The Towers of Silence

  Travers looked round, surprised because Clarissa Peplow’s voice sounded very unsteady. He had always assumed her to be emotionally dehydrated.

  ‘Will you have her back, Mrs Peplow? That is, if the question happens to arise?’

  Clarissa nodded.

  ‘I ask because it could be important. I mean if we get her over the pneumonia. People don’t die only of diseases, you know.’

  At that moment the telephone rang and thinking it might be the hospital warning him of a delay Travers got Clarissa’s permission to answer it. It wasn’t the hospital but Clara Fosdick, asking for Clarissa. She said she was glad to be speaking to him, however, because Nicky Paynton had had this telegram about poor Bunny being killed in action and Clara had already thought of ringing Colonel Beames to suggest that he should look in. Clara said she thought Nicky was taking it too well and being over-conscientious about not breaking down in front of people. Nicky and Bunny had absolutely adored each other and it was awful, Clara said, to see Nicky going about the house as if nothing had happened and even trying to get ready to go to the club to play bridge in order not to let Isobel and Maisie down, because with Mildred temporarily dropped out it was difficult to make up a four at short notice if, as she had last night, Isobel indicated that she had a free afternoon and wished to play.

  ‘I’m not sure whether I should cancel it or not,’ Clara said. ‘I mean I know I should. In fact must. But she seems set on keeping her promise. She says Bunny would have understood.’

  *

  There was of course no bridge. But neither did Nicky Paynton ever break down in front of anyone. She adopted a manner that made her in the eyes of her friends curiously immune from their sympathy although not from their admiration. After sending a telegram to her friend Dora Lowndes in Wiltshire (who was married to the boys’ housemaster and looked after them during the holidays) and then following the telegram up with a letter to the boys themselves, she continued her daily routine, not as though nothing had happened but as though it had and was over and wasn’t to be mentioned because it concerned no one except herself and her sons.

  Bunny’s death, she implied, was entirely her private affair. Even from the start, although still referring to him and saying his name, she used the past tense, which made people feel he had been dead for years and that her widowhood had been the determining factor in her personality for a long time – the one everybody had missed noticing before and had to get used to quickly if they were to stand a chance of remaining on friendly terms with her.

  Everybody agreed that it was an astonishing performance; the best ever put up in a society that prided itself on being able to do exactly what Nicky Paynton was doing if the need arose. That it was also a farewell performance was understood. It could only be a matter of time before Nicky announced that she was packing up and going home by the quickest means available, to be with her sons. No one else had any claim on her. With one stroke India was finished for her and although she would probably assure her friends that she’d be back, this was one of those crystal clear cases of a woman leaving and knowing that her chances of seeing India again were slim enough to be non-existent. She would never be able to afford the fare. If either boy eventually came out she might be tempted to scrape together enough to come and visit him and renew old acquaintanceships, but she would be foolish to do so. It would be unbearable.

  Already you could see her looking at things as if trying to fix them sharply enough in her memory to carry away indelible impressions of them; and then beginning not to look at all because she was only making it worse for herself, knowing she was looking for the last time.

  Nicky had had the worst kind of luck. If the children had been grown up or if there had been no children the decision to go home could have been postponed at least until the end of the war, even indefinitely. Perhaps – as in the case of her friend Clara Fosdick – the question would never have arisen. All her closest friends were in India. They would have rallied round as Clara’s friends – Nicky and Bunny in particular – rallied round when Freddie Fosdick died of cancer in his own hospital back in ’36, leaving no children but a wife rather younger than himself; although not young enough to have further expectations, even if she had had the inclination to marry again, which she had not. As it was between Nicky and Bunny so it had been between Clara and Freddie.

  Clara knew that Nicky’s loss affected her as much as anyone because the moment Nicky packed and went she herself would be homeless. The bungalow they shared was occupied officially by Nicky as the wife of Colonel Paynton of the Ranpurs. Clara was merely a paying guest. The obvious solution would be for her to go to live in Ranpur with her sister and brother-in-law, Mr Justice Spendlove, but she didn’t care much for Billy Spendlove and her sister knew it and stuck up for him whenever she thought he was being criticized. They usually managed to quarrel during Clara’s short visits.

  And so, stoically but without being able to disguise her inner preoccupations, Clara waited for Nicky to make the inevitable announcement.

  *

  She made it at what was from Clara’s point of view an unsuitable moment; at Rose Cottage and to the company assembled there as in the old days on a sunny Saturday morning.

  Mildred’s sister Fenny had come up from Calcutta to be at Mildred’s side during Susan’s illness and to help with the move to Rose Cottage; a move finally achieved a few days after Nicky received the telegram – if anything so piecemeal, so incomplete, could be reckoned an achievement. It was piecemeal because spread over several days and incomplete because Susan’s things were in Miss Batchelor’s old room along with Sarah’s, and Susan’s baby and the ayah were in the little spare; but there was no Susan. And Panther had escaped twice from Mahmoud’s custody and twice been found outside Susan’s old room at the temporarily empty grace and favour bungalow, his head resting on one of his two outstretched forepaws, too far gone in his animal misery to keep up the whining and whimpering which in the first few days of Susan’s absence had made Mildred lose her temper and say that the wretched creature would have to be put down.

  After the second escape during which he seemed to have torn his hindquarters on what the vet thought was barbed wire Mildred ordered the dog to be tethered in the servants’ quarters of Rose Cottage. He turned vicious. None of the servants dared approach. It was Sarah who risked being bitten, trying to calm and feed him and bathe his wound. She left water and a meaty bone within his reach. He did not touch them. It looked as though he intended to starve himself to death to prove his loyalty to Susan. His deterioration was frighteningly rapid. The tether became pointless. He hadn’t the energy to stand. No longer capable of snapping and snarling he trembled when Sarah stroked his head. She fed him warm milk and brandy through a pipette given to her by the veterinary officer from the old Remount Depot, Lieutenant Firozeh Khan. Lt. Khan said that the kindest thing would be to have the dog destroyed. It hadn’t acted like this when Susan was away having the baby. It was possible that the dog thought Susan had been taken away and the baby left in her place as a substitute. It might be dangerous to have it around.

  ‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s pure imagination. Panther’s got to be saved. Captain Samuels says Panther may be important to my sister when she’s a bit better.’

  Samuels was an RAMC psychiatrist attached to the military wing of the hospital. He hadn’t been in India long and was used to dealing only with men, chiefly British other ranks. Mildred had already said she didn’t see what good he could do since most of his work was confined to treating slackers who thought they had nervous breakdowns because they were deprived of fish and chips. Her friends agreed that perhaps there was something disagreeable about Susan being talked to, questioned, by a man; particularly by a man like Samuels who might be considered clever at home where psychoanalysis was fashionable, but who was after all a Jew. But the alternative was the Hospital of the Samaritan Mission of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Ranpur, a mental home staffed by Catholics; Eurasians and I
ndians mostly; the same ghastly kind of place with a small wing for Europeans such as poor Poppy Browning’s daughter had ended her days in, screaming obscenities at her mother who used to go home from her weekly visits and wash in Lysol because they’d given up bathing the girl forcibly, except once a month, and Poppy used to touch and hold her close in an attempt to show her she was still loved.

  Susan, thank God, was reported quite the opposite; clean, well-behaved, silent. She had said a few words to her mother and to Sarah and presumably more than a few to Captain Samuels who told Mildred her daughter was ‘beginning to adjust’ whatever that meant. Adjust to what? Mildred had apparently not bothered to ask. She distrusted the whole psychiatric process and had no time at all for the jargon. She said Travers had acted precipitately, sending Susan back to the nursing-home. There was nothing wrong with the girl that a good rest, a change of air and the company of young people wouldn’t put right. She wasn’t getting any kind of rest at the nursing home with Captain Samuels visiting her sometimes twice or even three times a day. Mildred managed to make these professional visits sound as though something unwholesome was going on.

  ‘I’m sure Millie is right,’ her sister Fenny said on this particular Saturday morning when Mildred had gone indoors in answer to Mahmoud’s announcement that Captain Coley Sahib was on the telephone. ‘I think it would be a good idea for her to come and stay with me in Calcutta and bring both girls and ayah and the baby. There wouldn’t be room in the flat but Colonel Johnson and his wife who are friends of ours have a simply huge old eighteenth century John Company house and would gladly put them up. Or we could spend October in Darjeeling with old Dogra friends of Arthur’s and come back down to Cal in November when the weather’s really nice. Sarah would benefit as much as anyone. In fact I’ve suggested she and I could go down to Calcutta together quite soon. She’s been up two nights with that dog as well as making sure ayah looks after little Edward properly and she visits Susan at least once a day, and still reports to the daftar whenever she can in spite of Dick Rankin telling her she can have extended station leave for as long as she wants. She’s gone there this morning.’

  ‘How is the dog?’ Maisie Trehearne asked.

  ‘Sarah says it’s on the mend. She’s got it in the mali’s shed. I haven’t looked myself. I can’t bear the sight of sick animals but then I’m no good in a sick-room of any kind which is why I never visited Sarah’s friend Captain Merrick, although the hospital’s practically visible from the flat. But I did ring before I came up to Pankot and they said he was fine and quite cheerful considering he’s lost his left arm.’

  Fenny stopped and conscientiously avoided looking at Nicky Paynton, presumably in the belief that the subject of wounded officers was to be avoided. Fenny had become stouter since her last visit to Pankot at the time of Susan’s engagement, when she pronounced Teddie Bingham ‘rather sweet’. She filled the chair she was sitting in, which happened to be the one Mabel died in. The others wondered whether she knew but supposed she didn’t in view of her confessed inability even to visit someone who was ill.

  And she was smarter than they remembered. Arthur Grace’s belated elevation to a Lieutenant-colonelcy and appointment in Calcutta seemed to have given her a sort of cosmopolitan gloss. She belonged, as though in default of having arrived sooner at a desirable peak, to a new order of Indian authority and had apparently, as a result, absorbed and smothered a multitude of sins. For Rose Cottage she was slightly over-dressed. Of the three women sitting with her, Maisie, Nicky and Clara, only Maisie remembered her as the youngest and prettiest of the three daughters of General Muir who had lived in Flagstaff House in the years immediately following the end of the 1914–18 war. Lydia, the eldest, had been cold and rather snooty, very intelligent and not at all enamoured of Anglo-Indian life. Her fiancé had been drowned in the Atlantic by German submarine action, a loss that had brightened the northern, arctic, gleam in her critical eye. She had gone home, got married and settled in Bays-water. Fenny in those days had a reputation for charming silliness, Maisie recalled, and in spite of being chased by scores of personable and promising fellows had married a man who turned out something of a failure. But all three knew well enough the Fenny to whom in middle-age an air of portly dowdiness had attached; a dowdiness she had combated by being vigorous in her opinions. Which had been comfortingly conservative. The vigour remained but now suited her. Fenny was particularly welcome just now. She radiated self-assurance.

  ‘I’m so glad to have got Millie out of that poky little bungalow,’ she said, making a sign to Mahmoud to replenish glasses. Mildred was still on the telephone indoors. ‘I don’t mind telling you I had to prod her a bit. At the last moment she said she didn’t want to come. But she didn’t want to stay in the grace and favour either and anyway she no longer had a choice. She said that if it wasn’t for the girls she’d ask Dick Rankin to pull strings and get the air-force to fly her home to wait for John there.’

  She looked over her shoulder to be sure Mildred was still indoors. Then lowering her voice slightly she said:

  ‘She’s awfully against that missionary woman, isn’t she? She told me she’s been going through Mabel’s papers because the money looks like being less than she expected. I thought she meant Miss Batchelor had been cooking the books and feathering her nest but she said there wasn’t any sign of that, only of what she calls influence.’

  ‘What sort of influence?’ Clara Fosdick wanted to know.

  ‘Payments to charities. Indian charities. Orphanages, famine relief funds, child-widows, that sort of thing, and always anonymously. There are all these letters from the bank in Ranpur, dating back years, acknowledging her instructions to make anonymous donations to this and that – hundreds of rupees at a time, and advice notes about transfers of sterling from London which means she was selling securities at home as well as having the interest sent out.’

  Maisie said, ‘I don’t see where the influence comes in if it’s been going on for years. Unless you mean only five. Miss Batchelor came here at the end of nineteen thirty-nine.’

  ‘I know. But according to Mildred although Mabel had been giving money to Indian charities for ages, long before Miss Batchelor came to live with her, it almost doubled afterwards, especially in the last couple of years. And there was one donation to the Bishop Barnard Mission which isn’t an Indian charity but does help to educate them. Not that I’m against it, any of it, but Mildred says the Bishop Barnard was the mission Miss Batchelor worked for, which proves it—’

  ‘Proves what?’

  ‘According to Mildred, that Mabel was influenced to dish out all this dough by Miss Batchelor. On top of which the estate has to fork out to buy an annuity for the woman and if she dies soon after it’s bought it’s hundreds or thousands of rupees wasted.’

  ‘Perhaps she won’t live long enough for it to be bought at all,’ Nicky said. ‘Clarissa Peplow told me Captain Travers doesn’t expect her to pull through.’

  ‘But she’s been in hospital well over a week, nearly two, and she hasn’t popped off yet. Don’t tell Mildred, for Pete’s sake, but Sarah’s been over to the civil wing once or twice to see her when she goes to talk to Susan. Sarah says she only seems semi-conscious but reckons she’s a tough old bird and will get over it. But whether she does or doesn’t Mildred says the idea of an annuity could only have come from her because it’s a typical lower-middle-class idea of upper-class security and respectability.’

  ‘Isobel Rankin says Mildred is over-obsessed by the idea of Miss Batchelor as an eminence-grise,’ Maisie Trehearne said. ‘I don’t know whether that’s true or not but if it is we oughtn’t to encourage her. The whole situation is becoming very – unhappy.’

  Particularly in regard to spoons; about which Maisie’s husband had received what he called a charming and touching letter from the old missionary, but not, as yet, the spoons themselves, which had puzzled him until he heard she had gone into hospital. It still puzzled him a bit. Maisie did not kno
w what to tell him. For some years he had lived in an old-fashioned chivalrous world of his own. If it hadn’t been for the war he would have retired in 1942. Sometimes, she thought, he acted as though he had retired. He had become fond and foolish and sometimes querulous. He couldn’t understand why Coley insisted he’d received no spoons but only a sou’wester, and he inquired every day after Miss Batchelor’s health. The position was not an easy one for her to support. He lived for the regiment. Silver for the mess was as much an obsession with him as Isobel Rankin said Miss Batchelor was an obsession with Mildred Layton. When it came to choosing between Mildred’s and her husband’s obsession there was no question which side she would support. He wanted the spoons. She hoped no one would tell him the spoons were originally Susan’s and that Mildred had returned them in a fit of the extraordinary pique that generally possessed her nowadays. Another puzzling feature was that Mildred had said nothing about the spoons. Presumably Kevin Coley hadn’t mentioned Miss Batchelor’s intention to present them. But Maisie thought this strange too because Kevin and Mildred were so thick. Perhaps he was telling her now, on the telephone.

  ‘Of course,’ Fenny went on, ‘I’ve told Millie there’s absolutely no proof and certainly no reason why Mabel shouldn’t have forked out all that money without prompting. Millie seems to have forgotten, but I don’t suppose you have, Maisie, I mean about Mabel’s attitude to Jallianwallah.’

  ‘Attitude to whom?’

  ‘Jallianwallah. The General Dyer business in Amritsar in Nineteen Nineteen.’

  ‘Well I have forgotten. What was her attitude?’

  ‘Don’t you remember how we all collected money for Dyer when Government should have stood by him but didn’t and issued that report that he’d exceeded his duty, firing on the unarmed mob in the Jallianwallah Bagh, and the poor old boy was disgraced and retired on half-pay?’

  ‘Well of course I remember that. We were down in Mayapore at the time. There was a lovely ball at the old Artillery Mess and we collected about four thousand rupees just from that.’