Read Online The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott - Free Book Online

cannot be forgotten and is one we have a continuing responsibility for. I do not remember her as the sort of woman who would make this kind of gesture; but of course the girl has died, presumably in childbirth. I suppose she is telling us that she will never forgive us for what a handful of our men did on that particular night. Or do these announcements mean that she has forgiven us now and taken the child, so tragically and violently conceived, to her heart, for India’s sake? One cannot tell. The English have a saying, “He wears his heart on his sleeve,” but this is something they never reveal except very occasionally to each other.’

Part Two
    A HISTORY

I
    ‘So it was with Henry, and so now with poor Daphne,’ Lady Manners murmured. And handed her niece’s diary to Suleiman to lock up in the black tin box as he had locked up some of her husband’s private papers, years before, with an air of reverence or anyway forbearance; but he took Daphne’s book as if it were nothing special, put it in the box – whose lid was open – and stood, waiting, not catching her eye, still wearing the old astrakhan cap he had complained of months before in ‘Pindi and had had money off her to renew.
    Well, he is jealous, she thought, and still resents being sent for, travelling alone and uncomfortably on the bus all that way from Pindi to Srinagar, just to order the household for the journey back in the same direction, a beast-of-burden who has no burden worthy of the years, the centuries, the everlastingness of his service. He is an old man. His hair has gone grey, like mine. Why has he never grown a beard? If he grows a beard I must watch for signs of it and be prepared for the morning he will come to me and say, Memsahib, let me go, I am an old man. Before I die I must see Mecca, and having seen it dye my beard red, come back and live out my remaining years in peace and honourable retirement with the blessing of Allah the Merciful.
    So, too, I would go, but not to Mecca. Where then? And how? I do not know how or where. Nor who has mercy to spare.
    And she looked out of the window on to the placid waters of the lake, and heard the crying of the child. She made a gesture and said a word, both meaning the same thing. Khatam . Finished. Suleiman closed the lid of the box, turned the key and handed it to her. His old brown fingers were stillsupple from a lifetime of manipulative care of her property, and Henry’s property, which were his gods, his ikons, but to care for Daphne’s was nothing to him. It was all gone. But what? Well it has gone, she thought, whatever it was. And took the key from him, and put it in her handbag, aware of the finality of the gesture without understanding why she should think of it as final. You were handsome once, she told Suleiman without speaking. You had one wife we knew about and two concubines you pretended were your wife’s sisters. And were a rogue and a rake, and had children, God knows how many, by whom, nor where scattered. Now you are alone and I am alone, and we cannot speak of it even yet as a man and a woman might speak who share recollections. But if you were to die I should weep. And if I were to die you would cover your head and speak to no one for days. But here in the world where both of us live – poised between entrance and exit, or exit and entrance – we will maintain the relationship of mistress and servant, although we have grown far beyond it and use it simply as a shorthand to get through the day without trouble to one another.
    Suleiman took hold of the box and carried it through into the passage that ran along the side of the houseboat – the side adjacent to the bank of the island to which the boat was moored – from her bedroom, with its single bed, past the empty guest bedroom with its two beds, and into the dining-room, up the two steps into the living-room beyond which was the veranda with its view on to the water and the opposite bank where the tongas waited,