The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet)

by Paul Scott

  ‘One can protect ankles. Throat’s what you have to watch out for.’

  Susan and Dicky came back but were detained within earshot by Lucy and Tusker Smalley.

  ‘Lots of congratulations, Susan,’ Lucy said. Tusker added, ‘Rather.’

  ‘Thank you. And thank you for the lovely flowers you sent. I’m afraid I haven’t yet written to everybody.’

  Lucy said, ‘I hear you’re calling the baby Teddie.’

  ‘No, not Teddie. Edward. It’s very important to get it right. I’ve got not to care for nicknames and diminutives for men.’

  She glanced at Lucy’s husband. ‘Why do they call you Tusker, Major Smalley?’

  Smalley indicated his regimental insignia, the Mahwars: a bull-elephant from whose back, howdah-like, sprang a tuft of toddy-palm.

  ‘Mahwars. Tuskers, regimental nickname.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. But why do they call you Tusker?’

  ‘Bit of a long story.’ Tusker looked modest but pleased.

  ‘– after all,’ Susan continued as if he had not said anything, ‘we never called my husband Muzzy Bingham. Nor daddy old Pankot Layton.’

  There was a pause. A breeze riffled the skirts of the women’s dresses.

  ‘Which regiment will you want little Edward to belong to?’ Lucy Smalley asked. ‘That will be quite a decision, won’t it? Between the Pankots and the Muzzys. You’d have to be making it now if you could put a boy down for a regiment like you have to for a school.’

  Mrs Smalley’s voice drifted away, caught by the tail of the breeze and chased by the stronger following gust that whipped through the churchyard and prompted Susan into action. She appeared almost to be spun round by it, so that no one could have said that she turned her back on the Smalleys nor that she pushed through the group headed by her mother, but there was what amounted to a convulsive movement, a rearrangement of positions, a making way for her whch was ended abruptly by her touching her sister’s elbow as if finding base and going off then slightly ahead of her, down the path at a pace quick enough for Dicky to have to start off rather fast and lengthen his stride to catch up with them.

  ‘The children are having tiffin at home,’ Mildred said, ‘and they have their own tongas.’

  ‘Is Susan all right?’ Nicky Paynton asked.

  ‘Susan is fine.’

  She anchored the group round her by not budging until the Smalleys approached. And then, turning her back, snubbed them as if so far as she was concerned Susan had been perfectly behaved until they managed to upset her; Lucy by mentioning Teddie’s name and Tusker by saying the word regiment which was the very thing Teddie had died for; and then slowly led the way down the path between the ancient gravestones: a woman making a point, one that was less well defined than it was felt – the point, perhaps, that if Susan’s behaviour could be seen as a further demonstration of how time was running out for people like Mildred then anything like a scramble was vulgar, too tiresome to consider let alone join.

  *

  The next time Mildred walked along that path would be for the christening, the admission as a lively member of holy church of little Edward Arthur David; and that would bring to a formal close a difficult phase of the responsibility she had shouldered during her husband’s absence. From things she said it was gathered that there could be no question of Susan marrying Dicky Beauvais or anyone until John Layton came home. The implication was that the same must apply to Sarah. One dead and never-seen son-in-law, one live grandson, and two still healthy daughters were sufficient evidence of life having gone on for Colonel Layton to come back to and not feel that things had fallen apart for want of a firm hand. Now Mildred was digging her heels in. She would not be rushed again. She had been rushed once and the result had been pretty disastrous or nearly so. Real disaster had been averted by Susan not letting the baby die on her or herself die on the baby.

  According to Nicky Paynton, Mildred’s off-hand manner towards the child, her use of a word like brat, did not disguise the fact that she was bucked at the prospect of having a grandson to hand over to Colonel Layton when he resumed his position as head of the family. The boy was half a Layton. John must have often regretted having no son of his own to bear his name, though he had been proud and fond of both his daughters. And he had been pleased about the marriage, quite taken, so Mildred said, by Teddie’s photograph. How stoically he received news of Teddie’s death wasn’t known. His letters took a long time to reach Pankot and there was proof of letters going astray in both directions. It was possible that he would get the news of the child’s birth and not know that his son-in-law was dead. It was possible that he was ignorant of both events. They had heard nothing for some time and with the opening of the second front they perhaps had to be prepared for a period of silence and uncertainty.

  But they were inured to both and Mildred without dropping her characteristic guard infected her friends with a spirit of optimism. The christening party to be held at the grace and favour after a quiet family ceremony at St John’s promised to be a jolly affair, rather like a picnic amid (Mildred warned) the packing crates that were already being filled as the process of separating Layton private possessions from stuff belonging to the army and public works department got under way.

  When it was all over there would be little left to delay the move up to Rose Cottage. The christening party had its valedictory aspect. In spite of all its drawbacks the grace and favour bungalow had served its turn and deserved a good send-off. The accommodations officer was already nagging for possession so that he could turn the bungalow into a chummery for officers of the new emergency intake and relieve pressure elsewhere. From being full of women it would become (Mildred said) ‘full of chaps’ and presumably they wouldn’t object so much to being woken at the crack of dawn by bugles opposite or, if they did, would have less cause.

  And (at the club during midweek) Mildred smiled, directed the bearer’s attention to her glass and said, ‘Although I’m afraid Edward’s going to be even more effective than a bugle. He seems to have an instinct for getting everybody on parade at six a.m. prompt. Doesn’t he, Su?’

  ‘Most children wake at six,’ Susan said. ‘I used to wake at six at Aunt Lydia’s in Bayswater and at great-grandpa’s in Surrey. They never had bugles.’

  ‘But then you’re Army,’ Nicky Paynton said.

  ‘Yes,’ Susan said. She sat very upright on a club chair watching the clock and everybody who came in and went out. She had not been inside the club for months, not since she had begun, as she put it, to ‘show’ and took to smocks. This morning her mother had persuaded her to put in an appearance, to take up the reins of a proper routine.

  ‘Relax, darling,’ Mildred said. ‘You simply must learn to trust Minnie. And you ought to change your mind and have a drink, even if it’s only a nimbo.’

  ‘All right.’

  The bearer brought her a nimbopani. She sat holding the tumbler in both hands and used both hands to raise it to her lips. ‘Are you cold?’ her mother asked. It had been raining hard all morning and the temperature had dropped. No, Susan said, she wasn’t cold.

  ‘I thought you shivered,’ Mildred went on. ‘I hope you’re not sickening for something.’ No, Susan said again. She was quite all right, she wasn’t sickening for anything. She put the glass on the table and made an effort to take part in the conversation by giving her attention to the person speaking; but after a while her glance strayed to the clock again and to the people coming in and going out and back to the clock and then to her wristwatch. She reached for the glass one-handed, lifted it and then lost her grip.

  The glass fell, wetting her skirt and legs with the nimbo, and broke into sharp fragments on the floor at her feet. She stayed seated. There was a hush in the room, then talk was resumed. A sweeper was sent for. Clara Fosdick examined her stockings and pronounced them unladdered and only a bit damp. On the other hand Susan, she said, was soaked.

  ‘Well,’ Mildred said, ‘that was clumsy of you
, wasn’t it? You’ll have to change when you get home. Are you madly uncomfortable?’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better go to the cloakroom and mop up with a towel. Then come back and have another nimbo. There’s loads of time.’

  ‘I shan’t want another nimbo.’

  ‘Well go and dry off.’

  ‘I’m more comfortable sitting still.’

  The sweeper came with brush and pan. Mrs Fosdick, without getting up, shifted her chair and gave him room to get at all the splinters but Susan did not. She watched him sweeping gingerly round her feet. After he had gone Mildred ordered another drink but the conversation lagged and Susan had not looked up again. Irritably Mildred said:

  ‘Darling, what on earth’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter. I’m relaxing.’

  She smiled and suddenly leant back with her arms folded. She asked Nicky Paynton whether she had heard recently from the two boys in Wiltshire. Nicky said she had. The elder was looking forward to being eighteen, finishing with school and joining the RAF of all things. ‘But I expect we can talk him out of that,’ she added, ‘unless he’s really set on it as an alternative career to the army and it’s not just the temporary glamour of the boys in blue at home that’s attracting him.’

  ‘And what about the other?’

  ‘Oh, it’s the Ranpurs for him. But then he’s still at the stage of thinking his father’s the cat’s whiskers.’

  Susan had not stopped smiling but the others were aware of the avoidable subject having once more cropped up and conjured Teddie’s shade. Again their conversation lagged and presently Mildred looked out of the window, finished her drink and said, ‘It’s stopped. We’d better get you home and out of that damp frock.’

  ‘Yes, I should like to go home now, if you don’t mind.’

  But she waited until the others had got to their feet before rising herself. She walked, arms still folded, behind her mother and her mother’s friends, past the pillars and the potted palms––

  *

  ––and into her inner life, her melancholia; an inexplicable business, worse than that of Poppy Browning’s daughter because that girl had had a certain justification for what she did: an unfaithful husband dead in the arms of his Indian mistress. But Susan’s husband had died gallantly and tragic as the circumstances were then and later in the matter of the premature birth she was surrounded by love and devotion and the child was surely a lively reminder to her of this fact and of the duty she had to cherish him, show him at least as much affection as she herself had been shown.

  And she had done so. Therefore the incident that occurred at the grace and favour bungalow on the afternoon of the day before the christening ceremony was even further beyond anyone’s ability to understand than it would have been had she continued to show signs of rejecting the child. But the rejection had been of brief duration. Her subsequent concern for the child’s welfare was both charming and touching; a bit exaggerated but no more so than the other traits and characteristics that went to make up the bright little personality in whom there had always seemed to reside a spirit of particular determination to do the right thing, but with style and youthful freshness; no doubt drawing attention to herself in the process but also to the purpose and condition of a life based upon a few simple but exacting ideas.

  Now through a single action she shattered her own image as a child might destroy its own carefully constructed edifice of bricks. Indeed there was in her behaviour a disagreeable element of play, of wilful destruction of a likeness of the adult world she inhabited. At first her action was said to be one that had endangered the child’s life but once the facts were known the idea of tragedy narrowly averted was replaced by a suspicion that if mockery had not been intended it had been accomplished; and this suspicion proved as strong as the pity felt for a girl in the grip of such a deep post-natal depression that there was little to distinguish it from madness.

  But the word madness did not help. If she had gone off her head presumably she had done so because she found everything about her life unendurable. Meaningless. It did not help either to remember that she had not only fitted in but Lad been seen to fit in. She had tried. Trying should not have been necessary. Apparently it had been, for her; and suddenly she had stopped; not only stopped but symbolically wiped out all the years of effort by her extraordinary gesture.

  On the afternoon of the day before the christening when her mother was at Rose Cottage supervising the measurement of new curtains, and Sarah had gone back to the daftar and so left Susan in sole command, she sent Mahmoud to the bazaar to buy some blue ribbon for the christening gown – Sarah’s old gown which Mabel had kept in a trunk for years and only handed over a day or two before her death. She made Mahmoud take Panther whom she complained was getting fat and lazy through lack of exercise. Ten minutes after he had gone, dragging the reluctant dog, she called Minnie from her task of sorting sheets and pillow-cases for the dhobi and told her to run after him and tell him she wanted white ribbon, not blue.

  So Minnie set off, but turned back. Questioned about that later she said that in spite of all the little offerings she had made since the little Memsahib became a widow, the bad spirits had not been appeased, they had not gone elsewhere, they still infested the bungalow and the compound, and this particular day – the day before the alien rite of christening – was especially inauspicious. And from certain things the little Memsahib had done – taking out the christening gown, smoothing it, holding it, talking to it; looking at the baby but not touching him as if afraid to – she believed the little Memsahib was also aware of the bad spirits. She had turned back at the gate partly because she was afraid of what might happen if she deserted her post and partly out of curiosity. She thought little Memsahib intended to make a special Christian puja of her own.

  Although, like her uncle, Minnie professed the Muslim faith, the rigours of that austere religion lay lightly on the people of the Pankot hills. Wayside shrines to the old tribal gods were still decorated with offerings of flowers and here and there in places believed to be inhabited by bhuts and demons – a tree, a crossroads – there might sometimes be found dishes of milk or clarified butter. For some time now in secret places of the grace and favour compound Minnie had prepared and kept replenished such tokens of appeasement. It would interest her to see how little Memsahib might go about a similar enterprise.

  She returned to the bungalow but stayed hidden and was rewarded by the sight of Susan, seated now on the verandah, dressing the child in the lace gown, talking to it to reassure it and then – the dressing completed – continuing for a while without speaking and looking not at the child but straight ahead, so that Minnie assumed she was engaged in some kind of silent incantation.

  And then quite abruptly Susan had risen and carried the child down the verandah steps and across the grass towards the bare brick wall that divided the garden from the servants’ quarters. Minnie thought that perhaps there were a number of magic paces which mother and child had to take together and automatically she began to count. The alarm she might have felt when Susan suddenly stopped and placed the child on its back on the damp grass was momentarily stilled by the fascination exerted by the whole strange process, for there could be no doubt now that she was the spectator of a ritual which no other Indian had ever witnessed, otherwise she would have heard tales about it. When Susan walked away from the child, along the wall, towards the place where the wall ended, again Minnie counted the paces taken, and when she bent down, picked up a can and walked back, it was the whole action that exercised Minnie’s imagination and not just the can, the reason for the can, which she recognized as one full of the kerosene Mahmoud found handy for lighting his bonfires of accumulated rubbish. Kerosene was oil. Was it holy oil to people like little Memsahib?

  Susan’s next action was the most fascinating of all. She walked round the child in a wide circle tipping the can as she went and sprinkling the oil. Then she
put the can down near the wall, approached the circle again and knelt. With the can there must have been matches because she had a box in her hand and was striking one and throwing it on to the kerosene. Flame leapt and arced in two directions, tracing the circumference until the two fiery arms met at the other side, enclosing the sacrifice.

  Minnie did not understand but she had stopped trying to work it out because she understood the one important thing. She understood fire. Crying out, she snatched a sheet from the dhobi’s bundle and ran. The grass inside the circle was too wet for the flames to catch hold and spread towards the middle where the child gazed at the sky and worked its legs and arms. But Minnie did not understand that either. She acted instinctively, flung the sheet over the flames which were already turning blue and yellow, dying; and used the sheet as a path to reach the child. Picking it up she backed away calling out all the time to little Memsahib who continued kneeling and gazing at the centre of the ring of fire where the child had been. She seemed not to notice that the child was no longer there and that Minnie was crying out to her.

  She was still there when Mahmoud got back from the bazaar and found Minnie on the verandah hugging the now crying child, not daring either to approach her mistress or let her out of her sight. She was still there when, summoned by Mahmoud, Mildred returned. She ignored all her mother’s orders and entreaties to get up. When Travers arrived she ignored him too. She stayed where she was until Sarah, driven home by Dicky Beauvais, went out and talked to her. She let Sarah take her indoors and presently into the ambulance that Travers had called to take her back to the nursing home. In all this time she had looked at no one, spoken to no one, but smiled as if happy for the first time in her life.

  *