The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (24 page)

Teddie felt reluctant but grateful. It was like being jawed by an older boy about looking after your health; like being taken to the San because someone had noticed you were suffering in silence. Merrick came back with a small bottle and a spoon. Hosain followed him in. ‘I’ll pour,’ Merrick said, ‘because it tends to come out in a dribble and then in a rush.’ He poured a couple of drops. The drops were followed by a dollop. It was brown and looked nasty. Merrick leant forward and obediently Teddie opened his mouth. The stuff tasted like very strong cough mixture. It seemed to grip his throat all the way down.

‘It cements you up,’ Merrick explained. ‘If you have another dose in the morning you’ll be right as rain.’

‘Thanks.’

Merrick made a gesture at Hosain who knelt and untied Teddie’s shoes. He took the medicine bottle and spoon back to the bathroom and returned rubbing his head with the towel again.

‘It must be the humidity,’ Teddie said. ‘Not used to it recently. I’ve been stationed up in the hills the past few months.’

‘Well you’d notice it then. Actually the humidity’s fairly low here. Ever been in Sundernagar?’

‘I’ve never even heard of Sundernagar.’

‘It’s where I was before they let me into the army. Your shoes go green overnight. I had an inspector who swore he was getting webbed feet, and
he
was an Indian.’

‘An inspector? Were you in the Indian Police then?’

‘Yes. I was DSP Sundernagar. Most of it’s tribal area. Pretty boring for anyone who isn’t an amateur anthropologist. My predecessor was. He was desperate to get back. I was just as keen to get out.’

‘Were you there long?’

‘Too long.’

Teddie nodded.
DSP
meant superintendent, the top man in a district after the collector and the judge. He was glad Merrick wasn’t
ICS.
The few
ICS
men he’d known had been remote clever fellows, too intellectual for his tastes. The police were different, easier to get on with. Some of them envied you if you were Army. Merrick was now satisfactorily placed and explained and in spite of his high police rank Teddie felt pleasantly superior to him in occupation as well as in type, background and – as was clearer the longer he listened – in class. The police weren’t always quite as particular as the other services.

He forgot about the bicycle and chalk marks until he was in his bath and then he had a flash of inspiration about them. Having arrived at an explanation that connected the whole incident to Merrick rather than to himself he was reluctant to mention it but decided he ought to, for security reasons.

Returning to the room, already dried and wearing clean underclothes under his robe, he said, ‘I say, Merrick–’ and then stopped, struck by a sense of having intruded upon a situation between Merrick and Hosain which he could not describe but which seemed full of potential for an intimate kind of anger or violence. Hosain was looking sullen but also tearful. He went out. Merrick now fully dressed, appeared momentarily distracted, deprived by Teddie’s entrance of the opportunity to press home some kind of point that a moment ago had been important to him to make.

Merrick said, ‘I’ll see you in B mess in a few minutes then. What will you drink?’

Surprised, Teddie said, ‘No, it’s on me–’

‘Well, we’ll see.’

Merrick went. Teddie looked round the room expecting to see something that explained what he found inexplicable. He shrugged, called Hosain and began to dress. When he got to the shoe putting-on stage he called Hosain again. Putting on and taking off his own shoes and boots were activities at which he drew the line if there was a man available to perform these services. He had learned to draw the line in Muzzafirabad where his first co, Colonel Gawstone, advised him never to stoop if he could help it. The climate wasn’t right for it. Mrs Gawstone had stooped to pick up a glove and keeled right over and never got up. They had buried her the next day.

‘Everything comes suddenly in India, Bingham,’ Teddie remembered old Hooghly Gawstone saying. ‘Sunrise, night, death, burial. Nothing keeps in the heat.’ And in Shropshire in sultry weather the milk went off. Extraordinary chain of thought. He had forgotten why Gawstone was called Hooghly but vaguely remembered a story involving an elephant and the floating body of a dead sadhu. Or was that another story? Even two stories?

He went to the door and looked out. Not a soul in sight. The chalky smear was indiscernible because the light was going and the glow of the lamps in the room pushed his shadow across the place where the smear was. A man appeared suddenly round the corner of the hut. It was Merrick. He came up the steps saying, ‘I left something behind.’

It sounded rather feeble. Something. What? Key? Wallet? Why not say? Had he come back to find out whether Hosain was telling Teddie what the row had been about? If it had been a row. There’d been no sound of a row.

‘Did you send Hosain on another errand?’ Teddie asked.

‘No. Isn’t he here?’

‘No, he bloody well isn’t. He’s just buggered off.’

‘Anything special you want?’

‘Only for the little blighter to put my shoes on for me.’

Teddie went back in, sat down, and began to slip his feet into the clean pair of shoes.

‘Here,’ Merrick said, and threw him a long tortoise-shell shoe-horn. It made the job easier but Teddie was too irritable to mutter more than an almost inaudible ‘Thanks.’ It irritated him to have to do the job himself and irritated him to have Merrick watching him. At one point in his exertions he could have sworn the man was about to come and help him. The idea made him nervous. He fumbled with the laces. He went into the bathroom to wash his hands. When he returned to the room Merrick was standing in the open doorway as if looking for someone but presumably just waiting patiently for Teddie to finish.

‘I’m ready now. Did you get what you came back for?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘We’d better lock up at the back too, I suppose. The whole thing strikes me as a bit bloody much.’

‘What does?’ Merrick asked Teddie when Teddie had bolted the bath-house door from inside and the door connecting bath-house to living quarters and rejoined him at the doorway on to the front verandah.

‘What does what?’

‘Strikes you as a bit much.’

‘Having to put on your own shoes and lock up your own room. The little blighter has practically fuck-all to do. I’ve a good mind to boot him in the arse when I see him again, buggering off like that.’

Teddie wanted to get out of the room now into the open air and over to the mess to have a couple of burra pegs; but Merrick was standing in his way. There was an expression on his face which Teddie interpreted as disapproving. Perhaps Merrick was one of those chaps who had moral objections to strong language. Teddie wasn’t very happy about it himself but there were pressures building up inside him these days which he didn’t understand and using words like that helped to reduce them; or did if they weren’t silently rejected, crammed back down your throat by someone like Merrick. Perhaps the fellow was religious.

Merrick said, ‘I think I’m to blame for Hosain making himself scarce. I had to tick him off. It was the first time and he got quite a shock.’

‘And what was the ticking off about?’

‘A small enough thing.’

It may have been the way Merrick looked at him (in that manner Teddie would have called calculating had it not been for the tentative friendly smile) but now he felt exposed to the accusation he believed Merrick had intended to spare him. He said, ‘Was Hosain complaining about me?’

Merrick seemed in so little hurry to reply that the answer became unnecessary. Merrick dressed it up, though. He said, ‘I got the impression he found working for two officers – onerous. I wasn’t conscious of anything so strong as a complaint against one of us in particular.’

‘But that’s what it came to.’

‘Only if you assume it’s more natural to raise the subject of overwork with the one officer you’d be willing to go on serving. But the natural way isn’t always the one they choose, is it? He may have been making a subtle complaint about me, to my face.’

‘I wouldn’t call Hosain a subtle sort of chap.’

‘All Indians have subtle minds if you put it like that. Often I prefer the word devious for uncultured fellows of Hosain’s stamp. I’m sorry if that offends you. You regular army people are rather touchy on the subject of army personnel, aren’t you? But I’m afraid my experiences as a police officer have blighted any enthusiasm I ever had for the idea that the simple fellow from the village is eager to prove his devotion to the
raj.’

‘Oh.’

There seemed to be nothing else to say. On the other hand Teddie did not feel as shocked or unhappy as he guessed he ought to be. In the back of his mind there were crammed scores of case-histories which showed the relationship between white man and Indian in a holy, shining light; but none was pre-eminent, none actually came pushing through to the front to make him articulate in defence of this relationship. Merrick stood aside and Teddie hesitated, then went out on to the verandah. In any case Hosain was not a good example of the kind of man he wanted to be thinking of. He waited while Merrick closed and padlocked the door.

‘That was interesting, what you were talking about this morning,’ he said.

‘I’m glad you thought so. One courts a certain amount of unpopularity with that kind of thing. Myth breaking’s a tricky business. To make the facts at all palatable you have to leave people with the illusion that the myth is still intact or even that you’ve personally restored it.’

Teddie hadn’t the least idea what Merrick meant. He fell into step.

‘For a moment,’ Merrick said,’ – towards the end – I was made to feel I had the honour of the Indian Army in my hands entirely. The relationship between a man and his subject is very close. People tend to confuse them. It was impossible to leave the facts to speak for themselves. They had to be presented in the most charitable and acceptable light. Not necessarily so that people would leave the hall thinking well of me in spite of what I’d told them but leave it thinking optimistically about the future. One has to produce a positive response not a negative one. And the facts about the
INA
are a negation of most of the things the army, people as a whole, have believed in as a code of
possible
conduct.’

‘I can’t help feeling,’ Teddie began, and because he hesitated Merrick put a hand on his shoulder, to guide him. They had reached a radial intersection of the covered ways. It was quite dark now. They steered by instinct, usage and the star patterns of lit buildings. Continuing along the correct path to B mess Merrick allowed his hand to remain.

‘What? What can’t you help feeling?’

‘Well. That ninety per cent of the chaps who’ve joined the
INA
intend to come back over at the first opportunity. As you suggested.’

A moment or two elapsed before Merrick said, ‘But I suggested no such thing. You heard what you wanted to hear. You’ve proved the point.’

‘What point?’

‘That the facts aren’t as important as the light they’re presented in. What’s chiefly interesting about all this is that a lot of those men may persuade themselves they joined the
INA
because they saw it as the quickest route back to base, but I doubt very much whether that’s the true reason in more than a handful of cases.’

‘What do you think is?’

‘Herd instinct. Self-preservation. At the top among men like Bose it’s a combination of herd-
leader
instinct and self-aggrandizement. Patriotism doesn’t come into it. So neither does the question of loyalty. It will end up as a simple matter of two opposed views of legality, and even that’s going to be settled on a purely theoretical basis.’

‘How?’

‘You can’t hang ten thousand or more traitors.’

‘You can shoot the officers.’

‘Or just Bose? To encourage the others?’

‘Perhaps they’ll save us trouble and shoot themselves.’

‘Would you?’

‘Good God, yes. It would be the only way out, wouldn’t it? I mean if I’d done that and got recaptured.’

‘Even for a man who thinks himself a patriot?’

‘You said that didn’t come into it.’

‘I don’t think it does, but a lot of them will think they are patriots.’

‘Well, I’m sorry. But there are still a few things one just doesn’t do. I don’t blame the other ranks so much but I find the idea of King’s commissioned officers leading their men – our own men – against us utterly unspeakable.’

‘Beyond the pale?’

‘Yes, beyond that. Whatever it means.’

‘It means outside,’ Merrick said, taking him up rather too literally. ‘Pale, fence, boundary. Where you draw the line between one thing and another. Between right and wrong for instance.’

‘The line’s already there, isn’t it? We don’t have to draw it.’

‘There was a British officer at Farrer Park too,’ Merrick said. ‘He told the Indian prisoners that from now on they had to obey the Japanese as they’d obeyed the British. I don’t think he meant obey in quite that sense, but it’s something that may cause trouble when the legal rigmarole begins, which it will, when the war’s over. Assuming we win it.’

‘A British officer?’

‘A senior British officer.’

‘You didn’t mention that this morning.’

‘I thought it wiser not to.’

Teddie nodded. He felt oddly light-headed. He had a sensation of not being quite himself and at the same time of recognizing Merrick as one of the most unusual men this other self had ever met. He felt himself being drawn out, enlarged. This was dangerous because if you were enlarged there was more of you and the world was still exactly the same size. It didn’t get bigger to make room for you.

The ante-room of B mess was almost empty. It was not a place in which you would ever feel at home. Its atmosphere was transitory like that of a waiting-room. Teddie was glad to have Merrick with him. He ordered scotches and sodas and thought it would be pleasant to get mildly drunk. Or even quite drunk.