More often than not, Daniel and I just rode in silence together, because, to put it bluntly, men don’t seem to need to fill a pleasant silence with chatter, as so many women do. Men only become garrulous when drunk, apart from the ones who fall into the complete opposite and won’t say a word.
There came a day, however, when I was obliged to speak to him as tactfully as I could manage, because there is a certain modus operandi when it comes to native women and having affairs with them, and I was not certain that Daniel knew what was what. We did the usual rounds of the estate and then decided to go to our little range where we played gun snap. I’d tied a sack of cans to my saddle to use as targets, and we rode along to the accompaniment of a gentle hollow rattle. Once there, and before we settled down to the game, I said, ‘Daniel, old boy, I’m afraid I have to speak to you,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I know you do. I thought you would.’
I said, ‘I did warn you about native women on your first day here.’
‘You did. It seemed a very unlikely prospect at the time.’
‘You know there is a protocol about these things? So that a certain decency is maintained?’
‘You mean so that we don’t unduly annoy the natives and turn them against us? Samadara tells me that she has the full consent of her family. Apparently it all got discussed in a kind of grand council. One can only imagine what it must have been like. I’ve put her up in a little house well out of Rosie’s way.’
‘You do realise that you are supporting her whole family?’
‘Yes. But I don’t have any doubts about her. She’s not an actress. All her feelings are on the surface in plain sight.’
‘And you do realise that if you have children she can take you to court for maintenance, and she’d win? Our magistrates are dreadfully puritanical. And it would all become terribly public?’
‘You told me that in Colombo.’
‘And if you leave Ceylon, you’ll have to do the decent thing, and arrange for a lawyer to pay her a stipend? And the children will have to go to Hill House, and that’s quite an expense?’
‘Yes, I know all that. Everything seems to have been laid down by custom.’
‘I blame Maitland.’
‘Maitland? The Governor back in the old days?’
‘Yes. Turn of the last century. He took a mistress called Lavinia. She was a dancing girl from a caste whose women were forced to go bare-breasted. He abolished that rule, and set her up in a house near his, and had a tunnel dug so they could go back and forth without too much public scandal. That’s why Mount Lavinia is called Mount Lavinia. It seems he set a pattern for the rest of us to follow.’
‘Us? You mean, you too?’
‘Why do you think I warned you?’
‘But your wife? What does she think? Does she know?’
‘Daniel, don’t be shocked. And don’t be a hypocrite. And I don’t know if Gloria knows. She acts as if she doesn’t, but on the other hand she may not care very much. Rosemary strikes me as the kind of girl who would mind very much, and demand to go home.’
‘She doesn’t seem to give a damn about me any more,’ said Daniel. ‘Now that she’s got the children, I’m just the one who brings home the bacon. I’m a useful ghost. Anyway, she’s had too many things to get over.’
‘And what about you?’
‘You mean, what are my feelings for her?’
‘I know it’s not my business. Of course you don’t have to say anything. But we have become good friends, and it’s a great salve, having someone to talk to. I would like to think I could talk to you.’
‘Women think that men don’t talk to each other,’ said Daniel. ‘They live in ignorance of how much they get discussed. But I’m no better at all this confidential stuff than the next man. One tends to keep private things private. However, as we’re pals…and I’m fairly sure you won’t bandy this about, the answer to your question is that I am exasperated with her, she ignores me apart from when I am trying to play with Bertie, in which case she tries to prevent me, but I love her as much as ever, and I am having to come to terms with the certitude that for the rest of our lives I will be living with her as a brother and not as a husband.’
‘That’s a good way of putting it,’ I said. ‘British women are best at being sisters. Always have been as far as I can see.’
He came back with ‘So I assume that you are in the same situation?’
I said, ‘In this case a pragmatic compromise is better than a principle stuck to. Principles are made for angels, not for us. If you want any kind of life worth living, there doesn’t seem to be any choice, does there? Let’s play gun snap, shall we?’
13
Ottilie
One day Ottilie realised that she was going to have to renounce her devotion to Archie. She had this revelation when sitting by the Tarn, throwing stale bread to the coots. All sorts of metaphors occurred to her. Loving Archie wasn’t exactly throwing pearls to swine, because no one could ever think of him as a pig, but it was offering something to someone who could not possibly appreciate it. He had been besotted with Rosie ever since they were children, and was clearly not going to give up, even though Rosie had never given him the slightest encouragement. There had never been even the most fleeting moment of flirtation.
In the early days Rosie had promised herself to Ashbridge, and after he was killed she had married Daniel. Ottilie could only imagine how much Archie must have been hurting, to think of his brother with her in perpetuity. It was not really surprising that Archie had redoubled his addiction to the bottle and scuttled back off to the North-West Frontier. In fact, Ottilie thought, he had always shortened his leaves so he could get back sooner to his Pashtuns and his Masouds. He really did seem so much more at home with the tribesmen, with their religious fanaticism and their blood feuds, their absolute misogyny, and their insatiable appetite for sadism and robbery. Archie simply could not cope with the subtleties of civilian life, or with anything that brings out the natural unruliness of the heart.
Ottilie looked up at the March sky, and a small flock of dry leaves whipped past like a sprinkling of sparrows. She hugged her coat to herself, and said, ‘Ottilie, you’re getting older and time’s passing you by. You can’t keep waiting for someone to notice you who’s never noticed you in twenty-five years. And if you married him, what next? Wouldn’t he just carry on drinking, and carry on wishing he was with Rosie, and volunteering to go to Waziristan for months at a time? And wouldn’t he just leave me to stew with the children in some bungalow in Peshawar or Simla?’
‘First sign of madness,’ said a cheerful, tattered old man, passing by with his dog, whose collar was attached to his hand by a long piece of thick brown string.
Ottilie looked up with a puzzled expression, and he explained, ‘Talking to yourself. First sign of madness. That’s what they say.’
‘Oh, I am really quite mad,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t worry about me.’
‘Best way to be,’ he said. ‘I’m mad myself. Only got this dog, and I’m happy as Larry.’
‘It’s a nice dog,’ said Ottilie, even though it was scruffy and ugly, of no nameable colour, with a clumsily docked tail and dull, watery eyes.
‘No, it’s not a nice dog. It’s called Nipper, and it nips. But not me. I don’t get nipped.’ He paused, and then, anxious not to end the conversation, said, ‘I see that Major Segrave has broken the land speed record.’
‘I read it in the paper,’ said Ottilie. ‘Nearly 204 miles an hour!’
‘Wouldn’t fancy it myself. I’m for Shanks’s pony, I am, and that’s about it. Well, goodbye then.’
Ottilie watched the old man go, and rubbed her hands together inside her muffler. ‘I don’t have to stop loving Archie,’ she thought, ‘I’ve just got to love him in a different way. I’ve got to love him in a letting-go-forever kind of way.’
Q
uite suddenly she thought of the metaphor she needed. ‘I’ve been barking up the wrong tree,’ she said to the two mallard ducks at her feet.
Not long afterwards, Ottilie went to a lecture about theosophy, to be held in Lambeth. She had missed the one the week before, because she had been embarrassed by the topic, which was Free Love, and she had been a little frightened of what the rest of the people in the audience might be like. She had envisaged bug-eyed men in brown raincoats, with dribbles of saliva coming from the corners of their mouths.
She had washed her thick dark hair the night before, and spent a good many minutes brushing it until it shone. She looked at herself carefully in the mirror, and put a little eyeliner on to emphasise the luminosity of her eyes. She put on a long dove-grey skirt, and the matching jacket that slimmed her waist and accentuated her breasts. She had chosen a cambric shirt with a lacy collar, and pinned a large bloodstone brooch at the throat. She put on her sensible shoes with just enough heel to make her look a little taller. She put on her favourite hat, which she liked to think of as her ‘amuse tête’, because it was really more of a decoration than a hat, with its jaunty pair of pheasant feathers and its silver buckle. Because it was cold and windy she put a fine Kashmir shawl over her shoulders.
On the train into London she thought about how rotten it was to be the only one of the sisters left behind at The Grampians. Christabel had turned into a terrible bohemian and was off with Gaskell doing disreputable things in places like Hexham and Bloomsbury and Lewes. Rosie was in Ceylon, and Sophie was in Blackheath with Fairhead. Ottilie felt that she had drawn the short straw, even though it was often quite a lot of fun being at home with a dotty mother and an indulgent father. There was never quite enough to do, however, what with the Honourable Mary FitzGerald St George attending to Mrs McCosh, and Cookie doing all the cooking, and most of the housework too these days. Ottilie knew it was time to go forth and re-establish herself in the world outside, and in the meantime she was going to go to lectures and learn about all sorts of things that were of no intrinsic benefit to her. Her mind was still reeling from a talk about relativity two weeks before; she had thought she had understood it at the time, but now had no recollection of it at all, beyond the bafflement. She had not told anyone about the lecture on Fabian Socialism, because she knew that her mother would think it even worse than Free Love.
As she was leaving the lecture in the early evening, a young man next to her slipped on the wet steps of the hall, and fell backwards. She had noticed him earlier, because of his rather striking profile. ‘Thirty years old,’ she had thought, ‘officer class, probably served in the navy. Receding hair, a bit too thin for his own good. Tennis player, I should think. I wonder what he does now.’
There was a general rush to raise the fallen man to his feet, during which he insisted volubly that he was perfectly all right, and please don’t anyone make any fuss, after which he was left standing face-to-face with Ottilie. She looked up at him with her big dark eyes. ‘You’re not all right, are you?’
He winced and said, ‘No, no, perfectly all right. Really and truly.’
‘Then why are you grimacing and holding your left wrist in your right hand like that?’
‘Just a bit painful, that’s all. I used that hand to break my fall.’
‘On wet days you should wear rubber-soled shoes,’ said Ottilie.
‘I didn’t know it was going to be wet.’
‘Move your fingers,’ said Ottilie. ‘Waggle them.’
‘I don’t think I can. Nothing seems to be happening.’
‘You’ve broken your wrist,’ she said, removing the Kashmir from her neck, and throwing it around his shoulders. She caught the scent of his cologne, and he noticed the sweet aroma of freshly washed young woman’s hair.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m making a sling.’
‘Gracious me. I’m sure I’m all right. Really, I don’t need any help.’
‘I was a VAD in the war. You’ve broken your wrist, and now you’re going to hospital to get it put in plaster.’
‘Are you certain about this? I mean, it’s a lovely shawl. How will I get it back to you?’
‘I’m coming with you to the hospital to hand you over, and when I leave I shall make sure that I take it with me.’
‘You might leave me your address, so that I can forward it to you. And I do think I’d like to come and thank you in person. How are we going to get to the hospital?’
‘We’ll hail a hansom cab. Obviously.’
‘Oh yes. Stupid question.’
‘You’re paying for it, though,’ she said. ‘It’s your fault. You’re the one with the slippery leather soles.’
‘Of course.’
* * *
—
A week later Frederick Ribaud, a civil servant from Madras, arrived at The Grampians with one arm in a sling, and a bunch of twenty-four red roses tucked under the other. It was Ottilie who answered the door.
‘I’ve come to sweep you off your feet,’ he said. ‘Excuse me for not removing my hat. I don’t have enough available arms.’
‘What would you have done if it had been my mother?’
‘I would have given her one of these, and taken advantage of her moment of confusion to ransack the house for you and a vase.’
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘No need to ransack. I’ll raise your hat for you.’ She lifted his hat a couple of inches, and plopped it back down again, so that the brim fell over his eyes. ‘Mind the step. Don’t trip up,’ she said.
14
Samadara (3)
One day my beloved came into the house. I had been waiting for him on the terrace because there was a big hairy poochie in the kitchen, and I needed him to get it out. I was listening very hard for either the hammering of his motorcycle or the clopping of hooves.
But when he arrived he was very distressed, and he said, ‘I have terrible news,’ and he sat down next to me on the step of the terrace and he put his head down into his hands, and I said, ‘My beloved, what is it?’ and he said, ‘My wife wants us to go back to England,’ and I said, ‘What? Has she found out about me?’ and he said, ‘That’s what I thought at first, but she hasn’t, she doesn’t suspect anything,’ and I said, ‘Why would she want to leave when all the white men say this is paradise, and all the women have nice houses with servants and gardens, and the gardens are full of flowers and the flamboyant trees blossom on the hillsides, and there’s so much fruit?’
He said, ‘Sometimes it’s boring to be in paradise. My wife wants more to do. She says the coolies don’t use the clinic and there’s no point in her trying to work there any more. She says that she can’t write poetry here because the life is too easy and you can’t just keep writing about how beautiful it is.’
I said, ‘She should write poems with stories in. And with memories.’
He said, ‘And she thinks that Esther and Bertie should be at school in England, even though the schools here are just as good. What’s wrong with the one in Kandy?’
And I said, ‘There is nothing wrong with the school in Kandy that I know of.’
My beloved said, ‘But these are all excuses and false reasons. The real reason is that she fears that her father is going to die soon, and she wants to be with him when he dies. Then her mother will be alone, and she thinks she should look after her mother.’
I said, ‘For everyone in this world it is the family that matters most. I would want to be there when my father dies.’
‘My mother is quite old,’ he said, ‘but she wouldn’t want me to come back if I was happy and successful here. And I am.’
‘Does her mother want her to come back?’
‘Her mother is more than a little bit mad. She’s mainly preoccupied by the royal family. What she wants the most is for Their Majesties to come to tea.’
‘An
d her father?’
‘Her father would definitely not want her to come back for his sake.’
‘Then you must write to her father and let her father write to her.’
My beloved was pleased and said, ‘My darling, you are sometimes very wise.’ Then he said, ‘I think my wife loves her father more than anyone else. He’s much more important to her than I am. I don’t blame her. He’s a great man. He’s a wonderful father.’
After we had drunk coconut milk we went to the bedroom, and I lay down with him with a heavy heart, because the white women are very powerful over their men. The white men go out and stand up to rogue elephants with only two bullets in the barrels of their gun, but they tremble before the fury of their wives, who are armed only with words and self-righteousness. After we had had our pleasure he lay back with his arms behind his head and said, ‘I’m damned if I’m leaving Ceylon. I’m damned if I’m leaving you.’
I said, ‘Brave talking is more easy than brave doing.’
When he went back to his motorcycle he embraced me so strongly that I thought my ribs would crack, and he said, ‘You know I love you, don’t you? You have the sweetest heart of any woman alive. I’ve never loved any woman as I love you,’ and it was those words, and the way in which he said them, so much like a farewell, that made me know I was going to lose him.
15
Ottilie and Frederick at the Tarn
The trees about the Tarn were in blossom, and Ottilie and Frederick sat side by side on a bench, watching the old ladies throwing bread to the ducks.
‘How’s your arm?’ asked Ottilie. ‘Still a bit achey?’
‘Very achey, but I shall be brave.’ His wrist was still in plaster, but he had abandoned the sling unless the pain became too much to bear, which usually happened in the evenings. ‘This is a lovely spot, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Ottilie. ‘There’s a local legend that it has no bottom.’