‘One of them stole my handkerchief last time,’ said Rosie.
‘I go see them again,’ said the doctor sadly. ‘I say goodbye monkey.’
‘If you’re going back to Greece, why not have dinner with us tonight?’ proposed Daniel. ‘We can have a farewell meal. We’re staying at the Bristol.’
‘Ah! Nice hotel! Best hotel! Beautiful garden! But Grand Hotel also good. Moorish patio! I stay in Cecil. I like reading room, many newspaper, many language. I enjoy. We eat huevos a la flamenca. Is topical. You like paella? Is rice with everything kind of thing.’
‘Like a risotto?’
‘Is better. Is more flavour. Is krokos. You know krokos? Is yellow. Is nice, is delicate.’
There was little to do in Gibraltar but walk about enjoying the life in the streets. There seemed to be meditative, sun-browned pairs of men playing accordion and cornet mournfully on every street corner, and there were acrobats in the square outside the cathedral of St Mary the Crowned, including a little girl no more than five years old, who was doing backflips and walkovers, and then handstands on her father’s shoulders. Esther was mesmerised, and wanted to watch for hours. Here began her passion for cartwheels, which was to end only with adulthood.
She also loved the slightly mad donkeys that brought their own kind of chaos to the streets, with their constantly slipping burdens and small acts of rebellion, and she had to pat the noses of every one they passed. Dr Iannis expatiated on the Genoese nature of the architecture, and the perfection of the rhythms of arches, the symmetry of the elaborate patterns on the Moorish tiles. He wanted to show them the Flemish synagogue, and Bedlam Court, because of its sash windows. He also felt he had to show them all the chandlers’ in Irish Street, and the cemetery where there was a victim of the Battle of Trafalgar, and he made them walk up to the Moorish castle above Casemates Square. In those days the square itself was not the grand piazza it became forty years later, but a parade ground. As they stood outside, Daniel looking at the soldiers wistfully, and thinking how ridiculously young so many of them were, Dr Iannis said, ‘Is place where bad soldiers hanged. Rope on neck. Bye-bye.’
‘You should have been a historian,’ said Daniel, ‘rather than a doctor,’ and the doctor looked at him as if he was mad and replied, ‘I both. A man is many thing. Like soldier poet. Like Byron! We like Byron in Cephallonia. He stay with us a long time. He two thing.’ He tapped his own chest. ‘I many thing. I doctor, I father, I historian, I traveller, I Greek, I cosmopolitano, many languages and other thing. In my country, all doctor is historian.’
‘It’s true,’ said Rosie. ‘No one is ever only one thing. Inside one person there are so many different people, and quite often they’re at war with each other, and sometimes one of them is winning, and sometimes another. We’re all so hard to understand, aren’t we? I don’t even understand myself. It’d be so much easier to be a dog, don’t you think? Or one of these donkeys? I just wish so much…’ She looked away, leaving the words unsaid, and the doctor said quietly, ‘Is true, is very true. I remember this to tell my daughter one day. But I know one thing, if no one love you and you not love no one, then…?’ He spread his hands apart and thrust his head forward with his lips downturned. ‘Is all life no good. Dead is better.’
‘I’m quite looking forward to being dead, as long as it’s oblivion,’ said Daniel. ‘I’m completely fed up with the insane chatter I have to live with…I don’t mean the chatter of other people…I mean, you know, my own thoughts thinking themselves, round and round. Hopes and complaints, and things you plan to say to somebody one day…I just wish it would all stop and let me have some peace.’
‘It shuts up when you’re asleep,’ said Rosie sensibly. ‘At least, when you’re not dreaming. And then you might as well be dead. You are sort of dead, when you’re asleep, aren’t you? And then you wake up and it’s like coming back to life, being reborn.’
‘That’s what worries me about death,’ said Daniel. ‘I really do not want to go through that ordeal, and then wake up and find I’ve got to carry on living with myself, even in heaven.’
‘Well, I believe in the life hereafter.’
‘Of course you do. You still have your faith. I’m often very envious.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ said Rosie, ‘that reminds me. I’d so much like to go and see inside some of the churches. Why don’t you and the doctor go and see the monkeys, and we can all meet back at the hotel for drinks at seven? You take Esther and I’ll hang on to Bertie. I’m sure you can find a hansom cab these days.’
As the three of them set off towards Irish Street, the doctor said, ‘Is the same rule for wifes and monkeys. You touch them first, they get angry. You wait for them to touch you, is OK.’
At the top of the rock, they endured the astonishing insolence of the monkeys, who rifled through their pockets, throwing away anything inedible, having tested it first. Esther was completely delighted, and did her first cartwheel. The macaques were visibly alarmed and impressed, backing away and chattering, so Esther did it again.
‘Estherakimou is little monkey now,’ said the doctor.
Whilst Esther entertained the monkeys, Daniel and the doctor took in the astonishing view of Morocco across the strait, almost an arm’s length away, it seemed. ‘I been there once. I not like it. Woman, she try to sell me her daughter. Daughter only five, maybe six. I get very angry, and woman think I mad. Over there, is too poor, too much poor people.’
‘Did you like Ceylon?’asked Daniel.
‘Oh yes, Ceylon. I like. Is paradeisos. How you say? Old Eden Garden? Too many beautiful women. Men very nice, very polite. I like fruit. I like rice. Colombo too busy, but still nice.’
‘I am going to miss it forever,’ said Daniel.
Down at the baroque Roman Catholic church, Rosie parked Bertie in his pram at the bottom of the steps and paid one of the street children sixpence to keep an eye on him. Inside, she listened to the officiating priest conducting communion and sat unhappily in a pew at the back, trying to understand herself, and wondering how she could keep asking God to forgive her if it never made any difference and she never managed to change, and never realised until it was too late the difference between real virtue and the selfishness that disguises itself as such.
The following day, down at the docks, Dr Iannis kissed Rosie’s hand with elaborate elegance and then did the same to Esther, who held out her hand like a real lady, loving the theatre of it. He bent down and kissed the sleeping Bertie on the forehead, and then kissed Daniel on both cheeks and hugged him to his chest. Daniel noticed that he smelled pleasantly of cologne and pipe tobacco, and he felt a pang in his heart that he would probably never see this kind and interesting young man ever again.
Dr Iannis reached into his breast pocket and brought out his portefeuille. He presented Daniel with his card, which was somewhat grubby, but beautifully designed. The doctor noticed Daniel attempting to decipher the Greek script and took it from him, turned it over and returned it. It read ‘Poste restante, Argostoli, Céphalonie, Isles Ioniennes, Royaume Hellénique’.
‘I’ll write,’ said Daniel, ‘and I do hope that everything works out for your wife.’
‘I say goodbye to wife soon,’ replied the doctor mournfully. ‘Maybe one year, maybe two. Maybe six month. Is me and my koritsi now.’
As the SS Derbyshire left the harbour, Daniel and Rosie stood at the rail, waving to the doctor, until finally there was no point in it any more. Daniel turned to Rosie and said, ‘Too many damned goodbyes. Halfway through my bloody life, and all I ever do is say one damned goodbye after another.’
‘We’ll be back home soon,’ said Rosie, looking up at him apologetically.
‘Home? Where is home? Have I got to live with your damned mother again?’
‘Don’t call her my “damned” mother,’ said Rosie. ‘I don’t talk about your mother like that.
You’re altogether too free with your damns and bloodies.’
Daniel picked up Esther and hoisted her onto his shoulders. He looked hard at his wife. ‘Well, my mother is going to give you hell,’ he said, ‘and so will your father.’
19
An Interview with Mrs McCosh
Mrs McCosh poured tea from her second-best teapot, and said, ‘One sugar or two?’
Lieutenant Commander Frederick Ribaud replied, ‘Just the one, please.’
‘You should not say “just the one”, you need only say “just one”. It is very important for one’s speech to be comme il faut. It says so much about one’s state of refinement.’
‘Quite so, Mrs McCosh.’
‘I understand,’ said Mrs McCosh, ‘that your name may be of French origin. I do already have one son-in-law who is half French. Another would be quite de trop.’
‘I believe we were French some centuries ago, but now we are as British as the royal family.’
Ottilie very nearly spat out her tea, and dug him in the ribs with her elbow.
Frederick said, ‘The name is apparently of Germanic origin, from a word meaning “to live licentiously”, and then it came to mean “the lowest class of servant”, one that carries out the most menial and demeaning duties.’
Ottilie said, ‘Oh, come on, Frederick, do be serious.’
‘I am serious. I was told by an etymologist.’
‘And what would an expert in insects know about such things?’ demanded Mrs McCosh. ‘Really, one has a duty to be a little sceptical of irrelevant expertise.’
She adjusted her lorgnettes, and gazed at him imperiously.
‘I understand that my dear husband has consented to your marriage to Ottilie. Without consulting me.’
‘He has indeed done me that honour, Mrs McCosh, but naturally I am hoping that you will also find it in your heart to give me your blessing.’
‘Well, I agree that that would be preferable. What are your prospects?’
‘He’s going to become a provincial governor, one day,’ said Ottilie.
‘I may have to leave India eventually,’ said Frederick. ‘All the talk these days is “India for the Indians”. I’d say the writing’s on the wall.’
‘Impossible!’ cried Mrs McCosh. ‘How would they ever manage without us? Now, young man, tell me about your family.’
‘My mother is from Derbyshire, and her father was a clergyman. My father comes from a long line of naval officers, of whom not one ever became an admiral.’
‘Not one? Not one? Such a pity.’
‘I have a brother who’s gone to South Africa to look for diamonds, and a sister who’s married to a barrister.’
‘Barristers are intolerable people,’ she said. ‘Unbearable blatherers. One cannot trust people who earn a living by merely talking cleverly and throwing Latin tags about like confetti.’
‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ said Frederick.
‘You have no aristocratic connections?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘He knows Prince Albert,’ said Ottilie.
‘Prince Albert? Do you? Good gracious!’ Mrs McCosh’s nostrils flared like a cavalry charger at the sound of a bugle. She put down her teacup and looked up at his face adoringly.
‘Frederick was on HMS Collingwood at Jutland,’ said Ottilie proudly.
‘Prince Albert was a midshipman. In command of the forward turret.’
‘No doubt he sank a great many enemy ships.’
‘I believe we lightly damaged a battlecruiser. That’s all, I’m afraid.’
‘No doubt the range was too great.’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘Frederick used to call him Bertie,’ said Ottilie mischievously.
‘We all did,’ said Frederick. ‘All the officers, I mean. He had a terrible stutter. I’m afraid we called him BeBeBeBertie behind his back.’
‘How shockingly disrespectful! And are you inviting him to the wedding?’ asked Mrs McCosh.
‘We can send him an invitation,’ said Frederick. ‘I very much doubt if he’d come.’
‘He must be invited! He must be invited!’
‘Mother, calm down, do.’
Frederick was amused. ‘Do I take it, Mrs McCosh, that you find me a suitable husband for your daughter?’
‘Oh! Most suitable! Most suitable!’
That evening Mrs McCosh collared Ottilie on the upstairs landing. ‘My dear, my dear, I have committed the most dreadful faux pas.’
‘A faux pas? Mother, what could it be?’
‘My dear, I served him tea from the second-best teapot! It’s plated! And some of the plating has gone so that one can see the brass underneath. And the butter knife was also the plated one, and his scone fell to pieces, and one of the saucers was chipped!’
‘I honestly don’t think he would have noticed.’
‘My dear, I should have used the best. You’re very remiss. I do wish you’d told me he knows Prince Albert!’
20
A Letter from Archie
Care of the Political Agent
Waziristan
Third tent on the left up a nullah,
out of the firing line of snipers
13 June 1928
My dear Ottilie,
I have just received the news of your engagement. Your dear sister Christabel was so kind as to write and let me know. He sounds like a very fine fellow, and of course one cannot but be in awe of naval types. I am certain it was the blockade that brought the Kaiser to his knees.
I don’t have long to write this, as we are up at dawn to do a patrol in search of the tribesemen who stole rifles and grenades from the armoury by blowing a hole in the back of it. We’ll have to get them back before they are used against us, and luckily we have excellent trackers. These are exciting times for us on the North-West Frontier, but then they always are. One expects to be killed at a moment’s notice, and is gleefully surprised when one isn’t.
My dear, there is no subtle way to put this, and so I shall eschew subtlety.
I am so heartily glad and joyful that you have found a worthier object of your affections than I was. I have always known about the inclination of your heart, and I have always been bewildered as to how to deal with it. You know the reasons, and there is no need to go over them. What I do know is that if I had ever had any sense, my affections would have settled on you. Of the four sisters, you are the closest to being an angel, and I am certain that your fortunate husband will find the touch of your hand a balm to the spirit.
But, Ottilie, my dear, I have never been, and never could be, good enough for you, and I would have remained painfully myself. You could not have been my salvation, because no one ever will be. I am one of the damned. I am reconciled to experiencing love only in my imagination, and reconciled to my fate here in this most godforsaken and lunatic corner of the Empire. This is where my destiny lies, and I have made a point of letting everyone know that one day I would like my bones to rest in Peshawar, in a grave where in spring it will be covered in peach blossom.
Ottilie, my dear, I wish you the most profound happiness with your husband. May he treat you with care and reverence. You have taken steps to free yourself of me, and I only beg you to ensure that you do it resolutely and absolutely, so that you may live to attain the happiness with him that you so richly deserve.
Yours ever, your old Pal from next door,
Major Archie P
21
In Which Frederick and Ottilie Abscond
Frederick and Ottilie sat side by side on a bench at the Tarn, as they so often did when they wished to escape from The Grampians and have a little time to themselves.
‘All this bread really can’t be good for them,’ said Frederick. ‘It’s not as if ducks feed on bread in the wi
ld. Shouldn’t we bring seeds or something?’
‘Haven’t you heard of evolution? These are ducks that have evolved over the centuries to live on the Tarn and eat a dreadful diet. They’re called Duckus Elthamiensis Breadophagus.’
‘Sounds plausible. What are we going to do about the wedding?’
‘Oh gosh, I don’t know. I mean, the last one, when Sophie and Rosie had a double wedding, it was such a wonderful affair. Daniel was still in the RAF, and his whole squadron came and stunted for us, and it was a beautiful day, and my father was perfectly well, and my mother wasn’t nearly as mad. And of course my father paid for it all.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying we should do something that’s altogether different. I mean, poor Mother is off the rails, and Daddy can hardly breathe, and it’s bound to rain, isn’t it? And Daniel and Rosie don’t get on any more, so it would be difficult for them, and Sophie and Fairhead will be thinking back on it and being sad that they can’t have the children they’d hoped for. So we’ve got to do something different. But terribly romantic.’
‘We could do an Oriental.’
‘An Oriental?’
‘Yes. I’ll send in my brothers to kidnap you, and a few days later I’ll send the bride price to your father. It’s a wonderfully efficient system, and it would save your father from having to give you a dowry.’
‘He wouldn’t anyway. And you’ve only got one brother, and he’s in Burma. What about coming in the middle of the night with a ladder?’
‘I don’t have a car at present, and I don’t think I’d get a ladder onto the train.’
‘You could borrow our AC Six. Or get a hansom.’
‘How does one get a ladder into a hansom?’
‘You strap it to the roof, silly. Actually I think we might have a ladder in the storeroom under the conservatory. Where Wragge sleeps in the wheelbarrow.’
‘And what about the honeymoon? Where shall we go? Normandy?’
So Much Life Left Over Page 12
