by M. M. Kaye
Firms and people who wanted designs for book or magazine covers, illustrations for serial stories, fashion sketches, fairy stories, Christmas, birthday or anniversary cards – anything in the art line in fact – could (and did) submit their particular requirements to the Chelsea Illustrators. MG would let us know what was wanted, and one of us, or sometimes several of us, would take on the job if we thought it was in our line. The customers could do the choosing and a percentage of the price would always go to the group, to pay for such expenses as rent of the studio and heating and lighting bills etc. The rest went into the pocket of the successful artist. It was, for someone in my position, a lifeline, and I grabbed it with enormous relief and made many friends there. Two of them became lifelong ones: dear ‘Fudge’ Cosgrave, whose parents, like mine, were members of the Raj, and Temmy – Margaret Tempest, the illustrator of that famous series the Little Grey Rabbit books.
MG advised me to find myself a ‘bed-sit’ as near to the studio as I could, to save bus fares and to move into it as soon as Bill and Mother sailed. It was advice which I ought to have taken at once, if I’d had any sense. But when I returned to Yateley with the good news that evening, it was to discover that Mother had already been making inquiries about bed-sits in anticipation of this moment. Cull Brinton’s new wife, ‘Curly’, who had been spending a few nights with us, had told her of a houseful of bed-sits in a Georgian square near Notting Hill, where her own daughter, a ballet-student studying under Marie Rambert at the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, was already installed. Curly had given Mother the telephone number of the house and the name of the landlady, and Mother had rung up that very afternoon. Yes, there were still one or two vacancies in the house. We were to call and see it the very next day, and if we approved of it, I could move in at once …
I didn’t think much of the idea, as Notting Hill was nowhere near the Illustrators’ studio in Park Walk, Chelsea. But Mother and Curly had got all that taped: there was a bus that I could catch at Notting Hill that would take me to Hyde Park Corner, where I could catch another one that would take me down King’s Road and drop me at the King’s Road end of Park Walk – all those bus fares! My heart sank. But Mother, wildly elated at the prospect of returning with her darling Bill to India (he had asked her to keep house for him in his new posting in Poona), had the bit between her teeth. So off to Notting Hill we had to go. And the moment I saw that square, I fell for it. It was the most beautiful bit of Georgian nonsense and as pretty as a picture. The church at the end of the square was exactly right for the design, and the central oblong of carefully mown grass that filled the square was edged with trees. The whole thing looked like a design by Motley for Quality Street, or something painted by that enchanting Dutch illustrator of nursery rhymes, Willebeck le Mair. I couldn’t resist, and I took the room, even though it was going to cost me more than I could afford.
The room was on the ground floor, just behind Curly’s daughter’s, and its French windows faced on to a tidy little back garden. And on the same day that I saw Mother and Bill set sail for India – and oh, what wouldn’t I have given to be leaving with them! – I moved into that ground-floor bed-sitting room. And found my gloomy, rock-bottom spirits surprisingly raised by a totally unexpected phone call.
The telephone in that house was in the hall, and when it rang it was customary for the nearest person to answer it and put the caller in touch with whomever he or she wanted to speak to. On this occasion it was our landlady who answered it and tapped on my door to say, ‘It’s for you, Miss Kaye.’ Since I didn’t think anyone as yet knew where I was, I picked up that phone in some surprise, and a voice at the other end said: ‘You won’t have any idea who this is!’ But, inexplicably, I did. Why, I can’t tell you, since it must have been a good eight years since I had last spoken to her. We had corresponded, of course, but not very frequently. Yet I knew at once, and without a second’s hesitation said: ‘Yes, I do. It’s Bargie!’
And it was. My oldest friend, who appears frequently in The Sun in the Morning, the story of my childhood in Simla and Delhi and during my school days at The Lawn. Beautiful Marjorie Slater, now Marjorie Tancred, whose brother Guy had been my first beau when I was only four years old, and whom I had loved and admired for as long as I could remember. I don’t know how she came to have my address and phone number, but it was one of those gorgeous flukes that brighten one’s life and give existence a sudden, magical sparkle.
We talked and talked, and suddenly it was fun to be on my own and independent, no longer a member of the Fishing Fleet, but me – M. M. Kaye, setting out to make a career for herself with nothing but one pound five shillings a week and a paintbox. Excelsior!
Chapter 20
When Mother and Bill set off for India, their plan had been that she should move into his Army quarters with him and take over the housekeeping, which, from Bill’s description, was a shambles. The quarters in question were a bungalow in Poona, which he shared with another officer on the same course – Arthur Something-or-other, with whom Bill had discussed the idea and received enthusiastic agreement. Mother had suggested that she should pay her share of the expenses, but both young men had insisted that her housekeeping would more than pay for her keep.
On this happy understanding, Mother and Bill had set sail for Bombay. Having run short of money, their first call on landing there had been Grindlay’s Bank, where Bill said there would be ‘plenty of money’ in his account, adding that Mother wouldn’t need to draw on hers ‘for ages’. He duly had a chat with one of the tellers and explained that he had just arrived an hour ago and would like to know how much he had in his account. The man departed, to return some minutes later with a small slip of paper which he slid across the counter, face down, to Bill. My dear brother, recounting the incident several years later, said: ‘I flipped it up cheerfully, expecting a nice round sum, and there it was: “Rs: 1, annas 11”. Gave me the shock of my life, I assure you. I don’t know why I thought there would be quite a lot. I’d just forgotten how many cheques I’d signed. Worst moment of the year!’
Fortunately, mother and son both thought this was hilariously funny and laughed themselves into stitches over it, before taking the tonga on to Mother’s bank, where Mother cashed a largish cheque to see them both through.
In the end she only spent a few days with Bill. Poona was still uncomfortably hot and she wanted to see Bets, who was in Ootacamund, staying in her mother-in-law’s guest-house. As a result, Mother never did become Bill’s housekeeper. For while she was away, Arthur Someone, the friend Bill was sharing the bungalow with, who had met a girl during his last home leave and subsequently become engaged to her by cable, confessed to Bill that he was in a ‘hell of a hole’. Bill, supposing it to be financial, inquired for details, and was told that Joy, the fiancée, would be sailing on one of the next P & O boats for Bombay, complete with trousseau, bridal-gown, wedding-cake and a mountain of wedding presents, and was expecting him to arrange for the service, a reception and a honeymoon and, since she herself knew no one in India, someone to put her up for a night or two before the wedding.
‘Well, what about it?’ asked Bill, puzzled. ‘You’ve known all that for months! And if you haven’t coped with all the chores at this end, well, there’s no tearing hurry, you’ve still got a good three weeks – bit more if she hasn’t sailed yet. So what are you worrying about?’
‘I don’t want to marry her,’ confessed Arthur.
‘You don’t want –? Good grief! Then why on earth did you get engaged to her?’
Apparently the silly ass had not known the girl for too long. They had met at a few parties on the Isle of Wight during his leave, and there had been a bit of hand-holding, a few kisses and sweet nothings in the rose garden, but nothing more than that. He had sailed without saying anything that might commit himself. But one day, sitting alone in the bungalow and feeling low and depressed and in want of someone to hold his hand and cherish him, he thought of Joy; a one-man-girl if ever there
was one. A girl who would never let him down. And on the spur of the moment he sent off a cable asking her to marry him, and received a rapturous acceptance in reply.
There had been an exchange of letters, and Joy’s parents had been distinctly difficult. But Joy had been well and truly spoiled as a little girl, and her elderly parents had always let her have her own way. So off she went, bag and baggage, to get married to a man she hardly knew, in a country about which she knew nothing, blissfully unaware that back in Poona the faithless Arthur had been wining and dining and falling hopelessly in love with a girl called Joan. And, as far as I can make out, doing nothing at all towards solving the problem that he had landed himself with.
Bill, on discovering that there was still time (though only just) to prevent the redundant fiancée from sailing, urged the instant dispatch of a cable calling the whole thing off, and was horrified to find that Arthur refused to do anything of the sort: ‘No gentleman could ever, under any circumstances, break off an engagement. Only young ladies were allowed to do that.’ He therefore proposed to let the unfortunate Joy embark for Bombay, in the fervent hope that she would fall in love with someone else during the voyage – this being something that occurred so frequently that the odds in favour of at least one eager fiancé hurrying down to the dockyard to greet his betrothed, only to find that she had changed her mind and was now engaged to marry someone else, were said to be around 75 to 2. ‘And what if she doesn’t?’ demanded Bill.
Well, the answer to that one was simple: the ‘gentleman’ would have to behave so badly, and be so boorishly unkind, that she would have no alternative but to break off the engagement and creep home, lugging trunkfuls of wedding flummery, to explain to all her friends and relatives that she’d been jilted on the dock. Simple.
Believe it or not, Bill apparently saw nothing out of line in this appalling scenario. It was only when the girl arrived, looking radiant with happiness and expecting Arthur to catch her in his arms, only to be greeted with a curt ‘Hello, Joy’ and an immediate introduction to a strange young man – ‘This is Bill Kaye who shares the bungalow with me. We’re both on the same course. Bill, meet Joy Hutton’ – that he realized the full horror of the situation.
Bill – confirmed by Joy’s diary, read many years ago – gave a blow-by-blow account of the next few days. She was being put up by some friend of either Bill’s or Arthur’s, and I suppose she must have been told that the wedding could not be arranged immediately (presumably in order to allow ‘plan B’ plenty of time to work). There was a party on the night of her arrival, a dinner-dance at the Poona Club at which their guests included her supplanter, Joan. Joy imagined that Arthur had arranged it in her honour, and was stricken when he did not dance even one dance with her. There were several other women in the party, and he had danced once with each of them, and all the rest with Joan. Bill was horrified when he saw what was happening, and he says he tried to make it look as though Arthur would have asked her to dance if he, Bill, hadn’t always cut in first. But I gather he was not very successful in this, which doesn’t surprise me. He always was a rotten actor. Judging from that diary, Joy made a desperate attempt to persuade herself that Arthur was paralysed with shyness, and that it was this that was making him behave so badly; all she had to do was to be patient and let it wear off. But it got more and more difficult to be patient …
Apart from Arthur’s behaviour, she was stranded in a strange country where there was no one she could talk to and ask for advice. No one but Bill Kaye, who was being so kind and supportive. And who, incidentally, lacked the guts to tell her what was going on! (Bill says he couldn’t do it. ‘It was too cruel.’) The dénouement came when a picnic that had been arranged by Arthur, consisting of himself, Joan, and Bill and Joy, ended up by being a twosome, because Arthur and Joan did not turn up. When it became plain they had no intention of doing so, Joy broke down and wept. This was too much for Bill, who did what anyone else would have done in the same circumstances; he put his arms round her and did his best to comfort her, petting and reassuring her, and begging her not to cry. At long last he blurted out that Arthur was only behaving like this to give her the chance of ‘saving her face’ by jilting him (noble fellow!) instead of him jilting her. I do hope this made her lose her temper with both those conceited young men, but apparently not, for Bill wound up by saying that if Arthur didn’t want to marry her, would she please marry him instead?
Would she not! Arthur had not only proved himself to be a first-class rat, but had the face of one too, whereas my brother Bill was an outstandingly handsome young man and I have always considered that my sister-in-law – no raving beauty herself – was the luckiest young woman in India. True, she had been put through the mangle in the cruellest way during the last few days, but look at what she ended up with. A handsome, soft-hearted charmer instead of Arthur le Rat. On a par, I would have said, with winning a couple of million on the lottery, for though the way that Bill and his Joybell persisted throughout their lives in addressing each other as ‘Beloved’ used to irritate me somewhat, it says much for the success of their marriage.
Joy refused to accept Bill’s proposal immediately, saying that she must be given time to think it over. But this was just eye-wash, as it was to Mother that she went for the intervening months before a proper wedding and honeymoon could be laid on, instead of a scrambled affair attended by half a dozen total strangers in a side room of the Club.
Mother had been in Kashmir painting in a houseboat on the Dāl Lake, and she first heard the news of Bill’s engagement via a telegram that ended ‘Letter follows’. She did not take the telegram very seriously, since Bill was always falling in and out of love. But the lengthy letter that followed worried her a good deal, for this affair was different from all the others: he was making himself responsible for the girl, and if he should fall out of love with her as he had done with all the others, we were stuck with her. Nor did Mother like the idea of her darling boy marrying a girl who had come out to India to marry another man. The prospect horrified her, and I don’t suppose that Bill, who was no letter writer and not exactly overburdened with intuition, had put Joy’s case any too well. One has to admit that it does not make a very appealing story.
However, Mother had not only been brought up in a thoroughly Christian family, but she could refuse Bill nothing, so she agreed to put up Joy for a couple of months, until Bill had sorted out his end of the tangle. Joy came up to Srinagar, and one look at her was enough to convince Mother that here was no adventuress. And also that this girl was genuinely, and besottedly, in love with her Bill – which Mother thought was only natural. (‘And so she should be!’) Letters were exchanged between Mother and Joy’s parents, and old Mrs Hutton invited me to stay at Oak Lawn, their home in the Isle of Wight, for a long weekend, where I was given the once-all-over and apparently passed with flying colours.
Oak Lawn was an enchanting house, surrounded by woods that ran down to the sea, and full of Victorian bric-à-brac that gave it a distinct suggestion of refusing to admit that it had left the nineteenth century, or that there was such a thing as the twentieth. As for Joy’s parents, old Mr Hutton, who was easily old enough to be my grandfather, and lived a retired life among the book-lined walls of a musty and fascinating library, endeared himself to me for ever by presenting me with an 1896 edition of Seton Merriman’s In Kedar’s Tents; a much loved nineteenth-century novel given to me by Tacklow when I was at school, and which I had carelessly lost. Joy stayed with Mother on the houseboat for an unspecified time – two or three weeks I imagine – in the course of which her engagement to Bill was announced, and Bill put in for an exchange from the Gunners to the Supply and Transport Corps (rudely known as the ‘Sausage and Tum-tum’) because when it came to the crunch, he found that he could not afford to support a wife, let alone a future family, on a Gunner’s pay. The S and T were a good deal better paid, and were also not moved about from pillar to post as the Gunners and most of the Army units were, no ordinary
consideration. In mid-February Mother, whose friends were legion, sent out invitations in her name to ‘the Marriage of Rosamund Gwendolen Joy Hutton with her son William, Royal Artillery’ (Bill’s application for a switch to the S and T obviously had not got through at that date) and they were married in New Delhi in the Church of the Redemption, with Bets as Matron of Honour.
* * *
Meanwhile, in London, I had to get up early in order to reach the studio by nine o’clock sharp: MG did not tolerate lateness. Besides, there were two buses to catch, as well as a preliminary walk (it was more often a run) from the house up a sloping street – the ‘hill’ of Notting Hill I suppose – to the bus stop at Notting Hill Gate. I was always afraid of arriving to see the bus I wanted pull away, because I knew that the next one might not be along for as much as ten minutes.
During the few months of that first autumn I used to see every day, as I hurried breathlessly up the crowded pavement, an elderly, grey-haired and very tall man with a nose like an eagle’s beak, striding down the hill towards me as I scurried up it. His face was so familiar that I knew I knew him, and I decided that he must be a buddy of Tacklow’s. But since I was always late and afraid of missing the bus, I was terrified that one day he’d stop me and ask about Tacklow or Mother, and make me late. So instead of cutting the poor man dead, I used to give him a nervous nod and a smile, indicative of a desire to stop and fill him in with the family news, but regret that I couldn’t spare the time.
This went on for at least a month, until one day he did actually stop me. Late as usual, I had resigned myself to apologizing for not stopping to talk to him on previous mornings, and explaining why I hadn’t, when he said: ‘I’m sorry if I’m making you late for whatever it is you do, but I couldn’t resist it any longer. You so obviously think I’m someone you know. Do tell me who it is?’ Well, of course I couldn’t for the life of me remember. And you know what –? He turned out to be George Arliss, an exceedingly famous film star in those days, who was over in England making a film about the Peninsular War, in which he played the Duke of Wellington. I have seldom felt such a chump. However, he couldn’t have been nicer, and what really was surprising was that he did know Tacklow. They had attended the same prep school and were both nuts about cricket. I quite missed him when he went back to Hollywood.