Golden Afternoon Read online

  M. M. KAYE

  Golden Afternoon

  being the second part of

  SHARE OF SUMMER,

  her autobiography

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  To

  the friends of my youth,

  most of whom are now dead,

  but who live on in my memory.

  And to

  those happy highways where we went

  and cannot come again.

  With all my Love.

  Foreword

  Is it so small a thing

  To have enjoyed the sun

  To have lived light in the Spring

  To have loved, to have thought, to have done.

  Matthew Arnold

  Well, no. Or not as far as I am concerned anyway, for I’ve had a wonderful life, and if I had to answer the question put to the music in popular song: ‘If we could have it all again, would we — could we?’ I could honestly say, ‘Yes.’ Even though it would mean reliving some truly agonizing black patches. For among the many unhappy lessons that life teaches us is that hearts don’t break; even though they may crack so badly that however well the years mend them, the cracks are always there.

  I used to think that I should never get over the loss of my father, ‘Tacklow’. And I didn’t, until a few years ago when something very odd, but reassuring, happened to me, and made me realize that I might not have to wait too long before I saw him again.

  I was undergoing a five-week stretch in hospital, getting hell from angina, and there came a night when I thought I was dying (so, incidentally, did the nurses, one of whom telephoned my darling daughters at a hideous hour of the night to tell them to get there quickly if they wanted to see Mum alive). I’ve no idea how this transition was made, but quite suddenly I found myself standing in the dusk on one side of a wide, stony valley on the far side of which lay a long line of barren hills, rather like the Khyber hills on India’s North West Frontier. It was getting very dark, but though the valley and the hills were in shadow, the sky still held the dregs of a yellow and gold sunset, and the whole scene was a study in sepia, as though it had been drawn on a sheet of brown packing-paper with a Conté pencil.

  I looked down at my dress and saw that I wasn’t wearing my long-sleeved granny-style nightgown any more. I was wearing a full-skirted cotton dress of the 1930s and 40s. And I knew in the same moment that I was young again. And not only young, but feeling incredibly happy and exhilarated as well. Wonderfully well! I could have danced my way across that desolate waste of broken ground and skipped over the boulders. It would soon be too dark to see, but there was still enough light to show me that there was a pass in those hills, and I knew without any doubt whatever that if I could reach it, I would be home and safe.

  I had taken the first step when it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to check on the ‘me’ who was lying on her back in the blackness, behind me, being badgered by nurses. A nurse was holding each of her hands and one of them kept shouting, ‘Can you hear me?’ and telling her to press her hand, or make a movement — any movement — to show that she could hear her.

  Well, of course I could hear her! But all I wanted was for everyone to leave me alone to get on with getting up to that pass. However, I thought that I’d get back into ‘me’ for a moment, just to see how things were with her, so I did — but ‘me’ was feeling truly awful, so I hastily abandoned her and started off, young and gay and supremely confident, to cross that shadowy valley and scramble up to the pass. But I hadn’t gone far when, without warning, I was jerked out of it like a trout on a line and found myself in a brightly lit hospital room, full of people, and feeling far from well. It was a distinct shock … because I’d so nearly made it.

  I learned later that my heart had stopped twice (hence that brief return into ‘me’ and back again, perhaps). Also that, as the heart unit that night had been pretty busy, and its electrical gadgets were in use, the doctors had restarted mine with the aid of one of those rubber plungers that you use to unblock kitchen sinks. Very infra dig!

  I’m sure that the medical profession will be able to explain away that ‘out-of-body’ experience, but I don’t have to believe them. I was there and they weren’t, and the best thing about it was that wonderful feeling of happiness and well-being which by itself was enormously reassuring. I know now that when my number comes up I shall only have to cross the valley and find my nearest and dearest waiting to give me a hand if there are any tricky bits to be negotiated in the pass. And in the nature of things it can’t be too long now before I meet them again.

  I have told this story here partly because it explains why there was such a long gap between the first volume of my autobiography and this one. My apologies to the many readers who have been writing in during the past nine years, demanding to know when Vol. II will be coming up, and would I please get a move on with it? I’m truly sorry for the delay. I really did try, but it was ill-health and not idleness that caused the hold-up: cross my heart.

  The other part was because not long after I’d had the curious experience, I described it to a dear friend, one Stanley Hall — who had more friends to the square inch than you would have thought possible. Stanley made me promise that I would write it down somewhere in my autobiography — ‘And don’t go leaving it too late,’ he said. Well, this seems as good a place as any, though, alas, it’s too late for Stan to read it here, for he crossed his own valley not long afterwards. I rather think his would have been a Mediterranean one within sight of the sea and with a heavenly palazzo somewhere in the offing. I wouldn’t have chosen the one I landed up in, but I’m not complaining, since I reckon one gets what one deserves. And now, while I’m about it, I would like to give my special thanks to three people without whose help this book would never have got off the ground. My sister Bets for all the help and support she has given me; Carole Pengelly Parrish for her unfailing encouragement — not to say nagging — and for introducing me to Margaret Samuel, who has actually been able to translate endless pages of scruffy pencilled longhand and not only made sense of it but managed to turn it into type. My warmest thanks to you all. Especially Bets.

  Northbrook, 1991–7

  M. M. Kaye

  1

  ‘Exemption from oblivion’

  Chapter 1

  How does one describe Memory? The Shorter Oxford Dictionary, which weighs around six and a half pounds and ought to know, goes into it at some length. According to its compilers, Memory is ‘the faculty by which things are remembered’; ‘recollection’; ‘the fact or condition of being remembered’; ‘exemption from oblivion’ (I rather fancy that one); and, among other things, ‘a memorial writing’; ‘a record’; ‘a history’; ‘a tomb, shrine, chapel, or the like’. And by way of illustration, this information is followed up by a flurry of quotations; notably one from Chaucer (he of The Canterbury Tales, circa AD 1340–1400), which states briefly that he was ‘yet in memor
ie and alyve’.

  Well, so for the present, am I. And so much for the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.

  I have not consulted the long one, which runs to an incredible number of volumes, but I doubt if it supplies much more information on this head, and I am quite sure that it fails to mention that Memory (mine, at all events) is a chancy thing with a mind of its own. It picks and chooses at random, rejecting any number of names, dates and incidents of (possibly) world-wide importance, which you would have thought it might have had the sense to retain, while preserving instead a whole rag-bag of odds and ends: a few lines of verse read long ago in an old pre-war copy of an American magazine, an almond tree in bloom in the garden of a shabby little Dâk-bungalow above the Kashmir road, and a full moon rising behind the enormous lateen sails of a fleet of Chinese junks setting out at dusk to fish in the Yellow Sea …

  I am not criticizing my memory for its quirkiness in this matter of choice, because I have come to realize that, as memories go, it is Grade A and I am very fortunate in possessing it, since a majority of my friends (and both my daughters) seem unable to remember in any detail anything that happened more than a few years ago. I, on the other hand, have the pleasing illusion that I remember everything. Though I know very well that this cannot possibly be true, and that a great deal must have fallen through the net and been washed away by time; some of it, I suspect, of some importance — or historical importance, anyway. Yet, as I look back along the long road of my life, which in retrospect seems so astonishingly short, I don’t regret the choices my memory has made. For even if I remember nothing else, that almond tree, and the autumn moon lighting the fishing junks out into the Yellow Sea, will surely serve as acceptable coin to pay the Ferryman for taking me across that last river. While as for those few lines of verse, they should furnish me with a password on the other side.

  But, while I am ‘yet in memorie and alyve’, I find that remembering stands so high in my list of favourite things that I am astonished by the number of people who say, ‘Oh, I never look back! The past is over and done with, and since it can’t be altered one should throw it out with the bathwater and forget it. “Always look forward” is my motto!’

  Well, all right. But why not do both? What’s wrong with looking back? Apart from anything else, I should have thought that some of our more truculent nations and their governments, and/or dictators, might even begin to learn a thing or two by doing so. (Such as, for instance, that taking over Afghanistan isn’t really quite as easy as you may think.)

  There have been black patches, of course, some very harrowing ones. But we all get those, and, personally, I look back on most of my life with the greatest delight. In particular, on the joyful day of my return to the lovely land of my birth after almost nine years of exile in a boarding-school in England.

  I had been so afraid that I would never see it again, and on every day of those interminable years I had badgered God in my nightly prayers to please, please do something about it. But although my brother Bill had managed to return there and was now serving as a gunner in a mountain battery on the North West Frontier,* there seemed to be no chance at all of my ever getting back to the lovely land in which I had been born and spent the first ten years of my life. And then, out of a dingy sky in which I could detect no trace of blue, appeared a miracle in the form of an elderly British postman, who bore a letter from the Government of India asking my father, who had retired a few years previously, if he would please undertake the revision of Aitchison’s Treaties,* a task that would necessitate his return to India for a limited time — probably a year at most.

  My father, whom, as I have had occasion to point out before, we always called ‘Tacklow’† (though we truly hadn’t any idea why), accepted. But since he had seen almost nothing of his children during their school-years — in Bill’s case a mere ten days between the ages of six and sixteen! — he decided that enough was enough, and that whatever it cost he would take Mother, my sister Bets and me out with him. The miracle that I had prayed for — and I still think of it as one — had actually been granted me and I was going back. It seemed too good to be true.

  In September of 1927 the four of us boarded the SS City of London, and now, at last, after three weeks at sea, here was India again. And as I stepped off the police launch that our host in Calcutta, Sir Charles Tegart, Bengal’s Chief-of-Police, had sent to take us off the ship, I was sorely tempted to do something that might not seem too over-the-top in these days, since the present Pope has made a habit of it whenever he visits a foreign country. Tempted to fall on my knees and kiss the ground because it was India’s soil that my feet were standing on once again.

  However, the first Polish Pope can barely have been born then, and since at that time I was far too young and self-conscious (and, thanks to that English boarding-school, far too British) to indulge in such continental gestures, I could only stand there like a dummy, struggling to swallow the lump in my throat and pretending that I had a bit of grit in my eye, while my parents greeted the Tegarts and shook hands with or embraced the large number of people who had come down to the docks to welcome them back again.

  All of these, with one joyful exception, were strangers to me. The exception was Abdul Karim, our ex-abdar-cum-khitmatgar, who, back in that sad, traumatic spring of 1919 when Bets and I had been taken down to Bombay to board the SS Ormond and begin the long years of exile, boarding-school, and separation from our parents, had stood in for Tacklow’s old bearer, dear Alum Din of fond memory, who had been absent on sick-leave and whose portrait I included over half a century later in one of my India novels, The Far Pavilions.

  Alum Din had died and Abdul Karim had stepped into his shoes. But when Tacklow retired, Abdul had decided that he too would take his pension and return to end his days in his home village, giving as his reason that he had grown old in Kaye-Sahib’s service; too old to learn another sahib’s ways or face the prospect of working for anyone else. It was, he said, high time that his sons and grandsons shouldered the responsibility of looking after him and let him sit back and take his ease in the shade. But although he and my father had corresponded fairly regularly since then and had been punctilious in the matter of exchanging greetings on feast days and festivals, Tacklow had not written to say that he would shortly be returning. This was largely because he had found himself overwhelmed with an avalanche of chores, but also because Tacklow was afraid that if he wrote to tell Abdul of his return, the old man might regard it as a hint that he should return to work and consider it his duty to do so, even though advancing years, and a long spell of idleness, might well have made this beyond him.

  ‘I’ll write to him later on, when we’re more settled and know where we are likely to be, and for how long,’ said Tacklow. But he had reckoned without India’s superbly efficient grapevine. For there, on the dock at Calcutta’s Garden Reach, waiting to take us under his wing and boss us around as firmly as ever, stood Abdul Karim.

  I am ashamed to say that I didn’t recognize him immediately, because he had dyed his beard a ferocious and improbable scarlet, and when I had said goodbye to him all those years ago in Bombay it had been grey. Then, too, he seemed so much smaller than the tall, burly Punjabi I remembered; as though he had shrunk in the passing years. Or was it only because I myself had grown upward — and outward! — during that time, and so no longer had to look up so far when he spoke to me? A bit of both, probably. I recognized him suddenly when he stooped quickly to touch Tacklow’s feet, and the two embraced as old friends.

  Long ago, a man who had been a friend of Abdul’s, Kashmera, Sir Charles Cleveland’s shikari and one of the most admired friends of my childhood, had told me that I must not cry in public; it was shurram (shame), and Angrezi-log (English people) never did so! But it seemed that this spartan rule did not apply to men of his own race, for there were tears trickling down Abdul Karim’s leathery old cheeks as he took a firm grip of the reins which he had relinquished on the day when Tacklow and Mother had left I
ndia for what they, and he, had believed would be the last time.

  Now here they were, back again; and in the charming tradition of that most charming of lands, their Indian friends crowded round to garland them with necklaces of flowers or tinsel, which they hung about my parents’ necks in such numbers that if Tacklow — who was a small man — had not been wearing the topi he had bought at Simon Artz shop in Port Said, we would not have been able to see the top of his head.

  One of his friends, a tubby little Bengali who was a High Court judge, had been thoughtful enough to bring two splendid garlands of jasmine buds and silver tinsel for Bets and me, so that we should not feel left out. I could have kissed that man! Bets and I made namaste and, thus honoured and decorated, we stepped into a second car, together with the overnight suitcases, and set off in the wake of the one that carried our parents and the Tegarts, Abdul Karim following grandly behind in a third, in charge of the heavy luggage.

  Calcutta was not part of ‘my India’,* for I had been born some 2,000 miles to the north-west of that great port, in the little hill town of Simla, which lies among the foothills of the Himalayas within sight of the uncharted snows. Here, in the days of the Raj, the Government of India, together with the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief, the Governor of the Punjab, and the whole of Army Headquarters — plus innumerable wives, families and holiday-makers — used to spend the months of the hot weather, escaping the intolerable heat of the plains. In autumn, with the coming of the cold weather, we would all descend, bag and baggage, ‘Uncle Tom Cobley and all’, to those same plains; most of us to Delhi, which by then would be no more than pleasantly warm and no longer sweltering in temperatures of between 115° and 125° in the shade.