The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (60 page)

‘Thank you.’ He looked at his black glove. ‘Not too many, I hope.’

‘I’m afraid so. You’re famous. Not only because of what you tried to do to save Teddie but because of your connection with the Manners case.’

He continued to regard her.

‘She was here you know,’ Barbie said.

‘Here? Miss Manners?’

‘No, no, the aunt. Lady Manners. She came to Pankot this summer.’

‘Oh, yes. Sarah told me the name had appeared in the Flagstaff House book. She said no one had seen her though. I never met Lady Manners myself.’

‘I saw her. In the church. I knew it was her. It couldn’t have been anyone else. But she must have gone. I’ve never seen her again. Forgive me, perhaps you prefer not to talk about it. After all, if it hadn’t been for that awful case you’d probably still be DSP in Mayapore or something even more important like a Deputy Inspector General.’

Chin back in hand he continued to regard her. Briefly she found the situation disturbingly familiar, as if they had sat like this before in another life. Now he removed the cup and saucer from the smooth black glove and replaced it on the tray. He took out his cigarette case.

‘Why do you say that, Miss Batchelor?’

‘Isn’t it true? People have always said that your superior officers failed to stand by you.’

He offered her a cigarette. She declined but asked him to smoke if he wished. She glanced round. The mali’s boy was watching from a corner of the bungalow. She told him to bring out an ashtray for Captain Merrick Sahib. Merrick had selected a cigarette, returned the case to his inside pocket and taken a gold lighter from another. The live-hand had great dexterity. He blew out smoke. The mali’s boy came with a brass ashtray. Merrick looked at him gravely then pointed at the gloved artefact. With a frown of concentration the boy tried to place the ashtray in the palm. Merrick reached over to help him secure it between the finger and thumb. The boy stood back, arms behind him, prepared to watch.

‘Chalo,’ Barbie said. When the boy had gone Merrick smiled at her.

He said, ‘The curiosity of children has a great therapeutic value.’ He blew out smoke again. ‘Reverting to that other subject. I ought to correct any impression people have that my department failed to stand by me. It was an impression we were quite willing that the Indians should get. Nothing takes the steam out of the opposition more effectively than appearing to remove the cause of conflict or complaint. But I always imagined our own people understood that.’

‘But weren’t you sent to a rather unpleasant area?’

Merrick was regarding her again. The eyelid from which the lashes appeared to have been burnt looked fixed. She found herself watching it to see if it blinked.

‘Only with my full approval,’ he said, ‘and on the understanding that the department wouldn’t stand in my way, if I renewed my application for a temporary commission in the army. I applied originally in nineteen thirty-nine and they sat on it then. And subsequently.’ He paused to take in another methodical lungful of smoke and then let it escape in puffs with each of his next words. ‘Actually you could say the army was my reward for my handling of the Manners case.’ The smoke had gone. ‘But probably only my Inspector General appreciates that fully.’

He noticed how her glance fell on his ruined arm.

‘I hope you don’t interpret this elegant monstrosity as payment deferred for having made a tragic mistake.’

‘Oh no.’

‘They were guilty, you know. The I.G. agreed.’

When he put the cigarette to his lips this time she thought for an instant that his fingers trembled slightly but she must have been mistaken. The live-hand now hung free, unsupported except by the forearm on the arm of the chair, and the cigarette looked as steady as a rock.

He said, ‘One in particular is guilty. The ringleader. He is guilty for the rest of them.’

He gazed at her through wreaths of smoke.

‘His name is Kumar,’ he continued. ‘The worst kind of western-educated Indian. With all the conceit and arrogance of the Indian whose family owns or once owned land, plus the arrogance of the most boring and unprincipled but privileged English lad who believes the world belongs to him because he was taught at a public school to think he should rule it by divine right instead of by virtue of a superior intelligence. It’s difficult to see why she fell for it, but of course he spoke and acted like an English boy of that type.’ He blew more smoke. ‘And he was extremely good-looking.’ He had not stopped regarding her. He said, ‘Well, enough of that. I can see you find the subject painful. I do too. As a reasonably conscientious police officer it’s rather gone against the grain to see six criminals comfortably put away as mere political detenus.’

‘Painful yes. One must find it that. But that doesn’t mean we should hide it away or pretend it never happened or that it’s over.’

‘Oh, it’s over. The girl’s dead.’

‘The child’s alive.’

He smiled. ‘I mean the
case
died with the girl. I agree, the child’s alive. His child, presumably. At least one presumes she imagined so.’

‘You told Sarah you were fond of the girl yourself. And yet you sound so bitter. About her.’

He seemed quite undaunted. ‘I
was
fond of her. I had to take that into consideration. But I think I stopped being fond of her when I realized which way she’d jumped. So it was never a serious impediment.’

She thought: What a curious word to use. Impediment. And – jumped. That’s a curious word too. Sexual jealousy? Racial jealousy?

She found herself suddenly unwilling, unable, to consider the matter. She felt drained of imaginative energy. She stared at the embryo tennis court. It meant nothing. It was simply a place to pat a ball to and fro, to and fro.

Between their feet the woman in the white saree abased herself. Beseeching them. ‘We are gods,’ she thought, ‘and this was our garden. Now we play tennis. It’s easier to beseech against a background of roses.’

That flash of inspiration had come, unexplained, unattended. But there seemed no more to come. She looked at him. Again he was regarding her. His chin was in his hand. He had stubbed the cigarette. It lay dead, bent double, on the little brass tray that had come from Benares on the banks of the Ganges where bodies were burnt and the ashes cast to float, float on, float out to an unimaginable sea. Her old trunk of missionary relics with them. Bobbing, lazily twisting, under a copper-coloured sun. Immense crowds came to the festivals on the banks of the holy river. Greater crowds than came to any church. The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine, decayed fish, human and animal ordure. In the trunk Edwina’s picture sailed to a far horizon.

She said, ‘I am your mother and your father.’

‘What?’

‘Man-bap. It wasn’t that for Edwina. It was despair. But I suppose Teddie felt it.’ She realized that in an oblique way – in his remarks about Kumar and a certain type of Englishman – he had been referring to Teddie, to men like Teddie, but she could not fathom his deeper references. The arm he had lost for Teddie span away too – on the swift current of the holy river: garlanded.

She had slumped forward, knees apart, feet splayed, her skirt stretched, elbows on her knees, her hands clasped.

‘Tell me about my friend, about Edwina Crane. Was there much left?’

There was a long pause. She did not look at him. She stayed in that ungainly position.

‘Enough to identify.’

She nodded. And to bury. She had never thought of that before. Never thought of the possibility that the coffin was light with a few scorched bones shrouded in fragments of burnt saree. ‘And the letter?’ she asked. ‘What did she say in the letter, the one that was never read out at the inquest?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t remember except that it satisfied the coroner.’

‘And satisfied the police. You remembered the picture. You must remember the letter. The letter was much more important to a policeman.’

‘Is it important to you?’

‘It might be.’

She glanced up. His chin was still resting on the live-hand, but he was looking at the garden.

He said, ‘Well, it was a sane letter. Personally I should have recorded a simple verdict of suicide.’

‘What did it say?’

‘Simply that she was resolved to take her own life.’

‘There must have been more.’

‘You mean something to support the verdict of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed?’

‘Yes, was there?’

‘Personally I don’t think so.’ He seemed in a way to regret that Edwina had gone to hallowed ground. He added, ‘But she did end the letter with the kind of statement that satisfied people she was off her head. The kind it was thought better not to read out. I can’t think why.’

‘What was it?’

He turned his head towards her, using his hand as a pivot for his chin.

‘“There is no God. Not even on the road from Dibrapur.”’

An invisible lightning struck the verandah. The purity of its colourless fire etched shadows on his face. The cross glowed on her breast and then seemed to burn out.

‘“Not even on the road from Dibrapur?”’

He nodded.

For a moment she felt herself drawn to him. He offered recompense. He looked desolated as if Edwina’s discovery were a knowledge he had been born with and could not bear because he had been born as well with a tribal memory of a time when God leaned His weight upon the world. He needed consolation.

She became agitated. She felt for the gold chain and found it but it seemed weightless.

He smiled. He said, ‘How serious we’ve become.’ He shot the sleeve of his good arm and looked at the dial of a watch which he wore with the face on the inner side of the wrist. ‘And I ought to be getting back to see the club secretary.’

She got up. ‘No, wait. I want to give you something.’

She bent down and retrieved her handbag from the ground near the leg of the unfamiliar chair.

‘Come, you can help me. The locks may be stiff.’

She waited until he had got to his feet and then led the way round the verandah to the front, walking several paces ahead of him. The tonga-wallah sat hunched, half-asleep, his head at the same angle as the horse’s. She saw to her horror that the horse had deposited a neat pile of manure between the shafts of the sacrosanct gravel of the drive.

She edged round the trunk and knelt on the first step, then scrabbled in her handbag for the key. The padlock clicked open easily, so did the left hand clasp. The right hand one had always been a brute. But it gave. She flicked the hasps up.

‘Now,’ she said. She raised the Pandora-lid, stared and cried out. From rim to rim the trunk was filled with the creamy white butterfly lace.

‘But this isn’t mine!’

She snatched at the lace and pulled it out. Beneath it were her relics.

‘How did it get in here?’ she wanted to know. ‘I never put it in here. I’ve not seen it since the day Mabel showed it to me.’

She held the lace in both hands and then looked up to appeal to Captain Merrick. But the lace was before his time. She had a desire to show it to him. ‘Look,’ she said, and threw one end. He caught it deftly. She drew her arm back. The lace hung between them. The butterflies trembled.

‘Isn’t it beautiful? The woman who made it was blind.’ She stared at and through this lepidopterist’s paradise-maze but could see no further than the old woman’s fingers. ‘Mabel wanted me to have it for a shawl.’

He offered back the end he had. She gathered the lace in and then flung it over her shoulders.

‘Can I carry it?’ she asked, laughing. The lace smelt of camphor, lavender and sandalwood. These were the scents of Mabel’s and Aziz’s gift. ‘She must have given it to Aziz, and he to me. During that time he had the key to my trunk.’

She pulled the lace off her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, Captain Merrick. You haven’t the least idea what I’m talking about. No matter. I opened the trunk’ – she picked up the picture – ‘to give you this.’

She held it up to him. He made to take it.

‘No,’ she said. ‘The other hand.’

She reached up and helped to insert the picture into the rigid glove.

‘It’s small, but much bigger than an ashtray. Is it too heavy?’

‘I don’t think so.’

The black glove, his good hand and one of her hands held the picture. Slowly they each withdrew the support of their living flesh.

‘There, you can do it. You can
carry
it.’

There was perspiration on his mottled forehead. He gazed down at the awkwardly angled gift.

‘Oh, this,’ he said. ‘Yes, I remember this. Are you giving it to me?’

‘Of course.’

One eyebrow contracted in a frown. The other – vestigial – perhaps contracted too.

‘Why?’

She thought about this.

‘One should always share one’s hopes,’ she said. ‘That represents one of the unfulfilled ones. Oh, not the gold and scarlet uniforms, not the pomp, not the obeisance. We’ve had all that and plenty. We’ve had everything in the picture except what got left out.’

‘What was that, Miss Batchelor?’

She said, not wishing to use that emotive word, ‘I call it the unknown Indian. He isn’t
there.
So the picture isn’t finished.’

A drop of sweat fell from his forehead on to the bottom left-hand corner of the glass that protected the picture.

‘Let me relieve you of its weight, Captain Merrick. I’ll ask mali to wrap it in some paper for you. Meanwhile’ – she began closing and locking the trunk – ‘would you be so kind as to ask my tonga-wallah there to put the trunk in the back of the tonga? I’ll ask mali to help him and also for some rope to lash it in. But I think it will require a man to order him to take it.’

‘The trunk? In the back of the tonga?’

‘What else?’

‘I should have said it’s much too heavy.’