The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (37 page)

The girl swung round in her swivel chair, fumbled with plugs. She said, ‘It’s Miss Batchelor, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I am to see Doctor Iyenagar or his assistant in connection with the death this afternoon of Mrs Mabel Layton. Colonel Beames should have rung before he left for Flagstaff House.’

‘Yes. I see. I don’t remember–’ She responded to a voice in her ear. ‘Get Doctor Lal, please.’ She looked up at Barbie. ‘Doctor Lal will come. Please sit down.’

‘Is he on the other end now?’

‘Not yet. I will tell him.’

‘There’s no need for him to come. Just tell him I’m here as arranged by Colonel Beames and then be good enough to have someone show me to his office.’ She turned to Mr Maybrick. ‘Edgar, why don’t you go back to the rectory bungalow and tell Clarissa I’ll be there in half-an-hour. You could send the tonga back for me. It oughtn’t to take me half-an-hour but if there’s any snarl up here I’ll have to get on to Isobel Rankin and ask her to get Beames to sort it out from that end.’

‘I’ll wait,’ Mr Maybrick said, then added, ‘You may need me if you have to deal with people called Iyenagar or Lal or whatever it is.’ He glanced at the Eurasian girl who looked at him as if she agreed. He looked back at Barbie. His face was redder than usual, but grave. He understood.

‘Doctor Lal?’ the girl said. ‘I’m sending Miss Batchelor to your office in connection with the late Mrs Mabel Layton. It is arranged by the civil surgeon. Please see her urgently. Thank you.’ She removed the plug and banged a bell. A chaprassi came. She gave him an order.

‘Doctor Lal will be waiting, Miss Batchelor,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

She followed the chaprassi through into a corridor and found that Mr Maybrick was accompanying her.

‘Barbie, what are you doing, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Something I have to,’ she said. The chaprassi indicated a flight of steps leading to basement level. On the half-landing there was a directional sign. It said: Mortuary.

Mr Maybrick grabbed her shoulder. ‘Barbie, you can’t!’ But she shook him off. The basement corridor was low-ceilinged and very hot. She glanced back up the stairs and saw Mr Maybrick leaning against the wall holding his elbows. He shook his head. His mouth moved. She did not think badly of him. Because of Clarice. Who had ailed in Assam. And died slowly. And been unrecognizable. According to Clarissa. Who knew.

The chaprassi opened a door. A thin young Indian in a white coat got up from a stool at a bench littered with white enamel trays and large glass jars. The walls were of whitewashed brick. In one corner a fan whined on a chromium stand. There was a smell of formalin.

‘Doctor Lal?’

‘Yes, I am Doctor Lal.’

‘I was expecting to see Doctor Iyenagar but I’m told he’s left.’

‘Oh, yes. Half an hour since.’

‘Then you are in charge.’

‘Yes. You come from Colonel Beames, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, I do. Obviously Doctor Iyenagar told you to expect me. Upstairs I was afraid there’d been a tiresome lack of liaison. May we please proceed without further delay, Doctor Lal? I should have been at Flagstaff House ten minutes ago.’

The young man looked tubercular. His eyes were enormous. He had studied too hard. He had not eaten enough. He had his qualification. Which should have opened a world to him. But the way into that world was blocked by Beames and his fear of Beames upon whose good opinion his career depended. Contrasting his delicate night-animal’s features with Beames’s bone-fed face she felt instinctively that he had no sanguine expectations of that opinion.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. Did his lower lip tremble? Necessity made him frank. ‘Proceed with what? I am sorry, but Doctor Iyenagar–’

‘What about Doctor Iyenagar? Are you saying you’ve no instruction in this matter? If so we’ll waste no more time. Ask the switchboard for Flagstaff House. I’ll speak to Colonel Beames and ask him to repeat to you what he’s already said to Doctor Iyenagar.’

For a moment she feared that a habit of acting upon the last order given would send him to the telephone. But almost at once he said, ‘It should not be necessary if you tell me what is the problem.’

‘It’s not a problem. Or at least it wasn’t. It’s a question of identification.’

‘Identification? Of what, please?’

‘Doctor Lal, you’re making this extremely painful and tedious. The business is bad enough without prolonging it. I have to see and identify the body of the late Mrs Layton.’

He looked relieved. And then puzzled. He said, ‘Oh, yes. But no one mentioned to me this necessity. Are you a relative?’

‘Yes.’

‘One moment.’

He went towards a door, then came back, moved a chair a few inches from the wall. ‘Please sit.’ She did so. He opened the door and went through. She closed her eyes to pray for grace, for the continued suspension of Doctor Lal’s disbelief. And abruptly opened them, warned by the blankness behind her eyelids. She got up, opened the door he had gone through. The corridor on the other side of it was narrower and lower than any she had been in this evening. But chill. At its end there were closed double doors flanked by fire extinguishers. In each door there was a circular window.

The corridor floor was covered with tiles of some kind of rubber-like composition. She walked silently to the doors and opened them upon an enclosed winter that hummed faintly on a high note so that she seemed to be both deafened and desensitized, projected into a season of frost, a landscape and a time unknown to her. Entering it she became inhuman, like Doctor Lal, like the two white rubber-clothed figures who seemed to be chafing the naked body in a farcial attempt to bring it back to life. The body was on its side with its right arm raised, held by brown hands. There was a yellow pigment in the arm and in the shoulders. It ended just above the pendulous white breasts but spread upwards across the face which was framed by tousled grey hair. The eyes were open and looking directly at the doorway. The mouth was open too and from it a wail of pain and terror was emitting.

*

‘You should not have gone in!’ Doctor Lal shrieked. ‘It is most irregular. Please go back and wait.’ He stood guarding the doors through which he had just pushed her with feverish hands, back into the corridor. ‘Nothing is ready yet. Doctor Iyenagar is saying nothing to me about identification. I am telling the men. But suddenly you come in without permission upsetting everything. It is not allowed. And now you are in a state. Please, please you must sit somewhere and wait and be patient. Why should I be blamed for this?’

The wall supported her. She felt its hardness against the back of her head. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply through her mouth.

‘No one is blaming you, Doctor Lal. No one will blame you. I shall say nothing. You would be wise to say nothing too. I’ve seen all I need. Just forget I was ever here.’

She went up the corridor and through the still open door into the laboratory. When she got out into the main corridor she saw Mr Maybrick sitting on the bottom step of the flight that led up to the ground floor. Their glances met. She felt that they were people who had known each other a long time ago, too long ago for either of them to presume upon an old acquaintance by speaking first. They ascended silently: he from his reminder and she from her first authentic vision of what hell was like.

*

The blue-haired woman was still on duty. Barbie approached her alone. Outside, in the tonga whose driver had been persuaded to come by the narrow asphalt path prohibited to vehicles, Mr Maybrick sat, still speechless from the shock of that word: Mortuary.

‘I’m afraid an emergency has arisen that makes it imperative for me to see Mrs John Layton at once. It’s in connection with the death this afternoon of Mrs Mabel Layton.’

‘Oh yes. Well, now.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Mrs Layton isn’t a patient so I expect it can be arranged. I’ll have a word with Sister Page.’

‘You’d better tell her I’ve come on behalf of Captain Coley and the Reverend Arthur Peplow. It’s really extremely urgent. It affects the funeral arrangements and of course Mrs Layton has to be informed at the earliest possible moment.’

The blue-haired woman nodded. She had already lifted the phone, pressed one of the red switches and turned a little handle. She asked to speak to Sister Page. It seemed that Sister Page was with a patient. The blue-haired woman gave a careful message, repeated everything that Barbie had told her but had to say names twice. She waited. While she did so the box buzzed. She manipulated switches and said, ‘Pankot Nursing Home, can I help you?’ And then, ‘Just a moment.’ She pressed more switches, turned the handle, listened and then presumably switched herself off from the conversation and back to Sister Page’s extension.

‘Hello?’ she said. She listened. ‘Well, will you do that? Meanwhile I’ll have the visitor brought up.’ She replaced the receiver, banged a bell and said, ‘Sister Page is with Mrs Bingham but Mrs Layton hasn’t gone to bed yet. A porter will take you to the second floor. If you wait at Sister’s desk in the lobby, Sister Page or Sister Matthews will meet you there and then take you to Mrs Layton’s room.’

She told the porter who had come in answer to the bell to accompany Memsahib to Wellesley. Barbie said, ‘Thank you,’ and followed the man. They went up by lift.

Sister Page’s desk was unoccupied. It was surrounded by vases and baskets of flowers taken from the rooms for the night. A clock on the wall behind the desk showed ten minutes to ten. To the right, painted in black, was the legend: Rooms 20-39; with an arrow. To the left a similar legend pointed the way to Rooms 1-19. Barbie turned left along the broad corridor. As she turned a corner into a narrower one a nurse came out of a room half-way down it and walked towards her. She had wide hips and thick legs.

‘Sister Page?’ Barbie asked.

‘No, I’m Sister Matthews. Are you lost?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m here to see Mrs John Layton. They told me downstairs to come up.’

‘Oh.’ The girl looked put out. But then smiled. ‘I understood it was a Captain Coley with a message from a Mr Peplow.’

‘Then they’ve got it slightly muddled. It
is
a message, and a very urgent one, which concerns Mrs Layton, Mr Peplow and Captain Coley.’

‘Yes, I see. And there I’ve just told Mrs Layton it’s Captain Coley. Well never mind.’

‘How is her daughter, Susan?’

‘Mrs Bingham’s just as well as can be expected.’

‘It isn’t a false alarm?’

‘No. But the pains have settled down a bit. I’m afraid it’s not going to be an easy delivery, she’s so tense. But who can blame her? We’ve been trying to get her mother to take something to get a good night because Captain Travers says it won’t be until morning at the earliest from the look of things. But Mrs Layton’s awfully anxious to get on the phone to her sister and other daughter in Calcutta. We’ve been through once but a dense sort of servant answered, so we’re trying again at eleven tonight. I expect they’re all out celebrating the second front, which is what I should be doing if we weren’t so short-staffed. I’ll take you to Mrs Layton.’

‘Don’t trouble. I know the room number.’

‘No trouble.’ She turned to lead the way but as she did so a door opened and another nursing officer, coming out, said, ‘Oh, Thelma, thank God, come and–’ and broke off, seeing Barbie. ‘Be with you,’ Sister Matthews said and then knocked at room number eight, thrust the door open, glanced round and called loudly, ‘Your visitor, Mrs Layton,’ and stood aside for Barbie to go in.

*

The room was filled with a cheerless festive odour. From what was obviously a bathroom Mildred called, ‘Come in, Kevin. There’s a fresh glass on the dressing-table. Pour yourself one and freshen mine, will you? I’ll be with you in a minute.’ A tap was turned on for a few seconds. ‘What’s happened?’ Mildred asked. ‘I warn you I can’t stand much more today. Bring mine in, will you? There’s an angel. I’m going barmy in this bloody place. I’ve been phoning Calcutta like mad but there’s nobody at Fenny’s except some halfwitted Bengali bearer. Since you’re here you might have a go and see if you can get any sense out of him.’ A pause. ‘Kevin?’

Another pause. The bathroom door swung wide open. As she caught sight of Barbie Mildred seized the edges of her open dressing-gown and quickly covered her nearly naked body.

For a moment she stood quite still.

Then she said, ‘You bloody bitch.’

‘Mildred, no. Please don’t. Don’t talk to me like that. We mustn’t let any unfriendliness come between us and what we have to do. It’s much too important. I’m sorry if there’s been some kind of confusion. But it’s not my fault. I had to mention Arthur’s and Captain Coley’s names because it
does
concern them and I knew you’d never see me just on my own. But you must realize it’s not my fault if the message was wrong by the time it reached you. Do I look like someone called Captain Coley? It’s pure nonsense, and very wrong of you. But I don’t care. You can call me anything you like afterwards, punish me in any way you like for anything you’ve ever thought I’ve done to you or done you out of. But you must listen to what I have to say and you must do it, you must. Otherwise she’ll never rest. Never. Never. I’ve seen her, so I know. She’ll haunt me, she’ll haunt you, all of us. She’s in that terrible place and in anguish because she knows you’ve forgotten your promise or aren’t going to abide by it.’

Mildred had gone to the dressing-table, and refilled her glass. Now she said, ‘I’ve no idea what you mean. What promise and to whom?’

‘The promise to Mabel to bury her at St Luke’s in Ranpur.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘It’s what she wished. She told me. She must have told you.’

‘At St Luke’s? In Ranpur? I know absolutely nothing about it and it’s quite out of the question. If you don’t want the humiliation of being asked to leave by a member of the staff you’d better go now.’