The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (5 page)

This sense of danger, of the sea-level rising, swamping the plains, threatening the hills, this sense of imminent inundation, was one to which people were now not unaccustomed and although the outbreak of war in Europe had momentarily suggested the sudden erection of a rocky headland upon which to stand fast, the headland was far away, in England, and India was very close and all about. And as the war in Europe began to enter its disagreeable phases it looked as though the headland had been either a mirage or a last despairing lurch of all those things to which value had been attached and upon which the eye, looking west from Pankot, had been kept loyally fixed through all the years in which the encouraging sensation of being looked at loyally in return was steadily diminished until to the sense of living in expectation of inundation had been added the suspicion that this inundation would scarcely be remarked or, if it were, not regretted when it happened.

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The slight disapproval which counterbalanced the respect in which old Mabel Layton was held could probably have been traced to the haunting belief that in spite of everything she was among those people who would not regret the flood. Her whole demeanour was, in fact, that of someone who already saw the waters all around her, had found her boat and did not want it rocked.

A few months after Miss Batchelor’s arrival, in answer to the advertisement for a single woman to share, an interesting situation had arisen. In retrospect it looked as if Mabel Layton had anticipated it and for some unintelligible but perhaps typical reason taken steps to protect herself.

This situation was the one arising in regard to accommodation in Pankot for Mildred Layton, the wife of Mabel’s stepson, Lt. Colonel John Layton and his two grown-up daughters Sarah and Susan whom he brought up to the hill station at the beginning of the hot weather of 1940 and established in the only place now available: a rather poky grace and favour bungalow in the lines of the Pankot Rifles regimental depot, opposite the mess. The bungalow they had occupied for a few weeks in the late summer of 1939 before going down to Ranpur in September had since been appropriated by Area Headquarters as a chummery mess and Colonel Layton failed to persuade the accommodations officer to give it back.

Having settled his family in what comfort he could he returned to Ranpur where the battalion he commanded, the 1st Pankot Rifles, was under orders for abroad. The 1st Pankots sailed for the Middle East a few weeks later, and in Pankot Mildred Layton settled down as a grass-widow in the grace and favour bungalow with her daughters who had got back to India from school in England only in the July of the previous year.

Before 1939, the year of family reunion, the Laytons had not been on station for many years but they were Ranpur and Pankot people. The parents had been married in Pankot and both girls born there. It took no time at all for the Laytons’ friends to fit them mentally into Rose Cottage and find that the arithmetic worked. Sarah and Susan could share the second large bedroom currently occupied by Miss Batchelor, Mabel could stay in the room she had and Mildred sleep in the little spare.

Although there were three bedrooms in the grace and favour bungalow down in the Pankot Rifles line, they were small and the whole place had an atmosphere of barracks:
PWD
furniture, a view at the front of the rear of the mess and at the back of a bare brick wall hiding the servants’ quarters. The garden was bleak – weedy grass and no flowers – and one’s peace indoors and out interrupted by parade-ground noises. A military wife and her daughters would be expected to pig in there without complaint if it was the best that could be done for them, but its discomforts and inconvenience (the wrong side of the bazaar and twenty minutes tonga ride to the club), the enchanting prettiness of young Susan around whom Pankot males were already gathering, and the quiet but obvious efficiency of the elder daughter, Sarah, hardened the conviction that Rose Cottage was their proper and rightful place.

Mildred Layton refused to be drawn on the subject but when a question was put to her in any one of several oblique ways whose meaning was simply: Did Mabel discuss her plan to take a paying-guest with Colonel Layton? she left little doubt that the answer was no, and that the first she and John knew about it was down in Ranpur when they saw the advertisement.

Nevertheless relations between Mildred and Mabel Layton seemed perfectly amiable. No abnormal strain was apparent to the inner circle of Pankot women who were in the habit of dropping in to make sure Mabel was still there and representing what had to be represented. Mildred and her two girls were frequent droppers-in at Rose Cottage themselves. In fact for the first few weeks after her arrival from Ranpur Mildred made free of Rose Cottage as if it were a logical extension of her life, which it was, being only a few minutes’ drive from the club; and her right, which it also was, because when Mabel died Colonel Layton would inherit the property along with what was believed to be a considerable amount of money.

The girls made free of it to a slightly lesser extent; Sarah more often than Susan who tended to be occupied appeasing as many as she could of the young subalterns who made demands on her time and company, swimming, riding and playing tennis. In the elder sister’s case, visitors noted, making free was not quite the phrase to use. Sarah was less volatile than Susan, far less off-handedly possessive than her mother. She seemed very fond of the place, particularly of the garden, and much more communicative with Mabel (whom she and her sister called Aunt). She was also more patient with Miss Batchelor who chattered at her as she chattered at everybody but was given attentive replies to her comments and questions.

Sarah was a quiet girl. According to her mother she suffered badly with her periods, as badly as Mildred had suffered before having her. Mrs Paynton, Mrs Fosdick and Mrs Trehearne, the three women who could claim some intimacy with Rose Cottage’s silent chatelaine, observed this well-mannered and presumably sometimes stoic behaviour of Sarah’s with sympathy and approval. Colonel Layton’s elder daughter was an unassuming and intelligent girl with a face a bit too bony to be called pretty, and obviously took her obligations seriously. Her quietness suggested to them that the perplexity of her English years was still upon her. She probably had some strange ideas because life at home was no longer what it had been, but there was backbone there. The other girl was as clear and uncomplicated as daylight by comparison. England had not touched her except to give her a necessary scraping to detach the barnacles gathered while becalmed in the sea of Anglo-Indian childhood; a ruinous experience if not corrected by schooling in England: all privilege and no responsibility. But here now was young Susan, sharp-keeled from home, clean and eager. It heartened one just to look at her. She seemed to know it, and that could be dangerous, but presently she would settle and the gravity of Anglo-Indian life would touch her pretty face soon enough.

The flush would disappear. The enchanting laugh would give way to the kind that reflected the gratitude felt for anything that still exercised one’s sense of humour and kept it from atrophying. The years would play havoc with that rosy skin, tauten the mobile mouth, expose the sinewy structure of the neck that turned so attractively as she looked about her, endlessly responsive to the stimulus of surroundings which woke her adult perceptions as well as her childhood memories.

In the garden of Rose Cottage Susan’s gaiety was especially flowerlike. Her bewitching quality was heightened for the other women by their sad awareness that her bloom must fade as their own had done. But not yet. And before then she would be plucked and carried off. She seldom came to the bungalow unaccompanied by young men. If she did she was attended by them later and quickly spirited away, alone or with Sarah who played the chaperone role of sensible elder sister.

With all this Mabel seemed perfectly compliant, although it was apparent that she was not keen on Susan’s black Labrador puppy, Panther, who threatened havoc among the rose beds but came at Susan’s call and learned the hard way that the garden was not his. This disciplining of the dog (until in going into the garden, heel-tracking Susan’s progress in an awkward splay-footed progress of his own, he looked conscious of special dispensation) was – apart from Sarah’s more tentative approach to the act of being in Rose Cottage – the one acknowledgement Mildred and Susan publicly made of enjoying little more than a dispensation themselves. The use of a pet as a symbol of that acknowledgement was a guide to the dissatisfaction felt with the arrangements that kept them from living there. The mock-severe tone of Susan’s and Mildred’s voices and the impatience of the gestures Susan used to admonish the dog, instructing him to be quiet, lie down, come here, stop slobbering, keep his paws off the table, behave properly, were clearly not intended to correct him but to advertise and simultaneously relieve an exasperation with something other than the dog’s exuberance.

While Mabel raised no objection to this invasion of her home, allowed it to develop unhindered until scarcely a day went by without a coming and going on the front verandah, a settling in chairs on the back, a persistent tinkling of the telephone, she did not become involved; so it emphasized her detachment, even strengthened it, enlarged its scope. There was now more for her to be detached from. Caught up in the midst of these unusual activities she assumed a protective colouring and merged into the backgrounds of normality which the activities created.

If it was Mildred’s intention to force the issue, this capacity Mabel had for creating an illusion of not being in possession of anything anyone could want to take from her or force her to share was an effective deterrent; far more effective than Miss Batchelor’s physical presence.

Demonstrably Miss Batchelor had what presumably Mildred desired, but to judge from her reactions she was increasingly self-conscious of the fact, daily more embarrassingly aware of enjoying what she had comparatively no right to, and obviously torn between the conflicting beliefs that she should either make herself pleasant, or scarce.

Whichever course the poor woman adopted the effect on Mildred was the same. Outwardly her attitude towards the missionary was one of unchanging indifference and Miss Batchelor could not disguise from visitors that she was frightened of her. Her inconsequential conversation began to be accompanied by nervous gestures: hand to throat, hand rubbing hand, hand clutching elbow. She jumped up and down fetching things, providing comforts, answering the telephone. Such energy hinted at an overloading even of her remarkable power-house. At any moment a fissure might appear in her structural organization and she would then collapse in fragments and a little cloud of dust; from the sight of which phenomenon Mildred Layton would surely turn, as if this sort of thing were an everyday occurrence and only vaguely to be regretted in the brief instant it would take for her attention to be given to some other evidence of the oddity of Anglo-Indian life.

In company Mabel made no effort to protect Miss Batchelor from Mildred’s presence. It became doubtful that the missionary woman could survive and it was not at all clear whether Mabel cared one way or the other. It was just possible that the reappearance of her stepson’s wife and her two grand step-children, their proximity, their needs, their standing, would remind her of her own duty to the station.

For there was – let there be no doubt of it – a distinction, a virtue attaching to Mildred Layton which set her apart and gave her a weight quite independent of her actual rank. In that, she was not above Nicky Paynton whose husband commanded a battalion of the Ranpurs, or above Clara Fosdick whose late husband had been a civil surgeon and whose sister was married to a judge of the High Court in Ranpur. She was junior in rank to Maisie Trehearne, the wife of the Colonel-Commandant of the Pankot Rifles depot and junior, naturally, to the wife of whatever officer occupied Flagstaff House.

The special virtue of Mildred Layton was not to be found in the place she enjoyed in the formal hierarchy nor even in the fact that her father, General Muir, had been general officer commanding in Ranpur in the ‘twenties, and that she and her sisters had lived at Flagstaff House in Ranpur and Pankot as girls. The virtue was not to be found either in her being the wife of a man whose father (Mabel’s second husband) had a distinguished career in the Civil, was still remembered in the Pankot hills and whose portrait hung in the chamber of Government House in Ranpur where the council sat and where before his death of amoebic infection in 1917 he had distinguished himself further.

Her position as John Layton’s wife brought one closer to the secret of her virtue but it was a virtue that could have escaped them both, settled on other shoulders. All her history of eminent connection counted once the virtue became attached to her, but the virtue itself was the gift of a condition, the visible source of which was down there in the valley in that random pattern of army installations which Barbie had seen from the miniature mountain pass; its actual centre a low, ugly, rambling brick and timber building: the Pankot Rifles mess.

This building, like a temple, was only an arbitrary enclosure but it was a place in which the particular spirit of Pankot was symbolically concentrated. No more nor less than any other station whose history was inseparable from the history of a regiment, Pankot’s pride and prejudice and lore were deeply rooted in its famous Rifles. The gentle roll of the hills, the tender green, the ethereal mists: these were deceptive. There was not a village as far as the eye could see and in the rugged terrain beyond that marched towards a mountainous horizon which was not steeped in Pankot’s regimental tradition.

In the ordinary smoke of morning and evening fires the ghostly smoke of old campaigns was mingled. There was always an opacity. Clean and hard and clear as the sunshine struck it seemed to strike gun-metal. On a hot still day the snapped branch of a forest pine resounded like a sniper’s shot. A sudden flurry of birds led the eye away from them to the dead suspect ground from which they had risen. There was an air of irrelevancy in husbandry.