Authors: dorin
“Mrs Smalley?” he said, when it was her turn.
“Yes, Father Sebastian. What a lovely Matins. Whatever happened to restore the organ to
us?”
“A little technology, a lot of faith and Miss Williams to play.” He had had something for
breakfast spiced with garlic. “You
are
the lady in the photographs?”
“There were some photographs, yes. We shall see you tomorrow? My husband particularly
asked me to remind you. Seven-thirty?”
On the spur of the moment she added, “Do bring Susy with you. I’ve known her since she
was a child.”
WALKING HOME she began to regret that impulsive invitation and rather to hope that
tomorrow morning when she kept her appointment at the Seraglio Room Susy would plead
a prior engagement. In all the years they’d known one another they had never exchanged
social visits and Susy had never called her anything but Mrs Smalley nor Tusker anything but
Colonel Smalley, never taken the least advantage of the fact that they both called her Susy
and that she was now virtually their oldest acquaintance in Pankot—and, until last year, a
regular professional visitor at The Lodge and as familiar with it as she was with her own little
bungalow.
Regretting the invitation, Lucy was at the same time ashamed of regretting it; but one of the
earliest lessons she had learned in India was of the need to steer clear, socially, of people of
mixed blood and she had quickly been taught how to detect the taint, the touch of the tar-
brush in those white enough to be emboldened to pass themselves off as pukka-born. She’d
been told that the Eurasians (Anglo-Indians as they were then called) were very loyal to the
British, that without them there would have been no reliable middle-class of clerks and
subordinate officials. The railways, especially, depended on them. With their passionate
attachment to a Home many of them had never seen and had no prospects of seeing ever,
they formed an effective and in-depth defence against the strange native tendency to bribery
and corruption which, coupled with that other native tendency to indolence, could have
made the Indian empire even more difficult to run than it already was. Nevertheless,
effective and reliable though they were, they would take a yard if you gave them an inch; and
in any case—although it was not their fault, individually, as people who hadn’t
demanded
to be
born — they did represent a physical connexion between the races that had continually to be
discouraged.
Most of them were the off-spring of sad and reprehensible liaisons between native women
or women of mixed blood and British Other Ranks who unless you kept them fully
occupied, which wasn’t easy, did have this tiresome habit of occupying themselves. But then,
if a man was stuck in India for years, serving his King and Country, you could hardly expect
anything else. It was the way of the world. Unfortunately, many of the liaisons were
unofficial, some were instances of bigamous marriage. Whatever the origin, though, the
Eurasian population had grown, through inter-marriage, living what Lucy thought of as its
own rather sad and self-contained and often pretentious mimic life. It had always touched
her when she heard of a soldier who had married his Eurasian girl and taken her back to
England, and it had touched her too when she heard of a soldier who had fallen in love both
with his girl and the country, signed on for another stint or taken his discharge in India when
the time came and stayed on with her.
Susy’s father had been potentially such a man. Lucy remembered the widowed Mrs
Williams saying years ago, “Len loved it here.” Mrs Williams, pale though she was, the
daughter of a Eurasian mother and a Eurasian father, had never tried to pass herself off. Her
elder daughter, Lucille, had not only tried but successfully married her GI when living in
Calcutta earning her living as a singer, and gone with him, as the saying then was, Stateside.
What had happened to them subsequently, Heaven knew. Susy never said, perhaps because
she did not know but could only guess from the infrequent letters she got from time to time.
Perhaps the child of the marriage had exposed the great lie. The genes could play cruel
tricks. They had played such a trick on Susy herself who was not only not stunningly
beautiful, as some of the Eurasian girls could be, but as brown-skinned as Mr Bhoolabhoy.
Susy had learned her hairdresser’s trade literally at her mother’s knee. Lucy met her first as
a skinny-legged little girl in a plaid skirt, white blouse and white knee-high socks, with her
black hair done in a plait and tied with a white ribbon (the whiteness emphasizing the coffee-
coloured skin which her mother was at no pains to try to disguise). Susy turned up with her
mother at Smith’s, when Lucy and Tusker were billeted there early in the war. She came to
help and watch and learn her mother’s skills as a hairdresser.
In those days you had alternatives. You could go to Mrs Williams’s bungalow, one room of
which was equipped to cope with several memsahibs at a time, or you could have Mrs
Williams call. The latter was preferable, the former sometimes unavoidable if there were
grand things afoot like a party at the Summer Residence or at Flagstaff House when the
demand for Mrs Williams’s services were especially heavy. How that woman had worked!
How well she had trained the two Eurasian girls she hired. How well she’d taught skinny
little Susy.
Towards the end of the war people said Mrs Williams must be making a small fortune; but
Lucy watched the decline and fall between 1947 and 1948 when most of the English women
had gone home and Pankot gradually filled with Indian wives who washed and dressed their
own hair, never had it cut, and many of whom still seemed almost to be in purdah, so shy
and retiring were they.
When Lucy and Tusker left Pankot, finished with the army, beginning a new life as box-
wallahs in Bombay, Mrs Williams was still alive. When they returned to Pankot in 1961, Mrs
Williams was some years dead but Susy was carrying on the business and bene-fitting from
the new wave of modern Indian wives and daughters. She had opened a salon in the bazaar,
called Susy’s. She could do back-combing and beehives, short cuts, the things young Indian
women now wanted. The older ones could still have appointments with her in her bungalow
if that was what they preferred. The salon had rather frightened Lucy. She felt out of place
there. It was styled on the open-plan. Conversation was free and open; but she could not
easily join in. She knew nothing of Dusseldorf, Basle, Roma, Cairo, Moscow, Paris. She
could not state a preference for a particular duty-free shop at any one airport. She could not
even discuss Fortnums except from a ten year old recollection of going in once to buy
Tusker some stilton. She had never been to Washington. Saks in Fifth Avenue was merely a
name to her.
“You can come to the bungalow, Mrs Smalley,” Susy said after her second visit to the
salon. “Or I will come to The Lodge if you’d prefer. I do not care for all this togetherness
either, but people expect it nowadays once they’ve been foreign. Gossip, coffee, magazines.
All London-style.”
So Susy had come to The Lodge, once a month, bringing her modern portable equipment
with her. Lucy enjoyed these sessions. Susy was a film fan too. And liked the old tunes. She
liked hearing about London in 1950; and telling Lucy what if anything she had heard from
Lucille in the States. When the Blackshaws came to Pankot, Phoebe had shared the sessions
at The Lodge. After they went home Lucy enjoyed them again because there was only Susy
to talk to and talking to Susy was more interesting than talking to Phoebe Blackshaw who
had spent so many years in tea-gardens she could talk of nothing else. Also, Phoebe hadn’t
treated Susy very kindly. She had been abrupt and distant. Susy never showed any sign of
being upset. She’d simply got on with the job, moving from one to the other of them.
It must have been a month after Phoebe Blackshaw went home that Susy stood back one
day and looked at the mirror into which Lucy was looking and said, “Mrs Smalley, have you
ever thought of letting it go?”
Lucy had stared at her own reflection and seen how the dark brown dye was beginning to
make her look like an old woman who tried to look younger but managed to look older.
“What do you advise, Susy?”
“It’s such lovely hair, Mrs Smalley. Very fine and soft. Never any trouble to set. But the
colouring is beginning to coarsen it. Also you have such a lovely white skin. Like porcelain.
The colour no longer works with it.”
“But grey is so depressing.”
“You will never be grey, Mrs Smalley. You will be white. And don’t worry about the
transitional period. We can bleach the colour out. It will be perfect when white, cut a little
shorter, just gently waved, and given a blue rinse.”
“Blue?”
“Yes, blue. It will bring out the violet in your eyes. I have some good rinse. An American
lady brought it from London and left two whole cartons. Man, they are so rich, these
Americans.”
That was the beginning of the blue rinse. To perform the initial operation, Susy removed
the mirror and only set it up again when she had finished. Lucy stared at herself. She
thought, The girl’s a genius. Even Tusker said, “Good God! Whatever’s Susy done to you?”
but had looked pleased. “Only English women can carry it off, Colonel Smalley,” Susy told
him, “only English women with delicate features and fine skins and who are not too tall and
have not put on weight.”
Thereafter, tending Lucy’s blue-white hair, poor Susy’s hands had looked even more
uncompromisingly
of the country
; and the transformation of Lucy marked the beginning of
Susy’s professional troubles.
Lucy had supposed Susy owned the bungalow her parents had lived in but she only rented
it. Her old landlord died. The new one, down in Ranpur, renewed her lease on condition that
no business should be carried out from there. The new landlord already owned the premises
where Susy had her salon. Two years later he acquired the concession to run the Seraglio
Room in the new Shiraz hotel, gave Susy notice to quit the tenancy of the salon which he
intended to redevelop as a shop for the luxury tourist trade (semi-precious stones from
Jaipur, furs, silks, local folk-craft from the remoter villages of the Pankot hills) and as a sop
(and perhaps recognizing that Susy’s skill and reputation could be turned to immediate
short-term advantage in terms of immediate cash-flow) made a deal with her that entitled her
to take one or two paying-guests at the bungalow (which she was already doing anyway by
arrangement with the Indian tourist office) and to continue work as a hairdresser at the
Seraglio, although not as its chief coiffeurist—who turned out to be a young man of
outstanding good looks (if, Lucy thought, you liked those sort of good looks) called Sashi,
who claimed to have been trained in Mayfair, London, who wore wet-look black trousers,
high-heeled boots, a frilly shirt open almost to the waist to expose a chest-full of black hair
in which nestled a primitive metal medallion on a chain.
Under Sashi’s emotional rule at The Seraglio, Susy obviously suffered. Lucy did not know
to what extent and did not want to. She was happy to have been able to make a cut-rate deal
with Susy which meant that she could just afford the Seraglio Room provided she was there
not later than 8.30 am when Susy would let her in, trim, shampoo, rinse and set her and get
her under the dryer before 9.30. Nine-thirty was the official opening hour and within a few
minutes the first of the smart young assistants began to arrive to get things ready for Sashi’s
manifestation shortly before 10 am when the first appointments of the day were due to turn
up, usually in the elegant shapes of Air India and Indian Airway hostesses who had spent a
night at the Shiraz and had to smarten themselves up for the flights that evening back to
Ranpur and on to Calcutta or Delhi.
Yes, Susy had been a good friend. She should not regret inviting her to join Father
Sebastian at The Lodge.
When she got home Tusker was on the verandah. Today, or tomorrow at the latest, she
would have to tell him about the photographs, about Sarah, about poor Colonel Layton, and
about the imminent Mr Turner. He seemed to have nodded off. Bloxsaw, some distance
away, opened one eye, then shut it. There was no sign of Ibrahim. It was a quarter to one. At
Smith’s hotel, Sunday was usually chicken pulao day, and she was very hungry. She hoped
Ibrahim had not been sent over for trays, because then it was difficult to get second helpings