Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  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.

  Chapter 33

  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 o
ther 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.

  Our numbers at these parties were seldom more than fourteen, at most, and six at the least, though now and again someone would dream up a ‘treasure-hunt’ party, which involved anything up to and even over twenty-four. And on one occasion — the fancy-dress ball during Horse Show Week — at least eight or nine men got together and hired the Lodi Golf Club’s sitting-room and dining-room for a dinner party before the ball, and decreed that everyone should go as a cowboy or a cowgirl. In those days the Club House was one of the least ruined of the ruins that were scattered all over the plains around Delhi and could have been part of a king’s palace, or a pavilion for his zenana. It was an unlikely setting for eighteen to twenty palefaces dolled up as cowboys and their girls.

  It was a hilarious party, and the hosts had hired tongas to take the party out to the dance. Paper cowboy hats and sheriffs’ stars (both easily obtainable from shops in the bazaar that sold carnival junk), were provided for the tonga drivers, who entered with enthusiasm into the spirit of the thing, and the entire party arrived at the IDG, whirling ropes or banging toy guns and whooping at the top of their voices, with the tonga-wallahs racing each other to arrive first.

  I’d had a lot of fun concocting a very fetching cowgirl outfit from white American cloth (boots, belt, cuffs and hat) with a white flannel skirt cut to look like fringed leather, and about a million little silver metal stationery studs which I used for the nail-head decoration on the belt and its holsters, and on the cuffs and the band round the hat. Very taking it was, too. Neil concocted a white outfit for himself, complete with toy revolvers, and we made a nice pair.

  Another of our fancy-dress parties was far less successful. Bill had managed to wangle himself some leave and, having joined us at 80/1, collected himself a girl in record time — Pam Cosgrave, the eldest daughter of great friends of my parents who were temporarily stationed in Delhi. The six of us, chaperoned by Mother, had spent a weekend in Agra, from where we arrived back in the late evening just in time to bathe, change and eat a hasty dinner, before leaving for the Old Delhi Club. But we had failed to read the small print on the leaflet that advertised the ball, in particular a brief announcement towards the end of the leaflet that said, ‘Fancy dress optional’.

  Well, most women enjoy dressing up in exotic costumes, but the average man shrinks into his shell like a startled hermit-crab at the very idea of ‘making a fool of himself parading about in spangles and a ruff, or whatever’ — much as they enjoy themselves once they have been bullied into it! So one and all, they had grabbed the lifeline offered by that one word, and chickened out. And minus their loved ones’ support, the women had decided, ‘I can’t go all togged up as Mary Queen of Scots when George insists on wearing a dinner-jacket and a black tie!’ and they too had tamely followed suit and worn the old blue taffeta again. Our party, arriving late at the Club just as the second or third item on the dance-programmes was finishing, walked out in all our glory on to the raised platform at the entrance to the ballroom. To be faced by a crowd of around 200 soberly clad dancers and received by a roar of laughter and a storm of cheers and hand-clapping. We were the only people in fancy dress!

  Poor Pam was the one who suffered most. She was new to Delhi, and since she hadn’t got a fancy dress and could not spare the time to have one made for her, Mother had lent her one that she had worn early on in the days of the First World War. She had gone as Autumn, wearing her opals, complete with tiara, and a dress made of leaves cut from cotton cloth, and shading from green through orange to yellow to varying shades of red. Mother had painted each leaf herself, and it had fitted her then fashionable hourglass figure like a glove, as far as the hip, below which there had been a full skirt of tulle, spangled with tiny beads and ending just above the ankle — very saucy, for Edwardian days. The tulle had perished years ago, but we had kept the exquisite bodice for our dressing-up box, and now produced it for Pam, on whom it reached just above the knee. The whole effect was charming, but exceedingly skimpy, though it showed off Pam’s long and lovely legs a treat. But she was a shy child, only just out of school, and finding herself standing there, ‘half-naked’ as she protested on the verge of tears, being uproariously applauded by a ballroom full of women in floor-length dresses and openly appreciative men in dinner-jackets, all yelling with laughter, she turned, scarlet-faced, and bolted like a rabbit for the Ladies’ room, followed, to the Gents’, by a red-faced Neil, disguised as the Knave of Hearts in an equally scanty costume that we had made for Sandy Napier and which he had subsequently donated to the Kaye dressing-up box. Grabbing his overcoat, our cowardly knave (normally a terrific extrovert) took refuge in our parked car where the rest of us hastily joined him.

  You would have thought after all that that we would have given up and gone to bed. Not at all. The young us are appallingly resilient, and all that happened was that W. H. P. drove us back to 80/1, where he dropped three Kayes and a Cosgrave before streaking back to the chummery, where he and Neil swapped their motley for dinner-jackets before returning to pick us up, now more conventionally clad (Pam borrowed an evening dress off one of us), and take us back to the Club. Here we rejoined our friends and danced until the band packed up sometime in the small hours, when the sky began to turn grey and snuff out the stars, and the yawning khitmatgars served a lavish British breakfast of ham and eggs, imported sausages, toast and marmalade and cups and cups of tea or coffee. Then the tougher half of the revellers made for their homes or the Club dressing-rooms to change into riding clothes and drive off, as the sky turned primrose yellow, to join a meet of the Delhi Hunt at some previously designated spot in the empty, ruin-strewn lands that stretched away from left to right of the Mall, where their horses and their syces would be waiting for them. You can see that the Raj took its amusements, and the more energetic of its exercises, seriously. Thank goodness I have no use for horses.

  Tacklow laughed his head off at our account of sweeping into the Old Delhi Club to find ourselves faced by a sea of the correctly clad members of the Establishment, and he told me a fascinating story of his early years in Simla and a fancy-dress ball at Viceregal House.

  Cards of invitation to any Viceregal function were valued above rubies among certain members of the social-climbing set, some of whom went to extraordinary lengths to wangle o
ne of the coveted invitations, while others were quite capable of leaving Simla, ostensibly on holiday or to visit friends, rather than let it be seen that they had not been invited. It was impossible to gatecrash the average Viceregal bash, since a printed table plan was issued to each guest. Only at the annual fancy-dress ball, which was a buffet-supper affair for which private dinner parties would be held all over Simla, was it possible for the uninvited to gatecrash, and one year, said Tacklow, after all the invitations were out and every darzi in Simla had worked like mad, when the great day came round, news was received that some truly royal Royal had died and all festivities must be cancelled. There were only hours to go before the guests were due to arrive, but by around tea-time every guest had been warned, and the exhausted staff were congratulating themselves on a job well done.

  Aware that they had missed no one, they were therefore unprepared for the arrival of several rickshaws pulling up before Viceregal Lodge and decanting passengers in fancy dress at about the time when, but for that eleventh-hour cancellation, the main flood of guests would have been arriving. What do you say, when you arrive at a party to which you were not invited, all dressed up as Mephistopheles, complete with scarlet tights and cloak and a crěpe-hair beard, or Madame de Pompadour in a white wig and twenty yards of petunia satin and spangles?

  The Delhi season ended for us with another ball at Viceroy’s House, after which Mother and I got mentioned in the social column of the newspaper write-up next morning, as ‘looking charming (me) in a delightful ball-gown of green satin’ (actually, last year’s model, courtesy of our verandah darzi, who had lengthened it by tacking on a wide hem of mosquito netting dyed to match) and Mother ‘looking as young and as pretty as ever in black chiffon-velvet’. Mother was very chuffed! So was I, because it was the first time I had ever been mentioned in the society column. And the last, as far as I remember. Bets’s dress didn’t rate a mention, so posterity will have to get along without knowing if it was her old pink or the one with spots on. But she danced every dance, mostly with W. H. P., and announced the next day at breakfast that she was engaged to him.