The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (3 page)

She wanted to be sure that Mabel Layton knew the Batchelors had been very small lower-middle-class beer. In Rose Cottage there were photographs of Laytons, and of Mabel’s first husband and his family (it turned out she had been married and widowed twice) and all of them looked distinguished and well off, very pukka, the kind of people who belonged to the ruling class in India: the
raj.
Mabel, it was true, had let herself go, but in the manner that only people of her upbringing seemed capable of doing without losing prestige and an air of authority.

Barbie’s first view of her was of an elderly shapeless woman wearing muddy grey slacks, an orange cotton blouse whose sleeves and collar had been ripped out to afford more freedom and expose more to the sun the brown, freckled and wrinkled arms, neck and shoulders. An ancient straw hat with a frayed brim shaded her face. She had seemed unwillingly distracted from the job she was doing: grubbing out weeds from one of the rose beds, a task she performed without gloves, kneeling on the grass on an old rubber hot-water bottle stuffed (as Barbie discovered later) with discarded much-darned cotton stockings. She did not look up until Barbie, obeying Aziz’s gesture of permission and invitation, approached to within a few feet of her and cast shadow on the busy work-roughened hands.

She was in the garden every day of the year, she said. The mali usually did only the heaviest work of digging and keeping the grass cut, and even then under Mrs Layton’s supervision. In the wet season she would go gum-booted and sou’westered and macintoshed in search of a job that needed doing. The heavier downpours would drive her in to the verandahs, but these were vivid with shrubs and creepers: azaleas, bougainvillaea and wistaria – and flowers such as geranium and nasturtium. All needed constant attention.

Seeing the garden at Rose Cottage Barbie realized she had always longed for one. She was ashamed of her ignorance of the names and natures of plants.

Built in the old Anglo-Indian style, Rose Cottage was a large rectangular structure with cream stucco walls and colonnaded verandahs at front, back and sides. There were two main bedrooms and a third which was called the little spare. There were a dining-room and a living-room. Central to the rooms was a square entrance hall which had been panelled in the ‘twenties by its former owner. On the panelling Mabel had hung a variety of brass and copper trays. On either side of the doorway into the sitting-room stood a rosewood table with a crystal bowl of flowers – usually roses, as on the day of Barbie’s arrival. These could be cut from the bushes almost continually from February to November.

Barbie’s bedroom was to the right of the hall and Mrs Layton’s to the left. Both had windows on to the front verandah and french doors on to the verandahs at the sides. Barbie’s room connected to the little spare through a shared bathroom. Mabel Layton had a bathroom of her own. Her bedroom connected to the dining-room which, like the living-room, had views on to the back verandah. Dining- and living-room also interconnected. In all but the cold weather these doors were left open to give extra air. Behind the dining-room lay the kitchen and storeroom. Here Aziz had a bed made up. The general servants’ quarters were reached by a path from the kitchen but were screened from the garden by a hedge.

Mabel Layton said she hoped Barbie would not mind being looked after mainly by Aziz. She had never cared for personal maids and in recent years had done without one entirely. Aziz, she said, was as competent to look after a wardrobe as any woman. The mali’s wife came into the house to collect soiled household and personal linen and could attend to Barbie if that was what she preferred. Barbie said she was used to being looked after by male servants and had every confidence in Aziz. It seemed that Aziz cooked too. After her first meal, lunch, she no longer wondered why Mrs Layton, who appeared far better off than Barbie had expected, depended so much on him. The food was simple but exquisitely prepared and served.

‘So long as I have Aziz and a mali to do the rough work in the garden,’ Mabel Layton said, ‘I don’t much care to be bothered about servants. I leave Aziz to hire and fire whom he will. That way we get along perfectly. And he’s been with me since my second husband died, which makes it twenty-two years next month. I’m not sure how old he is but James took him on in Ranpur the month before he was ill and Aziz seemed quite elderly then.’

Barbie’s holiday was originally agreed as one of three weeks’ duration. During the first few days there were quite a number of casual visitors and Barbie assumed that she was being submitted by Mabel Layton to the test of selected friends’ approval.

She made a careful note of names and apprehended that they were in all probability names with which any woman who deserved to live at Rose Cottage should have been familiar. Mrs Paynton, Mrs Fosdick, Mrs Trehearne: these were the most formidable. Their husbands were probably all generals or colonels at least. Mabel Layton was herself what Anglo-Indian society called Army: Army by her first husband, Civil by her second and Army again by her second husband’s son, her stepson, no less a person than the commanding officer of the 1st Pankot Rifles which Barbie had heard enough about to know was a very distinguished regiment indeed, particularly in the eyes of Pankot people. She was spared a meeting with Colonel Layton and his wife and the two daughters who had just returned from school in England, because they were all down in Ranpur. She was sure that the younger Mrs Layton would also be formidable, the daughters hard and self-assured.

In fact she was puzzled why a woman like Mabel Layton should advertise accommodation and go to the length of vetting such an unlikely candidate as a retired teacher from the missions. She decided she could cope with the situation best by just being herself. Mabel Layton had really little of the burra mem in her at all although obviously she was one. But with the other women who called in for coffee Barbie felt exposed to a curiosity that was not wholly friendly.

She admitted to having an indifferent head for bridge but no prejudice against gambling, in spite of the fact that her father lost more on the horses than he could afford from his wages as a solicitor’s managing clerk which meant that her mother had had to earn money herself by taking in dressmaking.

‘We lived in Camberwell,’ Barbie explained, ‘and it was a great treat going with her to big houses in Forest Hill and Dulwich. I helped her with the pins. She had an absolute horror of putting them in her mouth because of a story she’d heard of someone swallowing one and dying in agony. So I used to hold the pin-cushion. I called it the porcupine. It was filled with sand and absolutely bristled and was really awfully heavy, but it was covered in splendid purple velvet with seed-pearl edging and I used to stand there like a little altar boy, holding it up as high and as long as I possibly could. I can tell you it was tough on the arms but worth it because I was positively enchanted, I mean by watching my mother turn a length of silk or satin into a dress fit for a queen. I only hated it when she was doing mourning because then we both had to wear black and the houses we visited always smelt of stale flowers. And of course we knew we’d have to wait ages to be paid. Weddings were the big things. We got all sorts of perks.’

After such expositions a little silence used to fall, like a minuscule drop of water from the roof of an underground cave into a pool a long way below, where it made more noise than the scale of the actual situation seemed to merit. And the situation was worsened by Mabel Layton remaining immobile and expressionless as though what she always appeared willing to listen to when she and Barbie were alone, even if slow or reluctant to comment on it, bored her when it was told in front of her friends. It was left to the visitors to respond, which they did in those little silences and in then recalling, as though suddenly reattuned to the realities of life, other obligations and appointments that took them away wearing airs of concentration. There was, after all, a war begun in Europe. At any moment the Empire might be at stake.

‘Come on, Batchelor,’ Barbie said on a morning she decided there could be no future for her in Pankot at Rose Cottage, ‘chin up’. She went to her room because Mabel had gone back into the garden. She sat at the borrowed mahogany desk to write yet another letter on the beautiful engraved paper, supplies of which had been placed in a wooden rack for her convenience. There were as well supplies of the matching purple-lined envelopes with stamps fixed at the inland rate, a mark of hospitality that amounted to graciousness but suggested a limitation of it, there having been but twelve; a generous but perhaps significant calculation of four letters a week for three weeks being enough to meet the requirements of any reasonable visitor.

But there were now only four stamped envelopes left which meant she had used two weeks’ supply in one. She was a prodigious letter writer. She believed in keeping up. She once estimated that she wrote upwards of a dozen for every one she received, but the proportion had since changed to her further disadvantage.

‘I know,’ she said, murmuring aloud, the morning having become unusually still, pregnant with the possibility of her immediate eviction, ‘that my own addiction to pen and paper is a form of indulgence. It’s also of course a form of praise, I mean praise for the fascination and diversity of life which if you notice it yourself is always nice to bring to someone else’s attention. I have written eight letters which means that there are now eight people who know things they didn’t know, for instance how beautiful Pankot is and that I have hopes of living here. They know that a Miss Jolley has taken over my job. They know that I am happy and comfortable and looking forward to taking things easy. They know about the ridiculous mistake made by Thomas Aquinas and about Aziz and how helpful he was, and that the trunk is still at the station. They do not know that I am slightly worried about the trunk and the table because it is as unfair to share one’s fears as it is right to share one’s hopes. I shall share my hopes now with someone else.’

But when she had a sheet of writing paper squared up on the blotter and her Waterman fountain pen poised (it was one that was filled through a rubber top on the ink bottle into which the pen was inserted and pumped with a motion whose faint indelicacy was a constant source of slight embarrassment to her) she was aware of being about to project her thoughts not to one of the many people to whom she was in the habit of writing but into that deep that darkness was once said to be upon.

And suddenly she felt what she had felt once or twice before in Ranpur, the presence of a curious emanation, of a sickness, a kind of nausea that was not hers but someone else’s; and sat stock still as she might if there was something dangerous in the room whose attention it would be foolhardy to attract. On the earlier occasions she had attributed the emanation to some quality of atmosphere in the Ranpur bungalow and so it surprised her to encounter it again. She felt instinctively that if the sickness touched her she would faint. And then she might come to with Mabel Layton standing over her telling her that Aziz had found her unconscious clutching a piece of paper on which she had written, ‘Dear  . . . ’ and no more.

‘And that of course would be the end,’ she said aloud in a normal conversational tone so that the emanation could observe that she was not bothered by it. ‘Mrs Layton would quite ignore my assurance that there was nothing wrong with
me
and that there was no need to send for a doctor. I’d be off out of here and popped into a hospital bed as quick as winking. But I’m not ill. There’s illness in the room but it isn’t
my
illness.’

She gripped the edges of the desk and hoped she wasn’t due to become a visionary. ‘At my age! I mean how awfully disagreeable, not to say inconvenient.’ She gripped the edges so hard that her palms hurt. Cautiously she removed her hands and was relieved to find nothing scored in the flesh that bore any resemblance to the stigmata.

‘Whatever it is or whoever you are who isn’t feeling up to par,’ she said, having lost her fear of the emanation, ‘I’m awfully sorry but there’s nothing I can do for you, so please go away. Preferably in search of the Lord.’

She waited and felt the room return to normal.

‘I’ve seen it off,’ she thought. And at once thought of the person she should write to. She recovered her fountain pen, inscribed the date, October 9th, 1939, and wrote ‘Dear Edwina,’ and then found herself stuck for words, a rare event but an effect that Edwina Crane had always had on her. Edwina was the woman Barbie succeeded at Muzzafirabad and to Barbie she remained the heroine of a quarter of a century ago when alone, with the children cowering behind her in the schoolroom, she stood valiantly in the open doorway, at the height of serious civil disturbances, facing a gang of crazed and angry Muslims who had come to burn the mission down, and told them to be off; which they were (so the story went) in a subdued and silly-looking bunch, whereupon Miss Crane, leaving the door open because it was very hot, returned to the dais and continued the lesson as if she had just said no to an undeserving case of begging; a lesson that no doubt centred upon the picture she was reputed to have put to such brilliant use as an aid to teaching the English language that Barbie had never dared attempt emulation but had introduced instead
First Steps in Bible Reading
and taught from this, almost literally in the shadow of the picture which hung on the wall behind the dais.

This picture, of which she had a miniature copy among the relics in her trunk, a coloured engraving showing Queen Victoria receiving tribute from representatives of her Indian empire, had originally aroused in Barbie a faint dislike which she had prayed to be purged of because she guessed it was not the picture but Miss Crane for whom the dislike was felt, and at that time she had not even met the woman. Edwina had gone from Muzzafirabad before Barbie arrived to take her place. But spiritually she was very much still there, in the picture behind Barbie and in the minds of the little boys and girls who faced her, challenging her to do half as well for them. And Mr Cleghorn had a tendency to make comparisons between Barbie’s methods and Miss Crane’s.