The Towers of Silence

by Paul Scott

  Receiving the picture back from Mrs Paynton via a young man with a fair moustache she looked at it again herself. ‘It always seemed to me to be a picture about love rather than loyalty. Perhaps they amount to the same thing. What do you think?’

  She looked at the moustached young man whose mouth was puckered in concentration. He was pulling his left earlobe.

  ‘Have you got transport?’ Mildred asked one of the men, who said yes they had. ‘Then directly you’ve downed your beers we ought to be getting along to the club.’

  There were movements of departure. Two of the men went into the garden to rescue Susan.

  ‘Oh, are you all going?’ Miss Batchelor asked in her carrying schoolroom voice. ‘Let me just say I do appreciate everyone being so kind, so solicitous for Edwina.’

  *

  She hammered a nail into the wall above the old campaigner’s writing-table and hung the picture. Aziz approved. He would pause in his work to consider it, stand like one of the children of Muzzafirabad grown old but still possessed. She had told him about her friend Miss Crane, that she was in hospital in distant Mayapore hurt trying to save someone who was attacked and killed, and might when better stay for a week or two in the little spare. He nodded his understanding in the Indian way. In Aziz this was a gesture of great economy. He had the dignity of the people from the higher hills who walked shrouded in blankets and secrecy and made excursions into Pankot, involved in mysterious errands whose object escaped her since they came and went empty-handed as if merely to look and reassure themselves that nothing was happening in the valley of which they disapproved.

  Mabel, in her solitary walks, went in their direction but nowadays went less often. On her own walks the other way downhill Barbie had become used to feeling like a dove sent out to check the level of the flood. After three years the darkness still lay on Mabel’s soul and Barbie felt a bit discouraged. But since the incident on the road from Dibrapur the nature of her outings seemed to have changed and the familiar route had become unfamiliar. She anticipated revelation.

  In her mind she too guarded the body. It lay near the milestone half way up (or down) Club road. Passing the milestone made her light-headed; almost there was a sense of levitation. Edwina’s act of guarding the body had been one of startling simplicity and purity which possibly only a woman like Edwina could have had the occasion to perform and in performing it sum up the meaning of her life in India. From the schoolroom door at Muzzafirabad to the place on the road from Dibrapur was a distance measurable in miles, in years, but between the occasions there was no distance. Right from the beginning Edwina had been close to God and therefore to herself. Not teaching but loving. From her plain face, her manner, you might not have guessed this. Only from her actions. And in this most recent action, this guarding of the dead Indian’s body, it seemed to Barbie that Edwina had achieved her apotheosis.

  Oh how I long, Barbie said, standing still suddenly, having passed the milestone and accepted the sad fact that there was no body there for her to guard, how I long for an apotheosis of my own, nothing spectacular, mind, nothing in the least grandiose nor even just grand, but, like Edwina’s, quiet with a still-centre to it that exemplifies not my release from earthly life although it might do that too but from its muddiness and uncertainty, its rather desperate habit of always proving that there are two sides to every question; my release from that into the tranquillity of knowing my work has been acceptable, good and useful perhaps, perhaps not, but performed in love, with love, and humility of course, indeed, humility, and singularity, wholeness of purpose. That is the most important thing of all.

  But not knowing what kind of apotheosis this could be she walked on in the direction of the bazaar to settle the accounts at Jalal-Ud-Din’s and Gulab Singh Sahib’s, and buy more stamps to write more letters to Edwina who did not reply. No news she said to Sarah who inquired, being also at Jalal-Ud-Din’s querying a bill upon which was writ large the rising cost of living in her father’s continuing absence, no news is good news. She hoped for both their sakes that this was so.

  She was in love with Sarah Layton and with Susan but more with Sarah who seemed to need it more. She was in love with Pankot and her life there and her duty to Mabel and the wind in winter. She was afraid to be in love with Mr Maybrick who played the organ at St John’s and was widowed and retired from Tea, because he was to begin with a man and to go on with a man with a temper and an air of self-enclosure who did not normally invite proofs of attachment even of Barbie’s kind, which did not extend to flesh. In any case he had large hands with more hair on the wrists than on his head and when he played the organ his hands looked extraordinarily vivid and enterprising. He lived alone except for his Assamese houseboy in a tiny and very untidy bungalow not far from the rectory-bungalow on the same tree-shaded road. In his bungalow there were many photographs of his dead wife and in most of them she had her hand above her eyes to keep the sun out, a fact which always made Barbie feel outdoors when really in.

  On her way back from the bazaar she looked in at St John’s to collect his album of Handel which was falling to pieces and which she had volunteered to repair. Mr Maybrick was at practice. She could hear the organ as she approached the church door. Bach. Toccata and fugue.

  She sat in a pew and listened. She imagined Mr Maybrick’s red face and bald head reflected in the mirror above the keyboards. The mirror was a framed picture. Who is this? This is the Planter. The face of the Planter is reddened by the sun. Here is his Lady. She shades her eyes from the light. She is of the North and ails in the climate. But keeps going. What is the Planter doing? He is showing the coolies how to pick only the tender leaves. As he shows them God sings through his fingers. The leaves are green. When they are dried they will be brown. The music will be preserved in caddies. The Planter and the coolies between them will bring Tea to the Pots of the Nation.

  She thought: I shall bring Edwina to St John’s to hear Mr Maybrick at practice and on Sundays to hear Arthur Peplow’s sermon. And afterwards we shall return to Rose Cottage. And I shall be large again and shapely with intent, so close to Edwina that God will remember and no longer mark me absent from the roll.

  *

  The attitude of the old Queen inclining her body, extending her two hands, was then suddenly an image of Edwina on the road from Dibrapur holding her hands protectively above the body of the Indian. Flames from the burning motor-car were reflected in the sky where the angelic light pierced bulgy monsoon clouds.

  In this image she had a surrogate for God, a half-way house of intercession, capable perhaps of boosting the weak signals from the rush mat and transmitting them through the crackling overloaded ether which her direct prayers could not penetrate. She knelt with her body upright, facing the writing-table and the picture that pointed the reality of a Christian act, the palms of her hands turned to receive whatever was offered. She exposed her chest well below the gold pendant cross to give the metal room to act as a lightning conductor and sometimes felt it warmed by the reflected light from the burning vehicle; which was a promising beginning. Otherwise everything remained as it had been.

  *

  Once a week she visited the club subscription library for Mabel, seldom for herself who found what Mr Cleghorn had called the book of life sufficiently entertaining and puzzling to keep her occupied without recourse to the print and paper of imaginary or refurbished adventure.

  Lost between the shelves among which she and Edwina would wander she heard a voice say, ‘I’m told the whole trouble is she was infatuated with the Indian. She’d have done anything to save him.’ She recognized the voice of little Mrs Smalley, the station gossip, and then Clarissa’s saying, ‘You can’t know that.’ To which Lucy Smalley replied, ‘It’s what people in Mayapore are saying, according to Tusker, and they have been in a position to judge. They say she was always out with him, holding his hand in public places. And now she’s threatening to say the most dreadful things against the authorities if the men they�
�ve arrested are charged and tried, because he’s one of them. The police officer who made the arrests is almost out of his mind.’

  Barbie emerged armed with a volume of Emerson still open at the page with her thumb on the line, ‘Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history,’ which a moment ago had caused her to catch her breath. She cried out, ‘Of whom are you talking?’

  Not, it seemed, of Edwina, but – Lucy Smalley explained, recovered quickly from the nasty shock of Barbie emerging and bearing down like a Fury – of ‘the Manners girl’, the other victim. ‘You didn’t think we were talking about your friend, surely?’

  Barbie took Emerson home with her. She had not meant to but he was in her hand as she arrived at Mrs Stewart’s desk and was marked out to her with a rise of Mrs Stewart’s eyebrows because Mrs Stewart, a widow from Madras with a literary turn of mind, was more used to receiving from Barbie her interpretations of Mabel’s standing order for something light, which generally turned out to be so easy on the mind and lap that Mabel nodded off over it in her wing chair having pronounced it earlier ‘just right’.

  Presented with Emerson’s essays Mabel said, ‘Oh, I read those as a girl, I don’t think I could bother again.’

  ‘I’ll take it back tomorrow,’ Barbie promised. ‘It was a mistake, or rather absent-mindedness, my attention was taken as it can be all too easily. Well, you know, you know. I am sorry.’

  But Mabel merely smiled and touched Barbie’s arm as she did from time to time as if to make up for all the occasions when she might have failed to let Barbie know she was appreciated.

  Barbie sat at the writing-table, opened the rejected book. ‘If the whole of history is one man,’ she said, ‘it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.’ She closed the book abruptly and made herself busy in the room, opening drawers and rearranging their contents.

  Not taking Emerson back she returned to him daily like a sparrow easily frightened from a promising scattering of crumbs by the slightest noise, with a nagging sense of having more duties than intelligence. It was pretty plain she was not cut out for the philosophical life but through Emerson it impinged on her own like the shadow of a hunched bird of prey patiently observing below it the ritual of survival. The bird should have been an angel.

  She began to feel what she believed Emerson wanted her to feel: that in her own experience lay an explanation not only of history but of the lives of other living people, therefore an explanation of the things that had happened to Edwina and to Miss Manners of whom she had only the vaguest picture, the one that had been commonly shared in Pankot of a reclining figure, in white, in a darkened room. But now it had changed. The girl’s hand was no longer pressed inverted against her forehead but held by another which was brown like the dead teacher’s. The picture shimmered, became fluid. Colours and patterns ran. When Barbie sat at her desk and gazed at the actual picture she was no longer sure of what she saw: Edwina guarding the body, Mabel kneeling to grub out weeds or inclining to gather roses; or herself, Barbie, surrounded by the children she had presumed to bring to God; or Miss Manners in some kind of unacceptable relationship with a man of another race whom she was intent on saving.

  From this there emerged a figure, the figure of an unknown Indian: dead in one aspect, alive in another. And after a while it occurred to her that the unknown Indian was what her life in India had been about. The notion alarmed her. She had not thought of it before in those terms and did not know what to do about it now that she had. She could not very well look for him because she did not know where to do that. Aziz for instance seemed content even in his alternative persona of a man from the hills with a blanket and a secret. He did not strike her as being in distress of any kind.

  But the dead man in the vicinity of the milestone had moved. Overnight there had been a rearrangement of his limbs as if while it was dark he had sat up. And howled. The hills were hunted by jackals. People would not have noticed. But she thought that she would henceforth be able to distinguish the man’s cry from the cries of the animals.

  *

  She began another letter to Edwina.

  ‘September 4th. Why don’t you write Edwina? I need your letter,’ then tore it up and began another sensibly.

  ‘Some people from Mayapore have been here. I didn’t meet them but a woman called Smalley who lives at the little Smith’s Hotel where these people stayed for a couple of days told Clarissa Peplow that according to these visitors whose name I think was Patterson or Pattison you were reported well on the mend and about to be discharged. How thankful this news has made me. I have not rung the hospital again because of the expense and the delay in getting through and then getting only the briefest official answer to the question. But I have written several times. I hope my letters all arrived. The posts have been badly delayed, indeed disrupted. If you are already discharged no doubt the hospital will send this note round to your bungalow. I shall mark the envelope please forward and shall probably send a separate note to you at home. How glad you will be to be there. I hope, hope that you are truly recovered, Edwina.

  ‘Is there a possibility of your making the journey to Pankot? The invitation still stands. Mabel has asked me to emphasize this and also to say that we should keep you free from the prying and the curious. I do trust that you are not too disagreeably involved with the aftermath of that awful business. It is said officially that the country is returning to normal and that now surely is the time for magnanimity. But one hears the unhappiest accounts and most unpleasant remarks. I am, my dear Edwina, a bit concerned for you as a result of something Clarissa said, echoing Lucy Smalley and presumably these Patterson Pattison people. It would be monstrous if after all you have been through you were in the least criticized for stating that you could not either describe or recognize individuals among that wicked mob. It must have been a nightmare and after a nightmare the details are often mercifully forgotten. Only those with vengeful natures would wish to see you drag some detail back into the light, one upon which they could then proceed to act over-righteously perhaps and in all likelihood unjustly. No doubt you feel as I do that God will punish and perhaps has already punished. As Clarissa says, some of the men who hurt you and killed the teacher may since have been killed themselves in the rioting. Divine retribution!’

  Here Barbie’s pen hesitated as if of its own accord and she could not continue. Divine retribution was all very well. It did not help the unknown Indian who seemed this morning to be crying out harder but still soundlessly, begging for justice and not alleviation. She found it difficult to distinguish between the teacher who died in the attack on Edwina and the Indian who was supposed to have had Miss Manners infatuated with him. Lucy Smalley’s opinion was that the Indian boy Miss Manners thought she was in love with must have been some kind of hypnotist. But perhaps love was a form of hypnosis anyway. Had not Barbie been mesmerized herself years and years ago?

  My life, she thought, has become extraordinarily complicated. There is more than one of me and one, I’m not sure which, has a serious duty to perform. ‘It seems perfectly dreadful (she wrote suddenly, allowing the Waterman pen its now free-flowing head) how within the space of a few weeks poor Daphne Manners has become “that Manners girl”.’ And she continued for a page or two becoming while she did so a projection of that poor misused creature who it was said was not frail and pretty after all but rather large and ungainly and in need of spectacles, so that the sympathetic transference of Barbie to Daphne and back again was easier to make than it would have been had the idea of Miss Manners as frail, ethereal and beautiful in victim’s white turned out to be accurate.

  Instead here she was according to reports from people who had been in a position to know, in a rather grubby dress to suit the circumstances arising from her extraordinary behaviour, throwing up blinds, peering short-sightedly and threatening to create a scene, standing in shafts of sunlight which were alive with particl
es of dust. Barbie understood this image better than the other.

  Miss Manners said the men arrested were the wrong men. Barbie wondered how that could be but was impressed by the reported strenuousness of Miss Manners’s insistence which everyone else seemed to feel outraged by, just as they were ready to be outraged by Edwina’s insistence that she had no contribution to make to the identification of a few men in a large crowd. In those circumstances they all looked alike anyway in their murky dhotis and Gandhi caps and filthy turbans. And the smell. Suffering, sweating, stinking, violent humanity. It was the background against which you had to visualize Jesus working. People did not remember this important thing about His presence. Edwina did. Did Miss Manners? Or was she only intent on confusing the police to save her lover? Apparently she kept changing her story. According to the Pattersons she had threatened to say that if the six youths who included her lover were charged and tried for rape she would stand up and say that the men who assaulted her could just as easily have been British soldiers with their faces blacked.

  In that threat, that outburst, which had scandalized her countrymen, Barbie detected what she thought of as the girl’s despair and was sorry for her. She would have liked to take Miss Manners in her arms and comfort her. She was not convinced though that Miss Manners was telling the whole truth so she was also sorry for the police officer who had arrested the men and was convinced of their guilt. It was said by the Patterson Pattisons that the police officer had warned Miss Manners about her association with this particular Indian who was handsome if you liked that sort of thing and educated, so he claimed, in England but certainly beyond his real station, and had already been questioned over something to do with political affiliations. On the face of it, Barbie saw, the Indian was as likely to be guilty as not, leading Miss Manners on, laughing at her behind her back as Lucy Smalley suggested, and planning to attack her in the dark on the way home from one of her errands of mercy, in the company of five of his westernized friends, student-types, who came at her from behind, dragged her off her bicycle into the Bibighar Gardens, covered her head with her own raincape, raped her and left her to stagger home in pain, in torment, totally disorientated.