The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (20 page)

*

It was dark when Teddie got back. A light in the window of his room showed that the servants’ quarters had been alerted and that Hosain was prepared for him. He entered unbuckling his rain-sodden equipment, yelled for the boy and then, dropping his belt, holster, straps and pack on to the floor, paused – observing the signs of renewed occupation: a row of highly polished shoes, fresh underclothes and socks – not his own – already laid out on a chair for the morning, both beds with lowered nets and pair of slippers within foot reach; and on the other officer’s side of the writing-table a pile of books and pamphlets.

There was something else on the table on Teddie’s side: a round chromium tray, a jug of water and a glass each with a beaded muslin cover – a tray such as could only be got from the mess bar by signing a chit and sending an orderly over with it. He heard Hosain at the back calling for the bhishti. There was a note under the tumbler. He slid it out. ‘I would have waited and joined you for dinner but I have an appointment. In view of the kind of weather I hear you’ve had on the scheme I thought you’d need this as well as a hot bath. R.M.’

The tumbler held three fingers of whisky.

‘I say,’ Teddie said.

What an extraordinarily decent thing to do. He sniffed the whisky and drank some of it neat then yelled for Hosain again and sat in a wicker arm-chair with his damp legs stuck out. The boy came in with a newly pressed suit of
KD.

‘Well done, Hosain,’ Teddie said. But the suit was Captain Merrick’s. Teddie had to wait until it had been hand-flicked and hung in one of the almirahs before he could get Hosain to come and unlace his boots. He’d had them on for thirty-six hours. Relieved of them his feet felt alternately hot and raw, cold and raw. He smoked, drank and listened to the swoosh of water as the bhishti poured it from cans into the tin tub in the adjoining bath-house. He picked up one of Merrick’s books, opened it and stared at the incomprehensible Japanese text on the right-hand page. On the left-hand page there were questions in English and, underneath, the same question in phonetics to show you how it would sound if you asked it in Japanese. What is your army number? What is the name or number of your regiment? In what division is your regiment? Tell me the name of your divisional commander. What unit had the position on your unit’s left flank when you were captured?

‘Some hopes,’ Teddie said aloud. If you ever got close enough to speak to a Japanese soldier one of you would be dead a second later. That was how poor old Havildar Shafi Mohammed had been killed, reporting a wounded Jap lying out in the open and volunteering to bring him in. The Jap had had a grenade in his tunic. He must have pulled the pin surreptitiously when he saw the Havildar get within a few paces. They both went to Kingdom Come. Merrick was wasting his time learning a bit of Japanese.

Teddie turned the page and displaced a piece of square-ruled paper which must have been marking the place Merrick had got to. In the tight neat handwriting was written: Lecture Note. 1942, approx 10,000. Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore, July ‘43. Mohan Singh. Bangkok Conf.

‘Sahib,’ Hosain said. He motioned shyly in the direction of the bath-house. Teddie replaced the marker in the book, carried his whisky into the next room and began to shed his clothes.

He came back from the mess early. He was too tired even to write to Susan. He scribbled a note and pinned it to Merrick’s mosquito net. ‘Thanks for the drink. Have one on me tomorrow.’ He left Merrick’s bedside lamp burning, turned off his own, climbed inside his net and was asleep almost at once.

Hosain woke him at 0700. He brought only one tray of tea. Hosain indicated Merrick’s huddled form, put both hands to his cheek, inclined his head, shut his eyes. Teddie scratched his head, understanding himself requested to be quiet, and went off to the
WC
. When he left for the mess at 0800 Merrick had still not moved.

It is possible, perhaps, for death to come slowly, even gently, civilly, as if anxious to make the whole thing as painless as possible. One thinks of death at this juncture because Merrick represented Teddie’s. Coupled with the civility and consideration a certain reluctance could be detected, almost as if Merrick knew and kept giving Teddie a chance to pack his bags and go before a meeting actually took place. A final opportunity occurred that morning because Teddie saw Merrick and heard him talking for a good twenty minutes before the moment came to claim acquaintance and establish the specific relationship. But there was nothing in Merrick’s appearance that caused Teddie to feel uneasy.

*

After his schemes the general held post-mortems behind locked doors in the Garrison Theatre. During his career Teddie had sat through countless hours of what in common with other junior officers he called prayers. He found that what distinguished the general’s prayers were brevity, deadly earnestness and the presence – among the hybrid ranks of divisional, brigade, battalion and supporting arms officers – of
VCOS
and senior British and English-speaking Indian
NCOS,
who were seated not quite under the general’s eye but in constant danger of attracting it.

One of Teddie’s jobs, he discovered, was to make sure that the
NCOS
from the British battalions did not sit in stiff-necked seclusion but were properly mixed up with their Indian colleagues. According to Selby-Smith the general had a bee in his bonnet about mutual trust and also about making the ordinary soldier feel he had a ‘share in the company’. Teddie thought that mutual trust was a matter of respect for each other’s achievements in the field more than of sitting next to a chap you didn’t know and hadn’t got time to get to know, and he wasn’t convinced of the value of the share in the company business when it involved the risk of an officer giving a silly answer to the general’s questions and making a fool of himself in front of non-commissioned ranks.

The post-mortem began at 1100 hours. Since one brigade headquarters was stationed twenty-five miles to the east of Mirat and another twenty miles to the north and some of their battalions farther away still, most of the officers attending had had an early start. Some of them had stayed in Mirat overnight and looked the worse for it but neatness and formality of dress were among the things to which the general seemed to attach little importance. The general himself was wearing a set of cellular cotton overalls cut to look like battle-dress jacket and trousers and made in the new jungle green material that was not yet on general issue. His feet and shins were encased in black dispatch rider’s boots. This morning to Teddie’s horror he had a Paisley patterned scarf at his neck.

He spoke from notes at a lectern on the stage. His aide and an NCO from the intelligence staff produced beautifully drawn giant-scale sketch maps which they pinned efficiently to the blackboard one after the other to illustrate the points the general was making. After a while Teddie had to admit that everything began to make sense to him. For the first time he fully understood what the scheme had been about. He was even aware that it had a kind of beauty. Formless, almost shapeless, the beauty consisted in the subtle cohesion of what seemed like disparate parts and in the extraordinary flexibility of each arrangement made to bring them together.

Suddenly withering in his mind were the stiff and predictable patterns that made traditional military affairs so easy to grasp on paper, so difficult to put into operation when the real thing was all about you. His blood stirred momentarily with a new sense of excitement in his occupation. The general, direct and thrusting, was filling Teddie’s mind with poetry. Teddie sat physically composed as usual, wearing the rather blank expression of a man not naturally receptive to any idea which took time to be expounded. Had the general noticed him particularly and glanced at him every so often to judge what sort of impression he was making on the young man he might have thought he was making none and so made a note to tell the Gl to replace him with a more alert and aggressive officer, in which case he would have done Teddie an injustice because Teddie’s soul, uncommitted a short while ago, had risen to its feet and was gallantly attempting to expose itself totally to the revelation.

If recognition of talent had been the same as having it Teddie might have blossomed under the general’s eyes. When the general threw the meeting open to questions Teddie’s soul sat down, finding itself dumb, unwilling to expose itself further, but it had planted a hopeful flag. Teddie had been won over, to what he was not sure, but the boots and the Paisley scarf were now part of the man whose man he felt he could become. You couldn’t call the boots and the scarf stylish but they were not really flamboyant, Teddie decided. They were idiosyncratic marks of identification.

The post-mortem was wound up by the general with a quick but comprehensive summary of the main lessons learnt and a look into the future from which Teddie got a fleeting but satisfactory glimpse of his own as one that involved no immediate move from Mirat. The formation was still in the process of working-up exercises. These would lead to a period of intensive training for jungle warfare.

‘I think you may assume,’ the general ended, ‘that our role will be there, to the east. Some of us are familiar with jungle conditions. My advice to you is to forget them because we knew them at a bad time. We have the wrong picture. Fortunately I don’t think any of us is affected by the myth of Japanese invincibility. Man for man there’s no problem. That’s all I have to say this morning but I ask you now to give your attention to one of my junior officers, a man recently appointed to my Intelligence staff. If any senior officers wonder why they should stay to hear what a mere captain has to say they may restrain their natural impatience if I explain first that what he will tell you is confidential and of importance to the picture we need of the enemy we may expect to meet, and secondly that he has been in the service of the Indian government for longer than quite a number of the officers present today. He is something of a rare bird, an officer of the civil authority who has managed to persuade his department to let him into the army for the duration of the war. Captain Merrick’s civilian rank was a senior and responsible one. I scarcely believe him when he tells me that there was so little going on in his district that even his superior officers agreed he might be more usefully employed. I do believe him when he tells me he first applied to join the armed forces as far back as 1939 and has continually renewed his application and I suspect it was not a case of nothing much going on but of his department deciding that if they wanted any peace they would have to let him come to the war. The kind of work he was doing meant that the most suitable branch for him to serve in was intelligence and his civilian rank would have qualified him for a more senior army rank than the one he holds. I happen to know, and I have no wish to embarrass him, in any case he is now stuck with what he’s got, that he had a choice between this appointment and one elsewhere which would have given him more glamorous epaulettes. He chose the more active role and the lower rank because it was an active role he was looking for. I am glad to welcome him to this formation. I repeat that what he has to tell us is confidential. There should be no general discussion of the subject inside units and certainly not outside. Although Captain Merrick will perform the ordinary tasks of a G3 this particular subject is likely to become one of his special interests and he will continue to keep in touch with brigade and battalion intelligence staffs in regard to it and to the level at which it remains a restricted subject. Brigadier Crawford, Captain Sowton and I will not stay to listen to his address because he gave us a full and detailed account last night after dinner. Thank you gentlemen. No standing if you don’t mind, it only makes for disruption. Colonel Selby-Smith, will you take over please?’

The general came down from the stage, was joined by Crawford and Sowton, and left by the main aisle. From the foyer on the other side of the doors came the sound of boots stamped on the tiled floor as the men on guard duty came to attention. Selby-Smith got up and now made a gesture of invitation. On the far side of the right-hand second row of seats Teddie saw his elusive room companion rise. At first sight he looked younger than the general’s reference to seniority had led Teddie to expect. Tall, fair-haired, slim and well-built, he moved with a sort of snap that Teddie would have expected in a smart cadet or a young hard-case sar’major. But once on the platform, behind the lectern, in stage-lighting, the fairness of the hair faded and the used quality of the face was revealed. He could have been any age between thirty and forty.

The hall was remarkably quiet. The general’s recommendation and explanation had alerted an old instinct to dislike on sight anyone about whom there was a faint mystery, a difference, anyone who was not fully defined by rank, occupation and regiment, who appeared to have an obscure but real advantage over his fellows. Teddie was aware of this because he felt a prick of resentment himself.
I would have waited and joined you for dinner but I have an appointment.
Dinner with the general. How and when had that been arranged? The general would have got back in his staff car from Premanagar two or three hours before Teddie spluttered in on his motor-bike after playing messenger-boy over several square miles of bloody awful country and then helping off-station officers to find accommodation in Mirat for the night. The three fingers of whisky represented something ambiguous like the postcards his mother used to send from Singapore saying ‘Miss you’ while all the time she was having a high old time with that chap Hunter.

For the first few minutes of Merrick’s address the silence persisted, but during these minutes it lost density, became riddled with receptive channels drilled one way by Merrick’s strong and resonant voice and the other way by the audience’s growing interest in what the voice was saying until the two sides met like tunnellers who had worked from opposite sides of a mountain and come face to face at the centre point of a clear uninterrupted passage. As if he knew that contact had been made Merrick now made a dry joke and was rewarded by more laughter than the joke deserved. Thinking about it afterwards Teddie believed that most men would have attempted a joke right at the beginning to break down the unfriendly atmosphere. Merrick must have been conscious of the critical silence that greeted his appearance on the platform. But he ignored it, simply started to speak, standing at the lectern removing his papers from his briefcase then dropping the case on a nearby chair and sorting out his notes, apparently in no hurry to look like a man giving a lecture but already giving it.