‘The day after,’ Sister Prior suggested.
‘I shall be in Pankot the day after – I thought of ringing before I left.’
‘Oh well, your uncle can keep in touch. I’m sorry to hustle you, but we have our little duties.’
Sarah laughed. Sister Prior in the ward, in front of her patient, was quite a different person from the one in the waiting-room. She did not like either, but preferred the bitterness to the professional coyness. She turned to Merrick.
‘I’ll write to you from Pankot.’
‘Will you?’
The reply, meant – she believed – to shatter her, seemed to bounce off her. Never before had she been so conscious of the thickness of skin that was part of her inheritance. But consciousness of it at once began to thin it down. He had not meant, perhaps, to remind her of the earlier unkept promise, but had spoken involuntarily, out of genuine hope but lack of real expectation.
‘Of course,’ she said and then, determinedly, subtly stressing his Christian name because as yet he had not called her Sarah, she ended, ‘Goodbye, Ronald.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said. For an instant there was a repetition of that difficulty with the throat. ‘Goodbye,’ he said again, and closed his eyes, as if he knew he had been played with long enough.
In the corridor Sister Prior said, ‘He’s marvellous, isn’t he? You simply wouldn’t know he’s constantly in pain. He fights taking drugs. Is he a religious man?’
‘Religious? No, I don’t think so.’
‘I ask because there are sects that think pain is something you have to bear. With Ronald we have to get up to all sorts of tricks. But the odd thing is him thinking he’s not been drugged has the effect you’d expect if he actually wasn’t.’
Sister Prior pressed the button to summon the lift. The Bengal sky beyond the window of the waiting-alcove was sodden with rain and cloud and evening. Below, waiting, was Uncle Arthur on whom fortune had smiled at last.
‘Of course,’ Sister Prior was saying – and this, surely, was a third persona? – the talkative, informed and uniformed
bouncer? – ‘it’s all to the good that he’s not over-dependent. He’ll come through tomorrow that much better.’
The lift arrived. Sister Prior waited while the attendant clanged back the gates. Entering, Sarah placed her hand so that the gates should not be shut and the descent begin, and it all be over without having come to its logical end.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but we know nothing and he wouldn’t say.’
‘Oh, I realized that. And you ought to know, oughtn’t you? The left arm.’
‘The left arm?’
‘They took the hand off in Comilla. Tomorrow we have to take off from just above the elbow. Third degree burns and a bullet in the upper arm and one in the forearm. The right arm’s a mess too, but we can save that. His face will be scarred for life but his hair will grow again, of course. He might even look human without the bandages.’
As if stung Sarah removed her hand from the gates and Sister Prior took her opportunity and slammed them shut. The lift lurched and began to go down. You bitch, she shouted silently. You bloody, bloody bitch. And wondered, presently (as the lift arrived and she smiled automatically in reply to fat old Uncle Arthur’s brick-red grin behind the mesh – strayed like a Cheshire cat into the infirm and unstable world of suffering), whether she meant herself or Sister Prior.
IV
‘We’ve gone in,’ Uncle Arthur had said. ‘We landed in Normandy this morning and established a beachhead. Your mother will be bucked, won’t she? I’d lay odds on your father being home by Christmas. We thought we’d have a special drink to that.’
In the vestibule, watched by the sergeant and the orderly with pimples, he introduced her to the officer he had brought with him – one of the men, she imagined, who was to enjoy or suffer dinner with the course leader and his wife and whose evening was probably further disorientated by being asked to
help collect the niece who had visited a patient in the military hospital.
‘This is Major Clark. For some reason utterly escapes me I think he’s sometimes known as Nobby. He was only a Captain a couple of months ago when he had to sit and suffer my interminable spouting. Decent of him to come back and visit us. My niece Sarah Layton. Be a good fellow and whistle the driver up.’
As Clark went out into the porticoed entrance she was aware of a broadness of back, a compactness of body, a physical wholeness. No burns, no bullets, no severance.
‘How was young what’s-his-name?’
‘All right. Considering.’
‘Good. Tell us all about it presently. I rang your aunt from the daftar. She said to see if I could pick you up. She’s wondering if she should ring your mother.’
‘Why should she do that?’
‘To make sure she’s heard.’
‘Heard what?’
‘The good news. But she’s bound to have. I say, are you all right?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ She smiled. Her face felt made of elastic.
‘It’s these places. The smell gets on your tummy. Come on, the gharry’s here.’
The gharry was Uncle Arthur’s staff car. Clark saw them into the back and sat himself next to the driver. As they turned into the road the rain fell. Lightning scarred the horizon.
‘When are you off then?’ Uncle Arthur inquired, raising his voice to be heard above the sluicing rain and the long, trundling, skittle-ball rolls of converging thunder. But it was Clark he’d spoken to.
‘First thing in the morning.’
Clark sat with one arm along the back of the seat, his back wedged in the corner of the seat and the door, so that he could talk and be talked to, see and be seen. Vaguely she registered the voice, the intonation, the air of ease, the appraisal she was under. She looked out of the window, scarcely listened to their conversation. They came out into Chowringhee, a place of lights and bicycles and trams. The window was
misting up. The city lights hastened the approaching dark. With the edge of her palm she cleared a view for herself and felt like a child intent on observing, from a position of safety and comfort, an alien and dangerous magic.
‘Well, what d’you think of the second city of the Empire?’ Uncle Arthur asked. ‘It’s her first visit,’ he explained, not waiting for an answer, something she usually thought of as a failing in other people but as a virtue in him. His lack of curiosity had always made him easy to get on with. It was, she supposed, a wholly avuncular virtue, common to that species. She thought that in its unpossessive uninvolved affection there might be felt something of the granite-rock of always available love. Should she weep – and for a few seconds, alarmingly, she felt like doing so – he would be desperately embarrassed but inarticulately sound, a speechless comfort. ‘You should have been here a couple of months ago. Major Clark would have shown you the ins and outs. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Would I, sir?’
‘Well, dammit, Clark, you had a reputation. I doubt he ever got to bed before dawn. But no one would have guessed. Always looked as fresh as a daisy.’
She glanced at Uncle Arthur, realized he had already had a sundowner to celebrate that distant inaudible barrage of invasion, or had not quite recovered from a sumptuous lunch; and, catching Clark’s eye, saw his judgement or knowledge corresponded with her own. There was, on his rather ugly face, an opacity, a semi-revelation of vanity and of amusement at someone else’s expense which she did not understand and did not like. She thought of herself as pinned by its calculated directness. And looked back at the streaming window, burning with a ludicrous little sense of injustice that he should exist, unmarked, to pass silent comments on Uncle Arthur who seemed to find him engaging and anyway gave him lifts and invitations, good counsel and reports presumably; carried him into the circle of her safety that rested for the moment in the existence of Aunt Fenny in Calcutta; and there, in Pankot, dark, silent and undisturbed by rain or rumours of war and amputation – in Susan and her mother – and far, far away, beyond the streaming window, in
the still centre of her father’s patience and yearning for release and a quiet passage through the night.
She had not recognized the road. The driver’s turn into the forecourt of the apartments was unexpected. She felt the curious flattening of inquiring spirit the traveller suffers from, knowing himself without occupation or investment in the fortunes of a strange city. Sandwiched between Uncle Arthur and Major Clark (who, she noted, smelt of some aromatic substance, an aggressive exudation of his naked body beneath the thin cellular cotton of his khaki bush-shirt) she thought of the lift as taking her from one level of non-experience to another. It came to her that like Ronald Merrick she did not travel well, and then that she was whole and, unlike Susan, unbeholden. I do not, she thought, no I do not, give a damn. The Furies were riding across an uninhabited sky, to their own and no one else’s destruction. The real world was a tame, repetitious place: one part of it, when you really looked, was much like another, a chemical accident, a mine of raw material for the creation of random artefacts to house and warm or satisfy the need for sensual pleasure or creature comfort. The lift was one such. It jerked to a stop.
‘No, a drink first and a bath second,’ she told Aunt Fenny who was abroad in the flat in housecoat, slippers and tidy chiffon turban, midway in her preparations for the evening: a revelation to Major Clark of intimate domestic detail which Sarah put down as a further sign that Aunt Fenny had entered the new age, in which old Flagstaff House values were shrewdly to be readjusted as an insurance against the extinction of those who had held them. Gimlet and cigarette in hand and for a moment alone, Sarah was conscious of belonging to a class engaged in small, continual acts whose purpose was survival through partial sharing in an evolution which, of all the family, only Aunt Lydia back in Bayswater had anticipated and closely witnessed the process of. It was a survival of exiles. Their enemy was light, not dark, the light of their own kind, of their own people at home from whom they had been too long cut off so that, returning there briefly, a deep and holy silence wrapped them and caused them to observe what was real as miniature. In India they had been betrayed by an illusion of topographical vastness into sins of
pride that were foreign to their insular, pygmy natures. From the high window of this concrete monstrosity you could see the tragedy and the comic grandeur of tin-pot roofs, disguised at street level by those neo-classical facades which perversely illustrated the vanished age of reason. What reason? My history (Sarah thought, drinking her sweet gimlet, then drawing on her bitter cigarette), my history, rendered down to a colonnaded front, an architectural perfection of form and balance in the set and size of a window, and to a smoky resentment in my blood, a foolish contrivance for happiness in my heart against the evidence that tells me I never have been happy and can’t be while I live here. It’s time we were gone. Gone. Every last wise, stupid, cruel, fond or foolish one of us.
She turned from contemplation of the rooftops, aroused by the sounds of more of Uncle Arthur’s chaps arriving – among whom she sensed the presence of the next generation of her jailers. To avoid immediate confrontation she brushed past Major Clark who had been standing there as if about to speak and told Aunt Fenny – who was giving orders to the white-clad servant – that she’d finish her drink in the bath.
‘I’ll come in while you’re dressing. I want to hear everything,’ Fenny said. ‘I’ve only got to slip into something and I’m ready. Have you anything pretty to wear? Iris Braithwaite from downstairs hopes to come, and perhaps Dora Pedley. They’re always got up to kill. But the little party’s for you, pet. Afterwards the boys will probably take you dancing or to the flicks, so do your best—’ this last in almost a whisper, on the threshold of Sarah’s room whose door she held open.
‘Well I can’t do more than my best, Aunt Fenny.’
‘My dear, I’d forgotten. You look done up. Was it bad?’
‘They’re cutting off his arm.’
‘Oh, no.’
The bath was already drawn. She rang the bell and, when he answered, gave her glass to the bearer and told him to bring it back refilled. She shivered in the bleak atmosphere of the air-conditioned room, gratefully entered the steam and humidity of the bathroom to undress in more familiar discomfort. Naked, she put on her shabby bathrobe and felt caressed, but stubborn in her refusal to succumb to a small
passion for personal belongings. For a minute or so, back in the ice-box of the bedroom, she sat, smoked, combed out her hopeless hair and drank the second gimlet, smoothed cleansing cream on to her incorruptible Layton face. So uncomely was it (in her eyes) that a wave of pity for it released a succeeding wave of erotic desire to have it loved, it and all her body – untouched beneath the robe Barbie Batchelor had helped her choose the sensible material for. She went and lay in the bath, the tumbler on its edge, within reach, and wondered what else might be in reach.
No, I don’t, she repeated, I don’t give a damn. But knew she did. Even for Aziz Khan and Fariqua Khan for whose names she had already conjured faces, and – considering them now, their staring eyes and speechless open mouths (as if aghast at the injustice of no more than condign punishment) – she formulated questions:
Why really did Teddie interfere? What made him so anxious to be present when Ronald Merrick tried to get information out of captured Indian soldiers? Had he witnessed an earlier interrogation? Or was it merely, as Merrick seemed to suggest, because he had grown not to trust him over anything?
When the water had cooled below the point of comfort she got out, wrapped herself in one of Aunt Fenny’s new-age towels – which was as big as a tent, as soft as down, fit only for a woman in love – and dried herself quickly as if to avoid contamination; but remained swathed for a few moments longer before substituting the shabby robe that had strayed with her from shabby Pankot.
The air-conditioning enveloped her as she passed from bathroom to bedroom. She felt like a clinical specimen captured and cosseted for some kind of experiment which Aunt Fenny, who knocked and entered, had already undergone and emerged from triumphantly, qualified to conduct on others.