The Day of the Scorpion (73 page)

And so Mabel Layton had gone to her last resting place in the late afternoon of the day following her death. There were mounds of flowers on the grave to make up for the thin scattering of people who managed to get away for the service. Mrs Layton’s flurried presence was noted and respected. She would have been forgiven for not attending because Susan still lay in a room of the Pankot nursing home, as yet undelivered. Her mother had spent the night there and would return directly the funeral was over to spend another night, if need be. Was it, people wondered, a false alarm? It would be quite understandable, if so. It was a terrible thing for a young girl so far advanced in pregnancy to find herself sitting on a veranda with a dead woman. It would have been better if there had been some warning, if old Mabel had cried out or fallen or at least shown signs of being unwell; instead of which she had simply stopped tending the plants on the balustrade and sat down in a chair close to the one Susan was lying on, and given up the ghost. Well, she was an old woman and it was a good way to go; but
not good for Susan who had only gradually become puzzled and then alarmed by the angle of the old woman’s head. ‘Are you awake, Aunty Mabel?’ she asked, raising her voice because of the deafness. And, three hours later, when Rose Cottage was almost empty again of all the people Susan had sensibly and courageously helped to summon, her mother found her in the little spare, with her hands pressed to her abdomen and her eyes wide with terror and incomprehension.

‘It can’t have,’ she said, when Dr Travers told her twenty minutes later that her labour seemed to have begun. ‘It can’t be. It isn’t time. The baby isn’t finished.’ For thirty-three hours she lay in a room of the nursing home which Isobel Rankin had seen was made available – a lovely room, marked down on the official lists as exclusive to the wives of officers of senior field rank. And at five o’clock in the morning – as Sarah slept fitfully on the train from Ranpur, keeping watch on the night’s progress (and Ahmed Kasim sat on the veranda of the Circuit House near Premanagar, keeping a different kind of watch) – Susan was delivered of a boy who looked absurdly, touchingly, like Teddie.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Susan said when Sarah told her Mr Merrick was grateful but felt he couldn’t accept. ‘I’m going to ask General Rankin, but there have to be two godfathers for a boy so you’d better ask Dicky. At least he’s got two arms.’ It was the only thing she ever said that showed how little or much she had taken in of Sarah’s story about Teddie’s death and Merrick’s action and misfortune; but thereafter she began to show a tender devotion to the child which Dr Travers said was a sign of her having come through, of her confounding those Jeremiahs who once talked about her as being dangerously withdrawn like the daughter of a woman called Poppy Browning. Who said that? Mrs Layton demanded, not having heard the rumour but remembering Poppy Browning well enough from the old days in Lahore. Miss Batchelor had mentioned it, Dr Travers thought. ‘That woman!’ Mrs Layton cried; and another nail was driven into Barbie’s coffin.

On the day before Barbie quit Rose Cottage for temporary sanctuary with the Peplows, Sarah found her wandering in
the garden with Mabel’s cradle-basket and Mabel’s secateurs. ‘I should have kept my mouth shut,’ she said, ‘I mean about St Luke’s in Ranpur. But she
did
wish it. She
told
me. Quite clearly. Last year. I suggested we should go down to Ranpur to do some Christmas shopping but she said, Oh I shall never go back to Ranpur, at least not until I’m buried. I thought your mother knew all about it but was forgetting it in all the rush and confusion. But there you are. I’ve opened my mouth once too often. Rose Cottage is yours now, and it’s not as if I expected to stay on or have longer than a week or two to make other arrangements if Mabel died before I did. What hurts is being misunderstood and leaving a place I’ve been happy in, under a cloud. I know it was unfair to you, my being here. If I hadn’t been, there’d just have been room for you and Susan and your mother. I said so to Mabel. More than once. Oughtn’t I to go, Mabel? I said. After all I’m not family, and they’re not comfortable down there in the grace and favour. But she wouldn’t hear of it. I don’t know why. She lived a life of her own, didn’t she? I never knew what she was thinking. It sometimes seemed to me she’d
found
herself, I mean her true self, and just wanted to be alone but have someone who would talk to her. Heaven knows I did that. Well, it’s all over now. I’ve written to the Mission. I thought I might do some voluntary work. There are people starving and dying, aren’t there? There must be something I can do, even if it’s only laying out bodies. I shouldn’t want paying. I’ve got my pension and the little annuity she’d left me. Not that I’m happy about that. Nor is your mother, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘You mustn’t think that, Barbie. You made Aunt Mabel’s last years very pleasant. It’s the only way she could repay you. And we’ve still got plenty. We’re well off now.’

Barbie looked round the garden. Mabel’s presence was like a scent. ‘Shall you be happy here, all of you?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know at all, Barbie.’

‘Will she marry Captain Beauvais?’

‘Susan?’

‘People think so. They say the child should have a father. I’d encourage it if I were you. If she doesn’t marry again you’ll never get away.’ Suddenly Barbie flushed and grasped
Sarah’s arm. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? To get away. But some people are made to live and others are made to help them. If you stay you’ll end up like that, like me. Worse probably because all this’ – she released Sarah’s arm and made a broad gesture at the garden and the hills – ‘it’s coming to an end somehow, isn’t it? Very soon.’

Abruptly Barbie left her and Sarah did not see her again until the morning of the christening when she sat alone in a pew near the altar while Sarah and Dicky, General and Mrs Rankin, and Sarah’s mother, stood at the font and Mr Peplow received the new Edward Arthur David Bingham as a lively member of Holy Church. The baptism was hurried, almost furtive; and when it was over the Rankins went their way and the Laytons went theirs. There was no party but Dicky went back with Sarah and her mother to the grace and favour bungalow where the business of packing private possessions into crates for the move to Rose Cottage had been interrupted the day before. The child was placed in the care of Minnie who had been promoted to the position of ayah and had already notably proved her worth; but it was Sarah who dealt with the milk and the bottle and the rubber teat while Minnie watched, anxious to learn but so far unsuccessful in persuading the child to accept this substitute for his mother’s breast.

In the afternoon Dicky drove Sarah to the nursing home – a week to the day and almost to the hour that he had driven Susan home from there with the child in her arms. He did not go in and Sarah told him she would get a tonga home. ‘Shall I come and see you tonight?’ he asked. She did not want him but thought it might be better, if only for her mother’s sake, to have someone in the house to whom both of them could talk. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘come in time for drinks.’

‘I do hope you find her better,’ he said, ‘Oh, I do hope so.’ He turned away and Sarah went in. Twenty minutes later, escorted, she entered the room where Susan was, which was not a pretty room at all. There were bars at the window. Susan sat on an upright chair, hands folded on her lap, watching the gently falling rain and smiling. Another chair was placed near by and on this Sarah took up her position
and waited until Susan slowly turned her head and looked at her.

‘Hello, Su. I’ve come to see if there’s anything you want.’

How pretty you look, Sarah thought. Pretty and happy. No, more than happy, profoundly content, totally withdrawn. You’ve found your way in. Why should that cause us pain and sorrow? Why should it hurt to think that you don’t recognize me? Or only recognize me as someone belonging to a world that’s become unreal to you and isn’t to be compared with the one you’ve always imagined and imagine now, and smile at because you feel its protection all round you like a warmth?

Now you look back at the window, through the bars which you don’t see. The little flush on your cheeks which used to look hectic no longer does so; it’s a flush of pleasure and the smile is a smile of happiness, almost of beatitude. Why do we call it sickness? And pray for you to come back to us? When you come back you may remember what you did or tried to do, and why. And we are selfish enough to want you to remember and tell us because we’re not people who will accept mysteries if we think there are explanations to be had.

But you scare us. We sense from the darkness in you the darkness in ourselves, a darkness and a death wish. Neither is admissible. We chase that illusion of perpetual light. But there’s no such thing. What light there is, when it comes, comes harshly and unexpectedly and in it we look extraordinarily ugly and incapable.

She glanced round and spoke in a whisper to the young psychiatrist who stood waiting with Dr Travers. ‘May I touch her?’ The man nodded. Sarah had no faith in him; not because he was young – that was a good thing – but because his work was exclusively with men. She leaned forward.

‘Susan? It’s me – Sarah.’

But Susan did not look at her again and Sarah shrank from touching her. She did not want to intrude or disrupt the pattern of her sister’s absorption. After a while she said, ‘Goodbye, Susan. I’ll see you again tomorrow,’ but the words went unheeded or unheard and she rose and went with the doctors to the door. ‘Can you keep her here?’ she asked.
Travers said they hoped so. The alternative – as Mrs Layton so much feared – was a place in Ranpur. But the patient was very quiet. It was probably only a passing phase. Travers said he could have sworn that a week ago her attitude to the child was normal; maternally loving and possessive.

It wasn’t normal, Sarah wanted to say, but none of them had seen it; except Mahmoud’s widowed niece, Minnie; and it had not been her place to say but only to watch and learn and be on her guard, and make offerings to the old tribal gods of the hills, which it seemed she and the other servants had got into a habit of doing, secretly, to ward off a rumoured evil of monstrous birth, and which she now continued to do because as far as Minnie was concerned the affliction which she had detected in the young memsahib’s devotion to the child was of divine origin, as all madness was, a sign of God’s special concern and interest.

Sarah waited until the rain stopped, then left the nursing home and took the first tonga in the line. ‘To St John’s,’ she told the tonga-wallah. She did not want to be alone with her mother. When they reached the church she asked the man to wait and went into the churchyard, past the hummocky graves – old lichen-eaten crosses aslant in long wet grass. She took the path round the south side of the church, to the newer part of the cemetery and stood at Aunt Mabel’s grave with its mounds of withered wreaths. Her own little posy, gathered from the garden of Rose Cottage after the funeral, was withered too. The ink had run on the cards, leaving ghostly traces of anonymous remembrances.
Ah, oui. Elle est une de Mes prisonnières
. That too had been a nail in poor Barbie’s coffin because she had told Susan about the butterflies in the lace. Had she been listening or had Mabel repeated the story to her after Sarah had gone? No matter. ‘Little prisoner, little prisoner. Shall I free you? Shall I free you?’ Susan had said, touching the baby’s cheek with her finger. But even that had passed them by as no more than a tender admonition.

Sarah left the graveside and on impulse went into the church through the south door which Mr Peplow always left open during the hours of daylight. She sat in a front pew and after a while had the curious feeling that she was not alone.
Little prisoner, little prisoner, shall I free you? Is that what she had meant to do? And was it only yesterday that, finding herself alone with the servants in the grace and favour bungalow while Sarah was at the office and her mother at Rose Cottage measuring curtains, Susan had sent Mahmoud to the bazaar for blue ribbons and then sent Minnie after him to tell him white, not blue?

Uneasy, Sarah looked behind her but saw no one and turned back to her contemplation of the image of her sister’s madness; but in the stillness she heard from outside the church the squeaking sound of a motor-car or taxi coming to a halt and then, after a second or two, the short note of summons on its horn; and presently, much closer, the unmistakable sound of footsteps on tiles, within the body of the church. She turned again. A woman in an old-fashioned veiled topee was coming down the aisle towards the altar, making for the south door; a woman who must have been there all the time on the darker side of the nave, and whom Sarah recognized. At the end of the aisle the woman genuflected, supporting herself with one hand on the end of the pew.

Why, what a lot you know, Sarah told her silently, what a lot, what a terrible, terrible lot. But now I know some of it too, and know that this kind of knowing isn’t knowing but bowing my head, as you are bowing yours, under the weight of it.

The woman came towards her, one hand held to her breast clutching a cross that wasn’t there except in the form of pleats and buttons. Level with her the woman hesitated. Sarah could make out little of the face through the veil, but smiled because she felt beholden, as Susan would have said. The woman said nothing but half raised a hand in a gesture that stopped short both of greeting and farewell, and then went out through the south door to the waiting transport. And when she had gone Sarah moved, stumbling over the hassocks, wanting to ask, to ask; but just what she didn’t know. She hesitated too, and was lost. Outside, rounding the buttressed corner of the church she saw the old woman opening the lych-gate, began to run, and stopped. The rain was falling again; gentle rain. All the hills of Pankot were
green and soft. She ran down the gravel pathway, past the graves of Muirs and Laytons, understanding that this was part of her dream, the running and the absence of an end to the journey. When she got to the road the car was gone.

Little prisoner, shall I free you? Divine intervention! Well, Minnie had understood and not gone beyond the gate in Mahmoud’s wake, to change an order for blue ribbons, but crept cautiously back to the end of the veranda where she had been sorting bundles of laundry for the dhobi, and where Susan Mem was dressing the baby in the lace he was to wear on the morrow, talking to him in her strange guttural tongue.