The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet)

by Paul Scott

  ‘I don’t think Aunt Fenny knows any mission people. I’ll try to write though.’

  Barbie began to tell her about the mission headquarters in Calcutta but as she did so she tuned out of her voice and into the soundless echo of the white room.

  There is a letter in my handbag from Colonel Trehearne, the echo announced for her. The walls shone with an extra purity as if they had absorbed the simplicity of Colonel Trehearne’s kindness and the clarity of Clarissa’s eyes. There was a letter for you, Barbie, Clarissa had said standing by the bedside like a caryatid supporting the weight of a celestial esteem which might have weighed a lesser person down. I brought it with me. On the back of the envelope there was an engraving in shiny blue ink of the Pankot insignia. My Dear Miss Batchelor. Two huge epergnes floated across the room. Empty. Awaiting a cargo of apostles. ‘There is your sou’wester too,’ Clarissa said, ‘but I didn’t bring it. Captain Coley found it in his driveway.’ ‘They were out,’ Barbie whispered. ‘They?’ ‘He and his servant.’ Clarissa did not ask why Barbie should visit Captain Coley. Probably she knew from Colonel Trehearne. But spoons were not mentioned by either of them.

  The spoons and the note to Captain Coley must still be in her room at the rectory bungalow locked in the drawer of the writing-table where she had put them after getting home soaked. ‘It was kind of Captain Coley to return my hat,’ she said. Clarissa said, ‘Why should he not? Your name is in it.’ Enclosed by white walls she was aware of risk: her own, not Coley’s, not Mildred’s. The return of the sou’wester had been a master-stroke. She would never again be able to put it on her head without feeling the pressure of Mildred’s contempt. They had seen the significance of the sou’wester and coupled it with the mystery of the missing spoons. They must have known they had not been alone. Coley might care. Mildred did not.

  ‘I must go now, Barbie,’ Sarah was saying. ‘Is there anything you want?’ She shook her head, thinking: I want you to help me find Lady Manners so that I can give her the spoons as a present for the child. I want us to sit together in St John’s and wait for her and for you to say, Lady Manners, this is my friend Barbara Batchelor, a holy woman from the missions. Or to go with me into the region of West Hill where the rich Indians from Ranpur have summer houses in which they live for a few months of the year without being bothered by us or with us and are seldom seen in the bazaar, having their own sources or sending servants into ours for the products of the West. We could go into West Hill (curiously named) and search and ask. But you are going to Calcutta. And in any case haven’t met her after all, it seems. Or have you? This time you didn’t comment.

  ‘Good-bye, Barbie.’

  ‘Good-bye, Sarah.’

  The girl bent and kissed her. Barbie put up her arms. Sarah submitted to the embrace. Then she rearranged the blankets.

  ‘Shall I wheel you back to the balcony?’

  ‘Please. Then I can watch you go down the path.’

  ‘I don’t go that way, Barbie, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Is Captain Beauvais waiting for you with a car?’

  ‘No. I’m getting a tonga.’

  ‘Oh, but I was forgetting. Clarissa told me Captain Beauvais has gone.’

  ‘Yes, and now I must.’

  She felt the girl’s head close to her own again and breath coming against her cheek as though she were an old yellow candle being blown out very gently. Some time later she was surprised to see the girl on the tarmac pathway, having walked out of her way to wave, and waving, and then coming back towards the building to follow the path round to the front where a tonga would take her on the first stage of the long journey to Calcutta.

  She looked at the familiar panorama and after a while pulled the blanket up to her throat and tucked her chin in. The sun dipped below the overhanging roof of the balcony and shone through her eyelids. The little Anglo-Indian nurse had never left her on the balcony so long. Perhaps she had forgotten her.

  She pictured herself abandoned there, until dark, and beyond; for many days, through the changes of season, from one decade to another, while the building slowly crumbled round her, leaving her isolated, high up on a pillar of jagged but stubborn masonry, enthroned, wrapped in the scarlet blanket, with a clear view across the uninhabited valley to the ruins of the church of St John.

  III

  Isobel Rankin’s generosity to Mildred in allowing her to move into Flagstaff House and close Rose Cottage did not escape criticism. Lucy Smalley, more or less indistinguishable nowadays from the potted palms and stained napery of Smith’s Hotel, said it was a bit odd that a place could be closed, however temporarily, and yet escape the net of the accommodations officer who she swore slept with requisition orders under his pillow in the hope of being woken in the middle of the night by one of his spies and tipped off about a bungalow that had been left empty for a day or two, so that before daylight a notice could be tacked to the door denying entry to its rightful owners.

  ‘I heard about Nicky Paynton’s decision to go home within a few hours of her making it,’ Lucy complained, ‘and I rang him at once, because Tusker wouldn’t, and he said he had a waiting list and had already made provisional allocations. He was barely civil.’

  But Lucy Smalley’s disappointment did not prevent her turning up several weeks later at Nicky Paynton’s auction party, wandering from room to room in the place she had briefly visualized herself and Tusker moving into, and wanly watching the auctioneer – Nicky Paynton herself – hammering down the familiar detritus of an Anglo-Indian career.

  The most prized items were those which had practical use, scarcity value and a comparatively short life – a radiogram, a refrigerator, a portable wireless set, an electric iron and an ironing board, two electric fires, an electric fan. After these, for which the bidding was on a tense but modest level, Nicky had success in getting rid of crockery, cutlery, glasses, two alarm clocks, blankets, sheets and pillow-cases, a picnic basket, camp equipment, and assorted thermos flasks which were a godsend on the trains packed with ice or filled with decent drinking water. Lowest on the list of desirable things were the ornamental coffee tables, the Benares trays, numdah rugs, vases and ornaments which for most of the people who could find room for them would be replicas of those they already had.

  Finally there was the stuff which in other circumstances might have ended its days in a modest house in Surrey, and still might, although not in the possession of Colonel and Mrs Paynton. The Payntons themselves had bought it at an auction in Rawalpindi. It had spent quite a number of years in storage, and on loan, during the periods when Nicky and Bunny were moving too frequently from one station to another for it to go with them. A mahogany sideboard, elegantly proportioned, a mahogany dining-table (with two leaves) and a dozen imitation Georgian chairs, plus two armed servers, were the chief items on this particular list. Supplementary to it were two wing chairs covered in rather murky but genuine tapestry – one man-size and the other woman-size. These chairs, Nicky announced, had belonged to the late General Sir Horace and Lady Hamilton-Wellesley-Gore and one of them had been sat in by the Prince of Wales when he toured India in 1921.

  ‘They were snitched from under my nose at the ‘Pindi auction,’ Nicky explained, ‘by a simply frightful chap with pots of money. He turned up next year at the same beano in Gwalior and without telling me Bunny played him for them at poker and the next thing I knew they arrived on the doorstep. So what am I bid? No reserve price. Going for a song.’

  Maisie Trehearne called out a figure which her husband didn’t hear. He called out a lower one and under the screen of the ensuing laughter Clara said to Nicky, ‘I want the chairs.’ She doubled Maisie’s figure.

  ‘You must be mad,’ Nicky said. ‘But I’m not saying no.’

  The chairs were knocked down to Clara Fosdick. Her sister in Ranpur wouldn’t be pleased – she already housed some of Clara’s and Freddie’s old furniture – but these were chairs Clara and Nicky had sat in, many a winter evening, over a pine-log fire liste
ning to the news.

  When the auction was over the dining-room furniture was still unsold, but Nicky’s farewell party got under way merrily enough. In the next few days the stuff that had been auctioned off would be collected and removed, leaving the two women bereft of most of the things that made the bungalow into a home. But that was all to the good, they felt. Their departure from a place in which nothing belonged to either of them would come as a relief and with luck (from Clara’s point of view) they would have a few days together in Ranpur, perhaps more because although five days was all the notice Nicky would get of a flight from Ranagunj she had to be prepared for postponements. Her final departure might be a relief as well. Already, at the height of the party, they were both on tenterhooks, and old Fariqua had obviously been at the rum bottle.

  For the party he had put on the white trousers, tunic, Ranpur sash and head-dress that he used to wear to go in to mess when Bunny dined there, but the pugree was indifferently swathed and the fan of muslin which should have been as perky as a cock’s comb had flopped over. As he got drunker he grew lugubriously into the role of skeleton at the feast, chief mourner at the wake for Bunny Paynton, the only one with a long face, sodden with the liquor that buoyed other people up.

  ‘To look at Fariqua,’ Lucy Smalley said, with what was becoming after the years of her social frustration an unerring sense for saying the right thing at the wrong time, ‘you’d think Nicky was going to invite bids for him as well.’

  She was saved the rebuke that Maisie Trehearne might have administered by the arrival of the general’s lady, Isobel Rankin, to whom all heads turned, like compass needles to a magnetic north. There was nothing unusual in this ritual observance, this metaphorical doffing of caps and bending of knees, but this morning a special intensity attached to it, because of certain rumours that had been taking shape and seriously disturbing the station’s sense of balance and proportion and were now contributing a ground-swell of uneasiness to the determined light-heartedness of the occasion.

  *

  Nicky had announced her decision to go home in mid-July. Thereafter, slowly and quietly she had made her dispositions, settled her affairs, transferred money to London, paid her debts, written to Dora Lowndes to warn her and to advise her to say nothing to the boys until she got a cable from Clara Fosdick confirming her departure. She had also written to her friends in India and given them Dora Lowndes’s address. By the middle of August she was ready to take the last step. The airforce liaison officer on Dick Rankin’s staff told her he would start pulling strings the moment she said the word. For a week she did not say it and it began to look as if she might change her mind at the last moment. But it was during this week that the rumours were first heard and by the end of it there seemed little doubt that there was more than a grain of truth in them. If Nicky had been wavering her mind was now abruptly made up again. She rang Wing-Commander Pearson and asked him to pull the first string on the last day in August. She announced her auction and farewell party for that same day.

  The rumours which had encouraged Nicky to stick to her decision to go home had begun at area headquarters as a result of the circulation of curiously worded documents from higher authorities about reallocation of areas of military responsibility; innocent enough on the surface and apparently without reference or application to the military hierarchy established at Pankot. This hierarchy was still in effect the old Ranpur Command whose authority, in spite of erosion here and there, extended over large stretches of the province’s territory.

  But between the lines of the documents’ oblique phraseology casual references acquired dangerously direct meanings. Among the senior members of Dick Rankin’s staff the junior officers detected signs of that alert fascination which people in high places cannot disguise when first glimpsing a future upheaval which they know they are personally too distinguished and secure to be adversely affected by.

  What had emerged was an image of Pankot stripped of a proportion of its powers as a central seat of military control and administration. How large a proportion could only be guessed at but since it was human nature to adopt a pessimistic view of any rearrangement from above the guess was that for ‘a proportion of’ one had to read ‘most of’. Once such a guess had been made the rumours proliferated, some of them disagreeably backed by mounting evidence that the guess was correct: rumours that the old Ranpur Command was to be hacked up into several areas and redistributed on a geographical rather than a viable military basis between Central and Eastern Commands, that Pankot would be separated from Ranpur and become a training and rest centre with a Brigadier as its area commander; that a new OTS was to be established, most of whose cadets would be Indian; that the old Governor’s summer residence which dominated the height of East Hill and had been closed throughout most of the war, was to be reopened – not, as Isobel Rankin had often proposed, as a convalescent home for wounded British and Indian officers of all three services, but as a leave centre for American troops of non-commissioned rank. Only in the bazaar where the rumours were quick to penetrate was the latter news greeted with enthusiasm. One or two ladies swore there had already been a rise in prices to prepare people for the new era of native prosperity.

  ‘We shall all have to get used to walking,’ one of them said, ‘because the cost of a tonga up the hill to the club, should one manage to find one not already loaded with GI’s, will be quite beyond our pockets.’ But on second thoughts, she went on, one would probably stop going to the club because it would be crowded with American officers – those in charge of the leave centre – and perhaps with top-sergeants, whatever species they were. If the cinema was any guide even the sergeants in the American army seemed to get saluted and to call officers by their Christian names, so they would all be at the club with their hands in their pockets, their bottoms hanging out of their shiny trousers and cigars in their mouths, getting drunk, breaking the place up and bringing in Eurasian girls.

  Moreover, she said, with Pankot’s military role downgraded there would be fewer and fewer young British officers doing a stint on area headquarters staff between regimental and active staff appointments. From area headquarters as it now existed the top and junior levels would be creamed off and the men would be off to brighter places. Probably only men like Major Smalley could expect to survive from the old to the new regime, if such a thing could be called survival. And Flagstaff House would be occupied by some doddery dugout Brigadier. In Mildred’s father’s day, the Ranpur Command had carried a Lieutenant-General’s hat. It still carried a major-general’s.

  Which brought one to the Rankins. What glamorous appointment would fall into their laps? Already people had it on good authority that they were for Mountbatten’s staff and the fleshpots of Ceylon; that they were for the India Office and home; for Washington on a military mission, for Moscow, for Cairo, for Persia; Simla at the very least. Two days before Nicky’s party Dick Rankin had been driven down to Ranpur to be flown to Delhi. When he got back perhaps he would have fuller details of the station’s fate and of his and Isobel’s brighter prospects.

  And here was Isobel, arriving too late for the auction, alight and vibrant with both power and discretion, giving nothing away which was only comforting if it could be assumed that she had nothing to give and was as ignorant of what was in store as the least among those present.

  She embraced Nicky in the centre of the crowded living-room, apologized for being late in a voice that carried above the resumed conversation and then without lowering her voice said, ‘Where can we have a word?’ which caused a tremor of delicious apprehension, a pause in the flow of talk. Nicky led her into the dining-room where the unsold table, chairs and sideboard already appeared to have lost their sheen.

  ‘Nicky, I’m late because I waited for Mildred to get back from visiting Susan, but she rang and asked me to come along on my own and to warn you that she’s bringing Susan with her.’

  ‘Oh.’ The two women looked at each other straight. ‘Is Susan allowed out
then?’

  ‘It will be the first time.’

  ‘A noisy party? What an extraordinary choice.’

  ‘She wanted to come. She asked this Captain Samuels chap and apparently he said it was a first-rate idea. He hopes it’s all right if he looks in too. I think he’ll take her back, to save Mildred doing it.’

  ‘I must say that’s a bit cool, isn’t it? I don’t know Captain Samuels and it’s a private farewell party not a therapy session. Is she really fit enough? I should hate a scene. That’s why the trick-cyclist wallah insists on coming, isn’t it? To be on hand if Susan throws a fit or does something odd.’

  ‘He says she’s well enough. In fact he’s letting her out in a day or two. She’ll be coming up to the House, so I can only assume he knows what he’s doing. He thinks a party would be a good ice-breaker. Do you mind?’

  ‘As long as it’s only ice. Does she know about Bunny?’

  ‘Yes. And she knows you’re going home. That’s why she wants to come. It’s very sweet really.’

  ‘I hope she’s not going to be condoling,’ Nicky said. She looked feverish.

  ‘The thing to do is tell everybody before she gets here and prepare them to look as if they’re acting naturally. Did you sell this dining-room stuff?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mildred may want it. Try to persuade her. She has a lot of plans for the cottage. In any case she could store it. I’d have it myself but God knows how much longer we’ll be here or where we’ll be going. What about getting Jalal-Ud-Din’s man along? He might sell it like a shot to one of his rich Indian clients.’

  ‘I’ll see.’

  They went back to the living-room, separated and passed the word that Mildred was bringing Susan and that Captain Samuels would be looking in, to take her back to the nursing-home to save her mother going all that way herself when the party was over. Prepared for important general news this struck the guests as an anti-climax and it took a while for it to sink in and to be recognized as important too, important to the old Pankot if not to the one currently in a state of derangement of its own, which one had to hope would turn out to be as temporary as Susan Bingham’s had proved. Curiosity and nostalgic affection began to flow out to her in advance of her arrival. Heads kept turning towards the door through which she would enter.