Golden Afternoon (52 page)

Mother, who had attended first aid classes throughout the Great War years and never travelled anywhere without a first aid box, soaked a roll of bandages in cold water and bandaged up the swollen ankle as well as she knew how, but could not commit herself as to whether it was only sprained and not broken. Mike was obviously in great pain and the sooner we got him to a doctor the better. That, however, was easier said than
done. As far as we knew there was not a qualified doctor within miles. But Kashmera assured us that there was a skilful
dai
(nurse) at Narora, and if we left immediately after breakfast next morning, we could reach Narora by mid-morning. If she proved to be useless — which he refused to believe — we could get the Sahib to the railway station and on to the first train to Delhi, as the next best thing. He would send a runner immediately to Narora to enlist the
dai
's services.

Mike had a nasty night but managed to drown the pain in a good deal of brandy, with the result that he had a hangover next morning to provide a counter-irritant to the ankle. We left Mahdoo and Kadera and the rest of the second boat's crew to strike camp and follow us, and left for Narora as early as we could, taking only Kashmera and two crew men.

This hasty voyage on the final day of our journey was a sad anticlimax. We had meant to take it slowly, savouring every last precious minute of it, because all of us knew that this was something that we were never likely to do again. Not ‘us Kayes', anyway. I suppose Mike could, if he had really felt like it, have repeated the trip; though not with people like my parents and Kashmera, who knew and loved every last curve and bend of that fabled river, its shoals and shifts and sandbanks, the high bluffs and the lantana and pampas grass and the occasional groups of trees, mango and silk-cotton, neem and Dâk trees, and the grey-greens of casuarina and the tall broomstick palms.

As it was, we took it as fast as we could, keeping to the main current and not bothering, when we rounded an outflung arm of land, to look out for the grey shape of a mugger or a
garial
basking in the sun near the water's edge. In places where the current slowed, Kashmera and two boatmen would man the two huge, clumsy wooden oars, and hurry us along. And when we reached Narora, the
dai
was waiting, and so were four coolies from the canal-works with a stretcher who under the
dai
's orders, carried Mike up to the nearest Canal-bungalow — the one that we used to stay in when Bets and I were children and paid our annual visit to Narora.

The
dai
turned out to be an ancient, witch-like old village woman, grey-haired and wizened, with bony, wrinkled hands, and wearing a not over-clean sari which she kept on twitching into place in order to hide her face, whenever it fell away — which it did every other minute. Mike took a dislike to her on sight and began by saying he wasn't going to let
the old hag touch him, and that she probably had at least six diseases which he could catch if she did. There followed an exhausting argument, which in the end I won, though not until I had become so exasperated with him that I would have enjoyed slapping him. He gave in eventually, and sulkily allowed the old creature to have him transferred from the hut to a mattress that was laid on the ground. Having got him there, she squatted down beside him, very carefully removed the bandages and felt his ankle with the tips of her long, bony fingers, announcing after a moment or two that the Sahib had only sprained his ankle and the bone was not broken, and she could put that right at once. Which, believe it or not, she did. Mike was fascinated. He hadn't come across the ancient Indian skill of massage before, but he swore the old lady had drawn out the pain with her fingers and got all the wrenched muscles straightened out again.

She told him he must rest it as much as possible for a week or two, but otherwise he was OK, and she advised against going off to catch a train to Delhi for the next couple of days. So Mike stayed in the Canal-bungalow, while the rest of us camped as usual in tents set up in a grove of trees above the canal-works on the banks of the river, where it widens out and slows because it is held back by a weir, and by the great sluice-gates controlling the water that flows into the Ganges Canal.

It was lovely to be back in Narora again, even though our friends the Perrins were no longer there. But it had been a mistake to let Mike sleep alone in the Canal-bungalow, with only his bearer and a
chowkidar
who was employed by the Canal Company to keep an eye on him. He was cheerful enough while we were all there with him, and after a comparatively long spell of sleeping under canvas on camp-beds, I think we all rather envied him in his more spacious and civilized bedroom in the Canal-bungalow. But once we had said our goodnights and left him, he found that even with his own bedding the regulation
narwar
bed provided by the Company was not all that comfortable and that he could not sleep — not even after counting flocks of sheep. Finally he gave up the attempt and stood himself another slug or two of brandy, which proved far more effective than the sheep. So much so that he ended up by finishing the bottle and sending his bearer down to his tent to fetch another.

I knew very well that Mike wasn't an alcoholic, or even on the way to becoming one, for he hadn't drunk more than two regulation ‘sundowners'
every evening, and one, or at the most two,
chota-pegs
— small whiskies and soda — between dinner and going to bed, during the entire trip. I think it was a combination of a lot of petty things — sheer fury at being confined to bed with a still swollen ankle, finding, when he could not sleep, that he had no one to talk to, and general frustration because a
narwar
is uncomfortable to sleep on unless you are used to it, aggravated by being made to stay still, or told that he couldn't do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it; plus the disappointment that a trip that had been so much fun, and such an enormous success, should be spoiled like this at the very last moment, and that he might even have to spend another day — even two — supine on this wretched
narwar
while the rest of the party carried out the prearranged programme for the final day in Narora: fishing for
chilwa
on the weir, and for
maseer
, the great fighting fish that are the salmon of India's rivers, in the mile-wide waters above the Canal head.

There was also the fact that he was in pain, and that Mother's first aid box contained neither painkillers nor sleeping-pills, and that all we carried in the way of drugs was brandy and a few aspirin. Whatever the cause, Mike consoled himself by getting beautifully tight and waking up in a filthy temper and with the hangover of a lifetime. What he needed was loads of sympathy and a couple of prairie oysters and I was in no condition to offer either. Because the one thing I had no idea how to deal with, and felt that I could not and would not cope with, was a drunk. And I, too, was feeling on edge and far from calm and controlled, for after all, this was to have been the day on which I decided my future, and presumably Mike's. Well, I suppose you could say that at least I did that, because we ended up having one hell of a row.

It was a thoroughly undignified one, in the course of which I remember getting tied up with a truly ghastly sequence of yes's and no's, when Mike yelled at me that he supposed that my answer was ‘no' and I yelled back, ‘Yes — I mean
no!
— I mean yes, it's no! …' Oh, dear; youth, youth! What chumps we can make of ourselves.

In the end Mike shouted at me that in that case he was returning to Delhi that very day, and what's more he was going to marry the first nice-looking girl he met —
so there!
And having got that off his chest, and forgetting in the heat of the moment that he had a sprained ankle, he stormed out of the bungalow — ruining his exit by a howl of pain as whichever foot it was hit the floor, and thereafter limping furiously away
in search of Colonel Henslow, while I shouted after him with equal fury, ‘
Good!
I'm
delighted
to hear it! I hope she turns out to be an alcoholic shrew, which is what you deserve!' — or words to that effect.

I have to admit that I really didn't believe for a moment that he meant what he said. I thought it was just Mike in a rage, and that like all those other times in Delhi when he had drunk too much and been rude and insufferable, he would be around first thing in the morning, apologizing in dust and ashes and promising never, never, never to behave like that again. And when he and Colonel Henslow actually did leave an hour or two later — I forget what excuse he and the baffled and embarrassed Colonel cooked up to explain their abrupt departure (the necessity of getting to a hospital, I imagine) — I was truly relieved, because I felt that this was a point of no return, and that what I had to decide now was not so much ‘yes' or ‘no', but just how many more times (if I made it ‘yes') I was going to accept the apologies and the promises never, never to offend in this manner again. I had already begun to feel that I had done so far too often. I needed a few Mike-free weeks to straighten things out, and we would do that together when he arrived in Tonk for the Christmas camp and the tiger shoot.

But Mike had meant exactly what he said, and within a week of arriving back in Delhi — where, as far as I can remember, he parted with the Colonel, who had other commitments — and on his own for the first time, he seems to have collected the old gang of scroungemongers again. Once his ankle was out of plaster, they swept him off to another dance at the IDG, where someone introduced him to a prominent member of that year's Fishing Fleet, one Amber Orr-Wilson, an ex-model — the job had not the star-status that it acquired in the years after the Second World War, but was still considered fairly ‘dashing'. She was not merely ‘the first nice-looking girl' that Mike met on his return to Delhi, but a spectacular creature with the figure which one would have expected from a model, and she had already caused more than a few ripples in Peshawar.

There had been, for instance, the occasion when, at a dance at the Peshawar Club, she and her partner had been dancing the tango so superlatively that the other dancers had stood back to watch, and let them have the floor. Undeterred, they continued to dance until it dawned on the spectators that either a button or a bit of elastic, or both, had given way and a vital part of Amber's underwear was gradually descending. Amber herself did not become aware of this until she suddenly discovered
that her ankles were caught up in a loop of lace and satin. Stopping, she looked down to see what it was, and then gracefully stepping out of her ‘smalls', she freed herself from her partner, stooped down, picked them up and, carrying them at arm's length, sailed across the ballroom floor and handed them, with the maximum publicity, to the scarlet-faced youth who was presumably her host, saying in bell-like tones, ‘George — park my knickers, will you?' At which there was a roar of laughter and a good many people clapped.

Women's underwear, in those days, was still considered to be ‘unmentionable' (heavens! how far we have come!), and most women, myself among them, would have been speechless with embarrassment if caught in the same predicament. I remember being inordinately impressed by that masterly exhibition of
savoir-faire
. For you have to be a member of my generation — and of the Raj too, which still preserved a code of morals and behaviour that, if no longer Victorian, still hovered on the fringe of Edwardian — to realize what a quantum leap that gesture of Amber's was in the direction of the distant future. Those of my parents' generation — Victorians all — were profoundly shocked, while my own laughed our heads off, and rethought a good many of our attitudes.

I imagine that I lost Mike from the moment that Amber first met him and decided that this was the one she wanted. I simply wasn't in her class; and even without that silly quarrel and the screaming-match that ended it, if she wanted him, I feel sure she would have annexed him without any trouble at all.

I didn't realize that I could stop dithering as to whether I wanted to marry him or not, and that I could now, to quote a future pop-song, ‘colour him gone', until Tacklow and Mother both received charming letters from him. He thanked Tacklow for laying on the Ganges trip for him, and told both of them what fun it had been and how much he'd enjoyed it, didn't even mention me in either letter, but ended both by saying that he was afraid he would not be able to come to Tonk for the Christmas camp after all, because he had had a telegram from his mother to say that she would be coming out to Delhi for Christmas, and would be staying with friends who hoped he too would stay with them. He was
so
sorry … etc., etc., but it couldn't be helped, and he wished them both a very merry Christmas and New Year. And that was that.

I didn't see him or hear from him again for several years, though I did hear about him from certain kind friends who took care to keep me
au
fait
with all the gossip about him and Amber. It seems that they swanned around India together, and on a return visit to Peshawar — where he did not look up the Captain and the Bo'sun or any ex-member of the NBN — he managed to break all the rules by smuggling Amber, dressed as a man, up to Razmak, a men-only frontier post which in those days was strictly off limits to all British or European women.

This, when discovered, raised a terrible furore, and the story goes that when the officer in command of the garrison at Razmak was telephoned by some irate brass-hat in Peshawar and asked if it was true that an Englishwoman had actually been smuggled past the sentries into tribal territory and was present in Razmak, he admitted it, and asked, on behalf of the entire Mess, if they could please keep her for a day or two before sending her back. She was a dazzler, was Amber.

Mike very nearly married her. But on the eve of the wedding,
^*
assisted apparently by a collection of his bachelor friends who were giving him an eve-of-wedding party, he got gloriously tight, and treated Amber as he used to treat me when under the influence — as though she was some unattractive stranger who had gatecrashed his party and could therefore be spoken to as rudely as possible. That attractive creature, Amber, was not used to this sort of thing, and the result was a terrific row, in the course of which the lady tore off her engagement ring and threw it in his face, announcing that as far as she was concerned the wedding was off — for good! And stormed out. She (like me!) expected him to turn up the next morning full of apologies and penitence, and when he didn't she telephoned his flat and got no answer. His mother and his best man and a selection of his friends all insisted that they hadn't an idea where he was, which could possibly have been true, because Mike, with a good deal of assistance from his resourceful mother, Lady Guernsey, had phoned ex-Able Seaman Tony Weldon NBN,
^†
whom the two of them had prevailed upon to accompany the escapee on an expedition to Canada's Hudson Bay, all expenses paid and starting at
once
. They would be responsible for booking all the tickets and for ship and hotel accommodation.