Golden Afternoon (23 page)

I do not know how long that purgatory went on for. Probably not more than fifteen minutes at most, but to me it seemed like hours, and I remember literally praying God to let something — anything! — happen that would put a stop to this ghastly party; for a bad storm to blow up so that everyone who lived on a houseboat would have to rush back in case it got too rough on the lake for the
shikarras
^*
to paddle them home; or for a bolt of lightning to strike the Residency and set it on fire, so that we'd all have to leave; or for me to trip over my feet and break an ankle
(or even a
leg
if necessary). Anything that would let me get back to my own bed, pull the blankets over my head and hide from the whole lot of them.

But God was obviously not prepared to bother His head over such matters that night. When one thinks of what He has to deal with, what with wars, rebellion, persecution and natural disasters cropping up all over the globe like measles every day, it surprises me that any prayers concerned with such very trivial and derisory matters — even such really frantic pleas as mine were that night — ever get answered at all. The truly astonishing thing is how many of them actually do.

They didn't that night. At long last my harassed hostess gave up the unequal struggle. The band started up again, immediately the floor was invaded by dancers, and, releasing my arm, she took a last hunted look around the fringes of the packed ballroom and, seeing no unattached male that she could unload me on to, shouted a few kind words above the music to the effect that she was sure that I'd soon find some partners, and left me to it.

By now someone else had taken the chair next to Lady Maggie, and I could see no other vacant ones in the ballroom (which on a normal occasion was the dining-room), so I slid back into the hall and made a tour of the public rooms — walking briskly as though I was on some errand, in case anyone should guess that I had no one to dance with or talk to, and was hoping that someone would call out to me and ask me over to join their party. No one did, and I came back, with one of those awful, artificially carefree smiles fixed to my face. Finding that those couples who were not dancing were sitting in pairs, holding hands on the staircase, I beat a hasty retreat to the cloakroom, where I lurked for as long as I dared, under the sympathetic and far too knowing gaze of the ayah, who obviously did not believe a word of my headache story, and kept on patting my shoulder and telling me that it would pass — it would pass. She couldn't have been kinder if she had been my own Punj-ayah, who had said the same thing to me so often in my childhood, and I would have given a good deal to have been able to weep on her comfortable shoulder, as I used to weep on Punj-ayah's when things went wrong. But I did not dare to do so, because there were constant interruptions from other women guests, and for fear of smearing my newly acquired mascara all over my face.

I have heard very young men complaining of the horrors of turning
up at dances where everyone else appeared to know each other and they knew no one. But no male, of whatever age, can begin to understand the true horror of being a wallflower — particularly at a dance in the days when there were dance-programmes and it would have been social death to dance with another woman or go on to the floor and jig about by oneself. Any man, however young, has only himself to blame if he won't ask a girl to dance merely because he doesn't know her and she doesn't appear to have a partner. But in my day no girl could go up to a boy and ask him to dance with her. She had to sit there and wait until some Lord of Creation condescended to come and ask her to dance with him. A partnerless male could always stand with his hands in his pockets, looking on at the dancers, and it would not occur to anyone to think, ‘Poor chap — he can't get anyone to dance with him!' On the contrary (if anyone thought about it at all), they would think he was hard to please, or was merely assessing the local talent to see if there was anyone there who looked worth getting to know. And in the last resort, the single male could always prop up the bar, without making any attempt to earn his keep as a guest, or attracting the least attention by doing so.

But a partnerless girl in the same situation had no escape. She must sit, silent and upright among the dowagers and chaperones, pretending an interest in the couples gyrating past her on the dance floor, or retire at intervals to the ladies' cloakroom where one could waste a certain amount of time pretending to repair one's make-up or inventing a headache. I must have taken refuge in the cloakroom at least three or four times that night, and eventually, driven out by the embarrassment of being found lurking there yet
again
by an acquaintance who remembered seeing me there half an hour earlier, and exclaimed, ‘Hallo, you still here? Aren't you feeling well? Oh, bad luck. Ask the ayah to get you some aspirin — Gosh, there's the next dance starting, I must rush …', I went out by a back door into the garden. Here, finding that one of the groups of chairs under the chenar trees on the front lawn was unoccupied, I huddled down in one and sat there in the moonlight, invisible in the speckled shadows of the chenar leaves, and wishing I was dead.

The dances at Tollygunj and the Saturday Club, and all the picnics and parties in Calcutta, had done wonders for my self-esteem; and so had Bob Targett's attentions in Delhi. But the experience of finding myself a wallflower and a social flop at my very first dance in Srinagar destroyed my newly acquired and still very fragile confidence in about fifteen minutes.
I felt like a hermit crab who, having successfully crawled out of his original shell, can't find another one in which to hide his extremely vulnerable self.

For a time I huddled in my chair in the garden, listening to the music and laughter and the chattering voices, and soaking in self-pity. But eventually the cold drove me indoors, and once again I took refuge in the ladies' cloakroom. I was there, pretending to powder my nose or touch up my lipstick, when the heavenly intervention I had been praying for arrived in the unlikely person of Mrs Wakefield, who came in to collect her evening cloak, explaining that her husband had to be getting home as they were due to make an early start for somewhere or other next morning. I grabbed at this lifebelt with feverish gratitude (knowing that her car would have to pass the gate of our house in order to get back to her own) and implored her to give me a lift home and drop me at our gates because I had a cracking headache — which by then was only too true — but did not want to drag my parents away, for Tacklow was pinned down in a bridge four, and Mother was enjoying herself.

Mrs Wakefield said yes, of course she would, and as Mother was dancing with one of her old flames I scribbled a hasty note which I asked the
abdar
(butler) to deliver, saying that the Wakefields were taking me home, and left with enormous relief, vowing that I would never allow myself to be trapped into a similar position again. Never, never,
never
. Even if it meant never attending another dance. Back once more in my bedroom I burst into tears and wept my way into bed, convinced that I had reached life's lowest ebb and that nothing that could happen to me in the future could be as bad as this. In which I was speedily proved wrong. For I was still awake and snivelling when shortly after midnight my parents returned. I had purposely left my light on so that they would know that I was awake and in dire need of sympathy and encouragement. I was so sorry for myself that I was sure that they would be even more sorry, and I confidently expected Mother to come running upstairs to inquire after the headache that had been my excuse for cadging a lift home from the Wakefields. I couldn't wait to pour out my woes and weep on her sympathetic shoulder, and be petted and hugged and comforted, and assured that I would never have to endure such an ordeal again.

Well, I was wrong. The worst part of that nightmare evening was to come, since far from being sympathetic, Mother was furious, and I found myself being given the talking-to of a lifetime. Worse still, Tacklow agreed
with every word of it. I had behaved like a spoilt brat, shown no gratitude for my hostess's kind efforts to find partners for me — she had done her best to do so, and it wasn't her fault that we had arrived late and found all the available young men already booked for every dance. I had given her
no
help, but thrown up the sponge at once and spent the next couple of hours hiding in the cloakroom or the garden, instead of behaving sensibly and talking to the several people I
did
know — no, of
course
not the young ones, if they were on the dance floor. But there were plenty of older people whom I knew besides Lady Maggie and the Wakefields, and I could easily have sat down with them and made myself pleasant; and then perhaps one of the older men would have asked me to dance. I couldn't expect to go to a party of this type and spend the whole evening within my own age group, and it had been cowardly and silly, and very rude to my kind host and hostess, to cut and run in this childish fashion. The tirade ended with Mother snapping off the light and slamming the door shut behind her. Leaving me to pick up the pieces in the dark.

I remember sitting there, stunned and shivering, with shock more than cold, though the fire in the archaic wood-burning stove in my bedroom had burned out long ago. It had never occurred to me that my parents could possibly see the whole horrible affair from any side but mine. Or even that there could be another side! I felt as though the bottom had fallen out of my world.

Neither Bets nor I can remember where she was that night. We don't think she can have been in the house, for surely I should have gone straight in to tell her the whole sad story as soon as I arrived back, and I know I didn't. She could have been asleep and I might have decided against waking her. But I don't remember Mother exactly lowering her voice during that distressing telling off. All I do know is that I didn't tell Bets anything that night, but that she got the whole sad story next morning and gave me the hundred per cent support and sympathy that I had signally failed to get from my parents.

Tacklow, though he had let Mother do all the talking that night, supported her view of my behaviour next morning, and it was the first and only time he ever failed me. I thought that he at least would sympathize with me; not that he would ‘take my part' against Mother, but that he would
know
, because it was me, exactly how I had felt during that humiliating evening and therefore understand how unbearable it had been and why I
had
to leave at the first opportunity. But he didn't. He
agreed with Mother, though he wasn't angry about it, as she was, merely disappointed at my hysterical behaviour; he had expected me to have more sense, and more social poise, and I hadn't shown either.

Bets and I retreated to a point half-way up the Takht, from where we could look down on the roofs of the Gupkar Road houses and out across the valley to the snows, and, discussing the whole affair, agreed with the conclusion that I had come to in the small hours of the previous night: that any girl, however sensible and insensitive, would feel just as I had done if trapped in a similar situation, but that it was impossible for either of our parents to understand what an appalling ordeal it had been for me. Tacklow, apart from being a man, wouldn't have a clue, because it was something he could never have experienced; he never went to dances if he could help it. He merely escorted Mother to them, waited until her programme was full, arranged with someone to bring her home and went happily back to bed. And on those occasions, such as a ball at Viceregal Lodge, which was practically a command performance, or some official piece of entertaining such as the Residency Ball, he would dance once with Mother and spend the rest of the evening either playing bridge or wandering around talking to friends or watching the dancers. He simply could not understand why women could not be content to do the same.

Mother, on the other hand, who as a woman should have sympathized with the horror of my position, was in fact as ignorant as Tacklow on such matters — probably even more so, since she had less imagination. She was never very good at seeing another person's point of view or putting herself in their shoes, and so she, even less than Tacklow, had no idea why I should have worked myself into such a state over something so trivial.

All I had had to do was sit down somewhere in full view, and some young man would have rushed up and asked me to dance with him. It never failed. Well, it hadn't for her. Mother had been collecting beaux since she was fourteen — and she was only sixteen when Tacklow first saw her on the platform of a railway station in North China and fell instantly in love with her. He courted her for the next three years and, having at last won her father's consent, married her a few days after her nineteenth birthday and took her back to India when his regiment returned there after completing a three-year term of duty in China. She enjoyed her first taste of army life under the Raj, and she was barely twenty-one when Tacklow was posted to Simla, where she was an instant success.
So one couldn't really blame her for not having a clue as to what it felt like to be a wallflower at a dance. Other girls (and later, other women) might lack partners and have to sit against the wall for hour after hour, trying to look as though they were enjoying themselves, talking to women twenty or thirty years older than themselves, and wishing that the floor would open and swallow them up. But since this was something that she herself had never had to do, I don't suppose she even
noticed
them — she would have been too busy dancing, laughing and flirting light-heartedly with some bedazzled male. And as it is never easy to understand and sympathize fully with an emotion you yourself have never experienced — and are never likely to! — it was not surprising that she should have failed to realize what a nightmare that dance had been for me.

Bets and I, sitting in judgement, decided that taking all that into consideration she could not be blamed: and oddly enough, I didn't blame her, not after talking it over with Bets. We decided that as Mother really didn't understand, there was no point in trying to make her, while as for Tacklow, the same went for him.