The Towers of Silence

by Paul Scott

  I am sure you will remember Edwina Crane? She was superintendent of our schools in Mayapore district, amongst which is the little school on the outskirts of Dibrapur. Since the death both of the Indian teacher there and of Miss Crane the Dibrapur post is one we have found it not at all easy to fill.

  Fortunately, six months ago, we were able to place a Miss Johnson, a Eurasian Christian, who has been very successful and whom we hope will continue as teacher in charge of Dibrapur for some time to come. However, Miss Johnson recently announced her engagement to be married and has asked for a month’s leave from December 12th in order to solemnize the union and go down to Madras province with her husband. To this request, naturally, we have acceded. What has proved more difficult to arrange is for a teacher to take her place while she is away. The Dibrapur school is an infants’ and junior school, most of its pupils come from nearby villages, not from the town. Unlike the senior schools in the towns it is normally closed for a few days only at Christmas. There is a bungalow nearby where the teacher in charge lives. Mayapore, I’m afraid, is 75 miles distant. One is rather cut off. The town of Dibrapur is not salubrious. But the troubles that affected that area are long since over.

  The question is, would you consider filling in for Miss Johnson? We should be most grateful. A telegram saying one way or the other would settle the matter. If your answer is in the affirmative I will at once instruct Miss Jolley in Ranpur to arrange your transportation from Pankot to Mayapore on, I suggest, December 5th, which would enable you to reach Mayapore on the 6th or 7th and have a couple of days with Miss Johnson in Dibrapur before she departs. The superintendent in Mayapore is Mrs Lanscombe whom I do not think you know. She would undertake all the arrangements for your reception and transportation at the Mayapore end. If you are agreeable I will ask Miss Jolley to telephone you at the rectory bungalow as soon as she has effected all the necessary bookings so that she can give you the details. Meanwhile my sincere good wishes: Cyril B. Studholme, MA.

  *

  She read the letter twice before folding and returning it to its envelope. On the second reading she knew what Sarah had done. She had visited Mr Studholme to disabuse him of any idea he’d got hold of that the old warhorse was past it. She had done this subtly, so that he had not realized it and had even forgotten to write a letter of good wishes on her recovery from her illness. With this gesture of Sarah’s, practical, unobtrusive, Barbie felt that their relationship had been sealed in a way that touched her more deeply than any open declaration of esteem could have done.

  She put the envelope in her handbag. Again, as at the time of Colonel Trehearne’s unexpected invitation, she wanted to be enclosed in the world of her private happiness so that she could experience it fully, exist for a while at its tranquil centre which was not a fixed point in space but a moving one gliding across a flat landscape in the long straight line which, in her imagination, was the road to Dibrapur. She shut her eyes and in the dim room turned her face to the enormous white sky and the scorching oven-breath of the sun that baked the earth and the body to a holy exhaustion.

  India, she thought. India. India.

  India, she whispered.

  She said aloud, ‘India. India. India.’

  The children laughed. Say it again, Barbie Mem, they chorused. India, she cried. The first syllable was inaudible and the second seemed to spring shrieking from her throat, hover, then fall like a bird struck dead in flight. She lowered her voice and spoke in the breathy tone adopted for talking to Arthur, Clarissa, Edgar Maybrick and little Ashok. I must conserve my real voice, she said. Conserve it for use in the schoolroom at Dibrapur.

  But her real voice had gone. Would the warmth of the plains restore it to life and vibrancy or was it permanently damaged? Would a Pankot winter of cold nights complete its ruination? These questions were rhetorical. The damage to her voice in spite of Travers’s assurances was a punishment whose sting she only truly felt this morning. If she accepted the mission’s invitation she would be doing so under false pretences.

  She could only pray and having prayed decline, because prayer had long since become a matter of form, of habit. She did not even bother to kneel. Oh, God, she said, give me back my voice.

  *

  When she reached the hall she said loudly, ‘Clarissa!’

  The bead curtains merely shivered. They should have opened.

  With the letter from Mr Studholme firmly held in one hand she parted the beads with the other and clattered through into the sea-green incorruptible room. And stopped.

  Captain Coley rose.

  Clarissa said, ‘There you are, Barbara. I was just going to send to see if you had a moment.’

  ‘Oh, I have plenty of moments.’

  The old crone, cracking jokes. There had been a night when she felt she could have toppled this man over merely by placing a finger on his chest. Was there hair on it? She knew nothing except the prone view from above. They were looking everywhere but at each other. Mostly they looked at Clarissa who gleamed under this concentration of light.

  Clarissa spoke: an oracle with questions instead of answers. With Coley present Clarissa had reverted. She no longer looked solicitous. She spoke as she might to children from whom it was her duty to prise secrets.

  ‘There is some mystery,’ she said, ‘about a trunk in the mali’s shed at Rose Cottage.’

  ‘No mystery,’ Barbie replied. ‘The trunk is mine. Is it required to be removed?’

  Clarissa silently referred the question to Captain Coley. Apt Coley. Barbie turned to him. His face (that martyr’s face) was red and, she could have sworn, stippled with sweat on the anguished forehead, although the daytime November warmth had not come into Clarissa’s room with him.

  ‘Be appreciated,’ he said.

  Clarissa explained. ‘Captain Coley is keeping an eye on things while Mildred is away, you see.’

  ‘Including the gardening implements?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘Spot of bother. Between the mali fellow and old Mahmoud.’

  ‘Is not Mahmoud on leave?’

  ‘Came back. Going to Calcutta tomorrow to join Mildred. Mrs Layton.’

  Apt Coley did not use many words. After a decade and more as adjutant of the depot words were probably meaningless to him. Since his routine did not vary from one week to the next, year after year, he must use the same ones every day of his life.

  ‘What was this spot of bother between the mali and Mahmoud?’ she asked him.

  ‘Suspected theft.’

  ‘Why on earth should Mahmoud suspect theft? My name is clearly printed.’

  ‘Covered. Trunk covered.’

  ‘But didn’t mali explain it was mine and that he had it only to look after for me?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. Check his story.’

  ‘But you still want it removed.’

  He looked round the room as if looking for a place where it might go.

  ‘Be appreciated,’ he said eventually.

  ‘When? Today?’

  ‘Heavens, no.’ For a moment he was almost stung to articulacy. Perhaps he feared one thing as much as a posting he couldn’t get out of. The word Urgent. ‘They’ll be home for Christmas. Twentieth actually. Loads of time. Month in fact.’

  ‘But you’d like to tell Mahmoud before he goes to Calcutta tomorrow that he can forget the trunk because it will be gone?’

  The telephone rang.

  Clarissa got up. ‘That will be Isobel about the prizes for their farewell dance. Are you going, Captain Coley?’

  ‘On duty that night, I’m afraid.’

  Barbie knew that by farewell dance Clarissa meant the first and most important. There would be several others, in descending order of priority, with smaller bands, ending with a quartet. The Rankins were not going until after Christmas. No one knew where. They pretended not to.

  ‘What a pity,’ Clarissa said. Passing Barbie she added, ‘Captain Coley is such a lovely waltzer.’

  When they we
re alone the tension between them soared to a peak and then quite simply and quietly died as if they had survived an act of God and found themselves stranded and non-combatant.

  ‘I danced too as a gel,’ Barbie heard herself croaking. The ‘gel’ interested her even as she said it. It was a pronunciation a man like Coley might feel happy with. ‘Which may surprise you. We danced at a place called the Athenaeum. Not the Athenaeum, naturally. I think its real name was the Athenaeum Temperance Assembly. Every year there was a church charity ball. I loved the mazurka. My father taught me to dance when I was a child. He hummed the music. Once he danced me all the way down Lucknow Road.’

  ‘Lucknow?’

  ‘Lucknow Road. Camberwell.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘When will it be convenient?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For the trunk?’

  ‘Oh, that. I’ll send it down.’

  ‘Don’t trouble.’

  ‘No trouble.’

  ‘There wasn’t room, you see. For the trunk. But it’s different now.’ She waved the mission’s letter. ‘I’m back in harness. Going Dibrapur.’ Coleyism was catching. ‘Clarissa won’t mind about the trunk because it’s only a week or two before I go. After that, who knows? If I do well Mr Studholme will be pleased with me, won’t he? And I can stay in Mayapore for a while afterwards. Edwina’s buried there. My friend, Miss Crane. I expect you remember. And then I’ll be quite content to go to Darjeeling or Naini Tal. With all my luggage. I can always write to Colonel Layton when the war’s over. I can leave it to him to decide where Mabel should have been buried. But I should like to see Rose Cottage just once more, Captain Coley. Preferably after Mahmoud’s gone to Calcutta.’

  ‘Going first thing tomorrow. Got him on a convoy to Ranpur.’

  ‘Then second thing tomorrow would be fine. Say eleven a.m.?’

  ‘On duty tomorrow, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh but that doesn’t matter. Just tell mali. There’s no need for you to be there.’

  Coley inclined his head. There was a childlike grace about him which she suddenly understood and found pleasant. She felt that somewhere in the background he kept a box of bricks. She went with him to the hall where Clarissa, smiling and talking to the telephone, raised her hand in august farewell.

  On the steps of the verandah Barbie said:

  ‘Thank you for sending back my sou’wester, Captain Coley. That afternoon I tried to deliver the spoons there was no one there. I must have lost it running – running in the rain.’

  His face reddened slightly but the martyred look had gone, briefly, as it might have done centuries ago if a man from the bishop’s palace had galloped up to the place of execution waving a paper that quenched the fire before it could take hold. He offered his hand which she took.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. He hesitated. She feared a more intense declaration.

  ‘Regiment most grateful. For the spoons.’

  He turned, went down the steps putting on his cap, thrusting his little cane under his left arm, making for a battered old Austin 7 which they both knew had been in the locked corrugated shed on that particular day.

  V

  She told the tonga-wallah she required his services for the entire morning and made a bargain. He was an enclosed dilapidated man with a curved nose and predatory sleeping eyes, a starved bird with folded wings.

  ‘Is your horse strong?’ she asked. ‘Strong in the bone?’ The three of them had bones aplenty. The horse was strong he said. She told him to drive her in the direction of Pankot railway station.

  At the crest of the hill where the road led out of the valley through the miniature mountain pass she ordered him to turn round and stop. She got down and stood for several minutes. She could not see the celestial range of sunlit peaks. There was cloud there to the northeast, cloud that brought snow to the mountains and sometimes if the winds could carry them so far cold rain to the valley. But the late November sun was strong and the valley clean, bright, sparkling.

  She pictured Aziz, arm extended, offering Pankot to her. She put out her own arm in conscious imitation and ordered the tonga-wallah to drive her back to East Hill and when he got there up Club road. He gave no indication of having heard but when she got back in set off. No doubt he thought her mad.

  Twenty minutes later they were passing the milestone half way up Club road. There was no body lying there. All the bodies were buried but the jackal packs had multiplied; men ran with them on all fours, ravenous for bones. The tonga-wallah sat hunched letting the horse make its own pace.

  At the entrance to the club it began to turn in as if this were its nature. ‘No,’ she called. ‘Further, further.’ Horse and man struggled for supremacy. The tonga lurched back on to its route.

  They continued on and up past the familiar entrances to the bungalows between the club and Rose Cottage. She felt no pang. All this had been in another life. It seemed strange that it still existed. Staring at the road below her feet she counted the horse’s paces and then said, ‘Stop!’ and glanced round. The equipage was outside the gates which the mali had left open, presumably because Captain Coley had told him to expect her. She imagined that most of the time while Mildred was away the gates were closed and padlocked. She told the tonga-wallah to drive in.

  The first thing she saw was the trunk. It was uncovered. It had been placed conveniently on the front verandah at the head of the steps. The main door behind was shut and barred. The mali must be in the servants’ quarters. She thought it lax of him to leave the trunk unattended and the gates open. Anyone could have come in and removed it. But he may have thought it too large and heavy for a casual thief. She went up the steps and tested the padlock. It was intact.

  The trunk certainly looked bigger than she remembered. She had imagined it roped easily in the back of the tonga and herself up front sharing the driver’s seat for the return journey. She glanced at the stationary contraption, the droop-headed horse, the drooped old man. He would need help, persuasion probably.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. The man said nothing. He was already waiting.

  She edged her way round the trunk to gain the front verandah. Again she felt no pang to be standing on familiar ground. The unkempt plants on the balustrade looked confused by some rearrangement that was not clear to them and to which they would never get used. There was an element in the atmosphere that was neither warm and friendly nor yet quite cold and hostile. The window through which she could have seen into her old room was shuttered. She paused in front of it and had an impusle which she restrained to rap on the wood and cry: Is anybody there? and then to put her ear to the crack between the shutters and to listen for the sounds of the years she had spent there scattering in panic at the stranger’s voice. She moved on round to the side where her old french window used to be. It was still there but was also shuttered. Again came the impulse to knock and again it was restrained, just in time. Her hand was already a fist, the knuckles resting against the wood which her forehead was almost touching. She stood like this waiting for the impulse to go away. When it had gone she felt hollow with her history, so long unused. She uncurled her fist. There seemed to be webs of new-grown flesh between her fingers.

  She moved from the door and then stopped, arrested by a conviction that she was not alone. She glanced towards the corner of the bungalow where the rear verandah began, the verandah on which Mabel had died. It was coming from there, the sense of a presence, of someone in possession and occupation, of something which made the air difficult to breathe. She put her hand to her throat and felt for the gold chain with its pendant cross and then walked forward, turned the corner and gasped – both at the sight of a man and at the noxious emanation that lay like an almost visible miasma around the plants along the balustrade which had grown dense and begun to trail tendrils. The man stood as she had once seen Mabel stand, staring at the garden as if struck by a thought about it but also beyond it to the hills and where the mountains lay behind the impenetrable formation
s of sunlit cloud: a lean tall Englishman, dressed in civilian clothes and a soft tweed hat, his right shoulder towards her, his right arm extended and hand flattened upon the rail, gazing as from a height, upon a world spread out before him.

  Fighting the sickness she called out, ‘I beg your pardon. But would you please explain what you’re doing here?’

  Some ten yards separated them. He heard her voice but probably not the poorly articulated words. His sharp glance in her direction was not accompanied by any movement of his trunk or limbs.

  ‘You,’ she called again. ‘What are you doing? This is private property, not a public right of way.’

  She went to confront him. He let go of the balustrade, clutched the tweed hat at its crumpled crown and began to raise it; and then the nausea and her apprehension faded, scorched out of her by this courteous gesture. She had a wild notion that the man was Colonel Layton, released and restored and come home to find his family absent.

  But she had seen Colonel Layton and the hat was now fully off, revealing a head and an unshadowed face, one half of which, the left, was branded under a lashless and uncanopied blue eye with a pink and white spider web of puckered flesh. There, on that side of his head, the man had been burned.

  He put the hat back on.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said – and the apology served a dual purpose. ‘My name’s Ronald Merrick. I came to see the Laytons but the mali tells me they’re in Calcutta. He invited me to stay while he made me a cup of coffee.’

  He had moved round to face her. His left arm hung unnaturally stiffly. His right hand was bare. The left was encased in a black leather glove, the fingers and thumb of which were moulded to hold something invisible and useless.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I do apologize. Of course. Captain Merrick. My name’s Barbara Batchelor. I was Mabel Layton’s companion. I used to live here.’

  She put out her hand and at once wished she had not; not because by doing so she broke one of the stuffier rules but because the arrangements he had to make to reciprocate were complicated. Taking his hat off again, revealing once more the raw geography of his face, he inserted the hat into the black leather glove, clamped its fingers and then put his one warm living hand in hers.