The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (48 page)

A foot square, two feet off the ground, it had been painted white some time ago. The paint was peeled, the black letters had faded and the first letter had come off with its background. The notice read: apt. K. Coley. Under the name an arrow pointed up the track or would have done so had the board been straight. Its tilt directed the arrow downward into the mixture of gravel, pebbles, earth and mud and tyre-marks which made up the track’s surface.

From the path there was nothing to be seen of the bungalow where Coley lived. It was an appropriate setting for a man whose military ambitions were said to have been smothered ten years before in the tumbled bricks and masonry of Quetta. One could imagine him choosing it for its isolation, its proximity to the lines and to the office he was content to occupy for the rest of his working life. He stirred himself, Barbie had heard, only when threatened by promotion and posting to another station. There was nothing he did not know about the running of the regimental depot. Successive commandants had connived at his schemes to stay put.

At the entrance to his hidden retreat Barbie felt a pang of remorse. She could never like Coley but the air of melancholy emanating from the faded tilted board and from the whole area persuaded her to make allowances, to forgive him for behaviour that perhaps had not been natural but forced on him by Mildred. Perhaps he had been afraid to resist her, fearing the power she potentially wielded. Mildred’s husband – if he survived prison-camp – was Trehearne’s likely successor as depot commandant. Or so Coley might anticipate. And presumably he had only a slender stock of pride. Most of it would have gone with his ambition. If acting the part of the dog at Mildred’s heels secured his future, he would play it.

The track curved and came to an abrupt end: a corrugated iron shed, a garage. To the right a gateway without a gate opened on to steps of rough-hewn stone that led up into the copse.

She climbed the stone steps. What she entered was a compound planted with hedges, shrubs and bushes that had grown wild among trees. She identified rhododendron among other more exotic leaves and could see that the path had originally been laid out with an eye to withholding for as long as possible a view of the bungalow that lay at its end; so that the revelation of what was ordinary and ugly stunned her for an instant into acceptance of it as rare and beautiful. Walls, windows, roof, verandah – entirely commonplace, mean even – moved her with the austere poetry of their function. Here a man sheltered from and diminished the horror and vulgarity of the world by the simplicity of his arrangements for living in it.

The path had brought her within a few feet of the front verandah steps. The verandah was narrow. From where she stood she could see the padlock on the hasp of the closed doors. Eden was unoccupied. But perhaps round the back she would find a servant capable of being roused from mid-afternoon torpor. As she moved a gust of wind blew leaves upward. At the back of the bungalow she found a small grassed compound, a servant’s hut, also closed and padlocked, and an open-sided byre in which a tethered goat was munching vegetable stalks.

The rain was still not heavy. She hesitated before climbing the steps to gain the temporary shelter of the back verandah, then went up stealthily, conscious of trespass during the occupier’s and the servant’s absence. This verandah was deeper than the one at the front and was furnished in the familiar way with wicker chairs and table. The windows were shuttered. There were no french windows; only plain narrow doors, also closed.

She prepared to wait for the rain to reach its peak and die out or settle into a persistent Pankot drizzle through which she could walk in search of a tonga without getting too wet. The darkness of the sky suggested a heavy fall. Already the air seemed thick with mutterings of storm and the distant warning murmur of tempestuous forces gathering in the hills to strike through the valley.

But after that single gust of wind no other came and the rain continued to fall modestly. Nothing in nature confirmed as real the restlessness in the surrounding air. She clenched her fist and put it against her chest; her heart was not pounding, but there was a pressure round about her, a pulsing. She turned and stared at the shuttered windows and then at the narrow doors which when not closed would be hooked back to the outside walls. The hooks hung loose. But the hasps were not in position. The doors were not locked. Cautiously she tried the handle on one of them. It opened without a sound and the screen of wire mesh yielded to a touch.

‘Captain Coley?’ she said, and cleared her throat, meaning to call again, more loudly, but the interior was dark and so hot it seemed to suck the breath out of her lungs and at the same time to whimper with relief like a creature deprived of liberty who sensed release. ‘Captain Coley?’ she repeated. The words came out unsteadily and made no impression on the creature’s distant incoherent supplications, its scarcely audible gasps and cries. The mesh screen swung back; she was not aware of pushing it. ‘Captain Coley?’ she said again and something folded her in its sticky arms and drew her into the interior; not the creature but its keeper. It held her for a moment and then was not there and the illusion of hot darkness was splintered. Her flesh tightened, attacked by frosty particles of fear, the shuttered bungalow was filled with subterranean light and at its centre the creature was imprisoned in a room divided from the one she stood in by swing ornamental shutters that filled no more than the central space of the open doorway. It was like being back again in that chill corridor approaching other doors that gave a view through oval windows. She was drawn to them by the creature’s moans and cries until she stood in a place where over the top of the shutters she saw in the gloom the creature herself, naked, contorted, entwined with another, gaunt and male and silently active in a human parody of divine creation.

It was not the stark revelation of the flesh that caused Barbie to gasp and cover her mouth for in her own body she guessed the casual ugliness that might attach to a surrender to sensuality. What filled her with horror was the instantaneous impression of the absence of love and tenderness: the emotional inertia and mechanical pumping of the man, the cries coming from the woman who seemed driven by despair rather than by longing, or even lust. It was as though the world outside the subterranean room was dying or extinct and the joyless coupling was a bitter hopeless expression of the will of the woman for the species to survive.

Turning, groping, Barbie regained the verandah, closed the door and leaned on it, head back, mouth open like a swimmer breaking surface; and then fearing she must have been heard made for the steps, stumbled in going down them and blundered round the side of the bungalow, terrified of discovery, of turning and seeing Mildred and Kevin Coley bearing down on her, naked, raw-eyed, determined on her destruction as the sole witness of their act of adultery.

She ran down the path and – misjudging the twists – was whipped by twigs and obstructed by branches. Going down the rough-hewn steps she misjudged again and wrenched her ankle, falling. Scrambling up she ran down the track. It seemed endless. When eventually she came out on to the lane she turned left into the unknown.

The ankle did not begin to hurt until, after walking for fifteen minutes without coming upon a landmark or a wider road that might lead her back to familiar surroundings, she stopped, knowing that something was wrong. She felt in her pocket – but the spoons and the letter were still there. The wrongness was in the other pocket. There was no sou’wester but it wasn’t on her head either. Her hair was sopping wet. She turned, intending to go back to look for it but at that moment became aware both of the pain in her ankle and of the futility of such a search. The sou’wester must have been torn off her head by the overhanging branches in the garden. She could not remember that happening. But then she could not remember either whether she had taken the hat off on the verandah and left it on the table. Her name was written in indelible pencil on the white lining of the headband.

Limping, punishing the stick, she struck out again through what had become a downpour, not daring to stop and shelter in case her ankle seized up and she found herself unable to move, marooned in this inhospitable region.

Part Five

THE TENNIS COURT

I

Miss Batchelor was taken to the civil wing of the general hospital on the day Nicky Paynton heard that her husband had been killed in the Arakan.

For three days Clarissa had sent meals into Barbie’s room, spoken to her from the doorway but otherwise kept clear in order not to be infected by the awful cold the old missionary had caught as a result of walking about in the rain, without a hat, getting lost, returning home like a drowned rat and then refusing all advice and offers of hot balsam.

But on the fourth morning, alarmed first by the sight of Barbie’s flushed face and the fact that she opened her eyes but seemed unable to speak or rouse herself, and then by the feeling of hot dry skin under her own cool hand, Clarissa rang Doctor Travers who, after a brief examination, sent for an ambulance.

‘How long has she been like this?’ he asked while they waited. Clarissa confessed that she hadn’t actually seen her since before lunch on the previous day when she thought she looked better but not as well as she insisted. ‘I made her promise not to get up and she said she wouldn’t. After that I was busy all day but the boy said she ate all her meals, except her supper. She was asleep when he took it in. She hasn’t touched her night drink either.’

Travers said, ‘I wish I’d known sooner. Actually it’s risky moving her but I don’t think we could save her here. I ought to warn you it’s ten to one against her making it. She’s got broncho-pneumonia and the heart’s pretty weak. What on earth’s the poor old thing been doing?’

Clarissa said she didn’t know but described the state Barbie was in when she came back into the house on the afternoon of the day of the christening. They went back to the room and for a moment Clarissa thought Barbie had gone in the few minutes she and Doctor Travers had been talking in the hall.

He sat on the bed holding Barbie’s wrist and then listening to her chest again through his stethoscope. ‘I suppose she’s quite alone in the world?’ he asked presently.

‘Until she came to Pankot she lived only for the Mission,’ Clarissa said. ‘She talks about getting back into harness but of course she’s past it. I think it was the letter she had from them saying they wouldn’t have her back that did it.’

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.