Enchanted Evening (51 page)

In the city itself the temperature was already well into the eighties, but up on Malabar Hill it was still pleasantly cool, and I was sorry to leave it and exchange my ravishing white-and-turquoise room for three days in a hot and dusty railway carriage, with no Marcia to talk and laugh with. But it was high time I got back to Kashmir and did some paintings for the spring Art Exhibition, if I didn't want to run out of money. Besides, there had been an embarrassing evening when Marcia and Jocelyn had been dining out with friends, and JB and I had been dining
à deux
at the Bank House. I had rather enjoyed the prospect of a peaceful evening and not having to dress up and go dancing for a change, and for a time all had gone well. But when dinner was over and the servants had finally gone back to their quarters, the conversation suddenly took a most unexpected turn, and before I knew it I found myself behaving exactly like one of those nit-wit heroines of the Silent Screen days, who, having misread the motives of the elderly villain, winds up being chased round and round the dining-room table.

The situation looks absurd enough on the screen – unless it's being played for laughs with someone like Charlie Chaplin doing the chasing. But in real life, it's merely deeply embarrassing. I've never felt so silly in my life, and I could have strangled J B. Which I probably would have done if he'd been quicker on his feet and hadn't put away so many glasses of wine at dinner. Fortunately for everyone, the Marindens arrived back unexpectedly early from their dinner – their hostess having been smitten with a migraine or something of the sort – and broke up this ridiculous round-and-round-the-mulberry-bush nonsense.

We had not heard the car-wheels on the gravel but we heard Marcia's unmistakable laugh, and J B stopped and said: ‘
Damn!
' and I fled out by a side-door and up the stairs to my bedroom, where Marcia came in to tell me why they had had to leave their dinner-party so soon. When I told her how grateful I was for her hostess's misfortune, and why, she shouted with laughter, and said didn't I
know
that JB was a well known ‘fatal scuffler'? He tried it out on all his girl-friends.

‘And you'd be surprised,' said Marcia, ‘how many women have allowed themselves to be caught!' It was all his wife's fault for hating ‘abroad' and leaving him high and dry: ‘He never looks at anyone else when she's around, but when he gets left on his own for months on end, he gets restless, and starts putting in a bit of practice.' Poor JB. He really was a dear man, not like the general run of fatal scufflers, and we remained on the best of terms. All the same, I thought it was time to leave for Kashmir.

JB, Marcia and Jocelyn and an assortment of friends came to see me off, and stacked my carriage with books, flowers and ice, boxes of chocolates and baskets of fruit. And despite that awkward interlude I felt truly sorry to be leaving, while at the same time delighted to be going back to the Punjab again. And to Kashmir.

I had arranged with the bank at Rawalpindi to book me a front seat in a bus going to Srinagar (having discovered that I didn't get car-sick provided I sat in the front seat beside the driver, when travelling in a car or a bus). I can't say I enjoyed that part of the journey, for scenically lovely as most of it is, I cannot feel happy when being driven at top speed on a winding mountain road cut into the side of an almost perpendicular gorge, at the bottom of which – a sheer drop of 500 feet below the outer edge of the road – rages a foaming torrent, while a third of the inner side is overhung by terrifyingly unstable-looking rocks. To be honest, I spent a good deal of the drive with my eyes shut, praying.

The last part of the journey, however, is mostly on the level, and by the time we left the gorges and reached Baramullah, a town that stands in the doorway of the valley and from where you can see the twin mountain ranges that wall it in on either side, the air suddenly became sweet with the faint, elusive fragrance of irises – the tall, yellow-bearded purple or white ones that grow among the gravestones in the Muslim cemeteries, and spread out from there across the valley floor between the fruit trees and the poplars, and whose scent has always seemed to me to be the smell of spring. And all at once I was conscious of feeling wildly, gloriously happy, drunk with happiness, because I was back once more in beautiful Kashmir, and it was spring again.

I have never forgotten that quiet evening and the drive from Baramullah to Srinagar city, through the long avenue of Lombardy poplars that line the crest of the embankment upon which the road runs, raised a little above the level of the valley floor against floods. (I tried to describe it when I wrote a whodunnit that I had intended to call
There's a Moon Tonight
– the one that ended up as
Death in Kashmir.
) The last of the daylight had almost left the sky and the first stars were out by the time we reached the bus station and the end of the journey. And there was Mother waiting for me, with Kadera to cope with my luggage. Presently we were driving up to the Walls' house in Sonawar Bagh, and I was being hugged and kissed by Ma Wall and dear ‘Tugboat Annie' and her husband the Colonel, as though I were a prodigal daughter. What with Mr Wall's Australian terriers, Poppiter and Pippiter, leaping and yelping and trying to lick my face, and the servants beaming from ear to ear, it was quite a homecoming. An unforgettable one, followed by one of the
khansama
's especially good dinners featuring my favourite dishes. And ‘so to bed' in the familiar top-storey room I had stayed in so often before.

*   *   *

The air-letter that I had posted to my publishers at the same time as I sent off the manuscript of
Strange Island
had arrived with commendable promptness. But a month later the MS had still not turned up, so I sent off another, express, plus a separate letter to say I had done so. That letter too turned up, but not the MS, and my publishers suggested that this was probably due to ‘enemy action'. But when a third copy – the last of the three carbons – failed to turn up, I realized that it was most unlikely that all three ships bearing a copy of
Strange Island
could have been torpedoed. It was far more likely that the Censor's Office had been unwilling to wade through that solid wodge of typescript in search of a possible code, and had merely stuffed each one as it arrived into an incinerator. So I asked my publisher if I could sell it locally and, permission being granted, arranged with Thacker Spink of Calcutta to publish it. Which they did with the most unexpected speed. (Due, I suppose, to the scanty supply of publishing material in time of war.) It came out within a week or two of my handing over the top copy, and to the most gushing reviews. I can't
think
why, for the proof-reader had done an abysmally bad job. Typist's errors averaged fifteen to twenty a page, and whenever the print setters dropped or mislaid a paragraph and subsequently found it, they never wasted the missing bit. They merely shoved it in, with no explanation, at the end of the next chapter or wherever there was sufficient space for it.

I nearly wept when my free copies arrived. But I suppose that in time of war the reading public are not fussy. They liked the plot; failed to spot ‘whodunnit'; and were intrigued by the setting. And in the end it made, and is still making me, a small but steady income. For long after it was out of print (and therefore my own property again) I needed to produce another book to fulfil a contractual three-book clause. Time was short, and I couldn't see how I was going to do it, since in those days I was ‘following the drum', and always seemed to be packing and moving.

Remembering this long-forgotten mess of a book, I suggested that I rewrite it as a fictitious island off the coast of Mombasa. This was agreed with the publishers (I had an agent by then) and I spent a feverish two weeks rehashing the book, which, in due course, was flung in to plug the gap, retitled
Night on the Island.

10

‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…'

Chapter 33

Mother had managed to reserve our old
ghat
for us at Chota Nageem, and old Ahmadoo Siraj, who was beginning to show his years, was there to meet us and stayed to have tea with us and bring us up to date with all the gossip of the valley. Kadera and Mahdoo were there too, but the boat was not one of our old ones, because there were only the two of us.

The war news was still disheartening, yet here in ‘far Kashmir', with none of my near and dear as yet involved in it, it still seemed to me as to so many others, ‘a phoney war'. And sitting on the flat roof of our houseboat, looking around me at the beautiful, placid D
ā
l and the mountains behind Shalimar – at the almond blossom and wild iris and the shimmering line of the far snows – I remembered what Tacklow had said to me one evening at Pei-tai-ho. About the last Great War and the possibility of another one. A Second World War …

Tacklow believed that we should have bowed out of India in the early twenties, using an occasion such as the Prince of Wales's visit as an opportunity to do so gracefully. It wasn't, he said, as if we were making anything out of it any more, because we weren't; and in his opinion we couldn't
afford
to play at Empire-building any longer. It was becoming too expensive and the sooner we left the better.

I remember arguing hotly with him, shocked to the core at the very idea of ‘giving up' the Empire and all that that would mean. I didn't want to
think
of such a thing. But Tacklow only reminded me a little impatiently of the endless times he had told me that we were in India on sufferance only, and that we'd promised to leave some day. Well, that ‘some day', he insisted, was coming closer, and though he hoped very much he wouldn't live to see it, I might well do so. If there should be another major war, win or lose, once it was over we should have to give up India.

I had accused him of being an old Jeremiah, and put it down to the disillusionment he had suffered over the Tonk affair and his disappointment over China. Nor had I given any thought to it since we left. But I did now, and realized that he could be right, and that if he was, I was going to lose all this beauty, so much of which I had taken for granted. ‘Win or lose,' Tacklow had said …

That same evening I made up my mind that while I still had it – while it was still here – I would follow the advice of one of my favourite poets,
1
who in a poem entitled ‘Fare Well' had urged us to ‘look [our] last on all things lovely, every hour'. Instead of fretting and fuming at being ‘stranded in India' as so many were doing, I would thank God daily for letting me be one of the lucky ones who, in this violent hour, was able to spend my days in this paradise half a world away from the firing-line and the wail of air-raid warnings and the crash of bombs.

There were times when it didn't seem fair that, with my country embroiled in yet another murderous war, people like myself should be able to carry on living in much the same way as we had done before there was any thought of war. On the other hand, now that it had begun, there was no way I could get back to England even if I had wanted to.

Remembering Tacklow's many attempts to take part in the fighting during the First World War, I sympathized with the frustration of the British Indian Army men, all of whom seemed to be spending their time inundating Headquarters with letters begging for transfers to home units, or anywhere near the front line. They all seemed to think that the war would be over before they had a chance to take part in it.

When the war was over we who had not been in the thick of it – had never heard the sirens shrieking their warning of air-raids, had never run for cover when the bombs began to fall, or helped to dig in the smoking ruins for the shattered bodies of our friends and family and neighbours – found ourselves feeling almost as though we were from another planet, speaking a different language. Not that our men need have tried so hard to get themselves transferred back to one of the home-based battalions, because their own particular slice of hell was waiting for them in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, in Libya and Crete, Sardinia and Monte Cassino. And after that in Burma and Malaysia, Singapore and Java and Hong Kong. Their turn came all too soon.

The only time I felt that I would give anything – anything at all – to be back in London was during that time when it really seemed that England was going to be invaded. Everything had gone wrong for us. Our troops had had to withdraw from Norway. Neutral Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg had been invaded. Rotterdam had been bombed into extinction and the Dutch forced to surrender. King Leopold of the Belgians had ordered his army to stop fighting and the British forces to withdraw from Flanders. The bulk of the BEF
2
were beaten back as town after town fell to the enemy, to be cornered at last at Dunkirk, from where the majority of them were evacuated in a spectacular rescue operation by the Navy, assisted by a fleet of little ships – sailing boats, Thames barges, tugs, motor-boats – every craft owned by those English who love ‘messing about in boats' and spend their holidays doing so. Every fishing-boat and pleasure boat from every port on the south-east coast of England, and every cross-channel steamer, set out to pick up our defeated army off the beaches of Dunkirk … Close on 4,000 ships of every shape and size had, between them, snatched 335,000 men off those terrible bloodstained sands and brought them back home to a country that will remember their rescue long after the tales of victories are forgotten.

As Churchill reminded us, Dunkirk may have been a minor miracle, but it was also a major defeat. The rest of the world certainly saw it as such. Hitler made a ferocious speech in which he declared a war of ‘total annihilation' against us. Italy declared war against Great Britain. Mussolini was not the only one to write us off after Dunkirk. The French had relied too heavily on their ‘impregnable' Maginot Line, but in the event they did not have to put that impregnability to the test, for the Germans simply ignored it. They went round one end of it, and having chased the BEF out of Calais, advanced on Paris. And so sure were we all that Hitler would attempt to invade us that hundreds of schoolchildren were evacuated from London and frantic preparations were made to delay the advance of troops making for the capital.