Staying On

When the British left India in 1947, Tusker Smalley and his wife Lucy stayed on, and by 1972 they are the last of their kind in Pankot, living in the annexe of Smith's Hotel and answerable to Mrs Bhoolabhoy, the formidable proprietress whose husband they call Management. Tusker is a retired colonel who never rose as high as he should have, now given to silence, whisky and the crossword; Lucy has spent forty years being a good wife to a man who does not talk to her, and has a standing appointment at a hairdresser's where she can pretend to be someone. The immediate crisis concerns the lease on the annexe, which Mrs Bhoolabhoy intends to terminate. Scott, having spent four vast novels on the end of the Raj, returns to the same hill station for a short, comic and quietly agonising coda about two people who are neither grand nor tragic and simply have nowhere to go. Lucy's monologues, addressed to nobody, contain some of the most affecting writing about a marriage in English. The first page tells you how it ends; the pathos is in getting there.