The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) by Paul Scott Page B

peaceful and, climatically speaking, marvellous: clear skies by day, refreshing rain by night, the perfect combination and a rare one even in the old station which was protected from the streaming and steamy monotony of the southwest monsoon by the very hills that made Ranpur so wet and humid. As Isobel Rankin said – at least the weather was pro-British.
    There was bridge at Rose Cottage: the first session for some time. Mildred said she was tired of the club where the Pankot emergency committees had been meeting. Through the open french window came the velvet smell of roses and the marquee smell of cut grass. At mid-day Aziz brought drinks out to the verandah and cards were abandoned. Mabel was still in the garden cutting flowers for the house. Miss Batchelor was out shopping in the bazaar. Mildred Layton, Maisie Trehearne, Clara Fosdick and Nicky Paynton had the place to themselves. Presently the girls were due with some of the boys; and there was to be curry lunch down at the club.
    But into this idyll, this scene reminiscent of more pacific times, Barbie erupted unexpectedly accompanied by the spectres of broken bloody victims and the Reverend Arthur Peplow’s wife, blue-eyed Clarissa, whose expression was one of constant challenge to the devil, an uncomfortable attribute but useful so long as it did not get out of hand which it had never been known to. Her presence was a kind of corrective to over-optimism, at the same time calming. She had a still clear voice and used it tellingly like a gift harnessed for professional purposes.
    ‘Of course,’ Miss Batchelor was saying, ‘we weren’t at all bound by such things at the Bishop Barnard. Oh, hello. Hello. I was telling Clarissa, that it was teaching first last all the time, well practically speaking, that is especially after the Great War. Miss Jolley is non-conformist which hides a multitude of sins. In my day and Edwina’s day it had to be C of E. It’s in my trunk or should be. I’ll go and look and bring it out and then everyone can see. If I can find it. In spite of one’s resolution to be neat and tidy, as my father used to say a human being’s no better than a magpie.’
    She went indoors. The silence that followed was explicit. Mildred broke it, beating Clarissa perhaps by the shortest head.
    ‘What treat have we in store?’ she inquired.
    She had her elbows on the arms of the wicker chair and her glass at chest level, held there by the fingers of both droop-wristed hands, and like this seemed to define the limit of her contribution to public interest in Miss Batchelor as the friend of a victim of the riots. Her indifference to her as the sharer of Mabel’s kingdom was unchanged. Clarissa, who sat upright on a stool with her feet together and her handbag on her knees, directed her Christian gaze at Mildred but finding no fault unless it were in the large glass of gin and lemon summoned her still clear voice and said, ‘It’s some kind of picture I gather. One that has to do with her friend.’
    ‘How is her friend?’ Nicky Paynton asked.
    ‘The question that concerns me more,’ Clarissa answered, ‘is how is she ? She has just been acting very strangely on Club road.’
    Walking without due care; a danger to herself, indeed to others, up the long stretch from Church road which tongas bowled down or strained up, which no one ever walked or if they did walked with accidents in mind, keeping well into the bank on the golf-course side and facing the oncoming horses, bicycles and vehicles; not – like Barbara – on the left hand side and certainly not in the middle, stopping, starting, drawing her own or an invisible companion’s attention to some aspect of the Pankot scene which she must have seen hundreds of times before. And talking. Not in a loud voice. But quite definitely talking. To herself.
    ‘I felt,’ Clarissa said when she had described this curious and dangerous behaviour, ‘that she imagined herself in the company of her friend,