Golden Afternoon (28 page)

Both of these weddings — like practically all weddings in Kashmir — were followed by a reception in the gardens of the Residency. And at both an unseen band played, among other things, a dance-tune that was new in those days, but would appear again and for at least another quarter of a century — ‘Charmaine'. I had never heard it before, and it still has the power to switch on that private video that I keep in my brain, and which can show me, in sound and colour and scent, three separate wedding receptions on the wide Residency lawn under the shade of four gigantic chenar trees: Peggy's, Molly Tatham's and Bets's. I can see them all, young and laughing and visibly glowing with hope and happiness. The air is full of scent from the long barrier of sweet peas that used to hide the kitchen gardens from the lawns and trees and formal flowerbeds, and from behind it Nedou's band is playing, softened by distance … ‘Charmaine, Charmaine …' Ah me! Romance! Romance …

I acquired two new beaux that year, both of them, so far as I remember, friends of my brother Bill, through whom I met them. One of them, a high-spirited subaltern named Tony Weldon, was the proud possessor of an exceedingly noisy motorbike on which he roared around the town and which he relied on to get him up the 290-odd miles of hill road to Srinagar whenever he could manage to wangle a few days' leave, which he did at frequent intervals. The other was a Donald someone, whose surname escapes me (I hadn't remembered Tony's either but Bets came up with
it; she says the motorbike was unforgettable and the name stuck with it!).

Donald was several years older than Tony, four or five at a guess, and he started by taking Bill and me out on the Dal in a minute sailing boat that he had hired for the duration of his leave. We took a picnic tea with us and the afternoon was a great success. It was the first time I'd ever been in a sailing boat, and I was not only enthralled but much impressed by the skill with which Donald handled it, and delighted when he invited me to go sailing with him again on the following day. This time Bill was not with us, though whether because he had not been invited, or because Donald had hinted that he'd be grateful if Bill made himself scarce, I don't know.

After that I saw quite a lot of him; enough to make Mother suggest to Bill that it was high time he asked this young man, who was monopolizing so much of Moll's time, to dinner so that she and Tacklow could meet him. Bill issued the invitation, Donald accepted, and presented himself at the Red House, looking very spruce in a dinner-jacket. The evening was a great success. Far too much so, I'm afraid, for when our guests departed, Donald was the last to go, and as we waved goodbye to him Tacklow said, ‘That's a very pleasant and intelligent young man … I enjoyed talking to him.'

The comment was made quite lightly, but I took it seriously. Tacklow approved of him; QED he had passed a rigorous test with flying colours. I was already half in love with him, but slightly uncertain, for although I was fascinated there was something about him that I found a bit daunting, something that made me feel childish, gauche and immature, as if I was advancing too quickly into unknown and possibly dangerous territory. He made Bill and Tony and various other subalterns whom Bill brought to the house seem a lot of callow little boys; which was odd, for he wasn't nearly as old as Bob Targett, who had never had that effect on me, and had always been so easy to get on with. Admittedly, neither had passed the Gerald du Maurier test. But perhaps no one ever would, and if so …?

I had been havering and wavering about Donald, excited at having captured such an attractive and sophisticated man, but not quite knowing what to do with him now that I had. To land him, or throw him back? That was the question. And then, while I teetered on the brink, Tacklow expressed approval and instantly the scales dipped. If Tacklow liked him, then I could safely take the plunge, for my father had always been both my touchstone and my private Oracle of Delphi. Everything was going
to be all right … Everything was wonderful! Here comes the bride — !

You notice that it did not occur to me — and would not at that time have occurred to any girl of my age and class — that the next move was not marriage. There was even a song that dance bands belted out nightly in every country in Europe and America — ‘Love and marriage, love and marriage, Go together like a horse and carriage' and ended firmly ‘you can't have one without the other'. Too right. Nowadays, it would appear that love by no means leads to marriage; which to my mind is just wonderful for men, since nine times out of ten it merely means that they can acquire an unpaid housekeeper-cook-cum-mistress who not only pays up for half the expenses of a flat or whatever, but can, in a year or two — or five, or ten! — when lust grows cold and the novelty wears off, be discarded without a qualm.

Rampant women's-libbers will argue that women can do the same, and walk out on their men. Yes indeed; the real charmers will always be able to play the field; and should they discard a man, he and his friends will raise all hell about the appalling behaviour of ‘that heartless bitch!' Which could be one reason why the ‘faithlessness' of women gets so much publicity when one of them decides to discard a husband or a lover, men being permitted to yell the roof off when dumped in the ash-can. A woman in a similar position is, by tradition, expected by one and all (but in particular by men) to ‘behave with dignity'. In other words, to sit down and shut up and do any howling she has to do in decent privacy.

Within two days of that dinner party, and while dancing cheek to cheek to the strains of the Club band, I became engaged to be married. Bill, who had taken his current flame to the same dance, was the first to be told, and his initial reception of the glad tidings was unflattering to say the least of it. He didn't believe a word of it and was convinced that his much admired friend had had ‘one over the eight' and was merely pulling his leg. For like many another brother, he could see nothing alluring about a mere sister, and was convinced that someone as mature and worldly-wise as Donald could not possibly have fallen in love with ‘Old Piano Legs'.

It took some little time to convince him that the whole thing wasn't an elaborate joke, and when he finally accepted that it wasn't, he offered his congratulations but took his prospective brother-in-law aside and assured him earnestly that anything he had said would not be held against him unless repeated on the following day.

Bill's reaction to the news cast a distinct shadow over what had until then been a glittering evening, and I began to wonder uneasily if perhaps Donald
had
been knocking back a few drinks too many, and if he really would come round to the house the next morning and repeat in the unflattering daylight all the charming things he had said into my ear on the dance floor to the accompaniment of the band playing ‘I'll be loving you always, with a love that's true, always' — Would he …? Yes,
of course
he would! But Bill's bucket of cold water was not to be the only setback I was to receive that evening. Leaving Bill and his current girlfriend to get on with the dancing, Donald had taken me for a stroll in the moonlight … For just to add to the romance of the occasion, there was a moon that night. There always seemed to be a moon in Kashmir when one needed it, and looking back on countless evenings in that delectable valley it is only the moonlit ones that I remember, so that when, many years later, I was to write a ‘whodunit' set in Kashmir, my original title for it was
There's a Moon Tonight
. (Alas, the publishers wouldn't wear it — don't ask me why; I still think it was a good title.) It ended up with the unalluring one of
Death Walks in Kashmir
^*
. Well, it was a murder story anyway.

The Srinagar Club stands on the left bank of the Jhelum river, behind and just below the broad, high, manmade embankment known simply as the Bund and built to protect the land behind it from being inundated in flood years. The Bund is overhung by willows, poplars and great chenar trees, and it was along this romantic, tree-shadowed and moon-splashed walk that Donald and I went strolling arm-in-arm, while behind us the night was made hauntingly sweet by the distant strains of the dance band playing an old favourite of my school days: ‘Avalon, Avalon, River of Dreams …'. Odd how a cheap melody and every word of its accompanying lyric can attach itself like a limpet to one's memory, when a name cannot.

There seemed to be no one else on the Bund at that hour, most of the courting couples who went strolling on it having turned up-stream, where there were fewer houses and more trees, instead of down-stream as we had done, towards the Post Office and the shops. Donald and I had the Bund to ourselves, and it was here, in the black shadow of a huge chenar tree, that he stopped, and, pulling me into his arms, gave me what I subsequently learned is known as a ‘french kiss'.

Well, I'd been kissed before, of course, and found it pretty exciting. But not in this way, and it gave me the shock of my life. Frankly, I thought it was disgusting, and I remember standing there, clutched in a close embrace, and thinking wildly: ‘If this is how people kiss when they are married, I'm going to have to put up with it every day of my life from now on! How am I going to
bear
it? It's revolting! I'll
never
get used to it. But I'll have to, I'll
have
to — '

Bob had never kissed me like that, yet his kisses had given me a terrific kick, but the meal that Donald was making of me filled me with nothing but disgust and panic. Panic at the thought of having to endure this sort of thing every time he felt like kissing me, without letting him know that I wasn't enjoying it as much as he was. It didn't occur to me to think, ‘I can't marry this man, and I'd better call it off at once,' and I hadn't even the guts to struggle or make any attempt to push him away. With hindsight, I suppose I imagined that all modern and sophisticated couples kissed like this once they were engaged, and I didn't want him to think I was a boring little ninny who knew nothing whatever about men — or making love. I merely thought that the sooner I learned the better; though the prospect of having to do so chilled me to the marrow, and I blamed myself for not having applied the du Maurier test earlier on, instead of saying ‘yes' first and then beginning to wobble.

In view of this, it is hardly surprising that my first — and when I come to think of it, last — engagement did not last long. Whether Donald had sensed the shock and disgust with which I had received his first celebratory embrace on getting engaged, I don't know; but he presented himself next day at the Red House in the character of an accepted suitor, and was received as such. (Though a little warily I noticed, which I did not take in very good part since, after all, if it hadn't been for Tacklow's approval my very first ‘official' love affair would probably never have got off the ground, so it was too late for him to be cagey about Donald now.)

Looking back at that period of my life, I realize that although Tacklow's main reason for returning to India in order to revise Aitchison's Treaties had almost certainly also been because he knew that it would delight Mother, for whom parties and dancing and gaiety were the breath of life, and who had endured the dullness and hard work, the non-stop cooking, ironing, housework and gardening of the past few years in England without complaint, there had been a strong secondary reason: the hope
that if he brought his daughters out to India they might find husbands there. For with all his many perfections, my darling Tacklow was a true child of his time, and that time was the Age of Victoria, when well-bred young women did not go out to work but stayed demurely at home, occupying their empty hours with embroidery and good works until the glad day when some suitable knight-errant appeared on the horizon to rescue them from the dragon of boredom and bondage to ageing and autocratic parents, and allow them to escape into one of child-bearing and housekeeping instead.

Looking back to that period now, I wonder if Tacklow did not think that from what little he had seen of Donald, this young man might not turn out to be a far better bet as a husband for me than the only previous contender for that role — Bob Targett. He certainly did not refuse his consent, or anything of the sort, but allowed the situation to remain vague; there was little or no prospect of Donald being able to get married in the near future, so we would have plenty of time in which to get to know each other better. Well, that was all right by me. I didn't in the least mind having ‘an understanding' rather than an official engagement and an announcement in the papers to the effect that ‘A marriage has been arranged, etc, etc'. Nor did Donald or Tacklow, and I'm not sure how the affair would have ended if it had not been for Mother's long-time friend, Lady Maggie Skeen, taking a hand. To this day, I can't think why she should have bothered to do so. But interfere she did. Perhaps she thought Mother was too unworldly to handle the situation and needed help and advice.

Hearing of my engagement, she was apparently shocked to discover that the prospective bridegroom had not even troubled to get me an engagement ring. An omission, insisted Lady Maggie, that plainly showed that he had no intention of getting married and was merely using this ‘understanding' as an excuse to monopolize my time and attention — while at the same time warning off other possible suitors — without committing himself in any way. Had he been serious, the purchase of a ring would have been the very
first
thing he would have done!

Whereupon Mother, who until then had been rather preening herself on having one of her daughters engaged to be married so soon after arriving back in India, was thrown into a fluster and began to nag me about the absence of that ring. Worse still, it was at this point that she produced, for the second time, the form of criticism that she had originally
applied to Bob Targett and was to use with regrettable frequency in future years, and which never failed to be an ominous sign. She announced once again that although on first acquaintance he
seemed
nice enough, there was
something about his face that she didn't quite like
— ‘I don't quite trust him …' Poor Donald! And poor Mother. She had always been so gay and friendly and uncritical and had made friends so easily. People fell for her by the score. But that first ‘official' love affair of mine, and Lady Maggie's needling, had unearthed — or possibly even manufactured — a streak of suspicion in her hitherto blithe and happy-go-lucky nature which was to grow like ground-elder or some equally invasive weed, until it became in time a dreaded phrase.