I had never come across anyone of that name either before or since the evening in Sir William’s office on Ross, and I said without thinking: ‘Good heavens! – that cad Tewson!’ and started to laugh my head off. My hostess looked shocked to pieces and the wretched man looked terribly taken aback. But when I explained hastily why the phrase had jumped into my mind, he said: ‘This is fantastic – that must have been my grandfather!’ And it was. Or rather had been. I rang up Fudge that evening and we both laughed ourselves silly. Oh, how lucky we were to have lived on an unspoiled coral island.
6
GOLCONDA
The old name for Hyderabad
Chapter 23
I left the Andamans in a worse condition than I was in when I arrived. Not, I hasten to say, the result of Pimm’s No.1 this time, but because the islands had given me a vicious parting present in the form of an insect bite on my top lip. I got bitten at the very last moment, probably by something peculiar and nervous that had been lurking among the garlands of orchids that well-wishers had draped around my neck as parting presents.
Few people have penetrated very far into the Andaman forests, and all sorts of strange flowers and trees, insects and animals, could have been lurking there alongside those stone-age people the Jarawas. I didn’t even see the insect that bit me. I only felt it, and yowled and slapped the place, thinking it was only a mosquito or a thorn among the flowers. But within seconds my lip had started to swell up, and by the time our little steamer upped anchor and was heading out of the harbour, with me hanging over the bows and waving wildly at Fudge and various friends in the launch and assorted sailing-ships around it, I could barely see them, or Ross; or Harriet either, because my entire face had swollen up into a rainbow-coloured suet pudding. I nearly had a fit when I saw my reflection in my cabin looking-glass. So did the Captain and the ship’s doctor. They tried dabbing various disinfectants on to it, but nothing worked. In fact it got worse.
Three days later, having discovered that my eyes and forehead were comparatively unblotched, I landed at Calcutta wearing a very fetching yashmak (fashioned from a chiffon scarf that fortunately matched the dress I was wearing), and looking every inch like ‘Olga Petloffski the Beautiful Spy’. It was the only thing I could do, and it was an enormous success. It is on record that gentlemen prefer blondes, but I soon discovered that they are also suckers for anything in a yashmak. Fortunately I have (or had) a fairly good pair of eyes, and this was instantly accepted by those who had not previously met me as evidence of other features to match. Yashmaked, I was credited with being a raving beauty, while underneath those layers of chiffon my face was an unholy mess.
This time the Governor himself (he had been a friend of Tacklow’s) came down to meet me, accompanied by his private sec. HE1 was fascinated by the yashmak. However, he refused to believe it was necessary – ‘all this fuss about a mosquito bite that has gone bad on you!’ – until back in Government House he sent for the Residency doctor who, prepared for a slightly unsightly red blotch (and also taking a lofty ‘What’s all this fuss about, young woman?’ approach), took a hasty step backwards when I removed the yashmak, much as though I had unveiled a Dr Jekyll in the process of turning into Mr Hyde – either that or an advanced case of leprosy or the plague.
He rang up a colleague who was supposed to specialize in weird skin diseases, and the two of them wrangled over it for what seemed like hours. After this it was agreed that I could have all my meals by myself. They would have to be near-liquid ones because it was difficult to get anything into my mouth, since I could only ladle very soft things in at one corner. They also tried a variety of drugs and lotions (none of which did any good and most of the latter only stung), and finally wrote a joint letter explaining their views to the Residency doctor in Hyderabad, where I was heading to stay with Sandy, who had invited Mother and me to visit for a few weeks.
I only spent two nights in Calcutta, and those ADCs – only two of them, one had returned to his regiment and not yet been replaced – insisted on taking me out to a dance at the Saturday Club, solely on account of that yashmak which, as they prophesied, proved a spectacular success. Moving on to Hyderabad, Deccan (there is another Hyderabad in Sind), I found Mother and Sandy on the platform to meet me – Sandy established in a huge, white, two-storey house standing among lush flower gardens – and had my customary success with the yashmak. Believe it or not, that beastly Andamans-sting and/or bite took well over a month to subside, and I have a sad feeling that when I was eventually able to remove the yashmak I disappointed a lot of people who had obviously been expecting something like Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich to emerge from behind it.
It was while I was in Hyderabad that Somerset Maugham and his secretary descended upon the State during one of that excellent but acidulated writer’s many Eastern tours, and the Resident pushed him off on to Sandy to entertain him. I was enthralled to meet him, but disappointed to find him a sour and unfriendly old gentleman who stumped off fairly early to bed. It was after he had taken himself off that I told his secretary that I hadn’t mentioned his books, because I thought the Great Man must be sick to death of people saying: ‘Oh, Mr Maugham, I simply adored this or that book, and/or short story.’ To which his secretary replied: ‘You were wrong. It’s the only thing he likes to talk about!’
So next morning we got on like a house on fire, and in the end I became brave enough to mention that I had just written a very light-hearted novel, but that I was afraid I would never make a writer. He asked why, in a distinctly bored voice, and I said because I wrote much too slowly and would stick for hours on end over a sentence that I couldn’t get right, and though advised by any number of friends to leave it and press on, and come back and fix it later, I found myself totally unable to do so. I had to get it right before I could go on, and sometimes I got held up for hours on end.
The old boy peered at me over the top of his spectacles exactly like an elderly tortoise, and said: ‘My dear young woman, that is the only thing I have heard you say that makes me think you may be a writer one day: I do that!’ He also told me that Colette did it too, so I was enormously cheered. I asked him if it was true that the plots of all his stories were ones he had overheard or been told by people who had been involved in them in some way or another, and that they were all based on fact, and he replied that of course they were: ‘Why should I cudgel my brains to invent stories when people keep giving me excellent real-life ones on a plate? If they ever stop handing me interesting stories I may have to start inventing. But not until then!’
He also gave me what he said was an invaluable tip: ‘If a word is just what you want, don’t try hunting for a similar one because you’ve already used that one several times. Even if you’ve used it six times in a row, if it’s right, leave it.’ I’ve tried following that advice, but it’s no good. I hate repetition, and I fly to Roget for an alternative. Though I apologize to old Somerset’s ghost whenever I do it!
* * *
Mother and I painted a lot in Hyderabad. I muralled two walls in the hall of Sandy’s house, and met a lot of interesting people. Hyderabad was supposed to have the grandest Residency in all India, and was also one of the states that tourists visited because of the polo – there was hardly a day when some first-class polo-match was not being played there – and because of the legendary diamond mines of Golconda. The then Resident was not a social-minded man, so if he had to put passing VIPs up in the Residency (which was certainly the most lavish piece of showing-off to be met with in the days of the Raj – a palace, no less) he would send them over to Sandy to wine and dine them and arrange expeditions and picnics, and take them shopping. Among them that year we had Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, and her current husband, Count Reventlow. She wanted to go shopping for jewellery, so instead of taking her and her entourage to one of the glittering jewellers’ shops in the flashiest and more Europeanized part of town, we took her down to the old city, where the real trade goes on in the houses of
the jewel merchants.
Here we entered one of the tall Indian houses straight from a narrow, unpaved lane lined with similar houses, and climbed up innumerable stairs in the half light to a long, whitewashed room where there was no furniture at all, just thick druggets (or possibly carpets) covered with white cotton sheeting, on which the owner and a couple of assistants, also dressed in white, were seated cross-legged and smoking a hookah. They rose and bowed when we came in and then sat down again, gesturing us to do the same, which we did somewhat awkwardly – Barbara’s high heels proving a distinct handicap in this kind of caper. Having got us all safely down on the floor, the owner clapped his hands and cups of coffee and various bits of this-and-that, halwa (sweetmeats) mostly, were produced and passed round. After an interval of polite social chit-chat the cups and dishes were removed and two more white-robed assistants appeared, carrying between them the type of cheap tin trunk that India used when it decided to travel and had more clobber than could be trusted to a bedding-roll. You could see them by the score on any railway platform all over the country, and they could, in those days, be bought for a few rupees.
A succession of these locked and unlovely objects was carried in and dumped on the white sheeting that covered the floor, and out of them, when the locks had been removed, an Ali-Baba’s treasure of jewellery was lifted out and laid on the floor. This was the kind of jewellery that the average globe-trotter never sees, the kind that we had seen in the Treasure House in Gwalior, incredible stuff: pearls the size of pigeon’s eggs, carved emeralds, glittering rubies and enormous, table-cut diamonds. Sapphires, topazes and turquoises and a wonderful example of a fascinating jewel that I had only seen once before, in Peking, where I was told that they are so rare that their number is known, and that most of those had been in the Russian Crown Jewels: Alexandrites.
This was the first occasion on which I suddenly realized that great riches must be a terrible bore. Because I would have given almost anything to possess one of the magical works of the jeweller’s craft that were being unwrapped and laid out one at a time on the cheap chudder-cloth in front of Barbara, yet she couldn’t have cared less about them. She sat there on the floor, saying occasionally in a languid voice, ‘That’s pretty. I’ll have that. And that one too. And that…’ Just pointing a finger at the things that caught her fancy, knowing that she could, if she felt like it, buy the lot twenty times over. She couldn’t have been less excited about them if they’d been two-cent trinkets in one of those souvenir shops in a seaside arcade, and I thought, ‘You poor dear! What a bore life must be when there isn’t anything you want that you can’t have, and don’t have to save up for.’ Yes, I’d have changed places with her. Of course I would! But only long enough to buy that pearl and diamond and emerald flower-bracelet. She simply did not get a kick out of anything. And how could she?
Well, she did out of one thing. Sandy had made great friends with one of the nobles of Hyderabad, and since any friend of Sandy’s was a friend of ours, Mother and I were soon privileged to become friends of his too. No one could possibly have done anything else, because he was one of the most attractive men I have ever met. He was an old man when I first met him, but when he was young he must have been devastating, and it can have surprised no one when the youthful daughter of the then Resident fell madly in love with him – and he with her. But though Christians are accepted by Muslims as ‘Children of the Book’, because the Koran acknowledges Christ to be among the prophets and contains the Christmas story, Sala Jung’s family, who were too near the throne to get away with a mixed marriage, were horrified and refused their permission, backed by the then Nizam and the mullahs. The girl’s father, equally horrified, also put his foot down and sent her back to England by the next available boat. The lovers had managed one last meeting, at which they promised each other that they would never marry anyone else. And they never did. Not so surprisingly from the girl’s side of things, for Victorian damsels did a lot of ‘going into a decline’ because they couldn’t have the man they wanted. But amazing for a Muslim royal. I suppose he had the odd concubine when he felt like it. But he kept that promise to the end of his life. And no, it was not Sala Jung whom Barbara fancied. It was one of his possessions.
He lived in a large and rather shabby palace in the city, which one felt he had lost interest in and was allowing to grow old gracefully around him. It was crammed with treasures, all of which could have done with a bit of dusting; huge oil paintings by Victorian artists covered the walls and wonderful Persian carpets covered the marble floors. He liked to give lunch parties on Sundays, and we were lucky enough to be asked to them fairly frequently. We thought it might interest Barbara and her Count to meet the old charmer and attend one of his famous lunches, so we asked him if we could bring her with us on the following weekend. Having told them a good deal about their host, we ought to have warned her that Sala’s lunches were, as far as dress went, strictly informal. But we didn’t even think of it and were very taken aback when we went to collect her and found her decked out like one of her own Woolworths jewellery counters.
I don’t know why it is that too much glitter on anyone but the Queen – and then only on a State occasion! – always looks phoney. But it does. The Countess Reventlow must, that morning, have been worth several millions (billions in today’s currency!) ‘on the hoof’. It began with the hat, which was pinned to her hair with a couple of diamond hat-pins. Well, OK, but the hat was a small plate of multi-coloured artificial flowers, swathed in black net that had been liberally sprinkled with tiny sequins. The whole thing glittered. Worse, it topped a dress of multi-coloured, patterned crêpe-de-Chine, on which the late Czarina’s pearls, a recent acquisition – or so we were told – gorgeous as they were, had somehow become artificial. Her earrings were in the shape of four-leaf clovers, each leaf a huge emerald and the centre a large diamond, and even her shoes glittered because they were made of shiny black patent leather. She was wearing a diamond ring that would have dwarfed Elizabeth Taylor’s, as well as several simply gorgeous three-inch-wide 1920s-style diamond bracelets, and, to top all this splendour, in place of a bag she was carrying a platinum box about the size of one of the smaller paperback novels, the edge of which was paved with flat oblong diamonds, and on top of which were her initials in – I think – emeralds. As she walked out into the bright sunlight, the sun suddenly caught her and made her glitter all over as though she had been caught by a powerful spotlight. I think she must have dressed to impress a rich Indian royal. But she certainly made the rest of the party look as drab as sparrows on a wet day. Not a diamond among the lot of us. Or even a sequin!
Sala Jung may have become old and grey, but he had never lost his ability to charm, and in no time at all he had Barbara eating out of his hand. I’d never seen her look so alive and interested, and so charming herself. The lunch party was a great success, for the Count too was a charmer, and I am not surprised that she fell for him. All went well until we moved out to a flagged patio in the middle of the ground floor – the house, like many eastern houses, was built around an open square, and this one, like the majority of its fellows, had flowering creepers and brilliant sprays of bougainvillaea and jasmine growing in tubs in the patio, part of which was generally in sunlight.
Except during the monsoon, or the brief winter rains, coffee was always served in the patio, and Sandy having told Barbara about Sala’s collection of daggers, she begged him to let her see them. A display of these daggers was apt to be a normal ending to those Sunday luncheons, because the collection was famous, and I must have seen them many times myself. But I never got tired of seeing them. No one could. They were wonderful. Once again, as in the jewel-merchant’s house in the city, servants tottered out into the patio with a selection of cheap tin trunks, and having spread a large sheet over the marble paving stones, took out the daggers one by one, each in its own velvet-covered box. Each in turn was removed from its box and laid on the ground, and everyone ‘ooh’d’ and ‘aah’d’, a
nd was allowed to handle the fabulous things.
The names of the previous owners read like a page from history and were even more fascinating than the weapons that centuries ago had been made for them and carried by them. Among them all, one in particular caught Barbara’s eye, and she asked if she might handle it. It was a fairly short dagger and its curved hilt was made in the likeness of a parrot’s head, the beak carved from a single ruby and the head from an enormous emerald. The eyes were rubies ringed by smaller jewels, either sapphires or diamonds, I don’t remember which; maybe two rings, one of both. And a hole had been bored through the parrot’s neck from which there hung a tassel of pearls. It was a beautifully made piece of jewellery, and, I should imagine, a horribly effective weapon, for the steel of the blade, which was inlaid with patterns of gold, was as razor sharp as the day it was made. Sala warned Barbara to be careful she didn’t cut herself as she eased it out of its green velvet diamond-studded sheath.
There were dozens of daggers, each one of them worth their weight in pearls or platinum, and each more dazzling than the last. But the one with the parrot-like head and the gleaming tassel of pearls had caught Barbara’s fancy, and she kept on coming back to it. I think someone must have told her to be careful of how she admired the possessions of Eastern or Oriental potentates, because you could find yourself presented with the object of your admiration, and though it would be handed to you as a gift you were expected to give the donor something of equal value. She certainly went overboard about that parrot-headed dagger, bestowing only the most cursory of glances on the rest of the collection, and saying, ‘Oh, yes, very pretty … But not a patch on this lovely thing – why, it might almost be a real bird! I’d give anything to own something like this! It’s just about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen…’ and so on and so on. Until our host suddenly took fright. He probably thought the young woman was going to back him into a horrid corner by asking him to sell it to her. Or give it to her! Neither of which he would have thought of doing. He gave a curt order to the servants, who whipped everything away at the speed of light. I should think that dagger was the only artifact that La Comtesse ever wanted that she didn’t get.