Golden Afternoon (60 page)

We were slightly surprised that he never came near us during the following months, even though we heard that he had actually passed through Tonk and had spoken to Saadat and one or two members of Council. We had merely supposed that he was in too much of a hurry. I can't remember who it was who first told me that Barton-Sahib had his knife into Tacklow, and why. At a guess, it was the Tikka-Sahib — a cheerful young man who delighted in gossip, always knew everything, and was a frequent visitor to Tonk. It could even have been one of the Begums, because this being India, almost everyone in Tonk apparently knew about it; and thought it was funny! Everyone, that is, except my parents, who until the balloon went up remained in happy ignorance.

Unfortunately, I can't give a detailed account of the various events that led up to what Mother called the ‘Tonk Affair', although about a year after Tacklow's death she gave me a bulky sealed package that contained,
so she said, all the relevant documents concerning it that Tacklow had kept. These included his own account of everything that had been said or done as well as the letters he had written to her at that time — which alone accounted for almost a quarter of the whole, since throughout their married life, whenever they were apart Tacklow would write to her every day. There were also copies of a couple of letters that Mother had written (most ill-advisedly) to Saadat.
Everything
was there down to the last detail, insisted Mother in floods of tears, and she was giving it to me so that one day I could write it all down, ‘so that everyone would know the truth'.

Well, perhaps she
did
possess a touch of the second sight after all, for at the time that she thrust that bursting file into my reluctant hands, I had no more intention of becoming a writer than I had of swimming the Atlantic. I was going to be an illustrator of children's books, another Arthur Rackham or Edmund Dulac. Never,
never
a writer! I took that file because I couldn't possibly have refused it, not with Mother dripping tears all over it, and behaving as though she was landing me with some kind of sacred trust. But as just then life was being pretty sticky for me without this as well, I locked it away in a suitcase and forgot all about it for the best part of another year. And when I did get round to it, it made me so
bloody
^*
angry (it still does!) that if I'd been in India at that time instead of a bed-sit in London I really think I would have hitch-hiked to Tonk to tell Saadat and Co. exactly what I thought of them, and gone on from there to Deoli to try my best to strangle the Major with my own hands; confident that no jury would convict and that the verdict would be ‘Justified homicide'.

I wept buckets over that file, just as Mother had done. My poor, darling Tacklow. I couldn't bear to think of what he had been through.

When I felt less murderous, I began to wonder what I could do with the file, and after spending hours and days of thought on it, I realized that there was literally
nothing
I could do. It had all happened several years before, and Tacklow himself was dead. It was finished.
Kutam hogia!
And I was a nobody; a penniless art student living in a sleazy ‘bedsitter' off London's King's Road and managing to live on an income of one pound five shillings a week, which was the pension of an unmarried daughter of an Indian Army Officer (and lucky to get it, for if Tacklow had been
in the British Army I wouldn't have got anything!). I had no ‘pull', and if Tacklow's friends had been unable to help him, of what use would I be?

In the end, I burnt the file. I couldn't bear to read it again and realized that I could do nothing about it. The past was the past, and the sooner I burnt it the better. Tacklow was where he would no longer care, and I couldn't spend the rest of my life lugging that bulging file of past misery and malice around with me like that tedious albatross. Anyway, I was going to be an illustrator, and I'd better get on with that …

Well, time catches up with one. I failed to make a living from my art, and ended up writing. And now, after all these years, I could almost wish (only
almost
) that I had kept that file. Because when it comes to details — names, dates, scraps of information, and so on — there is so much that I have forgotten; and what is left can so easily be dismissed as ‘what the soldier said'. For instance, I can't even remember what the Begum's name was, because, as the senior lady in the state, she was
the
Begum: the others were merely ‘so-and-so Begum'. I can only give you a rough outline of the ‘Tonk Affair', which is probably just as well, as from what I recollect of the size of that bulky dossier, a detailed account of its contents would have taken up far too many pages and been insufferably boring.

The trouble started when Saadat, running true to the tradition of too many Mogul royals, suddenly turned against his young brother Nunni-mia — who until then had been regarded as the heir apparent — and with him, his mother the Begum. I can't remember what the quarrel was about, or who started it. But from what I know of the intrigues that seem to be an integral part of
zenana
life, I would say, at a guess, that some rival pretty lady had managed to steal the heir's affections, and was scheming to get a son of hers installed as heir apparent. Whatever the reason, Nunni and his mother fell from favour and the Begum suddenly found herself virtually a prisoner in Tonk, unable to leave the state.

None of this would have happened if the old Nawab had been hale and hearty, for Nunni was his favourite son and he doted on the boy. But the old man, whose health had been failing for some months, was now seriously ill, and a gang of courtiers, counsellors, palace favourites, servants and hangers-on had suddenly begun to reassess their positions and change their loyalties in light of the fact that there would soon be a new ruler in Tonk. As a result, any number of old alliances were broken
and new ones formed; spies and tale-bearers proliferated, helping to stir up trouble, and ‘Nunni's' Begum turned to Tacklow for help.

As the heir apparent, Nunni had been expected to finish his education at the College of Princes in Ajmer, but in order for him to do so, his name must be put down in advance as a prospective pupil, and a sum of money paid over to the school — presumably to cover a certain amount of the fees in advance. This sum Saadat had suddenly refused to pay, saying he had not yet decided who should be his heir! And since without it Nunni could not be entered as a pupil, ‘Nunni's' Begum was anxious to pay it herself. But because she herself was not allowed to leave the state — and probably because the poor woman no longer knew whom she could trust — she wanted Tacklow to sell some of her jewellery for her, and see that it was paid over to the school.

This was something that Tacklow was not keen to do: he was well aware of how involved and dangerous intrigues in palace circles could be, and he had no desire to find himself being accused of persuading the Begum to part with her jewels, and pocketing the proceeds himself. And in the middle of all this, the poor old Nawab lay dying.

At first Tacklow would call at the palace once or twice a day, to sit beside the Nawab's bed holding his hand and talking to him; they had always been good friends, and the old man said that his visits made him feel better. Tacklow himself was sure that if only he would call a European doctor to treat him, there was a good chance that he would recover. But the Tonk
hakims
(doctors) bristled with rage at the very idea, and when Tacklow pleaded with Saadat and some of the senior councillors to allow an English doctor just to see the invalid and give an opinion, he found his own visits to the palace sharply curtailed. In the end, the old man himself asked to see an English doctor, and Tacklow sent for the nearest one: I don't remember where that would be, or what the doctor's name was. He was probably stationed in some outpost of Empire like Deoli. But when he arrived, Saadat said that his father had changed his mind and was ‘too ill to see him'. Or Tacklow, either.

The doctor stayed in Tonk for a day or two, waiting on the chance of being called to see the Nawab, and in the end was allowed to. But he said the case was hopeless, although he too thought if the old man could be taken into an English hospital and be treated with European drugs, and allowed some peace and quiet — and fresh air — there was a chance of him recovering. But his room was crammed with relations,
courtiers and servants, not a breath of fresh air was allowed into it, and his
hakims
were dosing him with water (in which strips of paper bearing charms or verses from the Koran written in cheap ink had been boiled), gold leaf, and even more expensive decoctions which contained emeralds and other precious stones that had been pounded to powder, or pearls dissolved in vinegar, ‘medicines' that only a King could afford to take, and which, because of their value, must do the patient some good. Tacklow, who was fond of the old Nawab, tried to make the doctor stay a bit longer. Just in case … But the doctor said he had wasted too much time in Tonk already, and had too many other patients who were in need of care.

Despite all the peculiar nostrums, the old man hung on to life and raised enough energy to insist on seeing Tacklow, whom he begged, for the sake of their friendship, to look after Nunni and see that he was entered for the College in Ajmer. Apparently he had managed to see the Begum — or, more likely, she had managed to force her way in to see him — for he seemed to know all about the plots that were being woven to push Nunni aside. He also begged Tacklow to do his best for Saadat, who, he suspected, was also in danger of being pushed aside and superseded by another member of the family: ‘Stay with him until he is safely seated on the
gudee
and cannot be deposed,' pleaded the old man, ‘and promise me that you will not let Nunni or his mother be cheated out of their rights.'

Tacklow promised. What else could he do? But having regarded Saadat as the sole trouble-maker, he was somewhat shaken by the suggestion that there might be another candidate lurking among that swarm of brothers, step-brothers and sisters, and busy plotting a
coup d'état
that would oust both Saadat and Nunni from the succession. Tacklow was inclined to take that piece of tale-bearing with a large pinch of salt. But just in case there was something in it, he took the precaution of removing the keys to the Treasury and locking them up in his office safe, to ensure that when Saadat became Nawab of Tonk he would not find that a large proportion of its contents had mysteriously disappeared. Which but for Tacklow, very nearly happened, since within the next few days not only one group of anti-Saadat relations and their supporters demanded the keys to the Treasury, but two. And both were livid when they discovered that they had been impounded by Kaye-Sahib.

At this point Saadat, faced with the imminent prospect of power or a
possible
coup d'état
, came to see Tacklow and begged him to stay on as President of the Council of State and, metaphorically speaking, hold his hand until such a time as he was firmly settled on the throne and had learned how to deal with the problems of rule and an unruly family.

Tacklow's contract with the old Nawab had still some months to run and he had been looking forward to the end of it. He had not enjoyed living in such a remote part of Rajputana. The heat and the dust-storms, the lack of electricity and made roads, the loneliness — most of all, of late, the loneliness. This last would not have worried him in the days when he was a carefree bachelor. On the contrary, as anyone who has read
The Sun in the Morning
will know, he enjoyed it. But Mother had changed all that. He was that rare creature, a one-woman man, and having found his one woman and fallen in love with her on sight, he remained in love with her for the rest of his life. He quite literally adored her, and every letter he ever wrote her was a love letter. There cannot be many women whose husbands still write to them, after a quarter of a century of marriage, as ‘My own dear, darling Love …'

He had accepted the job in Tonk because he had two unmarried daughters on his hands, and a wife who loved the fun and gaiety, and the freedom from household chores, which life in India offered in the time of the Raj. But oh, how he missed us — Mother most of all. I used to think that I meant as much to him as he did to me. But that was before I read (some five or six years after Mother's death) the letters that he wrote to her during the Tonk period, when they had been separated so often, and I realized that her happiness was the most important thing in the world to him, and that I came a very poor second.

Tacklow had often written of a much-cherished plan of his for the two of them to return to China to spend a summer together in Pei-tai-ho, where they had spent a blissful honeymoon all those years ago. They would, of course, have to take the girls with them, unless those two decided to settle for one young man instead of several, and got married. But even if they didn't, there were plenty of young men in North China. And plenty of aunts and uncles with whom they could all stay until he could find a suitable house to rent and to live in.

Judging from some of the letters Mother kept, this had been a longstanding dream of his; and had the old Nawab not offered him that job in Tonk, the chances are that he would probably have moved on to China when his work on the Treaties was finished. But with his children having
a whale of a time in India, and his darling Daisy urging him to accept the Tonk offer so that she could stay in India for a few years longer, I think he felt that he would be letting us all down if he refused.

Now, once again, with retirement and the prospect of a second honeymoon beckoning him, he wrote to Mother to tell her of the promise he had given the old Nawab, that he would do his best for Saadat — and for Nunni and the Begum (which might not be so easy since, if rumour were true, their interests could well conflict). Also that Saadat was pressing him to stay on for a further term as President of the Council of State when his term of office ended. This would mean at least two more years in Tonk. Probably three, and it was not a prospect he looked forward to. What did Mother think?