The Day of the Scorpion (24 page)

After a while he sat up. Above him loomed the plinth on which the White Queen sat, hardened and sensitive, gazing up the length of Gunnery Road, which was still empty of traffic. The file of village women, now some four hundred yards away, continued their journey uninterruptedly. Turning he found both officers standing in the road a few feet from the car. They were looking towards and making gestures at the low grey stucco wall that marked the boundary of a compound. One of them had a handkerchief held to the left side of his face. They stopped looking at the wall and looked at him.

‘Sahib,’ he said to the one without the handkechief, after he had picked himself up, walked down the steps and approached them, ‘I thought you jumped out because a bomb had been thrown.’

The officer did not smile. He had blue eyes. The driver was always fascinated by Sahibs with blue eyes. The eyes of the other Sahib were not so blue, hardly blue at all, but he had very pale eyelashes. There was blood on the handkerchief.

He followed the Sahibs back to the car and watched while they looked at the shattered window and into the back. He
went round to the offside door and helped them to look. He did not know what he was looking for. An object of some kind. He found the object wedged in a corner under one of the tip-up seats. He picked it up. A stone. He said, ‘Sahib, this is it.’ He handed it to the Sahib with the blue eyes. The Sahib took and showed it to the other Sahib.

Presently the unwounded Sahib looked across at him and said, ‘Did you see who threw this?’

‘I saw no one, Sahib. Only the women with the baskets but we had gone many yards past them before it was thrown. The person who threw it must have hidden behind that tree, Sahib. There may have been such a man. I do not know. My mind was not on this kind of matter. There was a man on a bicycle in front of the car. He was not making signals. My mind was on this man on the bicycle. He is gone. He went to the left. I did not see any other man. I am sorry, Sahib. It is not an auspicious beginning.’

‘You’re damned right it isn’t,’ Teddie Bingham said. ‘For God’s sake, Ronnie, is there any blood on my uniform?’

‘It’ll sponge out. Let me have a look at that cut.’

Teddie took the handkerchief from his cheek. Blood oozed out of a jagged cut below the cheekbone. Captain Merrick clapped the handkerchief back on.

‘It may need a stitch and there may be glass in it.’

‘But, Christ, there isn’t time.’

‘You can’t get married bleeding like a stuck pig. Come on. Get back in and mind you don’t sit on a splinter or you’ll really be in trouble. When we get to the church I’ll root out the chaplain and use his phone to get a doctor. There may be time to ring through and warn Susan and Major Grace. It’ll mean putting the ceremony back a few minutes.’

Before sitting Merrick inspected his own and Teddie’s side of the seat for splinters, then told the driver to get on quickly to the church.

‘The bloody bastard,’ Teddie said. ‘Whoever it was. Bugger him and bugger the Nawab. And bugger his bloody limousine.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? A crest on the door as big as your arse. A bloody open invitation for some bolshie Nawab-hating
blighter to heave a bloody great rock through the window.’

Merrick smiled; and was silent, contemplating the stone which he held balanced on the palm of his right hand.

Nawab Sahib was having the frayed end of his coat sleeve trimmed when Count Bronowsky told him there had been an incident involving one of the motor-cars on loan to the wedding party. The car, a 1926 Daimler, once the property of the late Begum, had been struck by a stone as it turned into Church Road at the Victoria roundabout. A window had been shattered and Captain Bingham cut on the cheek. The other occupant of the car, a Captain Merrick, was unhurt. He had telephoned the information through to Ahmed Kasim from the chaplain’s house where Captain Bingham was receiving attention from a medical officer. The ceremony had been delayed for half an hour and the reception at the Gymkhana Club would now begin at 11.15 instead of at 10.45. There was therefore no need to hurry.

Nawab Sahib, who was standing patiently in the middle of the room – his left arm held out while his personal body-servant snipped stray bits of thread from his cuff – glanced at Bronowsky. The Count was dressed in a starched cream linen suit, cream silk shirt and dove-grey silk tie. He had his best ebony gold-topped cane to lean on. The Nawab then looked at young Ahmed who wore a grey linen jacket and trousers, noticeably less expensive but quite well cut and properly pressed.

The silent inspection over, the Nawab returned his attention to the make-and-mend operation on his own coat, and said,

‘Has a substitute car been sent?’

‘It was offered but declined. Captain Merrick insists the damaged one is perfectly serviceable.’

‘Has the chief of police been informed?’

‘Ahmed has telephoned him, your Highness.’

‘Will he think to make contact with the military police in
the cantonment? Or will he rush about in the city arresting every likely culprit?’

The questions, recognized by the Count as rhetorical, were left unanswered. Ali Baksh, the chief of police in Mirat, was currently under the cloud of the Nawab’s unpredictable but cautious displeasure. Another reason for Bronowsky saying nothing was his understanding that the Nawab’s composure was deceptive and so best left untampered with. Bronowsky had trained the Nawab to think of himself as a man who had to deny himself the luxury of violent criticism, even of expressing an opinion about anything except strictly personal matters, and who had a duty to the one million people he ruled never to leap to a conclusion or take any unconsidered action. But Bronowsky knew that although the Nawab had so far made no comment on the incident of the car his sense of outrage had been disturbed and fired.

Bronowsky smiled. Within sight of the end of his own reign he allowed himself the full pleasure of self-congratulation. Nawab Sahib had been transformed, step by painful step, from a tin-pot autocratic native prince of extravagant tastes and emotions into the kind of ruler-statesman whose air of informed detachment and benign loftiness was capable of leaving even the wiliest mind guessing and the coldest heart warmed briefly by curiosity; and wily minds and cold hearts were the combination Bronowsky found most common in English administrators. Nawab Sahib was Bronowsky’s one and only creation, his lifetime’s invention. He had fallen possessively in love with him and watched with compassion the struggle Nawab Sahib sometimes had to discipline himself to act and move – and think – in the ways Bronowsky had taught him.

Nawab Sahib removed his arm from the gentle support of the servant with the scissors and inspected the cuff. His private austerities were the last remarkable flowering of Bronowsky’s design for a prince; remarkable because Bronowsky had not planned them. For Bronowsky, the austerities were to his design what the unexpected, seemingly inspired and unaccountable stroke of the brush could sometimes be to a painting, the stroke that seemed to have created the need for itself out of the combined resources of the canvas
and the man who worked on it, and so was definitive of the process of creation itself and of the final element of mystery in any work of art.

The frayed cuff coats were not worn with the bombast of a rich miser, and it was difficult to say what emotion it was, precisely, that a man felt when he first noticed the spotless but threadbare cloth of the long-skirted high-necked coats, the clean but cheap and floppy trousers, the clean bare feet in old patched sandals or polished down-at-heel shoes; but Bronowsky believed that a major part of that response was made up of respectful wariness, much the same – possibly – as one’s response would normally be to the sight of a gentleman down on his luck, but without the measure of pity and contempt such a condition evoked. The Nawab was rich enough for any but the most exaggerated taste. He was surrounded by proofs of his public comfort and of his private generosity. His austerities were reserved wholly for himself. They appeared at once as the badge of his right to lead a personal, private life and as evidence of how spare such a life had to be when so much of his interest and energy was expended for the benefit of the people it was his inherited duty to protect and privilege to rule. And it was this – the duality of meaning to be read into the Nawab’s appearance – and the fact that the appearance was not deliberately assumed, that excited in Bronowsky the special tenderness of the artist for his creation. The austerities had been gradual, so that neither Nawab Sahib nor Bronowsky had ever commented on them. Equally gradual, Bronowsky supposed, had been the growth of dandyism in himself. It was as though the love that existed between him and the Nawab had exerted an influence to make them opposites, but what pleased him more was the realization that when they were together the comparative splendour of his own plumage looked like that of a slightly more common species. People, observing them, would be less inclined to believe what they heard – that Bronowsky was the power behind the throne. In Bronowsky, pride in what he had made was stronger than personal vanity. It was part of his pride that Nawab Sahib alone should be credited with the talents and capabilities
Bronowsky had worked hard to train him to acquire and exercise.

He believed that Nawab Sahib was quite unconscious of there being any particular meaning to read into his habit of wearing old and inexpensive clothes. The Nawab had said once as they were preparing to go out on a public occasion for which Bronowsky had arrived dressed in his uniform of Honorary Colonel, Mirat Artillery (a uniform he had designed himself and which incorporated certain decorative flourishes reminiscent of the uniform of the old Imperial Guard to which Bronowsky had never belonged): ‘Sit low in the carriage, Dmitri. Otherwise how will they tell that it is not you who is Nawab?’

‘Should I sit higher than a man can sit, your Highness,’ Bronowsky said, ‘they would still know I was but Bronowsky. A wazir must dress to do honour to the State and the Nawab Sahib is the State. His raiment is Mirat.’

The Nawab smiled: the same slow, grave smile that had been one of the persuasions the Russian felt to follow the small, lost, dark-skinned man of passion, sorrows and absurdities to his curious little kingdom in an alien land. And since the occasion of this particular courtly exchange Bronowsky had noticed how whenever he entered a room where the Nawab stood the Nawab said nothing until he had taken in at one short or prolonged glance – depending on the amount there was to scrutinize – the details of his wazir’s dress and accessories. The ritual had become one he felt the Nawab depended on for reassurance. For some time Bronowsky had encouraged Ahmed also to take an interest in his clothes (or, anyway, to submit to directions and suggestions because interest in anything seemed to be something Ahmed was incapable of taking, unless visits to the Chandi Chowk could be counted as an interest as distinct from a compulsion).

That Ahmed should find increasing favour in the eyes of the Nawab was a continuing concern of Bronowsky’s present policy, one of whose objects was the marriage of Ahmed to the Nawab’s only daughter, Shiraz, whom the late Begum had brought up, out of spite, in a rigidly traditional manner, with the result that Shiraz, after her mother’s death, would
not come out of the seclusion she had been taught to regard as obligatory for a woman. Her mother had died just before Shiraz reached the age of puberty, and so she had never gone officially into purdah. The Nawab, urged by Bronowsky, had withheld his permission for that step to be taken; but the girl was so timid her father did not have the heart to follow Bronowsky’s advice further and insist on her adopting the modern ways of the palace. She was now sixteen, virtually untutored, and proved to be tongue-tied in the presence of strangers on the few occasions Bronowsky had succeeded in persuading the Nawab to command her out of her self-made zenana to pay her respects to visitors Bronowsky considered important. She had been taught by her mother to regard the wazir as an ogre, a man who had her father in thrall and whose private life was so wicked as to be unspeakable; and it was only with patience that he had gradually succeeded in removing from her mind the idea that simply to look him in the eye was tantamount to gazing at the Devil. Mostly, denied the privacy of the veil, she kept her eyes downcast and fled to the security of her rooms at the first hint that she had done her duty.

The sad thing, Bronowsky thought, was that she was ravishingly pretty. He assumed – because neither the Nawab nor either of his two sons was handsome – that this prettiness, like the perverted desire to hide it, was a legacy from her mother. Bronowsky had never been permitted to see the Begum. She submitted him to long and unkind interrogation from behind a purdah-screen which left him no notion of her except what could be gathered from strong whiffs of expensive imported perfumes, the glint of rich silks and brocades through the tiny carved apertures, and the harshness of a high-pitched voice in which passion, cruelty and bitchiness were in roughly equal proportions. From such one-sided interviews Bronowsky would retreat confirmed in his hatred of women, raging impotently against the enormity of their abuse of the moral weapons God had mistakenly given them as armour against the poor savage male and his ridiculous codes of honour. Sometimes, looking at Shiraz – a dark red blush under the pale brown skin of her cheeks, her eyes downcast, the fabric of her saree shimmering not from
reflections but from the trembling underneath – Bronowsky wondered how much of her mother’s temperament was concealed there and what it would take to release it and make some man’s life – Ahmed’s for instance – a misery. He comforted himself with the belief that the Begum, from all accounts, had always been a strong-willed woman and that what she had taught her daughter, once untaught, would release a temperament no more like the Begum’s than the two sons’ temperaments were like their father’s.

Bronowsky thought little of either son. Both had eluded his influence. Mohsin, the elder, the future Nawab, product of the English tutors and public-school style college Bronowsky had agreed to early on as a sop to the Political Department, had acquired the pompousness of the English without the saving grace of their energy and without that curious tendency to iconoclasm which they called their sense of humour. He spent most of his time in Delhi, worthily and dully engaged in what he called his business interests, and as little as possible in Mirat, a place which his Westernized wife despised as socially backward. The younger, Abdur, similarly schooled, had acquired different English characteristics. He was a harmless young man who had graduated from an absorbing interest in cricket which he played badly to an equally absorbing interest in aeroplanes which he had not yet succeeded in learning to fly to the satisfaction of the Air Force.