The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (28 page)

‘But what about the journey?’

‘We’ll be all right. We’re meeting Aunt Fenny in Ranpur and all going on together.’

‘And your Uncle Arthur, Major Grace?’

‘He can’t get away from Delhi until the Thursday before the wedding.’

‘All that way, with no man to look after you?’

Sarah smiled. ‘I’m sure there’ll be lots of officers on the train. We shall be quite safe. Don’t worry.’

There are these spoons, Barbie wanted to say. The twelve Apostles. They came today. My gift to Susan and Teddie. Twelve witnesses to love of the sublimest kind. But having got them she was at a loss how and when to offer them. She watched the tonga turn and waved to Sarah’s retreating figure. Sarah sat holding on to the struts of the hood with one hand and on to the book on her lap with the other.

It is not for you to say Gaffur that the rose is God’s creation, even if, though, its scent, its scent is of Heaven, heavenly. ‘My memory,’ she said aloud, turning back in, ‘Is not What it Was.’

She wondered what happened to all the thoughts which once having had you stored up, and especially what became of those that seemed to be lost which you couldn’t put your hand on. She stood in the middle of her room, one repository inside another, and was filled with a tiny horror: the idea of someone coming to claim back even one item of what was contained in either. The idea was horrifying because if you allowed the possibility of one claim then you had to allow the likelihood of several and then many of them, and finally of thousands; so that the logical end to the idea was total evacuation of room, body and soul, and of oneself dead but erect, like a monument marking some kind of historical occasion.

II

The disappointment people had felt at missing an event that would have added some necessary glitter to life was lifted a bit when the Laytons got back from Mirat and it became known that the wedding had been dogged by a series of minor misfortunes.

Mildred’s initial attempts to dismiss these as being of no importance only succeeded in making the misfortunes seem major and presently the word disaster entered people’s heads and was actually used on several occasions.

If Susan herself had looked downcast the idea of disaster would have gained currency; but, as if making up for what Pankot had missed, she glittered for it, trailing the absent ceremony and reception behind her like a diaphanous shadow that sparkled in the pure late October light, a shadow which was a degree or two darker than was really fair but causing her no trouble, a fact that attracted the kind of new regard to which she was entitled: a girl who had left Pankot pale and beautiful and come back flushed, happy, quite her old self, but with this extra dimension of having entered the honourable company of grass widows, with the bloom of the orange blossom still on her cheeks and her husband already gone on the first leg of the journey back to the front to fight for the preservation of the sterner world she now inhabited.

And when the misfortunes had been pieced together in some sort of chronological order, when they were looked at calmly, then even the stone that had broken the glass that cut Teddie Bingham’s cheek on the way to the church could be seen as an acceptable symbol of the attacks to which people who merely tried to get on with the job in hand were only too well accustomed.

The stone, it seemed, had not been meant for Teddie but for his companion, the last minute substitute for Tony Bishop, an extremely interesting man whatever way you looked at it, a man who had apparently incurred such intense dislike among Indians of a certain kind that they persecuted him, kept track of him wherever he went and then chose a moment to embarrass or harass him. On the day of the wedding it had been two moments: on the way to the church and on the platform of Mirat station just as Susan and Teddie were about to wave good-bye from the window of their honeymoon compartment.

Between these two moments there had been another for which Captain Merrick was hardly responsible unless you expected a best man to think of everything in addition to the groom’s state of nerves; but from the point of view of the wedding this middle incident had been the worst, or very nearly. In a way nothing could be worse for the bride than to be told within a minute or two of leaving for the ceremony that there had been a hitch which meant a half-hour delay, and then, on coming up the aisle at last, see her groom standing at the head of it, pale, smiling lopsidedly, with a large piece of gauze padding stuck to one cheek with sticking plaster.

‘You have to admit,’ Lucy Smalley said, ‘that it has its comic side,’ but no one else was prepared to admit that it did when a Layton girl and a Muzzy Guides officer were the central characters in the affair.

It was the involvement of a Layton girl and a Muzzy officer that weighed most heavily against the substitute best man, an otherwise virtuous target for despicable attack. He ought to have made it clear to Teddie who he really was.

Mildred said that after the wedding was over he had admitted persecution of one kind and another ever since leaving Mayapore for a dreary backwater called Sundernagar, where he had continued in his police rank as District Superintendent until making his escape into the army for the duration. It would, she supposed, have been rather difficult for him to anticipate a demonstration against him on the day of the wedding, but if he had made it clear, if he had said to Teddie right at the beginning, Look, I’m the policeman who was made to seem to have put up a black in that ghastly Manners case, the fellow who actually arrested those blighters, then even if he hadn’t added, And I’m still being tracked down and messed about by Indians who think I arrested the wrong men and treated them in some sinister sort of way; even if he hadn’t added
that
useful bit of information, then when the stone came sailing through the window of the car taking Teddie and him to the church, he would have been able to say, That was meant for me, and explained why then or later. And boring as it would have been, a perfect bloody nuisance, everyone would have known what was up and Teddie wouldn’t have been able to say he’d never been warned that his best man was someone who’d been unpleasantly in the limelight. Teddie had always had a horror of being mixed up in vulgar scenes, apparently. He thought at first that the stone was meant for him because he was a British officer or that it had been chucked by someone demonstrating against the Nawab because all the cars used at the wedding were lent by the palace and had crests on the doors. And in either case, of course, it made him feel perfectly miserable. Not to mention his poor cut cheek.

And there, in regard to the stone, Mildred left it with a sound of shattering glass and an impression of Teddie making just a little bit of a fuss, and of Mr Merrick having failed by a perceptible margin to act quite like an officer and a gentleman; an impression which she hardened by reporting him by no stretch of the imagination out of the top drawer, so that it had seemed almost a special kindness to have chosen him for best man, an unconscious repayment to him for the poor way the authorities had treated him in the Manners affair, after all he had done to try to solve and settle it.

After the stone there had been the incident at the club, and it was reasonable to suppose (Mildred suggested) that if there had not been the incident of the stone nothing dire would have happened at the club.

The Nawab and his party had been refused entrance to the reception by the British military police who were stationed at the front. The MPs were a last-minute precaution, only there in case there were further untoward or unexplained incidents. Assuming that no Indian was persona grata at the Mirat Gymkhana, they stopped the Nawab, his chief minister and his social secretary from crossing the threshold, which could have caused troublesome diplomatic repercussions if the club secretary hadn’t got wind of it and personally rescued them, personally conducted them into the reception. It was the wedding group’s first meeting with the Nawab and his chief minister, Count Bronowsky, émigré white Russian who now looked like one of those dessicated Muslims of the Jinnah stamp. The two had been away on a visit to a neighbouring state. The social secretary was a different kettle of fish, perhaps a tricky one. He was Ahmed Kasim, the younger son of the ex-chief Congress minister in Ranpur, M. A. Kasim. Heaven knew what he thought of everything. If he thought badly he’d disguised it well. He’d made himself very useful during the week – you couldn’t say charming, he’d been too formal and correct for that. He accompanied Sarah riding one morning and she had no complaint about his behaviour, which Aunt Fenny had been worried about. He never mentioned his father or the fact that he was in prison. He had not struck one as in the least politically minded which may have been why his father had packed him off to work in a princely state as a hopeless reactionary case. When it came to M. A. Kasim’s sons, the old Congressman had probably had to swallow political pride and disappointment, because the elder was a King’s commissioned officer currently a prisoner of war in Malaya and here was the younger working for an Indian prince and looking after the comfort of visiting members of the
raj.

‘It was Susan,’ Mildred said, ‘who really saved the day. When the old Nawab finally arrived on the lawn, still bristling from the insult, she went forward and dropped him a curtsy, which wasn’t protocol but made all the difference.’

Glances went admiringly to where Susan stood, or sat, wherever she was on the two or three occasions Mildred recreated this picture of her, on a lawn, in sunshine, in her wedding veil and dress, holding together a situation that had threatened to fall apart. Admirable girl. The Nawab must have been immensely flattered.

*

It was the third incident that most concerned and puzzled Barbie because it seemed to her from what she could understand of it that it was of a different order, one that reached outside the wedding and cast innumerable patches of light and shade. The patches of light revealed nothing because the light did not fall on anything, rather it pulsed on and off so that the patches were like mysterious glowing areas attempting to burn their way out of an imprisoning mass of darkness. They did not move; and, coming on, they had gone out before you could fix their positions or even their relationship to each other.

‘What was it,’ she asked Sarah, ‘that actually happened at the station?’

They were walking in the garden of Rose Cottage; or rather Sarah had been walking and Barbie had come down to her. It appeared that they were together but Barbie did not feel that this was the case. She was wary of the girl. She had an idea that it might be unwise to touch her. The Nawab had been pleased with the volume of Gaffur’s poems, Mildred said. Sarah had not mentioned them again. She had not mentioned Mirat, or going riding with the Kasim boy, Ahmed; an excursion which Barbie would have liked to hear about. It was as though she had never been to the wedding or had been and not come back but sent only her reflexion home. She looked at Barbie now from that sort of distance.

‘At the station? No more than you’ve already heard.’

‘But I heard it without understanding it.’

‘I think that’s how we all saw it at the time. Without understanding it. But it was very simple really. Just an elderly Indian woman pushing through us and kneeling at his feet.’

‘Captain Merrick’s feet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Beseeching him?’

Sarah paused with her hands behind her back, looking down at her own feet as though she could see the woman there.

‘Beseeching him,’ she agreed. ‘Yes, that’s a good word.’

‘But who was the woman?’

‘The aunt of the Indian boy Miss Manners is supposed to have been infatuated with. The boy who was the chief suspect. He’s still in prison.’

‘Poor woman. What was she like?’

‘Grey-haired. Dressed in a white saree like a widow.’

‘In a white saree?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that was all that happened?’ Barbie asked after a while.

‘That was all. She pushed through the crowd and fell at Mr Merrick’s feet and had to be taken away. Then the train was going and we were waving good-bye to Susan and Teddie.’

‘It couldn’t have made much sense.’

‘It didn’t, at least not then.’

‘When, then? When did it make sense? When you knew who Mr Merrick was?’

‘Oh, we knew that by then. It came out during the reception. He was embarrassed because it made it look as if he’d tried to hide it but according to him he was just trying to forget it. I suppose he wasn’t really lying when people asked him what he’d been in the police and he said DSP in Sundemagar.’

‘No, that’s true. How did it come out?’

‘Count Bronowsky remembered his name.’

‘Who is Count Bronowsky?’

‘The old Russian the Nawab has as his chief minister. He was talking to Aunt Fenny. He said how well the best man had dealt with the stone-throwing incident, making sure they knew at the palace that the reception would be delayed. When Aunt Fenny told him Mr Merrick had been in the police and was used to dealing with a crisis he identified him at once as the
DSP
in Mayapore. I gather the case had interested him or perhaps he just had an exceptionally good memory. He went to find Mr Merrick and they had a long talk on the terrace but Aunt Fenny had the news well broadcast by the time they came back in. Teddie was awfully cool with him which was a bit unfair, but I think someone had already suggested that if Mr Merrick was the
DSP
in Mayapore at the time of the Manners case then the stone had probably been thrown at him and not at the Nawab’s car. And the thing that happened on the station capped it. But still without making much sense. I didn’t really get the hang of it until that evening when Mr Merrick came over to the guest house to apologize to Mother.’

Barbie thought: Mildred never mentioned an apology.

‘But I was the only one up,’ Sarah went on. ‘All the others were still resting. I was waiting for the dark and for the fireflies to come out. So Mr Merrick and I sat and waited for them together. He was going that evening, leaving Mirat for the new training area in Bengal. He told me quite a lot of things. He seemed to want to talk about it now that it had all come out. He explained who the woman in the white saree was. He said he was sorry for her because she was what he called an ordinary decent person who had done everything for her nephew, the one who’s in prison. He’d not seen her since he was in Mayapore but he’d always known he was kept track of by the kind of people who tried to make out he’d arrested the wrong men and ill-treated them, the people responsible for what happened to spoil the wedding. He said they were exploiting the woman, using her as part of a scheme to make him feel like a marked man. It all seemed a bit far-fetched to me, but I expect it’s the only explanation.’