She heard a faint sound and looked over her shoulder. Aunt Mabel was standing behind her, watching Susan too. She had never been able to tell what Aunt Mabel was thinking and now that true deafness was setting in even the old look of her sometimes watching you with inward curiosity about what you were thinking and why you were thinking it seldom appeared on the old but unwrinkled face. Her mother once said Mabel had no wrinkles because she cared for nothing and nobody, not even herself, and was never worried or concerned like an ordinary human being.
From the hall came the ring of the telephone. Mabel did not hear it. She moved to the balustrade and began to tend some of the flowers that were growing in pots and hanging baskets. Don’t wake, Sarah told her sister. The telephone was promptly answered. She guessed the caller was Mrs Rankin. Mrs Rankin would be relieved that Mildred wasn’t alone, but had Mrs Paynton and Mrs Fosdick to support her. In Mrs Rankin’s book Mrs Paynton and Mrs Fosdick would count. And Sarah knew that she herself would count. While
intending almost the opposite she was growing into a young pillar of the Anglo-Indian community. When they got back from the wedding she had been restless. It had been as if with Susan safely married her role of elder daughter had been taken from her. A married woman took precedence over a spinster. Sensing a release and a challenge she told herself: I must go to the war; and inquired about a transfer to the nursing services, which would take her as close to the war as a girl could get; closer than her clerking would ever take her. When she heard of it her mother made no comment; it was Mrs Rankin who took her aside and said, ‘My dear, you mustn’t think of it. It seems unfair because you’re young, and want to do your bit, more than your bit if you can, but here’s where it’s going to be done. Have you thought of how much more your mother will need you if Susan has a baby?’ And a week later Susan announced that this indeed was what she was going to do. Neither Sarah nor her mother ever said anything about the war Sarah could not go to, but between them now, in addition to the silences that hinted at need there were these new silences that were like a recollection of intended betrayal, silences of accusation, silences in which Sarah felt herself charged with having attempted to escape from her responsibilities, caring nothing for her mother, being jealous of her sister and forgetful of her father whose peace of mind depended on a certain picture of them holding a fort together. But these were charges she sometimes made against herself and needed no look in her mother’s eye, no set of her mother’s still lips, to remind her of.
She leaned back in the chair, turning her head to keep the silent watch: on Susan sleeping and smiling, and on Aunt Mabel taking dead heads off an azalea to give strength to buds not yet open. But that only worked with plants. The bud of Susan’s belly wouldn’t wax stronger with the cutting off of Teddie. Or would it? The image was grotesque but it had come and would not go away. It was merged with another, an image of a shapeless mindless hunger consuming Susan, consuming all of them, feeding on loss, on happiness and sorrow alike, rendering all human ambition exquisitely pointless because the hunger was enough itself.
Don’t wake, she told Susan again, and closed her eyes to
contribute to the persuasive arguments of the heat and scent and the siren whispers of the air. She opened them abruptly because Susan had stirred, shifted her legs and turned her head so that now she faced Sarah. After a while with eyes still closed she raised her right arm and made extra shade for her face with the crook of the elbow, then seemed to fall asleep again, but the weight of her own arm disturbed her, and her waking thoughts were more solemn than her sleeping ones. Unsmiling now she half lifted the lids of her eyes and observed Sarah through the fringes of her lashes and the shadow of her elbow. Sarah looked away. Presently she heard another movement – the sound perhaps of Susan lifting her arm to disperse the shadow, raising her head a bit to confirm the reality of Sarah’s presence. A moment later Susan asked in a sleepy voice:
‘Is it lunch-time already?’
Her eyes were shut again. She had moved her arm and made a pillow of both hands for her face.
‘No. I’ve come back early.’
At the far end of the veranda Mabel stood watching, alerted by the movements Susan had made. She had kept an eye open. Sarah was grateful. In spite of the marked withdrawal from other people, when a real pinch came – Sarah had always thought so – Mabel could be relied on. She was a point of reference. You could not embrace her but you could lean against her and if you ever did so perhaps you would find that she was a shelter too, because she stood firm, and cast a shadow.
‘Why have you come back early?’ Susan asked, long after Sarah thought she’d dozed off again. And then, ‘Anyway, what is the time?’ Susan had stopped wearing her watch. She had read somewhere that mothers-to-be shouldn’t allow themselves to be distracted by artificial divisions of time. Sarah looked at her own wrist. Was it only thirty-five minutes?
‘Eleven-twenty.’
She glanced back at Susan and watched the eyes open yet again. They conveyed a slight annoyance.
‘Have you come on badly, or something?’
Sarah shook her head. Since Susan had stopped coming on
herself she either pretended not to know when Sarah had a period or spoke of it as if it threatened to disrupt her own routine. So Sarah thought. But perhaps she had become self-conscious and read into Susan’s manner what she felt about them herself: that hers were the menstrual flows of a virgin, sour little seepages such as Barbie Batchelor had presumably sustained for a good thirty years of her unreproductive life.
She said, ‘No,’ and then, seeing an opportunity, added, ‘It’s not that.’ She found herself studying the snag in her stocking again, and automatically wetted her finger, dabbed it, found inspiration from the firm contact. ‘Let’s help Aunt Mabel with the flowers.’ She had an idea that Susan ought to be standing, that it would be bad for her to be told what she had to be told, lying as she was.
She stood up. Susan watched her and then looked round and noticed her aunt standing at the balustrade, attending to the flowers and yet not attending to them.
‘Why should we do that?’ she asked, but fully awake now, returning her right arm to its crooked position above her head, looking at Aunt Mabel who, Sarah saw, remained still, resisting any temptation to dissociate herself from the situation that was arising.
‘Come on,’ Sarah said, ‘you’ll get as big as a house if you lie around all day. You ought to take much more exercise.’
‘I am as big as a house, and I’ve done my exercise.’
‘Well, I’m going to push the back of your chair up anyway. You always lie out on it much too flat.’ She went round behind and heaved the levered back higher.
‘Oh, Sarah, no. What on earth are you doing?’
‘Sitting you up.’ She readjusted the holding rod. Her arms were trembling. She came round to the front of the chair. ‘I’d better lower the foot. Then you’ll be almost respectable.’ She knelt, and did as she had warned. When she had finished she continued kneeling. She said, ‘Sorry. Have I made you awfully uncomfortable?’
Her sister was leaning forward, her hands clasped to the chair arms, her legs slightly apart with the smock ridden farther up from her knees. She was not displeased by the attention but puzzled by its suddenness and the absence of
any immediately clear reason for it. Now she leant back, but kept her grip on the arms.
‘What have they done, given you a day off?’
‘Sort of.’
Susan waited.
‘Well?’
Sarah reached for one of Susan’s hands.
‘Something’s happened, which I have to tell you.’
The hand lay beneath hers, quite unresponsive.
‘I don’t know how to, but I’ve got to. I think I can only say it straight. It’s about Teddie.’
She paused, deliberately, to let it sink in. When she believed that it had she went on:
‘The signal came this morning and they stopped it being sent over because they knew I was on duty. The signal says – it says that Teddy’s been killed. So that’s what we have to start believing because there can’t be any doubt. If there were any doubt it wouldn’t say that, but it does, and I’m sorry, sorry.’
Now she took both of Susan’s hands. But they were pulled away.
‘No,’ Susan said.
She stared down at Sarah.
‘No.’
Mrs Fosdick came, and her mother, and Mrs Paynton, then Miss Batchelor. ‘No,’ she said, rejecting them all, jerking herself away from each touch of a hand on her arm or shoulder. ‘No. No. No.’
She kicked out with one foot, as if kicking Sarah away. Sarah got up and the others closed in, filling the gap. They surrounded her completely. ‘No,’ Sarah heard her say again; but her voice was muffled now, as if she had covered her face.
Sarah went down the steps into the garden. At the end of the garden there was a place – a pergola dense with briar rose, and behind it a fir where there would be shade from the hot yellow light. As she went she heard a sound that made her stop: a drawn-out shriek, a desolate cry of anguish. When she reached the shade behind the pergola and under the fir she stood with her arms folded, and then sat and wondered whether Susan’s cry had crossed the five measured miles to
the other side of the valley, and wept – for what exactly she did not know – and it was over very quickly. She dried her eyes and did not want to be alone any longer. She got up, left the shade and reapproached the house with the sun heavy on her neck and heating her scalp. The situation was familiar. It had all happened before – people on a veranda and herself returning to join them. How many cycles had they lived through then, how many times had the news of Teddie’s death been broken? How many times had Susan been taken indoors – almost dragged, stiffly resistant – in her mother’s arms, while Mrs Fosdick and Mrs Paynton stood like silent supervisors of an ancient ritual concerning women’s grief? Aunt Mabel had sat down, with the basket of dead heads on her lap.
‘Are you all right, Aunty?’ she asked, bending over her.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Can I get you anything?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Let me take those.’ She touched the handle of the basket but Aunt Mabel held on.
‘Tell your mother she and Susan can have my room for the night if they would like that. I don’t advise it, but Aziz can rig up extra beds and I can pig in with Barbie. You can have the little spare if they decide to stay.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll try and get them home.’
Mabel gazed up at her, then nodded. Sarah left her and joined Mrs Paynton and Mrs Fosdick who had gone into the sitting-room. There was no sound from anywhere in the house.
‘They’re in Barbie’s room,’ Mrs Paynton said, keeping her voice low. ‘You mustn’t be hurt, Sarah.’
‘No,’ said Mrs Fosdick. ‘She didn’t mean it, hitting out at you like that.’
‘I wasn’t hurt.’
A message had been left at Dr Travers’s. Isobel Rankin had phoned and offered to look after Susan and her mother at Flagstaff House. Everyone would do everything they could. It was difficult to tell how Susan was taking it. She hadn’t cried yet. But there had been that sound. Sarah guessed that the sound had shaken them. It wasn’t the kind of sound a Layton
made. The servants had heard it. The sound was shocking, Sarah thought, to everyone but her. They would have preferred her sister to cry, quietly, in the privacy of her room. Well there, in her mother’s arms, she could have wept to her heart’s content and earned their eager sympathy. God knew they weren’t hard women; but there was something intemperate, savage, about a grief that went unaccompanied by a decent flow of tears. They all three stood in the room that Barbie Batchelor had made cosy with chintz and cretonne. Miss Batchelor came back. Her tall thin body, iron-grey short-cropped hair and unhealthy yellow face – a network of lines and wrinkles – suddenly struck Sarah as ridiculous. Missionary India had dried her out. There was nothing left of Barbie Batchelor.
‘She’s just sitting there,’ Miss Batchelor said. ‘She won’t answer us and she won’t lie down on the bed. I feel that if only she would lie down it would be all right.’ She hesitated. ‘It’s not like Susan. Not like Susan at all. Poor Mildred can’t get through to her, and one feels so useless. One feels so useless.’
Suprisingly Miss Batchelor herself burst into tears, and sat heavily in one of the cretonne-covered chairs. No one in Pankot had ever seen Barbie Batchelor cry. She had come a few years ago, in retirement from the Missions and in answer to the advertisement old Mabel Layton put in the Ranpur papers for a single woman to share. Only once in her time in Pankot had she come into any sort of prominence, and that was at the time of the August riots down in the plains in 1942. She had cried: ‘I know her!’ when they read out the reports of the attack on the superintendent of the protestant mission schools in Mayapore, Edwina Crane, who, travelling from Dibrapur back to her headquarters, had seen her Indian companion murdered in front of her eyes and then been knocked senseless by the same mob and had her car burnt out; been found, later, holding the dead man’s hand, sitting on the roadside in the pouring rain. ‘I know her!’ Miss Batchelor cried, and wrote, but had no reply, which was no surprise when eventually it was heard that Edwina Crane had gone very queer as the result of her terrible experience, and died by her own hand, setting fire to herself in a garden shed. ‘Oh, poor Miss Crane,’ Miss Batchelor was heard to say
then. But she had not cried. ‘I’ve always been useless, useless to everybody, how many of those little Indian children really loved God and came to Jesus?’ Miss Batchelor said. They soothed her with murmurs of, ‘Now don’t be silly, how can you say that? There must be hundreds who are grateful to you.’
Sarah felt a suffocating claustrophobia, a tense need to destroy, and run, find air and light.
The claustrophobia was the beginning of the dream she was presently to have, where they were saying goodbye to Teddie, where she herself was running and being made love to by a man whose face she couldn’t see and whom nobody seemed to know. He was there and then not there, then there again. He had a great, an insatiable, desire for her but it did not enslave her. He was a happy man and she was happy with him, not jealously possessive. He existed outside the area of claustrophobia, entered it and left it at random, without difficulty. He came to her because she could not go to him. A climax was never reached by either of them, but that did not spoil their pleasure. Disrupted as it was their loving had assurance. There was always the promise of a climax.