by M. M. Kaye
The wedding was set for the first of September, and the Resident and his wife, Colonel and Mrs Lang, not only lent us the Residency for the Reception, but the Residency ghat as well, the latter from 20 August until as long as we liked in September, so that we could be nearer the centre of activity. Bruce6 and Edna Bakewell, who had always been particular friends of ours, had offered Bets the loan of the forest hut in the Lolab Valley for her honeymoon, and had been disappointed to hear that the wedding would take place in North China. But now that we were all back in India, they renewed the offer, which was gratefully accepted.
Our brother Bill was to be best man, and the line-up of ushers included Tony Sanger, who had captained the British Polo team to America, Bruce Bakewell, Ken Hadow and Gerry Lloyd our local Lloyds Bank manager, while the five bridesmaids, starting with me, were Joan-Mary Weir, Ray Lawrence, Connie Tallon and a charming American girl, Ora Otis Worden, who was spending the summer as a house-guest of Ken Hadow’s wife, Peggy. William Henry and Bill arrived up on leave during the last few days of August. Mr Lang had put the best guest-room in the Residency at our disposal for Bets to dress in, and as the weather was set fair it was decided to hold the reception under the chenars on the Residency lawn. Everything, in fact, seemed in place for a really lovely wedding. And then, a mere two days before the balloon went up, the bridegroom elected to throw a spanner in the works.
I had acquired a cracking headache after spending an afternoon choosing flowers to pick for decorating the church on the following day, and as the day had been very hot I asked for my bed to be carried up to the flat top of the houseboat, and therefore missed witnessing the fireworks. The first I knew of it was when Bets rushed up the stairs that led up out of the pantry, and collapsed on my bed in floods of tears. It took me some time to find out what had happened, because unlike Tacklow I had never had any doubts about Bets’s chosen chap. If she thought William Henry was the man of her dreams, well, it was all right with me and the fact that he wasn’t my cup of tea was neither here nor there. I’d forgotten that Tacklow had been worried. But Tacklow was right.
I mopped up Bets, who appeared to be in a mild state of shock, and finally sorted out the trouble. The wedding was on Saturday, and tomorrow we would be spending the afternoon cutting the flowers we needed for decorating the church, and stowing them in buckets of water in the vestry, together with all the vases and containers and chicken-wire, etc. etc. that the flower arrangers would need on Saturday morning. It was unlikely that the Vicar would have much of a congregation for Evensong, and Mother suggested that we might all – five Kayes and the bridegroom – attend, to ask for a final blessing on Bets and William Henry. At which he announced that he had no intention whatever of letting himself be ‘bounced’ into going to church; now or ever.
I gathered that this had been received with the dropped jaws and pop-eyed silence of shock. Not so much for its content as for the extreme rudeness with which it was said. Mother had eventually said uncertainly: ‘But you’ve been to church with us before – every Sunday when we were in Delhi.’ To which WHP retorted that yes he had, and he might well do so again – if and when he happened to feel like it. But he wasn’t going to be bounced into going, and he hoped that was quite clear.
Mother, to whom until now he had always been perfectly charming – and who had never been spoken to by anyone in that tone of voice before – quavered that she’d only meant … she only thought, ‘that since it was Bets’s last day as an unmarried girl, it would be nice if we all…’ ‘Well you can count me out!’ said WHP. At which point Bets came rushing up to me. I don’t know what my parents did; but knowing Mother I imagine she dissolved into tears and that Tacklow – who was as unaccustomed to rudeness as she was – was doing his best to smooth her down.
William Henry had apparently left the table and marched off on to the bund, and I don’t know what evasive action Bill had taken. My memory of the occasion is confined to Bets’s tearful account of the scene and of myself advising her to go downstairs and have it out with him, because if this was the way he was going to behave on the eve of the wedding, it did not augur well for her future. He’d certainly never shown us this side of himself before! ‘And if he won’t apologize to Mother for upsetting her so, I suggest you postpone the wedding until you’ve sorted it out!’ (I did have a headache.)
Bets, aghast at the very idea, said how could she possibly do such a thing when everything was planned and ready, and she’d have to let everyone know, and return all the presents, and what about the band at the reception, and the food, and … I remember intervening tartly to ask her which was the most important to her – the rest of her life, or spending a few hours on the telephone warning a shoal of wedding guests that the festivities were off, and telling the caterers that their eats and drinks would not be needed. And, if it turned out to be permanent, returning the pile of presents (mostly tea and/or coffee trays as it turned out – a sad lack of liaison between guests). When Bets failed to rise to this, I said that if I changed my mind about marrying a man I had become engaged to, even if it was at the last vital minute before I had to say ‘I do’, I would drop my bouquet and run for the door, scandal or no scandal. For you have to remember that in the early thirties, marriage was still considered to be something you took on for life, though divorce was getting more and more common – or should I say ‘easy’?
Bets’s retort to this was a watery: ‘Yes, I know you would. But I’m not you!’
She went downstairs and patched it up with him, and the wedding went forward as planned, Mother shedding more tears than are normally shed by the bride’s mother and Tacklow looking resigned. Everyone else had a lovely party. The Kashmir Correspondent of one of the Raj ‘dailies’ (I don’t remember which) said it was ‘quite the prettiest wedding of the year’. The Tatler had a photograph of Mother, managing to look very elegant while sitting on the grass!
Chapter 16
There had been a depressing sense of emptiness after Bets left. A feeling of coming to the end, not only of a chapter, but of a whole book that has for a long while kept you interested, amused and entertained. From now on, for the rest of my life, nothing was ever going to be quite the same. I would see Bets again, of course. Often, I hoped. But not as a matter of right. She didn’t belong to us any more, but to William Henry; and wherever fate or his firm sent him, there she would go.
Mother too felt flat and bereft and, owing to that behaviour from her son-in-law, torn with doubts and anxiety on Bets’s account. Tacklow, I knew, must be equally worried, and I did my best to assure them – and incidentally, myself – that it could only have been the result of pre-wedding nerves and worry. After all, brides were known to be prone to attacks of what the Victorians called ‘the vapours’. It was almost expected of them. Well, why not bridegrooms too? They had just as much reason for it (if not more), and William Henry had no one of his own family to support him. No wonder he was feeling nervous and on edge. He had never to my knowledge said or done a nasty thing before, he adored Bets and she was nuts about him, and the whole incident was nothing but a storm in an acorn-sized teacup, and should be brushed under the doormat instantly!
I think I convinced them (I certainly convinced myself). And since none of us felt like moving back to the Moons’ ghat, or to our old one at Chota Nageem, we decided to try a change of scene, and had the houseboat poled downstream, roughly twelve miles below Srinagar, to a village called Shadipore, which stands at the meeting place of two rivers, the Sind and the Jhelum. Presumably on account of that joining (and the fact that the Urdu word for wedding happens to be shadi) the village was thought by the Kashmiris to be a particularly auspicious place in which to be married. But it was also a very paintable spot and one that Mother had always meant to visit. So this seemed a good time to do so.
It was the first time that I had taken a longish trip on a houseboat as opposed to being poled around the lake from one mooring to another. We drifted with the current down the Jhelum in char
ge of a steersman, ate lunch and tea on the way, and as dusk began to fall pulled into the bank and, having set up Angie’s pole-house for her, took her for a walk along the towpath while the houseboat and cook-boat were moored for the night, returning to find everything teek and accha – or Indian ship-shape. We must have spent at least a week at Shadipore. Yet I never got used to the fact that all our belongings were with us. I kept on thinking: ‘Oh, I wish I’d had the sense to bring this or that with me,’ and then suddenly realizing that everything was with us. It was all there: carpets and furniture, books and painting materials – the lot, and I decided that this was the perfect way to travel: take your home with you.
Shadipore turned out to be eminently paintable, and we returned with the nucleus of an exhibition and, as far as I was concerned, a new way of sketching that was to stand me in very good stead in the years to come. Tacklow was unwittingly responsible, since just before we set off for Shadipore he had paid a visit to Lamberts the Chemist, who also sold painting paper, brushes and a variety of paints and pastels. He had gone in to buy some watercolour paper for Mother, and while browsing through a newly arrived stock of art materials his eye had been caught by a set of miniature pots of Winsor and Newton’s poster paints, each one measuring no more than one-and-three-quarters of an inch across and barely two inches high (I have the only unfinished one left in front of me as I write: I kept it as a souvenir).
The set, comprising a dozen different colours and two ‘student’s’ paintbrushes, came in a narrow oblong box and was obviously meant as a present for a child. But the cheerful little row of clear, bright colours in their tiny glass pots and white screw tops had caught Tacklow’s fancy, and since it only cost two rupees eight annas – the equivalent of about twenty-five pence at present prices – he bought it for me. He knew that I was feeling flat and lost and loose-endish now that Bets had gone, and hoped that those silly little bottles might cheer me up a bit.
Darling Tacklow! Little did you guess what a financial windfall you gave me that day, and what a help it was going to be to me in the future. I was as fascinated by the miniature paints as he had been, and because they were so small, I tried them out by doing a tiny sketch on the back of an envelope, of the view from where we’d moored for the night. I hadn’t realized then that the only one of the little pots of colour that would need constant replacing was the Process White. The others, small as they were, lasted for years; literally. And as I have said, one (the purple) has never run out.
I experimented with that set of paints on different coloured scraps of paper, and finally hit upon black as the most successful. I had cadged a page of a new and as yet unused photograph album from Mother and discovered that I could leave the paper untouched for the shadows, and also leave a very thin line of the black as an edging to almost everything else in the picture. This had the great advantage of preventing the colours from running into each other, which in turn speeded up the process, as I didn’t have to wait for a colour to dry before adding the next one; the effect was formal and very decorative.
I painted any number of ‘little pics’ during the week we spent in Shadipore, and Mother produced at least half a dozen really nice watercolours, one of which I still have. I begged her to keep it as a memento of that time, and since she wasn’t particularly pleased with it (the foreground on the right-hand bottom corner, and a most peculiar tree, are not her best work) she let me have it. It may not be all that well painted, but somehow it has hit off that view from the roof of the ‘HB Sunflower’ so well that I sometimes feel that I can almost smell the smoke of the cooking fires as it drifts up from the dhungas1 moored in a backwater on the Sind bank of the river, a little way upstream from the village.
Greatly daring, I submitted six of the ‘little pics’ done at Shadipore to the Art Society’s Selection Committee for the Autumn Art Exhibition. Done on that black photograph-album paper, and all of them only a bit larger than my first trial effort on the back of an envelope – roughly six inches by four. The mounts were much larger, fourteen by ten, which showed them off beautifully. But I was still afraid that the Committee might think I was being frivolous. In the event they not only accepted them, but all six were sold on the first day and in the first ten minutes, and a good many people asked for copies. Triumph! I had hit on something that would pay for my bread-and-butter.
Tacklow had arranged to rent the Club ghat when we returned from Shadipore because he and Mother would be going away for a few weeks, taking Kadera with them, and they did not like the idea of leaving me on my own in an isolated ghat, in sole charge of Angie and the Lizel Kaz. It was not that they did not consider Mahdoo and the manji and his family sufficient as protectors, but I was a young unmarried woman, and as such must be particularly careful not to offend any of the Old-Cats Brigade. As an additional precaution against this, it had been arranged for a friend of mine, one ‘Kitten’ Critchly (she wasn’t Critchly then, but I can’t remember her maiden name) to be my guest on the ‘Sunflower’ until they returned.
Having settled into our new ghat, we drove out to the Lolab Valley to have lunch with the honeymoon couple, who seemed to be having an idyllic time in their forest bungalow, and had nothing to complain of except for one rousing interlude when a Cona coffee machine, one of the wedding presents that they had taken out with them, had suddenly blown up like a bomb, spattering coffee all over everything in the sitting-room. Fortunately, neither of them had been in the room at the time.
Bets seemed to be full of the joys of spring, and as William Henry didn’t put a foot wrong, we returned to Srinagar feeling greatly reassured. The next day Tacklow, Mother and Kadera left for the South. They had both been secretive about the trip, and I didn’t realize until the last moment that as soon as Tacklow reappeared in India, quite a number of semi-independent potentates had written to him offering him jobs in their states. But since the majority of these states were in Rajputana he had to refuse.
Now the ruler of one that was not in the ‘Country of the Kings’ had not only written, but sent one of his senior officials to discuss the matter with him. It was an alluring offer; but in a part of the sub-continent that Mother did not know, and Tacklow was not sure if she would like spending the next three or four years there. Or if he would either. While he was still hesitating, an invitation arrived for both of them to visit the state for ten days or so, which would give Tacklow a chance to become familiar with the problems involved, and Mother to see the house that she would be living in, if that offer was accepted.
My parents, who would normally have left me in charge of Kadera, had taken him with them in order that he too would see what the problems were and decide if he could cope with them. For unlike Tonk, which was a Muslim state, this one was Hindu. ‘I can’t accept unless your Mother and Kadera feel that they would be happy there,’ said Tacklow. ‘And Mahdoo says that Kadera speaks for him.’ So off the three of them went while I resigned myself to a period of peace and dullness, playing gooseberry to Kitten, who was never without a suitor in tow. In fact, the following weeks turned out to be some of the most hectic that I can remember.
What with all the pre-wedding flap, followed by that spell in Shadipore, and one thing and another, I had, again, been too preoccupied with my own affairs to keep track of Kitten’s. I now discovered that she had written off the young man who had been in hot pursuit when I had last been paying attention, and that he had been replaced in her affections by not one but three ardent suitors, all in the Indian Cavalry, though in different regiments, and all equally tall and charming. Her trouble at the moment was that she could not choose between them. I insisted on remaining strictly neutral and refused to advise.
Kitten was, when I first knew her, the most attractive creature: small and slim and green-eyed, with the most lovely red-gold hair, the sort of girl that chaps fall for on sight. The fact that the three she had acquired were all friends helped a lot; and since Kitten made it clear to them that wherever she went, I went too, I had a lot of fun
, for I had met all three before and their manners were far too good to allow me to feel that I was the odd one out. Which would certainly have happened if there had been a single suitor. As it was, I was never allowed to feel de trop, and while Kitten was a house guest on the ‘Sunflower’, the days were filled with luncheons at Nedou’s, picnics on the lakes or in a Mogul garden, expeditions to Vernarg, whose secret springs are the source of the Jhelum, and to the lovely little garden of Achabal that was planted by Shah Jehan and said to be his favourite among the Mogul gardens.
Some nights Mahdoo provided dinner for the five of us, but very rarely on dance nights, in other words every night but Sunday, for when there wasn’t a dance in Nedou’s Ballroom, there was one at the Srinagar Club, with the attraction of a ‘gramophone hop’ at the Nageem Bagh Club – an attractive option, since it entailed a half-hour shikarra trip by starlight or moonlight through the romantic waterways that link the Dāl Gate to the main lakes.
The shikarra rides presented a problem, for since none of the three boys would allow Kitten to be rowed tête-à-tête with only one of the others, she either had to go with me and one of her suitors, or with two of them while I went with the third. I got a lot of fun out of watching the manoeuvring of the boys, each of them keeping a wary eye on his friends for fear that one of them would outsmart the other and get her to himself. I lent an interested ear to all of them in turn, while they confided their hopes and fears to me, secure in the knowledge that Kitten was in the company of both the others. And because they were nice young men, and afraid that I might feel like the mother-of-all-gooseberries, and resent it, they put themselves out to be nice to me, so that although lacking a cavalier of my own, I was looked after and entertained royally.
