One morning at dawn I arrived at Taprobane Bungalow on horseback, leading another pony on a rein. Daniel was waiting for me, as arranged, and we set off to hack around the estate as we usually did at least once a month, to check that all was in order.
We enjoyed these rides. We had a pair of bay horses who knew the estate like the back of their, well, not hands exactly. Hooves? Like the front of their forelegs, shall we say? They became quite disconcerted if one didn’t follow the usual route, and you could just feel them thinking, ‘What, doesn’t he know what he’s doing? Silly man.’
I’ve always loved horses, especially a good gallop, and I’ve won a few cups at Nuwara Eliya in my time. I feel about a horse the same way as Daniel felt about his motorcycle. That is how you fly without an aircraft. Horses have a toasty smell, and a kind of warmth of spirit as well as of body. Some are intelligent, and some are dense, some are frolicsome and some are staid.
Daniel and I usually talked about the war, and developments in modern aircraft. We were both interested in the idea of setting up some kind of air service in Ceylon. We thought that there was immense potential in seaplanes, and so, of course, we were in exactly the wrong place, up in the highlands. There should have been a service between Colombo and Trincomalee, for example, and Jaffna always seems cut off from the rest, arbitrarily stuck onto the tip, so to speak. The big frustration was that there were the tanks, huge reservoirs, the most marvellous and obvious places to land floatplanes, but they were constructed in the first place by a civilisation that had been entirely destroyed by malaria. Until we got on top of the malaria there would be no future in setting anything up on the tanks.
We talked quite a lot about the Empire. Daniel was preoccupied with the notion that it was bound to fall away, and I had thought a great deal about that myself. I told him that Ceylon had not been anything like a democracy when we arrived, so the natives didn’t see any difference over who dominated them, and there was still some residual gratitude for the abolition of compulsory unpaid labour, but even so, it’s obvious from history that all empires are exhausted after a couple of hundred years. I remember saying this to him when he and Rosie first arrived, and I’d gone to meet them in Colombo. Daniel and I both had pangs of conscience about whether we were really entitled to be there. In my opinion we were a hell of a lot better than what we replaced, but that’s just about all the justification I could come up with, and my pious hope is that perhaps we’ll leave something worthwhile behind us when we go. It was only last year that Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and Newfoundland got independence, and the Empire began to turn into a Commonwealth. Sooner or later the brown peoples are going to notice. In fact they already have. If you raise a native elite to play cricket and golf and recite ‘Daffodils’ and drink sundowners and be just like yourselves, and then don’t let them into your club, you can expect trouble. It turns them into Bolshies. Who’s next? India, no doubt. We’ve created the same stroppy elite there.
More often than not, Daniel and I just rode in silence together, because, to put it bluntly, men don’t seem to need to fill a pleasant silence with chatter, as so many women do. Men only become garrulous when drunk, apart from the ones who fall into the complete opposite and won’t say a word.
There came a day, however, when I was obliged to speak to him as tactfully as I could manage, because there is a certain modus operandi when it comes to native women and having affairs with them, and I was not certain that Daniel knew what was what. We did the usual rounds of the estate and then decided to go to our little range where we played gun snap. I’d tied a sack of cans to my saddle to use as targets, and we rode along to the accompaniment of a gentle hollow rattle. Once there, and before we settled down to the game, I said, ‘Daniel, old boy, I’m afraid I have to speak to you,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I know you do. I thought you would.’
I said, ‘I did warn you about native women on your first day here.’
‘You did. It seemed a very unlikely prospect at the time.’
‘You know there is a protocol about these things? So that a certain decency is maintained?’
‘You mean so that we don’t unduly annoy the natives and turn them against us? Samadara tells me that she has the full consent of her family. Apparently it all got discussed in a kind of grand council. One can only imagine what it must have been like. I’ve put her up in a little house well out of Rosie’s way.’
‘You do realise that you are supporting her whole family?’
‘Yes. But I don’t have any doubts about her. She’s not an actress. All her feelings are on the surface in plain sight.’
‘And you do realise that if you have children she can take you to court for maintenance, and she’d win? Our magistrates are dreadfully puritanical. And it would all become terribly public?’
‘You told me that in Colombo.’
‘And if you leave Ceylon, you’ll have to do the decent thing, and arrange for a lawyer to pay her a stipend? And the children will have to go to Hill House, and that’s quite an expense?’
‘Yes, I know all that. Everything seems to have been laid down by custom.’
‘I blame Maitland.’
‘Maitland? The Governor back in the old days?’
‘Yes. Turn of the last century. He took a mistress called Lavinia. She was a dancing girl from a caste whose women were forced to go bare-breasted. He abolished that rule, and set her up in a house near his, and had a tunnel dug so they could go back and forth without too much public scandal. That’s why Mount Lavinia is called Mount Lavinia. It seems he set a pattern for the rest of us to follow.’
‘Us? You mean, you too?’
‘Why do you think I warned you?’
‘But your wife? What does she think? Does she know?’
‘Daniel, don’t be shocked. And don’t be a hypocrite. And I don’t know if Gloria knows. She acts as if she doesn’t, but on the other hand she may not care very much. Rosemary strikes me as the kind of girl who would mind very much, and demand to go home.’
‘She doesn’t seem to give a damn about me any more,’ said Daniel. ‘Now that she’s got the children, I’m just the one who brings home the bacon. I’m a useful ghost. Anyway, she’s had too many things to get over.’
‘And what about you?’
‘You mean, what are my feelings for her?’
‘I know it’s not my business. Of course you don’t have to say anything. But we have become good friends, and it’s a great salve, having someone to talk to. I would like to think I could talk to you.’
‘Women think that men don’t talk to each other,’ said Daniel. ‘They live in ignorance of how much they get discussed. But I’m no better at all this confidential stuff than the next man. One tends to keep private things private. However, as we’re pals…and I’m fairly sure you won’t bandy this about, the answer to your question is that I am exasperated with her, she ignores me apart from when I am trying to play with Bertie, in which case she tries to prevent me, but I love her as much as ever, and I am having to come to terms with the certitude that for the rest of our lives I will be living with her as a brother and not as a husband.’
‘That’s a good way of putting it,’ I said. ‘British women are best at being sisters. Always have been as far as I can see.’
He came back with ‘So I assume that you are in the same situation?’
I said, ‘In this case a pragmatic compromise is better than a principle stuck to. Principles are made for angels, not for us. If you want any kind of life worth living, there doesn’t seem to be any choice, does there? Let’s play gun snap, shall we?’