How to Disappear (6 page)

‘I'll take you for a drive in my jeep if you like,' he offered at our first meeting.

‘That's very kind, Mr Townsend.'

‘Lin, call me Lin, like the Chinese laundry.'

It must have been a colonial-type joke. I noticed he cracked it whenever he met someone new, and I still don't get it.

‘Do you want to look downstairs first? You'll find Roy Kugler there. He's a fool, so I gave him the novels to sort out where he could do no harm.'

At first Roy Kugler, thin and bony, was in amiable spirits, reminiscing about his Burmese trading days in a distinct Derbyshire accent. But a great gust of irritation suddenly overwhelmed him and he declared ‘To be honest, I have no patience with this sort of thing!' – meaning my visit to the Library – but I was the only person there! – and he stormed off.

Blinking, I go back upstairs and ask if I've done anything wrong. Lin says ‘Don't mind him. I told you he was a fool.'

‘Don't you ever feel like going back to England?'

‘I did go back once a few years ago when my father died. But I couldn't live there any more, it's been too long. It would be like being shut inside a kitchen garden. How should I exist? A tiny house on the south coast? I'd die! I still think of the UK as home but only at a distance.'

He was speaking inside a colossal Victorian fireplace with ornamental overhangs from which he emerged like a majestic troglodyte when his manservant Monica (yes, that's right) entered the room with a tray of coffee. Monica stepped across piles of books to reach Lin's teak desk laden with ledgers and inkpots. When later I came to spend time working in this library, Monica would bring me a pot of coffee for one rupee a go.

Lin, staring over his half-moon spectacles, asked ‘Do you take sugar?'

‘Not usually. But to-day I shall.'

‘Do you like India?'

‘Yes.'

‘What do you like about it?'

‘Like isn't the word actually. Sometimes it's very hard work. But it doesn't feel alien. This library for example reminds me of my school. And one is never asked to explain one's presence. It's as though one were expected.'

‘Being an expatriate makes me realise that all life is temporary,' he replied.

‘Can I look round up here?'

‘Do – do…'

Copies of
The Yellow Book
were wedged against Marie Corelli's thirty-seven-page rodomontade on Victoria,
The Greatest Queen in the World
(Skeffington's of Piccadilly, 1900 – I read it during a violet, green and tangerine sunset);
The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic,
the
Westminster, Edinburgh,
and
Contemporary
reviews;
Baily's, Fraser's, Blackwood's;
shelf upon shelf of royally bound obsolescence; and one morning a Scarlet Minivet chirruped in a cedar outside the window as I flicked through Louise Jordan Miln's
When We Were Strolling Players in the East.
The character of the upstairs collection is that of the British Empire weekending and this is probably the last conservatory for it outside museums. I became particularly entranced by an old guidebook,
Ooty and Her Sisters, or Our Hill Stations in South India,
published by Higginbothams of Madras in 1881, authored by ‘Geofry' (yes, spelt that way) whom Lin identified as Geofry Ryan, an English coffee-planter of those times. ‘Effect of Mountain Air on European visitors…To see him skipping like a deer over the heights you might fancy he had got invisible balloons under his armpits.' Geofry wants to get rid of the native village: ‘Surely the knocking down of this small village and building a better where it could never contaminate the lake, is as nothing when we look at Peter the Great and his great city! Is not our righteous government greater than he?' Well, the native village is still there, gradually taking over and driving the European elements into ever lonelier corners.

Back at the Ratan Tata there was a perceptible tightness between the two women. Rita was small and round with a beautiful face. She was the first woman I ever slept with (she took charge; I was hopeless), and was one of the most cheerful people you could meet. To use a cliche: she lit up a room when she entered it – even if you didn't want it lit up. Her vivacity had survived serious rebuffs, including a failed marriage. One of the first things she told me, when she came to my rooms at Folly Bridge in Oxford, was that while pregnant with their last child, her husband had spat in her face and she could always feel the spittle running down her cheek whenever she thought of it. Concerning that strange relationship with her American husband, who was an academic, who obviously loved her at first, it was the only self-pitying thing she ever said. He was disinherited by his father as a result of the divorce. Rita's father-in-law, a very rich man who'd been involved with the development of sonar navigation or something of the sort, asked her not to make a scandal for the family by demanding her dues and in return he'd make generous provision for her privately. Rita, who couldn't bear the idea of court proceedings, readily agreed; but almost immediately afterwards her father-in-law went into a coma from which he never emerged and Rita and her children got no settle-ment at all. Funnily enough I think Sarah's father had been disinherited by his father for the same reason, divorce.

Even at seven and a half thousand feet, the Indian climate doesn't suit redheads, and neither do rats, and Rita had grown muted. But something else had happened. Had the women had some kind of squabble? There was a froideur between them. Sarah was in the more confident position psychologically, having been on the road with me for months. She was looking fit and tanned. Her long floating hair was streaked with sunshine, as was mine. Also she was younger than I, Rita older, and such things are more important to women than to men, or anyway more important to the women on this occasion than to me. When I came in from my library visit Sarah perked up diplomatically and said ‘Look what I bought at the junk shop,' and plonked on her head a flowered nineteen-thirties hat. Its label read ‘Modern Modes, The Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells'. Rita, who'd been looking out of the window, turned round and exclaimed ‘Where the hell can we get a drink?' Oh dear.

And not easy. Tamil Nadu was a dry state. However Inkie explained that as non-Indians we might go to the District Collector's Office for our quota of liquor chits. So we did that, hung around there for ages in a queue which never shrank but I became restless and said ‘Let's come back another time, I'll roll a joint,' and we wandered off to the St Stephen's Jumble Sale. Here a loose mix of residents were investigating the stalls, picking up, considering, price-asking, putting back, occasionally buying. I stirred the contents of a broken wheelbarrow, mostly old guidebooks, water-stained, worm-eaten, rat-gnawed, but I bought several including
The Indian Yearbook 1941-2.
This was an important publication. Its last four hundred pages comprised a living Who's Who of India at that time, an archive of extravagant characters, many accompanied by a photograph.

Rita was signalling. ‘Darling, come and meet Dolores!'

Dolores said ‘You can pay me for those books if you like.' She looked Anglo-Indian but said she was French and, as if to emphasise it, her jet hair was cut in a straight line below the ears with a square cut out for her face. ‘How long are you here for?' she asked, ‘and will you all come and have tea with us? We live over there.' Now and again when travelling, one comes across these engaging, spontaneous people – they're one's salvation really. So often, trying to bridge the gap with strangers is like greeting concrete, but Dolores was onto our case at once, and said ‘Have you tried the coffee eclairs from the English Confectionery? You must.'

That evening at the Ratan Tata we smoked joints in the starry garden among scents of geranium, cypress and mildew. The Kashirs had gone but the greenish mechanical object in the sky was still with us and Sarah pondered ‘So if it's not a star, and it's not a satellite, what on earth is it?'.

‘For a start it's not on earth,' said Rita with a dry laugh. Mmm – we had to make more of an effort to find some booze.

Back inside in the main sitting-room there was a radiogram the size of a coffin, with nets of gold metal over its loudspeakers, and we leafed through the records – Moura Lympany, Mantovani, Frankie Laine – but none was very tempting, so I withdrew to the bedroom and roamed through the potted biographies in
The Indian Yearbook.
There were hundreds of them: generals, princes, members of the Indian Civil Service, writers, politicians, and religious dignitaries. I was completely absorbed in this parade of Ruritanianism. One entry above all held my attention and I kept returning to it, perhaps because the postage-stamp sized photograph adjacent was so arresting. It portrayed a beautiful woman with passionate, sorrowful eyes. Her entry read as follows:

What a snapshot of an era. The two biographical entries following hers were of Miss Pavry's father and her brother. The brother, Jal Pavry, who described his career as ‘Orientalist', had been received by the same gang of rulers. Obviously they'd gone in together, arm in arm. Unlike his sister, he had entered correctly in the singular Publication:
Zoroastrian Doctrine of a Future Life
(New York, 1926). But what on earth is ‘an Orientalist'? Would anyone conceivably describe their career as ‘an Occidentalist'? As for the father, Khursedji Pavry, he was a Zoroastrian high priest, ‘First High Priest of the Fasali Parsis, elected 1920', who informs us in his entry that he has received ‘dedications and tributes from many world-famous men.' Here in this family was a bizarre mixture of Zoroastrian fire worship, vulgar bombast, and international
grandeur
.

Did none of them have the slightest sense of humour? I longed to meet Miss Pavry and find out. If, that is, she were still alive; for in 1975, the world of the nineteen-twen-ties and -thirties was already another age. Afloat on the bed in a reverie, my mind recalled the words of Max Beerbohm concerning his visit to Algernon Swinburne in Putney (I couldn't remember the words precisely, but I've since then looked them up and they are: ‘.I was glad to see that he revelled as wistfully in the days just before his own as I in the days just before mine'). The thick volume of
The Indian Yearbook 1941-2
fell from my grasp, my eyelids sank, and I drifted asleep to the outlandish squawk of some restless creature on the other side of the window pane…

Lin's drive turned out to be more ambitious than expected and he turned out to be far more than a librarian -a game warden at a wildlife sanctuary, a keen calligraphist, a behavioural scientist, plant-lover, local historian. Wearing bwana shorts and boots, he collected us punctually in his jeep and we zoomed off to the kennels of the Ootacamund Hunt. This is the first and last of the Empire, in that it was the first hunt to be established on Imperial territory and is now the only one still at it, kept going these days by dandies from the Wellington Military Academy nine miles away. The hounds, seven couple, lined themselves up like washed and brushed schoolboys, wagging their tails for our camera. The gallop is over the Wenlock Downs in pursuit of jackals.

The Madras Government used to transfer to Ooty in the hot season and our next call was on Government House. ‘Buckingham Castle it used to be called from having been established as an official residence by Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Greville, Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, when he was Governor of Madras,' said Lin and he paused to see what effect this celestial statement might have. I squirmed with almost erotic pleasure and made a note of it at once but Rita, I saw, was bending down, anxiously examining her rat-bite. The situation of Government House is choice, overlooking the town yet also sheltered, and approached through the Botanical Gardens. But the House was more than locked up, it was sealed tight, its many windows cancelled by fawn blinds drawn down from within. There was not even a caretaker around, so complete was its embalmment. Passive and powerful, the building tantalised the imagination, and it seemed likely that were we to break open its heavy doors we should find that the British had not left India after all and were conducting therein an afternoon reception for local worthies, polite voices merging with the tinkle of teacups in shadowy, pillared drawing-rooms.

Lin looked about and barked ‘No Todas!' The last of the Todas, a prehistoric tribe, are said to inhabit the Botanical gardens (which are extensive). But we saw nobody. Perhaps you have to stand and wait for a long time until they creep out, and Lin was impatient to crack on. Another prehistoric tribe hereabouts is that of the Badagas who in the past were famous for the superior quality of their opium, which they didn't smoke but ate formed into little squares of ‘cavendish'.

As we drove from Mount Snowdon to Doddabetta Peak, Rita asked Lin ‘Do you know Dolores?'

‘Dolores Maclaine-Clarke?'

‘Yes.'

‘She hasn't paid her library subscription. I keep reminding her. Richard is very nice. She breeds Alsatians.'

That seemed the end of that, so I asked ‘Have you heard of Bapsy Pavry?'