Enchanted Evening (15 page)

There are so many things I remember about the Peking days which make me think: ‘I
must
put that in!' There was the Cat's Christmas party given by a girl called Nancy Caccia, whose husband was at the British Consulate. The Christmas tree was decked with bits of fish and other snacks popular with cats, and the floor strewn with saucers of milk. I hadn't laughed so much in years.

There were dinner parties given by Tacklow's Chinese friends. And a ghastly afternoon in the Peking Hotel, when Bets and I had been dragooned by some senior consulate lady into collecting money from an influx of tourists off an American tour ship. The tourists, to a man – and woman! – had had enough of being badgered for money, and treated us as though we were begging for
ourselves
: they
couldn't
have been ruder. Or nastier. After an hour of this, our collecting boxes were empty, Bets was in tears, and I was almost sick with rage. I'd no idea human beings could be so beastly and, in memory of that ghastly afternoon, I have never passed someone with a collecting box without putting a coin in it.

Then there was a fascinating four hours at a Chinese theatre, where the heroine, and all the female characters, were played by men. There was having my portrait painted by an excitable Russian with an unpronounceable name, who half-way through the sitting suddenly flung his brush to the floor and shouted at me: ‘There is nozzings in your face. But, nozzing! It is only a pink and white egg!' and stormed out of the room.

John commissioned a portrait of me from another painter, Nancy Caccia (she of the Cat's Christmas party), and when it was finished he gave a dinner party in his rooms, with the only light a few candles on the dining-table and a single brilliant electric bulb trained on the portrait:
most
embarrassing. Years later, when I happened to be in Washington, I called at the British Embassy and asked to see Nancy (whose husband was the then British Ambassador). She couldn't have been nicer; but alas, she hadn't the
remotest
idea who I was, or that she had ever painted my portrait or asked me to her Cat's Christmas party (to which I certainly did not contribute a cat).

Chapter 11

Considering that I was born among the foothills of the Himalayas and spent the largest part of my formative years within sight of what was then – and one could almost say still is – the Edge of Nowhere, since only a single unmade track led out of my hometown of Simla towards Tibet, I can't explain why living in China should have given me such a strong feeling of being stranded on the edge of the civilized world. After all, we were merely living on a different section of the same huge expanse of nowhere, with Tibet to the south-west instead of due west of us.

But there was something about North China that made me feel, from the day I arrived there to the day I left, as though I had come to the world's end, and that there was nothing at my back except hundreds and hundreds of miles of uninhabited desert and tundra, shale and snow and glaciers, with an icy wind from outer space forever blowing across it. Thinking about it, I imagine that this may have had something to do with the fact that in those days, when the Air Age had barely begun and letters and parcels came by sea – and took an unconscionably long time about it – I found myself losing touch with Neil. Although he wrote frequently and faithfully, I tended to forget what he or I had said in a previous letter, and often failed to reply to some question that had been put in a letter written a month previously.

Bets and WHP managed to keep up an uninterrupted flow of correspondence, and Bets said it was my own fault for settling for an ‘understanding' instead of getting properly engaged. She admitted that if she hadn't been engaged she might well have begun to waver under the strain of a long separation. I replied that this was exactly why I had refused to tie myself down – because if Neil really was the right man for me, no amount of separation would make the slightest difference. But if it didn't stand the strain, well, too bad. It had been fun while it lasted, and now it had better fade quietly away – ‘No tears, no fuss. Hooray for us!'

Our letters had become fewer, and at longer and longer intervals, until one day they just stopped, and I didn't even notice for several months. But I think now that it was probably the length of time it took to get a letter during those early days that was the main reason for that uncomfortable feeling that I had come to the end of the known world and that anything could happen here – anything!

No; I didn't trust China. It frightened me stiff, and I used to remember that famous pronouncement of Napoleon's, ‘Let China sleep. He who awakens her will be sorry!' and to realize that it was my countrymen who were largely responsible for awakening her. All the same, I am grateful that I had the chance to see the last flicker of Imperial China, the Celestial Kingdom whose rulers had believed their country to be the centre of the world, and had done their best down the centuries to keep the Outer Barbarians from entering it, believing (rightly when one comes to think of it) that we were all no better than foreign devils who would do our best to plunder and destroy if the door was once opened to us. The Empire had fallen more than twenty years before I set foot in China, but the echoes of its past greatness were still there: the scent and the smell, the same customs and the same dress that had been worn down the centuries, almost unchanged. And, despite the Republic, a respect for the Blood Royal and the ceremonies of the past.

You could sense all that, and still see much of a world that would have been familiar to the Old Buddha, who had died in 1908, the year in which I was born, and been buried with extravagant honours in the Imperial tombs. The list of the treasures that were buried with her in her coffin reads like something out of a fairy tale. There were ropes of pearls about her neck and a chaplet of pearls on her head, a mattress embroidered with pearls and a coverlet strewn with loose pearls; a rope of pearls encircled her body eight times, and by her side were laid 108 gold, jade and carved gem Buddhas, and any number of jade carvings. The gaps were filled with scattered pearls and jewels, and above all that lay a network of pearls. Finally, as the lid of the coffin was about to be closed, one of the princesses added ‘a fine jade ornament of eighteen Buddhas and another of eight galloping horses'. And that, and a lot more, was only in the coffin. Endless other treasures of lesser value were placed in the vault. It sounds like the burial of one of the great Pharoahs of Egypt, doesn't it? Yet it happened in this century. In my
own
lifetime – just!

Needless to say, when the Empire fell a few years later and the country began to disintegrate under alternate blows from opposing war lords, floods and famine, it was only a matter of time before a gang of unpaid and masterless troops raided the Imperial Tombs and tore open the coffin. Having looted everything of value they flung out the corpse of the Great Empress and scattered her bones in the park. I hope she haunted them!

*   *   *

With the end of spring the weather became unpleasantly hot, and all over Peking the
pangs
went up to protect the courtyards of Chinese-style houses from the glare of the summer sun. The shade they provided was very welcome, since without it we would have been driven indoors from sunrise to sunset, as we had been in Tonk. But it made the rooms very dark, and effectively reduced the flow of air – which may have been an advantage, for as the temperature rose, so did the malodorous fumes from the Jade Canal.

Considering how often this could hit us in the face when we stepped outside our To-and-from-the-World-Gate, I was frankly staggered by how effectively our high walls and curved, tent-shaped roofs protected us from it. Perhaps the depths of the overhang beneath the upward curve of those tiled roofs siphoned away the air above the canal at a certain level. I can only say that if it was due to some ancient Chinese trick of construction, it worked astonishingly well – and that all the same I was deeply grateful to exchange Peking for the cool, salty sea air of Pei-tai-ho.

The remainder of the summer was a repetition of the previous one: sailing picnics and parties with young naval officers off the ships that took it in turns to put in at Pei-tai-ho. There were expeditions to the temples in the Lotus Hills and the Great Wall and Chin-wang-tao, lazy afternoons under the shade of our
pang
on the sands of the small bay where the diving platform was anchored; and lunches and tea parties with the Grand-dadski and a variety of aunts, uncles and cousins at the Bryson house overlooking the bay.

I made several friends and collected one serious admirer among the Navy men. Roger was, as far as I remember, Number Two of a destroyer, and one of the nicest of men, the kind that parents take to on sight. Mine were no exception. Like Tacklow, he was a ‘quiet' man, and also very much like him both in height and looks. I can't think why I did not fall in love with him, for if there is any truth in the theory that girls who dote on their fathers invariably choose husbands who are exactly like them, I ought to have done. Particularly as he was also a dear. Perhaps it was because my mind still held a picture of a tall, ugly-attractive man who laughed a lot and had come to my rescue at one of the most miserably embarrassing moments of my school years, and turned it into a triumph.
1

The fact, as I learned later, that my unknown knight-errant was a famous actor, Sir Gerald du Maurier, added considerable glamour to the memory. Dear Roger, though a good-looking man, was only an inch or two taller than I was, and in no way spectacular. On the other hand, he was a Navy man, and from an early age I had thought highly of the Navy.

The uniform had a lot to do with it, and the fact that during my school years my reading had included several books of short stories by a retired naval officer who called himself ‘Taffrail'. I used to think how romantic it would be married to a Navy man and go sailing all over the world to strange and glamorous ports, where one would never stay long enough to get bored. If I couldn't marry someone in one of the Indian Services – and Tacklow, who foresaw the Second World War very clearly, was always warning me that the Indian Empire would not survive it, so that like it or lump it I would have to leave that dearly loved country some day in the not too distant future – my second choice would be a husband in the Navy.

I'm afraid it was that uniform, and the glamour of Taffrail's stories, that attracted me to Roger more than anything about the man himself. But because of him, I had a wonderful summer in Pei-tai-ho.

I'm afraid Tacklow did not. He had wanted too much to come back to this little town where he had spent his honeymoon and been happier than he could ever have imagined. But I think it must be almost impossible to recreate something like that over thirty years later. And though he was still deeply in love with Mother, and always would be, I think she was a good deal less so with him, and was finding it difficult to behave as though she was still a deliriously happy nineteen-year-old bride on honeymoon.

They hadn't quarrelled, or at least I don't think so. But there was a faint trace of impatience in Mother's manner towards him, and Tacklow had lost the high spirits of the previous summer and seemed unnaturally subdued. He still spent a lot of time walking alone along the wet sands when the tide was going out, selecting shells of the right size and shape to add to his collection, while Mother would sit chatting with her brothers and sisters and the Dadski on the verandah of the Bryson house, and Bets and I would be partying with the Navy or discussing life in general with Bobbie Aldington and Evelyn Young in our secret sandpit a little way behind the beach houses.

*   *   *

I don't think Tacklow minded the lack of entertainment; he had never minded solitude. But I think he had hoped to have Mother more to himself when he planned this repeat performance of his idyllic honeymoon and, though it had worked the previous summer, it wasn't going to work again. Mother preferred, or pretended to prefer, the company of her kith and kin and endless Bryson-family gossiping (which must have bored him rigid – it certainly bored Bets and me); and the news, which was largely rumour, and unreliable, worried him. He was not having a happy summer.

The only other thing I remember about that second summer in Pei-tai-ho is that towards the end of it we had a sudden plague of ladybirds that flew in by the million from somewhere on the far side of the Gulf of Liao-tung in the direction of Port Arthur. It was disconcerting to wake up one morning and find the waves depositing layer after layer of scarlet, black-spotted bodies, the majority of them dead, in long red lines at the sea's edge. I like ladybirds, and I encourage them on to my roses. But I admit I didn't like to find them crawling all over me by the hundreds.

We left Pei-tai-ho earlier, I think, than we had meant to. Peking was still uncomfortably warm, but the
pangs
had come down from over the courtyards, since by now it was not hot enough for us to need them.

*   *   *

Tacklow had a habit of singing to himself: generally in the bath and usually a song from Gilbert and Sullivan. So I was not surprised when returning from some expedition or other one evening I found my darling parent strolling around the Reception Courtyard in the dusk, singing to himself. It was ‘Ol' Man River', a song from
Show Boat,
and, pausing to listen in the shadow of the gate between the courtyards, I heard him repeat two of the lines almost under his breath, almost as if he were talking to himself. They were the lines about ‘getting weary and sick of trying' and being ‘tired of living but scared of dying'.

There was something personal about that repetition, and the way in which he had sung it, that disturbed me, and I ran down the steps into the courtyard and said, ‘You sound very gloomy tonight, Tacklow darling! Couldn't we have something a bit more cheerful?' I had expected him to laugh, but he looked at me for at least half a minute – which is a very long time if you count it off to yourself in seconds – and then said without smiling, ‘I don't feel cheerful. And anyway, it's true.' I didn't ask what was true, because I didn't dare. I was suddenly so scared that I couldn't say anything at all, and he turned and walked away into the house where the Number-One-Boy was switching on the lights.