The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (15 page)

She left her door open so that she could see her way across the hall. There was a slit of light under Mabel’s door. She hesitated. The smell had gone. She went to the door and tapped very gently. She got no answer. She tapped again and said, Mabel. She would have gone back to bed because she realized how silly it was to expect a deaf person to hear and she did not want to open the door and frighten her. But potential alarm was exerting its hollow fascination. She opened Mabel’s door until she had a gap wide enough to admit her head and one shoulder.

Mabel was asleep propped on the pillows. The light was still on. Mabel’s head had fallen to one side and her reading glasses were low down on her nose and looked as if they might come adrift and get broken and cause damage to her eyes and face. A book was open on her lap. The hand that had held it lay inert.

The fire was off. Barbie went to the bedside. She took the book away, placed it on the table with its tasselled marker between the pages at which it had been open. Next, she very carefully removed the dangerous spectacles, returned them to the leather case. She settled the pillows, drew the sheet and blankets farther up. She wanted to cover Mabel’s hands but decided not to in case she woke her up. She seemed to have disturbed her slightly as it was. A sigh came. And then a sound in the back of the throat almost like something being said.

Barbie looked down at her friend. Very briefly she had a ridiculous idea that she didn’t like her. At the same time she knew that she loved her. And she knew that Mabel was fond of her in spite of not appearing to be fond of anyone much. It was a curious relationship, like one between two people who hadn’t yet met but who would love each other when they did. Mabel had come closer to meeting her than she had come to meeting Mabel. After three years Barbie still knew almost nothing about her friend but even if one discounted facts not taken in because of deafness Mabel must now know almost everything about Barbie because Barbie had told her over and over. Telling Mabel things was part of the job of looking after her, almost more important than doing things to absolve her from household cares and responsibilities. Without the actuality of Barbie’s voice incessantly saying things Barbie thought that Mabel would not have appreciated so much the silence in which she seemed to exist. The only thing Barbie had never told her about was her secret sorrow. When she looked at Mabel as she was doing now she believed Mabel knew about it anyway and had known from the beginning.

She thought: In a way my secret sorrow is Mabel. I don’t know how much of me gets through. I’m rather like a wave dashing against a rock, the sounds I make are just like that. There is Mabel, there is the rock, there is God. They are the same to all intents and purposes.

Mabel stirred but did not wake. How old she looked in bed, immensely old. Barbie put out her hand to switch off the lamp. The old woman made that noise in her throat again as if disturbed by the shadow of Barbie’s arm. She made it again. She was muttering but the sound came from her throat because her lips were too far gone in the drug of each day’s little death to come together properly. She muttered for several seconds then paused and then said something which caused Barbie to stand alert and undecided with her finger and thumb on the little ebony key-switch of the old-fashioned brass table lamp, willing the echo of the sound to pause too before continuing on its flight into a state of being beyond recall. She caught the rhythm back first and then the vowel sounds, then the consonants. A name, a woman’s name, Gilliam Waller.

She watched Mabel’s face but could not tell anything from it. There was no more muttering. Mabel had reached wherever she had been going. Beyond Gilliam Waller she had found the dark of dreamless sleep.

*

TRAGIC DEATH OF ENGLISH MISSIONARY

Ranpur, October 29th, 1942

The death is reported in Mayapore two days ago of Miss Edwina Crane, superintendent of the district’s Protestant Mission Schools who was roughly handled by a mob during the August riots and narrowly escaped with her life when another teacher, Mr D. R. Chaudhuri, was murdered. Police have so far been unable to apprehend their attackers.

At an inquest held yesterday in Mayapore a statement obtained from Miss Crane’s servant was submitted by the police. According to this man his mistress sent him to the bazaar at 3.45 pm to collect a package from the chemist. Since her return from hospital he had frequently gone on such errands. On this occasion however the chemist said he knew nothing of a prescription for Miss Crane. The servant then returned home.

Reaching there he smelt burning and saw smoke. A shed in the compound was a mass of flames and servants from neighbouring houses were attempting to extinguish it. One of these men called out that Miss Crane was in the shed.

The police submitted a statement from this other man. Shortly before 4 pm he had seen a woman in a white saree in the compound of the mission superintendent’s bungalow. Thinking it was someone who had no business there he challenged her. She motioned him to go away. He observed that the woman in the white saree was Miss Crane. Neither he nor her own servant had ever seen her adopt this mode of dress. He watched her go into the shed and then returned to his work. Shortly afterwards he smelt smoke and noticed that the shed was on fire.

The police also submitted a note found in Miss Crane’s study addressed to the Coroner. An official in Miss Crane’s Mission confirmed that it was in her handwriting. The note which was not read out at the inquest was accepted by the police as satisfactory evidence of Miss Crane’s determination to take her own life.

Dr Jayaprakash, consultant physician at the Begum Mumtez Zaidkhan Purdah hospital and health officer to the mission schools stated that he had attended Miss Crane for some years. Normally in excellent health she had not regained it since the attack on her in August. After her discharge from hospital he prescribed tonics and advised her to take a holiday. On his last visit about a week before her tragic death she told him she had decided to retire from the mission.

A verdict of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed was recorded.

A touching note was struck when Miss Crane’s servant who seemed to confuse the proceedings with a legal case asked whether ‘Madam was to be released and restored to him.’ A colleague of the late Miss Crane at the Mission who led the weeping man from court told your reporter that this man, Joseph, had served Miss Crane since he was a kitchen boy at the mission in Muzzafirabad (
NWFP
) where Miss Crane taught before the Great War. ‘She was a heroine to him. She stood alone at the door of the school guarding the children and faced up to a gang of armed hooligans who threatened to burn the school down.’

The funeral took place later in the day. Waiting outside the cemetery were groups of Indian women, mothers of some of the children who attend the mission schools. After the funeral rites were over your reporter noted that these women entered the cemetery and placed flowers on the grave.

*

She went into the bathroom and locked the door and the other door that led to the verandah and the door that led into the little spare. She got down on her knees on the cold floor and clasped her hands on the rim of the smooth white porcelain hand-basin, then groped for her damp flannel and stuffed it into her mouth so as not to disturb the house. She reached up and turned the tap on full. The water spashed into the bowl, down the pipe and out into the open runnel that carried it away. She sank lower until her body was almost touching her thighs and let herself sob aloud.

Edwina had sinned. But that was not why Barbie wept. The question of what would happen to Edwina’s soul was beyond her power to calculate. It would be settled in limbo which to Barbie was a bleak and incomprehensible but real place chilled by God’s breath and darkened by the Devil’s brow; barren neutral territory where the dead waited, trembling and naked, incapable of further action to support a claim to either kingdom. To kill oneself was wicked. Her father had killed himself with drink walking with a skinful under the hooves and wheels of a horsedrawn carriage on the Thames Embankment. Her widowed mother had killed herself not with work as people said but with a combination of heartless love and heartless pride better known as keeping up appearances. Their deaths were small sins in comparison with Edwina’s terrible act of self-destruction but in their private little despairs of which the drinking and the pride had been evidence she had long since learned to see a glimmer of the devil’s face; thoughtful, chin in hand, offering recompense, suggesting anodynes that were not that at all but addictive means of excitation of the ill he did.

Barbie’s Devil was not a demon but a fallen angel and his Hell no place of fire and brimstone but an image of lost heaven. There was no soul lonelier than he. His passion for souls was as great as God’s but all he had to offer was his own despair. He offered it as boundlessly as God offered love. He
was
despair as surely as God was love.

And that was why she wept. Blinded by her tears, still kneeling, she reached out, entering that moment that should have brought her to the centre of the sublime mystery but did not because there was no mystery. She was an old woman like Edwina and the dead body was the one Edwina guarded – her life in India come to nothing.

She wept because the gesture that had seemed sublime revealed an Edwina who was dumb with despair not purified by love. Revelation of Edwina’s despair uncovered her own, showed its depth, its immensity. For herself she could have borne the knowledge, would have to bear it. For Edwina it must have been a cruel thing. Edwina had always seemed so strong and sure in God, in God’s purpose, so richly endowed that just to be near her was to share her gift and feel one’s doubts turn sour for want of nourishment.

And yet Edwina must have felt it too, the ever-increasing tenuousness of the connection, the separation in space as God inexplicably turned His face from humble service He no longer found acceptable but was too kind actually to refuse.

She rose painfully from her knees and soaked the flannel under the running tap, carried it sopping to her face and repeated the process until her face was chilled and only her eyeballs felt hot. Edwina’s faith had been of a higher order than her own, she had no doubt, and as a consequence her despair had been great enough to disturb the balance of her mind. But the disturbance could not be offered in mitigation because it was, itself, the work of the Devil. She looked in the mirror that hung above the basin. On the opposite wall there was another mirror. She was multiplied back and front. Frontwards she was Barbie, approaching herself, and backwards another self retreating through one diminishing image after another into some kind of shocking infinity.

She felt her skin freeze and harden as warmth went out of her blood. The bathroom was suddenly rank with the nausea, fetid and foul, but there was in its foulness a sense of exquisite patience and desire. She clutched her abdomen and her throat, leant over the bowl and was sick. She retched and gasped. The tap was still on and the running water carried the horror away. Now she supported herself gripping the porcelain basin. She let the water run until the whiteness sparkled again. Her whole body felt clammy. Slowly its warmth returned.

She rinsed her mouth over and over and then turned the tap off. When the last gurgle had died away there was a silence such as might follow a sigh.

‘Poor creature,’ she said. She shut her eyes. ‘I know who you are and I know you are still here. Please go.’

She waited, then caught her breath at the sound of a slow ungainly winged departure as of a heavy carrion bird that had difficulty in overcoming the pull of gravity. She waited for a few minutes and then fastidiously washed her face and hands, but – still dissatisfied – unlocked the door to her bedroom, collected clean clothes, returned and dropped each discarded article into the dhobi basket until she stood naked. Redressed and cologned she went back to her room and tidied her hair.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, her mother had said but she had not said who might behold.

Part Two

A QUESTION OF LOYALTY

M
ANNERS.
On May 7th at Srinagar. To Daphne, a daughter, Parvati.

M
ANNERS.
On May 7th, at Srinager, Daphne, daughter of the late Mr & Mrs George Manners, beloved niece of Ethel and the late Sir Henry Manners.

C
APTAIN
E. A. D. B
INGHAM
and M
ISS
S
USAN
L
AYTON

The engagement is announced between Captain Edward Arthur David Bingham, Mizzafirabad Guides, only son of the late Major A. E. D. Bingham,
MC
(Muzzafirabad Guides) and of the late Mrs S. A. Hunter, of Singapore, and Susan, younger daughter of Lt-Colonel and Mrs John Layton, of Pankot.

I

Thus Teddie enters already marked by a fatal connexion.

Sarah Layton, subsequently describing him as a man who didn’t grow on you, as one you soon got to the end of, initially gave a lone but vivid impression of vacuity, albeit cheerful vacuity. At the time, his future mother-in-law, Mildred, complained that there wasn’t much to go on and although she was thinking in severely practical terms (what to tell Colonel Layton, now transferred from an Italian to a German prison-camp, which made it seem more imperative to make an efficient and detailed report about the man his daughter Susan intended to marry), the idea of not much to go on coupled with that of his not growing on you at first led one inescapably to think of him as a person who conformed in every way with the stock idea one might have of a young man with nothing between his ears, a set of trained and drained responses and a cheerful complacency that would see to it he did nothing outstandingly silly and nothing distinguished either.