Golden Afternoon (38 page)

Bob Targett was up in Simla for the hot season. I saw quite a lot of him and discovered, with relief, that there was no slightest stirring of that previous romance; or of embarrassment either. Only lots of liking still. Which was just as well for me, as it didn't take long to discover that Bob was already heavily involved in a rather tricky romance with a gay grass widow whose charms — and experiences! — I could not have hoped to rival. But what with Bob and Sandy and Walter and a few other bachelor acquaintances, we were never short of partners at any of the many dances and dinner parties, and though for once I was completely fancy-free, and had been, surprisingly, ever since the disappearance of Donald from the scene, I must have been in love with life instead of in love with love that season. Because one of my clearest memories is of walking — no, not walking, dancing — dancing, skipping, running, along the Mall from the Combermere Bridge to the Cecil Hotel on a misty afternoon. I've forgotten what errand I was on, or if I was just out for a walk. All I remember was the feel of light raindrops, (in Scotland they would call it a Scotch mist) fingering my face and running down my mackintosh, and a wonderful sense of lightness and happiness. I had come back to my starting point, and found that all was right with my world.

I ‘came of age' that year. A magic date which in those days was twenty-one, but has now been reduced to eighteen, and already looks like being reduced to sixteen. The occasion was celebrated with a dinner party and dance at the Cecil Hotel, and I remember, with regret, that when my parents asked me what I wanted for my twenty-first birthday present, I asked for an evening dress that I had seen in one of the European shops on the Mall, and, of all the silly things, a wildly expensive ostrich-feather fan to go with it. Tacklow did his best to persuade me to choose something that would last. But I had set my heart on that dress, and even more so on that fan, for huge ostrich-feather fans were all the rage that year, and the
Tatler
and the
Sketch
and all the glossy European magazines were full of lovely ladies carrying them.

I got my dress; and the fan. And have regretted it ever since, for it would have been nice to have had a memento of that auspicious landmark in my life, that I could have kept for the rest of my days. A piece of jewellery, or silver — which, incidentally, would by now have increased enormously in value and probably ended by becoming an heirloom. As it was, the dress, a frothy and exceedingly fragile affair consisting of layer upon layer of silk net that shaded from orange to lemon (and to be honest, did not particularly become me), became limp and tattered in no time at all, while that spectacular fan, which matched it in colour and created a mild sensation in the ballroom of the Cecil Hotel, fell victim to those rapacious little insects that we used to call ‘woolly bears' who can (and do) eat anything that comes their way. Only the tortoiseshell sticks of that fan lasted for a few years, but in the end the woolly bears munched their way through those as well. And for some forgotten reason, no photograph seems to have been taken of me wearing that glamorous outfit.

The only thing — apart from the memory — that I have left to remind
me of my long-ago coming-of-age is a very small pile of moonstones which are all that is left of a beautiful but incredibly fragile necklace Sandy gave me because, he said, they were the only stones except diamonds (which he couldn't afford) that could be worn with an orange and lemon dress; they picked up and reflected any colours near them like soap bubbles.

He was right about them reflecting other colours. They do. And they looked wonderful with the fan and the twenty-first birthday ball dress. But alas, that dream of a necklace was as fragile as if it had indeed been made of soap bubbles. The slim oval stones were held together with loops and bands of gold barely thicker than a spider's web, a necklace such as only an Indian craftsman could have made. It broke too easily, and each time it broke and was mended, a few moonstone drops were lost. In the end it got too small to go round my neck; I tried sewing the remains on to a dress and lost even more stones. By now only a tiny handful, enough to fill a thimble, is all I have to remind me of my coming-of-age party, and of Sandy and Simla, and the band of the Cecil Hotel playing ‘Fancy Our Meeting', ‘Tea for Two' and ‘Always'…

My gunner brother, Bill, whose unit was stationed that year in one of the North West Frontier outposts — Razmak, I think — came up to Simla to stay with us for a few days of his leave. He and Phil someone, one of his gunner friends, had spent the main part of it in Kashmir, where they had hired a houseboat between them and evidently had what Bill described as ‘a whale of a time'. In the course of which, it eventually transpired, he had become engaged to be married.

This bombshell having been dropped into the collective family lap prefaced by, ‘Oh … er … um … and by the way —' it was not at first taken very seriously. Dear Bill had been in love with one damsel or another from his prep school days, and we all remembered the carry-on there had been over a lovely creature he had become temporarily attracted to during his final days in England before he sailed to India (the one who would insist on calling him ‘Billy-boy'), and the swiftness with which she had been superseded in his affections by a ‘smashing' girl in the course of the voyage out. But at least he had never got as far as being engaged to any of them.

This time it was evidently serious. However, his chances of actually marrying for some years to come were almost non-existent, since the
Army still stuck firmly to its rule that no officer might marry without his Colonel's permission before he attained the rank of Major or the age of thirty, whichever came first. And few, if any, Colonels were going to allow one of their young subalterns, with no private means, to launch into matrimony and the raising of a family before he had learned his trade and proved himself. However, Bill's main reason for spending the final days of his leave in Simla was not to see his family or celebrate his twenty-third birthday (or even my twenty-first) but to break the news of his engagement, and buy the ring. The style of token that his betrothed had in mind, explained Bill, was unobtainable in such outposts of Empire as Razmak or Bannu or wherever.

The object of his affection turned out to be a girl we had already met in Delhi during Horse Show Week. Her father was a Lieutenant-Colonel in, I think, some Corps or other, or possibly in one of the many Punjab Regiments, and she had a brother who was also in one of the Indian Army Regiments. She and her mother had been spending the hot weather in Kashmir, in a houseboat on the Jhelum, and Bill had met her at a young people's party at the Residency and, in his usual fashion, instantly fallen in love. I have to admit that I can't think why. In general, the girls he fell for were outstandingly pretty and this one — let's call her Bertha — though by no means plain, was nothing to write home about. Just a nice-looking girl with a figure that showed to advantage in a bathing suit, a costume in which she appeared in most of the snapshots of her which Bill produced for our inspection. He seemed to have spent his holiday, in company with a gang of like-minded young friends, on the bathing boat at Nageem, and his nights dining, wining and dancing either at the Club or at Nedou's Hotel, finishing up by floating off in pairs in
shikarras
across the moonlit lake, to join up again in the pallid dawn when everyone returned to their separate houseboats — where they would sleep until one o'clock and meet again at Nedou's for a late luncheon before driving back to Nageem, and repeating the whole programme again.

Had it not been for the engagement, we would probably not have seen Bill for so much as a day of his leave. As it was, he decided that the occasion was important enough to make him tear himself away from his love in order to break the news to his family in person. And then of course there was that ring. Bertha apparently felt the same about rings as Lady Maggie had. An engagement did not count without a ring on the right finger, and that was that. Bill had taken Bertha to look at one or
two in the shops of several Kashmiri jewellers on the Bund, but she had not thought much of them, and it had been decided that he would buy one in Simla. The only trouble was that he doubted he had got enough money in his account to cover the transaction, and should it come to more than expected would Tacklow please come up trumps and lend him enough to make up the difference?

Tacklow, looking a little worn, agreed to do so, though Bill had still not repaid that other debt. But he inquired how Bill thought he was going to afford the expense of feeding, clothing and housing a wife on a budget that did not even run to paying for a modest engagement ring. Weddings, he pointed out, were expensive items on their own, let alone honeymoons and all that came after them. ‘Oh, not to worry,' said Bill buoyantly; he wouldn't be able to get married for at least seven years, unless of course, as he had explained to Bertha and her parents, he should become a Major before then, which he didn't think was very likely. However, Bertha had promised to wait for him, and by then he would have saved up enough money to cover the extra expenses, and his pay would have gone up considerably. Everything would be quite all right, we'd see!

Mother, who had received the news with every sign of dismay, visibly relaxed, as I suppose we all did. In Mother's youth, seven years wouldn't have seemed like an eternity, as it would today. Victorian brides had always gone in for long engagements, in particular those who followed their men out to the further parts of a widespread Empire. Sir Henry Lawrence's wife, Honaria, had waited for nine years, living on nothing but scraps of news from him (and in those days it took half a year to get a reply to a letter from India to England), until he was able to send for her to come out and marry him. And she was only one of many. Which I suppose was partly why the idea of a seven-year engagement didn't seem as weird to us then as it would today. Certainly Bill was taking it very calmly.

Bets and I, both incurably romantic, thought he was being truly heroic. To have found and fallen in love with the only girl in the world for you, the one you wanted to spend the rest of your life with and to find that she felt the same about you, and then discover that you couldn't marry her and live happily ever after for seven years — (by which time, of course, you'd both be old!) seemed too cruel, and our hearts went out to poor Bill.

We needn't have bothered. The very next day Bill asked me to accompany
him to a jeweller's to buy the ring. He said he wanted my advice, and I remember feeling flattered. But in fact it was a confidante he needed, for there was something he wanted to get off his chest and, having pledged me to secrecy and extracted a solemn vow that I wouldn't breathe a word of it to anyone, especially not the family,
^*
he blurted out the whole unhappy story as we walked along the Mall on our way to Hamilton's, the jeweller's.

It seemed that he and a friend, a Phil someone who was a fellow gunner, had hired a small houseboat between them, and they had met Bertha at a Residency dance on the first night of their leave. Bill had been very taken with her from the start; she was an excellent dancer, and they had partnered each other for most of the dances that evening, and from then on were regarded as ‘a pair' at all the subsequent parties attended by their ‘crowd'.

About half-way through that leave, several members of the crowd who were due to return to their units in the plains had thrown a farewell party which began with dinner at Nedou's Hotel, followed by dancing and drinking at the Srinagar Club and, when the band packed it in, a late-night picnic on Char-Chenar Island, a little island in the middle of the Dāl lake to which the members of the party had arrived in pairs in
shikarras
. Someone had brought a wind-up gramophone, and there had been the usual mounds of sandwiches, salads and cake, and most people had donated a bottle of something or other, ranging from wine, spirits and liqueurs, to beer and lemonade.

Bill said that he supposed it was the mixture of these that had been his undoing, for he had learned early on, first as a prefect at Repton and later as a ‘snooker' at the Shop, that it was almost impossible for him to get drunk: because long before he reached that stage, he would be sick; a humiliating habit that he was never to outgrow but which had its useful side, since he never got rowdy, maudlin or belligerent; just vaguely happy — generally prior to being as sick as a cat.

He must have been slightly more than happy by the time the
shikarras
landed their passengers back at the Dāl Gate, from where they dispersed to their various hotels, guest-houses or houseboats, because he said he didn't remember anything about the homeward journey or how he had managed to get himself to bed. He woke some time towards mid-morning
in bright sunlight, and with a cracking headache, and received the first shock of the day from Phil, who he found fortifying himself with mugs of strong black coffee supplied by their solicitous and experienced
manji
(boatman). Phil had ordered more of the same for his fellow-sufferer, and lifting his mug in salute said: ‘Here's to you both. I hear I have to congratulate you.' ‘Whatever for?' inquired Bill morosely, gulping black coffee.

Phil looked surprised and, apologizing for speaking out of turn, said he hadn't realized that it was going to be kept a secret. To which Bill had inquired, what secret? What on earth was Phil blathering on about? And Phil had said: “Your engagement of course. Bertha told me last night when we were all milling around saying goodbye to each other, that you and she had just got engaged to be married. She didn't tell me that you wanted to keep quiet about it for the time being, so I supposed …'