I don’t remember anything at all between then and a day just before the ship that we went home on reached England, when I noticed with a sense of shock that Mother’s hair had a broad streak of white in it that hadn’t been there when we left Bombay. I hadn’t known that one’s hair could go white quite so quickly. Though I would see it all too often during the years of the Second World War, it shook me badly because it was the first time. And because I hadn’t believed it could happen.
Another result of Tacklow’s death was that I began to have nightmares. I have always dreamt a lot. But few of my dreams had been bad ones. These were bad, and to make matters worse, they were always the same dream, identical in every detail …
Tacklow and I were alone in an empty Dâk bungalow in the jungle, and it was beginning to grow dark, for the sun had just set and dusk was closing in. We stood side by side on the verandah, listening to the noise of peacocks and jungle-cocks saluting the approach of night. Somewhere not too far away a Karkar deer would bark its alarm call, and Tacklow would say, ‘I think we’d better light a few lamps and start shutting the doors. This is tiger country.’ We would walk along the verandah to the lamp room and collect and light a couple of kerosene lamps, and turning into the first of the empty rooms, all of which connected with each other, begin to close and bolt the doors. ‘You close this half and I’ll close the other,’ Tacklow would say, and he would turn away and go out of the room and I would see the small glow of his hurricane-lamp fade until it was lost.
As it did so, the wick of my own hurricane-lamp would flare up and go out, leaving me in the dusk; and in the same moment I would hear, quite clearly in the silence, the soft pad, pad, pad of paws on the matting of the long verandah outside. My heart would seem to leap into my throat and choke me, and I would hear behind me a sound that I took to be Tacklow coming back, and turning round quickly, see a tiger standing in the open doorway, staring at me. At which point the horrid noise that a sleeper in the grip of nightmare makes when they try to scream would wake me, and I would find myself in bed, shuddering and sweating with terror and still struggling to scream.
The dream never varied by an inch, and it recurred again and again, generally when I was feeling particularly dispirited and things were not going right for me. I came to know that Dâk bungalow so well that when, years later, I needed a slightly sinister one for Shadow of the Moon, I used the one in my nightmares, though by that time those scary dreams were a thing of the past.
* * *
Our first few months in England stay in my head as a confused jumble of other people’s houses, Mother in floods of tears, that terrifying, recurrent nightmare, and having to live out of suitcases, because the detailed arrangements that my parents had made with relatives and close friends during the past winter meant that more than half-a-dozen households were expecting us to spend at least a month if not more with them. You have to remember that middle-class England, though badly shaken by the after-effects of the Great War, was still to a large extent living the life of Riley and – secure in the possession of a considerably reduced but still adequate domestic staff – still thought nothing of inviting their friends and relations for visits lasting from a fortnight to a few months.
The object of our lengthy visits was, or had been before Tacklow died, to let us go house-hunting at leisure instead of being rushed into buying a house – any house – for the sake of having a roof over our heads. Tacklow had wanted a little house in which he could settle down and spend the rest of his life peacefully, cataloguing Ferrarie’s stamp collection, raising cabbages and watching his beloved Daisy grow old gracefully. But it had to be the right house, and he had intended to take his time about finding it.
Now, however, all thoughts of acquiring a house had to be put aside until Mother came to terms with widowhood, and I was deeply grateful that we had somewhere to stay for the remainder of that year. This, I thought, should give both of us plenty of time to plan for the future and adjust to life without Tacklow. But I soon learned that Mother was unable to do anything of the sort.
Instead of being able to stay in one place for several weeks (most of our visits had been planned for months), the most we managed were a few days. And I feel sure that all our kind hosts must have been unspeakably relieved to see us leave, for there are limits to how many times you can say to a grief-stricken friend or relative, ‘Oh my dear, I am so sorry for you; I do so sympathize – it must be terrible for you; if only I could do something to help!…’
Mother’s friends ran out of sympathetic repetitions in fairly quick time, because all she would do was collapse into the nearest armchair or sofa and cry. I don’t think she heard a word of what they said to her. She would just sit there, staring ahead of her, with tears streaming down her face, hour after hour. Once again I was reduced to wondering where, in one’s anatomy, one keeps this apparently bottomless well of misery, and what happens to it when one isn’t crying? – or hasn’t cried for ages?
Occasionally, some warm-hearted sympathizer would end up losing their cool and tick her off, urging her to pull herself together and telling her how horrified Cecil would be if he could see her going to pieces in this spineless manner. But nothing worked. Mother merely told them that they ‘didn’t understand’, and went on weeping. Then after a day or two she would decide that she would feel much better once she was with Alice or Josie, or whichever friend or relative we were booked to stay with next. And before I knew it she had stopped crying for long enough to arrange a move over the telephone and pack her suitcases, and we were off, three weeks prematurely, to stay with Jessie or whomever, where, I regret to say, the same scenario was invariably repeated.
I can’t think how she managed it without losing a whole row of dear friends for keeps, and can only suppose that they were so relieved to see the back of us that it outweighed the annoyance of having all their own plans upset and their hospitality rejected. But they stuck by her, and it was at this point in her life that she acquired a habit that was to madden Bets and me (who bore the brunt of it) and cause endless inconvenience, and occasionally great offence, to her friends and acquaintances. After the briefest of stays, she would take a scunner against whatever place she happened to be in, and having convinced herself that she would be much happier somewhere else, she would pack and move on. Only to regret, after a few days, that she had come there, and (now that it was too late to go back) begin to appreciate the charms and advantages of the place she had just left.
Poor Mother! From the time of Tacklow’s death to the end of her days, she would always think that she could escape from unhappiness or insecurity, or whatever it was that she was forever trying to escape from, if only she could move on somewhere else. And only when she had done so, and could not go back, did she discover that the grass she had failed to appreciate while she was standing on it was far greener and more attractive than what she had exchanged it for.
Never ever again would she appreciate anything while she had it. Only after she had lost it. For she had become like the dog in Aesop’s Fables who, standing by a river with a juicy bone in his jaws, dropped and lost it, because he thought the reflection of that bone in the water made it look a lot larger than the one between his teeth. He had grabbed at the shadow and lost the substance.
4
Digs in London
Chapter 19
The extent to which Tacklow’s death was going to change my life was painfully underlined on an evening at Pembury in Kent, where I was staying with my schoolfriend Helen, at her parents’ home, the Manor House. It was just before sundown, and I was in the dining-room, helping Helen to lay the table for supper, when she suddenly said: ‘Isn’t it your birthday today, Tish?’1
And it was! I remember the knowledge hitting me as though someone had punched me in the stomach, followed by the horrid sinking feeling you get when one of those over-swift office lifts drops you down twenty storeys non-stop to the ground floor.
I didn’t let go of whatever it was I was
holding – side plates I think – but I very nearly did. I had known Tacklow’s death meant the end of an era. But only with my mind. Not fully yet with my heart. Now it came home to me with the force of a knock-down blow. It was my birthday … and I hadn’t even remembered it!
We’d always made so much of birthdays. Present-giving at breakfast. A birthday tea-party to which all one’s special friends were invited. A birthday cake with candles on it and when we grew older a dinner party and a dance. And I hadn’t even remembered! We weren’t a family any more, now Tacklow had gone and Bets was married, Bill was somewhere on the North West Frontier and Mother a widow. I was on my own. It was one of the blacker and drabber patches in my life, and it was around about this time that Roger turned up again.
He couldn’t have picked a worse time to look me up, and I don’t think he had any idea of how much hung on our first meeting ‘on home soil’, so to speak. We had met briefly in Bombay, where Mother and I happened to be staying at the same hotel as he was, all three of us homeward bound, though on different ships. Mother must have given him the Manor House as my only fairly safe address.
Roger was returning to England on leave and would be staying with his mother, who lived in a suburb of London, and he had written to ask if he could call at the Keelans’ and take me out to lunch: a scheme that Helen was all in favour of, as she was deeply involved with the local church fête, which included lunches and teas among their day-long money-raising activities. (Tish scented another customer!) So Roger was duly invited down to collect me at the house and eventually stand me lunch in the grounds of the Vicarage, and be lured into buying home-made cakes, second-hand books, or assorted jumble off the stalls managed by the ladies of the village.
Helen and her mother, who were both stallholders at this yearly shindig, would have left long before Roger arrived. ‘So you will have him all to yourself for at least an hour,’ said Helen’s mother – a keen match-maker who thought it was high time I was married, and had said so at frequent intervals ever since I had unwisely told her that Tacklow had approved of Roger. As for myself, I was in a thoroughly mixed up and miserable state of mind, and I have never before, or since, felt so totally lost. I was on my own now in uncharted waters, and Mother was proving useless as a source of either comfort or support, for she too was hopelessly adrift, and I knew that I would have to look after her – because there was no one else to do so. We would both have to learn how to make ends meet, and oh, how I wished that Tacklow had taught us something about balancing the books!
Mother had always known that our means were modest, and now that Tacklow had gone, his pension and salary had gone with him, and Mother was left to manage on a widow’s pension of less than four hundred pounds a year (of which ninety-four pounds – or was it ninety-three? – was accounted for by the addition of something called ‘The Royal Warrant’ that was given in recognition of sterling work during the First World War – or something of the sort). As for my own princely pension as an unmarried daughter, it was one pound five shillings a week. And lucky to get it! (If Tacklow had been in the British Army instead of the British-Indian one, I would have got nothing.) There was no ‘Cradle to Grave’ stuff in those days!
The mere problems of how to manage on our pensions in what was, to me, almost a foreign country were worrying enough without Mother’s uninhibited grief and continual moves at short notice, and I would have given almost anything for ‘someone to watch over me’ – someone on to whom I could unload a share of the problems and woes that had been piling up on me and who would provide a shoulder to cry on. I don’t remember seriously considering Roger as a candidate for the post in the days immediately before his arrival in Pembury, but I suppose I must have done, because I know that I took a lot of trouble with my hair and my dress and my lipstick (Pond’s Kiss-Proof – and it was, too!). And that I borrowed some of Helen’s lavender water and went down to wait in the drawing-room with my heart beating a good deal faster than usual. The Keelans’ maid, who had not yet left for the church fête, let him in, and I went out to meet him in the hall.
Dear Roger. His guardian angel must have been taking good care of him that day, because if he had grabbed me in his arms and kissed me, I would have clung to him like a bit of fly-paper and, mentally and most thankfully unloading all my woes and worries on to him, kissed him back warmly. And a month or two later I would probably have married him and made him unhappy ever after, for I wasn’t the sort of girl he should have married at all. He deserved something a lot better than a wife who had married him as an escape from sorrow and the problems of penury. And his guardian angel must have known it, for when I ran out into the hall we were both suddenly overcome with shyness, which Roger covered up by starting to struggle out of the greatcoat he was wearing. There were raindrops on it, I remember. (One could have bet on that, since you must have noticed that the Devil, who has a warped sense of humour, does his best to ensure that any outdoor festivity on behalf of the church should be rained on.)
Getting himself out of that greatcoat gave Roger an excuse for getting his greetings over without having to accompany them with any demonstration which he was afraid I might not welcome. And by the time he had got it off, I had decided that he had done it on purpose for exactly that reason, for fear I might want to embrace him when he was no longer in love with me and had, in fact, found someone else. So in the end we didn’t even shake hands, but were terribly bright and chatty.
It wasn’t a good day. I took him over to the grounds where the fête was being held, and after I had introduced him to Helen and her parents, we had the sort of lunch one would expect in a tent at a church bazaar, and spent the rest of the day doing our duty by buying things we didn’t want at a variety of stalls, or guessing the weight of large plum cakes – correct guess wins the cake – and similar games of chance. The rain must have stopped early on, since I took Roger for a stroll around the Manor House gardens and the orchards, and presumably told him all about Mother and our present situation, and was brought up to date with his news – it seems he had been posted to HMS Excellent, that bit of land in or near Portsmouth that is a Navy enclave and pretends it’s a ship.
When, eventually, the Keelans returned looking eager and interested, and obviously expecting to be told the glad news of an engagement, Roger hastily presented me with all the junk he had bought and, taking his courage in both hands, pulled me towards him, gave me a brief kiss, and fled.
The kiss told me, if nothing else, that he hadn’t found anyone else. But it came too late. If he had done that in the beginning, I am fairly certain that we would have skipped lunch and the fête as well, and spent the rest of the day with our arms about each other, either on the drawing-room sofa, or strolling arm in arm along the garden paths, making plans for the future. And I am fairly certain that I would have married him. But fortunately for both of us he had started off the day on the wrong foot, and stayed there, uncomfortably and immovably. And by the time he left I knew that if I married him it would be for the meanest of reasons. A meal ticket. Which would not only be cheating, but would put me under a lifetime’s obligation to him, because if you marry for love and things go wrong, well it’s probably fifty-fifty anyway. But to marry someone for escape or convenience, or a meal ticket, or merely for ‘someone to watch over me’, and it doesn’t work out – well that’s going to be your fault. Because it should be your part of the bargain to make it work.
An afternoon spent making polite conversation to Roger made it quite clear to me that I couldn’t possibly pretend that he was the man I had been waiting for, the ‘Some day he’ll come along, the man I love’ – the one-and-only that all the romantic books and songs tell you is out there somewhere, waiting for you to come his way … Oh, dear, what a lot of heartaches and disappointment those songs and stories are responsible for!
It is odd to think that there are times when one’s whole life can be altered by a seemingly trivial incident, and I sometimes used to wonder what it might have been
like if Roger had caught hold of me and kissed me instead of talking. Very different, I imagine. For one thing, I would not have been a writer, since it would not have occurred to me to try. I had hoped to be an illustrator of children’s books, a second Arthur Rackham, or Edmund Dulac – and though I’m afraid I would never have been half as good, I might have made it on a much lower level. But a writer, never. The only reason I tried that was because although it was possible in those days to live on one pound five shillings2 a week (and many people managed on much less), it was not all that easy. For a start, the tools of one’s trade had to be bought and paid for. And one has to eat. If Roger had kissed me as though he meant it when we met, I would not have needed to worry about finding the money for the next week’s rent or a shilling for that insatiable gas-meter. Odd, when you come to think of it.
Helen’s parents, whom ever since my schooldays I had called ‘Uncle Pat’ and ‘Auntie Winnie’ (in the tedious Victorian tradition that all grown-ups were ‘uncles and aunties’), had taken to Roger on sight, and were gravely disappointed by the outcome of his visit. In fact Auntie Winnie took the opportunity to read Helen and me a stern lecture on the conceit and stupidity of heedless girls who played fast and loose with the affections of their suitors, and thoughtlessly rejected eligible proposals that might never come their way again. Such young women, warned Auntie Winnie, were heading straight for that dreaded end of all hopes – ‘the Shelf’. And Helen and I were both consigned to the doghouse, since Helen had disappointed her mother by continuing to turn down a devoted suitor, one Jack Glubb; known to fame as ‘Glubb Pasha’ – or ‘Father of the Little Chin’ – to his devoted Arab Legions. It used to amuse me to see the great man – a second, if considerably less romantic, Lawrence of Arabia, whose word at that time was law throughout most of Jordan – behaving like a wet doormat for the sake of a girl who kept turning him down.