Enchanted Evening (56 page)

I replied suitably – I hope. I don't really remember, since I happened to be deeply involved in murdering imaginary characters during a fictitious ski-club meeting in Gulmarg, and was in no state to spare any interest, let alone sympathy, for Gordon's declarations of undying devotion (which I'd always taken with a large pinch of salt – and how right I was!), or the domestic problems of his friend, which seemed to me of minuscule importance when set against the frightening daily bulletins from the war zones and the tragic and harrowing casualty lists. I wished that I could have made the hoped-for last-minute gesture of sending Gordon off to the war feeling happy by saying I'd marry him. But it would have been a pretence, and if he came through safe and sound I'd have to explain that it was only a ‘sympathy gesture' and that I'd never meant to go through with it. Which was not going to do much for his self-esteem.

It must have been about ten days after the arrival of that missive that I received another letter, postmarked Achabal, a little village known to all fishermen in the Raj and to most sightseers too, since the spring at Achabal is said to be the source of, among others, that excellent trout stream, the Bringi. The letter, a distinctly frivolous one, was from Gordon's friend, saying that he supposed I was aware of the purpose of his errand, and would it be OK by me if he were to pick me up at ten-thirty a.m. on 2 June and take me for a walk down the Bund in search of an expensive furrier and/or jeweller? It did not sound like the letter of a ‘bear with a sore head'. But then the writer was not to know that Gordon had been giving him away.

No mention of standing me luncheon at Nedou's, you notice. However, that was just as well, since it meant that I would with luck be back at the Walls' for lunch and have the whole of the rest of the day free for writing. Lunching out always meant that half the morning and most of the afternoon went down the drain. I replied in an equally frivolous tone, addressed the letter c/o the Post Office, Srinagar (the only address given) and sat down to write enough words for my word-bank to enable me to take a few hours off come 2 June.

Just in case the shopping expedition took up more time than I expected, or involved a lunch at Nedou's after all, when the day came round I exchanged my working overall (you've no idea what a lot of pencil-dust gets strewn about the place when you are writing exclusively in pencil) for one of my prettier cotton dresses, and rather than waste valuable time sitting around with folded hands until the clock struck ten-thirty, I took Rudyard Kipling's advice and sat down to ‘fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run'. In other words, got on with my whodunnit, which had now advanced as far as the third chapter.

It went well that morning, and I was scribbling along at a great rate when I heard a man's voice in the hall and realized that the time had passed quicker than I expected, and that this must be Gordon's friend, Goff. Ma Wall was saying: ‘Yes, this is the house; yes, she's expecting you…'

Hastily finishing the sentence I had been writing, I turned round to face the door. And there he was: Prince Charming in person. Mr Right at last! This was what I'd waited for. We stood and looked at each other for what seemed a very long time …

I can still see him clearly as he was at that moment. A tall young man with an engaging grin and eyes the exact shade of the rather battered green pork-pie hat that he had forgotten to remove … ‘Who can explain it; who can tell us why? Fools give us reasons. Wise men never try…'

Many years later my American publisher and fiction editor, taking me through the manuscript of
The Far Pavilions,
protested that I had allowed my hero and heroine to fall for each other far too quickly, and insisted that the whole business of falling in love was a very much longer process. It was, he assured me, totally unrealistic to have Ashton and Anjuli do so in a matter of minutes. But since my father, and later I myself had done it ‘
between one breath and the next',
nothing was going to persuade me to make my hero and heroine take any longer about it.

I don't understand it myself. This instant, mutual recognition that the French call a
coup de foudre,
and which can link two total strangers together as though by an almost visible flicker of lightning. And be durable enough to keep them in love with each other for close on half a century,
‘until death do them part'…

*   *   *

I still don't know what I would have done if there had not been a war on. You begin to think quite differently when your horizon is bounded by casualty lists. Or if Goff's marriage had been a happy one. I hope I would have had the courage to run like a hare while the going was good because I am a hundred per cent in favour of marriage. If it works, there is nothing that comes anywhere near it. But fate was kind to me and I was not put to the test. Because of Gordon's uninhibited correspondence, both I, and (I presume) a local representative of the Censorship Department, were aware that Lieut. Godfrey
2
John Hamilton's matrimonial barque had run aground on a familiar reef …

His wife had not settled down happily to the somewhat claustrophobic life of an Indian Army
‘memsahib',
in the little cantonment of Mardan
3
on the Empire's bleak North West Frontier Province. This cantonment was, by tradition, the headquarters and home of her husband's regiment, the QVO
4
Corps of Guides. They had not seen each other for close on two years when she wrote to tell him that she was not coming back to India, and there had followed a harrowing correspondence. It was not a new situation: she had never wanted to live in the East and had thought from the beginning that she could persuade him to transfer to a British regiment. But Goff – who at an early age had fallen in love with the romance of the Guides and their history – could not contemplate leaving them. There had been long arguments which he thought he had won. But because of the war and long separation, and the birth of a daughter now well over a year old, whom he had not yet seen, it had cropped up again. This time it was no longer a problem to be discussed between them. This time it was an ultimatum: India was no place in which to bring up young children, and since his wife did not intend to try doing so he must choose between giving up the Guides and transferring to a home-based regiment, or seeing his wife and child for only part of one year in every three. (There were no passenger planes in those days, and though transport by sea was astonishingly cheap, it was slow, and home leave was granted only every three years.)

Goff had come up to Kashmir in a thoroughly angry, embittered and disillusioned frame of mind. He would, I imagine, have been only too ready to fall into the arms of almost
any
unattached woman who happened to be passing. And I can only be profoundly and eternally grateful that she happened to be me.

*   *   *

He still had a little more than two weeks of his leave, and he spent five days with me and then suddenly said that he would be going up to Gulmarg for the next week to stay with his CO's wife and to ‘think things over'. I still remember those days as the longest in my life. Every hour of each one of those interminable days dragged by as slowly as a wet weekend in January. I didn't even know if he meant to see me again, and I found that I couldn't do any more work on
There's a Moon Tonight,
because my mind was a blank. Then, unannounced and unexpected, two days before I thought he might, he walked into the hall of the Walls' house and took me off to the Club.

There was never anyone in the Club ballroom at that hour of the morning, and we were crossing it side by side when he suddenly stopped and, turning to me, said, ‘If I can get a divorce, would you marry me?'

I think I must have said ‘Yes' almost before he'd stopped speaking, for fear he might change his mind. (
‘I'll be ready in five minutes – no, make it three!'
) … ‘No – one!'

*   *   *

It would be nice to finish this book with the four words with which Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre ended her story: ‘Reader, I married him.' Well, I did marry him. But it wasn't as simple as all that. Jane Eyre's story came to a full stop with that statement. But ours, Goff's and mine, had only just begun. And so, too – though I had hoped against hope, and despite all Tacklow's warnings tried to make myself believe that it would never happen – began the slow, inexorable march towards the end of Empire and the tearing apart of the enchanted and enchanting land that I so loved.

Notes

Foreword

1
. Family nickname for my father.

Chapter 1

1
. See dedication and Foreword.

2
. Bets also had the nickname ‘T' for Trainer. We had a game when young that I was a performing mouse and she my trainer. My family always called me Mouse from then on, and I always called her ‘T' for Trainer. I still do.

3
. The other three (and this is despite the fact that I once met Marlene Dietrich!) were Indian: Sita of Kaputhala; an unknown Parsee lady seen one evening dancing in the crowded ballroom of Bombay's Taj Mahal Hotel; and a Kashmiri girl paddling a
shikarra
near the D
ā
l Gate.

4
. See
The Sun in the Morning.

5
. I hate to admit it, but a reader tells me that we sank the
Conte Rosso
in the Second World War. Not, I do hope, with our Captain and crew aboard.

6
. A British Indian Army regiment that had been drafted out to North China to help clear up the havoc created by the Boxer Rising (see
The Sun in the Morning
).

Chapter 2

1
. See
here
.

2
. See
The Sun in the Morning.

3
. A well-known English interior decorator of the time, ex-wife of the writer Somerset Maugham.

Chapter 3

1
. The Chinese name for Jardine Matheson. Uncle ‘Cam' (Cameron Taylor) was the representative of JM in Tientsin.

2
. See
The Sun in the Morning.

3
. The ‘Keeper of the Doors'. Or ‘of the Gate', if you prefer.

4
. She pronounced it ‘Floor-ease'.

5
. See Leland's
Pidgin English Sing Song.

6
. A handsome, high spirited and very endearing young man who had proposed to me at frequent intervals during the last Delhi ‘Season'. See
Golden Afternoon.

Chapter 4

1
. A beach shelter consisting of four poles supporting a square of matting – which was supposed to provide shade for those who needed it, but was in fact a meeting place for friends.

Chapter 6

1
. Alleyways.

Chapter 7

1
.
Child Life in Chinese Homes
by Mrs Bryson. Isabella gives a detailed description and two illustrations of this peculiar and appallingly painful fashion.

2
. Mistress, Lady of the House.

Chapter 8

1
. See Chapter 11 of
The Sun in the Morning.

Chapter 9

1
. The words ‘student interpreter' had once been mistranslated by a Chinese member of the Embassy as ‘stupid interrupters'. It stuck. As did ‘Teddy Bear'.

2
. Chinese saints.

Chapter 10

1
. China was not alone in this sort of behaviour, for I was told that an entire British regiment was once sent to Tientsin in thin hot-weather dress, because someone in Whitehall thought Tientsin was in the Tropics.

2
. Or fourteen? I am not 100 per cent sure which. The crackers were probably the kind you threw, not those you pulled.

Chapter 11

1
. See Chapter 25 of
The Sun in the Morning.

2
. This is obviously a famous ‘packer's' trick, for the writer Norah Wall saw it performed when she too was moving house in China.

Chapter 12

1
. No relation to Subas Chandra Bose.

Chapter 13

1
. See
Golden Afternoon.

Chapter 14

1
. See
Golden Afternoon.

2
. Kadera was our bearer and Mahdoo our cook. See
Golden Afternoon.

Chapter 15

1
. Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club.

2
. See
Golden Afternoon.

3
. Mooring.

4
. A lake a few miles outside Srinagar, normally spelt ‘Nagim', but always pronounced
‘Nageem'.
So I have used ‘geem' instead of ‘gim'.

5
. I can't remember her real name, but I had painted her for ‘Ashoo at Her Lattice' and always thought of her as ‘Ashoo'.

6
. Forest Officer. See
Golden Afternoon.

Chapter 16

1
. Country boats.

Chapter 17

1
. He knew very well whom I would blame, and hoped to stop me getting into trouble.

2
. See
The Sun in the Morning.

3
. See above note.

4
. See
The Sun in the Morning.

5
. Crore = 10 million rupees.

Chapter 18

1
. Queen of the Night.

Chapter 19

1
. We had been known collectively as ‘Pish and Tush' in our schooldays, but both of us answered impartially to ‘Tish', ‘Tishy' or ‘Tishwig'.