‘I’ve done enough,’ Mrs Layton said. ‘I’m going to wash my hair.’ She gave Sarah the pile of envelopes, the result of the morning’s spate, and went into her room, calling for Minnie, Mahmud’s widowed niece who helped him run things by taking care of the intimate details of a household of women. The call for Minnie roused the dog. It went padding past the window, making for the source of this evidence of renewed activity. Sarah finished stamping the envelopes, went into the entrance hall and left them on the brass tray where Mahmud would find them on his return from his quest for the lost dhobi. She went into her own room. Minnie had made the bed, tied the laundry into a sheet and pinned Sarah’s list to it. The connecting door into Susan’s room was closed and she could not hear her sister moving.
She tapped, then opened the door. Susan was sitting on the bed with an album on her knee which Sarah recognized as the one containing the wedding photographs and press cuttings. The letter was on the bedside-table, propped between the table-lamp and a framed picture of Teddie – Susan’s favourite because it showed him looking serious, with the mere ghost of a smile.
‘Mother’s washing her hair and I thought I’d do mine,’ Sarah explained. ‘You don’t want the bathroom for ten minutes, do you?’
Susan shook her head.
‘Was it a letter about Teddie?’
‘Yes.’ She put the album down, picked up the letter and began to read it but seemed to give up half-way. She offered the sheet of buff army paper to Sarah.
‘Dear Mrs Bingham, Since it was with me that your husband worked most closely it is, I think, my duty – a very sad one – to offer you on behalf of his divisional commander and fellow officers, deep sympathy in the loss you have sustained by his death, of which you will by now have received official notification. He died as a result of wounds, having gone forward, under orders, with instructions to the commander of a subordinate formation then in contact with the enemy and under heavy pressure. With him at the time was Captain Merrick, whom you met in Mirat of course. Captain Merrick, although himself wounded – and at risk of his own life – rendered the utmost assistance to your husband, and stayed with him until the arrival of medical aid. Captain Merrick told the medical officer that your husband had not been conscious, and it may be some relief to you to know, therefore, that he did not suffer. Captain Merrick has now been evacuated to a base hospital and the Divisional Commander has been pleased to submit a report, in the form of a recommendation, in respect of Captain Merrick’s action. Teddie – as most of us knew him here – ever cheerful and devoted to his task, is sadly missed by all of us. Those of us who met you, your mother and your sister, on the occasion of your wedding in Mirat, all send our special personal sympathies. Yours sincerely, Patrick Selby-Smith, Lt.-Colonel.
Sarah returned the letter to its place by Teddie’s portrait. Susan was going through the album again.
‘I’ve never noticed it before,’ she said, ‘but there seems to be only one picture of him.’
‘Of Colonel Selby-Smith?’
‘No, of Captain Merrick. This is him, isn’t it? It’s really only half a face.’
Sarah sat on the bed next to her sister and studied the photograph. It was taken at the pillared entrance of the Mirat Gymkhana Club a moment or so before they left for the railway station. It showed Teddie with his plastered cheek turned from the camera and looking down at Susan who
stood with her feet neatly together, in a tailored linen suit, wearing a little pill-box hat and holding the bouquet. Behind them on the steps, partly shadowed, were Aunt Fenny and her mother, Uncle Arthur and Colonel and Mrs Hobhouse. Behind these was the group of largely anonymous officers of whom she only recognized Ronald Merrick. Merrick was not looking into the camera but down on to Uncle Arthur’s neck. In that little crowd of grinning young men he looked remote, humourless; but younger – she thought – than she remembered him looking in full light, under the sun. The camera and the shadows had smoothed out lines and not recorded the weathered texture of the skin. As a youth, at home, with his fair hair and blue eyes – she was sure they were blue – he must have seemed to those near to him comely and full of promise. ‘She didn’t care,’ he had said, when talking that evening about Miss Manners, ‘what your parents were or what sort of school you went to.’ He must have been conscious of them himself, though, and Sarah wondered about them, about the ambition that had driven him and the capacity that had enabled him to overcome what she supposed would count as disadvantages if you compared them with the advantages of a man like Teddie Bingham. She had never written to Captain Merrick, but then he had never written to her. Once – or was it twice? – he had sent his regards to them all through Teddie, perhaps more often than Teddie remembered to say. She wondered how literally he had taken what she recalled now as a promise to write sometimes. She had thought the request for letters part of the attempt he seemed to make to convey to others an idea that he was a man rather alone in the world, a man whose background and experience set him somewhat apart but gave him reserves of power to withstand what other men might feel as solitariness. She remembered how they had sat on the terrace the last time she saw him, waiting for the fireflies to come out, and how as the light faded Captain Merrick’s body had resisted that diminishing effect, had intensified, thickened, impinged; and how she felt that if she had reached out and touched him then he could have carried the frail weight, the fleeting sensation, of her fingers on his arm or hand or shoulder into those areas of danger that co
existed with those of the impenetrable comfort that surrounded her, protected her, and barred her exit. He had appalled her, she had not trusted him, although why that was so she did not know clearly. He had stood under the light that lit his face and his need, and his implacable desire to be approached; and offered his hand. He still impinged; what he had done or tried to do for Teddie, did not seem to alter – except in a curious way to emphasize – her picture of him as a man obsessed by self-awareness; but the request for letters might have been genuine.
‘Yes, that’s Ronald Merrick,’ she said. ‘Are you sure it’s the only one?’ She turned the pages of the album. It struck her as disturbingly significant of some kind of failing in all of them that he should have been missed out of the main wedding groups, that none of them had noticed his absence at the time, nor remarked it later when the proofs were chosen and the enlargements made. ‘Yes, I remember,’ she said, turning back to the one photograph in which he was represented. ‘Aunt Fenny couldn’t find your hat-box and he went to look for it and then immediately he’d gone there was the fuss about getting the pictures taken while the Nawab was still in the garden.’
‘I didn’t even know my hat-box was lost,’ Susan said, ‘but I suppose you’d call that typical.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t want his picture taken.’
‘Oh, everyone likes their picture taken.’
‘He may have thought of it being in
The Onlooker
and people recognizing him as the policeman in the Manners case.’
Susan considered this. She smoothed the photograph with one finger as if feeling for an invisible pattern she thought must be there, in the grain of the paper. She said, suddenly, ‘Teddie was terribly upset. About that I mean. I don’t think he ever forgave him. But I must, musn’t I? I mean I must write and thank him for trying to help Teddie. It’s the right thing. Especially the right thing when he’s not what Aunt Fenny calls one of us.’ She smiled, as to herself, and continued smoothing the surface of the photograph. ‘I think I envy him. Not being one of us. Because I don’t know what we are, do you, Sarah?’ She closed the album abruptly. ‘The letter
doesn’t say which hospital or how badly wounded he is, but if it’s a base hospital he must be pretty bad, mustn’t he? If I enclose a letter for him when I write to Colonel Selby-Smith it would get sent back to wherever he is, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, that would be best.’
‘I should write, shouldn’t I?’
‘It would be a kind thing to do.’
‘Oh, not kind. I don’t know kind. I don’t know anything. I’m relying on you to say.’ She was staring at the letter. ‘I need help. I need help from someone like you, who knows.’
‘Knows what?’
‘What’s right, and wrong.’
‘Help with the letter?’
‘Not just the letter. Everything.’ She folded the letter and gave it to Sarah. ‘Will you show it to Mother for me?’
‘I will, but it would be nice if you showed it.’
‘I know.’ She was upright on the edge of the bed smoothing the counterpane now. ‘But I’d rather not.’
‘Why?’
‘Mother didn’t like Teddie. She didn’t want me to marry him. She never said so, but it was obvious. She didn’t really want me to marry anyone until Daddy comes back. She wants everything to be in abeyance, doesn’t she? – because for her everything is. Everything – especially things about men and women. She didn’t talk to me, you know.’
‘Talk to you?’
‘She made Aunt Fenny do it. Or anyway Aunt Fenny volunteered and Mother let her. I don’t think that was right, do you?’
After a moment Sarah said, ‘Was there anything you didn’t know?’
‘Oh, it isn’t that. It was that Mother let Aunt Fenny. It made me feel she didn’t care enough to make sure herself that I knew about the things I had to let Teddie do. She didn’t want any of it to happen, so for her it wasn’t happening. But at the time it just seemed to me to prove she didn’t care, that nobody cared really.’
Sarah felt cold. Again she did not speak for a moment or two. Then she asked, ‘Is that how you thought about it? That making love was just something you had to let Teddie do?’
Susan stopped the smoothing. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think about it much. All that was on the other side.’
‘The other side? The other side of what?’
Sarah saw that her sister’s cheeks had become flushed. She seemed, simultaneously, to become conscious of the warmth herself and brought her hands up and held them to her face. She no longer wore the engagement ring: only the plain gold band which had a thick old-fashioned look about it as if it might have been Teddie’s mother’s – the one relic of a life unhappily ended in Mandalay – although he had never said it was.
‘I seem to have lost the knack,’ Susan said.
‘The knack of what?’
‘Of hiding what I really feel. I’m out in the open. Like when you lift a stone and there’s something underneath running in circles.’
‘Oh, Susan.’
But she felt the truth, the pity of it, and was afraid. The wan hand of a casual premonition had stroked her neck.
Susan looked at her and, as if seeing the hand that Sarah only felt, at once covered her eyes and bowed her head. From under her palms her voice came muffled.
‘I used to feel like a drawing that anyone who wanted to could come along and rub out.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
Susan uncovered her face and looked at Sarah, surveying – Sarah felt – her outline and density. She did not say: No one could ever rub you out. But such a judgement, held suddenly by Sarah of herself, briefly lit her sister’s expression – calm, unenvious – without quietening the hectic flush that had reappeared after days of absence.
‘No, it’s not nonsense.’ She looked down at her lap and her now folded hands. ‘I felt it even when we were children in Ranpur and here, up in Pankot. I think it must have been something to do with the way Mummy and Daddy, everyone, were always talking about
home
, when we go home, when you go home. I knew “home” was where people lived and I had this idea that in spirit I must be already there and that this explained why in Ranpur and Pankot I was just a drawing people could rub out. But when we got home it wasn’t any
better. It was worse. I wasn’t there either. I wanted to tell someone but there was only you I could talk to and when I looked at you I felt you’d never understand because you didn’t look and never looked like someone people could rub out. Do you remember that awful summer? The summer they all came home and great-grandpa died? Well, I looked at them and felt no, they hadn’t come home, that they could be rubbed out too and that perhaps I fitted in at last. So I longed to come out again, longed and longed for it. When we did come out we weren’t kids any more. I wasn’t frightened of India as I was as a kid. But everyone seemed real again and I knew I still didn’t fit in because there wasn’t anything to me, except my name and what I look like. It’s all I had, it’s all I have, and it amounts to nothing. But I knew I had to make do with it and I tried, I did try to make it amount to something.’
‘I never knew you were frightened.’
‘Oh yes. I think I was very frightened. I don’t know why exactly. But I was always trying to get to the other side, the side where you and everyone else were, and weren’t frightened. It was a sort of wall. Like the one there.’ She nodded towards the closed window where Panther had tried to get in and Sarah glanced in that direction, saw that the wall she meant was the one at the end of the patch of garden that hid the servants’ quarters. ‘Was there a wall like that in the garden at Kabul road?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dividing the servants from us?’
‘Yes.’
‘I know I was frightened of the servants. No one else seemed to be. I suppose that was part of it. On the other side of the wall it was very frightening but only frightening to me and I expect I was ashamed and had this idea that if only I could get over I’d be like everyone else.’
‘Is that what you wanted? To be like everyone else?’
‘Oh, I think so. We do as children. I think that’s what I wanted. Of course when we came out again I wasn’t frightened any more, I thought of it more as wanting to make a life for myself that would add up just like everyone else’s life seemed to add up. I mean everyone seemed so sure, so awfully sure, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t sure at all. I thought, if
only I could make a life for myself, a life like theirs, a life everyone would recognize as a life, then no one could come along and rub me out, no one would try. Marrying Teddy was part of it, the best part, even though I didn’t really love him.’