Enchanted Evening (27 page)

Mother had always known that our means were modest, and now that Tacklow had gone, his pension and salary had gone with him, and Mother was left to manage on a widow's pension of less than four hundred pounds a year (of which ninety-four pounds – or was it ninety-three? – was accounted for by the addition of something called ‘The Royal Warrant' that was given in recognition of sterling work during the First World War – or something of the sort). As for my own princely pension as an unmarried daughter, it was one pound five shillings a week. And lucky to get it! (If Tacklow had been in the British Army instead of the British-Indian one, I would have got nothing.) There was no ‘Cradle to Grave' stuff in those days!

The mere problems of how to manage on our pensions in what was, to me, almost a foreign country were worrying enough without Mother's uninhibited grief and continual moves at short notice, and I would have given almost anything for ‘someone to watch over me' – someone on to whom I could unload a share of the problems and woes that had been piling up on me and who would provide a shoulder to cry on. I don't remember seriously considering Roger as a candidate for the post in the days immediately before his arrival in Pembury, but I suppose I must have done, because I know that I took a lot of trouble with my hair and my dress and my lipstick (Pond's Kiss-Proof – and it
was
, too!). And that I borrowed some of Helen's lavender water and went down to wait in the drawing-room with my heart beating a good deal faster than usual. The Keelans' maid, who had not yet left for the church fête, let him in, and I went out to meet him in the hall.

Dear Roger. His guardian angel must have been taking good care of him that day, because if he had grabbed me in his arms and kissed me, I would have clung to him like a bit of fly-paper and, mentally and most thankfully unloading all my woes and worries on to him, kissed him back warmly. And a month or two later I would probably have married him and made him unhappy ever after, for I wasn't the sort of girl he should have married at all. He deserved something a lot better than a wife who had married him as an escape from sorrow and the problems of penury. And his guardian angel must have known it, for when I ran out into the hall we were both suddenly overcome with shyness, which Roger covered up by starting to struggle out of the greatcoat he was wearing. There were raindrops on it, I remember. (One could have bet on that, since you must have noticed that the Devil, who has a warped sense of humour, does his best to ensure that any outdoor festivity on behalf of the church should be rained on.)

Getting himself out of that greatcoat gave Roger an excuse for getting his greetings over without having to accompany them with any demonstration which he was afraid I might not welcome. And by the time he had got it off, I had decided that he had done it on purpose for exactly that reason, for fear I might want to embrace him when he was no longer in love with me and had, in fact, found someone else. So in the end we didn't even shake hands, but were terribly bright and chatty.

It wasn't a good day. I took him over to the grounds where the fête was being held, and after I had introduced him to Helen and her parents, we had the sort of lunch one would expect in a tent at a church bazaar, and spent the rest of the day doing our duty by buying things we didn't want at a variety of stalls, or guessing the weight of large plum cakes – correct guess wins the cake – and similar games of chance. The rain must have stopped early on, since I took Roger for a stroll around the Manor House gardens and the orchards, and presumably told him all about Mother and our present situation, and was brought up to date with his news – it seems he had been posted to HMS
Excellent
, that bit of land in or near Portsmouth that is a Navy enclave and pretends it's a ship.

When, eventually, the Keelans returned looking eager and interested, and obviously expecting to be told the glad news of an engagement, Roger hastily presented me with all the junk he had bought and, taking his courage in both hands, pulled me towards him, gave me a brief kiss, and fled.

The kiss told me, if nothing else, that he hadn't found anyone else. But it came too late. If he had done that in the beginning, I am fairly certain that we would have skipped lunch and the fête as well, and spent the rest of the day with our arms about each other, either on the drawing-room sofa, or strolling arm in arm along the garden paths, making plans for the future. And I am fairly certain that I would have married him. But fortunately for both of us he had started off the day on the wrong foot, and stayed there, uncomfortably and immovably. And by the time he left I knew that if I married him it would be for the meanest of reasons. A meal ticket. Which would not only be cheating, but would put me under a lifetime's obligation to him, because if you marry for love and things go wrong, well it's probably fifty-fifty anyway. But to marry someone for escape or convenience, or a meal ticket, or merely for ‘someone to watch over me', and it doesn't work out – well that's going to be your fault. Because it should be your part of the bargain to
make
it work.

An afternoon spent making polite conversation to Roger made it quite clear to me that I couldn't possibly pretend that he was the man I had been waiting for, the ‘Some day he'll come along, the man I love' – the one-and-only that all the romantic books and songs tell you is out there somewhere, waiting for you to come his way … Oh, dear, what a lot of heartaches and disappointment those songs and stories are responsible for!

It is odd to think that there are times when one's whole life can be altered by a seemingly trivial incident, and I sometimes used to wonder what it might have been like if Roger had caught hold of me and kissed me instead of talking. Very different, I imagine. For one thing, I would not have been a writer, since it would not have occurred to me to try. I had hoped to be an illustrator of children's books, a second Arthur Rackham, or Edmund Dulac – and though I'm afraid I would never have been half as good, I might have made it on a much lower level. But a writer, never. The only reason I tried that was because although it was possible in those days to live on one pound five shillings
2
a week (and many people managed on much less), it was not all that easy. For a start, the tools of one's trade had to be bought and paid for. And one has to eat. If Roger had kissed me as though he meant it when we met, I would not have needed to worry about finding the money for the next week's rent or a shilling for that insatiable gas-meter. Odd, when you come to think of it.

Helen's parents, whom ever since my schooldays I had called ‘Uncle Pat' and ‘Auntie Winnie' (in the tedious Victorian tradition that all grown-ups were ‘uncles and aunties'), had taken to Roger on sight, and were gravely disappointed by the outcome of his visit. In fact Auntie Winnie took the opportunity to read Helen and me a stern lecture on the conceit and stupidity of heedless girls who played fast and loose with the affections of their suitors, and thoughtlessly rejected eligible proposals that might never come their way again. Such young women, warned Auntie Winnie, were heading straight for that dreaded end of all hopes – ‘the Shelf'. And Helen and I were both consigned to the doghouse, since Helen had disappointed her mother by continuing to turn down a devoted suitor, one Jack Glubb; known to fame as ‘Glubb Pasha' – or ‘Father of the Little Chin' – to his devoted Arab Legions. It used to amuse me to see the great man – a second, if considerably less romantic, Lawrence of Arabia, whose word at that time was law throughout most of Jordan – behaving like a wet doormat for the sake of a girl who kept turning him down.

*   *   *

I owe a lot to Helen and her parents, for they let me treat the Manor House as my home and set aside a room for me there, an enchanting little attic room reached by a steep winding stairway, with a window looking out across Pembury Green. It had probably housed at least three housemaids in the days of whichever Hanoverian George was on the throne when it was built (at a guess, George II) but since I was used to living in a houseboat it seemed fairly commodious to me, and Auntie Winnie allowed me to leave a lot of my luggage and various bits and pieces there. Helen's house was the one bit of stability I found in England in those days, and it was here, on another and much later occasion on a spring morning, sitting under an apple-tree in blossom in the Manor House orchard and doodling in pencil in an old school rough notebook, that I started to write a fairy story called
The Ordinary Princess
.

It turned out to be one of those rare and enchanting occasions when your brain and hand take over and write the story for you, and it was only to happen to me on one other occasion, many years later. But this time the story wrote itself for me in a single day, and with hardly any corrections. My hand could hardly keep up with the story that my brain – or possibly Amy, the Ordinary Princess – was telling me. I didn't do anything with that story for years, though now and again I used to do a few pencil sketches of the characters, and once I wasted an entire day making a doll's-house-size mock-up of what the story would look like as an illustrated book. But I didn't do anything with that either for years. It got put away and forgotten.

*   *   *

Mother continued to be a problem, and I decided that it was high time we ceased to burden our friends and rented a house or flat of our own. Mother had always been good with houses. She was a born home-maker, and it was a family joke that even during brief stops for a night at some Dâk bungalow she would produce a bed ‘throw' and a few knick-knacks, and always a vase of flowers and her silver-backed brushes and comb, plus a few framed photographs, so that in no time at all the room was Mother's, and no one else's. Remembering this, and the series of bungalows, houseboats and houses in the hills on which she had put her own unmistakable stamp, I started to house-hunt in earnest. Not for a permanent home, but for a base from which we could scout around for one.

Mother had been staying for a couple of weeks with a friend from the old days, also widowed. She was the mother of a friend of mine from the Delhi days, Liz Glascock, a one-time member of the ‘gang'. I had visited Mother there in order to meet Liz again, and been much taken with the little village of Yateley, near Camberley, where they lived. Mrs Glascock told me about a small house nearby that was to let furnished, and said that it would suit us down to the ground, and that it would be lovely to have ‘Daisy living so close'. I thought so too. Liz's mother was a cosy old darling, and it would do mine a lot of good to be anchored for a while instead of moving restlessly and at short notice from one friend's house to the next, in a vain attempt to escape from unhappiness.

Mother liked the house and, even more, the idea of living so close to an old friend who knew all the ‘Raj women' that she knew. So we hired it for a provisional six months and moved in, plus ‘Shao-de',
3
the Siamese kitten that a friend had given her ‘because they were such good company'. Shao-de, which is Chinese for ‘small piece', was certainly that, and I was optimistic enough to believe that the worst was now over, and that I could start by looking for a job, while Mother took over doing the housework and cooking – she had become a very good cook during our time at ‘Three Trees', the house we had rented unfurnished and that Tacklow had hoped to buy one day when he had retired from India Service in the early twenties.

Among the ‘furniture and effects' in our furnished house were several cookery books, and I can't tell you how relieved I was when I saw her take them down and flip through them. But the relief was premature. She merely put them back and never looked at them again and, since we could not possibly afford a ‘daily', if I hadn't taken over the cooking and cleaning we would have lived in squalor and existed on a diet of baked beans and biscuits and anything else that was cheap and came out of a tin.

It was only then that it dawned on me that for the past quarter of a century, Mother had been playing the role of home-maker solely for the benefit of an admiring audience of one – Tacklow. Now that he had gone, she ‘couldn't give a damn'. What's more, she wouldn't even
try
. Once I had taken that in, I realized that we had made a fatal mistake in bringing her to England.

We ought to have taken her straight back to Kashmir and kept on Kadera and Mahdoo to look after her. And that night I sent an SOS off to Bill, beseeching him to ask for ‘compassionate' leave to come back to England to collect her. India was the only place in which she could live comfortably on her pension and really feel at home. Besides, she would have both him and Bets there, as well as loads of old friends, both Indian and British. Best of all, she would be able to supplement her pension by selling her sketches, which would help pay for Mahdoo and Kadera and a small car. As for me, I would be able to set about supporting myself, which I hadn't been able to do while I had Mother on my hands in a perpetual pond of tears and despair. Bill cabled his agreement, and when I broke the news to Mother she cheered up wonderfully and ‘couldn't think why we' (Bill and I!) ‘hadn't thought of it before!'

*   *   *

I remember discussing the situation with Mike who, bless him – may he inherit one of those many mansions in Paradise – turned up on our doorstep one afternoon and, leaving Shao-de to look after Mother, drove me to London, gave me dinner at the Berkeley where he had rooms, and told me that he was in the doghouse with the manager and the staff because he had brought back a couple of wolf cubs that had been a gift from the head-man of a village somewhere in the Pamirs, where he had been on trek.

The cubs had had to spend a few months
4
at the zoo before he was allowed to take them away, and he had driven up with them to the front entrance of the Berkeley and said to the doorman, who had opened the door for him, ‘Watch out for the back seat, I've got a couple of wolves in there!' The doorman smiled tolerantly, thinking it was a joke, and got the fright of his life when he found it wasn't. In the end Mike was reluctantly given permission to take them through the hall (where the mere sight of them cleared the place of the usual crowd of cocktail-drinking customers in a matter of seconds) and down to the cellars, in one of which they were locked up for the night.