Free The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott Page A

holiday. She said it was the first real one they’d had since the war began. Both girls have joined the WAC(I) and work in Area Headquarters at Pankot. They decided to come to Srinagarthis year because the sister – the younger of the two – is to be married soon. I’d seen the usual crowd of young men visiting their houseboat so naturally I asked if the sister’s fiancé was also in Srinagar. Apparently not. The engagement took place when he was stationed in Pankot, and originally the wedding was to have been there, towards Christmas of this year. But he was suddenly posted to Mirat and has written to say that the wedding must be brought forward and has to be in Mirat, the sooner the better, and the honeymoon can’t be for longer than two or three days. Which means, of course, that he expects to be going back into the field (he was in one of the regiments whose remnants managed to get out of Burma in 1942). So the young bride will be a grass window almost directly she’s married. This is why the Laytons have gone back to Pankot earlier than they planned. They’ll be off to Mirat soon after they arrive and it seems they hope to stay in the palace guest house so the younger Layton girl is very excited. I told Sarah Layton she’d like Mirat, especially if they stayed there as guests of the Nawab, who entertained Henry and me when we were on tour in that area. Lending the guest house to service people who can’t get accommodation in the cantonment is probably part of the Nawab’s war effort. He must be getting on a bit, now, and so must his wazir, that extraordinary Russian émigré Count, Bronowsky, or whatever his name was, whom the Nawab brought back from Monte Carlo in the twenties, at the time of the scandal over the Nawab’s relationship with a European woman. I told Miss Layton to look out for Bronowsky, and how all the English used to hate him until they realized what a good influence he was on the Nawab. She asked whether I had any idea what they ought to take as a present, if the Nawab let them stay in the guest house. Apparently they’ve been arguing and discussing it for days. I told her the Nawab was distantly related to ex-chief minister M. A. Kasim, and that the famous classic Urdu poet Gaffur was an eighteenth-century connection of both; and suggested that the most flattering gift might be a specially bound copy of Gaffur’s poems. She was very pleased by the suggestion and said she’d tell her mother and aunt and try to get hold of a copy. I told her she could buy one in Srinagar and might even get it boundhere, in a few days. Alternatively that there used to be a shop in Ranpur, in the bazaar, which did excellent leatherwork and gold-leaf blocking.
    After we’d finished talking about the book she looked at me with the most extraordinary expression of envy that I’ve ever seen in a girl so young. She said, ‘What a lot you know.’ I laughed and said it was one of the few advantages of old age, to be a repository of bits and pieces of casual information that sometimes come in useful. But she said she didn’t really mean that, she meant know as distinct from remember. She couldn’t properly explain it and got up and said she mustn’t take up any more of my time. I told her to come again, and she said she would if there were an opportunity. I took it she meant there probably wouldn’t be and as it turned out I never saw her again, except to wave to. I didn’t see their departure but after they’d gone one of the boys who’d been on their cookboat brought round a little bunch of flowers with a card ‘With best wishes and many thanks from Sarah Layton’.
    I have been thinking over what she said about knowing as distinct from remembering. Perhaps all it amounts to is that as we talked and I trotted out these little bits of information I gave the impression, common in elderly people, not only of having a long full life behind me that I could dip into more or less at random for the benefit of