Enchanted Evening (26 page)

Chapter 18

In the end it was Mike who helped me the most during those nightmare last days in Delhi. I don't know what he was doing in India again, and I hadn't even known he was there. But he had been somewhere down south when he heard the news of Tacklow's death on a radio news bulletin, and he took the next train to Delhi and, walking unannounced into the Wrenches' house, abducted me in a hired car. There was a full moon that week, and he drove me to the Purana Khila, the Old Fort, and, leaving the car by the main gate, walked me off to the Sher Mandal – the library where a Mogul Emperor, Humayun, had killed himself falling down its steep and narrow stairway. Mike plonked me down on the steps that led up to it and said, ‘Aud says that you don't cry, and that it's not healthy. Come on, Midshipmite, tell me all about it. What happened?'

So I told him; and when I got to the worst part – how I'd been angry with Tacklow because he'd scared me rigid, and had gone off to Meerut without saying I was sorry, and never seen him alive again, I began to cry. And found that I could not stop. Mike sat with me for a time and then got up and went off to walk across the grassy spaces – in those days there was nothing within the ruined outer walls of the Purana Khila except the Sher Mandal and the beautiful Mosque of Shere Shah. I was still sitting there in the moonlight, dripping like a leaking tap, when he came back a good half hour later. But the pressure was off. Temporarily, at least. Mike was a real friend in those black days, and I shall always be grateful to him. He saw to it that I shouldn't have more than a modicum of time to myself, and Bets and Bill did the same for Mother. I only remember one other night during that time. It was early morning rather than night and the sleeping pills I had been given didn't work, so in the end I got up and went out into the Wrenches' garden to try and tire myself by walking up and down in the moonlight.

I remember how piercingly sweet the night-flowering stocks and the
Rat-ki-Rani
1
smelt, and how I couldn't stop crying; not because I would soon be leaving India with little or no prospect of ever getting back again, but because there was a single dreary sentence that kept on repeating itself in my brain with the maddening persistence of a frog croaking from the edge of a pond: ‘When I am an old woman, if anyone asks me about my father I shall have to say: “He died when I was still only a girl in my twenties…”'

That seemed to me then, and still does, the saddest thing that anyone could say. Because it meant that he left me just when I needed him most. When I was adrift in an uncharted sea and badly in need of a pilot. I must have walked the moon down because in the end it dawned on me that the garden had become very dark and the sky in the east was growing paler every minute, and that tears were still pouring down my face and had soaked the front of my nightdress. And suddenly I stopped thinking of Tacklow and began to wonder where on earth one's tears came from. I seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of them, but from where? How was it possible to keep on and
on
producing this mysterious salt water, hour after hour, without the supply giving out? It was the sort of ridiculous question that Tacklow could probably have answered off the bat. How was I going to get through my youth without him? How was I going to get through the rest of my life without him? There was so much of it left. All the rest of my twenties, my thirties and forties; marriage, motherhood and middle age, all without him. ‘My father died when I was a girl in my twenties…' I suppose I must have managed an hour of sleep in the end, but not until the sun came up.

I don't remember anything at all between then and a day just before the ship that we went home on reached England, when I noticed with a sense of shock that Mother's hair had a broad streak of white in it that hadn't been there when we left Bombay. I hadn't known that one's hair could go white quite so quickly. Though I would see it all too often during the years of the Second World War, it shook me badly because it was the first time. And because I hadn't believed it could happen.

Another result of Tacklow's death was that I began to have nightmares. I have always dreamt a lot. But few of my dreams had been bad ones. These were bad, and to make matters worse, they were always the same dream, identical in every detail …

Tacklow and I were alone in an empty Dâk bungalow in the jungle, and it was beginning to grow dark, for the sun had just set and dusk was closing in. We stood side by side on the verandah, listening to the noise of peacocks and jungle-cocks saluting the approach of night. Somewhere not too far away a Karkar deer would bark its alarm call, and Tacklow would say, ‘I think we'd better light a few lamps and start shutting the doors. This is tiger country.' We would walk along the verandah to the lamp room and collect and light a couple of kerosene lamps, and turning into the first of the empty rooms, all of which connected with each other, begin to close and bolt the doors. ‘You close this half and I'll close the other,' Tacklow would say, and he would turn away and go out of the room and I would see the small glow of his hurricane-lamp fade until it was lost.

As it did so, the wick of my own hurricane-lamp would flare up and go out, leaving me in the dusk; and in the same moment I would hear, quite clearly in the silence, the soft
pad, pad, pad
of paws on the matting of the long verandah outside. My heart would seem to leap into my throat and choke me, and I would hear behind me a sound that I took to be Tacklow coming back, and turning round quickly, see a tiger standing in the open doorway, staring at me. At which point the horrid noise that a sleeper in the grip of nightmare makes when they try to scream would wake me, and I would find myself in bed, shuddering and sweating with terror and still struggling to scream.

The dream never varied by an inch, and it recurred again and again, generally when I was feeling particularly dispirited and things were not going right for me. I came to know that Dâk bungalow so well that when, years later, I needed a slightly sinister one for
Shadow of the Moon
, I used the one in my nightmares, though by that time those scary dreams were a thing of the past.

*   *   *

Our first few months in England stay in my head as a confused jumble of other people's houses, Mother in floods of tears, that terrifying, recurrent nightmare, and having to live out of suitcases, because the detailed arrangements that my parents had made with relatives and close friends during the past winter meant that more than half-a-dozen households were expecting us to spend at least a month if not more with them. You have to remember that middle-class England, though badly shaken by the after-effects of the Great War, was still to a large extent living the life of Riley and – secure in the possession of a considerably reduced but still adequate domestic staff – still thought nothing of inviting their friends and relations for visits lasting from a fortnight to a few months.

The object of our lengthy visits was, or had been before Tacklow died, to let us go house-hunting at leisure instead of being rushed into buying a house – any house – for the sake of having a roof over our heads. Tacklow had wanted a little house in which he could settle down and spend the rest of his life peacefully, cataloguing Ferrarie's stamp collection, raising cabbages and watching his beloved Daisy grow old gracefully. But it had to be the right house, and he had intended to take his time about finding it.

Now, however, all thoughts of acquiring a house had to be put aside until Mother came to terms with widowhood, and I was deeply grateful that we had somewhere to stay for the remainder of that year. This, I thought, should give both of us plenty of time to plan for the future and adjust to life without Tacklow. But I soon learned that Mother was unable to do anything of the sort.

Instead of being able to stay in one place for several weeks (most of our visits had been planned for months), the most we managed were a few days. And I feel sure that all our kind hosts must have been unspeakably relieved to see us leave, for there are limits to how many times you can say to a grief-stricken friend or relative, ‘Oh my dear, I am
so
sorry for you; I
do
so sympathize – it must be
terrible
for you; if only I could do something to help!…'

Mother's friends ran out of sympathetic repetitions in fairly quick time, because all she would do was collapse into the nearest armchair or sofa and cry. I don't think she heard a word of what they said to her. She would just sit there, staring ahead of her, with tears streaming down her face, hour after hour. Once again I was reduced to wondering where, in one's anatomy, one
keeps
this apparently bottomless well of misery, and what happens to it when one
isn't
crying? – or hasn't cried for ages?

Occasionally, some warm-hearted sympathizer would end up losing their cool and tick her off, urging her to pull herself together and telling her how
horrified
Cecil would be if he could see her going to pieces in this spineless manner. But nothing worked. Mother merely told them that they ‘didn't understand', and went on weeping. Then after a day or two she would decide that she would feel much better once she was with Alice or Josie, or whichever friend or relative we were booked to stay with next. And before I knew it she had stopped crying for long enough to arrange a move over the telephone and pack her suitcases, and we were off, three weeks prematurely, to stay with Jessie or whomever, where, I regret to say, the same scenario was invariably repeated.

I can't think how she managed it without losing a whole row of dear friends for keeps, and can only suppose that they were so relieved to see the back of us that it outweighed the annoyance of having all their own plans upset and their hospitality rejected. But they stuck by her, and it was at this point in her life that she acquired a habit that was to madden Bets and me (who bore the brunt of it) and cause endless inconvenience, and occasionally great offence, to her friends and acquaintances. After the briefest of stays, she would take a scunner against whatever place she happened to be in, and having convinced herself that she would be much happier somewhere else, she would pack and move on. Only to regret, after a few days, that she had come there, and (now that it was too late to go back) begin to appreciate the charms and advantages of the place she had just left.

Poor Mother! From the time of Tacklow's death to the end of her days, she would always think that she could escape from unhappiness or insecurity, or whatever it was that she was forever trying to escape from, if only she could move on somewhere else. And only when she had done so, and could not go back, did she discover that the grass she had failed to appreciate while she was standing on it was far greener and more attractive than what she had exchanged it for.

Never ever again would she appreciate anything while she had it. Only after she had lost it. For she had become like the dog in Aesop's
Fables
who, standing by a river with a juicy bone in his jaws, dropped and lost it, because he thought the reflection of that bone in the water made it look a lot larger than the one between his teeth. He had grabbed at the shadow and lost the substance.

4

Digs in London

Chapter 19

The extent to which Tacklow's death was going to change my life was painfully underlined on an evening at Pembury in Kent, where I was staying with my schoolfriend Helen, at her parents' home, the Manor House. It was just before sundown, and I was in the dining-room, helping Helen to lay the table for supper, when she suddenly said: ‘Isn't it your birthday today, Tish?'
1

And it was! I remember the knowledge hitting me as though someone had punched me in the stomach, followed by the horrid sinking feeling you get when one of those over-swift office lifts drops you down twenty storeys non-stop to the ground floor.

I didn't let go of whatever it was I was holding – side plates I think – but I very nearly did. I had known Tacklow's death meant the end of an era. But only with my mind. Not fully yet with my heart. Now it came home to me with the force of a knock-down blow. It was my birthday … and I hadn't even remembered it!

We'd always made so much of birthdays. Present-giving at breakfast. A birthday tea-party to which all one's special friends were invited. A birthday cake with candles on it and when we grew older a dinner party and a dance. And I hadn't even remembered! We weren't a family any more, now Tacklow had gone and Bets was married, Bill was somewhere on the North West Frontier and Mother a widow. I was on my own. It was one of the blacker and drabber patches in my life, and it was around about this time that Roger turned up again.

He couldn't have picked a worse time to look me up, and I don't think he had any idea of how much hung on our first meeting ‘on home soil', so to speak. We had met briefly in Bombay, where Mother and I happened to be staying at the same hotel as he was, all three of us homeward bound, though on different ships. Mother must have given him the Manor House as my only fairly safe address.

Roger was returning to England on leave and would be staying with his mother, who lived in a suburb of London, and he had written to ask if he could call at the Keelans' and take me out to lunch: a scheme that Helen was all in favour of, as she was deeply involved with the local church fête, which included lunches and teas among their day-long money-raising activities. (Tish scented another customer!) So Roger was duly invited down to collect me at the house and eventually stand me lunch in the grounds of the Vicarage, and be lured into buying home-made cakes, second-hand books, or assorted jumble off the stalls managed by the ladies of the village.

Helen and her mother, who were both stallholders at this yearly shindig, would have left long before Roger arrived. ‘So you will have him all to yourself for at least an hour,' said Helen's mother – a keen match-maker who thought it was high time I was married, and had said so at frequent intervals ever since I had unwisely told her that Tacklow had approved of Roger. As for myself, I was in a thoroughly mixed up and miserable state of mind, and I have never before, or since, felt so totally lost. I was on my own now in uncharted waters, and Mother was proving useless as a source of either comfort or support, for she too was hopelessly adrift, and I knew that I would have to look after her – because there was no one else to do so. We would both have to learn how to make ends meet, and oh, how I wished that Tacklow had taught us something about balancing the books!