The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (12 page)

*

Once a week she visited the club subscription library for Mabel, seldom for herself who found what Mr Cleghorn had called the book of life sufficiently entertaining and puzzling to keep her occupied without recourse to the print and paper of imaginary or refurbished adventure.

Lost between the shelves among which she and Edwina would wander she heard a voice say, ‘I’m told the whole trouble is she was infatuated with the Indian. She’d have done anything to save him.’ She recognized the voice of little Mrs Smalley, the station gossip, and then Clarissa’s saying, ‘You can’t know that.’ To which Lucy Smalley replied, ‘It’s what people in Mayapore are saying, according to Tusker, and they have been in a position to judge. They say she was always out with him, holding his hand in public places. And now she’s threatening to say the most dreadful things against the authorities if the men they’ve arrested are charged and tried, because
he’s
one of them. The police officer who made the arrests is almost out of his mind.’

Barbie emerged armed with a volume of Emerson still open at the page with her thumb on the line, ‘Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history,’ which a moment ago had caused her to catch her breath. She cried out, ‘Of whom are you talking?’

Not, it seemed, of Edwina, but – Lucy Smalley explained, recovered quickly from the nasty shock of Barbie emerging and bearing down like a Fury – of ‘the Manners girl’, the other victim. ‘You didn’t think we were talking about your friend, surely?’

Barbie took Emerson home with her. She had not meant to but he was in her hand as she arrived at Mrs Stewart’s desk and was marked out to her with a rise of Mrs Stewart’s eyebrows because Mrs Stewart, a widow from Madras with a literary turn of mind, was more used to receiving from Barbie her interpretations of Mabel’s standing order for something light, which generally turned out to be so easy on the mind and lap that Mabel nodded off over it in her wing chair having pronounced it earlier ‘just right’.

Presented with Emerson’s essays Mabel said, ‘Oh, I read those as a girl, I don’t think I could bother again.’

‘I’ll take it back tomorrow,’ Barbie promised. ‘It was a mistake, or rather absent-mindedness, my attention was taken as it can be all too easily. Well, you know, you know. I
am
sorry.’

But Mabel merely smiled and touched Barbie’s arm as she did from time to time as if to make up for all the occasions when she might have failed to let Barbie know she was appreciated.

Barbie sat at the writing-table, opened the rejected book. ‘If the whole of history is one man,’ she said, ‘it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.’ She closed the book abruptly and made herself busy in the room, opening drawers and rearranging their contents.

Not taking Emerson back she returned to him daily like a sparrow easily frightened from a promising scattering of crumbs by the slightest noise, with a nagging sense of having more duties than intelligence. It was pretty plain she was not cut out for the philosophical life but through Emerson it impinged on her own like the shadow of a hunched bird of prey patiently observing below it the ritual of survival. The bird should have been an angel.

She began to feel what she believed Emerson wanted her to feel: that in her own experience lay an explanation not only of history but of the lives of other living people, therefore an explanation of the things that had happened to Edwina and to Miss Manners of whom she had only the vaguest picture, the one that had been commonly shared in Pankot of a reclining figure, in white, in a darkened room. But now it had changed. The girl’s hand was no longer pressed inverted against her forehead but held by another which was brown like the dead teacher’s. The picture shimmered, became fluid. Colours and patterns ran. When Barbie sat at her desk and gazed at the actual picture she was no longer sure of what she saw: Edwina guarding the body, Mabel kneeling to grub out weeds or inclining to gather roses; or herself, Barbie, surrounded by the children she had presumed to bring to God; or Miss Manners in some kind of unacceptable relationship with a man of another race whom she was intent on saving.

From this there emerged a figure, the figure of an unknown Indian: dead in one aspect, alive in another. And after a while it occurred to her that the unknown Indian was what her life in India had been about. The notion alarmed her. She had not thought of it before in those terms and did not know what to do about it now that she had. She could not very well look for him because she did not know where to do that. Aziz for instance seemed content even in his alternative persona of a man from the hills with a blanket and a secret. He did not strike her as being in distress of any kind.

But the dead man in the vicinity of the milestone had moved. Overnight there had been a rearrangement of his limbs as if while it was dark he had sat up. And howled. The hills were hunted by jackals. People would not have noticed. But she thought that she would henceforth be able to distinguish the man’s cry from the cries of the animals.

*

She began another letter to Edwina.

‘September 4th. Why don’t you write Edwina? I need your letter,’ then tore it up and began another sensibly.

‘Some people from Mayapore have been here. I didn’t meet them but a woman called Smalley who lives at the little Smith’s Hotel where these people stayed for a couple of days told Clarissa Peplow that according to these visitors whose name I think was Patterson or Pattison you were reported well on the mend and about to be discharged. How thankful this news has made me. I have not rung the hospital again because of the expense and the delay in getting through and then getting only the briefest official answer to the question. But I have written several times. I hope my letters all arrived. The posts have been badly delayed, indeed disrupted. If you are already discharged no doubt the hospital will send this note round to your bungalow. I shall mark the envelope please forward and shall probably send a separate note to you at home. How glad you will be to be there. I hope, hope that you are truly recovered, Edwina.

‘Is there a possibility of your making the journey to Pankot? The invitation still stands. Mabel has asked me to emphasize this and also to say that we should keep you free from the prying and the curious. I do trust that you are not too disagreeably involved with the aftermath of that awful business. It is said officially that the country is returning to normal and that now surely is the time for magnanimity. But one hears the unhappiest accounts and most unpleasant remarks. I am, my dear Edwina, a bit concerned for you as a result of something Clarissa said, echoing Lucy Smalley and presumably these Patterson Pattison people. It would be monstrous if after all you have been through you were in the least criticized for stating that you could not either describe or recognize individuals among that wicked mob. It must have been a nightmare and after a nightmare the details are often mercifully forgotten. Only those with vengeful natures would wish to see you drag some detail back into the light, one upon which they could then proceed to act over-righteously perhaps and in all likelihood unjustly. No doubt you feel as I do that God will punish and perhaps has already punished. As Clarissa says, some of the men who hurt you and killed the teacher may since have been killed themselves in the rioting. Divine retribution!’

Here Barbie’s pen hesitated as if of its own accord and she could not continue. Divine retribution was all very well. It did not help the unknown Indian who seemed this morning to be crying out harder but still soundlessly, begging for justice and not alleviation. She found it difficult to distinguish between the teacher who died in the attack on Edwina and the Indian who was supposed to have had Miss Manners infatuated with him. Lucy Smalley’s opinion was that the Indian boy Miss Manners thought she was in love with must have been some kind of hypnotist. But perhaps love was a form of hypnosis anyway. Had not Barbie been mesmerized herself years and years ago?

My life, she thought, has become extraordinarily complicated. There is more than one of me and one, I’m not sure which, has a serious duty to perform. ‘It seems perfectly dreadful (she wrote suddenly, allowing the Waterman pen its now free-flowing head) how within the space of a few weeks poor Daphne Manners has become “that Manners girl”.’ And she continued for a page or two becoming while she did so a projection of that poor misused creature who it was said was not frail and pretty after all but rather large and ungainly and in need of spectacles, so that the sympathetic transference of Barbie to Daphne and back again was easier to make than it would have been had the idea of Miss Manners as frail, ethereal and beautiful in victim’s white turned out to be accurate.

Instead here she was according to reports from people who had been in a position to know, in a rather grubby dress to suit the circumstances arising from her extraordinary behaviour, throwing up blinds, peering short-sightedly and threatening to create a scene, standing in shafts of sunlight which were alive with particles of dust. Barbie understood this image better than the other.

Miss Manners said the men arrested were the wrong men. Barbie wondered how that could be but was impressed by the reported strenuousness of Miss Manners’s insistence which everyone else seemed to feel outraged by, just as they were ready to be outraged by Edwina’s insistence that she had no contribution to make to the identification of a few men in a large crowd. In those circumstances they all looked alike anyway in their murky dhotis and Gandhi caps and filthy turbans. And the smell. Suffering, sweating, stinking, violent humanity. It was the background against which you had to visualize Jesus working. People did not remember this important thing about His presence. Edwina did. Did Miss Manners? Or was she only intent on confusing the police to save her lover? Apparently she kept changing her story. According to the Pattersons she had threatened to say that if the six youths who included her lover were charged and tried for rape she would stand up and say that the men who assaulted her could just as easily have been British soldiers with their faces blacked.

In that threat, that outburst, which had scandalized her countrymen, Barbie detected what she thought of as the girl’s despair and was sorry for her. She would have liked to take Miss Manners in her arms and comfort her. She was not convinced though that Miss Manners was telling the whole truth so she was also sorry for the police officer who had arrested the men and was convinced of their guilt. It was said by the Patterson Pattisons that the police officer had warned Miss Manners about her association with this particular Indian who was handsome if you liked that sort of thing and educated, so he claimed, in England but certainly beyond his real station, and had already been questioned over something to do with political affiliations. On the face of it, Barbie saw, the Indian was as likely to be guilty as not, leading Miss Manners on, laughing at her behind her back as Lucy Smalley suggested, and planning to attack her in the dark on the way home from one of her errands of mercy, in the company of five of his westernized friends, student-types, who came at her from behind, dragged her off her bicycle into the Bibighar Gardens, covered her head with her own raincape, raped her and left her to stagger home in pain, in torment, totally disorientated.

If they covered her head how could she see who they were? When did they cover her head? Only after she had a glimpse (as apparently she began to say), a good enough glimpse of them to be able to insist that they were dirty peasant-types not well-groomed European-style dressed boys of the kind arrested? And there had been some confusion about her bicycle. Had it been found by the police in the ditch outside the Indian boy’s house? At first this was what had been said but it had been denied later by the police officer himself. The most damning thing of all had not been denied though. When arrested the Indian boy had been bathing his face which was scratched and bruised. He would not say how; had never said, had refused utterly to talk. The others denied any complicity, any connection with his English girl friend, pretended they had spent the whole evening drinking hooch in a hut near the Bibighar Gardens where the attack had taken place. They had been arrested in the hut.

Now they were disposed of, all of them, to gaol, without trial, as political detenus. And Miss Manners seemed to have won. But what had she won except disgrace among her own people? And her Indian boy-friend; what had he got away with?

Barbie did not even know his name. She began to have dreams about him, but in these dreams he was the Indian Edwina had tried to save. In this dream his eyes were blinded by cataracts. He had a powerful muscular throat which was exposed because his head was lifted and his mouth wide open in a continuous soundless scream.

VI

It was the element of scornful rejection implicit in every violent challenge to authority which hurt most deeply and blighted the tendrils of affection which entwined and supported the crumbling pillars of the edifice. Upon faces already drawn from the strain of conveying self-confidence and from the slight but persistent malaise suffered by constitutions imperfectly designed to withstand the climate, there would fall – during these periods of pressure – shadows of brooding melancholy, even when the face was expressing scorn or indifference, amusement, wrath; whatever it was that was being felt or assumed. In the cries of shock and outrage with which news of victims was heard and passed on, in the calls for condign punishment of culprits, a plaintive note managed to be struck which corresponded to the melancholy shadow; a note of awareness that the victims must have been people in whom the impulse to show as well as feel affection in the performance of their duty had been stronger than was usual, even than was wise, so that the fates of these people were seen through all the tangle of misfortune and circumstance as sacrificial.