The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (38 page)

‘Why is it out of the question? There’s a telephone on that table. All you have to do is ring Arthur and tell him to get on to Mr Wright in Ranpur, tell him this simple thing, that it was her wish to be buried next to her second husband, your own father-in-law, at St Luke’s in Ranpur. Arthur and I will do everything else that’s necessary. But the instruction to cancel the arrangements for St John’s must come from you.’

‘What you will do is leave this hospital at once and stop interfering in matters that aren’t your business. I find your suggestion utterly obscene. It is June. Perhaps you’ve noticed it’s warm even in Pankot. Quite apart from the question of the cost of the ice, I have no intention of having my husband’s step-mother transported like a piece of refrigerated meat to be buried after several days’ delay in a churchyard that so far as I recall hasn’t been used for burials since the nineteen-twenties. And especially I have no intention of doing so at the whim of a half-witted old woman. Even if there were an indication of such a wish in my step-mother-in-law’s Will, or a subsequent written instruction, I should have to override it.’

‘I know nothing about a Will, I only know–’

‘But I do know about the Will. I’ve had a copy of it ever since my husband went abroad and copies of subsequent codicils. She had a horror of people having to grub through papers. In fact she was most meticulous and thoughtful about sparing her family unnecessary bother and anxiety. The gruesome little convoy you seem to think she wanted us to become involved in is quite out of character. After five years of living on what one presumes were fairly intimate terms with her I’m surprised you didn’t know her better. On the other hand–’

Mildred sipped her gin, put the glass down. And smiled.

‘–I’m not surprised. You were born with the soul of a parlour-maid and a parlour-maid is what you’ve remained. India has been very bad for you and Rose Cottage has been a disaster. I imagine you’re paid up either to the end of the month or the end of the quarter. This month it comes to the same thing. I’d be glad if you’d be out before then. As quickly as possible in fact. I’d see that you got a pro-rata refund.’

‘Mildred–’

‘How dare you call me Mildred! To you I’m Mrs Layton.’

‘No, that is ridiculous. That’s just spiteful. Mildred is your given name, your Christian name, given when you were baptized. I
shall
not call you anything else. Not in His hearing–’

‘Oh, God,’ Mildred said. She covered one ear and bent her body as if to ward off a blow or to ride with the flow of a physical pain. The movement brought her in direct visual contact with the table and the telephone. She moved forward and reached for it. Barbie lunged; grabbed her wrist and found herself off-balance, forced heavily and painfully to her knees. But she grabbed Mildred’s other wrist and hung on, imprisoned by her own violence in this penitential position. She shut her eyes so that the surge of her strength would not be interrupted. It flowed through her arms and into Mildred and they were united in a field of force, an area of infinite possibility for free and exquisite communication.

Tears of wonder, of love and hope and intolerable desire flowed from beneath Barbie’s parchment-coloured lids. For a moment she could not get feeling into her lips. They would not come together to help her form the beginning of the required first word of supplication. She had to dispense with it and begin with a confession.

‘I am sorry,’ she said, ‘sorry, sorry. I am what you say but I loved her so much and it seemed she was my chance, my gift from God to serve Him through her when everything else had been no good hadn’t come to anything and just now she was trying to say help me help me. Please, Mildred. She asked for so little but she did ask for this. Why should I ask for it? Why should I make up a story? I’ll do anything everything you say but please please don’t bury her in the wrong grave. Not that, not that.’

She felt Mildred’s wrists force themselves free and knew the answer. She opened her eyes but could not make anything out clearly. The shock of an impact stunned her. For an instant she thought that Mildred had hit her face with her open hand. But then she felt the coldness of water soaking into her blouse and as her eyes cleared she saw the empty carafe which Mildred held.

Without water there was no ice, no frosty particle, no storm of hail. The devotional machine had come to life in the shape of Mildred and a handy jug. The bathos of this situation shocked Barbie into a perilous composure. She felt capable of killing in cold blood, of burying Mildred alive along with Kevin Coley, a pile of empty gin bottles, some silver from the mess, and one of the mummy-rag-thin flags on top to mark the place.

She held an edge of the table, getting purchase to rise which she did without dignity but perhaps honourably. Who could say? She did not know. Dignity and honour were not inseparable. At times, and this was one of them, they seemed far distant for both of them.

Without another word she retrieved her handbag from the floor where it had fallen and left the room. She closed the door gently. In the corridor she realized that limp strands of hair clung to her forehead. The front of the heliotrope jacket was blackened by water. Her chest was icy cold. She put her head up and strode past Sister Matthews and another nursing officer, said good night to their open-mouthed faces and clumped down the stone stairs that entwined the lift shaft. On the ground floor the blue-haired woman was busy on the telephone and smiled absently when Barbie called good night. She was spared the shame of a direct encounter.

Mr Maybrick was asleep. He had reclaimed the fibre suitcase from the driver’s seat and sat nursing it, with his head on one side. She climbed in gently and spoke in undertones to the tonga-wallah. When the vehicle jerked forward Mr Maybrick woke, alarmed. She clutched one edge of the suitcase and he another to save it from disaster. And like this they swayed and bucked through the benevolent night guarding her possessions.

vi

Four young officers of the Pankot Rifles took the weight of the coffin on their shoulders. A scratch lot they could have been better matched in height, but the angle of their burden was maintained step by faltering step at a degree several notches above a level that would have led to a bizarre accident. She recognized the pink face of Captain Beauvais, pinker from the exertion of this funereal regimental duty, and wondered whether on his way out he felt the additional weight of a recollection of Bob Buckland, whoever Bob Buckland had been or was. The shortest of the four, he had the right front station and so the coffin had an inclination downwards and moved upon a line that drove logically into the ground beyond the open door to the hastily dug hole for which the woman immediately behind the cortège was responsible.

Beside Mildred walked Kevin Coley; behind these two Isobel Rankin and Maisie Trehearne, and then Clara Fosdick and Nicky Paynton and Clarissa. A thin scattering.

For some time after the coffin had been borne out and the last mourner had followed it through the open door Barbie remained seated in the shadow of a pillar far back in the church, and in the denser shadow of her own bitter and terrible conclusions.

There (she thought) went the
raj
, supported by the unassailable criteria of necessity, devoutness, even of self-sacrifice because Mildred had snatched half-an-hour from her vigil to see the coffin into the hole she had ordered dug. Presently she would return to the hospital where Susan was still in labour. But what was being perpetrated was an act of callousness: the sin of collectively not caring a damn about a desire or an expectation or the fulfilment of a promise so long as personal dignity was preserved and at a cost that could be borne without too great an effort.

And so it will be (Barbie thought) so it will be in regard to our experience here. And when we are gone let them colour the sky how they will. We shall not care. It has never truly been our desire or intention to colour it permanently but only to make it as cloudless for ourselves as we can. So that my life here has indeed been wasted because I have lived it as a transferred appendage, as a parlour-maid, the first in line for morning prayers while the mistress of the house hastily covers herself with her wrap and kneels like myself in piety for a purpose. But we have no purpose that God would recognize as such, dress it up as we may by hastily closing our wrap to hide our nakedness and convey a dignity and a distinction as Mildred did and still attempts. She has a kind of nobility. It does not seem to me to matter very much whether she appears half-dressed in front of Kevin Coley. But I think it matters to God and to the world that she rode with him into the valley and offered matriarchal wisdom to women older and as wise or wiser than she. For that was an arrogance, the kind which Mabel always set her face against, because Mabel knew she brought no consolation even to a rose let alone to a life. She brought none to me in the final count, but what distinguished her was her pre-knowledge that this was anyway impossible. So she probably forgives me about the grave and closes her eyes. It was not everyone who saw that they were open.

*

‘Those are for her, aren’t they?’

It was Edgar Maybrick’s voice. He gathered the bunch of flowers from where it lay on the pew at her side.

‘They’ve all gone now,’ he said. ‘Is that your case?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and rose, letting him reach down and pick the suitcase up as well. He led her out. When they reached the place – a blur of fresh-piled flowers – she took the bunch from him and standing well away from the shape of the dark hole that should never have been dug cast it in.

She returned to Rose Cottage alone. As the tonga pulled up at the porch she saw the figure of an old man come from the side of the house and stand waiting. She got out and paid the fare. The front door was open, as were the windows of her room. She and the old man watched each other for a while and then she called to him, ‘Will you come and help me, Aziz? I’m very tired and should like a cup of tea.’ She went up the steps and entered the hall. Behind her she heard the clunk of his sandals as he cast them off on the verandah before following her in.

Part Four

THE HONOUR OF THE REGIMENT

I

Susan was delivered of a healthy male child, that looked absurdly like poor Teddie, at five o’clock in the morning of June the eighth, three hours before Sarah, hurriedly summoned home from Calcutta, arrived in Pankot on the night train from Ranpur and thirty-three hours after Susan had cried out ‘But it can’t be! The baby isn’t finished yet.’

For a while Susan did not look at the child. She averted her head no matter what her mother said or Travers said and the nursing staff said. It began to look like a classic case of rejection. It was not until Sarah took the child in her arms and impressed on Susan that there was nothing wrong with it, that it was as lively as you liked, in fact pretty obstreperous and not in the least pleased by anything or anyone it had seen so far, that Susan turned her head and looked at Sarah and then at the child and said nothing but let Sarah put the screaming bundle where she could get a view of its purple face and groping miniature hands.

Accepting the child in her own arms her reluctance to examine it closely was obvious. She said, ‘Is it whole? Is it?’ and took some time to comprehend the evidence, revealed detail by detail by Sister Page, that there was no doubt of this. The effort exhausted her and she cried a bit but smiled and touched the baby’s cheek; and slept and woke; and when the moment came applied herself to the primitive task of giving suck with a frown of spartan concentration which gradually eased and left upon her brow a radiance that was too old, too heavy for her face. But no one noticed that.

Presently her milk failed which Mildred said was just as well because one ought not to become so physically involved. It was bad for the child and the mother, unhygienic and potentially a bloody nuisance for everyone concerned. She had advised against it and had been surprised by Susan’s insistence that at least she should try. Well, not surprised. The poor girl had done her damndest to do everything right. She’d been a brick.

‘After all,’ Mildred said, ‘one can’t imagine more trying circumstances.’ She gave up the room next door to the one auspiciously numbered seven, took herself back to the grace and favour but still spent most of the day with Susan. Isobel Rankin saw to it that a telegram was sent to Colonel Layton through the Red Cross. Letters were written. The slight unease felt about the welfare of prisoners of war in Germany now that Europe had been invaded was not openly admitted; instead it was suggested to Susan that her father might be home for Christmas.

‘How lovely if he were,’ Susan said. ‘For us anyway. But it seems a bit unfair, doesn’t it? All he’ll want is peace and quiet and looking after and what he’ll get is a screaming baby that gets all the attention.’ She smiled and added, ‘But I don’t suppose he’ll mind because it’s a grandson,’ and then closed her eyes so that the visitors lowered their voices for a while and thought of the need there would presently be for Susan seriously to consider getting married again to give the boy a father; preferably to Dicky Beauvais who was attentive and in every known respect an excellent choice.

Like other young men in the past Captain Beauvais had originally seemed interested in Sarah; but in his case it would have been impossible to show interest in Susan because when he arrived in Pankot she was a married woman and then a pregnant married woman. He had assumed a brotherly role and it was only since the news of Teddie Bingham’s death that the brotherliness had begun to wear thin which it did in a way that suggested to some people that it had never been more than a disguise for the warmer feelings he had always had but tried to reserve and express for Sarah only.