The Towers of Silence

by Paul Scott

  The most interesting gaps, perhaps, in Teddie’s history are those through which one could have traced the progress or lack of it of his relationship with women. At twenty-five one assumes some heterosexual experience, but the questions – with whom? in what circumstances? – are impenetrable enough to leave about him a pure aroma of cheerful male virginity tainted only by traces of something more pungent, the odour of voluntary or involuntary nocturnal emission, which does not alter his expression but does emphasize the underlying shadows of modest perplexity.

  Tony Bishop had no recollection of Teddie ever having been ‘mixed up’ with a girl before he applied himself so wholeheartedly to the business of being mixed up with Sarah Layton. Bishop knew him before Burma and after Burma but not during Burma, so his recollections did not cover a possibly important phase of Teddie’s development. He had the unit-image of him rather than a private one. The Muzzy Guides (so Bishop said, fondly mocking) was one of those regiments which not only had a rule about never mentioning women in the mess but stuck to it with such iron resolution that an outsider could have been persuaded to believe that its young subalterns not only stopped mentioning them but stopped thinking about them too until a certain age was reached and they came face to face with a situation that called for a tricky decision: whether to remain a bachelor or get married. This question was usually settled by another of the regiment’s unwritten rules which was that an officer had to have a wife before he was thirty unless he wished to enjoy a reputation for unseemly frivolity.

  Since Teddie was deeply attached to his regiment – it was the one thing he may be thought of as taking seriously – the regimental aura of ambiguous monasticism probably explained Teddie’s own aura of either never having sown wild oats or of having sown them so far out of range of the regimental eye that they didn’t count as his but as those of someone whose body he had borrowed for the purpose. Whatever the reason for this aura, it shone behind his approach to Sarah which was that of a man whose physical appetite had never bothered him before but promised to be really rather adequate, as if it knew all about itself.

  What it finally came to was that Teddie was in pursuit of an idea. The idea was initially embodied in the person of Sarah Layton. After three weeks he was close enough to her to feel that all he need do next was pop the question and settle the matter. He had, one imagines, few doubts about the outcome. She had been awfully amenable and absolutely available. He hadn’t kissed her yet but he had held on to her hand and made other gestures claiming physical possession. They had played tennis, gone riding, swimming, dancing, to the pictures, the Chinese restaurant and Smith’s Hotel for supper. He had called for her at the Club, at the grace and favour bungalow and once at Rose Cottage where an elderly woman (something to do with missions) had talked rather a lot about Muzzafirabad but not about those aspects of its life which he knew. Sarah and he had walked together, shared tongas, and the front bench of a staff car when he had been able to log it out as on official duties and get rid of the driver.

  The next step was therefore clear. He must arrange for them to be alone so that he could put an arm round her, kiss her and say something like You know I’m most awfully Fond of You? which sounded a bit dull but was certainly the truth and once he had said it he could logically follow it up by suggesting they might Sort of Get Engaged If She Felt Like It; which was as far as one needed to go because once one had gone that far everything else surely fell into place of its own accord.

  At first (Sarah says) she thought Teddie Bingham no different from other young officers who assumed that because she was there and they were there something should be done about it. But after a while she realized he was different. He had been wound up and wouldn’t stop and she wasn’t sure what she could do about it except hope that he suddenly ran down or noticed Susan as so many other officers had. She did not find him unattractive but this was somehow proof of what she thought of as his negative transparent quality; he was not unamusing, not unpleasant to talk to and not uninteresting up to a point which was soon reached.

  When the moment came she knew instinctively that it had and was in as great a state of uncertainty as ever about how to deal with it. He encircled her and kissed her and became rather elaborately excited. She noticed that he smelt of Pears’ soap. This heightened her impression of him as being transparent because suddenly he was not, having worked himself into a lather. His excitement was a bit embarrassing because he failed utterly to move her to any kind of response and she wondered whether this was his fault or hers. She had very little fear of Teddie attempting anything more serious. Apart from his lips which were glued to hers he was not actually doing anything to any part of her with any part of him which he could not have done in a ballroom or would be ashamed of in the morning.

  She thought, too, that his excitement was caused less by the effect kissing her had on him than by the feeling he had of breaking out, to the degree that was allowable, from the strict confines of his normal pattern of behaviour. But a man like Teddie didn’t kiss a girl as he was kissing her just for the hell of it. At any moment, she thought, he would make a declaration. She considered this imminent event as calmly as she could. She had no intention of accepting a declaration from Teddie Bingham but for an instant she understood the awful ease with which the whole business could gather momentum and overwhelm them both. If she had not been cursed with a mind that questioned everything she could at this very moment have been within an inch or two of becoming the future Mrs Bingham because she couldn’t think of a single practical reason why things should not take this course, providing one discounted the question of whether they loved one another, which wasn’t a question anyone seemed to take very seriously.

  In any case Teddie on the face of it was doing well enough on that score for the two of them. Or had been doing well. But Sarah realized she was bored and had been bored ever since he began and suddenly she felt that he was bored too. She would have understood his becoming depressed or cross at finding his amorousness was not infectious but she had a distinct impression of his boredom. He kept the kiss going but it had taken on a remote and pointless quality, like a breath-holding contest, which it was to some extent. She had a stubborn inclination not to be the first to give in.

  Just as she decided she couldn’t go on he came unstuck and breathed deeply. They stared at each other in the dark of the motor-car. Surprisingly it was a serious, even tender, moment and she was afraid that in spite of everything he would make his declaration; but he didn’t. For Sarah it was as if they had both drawn back in the nick of time from being involved in an association neither of them wanted but which Teddie had thought they ought to want.

  Presently he resumed a proper sitting position behind the steering-wheel, looked at his luminous watch and said, ‘I say, I think we ought to be getting back.’

  Two days later he turned up at the grace and favour at a time when she wasn’t there but Susan was. And that was that. He was still wound up, still working. She thought he would run down and disappear like Susan’s other young men whose numbers remained more or less the same while their names and faces altered. But within a month he was engaged to Susan to be married. It was this that so surprised Sarah. One day he had been just one of the crowd round her sister; the next he was the only one. Susan seemed to have put out her hand and picked out the toy she decided she liked best. Sarah had a picture of Teddie held upside down with his wheels racing and the spring whirring, his eyes closed in the ecstasy of being singled out and taken to Susan’s heart forever.

  But in real life Teddie was upright, on his feet, and his eyes open, alight with the pleasure if not the pain of being in love – or what passed for it in his opinion; and his opinion was the only one that could matter to him and was in this sense as good as anyone else’s. Allow him that happiness, and the illusion that it sprang from Susan and not from an idea. The moment in the car with Sarah could possibly have been a turning point but the effort of making it would have been tremendous, virtual
ly impossible. It would have involved treachery to his upbringing, a complete rearrangement of the ego, a thorough breaking-out, an entry into an unknown and rather frightening world. Besides it is better to accept the explanation that lies nearest and easiest to hand: that Sarah’s lack of interest eventually got through to him as a failure of physical response, as a personal rebuff, not as a general pointer to the boring artificiality of the situation that could have prodded him alive to the fact that to date his life had been one protracted grinding experience of boredom after another because he never did anything, never would do anything, except according to the rules laid down for what a man of his class and calling should do and for how and why he should do it.

  There was of course that little gap (characteristic) between getting Sarah home and turning up a couple of days later to take up with Susan. Perhaps the gap in this case represented a dark night of Teddie’s soul (a whiff of that pungent odour?), a battle between a disturbing new instinct, only half felt, and an old safe and happy one which was familiar and reliable and inevitably the victor. In that case the spoils were Teddie, not Susan.

  ‘I’d rather they waited,’ Mildred told Sarah. It was apparent that she had in mind a long period; waiting until Colonel Layton was restored to them, in other words until the end of the war. But Susan would not wait. Neither would Teddie. Together they seemed to recognize a sense of urgency as if they wanted to abide by the rules while the rules were still there to abide by. The announcement of their engagement appeared on the same day as those other two announcements which advertised the fact that one of the rules had already been broken. It was the first coincidence and perhaps it was significant. This was in the second week of May. Mildred agreed to put the notice in The Times because Susan insisted and Mildred saw no harm in putting in what could easily be taken out by a second announcement of the cancellation she expected at any moment – for instance when Teddie produced the photograph and Susan looked at it and imagined herself left with that and nothing else after Teddie had gone back to the war as he was bound to eventually.

  But the photograph turned out surprisingly well. Teddie’s smile was rendered down to a quirky upward twitch of one corner of the lips which gave the lower part of his face a look of even-tempered manly resolution. The stilted professional studio lighting had for once worked on a fortuitously inspired level and produced a sort of subdued halo that was reflected again by a dreamy look in the eyes, so that his face was amazingly that of the soldier-poet, the man of action capable of making sensitive judgments. When Susan saw it she at once demanded a cabinet-sized copy and had it framed for her bedside table. Towards the end of May, publicly acknowledging that there was not another thing she could do to delay matters, Mildred announced that the wedding would be shortly after Susan’s 21st birthday, which fell in November. It was the most she could do to relate the affair to circumstances beyond her control. She wrote to her sister Fenny in Delhi who came up at once to inspect Teddie. Aunt Fenny thought him ‘rather sweet’. Apart from Susan she was the first person, perhaps, to see anything below the surface.

  II

  Before making the necessary imaginative readjustment to see most of the rest of the short life of Edward Arthur David Bingham almost entirely from Teddie’s point of view one minor and possibly irrelevant aspect of his behaviour is to be noted. His experience of combat conditions had coarsened his vocabulary.

  In certain circumstances in male company he nowadays permitted himself to use words he had seldom found it necessary to use before going with the first battalion to Burma. The standard of vulgarity he reached never rose above that acceptable in an officer of his type and standing and he would never have dreamed of swearing in the mess let alone in front of women. The Muzzys had been as strict about bad language in the mess as about references to the weaker sex, if anything stricter. Damn was allowed, in fact it did not count, but bloody was frowned upon if used by anyone below senior field-rank. Teddie therefore found the conversation in the junior officers’ mess at area headquarters alarmingly and disagreeably lax. He was quite shocked. Regular officers from good regiments could still be relied on to do as Teddie did – reserve bad language for private or office occasions – but this mess was full of curious unmilitary fellows with emergency commissions and civilian habits. Fortunately as he thought it he seldom had to eat there. He and Tony Bishop together with an officer of the engineers and a gunner lived in a chummery a few bungalows down the road from Nicky Paynton and Clara Fosdick. In the chummery mess he maintained formality of manner and speech and once rebuked the gunner for the terms in which he expressed an opinion about the origin of the woodcock toast.

  But in private, the bedroom he shared with Tony Bishop and in the daftar, Teddie’s otherwise predictable statements and responses were enlivened by certain rich images and expletives often enough for Bishop to have marked them down as something new in Teddie dating from the Burma experience, indicative of the kind of wildness even a cheerful and level-tempered fellow like Bingham would have found bubbling up in him when (as he now described it) the shit hit the fan and he had to duck.

  Bishop went so far as to see two Teddie Binghams: the one who stood upright encased in the armour of the mystery of being a Muzzy Guide and the one who in moments of office crisis stepped out of the armour’s support with no warning whatsoever and emphatically but unvehemently announced his opinion that the situation was balls-aching, only just short of a fuck-up, and that he had no intention of being buggered about.

  *

  The signal ordering him to a place called Mirat to take up a G3(O) appointment at the headquarters of a new Indian division had originally been sent to Muzzafirabad. The delay and confusion caused by this administrative error led to a further signal, peremptory in tone, which managed to give the impression that Teddie was to be blamed for not being where he was not and must make up for it by leaving for Mirat immediately.

  This second signal which was the first Teddie knew of his default was brought round to the chummery by special messenger on an evening in the middle of July 1943. There was a thunderstorm in progress which lent the occasion an apt touch of flashy drama. Teddie was lowering his long ribby body into the tin tub in the ghusl-khana. It was 6.15. He had had a hard day at the office. He was due at the grace and favour at 7.30 to take Susan to the Electric Cinema and had just bitten his bearer’s head off because the dhobi-wallah had failed to turn up with his second suit of khaki-drill. Allah Din had gone grumbling into the storm. Meanwhile the bhishti had heated the bathwater above the degree Teddie enjoyed, had left no tin of cold and was presently nowhere to be found.

  As Teddie’s buttocks made contact with the steaming water his thighs came out in goosepimples to compensate. His knees smelt of leather, which reminded him of when he was a boy having a hot bath after a game of football. He completed his submersion and breathed out slowly. He reached for the Lifebuoy soap (Pears’ was for face and hands) and just then Tony Bishop walked in with the fatal signal and the messenger’s pad for Teddie to sign.

  Teddie had one sterling military quality. He never panicked. The word immediate had no galvanizing effect on his intellectual machinery. Immediate meant as soon as possible because nothing could be sooner than that. In the past year he had become aware that there were people in positions of authority who pretended otherwise. They put texts up on their office walls and issued directives advocating the strangest beliefs: for instance that what was difficult could be done at once whereas the impossible might take a little longer.

  Teddie thought this showy and undeserving of serious consideration. He was inclined to blame the Americans, who mistook activity for efficiency, and those civilian elements in the wartime army who were naturally anxious to get it over and done with and go back into commerce where they belonged. Between them the Americans and the civilians were trying to dictate the pace of army operations and run them like a business. And they were being encouraged in this by the careerists and odd-men-out in the regular army wh
o saw the war as an opportunity to promote themselves and their eccentric ideas.

  Teddie distrusted anything to which the word flamboyant could be applied. On the other hand he admired what his Shropshire uncle called style. Not knowing quite what style was he sometimes had difficulty in distinguishing it from flamboyance and thought his uncle must have been right when he said style was on the wane and went unnoticed in an age in which vulgarity was admired more often than it was deserted. Teddie took pride in having some style himself. At the moment it meant sitting on in his bath for at least five minutes after Bishop had opened and read the signal, after he had dried his hands to read it himself, sworn, signed the book and sent Bishop away.

  Quite unfairly behaviour like this gave rise to an idea that Teddie was a bit slow-witted. His confidential report at Quetta, while paying tribute to his cheerfulness and capacity for work, had mentioned lack of ‘verve’. The phrase had caused him no lasting pang.

  Actually Teddie grasped all the implications of the posting at once. Where the slowness came in was in the method that came most naturally to him of considering them one at a time in a roughly ascending order of priority; for example: where exactly was Mirat? How long would the journey take? Should he take his own orderly with him? Did he really want to in view of the fact that the fellow couldn’t organize his laundry? Who was the divisional commander? Had he heard anything at the daftar about this particular formation? Would he be able to get leave in August to join Susan and her family on the late holiday they were planning to take in Srinagar? Would he be able to get leave later in the year to come back to Pankot for the wedding? Would Susan kick up a fuss about changing the arrangements if a change was necessary? Since the posting did not bring him any promotion would it be worthwhile having a word with General Rankin to see if it could be cancelled? Did he want it cancelled? Was it fair to marry a girl when it looked as if he was in for another dose of active service? He had thought of that before but had she? Should he ask her whether she would like to be released from their engagement?