The Day of the Scorpion (7 page)

But Suleiman (she thought) stands detached from this foolery. Well, there was a time when he protected me from rogues, for he was our rogue, our beloved rogue, who never cheated us but knew rogues, being brought up with them; and their ways, being brought up in them; and saw lesser rogues off, and equal rogues, and bigger rogues. He taught me all I know about the ways of the bazaars and what he taught me is all that he knows too. He stands, holding the reliquary, and lets me get on with it as if I were a pupil old enough to know better, too old to be corrected. And does not look, but listens to the crying of the child.

And I choose this one, to warm my shoulders on a frosty night, for I am of an age that can grace a faint vulgarity, am I not? So much silver-thread, and too much scarlet silk. Shall I ever wear it? Perhaps that is doubtful. Or even this one? The green is a bit bilious, after such an early breakfast. Well, any of them? Am I too old, then, for this kind of gesture? For whose sake am I making it? My own? Henry’s? Suleiman’s? Daphne’s? Or for Kashmir’s because after all these years of arriving and departing I feel it in my bones that I am going this time never to return? Or is it an insurance? To buy believing it the last, to ensure that it is not? Perhaps I buy for the child, for Parvati, whose crying Suleiman listens to and will not speak of. Has Suleiman yet looked at the child?

She chose a shawl that could have offended no one. But when she had paid for it and gone back inside after repeating the word and the gesture: Khatam: she regretted buying something that would give her neither pleasure nor pain, and wondered at the marvel of losing an opportunity to make a gesture others and she herself could have described later as out of character. In the end, she saw, habit became a vice, and good taste an end in itself: nothing could ever come of it.

Fifteen minutes later the khansamar knocked at the door of her room where she sat alone staring through the little window at the lake, her old-fashioned veiled topee already on her head, gloves on her hands, repeating to herself, with no outward sign that she was doing so, the little prayer she always offered up at the beginning of a journey. The khansamar told her that all was ready. She rose, thanked him for his service, and went out. She had distributed tips the night before. The staff of the houseboat, and of the house she had lived in from the November of 1942 all through the hard winter to June when she had come down to the lake, were gathered on the forward veranda and on the sunroof. Fifteen of them all told: twelve from the boat, and three from the house. She stood for a moment. They watched her in silence. Then she said, ‘Thank you,’ and allowed the khansamar to help her down the steps into the shikara which had an embroidered canopy and a spring mattress – the kind of shikara Henry once said made him feel when with her like Anthony making himself at home with Cleopatra on her
barge. At the foot of the mattress, the young ayah already sat, veiled for the journey from the valley she had never left before, nursing the child. When Lady Manners was settled Suleiman stepped aboard and sat in the narrow prow, still holding the reliquary. Behind her the three boatmen raised their pointed, elongated, heart-shaped paddles and began to negotiate a passage between the clustered boats of the vendors. She turned to wave, but the outline of the houseboat had become infuriatingly unclear. She realized, too, that she had forgotten to look at the flowers in the vase by her bedside, to make sure they were quite dead; and thinking of those flowers thought as well of Daphne’s rhetorical question, written down while the snows still held, when the summer that had somehow never been was yet to come:

‘Shall we go down to the lake, then, Aunty, and live in a house-boat and fill it with flowers, and have our fortunes told?’

I am leaving in two days’ time (she had written to her old friend Lili Chatterjee in Mayapore), and so ends, as they say, a chapter – the burden of which you know and have lightened, not only by your too short visit this summer but by your wise counsel, and by the opinion you were able to express, after seeing the child. When I am re-established in Pindi, at Christmas-time for instance, perhaps you would come up and pay me a visit? I do not expect to be much invited out. My own race hardly knows any longer what to make of me and the existence of the child under my roof no doubt ranks as something of a scandal, such a lively, vocal repository for memories of events my countrymen are pretending it is best to forget – or if not best to forget at least wise to consider over and adequately dealt with. I don’t make my appeal to you, or invitation, from any sense the last few months may have given me of isolation, but from that other more important sense of contact with a friend who speaks my language and with whom, over Christmas, I should so dearly love to exchange gifts of conversation, plans and recollections.

Today we are moving the houseboat down the lake from
the isolated position you thought so pretty to its winter berth, to shorten the distance for the luggage shikaras the day after tomorrow. Since you were here I acquired neighbours. They are now gone back to Pankot where they are stationed. Their boat has been moved away and this last few days I have been alone again, which on the whole I prefer. These people who came and moored near by were punctilious about sending cards across when they arrived. I had Aziz return the compliment. Result: an almost tangible air of embarrassment and curiosity emanating from their boat; cautious nods if we happened to cross one another’s bows when out in the shikaras. But no visit, except towards the end of their stay, and that by one of them alone, one of the two daughters, when the rest of them were out enjoying themselves one afternoon. She saw me reading on the sun-deck as she went past alone in their shikara, and waved, then had the boatmen come in close and asked whether she could come on board for a few moments. I couldn’t very well refuse, although I thought it a bit offhand after the days that had gone by without a word exchanged. She came straight to the point and said it was embarrassment really that had kept them away, not knowing what on earth they’d be able to say to me that wouldn’t make it obvious they were all avoiding any mention of poor Daphne (‘the awful business of your niece’ she called it). But they were going back to their station soon and she said she didn’t like the idea of leaving without speaking to me. I thought it a rather thin excuse but not an uncourageous thing to do. She said she often heard the baby crying and would very much like to see her. So I took her down into the cabin where little Parvati has her cot. The girl – her name is Sarah Layton – looked at her for quite a long time without saying anything. Parvati was asleep and the ayah was adopting her possessive, on guard attitude, which probably added to the girl’s uneasiness. I think she’d expected the baby to have the kind of pale skin that makes the mixture of blood difficult to detect unless you’re looking for it. Eventually she said, ‘She’s so tiny,’ as if she had never seen a four-month-old baby before, then thanked me for letting her see her. I invited her to stay and have some tea under the awning on the sun-deck. She only hesitated for a
moment. On our way out she caught sight of the trunks with Daphne’s name on them and hesitated again. She puzzled me. Nice young English girls in India don’t usually give an impression of bothering their heads with anything much apart from the question of which men in the immediate vicinity are taking the most notice of them. Of course, they do go broody every now and again, but Miss Layton’s broodiness struck me as odd and intricate, not at all the result of simple self-absorption.

The name Layton had vaguely rung my bell at the time of the exchange of visiting cards and directly she mentioned Ranpur and Pankot I remembered it as a name quite well known there but couldn’t recall ever having met one of them. Henry and I were there for the five years of his appointment as Governor but one’s social life was fairly crowded. Over tea she told me that she and her sister and mother were sharing the houseboat with an aunt and an uncle. Her father, Colonel Layton, is a prisoner of war in Germany. He commanded the 1st Pankot Rifles in North Africa. He was in prison camp in Italy for a time but as we’ve advanced from the south a lot of the prisoners have been moved back, so our recent successes there haven’t brought Colonel Layton’s release and return any nearer. The revelation that her father was a prisoner of war went some way to explain her sudden visit and attempt at apology. In her father’s absence she was probably trying to do what was right and thought that coming to see me made up for the rudeness of the rest of the family. They may have believed that story themselves about not wanting to intrude on my privacy, but of course underneath this apparent delicacy of feeling is the deep disapproval I meet everywhere now and am used to. Perhaps dismay is more accurate a description, dismay that I should have stood by and let Daphne bear a child whose father might be any one of half a dozen ruffians, dismay that instead of bundling it off as unwanted to some orphanage when Daphne died bearing it, I take care of it, and have given it that name, Parvati Manners.

I asked Miss Layton whether she was enjoying her holiday. She said it was the first real one they’d had since the war began. Both girls have joined the WAC(I) and work in Area Headquarters at Pankot. They decided to come to Srinagar
this year because the sister – the younger of the two – is to be married soon. I’d seen the usual crowd of young men visiting their houseboat so naturally I asked if the sister’s fiancé was also in Srinagar. Apparently not. The engagement took place when he was stationed in Pankot, and originally the wedding was to have been there, towards Christmas of this year. But he was suddenly posted to Mirat and has written to say that the wedding must be brought forward and has to be in Mirat, the sooner the better, and the honeymoon can’t be for longer than two or three days. Which means, of course, that he expects to be going back into the field (he was in one of the regiments whose remnants managed to get out of Burma in 1942). So the young bride will be a grass window almost directly she’s married. This is why the Laytons have gone back to Pankot earlier than they planned. They’ll be off to Mirat soon after they arrive and it seems they hope to stay in the palace guest house so the younger Layton girl is very excited. I told Sarah Layton she’d like Mirat, especially if they stayed there as guests of the Nawab, who entertained Henry and me when we were on tour in that area. Lending the guest house to service people who can’t get accommodation in the cantonment is probably part of the Nawab’s war effort. He must be getting on a bit, now, and so must his wazir, that extraordinary Russian
émigré
Count, Bronowsky, or whatever his name was, whom the Nawab brought back from Monte Carlo in the twenties, at the time of the scandal over the Nawab’s relationship with a European woman. I told Miss Layton to look out for Bronowsky, and how all the English used to hate him until they realized what a good influence he was on the Nawab. She asked whether I had any idea what they ought to take as a present, if the Nawab let them stay in the guest house. Apparently they’ve been arguing and discussing it for days. I told her the Nawab was distantly related to ex-chief minister M. A. Kasim, and that the famous classic Urdu poet Gaffur was an eighteenth-century connection of both; and suggested that the most flattering gift might be a specially bound copy of Gaffur’s poems. She was very pleased by the suggestion and said she’d tell her mother and aunt and try to get hold of a copy. I told her she could buy one in Srinagar and might even get it bound
here, in a few days. Alternatively that there used to be a shop in Ranpur, in the bazaar, which did excellent leatherwork and gold-leaf blocking.

After we’d finished talking about the book she looked at me with the most extraordinary expression of envy that I’ve ever seen in a girl so young. She said, ‘What a lot you know.’ I laughed and said it was one of the few advantages of old age, to be a repository of bits and pieces of casual information that sometimes come in useful. But she said she didn’t really mean that, she meant know as distinct from remember. She couldn’t properly explain it and got up and said she mustn’t take up any more of my time. I told her to come again, and she said she would if there were an opportunity. I took it she meant there probably wouldn’t be and as it turned out I never saw her again, except to wave to. I didn’t see their departure but after they’d gone one of the boys who’d been on their cookboat brought round a little bunch of flowers with a card ‘With best wishes and many thanks from Sarah Layton’.

I have been thinking over what she said about knowing as distinct from remembering. Perhaps all it amounts to is that as we talked and I trotted out these little bits of information I gave the impression, common in elderly people, not only of having a long full life behind me that I could dip into more or less at random for the benefit of a younger listener, but also of being undisturbed by any doubts about the meaning and value of that life and the opinions I’d formed while leading it; although that suggests knowingness, and when she said, ‘What a lot you know’ she made it sound like a state of grace, one that she envied me in the mistaken belief that I was in it, while she was not and didn’t understand how, things being as she finds them, one ever achieved it. It would be interesting to meet the rest of the family, who from their general appearance and conduct I would describe as typically army if I hadn’t learned that people are never typical. But what I mean is that one could probably plot a graph of typical experience, attitude, behaviour and expectations of an army family in India and find it a rough but not inaccurate guide to that girl’s background and the surrounding circumstances of her daily life. I was touched by the flowers – and by the fact
that they have not lasted and will be dead by the time I leave and go down to Pindi.

Picture her then, an old lady dressed in a fawn tweed jacket and skirt, a high collar to a cream silk blouse that is buttoned with mother-of-pearl. No longer agile she scarcely welcomes the luxury of the embroidered mattress in the shikara which she finds it difficult to get down to and stretch out on; difficult but not yet impossible for someone trained to the custom of not inviting sympathy, or causing amusement, with evidence of weakness or infirmity; so that now, reclining safely, propped against the back rest, her topee-covered head turned at an angle of dignified farewell, one hand raised and the other seeking and finding some kind of old woman’s reassurance from the pleats and buttons just below her throat, there is an air about her of faded Edwardian elegance, Victorian even, for Victorian women were great travellers when they bothered to travel at all; and the early morning mist swathed in the mountains and above the lake, the movement of the boat, the pointed paddles dipping and sweeping, the totem figure of Suleiman, the huddled permissive attitude of the Kashmiri girl nursing the child, all combine to make, as it were, a perpetual willow-pattern of the transient English experience of outlandish cultures.