The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (25 page)

‘When is the wedding?’ Merrick asked.

‘December, or earlier.’

‘Earlier, surely? We’ll be gone from here in a couple of months. Once that happens you’re unlikely to get an opportunity.’

‘I thought sort of leave during our jungle training period, or just after it.’

‘I shouldn’t count on it. If you’ve really decided to marry I’d advise going ahead as soon as possible. Here in Mirat, for instance. There’s a hill station called Nanoora not far away. You could go there for the honeymoon. If you’re lucky you might get a second honeymoon about Christmas or just after, but my guess is you won’t.’

‘You seem well-informed.’

‘Well-advised. You’ve talked to Selby-Smith presumably?’

‘Oh, yes. Well, I’ve raised the subject. He knows and so does the General.’

‘I’d press it if I were you. Ask for a clear statement. Of the situation.’

He emphasized the last two words. They began to repeat themselves in Teddie’s head. The situation. The situation. What situation? Getting married was the simplest thing in the world. All you needed was the girl, the ring, a padre and a few minutes to spare, and that was it. The catch was in getting the few minutes and in extending them to hours, days, a week or two. The situation was one of time, not having enough of it to be able to call any of it your own, except by arrangement, by permission. Your whole life was subject to permission one way and another.

Teddie frowned, gulped his scotch and soda. Everyone’s life was lived by permission. Whose? There were plenty of people around whose permission you had to seek but to give permission they had to have it themselves from somebody else. Where the hell did it all lead? Where was the highest, the final authority? One ought to know because logically it was this highest final authority that was creating the situation that made a simple thing like marrying Susan so damned difficult.

He called the bearer over again, ordered two more burra pegs, smiled aside Merrick’s attempt to make the second round on him.

He said, ‘I suppose one’s wedding should be the most important day of one’s life. To other people it’s a sort of irritation, isn’t it?’

The belief that he had made an unexpectedly profound statement about the comparative unimportance of the individual in the wider general scheme of things pleasantly aggravated the notion he had this evening of not being quite the man his friends would recognize. Merrick, he thought, was looking at him with the intense regard of someone more finely attuned than most to another person’s potential. He felt encouraged to further profundity but found the way down to it blocked. He said, ‘Are you married, Merrick?’

Merrick was drawing on a cigarette. He took his time, inhaling and exhaling. ‘No, I’m not.’ Each word was marked by a wreath of ejected smoke. Teddie was left with an impression of a sad history in this respect, of what they called a torch being carried. Perhaps the heat of the torch explained the cool bright blue of Merrick’s eyes. Everyone had his defence. He supposed cheerfulness was his. Recently he had found the smile on his face a bit on the heavy side. Underneath it there were these pressures. Mostly sexual, he imagined. He recollected the soft flesh of Susan’s inner arm, just near the elbow. He signed for the second round, raised his glass and said, ‘Cheers.’

Unaccountably the second whisky went straight to his head. Denied physical intimacy with Susan who at this moment represented all women he craved the substitute; intimate accord with some man, here represented by Merrick who sat admirably composed, self-possessed, with all those hidden muscles relaxed but doubtless reassuring to him, sources of self-confidence as they were of Teddie’s envy and grudging respect. It occurred to him that Merrick was – how could he put it? – a mystery that attracted him. He found himself telling Merrick about his parents, about Hunter and the abortive search for his mother’s grave in Mandalay. On Merrick’s clear, handsome but experienced face he saw an expression that encouraged him to feel more in control of his affairs, more intelligent about the significance of a history which it surprised him to discover he had rather a lot of. Talking to Merrick made him feel that he’d almost made a contribution to the totality of the world’s affairs. He believed that Merrick cottoned on to this and was assessing the contribution accurately and appreciatively. It pleased him that Merrick continued to look interested and to ask him questions because this suggested to him that Merrick didn’t dismiss the contribution as negligible. With his third burra peg, which Merrick signed for, Teddie acquired a certain self-conscious tenderness towards him.

He also felt sick; rather suddenly. The medicine had cemented him up at one end perhaps but not at the other. He wondered whether the feeling would go away if he ignored it. He embarked on a description of Susan and said what a marvellous girl she was, what a lucky fellow he was. The more he thought about it (he said) the luckier it seemed to him he was. Pretty girls were usually frivolous, weren’t they? She was damned pretty but terrifically sensible as well as fun to be with. ‘I’d like you to meet her,’ he said. ‘You will if we do what you suggest and get married here.’ That sounded like a good idea: to show people in Mirat what a fine girl he’d got hold of. His forehead was damp.

‘Are you feeling bad again?’ Merrick asked him.

He said, ‘It’ll go off in a minute. It had better because I’ve decided to get pleasantly pissed tonight and that always takes me a fair time.’ He signalled the bearer for two more scotches but Merrick said, ‘Not for me. I’m not a great drinker. In fact there was a time when I hardly touched it. It used to amaze me how much some people could put away. It was Sundernagar that got me into a regular habit. But two in a row is still about my limit before eating.’

‘My uncle actually taught me to drink,’ Teddie began, remembering himself at seventeen and the evening session in Shropshire with the decanter and his uncle’s dedicated but critical eye; but then stopped short of explaining why: that his uncle said that a good head for good liquor was one of the few things that still distinguished a gentleman from others. But Merrick appeared to cotton on to that too. He said, ‘Mine was the kind of family that never kept drink in the house except at Christmas and then it was port.’

‘My uncle’s a port man,’ Teddie said, intending to encourage. ‘He’s always talking about putting some down for me, but I’ll be surprised if he does.’

Merrick smiled. ‘This was the sort that doesn’t get put down. Australian port
type.
When I was a boy I thought all wine was port and that all port came from Australia. It’s the sort of thing that makes life difficult for clever children from humble families. One suffers disproportionately. The young are extremely unkind to each other and their elders aren’t always free from prejudice. I doubt there’s a more unattractive sight than that of a schoolmaster currying class favour by making fun of the boy in his form whose background is different from the others. It’s the kind of situation in which it’s as well to be tough as well as clever. Fortunately I was both.’

‘What school was this?’

‘A grammar school. But my natural element would have been the local county. I got into this other place on a scholarship and my people were very proud of that. They weren’t exactly poor but they were poverty-stricken in comparison with other parents. And lower-middle-class. By those standards. I took up boxing and found my own level.’

‘Do you still box?’

It was the only thing Teddie could think of to say.

‘No. But it was my athletic skill as much as my academic achievement that got me into the Indian Police. Those and the interest taken in me by the assistant headmaster. He taught history which happened to be one of my best subjects. I owed him a lot. We kept up a correspondence after I came out, right up until the time he died.’

‘I was an awful duffer at school,’ Teddie confessed. Like his confidential report from Staff College, recollection of his scholastic stupidity and only average capacity at games caused him no regret: certainly no shame. School, after all, was only part of the adult arrangement to keep children out of the way while they were growing up. He supposed it was different for people like Merrick’s parents, but he imagined there was a similarity somewhere. In any case here they were, the two of them, arrived on the same sofa in the same place with the same rank and the same privileges, sharing the same room and the same servant who, as it happened, preferred Merrick who hadn’t been born in a world where servants figured and port got put down.

At once he remembered the bicycle and the chalk marks and the idea he had had that these were a message to Merrick, a warning to Merrick by an
INA
sympathizer who had found out that Merrick was taking a detailed interest in the subject and perhaps that he was lecturing on it that morning. But just what a bicycle and cabalistic signs had to do with either the subject or Merrick’s involvement was a mystery.

He said, ‘Does a bicycle have any special significance for you, old man?’

He had never seen such a change in a fellow. At least, he couldn’t remember seeing one. It was brief but – there was no other word for it – electrifying. The tingling sensation communicated itself to Teddie. For a moment Merrick looked as if he had been made by a machine and was waiting for someone to come and disconnect him so that he could collapse back into his component parts because there was no possibility of his being galvanized by the vital fundamental spark. Subsequently what puzzled Teddie was that he should have thought about the change in Merrick in such terms. He wondered whether he was becoming over-sensitive, whether he had picked up something that had attacked his nervous system, speeded up his reactions and sent his imagination out of control. Something odd had been happening to him ever since he arrived in Mirat. There was that peculiar fancy he had had about the spare bed as a burning ship or catafalque. Perhaps he had been affected by the aeroplanes. The height had hurt his ears and after each flight it had been a day or two before his hearing was really clear again. That sort of thing could upset your physical balance so there was no reason why it shouldn’t upset your mental balance too.

‘A bicycle?’ Merrick asked. ‘What do you mean, special significance?’

‘Well I don’t know. Is it a sort of symbol of the
INA?’

‘Not that I’m aware of. Why?’

Teddie told him.

‘Just that?’ Merrick said, when he had explained. ‘A broken bicycle?’

‘Well there were these chalk marks. I’m afraid I scuffed them out.’

Presently Merrick said, ‘What a pity.’ He sipped some of the scotch remaining in his glass. ‘Do you remember the marks in any detail?’

‘I’m afraid not. I say, do you think I was right?’

‘About what?’

‘The
INA.’

Merrick did not reply for a while. He was inspecting the palm of his left hand. He said, ‘Possibly. Have you told anyone else?’

‘I asked Hosain. He didn’t know what I was talking about. I expect the beggar thought I was accusing him of something.’

‘I see. Well that explains that. He did say or at least imply you’d questioned his honesty. But I never listen to complaints from servants about other officers. That’s why I was ticking him off. Have you mentioned the bicycle and the marks to anyone else?’

‘No.’

Teddie, sensing a secret, felt privileged.

‘Then I shouldn’t.’ He looked at Teddie’s glass. ‘Let me get you another of those before we eat. To kill the bugs.’ He called the bearer over. Ten minutes later when they got up to go into the mess Teddie felt euphoric. At dinner he drank beer. Afterwards he drank several brandies and Merrick drank one. Without Merrick to guide him he might have lost his way in the maze of covered walks. By the time they got back to their room Teddie was satisfactorily several over the eight but still on his feet. He protested when Merrick helped him take off his shoes. He did not remember getting into bed.

He woke with a thick head when Hosain roused them at half-past seven with morning tea, and recalled a dream that had been so vivid it hardly seemed like a dream at all but obviously was because it couldn’t have happened that he woke in the middle of the night and saw an Indian – a Pathan in a long robe – standing in the middle of the room.

*

When he pressed the subject of his marriage, as Merrick had recommended, he was unable to ignore a moment longer its grand irrelevance to the position in which he and every other officer at divisional headquarters were placed. He found himself having to treat it with the same sympathy and impatience that Colonel Selby-Smith showed (wrinkling his face and temporarily detaching his mind from the main stream of his multiple concerns) so that it was not until Teddie was alone in his room that he fully appreciated the fact that he was none the wiser but somehow committed to panic-action. He had no idea how to conduct his affairs on such a basis, nor how to break it to Susan and her mother. He wished he had left the subject unpressed but at the same time realized that to have done so might have been disastrous. His feelings towards Merrick were now ambivalent. He was grateful to him for the advice but couldn’t help identifying him with the unsatisfactory result of taking it.

Between mid-October and Christmas, Selby-Smith had said, there was now no likelihood of getting away because the serious business of working up would be done during those few weeks, probably in one of the stickier areas of Bengal. After Christmas, leave was anyone’s guess. Selby-Smith’s own was that there wouldn’t be any. The battalion and brigade leave rosters were at the tail-end stage. With the exception of Teddie every officer at divisional headquarters had had leave before joining. The general had been very keen to establish what he called a pattern of full working continuity once the division was formed. He would be adamant about not granting leave to any officer unless the circumstances were exceptional. Selby-Smith promised to have a word with him at lunch because Teddie’s circumstances were, if not exceptional, at least different. In the afternoon Teddie received the general’s ruling. He could either postpone his wedding until after Christmas and risk not having it at all or he could get married in Mirat at any time he wished between now and the third week in October and have seventy-two hours’ leave to enjoy the consequences.