The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (43 page)

She went into the bathroom, washed the grime from her hands and splashed her face, to cool her skin and the anger that hardened it and made it smooth. She chafed her wrists with cologne, combed her grey hair and called to Aziz.

‘Tea! Tea outside, or–’ returning to her bedroom, ‘sherry?’ And stopped. The decanters were locked in the sideboard and Kevin Coley still had the keys. Sarah, arms folded, turned from contemplation of the view from the front window.

‘I should love some tea, Barbie.’

‘Aziz has probably anticipated. Have you not? Aziz? Aziz!’ In the hall her voice rang beating against the gongs of brass trays on the panelled walls, rebounding from the implacable wood of the locked door of Mabel’s bedroom. From the region of the kitchen he shouted back in simple confirmation of his presence. She led the way through the sitting-room, unbolted the french window and went out on to the verandah. The sky was clear again but the areas of sunlight were eveningnarrow, the shadows long. The garden scent was heady, heightened by the dampness in the air. The chair in which Mabel had sat down to die had not been moved. Fallen rosepetals lay ungathered on the lawn.

‘One full day more,’ Barbie said, standing by the balustrade. ‘Early mornings and from tea until dusk – those were always my favourite times.’

She heard the creak of a chair as Sarah sat and presently the click of a lighter. She waited for the aroma of cigarette smoke to reach her and then turned round.

‘I shall be out of here after breakfast the day after tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Aziz will be ready to go too. I don’t know what his travelling arrangements are. He and I will say good-bye here but if he’s required to do so he’ll wait until someone arrives to take over his storeroom keys. Mahmoud or Captain Coley. Otherwise he’ll lock up and leave the keys with mali.’

‘Yes, I see. I’ll tell Mother.’

Aziz brought tea out. When he had gone Barbie said, ‘Will you pour?’ Then she sat down and took her cup. She asked how Susan was. Susan was well, Sarah said. They were taking her back to the grace and favour. The day after tomorrow. Minnie, Mahmoud’s widowed niece, who had never had children of her own and was scarcely more than a child herself, was excited but also fearful of her new responsibility. For a while Sarah would have to help her.

If there was a feeling of constraint between them, Barbie thought, the fault was her own. The girl’s manner was if anything less indrawn than it had been in the past, and beneath the pallor, the marks of strain, there was a faint flush, a look of contentment in the flesh of the face as if she had reached a firm decision about the situation she was in.

‘Clarissa told me your news about poor Captain Merrick,’ Barbie said.

‘Yes, I didn’t mention him last time I was here. I meant to tell you that he talked a bit about Miss Crane. He didn’t know her very well, I’m afraid.’

‘I imagined their paths were unlikely to have crossed.’

‘He knew her by sight of course, and visited her in hospital after she was attacked. They weren’t able to talk much because she was so ill, and afterwards one of his assistants dealt with it. By then he was involved in the other business of Miss Manners.’

‘And later still? When Edwina took her life?’

‘Yes, he dealt with that. He was at her bungalow. That’s what he remembers. He talked quite a lot about an old picture he found there. From the way he described it I think it must have been the one you had a copy of and showed to people.’

‘It would have been that one, I expect. I still have the copy in my trunk.’ Barbie thought back to that day on the verandah nearly two years ago. ‘I don’t remember your being with us when I showed it.’

‘I heard about it.’

Barbie nodded. She had made an exhibition of herself over the picture. She said, ‘Why did Captain Merrick talk about the picture?’

‘He seemed to see a connection between the picture and Teddie. Has Clarissa Peplow told you how Teddie was killed?’

‘She said he was trying to bring in some Indian soldiers who’d deserted. I’m afraid I didn’t listen very hard.’

‘Man-bap,’ Sarah said, after a pause, but abruptly.

‘What?’

‘Man-bap.’

Man-bap. She had not heard that expression for a long time. It meant Mother-Father, the relationship of the
raj
to India, of a man like Colonel Layton to the men in his regiment, of a district officer to the people of his district, of Barbie herself to the children she had taught. Man-bap. I am your father and your mother. Yes, the picture had been an illustration of this aspect of the imperial attachment; the combination of hardness and sentimentality from which Mabel had turned her face. If Teddie had died in an attempt to gather strayed sheep into a fold she saw why Captain Merrick might remember the picture. But Sarah’s reasons for referring to it were otherwise obscure to her. And she did not wish to probe. She did not want to talk about Edwina, or about Teddie and the ex-police officer who had lost an arm and whom Sarah had never liked.

But – ‘It’s interesting about Ronald Merrick,’ Sarah began. ‘He’d like to be able to sneer at man-bap but he can’t quite manage it because actually he’d prefer to believe in it, like Teddie did. If he did. Do you think he did, Barbie?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did Miss Crane?’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Because Ronald Merrick thought so. He talked about her sitting at the roadside holding the dead Indian’s hand. He thought that was man-bap. Was it?’

‘No.’

‘What was it?’

‘Despair.’

For a moment Sarah looked stricken by the bleak word as if it was the last one she had expected; but then she smiled briefly in recognition.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That makes sense.’

Again they became silent but it was the silence of matched temperaments.

‘What happened between you and Mother, Barbie?’

‘If you don’t know I expect it means she’d prefer that you shouldn’t.’

‘She said you had an idea that Aunt Mabel wanted to be buried in Ranpur.’

‘Then you know all there is to know.’

‘That’s all it was about?’

‘That’s all.’

‘What about Aziz?’

‘That wasn’t a bone of contention. Although your mother can’t have liked my saying she didn’t understand.’

‘No, she wouldn’t like that.’

‘I didn’t really understand myself, in the sense of being able to explain it. But I didn’t feel the need and your mother did. That was the difference. I’m sorry for any annoyance I caused her. She had a great deal to attend to. I had only this – one thing.’

Sarah nodded. She put out her cigarette. Barbie thought she would get up, make an excuse to be off home; but she settled back in the wicker chair.

‘How were your aunt and uncle?’ Barbie asked her.

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘You can’t have seen much of Calcutta.’

‘No, not much. A bit. I was taken dancing at the Grand, and then to a place where they had Indian musicians.’

‘By Aunt Fenny and Uncle Arthur?’

Sarah smiled. ‘No, by one of the officers who attended the course Uncle Arthur’s running. He and Aunt Fenny live a much gayer life than they used to in Delhi. They have one of these large air-conditioned flats and it’s usually full of young people, mostly these young men who do the course.’

‘What kind of course?’

‘About how India is run in peace-time. It’s supposed to attract recruits for the civil service and the police among men who’ve liked India enough to want to stay on after the war.’

Barbie tried to consider this. But she was giving Sarah incomplete attention. The image of the trunk was superimposing itself on the image of the verandah, the tea-table, and Sarah on the other side of it smiling as if waiting for her to smile back.

‘Is the course a success?’ she asked.

‘I suppose one or two of them might be tempted. Having them back to the flat is part of the attracting process. You know. The ease and comfort of lots of servants but in modern surroundings, the kind they have to admit are pretty decent. But I should think they’re more likely to try for one of the business firms where the future’s more secure and they can get transferred home to the London office when it begins to pall or if they want to get married and have a proper family life. Otherwise I get the impression they think the course is rather quaint.’ Sarah paused. ‘They were the kind of young men I was just beginning to get to know before Su and I came back out in ‘thirty-nine. My sort of people. The sort of people we really are. There’s such a tremendous gulf, I mean now. More so from their point of view than from ours.’

‘Well,’ Barbie began, intending to say something about Sarah’s sort of people, her own sort of people, but she could not apply herself to the subject. She said, ‘I’m glad you had a bit of fun.’ She recalled Sister Matthew’s explanation of the solitary presence of a Bengali bearer in the Calcutta flat on the night Mildred had tried to ring her sister from the nursing home: that everyone must have been out celebrating the second front. She wondered at what hour the news of Mabel’s death and Susan’s premature labour had reached Sarah; and pitied the girl, imagining her returning to her aunt’s place, flushed with the excitement of a night in the city in the company of those young men, men of her own kind, men whom she understood or had once understood and now envied because they were part of ‘home’, and her aunt saying: Sarah, your mother rang, it’s bad news I’m afraid. Had the girl’s thoughts immediately turned to her father, far away in prison camp?

Had the Layton girls missed a ‘proper family life’? What did that mean, anyway? Was it important to have one, significant if one missed it? As in other Anglo-Indian families the discipline of separation of children from parents had presumably marked Sarah’s childhood. With such a separation Barbie had never had to contend. The separation she had suffered had been permanent and presumbaly more tolerable as a consequence since there was no arguing with death: her father’s and then her mother’s. But she was full grown when she came out and she came out as a treader of new ground, not old, and in her own behalf and, so she had thought, in Gods, and had never married, never had children.

Knowing Sarah and Susan was the closest she had ever been to knowing what it felt like to have daughters. If they had been her own children, could she have borne the separation? Would Susan eventually have to bear it, or would the whole condition of life in India for English people have changed by the time the child had reached the age of seven or eight, which brought the first, the childhood, phase of Anglo-Indian life to a conclusion? It was not many years ahead. But the condition would well have changed by then. The child might be lucky.

But not its parents. Not Susan. Nor Sarah. Nor young Dicky Beauvais whom Clarissa Peplow hoped Susan would marry. Looking at Sarah Barbie felt she understood a little of the sense the girl might have of having no clearly defined world to inhabit, but one poised between the old for which she had been prepared, but which seemed to be dying, and the new for which she had not been prepared at all. Young, fresh and intelligent, all the patterns to which she had been trained to conform were fading, and she was already conscious just from chance or casual encounter of the gulf between herself and the person she would have been if she had never come back to India: the kind of person she ‘really was’.

Reaching towards the table to replace her cup Barbie hesitated, completed the movement with conscious effort, to keep her hand steady, and then leant back in her chair. There had been a disturbance, another quick displacement of air, but this time a faint whiff of the malign breath, of the emanation. Alert, she watched the verandah and then the garden which was in sharp focus but seemed far away, hallucinatory, dependent on the human imagination rather than on nature for its existence, wide open to the destructive as well as creative energy of mind and will.

She heard herself say to Sarah, ‘I have what I think nowadays you call a problem in logistics,’ and then stopped, hearing as well a gentle exhalation which presently she decided must have been her own sigh of relief, of renewed patient anticipation.

‘My little room,’ she said, ‘I mean of course my little room at Clarissa’s. It has its limitations. Quite serious ones. And Clarissa has said there cannot be, apart from myself, more than another suitcase. Which leaves two items. Important to me but not to anyone else. To begin with there is the writing-table.’

She looked at Sarah who looked back at her without the concern and commitment suitable to the occasion. But then Sarah was still very young. She would not have learned as yet to understand the grave impediment to free movement which luggage represented in one’s affairs.

‘Well my writing-table,’ she went on, ‘in a way, yes, that can be managed because it folds. Like a wing. It is portable. It can stand against a wall, go under a bed. I think I can get my writing-table past Clarissa. And quite apart from a silly affection I have for it I also have use. I expect I shall conduct quite a heavy correspondence. And I can unfold it, sit on the bed and write without worrying whether Clarissa’s room is put out of shape, because its shape can be quickly restored, but the trunk—’

She paused, collected her ideas.

‘The trunk is a very different kettle of fish. Unlike a writing-table, unlike one’s clothes, one’s
shoes
, it is of no
use.
But it
is
my history. And according to Emerson without it, without
that
, I’m simply not explained. I am a mere body, sitting here. Without it, according to Emerson,
none
of us is explained because if it is my history then it is yours too and was Mabel’s. But there is no room for my trunk at Clarissa’s, no room for my explanation.’ She grinned. Sarah’s brow had become creased. Barbie could not blame the girl for being puzzled. The situation was very complicated and she was not sure she understood it herself.