The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (41 page)

‘One must respect a Will,’ she said. The impression she gave was of blaming Mabel, not Aziz, and of declining to take any tiresome action that would draw attention to the fact that one was living through a period in which general moral collapse seemed imminent, a collapse for which Mabel was as much to blame as anyone.

It was remembered how on the day of the wedding party the old woman had sat, deafer than ever, making things difficult for young officers who were anxious to pay their respects, notably difficult for young Beauvais whose uncle had been a subaltern under Bob Buckland who, in turn, had been a fellow-subaltern of Mabel’s first husband and whom she had known, been fond of and consoled by between her husband’s death and her marriage to James Layton.

It was remembered too how she had left the party without a word, and apparently by a door at the back of the mess, ‘feeling unwell and not wanting to be a skeleton at the feast’, according to Mildred’s later explanation of an absence which, without causing any special concern at the time, had certainly made itself felt through the empty chair, like a criticism too subtle to be interpreted easily or accurately.

The truth could no longer be avoided. It had been a criticism of the foundations of the edifice, of the sense of duty which kept alive the senses of pride and loyalty and honour. It drew attention to a situation it was painful to acknowledge: that the god had left the temple, no one knew when, or how, or why. What one was left with were the rites which had once propitiated, once been obligatory, but were now meaningless because the god was no longer there to receive them. Poor Teddie! His was an end of an expository kind, like a last sacrificial attempt to recall godly favour. If there were still a glow to be had it would have spread from there, but it did not. Nor did it spread from the action of the man Merrick as once it would have done because nothing could obliterate the image of Merrick as an earlier victim of changed circumstances, of the general loss of confidence, the grave shifting of the ground beneath one’s feet as the layers of authoritarian support above one’s head thinned and those of hostile spirits thickened.

Somewhere along the line doubt had entered. Even on a sunny day it lay upon the valley, an invisible mist, a barrier to the clearer echoes of the conscience. A rifle shot would no longer whip through the air, slap hard against a hillside and bounce, leaving a penetrating and convincing smell of cordite, sharpening senses and stiffening the blood. It would go muffled, troubled, and its message would be garbled; and the eye would not dart alerted, Khyber-trained, to the hillsides for the tell-tale flick of a mischievous robe, but shift uncomfortably, to observe the condition of the lines, for signs of mutinous movements on the parade grounds where the Pankot Rifles went through the motions of training another generation of candidates for the rolls, acolytes for the temple.

And presently – not suddenly but with an increasing persistence – Mildred’s personality began to stand out, a reminder to people of what life had meant, been like; so that an interesting counter-image to the one of Mabel began to emerge – an image of Mildred, also made of stone, splendidly upright, and revealing her true distinction through her refusal to compromise either her upbringing or her position by allowing what was irresistible to move her or what was expedient to take precedence over what in her judgment was right.

And so after all a glow came, even if it did not spread. The glow was Mildred. The famous expression shone. It could not infect but it could remind. And when she said, ‘What Teddie tried to do was worth the whole bloody war put together,’ it was realized that with her unerring instinct she had gone straight to the heart of the matter, cutting through such irrelevancies as divisional annoyance, the cost of a jeep, the loss of a prisoner and Merrick’s arm, leaving one with Teddie’s blameless death, his praiseworthy sacrifice for a principle the world no longer had time or inclination to uphold.

From the rear of the compound of the grace and favour bungalow smoke rose, between showers, as Mahmoud directed the burning of the stuff Mildred was beginning to throw out, the unwanted accumulation of the years of pigging-in which were now over; over too late, of course. Rose Cottage would certainly be more comfortable, more convenient for most things, but the station had been deprived for ever of any significance that might have attached to her presence there. Now she seemed to wish it to be recognized that she was merely claiming what had become her husband’s property; not, as once could have been the case, acquiring an appropriate and proper setting for her virtue. She would live there and hold it in trust for him.

‘Susan has decided to give the baby all Teddie’s Christian names,’ she said. ‘So there’ll be another Edward Arthur David Bingham. On the whole I approve.’

It was the continuity, logical and unsentimental, to which she responded, the idea that in this matter of a name Teddie would endure long after the acrid smell of the lost jeep had died away and the bloody accountant-general had finished reckoning out the amount in rupees. Dick and Isobel Rankin had agreed to be godparents. Sarah would be the younger godmother and Dicky Beauvais the second godfather. The child would be well endowed. Mahmoud’s widowed niece, called Minnie because her real name was unpronounceable, had gladly accepted the duties of ayah. The christening would take place at St John’s, a week after the day fixed for Susan to leave the auspiciously numbered room in the nursing home.

‘We shall have the christening party here,’ Mildred said, meaning the grace and favour. ‘I want to get it over before we move up to the Cottage, and get Su used to the idea of having the baby at home. The last time she was up at the place wasn’t the happiest occasion.’ At the cottage, she said, she herself would have Mabel’s room, the little spare would be an excellent nursery. Susan and Sarah would share the other room, the one Miss Batchelor was in the process of vacating. Even sharing, they would have more space each than they had in the tiny bedrooms of the grace and favour.

‘I should have liked to do some redecoration, but I think that will have to wait,’ Mildred said. ‘I’ll have to keep the mali on but I’ve told Mahmoud to keep an eagle eye on him. It’s time the mali earned his keep. You can’t say that with Mabel he was exactly overworked, can you?’

She glanced down at her half-empty glass. For a while after Teddie’s death, the drinking habit had been less frequently indulged, but then resumed as if she had decided that giving anything up was a sign of weakness. Now that she could afford it, with the whole of Mabel’s money coming into Colonel Layton’s possession, there was no reason left for anyone to question the habit at all. For a hard-drinking woman who had recently had a great deal to cope with she was comparatively abstemious. And remembering the time when it seemed as if she drank for the station’s sake as much as for her own, people felt there were many good reasons, few of them identifiable, why she should actually drink more than she did. It was as if, anticipating more reasons to come, she deliberately held back, in order to be in good form for the occasion.

III

Her flesh had hardened. It had the toughness of metallic substance. When she walked she sensed her body’s displacement of the air. Between herself and Aziz there was a magnetic field of force. They spoke seldom. It was not necessary. In their brief exchanges there was an undertone of parable.

‘There’s very little more,’ she told Clarissa after several visits to the rectory bungalow; and edged out of the narrow space between the bed and the wall, catching the nailed feet of an imitation ivory crucifix with her sleeve, so that the Lord was tilted sideways as He would be if the cross weren’t planted firmly enough or were lowered into the wrong hole, one too wide for it.

She straightened the sacrificial figure and turned to face Clarissa’s forgiveness which was conveyed through a swift averting of the eyes as if from the sight of a near accident of an ominous, sacrilegious kind.

From the rectory she went to St John’s, visited the grave and then sat down in the shadow of the pillar, in the same pew as on the day of the funeral, so that Mabel might find her without difficulty. This was a vigil she kept every day between four and five, bringing roses cut from the bushes with Aziz’s help. It interested her to discover how much he seemed to have learned about the way to cut blooms without weakening the bush or spoiling its shape. She did not understand the principle but guessed there was one and allowed him to guide her by silent indication or a sudden gesture of restraint.

Returning home she faced daily the mounting evidence of what seemed like improvidence. Could one single woman have acquired so much, have needed so much? The drawers in the Rose Cottage chests were deep. Sometimes she thought of them as comically bottomless, yielding up one item more for each item removed and crammed into a suitcase.

And shoes. In serried ranks. On tip-toe along parallel brass rods at the base of the almirah, each pair polished and cared for by Aziz and the mali’s boy.

‘I am fond of my shoes,’ she said, newly discovering this attachment. She took the favourite pairs to the rectory but found the base of the almirah an unwilling repository. There were no brass rods and in any case the skirts of her suits and dresses hung too low, right down to the bottom of the cupboard. In one angle of the wall there was a curtained recess. She placed the shoes on the floor but the curtain did not conceal them. The shoes looked like the feet of old people eavesdropping. Nowadays tears came unexpectedly. ‘Crying in a happy home,’ Clarissa had warned her, ‘is like untidiness in a neat one, and is a worry to God.’ Barbie dried her eyes and looked round belligerently.

The room was dark as well as small. She peered through the single window, craning round the side of the miniature dressing-table to see what was to be seen. The view, on to the side of the bungalow, was blocked by creeper. She pushed the window open to let in some air. There were bars on the inside, a protection against thieves. The creeper sighed and shook. Tendrils of it, in possession of the sill, groped stealthily forward, probing for a grip on the interior. She hit and pushed them away, closed the window, found one tendril trapped inside and growing. She nipped it off. It was tough-skinned like herself. Its sap was odorous. Two kinds of death she had always feared: by drowning and by suffocation. She would need to be wary of the creeper. It was an understanding enemy.

Returning along the gloomy but sanctified passage to the hall she looked for Clarissa to say good-bye until tomorrow. Clarissa was no longer speaking on the telephone as she had been when Barbie arrived and sought and received nodded permission to take the suitcase through to the place of temporary refuge.

She said ‘Clarissa?’ and, leaving the suitcase on the floor, parted the old-fashioned bead curtain that hung in the archway between hall and living-room. The living-room was crowded with leather chairs and wicker-work. There were exhausted indoor ferns in brass pots which filled the air with a green spiritual miasma. An oval mahogany table covered by a bobble-fringed bottle-green cloth stood roughly in the centre of the room. By this table Clarissa was waiting, with her hands laced in the long string of sandalwood beads she wore in the afternoon but for some reason never before lunch and never at dinner.

‘Clarissa, I am just going to the grave and then home. I brought a few pairs of shoes.’ She clutched a bunch of roses, yellow ones whose strong sweet scent Mabel had loved best of all. Clarissa did not reply, except by nodding.

‘Is something wrong, Clarissa?’

Slowly Clarissa flushed.

‘Yes. At least. I have something I find it painful to say. But must say. I hope there has never been anything except total frankness in our relationship. I mean other things as well, a mutual respect and recognition of common Christian intention, but always frankness. You will have to forgive me, Barbie, but it would be totally – a totally false
position
for me if we went ahead with our arrangement without my saying what I have to.’

‘What is it Clarissa? Is it the amount of luggage? It
is
a little more than I thought.’

‘It is not the amount of luggage although speaking of that I am afraid you’ve already brought more than I can adequately provide room for and still leave the servants space to keep order. I don’t wish to be unthoughtful or unimaginative but if there is anything more to come than a easeful the day after tomorrow – providing we reach that stage – I think you’ll have to speak at Jalal-Ud-Din’s about storage. They do offer some facilities.’

‘That won’t be necessary, Clarissa. I should not want my stuff mouldering in a native storehouse.’

‘Let us say no more about luggage. Personally I always try to keep in mind the fact that we bring nothing into this world and can certainly take nothing out. Ever since childhood I have firmly rejected the tyranny of possessions, thanks to a proper upbringing in this regard. And Heaven knows that those of us who serve in India soon learn how transient our experience of home and hearth is, don’t we? I doubt that we shall remove from this station before Arthur’s retirement, but there is very little in this room that has been with us in other places or would go with us to our next. One is sure of but one thing, the strength and love of God.’

The scent of the roses became overpowering. Barbie supported herself with one hand on the bottle-green cloth. Its texture was harsh and scratchy. Like a hair-shirt. The flush had left Clarissa’s face and neck. She was now pale as from a sense of eternity and the will to earn her place there.

‘I have strayed from the point,’ she said. ‘The painful point.’

Barbie moistened her dry teeth with the tip of her tongue. The sandalwood beads began to clack through Clarissa’s suddenly animated fingers.

‘I was at the club this forenoon,’ Clarissa began, still in the pedantic way she had of speaking when delivering herself of an oration or an opinion previously formed and rehearsed. ‘Not alone, but with others, people whom I respect and whose good opinion I value, people whom you know but whom I shall not name. It happened, it so happened, that the question of your temporary refuge here arose, and it was said by one, it was said, well, what a pity it was that after all these years some way could not have been found of allowing you to remain at Rose Cottage to help Mildred, if only for a while, with the enormous burden she will bear at least for a time, with Susan and the baby to look after. What a pity, and how useful, what a help you might have been since you know so well the details of the running of that house.’