The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet)

by Paul Scott

  The word irrelevant came out slightly blurred and Major Mackay lost something of his grip on his audience. But with his next sentence he regained and hardened it.

  ‘She’s pregnant, you know. She’s gone back to R’l’Pindi pregnant. People say she’ll get an abortion. Myself, I doubt it. I concentrate on the proposition that she and Kumar were in love, still are, he in clink and she pregnant in R’l’Pindi. Having what she thinks is his child. Thinks, hopes or knows. You can’t tell. Perhaps she can’t either in the way women think they can. The old intuition.’

  A man with a red face and sparse hair, a civilian asked, ‘What’s your theory, Major Mackay?’

  ‘Well yes I have a theory. Glad you asked. My theory’s this. If you love and marriage isn’t on or isn’t easy sooner or later you get round to poking, to put it crudely. My theory is Miss Manners and this Kumar fellow poked in the Bibighar either that night for the first time or that night for the umpteenth but that that night whatever teenth time it was these so-called friends of his who’d not only guessed he was poking her but had found out where, were all lined up waiting for the show to begin and when it was over jumped on him, sat on him and then–’

  Major Mackay made an arm.

  ‘Then why didn’t Miss Manners say so?’

  ‘Say what? That she and Mr Kumar had been making love at night in a derelict garden doing no harm to anyone when up come these friends of his and say, Okay Hari, move over?’

  ‘Why not? From all accounts she’s not the easily embarrassed type. And if what you suggest is true and she and this journalist fellow had made a clean breast of it that part of it might have been kept dark and the other fellows just charged and sentenced.’

  ‘And do you think any of them would have let Kumar get away with that? They’d have implicated him like a shot. They’d have said it was Kumar’s idea, to share her.’

  ‘Well wasn’t it? The police thought so.’

  ‘Which is where you come back to my proposition. If it had been like that I don’t care what kind of act he put up she’d have known and she’d have stopped being in love with him. If you stick to my proposition that they were in love, are in love, everything’s as clear as daylight. These so-called friends of his jumped him and beat him up. She may not have seen who they were. If not he told her afterwards and told her what they’d threatened, that they’d accuse him of arranging it if there was any trouble. Well, she wasn’t a bloody fool. Everybody in Mayapore knew she’d been going out with him. Neither of them was popular as a result. He wouldn’t have stood a chance however much she swore his innocence. So they cooked up a story that they hadn’t seen each other for days and they damned well stuck to it, right through. What she hadn’t reckoned with was finding when she got home that Lady Chatterjee had already reported her missing to the DSP. It was the night the balloon was expected to go up and she hadn’t come home at the usual time. She wasn’t at the club or at any of old Lady C’s friends and the woman was pretty worried. And when she got home there wasn’t any disguising what had happened. Her clothes were torn and she was in a state. Lady C had a woman doctor from the Purdah hospital up to the house in a brace of shakes. Maybe Miss Manners panicked. But she said she’d been assaulted by a gang of men and that was the situation the DSP found when he called at the house. He had no time for Hari Kumar. He’d had his eye on him. He’d warned Miss Manners about associating with a fellow like that. So young Kumar’s the first chap the DSP thinks of. He hares off to the Bibighar, finds Kumar’s pals drinking in a hut not far away, arrests them and hares off to Kumar’s house and finds him bathing cuts and bruises on his face, the sort a fellow might get if he attacked a girl who fought back. What other evidence did he need? He jumped to the conclusion most people would. And he was right in my opinion except in this one case, the case of Mr Kumar who never did explain how his face got like that and just went on insisting as she did that they hadn’t seen each other since the night they visited a temple.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘Oh they played dumb too. They pretended they’d spent the whole evening drinking in the hut. They never changed their story but if Hari Kumar had split on them they’d have taken him with them. There was a pretty odd thing happened about her bicycle. The one she was supposed to be dragged off. First the police said it was found outside Kumar’s house and then the DSP said no that was wrong it had been in the Bibighar Gardens near the scene of the rape and put in the police truck that went to get Kumar, and a sub-inspector who came on the scene late thought one of the constables had found it in the ditch outside the house and put that down in a report. Indians said the DSP planted the bike himself and then realized it looked too bloody obvious. My own theory is that these other five took the bike from the Gardens and stuck it outside Kumar’s place and that the DSP didn’t find Kumar’s or any of their fingerprints on it because they’d wiped it clean, and guessed they’d been trying to incriminate him alone. It’s just the sort of crazy thing boys like that would do, forgetting that if Kumar was incriminated they wouldn’t stand a chance themselves.’

  ‘But that would mean this police chap withheld vital evidence.’

  ‘Messy evidence. Rigged evidence. Without Kumar’s prints on the handlebars or the saddle the sort of evidence he didn’t want. He wanted Kumar. A jury would have been very wary about the girl’s bike being found outside Kumar’s house even if wiped clean of fingerprints. I don’t think he was very interested in the other fellows. Whenever people talked to him about the case Kumar’s was the only name he ever mentioned. I think he disliked the chap because of the kind of boy he is. First-rate British public-school education, but black as your hat and going out with an English girl, and politically unreliable.’

  ‘Was he politically unreliable?’

  ‘A young educated Indian? It’s likely, isn’t it? On the other hand the paper he worked for was Indian-owned but pro-British. Not that that means anything. The police must have had enough on all six for the civil to decide to lock them up without trial as political detenus when the rape charge couldn’t be got to stick, but everyone knows that locking them up like that was nothing more than a face-saver. She wasn’t able to stop that. But by God she stopped the charges and she stopped the trial. The assistant commissioner was scared stiff about what she might come out with. They hadn’t a hope in hell of bringing the beggars into court with Miss Manners as the only witness for the prosecution ready to swear blind that the fellows who raped her were peasants, and saying God knows what else. You have to admire her. Well. You do if you accept my proposition that Kumar had her but didn’t rape her and that they’re both bloody well in love.’

  ‘Did the DSP know her well?’

  ‘In a place like that everybody knows everybody as likely as not. If you mean was he sweet on her himself I can’t answer. He wasn’t married and plain as they say she was she’d have been a good catch for a man like him, but he struck me as a pretty cold fish. Thought of nothing but his job, I’d say. Not a sociable character. Abstemious. Never heard him make a joke. Old Reid liked him though, but then Reid always admired a man for his guts first. Anything else came a poor second. Well, there it is. That’s my theory. Who else is thirsty?’

  No one was. The theory was peculiarly unacceptable. An hour later when the bar had been closed for some time Major Mackay was lifted off his stool by three servants and carried through to the room he occupied, undressed and tucked into bed. He smiled in his sleep. With that, the troubles could be said to have come to a happy end.

  *

  Barbie got up from the rush mat, buttoned the high-necked nightgown and shivered. It was cold enough now to have the electric fire on in the bedroom but she had begun to explore the by-ways of self-mortification and had asked Aziz not to switch it on as he did Mabel’s an hour before bedtime. She climbed chilled into bed, turned the lamp off and lay for a while blowing dandelion clocks, each one as useless as the last. The grey-white tufts wafted away almost before her breath rea
ched them, leaving her to hold a limp sappy stalk. And tonight the alternative, smelling roses, didn’t work either. They were of a scentless variety and on the turn, bulbous seedboxes with a few overblown petals so precariously attached she hardly dared to touch them. She counted sheep but they were stubborn and the gate too high.

  She counted children. They submitted to her calculations with expressions of ill-concealed dislike of such regimentation. She called the roll and crossed names out with a blue crayon. When all the names were crossed out one child remained uncalled: the little Indian girl to whom the blue crayon had belonged. She could not remember the little girl’s name. The little girl couldn’t remember it either and accused her silently of depriving her both of name and crayon. The little girl would not go away until her name was called. It was an impasse. We are stuck with each other, Barbie said, which is absurd because you have Krishna and I have Jesus. We are separately catered for. Let’s shake hands and call it a day. But the little girl had her hands behind her back and kept them there.

  Hold it higher, her mother said, so she held the porcupine higher and counted pins going into the place where the neck and shoulders had to be altered. Altared. Her mother was sticking the pins in too deep. Little beads of blood appeared like drops of red sweat on the white satin. The bride continued to smile like the Spartan boy with the stolen fox under his shirt. Observe, her mother said, the advantages of a strict upbringing in a family of rank.

  Her father was singing one of his funny songs. I’ve seen a deal of gaiety throughout my noisy life. Barbie sang it to her mother. Stop that vulgarity, her mother said. So she sang alone under her breath but found she had forgotten everything except the first line. The stairs were always dark and smelt of damp and gas jets and old linoleum. The paper on the walls was brown and patchy. She sang the first line of the vulgar song over and over going up the stairs but still under her breath because the stairs frightened her. She counted the stairs but there had only ever been twenty of them including the landing floor. Twenty stairs were not enough to send her to sleep.

  She switched on the lamp. Slowly she was in India again and as she returned to India she became homesick, ridiculously, unaccountably, inexpressibly homesick. The old chaukidar would be asleep on the front porch huddled in his blanket like a tired shepherd. She felt disturbed and then, hearing the weird calling of the jackal packs, lost in an immense area of experience, the whole area that separated her from childhood and young womanhood. She thought of it as an area because the separation seemed to be in space, not in time.

  She sat up wrapped in her own arms. The light from the bedside lamp did not reach the farther walls but the glass that protected the picture gleamed faintly. Behind the glass there was nothing. The picture had gone out.

  She thought: I have gone out, Thou hast gone out, He she or it has gone out.

  She reached for Emerson who had not gone out but had been renewed and renewed to Mrs Stewart’s perplexity.

  ‘Each new law and political movement has meaning for you,’ Barbie read and was convinced that this might be so because Emerson told her. ‘Stand before each of its tablets and say, “Here is one of my coverings. Under this fantastic, or odious, or graceful mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.” This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves.’

  She put Emerson aside and picked up her pocket dictionary. Proteus. Changing or inconstant person or thing. Amoeba. Kinds of bacteria. She laid aside the dictionary and recovered Emerson from the bed-cover. She had lost the place but with Emerson that never seemed to matter.

  ‘The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society, or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Everything tends in a most wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit at home with might and main, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the governments of the world . . . ’

  Suddenly she was aware of the intense stillness of Rose Cottage. Intense stillness and a faint odour as of something singed. She put Emerson away, got out of bed, put on her slippers and her long blue dressing-gown. She wondered whether Mabel had remembered to turn her fire off, whether something was in danger of scorching or bursting into flames.

  She left her door open so that she could see her way across the hall. There was a slit of light under Mabel’s door. She hesitated. The smell had gone. She went to the door and tapped very gently. She got no answer. She tapped again and said, Mabel. She would have gone back to bed because she realized how silly it was to expect a deaf person to hear and she did not want to open the door and frighten her. But potential alarm was exerting its hollow fascination. She opened Mabel’s door until she had a gap wide enough to admit her head and one shoulder.

  Mabel was asleep propped on the pillows. The light was still on. Mabel’s head had fallen to one side and her reading glasses were low down on her nose and looked as if they might come adrift and get broken and cause damage to her eyes and face. A book was open on her lap. The hand that had held it lay inert.

  The fire was off. Barbie went to the bedside. She took the book away, placed it on the table with its tasselled marker between the pages at which it had been open. Next, she very carefully removed the dangerous spectacles, returned them to the leather case. She settled the pillows, drew the sheet and blankets farther up. She wanted to cover Mabel’s hands but decided not to in case she woke her up. She seemed to have disturbed her slightly as it was. A sigh came. And then a sound in the back of the throat almost like something being said.

  Barbie looked down at her friend. Very briefly she had a ridiculous idea that she didn’t like her. At the same time she knew that she loved her. And she knew that Mabel was fond of her in spite of not appearing to be fond of anyone much. It was a curious relationship, like one between two people who hadn’t yet met but who would love each other when they did. Mabel had come closer to meeting her than she had come to meeting Mabel. After three years Barbie still knew almost nothing about her friend but even if one discounted facts not taken in because of deafness Mabel must now know almost everything about Barbie because Barbie had told her over and over. Telling Mabel things was part of the job of looking after her, almost more important than doing things to absolve her from household cares and responsibilities. Without the actuality of Barbie’s voice incessantly saying things Barbie thought that Mabel would not have appreciated so much the silence in which she seemed to exist. The only thing Barbie had never told her about was her secret sorrow. When she looked at Mabel as she was doing now she believed Mabel knew about it anyway and had known from the beginning.

  She thought: In a way my secret sorrow is Mabel. I don’t know how much of me gets through. I’m rather like a wave dashing against a rock, the sounds I make are just like that. There is Mabel, there is the rock, there is God. They are the same to all intents and purposes.

  Mabel stirred but did not wake. How old she looked in bed, immensely old. Barbie put out her hand to switch off the lamp. The old woman made that noise in her throat again as if disturbed by the shadow of Barbie’s arm. She made it again. She was muttering but the sound came from her throat because her lips were too far gone in the drug of each day’s little death to come together properly. She muttered for several seconds then paused and then said something which caused Barbie to stand alert and undecided with her finger and thumb on the little ebony key-switch of the old-fashioned brass table lamp, willing the echo of the sound to pause too before continuing on its flight into a state of being beyond recall. She caught the rhythm back first and then the vowel sounds, then the consonants. A name, a woman’s name, Gilliam Waller.

  She watched Mabel’s face but could not tell anything from it. There was no more muttering. Mabel had reached wherever she had been going. Beyond Gilliam Waller she had found the dark of dreamless sle
ep.

  *

  TRAGIC DEATH OF ENGLISH MISSIONARY

  Ranpur, October 29th, 1942

  The death is reported in Mayapore two days ago of Miss Edwina Crane, superintendent of the district’s Protestant Mission Schools who was roughly handled by a mob during the August riots and narrowly escaped with her life when another teacher, Mr D. R. Chaudhuri, was murdered. Police have so far been unable to apprehend their attackers.

  At an inquest held yesterday in Mayapore a statement obtained from Miss Crane’s servant was submitted by the police. According to this man his mistress sent him to the bazaar at 3.45 pm to collect a package from the chemist. Since her return from hospital he had frequently gone on such errands. On this occasion however the chemist said he knew nothing of a prescription for Miss Crane. The servant then returned home.

  Reaching there he smelt burning and saw smoke. A shed in the compound was a mass of flames and servants from neighbouring houses were attempting to extinguish it. One of these men called out that Miss Crane was in the shed.

  The police submitted a statement from this other man. Shortly before 4 pm he had seen a woman in a white saree in the compound of the mission superintendent’s bungalow. Thinking it was someone who had no business there he challenged her. She motioned him to go away. He observed that the woman in the white saree was Miss Crane. Neither he nor her own servant had ever seen her adopt this mode of dress. He watched her go into the shed and then returned to his work. Shortly afterwards he smelt smoke and noticed that the shed was on fire.

  The police also submitted a note found in Miss Crane’s study addressed to the Coroner. An official in Miss Crane’s Mission confirmed that it was in her handwriting. The note which was not read out at the inquest was accepted by the police as satisfactory evidence of Miss Crane’s determination to take her own life.

  Dr Jayaprakash, consultant physician at the Begum Mumtez Zaidkhan Purdah hospital and health officer to the mission schools stated that he had attended Miss Crane for some years. Normally in excellent health she had not regained it since the attack on her in August. After her discharge from hospital he prescribed tonics and advised her to take a holiday. On his last visit about a week before her tragic death she told him she had decided to retire from the mission.