The Towers of Silence

by Paul Scott

  Certainly an air of furtiveness hung over the ceremony of christening which Arthur Peplow at Mildred’s insistence conducted as arranged at eleven o’clock in the forenoon, ushering the participants in and speaking to them in a whisper as though the ritual were forbidden and everyone of them a potential martyr, fearful of God but also of discovery. The child’s feeble cries were a constant threat as were the nervous coughs, the scraped feet, Arthur’s mumbling, their muttered responses.

  There was no party afterwards. Mildred had cancelled it. How she managed to attend the ceremony was considered a marvel. Outside the church the Rankins, having done their duty as godparents, thoughtfully went back to Flagstaff House leaving Mildred to be taken home by Sarah and Dicky. To the innermost circle gathered for lunch, Isobel reported Mildred composed but uncommunicative except in one matter. ‘What was that bloody woman doing in church?’ she had asked, meaning the Batchelor woman who had been observed by all of them seated as far away from the font as it was possible to get, in the very front pew where she had never been seen to sit before; and on her knees praying as if her presence were going to make all the difference between a christening that ‘took’ and one that didn’t.

  ‘But I’m really not sure,’ Isobel said, ‘that Mildred hasn’t become over-obsessed by Miss Batchelor.’ Asked by Nicky Paynton just what she meant she showed some reluctance to answer. Things were bad enough, she said, bad for the station, without their being aggravated by criticism and gossip. But in the end she revealed that Clarissa Peplow who like Isobel herself had called at the grace and favour the previous night to see if there were anything to do to help had been forced by Mildred to take a box of teaspoons which the old missionary had given to Susan as a wedding present. Clarissa had tried to get out of it but Mildred became ‘extremely agitated’. She swore that nothing had gone right since Susan received them and said she didn’t want them in the house a moment longer. Clarissa could throw them away if she couldn’t face giving them back but she must take them with her. All of which, Isobel said, suggested that Mildred had got it into her head that Miss Batchelor was a bad influence and to blame for everything.

  In fact (Isobel went on to say) Mildred had come as near as dammit to accusing Barbara Batchelor of deliberately turning Mabel against her family. She said that if Mabel hadn’t been cosseted and flattered by Miss Batchelor right from the start she would have got rid of the damned woman and moved into the spare and let Mildred and the girls take over the rest of the house and that if that had happened Susan would probably never have married Teddie Bingham who had been a decent enough chap but not the husband Susan deserved. He would probably never have risen above junior field rank. Pigging in at the grace and favour had distorted the girl’s outlook, it had got on her nerves, completely unsettled her, until suddenly she had seen marriage as a way out, chosen Teddie without thinking properly and married him only to find herself back where she started, a grass-widow, then a widow, and then a mother with a fatherless child. And now God knew what was to happen to her.

  ‘According to Travers, Susan hasn’t spoken a word to anyone but just sits in the room they’ve given her staring out of the window and smiling,’ Isobel ended.

  It was this that seemed so appalling: to have done what she had done and yet to smile. But what had she done? The more one thought about it the more incomprehensible it became. Even the mechanics of the act – let alone the motive – were meaningless until one of the men, Dick Rankin himself, said it reminded him of the kind of thing kids did to scorpions to watch them sting themselves to death rather than be burnt alive. ‘It’s not true, though,’ Rankin pointed out, ‘if you pop a scorpion into the middle of a ring of fire it arches its tail and looks as if it’s stinging itself to death but it’s only a reflex defensive action. The blighters scorch to death because in spite of what they look like they’ve got very tender skins which is why they mostly come out in the wet weather. In the hot dry weather they hide under stones.’

  But God knew why the girl should use the child as a kid might a scorpion. She must be completely off her rocker. Perhaps in her deranged state she had been trying to re-enact the circumstances of Teddie’s death, which had been by fire. But why the carefully described circle? When you looked at it logically the child had never been in danger except of catching a chill which the little ayah had taken the first opportunity to ensure he didn’t, by bathing and wrapping him up warmly.

  ‘Well,’ Rankin summed up. ‘I suppose the psychiatrists will make something of it. You can’t apply ordinary logic in a case like this. But it’s damned embarrassing for the station.’

  And back you came to the smile and through the smile to the uncomfortable feeling that Susan had made a statement about her life that somehow managed to be a statement about your own: a statement which reduced you – now that Dick Rankin had had his say – to the size of an insect; an insect entirely surrounded by the destructive element, so that twist, turn, attack, or defend yourself as you might you were doomed; not by the forces ranged against you but by the terrible inadequacy of your own armour. And if for armour you read conduct, ideas, principles, the code by which you lived, then the sense to be read into Susan’s otherwise meaningless little charade was to say the least of it thought-provoking.

  V

  ‘I am sorry, Barbara,’ Clarissa said, having given her the spoons. ‘I know it was wrong of her. They were not her spoons to return. But I had no choice and have none now. Dearly as I should have liked to refuse, I felt I could not. Dearly as I should like to hide them and forget them, I cannot. I hope you will take the exceptional circumstances into consideration and forgive her.’

  ‘Blessed are the insulted and the shat upon,’ Barbie said. ‘For they shall inherit the kingdom of Heaven, which is currently under offer with vacant possession.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  Barbie did not repeat it. She said, ‘Forgive me. The circumstances are indeed exceptional. I am not myself. Mildred is not herself. Thou are not changed and God is not mocked.’

  Clarissa’s mouth hung open. She clutched the rosary of the afternoon sandalwood beads. Barbie put the box of spoons by her side on the bed. With Clarissa in the room there was scarcely sufficient space for the two of them to stand. From the bed she could see the old people concealed behind the curtain in the angle of the wall.

  ‘I had a letter from the bank in Ranpur this morning, Clarissa. The annuity Mabel has left me will amount to one hundred and fifty pounds a year. It will take some time for the first quarterly payment to reach me because it all has to be done in London. But it is considerable additional security. It means I can afford to pay you more for my board and lodging.’

  ‘For a temporary arrangement I am adequately repaid,’ Clarissa said. ‘Your suggestion is generous but I cannot accept it.’

  ‘I had another letter too, Clarissa.’ She opened her handbag, got out the letter and gave it to Clarissa. It read: ‘Dear Miss Batchelor, Mr Studholme in Calcutta passed your letter to me because he himself had no suggestion to make in regard to employment in the Mission on a voluntary basis. But he asks me to tell you to write to him again if the matter of accommodation remains unsettled at the end of the year. He says that he has no immediate solution to offer because during the past five years there have naturally been other retirements and the continuing difficulty of arranging passages home has led to more demand for places in Darjeeling and Naini Tal than there is a supply. However the main reason for his passing your letter to me was the possibility he thought there might be of our having a suggestion to make at this end both about accommodation and employment. Unfortunately we have none. I hope that you will soon find somewhere suitable to live. It is very kind of Mr and Mrs Peplow to take you in meanwhile. I trust you are well. Yours sincerely, Helen Jolley.’

  Clarissa gave her the letter back, said nothing and began clacking her beads.

  ‘I called at Smith’s Hotel after the christening this morning,’ Barbie continued. ‘Because
the annuity means I might have afforded their price for a while. But they have no vacancies and the accommodations officer has what the manager calls a lien on any room that falls vacant.’

  Clarissa released the beads and turned to go.

  ‘What news is there of Susan?’ Barbie asked, not wanting her to.

  ‘There is no news. She looks out of a window and smiles.’

  ‘Smiles?’

  ‘Smiles.’

  ‘Why then she is happy.’

  ‘Happy? How can she be happy when she is out of her mind?’

  ‘Perhaps she has entered it,’ Barbie said and then raised her voice because Clarissa had gone. ‘Perhaps that’s why she’s happy and why she smiles.’

  She lifted the lid of the box and stared at the twelve rigid identical apostles. One of them, Thomas, was said to have reached India and to have preached near Madras at San Thome which was named after him. Which spoon was Thomas? She wondered what she would make of them and they of her if they were suddenly made manifest and stood before her, laughing and lusty; simple hard-working men, good with nets and boats, swarthy-skinned, smelling of sweat, of fish, of the timber-yard; men who worked with their hands, most of them. ‘You’d get short shrift in Pankot,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t give tuppence for your chances, least of all if you tried to get into that place where the silver is and asked permission to sit at that table and break your bread and drink your wine.’

  She began to shut the lid but stopped, held by the picture she had just conjured of the apostles in the mess and by the fact that the spoons were silver, solid silver. They had cost, in her terms, a lot of money and had been given with pride as well as love. She realized that Susan had probably looked at them once, written her thank-you letter and forgotten them, making it easy for Mildred to ensure that they were left out of the display of presents. She did not blame Susan but she could never offer them to her again, she would never be able to say to the girl, Your mother sent these back, don’t you want them? It would be for Mildred to tell her should she think of asking where they were. It would be for Mildred to tell the truth or to lie.

  She did not want to keep them herself but they were too good to throw away. She could hardly offer them to Clarissa. The home they must find should at least be appropriate and she believed she had hit upon the most appropriate of all.

  She shut the box, dragged the writing-table from its place against the wall, unfolded the legs and set it up by the bedside. Having unlocked the drawer she took out some crisp blue writing paper and matching envelopes which were lined with sky-blue tissue.

  Dear Colonel Trehearne,

  I am sending today via the adjutant a small gift of silver teaspoons which I should like to present to the Regiment for use in the Officers’ Mess, in memory of the late Mrs Mabel Layton. I hope that this small gift will be acceptable to the regiment.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Barbara Batchelor.

  Dear Captain Coley,

  I have written today to Colonel Trehearne to say that I am delivering to you this box of silver spoons which I am presenting in memory of the late Mrs Mabel Layton for use in the Officers’ Mess.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Barbara Batchelor.

  Before sealing the letters she considered carefully whether she should bother with Coley. She could deliver the spoons direct to Commandant’s House without involving him; but she wanted to involve him because she wanted Mildred to know where the spoons were going before they actually got there and she was sure that Coley would tell her and that if he did she would try to make him send them back. And this he would be unable to do if he knew about the separate official letter already on its way to Colonel Trehearne. He would have no alternative but to pass the spoons on. She believed that even Mildred would be afraid to arrange for them to be lost in transit and would shy away from asking Trehearne to be so ungallant as to decline them.

  In the hall she checked the address of Commandant’s House in Clarissa’s directory. She looked for Coley’s too but could not find it. There was a telephone number with the words ‘Adjs, Office’ written in beside it. She would have to go to the Pankot lines and inquire. Back in her room she sealed the letters and addressed Trehearne’s and at half-past two set out stoutly shod, macintosh over her shoulder, stick in one hand, the box of spoons and the two letters in the other.

  In the bazaar which she could reach within ten minutes of leaving the rectory bungalow she bought stamps and posted the letter to Colonel Trehearne. As the letter disappeared into the box she thought: No going back now! Nothing for it now! March! To the barricades! She strode facing the oncoming traffic which seemed uncommonly heavy but with next to nothing going in her own direction so that she began to feel like someone moving against the flow of columns of refugees. The shouting tonga-wallahs, the bobbing head-load carriers, the gliding cyclists and the lurching soldiers in the open backs of uncovered trucks and lorries might have been calling: Wrong way! Wrong way! The notion exhilarated her. For the first time since leaving Rose Cottage she felt strong and free because the intense vulgarity of Mildred’s gesture in returning the spoons had released in her a vulgarity just as intense but of greater splendour. I, Barbara Batchelor, she declaimed, daughter of Leonard and Lucy Batchelor, late of Lucknow Road, Camberwell, am about to present silver to the officers of the Pankot Rifles. And as my father used to say, storming out into the night or into the morning, bugger the lot of you.

  Half way down Cantonment Approach road she transferred the remaining letter and the box of spoons to her macintosh pocket because her palms were sweating in the humid afternoon. The cloud level was low. There was no rain as yet but the light was strange: bright under a dark sky and then dark under a bright one as if there were a single band of luminosity which bounced, throbbing, between earth and heaven. She did not mind if it rained. She had her sou’wester in the other pocket of her mac. The umbrella, her mother used to say, take the umbrella. Horrid umbrella. Black cotton cave. Dead bat. God is weeping for the sins of the world, her mother said. Laughing, you mean, her father replied, laughing fit to bust. But rain was only rain: sea sucked up and sprayed on the parched land by the giant elephant, the elephant god.

  She paused opposite the main entrance to the grounds of the general hospital. The nursing-home wing was hidden from view by trees and the lie of the land. She walked on attended by a faceless wraith whose Susan-pale arms opened the way for her, parting misty curtains, one after the other, as if insisting on a direction, an ultimate objective, a sublime revelation at the end of a tricky and obscure path.

  The light became apocalyptic. Puddles in the road shone white reflecting a purity whose source was not visible. The landscape was now bleak, the ground on either side of the road waste: areas of windshorn turf broken by rifts and channels. The last refugee had gone by and she was alone, resolute in alien territory, entering Rifle Range road that ran straight full-tilt across the valley towards the hills. Suddenly, as if they had cracked under their own weight, there came a report and then another before the echo of the first had spent itself; and yet another, as many as a dozen. The air shifted under the duress of a wind of panic from the hills and the first drops of rain began to fall. The panic did not touch her but the rain would. She put on her macintosh and sou’wester, patted the pocket where the box of spoons nestled, and strode on past the entrance to grace and favour lane with scarcely more than a glance in the direction of the bungalow to make sure it was still there. Presently she turned into Mess road. It was the day of the wedding party. We could go to Ranpur, Barbie had said, to do some Christmas shopping. Oh, I shall never go to Ranpur again, Mabel had answered, at least not until I’m buried. But on that day it was sunny. Coming from the shade of the portico into the glare the white of the servants’ uniforms dazzled the eye and the emerald leaves of glistening plants in terracotta pots shone like scimitars and cast razor sharp indigo blue shadows. Is it you, is it you, Ghulam Mohammed? Mabel said. And Barbie knew for whom she might ask
. She walked into the mess compound. The pebbles in the path gleamed in the rain. Ahead, level with the entrance, there was a parked military truck and as she gained the shelter of the long portico a group of young officers came out laughing and began to climb up over the tailboard while one stood smoking and calling to the absent driver.

  Turning, he saw her, and two of the other three now settling in the back of the truck and slapping wood and metal with boisterous good-natured impatience saw her too. She filled her old schoolmarm’s lungs, grated her Memsahib’s voice into gear, and called: ‘Good afternoon. Can one of you help me?’

  Close to them she noticed that their faces were tight and youthful. Their single subaltern’s pips looked painfully new. None of them could have been at the party eight months before. She guessed the thought stiffening their necks and minds: Careful – You never know who she is.

  ‘Do you know if Captain Coley is in the mess?’

  ‘Coley? The adjutant? No, I don’t think he is.’

  The officer who had been shouting for the driver glanced at the three in the truck who shook their heads. One of them said, ‘He wasn’t in the daftar this morning.’

  ‘Oh, dear. How dreadfully inconvenient.’ She smiled, mimicking the bright brassy manner of women like Nicky Paynton and Isobel Rankin which she had noted tended to make men put themselves out and do things without actually being ordered to.