The Towers of Silence

  And there, in regard to the stone, Mildred left it with a sound of shattering glass and an impression of Teddie making just a little bit of a fuss, and of Mr Merrick having failed by a perceptible margin to act quite like an officer and a gentleman; an impression which she hardened by reporting him by no stretch of the imagination out of the top drawer, so that it had seemed almost a special kindness to have chosen him for best man, an unconscious repayment to him for the poor way the authorities had treated him in the Manners affair, after all he had done to try to solve and settle it.

  After the stone there had been the incident at the club, and it was reasonable to suppose (Mildred suggested) that if there had not been the incident of the stone nothing dire would have happened at the club.

  The Nawab and his party had been refused entrance to the reception by the British military police who were stationed at the front. The MPs were a last-minute precaution, only there in case there were further untoward or unexplained incidents. Assuming that no Indian was persona grata at the Mirat Gymkhana, they stopped the Nawab, his chief minister and his social secretary from crossing the threshold, which could have caused troublesome diplomatic repercussions if the club secretary hadn’t got wind of it and personally rescued them, personally conducted them into the reception. It was the wedding group’s first meeting with the Nawab and his chief minister, Count Bronowsky, émigré white Russian who now looked like one of those dessicated Muslims of the Jinnah stamp. The two had been away on a visit to a neighbouring state. The social secretary was a different kettle of fish, perhaps a tricky one. He was Ahmed Kasim, the younger son of the ex-chief Congress minister in Ranpur, M. A. Kasim. Heaven knew what he thought of everything. If he thought badly he’d disguised it well. He’d made himself very useful during the week – you couldn’t say charming, he’d been too formal and correct for that. He accompanied Sarah riding one morning and she had no complaint about his behaviour, which Aunt Fenny had been worried about. He never mentioned his father or the fact that he was in prison. He had not struck one as in the least politically minded which may have been why his father had packed him off to work in a princely state as a hopeless reactionary case. When it came to M. A. Kasim’s sons, the old Congressman had probably had to swallow political pride and disappointment, because the elder was a King’s commissioned officer currently a prisoner of war in Malaya and here was the younger working for an Indian prince and looking after the comfort of visiting members of the raj.

  ‘It was Susan,’ Mildred said, ‘who really saved the day. When the old Nawab finally arrived on the lawn, still bristling from the insult, she went forward and dropped him a curtsy, which wasn’t protocol but made all the difference.’

  Glances went admiringly to where Susan stood, or sat, wherever she was on the two or three occasions Mildred recreated this picture of her, on a lawn, in sunshine, in her wedding veil and dress, holding together a situation that had threatened to fall apart. Admirable girl. The Nawab must have been immensely flattered.

  *

  It was the third incident that most concerned and puzzled Barbie because it seemed to her from what she could understand of it that it was of a different order, one that reached outside the wedding and cast innumerable patches of light and shade. The patches of light revealed nothing because the light did not fall on anything, rather it pulsed on and off so that the patches were like mysterious glowing areas attempting to burn their way out of an imprisoning mass of darkness. They did not move; and, coming on, they had gone out before you could fix their positions or even their relationship to each other.

  ‘What was it,’ she asked Sarah, ‘that actually happened at the station?’

  They were walking in the garden of Rose Cottage; or rather Sarah had been walking and Barbie had come down to her. It appeared that they were together but Barbie did not feel that this was the case. She was wary of the girl. She had an idea that it might be unwise to touch her. The Nawab had been pleased with the volume of Gaffur’s poems, Mildred said. Sarah had not mentioned them again. She had not mentioned Mirat, or going riding with the Kasim boy, Ahmed; an excursion which Barbie would have liked to hear about. It was as though she had never been to the wedding or had been and not come back but sent only her reflexion home. She looked at Barbie now from that sort of distance.

  ‘At the station? No more than you’ve already heard.’

  ‘But I heard it without understanding it.’

  ‘I think that’s how we all saw it at the time. Without understanding it. But it was very simple really. Just an elderly Indian woman pushing through us and kneeling at his feet.’

  ‘Captain Merrick’s feet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Beseeching him?’

  Sarah paused with her hands behind her back, looking down at her own feet as though she could see the woman there.

  ‘Beseeching him,’ she agreed. ‘Yes, that’s a good word.’

  ‘But who was the woman?’

  ‘The aunt of the Indian boy Miss Manners is supposed to have been infatuated with. The boy who was the chief suspect. He’s still in prison.’

  ‘Poor woman. What was she like?’

  ‘Grey-haired. Dressed in a white saree like a widow.’

  ‘In a white saree?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that was all that happened?’ Barbie asked after a while.

  ‘That was all. She pushed through the crowd and fell at Mr Merrick’s feet and had to be taken away. Then the train was going and we were waving good-bye to Susan and Teddie.’

  ‘It couldn’t have made much sense.’

  ‘It didn’t, at least not then.’

  ‘When, then? When did it make sense? When you knew who Mr Merrick was?’

  ‘Oh, we knew that by then. It came out during the reception. He was embarrassed because it made it look as if he’d tried to hide it but according to him he was just trying to forget it. I suppose he wasn’t really lying when people asked him what he’d been in the police and he said DSP in Sundemagar.’

  ‘No, that’s true. How did it come out?’

  ‘Count Bronowsky remembered his name.’

  ‘Who is Count Bronowsky?’

  ‘The old Russian the Nawab has as his chief minister. He was talking to Aunt Fenny. He said how well the best man had dealt with the stone-throwing incident, making sure they knew at the palace that the reception would be delayed. When Aunt Fenny told him Mr Merrick had been in the police and was used to dealing with a crisis he identified him at once as the DSP in Mayapore. I gather the case had interested him or perhaps he just had an exceptionally good memory. He went to find Mr Merrick and they had a long talk on the terrace but Aunt Fenny had the news well broadcast by the time they came back in. Teddie was awfully cool with him which was a bit unfair, but I think someone had already suggested that if Mr Merrick was the DSP in Mayapore at the time of the Manners case then the stone had probably been thrown at him and not at the Nawab’s car. And the thing that happened on the station capped it. But still without making much sense. I didn’t really get the hang of it until that evening when Mr Merrick came over to the guest house to apologize to Mother.’

  Barbie thought: Mildred never mentioned an apology.

  ‘But I was the only one up,’ Sarah went on. ‘All the others were still resting. I was waiting for the dark and for the fireflies to come out. So Mr Merrick and I sat and waited for them together. He was going that evening, leaving Mirat for the new training area in Bengal. He told me quite a lot of things. He seemed to want to talk about it now that it had all come out. He explained who the woman in the white saree was. He said he was sorry for her because she was what he called an ordinary decent person who had done everything for her nephew, the one who’s in prison. He’d not seen her since he was in Mayapore but he’d always known he was kept track of by the kind of people who tried to make out he’d arrested the wrong men and ill-treated them, the people responsible for what happened to spoil the wedding. He said they were ex
ploiting the woman, using her as part of a scheme to make him feel like a marked man. It all seemed a bit far-fetched to me, but I expect it’s the only explanation.’

  ‘Did he remember my friend, Edwina Crane?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I never thought to ask.’

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose he did. Although as DSP in Mayapore he’d have known all about her being attacked. But I expect one of his juniors dealt with that. He had his hands full with that other awful business, didn’t he? Does he still feel he was right, or does he think he might have made a mistake after all, arresting those boys? Miss Manners seemed so positive they weren’t the ones, if we’re to believe all we heard.’

  They had reached the shade of a pine tree that stood near the very end of the garden. From here there was the view to the farther hills and the mountains. In a week or two the snow-capped peaks would be obscured by cloud as often as not. Sarah sat down. Barbie followed suit.

  ‘He feels he was right,’ Sarah said. ‘He sounded very sure. Very sure indeed. But the more he talked about it the more I felt he’d got it all wrong. And that would be terrible, wouldn’t it? If he had got it wrong but is always going to believe he didn’t. Do you see what I mean? I know it’s terrible in other ways, for the boys who have gone to prison and for – well – but she’s dead, and that’s another question, another sort of terrible. But to have got something wrong, and never see it, never believe it . . . ’

  Sarah dug her hand into a cushion of pine needles, sifting them, considering them. Suddenly she went on: ‘He said that he was once attracted to her himself, in love with her perhaps. He made it sound like a confession, like a determination to be honest about every possible aspect but all the time I felt it wasn’t. I don’t know why I felt that. But everything he said sounded rehearsed. And while he was saying it you felt him watching for the effect, even knowing what it was going to be.’

  ‘You didn’t like him.’

  After a while Sarah shook her head.

  ‘No. I don’t think I liked him at all.’

  Perhaps, Barbie thought, because you had seen the child and talked to the old woman, and had seen the other woman, the woman in the white saree, and felt the presence of the unknown Indian. And wonder how in all this complexity guilt can lie alongside innocence and whether it might not have been in Mr Merrick’s power to separate them.

  She continued to sit in spite of getting cramp because Sarah did not move and she did not want to leave her alone.

  ‘What did you say?’ Sarah asked, coming back into herself after what seemed a long time.

  ‘I wasn’t talking.’

  Sarah stared at her for a moment or two and said, ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were,’ and then Barbie wondered whether she had been.

  For years she had had real and imaginary conversations with people, with herself, with God, with anyone who was there to listen or not listen. But an imaginary silence was something new. If you didn’t know you were talking then you didn’t know what you were saying. She tried to remember exactly what she had been thinking in case she had spoken some of her thoughts aloud, but her mind appeared to have been blank after the image of Sarah sitting with the old woman and the child, pondering the question of guilt and innocence and the part Mr Merrick had played or not played in attempting to establish them.

  ‘You seem to be haunted by it,’ she said, ‘I mean by that awful business. First in Kashmir, being so close to the houseboat, and now in Mirat, with Captain Merrick.’

  ‘Someone should be haunted by it,’ Sarah said.

  And then Barbie was sure she was right: Sarah had visited the woman and seen the child. She had a concern to hold the child, to take it to St John’s and see it baptized.

  ‘Yes,’ Barbie said. ‘Perhaps we should.’ She got up. ‘Stay here. I’ve got something for you to take to Susan.’

  She went into the house, returned with the box of Apostle spoons and the note she had written. She knelt again and offered them.

  ‘They’re a combined wedding and twenty-first birthday present. Nothing very much. A set of teaspoons. I’d be grateful if you’d take them to her.’

  ‘Thank you, Barbie. That’s very kind.’

  Sarah put the box on the cushion of needles and looked at the envelope on which Barbie had written, ‘Mrs Edward Bingham’.

  ‘I may be leaving Pankot,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Oh, Sarah, why? Where?’

  ‘Just to do something more useful. Nursing perhaps or what I’m doing now only in a place where the war’s a bit closer. Do you think that’s selfish?’

  ‘Why selfish?’

  ‘Because of leaving Mother and Susan. With Daddy a prisoner it’s always seemed to be my job to help look after things.’

  ‘Susan’s a married woman now.’

  ‘Yes. That’s why I thought I could go.’

  ‘I should miss you dreadfully, well we all should, but it would be wrong to hold you back. That would be selfishness.’

  Sarah glanced up. For a while they looked at each other gravely. ‘I wish I could see things clearly enough to be positive like that,’ Sarah said. ‘But I never can. I must go—’

  Abruptly she rose.

  ‘Thank you for Susan’s present. Please don’t bother to see me off.’

  She was gone before Barbie could get to her feet. She watched her until she was out of sight and then followed slowly.

  Mabel was not working in the back or on the verandah which must mean she was either at the front or gone for one of her increasingly rare but still solitary walks.

  I must explore, Barbie thought; and then spoke aloud: ‘I must explore this mystery of the imaginary silence,’ and as her voice continued she found that she could detach herself from its sound so that it seemed to go drifting away, or she to go drifting away from it, until she was left in a state of immobility or suspended animation, surrounded by what she could only describe as a vivid sense of herself as new and unused, with neither debit nor credit to her account, no longer in arrears with any kind of payment because the account had not been opened yet.

  This was very clear to her but she guessed it wouldn’t be when the immobility was cancelled. She thought: Emerson was wrong, we’re not explained by our history at all, in fact it’s our history that gets in the way of a lucid explanation of us.

  She began to enjoy the sensation of her history and other people’s history blowing away like dead leaves; but then it occurred to her that among the leaves were her religious principles and beliefs, and – observing the solemn evergreen stillness of the wood-capped hills – felt reassured and wisely reinstructed.

  An imaginary silence should not be used to destroy contact but to create it. She went round to the front to find Mabel but the garden was empty. Mabel’s stick was on the front verandah so she was not out walking. She went inside, knocked on Mabel’s door and opened it.

  Mabel was sitting on the edge of her bed watching Aziz removing the contents of an old press and placing them carefully on a blanket spread on the floor.

  ‘Hello, Barbie,’ Mabel said, looking up. ‘We’re sorting out some winter things.’

  Barbie had never watched this ritual at Rose Cottage but she knew that it took place. She came further into the room, fascinated as she had been since childhood by the prospect of viewing someone else’s possessions; for these had a magic quality of touch-me-not that belonged in fairy tales and in such tales dispensation was possible but not inevitable and every invitation to come nearer was a sugared gift.

  ‘Oh, no, Aziz,’ Mabel said, as he opened layers of tissue to show the coat of a grey costume.

  ‘Hān,’ he insisted. ‘Bond is-street.’

  Mabel smiled. ‘I bought it in London the last summer I was there,’ she explained to Barbie, ‘the summer John’s grandfather died. Susan was only ten or eleven then so you can tell how out of date it is. But every winter Aziz tries to make me bring it out, because of the tag.’

  ‘Bond is-street,’ Aziz repeated. ‘Pu
kka.’

  The whole costume was spread out now. It had the simple elegance of all expensive clothes.

  ‘You could shorten the skirt,’ Barbie suggested. ‘It wouldn’t spoil the line.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it?’

  Encouraged by Barbie’s interest Aziz said, ‘Hān. Shorten is-skirt.’

  ‘Perhaps. If I can still get into it.’

  Mabel reached down and pulled the costume towards her, twitched at it, and Barbie wondered how easy or difficult it would be to make her take an interest again in things outside Rose Cottage: in clothes, in visits, sprees. The two of them could have a holiday, a short one, not far away. They could go down to Ranpur to do some Christmas shopping. She would take Mabel round the Bishop Barnard and introduce her to Helen Jolley. For such a holiday she would have the heliotrope.

  ‘Very well, Aziz,’ Mabel said. ‘Put it on the pile.’

  Aziz nodded. He rearranged the costume, folded it with reverence, replaced the dried sprigs of lavender whose scent mingled with that of sandalwood and mothballs. The tissue-wrapped costume was put on the smaller of the two piles. Suddenly he reached into the chest and said to Barbie, ‘Memsahib!’