The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (47 page)

Before sealing the letters she considered carefully whether she should bother with Coley. She could deliver the spoons direct to Commandant’s House without involving him; but she wanted to involve him because she wanted Mildred to know where the spoons were going before they actually got there and she was sure that Coley would tell her and that if he did she would try to make him send them back. And this he would be unable to do if he knew about the separate official letter already on its way to Colonel Trehearne. He would have no alternative but to pass the spoons on. She believed that even Mildred would be afraid to arrange for them to be lost in transit and would shy away from asking Trehearne to be so ungallant as to decline them.

In the hall she checked the address of Commandant’s House in Clarissa’s directory. She looked for Coley’s too but could not find it. There was a telephone number with the words ‘Adjs, Office’ written in beside it. She would have to go to the Pankot lines and inquire. Back in her room she sealed the letters and addressed Trehearne’s and at half-past two set out stoutly shod, macintosh over her shoulder, stick in one hand, the box of spoons and the two letters in the other.

In the bazaar which she could reach within ten minutes of leaving the rectory bungalow she bought stamps and posted the letter to Colonel Trehearne. As the letter disappeared into the box she thought: No going back now! Nothing for it now! March! To the barricades! She strode facing the oncoming traffic which seemed uncommonly heavy but with next to nothing going in her own direction so that she began to feel like someone moving against the flow of columns of refugees. The shouting tonga-wallahs, the bobbing head-load carriers, the gliding cyclists and the lurching soldiers in the open backs of uncovered trucks and lorries might have been calling: Wrong way! Wrong way! The notion exhilarated her. For the first time since leaving Rose Cottage she felt strong and free because the intense vulgarity of Mildred’s gesture in returning the spoons had released in her a vulgarity just as intense but of greater splendour. I, Barbara Batchelor, she declaimed, daughter of Leonard and Lucy Batchelor, late of Lucknow Road, Camberwell, am about to present silver to the officers of the Pankot Rifles. And as my father used to say, storming out into the night or into the morning, bugger the lot of you.

Half way down Cantonment Approach road she transferred the remaining letter and the box of spoons to her macintosh pocket because her palms were sweating in the humid afternoon. The cloud level was low. There was no rain as yet but the light was strange: bright under a dark sky and then dark under a bright one as if there were a single band of luminosity which bounced, throbbing, between earth and heaven. She did not mind if it rained. She had her sou’wester in the other pocket of her mac. The umbrella, her mother used to say, take the umbrella. Horrid umbrella. Black cotton cave. Dead bat. God is weeping for the sins of the world, her mother said. Laughing, you mean, her father replied, laughing fit to bust. But rain was only rain: sea sucked up and sprayed on the parched land by the giant elephant, the elephant god.

She paused opposite the main entrance to the grounds of the general hospital. The nursing-home wing was hidden from view by trees and the lie of the land. She walked on attended by a faceless wraith whose Susan-pale arms opened the way for her, parting misty curtains, one after the other, as if insisting on a direction, an ultimate objective, a sublime revelation at the end of a tricky and obscure path.

The light became apocalyptic. Puddles in the road shone white reflecting a purity whose source was not visible. The landscape was now bleak, the ground on either side of the road waste: areas of windshorn turf broken by rifts and channels. The last refugee had gone by and she was alone, resolute in alien territory, entering Rifle Range road that ran straight full-tilt across the valley towards the hills. Suddenly, as if they had cracked under their own weight, there came a report and then another before the echo of the first had spent itself; and yet another, as many as a dozen. The air shifted under the duress of a wind of panic from the hills and the first drops of rain began to fall. The panic did not touch her but the rain would. She put on her macintosh and sou’wester, patted the pocket where the box of spoons nestled, and strode on past the entrance to grace and favour lane with scarcely more than a glance in the direction of the bungalow to make sure it was still there. Presently she turned into Mess road. It was the day of the wedding party. We could go to Ranpur, Barbie had said, to do some Christmas shopping. Oh, I shall never go to Ranpur again, Mabel had answered, at least not until I’m buried. But on that day it was sunny. Coming from the shade of the portico into the glare the white of the servants’ uniforms dazzled the eye and the emerald leaves of glistening plants in terracotta pots shone like scimitars and cast razor sharp indigo blue shadows. Is it you, is it you, Ghulam Mohammed? Mabel said. And Barbie knew for whom she might ask. She walked into the mess compound. The pebbles in the path gleamed in the rain. Ahead, level with the entrance, there was a parked military truck and as she gained the shelter of the long portico a group of young officers came out laughing and began to climb up over the tailboard while one stood smoking and calling to the absent driver.

Turning, he saw her, and two of the other three now settling in the back of the truck and slapping wood and metal with boisterous good-natured impatience saw her too. She filled her old schoolmarm’s lungs, grated her Memsahib’s voice into gear, and called: ‘Good afternoon. Can one of you help me?’

Close to them she noticed that their faces were tight and youthful. Their single subaltern’s pips looked painfully new. None of them could have been at the party eight months before. She guessed the thought stiffening their necks and minds: Careful – You never know who she is.

‘Do you know if Captain Coley is in the mess?’

‘Coley? The adjutant? No, I don’t think he is.’

The officer who had been shouting for the driver glanced at the three in the truck who shook their heads. One of them said, ‘He wasn’t in the daftar this morning.’

‘Oh, dear. How dreadfully inconvenient.’ She smiled, mimicking the bright brassy manner of women like Nicky Paynton and Isobel Rankin which she had noted tended to make men put themselves out and do things without actually being ordered to.

‘I’ll ask,’ the young officer said and began to go inside but remembered his manners in time and invited her to precede him into the building. Inside, his newness and uncertainty were even more apparent. There was no one about and he seemed unsure what to do next. Barbie said, ‘It’s my own fault. I ought to have rung. But I was coming this way and thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. The trouble is I’ve never visited him in his quarters and have no idea where he hides out. Have you?’

‘No, I’m afraid I haven’t.’

She got it then: the unmistakable London accent. It came out in the word afraid. It warmed her heart. So did the rather over-greased black hair, the stubby plebeian but not unhandsome features beneath it. As a soldier he must be confident and efficient otherwise the regiment would not have accepted him even at this stage of the war when regiments were taking the best they could get, which she had heard was very good, but having to close their eyes to social shortcomings. As a gentleman he obviously fell short of the Pankots’ traditional requirements, and knew it, was far from happy in this silent mausoleum.

‘The fact is we only got here from
OTS
last week,’ he said. A bearer crossed the hall, carrying a tray. The subaltern stopped him and asked in inaccurate Urdu whether Captain Coley was in the mess. He didn’t understand the bearer’s reply but Barbie did. Captain Coley would not be in mess until after the week-end. She asked the servant if he knew where Captain Coley lived because she wished to see him quite urgently. He gave her directions but they were very muddled and she did not understand the references. She said, ‘Is Ghulam Mohammed here?’

The bearer said he did not know Ghulam Mohammed. There was no Ghulam Mohammed in the mess.

She asked him how long he had worked in the mess, and the answer was disturbing. Since last November.

‘Ghulam Mohammed was here then,’ she insisted.

No, he had never worked with a Ghulam Mohammed. If Memsahib wished he would ask the head steward.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She turned to go. The officer followed her. He probably hadn’t understood a word. She was glad. Her hold on things had begun to be undermined.

All the same he grasped the situation. ‘No luck?’

‘No, none. But I think I’ll be able to find it.’

‘The driver will know, won’t he?’

‘Oh, I’d forgotten the driver. How clever of you. The driver’s bound to know.’

When they got outside, the driver had turned up and was waiting by the cab door. Asked if he knew where the adjutant sahib lived he said nothing but inclined his head to one side and kept on doing so in answer to every one of her questions.

‘He knows?’

‘He knows.’

‘Can we take you?’

‘How kind. But shan’t I be making you late for a parade?’

‘It’s only the munshi.’ He led the way round to the passenger seat, warned her about the height of the step.

‘Adjutant Sahib bungalow,’ he told the driver after he had slammed the door shut for her. A few seconds later he knocked on the back of the cabin and shouted, ‘OK.’ As the truck engine started she thought she heard men’s laughter. She smiled. The cabin smelt of petrol and other peculiar metallic odours. The truck, one of the snub-nosed variety, gave her the feeling of riding in a tank. It bucked and growled. The windscreen wipers swung like metronomes but squeaked on the glass. She expected it was against the rules for a civilian to ride in it. She wished she had insisted on getting into the back. She would have liked to gossip to the young officers and to have found out where they all came from and what they thought of India. Were they the kind of young men Sarah had met at her aunt’s and uncle’s in Calcutta? If you’re ever stationed in Cal, she might say, watch out for a man called Colonel Grace, he’ll be after you to sign on for
ever.

She glanced at the driver. Thin cheeks. Hawk’s nose. And a skin so sunburnt that the usual Pankot copper-colour was, in this light, blue-sheened. There were minute red veins in the whites of his eyes. She was startled by the clarity of her vision. He smelt powerfully of garlic. His khaki was immaculately starched and pressed. His marbled brown legs were covered by fine dark hairs above and below the knee, between the tops of the socks and the hem of the knife-edged shorts. Tucked above the windscreen was a faded postcard, a photograph of a chubby wide-eyed smiling beauty with a caste-mark between her thick eyebrows; an Indian film star, she supposed. She imagined a smell of jasmine, a thin nasal voice. How remote his life from her own. But he could have come from the same village as Aziz, or Ghulam Mohammed.

She had never asked Mabel who Ghulam Mohammed was. Now he had gone, like Poppy Browning’s daughter, like Gillian Waller, with Mabel to the grave, the one that should not have been dug: crying out soundlessly like the unknown Indian on the road from Dibrapur and the girl in white whom she imagined running in the dark from a martyrdom, or from something unimaginable, which might even have been love. She thought: Perhaps I should have given the spoons to the old woman in the veiled topee, have waited in St John’s for her to arrive, and kneel or sit staring at the altar unconsciously sharing my vigil, and called to her softly: These are for the child. And given her the twelve little apostles. But perhaps she isn’t in Pankot any longer. Perhaps she was never here. In any case it’s too late. I’m presenting the spoons to the mess.

She clapped her hand against her pocket. Yes, the box was still there. She gazed out of the streaming windows. The speed of the truck made the rain seem heavier. All this area of Pankot was new and strange to her. It looked unwelcoming. Rows of huts, squat and dark, parade grounds, basket-ball pitches. Distantly, clutches of figures silhouetted against the white light running for cover. It was very hot in the cabin. The window in the door on her side was misting up.

At a cross-roads marked by military signposts the driver turned left. This road after a while became tree-lined. They were going past bungalows up a slight incline and then down into a dip at the bottom of which the driver stopped. There was no bungalow visible, only a dirt track leading off to the left through a kind of copse.

‘Adjutant Sahib,’ the driver said and pointed at the track. She noticed a square white board on a short post aslant in the hedge, but could not read it. The young officer appeared and opened the door. ‘Is it far up the track, do you think?’ he asked. ‘The truck could get up there. It’s muddy to walk.’

‘Oh I don’t mind. Not in the least. I’m dressed for it.’

‘What about when you leave? I’ve not been this end before. Do you know where you are?’

She asked the driver how far she would have to walk to get a tonga. He indicated ahead and said half-a-mile. She thanked him and got out. She put her sou’wester back on but did not bother to tie the strings under her chin.

‘It’s been very good of you. I hope I haven’t made you late for the munshi.’ She offered her hand. Before shaking it he took off his cap. She could hear the others talking. ‘My name’s Barbara Batchelor, incidentally. At present I’m staying with the Peplows, that’s at the rectory bungalow next to St John’s church. Arthur Peplow’s always glad to see new faces. People sometimes look in for a beer after Sunday morning service, before going up to the club. So don’t forget. And good luck to you all, if I don’t see you again. Don’t get wet. I’m all right. Well protected.’

She went and stood at the end of the dirt track. The door slammed. She waved, watched the truck turn in the road and waved to the men in the back when a full view of them was presented by the truck’s manoeuvres. When it had gone out of sight she turned and studied the board.