The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (23 page)

Selby-Smith rose and climbed on to the stage. As he stood at the lectern he clapped his hands about four times to demonstrate his own approval and to give a lead in the matter of bringing the ovation to an end. When he stopped clapping he seemed to be requesting silence and quite quickly got it.

He said, ‘Although this meeting has now gone on for longer than many of you anticipated, what we have just heard so ably and interestingly presented was certainly worth staying to hear. I think there is no disagreement on that score. On your behalf I thank Captain Merrick for the trouble he has taken to present a clear picture of this rather sticky subject. In bringing the meeting to a close I would firmly reiterate that the subject of the
INA
is not one that the divisional commander wishes to have generally or casually discussed among you. In other words keep what you’ve heard this morning under your hats. Junior officers and
NCOS
have a particular responsibility to be alert for gossip and rumour among the men and to report its existence without taking steps to squash it until they’ve had advice on the line to take. That is all, gentlemen.’

A bit stunned by what he had heard Teddie did not seize the opportunity that now presented itself to meet his room-companion. He found it easier to go with the stream making for the doors than against it down to the front where Merrick stood alone doing up the straps of his briefcase. At the foyer doors which had been swung open and latched back by the guards Teddie nearly changed his mind because the idea of Merrick standing by himself made him feel he was not being as friendly as he should be, but someone spoke to him and when he next thought about Merrick he was climbing into the back of the 15 cwt Chevrolet – the last man of a party of five. The driver put up the tailboard and in a moment or two the truck was entering the queue for the exit from the forecourt.

In B mess he sat with two other officers in the anteroom and ordered beer. At five to one he saw Merrick come in. This time he wasn’t alone. An Indian and an English officer accompanied him, guests from one of the brigades. Again he hesitated but just then Merrick’s glance fell on him and seemed to stay. Teddie stood up and went across and offered his hand.

‘I’m Teddie Bingham,’ he said. ‘What’ll it be?’

For a second or two he had a feeling that Merrick was wondering whether he should find the name familiar. His hand came out rather tentatively as if casual physical contact with someone not intimately known was ordinarily unwelcome. The handshake failed as such. Teddie was about to explain who he was when Merrick said, ‘We meet at last then.’ He still had Teddie’s hand and suddenly, unexpectedly, exerted grip, then quickly broke contact.

Between the man on the platform and the same man close to Teddie found a kind of discrepancy. When he thought about this afterwards he decided it was the same sort of discrepancy he’d noticed years ago in London when he was about twelve and his mother took him to a matinée and backstage afterwards to meet a man who’d played one of the character parts and still had his make-up on but spoke in an ordinary voice and seemed shy, but made up for it when they left by putting his arm round Teddie and giving him ten bob.

‘Whisky or gin?’ Teddie asked. ‘Or are you a beer only man at tiffin?’

‘It’s very good of you,’ Merrick began. Teddie now noticed that the blue of the fellow’s eyes was made particularly vivid by the steady way he considered you with them. ‘But I’m rather pressed. I’m supposed to be somewhere else at two o’clock so I’ll have to go right in. Could we make it this evening?’

‘Yes, of course–’

Merrick nodded. ‘Good. It’s time we got to know each other.’ He smiled, turned, then turned back again. ‘By the way. Congratulations.’

‘Congratulations?’

‘Hosain tells me you’re getting married soon.’

‘Oh. Did he? Well yes, I am. Thanks.’

He watched Merrick steering his guests to the dining-room, ushering them through the doorway with a guiding hand on each of their backs in turn. The bearer brought Teddie’s beer. The man standing next to him was the adjutant of the British battalion of the brigade up near Premanagar.

‘Interesting that, this morning,’ the adjutant said. ‘No idea anything like that going on but then I’ve only been in the country six months. What was he, do you know? I mean in the Indian government?’

The chap meant ‘in the Civil’. Amazingly ignorant. Teddie said he had no idea which should have been good enough but apparently wasn’t.

‘A sort of spy do you reckon?’ the adjutant asked. He had a plebeian voice and manner. He was the sort of chap one found in the bars of Tudor-style roadhouses back at home in the vicinity of Kingston-on-Thames. The fellow actually winked as such fellows did. The vulgarity of modern English life suddenly overwhelmed Teddie. It was flowing into India, blighting everything. He smiled distantly at the adjutant and murmured an apology for leaving him. He intended to swallow his beer and go into mess but, warned by a mild but sudden sensation of inner instability, put his glass down and made his way across the room to the door that led to the lavatories. Secluded there he discovered that his normally healthy and regular motions had become unpleasantly loose, untrustworthy. His forehead came out in a sweat. He felt rather unwell. The thought of food didn’t much appeal. He must have picked something up.

He left by a side entrance and entered the complex of covered ways that connected B mess building to the junior officers’ huts. The whole place had a temporary feeling about it. The last occupants of these particular lines had been members of the staff of a chemical and psychological warfare school. They had left a smell of gas capes and propaganda. Teddie had heard someone say that. It struck him as apt. Reaching his own room he found the door padlocked. Hosain was on mess duty. Teddie cursed his present domestic arrangements. He fumbled for his key and then paused, having noticed something extremely odd. Leant against the wall under the window there was a push-bike, or rather the remains of one. For an instant he thought someone had been in the room, taken either his own or Merrick’s bicycle, removed one wheel and buckled one of the mudguards for a joke. But that wouldn’t account for the rust. And then, the wreck under the window was without a cross-bar: a woman’s bicycle. Nevertheless he hastened to take the padlock off the door and open up.

Bicycles were kept inside rooms because of the danger of theft. Both bicycles were where they should be. He went out for another look at the useless and mysterious object and in doing so noticed something else: chalk marks on the floorboards of the verandah, decorating the threshold. Some sort of design. The effect was cabalistic.

He sniffed the air for the lingering scent of an ill-wisher, wondering whether he would be able to isolate such a smell from all the others to which he had become used. He could not. He stepped over the chalk marks and went to the verandah rail. There wasn’t a soul; just a perspective of doors like his own, each with its padlock, and beyond the hut a space and in continuing perspective another hut. Straight ahead across the bare earth compound the prison-camp style wire fence divided the lines from waste ground. Nobody could get over the wire but nobody needed to. The lines were always full of unexplained people. They came in at points where the PWD had either got fed up with erecting the fence or run out of material. It was not a security area. It might once have been someone’s intention to make it one.

He reconsidered the broken push-bike. Perhaps Hosain had found it dumped and placed it there to show that he was an honest boy. He could have got a few annas for it from the cycle-shop wallah in the cantonment bazaar. But there had to be a connexion between the bicycle and the chalk marks. The marks could have been made by Hosain. If the boy had been a Hindu Teddie would have more readily believed that this was the explanation; that the bike and the chalk marks were some odd form of puja or offering for the welfare of the rooms’ occupants to ensure them a safe journey, wherever they were going, through intercession with some modern addition to the Hindu pantheon: the god of mechanical transport.

But Hosain was a Muslim. It was unlikely that either the bhishti or the sweeper took sufficient interest in any of the officers they served to make such a well-meaning gesture to one or two of them. Besides which the marks had an inauspicious feeling to them. Teddie hesitated, controlling an urge to obliterate them. His bowels began to move again. There was a griping pain in them and the sweat broke out on his forehead. He stared down at the cabalistic signs which suddenly seemed to be responsible for the disorder in his guts, for the disruption of his life which he now felt the whole morning had somehow plotted to bring about. He scuffed his rubber-soled shoes across the marks, blurring the outlines. He continued scuffing and scraping until only an ashy smear was left. He felt better.

Back in his room he found a letter from Susan on his side of the desk. He ripped it open. It was dated five days ago. ‘Dear Teddie, Tomorrow we’re off to Kashmir. Aunt Fenny and Uncle Arthur will meet us in Delhi and then we’ll all travel together up to ‘Pindi.’ They would be in Srinagar by now. He stuffed the letter into his jacket pocket and went round the back to the privy. Things were no better but he had stopped sweating. He hoped he was not going to be really ill. He read Susan’s letter right through. When he returned to his room he lay down on the bed hoping to catch forty winks. After ten minutes, still wide awake, he sat up and lit a cigarette and read Susan’s letter again. Srinagar would be full of officers on leave. He saw the danger he was in of losing her to some fellow with more to offer, a fellow with talent and money, a fellow who had the measure of things as they were, the kind of fellow who would understand everything Merrick talked about this morning and be able to believe it without feeling that if it was true nothing was sacred any more and nobody could be relied on, that everyone was living in a bloody jungle.

Teddie got off the bed and stubbed his cigarette. He felt emotional but couldn’t work out what he felt emotional about except the prospect of being jilted or of hearing that the whole of the Malayan battalion of the Muzzys which had been captured near Kuala Lumpur had gone over to that Bose character. What he did work out was that everything that was wrong for him was really the fault of that bounder Hunter who had drunk away his mother’s money and then her vitality and when he was dead hounded her to her own grave. Except that there wasn’t a grave. He would have felt more settled knowing there was a grave.

It was raining again when he was ready to go back lunchless to the daftar. He couldn’t face putting on a sweaty cape and cycling. He stuck his cap on and padlocked the door behind him. The ruined bike struck him as ridiculous. He walked through the covered ways until he got to the front of the mess where he was able to whistle up one of the cycle tongas whose drivers congregated outside the main gate.

IV

During the afternoon Teddie forgot about the bicycle and the chalk marks but remembered them at six o’clock on his way back to the hut. Hosain was squatting on his hunkers outside the room, whose door was open, latched back against the outer wall leaving the mesh screen exposed. The orderly got to his feet when he saw Teddie coming up the steps. He had been sitting on the spot where the chalk mark smear was. There was no sign of the bicycle.

Teddie asked where it was. Hosain indicated the room, entered ahead and pointed at the two serviceable machines. Teddie explained about the broken bicycle. Hosain went outside, looked and came in saying there wasn’t a bicycle.

‘I know,’ Teddie said. ‘But there was. What time did you get back from mess duty?’

Hosain said he was back at 1430 but had gone straight to his own quarters, changed and gone to the bazaar for Merrick Sahib. He came back from the bazaar at 1630 and opened the room. There hadn’t been a bicycle then. If there had been a bicycle earlier someone must have taken it, probably the person who left it there in the first place. He would ask some of the other orderlies and the bhishti. But what was the good of a bicycle with only one wheel?

‘Quite. That’s the whole point.’

Teddie felt cross because Hosain was looking at him as if he thought Teddie was trying to cause trouble for the servants over something he had only imagined seeing. Suddenly Merrick called from the bath-house. Hosain shouted, ‘Sahib!’ and went with alacrity. It wasn’t Merrick’s fault but, no doubt about it, since his arrival Hosain had given Merrick preferential treatment. It was ridiculous having to share an orderly. Come to that it was bloody stupid having to share a room.

Teddie sat in his armchair with his legs stuck out in the shoe-removing position. Presently he heard Hosain laugh and a warm friendly sort of noise from Merrick. Less than a minute later he heard the back door being unbolted and Hosain shouting for the bhishti and then Merrick clomped in wearing unbuckled chappals and nothing else but a towel tied round his middle. He was rubbing his head with another towel.

Teddie’s immediate reaction to the sight of Merrick was admiration shot darkly through with envy because Merrick had one of those bodies in which every sinew was clearly and separately defined, properly proportioned and interlocked. The fellow didn’t seem to have an ounce of fat on him. You could count the pads of muscle that made up his abdominal wall.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Merrick said. ‘I’m sorry about lunch-time.’ He stopped rubbing his head and stuck the towel round his neck. ‘We seem to have been Coxing and Boxing for days one way or another. I didn’t see you come into mess, by the way.’

‘As a matter of fact I got rather taken short.’

‘Oh. Mirat tummy?’

‘Sort of. But I think it’s gone off.’

‘I have some stuff that will settle it if it hasn’t. I expect you’ve been sitting under the fan or drinking too much iced beer. Take a dose anyway to be on the safe side. Hold on and I’ll get it.’