The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (27 page)

It seemed that in Kashmir, at Mildred’s insistence, the houseboat had been moved from its original site – a noisy berth between two others that were rented by American officers who played portable gramophones until the early hours and had Eurasian girls draped on the sun-decks under awnings. They had tried to involve Sarah and Susan in these late-night parties.

Mildred ordered the boat taken to the remote spot where she and John Layton had spent part of their honeymoon, and moored it one hundred yards from someone who had got there sooner but whose boat seemed quiet, hardly to exist in fact; muted to the point of creating its own illusion of itself as though at any moment it might break up into component parts of air and light and water.

Or so Barbie conjured it, absorbing all the separate pieces of information from Mildred’s account and re-assembling them. To begin with she had never been to Kashmir and had to imagine this entirely for herself, helped out by recollections of pictures in books and on postcards. She thought of Kashmir as snow and apples at the same season and a deep lake into which the snow melted and the apples fell. In Spring there were sheep from which the fine wool shawls came; and then in Autumn the smell of carpentry. The water was always placid but grey and misty. At night there were stars and heaven looked very far away, far behind the stars, as it did in places where there were mountains. For the first time, listening to the story, she admitted the actual quality of colour and sunshine so that the water now looked green as well as deep, shaded by willows whose fronds brushed the ornate fretted wood of houseboat roofs.

And in this long warm sleeping afternoon a cry came, across the one hundred yards of water, a cry of a child, which seemed odd. Only an elderly woman, apart from servants, had been noted. To this woman, after discussion, cards had been sent and the cry of the child at first sounded like the ambiguous answer and continued to do so until the arrival of the tiny reciprocal rectangles of pasteboard with that name in copperplate, engraved.

Lady Manners.

The lake was still placid; no ripple. Distantly the mountains still erected sharp outlines. Shade remained dark like indigo velvet. Butterflies hemstitched this tangible material, and Barbie – living it – watched them and heard the cry repeated, felt the fascination of the situation before she understood the predicament created by the proximity, the awful nearness to the untouchable condition that attached to that name, Manners, which was the name of the woman and, with her inexplicable permission, of the child whose father was any one of six disgusting hooligans. There she was, the old woman, once distinguished, once elegantly in occupation of Government House in Ranpur and the now virtually disused Summer Residence in Pankot, at ease upon the sundeck of a houseboat; isolated from the world her niece and now she had scandalized.

The girl, the Manners girl (poor running panting Daphne) had paid the price of her folly by dying, bearing the tiny monster of the Bibighar that should have been destroyed in the womb and, it was once suggested, thrust down the throats of the culprits or their bloody priests. Miss Manners had not had, surely, religious scruples about abortion? More likely a conviction that she knew the father. The implications of this conviction were almost too astonishing to imagine, as were the old woman’s motives in announcing the death, the birth, to a world that thought it better to forget.

Of course, Mildred said, it wasn’t possible to follow up the ritual begun in ignorance with the exchange of cards. She let her slightly hooded eyes stray explanatorily towards the garden where the girls innocently played with Panther in that permitted zone originally marked out by Barbie. But, she added, there had been odd moments of hiatus: shikaras setting out from both houseboats at the same minute, or unable to avoid what only a few yards of water stopped from being an actual confrontation, but close enough to demand an inclination of heads, since the occupants of each had met by pasteboard and they could not accept the burden of uncivilized pretence that this had not occurred, could not assume that they were total strangers, even if it were tacitly agreed there should be no development of an acquaintance from which neither side could benefit, and from which one side (that of the girls, playing there with the ball and the dog, those appendages of unsullied English life) could only incur positive harm.

‘What did she look like?’ Nicky Paynton wanted to know.

‘One couldn’t see. We were never, thank God,
that
close, and even under the shikara awning she wore an old topee and a veil.’

Teddie’s letter about the new arrangements for the wedding had been almost a relief, giving as it did a conscientious reason for ordering the boat away (even if it looked like embarrassed retreat) back to its original mooring to be closer at hand for unexpectedly early last-minute shopping and the making of arrangements for an early return to ‘Pindi by cars, to Delhi by train (where Aunt Fenny and Uncle Arthur became detached), and on to Ranpur, back to Pankot, and the excitement as well as the slight hysteria of bringing the wedding forward and somehow transferring it to Mirat: a place of palaces, mosques and minarets.

Guests of the Nawab! Barbie’s visions were now coming to her through the fretted stone screens that embellished so much Moghul architecture. Through these she peeped at lawns and lakes and fountains and saw Susan, standing in her new-found stillness, in bridal white, her veil lifting in rose-scented breezes that had blown across deserts.

*

Quite quickly she detected a mystery about the book but put it down to the curious evasiveness Sarah had brought back from Kashmir with her, like something caught and not yet shaken off.

The book was an elegant affair of dark red leather, gold tooling and paper in which you could see flecks of the wood from whose pulp the paper had been made. The text was printed in the Arabic script which Barbie, fluent in spoken Urdu, had never learned to decipher. But she could see it was poetry.

The book was to be the Laytons’ thank-you present to the Nawab of Mirat in whose palace guest house they were to stay. Mildred mentioned the book and now Sarah had brought it up to show to Mabel. She unwrapped it and offered it as if it were a gift she had received not one the family were to give.

‘It was a bit of luck really,’ she said.

‘Why luck?’ Mabel asked, hearing.

‘Luck to discover the connexion.’

‘Connexion? Who are the poems by?’

‘Gaffur.’

‘Oh!’ Barbie interrupted. ‘Gaffur. He’s a classic Urdu poet. I used to know several quotations. What connexion do you mean?’

‘He was court poet to a Nawab of Mirat in the eighteenth century. A relation. The same family as the present Nawab. A Kasim.’

‘“It is not for you to say, Gaffur,”’ Barbie suddenly recalled, ‘“that the rose is God’s creation. Howsobeit its scent is heavenly.” Oh, how does it go on?’
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‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘How?’

Her face was very pale. This was unusual.

‘I don’t know. But I do know that in each poem they address themselves by name, just once, I think. Not their real names. Their pen-names. I didn’t know Gaffur was a Kasim.’

She hesitated, held up one finger. ‘It is not for you to say, Gaffur, that the rose is God’s creation. Howsobeit its scent is heavenly. Something something something. It’s quite useless. I’ve lost it. Is there a connexion between the Nawab and Mr Mohammed Ali Kasim the politician?’

‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘The Nawab and he are kinsmen as well, but fairly distantly.’

‘How extraordinary, and well – fraught. I mean, is that the word?’

‘What are you saying, Barbie?’ Mabel asked. Barbie answered from her abdomen, a schoolroom trick that did not strain the throat. Her whole body acted as a sounding board.

She said, ‘The Nawab of Mirat is related to Mohammed Ali Kasim who is presently in gaol.’

‘Oh,’ Mabel said. ‘Is he?’ So that it was not clear which he she meant or which condition – the relationship or the incarceration.

‘The Congress ex-chief minister in Ranpur,’ Barbie emphasized.

‘I know,’ Mabel said. ‘My second husband was once a colleague of
his
father.’ She turned to Sarah. ‘Who thought of the book?’

‘Someone we met in Srinagar.’

‘What was their name?’

A pause.

‘The idea just emerged in conversation. We met so many people,’ Sarah eventually said.

As Sarah took the book back into her hands Barbie remembered the old parlour game in Camberwell. I open the book. I look at the book. I close the book. And I pass the book along. The catch had been to cross your legs as you passed the book to the next player otherwise you were out. It was a game which like others of its kind scared her until she was old enough to think it silly, and even then the icy little hand would touch her low down on the back of her neck, the hand of the invisible guest, the demon-spirit of the party who knew the answers to all the conundrums and puzzles and who presided over the gathering with a thrilling kind of malice, totting up the scores and marking down for ridicule, if not worse, special victims: the foolish aunt, the sickly cousin who cried when Barbie’s father did his grotesque babes-in-the-wood act, sitting in a tub, under the table, with only his bare knees showing, and on each knee a grinning face sketched with burnt cork, the eyes closed.

Sarah, having taken the book, looked at it herself. Her grace was a different kind from Susan’s. If grace was the right word then Susan had the look of imminent entrance to it, Sarah the look of being born there, of merely having to wait for it visibly to form itself around her, when she and it would exist in a state of mutual recognition. It had not happened yet, but something had happened, in Kashmir, which had heightened the other look she had always had of taking very little on trust, of preferring to work things out for herself; heightened the look and presumably her realization that it was far from easy. It then occurred to Barbie that Sarah could have seen the child, talked to Lady Manners, taken one of those opportunities when characteristically alone to pay the visit her family steered clear of.

Barbie pictured it: this young girl and the old woman, and the child somewhere in the vicinity. I came, the girl was saying, because I couldn’t go without saying hello. So said hello and talked and later was shown the child. One of God’s creatures. Although, as Gaffur for some reason would have it, that was not for one to say. The idea of the book could have come out of this visit because the conversation could have turned upon the imminent journey to Mirat, and the reason for the journey. It was the kind of thing the old woman would know: the connexion between a poet and a prince and an imprisoned politician.

Convinced that she had hit upon the solution to the mystery of the book Barbie gazed at Sarah with awe and curiosity; fear for her toughness and temerity. Sarah had her father’s dignity but it was committed in a different cause, or seemed to be; committed to discovering where she would feel it earned, where her duty was. On the score of duty her father obviously had no questions. His dignity was therefore unqualified. It was this difference in dignity that people saw and in Sarah misinterpreted; people like the Smalley woman who saw the difference as something perilously close to ‘unsoundness’ – a condition which led to an inability to retain the affection of suitable and dignified young officers. Barbie thought: More fools they, Sarah’s worth ten of most of them; lucky the man who gets her but he will have to be pretty special. She looks at my old fond and foolish face and sees through it, I think, sees below the ruination, hears behind the senseless ceaseless chatter, sees right down to the despair but also beyond to the terrific thing there really is in me, the joy I would find in God and which she would find in life, which come to much the same thing. But if she’s not careful she’ll find herself not living, just helping others to. Perhaps that’s all I’ve ever done. If so it isn’t much, it isn’t enough I don’t suppose. Especially if I ask myself: How many of those children did I ever truly bring to Jesus?

Sarah glanced at her.

‘What did you mean, Barbie, fraught?’

‘I suppose I meant odd, difficult, to be the guest of a man whose kinsman we’ve put in clink, but India is full of oddities like that isn’t it and perhaps the Nawab disapproves of his politician kinsman. Or if he doesn’t he obviously doesn’t disapprove of us. But then the princes like us better than the rest of them do, don’t they? We’ve bolstered them up and some of them one gathers hardly deserve it. One of my friends belonged to what’s called a zenana mission and she once spent a year in a palace of a tiny state in Rajputana. Actually I forget but I think it was Rajputana. Her job was to try to give the rudiments of a modern education to the ruler’s wives and daughters who were all in purdah or going to be in purdah. She adored the children but said there were times when she actually went in fear of her life, not that it was ever threatened but she heard such terrible things, quite barbaric. But I’m sure Mirat’s not like that.’

‘No, I’m sure it isn’t,’ Sarah said. ‘I must go.’

She got up, leant and kissed Mabel who thanked her for bringing the book of poems. Barbie went with her to the front where the tonga was waiting.

‘She did appreciate it. She would have liked to be at the wedding, but Mirat’s so far. Too far. It was awfully nice of you to come up specially to show the book. Shall you invite the Nawab to the wedding?’

‘I expect so, Barbie. You would have liked to come too wouldn’t you?’

‘Oh yes. But I couldn’t leave Mabel. Has Captain Bishop been given permission to accompany you?’

Now seated in the back of the tonga Sarah looked down at Barbie. ‘Well he was, but he’s just been taken to hospital. We believe it’s jaundice. Mother’s gone to see him this afternoon to find out.’

‘But whatever will you do?’

‘If it’s jaundice Susan’s going to ring Teddie and tell him to find another best man quickly.’