Golden Afternoon (64 page)

It needed a lot of coaxing, but in the end I managed to inveigle the poor man into letting me have just a peep. And that was all it was. He hurried me down a series of red-carpeted corridors and stopped by a door from behind which came the sounds of sitar and tabla accompanying a shrill Indian soprano, punctuated by and almost lost in roars of male laughter. The door-keeper, looking startled and disapproving, began to
protest in a hushed whisper, and after a brief colloquy, and the passing of something that I took to be a five-rupee note, he opened the door just wide enough for me to stick my head inside …

So
this
was why there was such a shortage of Englishmen on the ballroom floor and in the rooms immediately surrounding it! I had thought they must have become bored or drunk too much champagne, and left early. But here they all were — or far too many of them, anyway — laughing their heads off at the most famous
nautch
-girl in India, and clapping almost every word she said. As for the ‘dancing-girl' herself, she may have been pretty once, but now, to my young eyes, she was just a fat old woman bundled up in a glittery sari over a Rajputana-style skirt, lavishly embroidered with gold thread and spangles, that stopped just above her ankles; her feet were bare below jingling anklets, and like the lady who rode a white horse to Banbury Cross, she had ‘rings on her fingers and bells on her toes' — and more in her ears and her nose as well. As for her dancing, it was restricted by the fact that she had a brought a small carpet with her, one that couldn't have been larger than the average bathmat, and she never moved off it. Standing on it, she stamped and shimmied and swung her massive hips so that her skirts whirled and undulated to the twanging of the sitar and the thumping of the tabla. Her arms and her bejewelled neck did more dancing than her stamping feet, and the movements of her eyes and chin and those supple, elegant hands were a marvel to behold.

I haven't got a good enough ear to appreciate Indian music, and, perhaps fortunately, my Hindustani was no longer good enough to take in more than a fraction of the words she was singing, for they were undoubtedly not of the kind that Mother would have approved. But her strictly male audience, which included His Highness and every man, Indian or British, who could manage to sneak off while his womenfolk were not looking, were literally mopping their eyes and rocking in their seats with laughter. And from that brief look at her I realized that however much she had been paid for her performance she was worth every anna of it. I wish I could have seen more of it, but my agitated young friend tugged at my arm and pulled me back after a mere minute or two, and hurried me back along the corridors to the ballroom.

I was aware that a lot of correspondence was going on between Tacklow and Mother's friends and relations in China about our move there, and was relieved to learn that there was no chance of our booking one of the
Brysons' bungalows at Pei-tai-ho that summer, or of getting a passage to Shanghai and Tientsin that would land us up there at the right time of year — Mother did not fancy getting involved with the typhoon season, and I don't blame her. And though Tacklow, if he had had the choice, would have left at once, our departure for China was eventually arranged for the spring of the following year, when a bungalow at Pei-tai-ho would be at our disposal for the summer — and for as many of the following summers as we chose — and a passage booked on a China-going ship at a time that would miss the freezing North China winters, and land us in Shanghai at the best time of year to fit in with visits to those of Mother's relations whom she particularly wanted to see.

I still had a whole year stretching out before me — more than a full year. A whole summer and part of autumn in Kashmir, and after that a cold weather season in Delhi. Why worry about anything after that? I had a wonderful summer.

That party, plus a final cabaret show and dinner-dance at Nedou's, and Bets's birthday on 13 October, for which Ken Hadow again laid on a party at the Hadows' hut in Gulmarg, brought the Kashmir season to a close for us.

The summer visitors had already begun to leave in droves as the nights became colder and the snow-line crept downward across Apharwat. And now the long avenue of Lombardy poplars leading from Srinagar to Barramulla turned from green to gold, and Mother, Bets and I, who with Tacklow and Angie would be among the last to leave, were out with our paintboxes nearly every day. I have never been able to decide whether the valley was more beautiful in autumn than in spring. Spring in the valley was Paradise regained. But then autumn can be spectacular, for the grass and the poplars turn gold and the willows bright yellow, and with the first touch of frost the leaves on the chenars turn every shade of red from scarlet to magenta, and all this gorgeous bonfire of colour blazes up against a background of chalk-white snow-peaks and a deep blue sky.

We left Kashmir in early November, without knowing when, if ever, we should see it again. And this was one time when I would have welcomed sullen skies, a whingeing wind and spitting rain, not only because it suited my mood, but because it would have made saying goodbye to the valley easier. Instead, Kashmir chose to give us a royal send-off with one of its
most brilliant days. The kind of day that stays fresh in your mind for ever.

The snow-peaks glittered against a cloudless sky, and there was just enough breeze to make the last of the poplar leaves flutter down and carpet our road with gold coins. The whole valley sang with colour and the red and orange and gold of the leaves that flickered and floated down in the brilliant air in a ballet of colour seemed to dance to the strings of an unseen orchestra. Every yard of the road was beautiful that morning. I could not help wondering if anything in China could possibly compare with this.

We left Kashmir by the Banihal route because the Baramulla one was blocked, and we stopped at the last turn on that long zig-zag road that leads to the tunnel near the crest of the pass, through which one leaves the valley. We climbed out and walked back to stand by the low stone wall that edged the road, to look down at the red and gold valley that now lay so far below us. Bets and I were probably sharing the same thought: would we ever come back? And Tacklow and Mother, at a guess, were thinking of a future in the country where their married life had begun, Tacklow thankful to be leaving a country in which he felt he had been publicly disgraced for one in which he had been so blissfully happy.

I don't remember that any of us said anything. We just looked for about five minutes, then got into the cars again and drove through the tunnel and down another twisting, winding, zig-zagging road on the other side of the mountain and away to the plains, where after a night or two on the way we reached the same flat-roofed bungalow, 80/1 The Mall, which Tacklow had once again rented for us for the Delhi season.

Burma Shell happened to have set up a chummery in Old Delhi that year, and since one of the members, Oliver de St Croix (known to one and all as ‘Crux'), was a particular friend of ours, almost as soon as we arrived we found ourselves involved in a round of parties. That was the gayest of seasons, a last merry-go-round of fun and party-going.

It began with a staid dinner party, hosted by Crux, which proved to be a launching-pad from which other parties proliferated. At one of the earliest of these, given by the members of the Burma Shell Chummery in Underhill Lane, Old Delhi, Bets met, and fell instantly in love with, one of its members, W. H. Pardey, a tall rugger-playing type with a Bulldog Drummond moustache, known to his friends as ‘Cecil', though that was not his name. It was, however, Tacklow's name. As far as Mother was concerned there was only one Cecil, so she jibbed at having another one
as a constant caller at 80/1 and demanded to know why he was always called ‘Cecil' when his initials were W. H.? The explanation, blithely given by a member of his chummery, was that the young Pardey had acquired the nickname of ‘Cess' because he was credited by his little schoolmates with having ‘a mind like a cesspool'. This was not, as you may have imagined, well received.

This unfortunate nickname had followed him out to India, where someone, hearing him hailed as ‘Cess' by a chum, leapt to the conclusion that his Christian name must be Cecil. And since no one had bothered to correct it, ‘Cecil' he became. And would have remained, if Mother had not flatly refused to use it. Tacklow thought it was all rather funny, and pointed out to her that a cavalry general of their acquaintance had originally been introduced to him, many years earlier when Tacklow was doing an attachment to his regiment, with the unforgettable words, ‘And this chap, if you can believe it, rejoices in the name of Offley Bohun Stovin Fairless Shaw. But you don't have to let that worry you, because we always call him “Stinker”.'
^*

Mother refused to be amused, and told Bets that if she was going to spend most of her time dancing and picnicking and playing tennis in this young man's company, she had better decide on what she wanted us to call him, because ‘Cecil' was
out
. And if Bets thought that it was time her parents stopped calling him ‘Mr Pardey', when all the other young men she knew were addressed, or referred to, by their Christian names, then what did his
family
call him? ‘Bill,' said Bets — in a
‘so there!'
tone of voice. Those initials stood for ‘William Henry', and Mother objected to using Bill — or William either — on the grounds that she would never be sure which Bill (or William) was being referred to. It would have to be Henry. She had a shot at it the next time he was around (which was practically every minute of his out-of-office hours) and encountered an obstinacy equal to her own.

Our Mr Pardey — or rather
Bets's
Mr Pardey — had no intention of answering to the name of Henry. It seems he had an uncle or a cousin or someone named Henry with whom he was not on speaking terms and disliked intensely: something to that effect. I forget the details, but ‘Henry'
was a non-starter, and that was that. Mother compromised by deciding to call him by his initials, and he became ‘W. H. P.' from then on. I suspect he resented this, though he never said so: at least it put him apart from the Toms, Kens, Sammys, Johns, Jimmys et al. with whom Bets went out dancing and picnicking every night of that light-hearted season.

There had always been as many, if not more, young men than girls around during those summer seasons in Kashmir, most of them footloose and fancy-free, and on leave. So all one had to do was to pair up with a temporary ‘summertime soul-mate', collect a gang of like-minded friends, and in their company enjoy oneself in one of the loveliest and most romantic settings that anyone could dream of. Never mind that there were wars and rumours of wars in far-away Europe, and that people were beginning to talk about a man called Hitler and laugh at another called Mussolini. We were young and in love with love; and Noël Coward wrote a song that said it all for all of us, about not regretting past happiness or fun that didn't last. Anyway, some of the fun did last and ended in a haze of orange-blossom and wedding bells and (we hoped) ‘happy-ever-after'. Some led to broken hearts and high words, but the majority were remembered with deep affection and no regrets. So I didn't realize until very late in the day that Bets was seriously taken with W. H. P. And also of course, because he wasn't my type at all, I didn't really see him, except superficially and in passing, and thought that Bets was still playing the field and that W. H. P. would just be a pleasant memory to take with her when we sailed for China in the spring.

Bets, however, had fallen in head-first at the deep end. And I suppose she had some excuse, for she had always had a weakness for men with moustaches (I preferred them clean-shaven myself) and when she met him he was convalescing from some operation or other — kidney, she thinks — which had led him to losing a lot of weight. He was a big man who needed to watch his weight and did not always do so. But he was looking his very best when Bets first saw him, and she says that the minute she laid eyes on him she thought, ‘
Oh
, what a
gorgeous
man!' And was lost. I don't think I can have been paying much attention, because it was at that same party that I was introduced to a charming, high-spirited young
box-wallah
by the name of Neil Pierce, who turned out to be a friend of W. H. P.'s — they had often played against each other in Madras, where both had been members of their respective firms' rugger teams.

Neil was the greatest fun, and would, we thought, have made excellent
Nageem Bagh Navy material. We collected a ‘gang' in time-honoured fashion, and manoeuvred in company, as the NBN had done two years earlier, attending the various seasonal gaieties
en masse
— the Christmas party at the Club, the Horse Show and the Horse Show Ball, the fancy-dress ball and the Bachelors' Ball, and the Saturday night dances. And every Sunday, after morning service at ‘Sikandar-Sahib's' Church, St James's by the Kashmir Gate, Neil, W. H. P., Bets and I would make for whatever spot had been arranged to picnic, where we would meet the others and spend the rest of the day. Sunday was always picnic day. But whenever the moon was full we arranged a moonlight picnic, or, if that was not possible, then the night before or just after it was full, either at Tuglukabad or, preferably, Haus Khas, the ruined remains of a tank and a college built in the reign of the Emperor Feroz Shah.

Those moonlight picnics, like the ones at Chasma Shai in Kashmir, were pure magic, accompanied by the sugar-sweet melodies of a wind-up gramophone in the enormous night silence of a moonlit world that had not yet become too besotted by petrol-driven engines, aeroplanes and transistor radios blaring out rock-'n'-roll. And where, when no gramophone was playing and no one happened to be talking, you could hear the breeze whispering through the broken sandstone and marble tracery of buildings that had in their day been part of great cities and centres of learning. Better still, when the moon was low, one could see the stars as our children and grandchildren will never see them: clear and sharp and sparkling in a sky that even in dusty India was, compared to today's, still almost free from pollution.