The Towers of Silence

by Paul Scott

  A verdict of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed was recorded.

  A touching note was struck when Miss Crane’s servant who seemed to confuse the proceedings with a legal case asked whether ‘Madam was to be released and restored to him.’ A colleague of the late Miss Crane at the Mission who led the weeping man from court told your reporter that this man, Joseph, had served Miss Crane since he was a kitchen boy at the mission in Muzzafirabad (NWFP) where Miss Crane taught before the Great War. ‘She was a heroine to him. She stood alone at the door of the school guarding the children and faced up to a gang of armed hooligans who threatened to burn the school down.’

  The funeral took place later in the day. Waiting outside the cemetery were groups of Indian women, mothers of some of the children who attend the mission schools. After the funeral rites were over your reporter noted that these women entered the cemetery and placed flowers on the grave.

  *

  She went into the bathroom and locked the door and the other door that led to the verandah and the door that led into the little spare. She got down on her knees on the cold floor and clasped her hands on the rim of the smooth white porcelain hand-basin, then groped for her damp flannel and stuffed it into her mouth so as not to disturb the house. She reached up and turned the tap on full. The water spashed into the bowl, down the pipe and out into the open runnel that carried it away. She sank lower until her body was almost touching her thighs and let herself sob aloud.

  Edwina had sinned. But that was not why Barbie wept. The question of what would happen to Edwina’s soul was beyond her power to calculate. It would be settled in limbo which to Barbie was a bleak and incomprehensible but real place chilled by God’s breath and darkened by the Devil’s brow; barren neutral territory where the dead waited, trembling and naked, incapable of further action to support a claim to either kingdom. To kill oneself was wicked. Her father had killed himself with drink walking with a skinful under the hooves and wheels of a horsedrawn carriage on the Thames Embankment. Her widowed mother had killed herself not with work as people said but with a combination of heartless love and heartless pride better known as keeping up appearances. Their deaths were small sins in comparison with Edwina’s terrible act of self-destruction but in their private little despairs of which the drinking and the pride had been evidence she had long since learned to see a glimmer of the devil’s face; thoughtful, chin in hand, offering recompense, suggesting anodynes that were not that at all but addictive means of excitation of the ill he did.

  Barbie’s Devil was not a demon but a fallen angel and his Hell no place of fire and brimstone but an image of lost heaven. There was no soul lonelier than he. His passion for souls was as great as God’s but all he had to offer was his own despair. He offered it as boundlessly as God offered love. He was despair as surely as God was love.

  And that was why she wept. Blinded by her tears, still kneeling, she reached out, entering that moment that should have brought her to the centre of the sublime mystery but did not because there was no mystery. She was an old woman like Edwina and the dead body was the one Edwina guarded – her life in India come to nothing.

  She wept because the gesture that had seemed sublime revealed an Edwina who was dumb with despair not purified by love. Revelation of Edwina’s despair uncovered her own, showed its depth, its immensity. For herself she could have borne the knowledge, would have to bear it. For Edwina it must have been a cruel thing. Edwina had always seemed so strong and sure in God, in God’s purpose, so richly endowed that just to be near her was to share her gift and feel one’s doubts turn sour for want of nourishment.

  And yet Edwina must have felt it too, the ever-increasing tenuousness of the connection, the separation in space as God inexplicably turned His face from humble service He no longer found acceptable but was too kind actually to refuse.

  She rose painfully from her knees and soaked the flannel under the running tap, carried it sopping to her face and repeated the process until her face was chilled and only her eyeballs felt hot. Edwina’s faith had been of a higher order than her own, she had no doubt, and as a consequence her despair had been great enough to disturb the balance of her mind. But the disturbance could not be offered in mitigation because it was, itself, the work of the Devil. She looked in the mirror that hung above the basin. On the opposite wall there was another mirror. She was multiplied back and front. Frontwards she was Barbie, approaching herself, and backwards another self retreating through one diminishing image after another into some kind of shocking infinity.

  She felt her skin freeze and harden as warmth went out of her blood. The bathroom was suddenly rank with the nausea, fetid and foul, but there was in its foulness a sense of exquisite patience and desire. She clutched her abdomen and her throat, leant over the bowl and was sick. She retched and gasped. The tap was still on and the running water carried the horror away. Now she supported herself gripping the porcelain basin. She let the water run until the whiteness sparkled again. Her whole body felt clammy. Slowly its warmth returned.

  She rinsed her mouth over and over and then turned the tap off. When the last gurgle had died away there was a silence such as might follow a sigh.

  ‘Poor creature,’ she said. She shut her eyes. ‘I know who you are and I know you are still here. Please go.’

  She waited, then caught her breath at the sound of a slow ungainly winged departure as of a heavy carrion bird that had difficulty in overcoming the pull of gravity. She waited for a few minutes and then fastidiously washed her face and hands, but – still dissatisfied – unlocked the door to her bedroom, collected clean clothes, returned and dropped each discarded article into the dhobi basket until she stood naked. Redressed and cologned she went back to her room and tidied her hair.

  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, her mother had said but she had not said who might behold.

  Part Two

  A QUESTION OF LOYALTY

  Notices in the Times of India, May 1943

  Births

  MANNERS. On May 7th at Srinagar. To Daphne, a daughter, Parvati.

  Deaths

  MANNERS. On May 7th, at Srinager, Daphne, daughter of the late Mr & Mrs George Manners, beloved niece of Ethel and the late Sir Henry Manners.

  Forthcoming Marriages

  CAPTAIN E. A. D. BINGHAM and MISS SUSAN LAYTON

  The engagement is announced between Captain Edward Arthur David Bingham, Mizzafirabad Guides, only son of the late Major A. E. D. Bingham, MC (Muzzafirabad Guides) and of the late Mrs S. A. Hunter, of Singapore, and Susan, younger daughter of Lt-Colonel and Mrs John Layton, of Pankot.

  I

  Thus Teddie enters already marked by a fatal connexion.

  Sarah Layton, subsequently describing him as a man who didn’t grow on you, as one you soon got to the end of, initially gave a lone but vivid impression of vacuity, albeit cheerful vacuity. At the time, his future mother-in-law, Mildred, complained that there wasn’t much to go on and although she was thinking in severely practical terms (what to tell Colonel Layton, now transferred from an Italian to a German prison-camp, which made it seem more imperative to make an efficient and detailed report about the man his daughter Susan intended to marry), the idea of not much to go on coupled with that of his not growing on you at first led one inescapably to think of him as a person who conformed in every way with the stock idea one might have of a young man with nothing between his ears, a set of trained and drained responses and a cheerful complacency that would see to it he did nothing outstandingly silly and nothing distinguished either.

  How close he came to being jolted out of complacency in the first few months of 1942 in Burma was possibly indicated by his demeanour when he turned up in Pankot a year later, on Dick Rankin’s staff, ‘rather disappointed’ with the immediate result of his attendance at the Staff College in Quetta but ‘hoping for something better’ in the future. Presumably he had been rather disappointed too to discover that the Japanese had proved ‘more us
eful in a scrap’ than the British and Indian armies together and, as he trudged through the jungle back to India with the remnants of his unit (because that was the direction everyone was going in who still could) hoped for an improvement presently.

  One could picture him marching out, tired, dirty and hungry, carrying more than his quota of small-arms (to relieve a couple of exhausted sepoys of their weight), keeping on and smiling because being personally blameless for what he supposed had to be summed up as a stunning defeat, a complete disaster, there was no call to look miserable and every reason to give an example of how to keep going, even when every limb was attached to the trunk by things that felt like loose hot rubber bands.

  Between this picture of Teddie leaving Burma and the one of him arrived in Pankot a year later there is a gap, but it is one of many and it plays a perfectly proper schematic part in an account of him because to Teddie himself his whole history seems to have been a series of gaps linked by a few notable events if one is to judge by the extraordinary difficulty Mildred had in getting anything out of him except a few bare and not very encouraging bits of information and a slight frown of concentration, which could have been the effect had on him of his realization that between them he and Mildred had a duty to do.

  ‘I do have an uncle,’ he said; and added, ‘In Shropshire actually,’ as if this made the uncle more lively and identifiable. Teddie had lived with the uncle when sent home from India to school, just as Sarah and Susan had lived with their Aunt Lydia, Mildred’s elder London-based sister. Teddie’s father had been in the Muzzafirabad Guides which was why Teddie was in them now but had broken his neck hunting when Teddie was fourteen. His mother married again, a commercial chap called Hunter (which was odd when you thought of the cause of the first husband’s death). They lived in Singapore until Hunter died. ‘I don’t mind telling you,’ Teddie told Mildred, ‘people said she had a rotten time with him.’ She died suddenly in Mandalay on her way back to Muzzafirabad. All this was before Teddie came back to India himself to join the regiment. In due course he went to Burma, tried but failed to find her grave and worried a bit about it until he remembered she’d been cremated. In due course the Japanese arrived in Burma too and presently Teddie marched out.

  And that was about it. He had red hair and sandy eyelashes (which Clara Fosdick said she thought a sign of untrust-worthiness). He was twenty-five but had that elongated bony English look of not yet having completed the process of growing-up and filling out which meant that in a few years he would suddenly appear middle-aged as well as beefy because to men like this everything seemed to happen at once round about the age of thirty; everything except white hair which was reserved for retirement and was equally sudden and the only sign that old age had arrived.

  School, military academy, regiment, baptism of fire, staff-college: the next logical step was marriage so that the process could be repeated through a continuing male line. Arrived in Pankot Teddie metaphorically cleared his throat, put up his head and looked round for a girl with whom to take it. It could not be any girl. The choice had ideally to be made among girls in the range labelled Army which more or less knocked out Carol and Christine Beames whose father Colonel Beames was in the civil branch of the IMS. It knocked out several others whose fathers’ regiments did not in Teddie’s opinion match the standard set by his own, the Muzzys, to which none of course was superior but with which one or two might claim equality. This opinion was one Teddie’s father had held and Teddie had acquired it in much the same way that he had acquired a bit of private property in the shape of an unearned income, although the capital from which the income came had been filtered to him through his mother and therefore been diminished somewhat by the commercial chap Hunter, who fortunately died of drink before his mother died of what Teddie always assumed had been shame and sorrow, otherwise he might never have seen a penny of it and have been forced either to go into some sort of business or join an inferior regiment, which would have been pretty awful he supposed. He doubted that his uncle would have ‘stumped up’. He believed that his uncle hadn’t liked his father. His uncle had been the elder brother.

  ‘I suppose you’ll get money from your uncle eventually,’ Mildred said. She believed in coming to the point and came to it stylishly, using her languid but abrasive first-two-drinks-of-the-day voice.

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t rely on it,’ Teddie said. ‘He’s a bit of an old skinflint. I’m not looking beyond the six hundred a year. And my pay of course.’

  ‘Well it will be years before Susan gets anything from us,’ Mildred warned him. ‘So you’ll just have to buckle to and rise to dizzy heights.’

  ‘Yes. Rather.’

  ‘Have you a photo or a snap?’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Of you. So that I can sent it to John in prison-camp. I think he’ll want to know what you look like, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ll get one done, shall I?’

  ‘That would help.’

  ‘Full length or head and shoulders?’

  Teddie had a practical turn of mind. It made up for his lack of imagination. He would never have thought to offer Mrs Layton his photograph but knowing that she wanted one and suddenly understanding why he saw that it was important to get it right. In uniform or mufti? Postcard size for easy handling or something larger? With or without his cap? Since he seemed to have no personal vanity the questions had to be taken seriously. He couldn’t be palmed off with a casual reply such as, ‘Oh anything so long as it looks like you.’

  He had the kind of thick skin which managed to fall just short of suggesting insensitivity. Mildred became bored with the photograph long before the details were agreed. Teddie did not notice she was bored or that she drank too much. Perhaps he did not really notice people. There were times when he did not seem to notice himself. For instance he didn’t appear to be at all put out by what another man might have thought of as the delicacy or awkwardness of his position in a household where he constantly bumped into Sarah. Before he took up with Susan he had taken up with Sarah and shown every sign of not being aware of the younger sister’s existence. His attentiveness to Sarah now suggested he might at any moment explain why he’d cooled off her in spite of the fact that Sarah had not encouraged him sufficiently to make his cooling off actually require an explanation. His attentiveness would have struck an outsider who knew nothing of their history as the kind a man felt he had to show the girl whose sister he was about to marry; anything apologetic in it being an apology for taking Susan away not for giving Sarah up. Perhaps that was how he saw it too.

  There were several explanations given in Pankot, though, of his defection, change of mind or change of heart. Had he known about one of them he might have been surprised (at last) because it is unlikely that ‘fickle’ was a word he would ever expect to hear used to describe him. Had he known about the other two explanations he would have agreed with the first of them, that he had finally been unable to avoid seeing how pretty Susan was and unable to resist the strong emotion with which the sight suddenly affected him. The other explanation he would probably not have understood at all and he certainly would not have cared to hear it.

  Little Mrs Smalley had described Sarah Layton in terms which were sufficiently accurate for the inaccurate conclusions she then drew from them in regard to Teddie’s defection to be accepted as coming close to the mark. But Teddie would have made nothing of the Smalley image of Sarah. He surely never felt that she didn’t take him seriously as a person; never felt that she took none of ‘it’ seriously (‘it’ meaning India, the British role in India, the thing the British were in India to do); never felt that she laughed at ‘it’ and consequently at him; never felt, being a man and therefore much more serious about ‘it’ than a woman had to be, that Sarah was the kind of girl who although admirable in every other way lacked the attitude which men thought it important for a girl to have underneath everything else and that this explained why after a bit men felt more comfortable in the company of the young
er sister. He might have agreed with Mrs Paynton when she gathered all these potentially damaging Smalley threads into a single sensible one and declared that what Sarah needed was to settle down and that she would be all right then, being fundamentally sound and a veritable rock so far as Mildred was concerned.

  Getting Sarah to settle down as Mrs Bingham was exactly what Teddie had first hoped for. For him the question of her soundness never arose. Seeing her come into his office at Area Headquarters with some confidential files he had asked his friend and fellow Muzzy, Tony Bishop, Dick Rankin’s ADC, who the WAC(1) corporal with the fair hair and slim figure was. The answer was tremendously satisfactory to him one assumes. Failing a Muzzy Guide girl a Pankot Rifles girl would do very well, in fact rather better because Teddie probably thought that there was something vaguely incestuous about marrying into one’s own regiment. His father had done it and it really hadn’t turned out at all well. If fate had at first disappointed Teddie, bringing him to a static headquarters as a mere captain when it might just as easily have sent him to an active formation perhaps as a G2, it now looked as if in bringing him to Pankot it had done so with the sole and excellent purpose of introducing him to this girl from the station’s favourite regiment.

  Chasing or wooing would be the wrong words to use about Teddie’s activity in regard to Sarah Layton. He applied himself to her as he applied himself to any task that fell within the area of his competence. But because he was unable to think of more than one thing at a time he appeared to everybody to have mounted a frontal attack on a girl who had caught his eye and awoken feelings in him of a tender and passionate nature.

  This was the light in which if he gave it any thought he must have appeared to himself and he must have given it thought, and found nothing amiss. After all chaps fell in love every day. There was nothing peculiar about it. And she was awfully nice. His father would have approved.