Enchanted Evening (55 page)

Once again, as we took the ‘Pindi road, the heat met us like the blast from a furnace, and the air became hotter and hotter as we left the hills behind us and met the rocky levels where the trees give way to bushes and thorn-scrub and tufts of dry grass. Behind us the dust of our passage fumed up in a dense cloud that poured in between cracks and crannies of the truck, and though we shut every window, we could no more prevent the dust-clouds raised by approaching vehicles from half-smothering us than they could avoid being smothered by ours.

Fortunately, by this time it was nearing sundown and there was hardly any traffic on the ‘Pindi–Murree road; which was a blessing. I suppose the heatwave, now in its third or fourth day and proving itself a killer, had driven people off the roads until after sunset. My driver's khaki uniform was dark with sweat; as was my own, made of grey
muzri
, a cotton material that is about the cheapest cloth obtainable in the bazaars (our higher echelon were all for saving money). Many of our better-heeled members preferred to provide their own uniforms, but people like myself accepted the ones on issue with gratitude. Which, on this occasion, proved a godsend, for had I been wearing a smarter and more expensive version of the uniform instead of a
muzri
one, I would probably have come down with a bad case of heat-rash or a lethal one of heat-stroke.

My driver pulled to the side of the road and once again requested permission to relieve himself, and as I too could do with the same, we descended, and disappeared behind the nearest bit of cover – of which there was plenty. When I came back to the lorry, without thinking I put my hand on the bonnet – and very nearly scorched my palm off. I swear you could have fried a steak on that metal, and I regretted that I could not take off my uniform and spread it over the bonnet, where it would have dried in under two minutes. However, since I had nothing under it except a pair of panties and a bra, I abandoned the idea and crawled reluctantly back into my seat – my uniform sticking to me as though I had been taking a dip in a swimming-pool full of glue.

We reached Rawalpindi around four o'clock, where a room had been reserved for me at Flashman's Hotel and where my driver (who had made his own arrangements for the night) dumped me, with the brief information that he would collect me again at seven o'clock the following morning. He gave a stern warning to the hotel room-bearer to look after the Missahib and see that she had everything she wanted,
tez jhaldi se!
– or Indian ‘at the double!' He departed in a cloud of dust, and I was ushered into my room, which was possibly a degree cooler than the world outside, having been shuttered against the sun all day. As soon as the room-bearer had left me to my own devices, I stripped off my sweat-soaked clothing and made for the bathroom to wash off all the dust of that long journey. Heaven knows I ought to have known better, for we had had the same problem in Tonk. But I had forgotten. I turned on that cold tap, and putting my hand under it, got it practically par-boiled.

The water must have been near boiling point, for the metal water-tanks were on the roof, and for the past few days (and all of that one, with the thermometer hovering around 124 and the sun beating down on them) they had been absorbing heat. I let the tap run until the bath was almost full, in the hope that if left to itself for a few hours it might cool down. I suppose I had some supper, but if so I don't remember that. I do remember the
bheesti
sprinkling what must have been hot water over the stone floor of the verandah, and hearing it hiss. The water from the
mussacks
was also sprinkled all over the parched grass of the lawns and the gravel paths that surrounded the hotel, and for a minute or two the night air smelt deliciously of wet earth. But the darkness brought no alleviation of the heat, and I went in search of the manager, who lent me a couple of table-fans to help out the big white ceiling one.

I trained one of these on the bath and the other one directly on my bed – I didn't need a mosquito net, for the fans at least kept those maddening insects away.

It seemed like a good idea to dip my cotton nightgown in water before lying down in it, in the hope of getting some sleep. But it dried in seconds, and after that I fell back on dunking the sheets in the bath, wringing them out and lying down with the other table fan blowing directly on them. This was bliss for about five minutes, but not long enough to let one fall asleep. The room seemed to get hotter and hotter, and eventually, in the small hours, deciding that the night air must be cooler outside than the close heat of the room, I went out to walk in the shrivelled gardens. By now it was around two o'clock in the morning, and I crossed the brittle grass of the lawn outside my window, hearing it crunch under my sandals, to see what the thermometer on the tree in the centre of the lawn, which had been repeatedly watered, registered. The mercury stood at 103.

Well, that was a good deal better than the figure it had registered when I arrived, and feeling a trifle cheered I returned to the rooms and dipped a hand in the bath again. The water in it had had nearly ten hours and the services of a table-fan to cool it down, and though it was nowhere near cold it was nearly lukewarm. I got into it thankfully, and spent the rest of the night sleeping in it, which made my skin as shrivelled as an old washerwoman's. But it was wonderful.

The next day was another windless scorcher. But the heat had some advantages: the cloth-bazaar was half empty, so I got through my chores in half the time I would have done on a normal crowded day. Loaded to the roof with bales of material, I was able to avoid spending a second night in Rawalpindi. We made for the hills in the late afternoon, spent the night in a Dâk bungalow among the pines and got back to Srinagar in time for a late lunch next day.

*   *   *

Now that I didn't have to cope with any more ‘propaganda illustrations', and the spring blossoming was over for another year, I decided that since the bank-balance was getting dangerously low, it was high time I got down to writing another ‘whodunnit', this one to be set in Kashmir: time, the present, with a plot full of sinister Nazi spies scheming to pull down the Empire. I like to have a title for a book I'm working on, though it has often been changed by the time it gets to the printers – this one being a case in point. I had been charmed by a few verses in a back-number of the
Saturday Evening Post
, the last two lines of which I have used to start the next chapter.

Chapter 36

‘And lilies blow and it is Spring. And there's a moon tonight…'
1

Moonlight almost anywhere can be enchanting. But never more so than in Kashmir; and reading those lines I thought immediately that the last one would make a marvellous title for the book I had in mind. I still think so. But the publishers didn't, and they gave it a thoroughly pedestrian one. So I shall use it here instead.

I roughed out a plot, and did what I always did with a whodunnit – worked out a sort of grid for the chapters. You have to – or
I
have to – plant a clue in each chapter, so that when your villain is unmasked in the final one, your readers can think: ‘So
that's
why George Blimp took twenty minutes longer to get back from the party than Gregory Blonk did!…' There has to be a reason why the characters behave as they do. In the case of the baddies, a sinister one; and with goodies (innocent but mistaken) just to provide an appropriate number of red-herrings.

That done, I replenished my stock of writing blocks and the usual supply of pencils and india rubbers. Mrs Wall loaned me the use of her late husband's desk and the little room that used to be his study, and I was off, determined to refuse all engagements until I had finished the book, and all unaware that this was going to be another case of ‘Man proposes but God disposes'.

It had become a habit, ever since
Six Bars at Seven
, to count and write down in a ledger every day the exact number of words I had written. It may sound laborious, but it helped me to keep track of the length of each chapter and therefore the length of the book. I aimed at a minimum of 2,500 words a day. But if I could manage it I would write more than that as a ‘bank' on which I could draw if, for any reason, I wanted to take a day off to do something else.

I've always envied people who can write quickly. Me, I write at a snail's pace, and for every word I keep I rub out at least twenty. It's a slow process, and I only wish I could do what most of the true professionals do: set aside three or four working hours each day during which no one is allowed to disturb them, and live an active social life for the rest of the time. Alas, it does not work for me.

There's a Moon Tonight
got off to a good start, and I often found myself doing a steady 2,500 words and up, without too much difficulty. I also found, with some irritation, that practice had not helped me to get started when I sat down to it each day. In an effort to defeat this, I made a point of leaving off work in the middle of a sentence and always at a sufficiently interesting part of the story to make it as easy as possible, next day, to pick it up from there and get started again.

The writing of the first two chapters of the book that ended up as
Death in Kashmir
was punctuated by the arrival of letters from Gordon, who was wildly elated by the prospect of being sent back to his regiment. The Guides had been whisked off to a war zone early on, but Gordon had been seconded to ‘some dreary desk-job in Sialkot' (which was why he had been able to take those weekend holidays in Kashmir so frequently). He bombarded me with excitable letters, all of which included a plea that I would change my mind about marrying him. Couldn't I just get
engaged
to him for the duration?

Then one morning, to my horror, I found that his almost daily letter had been heavily censored. This not only showed that he had been breaking the wartime code of ‘careless talk costs lives', but was a sharp reminder of something that darling Tacklow (who had been Deputy Chief Censor in India throughout the First World War) had mentioned not long before his death, at one of Buckie's lunch parties. Buckie had been discussing censorship versus security, and Tacklow had said that unfortunately, censors were only human, and that even the most trustworthy of them had been known to cause mayhem by passing on a legally obtained titbit of gossip (‘in the strictest confidence') to his wife or a bosom friend.

I scribbled a hasty note to Gordon, warning him that his letters were being opened and read by a censor, but all I got in return was a flat refusal to believe that he had ever given away anything he shouldn't. Not even when he would be leaving Sialkot! (He said he didn't know that himself, and added a rude remark about ‘dirty old men and peeping Toms'). However, after that he did at least stop criticizing – in detail and by name – the goings-on of certain senior ‘brass hats' in charge of Movement and Control, confining his criticisms of these gentlemen to pen-and-ink drawings in the margins of his letter. Gordon would have made an excellent cartoonist.

His letters continued to be opened at intervals, but there were no more blacked-out lines, and there was far too much about the woes of his best friend in the regiment, one Goff Hamilton, who (in company with almost every officer in an Indian Army regiment still cooped up in cantonments) was spending every free moment, metaphorically speaking, battering on the doors of the mighty and badgering his superiors to let him be transferred to an active unit. Gordon, fuming on his friend's behalf, sent me an angry diatribe on the subject. Apparently those ‘B––––hatted B––––s in Delhi (no names no packdrill!)' had not only turned a deaf ear to the poor chap's latest efforts to be let off the leash, but had arbitrarily returned him to – guess where? To Sialkot district! Just as he (Gordon) was about to leave it.

‘Can you beat it?' demanded Gordon, exaggerating the timing of the appointment for the sake of drama and taking, as far as I can remember, at least four pages of writing-paper to give me his unexpurgated opinion of Fate and the Higher Command, who were obviously in collusion. No wonder his frustrated chum was going round ‘like a bear with a sore head'.

I was faintly interested in the woes of the said chum only because he turned out to be the man who Mother had thought was ‘just the one for Mouse if only he wasn't married'. He was also the chap who had lost his first-class berth on the
Duchess of Bedford
to my brother Bill and had later won the magnum of champagne presented to the best amateur floorshow by the management of the Taj Mahal Hotel. Apart from that, I had little interest to spare, and no sympathy, for either the domestic or the military woes of someone I had never even met, and was irritated enough to return an unnecessarily bad-tempered reply to Gordon's letter. It was something to the effect that his whingeing chum didn't know how lucky he was to be safely corralled in peaceful Sialkot instead of embroiled in some ferocious tank-battle in Italy or Abyssinia or wherever – while as for his wife's views on returning to India, she probably felt about that country as I did about China.

Gordon replied equally crossly that I was talking through the back of my head. And, after an interval of dignified silence, sent me a letter informing me that ‘in case I hadn't noticed it' he was still in Sialkot awaiting his marching orders. Also that his chum had been granted a month's leave in Kashmir – ‘as a sort of consolation prize he thinks, poor fellow' – and that he'd probably go fishing for most of it, but since he would be bound to go through Srinagar at some time or other, he (Gordon) had made him promise to look me up and give me lunch at Nedou's and take me out shopping to buy some expensive gift from him (Gordon), either as a ‘goodbye' present or – if only I would change my mind – an engagement one. There was also a postscript to the effect that he hoped I would be kind to poor old Goff who, whatever I might think to the contrary, was going through a bad patch and needed cheering up. ‘So no telling him how lucky he is to be in peaceful Sialkot, please!'