The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (16 page)

How close he came to being jolted out of complacency in the first few months of 1942 in Burma was possibly indicated by his demeanour when he turned up in Pankot a year later, on Dick Rankin’s staff, ‘rather disappointed’ with the immediate result of his attendance at the Staff College in Quetta but ‘hoping for something better’ in the future. Presumably he had been rather disappointed too to discover that the Japanese had proved ‘more useful in a scrap’ than the British and Indian armies together and, as he trudged through the jungle back to India with the remnants of his unit (because that was the direction everyone was going in who still could) hoped for an improvement presently.

One could picture him marching out, tired, dirty and hungry, carrying more than his quota of small-arms (to relieve a couple of exhausted sepoys of their weight), keeping
on
and smiling because being personally blameless for what he supposed had to be summed up as a stunning defeat, a complete disaster, there was no call to look miserable and every reason to give an example of how to keep going, even when every limb was attached to the trunk by things that felt like loose hot rubber bands.

Between this picture of Teddie leaving Burma and the one of him arrived in Pankot a year later there is a gap, but it is one of many and it plays a perfectly proper schematic part in an account of him because to Teddie himself his whole history seems to have been a series of gaps linked by a few notable events if one is to judge by the extraordinary difficulty Mildred had in getting anything out of him except a few bare and not very encouraging bits of information and a slight frown of concentration, which could have been the effect had on him of his realization that between them he and Mildred had a duty to do.

‘I do have an uncle,’ he said; and added, ‘In Shropshire actually,’ as if this made the uncle more lively and identifiable. Teddie had lived with the uncle when sent home from India to school, just as Sarah and Susan had lived with their Aunt Lydia, Mildred’s elder London-based sister. Teddie’s father had been in the Muzzafirabad Guides which was why Teddie was in them now but had broken his neck hunting when Teddie was fourteen. His mother married again, a commercial chap called Hunter (which was odd when you thought of the cause of the first husband’s death). They lived in Singapore until Hunter died. ‘I don’t mind telling you,’ Teddie told Mildred, ‘people said she had a rotten time with him.’ She died suddenly in Mandalay on her way back to Muzzafirabad. All this was before Teddie came back to India himself to join the regiment. In due course he went to Burma, tried but failed to find her grave and worried a bit about it until he remembered she’d been cremated. In due course the Japanese arrived in Burma too and presently Teddie marched out.

And that was about it. He had red hair and sandy eyelashes (which Clara Fosdick said she thought a sign of untrust-worthiness). He was twenty-five but had that elongated bony English look of not yet having completed the process of growing-up and filling out which meant that in a few years he would suddenly appear middle-aged as well as beefy because to men like this everything seemed to happen at once round about the age of thirty; everything except white hair which was reserved for retirement and was equally sudden and the only sign that old age had arrived.

School, military academy, regiment, baptism of fire, staff-college: the next logical step was marriage so that the process could be repeated through a continuing male line. Arrived in Pankot Teddie metaphorically cleared his throat, put up his head and looked round for a girl with whom to take it. It could not be any girl. The choice had ideally to be made among girls in the range labelled Army which more or less knocked out Carol and Christine Beames whose father Colonel Beames was in the civil branch of the
IMS.
It knocked out several others whose fathers’ regiments did not in Teddie’s opinion match the standard set by his own, the Muzzys, to which none of course was superior but with which one or two might claim equality. This opinion was one Teddie’s father had held and Teddie had acquired it in much the same way that he had acquired a bit of private property in the shape of an unearned income, although the capital from which the income came had been filtered to him through his mother and therefore been diminished somewhat by the commercial chap Hunter, who fortunately died of drink before his mother died of what Teddie always assumed had been shame and sorrow, otherwise he might never have seen a penny of it and have been forced either to go into some sort of business or join an inferior regiment, which would have been pretty awful he supposed. He doubted that his uncle would have ‘stumped up’. He believed that his uncle hadn’t liked his father. His uncle had been the elder brother.

‘I suppose you’ll get money from your uncle eventually,’ Mildred said. She believed in coming to the point and came to it stylishly, using her languid but abrasive first-two-drinks-of-the-day voice.

‘Oh, I shouldn’t rely on it,’ Teddie said. ‘He’s a bit of an old skinflint. I’m not looking beyond the six hundred a year. And my pay of course.’

‘Well it will be years before Susan gets anything from us,’ Mildred warned him. ‘So you’ll just have to buckle to and rise to dizzy heights.’

‘Yes. Rather.’

‘Have you a photo or a snap?’

‘What of?’

‘Of you. So that I can sent it to John in prison-camp. I think he’ll want to know what you look like, don’t you?’

‘I’ll get one done, shall I?’

‘That would help.’

‘Full length or head and shoulders?’

Teddie had a practical turn of mind. It made up for his lack of imagination. He would never have thought to offer Mrs Layton his photograph but knowing that she wanted one and suddenly understanding why he saw that it was important to get it right. In uniform or mufti? Postcard size for easy handling or something larger? With or without his cap? Since he seemed to have no personal vanity the questions had to be taken seriously. He couldn’t be palmed off with a casual reply such as, ‘Oh anything so long as it looks like you.’

He had the kind of thick skin which managed to fall just short of suggesting insensitivity. Mildred became bored with the photograph long before the details were agreed. Teddie did not notice she was bored or that she drank too much. Perhaps he did not really notice people. There were times when he did not seem to notice himself. For instance he didn’t appear to be at all put out by what another man might have thought of as the delicacy or awkwardness of his position in a household where he constantly bumped into Sarah. Before he took up with Susan he had taken up with Sarah and shown every sign of not being aware of the younger sister’s existence. His attentiveness to Sarah now suggested he might at any moment explain why he’d cooled off her in spite of the fact that Sarah had not encouraged him sufficiently to make his cooling off actually require an explanation. His attentiveness would have struck an outsider who knew nothing of their history as the kind a man felt he had to show the girl whose sister he was about to marry; anything apologetic in it being an apology for taking Susan away not for giving Sarah up. Perhaps that was how he saw it too.

There were several explanations given in Pankot, though, of his defection, change of mind or change of heart. Had he known about one of them he might have been surprised (at last) because it is unlikely that ‘fickle’ was a word he would ever expect to hear used to describe him. Had he known about the other two explanations he would have agreed with the first of them, that he had finally been unable to avoid seeing how pretty Susan was and unable to resist the strong emotion with which the sight suddenly affected him. The other explanation he would probably not have understood at all and he certainly would not have cared to hear it.

Little Mrs Smalley had described Sarah Layton in terms which were sufficiently accurate for the inaccurate conclusions she then drew from them in regard to Teddie’s defection to be accepted as coming close to the mark. But Teddie would have made nothing of the Smalley image of Sarah. He surely never felt that she didn’t take him seriously as a person; never felt that she took none of ‘it’ seriously (‘it’ meaning India, the British role in India, the thing the British were in India to do); never felt that she laughed at ‘it’ and consequently at him; never felt, being a man and therefore much more serious about ‘it’ than a woman had to be, that Sarah was the kind of girl who although admirable in every other way lacked the attitude which men thought it important for a girl to have underneath everything else and that this explained why after a bit men felt more comfortable in the company of the younger sister. He might have agreed with Mrs Paynton when she gathered all these potentially damaging Smalley threads into a single sensible one and declared that what Sarah needed was to settle down and that she would be all right then, being fundamentally sound and a veritable rock so far as Mildred was concerned.

Getting Sarah to settle down as Mrs Bingham was exactly what Teddie had first hoped for. For him the question of her soundness never arose. Seeing her come into his office at Area Headquarters with some confidential files he had asked his friend and fellow Muzzy, Tony Bishop, Dick Rankin’s ADC, who the
WAC
(1) corporal with the fair hair and slim figure was. The answer was tremendously satisfactory to him one assumes. Failing a Muzzy Guide girl a Pankot Rifles girl would do very well, in fact rather better because Teddie probably thought that there was something vaguely incestuous about marrying into one’s own regiment. His father had done it and it really hadn’t turned out at all well. If fate had at first disappointed Teddie, bringing him to a static headquarters as a mere captain when it might just as easily have sent him to an active formation perhaps as a G2, it now looked as if in bringing him to Pankot it had done so with the sole and excellent purpose of introducing him to this girl from the station’s favourite regiment.

Chasing or wooing would be the wrong words to use about Teddie’s activity in regard to Sarah Layton. He applied himself to her as he applied himself to any task that fell within the area of his competence. But because he was unable to think of more than one thing at a time he appeared to everybody to have mounted a frontal attack on a girl who had caught his eye and awoken feelings in him of a tender and passionate nature.

This was the light in which if he gave it any thought he must have appeared to himself and he must have given it thought, and found nothing amiss. After all chaps fell in love every day. There was nothing peculiar about it. And she was awfully nice. His father would have approved.

The most interesting gaps, perhaps, in Teddie’s history are those through which one could have traced the progress or lack of it of his relationship with women. At twenty-five one assumes some heterosexual experience, but the questions – with whom? in what circumstances? – are impenetrable enough to leave about him a pure aroma of cheerful male virginity tainted only by traces of something more pungent, the odour of voluntary or involuntary nocturnal emission, which does not alter his expression but does emphasize the underlying shadows of modest perplexity.

Tony Bishop had no recollection of Teddie ever having been ‘mixed up’ with a girl before he applied himself so wholeheartedly to the business of being mixed up with Sarah Layton. Bishop knew him before Burma and after Burma but not during Burma, so his recollections did not cover a possibly important phase of Teddie’s development. He had the unit-image of him rather than a private one. The Muzzy Guides (so Bishop said, fondly mocking) was one of those regiments which not only had a rule about never mentioning women in the mess but stuck to it with such iron resolution that an outsider could have been persuaded to believe that its young subalterns not only stopped mentioning them but stopped thinking about them too until a certain age was reached and they came face to face with a situation that called for a tricky decision: whether to remain a bachelor or get married. This question was usually settled by another of the regiment’s unwritten rules which was that an officer had to have a wife before he was thirty unless he wished to enjoy a reputation for unseemly frivolity.

Since Teddie was deeply attached to his regiment – it was the one thing he may be thought of as taking seriously – the regimental aura of ambiguous monasticism probably explained Teddie’s own aura of either never having sown wild oats or of having sown them so far out of range of the regimental eye that they didn’t count as his but as those of someone whose body he had borrowed for the purpose. Whatever the reason for this aura, it shone behind his approach to Sarah which was that of a man whose physical appetite had never bothered him before but promised to be really rather adequate, as if it knew all about itself.

What it finally came to was that Teddie was in pursuit of an idea. The idea was initially embodied in the person of Sarah Layton. After three weeks he was close enough to her to feel that all he need do next was pop the question and settle the matter. He had, one imagines, few doubts about the outcome. She had been awfully amenable and absolutely available. He hadn’t kissed her yet but he had held on to her hand and made other gestures claiming physical possession. They had played tennis, gone riding, swimming, dancing, to the pictures, the Chinese restaurant and Smith’s Hotel for supper. He had called for her at the Club, at the grace and favour bungalow and once at Rose Cottage where an elderly woman (something to do with missions) had talked rather a lot about Muzzafirabad but not about those aspects of its life which he knew. Sarah and he had walked together, shared tongas, and the front bench of a staff car when he had been able to log it out as on official duties and get rid of the driver.

The next step was therefore clear. He must arrange for them to be alone so that he could put an arm round her, kiss her and say something like You know I’m most awfully Fond of You? which sounded a bit dull but was certainly the truth and once he had said it he could logically follow it up by suggesting they might Sort of Get Engaged If She Felt Like It; which was as far as one needed to go because once one had gone that far everything else surely fell into place of its own accord.