The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (11 page)

She went indoors. The silence that followed was explicit. Mildred broke it, beating Clarissa perhaps by the shortest head.

‘What treat have we in store?’ she inquired.

She had her elbows on the arms of the wicker chair and her glass at chest level, held there by the fingers of both droop-wristed hands, and like this seemed to define the limit of her contribution to public interest in Miss Batchelor as the friend of a victim of the riots. Her indifference to her as the sharer of Mabel’s kingdom was unchanged. Clarissa, who sat upright on a stool with her feet together and her handbag on her knees, directed her Christian gaze at Mildred but finding no fault unless it were in the large glass of gin and lemon summoned her still clear voice and said, ‘It’s some kind of picture I gather. One that has to do with her friend.’

‘How
is
her friend?’ Nicky Paynton asked.

‘The question that concerns me more,’ Clarissa answered, ‘is how is
she
? She has just been acting very strangely on Club road.’

Walking without due care; a danger to herself, indeed to others, up the long stretch from Church road which tongas bowled down or strained up, which no one
ever
walked or if they did walked with accidents in mind, keeping well into the bank on the golf-course side and facing the oncoming horses, bicycles and vehicles; not – like Barbara – on the left hand side and certainly not in the middle, stopping, starting, drawing her own or an invisible companion’s attention to some aspect of the Pankot scene which she must have seen hundreds of times before. And talking. Not in a loud voice. But quite definitely talking. To herself.

‘I felt,’ Clarissa said when she had described this curious and dangerous behaviour, ‘that she imagined herself in the company of her friend, Miss Crane. I made my tonga stop and pick her up and directly she got in she said how kind it was of Mabel to let her invite Miss Crane to Rose Cottage when she is better. And then she started talking about a picture and insisted that I come in to see it.’

One after the other, Clarissa last, heads or eyes were turned towards the garden where Mabel stood motionless except for her hands and arms cutting roses. In the heavy air the click of the secateurs was clearly audible. The sound had a slightly enervating effect but suddenly there were other sounds, voices indoors, all but one of them male. A dog barked and Panther appeared scuffling blackly on to the verandah to greet the company one by one with a sniff of curiosity and a wag of tribute before gallivanting back to the french window, barking and skittering backwards as Susan came out ahead of four affable looking subalterns. Nigel you know, she said, this is Bob, Derek, Tommy. My mother, Mrs Trehearne, Mrs Paynton, Mrs Fosdick oh and Mrs Peplow, hello, no Panther come here.’

‘I expect there’s some cold beer,’ Mildred said. ‘One of you ring and Nigel we could do with refills, you’ll find the trolley indoors. No, don’t bother, Aziz has forestalled you, but tell him to bring the beer and if you don’t mind making yourself useful get me another of these and anyone else who wants one. Susan you’re looking hot. There’s some nimbo on the trolley, go and say hello to your Aunt Mabel first while one of the boys gets you a glass only stop Panther going mad for God’s sake. Is Sarah coming or joining us at the club?’

‘She said she’d join us at the club and may be late. Come on, Panther, come on old boy. Oh don’t be silly. It’s all right.’ She grasped the dog by its stout leather collar and took it down steps it remembered as the scene of chastisement, and just then Barbie reappeared.

‘I’ve found it!’ she announced. The men made way for her and each other. She held the framed picture – measuring twelve inches by eight – and was cleaning the glass with the sleeve of her jacket, gripping the cuff with her fingers to make a firm rubbing surface. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary when you see something you haven’t actually looked at for a while how familiar it is. The way the old man holds the alms bowl and the other leans on his staff. If you’d asked me to draw it from memory I couldn’t have but one look at it now and one thinks of course! that’s how they stood, that’s how the artist drew them and left them, caught them in mid-gesture so that the gestures are always being made and you never think of them as getting tired.’

She gave the picture to Mrs Peplow and now stood to one side and a pace behind, both hands behind her back, legs apart (tightening her skirt at the calves) her head tilted, looking down over Clarissa’s shoulder.

‘You have to imagine it much larger, on the schoolroom wall behind the desk and all the children gathered round just as the people are gathered round the Queen, and Edwina standing with a pointer, not that I ever saw her give a lesson because she’d left Muzzafirabad before I got there but Mr Cleghorn gave me a demonstration and wanted me to try it but as I said, no, no, one must plough one’s own furrow. I can see him now, copying Edwina. Here is the Queen. The Queen is sitting on her throne. The uniform of the Sahib is scarlet. The sky here is blue. Who are these people in the sky? They are angels. They blow on golden trumpets. They protect the Queen. The Queen protects the people. The people bring presents to the Queen. The Prince carries a jewel on a velvet cushion. The Jewel is India. She will place the Jewel in her Crown.’

‘Yes, I see,’ Clarissa said. She was holding the picture like a looking-glass. ‘Most admirable. To teach English
and
loyalty. Thank you for showing it to me.’

She handed the picture back. Miss Batchelor caught hold of it, strode across and thrust it at Mildred who had her refilled glass in both hands so that a young man with freckles and dark red hair gallantly reached out and took the picture and held it where Mrs Layton’s glance might fall upon it, which fleetingly it did.

‘Do pass it round,’ Miss Batchelor said. ‘It’s a copy of a picture my friend Edwina Crane used years and years ago. The children adored it. Pictures are so important when instructing the young. But one has to be careful. Edwina once told me she had a very grave suspicion that in the end the children confused her with Victoria! Isn’t that amusing? You must admit the artist got everything in, Mrs Fosdick. Disraeli’s there, the one with the scroll and the smug expression. Generals, admirals, statesmen, princes, paupers, babus, banyas, warriors, villagers, women, children. And old Victoria in the middle of it sitting on a throne under a canopy in the open air of all things, really quite absurd but allegorical of course, she never came to India. She looks quite startled, don’t you agree, Mrs Trehearne? But I think that’s the effect of the reduction in scale. The print on the schoolroom wall was ten times as big and in that I remember – thank you, Mrs Paynton – she looked terribly wise and kind and understanding.

Receiving the picture back from Mrs Paynton via a young man with a fair moustache she looked at it again herself. ‘It always seemed to me to be a picture about love rather than loyalty. Perhaps they amount to the same thing. What do you think?’

She looked at the moustached young man whose mouth was puckered in concentration. He was pulling his left earlobe.

‘Have you got transport?’ Mildred asked one of the men, who said yes they had. ‘Then directly you’ve downed your beers we ought to be getting along to the club.’

There were movements of departure. Two of the men went into the garden to rescue Susan.

‘Oh, are you all going?’ Miss Batchelor asked in her carrying schoolroom voice. ‘Let me just say I do appreciate everyone being so kind, so solicitous for Edwina.’

*

She hammered a nail into the wall above the old campaigner’s writing-table and hung the picture. Aziz approved. He would pause in his work to consider it, stand like one of the children of Muzzafirabad grown old but still possessed. She had told him about her friend Miss Crane, that she was in hospital in distant Mayapore hurt trying to save someone who was attacked and killed, and might when better stay for a week or two in the little spare. He nodded his understanding in the Indian way. In Aziz this was a gesture of great economy. He had the dignity of the people from the higher hills who walked shrouded in blankets and secrecy and made excursions into Pankot, involved in mysterious errands whose object escaped her since they came and went empty-handed as if merely to look and reassure themselves that nothing was happening in the valley of which they disapproved.

Mabel, in her solitary walks, went in their direction but nowadays went less often. On her own walks the other way downhill Barbie had become used to feeling like a dove sent out to check the level of the flood. After three years the darkness still lay on Mabel’s soul and Barbie felt a bit discouraged. But since the incident on the road from Dibrapur the nature of her outings seemed to have changed and the familiar route had become unfamiliar. She anticipated revelation.

In her mind she too guarded the body. It lay near the milestone half way up (or down) Club road. Passing the milestone made her light-headed; almost there was a sense of levitation. Edwina’s act of guarding the body had been one of startling simplicity and purity which possibly only a woman like Edwina could have had the occasion to perform and in performing it sum up the meaning of her life in India. From the schoolroom door at Muzzafirabad to the place on the road from Dibrapur was a distance measurable in miles, in years, but between the occasions there was no distance. Right from the beginning Edwina had been close to God and therefore to herself. Not teaching but loving. From her plain face, her manner, you might not have guessed this. Only from her actions. And in this most recent action, this guarding of the dead Indian’s body, it seemed to Barbie that Edwina had achieved her apotheosis.

Oh how I long, Barbie said, standing still suddenly, having passed the milestone and accepted the sad fact that there was no body there for her to guard, how I long for an apotheosis of my own, nothing spectacular, mind, nothing in the least grandiose nor even just grand, but, like Edwina’s, quiet with a still-centre to it that exemplifies not my release from earthly life although it might do that too but from its muddiness and uncertainty, its rather desperate habit of always proving that there are two sides to every question; my release from that into the tranquillity of knowing my work has been acceptable, good and useful perhaps, perhaps not, but performed in love, with love, and humility of course, indeed, humility, and singularity, wholeness of purpose. That is the most important thing of all.

But not knowing what kind of apotheosis this could be she walked on in the direction of the bazaar to settle the accounts at Jalal-Ud-Din’s and Gulab Singh Sahib’s, and buy more stamps to write more letters to Edwina who did not reply. No news she said to Sarah who inquired, being also at Jalal-Ud-Din’s querying a bill upon which was writ large the rising cost of living in her father’s continuing absence, no news is good news. She hoped for both their sakes that this was so.

She was in love with Sarah Layton and with Susan but more with Sarah who seemed to need it more. She was in love with Pankot and her life there and her duty to Mabel and the wind in winter. She was afraid to be in love with Mr Maybrick who played the organ at St John’s and was widowed and retired from Tea, because he was to begin with a man and to go on with a man with a temper and an air of self-enclosure who did not normally invite proofs of attachment even of Barbie’s kind, which did not extend to flesh. In any case he had large hands with more hair on the wrists than on his head and when he played the organ his hands looked extraordinarily vivid and enterprising. He lived alone except for his Assamese houseboy in a tiny and very untidy bungalow not far from the rectory-bungalow on the same tree-shaded road. In his bungalow there were many photographs of his dead wife and in most of them she had her hand above her eyes to keep the sun out, a fact which always made Barbie feel outdoors when really in.

On her way back from the bazaar she looked in at St John’s to collect his album of Handel which was falling to pieces and which she had volunteered to repair. Mr Maybrick was at practice. She could hear the organ as she approached the church door. Bach. Toccata and fugue.

She sat in a pew and listened. She imagined Mr Maybrick’s red face and bald head reflected in the mirror above the keyboards. The mirror was a framed picture. Who is this? This is the Planter. The face of the Planter is reddened by the sun. Here is his Lady. She shades her eyes from the light. She is of the North and ails in the climate. But keeps going. What is the Planter doing? He is showing the coolies how to pick only the tender leaves. As he shows them God sings through his fingers. The leaves are green. When they are dried they will be brown. The music will be preserved in caddies. The Planter and the coolies between them will bring Tea to the Pots of the Nation.

She thought: I shall bring Edwina to St John’s to hear Mr Maybrick at practice and on Sundays to hear Arthur Peplow’s sermon. And afterwards we shall return to Rose Cottage. And I shall be large again and shapely with intent, so close to Edwina that God will remember and no longer mark me absent from the roll.

*

The attitude of the old Queen inclining her body, extending her two hands, was then suddenly an image of Edwina on the road from Dibrapur holding her hands protectively above the body of the Indian. Flames from the burning motor-car were reflected in the sky where the angelic light pierced bulgy monsoon clouds.

In this image she had a surrogate for God, a half-way house of intercession, capable perhaps of boosting the weak signals from the rush mat and transmitting them through the crackling overloaded ether which her direct prayers could not penetrate. She knelt with her body upright, facing the writing-table and the picture that pointed the reality of a Christian act, the palms of her hands turned to receive whatever was offered. She exposed her chest well below the gold pendant cross to give the metal room to act as a lightning conductor and sometimes felt it warmed by the reflected light from the burning vehicle; which was a promising beginning. Otherwise everything remained as it had been.