The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (6 page)

The mind could never quite free itself from the hard condition imposed by the military connection. This condition could be mocked but it lay deeper than a joke about the honour of the regiment ever probed. From the curious quality of flatness of their eyes a stranger arriving in Pankot and warned to look out for it might have told which men among several in civilian clothes were Pankot Rifles officers. In uniform this guardedness of eye was even more noticeable; a visible sign of a man’s awareness that his virtue instantaneously commanded a recognition which he found onerous to bear but proper to receive. It could be and was accorded by senior officers to juniors of the same regiment but in that case the recognition of virtue was mutual. The real subtlety of the virtue lay in the recognition it commanded in Pankot from any officer however senior of whatever regiment or arm. There was a scale in the condition of life in Pankot in which a Pankot Rifles subaltern, on station, pegged higher than a general who had been less ambitious in his choice of regiment.

And there was a scale within the scale, and here was the secret of Mildred Layton’s virtue. The men’s virtue fell upon their women and the scale within the scale gave precedence by battalion as well as by rank. A subaltern of the 1st Pankots was a fuller embodiment of virtue than a subaltern of the 4/5th whose cool weather station was in distant Mayapore. Ranging outward and upward through a host of permutations of regimental and non-regimental employment the logical peak of attainment was reached in the supreme active regimental command, the command of the 1st Battalion. An extra glow warmed the peak if the distinction was achieved by an officer whose parent battalion it was – as was the case with John Layton – but no Pankot Rifles officer would willingly accept an appointment however attractive if he had reason to suppose that the command of the 1st was an alternative within his grasp; even though to have held it once did not enable him to bear the special virtue subsequently. It passed like a crown, itself perpetual, the heads it adorned coming and going. Trehearne had held it, a 4/5th man, now red-tabbed and banded, a full colonel; in effect father of the regiment; but the crown was presently John Layton’s on whose head it glinted in a middle eastern sun; and his wife Mildred, in the scale of this condition, had more virtue than Mrs Trehearne who took precedence over her in every other way.

Through the 1st Battalion of its Rifles Pankot especially judged itself, felt itself judged, gave hostages to its fortune, sent emissaries into the world. At this level an element of sentiment was allowable but it was a sentiment supported by the condition which only one thing could shake and weaken: the disclosure of a fault in the rock, disaffection, disloyalty. Everything else was forgivable: incompetence, failure, defeat, even cowardice which was a private affair, a personal and not a corporate failure.

So there was Mildred Layton, a still handsome woman whose face quite properly showed not a tremor of the concern she would feel for her husband away on active service in North Africa, and no change as she looked at and through her step-mother-in-law’s talkative and intimidated companion in that expression of constantly and perfectly controlled dedication to her duty to withstand the countless irritations to which English women in India were naturally subjected.

If the men’s eyes were flat the women’s – to judge from Mildred’s – were slightly hooded as though belonging to the weaker sex they were entitled to this extra protection; and the mouths, again to judge by hers, being less allowably firmed than a man’s, were permitted a faint curve down at the corners which could be mistaken for displeasure, in the way that Mildred’s languid posture when seated could be mistaken for
ennui
(closer observation of her as she was standing or walking suggested that she had probably achieved this economy of movement as a result of a long experience of the need a person in her position had to get through the day with the least trouble to herself).

But in the matter of Rose Cottage her distinction got her nowhere. The elder Mrs Layton remained impervious to it and something of that imperviousness seemed slowly to rub off on to Barbara Batchelor. It was imagined that the missionary must have asked Mabel outright whether she should go and had been asked to stay put and thereafter had girded her loins to the task of staying. The basis of her efforts to make herself pleasant changed, but too gradually for the day and circumstances of the substitution of security for insecurity to be determined.

Subtly she became endowed with some of the attributes of a co-hostess, a member of the family. She enlisted Aziz’s aid in fetching and carrying, at first covertly and then openly because he had a habit of coming out and asking her what it was she had asked him to do for the guests. She assumed responsibility for the dog by making a friend of him, throwing his ball in an invisible but clearly demarcated zone within whose bounds he could do no damage, saw him fed and took him for walks when his mistress Susan abandoned him for more adventurous pursuits.

Her attitude to the girls became that of an aunt who knew her nieces had heard her discussed unfavourably but could not help showing her interest in them and some of her affection. Indeed she seemed to acquire something of the thick skin such a woman had to cultivate if her feelings were not to be constantly hurt by inattention to her questions, opinions, and fund of boring anecdotes.

And within a month or two the visits began to thin out as though the holidays were over and more serious affairs demanded attention. The poky grace and favour bungalow showed signs of being grudgingly settled in. It was (Mildred seemed to suggest) rather more convenient for Susan’s followers, more convenient for herself whose duties were much bound up in the life of the regiment, for instance in helping Maisie Trehearne keep a matriarchal eye on the wartime crop of young men lucky enough to have got their emergency commissions into it. While suggesting this Mildred’s expression did not change from the one which inspired fear in Miss Batchelor. It did not need to because it was an expression for all occasions, the expression of a person who could not allow herself to doubt that she was right, would always do what was right and therefore had nothing to explain even when not done right by, except to people who did not understand this and to such people an explanation was never owing.

But expression or not Mildred could not remove from people’s minds the notion that she had suffered a defeat. The question was whether she was hurt by it. Later when a certain weakness began to reveal itself in that apparently indomitable armour it seemed likely that she had been hurt more deeply than she may have admitted even to herself.

There was something especially unpalatable about a family quarrel because it could undermine the foundations of a larger and essential solidarity. There was no known quarrel between Mabel and Mildred but family feeling had not been conspicuously shown. Blood had not proved thicker than water. ‘Mabel’s been like she is as long as I’ve known her,’ Mildred once commented. ‘According to John she was like that when he got back from the first war, quite different from the way he remembered her when he was a subaltern. He believes she never got over his father’s death.’

This was the only remark she ever made that had any bearing on her stepmother-in-law’s refusal to get rid of the Batchelor woman but it confirmed the impression that Mabel and Mildred had never hit it off and it was natural to wonder why, even if Mabel was not a person with whom it was easy to associate the idea of a close relationship.

It was odd that Mabel should squander upon a retired missionary what Mildred had a positive right to and would grace in a way that the Batchelor woman never could. And by depriving Mildred of this right she deprived her of another: trust. It was as if in Mabel’s eyes Mildred could not be trusted; which was thought ridiculous at the time and just as ridiculous later even when the weakness began to show.

This weakness, so admirably and typically controlled, had to be put down to a particular cause, a blow courageously sustained – the news in 1941 that the 1st Pankots had been severely mauled in North Africa and Colonel Layton with the remnants of his command taken prisoner by the Italians (an especial wound to pride).

For a week or two after receiving the news Mildred Layton acted with a fortitude she never afterwards lost but which in this initial phase was found exemplary. None of her husband’s fellow officers, killed or imprisoned, had wives living in Pankot but she wrote to all these women offering sympathy and any help that was needed. On horseback and accompanied by the depot adjutant, Kevin Coley, she visited the nearby villages to talk to the wives and widows of the 1st Battalion’s
VCOS
,
NCOS
and sepoys. Any who came in from outlying districts for confirmation or interpretation of the news, for help and advice, assurances about pay allotments, and who expressed a wish to see her, she talked to in the lines, on the adjutant’s verandah; and once or twice – receiving deputations – in the compound of the grace and favour bungalow.

‘It’s sad,’ she said to her old acquaintance, the newly arrived occupant of Flagstaff House, Isobel Rankin, ‘they think John will still be able to look after their men in prison-camp but of course the men will be separated from their officers and I have to tell these women what the position is. Then they ask me to write to the Italian general to make sure that John’s allowed to visit them and I have to tell them it’s highly unlikely he’ll be allowed to but that if he is he’ll need no reminder from me, and that seems to satisfy them.’

Thus Mildred conveyed to the new Area Commander and his wife, Dick and Isobel Rankin whose paths she and John had crossed in Lahore, New Delhi and Rawalpindi and with whom they were on Christian name terms, that it did not really satisfy her.

The station concurred. As if the disaster befallen the 1st Pankots weren’t bad enough, in prison-camp the other ranks would be deprived of their inalienable right to the comradeship, the guidance and unstinted moral support of their officers and the officers of the privilege of giving them. It was a hazard of war but for a regiment like the Pankots situated in a valley from whose surrounding hills its soldiers were traditionally recruited it struck at the foundation of the trust between officers and men.

Was it the act of trying to reaffirm that trust which exhausted Mildred or reaction to the blow she had personally received? Or, in going among the villagers on horseback had she suddenly become conscious of acting out a charade which neither she nor the women she comforted believed in for a minute?

As often as not it is the sense of the unbearable comedy of life that lights those fires which can only be damped down by compulsive drinking. Whatever the cause in Mildred’s case the idea of her fortitude as exemplary did not survive the discreet but unmistakable evidence that she was starting on the Carew’s gin too early in the day and arriving for bridge, for commitees, for morning-coffee, for lunch, with that look and air of being less sensitive than anyone else to the crosscurrents of feeling and opinion in the room she entered. Her natural languor, to which everyone was accustomed and which she had worn lightly, like a protective cloak, seemed a degree heavier and her gestures more studied as if they demanded a shade more effort than was usual. At first her expression remained stable, what it had always been, but presently, although still unchanging, it began to lose definition, as though the face which it controlled was gradually slackening.

By then Mildred Layton’s drinking habit was too well established in people’s minds for it to give rise to much comment; and it was indulged with such style that nothing about her was diminished by it. In a curious way it sharpened her distinction. In her, drink released none of the vulgar or embarrassing traits disguised by soberness in people of softer grain; it gave extra keenness to those edges in her personality that made her a woman no one in her right mind would want to cross. One approached her with the same discretion she displayed in her own behaviour but did so perhaps slightly more aware of the need.

No longer exemplary, aided by drink which it was known she could not afford, there were occasions when her fortitude was felt by those who knew her well to be a fortitude shown not just for her own benefit but for theirs as well, so that the drinking was for them too; a resistance to pressures they were too conscious of not to acknowledge as collective and likely to increase. In the guarded eyes, the faint upcurve of the downward curving mouth, there was the authority of the old order and an intelligence that could calculate odds accurately, interpret them as indications that the game that had never been a game was very likely up.

So Mildred drank; compulsively and systematically; two or more up on everyone when drinking in a fairly hard-drinking community officially began and more than that when a session ended. One became so used to it that really it became part of the manner which with the impeccable background and irreproachable behaviour had always promoted and still promoted the image of her utter reliability. Even the little matter of mounting bridge debts could be seen in a certain light as the exception that proved the rule of her soundness. Her forgetfulness was annoying and embarrassing but whichever way her luck was running, win or lose (it was mostly lose), one could not help feeling that she saw debts due only in the context of larger and more important issues; and then in speaking gently to Sarah (the one sure way of getting paid) one was bound to understand that in that grander context even so sacred a thing as a card debt was enclosed in an aura of irrelevance.

And after all it was not a question of honour alone but of money, and for money Mildred clearly had an upper-class contempt which meant that her attitude to it was one of complaint at not having enough but of this being no excuse for not spending it. Unpaid bills at local stores and overdue mail order accounts at the Army and Navy were not her personal fault. She had standards to maintain and two girls as well as herself to dress, especially Susan who had a perfectly proper streak of what her looks and figure excused – extravagance. With both girls now enlisted in the
WAC
(1), working as clerks at Area Headquarters with Carol and Christine Beames, the civil surgeon’s daughters, spending much of the working week in uniform, the number of new dresses Susan needed was reduced to what Mildred described as less unmanageable proportions, but unlike Sarah, who tended to stay in uniform, Susan changed immediately she got home; which was quite early quite often. There was not a great deal for a girl to do at the daftar if she thought it not her job to look for work and stupid to look busy if she weren’t; and in Susan’s case working in Dick Rankin’s office had doubled her number of escorts. It was her obligation to look fresh and pretty and Mildred’s obligation to help her do so.