Back at the Ratan Tata there was a perceptible tightness between the two women. Rita was small and round with a beautiful face. She was the first woman I ever slept with (she took charge; I was hopeless), and was one of the most cheerful people you could meet. To use a cliche: she lit up a room when she entered it – even if you didn’t want it lit up. Her vivacity had survived serious rebuffs, including a failed marriage. One of the first things she told me, when she came to my rooms at Folly Bridge in Oxford, was that while pregnant with their last child, her husband had spat in her face and she could always feel the spittle running down her cheek whenever she thought of it. Concerning that strange relationship with her American husband, who was an academic, who obviously loved her at first, it was the only self-pitying thing she ever said. He was disinherited by his father as a result of the divorce. Rita’s father-in-law, a very rich man who’d been involved with the development of sonar navigation or something of the sort, asked her not to make a scandal for the family by demanding her dues and in return he’d make generous provision for her privately. Rita, who couldn’t bear the idea of court proceedings, readily agreed; but almost immediately afterwards her father-in-law went into a coma from which he never emerged and Rita and her children got no settle-ment at all. Funnily enough I think Sarah’s father had been disinherited by his father for the same reason, divorce.
Even at seven and a half thousand feet, the Indian climate doesn’t suit redheads, and neither do rats, and Rita had grown muted. But something else had happened. Had the women had some kind of squabble? There was a froideur between them. Sarah was in the more confident position psychologically, having been on the road with me for months. She was looking fit and tanned. Her long floating hair was streaked with sunshine, as was mine. Also she was younger than I, Rita older, and such things are more important to women than to men, or anyway more important to the women on this occasion than to me. When I came in from my library visit Sarah perked up diplomatically and said ‘Look what I bought at the junk shop,’ and plonked on her head a flowered nineteen-thirties hat. Its label read ‘Modern Modes, The Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells’. Rita, who’d been looking out of the window, turned round and exclaimed ‘Where the hell can we get a drink?’ Oh dear.
And not easy. Tamil Nadu was a dry state. However Inkie explained that as non-Indians we might go to the District Collector’s Office for our quota of liquor chits. So we did that, hung around there for ages in a queue which never shrank but I became restless and said ‘Let’s come back another time, I’ll roll a joint,’ and we wandered off to the St Stephen’s Jumble Sale. Here a loose mix of residents were investigating the stalls, picking up, considering, price-asking, putting back, occasionally buying. I stirred the contents of a broken wheelbarrow, mostly old guidebooks, water-stained, worm-eaten, rat-gnawed, but I bought several including The Indian Yearbook 1941-2. This was an important publication. Its last four hundred pages comprised a living Who’s Who of India at that time, an archive of extravagant characters, many accompanied by a photograph.
Rita was signalling. ‘Darling, come and meet Dolores!’
Dolores said ‘You can pay me for those books if you like.’ She looked Anglo-Indian but said she was French and, as if to emphasise it, her jet hair was cut in a straight line below the ears with a square cut out for her face. ‘How long are you here for?’ she asked, ‘and will you all come and have tea with us? We live over there.’ Now and again when travelling, one comes across these engaging, spontaneous people – they’re one’s salvation really. So often, trying to bridge the gap with strangers is like greeting concrete, but Dolores was onto our case at once, and said ‘Have you tried the coffee eclairs from the English Confectionery? You must.’
That evening at the Ratan Tata we smoked joints in the starry garden among scents of geranium, cypress and mildew. The Kashirs had gone but the greenish mechanical object in the sky was still with us and Sarah pondered ‘So if it’s not a star, and it’s not a satellite, what on earth is it?’.
‘For a start it’s not on earth,’ said Rita with a dry laugh. Mmm – we had to make more of an effort to find some booze.
Back inside in the main sitting-room there was a radiogram the size of a coffin, with nets of gold metal over its loudspeakers, and we leafed through the records – Moura Lympany, Mantovani, Frankie Laine – but none was very tempting, so I withdrew to the bedroom and roamed through the potted biographies in The Indian Yearbook. There were hundreds of them: generals, princes, members of the Indian Civil Service, writers, politicians, and religious dignitaries. I was completely absorbed in this parade of Ruritanianism. One entry above all held my attention and I kept returning to it, perhaps because the postage-stamp sized photograph adjacent was so arresting. It portrayed a beautiful woman with passionate, sorrowful eyes. Her entry read as follows:
PAVRY, Miss Bapsy, M.A., Litterateur. Educ: Queen Mary High School and St.Xavier College, Bombay; M.A., Columbia University. Visited England every year since 1924. Presented at Their Majesties’ Court, 1928; received by President Coolidge, by Pope Pius XI, by Signor Mussolini, by the Shah of Persia, and by the King of Afghanistan, by President Attaturk, by King Boris and Queen Joanna, King Carol and Queen Marie, Prince Regent Paul and Queen Marie of Yugoslavia, and the Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Italy, by Herr Hitler, King Leopold and Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, King George of Greece and King Farouk of Egypt, by President Lebrun […etc.etc!]. Publications: Heroines of Ancient Persia (Cambridge 1930). Address: Malabar Hill, Bombay.
What a snapshot of an era. The two biographical entries following hers were of Miss Pavry’s father and her brother. The brother, Jal Pavry, who described his career as ‘Orientalist’, had been received by the same gang of rulers. Obviously they’d gone in together, arm in arm. Unlike his sister, he had entered correctly in the singular Publication: Zoroastrian Doctrine of a Future Life (New York, 1926). But what on earth is ‘an Orientalist’? Would anyone conceivably describe their career as ‘an Occidentalist’? As for the father, Khursedji Pavry, he was a Zoroastrian high priest, ‘First High Priest of the Fasali Parsis, elected 1920’, who informs us in his entry that he has received ‘dedications and tributes from many world-famous men.’ Here in this family was a bizarre mixture of Zoroastrian fire worship, vulgar bombast, and international grandeur.
Did none of them have the slightest sense of humour? I longed to meet Miss Pavry and find out. If, that is, she were still alive; for in 1975, the world of the nineteen-twen-ties and -thirties was already another age. Afloat on the bed in a reverie, my mind recalled the words of Max Beerbohm concerning his visit to Algernon Swinburne in Putney (I couldn’t remember the words precisely, but I’ve since then looked them up and they are: ‘.I was glad to see that he revelled as wistfully in the days just before his own as I in the days just before mine’). The thick volume of The Indian Yearbook 1941-2 fell from my grasp, my eyelids sank, and I drifted asleep to the outlandish squawk of some restless creature on the other side of the window pane…
Lin’s drive turned out to be more ambitious than expected and he turned out to be far more than a librarian -a game warden at a wildlife sanctuary, a keen calligraphist, a behavioural scientist, plant-lover, local historian. Wearing bwana shorts and boots, he collected us punctually in his jeep and we zoomed off to the kennels of the Ootacamund Hunt. This is the first and last of the Empire, in that it was the first hunt to be established on Imperial territory and is now the only one still at it, kept going these days by dandies from the Wellington Military Academy nine miles away. The hounds, seven couple, lined themselves up like washed and brushed schoolboys, wagging their tails for our camera. The gallop is over the Wenlock Downs in pursuit of jackals.
The Madras Government used to transfer to Ooty in the hot season and our next call was on Government House. ‘Buckingham Castle it used to be called from having been established as an official residence by Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Greville, Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, wh
en he was Governor of Madras,’ said Lin and he paused to see what effect this celestial statement might have. I squirmed with almost erotic pleasure and made a note of it at once but Rita, I saw, was bending down, anxiously examining her rat-bite. The situation of Government House is choice, overlooking the town yet also sheltered, and approached through the Botanical Gardens. But the House was more than locked up, it was sealed tight, its many windows cancelled by fawn blinds drawn down from within. There was not even a caretaker around, so complete was its embalmment. Passive and powerful, the building tantalised the imagination, and it seemed likely that were we to break open its heavy doors we should find that the British had not left India after all and were conducting therein an afternoon reception for local worthies, polite voices merging with the tinkle of teacups in shadowy, pillared drawing-rooms.
Lin looked about and barked ‘No Todas!’ The last of the Todas, a prehistoric tribe, are said to inhabit the Botanical gardens (which are extensive). But we saw nobody. Perhaps you have to stand and wait for a long time until they creep out, and Lin was impatient to crack on. Another prehistoric tribe hereabouts is that of the Badagas who in the past were famous for the superior quality of their opium, which they didn’t smoke but ate formed into little squares of ‘cavendish’.
As we drove from Mount Snowdon to Doddabetta Peak, Rita asked Lin ‘Do you know Dolores?’
‘Dolores Maclaine-Clarke?’
‘Yes.’
‘She hasn’t paid her library subscription. I keep reminding her. Richard is very nice. She breeds Alsatians.’
That seemed the end of that, so I asked ‘Have you heard of Bapsy Pavry?’
‘Come again?’
‘The daughter of a Zoroastrian high priest.’
‘Oh. There are so many high priests around. Maybe my wife knows something.’
‘You’ve got a wife?’ asked Rita. She was surprised – and obscurely annoyed that he’d suddenly become less available.
‘Yes, I have.’ But he didn’t elaborate.
Sarah asked him if he’d ever seen any UFOs. He hadn’t. ‘But I’ve seen an EFFO.’ I think this was another colonial joke. (Am I being mean? I shouldn’t be. Lin was so good to us. Dead now of course. God bless you, Lin.)
At Doddabetta Peak the view was rich with meadows and moorland, woods and plantations. One gasped. But Rita’s rat-bite had swollen badly and was now filled with pus. Lin examined it. ‘Not very nice,’ he said. Rita whimpered and looked about with nervous eyes while Lin, muttering, searched in the undergrowth. Eventually he grunted with satisfaction, tore at a bunch of leaves, crushed them slightly and, applying them to Rita’s calf, bound them in place with a strip of bandage from his first aid kit. ‘You’ll be fine now. Where would you like to go next?’
‘To the Ooty Club. I need a cup of tea,’ she implored.
‘I’ll drop you off. It’s only a short distance from your hotel. You’ll be able to walk back.’
‘Aren’t you joining us?’ asked Rita.
‘I’m not exactly welcome there.’
Fortunately we were. At the jumble sale we’d met its president, Jack Lawrence, who said ‘Do come up’. The Ooty Club – snooker was invented there – occupies a low cream villa, with a portico of fluted ionic columns, at the top of a hillside covered with white lilies. It was very quiet. In the season it fills up, which pays for the rest of the year when it is almost empty. The regulars hate the season when the ‘spivs’ arrive. We met a spiv on the terrace, an early swallow, about twenty-five years old. He was dressed in a yellow polyester shirt and black drainpipe trousers, with a narrow silver tie and winkle-picker shoes. His head shone with coconut oil and above his lip was an ink-line moustache, and hair grew out of his ears in wispy untended clouds.
Inside, squeaky-clean boys in gallooned ducks padded barefoot over the polished floors of teak beneath the smiles of many a martyred beast. Doors opened in all directions to other rooms revealing portions of chintz, pale Indian rugs, brass and sparkling glass. And the smell – oh, heavenly – of beeswax and flowers. Mrs Hill supervised the housekeeping, a chain-smoking drum majorette, short and plump. Despite her efficiency, or perhaps because of it, there was something slightly unhinged about her which wasn’t dispelled when she told us her son worked in Aylesbury. Perhaps she was what a later age would call obsessive-compulsive.
‘I live in Aylesbury!’ exclaimed Rita, happy to have made this connection (she’d been looking for connections and not finding them).
A dark boy entered and asked me ‘Will you take tea on the terrace, Master?’
Somewhat surprised by the mode of address, I pushed back my long curls and said ‘Very nice, yes, thank-you.’
The only other person in the sitting-room was an ancient birdlike lady in the far corner. She lowered a copy of The Financial Times, combined a quick smile with arching eyebrows, and raised the FT again, shaking it into a papery roar. Her eyes, even across the room, were sea-green and her outfit drew on several civilisations in a manner we associate with the Ballets Russes: plum jacket and knickerbockers fastened below the knee, a blouse of oyster silk, a cream turban with a green toque held by a diadem, and patent shoes with silver buckles. Sleeping Beauty or Scheherazade?
The glassed verandah was alight with flame-coloured cushions inside and the profuse scarlet of geraniums outside. An English soldier and his wife, on leave from the Persian Gulf, were bewickered among the full panoply of tea. I asked the soldier ‘Do you know who that extraordinary woman is inside?’
‘Which extraordinary woman?’
‘The one with buckles and feathers.’
‘I think,’ he ventured, ‘it’s someone called Queenie Wapshare.’
‘I bet she knows Bapsy Pavry.’
‘They say she knows everybody.’
‘No, they say she’s met everybody,’ corrected his wife. ‘It’s not the same.’
‘Apparently,’ the soldier continued, ‘the day India went off parity with Sterling she took up smoking again after thirty-six years. They say she met Queen Victoria as a child and that’s why she puts on a German accent – in deference.’
‘Does she have a German accent?’
‘Didn’t you speak to her?’
‘No.’
‘The BBC were filming here and she shot a coolie out of a fruit tree to show off.’
Something about the soldier – he didn’t look absolutely solid. His thin, smart wife nibbled on a dry biscuit. ‘I’m responsible for bringing Mervyn Peake to Muscat & Oman,’ she said. ‘They’re all madly reading Gormenghast now in the desert. Would you like a sandwich?’
‘This place is awfully good,’ said the soldier.
‘But I must say, I’d love a drink,’ said his wife. We all agreed we’d love a drink but the bar wasn’t open. I can’t recall exactly how the liquor-allowance system applied to bars and hotels but I do know it wasn’t straightforward. As for Gormenghast I can see how it might chime with readers who live in the Gulf, a region where, intellectually, the future is knocking ever more loudly on a worm-eaten door. A note preserved from this occasion says ‘Sarah lit a cigarette and fixed her eyes upon a tureen of lilies’. Odd the things one sometimes jots down.
A couple of days afterwards we were provided with an even more copious tea at Dolores and Richard’s. What I put in my notebook later was: -
‘Collected by their good-looking driver in black Ford Zephyr. They live in a house called St Mary’s at Fernhill, a little way past the mothballed Mysore Summer Palace. We were served three varieties of bread, five of jam, two of fruitcake, two of Madeira Cake, plus biscuits, on English china, with French silver, all heaving on a table of Kashmir walnut, and served by a relaxed and charming Indian footman. But the atmosphere in the house was disjointed. Richard was polite but in low spirits and did not join us at the table. He slunk out to the ferns of the greenhouse and played 78 rpm. records on his gramophone. One was Does the Chewing-Gum Lose its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight. A mild, quiet man who must f
eel beached by history. The British ruled India but they did not colonise it. After independence virtually all the British left. Indians and Pakistanis subsequently came to Britain which they did not rule but which they colonised.’
Dolores flapped her hands expressively and said she was trying to write something about Sir David Ochterlony. ‘I can’t get going, I can’t get going!’
I said what a wonderful name it was – presumably one of those Parsi names, or Sephardic Jewish names like Sas-soon, but it turned out to be Scottish. Dolores said ‘Spinach is a Parsi word.’
I thought Dolores could be Parsi but she didn’t let anything slip. She said the name ‘Bapsy Pavry’ rang a bell.
‘Ask Lin Townsend’s wife – she’s a Parsi.’
‘Is she?’
‘We’ve not met his wife,’ said Sarah.
‘No, she’s kept in the background!’ and Dolores laughed raucously.
‘But my leg healed completely,’ said Rita, rooting for him.
‘Why isn’t Lin welcome at the Club?’
‘Because he sticks up our names in public for nonpayment of library subscriptions. He stuck my name up! I was furious! Oh, let’s have a wonderful dinner at the Club before you leave. I’ve been trying to persuade Richard to buy a house in Scotland. I think it’s important for a man to have property in his own country, don’t you?’
The driver dropped us back in the Zephyr. He was charming in a slightly cocky way and Lin told us afterwards that Dolores was in love with him. Inkie ran past us in the drive but stopped, jogging on the spot to say hullo. Rita said she’d heard there was a dance at the Military Academy at Wellington and Inkie, already out of breath, said ‘I’ll have to come back at you, dear lady, on that one.’ Rita gave him a little wave as he lolloped past the lodge and into the lane for his exercise run. In that lodge lived a defunct Maharajah and his Welsh wife but we never saw them, not once. As for the Ratan Tata Holiday Home itself, it had originally been called Harrow-on-the-Hill and the property of a lady called Miss Cunliffe. You see how the lines of life branch out all over the place. But I shall have to resist going in quest of this long-dead Miss Cunliffe. I really would like to know who she was, how she came to live here, and what happened to her. Perhaps she was nobody and nothing happened to her, though instinct – or is it wishful thinking? – tells me that there is a curious story there too. Ah, yes, she gave birth to a mixed-race child who was sent to school in Singapore and Miss Cunliffe sought out her relations in Torquay but they didn’t click and the mixed-race child, having become a wealthy businessman in Australia, bought a seaside flat for his mother in Sydney where she ended her days as the bridge partner of Lord Beauchamp, a man lately exiled from England in a homosexual scandal…
How to Disappear Page 5