The Towers of Silence

by Paul Scott

  ‘Well,’ Barbie began, intending to say something about Sarah’s sort of people, her own sort of people, but she could not apply herself to the subject. She said, ‘I’m glad you had a bit of fun.’ She recalled Sister Matthew’s explanation of the solitary presence of a Bengali bearer in the Calcutta flat on the night Mildred had tried to ring her sister from the nursing home: that everyone must have been out celebrating the second front. She wondered at what hour the news of Mabel’s death and Susan’s premature labour had reached Sarah; and pitied the girl, imagining her returning to her aunt’s place, flushed with the excitement of a night in the city in the company of those young men, men of her own kind, men whom she understood or had once understood and now envied because they were part of ‘home’, and her aunt saying: Sarah, your mother rang, it’s bad news I’m afraid. Had the girl’s thoughts immediately turned to her father, far away in prison camp?

  Had the Layton girls missed a ‘proper family life’? What did that mean, anyway? Was it important to have one, significant if one missed it? As in other Anglo-Indian families the discipline of separation of children from parents had presumably marked Sarah’s childhood. With such a separation Barbie had never had to contend. The separation she had suffered had been permanent and presumbaly more tolerable as a consequence since there was no arguing with death: her father’s and then her mother’s. But she was full grown when she came out and she came out as a treader of new ground, not old, and in her own behalf and, so she had thought, in Gods, and had never married, never had children.

  Knowing Sarah and Susan was the closest she had ever been to knowing what it felt like to have daughters. If they had been her own children, could she have borne the separation? Would Susan eventually have to bear it, or would the whole condition of life in India for English people have changed by the time the child had reached the age of seven or eight, which brought the first, the childhood, phase of Anglo-Indian life to a conclusion? It was not many years ahead. But the condition would well have changed by then. The child might be lucky.

  But not its parents. Not Susan. Nor Sarah. Nor young Dicky Beauvais whom Clarissa Peplow hoped Susan would marry. Looking at Sarah Barbie felt she understood a little of the sense the girl might have of having no clearly defined world to inhabit, but one poised between the old for which she had been prepared, but which seemed to be dying, and the new for which she had not been prepared at all. Young, fresh and intelligent, all the patterns to which she had been trained to conform were fading, and she was already conscious just from chance or casual encounter of the gulf between herself and the person she would have been if she had never come back to India: the kind of person she ‘really was’.

  Reaching towards the table to replace her cup Barbie hesitated, completed the movement with conscious effort, to keep her hand steady, and then leant back in her chair. There had been a disturbance, another quick displacement of air, but this time a faint whiff of the malign breath, of the emanation. Alert, she watched the verandah and then the garden which was in sharp focus but seemed far away, hallucinatory, dependent on the human imagination rather than on nature for its existence, wide open to the destructive as well as creative energy of mind and will.

  She heard herself say to Sarah, ‘I have what I think nowadays you call a problem in logistics,’ and then stopped, hearing as well a gentle exhalation which presently she decided must have been her own sigh of relief, of renewed patient anticipation.

  ‘My little room,’ she said, ‘I mean of course my little room at Clarissa’s. It has its limitations. Quite serious ones. And Clarissa has said there cannot be, apart from myself, more than another suitcase. Which leaves two items. Important to me but not to anyone else. To begin with there is the writing-table.’

  She looked at Sarah who looked back at her without the concern and commitment suitable to the occasion. But then Sarah was still very young. She would not have learned as yet to understand the grave impediment to free movement which luggage represented in one’s affairs.

  ‘Well my writing-table,’ she went on, ‘in a way, yes, that can be managed because it folds. Like a wing. It is portable. It can stand against a wall, go under a bed. I think I can get my writing-table past Clarissa. And quite apart from a silly affection I have for it I also have use. I expect I shall conduct quite a heavy correspondence. And I can unfold it, sit on the bed and write without worrying whether Clarissa’s room is put out of shape, because its shape can be quickly restored, but the trunk—’

  She paused, collected her ideas.

  ‘The trunk is a very different kettle of fish. Unlike a writing-table, unlike one’s clothes, one’s shoes, it is of no use. But it is my history. And according to Emerson without it, without that, I’m simply not explained. I am a mere body, sitting here. Without it, according to Emerson, none of us is explained because if it is my history then it is yours too and was Mabel’s. But there is no room for my trunk at Clarissa’s, no room for my explanation.’ She grinned. Sarah’s brow had become creased. Barbie could not blame the girl for being puzzled. The situation was very complicated and she was not sure she understood it herself.

  ‘I had thought,’ she continued. ‘of asking permission to leave my trunk in care of the mali, until I can send for it. It could be put in the shed in the servants’ quarters where the gardening implements are kept. But—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But if I asked permission of the person fully qualified to give it – asked permission of your mother – it would certainly be refused. Would honour be satisfied if I were to ask it of you?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘If I asked should I obtain?’

  ‘I’ll look after your trunk, Barbie. It can stay in the room. Susan and I are going to share it but it can stay in my half.’

  ‘That is kind. Very kind. But if you are to share the room with Susan you can’t also share it with the trunk. Let the mali have it. Let him keep it in the shed. Then there should be the minimum of fuss for all of us. The alternative is Jalal-Ud-Din’s. Clarissa has already mentioned it. But I should not be happy to think of my trunk in a heathen storeroom. The trunk is packed with relics of my work in the mission. It is my life in India. My shadow as you might say.’

  Sarah nodded, readjusted the hold she had on her own arms, then said, ‘You’ll let me visit you at Clarissa’s, won’t you, Barbie?’

  For several seconds Barbie did not reply. Then, ‘It might be better if you didn’t,’ she said. ‘At least not for a while. Not until I’ve found my feet. The room is too small to be a suitable place in which to receive guests and I am myself merely a guest, albeit a paying one. You may of course always visit Clarissa and anticipate seeing me as well but I do not want, as the saying is, to push my luck. I do not want to incur Clarissa’s wrath by filling her house with wild and extravagant parties. I shall have to learn, have to learn, yes, to be as quiet as a mouse. Which won’t be easy. Clarissa does not hold the key to imaginary silences. Shall you tell Aziz about the trunk now, Sarah? So that he can tell the mali? And it will be official?’

  Sarah nodded and Barbie called the old man. When he came Sarah spoke to him. Presently he went away and returned with the mali and Sarah spoke to the mali too. When they had gone and Barbie had thanked her Sarah got up to go. The light was fading quickly.

  ‘There is one thing else,’ Barbie said. ‘Mabel once told me that she had made provision for Aziz in his old age.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘And it will be – respected?’

  ‘Yes, Barbie.’

  ‘Forgive me for mentioning it. I feared perhaps she may have meant to make provision, meant to remember him, but failed to put it into words.’

  ‘No, she remembered Aziz. She remembered you too, Barbie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Only in a little way. A small annuity. To help out with the pension. You should hear from the bank in Ranpur soon. Although of course they always seem to take ages.’

 
‘Yes, I see. She should not have.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She should not have. It’s taking it away from the rest of you. And I didn’t expect anything. But it was very kind. Very kind.’

  ‘Oh, Barbie, don’t.’

  ‘Kind,’ Barbie repeated. ‘So kind.’

  She felt in her jacket pocket for the cologne-scented handkerchief. She blew her nose.

  ‘My mother,’ she said – laughing – ‘was always terribly impressed by the word annuity. She thought it a mark of true gentility. It’s odd how these things come back to one. She would have been very proud. My daughter, she would have said, need never concern herself about money because she has her annuity.’

  *

  That evening before supper she sat on her bed and watched Aziz and the mali measure the trunk for its shroud of stitched gunny-sacking, which the mali said his wife would cut and help him to sew round it. Later, holding a lantern, she followed the cortège round to the mali’s shed and saw the covered object stowed in one cleared corner. As she left, holding the lantern high, she heard the clink of the spades and forks as the mali carefully replaced them.

  *

  On the morning of the day she left Rose Cottage she woke early, before Aziz brought the pot of tea, the banana, the thin slice of bread and butter which usually made up her chota hazri. The previous night she had drawn back the curtains in order to be able to distinguish between a clear morning and a grey one. It was scarcely light but she could hear the whisper of fine steady rain. She rose and walked bare-foot to confirm it and saw the hunched blanketed figure of the chaukidar who at night guarded Rose Cottage and the next bungalow down the road, patrolling between the two but usually to be found asleep on their own front verandah. The rain was dripping from the verandah roof but there was a lightness in the shadows of the garden that indicated a clear, perhaps sunny, morning later.

  She turned back into the room, gazed at the rush mat and then impulsively knelt to say a morning prayer. The prayer turned out to be as full of information as requests. Thank You for Your many blessings and for the years of Rose Cottage. Please guard this room where my two girls are to sleep and admit to Your kingdom the troubled soul of my friend Mabel Layton. I have left my trunk in the shed. I am going to Clarissa’s. It is not far.

  Rising she inspected the roses gathered yesterday. She had meant to cut many more but a further and final visit from Sarah had interrupted her, put her off her stroke. Seeing the girl crossing the lawn in the late afternoon she feared she had come to cancel the arrangement about the trunk. But she had not.

  Barbie had kept the roses in her bedroom all night; young buds, because she had wanted them to begin to unfold and absorb the substance of her dreams and waking meditations, so that they could express upon the grave a special love and particular gratitude. Leaning close to them now it seemed to her that they had absorbed little, perhaps nothing; that each bud was merely a convoluted statement about itself and about the austerity of the vegetable kingdom which was content with the rhythm of the seasons and did not aspire beyond the natural flow of its sap and the firm grip of its root. The bushes from which these roses came had been of English stock but they had travelled well and accepted what was offered. They had not wished to adapt the soil or put a veil across the heat of the sun or spread the rainfall more evenly throughout the year. They had flourished.

  ‘You are now native roses,’ she said to them. ‘Of the country. The garden is a native garden. We are only visitors. That has been our mistake. That is why God has not followed us here.’

  Like a departing guest she opened the drawers in dressing-table and chest just enough to show that they had been dealt with and were empty. For a similar reason she opened the almirah, took out her travelling costume and left the door ajar. After she had bathed she found the chota hazri tray on the bedside table. She sat in her underwear and dressing-gown and sipped and munched, kept glancing at her watch, already alert for the sound of the taxi which Mr Maybrick had guaranteed to send up not later than eight o’clock. She had told Aziz that she would not wait to eat a proper breakfast.

  At a quarter to the hour she began her final preparations. At five to she called Aziz. Between them they upended the writing-table which she had locked the night before and folded the legs in. He carried it into the hall and came back for the suitcase. He brought newspaper in which to wrap the roses; and then gave her a key.

  ‘What is this, Aziz?’

  He told her he had found it on the floor, that it must be the key to her trunk. She recognized it now. She put it in her handbag and then sat alone until she heard the car arrive.

  The rain had stopped. Outside, below the verandah, the other servants stood. She had tipped them all the night before for the last time. Now she shook hands with the mali and his wife, ruffled the boy’s hair, smiled at the sweeper girl who kept in the background. Last in the line was Aziz. He had on his fur cap and carried a shawl over one shoulder, ready for his own journey.

  ‘Good-bye, Aziz.’

  ‘Good-bye, Barbie Mem.’

  ‘Have you far to go?’

  He indicated a direction, his arm straight and stiff, the hand open, pointing vaguely towards a mountainous distance. A day’s journey. Two days’. More than that? She did not know. The name of his village and district written for her in uneven block capitals on a scrap of paper had meant nothing to her. One day she would borrow a large-scape map of the area and search for the name among the contours that showed the greatest heights.

  ‘God be with you,’ she said.

  ‘And with you,’ he answered. Briefly their hands met and clasped; and then she entered the taxi whose door was held open by the mali’s boy.

  IV

  On the first Sunday after Barbie’s arrival at the rectory bungalow Arthur Peplow conducted the morning service as one of thanksgiving for the defeat of the Japanese attempt to invade India at Imphal, for the news that the last Japanese soldier had been driven from Indian soil, and for the continuing good reports from France of the allied offensive against the Germans. Having announced that this should be their theme in all their hymns and prayers he said that they would begin with a rather more intimate kind of thanksgiving. He moved towards the front pew where Susan sat with her sister and mother.

  ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His goodness to give safe deliverance to this our sister, and hath preserved her in the great danger of childbirth, We shall give hearty thanks unto God and say: Except the Lord build the house: their labour is but lost that build it. Except the Lord keep the city: the watchman waketh but in vain.’

  As if blissfully unaware that several members of the congregation (the Smalleys for instance) raised their eyebrows at his inclusion of the form for the churching of women in a service attended by Other Ranks and young and impressionable officers, he announced hymn number 358; and it may have been that towards the back of the church where a group of young British soldiers on church parade got noisily to their feet, one of them glanced at the elderly woman next to him, on the other side of a pillar that rose between pews, alerted by a strangled sound such as might be caused by a sudden constriction of the throat. If so he must then have been reassured. No incident was reported. And the service got off to a rousing start with Bishop Heber’s missionary hymn: From Greenland’s icy mountains: which everyone knew and could sing happily without bothering much about the words.

  The hymn chosen to close the service was Onward Christian Soldiers. People felt that Arthur Peplow had done the station proud.

  Outside, shading her eyes from a splendid burst of Sunday sunshine, Nicky Paynton said that there was nothing so cheerful as a good rollicking morning at church. It set you up for the day. Ahead lay an equally cheerful session in the club bar and a luncheon there of Madras curry guaranteed to bring cleansing tears to the eyes and an overall feeling of well-being. In the evening Clara and Nicky were dining with the Trehearnes. They asked if they could stop in on the way and see the ba
by. Mildred assented. Kevin and Dicky were dining at the grace and favour. They could all have a drink together before Clara and Nicky went on to Maisie’s.

  ‘The baby will be asleep,’ Susan warned them. ‘I shouldn’t want him woken. He falls asleep as soon as he’s had his six o’clock bottle. It’s his best time.’ She plucked at her mother’s sleeve. ‘We ought to be getting back. Has Mahmoud brought the flowers?’

  ‘I’ll check,’ Dicky Beauvais said and walked off briskly down the path through the lingering groups of worshippers.

  ‘We sent Mahmoud up to the cottage,’ Mildred explained, ‘to get some roses for Susan.’

  ‘For Aunty Mabel’s grave,’ Susan said. ‘Because I missed the funeral.’

  Dicky was coming back, selfconscious with a large bunch of roses. Presumably Mahmoud had been waiting outside the churchyard gate. Susan went to meet him. She looked slim and pretty and very young. Dicky took her round the side of the church to place her offering on the grave Arthur Peplow had chosen for Mabel’s resting place: a secluded spot. It was plucky of Susan to come to church so soon after her return from the nursing home, Clara Fosdick said; and thoughtful of her to arrange for the flowers.

  ‘But she’s anxious to get home now,’ Mildred said. ‘Minnie’s not been in sole charge before. But it seemed wise to start as one means to go on. Minnie’s quite capable of making sure the brat comes to no damage even if she’s hamfisted with the paraphernalia. And Panther’s taken a shine to him. He growls if old Mahmoud goes near. He knows the ghastly thing belongs to Su. He doesn’t mind Dicky taking a peep because Dicky brought them home. But he took an unpleasant interest in poor Kevin’s ankles last night, didn’t he Kevin?’