The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott

suppose. Perhaps I felt this only because father was dead, the war had been a mess and I’d done nothing to deserve my MC, or because Mabel was crying. Well, it was all splendid enough, I suppose.’
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    Layton’s father had died unexpectedly in 1917 after a short illness caused by an abscess on the liver – the end result of a long-standing amoebic infection which had never been properly diagnosed or treated.
    He died in the Minto Hospital in Ranpur and was buried in the churchyard of St Luke’s. If he had lived another year, Mabel said, he would have got his KCIE. Since his death Mabel had altered, her stepson thought. There had always been a hard streak in her. Without it her gaiety would have seemed shallow. Now the gaiety had gone and the hard streak emerged when it was least expected: in private rather than in public. She cried at the ceremonial parade. But when she took her stepson to St Luke’s to show him his father’s grave her behaviour was off-hand. She seemed to have lost the knack, or the will, to make people feel at home in her company.
    A year later, after her stepson’s marriage to Mildred Muir and after there had been a committee of inquiry into the massacre in the Jallianwallah Bagh, a report by the Indian National Congress, a debate in the House of Commons on the findings of the Army Council, and General Dyer had been retired on half-pay (disgraced, whereas twelve months before he had been hailed as the saviour of India and was still thought of as such by all right-thinking people), Mabel Layton surprised everybody by refusing to identify herselfwith the ladies of Pankot and Ranpur who busied themselves collecting money for the General Dyer fund. These ladies had misinterpreted the tears at the ceremonial parade and the stony face over tea and coffee for patriotism of the most exemplary kind, and were shocked when by refusing either to contribute or help to collect money that would keep the wolf from the old General’s door she appeared in an entirely different light: widow of a soldier who had died for the empire, widow – for a second time – of a civilian whose work for the empire had killed him, stepmother of a young officer who had fought for his country gallantly, step-mother-in-law of the second daughter of General Muir, but who was, it seemed, nevertheless insensible to the true nature of what the men in her life (including her father, who had been an admiral) had stood or still stood for.
    When the total sum collected for General Dyer was heard to have reached the substantial fee of £26,000 the ladies of Pankot and Ranpur felt vindicated, justified. But Mabel Layton’s comment was ‘Twenty-six thousand? Well, now, how many unarmed Indians died in the Jallianwallah Bagh? Two hundred? Three hundred? There seems to be some uncertainty, but let’s say two hundred and sixty. That’s one hundred pounds a piece. So we know the current price for a dead brown,’ and sent a cheque for £100 to the fund the Indians were raising for the families of Jallianwallah victims. But only young Layton and the Indian to whom she entrusted the money knew this.
    ‘I’m keeping it dark for your sake,’ Mabel told him, but with an edge in her voice that made it sound as if she felt he had personally driven her to secrecy. ‘People would misunderstand. They usually do. You have a career to think of. You can’t have a stepmother who seems to be going native, which is the last thing I’d do. I hate the damned country now anyway. It’s taken two husbands from me. To me it’s not a question of choosing between poor old Dyer and the bloody browns. The choice was made for me when we took the country over and got the idea we did so for its own sake instead of ours. Dyer can look after himself, but according to the rules the browns can’t because looking after them is what we get paid for. And if it’s really necessary every so often toshoot some of them down like ninepins for their own good the least we can