The Man in the Wooden Hat (10 page)

Love you. Love you for not being at the wedding. If Eddie knew I knew you and was writing he’d send his love, but I’d rather he didn’t. I must keep hold of his love all to myself at least at first, until I understand it.

Dinner is served. Looks like langur fritters.

Your old school chum

Bets

(Letter stamped by Old Colonial Hotel, Hong Kong “To await arrival” and eventually thrown away.)

Two: A letter from the bride to her friend Amy of Kai Tak.

Amy, my duck, I’m writing from Dacca in East Pakistan but when I write to The Baxter (next one) I’ll call it Bengal and I have to say that Bengal suits it better, even sans Lancers. The climate remains the same. Every other change political and historical is on the surface. I can’t remember if you and Nick worked here? Actually you can’t see much surface for most of it is water. It is hardly “a land” but part of the globe where the sea is shallow and the sinuous silky people are almost fish but with great white smiling teeth. The “lone and level land” stretches far away and the crowds blacken it like dust drifting. Nowhere in the world more different than the last place, i.e. the first call in our Honeymoon Progress which is becoming
global
and all arranged in secret and string-pulling by Eddie.

First, Bhutan. We were dizzy there, not with releasing passions, but with altitude sickness. We were level with the eagles. There was also a bit of food poisoning. I managed not to buy the goat’s cheese they sell on the mountainside like dollops of soft cream snowballs set on leaves. “You would last one hour,” says my lord. In the rest houses the food came before us on silver dishes and looked ceremoniously beautiful: mounds of rice with little coloured bits of meat and fish and vegetables in it, warmish and wet, and only after a terrible day and night did we realise that anything left over is mixed in with the new stuff next day. Tourists are few. Probably mostly dead. The king hates tourists and you usually have to wait a year. Eddie was at Oxford with him after the war and I was all for dropping in our cards in the hope of getting some Oxford marmalade and Christ Church claret. Eddie said no. Eddie is . . . but later.

First, beloved Amy, thank you from all parts of me for all you did for me and the speed at which you did it. I
hope
you liked Edward? He is monosyllabic in a crowd. He very much liked you and Nick and was full of admiration for you controlling and producing a family among the poor and needy and weak in the head. He never mentioned your children, which is a bit frightening. He doesn’t know I want ten—plus a nanny and several nursemaids and a nursery floor at the top of a grand house in Chelsea on the river. I can’t help it. I read too many Victorian children’s books of Ma’s in China. And I miss my Ma. But don’t worry. I’ll probably be marching against the Bomb, unwashed and hugely pregnant like the rest.

Eddie couldn’t believe you have always been my best friend ever. He thought you’d be pony club and debutanting and hot stuff on the marriage market. “She was,” I said. Do you find that much-travelled men are the most insular? Like Robinson Crusoe? If he hadn’t got stuck on that island, Robinson Crusoe’d have got stuck on another. Of his own making.

I’m writing myself into a mood to say real things to you and maybe I should now quickly write myself out of it. Do you remember that book about marriage (Bowen?) that talks about the glass screen that comes down between a newly wed couple and all their former friends? I’m not going to let this happen but I can see, after that terrifying 1662 marriage service, that it can eat into one. Well, it was you made me go through with it. Said I was at last being practical. I wasn’t sure that you still thought so when you met Eddie and I wish he hadn’t stared so steadily and so high above your head.

Loyalty. And so I’ll only say that we had a ghastly first night in Delhi, propped up in basket chairs because harlots had been using our beds. Then we went in a solid car (called “An Ambassador’) up the Himalayas to Darjeeling where we were greeted by old English types and cold mutton and rice pudding and porridge, and our own room looking directly at dawn over the Katmanjunga. The occasional English flag. There was early-morning tea and everything perfect between white, white linen sheets. In the middle of the night Eddie said, “I can’t apologise enough,” which I thought weird after his spectacular performances. “About the Delhi hotel,” he said.

There was some ghastly hang-up in his childhood. I don’t want to know about it. I’d guess half the men with his background are the same. Well, he was so happy in the mountains.

Then after Bhutan we came on here to Dacca.

I’ve seen a chair in a dark shop. It is rose-and-gold, a patterned throne from some old rajah’s palace, but all tattered. I longed. I yearned. Eddie said, “But we haven’t a home yet.” This had not occurred to me. “We could send it to Amy at first.” He looked at me and said, “She wouldn’t thank you.” You and I aren’t very good at domiciliary arrangements, Amy. You leave yours to God and I’m still imprisoned by the past, and expect it to come again. It won’t, any more than sherbet fountains. It’s to be “Utility furniture” now for ever. I said, “Sorry.” And he said, “Hold on,” and he went into the back of the dark shop and came out saying, “I’ve bought it. It can go to Chambers.”

And this, not the great rope of pearls he gave me, and not the ring and that, not the moment he saw me in the Baxter butterflies, was
the
moment. Well, I suppose when I knew I loved him.

I’ll write to the Baxter next and explain about leaving the veil behind. In twenty years I’ll come to your little girls’ weddings. During the twenty years I’ll have been endlessly breastfeeding in the rose-red chair, and anywhere else I choose. Times will have changed. Maybe we’ll be having babies on bottles? Or in bottles? Maybe men will be extinct too.

But women will always have each other. You gave me
such
a wedding.

Love to Nick and the babes—by the way has the new one come? Don’t let Baxter tears fall on its sweet head but give it a X from

Betty

Three: A picture postcard from the bride to Mrs. Hildegarde Maisie Annie Baxter of Mimosa Cottage, Kai Tak, Hong Kong.

Dear Mrs. Baxter,

This is only a note until I get home when I’ll write to thank you properly for the veil. I have left it for the time being with Amy but I think you should see it back in its box. I fear for it among the hordes in Sunset Buildings. It
made
the wedding.

I am sure we’ll meet again and I’m so glad you could come to the restaurant though I’m sorry about the bouillabaisse.

With love from Betty
Feathers

(Card discovered unposted fifty years on in the Donheads down the cushions of a great red chair.)

Four: A letter from the bride to Judge Sir William Pastry of Hong Kong, posted in Valetta, Malta.

Valetta, Malta

Dear Uncle Willy,

We are up at “Mabel’s Place” and I don’t think I have to explain that it’s the medieval palace of the great Mabel Strickland on the hilltop and the blue sea all around. The walls must be six feet thick and inside there are miles of tall and shadowy stone passages, slit windows
for arrers
, no furniture except the occasional dusty carpet woven when Penelope was a girl, massy candelabra standing on massy oak chests. Our bed could be rented out in London as a dwelling: four posts, painted heraldry, old plumes drooping thick with dust, thick bedlinen like altar cloths. Wow!

But I expect you’ve been here lots of times. One day you’ll make a wonderful governor of Malta and they’d love you as much as they love Mabel in her darned stockings and tweed skirts. If you won’t do it then I’d push Edward for governor instead. We’d bring up our ten children here and become passionate about the Maltese, and have picnics on the beach (the Maltese perched on chairs and making lace) and watch the British flag going up and down with the sun. Until it’s folded up and put away.

But you won’t even think of it. Are you still wanting Thomas Hardy and Dorset? I can’t think why. Dorset sounds stuffy—full of people like us—and Malta is cheerful, flashing with the light of the sea. And they still
like
us here and we like them. That will become rare. Quite soon, Edward thinks.

But at present Grand Harbour is alive with British ships hooting and tooting, and the streets are alive with British tars and all the girls roll their black eyes at them on their way to Mass which seems to take place every half-hour. Their mothers, believe it or not, still stride the corkscrew streets in flowing black, their heads draped in black veiling arranged over tea trays. Oh—and flowers everywhere, Uncle W! Such flowers!

It’s been terribly bombed, of course, and it’s pretty filthy. Sliema Creek is covered by a heavy carpet of scum. The Royal Navy swims in it though the locals tell them not to. It’s the main sewer. They wag their heads. There’s a rumour of bubonic plague and yesterday a big black rat ran across Mabel’s roses not looking at all well.

Of course the food is terrible, as ever it was. It was we who taught them Mrs. Beeton’s mashed potato! There is not much in the way of wine.
But
the wonderful broken architecture from before the Flood stretches everywhere: hundreds of scattered broken villages—Africa-ish—the occasional rose-pink palace decorated like a birthday cake. There are about a hundred thousand churches, bells clanking all day long and half the night. Dust inside them hangs as if in water, incense burns and the roofs (because of the war) are mostly open to the sky.

There is a passion for building here and they’re all at it with ropes and pulleys. Restoring and starting anew. It would be wonderful for Eddie’s practice: plenty of materials. Malta is one big rock of ages cleft for us. It is full of cracks and overnight the cracks fill with dew and flowers. The smell of the night-scented stocks floats far out to sea.

(Scene: Hong Kong

Willy’s Dulcie: You aren’t
still
reading Betty’s letter!

Willy: She grows verbose. Don’t like the sound of it.)

It will remain a mystery that the island never fell to the enemy. It was dive-bombed night and day, the people hiding deep in caves and (I gather) quarrelling incessantly and threatening each other’s authority most of the time. There was almost a revolution. Then, in limped the battered British convoys with flour and meat and oil and sugar, and the pipes all playing and the cliffs black with cheering crowds.

(Willy: Now it’s military history. She’s holding back.

Dulcie: She’s going to be a British blimp in middle age if she’s not careful. What about the honey moon?

Willy: I think she’s coming to that.)

We arrived here by sea from Rome. We flew to Rome from East Pakistan and we arrived in East Pakistan from Bhutan! I think we were the only tourists. The king of Bhutan is pretty insular but he let us in because he was at Christ Church with Eddie. Not that they met. Then or then. He’s an insular king—like you and Thomas Hardy. And maybe George VI.

London tomorrow. We’ll be in Eddie’s old London pad until we can find somewhere else. The Temple’s bombed to bits still. I think—but don’t spread it—that Eddie wants to come back to live in Hong Kong and so do I, especially if you and Dulcie stay. Don’t be lured back to the dreary Donheads.

I’m sorry. I run on with no means of stopping—Oh, God—History!

(Willy: I think she’s stopping.

Dulcie: You’ll be late for Court.)

I have so much to tell you, my dear godfather I’ve known since Old Shanghai. This was to have been a simple letter of thanks. Thanks for being such a prop and stay at the wedding, for giving me away, for being so diplomatic at Le Trou Normand about Amy breastfeeding (tell Dulcie sorry about that, I didn’t know it would upset her) and especially when Mrs. Baxter was sick. You were wonderful. I’m afraid my Edward kept a seat near the back! He was silent for a long time but as we passed through Sikkim en route for Darjeeling and we saw slender ladies plucking tea leaves with the very tips of their fingers—their saris like poppies in the green, their little heads bound round with colours and I was transported with joy—he said, “I am not enough for you.”

Oh dear—I have been carried far away. Please, dear Uncle W, don’t show Dulcie this. Well, I expect you will.

In Dacca Eddie bought me a red chair. The old, old man who sold it lived far down the back of his shop in the dark, his eyes gleaming like a Maltese plague rat. The chair is to be sent to the Inns of Court, The Temple, London EC4!

Oh—I don’t seem to be able to concentrate on thanking you. If only Ma and Pa were here. “You are my mother and my father,” as the Old Raj promised India, or rather they said, “I am.”

Isn’t it odd how Hong Kong holds us still? Isn’t it odd how the “Far East” has somehow faded away with the Bomb? Do you understand? Now the British live out there by grace. I shall call my first daughter Grace.

I promise, dear Uncle Willy, to grow more sage: more worthy of your affection. I shall grow tweedy and stout and hairy, with moles on my chin, and I shall be a magistrate and open bazaars in support of the Barristers’ Benevolent Society. You won’t be ashamed of me.

Thanks for liking Eddie, with much, much love from

Betty x

(Letter left in Judge Pastry’s Will to Her Majesty’s Judge Sir Edward Feathers QC, residing in the Donheads, carefully dated and inscribed and packed in a cellophane envelope, and bequeathed to Edward Feathers’s Chambers where it may still be mouldering.)

Y
ou are grinning all over your face, Mrs. Feathers.”

“I’m happy, Mr. Feathers. I’m writing to Pastry Willy.”

“About a hundred pages, at a guess. Come on. It’s a picnic.”