Enchanted Evening (53 page)

‘Let's pretty it,' said Bets, ‘so that people will know that it's not here by mistake, and leave it alone. Then perhaps one day when we're grown up we can come back here and look at it.' So, we ‘prettied' it. We pulled the petals off several geraniums and spent a happy interval rubbing them into the wood so that the blakey stood in the centre of a red circle and we were sure that no one would think it was there by mistake. When we had finished Bets went off to wash her hands, and I climbed back into my seat and took up my book again, though I didn't read it. I just sat there, looking at the treetops and the roofs of the houses that covered the steep hillside below our drive, watching the kites, the common scavenger-hawks of India, that circled endlessly in the air above the Lower Simla bazaar and hearing their familiar call, pin-points of sound in the hot, lazy stillness.

I felt enormously happy because I was in a place I loved, and incredibly lucky because I was
me
, and able to look at it all. And then, even as I looked, a curious pattern of shadowy lines began to form itself in front of me, and I thought suddenly, ‘How very odd! – I believe I'm dreaming with my eyes open. I didn't know you could do that…' The pattern became darker and sharper and the lines became bars and squares … and all at once, with a terrible sense of loss, I realized that I was looking at the trails of creeper on the far side of the window-panes in Dr Soni's surgery.

It took several minutes to take in that
this
− the surgery − was real, and that Simla and the Rookery was something that was over and done with long ago. And when it did I began to cry. I sat there with the tears trickling helplessly down my face while dear Mrs Soni patted and petted me, and told me that ‘it was all over now'. Which was just exactly why I was crying. Because my happy childhood was over, and I was a ‘grown-up', and Tacklow was dead, and I'd never be young any more.

It was one of the most desolate moments in my life, for I had just made the jump from childhood to my thirties, and I felt as though I had lost all the years in between. That I was
old
! I have often dreamt that I have gone back to some place that I used to know, and with people I knew. But though the people are always real, the places are not, and when I wake up I realize that they were in no way similar. But what I had just experienced had nothing in the least dreamlike about it. I had relived a small fragment of my childhood, exactly as it happened. So exactly, that I now knew how Mother had furnished the drawing-room. Which until then had not been one of the things that had been recorded on my private and personal video. What's more, I
knew
that it was all real. The smell of it. The feel of the hot morning in the hills. The shrill call of the kites that circled high above the bazaar. The scent of the pine trees in the woods behind the Rookery and the unseen banks of cosmos flowers, that were just coming into flower below the railings at the edge of the drive. I didn't find any explanation for that fragment of the past until a few years later, when I read Dunn's
Theory of Time
, which made sense to me. The gas obviously helped, and for a short while I had slipped back into the past and relived a happy, pointless fragment of it.

I wrote to Bets and asked her if she remembered the blakey incident, without going into any details; and she wrote back to say that now I had mentioned it, she did. Didn't we make a ring around it or something? Red paint, wasn't it? We had both of us seen a lot of Simla, and visited the Rookery on several occasions, yet neither of us had remembered the incident or thought to look to see if it was still there. And a very long time later, when we were both grandmothers and had a last chance to do so, there was no evidence that it had ever been there, because the entire verandah had been refloored.

Chapter 34

Mrs Lang, the Resident's wife, a dear old bun who strongly resembled the sheep in
Through the Looking-Glass
, was a keen amateur artist. She always took her painting-gear with her on the tours that were part of her husband, Colonel Lang's, official duties, and this year she invited Mother, whose sketches she much admired, to go with her: ‘So that I can watch how you do it, dear.' Since these tours were treks which involved living in tents and moving on every two or three days, generally on horseback, Mother jumped at it, and it was arranged that I should stay at the Residency with the Langs' daughter, Joan Richardson, a dazzlingly pretty blonde who, if I remember rightly, was in the process of discarding her first husband.

During the next ten days I listened, riveted, to the tale of her latest love affair, of which I was given a blow-by-blow account. I couldn't help feeling that if only I were to abandon the ‘whodunnits' (which needed careful thinking-out as well as a reasonable plot) and switch instead to ‘Boy-meets-girl-loses-girl-gets-girl' romances, I could probably make a fortune. Inspired by Joanie's enthralling confidences I actually had a bash at it. But I discovered, as I imagine scores of would-be tripe-writers have done before me, that this form of literature isn't nearly as easy to write as you think. For one thing, you have to
believe
in it. You cannot write tongue-in-cheek about it. I
knew
I was writing something that I thought was sentimental and saccharine drip, and in consequence, all I produced was exceedingly bad and patently phoney drip that no publisher in their right minds would have accepted.

However, it all helped to pass the time very pleasantly during that stay at the Residency, and since Joan attracted admirers rather in the manner that a plate of sticky-toffee-pudding at a picnic will attract wasps, we never had a dull moment. As a result, I was invited to spend the Christmas and New Year holiday with Joan and her parents at the winter Residency in Sialkot, a cantonment town on the edge of the plains not far from the borders of Kashmir, where – since the few roads into that state are apt to be snowbound in winter – the Resident of Kashmir by tradition spent most of the cold weather.

Joan had invited several of her friends, including me, to spend the holiday in Sialkot, and I was able to accept with a clear conscience, since one of Mother's old friends had invited her to spend Christmas and New Year in Lahore, and had not included me in the invitation, and rightly. Mother really could not be expected to lug around a grown-up daughter wherever she went. (‘Oh, we
don't
have to have that daughter of hers
too
, do we? It's high time Daisy made her paddle her own canoe!')

I had recently seen a good deal of Gordon, and had begun to think seriously of marrying him, urged on by Gordon himself and a number of mutual friends – mostly of my mother's generation, a group who appeared to dote on him. Gordon certainly had a way with the middle-aged and elderly, and he had made a great hit with Mother early on. I had told him again and again, in answer to his repeated demand to know why I wouldn't marry him, that I didn't love him. That I liked him and was fond of him. That he was a dear and that I knew exactly the kind of girl he ought to marry, but she wasn't me.

‘Nonsense!' said Gordon. ‘She's the image of you! And it doesn't matter, your not loving me now. You would one day, and I wouldn't mind how long I had to wait. Besides, they're sure to send us off to the Front one day. We can't be left hanging about like this for ever, and then if I were killed you would at least be fairly well looked after, instead of being as poor as a church mouse! You can't
afford
not to marry me, Moll. Do be sensible! You ought to think of your mother if you won't let me look after you.'

I thought seriously about being sensible. For some relationships were not going well in my family. WHP would never look after Mother when she was old, and nor would Bill – Joy had already said as much. So there was only me. I would have to be responsible for her. And she adored Gordon – he had made his number with her early on. But if you married someone for a meal-ticket and not for love, you'd have to spend your days feeling in his debt and making it up to him, which would be hellish. The sheer strain of living under an obligation to someone would be too much. Yet someone was going to have to look after Mother one day, and (since there was no National Assistance in those days) that someone was going to
have
to be me. I havered and wavered, badgered daily by pangs of conscience and the importunate Gordon, and finally lectured by my sister-in-law. Which turned out to be the last straw.

Bill and Joy had come up to Kashmir to spend a brief holiday on the D
ā
l, in the course of which they had met the persistent suitor, who had managed to sneak another few days ‘casual' leave in Kashmir. Finding a sympathetic listener in Joy, he had unburdened his soul to her, and on the night before she and Bill left they sent a message asking me to go over and see them, ‘p.s.
without Mother
' – an ominous footnote that could have caused great offence to Mother had she not, by the greatest good fortune, been dining at a
burra khana
, or Indian posh dinner, at the Clutterbucks' that night. So as it was, I did not mention that codicil, and went over to see my brother and his wife after supper. To be met by Joy – my craven brother having made himself scarce. For which one can hardly blame him, since his wife proceeded to haul me over the coals for my treatment of Gordon and my failure to see that in all probability he represented my last chance of finding a husband …

Considering my age, said Joy, and the number of seasons that I had been ‘to put it crudely “one of the Fishing Fleet”', it was high time that I faced the fact that I was already on the shelf, and that if I didn't accept Gordon I would spend the rest of my life as an impecunious spinster. ‘And I do hope,' said Joy, ‘that you won't think I am being unkind. But in justice to my husband and my child, I have to warn you that you cannot count on any help, financial or otherwise, from us. Bill has to put his family first, and we both feel you should realize, here and now, that if you turn down this proposal, then you are on your own. I am speaking for Bill as well as myself…'

There was a lot more to this effect, plus a list of all Gordon's financial prospects, for, regarding Joy as an ally and a possible future sister-in-law, Gordon had listed these in some detail (down to the last aged relative whose Will was going to leave goods or property to ‘dear Gordon') in order to assure Bill, through his wife, that he need have no fear of either Moll or her mother becoming a millstone round their necks in old age. (Always provided, of course, that I married the chap.) I was meant to feel that if I didn't I would end up in some charity-run home for the elderly and indigent, and though I murmured something about having written a couple of whodunnits and the first of a series of children's books, besides selling every painting that I had exhibited at the last art exhibition at the Club, this was brushed aside impatiently:
chickenfeed!

An impecunious couple of in-laws with no home of their own were, apparently, as potentially lethal as those proverbial loose cannons on board a ship in wild weather, and Joy could only see us as a menace to the future peace and happiness of her marriage. My acceptance of Gordon would have solved all her problems, and she took my refusal of his proposals – which I could not see was any business of hers – as a personal blow against Bill and herself.

As for me, I sat staring at her (doubtless with a dropped jaw), unable to believe my ears and too stunned to interrupt the lecture. Damn it, I barely
knew
the woman. How dare she speak to me like this? I was on the verge of a major explosion when it suddenly occurred to me that she looked exactly like a truculent little London sparrow, valiantly defending its nest against a lurking magpie. Which, of course, was exactly what she was doing. At the moment there was only one hatchling in her nest. But I could almost see a clutch of little gaping beaks and Joy, every feather on end, wearing her wings out protecting her young. And quite suddenly I stopped being furious and exploded into helpless giggles. Which didn't help at all; it simply offended Joy, who said coldly that she herself could see nothing to laugh at in the situation. But having started to laugh, I couldn't stop, which though plainly lacking in tact was at least better than a blazing row and high words. I told Joy, between unstoppable explosions of giggles, that I would think it over, and departed, spluttering, into the night.

Joy never knew it, but her curtain-lecture had made up my mind for me, convincing me that I would rather spend the rest of my days on Joy's dreaded ‘shelf' than marry someone I was not in love with. I knew that Mother was going to be bitterly disappointed (it was a pity that Gordon wasn't thirty years older; they would have made a perfect pair!). But he was not my cup of tea. I wanted something a good deal more stimulating, and if it didn't look as though I was going to get it, well, what the hell? I knew now that I could always support myself with my paintbrush and pencil. (And so, incidentally, could Mother, whose watercolours were getting better and better every day, and selling very well.) I couldn't see why Bill and Joy were so obsessed with the idea that the pair of us were going to be a ghastly and expensive burden on them one day. The effect of Joy's lecture on the necessity of snapping up Gordon's offer because ‘at my age, I'd never get another' and would end up in some dim little bed-sit, was the opposite to what she had intended.

I gave Gordon a very final ‘no' (courtesy of Bill and Joy, had they but known it), and he insisted that we ‘remain friends'. Which doesn't often work, but in this case it did. Gordon went sadly off into the sunset, and that was that.

*   *   *

All I knew of Sialkot had been learnt from Sir John Kaye's
History of the Sepoy War
, and
Kaye and Malleson's History of the Indian Mutiny
, Vol. II. Which wasn't a great deal. They included the usual account of incompetence on the part of elderly, top-ranking, British Army Officers, and the refusal of those who commanded Bengal Army regiments to believe that their sepoy troops were not loyal to the core. This resulted in eventual murder, mayhem and bitter disillusionment. None of the details have stuck, but I was fascinated to discover that the house put at the disposal of the Kashmir Resident in Sialkot dated well back into East India Company days, and was said to be haunted.