What had happened? Of one thing I was quite certain. Even if I hadn’t made a dive for the knife, Gatcho would never have plunged it into my gizzard. He hadn’t attacked, and he had released the knife at once. He was just as strong as I was and he could have put up – had he wanted – a far longer fight. It was obviously my imperceptive and no doubt whisky-sprung and jarring laughter that had made him seize it in exasperation. But what had started it off in the first place? There had been not a flicker of previous trouble and we had parted cheerfully before I had set off. Nor had there been a trace of any sentimental discord, rivalry over studentkas, or friction of any other kind. Could I have talked too much about hated Rumania? I thought I had been careful about that. Or boasted beyond endurance about my smart new friends in Bucharest? Surely I would have had enough tact not to go wrong there. Could I have seemed to abandon Gatcho and his companions these last few days for English friends in exalted consular circles? It couldn’t have been this. I was certain, too, that it wasn’t a question of overstayed welcome, which after all it might have been. (I suddenly began to wonder how much of a nuisance I might have proved to countless people during the last year: had I been a perfect pest all across Central Europe? A deep subsidiary gloom set in, that made it almost a relief to return to the dominant question.) Perhaps I had stopped him from working. But that was just what I hadn’t been doing these last two nights; anyway, Gatcho was an even more confirmed noctambulist than I was, just as bent on excess and injudicious conduct; in fact I think we had what schoolmasters so damningly call ‘a bad influence on each other’, in this respect. At last I came to the conclusion, peering at the dark ceiling, that I must have said something tactless, perhaps during some exchange of heavy-handed teasing, or even something quite innocent which had passed unnoticed at the moment and been misunderstood later: one of those unintentional, feud-launching words that cannot be expiated, wiped out or explained, which after rankling and festering had exploded like a delayed-action bomb. The result could have been one of Gatcho’s blind rages which I had seen wreaking havoc on others . . . Was I letting myself off too lightly? Suddenly Gatcho asked if I were asleep, and apologized again. I said I was sure everything was my fault. ‘No, no, no!’ ‘Yes, yes!’; a maudlin exchange, but much better than nothing. We both feigned sleep.
It was much better, but far from all right next morning. We were both ill-at-ease and avoiding each other’s glance. As we squatted by the mangali, pushing the two long-stemmed Turkish coffee saucepans into the charcoal, I said, ‘Gatcho, I don’t know quite what has happened, but I think I ought to find other rooms. I’m sorry for being a nuisance.’ (I was waiting for the post again.) He seized me by the arm, almost upsetting the mangali again, and cried, ‘Oh, no! Please, please don’t! Think of the shame to me!’ He meant the crime against Balkan hospitality. I begged him to come and have lunch at a café I had discovered and had turned into a writing and reading headquarters during the day on top of the cliff. No more was said before he left, except: ‘Please, don’t tell the others.’ (As if I would!) On the way out, I went to look at the drainpipe. The knife was sticking in an upright of the woodshed wall, flung with enough violence to embed it nearly an inch. I put it back in its place.
The café was in an exactly similar position to the place where I had lunched with Rosa outside Rustchuk, except that instead of the Danube lay the Black Sea. Nobody seemed to come there. The old kafedji said he had got some sausages and could find some potatoes to fry when the time came. I spent a miserable morning there trying to unravel the events of the night before, but without success, peering out at the rain-dappled waves till Gatcho turned up on a borrowed bike. We chucked a first glass of slivo down our throats and poured out another. Our openings were nearly identical and embarrassingly contrite. Me: ‘I’m terribly sorry, whatever I did. I didn’t mean to.’ Gatcho: ‘I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I must be mad. Don’t let’s talk about it’, followed by an awkward pause overhung by a giant question-mark. I got busy with the wine and the conversation became less stilted. Gatcho asked me questions and I answered. I realized that we were running briskly through nearly all the subjects we had touched on since I had arrived in Varna. Gatcho listened in silence punctuated by grave nods. I feared I might repeat the same error, like the man in comic stories asked back into a house years after making some monster gaffe, and doing the same thing again. If only I knew where the snag lay! I talked a lot, but more thoughtfully than usual. There was no point at which, in spite of watching carefully, I could detect a sudden movement of détente, but the atmosphere did thaw. Afterwards, looking over the cliff, I realized we were walking arm in arm – it reminded me suddenly of Constantine at the ball – as though nothing had happened. It had somehow come right.
All was back to normal. I asked him two days later what the reason had been. He said, apologetically, that it was merely his lunatic temper. But I know it wasn’t. I had said something which had been misunderstood. Once cleared up, I think he felt shy about admitting how trivial it was.
The explanation of this odd incident has gone on too long. But, though much in a narrative like this had to be jettisoned, I couldn’t quite omit it, however inconclusive – I have thought about it often since, and always with mystification – and, once embarked on, to curtail it would have presented it wrongly. Not for the first time, I concluded despondently, I have wounded somebody badly without meaning to; nor, alas, for the last. But I wish I knew exactly how.
• • •
. . . for a long walk in St James’ Park. The Admiralty from the Regent’s Bridge looked like a palace in an illustration in the Russian Fairy Book, pearl and ivory coloured, the pinnacles and domes floating above the thinnest of mists, but the only sign of autumn was a lonely spray of gold in the green leaves of one plane tree, like Whistler’s solitary lock of silver hair. I was peacefully watching the pelicans (how sooty they get!) when a friendly old tramp with a nose like Mount Vesuvius in full eruption and a pink and positively magenta cloth cap asked me if they were . . .
. . . and the mean rainfall in Nepal is the heaviest in the Himalayas, 82% per annum, so I will be glad to return to Simla. The dress of the King and the court officials is most picturesque. I was interested of course, in a subsidiary of the Rhaeto-Alpine system of unwarped sedimentary with a superstratum of friable schist and faults of jurassic gneiss and hornblende. I hope you observe . . .
These letters from my mother and father, many times re-forwarded, and picked up that morning, must have been delayed on one of their many stages. My mother’s letters, dashingly written at top speed, were (and still are) long, charming and funny. I surprised the café-keeper several times by laughing out loud, till I got to the finish (‘everything, even the Cromwell Road, must come to an end, so . . .’) With the letters, as always, was a thick roll of weekly magazines and interesting or amusing cuttings from newspapers, comic juxtapositions, Times crosswords and so on. I answered them with long travel accounts (which, borrowed back for the first go at this book, also, unfortunately, went astray like the notebooks). Letters from my father, much shorter and more formal and punctilious both in writing and content, were rarer events. My parents had separated about twelve years earlier, and even before that he only returned to England for six months’ leave every three years, with the result that like many Anglo-Indian parents and children (in my case, one who had never been to India, though my mother and sister were born there and my father lived there nearly all his life) we were, in spite of determined efforts on both sides, semi-strangers.
My childhood was spent in London, in my mother’s very exciting company, with my sister Vanessa, who was four years older, when she was not in India: first of all, when I was about five, in Primrose Hill Studios, where one could hear the lions roaring at night in the zoo. These studios were entirely inhabited by sculptors and painters, and my mother persuaded Arthur Rackham to paint the door of our nursery-schoolroom with a picture of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens sailing
down the Serpentine in a bird’s nest. Then for years we lived in a rather fascinating flat high up at 213 Piccadilly, where I could watch across the Circus a staccato sky-sign shaker pouring a cocktail into a glass with a cherry in it – GORDON’S GIN THE HEART OF A GOOD COCKTAIL! – from my bed. In summer she would take a cottage at Dodford, in Northamptonshire, on the edge of one of the smallest and remotest villages anywhere, beside a brook flowing between steep, fox-haunted spinneys. Here my mother was absorbed in writing plays under the name of Aeleen Taafe, plays which never really struck lucky, though they seemed marvellous and tremendously exciting to me, especially read out loud. They were mostly about India, extremely adventurous and romantic, and not written without knowledge.
Her family, a mixture of Irish and English, had been there for three generations. My grandfather arrived there, as a midshipman in the East India Company’s navy, in the thick of the Mutiny and was greeted on landing by the appalling sight of mutineers being blown from a cannon’s mouth. My grandparents owned some large slate quarries in Bihar and Orissa, and when they were in India they lived in Hickey and Thackerayish splendour with even more than the usual army of servants, and unnumbered horses: an Elysian state vanished for many a year. Unlike many Anglo-Indians, my mother not only learnt to speak Hindi and Urdu perfectly, but to read and write them, and gathered much more than a superficial knowledge of India. (When, later on, she and my sister would suddenly break into an unknown tongue as we were walking across some sodden Midland field, I would try to drown them by bawling in Latin, but this was not nearly arcane enough to either of them for real revenge.) Beside this went random but enormous reading, passionate devotion to horsemanship and, above all, the amateur theatricals which seem to have played such a tremendous part in the life of Calcutta and Simla; these first started my mother’s long-standing devotion to the theatre in all its aspects (which perversely and sadly has always filled me – I mean the backstage part of it – with an instinctive recoil. Wrongly perhaps, because it got me out of a hole once during the war in Cairo, when I had landed into some sort of trouble. Halfway through the rocket which a rather nice elderly general was perfunctorily administering, his brow clouded thoughtfully. ‘Could it have been your mother that I saw playing the lead in The Maid of the Mountains in Simla in 1913? It was? My dear boy, I’ve never forgotten it! She was wonderful! I’m afraid she’d never remember a fogey like me, but please send her my regards.’ His old eyes misted over and the forgotten rocket sizzled out. I was very relieved and extremely touched.) This post-Kipling existence of reading, languages, gymkhanas and acting, unfolding under deodars, was half hindered, half abetted by my grandmother. She was a very fair portrait painter, rather of the Burne-Jones school, and she had left a picture of my mother at that time: a beautiful girl in a white dress with her head bowed in a posture of entirely deceptive meekness in order, I think, and quite rightly, to display the long Pre-Raphaelite cascade of flame-coloured hair.
This London–Northamptonshire life, which lasted all through my calamitous schooldays, was enlivened during a year or so by a sudden passion of my mother’s for the air, involving long drives to Castle Bromwich aerodrome and then anxious waits while my sister and I watched her disappear in minute Moth biplanes, and then, worse still, solo. Fortunately this period died away without disaster. But far more exciting than the delights of London and the country were journeys to France, and to the Bernese Oberland for skiing, which had us all three in its grip. (My mother was married when she was eighteen, so there was much that we could share.) But better even than this, or France, or the museums and picture galleries of Paris and London, which she knew by heart and filled with excitement, or the endless plays, were my mother’s gift for reading aloud: quantities of Shakespeare and poetry and scores of books ranging over vast tracts of English literature, sometimes for hours a day – and much of it, as I was four years younger than my sister, only just within reach, which made it doubly mysterious and memorable, and leaves a deeper impression than anything else in those years. There was a great deal of reciting and singing to the piano and dressing up. What was so extraordinary in all this fun and stimulus and charm of decor was that it was all achieved, though I didn’t know it for years, on scarcely any cash at all, by a genius for improvisation and stage-management: a miraculous and absolutely successful emanation of a very imaginative, inventive and strong personality.
Rather unexpectedly, beneath the shimmering, unconventional play of the surface waves lurked sunken and adamantine ranges of inherited and unquestioned conviction. On occasions they could rip the keel off a craft sailing too confidently there. Sometimes these submarine hazards seemed to change position and this would lend incalculability to the scene, a feeling that one would never learn the art of navigating this in all its niceties. Clouds would suddenly assemble in unexpected quarters, charged with distress and bewilderment – not too stiff a price to pay for the charm, generosity, stimulus, enterprise, fun and excitement that was the normal climate, let alone her forbearance and kindness about my troubled career which might justifiably have filled anyone else with despair. I think her own rather headstrong and turbulent career as a girl charitably tempered exasperation with a secret sympathy, however much it had to be repressed for decorum’s sake. A many-faceted character evoked every reaction except tedium. It was her high-spirited style and sense of the absurd in this long letter that made me, to the Bulgarian café-keeper’s puzzlement, laugh out loud again and again.
To say that one letter-writer could make something alive and captivating out of an ordinary London day and the other, somehow, drain the diamonds and aigrettes of a Himalayan court of their gleam, is not a fair comparison. It may indicate a shift in tempo and temperature, but it is interesting for a different reason. My own letters to my father were as formal and lacklustre as his. Due to the scarcity of leave from India and the small overlap with them that summer holidays afforded, we hardly knew each other. We met for the first time when I was five and since then, for the rest of our lives, we spent – placing all the communal periods end to end – about six months in each other’s company, for as long as our lives overlapped. It was never much of a go, and I think we always parted with secret relief, after trying hard on both sides. I wish we had met as total strangers when I was grown up, because today, if I saw him sitting in a hotel, say, in the Italian mountains, I would have longed to get to know him for the very reasons that filled me with malaise at the time.
He was enormously tall and thin, with a distinguished and scholarly look, heavily spectacled, and dressed and equipped on the occasion which I have in mind – these occasions rare enough for each one to leave an indelible impression – in a way that indicated his interests as plainly as armes parlantes. We were in Baveno on Lake Maggiore in April, preparing to climb the Monte della Croce just behind, and I think I was eight or nine. He wore heavy boots, carefully oiled and dubbined with tags that stuck out behind, thick green stockings, pepper-and-salt knickerbockers and an old-fashioned Norfolk jacket of the same stuff, belted, with pleats on the pockets and intricate leather buttons, a watch attached to the buttonhole in the lapel by a leather thong. In the pockets went lens, compass, maps, sandwiches, a bar of chocolate, an apple and an orange, a notebook, sketching block, pencils, killing bottle, guides to the regional botany and avifauna, and – slung about his long form – a japanned vasculum on a wide web baldrick, field glasses and a collapsible butterfly net. An alpenstock leant nearby. All this was all right, I thought, standing hard by like a reluctant page at this accoutring; but I dreaded the two coming items. The first was a geological hammer, the head of which was marked – as my father was in the service of the Government of India – with that scarcely perceptible broad arrow that stamps all government property. It was a favourite joke of my father’s that the only people to possess such implements were he, his colleagues and the convicts on Dartmoor, for breaking stones. I knew it was a joke, but did everybody else? When he stuck it through the belt of his jacket, I
always prayed that the arrow side was not the exposed one. On this occasion, it blazed forth. Pretending officiously to adjust it more comfortably, I tried to reverse it, when my father said in an austere and cavernous voice from high above: ‘Paddy, what on earth are you up to?’ I lost my nerve and left it, trusting the English people in the hall wouldn’t notice, although I had eyes for nothing else, and that the Italians might not know . . . The second item was almost equally dreaded: a vast semicircular cap, I think originally destined for Tibetan travel, like a bisected pumpkin of fur, armed with a peak and with fur-lined earflaps that were joined (when tied under the chin which was worse still) by a disturbing bow on the summit.
The Broken Road Page 23