Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  Aud’s father, Sir Evelyn Wrench, as the head of India’s railways, had been allotted one of the larger and more attractive of New Delhi’s Baker’s Ovens, number 12 King George’s Avenue, and I painted a large pastel-coloured mural on the wall above the fireplace in Aud’s bedroom, a decorative affair of Harlequin serenading Columbine, painted directly on to the whitewashed wall in poster paint. Mother took a snapshot of it, and many years later I did a copy of it on another whitewashed wall, this time in a bedroom in the British Consulate at Khorramshar in Persia.* This copy survived into the 1950s, only to be blown to bits when Khorramshar was reduced to rubble during the ferocious battles between Iran and Iraq. Some time during the Second World War years, the house on King George’s Avenue was briefly occupied by the Mountbattens, and I was told that when the officials of the Public Works Department, or whatever, gave orders for the entire house to be repainted before the ‘Supremo’ moved in, Lady Louis had asked that the mural should not be touched. So, for all I know, it may still be there.

  Aud designed me a spectacular evening dress and helped me choose the material at the Tree-Shop, which still flourished in the Chandri Chowk in the shadow of the Clock Tower. She also stood over our verandah darzi (tailor), who made it up, and when it was finished to her satisfaction she embroidered the cunningly draped top with a spatter of small square, cerise-coloured sequins. The end result was a triumph that would not have disgraced the great Stiebel* himself and I fancied myself in it no end.

  With the bazaars and shopping centres of New and Old Delhi crammed with fantastically beautiful materials that cost only a few annas a yard, plus the astonishing skill of the verandah darzis who, it seemed, could copy anything — you only had to show them a picture — it was no wonder that one of the most popular pastimes of the Raj years was the fancy-dress dance. The Horse Show Ball was always a fancy-dress affair and so was the Bachelors’ Ball which by tradition wound up the season. I attended the first dressed as the young Queen Victoria, wearing a black velvet crinoline that I bought for the enormous sum of ten rupees from a friend of the Wrenches who had had it made by some purveyor of fancy dresses in London. I kept it for years. With additions or subtractions and with or without the crinoline (which was a real one, constructed out of grey alpaca and whalebone), it did yeoman service at any number of fancy-dress dances. It featured again at that year’s Bachelors’ Ball (this time minus its black velvet sleeves, which had been removed and replaced by long medieval ones of lilac satin sewn with large artificial pearls). On this occasion, I seized the chance of showing off my hair, which by now reached below my waist. And very fetching it looked, flowing down my back from under a cap made from a network of pearls. The chaps loved it, and it created quite a sensation: the ‘shingle’ had been all the rage throughout the Roaring Twenties, and by now people were beginning to forget what long hair looked like. Well, it looked pretty good on me, and I regret to say that I traded on its novelty-value shamelessly, letting it down on every possible occasion from fancy-dress affairs to bathing picnics, until a year or so later a girl called Leila Apcar appeared upon the scene and trumped my modest ace with a Rapunzel-like supply of the most gorgeous pale gold hair you ever saw.

  Since Leila was also an outstandingly pretty girl, I gave up appearing at fancy-dress dances as Queen Guinevere or Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair or whoever, and a year later succeeded in badgering my reluctant parents into letting me join the ranks of the shingle-brigade: a great improvement on those two hideous coils of tightly plaited hair exactly like a pair of earphones, that gave me the appearance of a schoolmarm. There were not all that many fancy-dress revels and bathing picnics!

  Mother still had a great many friends in Delhi, among them the parents of Aunt Bee’s niece, Maxine Mitchell, the small girl who had spent a summer holiday with us in a rented house in the Isle of Wight and used to drive us nuts by following us around wherever we went, like an adoring puppy. Mrs Mitchell was a particular friend of Mother’s, and I admired her enormously. She was not only very pretty, but she dressed beautifully and in the sort of clothes that even at that age I realized, with awe and admiration, no verandah darzi, however skilful, could possibly have copied. Here at last was someone who wore models designed, cut and sewn by experts, the sort of dresses that ordinary women could never aspire to and that would for ever be out of my reach. So you can imagine my rapture when, one afternoon, she presented me with one of those fabulous outfits — the only Paris model I have ever owned, and certainly one of the most exciting presents I have ever received.

  It had been designed to be worn at cocktail parties and consisted of a slip of a dress in pale, pinky-beige crěpe de Chine, short and sleeveless, and worn under a finger-length, satin-lined coat of the same material, embroidered all over with a shimmering web of matching pearls, beads and sequins.

  Mrs Mitchell had apologized for the fact that the outfit would soon be terribly dated, since hems were already beginning to descend while waists, which had vanished a decade earlier, were returning to favour. She was, she said, afraid that every line of the enchanting confection she had just given me would soon be old hat. As if I cared! The mere possession of that glamorous outfit was enough to lift my spirits into the stratosphere, although Mrs Mitchell was right about the changing fashion; for in no time at all out went the boyish flat-as-a-board figure, and bosoms were in again. And with them, after an absence of many years, were waists. Belts and sashes returned there after a prolonged sojourn around the hip, and down went hems once more, so that the skimpy dress of my lovely Chanel model was soon to look as dated as an Edwardian bustle.

  The dampness and humidity of another monsoon (added to the fact that it was too tight for me) helped to split the material, and I was forced to abandon it. But the Tree-Shop provided me with crěpe de Chine, and the skill of the India dyers, who, for a modest sum, will match the exact tone and colour of any pattern you choose to give them, meant that I was able to have a new darzi-made dress to go under that beautiful coat. I wore the coat for years, and would probably still have it if only the material had been able to stand up to the climate. It got frailer and frailer; the silk frayed and split and began to shed its beads and sequins and develop bald patches, and I was forced to abandon it, though I can’t remember how or when it passed out of my life.

  I still possess a fragment of another dress that I acquired that year. This one, too, was worn until it disintegrated, but I cut a piece off the remains and kept it as a souvenir. (I have these silly ideas about some inanimate objects.) It is now in one of our many scrapbook-cum-photograph albums, and I hope to be able to include myself wearing it in this book.

  * Or, if you prefer, Iran.

  * Victor Stiebel, a famous London couturier, whose style I admired enormously.

  Chapter 8

  Back once more in our tents behind the Club, I discovered that more of our childhood friends and acquaintances had returned to Delhi — among them Peggy Spence, Sybil Roberts and Phyllis Moncrieff-Smith, plus their parents. I also made a new friend, one Olive Targett, the occupant of a tent just behind my own. Olive, who was a few years older than me, had come out to India to spend a season in Delhi under the chaperonage of her bachelor brother, Robert, who was one of the Club’s resident members and had a fairly senior job in the Stores Department.

  Olive told me in strict confidence that she was unofficially engaged to a young man in England, and that these few months in India were in the nature of a final fling before settling down to be a model wife and mother. But since she did not wear an engagement ring, and was pretty and very popular, none of the swains whose hearts she collected that season were aware that they were wasting their time on a girl who was already ‘bespoke’.

  There was never an evening when Olive was not booked to go out dining or dancing (usually both), and I still remember the shock I received on discovering, between awe and admiration, that, except for a minute pair of ‘bafflers’ (twenties slang for panties), she wore nothing under her d
ress. I remember sitting in her tent one evening, chatting while she got ready to go out to a dance and watching her put on a pair of silk stockings, ensuring that they stayed up above the knee by rolling them and tucking in a pi, that smallest of Indian coins, as an anchor. (Your grandmother can probably show you how this was done.) I knew that she had nothing else on under the loose silk kimono she was wearing, so when my eye fell on the clock as she dealt with her hair and her make-up, I said anxiously, ‘For goodness sake, Olive. Do you know what the time is? You’re being called for in exactly two minutes.’

  ‘That’s all I need,’ said Olive, blithely. And, flinging off the kimono, she donned the obligatory pair of crěpe de Chine bafflers, wriggled into a tube of something gold and sparkly that was supported by the thinnest of shoulder-straps, stepped into a pair of matching high-heeled shoes, and, picking up a beaded bag and her evening cloak, announced that she was ready — ‘On the dot! And here comes Reggie,’ or Tom or Dick or Harry, or whoever was taking her out that night. ‘Goodnight, darling.’ And she was off and away.

  I was astounded. The idea that a girl could go gaily off to a party wearing practically nothing under one of the skimpy dance dresses of the twenties struck me as incredibly daring, and more than a little shocking. Even if I had had a dress like hers I would still have considered myself undressed unless I put on layers of underclothes: a vest, a bra, silk stockings and a suspender-belt to keep them up, a pair of camiknickers that combined wide-legged panties and a camisole top, and finally a petticoat. All this before I topped it off with a dress! Olive’s evening dresses were exquisite, and not one of them could possibly have been run up by some ‘little woman around the corner’, let alone a verandah darzi. I admired everything about her, her assurance most of all — probably because I myself had none. This circumstance was not improved, on the social side, by the fact that Tacklow’s pension, now gravely reduced due to his commuting some of it in order to pay for our passages out to India, was not sufficient, even with the payment he received for the work that he had returned to do, to pay for parties for us that better-off parents, who lived in style in the Baker-built houses of New Delhi, gave for their daughters prior to every dance at Maiden’s Hotel or at the Club, or a ball at Viceroy’s House.

  Poor Tacklow simply could not afford to entertain for us, except on a very modest scale, and I was soon to discover that Gerry’s disclosures as to the prevailing social pitfalls were correct. Unattached men, who were very much in the minority, had become so spoilt that like the ‘Deb’s Delights’ of the London season, they would never accept the first invitation they received, but would wait until they received several, and then choose the one that offered the best prospect of a good dinner before the dance and the most lavish supply of drinks during the evening. And as if this situation by itself was not guaranteed to give a bad headache to any mother of two unmarried daughters and a very lean purse, mine made it even more difficult for herself by doing her best to see that if I were invited to a party, Bets would go too. Yes, she had promised once that Bets would not ‘come out’ until she was seventeen. But as she told her friends, she couldn’t bear to see ‘poor little Bets’ left out of anything. It was soon known to every hostess in Delhi that if you invited Daisy Kaye’s elder daughter to a party you had to have the younger one as well. And that meant another two men instead of one: four guests straight off! So as you can imagine, I didn’t get many invitations. I decided, sadly, that this was due to my lack of charm and social small-talk, allied to the fact that I didn’t play bridge, couldn’t talk ‘horse’, did not ride or play golf, was a useless partner at tennis and a pretty indifferent one on a ballroom floor. In short, I had nothing whatever to offer by way of ‘singing for my supper’. I have seldom felt so inadequate, and it was not until Gerry Ross arrived in Delhi that I learned from that seasoned campaigner the real reason for the sudden dearth of Invitations to the Ball.

  This information, which might have been expected to add to my depression, in fact cheered me up considerably; it was only Mother being dotingly maternal about her ‘baby’, and not, as I had feared, me being hopelessly dull and boring. The relief that this information brought was enormous and considerably increased by the discovery that even so dashing and popular a ‘Week Queen’ as Gerry could have her setbacks. For I had learned in Cawnpore that she (in company with any number of other women, both young and not so young) had fallen for the charms of one of Delhi’s most attractive bachelors, a Flying Officer Stephens, whom everyone knew as ‘Steve’, and who during the previous season had apparently given Gerry reason to believe that he was one of her conquests — in fact practically her personal property.

  However, that was last year; and now, arriving in Delhi expecting to carry on where they had left off, she was outraged to discover that she had been cut out by a grass widow — and one who was several years her senior at that! ‘She’s twenty-five if she’s a day!’ I remember her rushing into my tent like an infuriated whirlwind to tell me all about it: ‘And they are going to the dance here tonight — together,’ finished Gerry through gritted teeth. ‘Well, if she thinks she’s going to get him away from me, she’s wrong — lend me a pair of gunmetal stockings!’

  Sadly, I can’t remember if the gunmetal stockings were a success or not. But I have never forgotten Steve, for he was, in addition to his other talents, an excellent dancer, and one of the very few men I was ever to dance with (and that was only once!) who gave me the illusion that I too was an expert. Had he given me the faintest encouragement I am quite sure that I too would have fallen hopelessly in love with him. But apart from that single dance, he was never more than pleasantly polite to me. So I fell in love instead with Olive’s brother, Bob Targett, who was nothing much to look at, but possessed more than his fair share of charm.

  Bob must have been pushing forty (roughly the same age as Tacklow had been when he fell in love with my mother, whom he still quite obviously adored), and he was not what you would call ‘handsome’. But it was an attractive face, and in spite of the fact that he wore hornrimmed spectacles he had the reputation of being a ‘ladies’ man’; though to date, his liaisons had always been with married women. He was strictly a bachelor type, who had no intention of getting involved in matrimony if he could help it.

  I don’t know what he saw in me, for I wasn’t his type at all. He preferred married women, who knew the rules of the game and didn’t embarrass him by making claims on him; and his favourite pastime was bridge, a game at which he was in the championship class. When Lord Willingdon took over as Viceroy, Bob became the Vicereine’s favourite partner — she being a notable bridge-addict with a well-known fondness for winning. In fact it was rumoured that when Bob was eventually knighted, the honour was more for his skill at cards than for any particularly good work in the Stores Department! I, however, have always detested bridge or any form of card games: they bore me rigid and Bob knew it. Luckily for me, though, it amused him to take me to dances and parties, so that for the duration of that season we became a recognized ‘twosome’ and were invited to parties together, though I always lost out when bridge was the alternative. His partiality for my company saved my first season in Delhi from being a dire disappointment, for as an eligible bachelor who had become an experienced avoider of matrimony, it had amused him to flirt with me, and I decided that here at last must be True Love.

  The remainder of that season was, in consequence, a magic time for me. I floated on air — all ten stone of me — and envied no one, not even the ‘Week Queens’ with their troops of admirers. I had never wanted half-a-dozen rivals for my affections. I only wanted one.

  The most memorable event of that Delhi season, though for all the wrong reasons, was the last Viceregal garden party to be held in the grounds of Viceregal Lodge in Old Delhi, since next cold weather, Lord and Lady Irwin would move into Lutyens’s magnificent marble and sandstone palace, which, for only a brief spell — less than twenty years (and what are twenty years to India?) — would be
known as ‘Viceroy’s House’ before becoming the official residence of future Presidents of India.

  The occasion was made truly memorable by the sudden death on the brink of the garden party of the Queen of somewhere-or-other — I think she must have been a Scandinavian crowned head connected in some way with the British royal family (which, via Victoria, most crowned heads were). I don’t imagine that more than twenty people in Delhi had ever heard of her, but a cable from London announced to the Viceroy that Court Mourning would be observed for a stated number of days. Well, you would have thought that in the circumstances the easiest thing to do would be to cancel the garden party, wouldn’t you? But no. Someone in authority decided that it was far too late for that; either because there was no way of ensuring that every guest was warned of the cancellation in time to prevent a good many of them turning up on the dot, or because of the more obvious What on earth are we going to do with about a million assorted buns, sandwiches and all the rest of the food and drink and flowers that have been clogging up the kitchens for the past week?’ (No fridges in those days) Or perhaps it was just the good old showbiz motto, ‘The show must go on’ that carried the day. Whatever it was, the verdict went out that the party was on — but that ‘mourning would be worn’.

  Well, that was fine by the men, since most of the civilian British possessed a dark suit, while the Indians, who wear white for mourning, could wear either that or black. But not many memsahibs possessed black dresses that were suitable for a garden party. All those who didn’t tried borrowing from those who did, or, if that failed, hastily dyed something of their own. Every dhobi and dyer in both Delhis was pressed into service, and the place reeked with the smell of freshly dyed dresses — most of which were a total disaster, for in those days garden party dresses were for the most part ankle-length, frilly, pretty and floating confections, in pale-coloured chiffons and muslins, worn with wide-brimmed matching hats.