Enchanted Evening (43 page)

She hailed me over to join her. The verdict on my refurbished locks was enthusiastic, and from then on I began to enjoy my stay in Ranikhet. I think we all did. Not so much despite the ugly, ominous war-clouds that were rolling up across Europe and the Middle East, but because of them. Because we were all, I think, aware that we were living on a knife edge, and that although the storm clouds were no more than a black line along the horizon, they could at any moment roll up and over us, and destroy us all. But since there was nothing we could do about it but pray, we might just as well eat, drink and be merry, and forget about tomorrow. What's more, apart from Kashmir, I couldn't have been in a lovelier place.

Chapter 27

One of the hotel guests had complained to the management about rats that (so she said) had taken to stealing the nuts and biscuits that she kept for her ‘coffee mornings'. The management made apologetic noises, and took steps to deal with the problem by setting one of those large wire-cage rat-traps on the ground floor verandah of the block I was in, and baiting it with a bit of biscuit.

My room happened to be the one directly above it, and a few nights later, when the moon was almost full, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a small but irritating rattling noise that sounded like a piece of broken hinge or the end of a cane
chik
being shaken in the wind. It went on and on until presently, realizing that I had let it get on my nerves and that there was no chance of going to sleep again until it stopped, I got out of bed and went out, shoeless, into the verandah to investigate.

I had forgotten about the rat-trap, and as the night was exceptionally warm I had left my door open, and only had to part the curtains in order to step out on to the verandah. I stood there for a moment or two looking out at the black and silver world beyond the verandah railings and thinking how fabulous the hillsides looked by moonlight, before turning my attention to the source of that tiresome noise, and discovering that it came from somewhere on the verandah immediately below me. And also realizing, in almost the same moment and with a distinct sense of unease, that there was not a breath of wind stirring.

The night was so still that you could have heard a pine-cone drop in the woods behind the hotel. Which meant that whatever was making that irritating noise had hands – or paws? It was only then that I remembered the rat-trap, and was suddenly limp with relief, for I had had a swift and scary thought that it might be a thief trying to force a locked door or window. But of course it must be a rat – caught in that trap and scrabbling to get out. My bare feet can have made no sound on the matting as I walked to the edge of the verandah and leaned over the rail. And it
was
the rat-trap of course, and there was a rat inside it. But it wasn't the rat that was making the noise that had irritated me to the point of getting out of bed to investigate. It was a full-grown leopard, crouched there below me in the bright moonlight, with the trap and its frantic occupant between its paws. One paw held down the trap, while the other one was attempting to claw out the rat, shaking the wire cage to and fro. It began to growl very softly, deep in its throat, and all I could think of was that I had been sleeping with my doors and windows wide open, and it could have walked in on any night, for there was no door at the bottom of that staircase.

I stood there fascinated. Scared to death of moving in case the leopard might try and get at me in preference to the rat, though I knew it couldn't jump that high. But then there was always that open staircase …

I know that I made no sound and, as far as I know, didn't move a muscle. But either it caught my scent, or wild animals can sense the near presence of a human. For suddenly, its head came up and we were staring at each other in the bright moonlight. The rattling and growling stopped and the night was quiet again except for the scrabbling of that terrified rat. I remember noticing how the moonlight caught the leopard's eyes and made them glow like a pair of greeny-yellow moons. Then all at once it wasn't there any more. I didn't even see which way it went. It just vanished in a flash of spotted fur, and without the ghost of a sound. And there was only that rat-trap with a rat scrabbling wildly round and round inside it.

I woke the
chowkidar
(who naturally had slept throughout) and he took the trap and its captive away and went off to rouse some of his friends to patrol the approaches to the lower wing of the hotel. A day or two later a dog belonging to one of the hotel guests was taken by a leopard – presumably the one I had seen – and the bereaved owner organized a beat and succeeded in shooting the creature. But though I saw its body lying dead in a clearing on the edge of the forest, I never again slept with my windows wide and my door open while I was in Ranikhet. For an old
shikari,
who had helped set up the beat, told me a hair-raising story about a man-eating leopard which, in the years immediately following the end of the Great War, had terrorized a large part of the Gharwal and Kumaon districts, and according to Government records had been responsible for the deaths of a hundred and twenty-five people.

According to the
shikari,
the correct total was far larger than that, a verdict that was supported some years later when ‘Carpet-Sahib', Colonel J. E. Corbett – the Jim Corbett who wrote a marvellous series of tiger books and gave the entire proceeds of the first one,
Man-eaters of Kumaon,
to St Dunstan's
1
– came up with a riveting book called
The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag.
That book was first published in India in 1947, and I assure you that although at the time I read it I was nowhere near the hill-country in which that leopard had operated, when night fell I looked under the bed and in the cupboard and behind the curtains of my bedroom, to make sure that there were no leopards lurking there before I went to bed! It's that sort of book.

I remembered that night in Ranikhet when, a year later, I began to write a whodunnit set in Kashmir, eventually published as
Death Walks in Kashmir
and republished a long while later as
Death in Kashmir.
I started it with a girl being woken up on a moonlit night by a small monotonous sound that gets her out of bed to investigate. And when I finally came to write a Mutiny novel
2
I remembered the way that leopard's eyes had caught the moonlight and gleamed like a pair of green moons, and I put that in too – together with a host of other memories.

*   *   *

I don't remember when, in the course of that summer, Lady Haigh wrote to invite me over to Naini Tal to spend a week at Government House, and whether it was before or after I became a blonde. I think it was probably after, and that I must have been a bit worried about her writing to Mother to break the news, because I wasn't all that anxious to accept, and might even have invented some excuse if Jess hadn't told me I was behaving like a fourth-former with an inferiority complex. If she was in my shoes, she'd
jump
at it! Bets agreed, so I refurbished my distinctly scanty wardrobe and accepted.

An ADC arrived in one of the Government House cars to fetch me, and in spite of my qualms I had a truly enjoyable stay. Naini Tal, with its lake and its yacht-club and sailing boats, was the prettiest sight, and I was charmed by the entrance to Government House with its long, winding drive through woods, banked up high on either side of the drive with masses of hydrangeas in full bloom, not the shrieking ‘
deysi
3
-pink' colour, but every shade of blue and mauve and lilac and that soft pinky-mauve like the best opals. And all of them with unbelievably large flower-heads – I've never seen such enormous ones before or since. The woods were full of them: and so was half the garden. The effect against the massed green of the trees that clothed the hillsides – for the
Tal
(lake) lies in a cup of the hills that rise up steeply on all but the side that looks towards the plains – was stunningly beautiful, and I fell out of the car, babbling with admiration.

I couldn't have done anything that pleased my hostess more, for it seemed that Lady Haigh had a passion for the multi-shaded hydrangeas (she, like me, disliked the shocking-pink ones) and was responsible for those in the garden and along the drive. She had even had a small notice pinned up in all the guest-bathrooms asking male guests to give her their discarded razor blades. These, when collected, were dug in around the roots of the hydrangeas in order to put iron into the soil, since iron helps turn the flowers blue. Too much iron and they are
only
blue. And no iron at all produces only
deysi
-pink ones. Lady Haigh had obviously struck the happy medium – with the help of all those razor blades which must have provided a terrible hazard in later years to unwary gardeners.

The week I spent in ‘Naini' was a terrific success, at least from my point of view, and I was driven back to Ranikhet in the largest of the Government House cars, with the boot and the back seat stuffed full and overflowing with hydrangeas.
Dozens
of them. I filled every jar and pot and even a tin tub borrowed off the proprietor, with them. And the next day I photographed them with Jess and her lovely ash-blonde hair posing in the foreground to give them point. My Box-Brownie (I
think
it was still the Box-Brownie) came up trumps, and the result was so good that I had a really big enlargement done of it which I tinted with special photographic paint and will include in the book so that you can see both Jess and the size of the flower heads. But not, unfortunately, the lovely opal colours.

*   *   *

According to the latest films of the 1930s, and such magazines as
John Bull, Britannia and Eve,
the
Saturday Evening Post
and all that lot (now long defunct), the very latest way in which women were doing their hair was to pull it all up on top of their heads and, having first curled the ends into a handful of plump sausage rolls, skewer the lot on top with half a dozen bobby-pins. This fashion apparently only worked with blondes, for though research on thirties films and magazines showed scores of starlets balancing bunches of pallid-coloured sausages on their heads, I didn't find any girl sporting black or brown ones. Well, I was now a blonde, so why not have a stab at it?

The next time there was a Club dance to which I had been invited, I pressed Bets into service as a hairdresser's assistant, and spent the afternoon in strict seclusion and metal hair curlers. In those days you dressed up for dances and there was never any question of ‘come as you are'. Women wore long dresses and men wore dinner-jackets and black ties, and that was that. I wore the two-piece grey evening dress that I had bought at Bourne & Hollingsworth and kept for ‘best', and off I went to the ball.

That top-knot of bleached sausages (which I have to admit I thought was pretty hideous and would have combed out and restyled if only I had had the time) proved a wild success and gave me some of the greatest fun I had had since Tacklow died. There was never a shortage of personable young men up on leave in Ranikhet, and though the feminine section of the British holiday-makers remained more or less static, the male ranks were constantly changing, as those whose allowance of leave had run out left to go back to their regiments or their various jobs in the plains, and newcomers came up to replace them.

This turnover meant that there was always a selection of new faces to add interest to the season. But though August was more than half-way over, I had seen no one who caught my eye or caused me the slightest pang when we said goodbye. Tonight, though, when our party left the dining-room and joined the dancers in the ballroom, my attention was immediately caught by a newcomer who was standing at the far end of the room, hands in his pockets, idly surveying the dancers. He wasn't particularly tall, though that was probably because he was standing next to a man who was tall enough to make him look short, and I don't suppose I would have given him a second look if he hadn't happened to be the dead-spit of Brian Aherne, a British film star whom I much admired.

Intrigued by the likeness and wondering if anyone else had noticed it, I can't have been paying much attention to what my dancing partner was saying, for I didn't fail to note when Jess either introduced herself or was introduced to the Aherne double, and they started chatting to each other. I did hear when my partner informed me, somewhat sulkily, that one of my curls was about to fall down: instantly abandoning the poor fellow in the middle of the ballroom floor, I fled to the ladies' room in search of a comb and more bobby-pins. I was followed by Jess, who, seeing me leave, had hastily jettisoned her own partner
4
and ran after me to tell me that a new arrival who had joined the party she was with had asked who I was and did she know me? – if so would she please introduce me? ‘Do you know what he said about you?' demanded Jess. ‘He said, “I've been watching that girl, and I have to meet her. She's got
everything
!”'

Well, it may seem idiotic, but that extravagant compliment is one that I have always treasured, together with something that Roger wrote in the letter he sent me accepting the fact that I would never marry him: ‘I have always thought of you,' he wrote, ‘as a sort of Fairy Princess…'

Only a rather podgy girl whose brother persisted in calling her ‘Fatty' or ‘Old Piano-legs' can truly appreciate the value of such compliments as those. Pink with pleasure, I leapt to the conclusion that it was the Brian Aherne double who wanted Jess to introduce him to me and, dealing hastily with the recalcitrant sausage, I hurried back to the ballroom walking almost visibly on air. I was brought down to earth with a dull thump when Jess walked over to me, towing a man who bore no resemblance to Brian Aherne, and announced that she would like to introduce me to a newcomer to Ranikhet: George Something-or-other, who was up on a month's leave. It was, of course, the tall man who had been standing next to the Aherne look-alike, and they turned out to be great friends who had ‘manoeuvred together' for some considerable time.