by D. J. Taylor
But there was no getting away from it. There was the Bannisters’ car—it was an antique Armstrong Siddeley with the top taken down—and there, though currently invisible, were the Bannisters. The uneasiness that had been with her in the early part of the day came barrelling back, and she remembered a film she had once seen that the villa’s frontage seemed perfectly to reproduce—the car sending up black, elongated shadows, the native servant attending to the dust-piles on the step.
A more resourceful girl, she thought, would have snapped her fingers and made the scene disappear, discovered some more authentic life in the heat that sprang from its ashes. But she was not that girl, and so she stepped indoors, left the bag containing the pineapples on the trestle table in the hall, went upstairs to change into a print frock that made her look like a schoolgirl, and by degrees descended to the drawing-room where her parents and the Bannisters sat in conclave.
‘I believe I heard that Ronald Reagan was staying at the Galle Face,’ Mrs Bannister pronounced, with a certain amount of sarcasm, as she came into the room. ‘Now, who would he be?’
‘A film chap, isn’t he?’ Mr Bannister offered, looking keenly at his hostess. ‘That’s who he is. A film chap.’ But there was no point in appealing to Mrs Kirkpatrick. Disdain of popular culture was a central tenet of her myth.
‘And here’s Cynthia,’ Mrs Bannister said, with an indescribable attempt at archness, and a slight air of surprise, as if Cynthia had arrived wearing a Pierrot costume. ‘My dear, you’re looking frightfully well.’ There was a faint suggestion that Ronald Reagan had been rather too easily given up and might have to be returned to later. ‘Isn’t she looking frightfully well, Gavin?’
‘Frightfully well,’ Mr Bannister confirmed, with what appeared to be no interest at all.
The Bannisters’ amiability, their conversational brightness, their feigned unworldliness—Mrs Bannister knew all about Ronald Reagan—was deceptive, Cynthia thought, for they were, at heart, sinister people. Brought together in the Kirkpatricks’ drawing-room, they might have been a triptych of Egyptian deities—Horeb, say, and a couple of his satellites—zealously guarding the entrance to the underworld.
Mrs Bannister was a gaunt, stringy, curry-complexioned woman, the highlight of whose life had been to give birth to her elder daughter in a dak bungalow seventy miles short of Rangoon, attended by a Chittagongian midwife who spoke no English. Mr Bannister, who sat in Parliament for one of the Sussex constituencies, said less but arguably had to be watched more. Henry had come to ground a little away from the others, with his legs crossed so awkwardly at the knee that they might have been tied together with string, inspecting the garden with the air of one who would do some pretty serious things with its arrangement if given the chance.
Now that she had reached the centre of the room and been disposed of by his parents, he looked up and caught her eye. In the circles in which she moved, Henry was regarded as ‘rather an awful man.’ On the other hand, the concept of awfulness was not easily gone into. Why exactly was Henry awful? He was about twenty-three or twenty-four, had read Greats at Oxford, which Mrs Kirkpatrick said was a sure sign of intellectual capacity, and was supposed to have political leanings. The superciliousness that went with this was only skin-deep, although he had a rather frightening way of attending to you when you spoke, which upset the more timid of his listeners. But Cynthia, in her print dress, tired after her exertions on the tennis court and among the Pettah fruit-stalls, thought that whatever happened in the course of the evening, she would not be intimidated by him.
‘Cynthia dear,’ her mother said, in what even for her was an absurdly loud voice, ‘do come and have something to drink.’
They were drinking gin-and-Italian, which in itself was a mark of the esteem in which the Bannisters were held by their hosts, Mrs Kirkpatrick wisely regarding vermouth as the resort of foreigners and degenerates. She helped herself from the tray—the silver one, she noticed, which had been presented to Mr Kirkpatrick by the planters’ association and presumably routed out of the strongbox—and, arranging the dress to conceal as much of her legs as possible, sat down on a mahogany foot-stool equidistant from her father and Henry and sufficiently remote from either of them to discourage conversation. The gin-and-Italian went to her head and she began to take a more benign view of the world.
Over dinner an explanation of the Bannisters’ presence in Colombo was eventually vouchsafed, not by anything so banal as a straight answer to any of the questions occasionally put to them by Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick, but in a series of hints which it was possible to thread together, like the clues in an acrostic. It turned out that Mr Bannister had been flown to Delhi, at Lord Beaverbrook’s expense, as part of a delegation agitating for Empire Free Trade, with Henry in the role of aide-de-camp. There was also talk of the Bannisters’ elder daughter, the one born in the dak bungalow, now married to what by all accounts was an exceptionally dreary man in the Foreign Office, and their elder son, who had a rather mouldy-sounding hunt-secretary’s job somewhere in Leicestershire.
‘Such a pity the King can’t be persuaded to hunt anymore,’ Mrs Bannister declared, in a blizzard of ghostly italics, as if she had several times gone on her knees in pursuit of this object.
‘Oh, I don’t think he can be persuaded to do anything these days,’ Mr Bannister chimed in. ‘They say the Palace simply despairs.’
They had dinner in the big dining room with the green, distempered walls, with the fans winnowing the dense air above their heads and crumpling the overseas edition of the Daily Telegraph from which Mr Bannister tried to corroborate a cricket score. The white sauce that the fish came in tasted of cornflour, and the gravy smothering the guinea fowl tasted of nothing at all. Henry, she noticed, kept his head down over his plate, but his face had that rapt, calculating look that she disliked so much, knowing it meant trouble. It was as if they were all rehearsing a play in which she, alone, had not been given a script. Worse, as if the whole meal were a kind of conspiracy designed to test her loyalty to a cause whose principles no one had yet bothered to explain.
And she was right about Henry. They had barely reached the drawing room again, and Mrs Kirkpatrick had only just begun to tell Mrs Bannister, with whom she had adopted a comradely, daughters-of-the-regiment air, about the Davenports’ cauldron, when he said, as if the thought had only just occurred to him: ‘I say, why don’t I take Cynthia out for a drive?’
She looked back and forth, from head to head, but the cues had all been handed out.
‘What a splendid idea,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick said.
‘Still plenty of light,’ Mr Bannister volunteered in the same bright tone he had mentioned Ronald Reagan. ‘Won’t be dark for another hour yet.’
‘Of course,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick said, ‘I never really like to say anything about it, but one of the difficulties of being out here is that Cynthia so rarely gets to see any young men.’
In any other conversation, and with anyone other than the Bannisters, this would have been thought a step too far. Even Mr Kirkpatrick blinked at it. Like the gin-and-Italian, it was an example of Mrs Kirkpatrick’s myth at its most flexibly remorseless. But as Cynthia knew, such demonstrations of the will could not be gainsaid, and so a minute or two later she found herself outside on the villa forecourt, in the elongated shadow of the Armstrong Siddeley, while Henry did something with a hub-cap, brushed some dirt off one of the running-boards, and finally stepped back and let his hand fall on the nearside door.
‘She’s not a bad old bus,’ he said. ‘We’ll have some fun.’
A grass seed had got into the heel of her stocking again, and even now the light was so bright that she wanted to shade her eyes, and the zeal with which Mrs Kirkpatrick had abandoned her to the company of Henry Bannister made her feel acutely vulnerable. Another mother, she thought, would not have done this. Or rather—a vital qualification—another mother might have noticed that the si
tuation had more psychological complexity than was first apparent. ‘If it comes to that,’ she said crossly, ‘nobody asked me if I wanted to come.’
‘Didn’t they? I don’t suppose they did. Of course, we don’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want to.’
She thought about the bright confederacy of the drawing room which, even now, would be sitting down to discuss the iniquities of the National Congress, or examining the photographs that Mr Kirkpatrick had taken of Sigiriya Rock when he first went there in 1907.
‘No, it’s all right. I’ll come. I haven’t been out in a car for ages.’
In the passenger seat, with the grass seed worked down under her toes and less painful, and with the hat she had remembered to bring with her to shade her eyes, she softened a little.
‘That’s a rather awful pair of shoes you’re wearing.’
They were cream-and-brown co-respondent’s brogues that would have been laughed at on a golf course.
‘Yes, they are rather dreadful, aren’t they? I got them at Smart & Mookerdum’s in Rangoon. The sales-wallah said they were frightfully fashionable.’
The car was bowling on past hedges of antirrhinums and high laurels so tightly packed that they seemed to constrict the asphalt that ran between them and somehow increase the momentum of the car, like toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube. The made-up road went south for a couple of miles and then degenerated. Occasionally they passed a village where chickens went swarming up against the palm trees and small children with gleaming teeth looked vacantly out of doorways, and she thought of all the men she had been driven in cars by: pink-faced stockbrokers with hair cut so short that you could see the tendons on the backs of their necks like plucked fowl, land agents in shooting brakes whose gears clashed in anguish, all the flower of England’s young manhood: nervous, preoccupied, and dull.
‘Will your parents be taking you home soon?’ he wondered, after they had nearly taken the head off a pariah dog that had strayed too close to the road. He meant England, of course.
‘Early next year, Father says. Or perhaps in the winter. There are business things he needs to settle.’
‘It’s not a bad idea,’ he said, ‘with the situation being what it is.’
First her father and now Henry: everyone seemed appalled by the situation. The grass seed had moved round beneath her toes to the fleshy part of her instep.
‘Well, I call this jolly pleasant,’ Henry said.
‘Yes, I suppose it is, rather.’
The heat of the day had begun to fade now: the sun hung in the pale sky like a blood orange. In the far distance slim black birds cruised in the thermals, like scraps of burned paper above a fire. Once, climbing Sigiriya Rock, as one did, she had had an unusual experience. Standing on the summit, with twenty miles of scrub and jungle laid out beneath her, there had come into her head the memory of a dream, vivid and prophetic, in which the terrain she now saw had floated tantalisingly before her. All this had bred a deep suspicion of the landscapes of the East, which seemed to her unreliable, prone to unexpected duplicity, not, when it came to it, safe.
Meanwhile, the car was slowing down.
‘I thought we might stretch our legs,’ Henry said. ‘That is, if you wanted to.’
It was pretty obvious that he had decided to stretch his legs whether she wanted to or not, but she consented to step down from the car and walk a little way into the roadside clearing. Here the ground was parched and friable: the cream-and-brown brogues bought at Smart & Mookerdum’s left only the faintest indentation on the path.
A part of her wondered how she had ever met Henry, and why she put up with him—Henry with his leg-stretchings, and his calculation, and the way he looked at her as she stepped down from the running-board—but another part of her was merely caught up in the immediacy of the scene, and to some extent, however much she distrusted Henry, its willing accessory. If you came out in a car with Henry Bannister and he suggested that you stretched your legs, then you stretched them. Anything else was prevarication. It was as simple as that.
In this temporising spirit she had, in the past, lingered in the rear of picnicking excursions to the Yorkshire Dales, foraged through the bracken-strewn margins of Cotswold shooting-parties. But there were no beaters here, and no pheasants. Even Henry—redder-faced now, and perspiring a little from the walk—had a curiously alien quality, as if his features were a mask that he might suddenly tear off to reveal the grinning gargoyle beneath.
Fifty yards in from the road, the jungle fell away to disclose what at first appeared to be randomly flung lumps of stone, but in fact were the last traces of a ruined temple, and they halted on the path to take stock of their surroundings. Grotesque shadows spread away beneath them over the stone floor. Far above their heads, vast numbers of bats hung, unmoving, on the upper boughs of the eucalyptus trees. Two or three monkeys slunk out of the undergrowth, stared at them for a moment or two, and then loped nervously away.
‘I heard a story the other day,’ Henry said, ‘about a woman who was, you know, taken short in the jungle, and when she got up afterwards she found a whole tribe of monkeys was watching her. And when she went back to the people she was with, the monkeys just followed her home and simply wouldn’t go away. In the end someone had to come out onto the veranda and shoot several of them with an elephant rifle to make the others leave off.’
The East abounded in stories of this kind: tuppence-coloured tales in which leopards swam across raging torrents to carry off village children left in cradles twenty feet above the ground, snakes moving in synchronised counterpoint, balanced water jars on their heads, and gangs of ape-men descended from the hills to rampage through the bazaars. Cynthia had never believed any of them for a moment.
‘I don’t think any of them will follow us,’ she said. She had a sudden vision of Henry, who had been a prefect at Winchester, rebuking a monkey as if it had been an obstreperous small boy.
Winchester and Harrow. Lofted oars at Henley. The Hungaria River Club at Maidenhead, as portrayed by Miss Helen McKie. Where was the old world now? In the middle of the clearing it was still quite hot. Henry stood by the temple doorway—about the only part of it still standing—with the same look on his face that he had worn while inspecting the Kirkpatricks’ garden, as if he was a quantity surveyor working out exactly how many tons of cement it would take to refurbish.
‘I came prepared,’ he announced.
‘Oh, yes?’ she said. She had heard this kind of thing before. Men like Henry always came prepared. If you lashed them to a ship’s mast with a hawser, they would produce some Swiss Army knife with an attachment for maritime emergencies and go marauding over the side. There was no getting away from them, or the things they wanted.
He had his hand in hers now, and it was quite as disagreeably hairy as she remembered, almost to the point of furriness. If it had detached itself from its wrist and gone scurrying across the jungle floor, she would not have been surprised. Above their heads the bats hung sinister and inert.
‘You’re not being very kind to me,’ he said five minutes later.
‘I’m being perfectly kind to you. What do you want me to do?’
She had a sudden memory of him inspecting the point-to-point at Hawthorn Hill, leaning back on his shooting-stick with his bowler hat tilted over his eyes and his field-glasses three-quarters raised as they watched the horses coming over the last jump. Only two men had proposed to her so far in her life, and they had both been far worse than Henry.
‘You might take off some of your things, you know.’
‘Which things? Which things do you want me to take off?’
In the end she compromised and unbuttoned the front of her dress, which was presumably what he was getting at. It was no good, she thought as he ran the French letter to ground in the pocket of his jacket and began the laborious business of putting it on, she really could not go
on with this. Not just Henry, but all the other things he brought with him, from the Bannisters and Hawthorn Hill to that queerly indulgent look on her mother’s face. All of it had to go, but she could not for the life of her think when.
‘You might just, er …’ Henry said. He was breathing quite hard, and seemed to have come out in a surprising amount of clothing.
And so she just, er … which was on the whole preferable, and had the additional advantage of getting Henry’s furry paw out of the front of her dress.
‘Of course, Father’s in the faction now,’ Henry said, with maximum incongruousness.
‘That’s good,’ she said, without having the least idea of what he meant.
And so it was done, without much pleasure, on the stone temple floor, to the great detriment of her stockings, with a shaft of late sunlight pulsing suddenly through the leaves to blind her. Halfway through, a monkey vaulted down through the ruined doorway and she saw the rictus of amusement on its evil little face before it fled back into the jungle.
Afterwards Henry threw the French letter on the floor, where it made such a squelching noise that she felt rather sick.
‘That’ll give someone a surprise when they come across it,’ he said proudly.
It was what people like Henry did in these circumstances. They threw cigarettes out of upstairs windows and up-ended sugar-sifters over other men’s heads at dances and told jokes about fishermongers’ daughters who lay on the slab and said ‘fillet,’ and one day, she thought, she would marry one of them and be squashed into nothingness by him.