Those Wild Wyndhams (24 page)

Pamela was not openly dismissive of Mananai’s plans, but she did not leap to embrace new prospects either. Shipboard life was busy: games of deck quoits and shipboard croquet by day; and nightly concerts. Pamela had brought her guitar with her, but she sang her folk ballads rarely and socialized less. She preferred to be out on deck watching the blue horizon flash unchangeably past: marvelling at the ‘wonderful Opal days … such sunsets …
such
Waves & Sea’. At dinner she escaped from the chatter of the Captain’s table as soon as was polite and stood in the darkness on the ship’s prow, watching it plough ‘a great white
path
up the Waters’, with ‘the flying fish, & the funny porpoises, & the lovely phosphor’ lighting up its way. The greatness of the ocean, its space and darkness, gave Pamela a momentary sense of perspective and escape. Surrounded by ‘something Unimaginable … it was all perfect, & beautiful, &
great
, – & wiped away the dreadfulness of those 3 months’.
⁹

The
Ganges
docked in Bombay, and the party, accompanied by Baker-Carr, headed north for game-hunting near Peshawar, the town that lay at the mouth of the Khyber Pass on the Afghan border. All their Kipling, all the tales of India they had heard and their distillation in exhibitions visited had not prepared Pamela and the Adeanes for the country’s assault on their senses. The dusty windows of the rackety train revealed ‘a new world – new Birds, new grasses, new animals,
everything
new’. The rushing air was hot and filled with alien smells and sounds. They stretched their legs at stations ‘swarming with natives in
brilliant
clothes’, and as the train puffed and hissed at the siding drank soup quickly boiled up for them in the waiting room. Once they had reached their destination they travelled in ‘touges’, little dog-carts pulled by small sturdy ponies – ‘too delightful’, said Mananai – while bullock carts bearing their piles of luggage brought up the rear. They jolted past Buddhist rock temples and past Muslims at prayer in the mosque: ‘[they] touch the ground again & again with their foreheads … some pray out loud – calling on Allah in high mettalic [sic] tones’, Mananai reported.
¹⁰

The north-west border, from where the Khyber Pass – Kipling’s ‘narrow swordcut in the hills’ – led to Afghanistan, was tribal land, bandit country. Through the Pass wound the ‘kafilas’ of traders heading for Peshawar. The cries of the tribesmen, the clattering of iron pots over hazy campfires, the musty exotic smells of camels, carpets and musk: Kipling had imprinted all these images into the minds of the British public. They were accustomed to press reports touting imperial derring-do in the frequent skirmishes between the British and the guerrilla forces of the bandits. The slash-and-burn tactics employed by imperial forces to stabilize the region were quietly overlooked. Soldiers who burnt down villages, slaughtered livestock and destroyed food stores sat at odds with the propaganda of a noble, civilizing Empire.
¹¹

At Peshawar the party camped out in the wild and trekked over rocky terrain. By day vultures and eagles swooped overhead through sparkling blue skies; on nighttime drives through the arid country they heard the terrifying howl of jackals in the dark. ‘This
is
the land of the Bible,’ said Pamela; ‘it is
very
enchanted … & sometimes I am living in an Arabian Nights Tale – & sometimes in the old Scriptures & often – very often – in Fairytales. For there are Blue-birds here – the real Fairybird … and Night shuts down like a great Curtain on the day – & the stars quiver instead of shine.’
¹²

They parted ways with Baker-Carr, promising to meet him again in Calcutta, and travelled on to princely Rajasthan, where on a swaying howdah they made their way through the forest to the sixteenth-century fort of Chittor. As they passed through the monumental entrance gate, ‘the Native Guard played God Save the Queen … it is wonderful the way the Natives Salaam & bow down to white people’, said Mananai. They made their return at dusk, and as their elephants waded across a river the howdah began to pitch and slide. The mahout barked instructions at his passengers to shift their weight: ‘we all clung on to each other … there was
really
no fear & we were roaring with laughter all the time but it was anything but comfortable’, Mananai told her mother.
¹³

They visited acquaintances made on the
Ganges
, dined with them at Mess and reviewed the soldiers on parade, dazzled by the contrast between the dark skin of the Sikh soldiers and their vibrant red tunics and turbans. At Udaipur they toured the white stone palaces of maharajas. Mananai was appalled to find that they were furnished with pieces ‘all from Birmingham cut glass beds & chairs & tables … too dreadful’.
¹⁴
She thrived on the rough and ready nature of travelling – ‘one goes to bed
regularly
& can wash & dress quite well’ on trains – and was dazed by the sheer amount she saw: ‘to me it[’s] extraordinary to think that your little “Em-Wem” [Pamela] & “Jessie Rat” [Mananai] are seeing & doing all this – we can never be glad enough’, she wrote, before remembering the reason that had brought them there and hastily amending the line to read: ‘shall have
such
things to look back on & remember & tell you about shan’t we’.

Mananai reported proudly to her parents every conquest her little sister made, from elderly misty-eyed Englishmen on ferries, made nostalgic for ‘Home’ by Pamela’s singing, to those rather younger, attracted by her vibrancy.
¹⁵
Baker-Carr met up with the party again when they reached Calcutta. There too they found Eddy Tennant, the eldest son of the Tennant clan. Quiet, responsible, good-natured Eddy had been sent out to India to check on the progress of his sister Lucy Graham Smith. On paper he was immensely eligible: vastly wealthy, tall and good-looking. His fundamental shortcoming was summed up in one pithy sentence by his younger sister. ‘Eddy lacks
drive
,’ said Margot of her favourite brother.
¹⁶
More brutally one of Eddy’s children, who had inherited his aunt’s acidic streak, later declared that his father was so boring that he couldn’t even remember what he looked like.
¹⁷
That Pamela and Lucy were in India for the same reason did not appear to disconcert anyone. Diffidently, Eddy made his interest in Pamela plain. There was an uncomfortable afternoon when both he and Baker-Carr accompanied Mananai and Pamela to the Eden Gardens cricket ground. The group got caught in a thunderstorm and retreated to the Adeanes’ rooms to sit it out, where a drenched Eddy and Baker-Carr cast dark looks across the sitting room at one another.
¹⁸

Pamela did not mention these suitors in letters home, but told her friends that she was ‘much happier – happy even’. ‘“Miss Pam” … seems in tearing spirits and possessed of a mind that responds at once to every pleasurable stimulus,’ said Arthur to Mary, having been shown Pamela’s latest letter by George. ‘I put her at the head of all the letter writers I know at least for certain qualities … the vividness of the presentation and the life and colour … glowing in every line were extraordinary.’
¹⁹
But Pamela was not so perennially buoyant as Arthur either supposed or hoped. To Mary and to Sibell, she confided that misery still frequently leapt upon her: upon receipt of a postbag empty of letters from Harry; upon glimpsing others in love, as when the party met up with Guy and Minnie Wyndham at Lucknow, who seemed to exist in ‘a
nimbus
of pure happiness’.
²⁰

Pamela was no enemy of misery. She once proposed, in some seriousness, the instigation of a national holiday of grief: an annual two-day ‘regular out of door … celebration of being really, thoroughly, impossibly, cruelly unhappy’ in which people would only wear black and croon and rave in the streets.
²¹
Later in life she sank frequently into deep depression, sobbing in a darkened room for days, and recounting the experience at length to a select group of friends when she felt better. ‘“Life” is one damned thing after another … hardly has one pulled one’s bleeding roots from under one severing blow, than one has to trail them before another hatchet, & have yet another length hacked away … I wonder why – then – we are all sent into the world with such a longing for joy: for happiness as one’s birthright,’ she wrote to Mary later in life.
²²

The seeds of her emotional self-indulgence are plain to see in her letters written at this time, but the unhappiness of a heartbroken twenty-two-year-old is very real, her isolation in chattering, stifling rooms, bemused and angry at the hordes around her who seemed to have happiness so easily in their grasp. At those times ‘all the strength & philosophy’ that she tried to practise ‘goes for very little … one flattens ones nose against the glass window, at the hot sausages inside’, she told Sibell. In Lucknow’s steamy heat, with green parakeets chattering about her, Pamela’s heart and mind were back in rainy England with Harry.
²³

Those writing to her from England were evasive on the subject of Harry. ‘… I feel so far away & wonder sometimes if anybody but myself remembers anything about that time,’ she said to Sibell.
²⁴
Pamela felt as though a curtain had been drawn across her past as soon as she stepped on board the
Ganges
. She did not know that the story was far from forgotten and that Arthur was once more engaged in damage limitation – this time on her behalf – as the scandal threatened to rear its ugly head once more.

Of all the Souls, Lord and Lady Brownlow had felt the greatest rage, as they railed at their nephew’s ‘deception’. Lady Brownlow openly denounced Nina; Lord Brownlow refused to countenance Harry’s continued representation of Stamford, the Lincolnshire parliamentary seat that was in the peer’s control.
²⁵
In fury, Cust announced his intention to stand as the Unionist candidate for North Manchester in a by-election planned for the spring of 1894. Most of the Souls were alarmed by his impetuous decision, drawing attention to himself when he would do better to lie low. But Balfour, conscious that the previous autumn he had promised to help Harry escape social opprobrium and political ostracism if Harry would marry Nina, agreed to support him.

Millicent Fawcett, a radical Liberal Unionist and President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (the NUWSS),
caught wind of the ‘most ghastly story’ of Harry, Nina and Pamela. Appalled that Cust should represent the honest burghers of Manchester,
²⁶
she began to circulate the story around local political associations. She tried to recruit Lady Frances Balfour, a fellow suffragist, to her cause. Harry promptly sought the help of Arthur, who confronted Mrs Fawcett, fearing rightly that to leave the belligerent Harry to deal with the situation was a recipe for disaster.

The clash between Mrs Fawcett and Harry Cust posited radicalism and suffragism against historic patriarchy. ‘Up to our generation the whole of the social punishment in these cases has fallen on the woman and none or next to none on the man,’ Mrs Fawcett told Balfour. ‘But now, whether we like it or not, a movement is making itself felt towards equality … if for the last four or five generations the H Custs of the world had been disciplined by a healthy “coercion” of law and public opinion, the whole of this pitiable business might have been prevented and two lives at least saved from going to shipwreck …’
²⁷

The idea of opening out patrician Harry Cust’s behaviour to the common man’s judgement was anathema to the Souls.
Balfour, suppressing his own misgivings about Cust’s candidacy, icily told Mrs Fawcett that he could not see how episodes in Cust’s private life made him unfit for public duty. He reproved her for making ‘the unhappy story of a most unhappy woman [that is, Nina] … the common topic of political gossip’ through ‘the length & breadth of Manchester’. He threatened her with legal action if she continued to mention ‘Miss Wyndham’s’ name.
²⁸
Lady Frances explained that while she personally abhorred Cust’s behaviour, ‘all that need be known in Manchester was the seduction of his wife before marriage … and that would not tell against him in a working class constituency’.
²⁹
Cust, adopting an ill-considered and heavy-handed approach that displayed his contempt for women and for anyone he did not consider his social equal, threatened Mrs Fawcett with a libel suit for defaming himself by repeating the story.

Then, as now, justification was a total defence against defamation. One cannot defame a person by saying something about them that is true. Accordingly, and in return, Mrs Fawcett threatened to subpoena everyone who knew anything of the matter, including Balfour: all of whom she intended to call as witnesses to Harry’s actions. Prominent local politicians, many of them with Radical roots, began to weigh in, expressing their disgust at the idea that Cust might be imposed upon them by a decadent aristocratic ‘clique in London’. In June, Balfour finally told Cust, in terms courteous and unequivocal, that, for the sake of the party and the Souls, he could not stand.
³⁰
The existing Unionist candidate for North Manchester stood again, and Cust did not stand for re-election at Stamford in 1895, remaining in political exile until 1900, when he re-entered Parliament as member for Bermondsey, another working-class constituency, where presumably his past did not tell against him.

Of all this, Pamela was almost ignorant. Their party set sail from Bombay on 20 March 1894, on the
Peninsular
– ‘one of the
best
ships & we have the best cabins on board’, reported Mananai to her parents.
³¹
There were a few disappointments: Charlie had not bagged himself a tiger, and time constraints had forced them to drop items from their itinerary: ‘one can’t do everything’.
³²
Most importantly, Pamela finally seemed better. Mananai had been as encouraging as she could to Baker-Carr, on Pamela’s behalf. They left with the Lieutenant promising to write, and to visit when next in England. As Pamela and the Adeanes lay out on deck at night, looking up at the moon and stars and tousled by warm night winds, their previous crossing’s misery seemed a world away.