The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (29 page)

‘Did he remember my friend, Edwina Crane?’

‘I’m sorry. I never thought to ask.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose he did. Although as
DSP
in Mayapore he’d have known all about her being attacked. But I expect one of his juniors dealt with that. He had his hands full with that other awful business, didn’t he? Does he still feel he was right, or does he think he might have made a mistake after all, arresting those boys? Miss Manners seemed so positive they weren’t the ones, if we’re to believe all we heard.’

They had reached the shade of a pine tree that stood near the very end of the garden. From here there was the view to the farther hills and the mountains. In a week or two the snow-capped peaks would be obscured by cloud as often as not. Sarah sat down. Barbie followed suit.

‘He feels he was right,’ Sarah said. ‘He sounded very sure. Very sure indeed. But the more he talked about it the more I felt he’d got it all wrong. And that would be terrible, wouldn’t it? If he had got it wrong but is always going to believe he didn’t. Do you see what I mean? I know it’s terrible in other ways, for the boys who have gone to prison and for – well – but she’s dead, and that’s another question, another sort of terrible. But to have got something wrong, and never see it, never believe it  . . . ’

Sarah dug her hand into a cushion of pine needles, sifting them, considering them. Suddenly she went on: ‘He said that he was once attracted to her himself, in love with her perhaps. He made it sound like a confession, like a determination to be honest about every possible aspect but all the time I felt it wasn’t. I don’t know why I felt that. But everything he said sounded rehearsed. And while he was saying it you felt him watching for the effect, even knowing what it was going to be.’

‘You didn’t like him.’

After a while Sarah shook her head.

‘No. I don’t think I liked him at all.’

Perhaps, Barbie thought, because you had seen the child and talked to the old woman, and had seen the other woman, the woman in the white saree, and felt the presence of the unknown Indian. And wonder how in all this complexity guilt can lie alongside innocence and whether it might not have been in Mr Merrick’s power to separate them.

She continued to sit in spite of getting cramp because Sarah did not move and she did not want to leave her alone.

‘What did you say?’ Sarah asked, coming back into herself after what seemed a long time.

‘I wasn’t talking.’

Sarah stared at her for a moment or two and said, ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were,’ and then Barbie wondered whether she had been.

For years she had had real and imaginary conversations with people, with herself, with God, with anyone who was there to listen or not listen. But an imaginary silence was something new. If you didn’t know you were talking then you didn’t know what you were saying. She tried to remember exactly what she had been thinking in case she had spoken some of her thoughts aloud, but her mind appeared to have been blank after the image of Sarah sitting with the old woman and the child, pondering the question of guilt and innocence and the part Mr Merrick had played or not played in attempting to establish them.

‘You seem to be haunted by it,’ she said, ‘I mean by that awful business. First in Kashmir, being so close to the houseboat, and now in Mirat, with Captain Merrick.’

‘Someone should be haunted by it,’ Sarah said.

And then Barbie was sure she was right: Sarah had visited the woman and seen the child. She had a concern to hold the child, to take it to St John’s and see it baptized.

‘Yes,’ Barbie said. ‘Perhaps we should.’ She got up. ‘Stay here. I’ve got something for you to take to Susan.’

She went into the house, returned with the box of Apostle spoons and the note she had written. She knelt again and offered them.

‘They’re a combined wedding and twenty-first birthday present. Nothing very much. A set of teaspoons. I’d be grateful if you’d take them to her.’

‘Thank you, Barbie. That’s very kind.’

Sarah put the box on the cushion of needles and looked at the envelope on which Barbie had written, ‘Mrs Edward Bingham’.

‘I may be leaving Pankot,’ Sarah said.

‘Oh, Sarah, why? Where?’

‘Just to do something more useful. Nursing perhaps or what I’m doing now only in a place where the war’s a bit closer. Do you think that’s selfish?’

‘Why selfish?’

‘Because of leaving Mother and Susan. With Daddy a prisoner it’s always seemed to be my job to help look after things.’

‘Susan’s a married woman now.’

‘Yes. That’s why I thought I could go.’

‘I should miss you dreadfully, well we all should, but it would be wrong to hold you back.
That
would be selfishness.’

Sarah glanced up. For a while they looked at each other gravely. ‘I wish I could see things clearly enough to be positive like that,’ Sarah said. ‘But I never can. I must go—’

Abruptly she rose.

‘Thank you for Susan’s present. Please don’t bother to see me off.’

She was gone before Barbie could get to her feet. She watched her until she was out of sight and then followed slowly.

Mabel was not working in the back or on the verandah which must mean she was either at the front or gone for one of her increasingly rare but still solitary walks.

I must explore, Barbie thought; and then spoke aloud: ‘I must explore this mystery of the imaginary silence,’ and as her voice continued she found that she could detach herself from its sound so that it seemed to go drifting away, or she to go drifting away from it, until she was left in a state of immobility or suspended animation, surrounded by what she could only describe as a vivid sense of herself as new and unused, with neither debit nor credit to her account, no longer in arrears with any kind of payment because the account had not been opened yet.

This was very clear to her but she guessed it wouldn’t be when the immobility was cancelled. She thought: Emerson was wrong, we’re not explained by our history at all, in fact it’s our history that gets in the way of a lucid explanation of us.

She began to enjoy the sensation of her history and other people’s history blowing away like dead leaves; but then it occurred to her that among the leaves were her religious principles and beliefs, and – observing the solemn evergreen stillness of the wood-capped hills – felt reassured and wisely reinstructed.

An imaginary silence should not be used to destroy contact but to create it. She went round to the front to find Mabel but the garden was empty. Mabel’s stick was on the front verandah so she was not out walking. She went inside, knocked on Mabel’s door and opened it.

Mabel was sitting on the edge of her bed watching Aziz removing the contents of an old press and placing them carefully on a blanket spread on the floor.

‘Hello, Barbie,’ Mabel said, looking up. ‘We’re sorting out some winter things.’

Barbie had never watched this ritual at Rose Cottage but she knew that it took place. She came further into the room, fascinated as she had been since childhood by the prospect of viewing someone else’s possessions; for these had a magic quality of touch-me-not that belonged in fairy tales and in such tales dispensation was possible but not inevitable and every invitation to come nearer was a sugared gift.

‘Oh, no, Aziz,’ Mabel said, as he opened layers of tissue to show the coat of a grey costume.

‘H
ā
n,’ he insisted. ‘Bond is-street.’

Mabel smiled. ‘I bought it in London the last summer I was there,’ she explained to Barbie, ‘the summer John’s grandfather died. Susan was only ten or eleven then so you can tell how out of date it is. But every winter Aziz tries to make me bring it out, because of the tag.’

‘Bond is-street,’ Aziz repeated. ‘Pukka.’

The whole costume was spread out now. It had the simple elegance of all expensive clothes.

‘You could shorten the skirt,’ Barbie suggested. ‘It wouldn’t spoil the line.’

‘Wouldn’t it?’

Encouraged by Barbie’s interest Aziz said, ‘H
ā
n. Shorten is-skirt.’

‘Perhaps. If I can still get into it.’

Mabel reached down and pulled the costume towards her, twitched at it, and Barbie wondered how easy or difficult it would be to make her take an interest again in things outside Rose Cottage: in clothes, in visits, sprees. The two of them could have a holiday, a short one, not far away. They could go down to Ranpur to do some Christmas shopping. She would take Mabel round the Bishop Barnard and introduce her to Helen Jolley. For such a holiday she would have the heliotrope.

‘Very well, Aziz,’ Mabel said. ‘Put it on the pile.’

Aziz nodded. He rearranged the costume, folded it with reverence, replaced the dried sprigs of lavender whose scent mingled with that of sandalwood and mothballs. The tissue-wrapped costume was put on the smaller of the two piles. Suddenly he reached into the chest and said to Barbie, ‘Memsahib!’

‘No, no,’ Mabel said. She made a gesture as if to stop him but it was ignored. He was intent on revealing a treasure. He lifted a package out and removed the top layer of tissue with a flourish.

‘Sarah bachcha,’ he said. Barbie went closer. A wedding veil? No, a complete garment. She could see the neckline and tiny sleeves folded across its front. Sarah bachcha. Sarah as a baby. She got down on her knees. ‘Oh, it’s a christening gown. Was it Sarah’s?’

‘H
ā
n. Sarah Mem.’

Aziz linked thumbs and flapped his splayed fingers. ‘Batta fye,’ he said, and laughed at Barbie’s puzzled expression. He put his hand in under the creamy lace from which the gown was made. As he did so Barbie exclaimed. The hem of the fine lawn undergarment was edged with a band of seed pearls. But there was more enchantment to come. ‘Look,’ he said, and fluttered his hand. The lace came alive. Butterflies palpated his pink brown palm. Three of them. Five. Seven. A dozen. More than that. The whole gown was made of lace butterflies.

‘Oh, but it’s beautiful,’ Barbie said. ‘Did Susan wear it too?’ Mabel answered. ‘No. Susan had something new.’

Now that the lace was exposed Mabel seemed willing to acknowledge it. But putting out her hand to touch it Barbie felt that she was encroaching upon one of the many parts of Mabel’s hidden history. She drew her hand back.

‘No, do take it out,’ Mabel protested. ‘It’s beautiful lace. My first husband’s mother gave it to me for when we had children, but we never did. There’s a full length of it still unmade up. Enough for a shawl. Aziz, show Barbie Mem the piece.’

Aziz reached into the press and lifted out another tissue-wrapped package. He opened it and unravelled the lace as the durzi unravelled bolts of cloth. The lace cascaded across his and Barbie’s knees. The butterflies hovered, settled, rose, settled again. Some of their wings were folded, others only partly folded. Some displayed the full spread.

‘It’s exquisite,’ Barbie said. She hardly dared touch it. ‘So delicate and alive.’

‘It’s rather remarkable when you realize that the old woman who made it was blind.’

‘Blind!’

‘Not from birth. But for many years. She sat in a room in the top of a tower of an old French château that belonged to my mother-in-law’s family. She called the butterflies her prisoners.’

Barbie put both hands under the lace and raised them. The butterflies quivered as in a taut web. They were part of the web.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They are caught, aren’t they? How carefully you’ve looked after it.’

‘Aziz sees to that. Would you like that piece?’

Barbie let the lace free. ‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said, ‘but it’s much too beautiful. I wouldn’t know what to use it for. And besides it’s precious and it’s family.’ She thought of the wedding and its possible consequences. ‘And now it may come in.’

‘What?’

‘If Susan and Teddie have children.’

‘There’s Sarah’s dress already made up and there if wanted. Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure. But thank you very much for the offer.’

III

Mrs John Layton, the card began, Miss Sarah Layton and Mrs Edward Bingham, request the pleasure of your company at the Officers’ Mess, The Pankot Rifles. The date was for two weeks ahead, the time mid-day. On the bottom right-hand side it said Buffet Luncheon and on the left
RSVP.
Two cards were delivered to Rose Cottage.

In the envelope containing Barbie’s there was a note from Susan. ‘Dear Barbie,’ she had written, ‘thank you so much for the beautiful set of Apostle teaspoons. I’m writing to Teddie who I know would wish me to say thank you on his behalf as well. I heard from him a few days ago and he says he is very fit but of course working very hard. Mummy and I have decided that she should give a little party here to make up for having to have the wedding in Mirat and that it would be a good idea to have it on my twenty-first. A lot of our wedding presents were to cover both occasions. I do hope that you and Aunty Mabel will both be able to come. Mummy says it’s years since Aunty Mabel visited the Mess and a lot of the young officers who have heard of her but never met her are dying to because really she is quite famous, not just because of Daddy but because of all the silver her first husband presented and which is used on special occasions. We shall have the wedding presents displayed, by the way, and your spoons will look awfully nice in their blue-lined box. With Love, Susan.’

‘I expect you’d like to go, Barbie,’ Mabel said.

‘Only if you do.’

‘Well I shall have to but I’d want to come away before they start eating. I can’t bear eating standing up or eating in crowds. But Mildred knows that. She won’t mind. If I put in an appearance that’s all anybody will want, but you stay on and have a good tuck in.’

‘Eating in crowds gives me indigestion too. We’ll go and come back together. We’ll arrange to slip away.’