by Paul Scott
Chapter Thirteen
WALKING HOME she began to regret that impulsive invitation and rather to hope that tomorrow morning when she kept her appointment at the Seraglio Room Susy would plead a prior engagement. In all the years they’d known one another they had never exchanged social visits and Susy had never called her anything but Mrs Smalley nor Tusker anything but Colonel Smalley, never taken the least advantage of the fact that they both called her Susy and that she was now virtually their oldest acquaintance in Pankot – and, until last year, a regular professional visitor at The Lodge and as familiar with it as she was with her own little bungalow.
Regretting the invitation, Lucy was at the same time ashamed of regretting it; but one of the earliest lessons she had learned in India was of the need to steer clear, socially, of people of mixed blood and she had quickly been taught how to detect the taint, the touch of the tar-brush in those white enough to be emboldened to pass themselves off as pukka-born. She’d been told that the Eurasians (Anglo-Indians as they were then called) were very loyal to the British, that without them there would have been no reliable middle-class of clerks and subordinate officials. The railways, especially, depended on them. With their passionate attachment to a Home many of them had never seen and had no prospects of seeing ever, they formed an effective and in-depth defence against the strange native tendency to bribery and corruption which, coupled with that other native tendency to indolence, could have made the Indian empire even more difficult to run than it already was. Nevertheless, effective and reliable though they were, they would take a yard if you gave them an inch; and in any case – although it was not their fault, individually, as people who hadn’t demanded to be born – they did represent a physical connexion between the races that had continually to be discouraged.
Most of them were the off-spring of sad and reprehensible liaisons between native women or women of mixed blood and British Other Ranks who unless you kept them fully occupied, which wasn’t easy, did have this tiresome habit of occupying themselves. But then, if a man was stuck in India for years, serving his King and Country, you could hardly expect anything else. It was the way of the world. Unfortunately, many of the liaisons were unofficial, some were instances of bigamous marriage. Whatever the origin, though, the Eurasian population had grown, through inter-marriage, living what Lucy thought of as its own rather sad and self-contained and often pretentious mimic life. It had always touched her when she heard of a soldier who had married his Eurasian girl and taken her back to England, and it had touched her too when she heard of a soldier who had fallen in love both with his girl and the country, signed on for another stint or taken his discharge in India when the time came and stayed on with her.
Susy’s father had been potentially such a man. Lucy remembered the widowed Mrs Williams saying years ago, “Len loved it here.” Mrs Williams, pale though she was, the daughter of a Eurasian mother and a Eurasian father, had never tried to pass herself off. Her elder daughter, Lucille, had not only tried but successfully married her GI when living in Calcutta earning her living as a singer, and gone with him, as the saying then was, Stateside. What had happened to them subsequently, Heaven knew. Susy never said, perhaps because she did not know but could only guess from the infrequent letters she got from time to time. Perhaps the child of the marriage had exposed the great lie. The genes could play cruel tricks. They had played such a trick on Susy herself who was not only not stunningly beautiful, as some of the Eurasian girls could be, but as brown-skinned as Mr Bhoolabhoy.
Susy had learned her hairdresser’s trade literally at her mother’s knee. Lucy met her first as a skinny-legged little girl in a plaid skirt, white blouse and white knee-high socks, with her black hair done in a plait and tied with a white ribbon (the whiteness emphasizing the coffee-coloured skin which her mother was at no pains to try to disguise). Susy turned up with her mother at Smith’s, when Lucy and Tusker were billeted there early in the war. She came to help and watch and learn her mother’s skills as a hairdresser.
In those days you had alternatives. You could go to Mrs Williams’s bungalow, one room of which was equipped to cope with several memsahibs at a time, or you could have Mrs Williams call. The latter was preferable, the former sometimes unavoidable if there were grand things afoot like a party at the Summer Residence or at Flagstaff House when the demand for Mrs Williams’s services were especially heavy. How that woman had worked! How well she had trained the two Eurasian girls she hired. How well she’d taught skinny little Susy.
Towards the end of the war people said Mrs Williams must be making a small fortune; but Lucy watched the decline and fall between 1947 and 1948 when most of the English women had gone home and Pankot gradually filled with Indian wives who washed and dressed their own hair, never had it cut, and many of whom still seemed almost to be in purdah, so shy and retiring were they.
When Lucy and Tusker left Pankot, finished with the army, beginning a new life as box-wallahs in Bombay, Mrs Williams was still alive. When they returned to Pankot in 1961, Mrs Williams was some years dead but Susy was carrying on the business and benefitting from the new wave of modern Indian wives and daughters. She had opened a salon in the bazaar, called Susy’s. She could do back-combing and beehives, short cuts, the things young Indian women now wanted. The older ones could still have appointments with her in her bungalow if that was what they preferred. The salon had rather frightened Lucy. She felt out of place there. It was styled on the open-plan. Conversation was free and open; but she could not easily join in. She knew nothing of Dusseldorf, Basle, Roma, Cairo, Moscow, Paris. She could not state a preference for a particular duty-free shop at any one airport. She could not even discuss Fortnums except from a ten year old recollection of going in once to buy Tusker some stilton. She had never been to Washington. Saks in Fifth Avenue was merely a name to her.
“You can come to the bungalow, Mrs Smalley,” Susy said after her second visit to the salon. “Or I will come to The Lodge if you’d prefer. I do not care for all this togetherness either, but people expect it nowadays once they’ve been foreign. Gossip, coffee, magazines. All London-style.”
So Susy had come to The Lodge, once a month, bringing her modern portable equipment with her. Lucy enjoyed these sessions. Susy was a film fan too. And liked the old tunes. She liked hearing about London in 1950; and telling Lucy what if anything she had heard from Lucille in the States. When the Blackshaws came to Pankot, Phoebe had shared the sessions at The Lodge. After they went home Lucy enjoyed them again because there was only Susy to talk to and talking to Susy was more interesting than talking to Phoebe Blackshaw who had spent so many years in tea-gardens she could talk of nothing else. Also, Phoebe hadn’t treated Susy very kindly. She had been abrupt and distant. Susy never showed any sign of being upset. She’d simply got on with the job, moving from one to the other of them.
It must have been a month after Phoebe Blackshaw went home that Susy stood back one day and looked at the mirror into which Lucy was looking and said, “Mrs Smalley, have you ever thought of letting it go?”
Lucy had stared at her own reflection and seen how the dark brown dye was beginning to make her look like an old woman who tried to look younger but managed to look older.
“What do you advise, Susy?”
“It’s such lovely hair, Mrs Smalley. Very fine and soft. Never any trouble to set. But the colouring is beginning to coarsen it. Also you have such a lovely white skin. Like porcelain. The colour no longer works with it.”
“But grey is so depressing.”
“You will never be grey, Mrs Smalley. You will be white. And don’t worry about the transitional period. We can bleach the colour out. It will be perfect when white, cut a little shorter, just gently waved, and given a blue rinse.”
“Blue?”
“Yes, blue. It will bring out the violet in your eyes. I have some good rinse. An American lady brought it from London and left two whole cartons. Man, they are so rich, these Americans.”
Thereafter, tending Lucy’s blue-white hair, poor Susy’s hands had looked even more uncompromisingly of the country; and the transformation of Lucy marked the beginning of Susy’s professional troubles.
Lucy had supposed Susy owned the bungalow her parents had lived in but she only rented it. Her old landlord died. The new one, down in Ranpur, renewed her lease on condition that no business should be carried out from there. The new landlord already owned the premises where Susy had her salon. Two years later he acquired the concession to run the Seraglio Room in the new Shiraz hotel, gave Susy notice to quit the tenancy of the salon which he intended to redevelop as a shop for the luxury tourist trade (semi-precious stones from Jaipur, furs, silks, local folk-craft from the remoter villages of the Pankot hills) and as a sop (and perhaps recognizing that Susy’s skill and reputation could be turned to immediate short-term advantage in terms of immediate cash-flow) made a deal with her that entitled her to take one or two paying-guests at the bungalow (which she was already doing anyway by arrangement with the Indian tourist office) and to continue work as a hairdresser at the Seraglio, although not as its chief coiffeurist – who turned out to be a young man of outstanding good looks (if, Lucy thought, you liked those sort of good looks) called Sashi, who claimed to have been trained in Mayfair, London, who wore wet-look black trousers, high-heeled boots, a frilly shirt open almost to the waist to expose a chest-full of black hair in which nestled a primitive metal medallion on a chain.
Under Sashi’s emotional rule at The Seraglio, Susy obviously suffered. Lucy did not know to what extent and did not want to. She was happy to have been able to make a cut-rate deal with Susy which meant that she could just afford the Seraglio Room provided she was there not later than 8.30 am when Susy would let her in, trim, shampoo, rinse and set her and get her under the dryer before 9.30. Nine-thirty was the official opening hour and within a few minutes the first of the smart young assistants began to arrive to get things ready for Sashi’s manifestation shortly before 10 am when the first appointments of the day were due to turn up, usually in the elegant shapes of Air India and Indian Airway hostesses who had spent a night at the Shiraz and had to smarten themselves up for the flights that evening back to Ranpur and on to Calcutta or Delhi.
. . .
Yes, Susy had been a good friend. She should not regret inviting her to join Father Sebastian at The Lodge.
When she got home Tusker was on the verandah. Today, or tomorrow at the latest, she would have to tell him about the photographs, about Sarah, about poor Colonel Layton, and about the imminent Mr Turner. He seemed to have nodded off. Bloxsaw, some distance away, opened one eye, then shut it. There was no sign of Ibrahim. It was a quarter to one. At Smith’s hotel, Sunday was usually chicken pulao day, and she was very hungry. She hoped Ibrahim had not been sent over for trays, because then it was difficult to get second helpings and the tray-helpings were already small enough. She poured herself a very small gin and tonic and tiptoed out to sit near Tusker and wait for him to wake up.
But sitting, she saw he was awake already. His head was still lowered but his eyes were open, gazing at her.
“Hello, Tusker, dear. Have you had a nice little nap?”
He did not reply. She sipped her drink. “Would you like a little drink? A very very small gin, because it’s Sunday?”
“Why because it’s Sunday?”
“Sunday is chicken pulao day. Pulao goes down nicely after a spot of gin. And you have been such a good boy.”
“I’m not having chicken pulao. I’m having poached egg on toast.”
“Oh, dear. How dull. I’m not sure about egg for breakfast and egg for lunch. It’s very binding. Aren’t you feeling well, Tusker?”
“What I feel’s neither here nor there. I’m having poached egg on toast. In fact we’re both having poached egg on toast. And we’re cooking them here.”
She saw now that he was wearing his malevolent expression. She would have to tread carefully. “I see,” she said. “Are there enough eggs?”
“Ibrahim’s gone to get some more.”
She sipped her gin. He was going to be awkward. Her tummy rumbled with hunger.
“By all means then, Tusker, have a poached egg. But I’m really very hungry, so I shall have chicken pulao.”
“Not today you won’t because you’re not going to the dining-room and Ibrahim isn’t going to fetch a tray from the dining-room. We’ve finished with the dining-room and we’ve finished with trays.”
A pause.
“There are a lot of things I could say to that, Tusker, but I suppose first I’d better ask, why?”
“Because I say so.”
A pause.
“And what precisely is the connexion between what you say and what I do?”
“The connexion is that I’m still master of this bloody house.” He waited. “Well? Am I or aren’t I?”
“I can’t deny that. No. Indeed, I can’t. You are the master of the house. On the other hand I am the mistress. And it is usual for the mistress to decide what shall be eaten and by whom and when, and if the master does not like it there’s mostly nothing he can do about it unless he happens to have a talent for shopping and cooking which I’m afraid you haven’t. I have seen you attempt to make a curry. In the bazaar I’ve known you to squander half the week’s housekeeping in half-an-hour. I have watched you poach an egg. If you insist on having a poached egg for lunch I am prepared to poach it for you myself in order not to see several eggs wasted, and because as mistress of the house it’s my duty to see the master fed. But after that, Tusker, I shall go across and have my chicken pulao. I shall expect to sleep between three o’clock and five o’clock and providing Ibrahim brings back enough eggs I may even poach you another one for your evening meal. Then I’ll have to decide whether to have one too, or dine at Smith’s or at the Club or at the Shiraz.”
“Afford it can you?”
“No. What we can still just afford is our special arrangement with the kitchen and management at Smith’s and this is an arrangement I have absolutely no intention of giving up, unless of course you replace the electric stove with one that works effectively, and hire a cook. I have not stayed on in India to become, in my old age, either a cook or a masalchi. You have always pointed out the advantages people like us enjoy over those who have gone home and have to make do without servants even when they can afford them. If we had gone home I should have welcomed turning my hand to whatever was necessary. But we did not go home and so I don’t welcome turning it. Here is Ibrahim now.”
She called him so that instead of going round the back he came round the front. Her hand was feeling a bit shaky. She had not intended to take Tusker up quite in the way she had done. But he had this effect on her nowadays.
“Thank you, Ibrahim,” she said, taking the eggs from him. “I’ll deal with these. Go and get your own meal. Did Burra Sahib give you the money for the eggs?”
Ibrahim said he hadn’t. She asked how much was owed, opened her purse and gave him the sum asked. Before going he looked from one to the other of them, then salaamed and took himself off. She took the bag of eggs to the kitchen, switched on the plate that was supposed to heat a saucepan of water. It would do this either in a few seconds or half-an-hour. One could never tell. She smelt the butter from the fridge. It was a bit off, but would do to grease the poaching pan and stop the eggs sticking. She searched for this pan, found it, studied it. It was dirty. She went out.
“Will scrambled do? I’m not cleaning this.”
“Neithe
r am I.”
“Quite. So you see. You see the difficulties.”
“I see more than you think,” he said. “And you’re not going to the dining-room. Neither of us will. Ever again.”
She sat down, holding the dirty pan well away from her. “Then I’ll ask you again, Tusker. Why? Only this time don’t say because you said so. And do for once think before you speak. Think for instance of the fact that we have invited Father Sebastian to dinner tomorrow evening. One can hardly offer him a poached egg, so unless you intend to give him drinks here and then take him over to the Shiraz or up to the club – neither of which establishments strikes me as being quite his venue if that’s the word – there’ll really be no alternative to our dining him at Smith’s or arranging for Smith’s to serve a special little meal for us here. And while you’re bearing all this in mind I might as well tell you that I asked him this morning to bring Susy Williams with him, if she’s free. It would make up a four.”
“Susy Williams? In Heaven’s name you’ve known Susy Williams for more than thirty years and not had her to a meal once.”
“Which is one reason for having her now. When she does my hair in the morning I shall confirm the invitation. There’s no more to be said about that. The only thing there’s anything to be said about is where do we feed them? And if you say Ha! or start obfuscating and mention poached eggs again I shall throw this dirty pan straight at you.”
“Throw it then.”
“I shall if you say Ha!”
“Ha! Ha!”
She threw it. It bounced off him as if he were made of something other than flesh and bone. Bloxsaw yelped, staggered to his feet and loped away to seek sanctuary in the garage. Startled crows shrieked and wheeled in the warm pellucid air. She got up and went inside to get herself another drink.
Only once before had she hit him; and that was at the time of the débâcle in Bombay, when she beat him off with a rolled-up Times of India, outraged less by what had been hinted about a relationship between him and Mrs Poppadoum than by what he had just told her: that he had refused Mr Feibergerstein’s proposal to send them home to work out the last year of his contract with Smith, Brown and McKintosh, which would mean getting a small pension from the firm to add to the pension from the Indian Government. The alternative was really an ultimatum, little better than the sack. And he had chosen the alternative. “I’m sixty next year,” he’d yelled at her, grabbing the Times of India from her numb hand. “I’m not spending my 6oth birthday in some place like bloody Stevenage. And I’m not going to be blackmailed.”