by Paul Scott
“Anyway I thought this was better than a taxi, quite the best way to bring you to the club because sitting like we are with our backs to the driver and looking back at what we’re leaving behind you get this gradually unfolding and expanding view of the Pankot valley.
“We’re coming up what we call East Hill, which was always the British side. That’s the golf course on our left. There’s St John’s spire down to our right. I’ll take you there tomorrow. I hope Sarah liked the photographs I sent her. But your own will be better.
“Ah, now, Mr Turner. This is where you begin to see right down into the valley and the bazaar. Down there to the left, all those old buildings amid the trees, that’s the old area headquarters where Tusker worked during the war. That’s the Shiraz of course. It really is rather dreadful, isn’t it? You used to be able to see Smith’s from here but the Shiraz blocks it out. For the same reason you can hardly see the General Hospital, it’s that group of white buildings snuggling into the trees about half a mile beyond. Over to your right you get a good view of West Hill which is where the rich Indians always built their summer villas and still do. And from here you get the best view of the bazaar. It reminds me a bit of the bazaar in Gulmarg. On a misty morning the upper storeys of those old wooden buildings sort of peep out as if from the cloud. Some people think it looks Swiss or Tyrolean. But sometimes I’m reminded mostly of home, the hills beyond are so gentle.
“What we call South Hill, that is. Although of course it’s several. There beyond the bazaar. That’s where the Pankot Rifles are. Boys and young men still come in from the hill villages to the recruiting daftar. It’s part of Pankot’s tradition. That isolated grey building is Commandant House, quite the draughtiest one in Pankot. The Menektaras simply wouldn’t live there. If you direct your gaze an inch or so to the left that’s the mess. I must ask Colonel Menektara to let you see it. It’s kept up just as in the old days, which I find very encouraging.
“No, you can’t see Rose Cottage from here. That’s behind us and above us quite a long way yet, the very last bungalow at the top of Club road and we haven’t come to the bungalows yet, they all lie beyond the club in what’s called Upper Club road that takes you up and round the peak so that you’re facing north, and that gives you the loveliest view of all. At the back of the garden at Rose Cottage you can stand almost virtually on the edge of a very steep and wild and lovely descent and the nearest hill must be five miles away, and beyond there’s another hill and then another and then many, many more rising higher and higher until they become distant mountains with snow on them even in summer, and on the hottest day the air comes on your cheek with a bite in it and the smell of resin.
“But you’ll have caught a glimpse of the mountains when you arrived, as you came through the little pass at the top of South Hill, the only road into Pankot from the station. I remember so clearly the morning Tusker and I first arrived, years and years ago, over thirty. It was a day like this, Mr Turner. They’d sent a car from Area Headquarters to meet us and when we got to the pass and we saw the valley below and the mountains beyond I thought, well, perhaps Pankot won’t be so bad after all, even though I was tired of all our wanderings and never having a home for longer than a year or two and often less and hadn’t wanted to come. Not at all the sort of life I’d expected when I first came out.
“Before Pankot, I’d only been really happy once in India, Mr Turner, and that was in a little princely state called Mudpore, India in the way I’d more or less imagined it when typing those letters dictated by Mr Smith of Coyne, Coyne, Smith and Coyne to Lieutenant, then Captain, T. U. Smalley of the Mahwar Regiment which all had to be filed under F. J. Smalley Decd. The carbons I mean. The letters themselves went to the bank in Bombay and Bombay sounded so glamorous.
“I used to think how marvellous it was that a letter typed in the office and posted in Chancery Lane just by me would actually find its way to a bank in Bombay and then to wherever Tusker was which wasn’t always clear because the postmarks were sometimes smudged and although he used regimental notepaper there was no address on it except the one Tusker filled in himself which was always the bank. I got to know the insignia of the Mahwar Regiment so well that I could have drawn it by heart – the elephant with the huge tusks and the howdah on its back and the palm tree sprouting from the howdah. I didn’t know it was called a howdah and I didn’t know how to pronounce Mahwar properly, neither did Mr Smith. But not knowing only added to the glamour. Amid all those dusty boring files and boxes and deeds which were nearly all about dead people it was this unknown young officer serving in India who provided the single element of mystery and romance in my life, Mr Turner.
“The girls in Litigation had much more fun, but Litigation was young Mr Coyne and I hated it if I ever had to take dictation from him which I sometimes had to if Mabel Temple was ill. He referred to me once as the Virgin from the Vicarage. Not to my face, but I heard him, and I heard Mabel Temple laugh. She did her hair like Clara Bow and smoked what she called gaspers. She wore black for weeks after Valentino died, and sometimes broke down and cried when taking dictation and had to be comforted by young Mr Coyne. And welcome she was to that. He was over six feet tall but very thin and I swear his nails were polished. I once said to Martha Price that his height had gone to his head and that he made my flesh creep. After that she started inviting me out. I was in digs, then, Mr Turner, because my twin brothers had been killed in a motor accident the year before and the awful atmosphere in the house, mother’s hysteria, what we’d call her psychosomatic illnesses, her continual demands on me, were affecting my work at Coyne, Coyne, Smith and Coyne, and not only that but putting my job at risk, because I was always having to stay at home to look after her and making excuses to Mr Smith. And one night Daddy found me crying because Mr Smith had suggested that perhaps I ought to look for another job nearer home. It was forty minutes there and forty minutes back on the Southern Electric and the ’bus, every day, including Saturday mornings. Coyne, Coyne, Smith and Coyne represented the only freedom I’d ever had as a person in my own right, if you understand. Daddy understood, when he found me crying. He called me Mops, the name he’d used when I was a child and my hair began to grow again. I was twenty-five now. I’d been at Coyne, Coyne since I was twenty. It was my first job and only job and I really was happy there in spite of not getting on all that well with the other girls. Of course I realize I must have looked a perfect little goose to them when I first went there, which would have been 1925.
“Being a vicar’s daughter I automatically dressed like one, skirts always below the knee – and my hair! Heavens, Mr Turner, do you know I had it in earphones? Oh, dear, what a sight. I never had it bobbed or shingled, mostly I expect because I hated the thought of losing any of it again. In fact I didn’t have it cut at all until the year I was in digs. Daddy said I mustn’t leave Coyne, Coyne, so he got me into the Y. I went home at weekends, although not always then. I was awfully nervous and shy being on my own, but I was away from that awful atmosphere of Mother’s ceaseless mourning for the twins, and after a while Mr Smith said my work hadn’t only regained its original high standard but had even improved and he gave me another seven and six a week. I used to get in early and never minded staying late because there was no train to catch, and gradually I came out of my shell and got on better with the others. They were a nice lot really.
“I didn’t stay long at the Y because Martha Price who was old Mr Coyne’s secretary got me a bedsitter in a very strictly run house just round the corner from the flat where she lived with her mother. That was in Bloomsbury. She was older than me of course and took me under her wing rather. The other girls thought her a frump and I’d always been scared of her so it was a terrific surprise that she loved dancing and was mad about the cinema. We never went dancing but she taught me in her home, dancing to a little portable, she taking the man’s part. As for the pictures, I was mad about them too or rather I’d loved them whenever I was allowed to go but became mad about th
em now. We started going once or twice a week and sometimes sat through the whole thing twice. It was a bit of a scramble getting from the office to the cheap Saturday matinees they had in West End cinemas, but we used to dash into Lyons and have something like patty and chips and a cup of tea, then off we’d go. I liked it best in the evenings though, coming out aching in every limb, dazed and dazzled by all the lights and advertisement signs but happy, so happy, clutching on to one another to protect ourselves from being accosted. We felt tremendously daring walking home through the West End, I assure you.
“Since then I’ve wondered about Martha. Perhaps her feelings for me were not entirely natural, but I knew nothing about such things in those days. But she was very hurt when Tusker suddenly came into my life.
“He’d come home on long leave and walked into the office one day without an appointment and Mr Smith was engaged with a client. He said he’d wait, so I made him a cup of tea and sat him down in my own little cubby-hole. My officer from India! Heavens, how thrilled I was. Oddly I was only a little bit nervous. He wasn’t really at all as I’d imagined him but at the same time he wasn’t a disappointment, and he was so kind and somehow open with me, but reserved. He asked me a few things about F. J. Smalley Decd, just by way of explaining what he wanted to talk to Mr Smith about so that I could get out the necessary papers because he didn’t want to waste Mr Smith’s time. He seemed impressed by my knowledge of the estate and of the changes the trustees had made in the investment of the capital sum Tusker had a life interest in. He said, ‘Well, Miss Little, I scarcely seem to need to take up Mr Smith’s time at all now.’ But of course it was only a joke.
“I’m afraid when he dies the interest on the capital sum dies with him – so far as we’re concerned. It’s never yielded much, but as a little cushion it’s always been helpful to him. The money was his grandfather’s. His own father and mother died young and left nothing. He was brought up by an Uncle, and his grandfather old F. J. Smalley willed him this life interest. It helped to educate him, and it helped him in the army. It’s been particularly useful to us in retirement, if only helping to defray the cost of what he has to pay into the Indian Military Widows and Orphans fund to make sure I have some income if I’m left alone. His army pension stops at his death, you know, and heaven knows it’s little enough. In England it would put us on the poverty line. Whatever I get from IMWOF as we call it will probably have to be supplemented by a Royal Warrant pension. I know he’s never carried much life insurance and I know he’s never saved. Furthermore, Mr Turner, I know that the one decent bit of capital we ever got our hands on, his compensation from the Indian Government when he finally had to retire from the army in 1949 when he was only forty-eight, has all gone.
“Yes, all gone. In what I call the débâcle. But I mustn’t talk to you about that. And I forgave him long ago. And at least he didn’t do what one man did, and that was stop contributing to the IMWOF directly he retired, when contributions were no longer compulsory. But this man also compounded the premiums already paid in and when his wife found out she had a fit because if he’d dropped dead the next day she’d have been left with nothing except charity from the Royal Warrant. She had to spend virtually the whole of her own little capital paying the capital sum back into the fund and then beg, borrow and scratch to go on paying the annual contributions herself.
“So you see how a woman can be placed after years of following the drum in India? If you’re a colonel’s wife people look at you and think, ah yes, they plead poverty but they’ve had a good time and quite apart from the nice pension they must have, they must always have had something behind them, a cosy bit put away or inherited.
“People always assume, certainly they did in my day, that officers and their wives are comfortably off whereas of course service jobs are among the worst paid in the world. Tusker couldn’t have afforded to be in a decent regiment at home, or a swanky one out here. That bit of private income was a godsend to him. But I remember when I told Martha Price that Tusker had proposed to me and I’d accepted and that in a few weeks we’d be off to India and would she be a bridesmaid at the wedding, all she said was, Well congratulations, you’ve done well for yourself haven’t you?
“No, she didn’t come to the wedding. It was the other girls who came, and I’m afraid, yes afraid, and ashamed even to remember it, that when I saw them at the reception I thought, oh dear, has it been a mistake? They look so common. What will Tusker’s relations think? Not that there were many of those. An aunt who lived in Bayswater, Tusker’s old guardian Uncle George who’d come up from Dorset and his cousin Cyril who inherited the bulk of the F. J. Smalley estate and whose son Clarence will get his hands on the capital sum Tusker’s had the income from directly Tusker dies.
“But the girls from the office were just about the only young friends I had, and there they were, getting tiddly on the champers and standing for protection all in a group, all so obviously dressed, so obviously overdressed because it was a wedding. And a bit overwhelmed by the vicarage because it was old and large, a gentleman’s residence, but also noticing it was shabby, with pictures on the walls and no chromium anywhere which made it terribly unfashionable. And then, Mr Turner, they were disappointed because I think they’d expected Tusker to be in uniform, even though none of us had ever seen him in uniform, except in a photograph he gave me and which I showed them. I think they expected the two of us to come out of the church with all his fellow officers standing making a little roof of crossed swords over our heads. For all I know they might have expected to meet a Maharajah too, with pearls looped round his neck and the Star of India in his turban. And oh, I suppose in a way that is how I’d imagined it too.
“I’ve always had this tendency to imagine, to fantasize, to project. Like many young girls in those days I was stage-struck but much too shy and nervous to do anything about it except work for the local amateur dramatic society, which I more or less had to because it raised money for the Church Hall. I used to help with coffee at the intervals. Then I graduated to doing props and assisting the stage manager. It was a long time before they let me prompt because I had such a quiet way of speaking they didn’t think my voice would carry even that short distance. There’s nothing worse than a group of amateurs. They’re all so egotistical and self-regarding and there’s always a little clique of older members who are jealous of the young ones and won’t give them a chance. It was just the same here in India. We did The Housemaster once in Rawalpindi and I longed to play the quieter sister, Rosemary, but of course it went to a woman of nearly forty.
“At our Church amateur group only the daughters of the members of the clique got a look in, so not many young people joined. But I knew every line of every play and the first time they let me prompt they realized my voice was just right for that. And one day at rehearsals when a woman hadn’t turned up I had to speak her part which I knew by heart already while the others were still reading theirs, and I did, yes, forgive me for boasting, but I did surprise some of them and the man who was producing said that next year I ought to audition if the play they chose had a suitable part for me.
“But the next year was the year I met Tusker and the year I was in digs. Some of the group came to the wedding. The producer, for example. And he said, Lucy I’m not going to forgive you getting married and going off to India just when we’ve decided to be really daring this November and do The Letter if we can and I’d been thinking what a perfect Leslie Crosbie you’d make.
“He said it in front of Tusker. Moreover, Mr Turner, he said it to Tusker. ‘You’re taking away a very promising little leading lady, but then she’ll have her chance in India, won’t she, and she’s leading lady today anyway.’
“So why, why, when my chance came did he deny it to me? I mean in The Wind and The Rain. It can’t have been all my fault. Even if you tell a man you adore the theatre but would be terribly scared to go on, isn’t he capable of realizing that that is only really an act and that being scared is one way
of giving a good performance? And hadn’t he heard, hadn’t he listened, hadn’t he taken in that producer’s opinion?
“You may think no, he hadn’t heard, hadn’t listened, hadn’t taken in anything, but you’ve only seen him as he is now, after what I call his personality change. When he talks nowadays he seems to talk inconsequentially. He doesn’t seem interested in listening to any voice but his own or weighing any opinion but his own. But he takes things in. Oh yes. He hears. He listens. But doesn’t let on. And he rejects and obfuscates. He rejects anything he hears which it doesn’t suit him to hear.
“Of course you’ve only seen him with what I call his visitor’s face on, talking nineteen to the dozen. It’s different when we’re alone. Sometimes hours go by without him saying a word. Even so he talks more than he used to. One seldom heard his opinion about anything in those days. But his behaviour was impeccable. Never flamboyant. The very image of reliability. The first view I had of him was his back view, standing at the window of the waiting room, looking out. I said, ‘Captain Smalley?’ and he turned round. I’d always imagined him lean and brown, a soldier in uniform, instead of which there he was, not over tall, thickset rather than lean, in civilian clothes, really quite ordinary. But in spite of that he was not, no, not at all a disappointment. He had such a pleasant, open look, and when I explained that Mr Smith was engaged and that I was his secretary he said, ‘Are you LL? You must be.’