The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (9 page)

The meeting was informal. Isobel had made a draft agenda and out of general chat she formulated every so often a minute for Lucy to record.

The quietest member was Maisie Trehearne. She was tall, slender and stately in the way that a woman given to private preoccupation can be if she has the figure for it. What Maisie Trehearne’s preoccupations were no one knew. There may have been another explanation for the impression she gave of having more important things to think about than the matter under discussion.

There were people who said that her mind was as blank as her pale patrician face was comparatively and unfairly unlined; but she never fumbled if asked to comment on a view just given. She seldom smiled. But she was seldom upset either. The only thing known about Maisie Trehearne’s emotional life was that she had a fondness for animals and a horror of cruelty to them. But she expressed both the fondness and the horror in much the same tones as those in which she spoke on other subjects.

No one had ever uncovered in her the steel core which a military career in India normally required and which was presumably responsible for keeping her so upright even when sitting down. Perhaps the uprightness was due to an uncomfortable corset, but she looked too composed for that. Composure was Maisie Trehearne’s main characteristic. Were it not for the war her husband would have been coming up for retirement but she conveyed neither pleasure nor disappointment at the postponement of – as in her case it curiously but suitably was – Cheltenham.

Of the other women only Clarissa Peplow had any kind of physical affinity with Maisie. Clarissa was also pale although she was plump with it. She was stately but in her case the stateliness was that of someone conscious of the dignity of Christ’s church militant. Lucy Smalley excepted, Clarissa Peplow was the least important woman in the room; unimportant in temporal terms. Her clear-blue eyes proclaimed circumstances in which other terms prevailed.

Opposite her sat the widowed Clara Fosdick, whose sister was married to Mr Justice Spendlove of the High Court in Ranpur. Clara was big-boned and well-fleshed. She had a resonant contralto voice which enabled her to argue convincingly even when it was obvious that she had reached an opinion through a process of emotional reasoning, not logical deduction. She got on well with young men. She conformed in many ways to a young man’s idea of the perfect mother. She struck them as affectionate, even-tempered, good-humoured, restful, tough when necessary but blessed with a considerable capacity for understanding and forgiveness in that part of her which at her age and with her build could properly be called a bosom. It came as no surprise to such young men to learn from her friend Nicky Paynton that Mrs Fosdick had lost her only child, a boy, at the age of five, when he died of typhoid in the Punjab.

Mrs Paynton, the most talkative woman at the table and with whom Clara Fosdick shared a bungalow, was wiry, tight-wound, energetic. Her husband Bunny Paynton, the commanding officer of the 1st Ranpurs, was on active service in the Arakan. She had two boys at school in Wiltshire whom she had not seen since her and Bunny’s spell of home leave in 1938. She had seen little of her husband too. Only in the frequency with which she introduced the subject of the absent Bunny and the far-away children could one detect how seldom she was not thinking about them. But the references were all light-hearted, in keeping with the discipline the station expected such a woman to impose on herself. She was referring to Bunny now and to the report in the
Ranpur Gazette
which had named a Brigadier Reid as commander of the troops in Mayapore where the attacks on the two English women had taken place.

‘I shan’t tell Bunny Alec Reid’s got a brigade. We never knew him well but always thought him a bit of a duffer. I thought he was still in Rawalpindi which was where we last saw him. You remember Alec and Meg Reid don’t you, Mildred?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Meg Reid was a bit of a wet blanket too. I can’t think why they’ve given Alec a brigade. He’s been behind a desk for years. If I write and tell Bunny Alec Reid’s got a brigade he’ll probably blow his top.’

‘Shall we get back to the agenda?’ Isobel Rankin said.

She tapped her sheet of paper with a pencil. One noticed her knuckles. They looked hard. Her finger-nails were bright red. No languor about Isobel Rankin. She allowed some gossip at a friendly meeting such as this but kept it checked and did not contribute to it. She got things moving in the direction she desired. The slightest gesture – an index-finger adjustment of her reading spectacles on the bridge of her nose – was dynamic.

Concentration of energy distinguished her from the other women at the table, even from Nicky Paynton whose vitality, potentially as great, seemed by comparison to lack purpose. But then Isobel Rankin could not afford to relax as her colleagues could. She bore the burden of command. It could have fallen on several of the other women – on Mildred, on Nicky, on Maisie – and they would have borne it just as capably. The question of which of them sat at the head of the table as the
GOC
’
S
wife had been settled by their choice of husbands. With a long war and any luck Bunny Paynton could end up not merely with a brigade but with a division, and Mildred’s husband would probably have had a brigade by now if his wartime promotional expections had not been brought to a grinding halt in North Africa.

But these were military roles. Dick Rankin would never get an active command. He was a military administrator and young and well-connected enough to anticipate capping his career with military appointments at government level.

An air of power more far-reaching than that of the Army alone emanated from Isobel. She was preparing for the world where things were arranged and matters of consequence decided. A certain secretiveness, dressed as discretion, already hinted at a familiarity with what went on behind the scenes.

Outside the inner-circle of her friends she was of course much misunderstood. Those who thought themselves not as well-used by her as they deserved interpreted her flashes of wit and natural hardness of tone as evidence of malice and her impatience in argument as a sign of mental inflexibility. She was neither a stupid nor a malicious person and was in fact quick to detect stupidity and malice in others. And she was far from being the hidebound stickler for rules which she may have appeared in the eyes of people who, puzzled by the brusque manner she adopted towards the time-wasters, the ignorant and the prejudiced, decided that they had erred socially.

But today, Clarissa and Lucy apart, she was among friends and had she after adjusting her spectacles announced her personal creed instead of the next subject – the special arrangements for Indian mothers and children who came into defended areas for protection from riots, rape and arson-she would have found a measure of agreement, because in her there resided in a highly developed form the animus of declining but still responsible imperialism.

She had an astringent affection for the people and the country in which she had spent so many years of her life, and no personal prejudice against Indians as Indians. As with members of her own race she allowed her instincts to guide her when it came to separating those Indians with whom she was happy to associate from those with whom she officially had to deal or whom she could ignore. She counted quite a number of Indian men and women among her friends but these, like her English friends, were people she felt could be relied upon to preserve for India’s sake everything the English and the Indians had done together which could be reckoned of lasting value. She was under no misapprehension about the mistakes made in the past and still being made by her own people in India but if she had been asked to say in what way India had most benefited from the British connection, what it was that could be offered in extenuation of fault, error, even of wickedness, she would have been perfectly clear that it was the example so often given of personal trustworthiness: a virtue that flowed from courage, honesty, loyalty and commonsense in what was to her a single definition of good. She did not see how a person or a country could survive without it.

She was convinced that most of the things that offered some assurance of India surviving on her own resources in the post-war world would reflect the example of personal trustworthiness set by her countrymen in the past. She was in two minds about the benefit that might be had if the connection with England were much prolonged. She accepted the fact that at home her own people had often been indifferent to Indian affairs and that this indifference sprang from ignorance. But in the old days when the code by which she lived had been widely upheld in England this indifference to India had not mattered much, because those who came out to shoulder the responsibility could rely to a great extent on moral support at home. But of recent years, in England, she knew that these values had been eroded and she thought that this mattered a great deal because govern India as one might from Viceregal House, Government House, the commissioner’s bungalow, the district officer’s court and a military headquarters, the fount of government had always been and still was in the mother country and the moral climate there was bound to influence the climate in which the imperial possession was ruled.

In judging moral climate she took little account of factors usually selected to show evidence of decline. She was a tolerant woman in many of the matters that woke intolerance in others. She held the view that it was a bad thing for society to remain static, a desirable thing for it to be on the move and to divide its rewards more fairly and distribute its opportunities more equitably. She did not feel that there was a conflict between her idea of the way society should change and her conviction that certain principles should be inimical to change. She was aware however of there being that sort of conflict in other people’s minds. She was unsympathetic both to the prejudices of stubborn traditionalism and to the anarchic influence of those who often set about destroying it. She believed that through the business of attempting to divest old authorities of power the notion could become current that authority of any kind was suspect. To Isobel Rankin a world without authority was meaningless. There would be no chain of trust if there were no chain of command. She feared that in such a climate there could be a demission of authority in India by her own people that it would be possible only to describe as dishonourable, if by demission one implied as one should a full discharge of every obligation.

She was intent on discharging one such obligation now.

‘The problem with mothers and children is that the mothers look after their own to the detriment of community discipline. What we want is a strong-willed woman who’s good with kids and can keep them occupied while the mothers do their bit for the community.’

‘It’s difficult with Indian mothers,’ Clara Fosdick said.

‘We have to conceive of a hypothetical case, a state of siege lasting say a week,’ Isobel went on. ‘The teachers at the regimental schools can cope with the boys but I’m thinking of the girls. Mildred, what about that ex-mission teacher your stepmother-in-law has living with her?’

‘Barbara Batchelor,’ Clarissa Peplow said before Mildred had the chance, presupposing the inclination, to reply. ‘I think Barbara would be an excellent choice.’

‘But she’d never leave Mabel,’ Clara Fosdick pointed out. ‘And Mabel wouldn’t budge from Rose Cottage if the hordes of Ghengiz Khan were galloping down from the hills.’

‘She might have to,’ Isobel said. ‘Mildred? Any comment? Would Miss Batchelor be capable of controlling a gang of Indian boys and girls?’

‘Presumably she’s made the attempt in the past. I should think if Clarissa were in charge of her she might be of some use.’

‘I want someone capable of running her own show,’ Isobel put in. ‘Could you take it on, Mrs Peplow?’

‘It’s more Barbara’s line.’

Lighting a cigarette Nicky Paynton said, ‘Clara’s absolutely right though. She’d never leave Mabel. They’d die together on the verandah of Rose Cottage. Aziz too.’

Lucy Smalley coughed.

‘What is it Mrs Smalley?’ Isobel recognized the request to speak.

‘I’m sure Mrs Fosdick and Mrs Paynton are right and that it would be difficult to prise Miss Batchelor away from Rose Cottage so long as Mrs Layton senior elected to stay there. But there’s another reason why I don’t think she would be, well, much good at the moment.’

‘What reason?’

‘She’s in a terrible state this morning because the woman who was attacked in Mayapore district is a friend of hers. I mean the mission teacher, the one whose name was given. Miss Crane.’

She had the whole attention of the meeting. One of the advantages of having Mrs Smalley on committees was her more intimate knowledge of the affairs of the lower deck. Isobel turned to Mildred.

‘Really? A close friend?’

‘My dear Isobel, don’t ask me. I know absolutely nothing about Miss Batchelor’s connections.’

Isobel looked back at Mrs Smalley and raised her chin inviting further information.

‘I wouldn’t have known myself,’ Lucy said, ‘if I hadn’t met her in the bazaar a couple of days ago. She was quite worried then because of the reports of things being bad in Mayapore. I didn’t pay much attention, well, she does tend to go on. You don’t actually need to listen to every word, do you? But when I read the Gazette this morning and saw the name of this woman I remembered Miss Batchelor had been telling me about a mission friend of hers called Crane in Mayapore who’d been a heroine in what sounded like the dark ages. So I rang her after breakfast. She’d just read the report too and was hardly coherent. She seemed to think I was someone else, ringing up with
news
of her friend. So I don’t think she’d be much good looking after the children if we have riots in Pankot. From the way she was talking you’d have thought her friend was the other poor girl, whoever she is, who’s been criminally assaulted.’