The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (19 page)

‘You’ll probably share an orderly. I’m afraid you’re in for a rather Spartan existence.’

‘It’s indecent. I mean hang it all Mirat’s only another military station. We might be there for months. It’s not like buzzing off to the Arakan.’

He felt hollow again and indignant. The new general probably had a text on the wall saying: Do it Yesterday. This turned out not far from the case. Actually it said: Do it Now.

He took Susan home in the car which Bishop had been using to ferry the Rankins’ guests and had efficiently kept waiting as soon as he saw a tonga at the chummery and guessed whose it was. Unlike the tonga-wallah, who complained at being deprived of the fare back to the grace and favour, the lance-naik driver was quite happy with the arrangement. He was obviously one of those Indians who was tireless when behind a wheel and didn’t care how late he worked so long as an officer signed for the journey. Teddie and Susan sat in back-seat comfort. They held hands. Teddie had stopped feeling randy and started to feel emotional but chipper too because they were together in the same emotional situation: last night out for some time to come, last few minutes, probably, of being alone together.

‘It might be fun, flying,’ he said.

‘Yes, it might.’

‘I’ll tell you what would be.’

‘What?’

‘Flying back, for the wedding.’

‘You’ll tell them directly you get there, won’t you?’

Practical Susan!

‘Of course. I’ll speak to the Gee One first thing.’

‘What will happen if the division’s going away almost at once?’

‘It’s pretty unlikely. If we do it’ll be for working-up. Anyway, they’d always give an officer leave to get married. Don’t worry.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

He cuddled her. She was still very tense. But what a girl! No scene, no shilly-shallying. Just tremendous pluck and determination. As the car turned into Rifle Range road a cold night breeze blew in through the lowered window from the open spaces of the Pankot Rifles lines. It flirted a lock of her hair against his cheek. Behind the southern ridge of the hills the sky was suddenly illuminated. Down on the plains the monsoon was loose like an electric beast.

His uncle in Shropshire always said that a thunderstorm made the milk go off in the pantry. It occurred to him that his uncle was rather a lonely sort of chap being able to notice things like that.

III

The other, empty, bed in Teddie’s room had begun to make its presence felt. A plain wooden charpoy like his own, its mosquito net, folded up, was taped to the four bamboo poles tied to its legs. Three biscuit mattresses and a ticking pillow were piled at its head. Otherwise the bed was bare to the cords, awaiting an occupant.

In Mirat the rain was incessant. Violent storms were nightly visitors. They woke Teddie up. The empty bed seemed lit by St Elmo’s fire; it rode the night rock-firm, halfship, half-catafalque. In the peaceful early mornings its message was simpler but still to be reckoned with.

Ten nights after his arrival the electric beast lay quiet and he enjoyed uninterrupted sleep but woke before the orderly Hosain came in with the chota hazri. His eyes recorded the fact that the other bed was fully shrouded by its mosquito net several seconds before this struck him as new. He raised his head from the pillow and stared through the mesh of his own net. The other bed was occupied. He raised the net. How awfully odd. He thought back over his sleep and dreams but could recall nothing which the presence of the recumbent figure explained. His sleep had been wholly undisturbed. It was as if the figure had slowly materialized during the night and had now reached a stage of total conviction about itself and its surroundings. Teddie frowned. He was unused to thinking in imaginative terms. He glanced towards the window.

His own clothes were in their usual place: jacket thrown carelessly over a chair back, trousers on the seat, underclothes on the floor. The other chair held clothes too but these were neatly arranged. Nearby stood a large leather suitcase and a bedroll which had obviously been opened to remove sheets and pyjamas then rolled up again but left unstrapped. The chap couldn’t have done all that in the dark. And he must have had an orderly to help him, if not young Hosain.

Teddie reached for his slippers, automatically tapped them by the heels on the floor to dislodge any lurking scorpion gone into hiding during the night, set them side by side, swung his legs out and slipped his feet into them. The bed creaked. The other chap must have moved like a cat. Obviously a considerate sort of fellow. Teddie grabbed his robe. The humidity was high. The ceiling fan was whispering round at its lowest number of revs a minute. He clicked the dial a couple of notches higher and was rewarded by a faint and regular blowing on his forehead. Leaving the switchboard and going to stand under the fan he inspected his new companion’s jacket. Captain’s rank. Punjab Regiment. But a green armband hung over the chair back. Intelligence. Scholarly sort of fellow probably; not a real Punjab officer at all. The uniform and the pips looked new. The luggage looked very old though. Teddie twisted his head to find a name on it. The bedroll was set in such a way that any stencilled name on the canvas cover was hidden from view. The suitcase was more revealing. But initials only. R.M. There was no tin trunk. Like himself, RM had travelled to Mirat light. By what method though?

The writing-table caught his eye next. Set out upon it with noticeable precision were a briefcase, a field-service cap and a leather-bound swagger cane. The cane was parallel to the base of the briefcase and the cap lay between them with its badge facing front, squared up on an invisible line parallel with the other two. The three items were placed on the left of the blotter as if marking out that side of the desk as the new arrival’s, to correspond with the placing – on the left-hand side of the room facing the window – of the chair with the new occupant’s clothes on it and the bed in which he was asleep. A white line drawn from the middle of the window to the opposite wall would have defined the area which seemed to have been meticulously but silently claimed in the small hours.

But on the blotter on Teddie’s side of the line there was an intruder: a piece of paper tucked into one of the leather corners. Teddie recognized it as a page torn from a Field Service Notebook. In clear rather tight handwriting it read: ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you. The man who helped me find my quarters said our orderly is called Hosain. I should be grateful if you would ask him to wake me with tea at 0830 but not before as I did not get in until 0300. The train was badly held up. I’m told breakfast is between 0800 and 0930 but I shall skip it. I look forward to meeting you later in the day, perhaps at lunch if we are messing together. Meanwhile my thanks and my apologies for any noise last night. Ronald Merrick.’

In this note Teddie thought there was as much self-assurance as consideration. He went to the mess and on to the daftar by push-bike. At 1130 he was back in his quarters hastily packing his bedroll – Merrick was not there – and at midday was driving with the G.I, Lt-Colonel Selby-Smith, to the airfield. At 1230 he was airborne in an RAF Dakota for Delhi where he would meet the divisional commander for the first time. He was away for six days. When he returned, feeling run off his feet but happy to have come daily under the general’s eye as the ‘young Muzzy officer who wants to get married,’ he found that Captain Merrick was away on a course. In the interval Teddie’s tin trunk had arrived from Pankot, so had Merrick’s, from somewhere else. Merrick’s was just as old and battered as Teddie’s. The rank of captain was freshly painted in, however, and a band of new black paint obliterated something that had been written underneath the surname.

Teddie, who never gossiped to servants only just managed to resist the temptation to ask young Hosain what Captain Merrick Sahib was like. He noticed that the boy took considerable care with the things Merrick had left behind and he resented this in an ill-defined way that made him feel generally at odds with his domestic arrangements.

He was feeling similarly at odds with his work. There was a looseness as yet about the organization of divisional headquarters which made it difficult for him to grasp what was going on. In Delhi the general had talked a lot about what he called fluidity and about the fellow Wingate who had recently been behind the enemy lines down the road in Burma with a specially trained brigade, trying to play havoc with the Japanese lines of communication and being supplied by air. Teddie thought that this operation sounded like a costly and showy variation of the old cavalry role of sometimes penetrating enemy-held country, beating up their baggage trains and galloping back home: useful, an antidote to boredom, but hardly a pukka strategical operation of war. And the supply by air thing had reportedly become a fiasco once Wingate’s troops were out of the jungle and into the plains and having to move so fast to escape being trapped that stuff was dropped to them long after they’d had to leave the place they’d asked for it to be dropped to them in. Which meant the Jap got it. Worst of all, Teddie thought, when the operation petered out Wingate had told his chaps to split into groups and get the hell out by any means they could. From Teddie’s point of view this was like an officer abrogating his responsibility at the very moment when he was most responsible. That it had been the wisest thing to do only showed how unmilitary the whole affair was.

Even so, the casualty list had been alarming. More alarming, to Teddie, was the way his own general talked about the Wingate expedition having provided the key to the problem of defeating the Japanese. Teddie had a professional soldier’s contempt for anything that came under the heading of guerrilla tactics. He did not want to swan around in the jungle with a beard and a bag of rice blowing up bridges. And now he was not sure that he much wanted to play messenger-boy in a top-brass outfit like Div HQ. He missed the comradeship of his old battalion. He missed the good feeling of knowing every sepoy’s name, the name of his village, the number and ages of his children, the state of health of his wife, all the things that turned the fellow from a number or a statistic in an order of battle into a man whose personal welfare was a prime consideration.

But then Teddie thought of Susan, of the dizzy heights advocated by her mother, and accepted his present status as an essential trial and testing of his ability to rise to them. A chap, worse luck, couldn’t remain a cheerful subaltern or company commander for ever.

‘Delhi was pretty hectic,’ he told Susan in the first of the biweekly letters which his return to Mirat enabled him to resume. ‘I didn’t manage to drop round to see your aunt and uncle, Major and Mrs Grace, until the last evening. I told them it’s clear there isn’t any hope now of my joining you all in Srinagar either in August or September. Naturally I’m disappointed but we didn’t really expect it, did we, darling? As for the wedding the form here seems to be that we go ahead with the plans already made but stand ready for a rearrangement perhaps without much notice. It was nice to see your Aunt Fenny again. She got rid of the cold she caught in Pankot as soon as she got down into Delhi again. I also enjoyed meeting your uncle Arthur. He said he was glad to have the opportunity of seeing the chap he’s going to give you away to. He gave me the name and address of the houseboat contractor who’s fixing you all up in Kashmir so I can send a letter to await your arrival. You’ll have a lovely family holiday, I wish I were coming too but I’ll be too busy to mope, so don’t worry. I’m enjoying Mirat and beginning to feel my feet. I still haven’t met the man I’m sharing quarters with. Please thank Tony for me and tell him the trunk’s arrived safely. Now I can settle in properly. The rain’s been terrific here but there’s a lull at the moment. If my letters become a bit irregular you’ll know it’s only a matter of business before pleasure.’

He had been about to write: ‘You’ll know it’s only because we’re out and about on schemes and exercises,’ but even news about training was useful to spies. Teddie had been fairly security-minded ever since in Burma his battalion (he could have sworn) had been infiltrated by fifth columnists.

*

Through the curtain of rain the distant fort looked like a stranded battleship. The general’s artillery had been pounding its walls for two hours with 5.5. In four minutes when the barrage lifted his airborne commandos would parachute in to the south to establish a perimeter, cut off the garrison’s flight, block advancing enemy reinforcements and mop up pockets of local resistance. The tanks would advance from the north in the van of lorry-borne infantry. Two battalions had already moved in a wide arc to launch an attack from the left and another was holding the right flank.

The general stood, wrist cocked, eyes on watch, rain dripping from the peak of his red-banded cap. Inside the command lorry the R Toc crackled. Suddenly the general’s arm dropped, he turned his face up into the rain and after a few seconds smiled beatifically. A score of officers, including Teddie astride his motor-cycle, looked up into the sky. A vicious fork of lightning ripped across it. Teddie winced, blinded by the flash and deafened by the explosive bounce of thunder. When the thunder had gone tumbling and rolling out into the deep field where old Jove had thumped it, he heard a more homely sound which the general’s sharper ears had caught earlier: labouring aero engines. A lone Dakota appeared out of the monsoon clouds, roared overhead low enough for them to see the figure of a man standing in the open port; the air liaison officer presumably; and then flew back into them.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ the general said. ‘I think we may safely assume that we’ve taken Mandalay. Let’s go home.’

Teddie muttered, ‘Good.’ They had been out on the ground for two days. He looked forward to a hot bath and a man-size scotch in the mess. As Div HQ sorted itself out into its several kinds of rough-country transport Teddie kicked his machine into life and went bumping and slithering down the muddy track to make sure that the general’s staff car was waiting at the crossroads. A couple of officers representing the reserve brigade were standing miserably under thin branched trees. The fort at Premanagar had vanished entirely behind the curtain of rain.