1977 (26 page)

you’d make.

“He said it in front of Tusker. Moreover, Mr Turner, he said it
to
Tusker. ‘You’re taking

away a very promising little leading lady, but then she’ll have her chance in India, won’t she,

and she’s leading lady today anyway.’

“So why, why, when my chance came did he deny it to me? I mean in
The Wind and The

Rain
. It can’t have been all my fault. Even if you tell a man you adore the theatre but would

be terribly scared to go on, isn’t he capable of realizing that that is only really an act and that

being scared is one way of giving a good performance? And hadn’t he heard, hadn’t he

listened, hadn’t he taken in that producer’s opinion?

“You may think no, he hadn’t heard, hadn’t listened, hadn’t taken in anything, but you’ve

only seen him as he is now, after what I call his personality change. When he talks nowadays

he seems to talk inconsequentially. He doesn’t seem interested in listening to any voice but

his own or weighing any opinion but his own. But he takes things in. Oh yes. He hears. He

listens. But doesn’t let on. And he rejects and obfuscates. He rejects anything he hears which

it doesn’t suit him to hear.

“Of course you’ve only seen him with what I call his visitor’s face on, talking nineteen to

the dozen. It’s different when we’re alone. Sometimes hours go by without him saying a

word. Even so he talks more than he used to. One seldom heard his opinion about anything

in those days. But his behaviour was impeccable. Never flamboyant. The very image of

reliability. The first view I had of him was his back view, standing at the window of the

waiting room, looking out. I said, ‘Captain Smalley?’ and he turned round. I’d always

imagined him lean and brown, a soldier in uniform, instead of which there he was, not over

tall, thickset rather than lean, in civilian clothes, really quite ordinary. But in spite of that he

was not, no, not at all a disappointment. He had such a pleasant,
open
look, and when I

explained that Mr Smith was engaged and that I was his secretary he said, ‘Are you LL? You

must be.’

“I was so touched. Touched that he had noticed such a little thing. The GJS/LL at the

bottom of the firm’s letters. From the beginning then, you see, I had reason to think of him

as an observant person.

“This was the summer of 1930. His first long home leave. He was going back to India in

early November. The girls in the office guessed what was in the wind long before I woke up

to the fact that he wasn’t just being decent to his solicitor’s secretary, ready to pass the time

of day with her if he arrived early for an appointment. Arriving early became a habit.

“Then one day, Mr Turner, he was late for once. It was the last appointment of the day.

When he came out from seeing Mr Smith he found me with my hat and coat on and the

typewriter covered. He realized he’d kept me late and asked if he could drop me off

anywhere on his way to Bayswater.

“He got a cab in Chancery Lane and on the way to Bloomsbury I thought suddenly, poor

Captain Smalley. He’s a bit shy like me, and also finds London dull after all those years in the

gorgeous East. He’s probably longing to get back there, where all his friends are. And then it

struck me that he had been ringing and visiting the office rather more often than was

absolutely essential for someone whose affairs were comparatively simple and easily

conducted even when he was thousands of miles away. It’s that of course which the other

girls had noticed.

“So after that lift home in the cab I let my mind open to this possibility that perhaps he

came because he had few friends in London and quite liked talking to me not only because

he was lonely, but perhaps for myself —

“Myself as myself, myself as a woman who although working as a secretary and
having
to

work was all the same what we used to call (Heavens, Mr Turner, how old-fashioned it

sounds) a gentlewoman, whose father was in the Church and whose mother although only a

poor relation nevertheless was related to the late Sir Perceval Large of Piers Cooney Hall,

Piers Cooney, in Somerset, where my father had had his first curacy. Tusker knew about

Piers Cooney because he’d asked if I knew Dorset and I’d said no but I knew a bit of

Somerset and explained how for three glorious summers just after the war the twins and I

had spent a fortnight there and why this was and what the connexions were. I told him as

much as I did because I didn’t want to pass myself off as someone with connexions better

than they actually were.

“A few days after that cab drive he rang again. And what he said confirmed my thoughts

about him being a lonely man. He said he had two stalls for a show that night and would I

care to go with him, and that if so he’d pick me up at my digs in time to fit in a bite to eat

somewhere first, just a bite because we could have supper afterwards.

“I had no lunch that day, because after I’d put the phone down I remembered he’d said

stalls and in those days one dressed for stalls and dress circle, or did if one cared about doing

things properly, and I thought that if Captain Smalley had misjudged me and turned up in

day clothes I could always change back in five minutes but at least he’d know he needn’t

worry about inviting me out again to a place where it would embarrass him
not
to be dressed.

“So I spent the whole lunch hour in Oxford Street. I almost broke the bank. Not on a

dress. I had a long dress, a black chiffon. And I had a stole. Rabbit, dyed as black as sable. It

was my only evening rig. I’d brought it up from home in the Spring of that year when I felt

myself coming out of my shell and anticipated a need to have it by me in town. And here

was the need. What I broke the bank on was a pair of good shoes and a pair of good gloves.

Black shoes and black gloves. Oh, I paid the earth. But one had to on things like that.

“And then I bought a bag. How well I remember the bag. An evening bag. Dark green

moiré silk, and a chiffon handkerchief to match. Just this one statement of colour, Mr

Turner. I have always had to be careful about colour. My eyes never seem to have quite

made up their minds about being grey, blue, green or violet. In those days the faint green

tinge could be picked up by a green accessory. Later, by wearing deep red. Then the green

faded from my eyes forever. But this is woman’s talk. It couldn’t interest you.

“The black stole, the black chiffon dress, the shoes and gloves, and then the bag. A lovely

July evening. I was going to the ball, Mr Turner, and the coach called promptly.

“And he was dressed. He complimented me on the room. I always kept it neat and tidy.

I’ve called it a bed-sitter but there were two little rooms, the sitter and the bed, with

connecting doors. I’d bought some sherry. After we’d had a drink I went to fetch my stole

and bag. When I came out he was gazing out of the window just as I’d seen him that first

day at the office. And then he turned round.

“He didn’t say anything and I couldn’t see his face clearly. The sun was shining in. I was in

its glare. But I felt that its warmth and light were coming from him as well. I remember the

whole of the rest of the summer like that. Sun, sun, endless sun. Women need the sun.

There’s plenty of it in India but that’s not the kind of sun I mean. The kind I mean is the

kind that if it’s absent makes you feel your heart is undernourished and eventually that you

are dying, very slowly. Of neglect.

“And it was strange but for me the sun started to go behind a cloud very soon after we got

to India. So much sun otherwise. Days and days, weeks and weeks of sun. Not a cloud in the

sky. Only this other cloud, so small at first. The cloud of feeling that as Tusker’s wife I didn’t

please people much. That Tusker didn’t please them either. That I no longer really pleased

Tusker. The cloud grew bigger then.

“It vanished when we went to Mudpore, although in Mudpore it rained and rained, week

after week. Most people loved the rains at first and were happy for a week or two after the

monsoon broke. Then they got irritable. But I was happy all the time. Tusker thought I was

happy because of the prince and the palaces and the elephants, happy in Mudpore because

Mudpore was India as I’d imagined it. And partly that was why. Partly it was because I

wasn’t beset, yes, that’s the word, beset by women who in Mahwar were cruel to me in order

to be kind. But mostly I loved Mudpore because Tusker was happy there too, and I realized

that like me he was something of a solitary person but that this might be a solitariness we

could share. There were no other English people in that little state. The Political Agent

seldom visited. Tusker liked working alone and he liked working with Indians. And because

he was happy he was good to me.

“I wanted never, never to leave Mudpore. But we left Mudpore and there was no other

Mudpore ever again, only a succession of places like Mahwar, where cards had to be left and

ps and qs minded, and the army lists studied to be sure you knew who was who and who

was senior to whom. I didn’t object in principle. I never rebelled. Neither did Tusker. But

strangely, Mr Turner, so very strangely, I think we rebelled against one another. The rains

were over when we left Mudpore, and the sky hadn’t a cloud in it except that little one again,

coming up over the horizon as if it had been waiting for me to come back to reality, the

cloud of Tusker’s never explained withdrawal which I’d first felt the chill of in Mahwar and

which grew and grew and for years now has largely filled my sky. I expect my own cloud has

filled his.

“I ought not to be telling you this. But Sarah said you’d be interested to talk to people who

had stayed on and that can only mean you want to know what it has been like, but of course

it has not been
like
anything because it has been different for everybody, just as it has been

different for me and different again for Tusker, only I don’t know just in what way different

because we do not communicate. At the deepest level we do not know what the other one is

thinking or feeling and you might think that after forty years of marriage we could have got

around to that, and I really don’t think it’s been anything to do with our not having had

children, which is one thing he has never
blamed
me for, nor I him, and I don’t think that it’s

been anything in particular to do with India, although that must have helped, because when I

look back on it, when I sit back and concentrate on it, I feel that India brought out all my

very worst qualities. I don’t mean
this
India, though Heaven help me I sometimes don’t see a

great deal of difference between theirs and the one in which
I
was a memsahib, but our

India, British India, which kept me in my place, bottled up and bottled in, and brain-washed

me into believing that nothing was more important than to do everything my place required

me to do to be a perfectly complementary image of Tusker and
his
position. Do no less,

certainly no more, except to the extent that one might judge doing an allowable bit more

might help him.

“And you might think that actually I was ideal material, malleable clay. I was. I’d been

brought up to know my place. But I thought when I married Tusker and came out that all

that was over. I thought Tusker was rescuing me from it. But he was only taking me back to

the Vicarage. Father went into his study or off to Church or on his rounds of the parish.

Tusker went off to the
daftar
. And little Mrs Smalley went off to a sort of Coyne, Coyne,

Smith and Coyne run entirely by women. ‘You mean you can actually write shorthand, Mrs

Smalley?’ And up went the eyebrows. You could see them thinking, ‘We’ll have to make the

best of her.’ Which meant making use of me, so that although I was always on this

committee and that committee I was on it but not of it.

“And there were these rigid levels of the hierarchy. Put it this way, Mr Turner, if you were a

Captain’s wife there were always other Captain’s wives whose husbands were senior. Even a

day or two’s seniority mattered. You were supposed to know, you were supposed to find

out, and if you didn’t know they made it plain you’d made a gaffe. And above them were the

Majors’ wives. And when Tusker became a major then there were senior Mrs Majors not to

mention Mrs Colonels and Mrs Brigadiers and Mrs Generals all living in that heady

atmosphere of the upper air. Necessary, necessary, yes, but oh so often not easy to bear. I

remember the little thrill I felt when a senior colonel’s lady called me Lucy when Tusker was