The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  Juin Singh had once asked John what the English words “quite, quite” meant. It was no easier trying to explain the prospect of war. If Juin Singh had never seen an airplane, what could he tell him of bombs dropped from the sky? Or gas masks and concentration camps? But Juin Singh did understand that at their journey’s end he would once again become the sahib’s porter and John the sahib. And so it was. After a day’s rest, John paid them all off and saw them on their way. He turned to finishing a letter to Wystan.

  In London the previous summer John had learned from Christopher Isherwood that Wystan had had a tearful breakdown on their way back from China, confessing to Isherwood his fear that he was unlovable. Yet John had been so upset over Nancy he never thought to inquire further. Bitter heartache was his province; Wystan was impregnable. Wystan had all the luck. Now, from the Mussoorie mail, he learned Wystan had fallen in love with an American named Chester Kallman. They were celebrating their honeymoon in New Orleans.

  In his reply John described the nightmare he would face on his return to Calcutta. He had a cable from Betty; she had set sail for India. She expected him at the dock, marriage license in hand. Of course he was in the wrong. He had played the stricken card one time too many. He vowed never to play it again. If she sued him for breach of promise, so be it. Whatever price he had to pay, his freedom was worth it. He cabled her boat.

  There isn’t much visible ahead, he wrote gloomily, having entirely forgotten to wish his brother every happiness.

  Hatibagan, 139 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta,

  May 12, 1939

  Near about the time John Auden was recording his reflections on love in Harsil, the three unmarried Bonnerjee sisters arrived at Sudhin Datta’s adda in a phalanx of colorful saris to settle like tittering birds around the leading literary light of the Congress Party, a fifty-eight-year-old poet named Sarojini Naidu. That evening her wide, expressive face was framed by hair done up with flowers. A Congress legend and a great raconteur, Sarojini was the daughter of a revolutionary who had been executed by Stalin two years before. Her own resistance to British rule began with the 1905 partition of Bengal. She had accompanied that “little Mickey-Mouse of a Man” on the Dandi Salt March and been imprisoned during the civil disobedience campaign that followed. The first thing she said that evening was that Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s relations with Congress had gotten so unfriendly of late she needed a coat to ward off the chill. Gandhi was warmer. Unlike Nehru, with his hangdog eyes, he was just as quick to laugh as she was. Sarojini made India’s nationalist leaders seem like part of a one large and bickering joint family household. The adda lapped it up.

  While Sarojini told a mischievous story about Tagore, Sudhin introduced the Bonnerjee sisters to a young friend of Hiren-da’s, a flaming Red. Sudhin knew perfectly well that neither Minnie nor Sheila Bonnerjee was in the least political, though Anila was something of a smoldering Pink. Slim and sharp as a knitting needle, Anila had recently returned from Russia, accompanied by a love-struck and penniless Pushkin scholar from England. The previous Friday she had gotten into a fierce argument with a man who worshipped Adolf Hitler as an incarnation of Vishnu.

  After the death of their mother, Kitty, Minnie, the eldest and most brilliant of the sisters, had tried to step up but had never quite managed to master the art of running a household. A scholar of Smollett with a teaching position at a women’s college, she had long been the sole female of the adda regulars, much to the dismay of the secret diarist. He couldn’t abide intellectual women, particularly unattractive ones. But what Minnie lacked in looks or domestic skills, she made up for with her enormous fund of gossip concerning the private lives of the Set, making her terrifically popular at dinner parties. She was often found in the company of Hiren-da and Lindsay Emmerson, a Statesman editor. Humphry House had adored her. Beneath Minnie’s badly draped saris was a stout heart.

  Sheila, both the prettiest and the family artist, shared Minnie’s fatalistic view of life and her sense of the absurd. After attending Calcutta’s Oriental School of Art, she had received a scholarship to attend Munich’s Deutsche Akademie until the Nazis obliged her to shift to London. Recently returned to Calcutta, she was working with Jamini Roy, a classically trained painter turned folk artist whose current exhibition they had all just attended. Had he not needed the money, Jamini whispered to the adda diarist (who thought Sheila’s English accent overdone), he would have given Sheila Bonnerjee a wide berth. She was far too westernized. Sudhin had been coming to his studio to watch Sheila paint; Jamini doubtless suspected something was afoot between them.

  However often Sudhin reminded himself that, at nearly forty, he was an old man to this pensive, wry, and beautiful twenty-seven-year-old painter, he fell hard for her. Unlike the lover he’d left behind in Germany in 1929, Sheila Bonnerjee came from his own betwixt-and-between world. She made him laugh. She teased him. She was a talented painter. In her company he felt like a free man. But what could he offer her? He was not a free man. He had never been free. It was not just the British who ruled him, or even the oppressive propriety of his joint family household. It was his aged and gentle father’s good opinion that bound him. So even if he had the money to keep a mistress, Sudhin didn’t want to become the sort of profligate he’d often disparaged. Sheila deserved better. As the dog days of May gave way to June monsoons, with a European war threatening and promising to upend everything, Sudhin struggled. The longer he carried on with Sheila, the more impossible it would become. While outwardly he smiled as easily as before, inwardly he raged to see this chance, too, slip away.

  Ever so slowly, he resigned himself to losing her.

  One evening a month after the rains had arrived, Sudhin told Sheila she must meet his friend John Auden when he returned from the mountains. He tried to describe him.

  “John Auden sounds like a cold fish,” she said with a laugh. Soon “John Auden” became an ongoing joke between them. Only once did she take it too far. After putting up green curtains in her room at the family flat on Bright Street, she teased Sudhin that she wanted it to have the light of an aquarium so as to make the cold fish feel at home in her bedroom. He gave her a pained look. She was more careful after that.

  Sheila had been fifteen years old when her father’s drinking and debts caught up with him. She had been there, too, when Protap and Bharat returned from boarding school, their education permanently curtailed. She had watched a procession of carts pull up at her childhood home, the Park Street mansion where her legendary grandfather had once presided over an elaborately set table. The bailiffs had packed up the gilded imitation Louis XIV furnishings, rolled up the carpets, and stripped paintings from the walls before hauling everything off to a Russell Street auction house. Beloved cousins, aunts, uncles, servants, and pets were all dispersed.

  After that Sheila vowed to travel light and pretended to be more frivolous than she was. While she and Sudhin flirted madly and drank too much, she wondered what would become of her. Yet while he might tease her for her highborn airs, she saw in him a sense of loss that ran even more deeply than her own.

  De Sahib, the Special Branch officer who sometimes attended Parichay adda, must have been otherwise occupied the evening Lindsay Emmerson declared that he was entirely in favor of an armed uprising in India. If political necessity required that Europeans be killed, so be it. Sudhin, smiling, pointed out that arms weren’t so easily come by. Was it really so difficult, Lindsay persisted, couldn’t they be smuggled in? From Siam? The Irish had managed some rather sensational assassinations, he pointed out.

  Minnie had cackled sweetly; though Lindsay was an Etonian and Oxford man, they shared the anarchic spirit of the Calcutta born. Still, en route to Cornwallis Street for a drink and stand-up that August, Minnie pleaded with her sisters to behave like the grown women they were, and not act like silly schoolgirls without a thought in their heads. Sudhin might well put up with that but such behavior would not go down well with John Auden.

  So this John Auden
was a pompous prig, too, Sheila whispered to Anila.

  Sheila was struck first by his unearthly pallor, his blazing cheeks. Some silly woman asked if he used rouge. His white-blond hair reminded her of those Munich Hitlerites who would pull her roughly aside on the street to ask if she was a Jewess. She began a nervous digression on the exotic allure of blonds. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he decided she was a shallow flirt. His reticence flustered her. She may have been overconscious, too, of Sudhin watching from across the room.

  At Cathay, in Chinatown, Sheila left it to Minnie to make conversation while she ate an enormous number of dishes. When John Auden next invited them out, she was on her own as Minnie was off with Lindsay. She ate just as much at Chung Wa but the dinner passed in strained silence. Then came the Saturday lunch at Firpo’s with Sudhin.

  The previous night’s adda had left Sudhin despondent. The diarist had been the first to arrive, and as soon as he walked through the door Sudhin asked him if there would be a war. The Nazi–Soviet Pact had been signed on Wednesday, and it seemed to Sudhin as if England was going to let Hitler get away with whatever he liked in Poland by blaming it all on France.

  Despite England’s failure to abide by its stated ideals, whether in regard to India or to its European alliances, Sudhin had made up his mind to join the Indian Army. Whether this was a decision born of a broken heart, a high-minded commitment to the rule of law and democracy, or a hatred of fascism he couldn’t be certain; perhaps it was all these things.

  Then the adda’s Naziphile, an ICS officer and Muslim League member, sashayed in with a smirk on his face.

  “Sudhin, didn’t I tell you ages ago? You people don’t understand politics at all. You have no idea what’s going on. You’ll never be able to understand why I admire Stalin. Britain’s foreign policy is absolutely useless. They should all be given the boot. And why is Nehru going on about protecting democracy when this is India’s chance to get out from under the British? You have to admit that Hitler is a genius. Have you seen how easily—”

  Sudhin raised his hand in surrender. “I can’t disagree with anything you say. Still, I am prepared to enlist in any military capacity the British need me for.”

  “What has Germany ever done to you?” the Naziphile shrieked, dropping his smug demeanor.

  The diarist was taken aback at this outrageous departure from civility.

  “There is no point bickering,” Sudhin had replied mildly, gracefully offering him a cigarette before lapsing into silence.

  At Firpo’s the next day Sudhin was the first to get tight. He suddenly began talking wildly about how he and John might share Sheila by having her on alternate nights. John promptly offered to marry Sheila only to clap his head. A fortune-teller in Dehra Dun had foretold a marriage to someone named Doris. He was stymied.

  “Perhaps you might change your name?”

  “Would you marry me if I did?”

  “Well, I don’t know. You seem a little snooty.”

  “How can you say that?” Sheila said, rattled.

  “Indeed,” Sudhin interrupted. “Much as I admire you, John, I never thought you were a good judge of a woman’s character.” He was thinking of Betty Boggins.

  It was settled then. They would both live with her. By then they had had so much to drink they were making very little sense. After John promised to take them both on a night flight over Calcutta that evening, they went their separate ways. John returned to his office and stood there ecstatically admiring his maps.

  Neither Sheila nor Sudhin was entirely recovered when John went round to pick them up. Perhaps it was a mistake to have tried to extend the giddy afternoon into the evening. Sheila was ill on the drive, recovering briefly while they were in the air. John dropped Sudhin home first. When he got to Bright Street Sheila rushed out of the car. He supposed she was afraid he would try to kiss her.

  Too restless to return to Alipore, John drove to Lizzie’s. Expensive cars lined Karaya Road, hidden by the trees. As he entered, Lola, the bewigged and fat Yugoslav housekeeper, asked him if there would be a war.

  “Why yes, of course,” he said. He was feeling unusually lighthearted.

  Upon inquiring he found that Eileen, Baby, and both Peggys were taken. It was clearly a very busy Saturday night.

  “Take Babs,” Madam Lizzie said. “As a memsahib I tell you honest. She’s a nice girl, a fine girl.”

  He took Babs. The sound of a German broadcast followed them into her room.

  “Will they bomb us?” Babs asked.

  “You’re safe as houses,” he told her and then took off his pants.

  PART III

  The Fall of the Gods

  The eyes of the crow and the eye of the camera open

  Onto Homer’s world, not ours. First and last

  They magnify earth, the abiding

  Mother of gods and men

  W. H. AUDEN, “MEMORIAL FOR THE CITY” (1949)

  You see the fall of the Gods of yesterday

  And the fall of the Gods of the morrow

  Yet never a sigh or regret you say

  For the infinite ocean of sorrow

  W. H. AUDEN, “EVEREST” (DECEMBER 1922)

  CHAPTER 14

  Somewhere a Strange and Shrewd Tomorrow

  Sunday Lunch, Penwether’s House,

  Bude, Cornwall, August 27, 1939

  For nearly six months, Nancy Coldstream had plotted to rekindle Michael Spender’s interest. Yet when she lamented having to go to her mother’s because it again looked like war, he refused to listen. She hadn’t spoken to him since. When her train to London reached Okehampton, she rang him from the platform to ask that he meet her at Waterloo. He told her he couldn’t. He was going out for dinner in Hampstead.

  You sound upset, Michael remarked.

  Nancy had run away, abandoning her children after Sunday lunch. Bill had run out after her, jumping on the train, pleading with her to be reasonable: London was too dangerous, he argued.

  Nancy began to tell Michael of her argument with her mother but he interrupted her.

  “Why do you insist on foisting your troubles on other people?” She hung up.

  The next day she called him again. Michael said it would be unseemly to go to a nice restaurant so they went to a dreary one. He wasn’t pleased to hear Bill was with her in London and did not see her home. Back at Provost Road, Bill was warm and affectionate, insisting their marriage was not over. Nancy succumbed. The next morning he convinced her to return to Cornwall.

  Wystan had got Bill to scrap all his ideas about cinema and return to painting. Though Sonia Brownell had been modeling at his art school for nearly a year, Bill had only just met the woman the Boys called the Euston Road Venus. In her diary the previous Friday, Sonia had written, “Bill. Bad teeth, good hands, a ring I think.” Not that a ring bothered her. She also noted his slight stoop. “Not really an apologetic one,” she added, shrewdly. Sonia had agreed to sit for Bill when he returned from the weekend in Cornwall, hence the earnest desire to see Nancy safely out of London. It was only when war was declared the following Sunday that Nancy realized she’d been tricked.

  Two calls to Michael found him implacable. He cursed her. He was writing her off. She was terrified she was pregnant. This was the state she was in when a parcel from John Auden arrived. The sight of it banished her bitterness. Was he really coming back? Had he married that Brussels girl? Louis was in Ireland having a breakdown, she told him. His letters were those of a man rotting in his grave. It might be years before she saw him again. And Michael Spender was a bloody hypocrite. She didn’t mention the war. The war was the least of her concerns.

  When Nancy made her way back to London three months later, the prospect of a fire-breathing wife catching him with Sonia briefly eclipsed Bill’s fear of being called up. Among the Boys the state of the Coldstream marriage was by then a well-worn subject. Nancy suspected everyone knew more about Bill’s doings than they let on, and they did. Sonia suspected everyone o
f trying to marry her off to Bill. And they were. Had Louis MacNeice not left London, the Boys said, had Bill not become so famous, he might not have found himself so trapped. Heads nodded up and down Charlotte Street. Nancy tried to brazen it out by talking about her ambulance training. Everyone listened politely. She was humiliated.

  Louis wrote her a stream of consoling letters from Ireland. By then he knew his love for her was doomed, yet to abandon it entirely meant facing an unspeakable abyss. Some days he thought he might as well go out and sit under a bomb. When a job in Dublin fell through, Louis accepted a lectureship at Cornell University. Nancy assumed that, like Wystan, he wouldn’t be back. He managed to see her just before he left. She’d been beastly.

  “Do go on painting, puss. Don’t let the boys frighten you away from London,” Louis wrote from the docks.

  A fortnight after his departure, finally convinced that she’d lost Bill to Sonia, Nancy bought a bottle of poison and downed the lot in front of the Boys. They got her to hospital to have her stomach pumped while Bill hid under a bed somewhere at the back of a Baker Street hotel. It would take a bomb dropping on Nancy to free Bill, one of the Boys remarked.