Golden Afternoon (12 page)

One of the most nerve-racking social engagements of the Delhi season turned out to be my first Viceregal dinner party. This daunting function must have been among the last to take place in the original Viceregal Lodge in Old Delhi, for by the beginning of the next season the grandiose Viceroy's House, which Sir Edwin Lutyens had intended to be the focal point of New Delhi, would at last be ready for occupation by the then Viceroy, Lord Irwin, and his family.

Any chance of the evening being an enjoyable one was wrecked at the start by the combination of a dim-witted taxi-driver and my first pair of white kid sixteen-button-length gloves. The pair I had borrowed from Mother for that Blue Cross Ball had not been a success, for her hands were a good deal larger than mine and the unused space at the end of each finger was distinctly inelegant. A pair in the right size had duly been bought for me at Rago Mull's, and I carried them carefully on my lap, wrapped in tissue paper — intending to put them on in the ladies' room where we would shed our evening cloaks, rather than risk getting them grubby
en route
.

Tacklow had hired a taxi for the occasion, to save Mother from having to cope with parking problems. But, alas, this turned out to be a disaster. The ‘experienced driver' whom we had been promised (and who had confidently assured us that the way to the Burra Lat Sahib's house was well known to him) not only grossly underestimated the time it would take him to get us there, but took several wrong turnings in an effort to find an imaginary short-cut. We arrived late, to find several frantic ADCs and an assortment of Viceregal servants waiting for us on the porch steps, literally dancing with agitation.

There was no time for any powdering of noses in the cloakroom, and amid urgent White Rabbit-like cries of ‘You're late! You're late!', our cloaks, and Tacklow's overcoat and scarf, were snatched from us and I
found myself being rushed down interminable corridors between a couple of panting ADCs, each of whom was endeavouring to help me put on a brand-new elbow-length kid glove, which should by rights have been slowly and carefully eased on after being properly stretched. The Viceregal servants must have seen some peculiar sights in their day, but even their normally impassive faces registered several degrees of shock, ranging from raised eyebrows to grins, as we fled past. My parents preceded us at the double, accompanied by an appalled minor official, while I, in full and unfamiliar evening dress and high-heeled shoes, scuttled behind them, both arms at full stretch, with a frantic ADC on each, tugging at that malignant and unyielding white kid. The end, of course, was inevitable. Just as we reached the anteroom in which our fellow guests were already assembled, the left-hand glove split from top to bottom, above the first button.
Disaster!

My parents were whisked away to stand in line among the more senior guests, and the two ADCs, having hustled me in among the lowly ones, thankfully abandoned me, beetroot-faced from embarrassment and on the verge of tears, with a long strip of white kid hanging limply from my wrist. In the same moment the doors at the far end of the room were thrown open to admit their Excellencies and their house guests and various members of the Household. And had the devil himself been passing, I know that I would willingly have sold my soul in exchange for invisibility — or just to be allowed to sink through the Viceregal carpet.

Fortunately, Mephistopheles was not present, and I was saved by an angelic elderly woman with a heart of twenty-eight-carat gold who wore a long chiffon scarf. Taking in my situation at a glance, she whipped off the scarf, wound one end round my left arm, enclosing and hiding the split glove, draped the other round my shoulders and whispered encouragingly: ‘Don't worry, they'll never notice!' And they didn't — bless her for ever. I hope she has been given a specially nice room in the heavenly mansions in recognition of that kindly deed.

The rest of the evening is a blur. As the most junior person present, I was seated at the far end of the long table, among the ADCs, of whom I was scared silly because they were said to be chosen for their social standing, good looks and ability on the dance floor. They also had the reputation of being abominably conceited; for to annex a Viceregal ADC as your beau appeared to be the height of every girl's ambition (the next best thing being an ADC to the Commander-in-Chief, or the Governor
of a Province). It was not only the Fishing Fleet lovelies who made a dead set at them. Elderly members of the Viceroy's Council, the Civil Service, the armed forces, and their wives, were not above treating them as favourite sons — calling them by their Christian names and inviting them to dinner parties and dances as partners for their daughters and nieces. The competition for the attention of these gilded youths was intense, and I am sure that they were charming to the damsels on whom they bestowed their approval. But sadly, I was never one of that elect line-up so, as far as I and the rest of the Sour Grapes Brigade were concerned, the average AD C was an ornamental, superior and mannerless young so-and-so who could not be bothered with anyone whom he did not consider of sufficient importance, or pretty enough, to attract his attention.

There were, of course, exceptions to this rule; and it was my good fortune to be taken in to my first Viceregal dinner by one of them, a sprig of the nobility who could not have been nicer. Within minutes I had lost my heart to him. Not because he listened sympathetically to the saga of those gloves, but because it struck him as wildly funny and he laughed so much that I had to laugh with him, and stopped feeling that I had disgraced myself and my parents.

A few nights later we were all invited to a far more modest, but equally memorable dinner party and dance at Maiden's Hotel in Old Delhi. It was quite a small party, given by that old friend of Tacklow's, Sir Edwin Lutyens, the main architect of New Delhi. Sir Edwin proved to be a most enchanting host. He drew pictures on the tablecloth for Bets, and booked me for two or three of the dances, explaining, to my relief, that he did not dance but hoped I would not mind sitting them out with him.
Mind!
I was delighted to do so, for he was not only a world-famous man, but a most entertaining conversationalist. Moreover, he kept me enthralled by covering my dance-programme and a few of the nearest menus with fascinating drawings. I can't think why I hadn't the sense to cherish them for posterity, but I suppose, because he was a friend of Tacklow's, I took him too much for granted, and those charming scribbles soon went the way of so many valuable trifles, cherished for a season and then lost.

Yet an echo of them was to follow into the future, for although at the time I had not the faintest idea that I would one day take to writing
books, the seeds of authorship must have already been there — manifesting themselves in a collector's instinct that makes writers stash away certain incidents in their memory just in case they may come in handy some day. Nearly a quarter of a century later I was to use Lutyens's method of entertaining me in one of my whodunnits, when I made my artist-hero amuse a group of Cypriot children by doing quick crayon sketches of dragons, pirates and witches, and sailors dancing the hornpipe, on his drawing block. Paul Scott once told me never to waste anything, and I don't think I ever wasted much.

A day or two later Sir Edwin took us on a personally conducted tour of his still unfinished Viceroy's House, and complained that he had planned it as the focal point of New Delhi. It was, he said, meant to stand on the highest bit of land, with everything else leading the eye up to it. But owing to some miscalculation on the part of his co-architect, Sir Richard Baker (he of the Baker's Ovens), and the fact that he, Lutyens, had not been in India at the time when work on the twin Baker-designed Secretariat buildings had been begun, the two buildings, which had been intended to lead the eye up to Viceroy's House had been placed just too high up on the slope of the Kingsway — now the Rajpath — to allow the Viceroy's House to be built on the highest point of the rise. By the time Lutyens arrived out in India, work on the two Secretariat buildings was too far advanced to be scrapped, and there was nothing for it but to build the Viceroy's House a good deal further back, at a spot from which it was barely visible, and redraw the dome, in a belated and not too successful attempt to make it stand up much higher. It looks squat to this day — rather like a toad squatting in a dip of ground, that has puffed itself out sideways and is staring out crossly above the ridge of earth in front of it. Which is a pity, because it really is a rather splendid building.

Sir Edwin did not say so, but I got the distinct impression that he thought Baker had moved his Secretariat buildings higher up the slope on purpose — knowing perfectly well that by doing so he would force his rival to build the ‘focal point of New Delhi' much further back, and deprive him of the high ground. It certainly worked. Baker's Secretariat buildings, with their twin towers and their lavish use of decorative pavilions which (whether intentionally or not) exactly mimic those white pith helmets, topped by a metal spike, which were habitually worn on all state occasions by members of the ‘Heaven-born' and the British officers of
certain Indian Army regiments, certainly hog the view in New Delhi, and have successfully up-staged Viceroy's House — see any tourist's snapshots!

I couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for Sir Edwin, whose ace had been so neatly trumped, but it was obvious that he had had the greatest fun designing his ‘focal point', even if it had missed out. He had a strong sense of humour and had given it a field-day when it came to designing this vast Viceregal palace. The house was crammed with jokes, not all of which came off.

There is the tale concerning the wonderful marble grand staircase, which was open to the sky, and what happened to the surrounding rooms and passageways shortly after the last of the furniture and fixings had been moved in and arranged, and the whole gorgeous, fairy-tale palace was ready to be occupied. Legend says that no sooner had this happened than the father and mother of a rainstorm drove in from the south, and the clouds emptied themselves on to the eighth and last city of Delhi, paying particular attention to Viceroy's House. The staircase had been built to cope with the yearly monsoon, and there were numerous marble gutters intended to catch and channel the rainwater and direct it out into the gardens. But though these may have worked in theory, they proved to be inadequate in practice. The gutters flooded, and a huge piece of canvas the size of a couple of tennis courts was hastily rigged up to close off the pouring sky above the stairway. For a brief while, all was well. But as the downpour continued the canvas ceiling began to sag ominously, and eventually, unable to stand the strain of hundreds of tons of water that had collected in it, it broke, depositing a Niagara-like flood on to the stairway below, which swept, foaming, into the side rooms and passages, soaking carpets and sofas, chairs and curtains, and toppling innumerable occasional tables.

Well, it certainly makes a good story, and the embroideries on it were many and various, and always accompanied by shrieks of mirth from whoever happened to be telling me about it. The only thing that makes the whole story suspect is the fact that the main structure of the house, including that staircase, was, as far as I can remember, complete except for furniture and decoration when Tacklow and I were taken over it by Sir Edwin during the cold weather season of 1927–8, which means that it must have come through at least two monsoons by the time Lord Irwin and family moved into it. In which case, why did nobody ever notice
what would happen to the staircase and the ground-floor rooms when the rains came? I can well believe that no one thought about it until then. But I do not believe that the rooms were carpeted and decorated before anyone drove up to it.

However, I don't suppose either Lutyens or Baker was in India except during the cold weather, and no Indian would have dreamed of pointing out an error of judgement on the part of the boss. It's rude to criticize. Let them find out the hard way.

Many years later I was to come across exactly the same attitude when I arrived in Jaipur to watch part of my novel
The Far Pavilions
being filmed, and found that almost every Indian word, and all the place names and given names, were being pronounced wrongly. ‘Ashōk', for instance, was being pronounced ‘
Ash
-shock', though it is a popular name in India, and every single Indian on the set must have winced whenever they heard it mispronounced. But when I inquired why the heck no one had spoken up and corrected it, they looked shocked and replied that it was ‘not their place' to speak out, and I spent my first week in the country apologizing to the various Ashoks whom I know. Oh well, that's India, that was. And I bet it still is and always will be.

That open-to-the-sky staircase wasn't the only piece of nonsense-work that Lutyens put into his Viceregal extravaganza. He had many more jokes up his sleeve. There was a tower room, for instance, that had the effect of being entirely surrounded by windows, which looked out on every side on to the gardens and distant views of the plain. It was ‘all done by mirrors', of course; the outer ones showed the view, while the inner rooms merely mirrored it in looking-glass, an effect that could be distinctly disconcerting: once you had closed the door behind you, you were not sure for a moment or two which way you were facing, or how to get out again …