The information about Sarah's marriage to Perron is quite incidental to Staying On, Scott's next and last novel. He was not trying to wind up the plot of the Quartet here, nor was he simply indulging his penchant for recycling names or having one or two figures from an earlier novel put in brief reappearances. Rather, Staying On represents the ‘going back’ which William Conway in The Birds of Paradise sees as a kind of duty, a duty to confirm the past which has been recreated in the mind, and to validate what was found in it. Staying On is a splendid achievement in its own right, and was immediately recognized as such; but, especially in view of Scott's early training, it can also be seen as a final audit. It is one in which the novelist succeeds in producing both acceptance and a degree of closure.

In the Raj Quartet, the Smalleys are just what they sound – small figures who almost disappear in a vast canvas. Scott puts them on a par with his ubiquitous Smith's Hotels when he introduces them in The Towers of Silence: ‘Most stations had their Smalleys … slight bores but very useful’ (51–2). Indeed, the nondescript and childless army couple, Major (later Colonel) ‘Tusker’ Smalley and his not quite pukka wife Lucy, do live in rooms in a Smith's Hotel in Pankot, during the whole period covered by the Quartet.

When Scott takes them up again in Staying On, nothing has changed for the better. Tusker has moved from Pankot to a company job in Bombay and back again to Smith's, with his ineffectually protesting wife in tow, the only differences to their living arrangements being that they now have a yearly tenancy of the hotel's annexe, otherwise known as The Lodge, and that the whole place, overshadowed by the new and majestic Shiraz right opposite, is shabbier and more run down than ever.