The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (46 page)

Susan’s next action was the most fascinating of all. She walked round the child in a wide circle tipping the can as she went and sprinkling the oil. Then she put the can down near the wall, approached the circle again and knelt. With the can there must have been matches because she had a box in her hand and was striking one and throwing it on to the kerosene. Flame leapt and arced in two directions, tracing the circumference until the two fiery arms met at the other side, enclosing the sacrifice.

Minnie did not understand but she had stopped trying to work it out because she understood the one important thing. She understood fire. Crying out, she snatched a sheet from the dhobi’s bundle and ran. The grass inside the circle was too wet for the flames to catch hold and spread towards the middle where the child gazed at the sky and worked its legs and arms. But Minnie did not understand that either. She acted instinctively, flung the sheet over the flames which were already turning blue and yellow, dying; and used the sheet as a path to reach the child. Picking it up she backed away calling out all the time to little Memsahib who continued kneeling and gazing at the centre of the ring of fire where the child had been. She seemed not to notice that the child was no longer there and that Minnie was crying out to her.

She was still there when Mahmoud got back from the bazaar and found Minnie on the verandah hugging the now crying child, not daring either to approach her mistress or let her out of her sight. She was still there when, summoned by Mahmoud, Mildred returned. She ignored all her mother’s orders and entreaties to get up. When Travers arrived she ignored him too. She stayed where she was until Sarah, driven home by Dicky Beauvais, went out and talked to her. She let Sarah take her indoors and presently into the ambulance that Travers had called to take her back to the nursing home. In all this time she had looked at no one, spoken to no one, but smiled as if happy for the first time in her life.

*

In servants’ quarters up and down the station the tale spread quickly. It reached the bazaar and the nearer villages that same night before the last fire had been damped down and the last light extinguished. The little Memsahib was touched by the special holiness of madness and her melancholy cries could be heard in the hills, scarcely distinguishable from the howling of the jackal packs that disturbed the dogs and set them barking. The sound could be heard all night but faded out as morning came leaving a profound, an ominous, silence and stillness that seemed to divide the races, brown-skinned from pale-skinned, and to mark every movement of the latter with a furtiveness of which they themselves were aware if their aloof preoccupied expressions were any guide.

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.