The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (15 page)

You can’t from this (Lady Chatterjee says, rubbing at a speck of tarnish on the frame) get a real idea of her personality. I think looking at pictures of people you don’t or didn’t know but only know about is intensely unsatisfactory. Of course it’s fascinating to see for the first time a portrait of someone like that, someone whose name was at one time on a lot of people’s lips, as they say. You’re probably feeling that now, but once the initial curiosity has been satisfied there’s a sense of anticlimax, isn’t there? Or perhaps even of no climax at all because you can’t be absolutely sure the picture is anything like a good likeness or even that it’s a picture of the right person? Do you know, I sometimes take a second look of pictures of myself and Nello—that one downstairs taken at the garden party in Simla for instance, where we’re sandwiched between Lord Willingdon and the Aga Khan, and I think: Is that really Nello? Did I really look like that? Did I ever smile in quite such a smug way? Almost coy-smug, glancing at something that has caught my eye but isn’t in the picture. Since I can’t even guess what it could have been that caught my eye, let alone remember what it was, I begin to wonder whether the woman in the picture (who anyway doesn’t
feel
like me) isn’t an impersonator, and the plump chap with her a man who isn’t Nello but is taking Nello off almost as successfully as Nello used to take off Henry Manners. Willingdon and the Aga Khan look all right, but then when you meet and chat to blokes as high up as that you tend to look at them in only two dimensions, which is the way the camera looks at them too, so the photographic result is bound to seem authentic.

Daphne had this picture taken by Subhas Chand two or three months after she came to stay here. It wasn’t her idea. Lady Manners wrote me and said: Tell Daphne I’d like a picture of her for my birthday but not to bother to frame it because I’ve got trunks full of frames from Henry’s old Rogues’ Gallery. It’s what she and Henry called their collection of photographs. The Rogues’ Gallery. Everything from old daguerreotypes of Henry’s pa with his foot on a dead buffalo to groups taken at some
beano with all the princes except one scowling at the camera because Henry’s handsome aide had got the protocol wrong and stood a chap with a nine-gun salute closer to the Governor than a chap with eleven guns. And then there were all the snaps given to Henry and Henry’s pa by servants—timid old boys pretending to look like tribesmen, all white whiskers and lopsided turbans. Henry never threw a single snap away. They all got framed and went with him wherever they were posted. When he died Ethel had them packed up and put into trunks. I often wonder who this old silver frame originally had in it. I inherited it complete with Daphne’s picture along with the two letters. I think if Daphne had given me a copy too, at the time she bashed off to Subhas Chand to have her picture taken for her Aunt Ethel’s birthday, I think if I’d always had it, I’d see it as far more like Daphne than I do. But it came afterwards. It came here into this house, into this bedroom, when Daphne wasn’t alive to come back in herself. I expect I resented it. It’s always struck me as not quite belonging. It’s Daphne all right—she had that kind of hopeful smile—perhaps she’d nearly knocked over one of old Subhas Chand’s spotlights just before she sat down, and was still thinking: There I go again, just like me, catch me in a china shop, Auntie. It’s a sweet smile though, isn’t it? And that’s come through. But photographers like Subhas Chand always make people’s skin look like wax. There’s not the tiniest crack in it anywhere, and around the eyes where there ought to be cracks, lines anyway, it’s all been smoothed out by touching up and the real Daphne simply isn’t looking out of them.

She had a habit of blinking whenever she began to speak, as if she couldn’t get out the first word or two with her eyes open. And often she shut her eyes at the end of what she was saying. When she shut her eyes this little smile you see in the photograph used to come on automatically, as if her eyelids and lips were working off the same set of nerves. And it
was
nervousness that made her do it. I used to think of it as affectation. I met her for the first time when I went up to ’Pindi to spend Christmas with Ethel Manners. It was Daphne’s first Christmas in India and Ethel wanted to cheer her up. I’d expected to find someone mopey. instead there she was, blinking at me and chatting at me. I sensed the affectation before I pinpointed the mannerism, before I
noticed
the blinking, but once I’d separated the cause from the effect I realized that what I called affectation was nothing more complicated than straightforward shyness. The eye-shutting and the smiling were to give herself
confidence in company. Once she got used to you the mannerism disappeared. But it came back at once if a stranger came into the room. People instinctively liked her, though, and she never gave in to her shyness, she never seemed at a loss for a word.

What old Subhas Chand hasn’t been able to disguise, at least from me, is that this is the portrait of a girl who was more comfortable in specs. She had to wear them to read or to write letters. According to the oculists, she really needed them all the time but her aunt discouraged her and said specs were a lot of nonsense for young people. What she meant was that specs just weren’t attractive, especially on a girl. I discouraged her too, not because I thought specs could be unattractive, but because I knew you could cure bad sight by exercises, splashing the eyes with cold water, looking alternately from short to long distances, looking up from concentrated work like writing a letter or reading a book and focusing on some fixed object in the room several feet away. But Auntie, she used to say, she got into the habit of calling me Auntie, I can’t
see
into long distances, I can’t even see short distances properly. She used to stand at the window there, putting her specs on and taking them off. Eventually she made out where the hills are. She wanted so much to see everything there was to see. India was what we used to call a thing with her. She’d always wanted to come out. She was born in the Punjab but didn’t remember any of it because her mother couldn’t stand the climate and her father resigned from his service and went home into private practice when Daphne was still almost a baby. He was IMS. Years younger than his brother Henry. I don’t think he minded leaving India at the time. He obviously chose to be a doctor instead of an administrator so that he wouldn’t have to compete with clever brother Henry all his life. By all accounts his wife, Daphne’s mother, was a tartar. She had to have everything her own way and she was a frightful snob. India obviously didn’t suit her as the wife of a junior man in the IMS. Law and Medicine are the two things we Indians have always shone at so I expect George—Daphne’s dad—had too many Indian colleagues for Mrs. George’s liking. She wanted him to be what today you people call a Top Person, with rooms in Harley Street and masses of top hospital appointments. But when he was in a fair way to getting what she wanted she changed her tack and saw herself as a leader of county society, so then there was the flat in town and the house in Wiltshire and poor George working himself to death bashing off from one place to the other. You can tell the effect it had on him from
something Daphne said to me. She said, “Poor daddy always regretted leaving India, didn’t he? I wish he were here with me now to see it all again.” There were times when I thought she worked doubly hard at knowing India simply to make up to her father for what he had missed and probably admitted regretting having given up just to please her mother. And like all those apparently frail women who can’t stand the Indian climate Daphne’s ma turned out as strong as an ox. At least until she got cancer. And in my opinion that is a disease of the strong rather than of the weak.

Picture her then: Daphne Manners, a big girl (to borrow a none too definite image from Lady Chatterjee) leaning on the balcony outside her bedroom window, gazing with concentration (as one might gaze for two people, one being absent, once deprived, since dead, and now regretted) at a landscape calculated to inspire in the most sympathetic western heart a degree of cultural shock. There is (even from this vantage point above a garden whose blooms will pleasurably convey scent if you bend close enough to them) a pervading redolence, wafting in from the silent, heat-stricken trembling plains; from the vast panorama of fields, from the river, from the complex of human dwellings (with here and there, spiky or bulbous, a church, a mosque, a temple), from the streets and lanes and the sequestered white bungalows, the private houses, the public buildings, the station, from the rear quarters of the MacGregor House. A smell. Could it be of ordure?

After a few months the newcomer will cease to notice it. Ubiquitous, it translates itself from repellent through almost attractive because familiar stages into an essence distilled by an empirically committed mind, so that an old hand, temporarily bereft of it, nostalgically remembering it in some less malodorous place, will describe it to himself as the subcontinental equivalent of acrid wood smoke at the end of a burnished copper autumn. But let the old hand’s bereavement be of comparatively short duration: European leave, a rarified, muscular effort above the Himalayan snow lines. Let it not be, for instance, an eighteen-year absence ended by chance and luck and the lepidopteristic intention to pin down the truth about Miss Crane, Miss Manners and young Kumar, and the events that seemed first to flutter and then to shatter Mayapore but actually seem to have left it untouched, massively in continuing brick-and-mortar possession of itself (if not of the landscape feebly invaded by its architectural, artisan formation). No, let it not be
long, let it be short so that on renewed association the returning traveler will cry, possessively, even gratefully: Ah, India! Otherwise, after eighteen years and a too swift transition by Comet through the increasingly disturbing ambience of Beirut and Bahrein (the warmth correspondingly mounting, bringing the smell out like the warmth of a woman’s skin releasing the hidden but astonishing formula of an unusual perfume) the nose—unused, but imagining itself prepared—will flex its nostrils against the grave revelation of the car or taxi drive from Bombay’s Santa Cruz airport, along a road that leads through fields where the source of the wafting smell may be tracked to the squatting early morning figures of male labourers casting their pellets upon the earth, there to lie, and harden, and encrust, and disintegrate, and lift in the currents of air into the generality of the prevailing winds.

Taking possession of the room to help, as Lady Chatterjee says, in the business of getting to know the surroundings that were Daphne’s, left alone there, moving across the broad acres of uncarpeted floor, between the mosquito-net-shrouded bed and the door that leads into the private bathroom one might—by attempting the journey from one island of Kashmir rug to another, not wetting one’s feet in the striated sea of darkstained boards—play a variation of that old childhood game of not stepping on the cracks between paving stones and wonder if Daphne had time for similar absurdities. The bathroom is long and narrow. Green glazed tiles act on the walls from floor to shoulder height as shadowy mirrors of the room’s contents and of its headless occupant. Perhaps Daphne, with her uncertain sight, was unaware of this and strode oblivious of truncated duplication by reflection from the door to the porcelain pedestal whose cistern, high up, is activated by one’s pulling like a bell ringer on a long chain whose pot handgrip, moulded to the shape of the palm, emphasizes the luxuriousness of a comparatively rare machine. The porcelain tub is as big as an artificial lake, empty at this moment as if drained for an annual scraping. Its webbed claw feet are those of some dead, amphibious monster sentenced to support it like Atlas supporting the world. The immense brass taps suggest twin flows of piped-out water of ship’s pump velocity, but only the cold tap works; the hot—when the stiff faucet is finally budged—produces a hollow rasping echo and a skitter of rust flakes. But the cold is warm enough. The bathroom is airless. There is no fan and only one window high up above the lavatory pedestal. At the opposite end of the bathroom—fifteen paces on bare feet across lukewarm mosaic that is slightly uneven and impresses the soles with the not unpleasant sensation of walking
over the atrophied honeycomb of some long forgotten species of giant bee—there is an old-fashioned marble-topped washstand with an ormolu mirror on the wall above it, plain white china soap dishes and a white jug on the slab; beneath the stand a slop-bowl with a lid and a wicker-bound handle. Here too is the towel rack, a miniature gymnastic contraption of parallel mahogany bars and upright poles, hung with immense fluffy towels and huckabacks in a diminishing range of sizes, each embroidered in blue with the initials LC.

Returning to the other end, literally ascending the throne which is mounted on a broad dais anciently carpeted in the deep blue-red of mouldy cherries, the splendour of the paper holder fixes the attention. Here are lions, gilt-maned, gilt-faced, each holding in its gilt jaws an end of the bracket which supports the roll of buff, wood-chip austerity paper. The jaw of the nearer lion (and presumably that of its mate on the other side) adequately receives the ball of the little finger. Its head is as large as a clenched fist, so large that its cheek rests almost upon the cheek of its gilded counterpart. The effect is of two big cats grinning over the simple duty they have to hold, in readiness, something that is required for a catlike but, because of the paper, ridiculous human function.

Lying in the bath, the eyes engage the single 75-watt bulb in a shade the shape of a pantomime Aladdin’s hat, and attempt to see, above, the distant shadowy ceiling. A brass jug, dented from falls onto the mosaic floor, rests on the wooden rack that lies athwart the tub. The scoop. One remembers and, having soaped, stands and scoops and pours and scoops again and so, closing the eyes against the contrary evidence of the sex, attempts a reenactment of Miss Manners refreshing herself after a hard day on the wards of the Mayapore hospital.

(To Lady Manners)