Enchanted Evening (36 page)

Here we entered one of the tall Indian houses straight from a narrow, unpaved lane lined with similar houses, and climbed up innumerable stairs in the half light to a long, whitewashed room where there was no furniture at all, just thick druggets (or possibly carpets) covered with white cotton sheeting, on which the owner and a couple of assistants, also dressed in white, were seated cross-legged and smoking a hookah. They rose and bowed when we came in and then sat down again, gesturing us to do the same, which we did somewhat awkwardly – Barbara's high heels proving a distinct handicap in this kind of caper. Having got us all safely down on the floor, the owner clapped his hands and cups of coffee and various bits of this-and-that,
halwa
(sweetmeats) mostly, were produced and passed round. After an interval of polite social chit-chat the cups and dishes were removed and two more white-robed assistants appeared, carrying between them the type of cheap tin trunk that India used when it decided to travel and had more clobber than could be trusted to a bedding-roll. You could see them by the score on any railway platform all over the country, and they could, in those days, be bought for a few rupees.

A succession of these locked and unlovely objects was carried in and dumped on the white sheeting that covered the floor, and out of them, when the locks had been removed, an Ali-Baba's treasure of jewellery was lifted out and laid on the floor. This was the kind of jewellery that the average globe-trotter never sees, the kind that we had seen in the Treasure House in Gwalior, incredible stuff: pearls the size of pigeon's eggs, carved emeralds, glittering rubies and enormous, table-cut diamonds. Sapphires, topazes and turquoises and a wonderful example of a fascinating jewel that I had only seen once before, in Peking, where I was told that they are so rare that their number is known, and that most of those had been in the Russian Crown Jewels: Alexandrites.

This was the first occasion on which I suddenly realized that great riches must be a terrible bore. Because I would have given almost anything to possess one of the magical works of the jeweller's craft that were being unwrapped and laid out one at a time on the cheap chudder-cloth in front of Barbara, yet she couldn't have cared less about them. She sat there on the floor, saying occasionally in a languid voice, ‘That's pretty. I'll have that. And that one too. And that…' Just pointing a finger at the things that caught her fancy, knowing that she could, if she felt like it, buy the lot twenty times over. She couldn't have been less excited about them if they'd been two-cent trinkets in one of those souvenir shops in a seaside arcade, and I thought, ‘You poor dear! What a bore life must be when there isn't anything you want that you can't have, and don't have to save up for.' Yes, I'd have changed places with her. Of course I would! But only long enough to buy that pearl and diamond and emerald flower-bracelet. She simply did not get a kick out of
anything
. And how could she?

Well, she did out of one thing. Sandy had made great friends with one of the nobles of Hyderabad, and since any friend of Sandy's was a friend of ours, Mother and I were soon privileged to become friends of his too. No one could possibly have done anything else, because he was one of the most attractive men I have ever met. He was an old man when I first met him, but when he was young he must have been devastating, and it can have surprised no one when the youthful daughter of the then Resident fell madly in love with him – and he with her. But though Christians are accepted by Muslims as ‘Children of the Book', because the Koran acknowledges Christ to be among the prophets and contains the Christmas story, Sala Jung's family, who were too near the throne to get away with a mixed marriage, were horrified and refused their permission, backed by the then Nizam and the mullahs. The girl's father, equally horrified, also put his foot down and sent her back to England by the next available boat. The lovers had managed one last meeting, at which they promised each other that they would never marry anyone else. And they never did. Not so surprisingly from the girl's side of things, for Victorian damsels did a lot of ‘going into a decline' because they couldn't have the man they wanted. But amazing for a Muslim royal. I suppose he had the odd concubine when he felt like it. But he kept that promise to the end of his life. And no, it was not Sala Jung whom Barbara fancied. It was one of his possessions.

He lived in a large and rather shabby palace in the city, which one felt he had lost interest in and was allowing to grow old gracefully around him. It was crammed with treasures, all of which could have done with a bit of dusting; huge oil paintings by Victorian artists covered the walls and wonderful Persian carpets covered the marble floors. He liked to give lunch parties on Sundays, and we were lucky enough to be asked to them fairly frequently. We thought it might interest Barbara and her Count to meet the old charmer and attend one of his famous lunches, so we asked him if we could bring her with us on the following weekend. Having told them a good deal about their host, we ought to have warned her that Sala's lunches were, as far as dress went, strictly informal. But we didn't even think of it and were very taken aback when we went to collect her and found her decked out like one of her own Woolworths jewellery counters.

I don't know why it is that too much glitter on anyone but the Queen – and then only on a State occasion! – always looks phoney. But it does. The Countess Reventlow must, that morning, have been worth several millions (billions in today's currency!) ‘on the hoof'. It began with the hat, which was pinned to her hair with a couple of diamond hat-pins. Well, OK, but the hat was a small plate of multi-coloured artificial flowers, swathed in black net that had been liberally sprinkled with tiny sequins. The whole thing glittered. Worse, it topped a dress of multi-coloured, patterned crêpe-de-Chine, on which the late Czarina's pearls, a recent acquisition – or so we were told – gorgeous as they were, had somehow become artificial. Her earrings were in the shape of four-leaf clovers, each leaf a huge emerald and the centre a large diamond, and even her shoes glittered because they were made of shiny black patent leather. She was wearing a diamond ring that would have dwarfed Elizabeth Taylor's, as well as several simply gorgeous three-inch-wide 1920s-style diamond bracelets, and, to top all this splendour, in place of a bag she was carrying a platinum box about the size of one of the smaller paperback novels, the edge of which was paved with flat oblong diamonds, and on top of which were her initials in – I think – emeralds. As she walked out into the bright sunlight, the sun suddenly caught her and made her glitter all over as though she had been caught by a powerful spotlight. I think she must have dressed to impress a rich Indian royal. But she certainly made the rest of the party look as drab as sparrows on a wet day. Not a diamond among the lot of us. Or even a sequin!

Sala Jung may have become old and grey, but he had never lost his ability to charm, and in no time at all he had Barbara eating out of his hand. I'd never seen her look so alive and interested, and so charming herself. The lunch party was a great success, for the Count too was a charmer, and I am not surprised that she fell for him. All went well until we moved out to a flagged patio in the middle of the ground floor – the house, like many eastern houses, was built around an open square, and this one, like the majority of its fellows, had flowering creepers and brilliant sprays of bougainvillaea and jasmine growing in tubs in the patio, part of which was generally in sunlight.

Except during the monsoon, or the brief winter rains, coffee was always served in the patio, and Sandy having told Barbara about Sala's collection of daggers, she begged him to let her see them. A display of these daggers was apt to be a normal ending to those Sunday luncheons, because the collection was famous, and I must have seen them many times myself. But I never got tired of seeing them. No one could. They were wonderful. Once again, as in the jewel-merchant's house in the city, servants tottered out into the patio with a selection of cheap tin trunks, and having spread a large sheet over the marble paving stones, took out the daggers one by one, each in its own velvet-covered box. Each in turn was removed from its box and laid on the ground, and everyone ‘ooh'd' and ‘aah'd', and was allowed to handle the fabulous things.

The names of the previous owners read like a page from history and were even more fascinating than the weapons that centuries ago had been made for them and carried by them. Among them all, one in particular caught Barbara's eye, and she asked if she might handle it. It was a fairly short dagger and its curved hilt was made in the likeness of a parrot's head, the beak carved from a single ruby and the head from an enormous emerald. The eyes were rubies ringed by smaller jewels, either sapphires or diamonds, I don't remember which; maybe two rings, one of both. And a hole had been bored through the parrot's neck from which there hung a tassel of pearls. It was a beautifully made piece of jewellery, and, I should imagine, a horribly effective weapon, for the steel of the blade, which was inlaid with patterns of gold, was as razor sharp as the day it was made. Sala warned Barbara to be careful she didn't cut herself as she eased it out of its green velvet diamond-studded sheath.

There were dozens of daggers, each one of them worth their weight in pearls or platinum, and each more dazzling than the last. But the one with the parrot-like head and the gleaming tassel of pearls had caught Barbara's fancy, and she kept on coming back to it. I think someone must have told her to be careful of how she admired the possessions of Eastern or Oriental potentates, because you could find yourself presented with the object of your admiration, and though it would be handed to you as a gift you were expected to give the donor something of equal value. She certainly went overboard about that parrot-headed dagger, bestowing only the most cursory of glances on the rest of the collection, and saying, ‘Oh, yes, very pretty … But not a patch on this lovely thing – why, it might almost be a real bird! I'd give
anything
to own something like this! It's just about the most beautiful thing I've ever seen…' and so on and so on. Until our host suddenly took fright. He probably thought the young woman was going to back him into a horrid corner by asking him to sell it to her. Or give it to her! Neither of which he would have thought of doing. He gave a curt order to the servants, who whipped everything away at the speed of light. I should think that dagger was the only artifact that La Comtesse ever wanted that she didn't get.

*   *   *

Mother and I planned to spend the hot weather in Ootacamund, a part of India that I had never seen before. Bets had arranged to go up there to meet her mother-in-law and would be staying at Mrs Pardey's guest-house, and she suggested that Mother and I should do the same. So we had booked rooms for ourselves and arranged to drive there, via Bangalore and Mysore where Mother had old friends from the Delhi days. We should have left while the weather was still cool, but three accidents delayed us. The first was caused by Mother's Siamese cat, Shao-de. The second can also be laid at Shao-de's door, though it was hardly an accident, since Mother had arranged to mate her puss to a neighbour's tom, who was also a well-bred Siamese. With kittens on the way – and all of them ‘bespoke' – we had to wait until they arrived and were old enough to travel.

It was during that waiting interval that I went out into the garden late one evening in the dusk to collect Shao-de, whom we did not allow out at night (too many jackals and pi-dogs around). Mother and Sandy had both gone out to some senior dinner party, Kadera was out on the town with Sandy's bearer, and I was more or less on my own in the house. Shao-de obediently gave herself up when called, stalking elegantly out from under a mass of bougainvillaea at the far end of the garden, and I picked her up and was carrying her back in my arms, cradling her like a baby, when a hyena that had probably been stalking her suddenly broke cover and galloped away across the lawn. Shao-de lashed out in a panic, trying to turn over, and one of her claws slashed across my left eye.

Normally, an eye's reaction is so swift that I would have closed it in time. But it was nearly dark, and by the time I got the cat and myself into the house I discovered that I was pouring blood all over the place. Realizing that my eyeball had been neatly slashed, I rang the Residency Surgeon as my best bet. He was out of course. So I rang the people Mother and Sandy were dining with, and they managed to ring the Residency Surgeon (who was not pleased!) and they all turned up, to find me with gore pouring down my face. It looked much worse than it was. The Res. doc. turned pale green at the sight and said it would have to be left until tomorrow morning, since he knew nothing about eye surgery. I would have to go to the hospital to sort out the damage. Fortunately, Mother had a couple of great friends, a doctor and his wife who were natives of Hyderabad. She managed to get them on the phone, but the doctor had two operations on his hands that night, and having told me what to do in the way of bandages, asked me to turn up at the City Hospital as early as I could on the following morning.

The City Hospital was enough to make a modern doctor or hospital nurse swoon with horror. It was a huge barrack-like Victorian structure that strongly suggested the hand of Florence Nightingale – high-ceilinged rooms and plenty of light and air. It was crammed with rows of low iron bedsteads in every room and along all the verandahs, each bed surrounded as with a swarm of flies by what appeared to be every member of the patient's family. For India does not approve of leaving its sick to the mercy of the doctors and nurses, let alone in peace and quiet. A horde of anxious relatives accompanies a sick or dying man, woman or child to the hospital, where they squat beside the bed (veiled, if female, against the glances of strange men) so that they can offer comfort and sympathy and, too frequently, sips and scraps of unsuitable food, and pat the hand or shoulder of the sufferer in a soothing manner. (I notice with interest that the idea of allowing relatives to attend the sick in our children's wards is catching on. India has been doing it for
years.
)