by M. M. Kaye
By the end of her stay with me, my parents due to return ‘any day now’, not one of Kitten’s three beaux had been able to get her alone (the other two always made sure of that!) and she herself had still not made up her mind which one she preferred. Asked for my advice for the umpteenth time, I said rather crossly that if she really was unable to choose between them, then she obviously wasn’t in love with any of them. In which case I suggested that she kissed the boys goodbye and started again from scratch with somebody else …
On the other hand, if she was set on being cold-blooded about it, then why not play ‘eeny-meeny-miney-mo’ with them, or just toss a coin? Kitten said that I didn’t understand, burst into tears and rushed out of the room. Well, she was right there. I didn’t understand. But of one thing I was sure. The boys’ leave was almost up, and they had already hired a car between them to take them down to Rawalpindi and the railway, and booked a table at Nedou’s for a farewell dinner party and dance on their last but one night. One never knew when those dances would end until the band broke into ‘J’attendrai’. That melody spelt ‘Goodnight all, we’re packing it in’, and it had become a custom for couples with a sentimental interest in each other, if they were dancing together when the band launched into that tune, to make for the nearest door to the garden when it ended, instead of rejoining the members of their party on the stage or the sitting-out area around the ballroom floor.
I don’t think Claud, Dick or Andrew had recalled this habit until the dancing began, but I was aware of their increasing anxiety as the evening wore on, for it was fairly obvious that whichever of the three happened to be dancing with Kitten when that tune began would whisk her away into the garden the moment that it ended. And though they continued to behave beautifully to me, and I danced every dance, they began to watch Kitten over my shoulder, and to lose the thread of any conversation. I was enthralled!
The floor was still cluttered with dancers and the time well past one o’clock when the band began that fateful melody. Kitten had been dancing with Dick, and they must have been near the door at the far end of the room, because we didn’t see them leave. The band played ‘God Save the King’ and we all dutifully stood to attention. But when it stopped there was no sign of them; and though Claud and Andrew and I stayed on, talking and sipping our drinks long after the other dancers had dispersed and the big ballroom was empty except for ourselves and the hotel khitmagars, who were clearing away the usual debris of a dance night, they did not return. In the end, Claud took me home in a tonga, and came in and drank cups and cups of hot coffee (prepared by Mahdoo, who had been waiting up for me) and poured out all his woes. He seemed convinced (they all were) that the first one of them to get Kitten alone would be able to talk her into marrying him. I attempted to comfort the out-smarted suitor, but without much success, and finally, at about three o’clock, managed to persuade him to leave. Kitten returned shortly afterwards with the information that she was engaged to Dick, and I said: ‘Oh, good-o,’ and went back to sleep.
She told me next morning that he was the only man in the world for her, and that she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t realized it before; she must have been mad not to know it at once, and she was deliriously happy.
The boys left for their respective regiments; my parents returned from South India and received the usual delirious welcome from Angelina and the Lizel Kaz. Kitten left for Delhi, where Dick had arranged for some friends of his to put her up, and I received a distracted letter from her telling me that Dick had been sent off on some military business and had asked his brother to meet her at Delhi and look after her until he could get back to Delhi himself. ‘But, oh Moll, I’m in such a muddle,’ wrote Kitten. ‘I don’t know what to do. What would you do if you were me?’
It took me some time to sort out what she was in a muddle about, but in the course of several more distracted letters it became clear that Dick and his brother were twins. Well, we all knew that, and it had been mentioned to her again and again, but what with being too busy playing ‘eeny-meeny-miney-mo’ with her three suitors she hadn’t bothered to pay much attention to it. The trouble was that they were very nearly identical twins. When I say ‘very nearly’, I mean that when they were together one could tell at once which was which. But if one of them walked into a room alone I never had the least idea which one it was. Kitten hadn’t given the ‘twins’ angle a thought, and stepping off the train on to Delhi station platform, she had seen what she supposed to be Dick, who must have wriggled out of his Army chore after all, and had flung herself into his arms with cries of joy. Only to discover that she was embracing the wrong brother.
‘The awful thing about it is that he’s better looking than Dick,’ wrote Kitten. ‘And I know you won’t understand, you never do, but what would you do if you’d just fallen madly in love with a man, and hadn’t seen him for a week or two, and then met him again, and thought he was even better and handsomer and nicer than you’d thought, and having hugged and kissed him, found that it wasn’t him at all, but his twin brother! What would you do? It isn’t fair –!’
Well, I see her point. That’s a very tricky one. The trouble was, of course, that Gerald was better looking and nicer than Dick, and she hadn’t really had the time as yet to get to know Dick really well. If she’d met the two together, or Gerald first, there is no doubt at all which she would have gone after. I don’t know how they sorted it out between them, but I was told by several chums who were at their wedding (which I missed by being incarcerated at the time in the Islington Isolation Hospital for Infectious Diseases, having acquired two kinds of measles, German and common-or-garden, at the same time) that Kitten looked ravishing in her wedding dress, but when she came up the aisle to where the groom and his twin, the best man, awaited her, no one was quite sure until the last possible moment which one she would marry.
She sent me her wedding bouquet, a lovely mixture of lilies and white orchids that sent the nurses in the hospital into raptures; the matron told me that normally the only time they saw that sort of bouquet was in connection with a funeral. But a bride’s bouquet! – that really was something romantic. I handed it on to the Sisters’ sitting-room. The marriage seems to have been a success.
* * *
Tacklow had finally decided to take the job that had been offered to him, provided it was cleared with the F and P. Mother had approved of the house and been charmed by the royal women, one of whom, with attendant ladies of the zennana, came up to Srinagar with her husband for a ‘Princes’ Polo Week’ hosted by HH of Kashmir. Mother and I were both invited to a purdah-party, a women-only tea party in the upper room of one of HH’s guest-houses, and I have never in my life seen so many truly beautiful women in one room. They were truly dazzling; even the older ones. Their saris were of the kind that were woven in Benares only for the wives and daughters of India’s princely houses or, very occasionally, for the women-folk of her millionaires. But never for lesser mortals. Their jewels had been re-cut in Amsterdam and re-designed in Paris, and their shoes were made in Italy. And apart from their outstanding beauty and charm, on which no price could have been set, each one, as she stood there, must have been worth at least a million sterling, which in present terms would be thirty to forty million.
It was a privilege to see them; and we shall never see their like again. For after Independence and Partition, when the Princes were abolished and their revenues were subject to punitive taxes, it became too dangerous to flaunt fabulous jewels, since to own great riches brought the tax gatherers down. The legendary jewels of the ‘Kings’ went into hiding, and though men must still know where they are it is possible that in time their hiding places may be forgotten and they will lie hidden for centuries.
Chapter 17
You would have thought that the location of Tacklow’s new job, and the identity of his employer, would have been of sufficient importance to me to ensure that I remembered all about it. After all, I too would be making my home there for the next three ye
ars, and that alone must have been a matter of considerable interest to me. Instead, there is a complete blank in my mind concerning that job, what it was, where it was, with whom it was.
The blank remains to this day. I remember them coming back and Kitten leaving; and I must have received the impression that all had gone well and the future looked rosy. Because if it were not so, I feel sure that I would have remembered that. I certainly remember a feeling of aimlessness and of being at a loose end without Bets around to talk things over with; and of flatness and nothing-to-do, without Kitten and her adorers to fill every minute of the day with interest and amusement. Now, with both Bets and Kitten gone, my days would have been dull indeed if it had not been for that box of miniature poster paints. I fell back on them for my entertainment and worked hard at improving the technique.
Mother and I went out painting almost every day, sometimes in a shikarra and sometimes in the car. We were never short of subjects, for there were pictures wherever one looked, and Kashmir spoiled me for ever for sketching in the West, particularly in the land that all Anglo-Indians invariably referred to as ‘home’.
Srinagar began to fill up again for the brief autumn season, as up in Gulmarg the nights became too chilly and frost glittered on the marg every morning. One by one the huts emptied as their occupants left for the warmer temperatures in the valley below, leaving the chowkidars to roll up carpets, mattresses and curtains and stow them away among the shrouded furniture stacked for greater protection in one of the innermost rooms, before locking the doors and boarding every window with stout wooden shutters that would not be taken down until the following spring.
In the valley the willows and poplars, walnuts, chestnuts and fruit trees began to change colour, and high up on the side of the Takt-i-Suliman a single chenar tree that had somehow managed to take root and survive on what was then a completely barren slope signalled the coming of the cold weather by turning a brilliant scarlet. And one by one the holiday-makers began to leave for British India and the plains.
Houseboats, hotels and guest-houses emptied, and I started on a round of visits, spending a few days and nights with kind friends with whom I had danced and acted in a number of charity cabaret shows during the past year, and who in the kindness of their hearts decided that I must be cheered up and entertained to keep me from moping over the departure of my sister from the fold. It was very sweet of them and much appreciated, since it was also in a way a goodbye from the Punjab: the people I would meet down south would be different from the ones I had known in the north.
Tacklow was due to take up his new appointment at the end of October, which was one of the best times of year on the plains. September could be not only hot with the left-over heat-waves and dust-storms of the summer months, but intolerably damp and muggy from the remnants of the monsoon. The cold weather proper started at the beginning of November.
Bets’s birthday being on 13 October, we used to celebrate the occasion by a picnic up to Gulmarg, returning to Srinagar in time to dine and dance at Nedou’s that evening, festivities which also served to mark, for us, the end of the Kashmir season. After that all hot-weather visitors got down to packing up, paying their bills and saying goodbye to friends, many of whom would be leaving for widely separated sections of the map and whom we would therefore not see again until the hot weather drove them up to the hills once more. I would certainly have returned to the ‘Sunflower’ in time to help deal with this last stage of the annual sarabande, so I can only suppose that the letter cancelling Tacklow’s job must have arrived while I was away and that they had had time to get used to it, and to accept it, and saw no point in writing to tell me about it, let alone sending for me.
If they could have got out of telling me about it, I am sure that they would have done so. But there was no way of hiding it, since all the plans for our removal from Kashmir, our stop-over in New Delhi to see Bets and her husband, and all the arrangements for the long journey south, had to be cancelled. Until we could make alternative ones we would have to retain the ‘Sunflower’ and its crew and stay where we were.
It was Tacklow who told me what had happened. I don’t think he trusted Mother not to get too upset about it again. She had been so angry. He had received a most regretful and apologetic letter from the Diwan of his would-be employer, who was obviously deeply embarrassed by having to write it, to say that when (as was customary among the princely states) the Foreign and Political Department had been informed of the employment of Sir Cecil Kaye, they had been ‘advised’ against it on the grounds that Sir Cecil was persona non grata among the Department, and ‘regarded as a trouble-maker’ – Tacklow. Of all people! ‘It’s like being black-balled from my Club,’ said Tacklow bitterly, ‘and never being able to enter it again.’
The head of the state which had wished to employ him could, of course, have ignored the ‘advice’ and insisted on taking him on. Some most undesirable characters had, in the past, been employed by princes who had been strongly advised by the Government not to touch them with a bargepole, yet had insisted on their right to do so. Such appointments had frequently led to scandal and disaster and to the Department saying ‘We told you so, didn’t we!’ And even when they didn’t, a refusal to take advice went down in the books as a black mark, and was something to be avoided.
Nonetheless, there was a strong hint in the Diwan’s letter that if Tacklow desired it, His Highness was prepared to tell the F and P to jump in the lake, and go ahead with employing him; and, speaking for myself, I was so furious that I was all for that. But I might have known that Tacklow wouldn’t dream of agreeing – because to do so would only mean trouble for the state in the future. Besides, he simply did not know how to do nasty, sneaky, underhand things, any more than he knew how to tell lies.
He had been badly hit by the Tonk débâcle, so badly that he had wanted to have no more to do with India and its lies and intrigues, and had escaped from it to the China of his happiest memories. There had been no resting place there, and no option but to return to India, for his son was there and his wife and daughters couldn’t wait to get back there – Bets to be married and Moll because she regarded it as home, and his darling Daisy because it was the country to which he had brought her as a teenage bride over a quarter of a century ago.
The pressure to return had been too great. But so had the expenses. The visit to Japan. A winter season in Delhi. Bets’s trousseau and her wedding. It had all cost a good deal more than he had budgeted for, and if there was one thing that Tacklow was scared of it was getting into debt. He had had no desire to take another job, however well paid, in an Indian state. Not after the horrors of that last one. But when the offer came he could not afford to turn it down. And now this death blow …
I suppose he should have realized that in the Government of India the Departments stuck together in the manner of the mafiosi. According to Mother, there had been quite a lot of dismay when Tacklow, a soldier by profession, had been appointed Director of Central Intelligence – a post which until then had always been one of the plum jobs of the ‘Heaven-born’. Mother had once told me that some of them ‘hadn’t liked it at all’ and had been ‘excessively catty about it’ – their wives, I presume (though when it comes to cattiness no one can be as catty as a tom cat) – but that ‘fortunately’, that sort of thing ‘slid off Tacklow’s back and he never even noticed it’. He had had to notice it in Tonk because his nose had been rubbed in it. And he was noticing this time! Both of them were. The only thing I remember with painful clarity is how angry Mother was and how old Tacklow looked … how frighteningly old.
* * *
Everything had been discussed and decided upon while I was still away. I wasn’t asked to give my views on my parents’ future, or my own. This time Tacklow was going to do what he wanted to do. He had been a roving correspondent for the Near East and India ever since he had left England in the autumn of 1927, and now he had cabled them to ask if he could take over again as editor, a post that
was due to fall vacant in a year’s time. The reply being ‘yes’, he had written to book passages for Mother, himself and me on a passenger ship sailing from Bombay on the last day of March. Mother had already written off to a number of her special friends, asking if she could come and stay with them for a week or ten days, because Tacklow planned to stay with his sister, Aunt Molly, up with whom she would not put, while they went house-hunting. Since I was no fonder of Aunt Molly than Mother was, I also made arrangements to stay with friends until such a time as my parents found a house they liked and could afford. And in the meantime I went on what I thought was going to be a last, lovely spree in Kashmir.
There being no longer any reason for giving up the boat, we kept it on, moored at the Club ghat; and Mother and I went out painting every day, with a view to giving a last exhibition of our work in Delhi when the time came to pack up and leave for good. The valley put on its best party-dress for us and blazed with red and gold, and my brother Bill and my cousin Dick Hamblyn came up together to spend a short leave on the ‘Sunflower’.
Aud Wrench had invited me to stay with her for Christmas. And now, since her father, Sir Evelyn, was due to retire in the spring and her family too would be sailing home at the end of the season, they invited me to come down again to Delhi ahead of my family, and spend ten days with them so that I could join in all the goodbye parties that they were planning. Bets, too, was in Delhi in a minute ‘married-quarter’ that had no room for guests, so she could not put me up. But we saw a good deal of each other during that Christmas visit to the Wrenches, and again when I came down at the end of February.
Tacklow and Mother were going to spend a few days in Old Delhi with a long-time friend of theirs, an Indian doctor who, years later, I used as the model for Gobind Dass, Kaka-ji’s doctor in The Far Pavilions. He had a lovely house in Old Delhi, one of the old nineteenth-century bungalows, and I think he must have been the man who lent us the house in Gupkar Road in which we stayed when we first came up to Kashmir in that dismal March of 1927. He had been a friend and neighbour of my parents when Tacklow was the Director of Central Intelligence, and he and my parents had houses in Rajpore Road.
