by M. M. Kaye
What indeed? She had only been in her sixteenth year when Tacklow had seen her on the platform of the Tientsin railway station and fallen instantly and forever in love with her. He had spoilt and petted and cherished her, treating her as though she was still that attractive tomboyish ‘Gibson-Girl’ with whom he had fallen in love in North China, and she had about as much idea of looking after herself as a goldfish. Tacklow had done everything for her. She hadn’t known, until her first voyage home alone in 1919, how to write out or cash a cheque, because he had always paid all the bills and dealt with any household problems. And now she was on her own, with no one to do the sums for her or cope with things like rates and taxes, or teach her how to make ends meet on a drastically reduced widow’s pension.
The doctor and the night-nurse were both in the room with her, watching her with the silent sympathy of those who are only too used to death, and Bets took over comforting her with a good deal more success than I had had – she had always been Mother’s darling – while William Henry dealt with things like telegrams and announcements to the Press and, presumably, to Bill. Bets and the night-nurse managed to get Mother into her bed, which had been moved into another room after Tacklow’s first heart-attack, and the doctor gave her an injection of something to help her sleep. When at last that worked, Bets and I went back to Tacklow and I carefully cut off a curl of his grey hair – one of the two that we used to twist into a pair of little horns, one each side of his head, in imitation of a cartoon character called ‘Pop’ who bore a marked resemblance to Tacklow. I kept that little curl for years, despite being told by Kadera, and later by several of my Indian friends, that to keep the hair of a dead person is not a good thing to do, for it ties them to the earth, which is something they may not desire.
Many years later, during a scrambled house-move, some unknown ‘helper’ opened the tiny silver paan box that Devika4 had given me as a parting present when I left India for an English boarding school, and mistaking the little grey wisps inside it for padding intended to protect something small and valuable that was no longer there, shook them out and threw them away.
I don’t remember crying; all that came later. But even now, after all these years, I cannot think of Tacklow’s death, or talk or write of it, without crying. At the time I must have been too numbed by shock for tears, which was just as well, as both Mother and Bets were being torn to pieces by them, and someone had to be able to speak and answer questions. It was the doctor who asked me where we wanted Tacklow to be buried and reminded me that it must be some time today, because the weather was getting too hot to allow for delay. Well, I’d always known that those who died in this country must be buried within twenty-four hours. But this was Tacklow we were talking about …
A brand new cemetery had been opened in New Delhi, said the doctor, but he presumed that we would prefer to bury Sir Cecil in the Old Delhi one just behind Curzon House; the one in which General Sir John Nicholson of Mutiny fame had been buried.
Yes, I remembered it. That peaceful, tree-shaded, flower-filled spot, full of birds and squirrels and butterflies, where Bets and I used to play when we were small children; climbing over the wall in defiance of Punj-Ayah, whose muslin saris did not permit her to scramble over rough stone walls. But there was the hot weather to be considered; and I also remembered Tacklow reciting part of Kipling’s Ballad of Burial, which begins: ‘If down here I chance to die’ and goes on to beg his friends to take his body to the hills for burial, because he could not endure the thought of the hot weather and the September rains ‘Yearly till the Judgement Day’…
No. Stupid as it sounds, I could not let him be buried in the plains. But those lines of verse had reminded me of something else: that long-ago conversation about ‘Where would you be buried if you had to choose?’ Tacklow had mentioned the little British cemetery at Sanour – if he should die in India. Well, Sanour was not all that far from Delhi, and we could get there in a matter of hours.
‘There will not be time,’ said the doctor sadly, ‘for there are rules about such matters. You would have to get permission from the local authorities – in this case, I presume, the Governors of the Lawrence School in Sanour. And to get that permission would take days, not hours: you know what red-tape is like in this country! It would take too long, and we cannot wait.’
Yes, I knew all about red-tape. But I also thought I knew how to get that permission in record time. As soon as the sun was up I rang Viceroy House and asked if I could speak personally to the Viceroy, emphasizing that it was urgent. The ADC who answered the phone, sounding scandalized, said no, I couldn’t, not at that hour of the morning; but that if it was really urgent, I could leave a message and he would see that it reached His Excellency as soon as it was convenient. I told him that I couldn’t wait as long as that. My father had died during the night and I would like to speak to His Excellency at once. The ADC said: ‘Sir Cecil dead? Good God! Look, I am sorry. How ghastly for you,’ and told me to hang on while he got hold of the Viceroy. A minute later Lord Willingdon was on the phone.
He couldn’t have been nicer. He told me to give his deepest sympathy to Mother and the family, and that he quite understood about wanting my father buried in Sanour and not left behind in the plains, and that he would see to all that and I wasn’t to worry about any of the arrangements; he would get his people to see to everything and someone would be ringing up about it in an hour or two.
Someone, I don’t remember who, rang up and spoke to the doctor less than half an hour later, and we didn’t have to do anything, except to get dressed, and to see that Mother was dressed and ready for the drive up to Sanour when the cars came to fetch us. The undertakers came to take Tacklow away and we kissed him goodnight and au revoir, and then they were gone, taking him with them in a makeshift hearse that left about an hour ahead of us. I don’t remember much about the drive up to Sanour except that there were several cars in addition to the one we travelled in, and I only learned later that both Willingdons had sent ‘representatives’ and flowers, and that a surprising number of the men who had served under him when he was Director of Central Intelligence, mostly Indian, had taken the time off to attend.
I do remember how hot it was. There isn’t a great deal of shade on the road that leads from Delhi to Kalka and the foothills of the Himalayas, across miles of baking, almost treeless plains which in those days looked as flat as a pancake (and where, of all places, Independent India chose to celebrate her freedom by wasting crores5 and crores of rupees on building yet another grandiose capital city, which she named Chandigore, and which must be one of the hottest places in the Punjab).
It was, as ever, good to feel the air turn cool and freshen as we reached the fringes of the foothills and the road began to climb. At last we left the bare hillsides and the candelabra cactus behind us, and were among pine trees, with Dugshai below us and the hill resort of Kausauli stretching along a ridge above and to our left, and Sanour, and the boys’ school that Sir Henry Lawrence founded long before the Mutiny, among the pinewoods to our right. We left the cars at the school, and led by the Headmaster – who was in Orders and presumably took the service – walked in single file down the narrow, overgrown track that led to a seldom used and almost forgotten cemetery where, in the days when Victoria was Empress of India, the young Tacklow had chosen to sit and study, because ‘it was such a peaceful place, and because the view from it must be among the most beautiful in India’…
We hadn’t reached it when Bets stopped and clutched at Mother’s arm, turned an alarming shade of pale grey and proceeded to faint. I can still see quite clearly in my mind’s eye the few yards of road where she did so. It must have been on a particularly steep strip of hillside, because here there was a portion of low stone wall along its outer edge, which Bets had tried to sit on when she felt that she was about to pass out. Fortunately she didn’t manage it, because had she leant backwards I don’t know where she would have ended up; probably several hundred yards below and a hos
pital case. As it was, that faint of hers proved a godsend, for it gave Mother something else to think of.
She had been in a state of shock from the moment she came out of a drug-induced sleep that had lasted well into the morning. She didn’t seem to know what Bets and I were doing, or take in what we were saying, and we might have been dressing a life-sized doll. Nor did she say a word during that long drive. She just sat between us staring at nothing and saying nothing. But when Bets clutched at her and flaked out she came out of her daze and behaved as any ordinary parent would have done, demanding brandy, keeping Bets’s head down between her knees, and generally fussing over her; and when Bets came round (which was almost immediately) and refused flatly to be escorted back to the schoolhouse to lie down and recover, Mother half led, half carried her the rest of the way, made her sit down on a tree stump beside her and was so preoccupied with the state of Bets’s health that she got through the subsequent procedures without breaking down or, I suspect, taking in what was going on. Which was plenty …
Because of the delay caused by Bets’s faint, the coffin and its bearers had arrived some little time before us, and instead of just putting it down while they waited, they lowered it into the newly dug grave whose measurements had been telephoned to Sanour earlier that morning. Nothing wrong about that, except that they had laid it down so that it faced towards the steep pine-forested hillside behind it instead of towards the wonderful view that lay spread out before us.
I took one look at it and said: ‘I’m very sorry, but you’ve got him facing the wrong way. Would you be very kind and turn him round, please?’ But here the two coolie-log who had dug the grave came to life. They didn’t speak any English, but they understood sign language and I had, as usual, been using my hands as I explained what I wanted done, and now they both protested loudly that it couldn’t be done. The grave had been dug to fit the size of the coffin, and it would not fit the other way. ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘just take it out and widen the other end so that it does fit. It’s quite simple.’
No one else thought it was simple – with the exception of Mother and Bets who were paying no attention because Bets was still feeling groggy and Mother was worried about her. Whoever it was who took the service gave me a lecture on the un-Christian folly of thinking that the spirit of my ‘dear departed father’ would care about which way his ‘mortal remains faced’. I told him that I couldn’t agree with him more. But that I cared. I wanted to feel that we had left him lying in that particular place, facing that particular view – not with his back turned to it. And that I was prepared to stay here until it was done, however long it took!
In the end, and very crossly, they pulled the coffin out and we all sat there on the grass while the diggers widened the grave at the narrow end, and when the coffin was replaced facing the right way, the service went ahead. When it was over and the grave filled in, we went back to the cars. Leaving him on that tree-clad ridge among the foothills of the Himalayas, from where, on a clear day, you can see forever … and ever …
* * *
Later on, I designed a stone to mark the spot. A solid chunk of plain grey granite, cut in a flat-topped curve that is exactly the right height and width to make it an inviting seat; in the hope that an occasional pupil from the school, or some rare visitor taking a stroll along the hillside, may sit down to rest there and look out at the same view that Tacklow loved, and be as charmed by it as he was. His name and a couple of dates are carved on the face of the curve, and the only decoration is a pair of stylized daisies, one on each side. He would have liked that.
I have never seen it myself, but one of the Indian actors who appeared in the film version of The Far Pavilions told me that his son was a pupil at the Sanour School, and knew the stone seat. And later he took some very good photographs of it and sent me copies. Since then several tourists have done the same, and a few years ago a fan who was touring in the Simla Hills made a special visit to Sanour, and wrote to tell me that my father must have been almost the last, if not the last, person to be buried there, but that his stone still stands unchanged except for the golden circles of lichen here and there on the sides, and that standing on the exact centre of the grave was a single enormous fir-cone.
She had brought the fir-cone away with her because she ‘thought I might like it’. Would I! The dear woman sent it to me; and my younger daughter, who has an antique shop, found me a charming stand complete with glass dome, under which it now stands in a place of honour in the corner cupboard of my drawing-room, looking exactly as though it was a wonderful piece of carving by some Chinese master-craftsman.
* * *
The days immediately following Tacklow’s death were some of the worst I have ever had to endure. I needed him so terribly. I needed his advice and his criticism and his support and understanding, and the knowledge that he would always give me a straight answer, even though it might be a dusty one. I had always known that I needed him in my corner. That was why I had prayed every night that I might be happily married, and, hopefully, the mother of several children before he died, so that I might be at least partially insulated from the pain of losing him. And now he had gone. I hadn’t been able to cry that first day, because Mother was crying so dreadfully and there were so many things that needed to be done. I couldn’t let myself cry, not at that time, or for a day or two afterwards, because there were things that had to be decided, and Mother couldn’t cope at all. In the end Bets and I, and presumably Bill, decided to go ahead with the programme that Tacklow had mapped out for us, exactly as if he had been with us.
Mother and I would go back to England, and spend the first six months staying with the various friends and relatives who would be expecting us, and take it from there. But first we must get through the remaining days before the one on which we were booked to leave for Bombay. I don’t think there can have been many of them, but they were made hideous by Lizel Kaz. We had none of us had the time to spare for Kaz on that first day, but when we came back from Sanour in the evening, Kadera told us that Kaz had been yowling all day, and refusing to eat or drink. I don’t think we took this seriously to begin with, but as the days went by and Kaz continued to search the bungalow and gardens for Tacklow, yowling piteously all the while and getting thinner and thinner, the situation became very tricky. Kaz would only drink if we gave her something that still smelt of Tacklow, and then she would purr and knead it with her paws, and take a sip or two. But she would not eat, and her search for Tacklow became too harrowing for words. In the end we called in a vet, one who specialized in cats and was crazy about Siamese ones. He volunteered to take her home with him for a few days to get her away from the bungalow. But nothing worked. It was Angie all over again; the vet said she was dying of starvation and the kindest thing that we could do was to put her down. The last time I saw Kaz she was nothing but bones inside a black fur sack, but when I kissed her on her nose she purred a little. Poor Kaz. And poor Mother. Poor me!
Chapter 18
In the end it was Mike who helped me the most during those nightmare last days in Delhi. I don’t know what he was doing in India again, and I hadn’t even known he was there. But he had been somewhere down south when he heard the news of Tacklow’s death on a radio news bulletin, and he took the next train to Delhi and, walking unannounced into the Wrenches’ house, abducted me in a hired car. There was a full moon that week, and he drove me to the Purana Khila, the Old Fort, and, leaving the car by the main gate, walked me off to the Sher Mandal – the library where a Mogul Emperor, Humayun, had killed himself falling down its steep and narrow stairway. Mike plonked me down on the steps that led up to it and said, ‘Aud says that you don’t cry, and that it’s not healthy. Come on, Midshipmite, tell me all about it. What happened?’
So I told him; and when I got to the worst part – how I’d been angry with Tacklow because he’d scared me rigid, and had gone off to Meerut without saying I was sorry, and never seen him alive again, I began to cry. And found that I c
ould not stop. Mike sat with me for a time and then got up and went off to walk across the grassy spaces – in those days there was nothing within the ruined outer walls of the Purana Khila except the Sher Mandal and the beautiful Mosque of Shere Shah. I was still sitting there in the moonlight, dripping like a leaking tap, when he came back a good half hour later. But the pressure was off. Temporarily, at least. Mike was a real friend in those black days, and I shall always be grateful to him. He saw to it that I shouldn’t have more than a modicum of time to myself, and Bets and Bill did the same for Mother. I only remember one other night during that time. It was early morning rather than night and the sleeping pills I had been given didn’t work, so in the end I got up and went out into the Wrenches’ garden to try and tire myself by walking up and down in the moonlight.
I remember how piercingly sweet the night-flowering stocks and the Rat-ki-Rani1 smelt, and how I couldn’t stop crying; not because I would soon be leaving India with little or no prospect of ever getting back again, but because there was a single dreary sentence that kept on repeating itself in my brain with the maddening persistence of a frog croaking from the edge of a pond: ‘When I am an old woman, if anyone asks me about my father I shall have to say: “He died when I was still only a girl in my twenties…”’
That seemed to me then, and still does, the saddest thing that anyone could say. Because it meant that he left me just when I needed him most. When I was adrift in an uncharted sea and badly in need of a pilot. I must have walked the moon down because in the end it dawned on me that the garden had become very dark and the sky in the east was growing paler every minute, and that tears were still pouring down my face and had soaked the front of my nightdress. And suddenly I stopped thinking of Tacklow and began to wonder where on earth one’s tears came from. I seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of them, but from where? How was it possible to keep on and on producing this mysterious salt water, hour after hour, without the supply giving out? It was the sort of ridiculous question that Tacklow could probably have answered off the bat. How was I going to get through my youth without him? How was I going to get through the rest of my life without him? There was so much of it left. All the rest of my twenties, my thirties and forties; marriage, motherhood and middle age, all without him. ‘My father died when I was a girl in my twenties…’ I suppose I must have managed an hour of sleep in the end, but not until the sun came up.
