The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (40 page)

‘Nicky!’

‘Well, it’s true.’

‘But there can’t be all that many.’

‘Can’t there? There can be and are. We all know it. But we try to pretend it’s not so. But it is so. The bloody rot’s set in. When I think of Bunny sweating away in the bloody jungle–’

She went to her room to calm herself and wrote a letter to her husband who had got a brigade at last. ‘Darling Bunny, Hope you’re in good form,’ she began and looked at the latest snap of the two boys in Wiltshire, grinning into the sun with the innocence of youth. ‘Mildred’s younger daughter, Su, has just had a baby boy.’

II

When Mildred pronounced Susan ‘a brick’ Travers concurred. Seeing Susan come through, as he put it, he said this showed how wrong people had been who had thought her dangerously withdrawn like that poor girl of Poppy Browning’s; and was then taken aback by the hardening of Mildred’s jaw, her snapped demand and explicit rebuke, ‘Who said that?’ and thought it better not to mention it had been Sarah who, in case it was something he should bear in mind when treating her sister, told him what the missionary had said.

‘I think it was Miss Batchelor.’

‘That woman!’ Mildred exclaimed. ‘What can she know about Poppy Browning or her daughter?’

Poppy had been Ranpur Regiment, with a daughter married into the cavalry, a young girl six months pregnant when her dashing husband was killed in Quetta by a roofbeam collapsing on his back and on both arms of the Indian girl under him whose open mouth was choked with plaster and who was also dead, suffocated by lover and rubble, when rescuers arrived and disentangled them from the ruins of the bungalow and each other’s bodies: a situation which Poppy Browning’s daughter had celebrated by smothering her baby two days after it was born. The affair had been hushed up, which was one of the reasons why the daughter was now never mentioned by name but referred to as Poppy Browning’s daughter, and a clean clear image preserved of Poppy herself, whose life and record and those of her husband had been unblemished. The sad scandal that brought their Indian career to a premature and obscure conclusion, no longer being spoken of directly, had elevated them to a special place in the minds of people who recognized the value of selfless service, hard work and cheerful dispositions. Poppy and her husband had been mixed doubles champions three years running, back in the ‘Twenties when they were in their prime and their daughter still at school in England.

Ever since the Quetta tragedy the name Poppy had blown gently, frail but hardy like the flower, brave among the stubble of the reaped field of human experience. But this section of the field was private. The name Poppy Browning was scarcely known among the younger generation and it was certainly not one to be bandied about by a retired missionary, an interfering woman whose tiresomeness had reached its apogee and was no longer to be borne. So Mildred implied. But her habit of leaving her disapproval to speak for itself, of making exclamatory denunciations rather than explanatory criticisms, as if these were sufficiently informative, left the actual details of Barbie’s bad behaviour unclearly set out in the minds of people who felt their sympathies were due to Mildred and indeed assumed by her to be offered; anything else being unthinkable if the appearance of the order of things were to be preserved.

‘Some wild idea,’ Mildred said, ‘that Mabel wished to be buried in Ranpur. Can you imagine anything more grotesque?’ Imagine, no. But imagining the grotesque was not necessary when it got about that there had been a macabre and unauthorized visit to the mortuary, a visit which had involved a Eurasian receptionist and a Doctor Lal in serious trouble.

Daily, Miss Batchelor was seen aboard a tonga, clutching a bunch of roses, on her way to the churchyard, a visit prolonged beyond the time it took her to place the flowers on the grave by (it was said) a lengthy vigil in the church itself. Presently in addition to the roses she was observed to clutch a suitcase, the one in which bit by bit she was transferring her belongings from the cottage to the tiny room in the rectory bungalow where Arthur and Clarissa Peplow had offered her temporary refuge.

Neither Arthur nor Clarissa was to be drawn out on the subject of the grotesque idea Miss Batchelor had apparently had about her dead friend’s wishes and on the whole people refrained from asking them because merely to do so raised the question whether Mr Peplow had buried Mabel Layton in the wrong place. Neither were many questions asked on the subject of the offer of temporary refuge which Clarissa described as the most practical way out of an unhappy situation and a Christian duty but not to be thought of by anyone as a preliminary to a permanent arrangement being come to. The room was too small.

‘I am already worried,’ Clarissa said, ‘about the amount of stuff with which Barbara seems to be encumbered. If there is much more she will have to speak at Jalal-Ud-Din’s about temporary storage.’

Alive, old Mabel Layton had been precariously contained; but her gift for stillness, the sense that flowed from her of old and irreversible connections, had made the task of containing her less difficult than her detachment implied it could have been. She should no longer have been a problem but a once slightly disruptive pattern that now dissolved and faded into the fabric. But, dead, she emerged as a monument which, falling suddenly, had caused a tremor which continued to reverberate, echo, in the wake of Miss Batchelor who, bowling down Club road in the back of a tonga, now guarded the fibre suitcase as if it were crammed with numbered pieces of the fallen tower that had been her friend, and as if it were her intention to re-erect it in the garden of the rectory bungalow or even in a more public position, in the churchyard perhaps or at the intersection of Church and Club roads where – imperfectly reassembled – it might lean a little and dominate the whole area with a peculiar and critical intensity, make it impossible to go past the spot without having one’s confidence further impaired and one’s doubts increased by this post-mortem reversal of roles. For whereas one had been in the habit of looking in on the eccentric elder Mrs Layton to satisfy oneself that the purpose and condition of exile were still understood (however idiosyncratically by her), furthered and supported, now she would look down from an eminence upon the purpose, upon the condition, accusingly, still silent; but silent like someone who knew that events could speak for themselves and would do so.

On cue, the clouds of the southwest monsoon, thinned by the overland journey across the parched, open-mouthed, plain, appeared in the Pankot sky and spilt what moisture they had left, establishing the wet-season pattern of sudden short showers, of morning mist which could be dispersed by the sunshine or give way to a light persistent drizzle. When the sun came out there was a strange mountain chill that did not make itself felt upon the flesh but in the nostrils, mingling there with the pervading scents of hot mud and aromatic gum. But this year these familiar manifestations of a Pankot summer contained an element, difficult to analyse, but unmistakably felt, of something that acted as an irritant.

As if aware of a special necessity, Mildred Layton now took a day off, put on jodhpurs, and accompanied by Captain Coley set out on horseback on a day’s trek to the nearest villages to thank women who had sent little presents and messages of goodwill to Colonel Sahib’s younger daughter and baby; to discuss with them the now excellent prospects of the early return of the long-absent warriors from across the black water. It became known, through Coley, that Mildred had gallantly drunk cup after cup of syrupy tea, eaten piping hot chappattis, a bowl of vegetable curry, been soaked in a sudden shower between villages, held squealing black babies, patted the shoulder of an ill-favoured looking woman who was weeping because since her husband went away she had grown old and fat; discussed the crops with village elders, more intimate problems with the wives and mothers, the hopes of recruitment with shy striplings pushed forward by their old male relatives to salaam Colonel Memsahib, and returned exhausted but upright through one of the wet season’s spectacular sunsets which turned her white shirt flamingo pink and the shadows of the horses brown.

There was a glow, but it was external to the affair; a bit too theatrical to penetrate to the mind where it was needed. It gave the performance qualities of self-consciousness which made it look as if Mildred’s main achievement had been to draw attention to an undertaking whose only claim was a nostalgic one upon the fund of recollected duties and obligations which time and circumstances were rendering obsolete; as obsolete as Teddie’s gesture, of which the divsion had taken a view of a kind it would not, in better days, have taken, but with which one somehow could not argue – considering the cost of a jeep and the shortage of equipment, not to mention the escaped prisoner, the burnt sepoy-driver and Captain Merrick’s lost left arm. The price of regimental loyalty and pride seemed uncomfortably high.

The circumstances surrounding the death of Teddie Bingham were better not discussed but it was circumstances such as these which were speaking, louder than words, sustaining the illusion of Mabel Layton grimly looking down from the eminence whose site was shifted according to the whim of Miss Batchelor, who sometimes seemed uncertain what to do with the contents of the suitcase and was seen once to get as far as Church road and then order the tonga back up the hill to the cottage, which she had now received official notice to quit by the end of the month.

Perhaps at the height of this piecemeal removal from cottage to rectory Clarissa had put her foot down. ‘She’d better not,’ Nicky Paynton said, ‘otherwise where will the poor old thing go?’

A comic but horrifying thought took hold: of old Miss Batchelor, homeless, seated on a trunk in the middle of the bazaar, surrounded by her detritus, unpacking and rebuilding the monument there, to the amusement of Hindu and Muslim shopkeepers who would interpret such a sight as proof that the entire
raj
would presently and similarly be on its uppers.

‘She’s writing to the mission,’ Clarissa said, ‘or so she assures me. One hopes but has doubts that they’ll soon find something for her, either in the way of voluntary work or permanent accommodation. But everything points to the advisability of her leaving the station. In view of everything that’s happened she could never be happy here again.’

It would have been different if over the last five years Miss Batchelor had entered more into the spirit of things; for example, Clarissa hinted, she could have done more for the church in Pankot. But shortsightedly she had subordinated all her private interests to those of the elder Mrs Layton, had become over-wrapped up in that peculiar woman’s solitary affairs, ‘against, I often felt’, Clarissa said, ‘her true instincts which were to say the least of it for having as many fingers in the pie as possible if I’m any judge. But I’m afraid it’s too late for her to revert to type. Which is a pity because Barbara was born to serve. And then there is this attitude of hers to that old man which isn’t going to help her patch things up with Mildred. I mean the man Aziz. She says only she and Mabel would really understand his behaviour which is as may be, but Mildred says that if it hadn’t actually happened Mabel would have invented it, if necessary beyond the grave.’

Aziz’s extraordinary perhaps sinister disappearance had gone counter, utterly, to the case law, the accumulated evidence that justified a deep and affectionate belief in the dependability of old and faithful servants. In the welter of conflicting and often unsatisfactory responses of Easterner to Westerner, one simple rule had stubbornly persisted, the rule of loyalty to the man or woman whose salt had been eaten. It was an ancient law but it had lived on and been honoured countless times. Men had died for it, not only in their youth on the battlefield fighting the sahibs’ wars but in their age and infirmity on the steps of verandahs in defence of their masters’ women and children. Women had died for it too, ayahs for their infant charges, maids for their mistresses. The rule, uncodified, was written in the heart and in old men like Aziz could normally be assumed to have passed across the line of law and custom into the realm of personal devotion.

Well, so one might have thought; so it had seemed, as it would seem for Mildred and John Layton with their Mahmoud, Nicky Paynton with her old Fariqua Khan who wrote monthly progress reports to Brigadier Paynton; countless others, in Pankot, in Ranpur, the length and breadth of India, wherever master, mistress and servant had grown used to and fond of one another, had jointly experienced good times, bad times. A sahib’s, a memsahib’s death left such old bearers inconsolable and the death of a Fariqua or a Mahmoud could bring tears to eyes accustomed to the discipline of staying dry in public.

But Aziz had not conformed, he had not been inconsolable. He had not wept, he had not got in people’s way while doing his touching best to shoulder his share of sad and necessary duties. He had not shouldered them. His desertion – no matter what the civil surgeon said about having known a similar case – smacked of unfeelingness. His return and refusal to explain himself was like a declaration of an absolute right to answer to no one for his actions, to opt out, if he wanted to, from any situation in which there were established and desirable lines of conduct for him to follow.

So that queer thing Mildred said about Mabel inventing Aziz’s disappearance if it had been necessary to do so was clear. Mildred saw Aziz’s brief defection as a gesture made as much by Mabel as by him and which summed up, reflected, Mabel’s long-sustained and critical detachment from the life and spirit of things. Mildred – whom it used to seem that Mabel didn’t trust – had obviously never trusted Mabel, and for better reasons. While the old woman was alive Mildred had held her own criticisms in check, for John’s sake, the regiment’s sake, the station’s sake, and even now could not descend to anything so crude as a direct attack.

Instead there had been a faint shrug of the shoulders when Kevin Coley reported Aziz unassailable, protected by Miss Batchelor’s assertion that he had returned to serve
her
, that she would require, indeed insisted on, these services for the few days remaining to her at Rose Cottage, would herself pay his wages from June the first until the day of her departure for the rectory and his for his village and retirement. Mildred shrugged her shoulders too when people questioned Aziz’s right to receive the small pension Mabel had made provision for in the Will.