The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet)

by Paul Scott

  The prospect of her saying she would suddenly looked very likely to him because it would bring his world in ruins about his head; and there on that July evening in the tin tub Teddie – one may fancy – could not rid himself of the idea that he might be turning out to be the sort of man around whom things collapsed, not noisily but with a sort of slithering, inexorable, folding-in and -over movement. He scrubbed his back vigorously to kill this notion but stopped when he found that in getting rid of it he had got hold of another. The friction of the bristles was making him feel randy. This feeling was persistent. It continued after he had put the brush down. It had in fact been pretty persistent on and off for some time, ever since he had set his heart on getting married.

  Teddie was a firm believer in cold water. He yelled for the absent bhishti. Unexpectedly the old boy staggered in with two full cans. Teddie camouflaged himself with a sponge, swore at the bhishti for not having been available earlier and told him to leave the cans near the tub. Alone, Teddie stood and dowsed himself. There was no significant change. In fact the cold water had a setting-up effect. He shut his eyes and said, ‘Oh, Christ’, stepped on to the duckboard and wrestled himself dry with a towel.

  *

  Susan was an absolute brick. Kissing him in front of Mildred and Sarah she had said, ‘Congratulations’, as if being a G3(O) in a new division was something pretty terrific. For a while he felt it was. On their way to the cinema he had an ugly but exciting thought about the journey home. He felt heroic and felt that she felt he was heroic. He didn’t understand the film but became physically alert each time the girl with the enormous tits got manhandled which was every few minutes. At the end of one scene there was almost nothing left of her dress. There hadn’t been much of it at the start. The other ranks down in the body of the hall whistled and stamped. The film ended with her disappointingly fully-clothed kissing the fellow with the jaw who was lying on the steps of a church riddled with bullets. For some reason it was also snowing.

  In the tonga Teddie held Susan’s hand – the ungloved one – and surprisingly she let him and even seemed to want it. His thoughts stopped functioning in anything like a logical order. Normally when they were alone the chaste kisses and affectionate gestures Susan allowed in public were somehow made difficult as if she disapproved of what they might lead to.

  ‘We could have coffee at the chummery,’ Teddie said.

  ‘Aren’t we going to the Chinese?’

  ‘I mean after.’

  ‘Oh,’ Susan said. Then: ‘Yes, we could.’

  Like that. Teddie’s neck prickled. They had never been in the chummery alone. His hand and hers were clammy. He did not dare squeeze in case it frightened her. His heart was pumping nastily. It took only two minutes to get from the cinema fore court to the restaurant. All the bazaar shops were open and brightly lit by electric bulbs or naphtha lamps. The street was full of British Other Ranks. Some were lounging against the pillars of the arcade in a slovenly manner with their hands significantly in their trouser pockets talking to Eurasian girls in white high-heeled shoes. In one shop a radio played Indian film music. The tonga stopped outside the restaurant.

  Teddie got down. Susan’s face was coloured faintly by the lights. She looked marvellous. But she wasn’t looking happy.

  ‘Teddie, I’m not awfully hungry.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He climbed back in. A muscle in his left cheek twitched of its own accord.

  ‘Just coffee then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He twisted round and spoke to the wallah. The tonga was turned in the street, causing trouble to other vehicles. The wallahs shouted at each other. For a while all the tongas were stationary. The wallahs waved their arms. Teddie felt put out because he and Susan were at the storm centre. He hated scenes but in any case this one was like having everything advertised.

  He hit the wallah on the shoulder and told him to get moving.

  The wallah obeyed but continued to exchange insults with each of the wallahs in the line of tongas whose free passage he had blocked. And the driver of the tonga immediately behind their own, coming in their wake, shouted insults too, presumably at their driver but in effect at them. The damned fellow was grinning too, as if he knew.

  They did not hold hands. When the tonga left the lighted area they continued not holding them. There were puddles at intervals reflecting the infrequent street lamps. Between lamps the night was promisingly dark and humid. On other occasions when he had invited her to the chummery she had always managed to work the conversation round to the question of who else would be there before accepting. It was becoming clearer and clearer to him that tonight she had no intention of asking and that she anticipated finding exactly what she would find: nobody. Tony Bishop was dining at Flagstaff House. Bruce Mackay, the engineer, was down in Ranpur, and Bungo Barnes, the gunner, had gone round to see the QA sister, Gentleman’s Relish. He would not be back until the small hours. Teddie had seen Gentleman’s Relish only once. Her other name was Thelma and he thought her extremely unattractive and alarmingly common for a girl who ranked as an officer. Since Bungo had a reputation for never wasting time on a girl who – as he put it – didn’t, Teddie assumed that Gentleman’s Relish did, and more often than seemed reasonable because Bungo had been out every night for two weeks and looked washed out at breakfast. Where they did it he had no idea. He disapproved of Bungo Barnes. He also envied him.

  When they reached the chummery he envied Bungo more than ever because he knew that the whole thing was hopeless. Susan wasn’t that kind of girl. Her trim little body was protected by some sort of absolute statement about its virginity this side of the altar. She might wish otherwise but that was how it was for her, for him. As usual lights were on in the porch, entrance-lobby and living-room. Prabhu, Bungo Barnes’s equally lascivious servant, came out pander-like from the dining-room to see what was happening.

  ‘Oh, you’re duty-wallah are you, Prabhu? We’d like coffee.’

  ‘May I change my mind and have tea?’ Susan asked. She stood in front of the screened fireplace dealing with her gloves and handbag in that stunning way girls had.

  ‘Anything you want, old thing,’ Teddie said. ‘Matter of fact I thought I’d have a peg. Would you prefer that?’

  ‘No, tea is what I’d like. I’ve got rather a head.’

  ‘Oh, Lord, you’d better have an aspirin.’

  ‘No, I don’t want an aspirin, Teddie. Just tea.’

  ‘Strong or weak?’

  ‘Just as it comes.’

  ‘It usually comes like dishwater in this place.’ He told Prabhu to bring tea but make sure that the water boiled.

  ‘I say, do sit down or something.’

  ‘I will in a minute.’

  They stood, apart, smiling at each other. The room had always struck Teddie as a bit chintzy for an all-male establishment. He thought it awfully nice tonight because she was in it. Her dress had white and navy-blue flowers on it.

  ‘I say is that new?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s awfully nice.’

  He had not noticed it at the grace and favour because he’d been worried about how Susan would take the news. After that it had been dark most of the time. He reached out, stroked her shoulder. Her flesh was warm and cushiony under the thin silky material. The neck of the dress was cut square. He could just see the beginning of the division between her breasts. The skin was dotted with tiny little freckles. Her arms were freckled too. Delightfully. He slid his hand down the arm to the soft flesh on the inner side of the elbow.

  He said, ‘It’s rotten going away, leaving you.’

  ‘I know.’

  Since he touched her shoulder she had not looked at him. Her eyelashes were wonderfully long. The tips curled up. There were a few freckles near the bridge of her nose. He felt tremendously moved and protective. Her beauty was so simple, so artless. She glowed with health. The freckles came out because she was always in the sunshine. She was made for a clea
n, healthy, simple and loving life. He clutched her suddenly, pressing her to him. Her hair smelt sweet. It tickled. He kissed her forehead through it. She was awfully tensed up. Her whole body seemed to be a skull. If he kissed and kissed her she would melt. Through their clothes their bodies would flow into each other. He kissed her again and again until he had the most shamefully majestic erection. He didn’t care. She was still protected by that absolute statement. The erection was a statement too and just as absolute but in a negative way.

  ‘Su, I love you so much.’ He clasped her head, kissed her closed lids. Soft, marvellous, living warmth. The melting would begin here. ‘So much, honestly, honestly.’

  He heard the tea-things clunking like monks’ sandals and broke away, turned his back on her and the approaching Prabhu and walked, sweetly bitterly crippled, to the drinks cabinet. When he heard the tray set down he said without looking, ‘Thank you, Prabhu. Just leave it, will you.’ He opened a bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured a stiff measure. His eyes felt hot and hollow. His limbs were steady but felt as if they were not. He wasn’t sure if there was enough blood in the soles of his feet. His knees were awkwardly placed in his legs, a shade out of true. He didn’t really want soda but wasn’t yet ready to face around to things so popped a bottle and poured a long one. He thought therapeutically about liquor; of what it could do to your liver. His mother’s second husband, Hunter, couldn’t have had any liver left.

  When he came away from the cabinet Susan was sitting on one of the chintzy chairs staring at the tea-tray which Prabhu had put down on an ornate and untrustworthy mother-of-pearl encrusted table. It was maddening how easy it was to get worked up, how difficult to do anything about it if you cared about things like marriage and doing right by each other. She looked pretty pale. He hadn’t yet asked her if she’d prefer to be released from their promise and come to an understanding that they weren’t actually bound to each other while he was away; and now didn’t dare, not because she might jump at the chance but because it would be a damned insult after the way he’d just pressed up against her. When she suddenly reached for the teapot, using both hands, the little cluster of engagement diamonds glittered balefully. The line between self-sacrifice and acting like an unspeakable cad seemed perilously thin.

  He sat on the sofa at the end near her chair and watched her perform her womanly little tasks. A lifetime of tea-trays stretched ahead of them. Or might. With luck. He felt a draught as of a premonition that he’d drawn a dud chit out of luck’s hat and had been given Susan either briefly to make up for it or to give him a sniff of what he was going to miss. He was on the point of declaring an intention to talk to Dick Rankin in the morning about pulling strings to keep him in Pankot when to his great relief (because the intention was a callow quivering hand with a sleek shiny white feather in it) Susan said:

  ‘Of course it was bound to happen, this proper job I mean. I hoped it wouldn’t happen so soon which was silly of me, but it doesn’t make any difference does it?’

  ‘Difference?’

  ‘Difference to us.’

  ‘What difference could it make?’

  ‘I thought you might think we should wait, not make definite plans. Settle for a long engagement.’

  ‘Do you think we should?’

  She glanced into the pot to check how full it was. ‘No,’ she said, ‘if necessary I think we should speed things up.’

  She raised the cup to her lips and Teddie raised his glass. They were both trembling. Teddie couldn’t think why but it seemed touching and very serious. Just then they heard a car on the gravel and in a moment Tony Bishop came in looking done up. The Rankins had been entertaining visiting top brass but Tony had been able to mention Teddie’s posting-order. General Rankin said Teddie’s new commander was a fire-eater by all accounts, a youngish man with a reputation for unorthodoxy.

  Teddie groaned. ‘I suppose I’d better talk to the movement people first thing tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no need, it’s all arranged. Mirat was on the blower asking where you’d got to. They said to get you down to Ranpur tomorrow and out to the airfield at Ranagunj and they’ll fly you down to Mirat tomorrow night.’

  ‘Fly? But I’ve never flown in my life! Supposing I’m sick?’

  ‘I think you’ll have to get used to it. Your new general’s tremendously keen on his officers flying whenever they can. He’s air mad.’

  ‘What about my kit? Aren’t they awfully strict about weight?’

  ‘Pretty strict. You’d better go as light as you can and I’ll send your trunk on directly you tell me to.’

  ‘What about Allah Din?’

  ‘Sorry, no personal servants. We’ll get him back to Muzzafirabad.’

  ‘What am I going to do without Allah Din?’

  ‘You’ll probably share an orderly. I’m afraid you’re in for a rather Spartan existence.’

  ‘It’s indecent. I mean hang it all Mirat’s only another military station. We might be there for months. It’s not like buzzing off to the Arakan.’

  He felt hollow again and indignant. The new general probably had a text on the wall saying: Do it Yesterday. This turned out not far from the case. Actually it said: Do it Now.

  He took Susan home in the car which Bishop had been using to ferry the Rankins’ guests and had efficiently kept waiting as soon as he saw a tonga at the chummery and guessed whose it was. Unlike the tonga-wallah, who complained at being deprived of the fare back to the grace and favour, the lance-naik driver was quite happy with the arrangement. He was obviously one of those Indians who was tireless when behind a wheel and didn’t care how late he worked so long as an officer signed for the journey. Teddie and Susan sat in back-seat comfort. They held hands. Teddie had stopped feeling randy and started to feel emotional but chipper too because they were together in the same emotional situation: last night out for some time to come, last few minutes, probably, of being alone together.

  ‘It might be fun, flying,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it might.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what would be.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Flying back, for the wedding.’

  ‘You’ll tell them directly you get there, won’t you?’

  Practical Susan!

  ‘Of course. I’ll speak to the Gee One first thing.’

  ‘What will happen if the division’s going away almost at once?’

  ‘It’s pretty unlikely. If we do it’ll be for working-up. Anyway, they’d always give an officer leave to get married. Don’t worry.’

  ‘I’ll try not to.’

  He cuddled her. She was still very tense. But what a girl! No scene, no shilly-shallying. Just tremendous pluck and determination. As the car turned into Rifle Range road a cold night breeze blew in through the lowered window from the open spaces of the Pankot Rifles lines. It flirted a lock of her hair against his cheek. Behind the southern ridge of the hills the sky was suddenly illuminated. Down on the plains the monsoon was loose like an electric beast.

  His uncle in Shropshire always said that a thunderstorm made the milk go off in the pantry. It occurred to him that his uncle was rather a lonely sort of chap being able to notice things like that.

  III

  The other, empty, bed in Teddie’s room had begun to make its presence felt. A plain wooden charpoy like his own, its mosquito net, folded up, was taped to the four bamboo poles tied to its legs. Three biscuit mattresses and a ticking pillow were piled at its head. Otherwise the bed was bare to the cords, awaiting an occupant.

  In Mirat the rain was incessant. Violent storms were nightly visitors. They woke Teddie up. The empty bed seemed lit by St Elmo’s fire; it rode the night rock-firm, halfship, half-catafalque. In the peaceful early mornings its message was simpler but still to be reckoned with.

  Ten nights after his arrival the electric beast lay quiet and he enjoyed uninterrupted sleep but woke before the orderly Hosain came in with the chota hazri. His eyes recorded the fact that th
e other bed was fully shrouded by its mosquito net several seconds before this struck him as new. He raised his head from the pillow and stared through the mesh of his own net. The other bed was occupied. He raised the net. How awfully odd. He thought back over his sleep and dreams but could recall nothing which the presence of the recumbent figure explained. His sleep had been wholly undisturbed. It was as if the figure had slowly materialized during the night and had now reached a stage of total conviction about itself and its surroundings. Teddie frowned. He was unused to thinking in imaginative terms. He glanced towards the window.

  His own clothes were in their usual place: jacket thrown carelessly over a chair back, trousers on the seat, underclothes on the floor. The other chair held clothes too but these were neatly arranged. Nearby stood a large leather suitcase and a bedroll which had obviously been opened to remove sheets and pyjamas then rolled up again but left unstrapped. The chap couldn’t have done all that in the dark. And he must have had an orderly to help him, if not young Hosain.

  Teddie reached for his slippers, automatically tapped them by the heels on the floor to dislodge any lurking scorpion gone into hiding during the night, set them side by side, swung his legs out and slipped his feet into them. The bed creaked. The other chap must have moved like a cat. Obviously a considerate sort of fellow. Teddie grabbed his robe. The humidity was high. The ceiling fan was whispering round at its lowest number of revs a minute. He clicked the dial a couple of notches higher and was rewarded by a faint and regular blowing on his forehead. Leaving the switchboard and going to stand under the fan he inspected his new companion’s jacket. Captain’s rank. Punjab Regiment. But a green armband hung over the chair back. Intelligence. Scholarly sort of fellow probably; not a real Punjab officer at all. The uniform and the pips looked new. The luggage looked very old though. Teddie twisted his head to find a name on it. The bedroll was set in such a way that any stencilled name on the canvas cover was hidden from view. The suitcase was more revealing. But initials only. R.M. There was no tin trunk. Like himself, RM had travelled to Mirat light. By what method though?