Georgie wasn’t the only one who wrote to alert her. An elderly friend was prosaically concerned about Ruddy’s poor sight. Both had their effect: Alice swept the children up and away from Southsea in scarcely more than a day.
Such absurd clothes solemn little Trix was wearing – was that a bustle? – and Ruddy flinched when she first went to kiss him. But he didn’t resist for long. She’d known it wouldn’t be difficult to win him round.
Her heart did misgive her when she first saw them. They were such waifs.
Better to look forward.
They were quite different already. Thank God, it hadn’t been her choice to leave them so long in that place. How could she have guessed it would turn out badly? When the news had come through two years ago that ‘Mr. John Lockwood Kipling was appointed Principal of the Mayo School of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum’, at first she’d felt only relief. A higher salary was the least of it. Jack was much too good for his ancillary place at the School of Art in Bombay. Their whole standing out here would be transformed. But it did come at a price.
‘It means no Ruddy and Trix for me this year and I’ve waited so long,’ she had written to Georgie at the time.
‘I can hardly bear it. But we’ll be leaving Bombay and it will be up to me to oversee the move and establish a new home. If I left it to Jack we’d be camping on the Maidan.
It is a wonderful promotion but I do dread the Lahore climate, hundreds of miles from the coast. Bombay at least had the sea breezes. And Lahore’s little more than a frontier town, still given over to the natives (Jack makes me use that word but plenty of people call them niggers). There’ll be nothing in Lahore to compare with the Sassoon Library, or the Asiatic Society of Bombay. Jack may be in raptures about their mosques and monuments but I for one rejoice that our people all live quite separately, well outside the city walls.’
At long last, here, now, she was back in England. Able to hold her children warm in her arms, not just brood over photographs, trying to read their faces. Instead of letters, living voices. Eager as she was to remove them from Lorne Lodge she’d been careful to remain diplomatic. You never knew.
‘We all need some good English country air, Mrs. Holloway.’
She had to insist before Ruddy would turn round to wave good bye.
The three of them were going to spend the whole summer together at Mr. Emplins’ farm on the edge of Epping Forest.
*
Now Ruddy stood before her unabashed, dripping muddy water and pondweed onto the tiles that Mrs. Emplins had carefully strewn with sand only that morning.
‘I do believe you are the naughtiest children that ever –’ Alice began but she could not go on for laughing.
‘Trix’s hat blew off and I was rescuing it from the duck pond,’ Ruddy explained with a holy look.
‘Ooh, Ruddy, you know you tried to make it sail back to me on the water. It wasn’t a rescue at all!’ Trix gave him a shove. She used to keep that straw hat with its cornflowers round the brim in a place where she could see it from her bed at night.
Alice only laughed the longer.
‘Never mind, Trix, you shall have a new one. We’ll choose it together on Thursday. Mr. Emplins will let us ride with him when he takes the cart into market.’
Day by day, the children were compiling their observations, assessing their mother, though they did not speak even to each other of all they learned. Wordlessly they appreciated the way Mama didn’t make them go to their bedroom or put a stop to their games of battledore out on the rough grass of the shorn meadow. Every evening, right on into the time Mama called ‘the gloaming’, when you could hardly see the shuttlecock, they all played.
‘I do like to see her – don’t you, Trix? – Mama with her skirts caught up and all her pretty hair coming down,’ Rud murmured across their little whitewashed bedroom just before he fell asleep.
But even as she whispered, ‘Yes, I like it too, Ruddy. And all the games,’ Trix wished Ruddy hadn’t said that. He never used to like anyone but herself.
Summer was long past and winter approaching, when they left the farm for London and rented rooms on the Brompton Road. Their father, Lockwood, was to join them there after Christmas.
When she first saw Papa, Trix was disappointed. She hadn’t expected him to be fat. And he wasn’t very tall. She didn’t know what to say to him at first, just tried to look polite and interested. Then she realised that he was rather like Uncle Ned. Even when Mama was trying to have a conversation with him, he kept on making drawings.
He seemed to understand that Trix liked watching him as he sketched.
‘Would you like me to draw the garden you and Ruddy used to play in?’ he asked.
‘There was a well in that garden you know, Trix, and a water-wheel. Two big white bullocks walked round and round to turn the wheel and bring the water up. They had to wear blindfolds, to stop them getting dizzy. See, like this.’
His pencil flickered across the page. Trix edged closer.
Papa didn’t look at her but went on speaking.
‘Here’s the place where Ayah used to stand your perambulator, in the shade of a big tree. And now, this is what Ayah used to look like –’
‘There were red flowers. They were roses.’
It was her own voice speaking but it startled her. It was so loud.
Papa looked up. He took out a clean handkerchief and stood there holding it. He didn’t seem to know what to do. ‘Don’t cry, my pet. There’s nothing to cry about. It was sad leaving it all but that’s over,’ he said at last.
She didn’t know that she was crying. But the gasping wouldn’t stop.
Her chest was still heaving when Papa stroked her wet cheek. ‘We can’t go back to that garden. But in a few years you’ll come out to us in India again, to Lahore this time, and then you shall have a pony all of your very own to ride.’
*
‘Trix, lovey, would you like to make a drawing yourself?’ Papa asked, one afternoon Trix accepted the stalk of charcoal gingerly. She wanted to make something beautiful for Papa, wanted it so much that she could scarcely breathe. The black stick was cool in her hand as she drew it across the paper. But the picture in her head, the bird with its beak open, singing in the tree, wouldn’t come out. The marks she made on the big white sheet were dark and ragged. Not beautiful at all. The more she tried to make them look like a bird, the more of a scrawl it grew. She threw the charcoal down with a sob then looked across at Papa, scared.
‘It’s all right, Trix. We all get cross when we can’t do things first go’.
He ruffled her hair and picked up the gritty bits of charcoal.
But one day Papa went back to India. He didn’t even wait to have one Christmas with them.
‘I was only here on special leave,’ he explained.
Anyway, Papa liked Ruddy best.
‘What d’you say to coming with me to Paris, young man?’ she’d heard him ask. ‘There’s a rather grand show I have to prepare for the Paris Exhibition. That’s the only reason I could get away on leave.’
Papa had not come back just to see them, after all. Trix waited but he didn’t invite her to go to Paris or to see his grand exhibition. They could all have gone together. He didn’t think of that. He just took Ruddy.
‘The Pater had his work cut out, in charge of all the exhibits from India, so he gave me money to buy my own lunch. He let me go exploring all day by myself,’ Ruddy boasted on his return.
Sometimes she hated Ruddy.
July was chill and wet, not at all like last summer. Mama took Ruddy out to the shops almost every day, leaving Trix behind in their lodgings. The landlady put her head round the door, occasionally, to make sure Trix wasn’t playing with matches and sometimes she gave her a piece of cake, but she was still lonely.
‘These aren’t pleasure trips, you know, Trix,’ Mama told her. ‘Ruddy’s new school has sent me a simply endless list of things Ruddy’s going to need. Four pairs of flannel pyjamas if you please.’
Pyjamas? Ruddy was going to sleep at his new school, not at home? Slowly it came over Trix. They were going to be separated. It wasn’t really news to her but only now did she begin to feel what that meant.
‘Of course you can’t possibly go to the same school as Ruddy, Trix, darling,’ Mama said. ‘Don’t be silly. They only take boys at the United Services College. Cousin Margaret loves Notting Hill High School and so will you.’
At first Trix thought that if she could just explain, Mama would find a way for her to stay with Ruddy. She’d understand. But when she tried again, the next day, Mama became angry. She replaced her sewing on the table, among the pile of shirts and underclothing still waiting for name-tapes. She turned.
‘I hope you’re not going to be tiresome about this, Trix. It’s all settled. Ruddy is going off to school in Devon and you’re going to live in Warwick Gardens with Miss Craik and her sister. You’ll be starting at the High School in September.’
‘Staying with Miss Craik?’ Trix faltered.
‘And her sister. That’s right. And of course there’s Miss Winnard too. Until you’re old enough to come out to us in Lahore, your home will be with them in Warwick Gardens. And while I remember, darling, they’ve very kindly agreed to have you to stay with them next month. Ruddy will be going to the Baldwins, to stay with Cousin Stan. There are visits I have to make while I’m here at Home.’
‘But I don’t really know Miss Craik and – and the others.’
Her breath was coming quickly. Before she had time to lose heart, Trix spoke up.
‘Please, Mama, can’t I go back to Auntie? I could stay with her. I know she’d have me.’
Mama stared. ‘You really want to go back to that –’ she broke off.
‘Let me, Mama. Please. I do know Auntie Sarah and I don’t know those other people.’
Mama continued to look doubtful but she resumed her sewing.
At last, ‘Very well, Trix. I’ll write to Mrs. Holloway and enquire.’
‘Just as well I did hold my peace,’ Trix heard her add under her breath.
* * *
His first term at the United Services College almost over, Ruddy was slouching down the lane towards the village of Appledore with Nicholson the other new boy. It was Wednesday, their free afternoon. Some fellows, the really keen ones, got up games of footer but most, like himself, preferred to leave the school premises far behind. There were still rules. They had to wear their striped caps and school jackets but otherwise they were free, so long as they were back for prep at five.
A night of rain had left the lanes glistening and the air was sharp with the smell of hawthorn.
‘D’you think they make us wear our caps so the villagers can sneak on us?’ he asked Nicholson, the other new boy, as they tramped along. Between them they had scraped up one- and- sixpence and were planning to buy chocolate in the musty little shop on their way.
Nicholson paused, with a look of surprise. Without removing the grass stem he was chewing, ‘Dunno…’ he mumbled. ‘Never thought about it, Giggers.’
That’s what they were calling him here. ‘Giggers’, meaning ‘giglamps’, for the spectacles. He rather liked it. Poor Nicholson still didn’t have a nickname. Ruddy pushed the glasses further up his nose. That was better, the earpieces stopped digging in. He went back to explaining about rabbits. Although it was broad daylight the creatures were skipping about in every field they’d passed.
‘So you see,’ he resumed, ‘they get transfixed. It’s fear. They’re so exposed and the light blinds them so they can’t find where the shadow is. That’s where they’d rush off to hide, normally, in the shadows.’
Nicholson seemed quite impressed. He waited, boot poised above the large pebble he had been kicking along the path. ‘But Giggers, have you seen this, actually seen it yourself? It’s not just out of a book?’
‘I tell you, it’s true. I went out in the woods one night with the boy from the farm. We were looking for badgers. We borrowed the big kerosene lantern from the milking shed.’
He felt the excitement of it all over again. ‘We never did see any badgers, though we found the sett all right. We ended up going for the rabbits: it’s no end of fun to watch. Their eyes fix and they can’t move, once you trap them with the light.’
Nicholson was smiling but he didn’t seem very sure. He tried a sideways punt and the pebble shot away into the new growth of stinging nettles lining the track. After poking around after it with a stick, he gave up and returned.
‘Do your people live on a farm? I thought that they were out in India,’ he asked.
‘Oh, the farm was just somewhere we were putting up last summer when the Mater came home to see my sister and me. The Pater used to be stationed in Bombay. That’s where I was born, but now he’s Director of the Museum in Lahore.’
Nicholson nodded, walking faster, now he’d given up on the pebble. ‘Mine’s up in Burmah. I didn’t know you had a sister. I suppose you had to come back to live with your grandparents before you were old enough for the Coll.’
Ruddy let his face go blank, just as he had learned to do faced with Harry. His hands dug deep into his trouser pockets but came away again empty before he spoke.
‘Not exactly. We were living with a poisonous woman in Southsea. That was why the Mater came back.’
Nicholson looked surprised. ‘But why did she –’ he checked himself. Ruddy could see him remembering that other chaps didn’t always like to talk about their families. Beginning again, ‘I suppose she came back as soon as you told her it was no go.’
Ruddy turned up his face consideringly towards the pale April sky.
‘I think, actually, it might have been a friend of theirs, an old chap from Bengal. He came to visit Trix and me one day at Southsea when I was seedy and they kept asking me what I could see. That’s when I got these,’ he flicked a hand up at his spectacles. ‘I think he told the Mater to come. Or it could have been my aunt, I suppose.’ Seeing the confusion on his friend’s face, he added quickly, ‘I hadn’t said anything, you see. I thought – I don’t know – I think I believed she thought it was … that it was good for us. That she had chosen the woman deliberately.’
Nicholson nodded, looking wise. All the fellows here had fathers in the service. They knew that orders came through and you moved to your new posting. You didn’t ask questions.
Ruddy didn’t want to have to say any more.
‘What about your people, Nicholson? Do you have a sister?’ he asked.
‘Two, worse luck. Always fussing.’
Ruddy stopped still and gazed at his new friend, with a frown.
‘Girls are a bit strange. My sister says she wants to go back to Southsea to live with that foul woman in the holidays, once the Mater has gone back to Lahore.’
Nicholson struggled and gave up.
‘But you said she was poisonous. My father’s right. Women are a mystery.’
*
It was halfway through Christmas term at the Notting Hill High School. The smell of potpourri and beeswax that rose to meet Trix as she went through the door of 26, Warwick Gardens had become familiar over the past twelve months. Miss Craik had let her help to lay out the rose petals from the garden to dry and gave her the orris root to mix in later, when it was time to make the year’s supply last June. Now the afternoons were turning dark early and the gutters Trix walked by on her way home were choked with sodden leaves.
Edna, the maid who had opened the door for her, smiled before turning back down to the basement. Trix stepped gingerly across the polished floor, trying to stop her shoes from squeaking. All three ladies meant to be kind. They just didn’t know how difficult it was to live with people who were so quiet and polite all the time. She did her best to slip through the house without leaving a trace of herself. That way she couldn’t offend anyone without knowing. The ladies were all much too kind to hurt her feelings by saying anything. It meant she was never quite sure if she was doing the right things. With relief, she reached her bedroom unnoticed.
It was quite different at school, where the rules were clear. She was still surprised that the lessons were so interesting. As she began to spread her homework books out on the desk in her bedroom, Trix felt the return of a pleasant excitement. She was getting some of the highest marks in the class.
‘I can see you’re going to be a writer like Miss Craik and her sister,’ her English teacher had said.
‘Not like them!’ Trix had only just held back from exclaiming. The ladies were so mild in their views it left her feeling stifled. Tonight, instead of kindness what she needed was to be on her own. She needed to think. And not to be interrupted.
Leaving her bedroom and the pile of homework half-unpacked – one of the ladies might look in to see if she needed any help with it – she slipped along the landing and let herself into the linen cupboard. The size of a small room, she’d discovered it during her first days there on her own. It was lined with shelves piled high with sheets and towels, blankets and counterpanes, all arranged in orderly folds, almost like a shop. That first time she’d crept in and curled up in a nest of blankets for comfort but today she remained on her feet, her back against the door.
She needed to understand just what exactly she was feeling. Something didn’t quite make sense.
When Mama first told them they were going to spend all summer together in the country they had both been so happy.
‘No lessons,’ she and Ruddy capered.
‘No housekeeping for me,’ put in Mama, ‘and no beastly Indian servants.’
Ruddy’s face fell. Mama must have seen it too.
‘Best of all, I’ll have my favourite company in the whole world, my own darling, clever children,’ she went on quickly.
Her darlings? Her favourite company?
But Mama had gone away again. Trix didn’t want to think what that meant. Far away, first to visit other people, then back to India. To a place Trix only knew the name of: Lahore.
‘I have to look after poor Papa,’ she said.
That was such a weak excuse. Trix couldn’t make it come out right. She felt as though she were sinking, wondering about Mama and struggling.
The chime of a handbell. The signal for Trix to join the ladies in the drawing room for tea. As she passed through the hall she glanced at the little table under the clock, where the post was left divided up into piles. Oh good, one for her today. From Auntie. Wanting to know when the end of term was and when she’d be arriving for the holidays. Would it be more rude to make herself late for tea by reading it here, at the foot of the stairs, or to read the letter in the drawing room, instead of paying attention? Sighing, she pocketed it. After tea would have to do.
‘Now dear, you won’t mind, there’s a young lady going to be staying when you arrive. Her name’s Miss Garrard and she’s very well-connected. The Garrards, you know, the Crown Jewellers. I’ve put her in Harry’s old room.’
Trix threw down the letter. She rather thought she did mind. She wanted everything to be the same as before. Apart from Harry. She didn’t mind at all if he wasn’t there. But just herself and Auntie. She didn’t need another girl, especially one old enough to be called a young lady. There were enough senior girls at school giving themselves airs.
* * *
Fourteen now, and Ruddy was beginning to feel himself a man. Usually, travelling on his own like this, he’d have been light-hearted. But today he was taking the train for Portsmouth. Going back to Southsea. Even bagging a corner seat didn’t lift his mood.
He swallowed. The jolting had never made him feel sick like this before. There was sweat on his forehead and that wasn’t just the heat.
The used, dusty smell of the upholstery offended him. He leaned away from the padded backrest. Finding the window at his side resisted, he got to his feet and tugged. It gave abruptly with a jerk that made him stagger.
The man with gold braid round his cuffs, who was seated across the carriage, looked up.
‘Good for you, old chap,’ he said kindly. ‘Sound move.’
If it was up to him he’d never set eyes on That Woman again as long as he lived. She was death itself. Poison. How could Trix keep going back like this, every holiday?
Usually he managed to overlap with her for a few days in Warwick Gardens but this time, summer term at the Coll. had ended too late for that.
He could scarcely believe he’d agreed to make this visit. But he needed to see her. Just being with her calmed him down. And she was the one person he could trust to say something about his poems that was worth listening to, not just ‘Ruddy, how clever’. She had an ear.
They were jolting over the points outside Guildford.
‘This is horrible.’
He’d been on the verge of speaking aloud. He clamped his lips together. He hadn’t realised he’d feel like this.
Think of The Study and the fellows. Remember boiling that bottle of red ink over the burner Beresford rigged up. Stoppering it had been his own idea. A fountain of blood. That’d been no end of a scheme. Worth all the scrubbing afterwards.
Stopping for Haslemere.
He revved at his imagination. Remember those fellows and their voices.
‘Go to it, Giggers. We haven’t a bean, it’s time for you to write another set of sweet verses for the Penzance Mail.’
Five bob a poem, ten if it was over a dozen lines. Money for jam.
He couldn’t see through his spectacles properly. Wiping them didn’t seem to help.
He shut up his battered copy of Uncle Remus.
A shiver. Oh no, surely he wasn’t actually going to vomit? A hand flew to cover his mouth. As the qualm passed he became aware again of the satisfying bristliness of his upper lip.
Trix’d be surprised to see his moustache. It really stood out now. He was the only man in the lower forms who unarguably needed to shave. Other fellows might be head and shoulders taller for all he cared. Now it didn’t matter so much, either, that he was such a funk at games.
He stroked the moustache, appreciatively. What a head start it’d given him with the fisher-girls! He had been loitering with Nicholson behind the beach shacks, eyeing a knot of girls, who seemed determined not to look in their direction. Then that pretty dark one left her friends and came straight over to him, to him not Nicholson. His body surged at the memory. Her friends were good too. Lips, then tongues, those girls had plenty to teach. His hands no longer trembled as they slid inside an opened bodice.
Havant. Soon be there. Getting off at Fratton.
Fratton, one stop before Portsmouth, the nearest station to Havelock Park and the House of Desolation. Beresford, with his naval connections, had laughed when he solemnly explained to the Study, ‘I don’t actually go as far as Portsmouth. I usually get off at Fratton.’
The others just looked baffled, lost to understand his joke. He’d waited, relishing the moment. He was adding to the common store of significant information.
‘Getting off at Fratton, it’s what those matelots say for pulling out in time.’
By afternoon every boy in the school was sniggering at the name of Fratton.
Trix, soon. That’d better make it all worthwhile. At times he’d found something flat in the tone of her letters from Southsea. But this last one struck a note of excitement.
‘You can’t imagine, Ruddy, I’ve got a new friend here, her name’s Flo, and she’s an art student. A painter, awfully clever. It’s made such a difference. She’s older than us, sixteen. Auntie’s so impressed, quite cowed, poor thing, but that’s something you’ll be pleased to hear, I know.’
In spite of all his misgivings he felt a stir of curiosity as he got down from the train, overnight bag in hand.
It was a surprise to find his sister waiting for him on the platform. Surely they didn’t let little girls of twelve out on their own? And then he understood, as Trix gestured, blushing, towards a young woman standing over by the ticket office and keeping discreetly to the background. Flo. Her chaperone.
Astonishing, Trix had gone absolutely puce.
At first he took in only the brilliant cobalt blue of the other girl’s long coat. She wasn’t looking at them. A greyhound, elegantly stepping at the end of a scarlet leash, had absorbed her attention. As they watched, she fell to her knees, smoothing back its ears with little cries of admiration and pleasure. The owner, a portly man in tweeds, quite as gratified as his dog, was moving off by the time Ruddy and Trix came up to her.
The words of introduction passed over his head unheard as he stared into the exquisite oval of Flo Garrard’s face. The line of that cheek. Grey eyes fringed with heavy dark lashes gazed steadily back. He blinked.
She was speaking. Something about being pleased. About Trix’s brother. His poetry.
The languid drawl of her voice made his spine tingle.
He stuttered as he took the hand she held out, direct as another boy. It was cool and smooth. He didn’t want to let go.
Trix was babbling away.
‘It’s just like you, Flo, to fall in love with that dog. She’s mad about animals, aren’t you Flo? Wait till you see Flo’s pet goat, Ruddy. It’s so funny. His name’s Jeremiah. Auntie thinks it’s a disgrace, the name of a prophet. Doesn’t she, Flo?’
His sister was trotting along clinging to the new girl’s arm with an adoring look. It disturbed him for a moment. Was this one of those ‘pashes’ that she said the girls at her school went in for? She did look stupid.
Then he too became absorbed in gazing at Flo.
The delightful turmoil carried him through the worst of arriving at Lorne Lodge and having to speak to That Woman. She was even uglier than he remembered. And he was going to have to sleep on that horsehair sofa.
‘You don’t mind, do you Rudyard? Miss Garrard’s occupying your old room. It’s ever so kind of her, she shares it with your sister.’
It gave him shivers to think of Flo sleeping there, where he used to sleep, perhaps in that same bed.
At once he felt shame. That rare, that exquisite creature, how could he? Keep those impulses for the Appledore fisher-girls.
He turned back to the conversation. The Woman was almost grovelling. Exchanging looks with Trix he understood. The glance she threw at Flo told him everything. It was Flo’s presence that commanded this unlooked for courtesy.
‘The old brute’s terrified I’ll leave. My people pay her more than she’s used to, so I make sure to have things my way,’ Flo explained simply, once they sat down to supper alone.
‘There’s never any question of her eating with us.’
What a woman! Ruddy was dazzled.
After supper, which was almost edible, compared with food at the Coll, they escaped.
‘I think we’ll make for the sea, don’t you, little Kiplings? Tell me, when does a Kipling become a full Kip?’ Flo teased.
Trix giggled but Ruddy wasn’t sure whether to smile. Was she making fun of him? She was very tall for a girl. He tried not to show that he was struggling to keep up, she walked so fast on her long legs.
Next to Flo, Trix looked such a child, in that cap with a bow over her eye. Flo herself was wearing a loose dress of seagreen silk, belted at the waist with plaited thongs, under her blue coat. It was just the sort of thing Aunt Georgie would choose. No stupid frills. And such colours, like one of Uncle Ned’s paintings. You could tell Flo was an artist.
Small waves were lapping quietly in the distance as they settled themselves in a line on the sea wall, one on either side of Flo. She was a good sport. Other girls who looked younger than her were titupping along the pavement or sitting with their feet together on the municipal benches, looking respectable. Not Flo. She’d swung herself up onto the wall without hesitation.
Trix was chattering. Ruddy sat staring out to sea, wondering what he could say to sound interesting, when he sensed Flo fumbling in her coat pocket. He turned to see her select a white cylinder from a slim silver case.
‘I say, you don’t smoke do you? I didn’t know that girls smoked.’ To his horror his voice was squeaky with surprise. He hadn’t sounded like that for more than a year.
Trix looked up, ‘They’re called cigarettes. Flo buys them when she goes to Paris,’ she explained, infuriatingly smug, replacing her head on Flo’s shoulder.
What a baby she was.
‘Of course I know what they’re called, you infant. Don’t forget I’ve been to Paris myself.’
Now Flo would think he was just a squabbling kid.
‘Why did you choose to come here to Portsmouth to learn painting?’ he asked.
That should get some conversation going.
Flo laughed but she didn’t look happy. ‘That’s a long story’, she replied ‘and rather a gloomy one. Don’t be taken in by my name. They’re not terribly proud of my father at the crown jewellers. Let’s just say Portsmouth was cheap enough to appeal to those who hold the purse strings. And it’s a step on my way. I’m going to live in Paris and paint, one day.’
He was rapt. In this woman he picked up a conviction to match his own. He’d begun keeping a careful record of his poems in proper leather-bound notebooks marked ‘Private’. Turning out verses for the local papers to earn a bob or two at need certainly wasn’t the limit of his ambitions.
He stared with renewed admiration at the strings of carved wooden beads hung round the creamy neck. So much for the crown jewellers! Flo, like him, was having no truck with all that.
Next morning he woke up thinking about her. Not just a stunning girl but another artist. There must be a way to get to know her properly. To spend time together, without having to bother about his little sister.
He’d write to Flo just as soon as he was back in Warwick Gardens. Send some of his work too. Once he got back to his notebook with the fair copies, he’d make a choice and ask for her views.
That should get things started.
Drafting, then redrafting, his first letter absorbed his attention all through the journey back to London.
* * *
Over the next two years, in galleries and parks, in tearooms, when they could, Ruddy and Flo joined each other to talk about art and to argue. Flo shocked him with her ‘Sorry, he may be your uncle, but Burne-Jones and his work are just old hat.’ He wouldn’t have taken it from anyone else.
Ruddy, now sixteen, was strolling through Kensington Gardens, the spring sunshine warm enough to make him loosen his scarf. Away from the clatter of the streets and the stink of horse piss, he could pick up a hint of newly cut grass. At his side Flo was laughing at the small dogs – excited to be out in the bright day – who yapped and lunged at the end of their leads.
Thank heavens Trix wasn’t here too, mooning over Flo. That was one good thing about her passion for going back to Lorne Lodge. Today he had the clear field that he needed.
He must get on with it. Another week and Flo would have left for good. The pressure of his need to speak, to have things clear between Flo and himself, made the air seem thin. He gasped and she turned to him in alarm.
She really did care. He took courage.
Before he could summon himself, however, Flo began.
‘I can’t believe that another week and I’ll be in Paris. You’ve been a brick, Ruddy,’ she went on, ‘without you I don’t know what I’d have done.’
Hope blazed in him at this rare concession. Flo usually avoided anything that verged on the personal.
‘Only another artist could understand. My wretched trustees! I thought they’d never stop. “How can you need more classes when you’ve just had a year at the Slade?” It was you made me step up the pressure on them. There’s iron in you, Ruddy, when it comes to art.’
He glowed. She was stunning in that long mauve smock, her dark hair held back from the pallor of her face by an amber clip. Even the leather art satchel she was carrying added to that air of distinction.
‘It’s ripping, being able to send you my work, Flo.’
He was edging towards it, almost on the brink. They hadn’t been able to meet anything like as often as he’d wanted but he’d been sending her poems almost every week. Meeting Flo, falling in love with her – such a flood. Of course, he’d been writing tons of poetry anyway but she’d brought out something special. And fear. That wasn’t so good. The fear that she’d go away and he’d lose her – that he was losing her. He’d put a stop to that now.
‘Other people are such idiots,’ she smiled. ‘One simply has to have other artists to talk to. Who else could one possibly live with?’
She was making it easy for him. She guessed. His heart bounded.
‘I feel that too. You’re the one person who understands. And you’re so beautiful. I want to be always near you.’
There, it was out. She was smiling, her eyes half-shut, veiled.
‘You are the most alive person I know, Ruddy. You keep me going. Most people are half dead.’
‘I want to keep you going always.’
She smiled but did not reply.
They came to a stop before an empty bench. Before taking his place at her side, he looked enquiringly at her. Reverently he took her hand. The sensation sent thrills right up his arm. A distraction. This was spiritual, a meeting of minds.
‘Do keep writing your poems – though I don’t know why you dwell on all that hopeless love and failure. Pre-Raphaelite stuff. It’s today’s experiences we need to examine. I’m holding you to your resolve. Poetry or death!’
‘Or life, I suppose,’ he spoke a little wildly, dizzy with encouragement. No need to feel hopeless, she was telling him.
He still hadn’t given her the poem. His own lines rang in his ears, pleading to be spoken:
‘Let thy soul’s perfect music interpret its harmonies –
The passion that is in a line, and whence that passion had rise,
For my heart is laid bare to thy heart, and my soul in thy hands’ hold lies.’
Better though to let her read them first. Quietly, on her own.
‘For life, I mean. Flo, I’ve written a poem for you. Just for you, that is. I –’
She broke in, ‘Ruddy, we think alike. I’ve got something to show you too. The sketches are just here in my bag. Is that your poem? Let me take it so I can read it later, with proper attention. I’m thrilled,’ she added, undoing the straps on her satchel, ‘I’ve heard about the most extraordinary painting Edouard Manet’s been working on, someone’s taking me to his studio to see it next week. It shows a bar, with mirrors –’ She slid his envelope into the pocket behind her pastel crayons.
He’d done it. His formal proposal was in her hands. And hadn’t she as good as accepted?
*
It was late afternoon towards the end of the summer term. Rud leaned back in the wide Windsor armchair that stood across from the desk in the Head’s library and removed his spectacles. He wiped them with great deliberation then returned, dismay mounting, to scanning his father’s letter. He hadn’t realised where it was all leading, when that man from Lahore – what was his name, Wheeler? – had summoned him to London and jawed away at him for half an hour. He’d imagined that it was just the Mater with her fussing, wanting to know how he was. Now he felt as though he’d been tricked.
He’d been pleased enough to get an exeat to go off on his own to meet the man. You feel stifled, always in the same company. It could be pretty average good fun all together in Number Five Study but he liked being on his own too. Had to be on his own. Best of all, like this, in the Head’s library.
‘If you’re going to write, Rud, you’d better see as much of what’s been done in that line as you can,’ the Head had declared. And he certainly was going to write, couldn’t stop himself, he’d already filled four notebooks with his poems. All fair-copied. Work done off his own bat. No need, really, for Flo to urge him to keep writing.
He’d gone over and over the memory of that walk in Kensington Gardens, when he’d told her of his feelings. Just remembering her smiles lifted him with rapture. She hadn’t needed to say anything. The understanding between them was perfect. It was on a different plane from that stuff with those fisher-girls.
But now, he could scarcely take it in, this letter the Pater had sent to the Head, his old friend Cormell Price.
‘As you know, there was never any question of the Varsity: the funds wouldn’t stand it. So his mother and I are mightily relieved that Wheeler thinks he can make use of Rud on the CMG. He needs a European assistant and the boy made a good enough impression – as well he might, with all the care you’ve taken of him, Crom.’
Without a by-your-leave, they had obtained a position for him out in Lahore and now they were instructing him to leave England? Leave Flo? It was out of the question. The letter had been handed to him with a broad smile, as though he should be overjoyed! A journalist, forsooth! Assistant editor on the Civil and Military Gazette or whatever the God-forsaken rag was called. They’d deceived him. He’d no notion of going out to India. His life was here in Europe, writing. With other artists, at Flo’s side in Paris.
‘I had not spoken of this to you earlier but it seems I must. I consider myself an engaged man and am not at liberty to leave the country,’ he wrote to his parents.
His father’s prompt reply filled him with chagrin.
‘My dear boy, I don’t believe you realise how fortunate you are, to have a position offered you at sixteen-and-a-half with no experience or qualifications. A position, moreover, that by and by will carry a very decent screw, considering your age and the fact that you’ll be living at home without any expenses.’
The Head appeared to concur. His passage on the Brindisi had already been secured and he was to sail from Tilbury on 20th September, bound for Bombay. He was helpless
* * *
1883, a year on, and his sister was embarking on the same journey. Trix and her new friend Maud Marshall, both fifteen but wishing to appear older, were only a few days into the long voyage. Yet already they’d agreed to meet every morning straight after breakfast, to work on their poems and stories.
‘I can’t believe my luck, you’re the first girl I’ve met who’s thought of doing anything serious. A tinkle on the piano and a few pastels were enough for the rest of them,’ Maud exulted.
‘How awful for you. At least one of my old friends, Flo Garrard, is a very serious painter. It’s a bit sad for me, actually. She’s gone off to Paris. I haven’t a scrap of talent for painting myself, though.’
Trix was careful not to say anything about Uncle Ned. When she heard Mama drop his name into conversation with new people they met on board, it made her uncomfortable.
‘I do sing a bit,’ Maud confessed, ‘drawing room songs, for after dinner you know. Stuff to please Colonel Sahib, I mean Father. Nothing up-to-date, perish the thought, he’d hate it. And I’m not at all sure Mother likes it that I want to write.’
Trix laughed. How different peoples’ lives were.
‘In my family everyone writes,’ she replied. ‘Mama even does the “Notes from Simla” for the paper on top of all her poetry and Papa’s always sending off learned articles. Even my brother Ruddy, who’s not much older than I am, works on a newspaper.’
‘Goodness, which one? And how dashing, a brother who writes.’
‘It’s the Punjab paper, the CMG,’ Trix took pride in being able to sound like an old India hand. ‘But don’t get the wrong idea. Ruddy writes simply reams of poetry, but it’s nothing to do with his job. That seems to be more about reading. Digging out facts from all the local papers for his editor to write about. Then proofing most of the pages before they go to press.’
Maud seemed taken aback. ‘I don’t believe I’d know where to begin with proof-reading and all that. I’ve only thought about the imagining part.’
They found a quiet corner of the deck and drew their long chairs together.
‘It’s funny, I simply love writing stories though I hated lessons, didn’t you?’ Maud asked, settling herself.
Trix laughed and nodded companionably. She wasn’t going to intimidate Maud further by revealing that the Headmistress had wanted her to stay on at school.
‘Trix would make an excellent candidate for the new women’s colleges in Cambridge,’ Miss Morant Jones had written to Mama. ‘The expense would of course be much less than for a son,’ she’d added discreetly.
It was exciting to think she might have the brains for it. But Cambridge would have meant waiting even longer without seeing Ruddy. Mama hadn’t pushed her.
‘I’d rather not have my pretty, clever daughter turned into one of those fearsome bluestockings. No man wants a girl who thinks she knows more than he does,’ Mama had concluded.
‘It’s your turn to begin, Maud.’
‘Oh dear, I can’t lie back like this when we’re working,’ Maud wriggled and sat up.
‘We could sit side saddle,’ Trix offered, swivelling her legs round till her feet touched the deck. ‘Like this?’
Maud’s high pitched laugh was lost in the open air.
‘Trix Kipling, it’s perfectly clear you’ve never sat a horse.’
Pink in the face, Trix sprang to her feet.
‘If you’re going to just play about, Maud –’
‘I didn’t mean anything by it, Trix. Don’t be cross. You forget that the one thing I really learned, out in India, was how to ride. I’m longing to get back to all that – almost as much as I’m longing to be a writer. And you already know so much about writing. Come on, do. I’m depending on you to show me.’
The invitation, the opportunity, were too much for her. Trix returned to her seat and prepared to listen.
Taking a small notebook from the pocket of her serge skirt, Maud began to read aloud. When she reached the close of her short story, where romantic love and daughterly defiance were heroically entwined, the voice of Trix was decisive.
‘You know, I do think this new draft is an improvement. Making the girl say right out what she feels. And that whole scene with her mother is really daring. Much more convincing, too.’
Maud was flushed and grateful. ‘I don’t know how you do it, Trix, but you seem to hear exactly where a piece is going wrong.’ It was the turn of Trix to look gratified, before she reached for her own notebook.
‘It’s another parody,’ she explained. ‘I can’t resist doing them. I’m making a collection of all the ones I’ve finished, to surprise my brother.’
Trix could see her friend growing anxious, so she added ‘It’s a poet I know you’ve read, Maud. I’ll give you a clue. The title is ‘Jane Smith’.
‘I journeyed on a winter’s day
Across the lonely wold;
No bird did sing upon the spray
And it was very cold.’
Trix began with a straight face but by the third verse her composure was giving way.
‘A little girl ran by the side
And she was pinched and thin
“Oh please sir do give me a ride
I’m fetching mother’s gin.”’
‘Wordsworth, Wordsworth,’ Maud applauded in triumph. ‘Do go on. His real poems bore me to tears, but this is such fun!’
* * *
All four Kiplings, ‘the family square’ that felt complete again, were now reunited in Lahore. Alice and Lockwood had chosen to live on the Mozung Road, in the quarter built by the British. Situated between the Upper and the Lower Mall their home stood well outside the ancient walls of Lahore. It was a handsome Punjab bungalow, with a verandah on all sides, opening through pointed arches supported on double columns. Inside, the rooms opened out from each other, separated only by curtains as often as doors.
Trix hesitated, standing out in the passageway, wondering whether Ruddy was busy but he’d picked up her rapid footfall.
‘No need to hang about, Infant, I’m at liberty. Take a pew.’
She slipped through the fall of printed cotton at the entrance to his workroom, the words tumbling out.
‘I’m so excited, Ruddy. You know Mama’s decided I’m too young for the fleshpots of Simla and we’re to spend the Hot Weather at Dalhousie? Well, I’ve just had a letter back from Maud and she’s going to be there at the same time. It will make such a difference.’
‘I suppose that means you’ll sit and giggle together and there’ll be no getting a sensible word out of you,’ he growled.
‘You don’t understand, Maud’s really serious about her writing.’
Rud didn’t look convinced but she wasn’t going to argue.
Glancing from the wide solid table to the shelves put up by the local carpenter, following her brother’s design, Trix broke out, ‘You are so lucky, having a study. I know it doesn’t feel like a separate room,’ she added, ‘just a bit of the hall Mama’s curtained off for you, but it’s still a proper place for you to work.’
‘You can come in here as much as you like when I’m at the office. Just don’t touch anything or move the papers.’ Rud was quick with his offer.
Trix laughed. The surface of the table was covered layers deep in loose sheets.
‘I hope you number your pages,’ she observed.
‘Away with that housekeeping eye, O Maiden, and let’s get down to it,’ with her he still revelled in all the flourishes of the storyteller. ‘Now I’ve got you here I intend we should pull together and that we should both enjoy the advantages of my position. That’s one thing your friend Maud can’t offer you: if we use the office printshop it won’t cost us a penny to publish our book of verse. Your parodies and mine together – all we need to do now is agree on the order.’
Trix’s smile was gone.
‘Oh Ruddy, I don’t think Mama’s going to let me.’
‘What?’ He looked black.
‘I mean, I can put in some of my poems. But the really good ones, the ones that made you laugh, Mama thinks are not suitable. I must think of my reputation.’
‘Your reputation? How are you going to get a reputation if you can’t publish your best work?’
‘I don’t think she has that kind of reputation in mind. It’s men. “Men don’t like girls who are too critical,” that’s what she says.’
‘That’s rich, coming from the Mater. As sharp a tongue as was ever heard throughout all Hind.’
Trix could tell that this was a phrase picked up from the vernacular. She saw his temper was rising. But she could break the spell, with her talent for mimicry.
‘“My dear child, it’s no use thinking you can write just anything you fancy, like Ruddy. Your case is completely different.” That’s what she said. “Yes, we can publish our little volumes easily enough out here. But it’s like shopping in the bazaar. Cheap. As women we have to learn to be our own first editors. You see, you’ll be judged on it. I couldn’t bear you to spoil your own chances.”’
He was laughing long before she’d finished. But they both knew that this was one of the occasions when resistance was barred. Any argument on their part would provoke scenes of a kind not to be endured. Their father, too, had learned, and that early in his marriage, that when she was crossed Alice was without compunction. She would wear her opponents to rags.
‘Nil desperandum, Trix,’ her brother said at last. ‘You’re sixteen, for heaven’s sake. She doesn’t begin to realise you have a mind of your own now. When I came out here at sixteen, I found she’d taken some of the poems I’d sent her in letters and had them published. No thought of asking me. “Schoolboy Lyrics” indeed: “Mother’s Epic Cheek” would have been more like it.’
‘Was that the time of the great Three-Day-Sulk that Father makes jokes about?’
‘I prefer, O Maiden, to reserve my dignity; Let us call it the Period of Superb Withdrawal.’
‘Come along,’ his arm swept a space on his desk. ‘Sit here beside me. We’ll find a way to arrange the mortal remains to make a decent showing. Plus, we must think of a really good title. I confess, for the moment I’m stumped.’
‘Do you think “Echoes” would be any good? I was wondering. You know, the after-effects of hearing, when the sense seems to change …’ her voice was beginning to trail uncertainly but seeing her brother’s look of pleasure, Trix sat straight again.
‘I had an idea too about which of yours should lead,’ she said, reaching for the worn brown envelope marked ‘Trix and Self’.
* * *
‘Feeling abominably seedy,’ Rud wrote and laid the pen down by his diary. It was now his third year in Lahore at the Civil and Military Gazette. The clatter of machinery seemed to have got inside his head so that his thoughts jerked and rattled to the rhythm of the presses. Usually he could absorb their throbbing and ignore it but not today. In the gloom that opened beyond his tiny office, lean, turbaned figures moved languidly among the swing of the machines. When would he be free to go home? Not for an age: there was still a full set of proofs to be gone through and he wouldn’t be getting them just yet, not for at least another hour. Across the way he could see Stephen Wheeler, his Chief, sitting in his office, head on hand, reading intently.
It was a week now since he’d presented himself at the hospital for tests. What was he going to do if the results showed he was infected? Tarleton Young had been soothing and as a Medical Officer of experience the man ought to know. Not every chap in the army picked up disease, only one in three, he reminded himself. At least that’s what they claimed, the men he bought beer for in the Infantry barracks over at Mian Mir. He learned a lot from them. He looked up at the moon-faced clock high on the end wall. He might just catch Young before he set out on his afternoon tour of inspection.
‘O Ram Dass,’ he called to his friend the foreman, ‘keep these donkeys at their work unceasingly till my return.’ It was an old joke between them all, with its half-veiled reference to an obscene folk-tale: voices rose in appreciative laughter even as the foreman replied that the word of the Chota Sahib would be obeyed. Kipling minor: it had almost ceased to irk him. Here in India you were known as the son of your father.
The presses were thrashing away at an outside order: no good letting the men slack off or the job would be delayed. Printing the CMG took priority and had to begin on time but they couldn’t afford to be late with the outside work. The Civil and Military Gazette might be India’s most influential newspaper after the Allahabad Pioneer but it could never pay its way on sales alone. Putting the diary back in the drawer, he took his coat from where it hung on the broken hook by the door and picked up his hat, the solar topee that gave him the air of a walking mushroom. The light hammered at him as he left the building.
Jeyes Fluid, ‘the sweet and wholesome fragrance of British India’, he observed in passing, teased his nostrils once he entered the hospital quarters. At least, thanks to his job as a journalist, he was unquestioned in his comings and goings. Behind the Medical Officer’s desk, Tarleton Young looked steadily at young Rud Kipling.
‘There’s no question, you’re taking your life in your hands if you go on these forays alone, Rud.’
Another new name. A man’s one. About time, he wasn’t a kid. Out here, only his family persisted in calling him Ruddy.
‘Look, Young, I didn’t come here to be preached at.’
‘I’m not preaching. I’m trying to keep you alive: a little dose of clap would be nothing compared to the knife-wounds I’ve seen on men who thought they knew what they were doing and got mixed up in bazaar affairs. It’s knives out there before you know it.’
‘I’m not “mixed up” in anything, as you put it. I think I love her.’
‘Just as you think she gave you the clap?’
‘It might not have been Almitra.’
‘Good God, man, do you know what you’re doing? A girl brought up to that trade by her own mother – you know nothing about her.’
Rud got to his feet.
‘Anyway, you think that I’m probably in the clear – I’m much obliged to you.’
‘Till the next time, Rud. I’ll see you this evening perhaps at the Club?’ But the door had already closed behind Tarleton Young’s patient.
Rud was almost glad to have spoken out about Almitra. He would have liked to open his heart to someone more congenial than Young, but where to turn? He was determined never again to let the Mater see into his soul, even if he’d thought she were up to hearing that her son wanted to marry his fourteen-year-old Parsee mistress. He blushed to remember how recently he too had despised all non-Europeans. Still, a man could learn.
He felt more torn in the case of his father. He was fairly sure that the Pater wouldn’t turn a hair at the fact of the mistress. Yet he knew that he did not want to risk opening his life to his father’s scrutiny. He was afraid it would begin to look different, to make him feel bad, once he saw his own life through his father’s eyes. For a moment he felt utter rage merely imagining that calm gaze.
Reminding himself that it wanted only two nights till Thursday, when he would see Almitra, hold her in his arms again, he reined in his imagination and turned his steps towards the offices of the CMG. Later, he might drive over to Mian Mir. He would not, he absolutely must not allow himself to dwell during office hours on the touch of that slim body, in its folds of rustling rose-scented silk.
It was still hard for him to believe his luck: the old woman had followed him after an unsatisfactory evening session with one of the Eurasian girls who hung about the Shalimar Gardens. When she’d laid her hand on his shoulder, his first impulse had been to shake it off. But all that her hoarse whisper had boasted of her daughter, Almitra, had proved true, and more besides. Almitra was indeed beautiful. She threw all white women into the shade. What he hadn’t expected was her tenderness, her sympathy.
All that Flo had once seemed to promise. Had Flo really meant to get rid of him? ‘We must forget each other,’ she’d written when he went away. Her image still haunted him, at night on the edge of sleep. At times he still cherished hope.
Hope against hope. But he was not going to invite that black mood.
How trustfully Almitra had taken his hand, at her mother’s bidding. ‘And are you white inside, under all those clothes, Sahib?’ she had murmured when he pressed her to talk with him. He had laughed aloud, pulling his shirt right open, till his smooth chest was exposed to her exploring hands.
There was a whisper of freshness in the air on Thursday night, when he slipped through the great archway that marked the entrance to the bazaar. It must have come from the river, Rud thought, breathing with pleasure air that was all of a sudden grassy and sharp. Determined to preserve his secret, he never left the club early on these Thursday evenings, though it played havoc with his nerves to sit listening apparently placidly to the dull men round him exchanging their familiar platitudes. As he held to the shadows beneath the high uneven walls, there were few to mark him even in the old city.
Once inside the bazaar he went warily, eyes on the ground to keep his feet from the heaps of nameless refuse casually piled by carved doorways, navigating chiefly by his nose. Just past the serai, where the reek of camels was unmistakable, a trail of scented smoke beckoned to him. Any other night he might have tried to follow where it led, to a hidden temple, perhaps. Or maybe to a party of men sitting smoking round an upstairs room, their eyes brimming with tears as the words of the Persian Hafiz were sung.
His heart was drumming in his chest, his breath came hard as he drew near to the alley which led to the old Jain pillar by the last turning. Ahead lay the ancient door daubed with blue and jagged with rot at the base. The squat negro sat by it as usual, sharpening his long knife. Taking command of himself, Rud greeted him pleasantly, using the vernacular. Almitra had taught him more in a couple of months than a year of private tutoring from a munshi. He slipped through into the courtyard, hearing behind him the scrape of the door as the guard dragged it back into place.
But where was she? On many occasions that sound had been the cue for soft cries of excitement, as Almitra ran out from the lighted room across the dark courtyard, calling his name. Instead, tonight the lit doorway was empty, though shadows were moving inside. Still unsuspecting, he was in the room in two strides, only to find it empty apart from the old mother. At the sight of him, she scuttled off and he could hear her voice raised in argument, though he could not follow the exact words, before Almitra stepped into view.
With half his mind he’d noted the demurely covered head but he was still taken aback by the formality of her greeting. His arm went round her, releasing a waft of fragrance from the violet folds of her shawl, as he asked, ‘Heart of my heart, why so many strange happenings?’
She disengaged herself sinuously, and before he could protest, Almitra began what was evidently a prepared speech. She was going to be married. They had been very happy together but now it must come to an end.
He simply could not take the words in. Yet at the same time, something deep within him understood what he was hearing only too clearly, loosening streams that poured down his cheeks almost impersonally, as if from melting snows.
Almitra’s voice changed. ‘Ruddi, chota, sweet one. Be wise. Yes, of course, I love you very, very much. But it is time for me to marry. No, no, no’– she put his promises aside with a gesture of both hands –‘my mother is never allowing. My uncle has found me very good husband, very rich merchant in Peshawur. I am lucky, lucky girl.’
She was dry-eyed, he could see that, and positively agog with excitement, immune to his protests, not listening to a word he’d said. Meanwhile, gasping for air, his whole body registered the shock. Even so, a sceptical voice inside his head was already raised in question. If the merchant did indeed exist, what lies had he been told? Rud caught his breath and spat, full in her face. Her eyes were blank as she reached and mechanically wiped her scarf across her cheek, retreating as she did so, while her mother hurried forward into the room. Before the mother’s voice could be raised to call for help, Rud was gone. Afterwards he could not remember how he got out into the harsh moonlight.
The devil of it was that he did still love her, even while his mouth was acrid with hate. The games they had invented together, in that low-lit room, haunted by the scent of jasmine. Once Almitra had tried to get him to copy her as she danced, head angled, bells tinkling at her narrow ankles. Children again, they were abandoned to laughter, yet when he was with Almitra, laughter soon gave way to a passion that yielded in turn to a lingering tenderness.
Never again would he lie, his head in her lap, as she crooned the old songs from her grandmother’s village.
He feared for her, for what they would make of her.
Sleeplessness was nothing new to him. He spent the rest of the night seated at the small table in his bedroom in his parents’ home. ‘Bikaner House’ as friends named it, comparing it with the barren wilds of Rajasthan. It seemed as though hours passed while he remained staring, staring out over the bleak expanse of garden. For fear of snakes it was stripped as bare of growth as the desert sands.
Towards morning he struck his clenched fist once more against his aching forehead only to find that, beyond his choosing, his body was taking up a beat, a beat that was familiar, though he couldn’t place it at once. Then he knew. It was a line from the Arabian Nights, from a love-song:
‘If my feet fail me, O heart of my heart, am I to blame, being blinded by the glimpse of your beauty?’
He let himself chant the words aloud, soothing himself with each repetition. Imperceptibly, though, he found his drumming fingers shift their rhythm, as if to find an answering voice:
‘Come back to me, beloved or I die,’
he sang under his breath.
‘By Jove,’ he said slowly, after a while, digging around in his pockets to find his usual pen. There is a story here and I’m going to find it.’ His guts contracted as what he knew, what he had known, came back to him in force.
‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race, and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black. Then, whatever trouble falls is in the ordinary course of things – neither sudden, alien, nor unexpected.’
This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society, and paid for it heavily.
He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the second. He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never do so again.
‘Deep away in the heart of the city…’
* * *
Another year, another blistering Hot Weather and Rud was sent up to Simla to recuperate. Everything always seemed much more straightforward, once he left the frying pan of the plains and got up into the hills. For one thing, Trix awaited him there. Ever since Trix had come out to India to join them he’d been feeling happier. Why, he scarcely ever thought about Flo now.
He couldn’t help being a little anxious, however, about Trix. She was so evidently delightful. He’d already been obliged to see off more than one lovesick swain.
‘It’s much too soon for you to think of marrying, you know, Trix. We should all remain together as long as we can.’
They were taking a walk together round Jakko hill, waving and smiling as others trotted by on horseback but unwilling to be interrupted.
‘You underestimate Mama,’ she replied, pausing to brush a small caterpillar from his jacket. ‘And romances of the peerage tempt me daily, you know, Ruddy.’
She was laughing as she said it but would she succumb?
He turned to face her.
‘It’s true, then, what I hear about attentions from Clandeboye? I can see the Mater would find that hard to resist, an offer from the son of the Viceroy.’
‘I’ve resisted Arch Clandeboye for myself, thank you. He doesn’t really appeal and I don’t see myself in a tiara. But there’ve been consequences.’
She looked back at him teasing, waiting for him to ask.
‘Wretched girl, go on.’
She waited till they had settled themselves on a small wooden bench, placed to offer a view over the town.
‘It might come as a surprise, but his mother, Lady Dufferin’s very put out.
“If my splendid Arch is not good enough for Miss Kipling, I altogether give her up. I simply can’t understand what he sees in the girl.”’
Trix took off Lady Dufferin to a T. He was rocking with laughter.
‘That’s what she told Mrs. Hetheringham. And so it’s all round Simla. But that’s not the end of it. She decided they must protect her darling Arch. The Viceroy was instructed to tell Mama I should be sent home.’
‘No!’ his voice was louder than he meant. A passing rider pulled at the reins as his mount tried to shy, whinnying.
‘I told you not to underestimate Mama. She thinks Simla’s my best chance of finding a husband. She wasn’t going to be so easily cowed.’
They exchanged wry smiles.
‘Mama was rather splendid. This is what she said: “Perhaps it is Lord Clandeboye who would profit from a change of scene?’”
He enjoyed that. One up to the Mater.
Shifting his weight on the bench, however, he was distracted. He wriggled. Was he sitting on something sticky? Once on his feet he brushed furiously at his trousers.
‘It’s only resin from the pines, it will come off,’ Trix soothed him.
‘I do wish the Mater’d give you more time –’ he wanted to slow it down, all this talk of Trix and husbands.
‘I know, Ruddy I know, but what else am I to do out here? Afternoon calls and tennis at the club aren’t enough for me. I did take those classes in nursing but I’m not made of the right stuff for that. At least a home of my own to run would make me feel as if I had a position in the world. Some authority. Wasn’t a child.’
He came to a halt, heart pounding, blocking the path.
‘But what about writing? You’re not thinking of giving that up? Giving up on me ?’
Immediately he felt foolish. He blew his nose.
‘Never. How could you even think that? But unless I’m to live as Mama’s daughter under her roof –’
And under her sway. He allowed the words to remain unspoken.
Rud had never relished the thought of Trix having suitors. But now that she seemed to be making a choice among them, favouring one, as the season wore on, he was positively alarmed. Her judgment was so poor. He’d have expected better of eighteen.
‘I cannot conceive of the attraction of Jack Fleming. The man is tedious beyond words, my Infant. What appears to you like silent strength is mere bone – solid bone filling up the cavities of the skull, where other mortals like ourselves keep our brains. He may share a name with the Pater but that’s all they have in common.’
Trix looked up from her magazine, taken by surprise. A wet afternoon and they’d been sitting reading, more or less in comfort, though the fire in their little sitting room was smoking.
‘I am not your infant, Rud. Would you prefer it if I accepted Archie Clandeboye after all? Became daughter-in-law to the Viceroy? Archie’s still asking me. Scarcely a week goes by.’
This was new. She never used to take a sharp tone with him.
‘You know very well I’ve no wish to see you married to Clandeboye or any other knuckle-headed grandee,’ he snapped. ‘And let’s keep snobbery out of this. We can leave that to the Mater.’
The smoke was making him cough. He leaned across the writing table to open a window.
Trix was tight lipped.
‘You have no idea what it’s like. All these men. All wanting something.’
Palms upraised, she seemed trying to push the air away.
‘Every word you utter convinces me more deeply. You’re simply not ready for marriage. You can’t make a proper choice if you really have no idea what these fellows want from you.’
He waited but there was no response, no blush. Her face remained blank. He tried again.
‘It’s not just poetry and roses, you know. My dear girl, why do you think people here in Simla are calling you the Ice Maiden?’
That was new to her, he’d not intended the shock. White-faced, all too evidently pierced to the heart, she turned and walked out of the room.
Next week he would be going back down to the plains. Sitting up in bed, sipping the tea his mother had carried in with her own hands, Rud looked across at her and smiled.
‘That’s better, my dear. You looked like a ghost when you first arrived,’ Alice surveyed her son critically. ‘You can’t afford to let your health get broken down, Ruddy. This country’s treacherous. I don’t like to think of you exposed to all manner of horrors. Appalling sights. I still don’t believe it was necessary for you to visit that school where the roof fell in, before they’d removed the bodies.’
‘Really, Mater, you don’t need to warn me about the dangers. I’ve lost too many friends at what I’ve come to see as the regulation age of twenty-two.’
‘Well then, take heed. I know you’re very attached to Kadir Baksh but I wonder if perhaps you should get an older servant, one with more sense of responsibility. If any of them have. You don’t look as though you’re properly cared for.’
He stared, the cup still in his raised hand. She’d done it again. It was hopeless, she never could see what was in front of her.
‘Whatever faults you find with my appearance, Mother of mine, they can’t be laid at the door of Kadir Baksh. Don’t you remember? I told you that he nursed me through that terrible attack in the Hot Weather of ’84, when those of us still in Lahore were all going down with typhoid. I was rolling on the ground in agony –’
Cared for, indeed! He thought with gratitude of the calm morning wakenings, the low voice of his servant murmuring, ‘It is finished Kipling Sahib, the shaving is completed and the chota hazri awaits.’ Beside him, as he opened his eyes at that soft invitation, the tray of tea would be standing ready to his hand. Over by the almirah Baksh would already be storing away the long cut throat razor, scrupulously rinsed and dried, in its travelling case.
‘That tumbler of hot milk laced with opium stopped the typhoid in its tracks. And it wasn’t the only time Baksh has stood between me and death.’
He meant to impress her but his mother merely looked quizzical. She’d better hear the whole story.
‘Very well, Mater, listen to this. A native ruler in Patiala tried to bribe me, to get the CMG to come out in his favour. I thought it would be poetic to send the cash back by the hand of a sweeper – show what I thought of him and his offer.’
She’d picked up the teaspoon and was turning it in her hands. He couldn’t read her face. Was she paying attention? He pressed on.
‘It was pretty foolhardy, I can see that now. Though it did have style. When he realised what I’d done, Baksh was appalled. Protecting me from revenge was his first thought. “Kipling, Sahib, eat only food I have tasted first, from this day.” And he made me stick to that.’
‘Ruddy, that does sound awfully like one of your stories for the CMG.’
Winded, he fell silent.
His mother went on. ‘As for letting Kadir Baksh dose you – and with opium! You were lucky to escape with your life, in my opinion. I simply cannot credit that you allowed it. Really, dearest, what shall we do with you? Writing about this place is one thing but sinking into it –’ Her head tilted, she smiled charmingly but there was steel in her voice.
‘Well, you may take comfort from the knowledge that I’m not resigned to making my life out here as you have. I’m beginning to think of London.’ His own words took him by surprise. It was nothing less than shock that he saw blanking his mother’s face. ‘Too bad,’ he thought. ‘She’s asked for it.’
Alice did not allow the pause to lengthen.
‘Don’t let your head get swollen, will you, Ruddy? People may find your new little Departmental Ditties awfully amusing with its skit on officials and their documents. But are you sure you could write for an audience somewhat less parochial?’
‘My proprietor seems to think so. He wants me down in Allahabad before many moons have passed, working on the Pi.’ But she already knew that there had been talk of promoting him to the staff of the senior paper, the Pioneer. She was gone. His rejoinder fell upon empty air.
* * *
Yet another Hot Weather blasting the Punjab, with the thermometer still at 100 well after midnight all week. Leaning over his desk, for it was cooler than sitting, with a grunt of relief Rud finished proofing the advertisements for saddles and lamp oil. The waiting figure wiped his hands against his grimy dhoti before accepting them and carrying them away.
No longer concentrating on work, Rud was aware once more of his own mood. He didn’t like what he’d overheard.
‘The boy’s pocket money.’ So that’s what his father thought of his employment – and of what it paid him. Rud set his teeth, remembering the weary hours he’d spent the previous day in grinding out digests of official reports for the paper. The Pater had no conception of how a day with the indigo crops and the prospects for jute followed up by the Novoe Vremya used a man up. He’d show them. That night he ate his dinner at the Club.
‘But you know, Ruddy, we’re not invited anywhere this evening. We could all dine together,’ his mother had objected. At the time he had made no reply, letting them think what they would but in the afternoon he relented and sent a chit home.
At the Club, the usual crowd caught each other’s eyes as they rose from the table, coffee –‘filthy stuff’– left untouched. Forbes came clattering down the steps outside with Davis and Harrison to where Rud was waiting.
The drivers attending in their tikka gharries grinned at them:
‘Double quick, juldee jao, jump to it,’ Forbes took the lead once they had passed through the Lohari Gate. Tonight, he said, he was going to show them something different. But first they would smoke a pipe. There was still a novelty to Forbes in the opium houses. Shouldering aside the reeking curtain at the inner door, Rud felt its folds drag unpleasantly against his jacket. It was early in the night for the place but the figures stretched upon the slatted bunks looked as though they had not moved for hours. Maybe not for days. On his first visit the Chinaman who kept the house had pointed to more than one sunken-eyed figure that no longer left its mat but had a little food brought in now and then. Rud and his friends were not going down that road – too fly by half – but a pipe of the Chinaman’s finest would give a fillip to the evening’s adventures.
Inhaling deeply, as he lay stretched out on the frayed and blotchy cushions Rud felt his soul expand and open. From all the lives in the ancient city that lay about him, tremors played against his nerves. The steps of the young men were slowed when they left, their eyes brighter, as they half stumbled into the street.
‘What now?’ All turned expectantly to Forbes.
‘I’m going to show you something that even our friend Kipling here hasn’t ferreted out yet. We’re going to a new whorehouse tonight, gentlemen.’
A let down: he’d imagined magicians, sorcery. He didn’t need Forbes to find him women. Disappointed, Rud gave his attention to the cloud streaked brilliance of the night sky, and to the domes and minarets of the far Mosque of Wazir Khan that reared themselves in silhouette against it.
In fact, he was already acquainted, if only slightly, with the mohalla they found themselves in, having marked it as he wandered through one midnight weeks before. There were lamps on the ground in the courtyard they entered and men sitting about smoking, the coals in the hubble-bubble pulsing bright.
‘Are you ready for this, you fellows?’ Forbes demanded as a tall woman stepped forward, ushering them inside. Blinking, his eyes watering in the smoky lamplight, Rud was still able to observe that she was thickly made up and that her bones were too heavy for a woman. He would have turned full face to make sure but he picked up a sudden rigidity in his companions. Following their arrested gaze his own fell on half a dozen painted boys, slim as reeds, doe-eyed, reclining on bolsters of peacock silk.
‘Ohhh…’ the newcomers stood foolish with surprise; all but Forbes, who looked pleased with himself. One of the children, he could not have been more than ten, tripped forward coquettishly with downcast eyes, to welcome them.
‘We have friends for all of you sirs, many friends,’ he offered. ‘You have only to choose among us. We are many here tonight.’ There was a pause. The men didn’t look at each other. Forbes was first to move, beckoning a dark-skinned youth who ran up and flung a graceful arm around his neck. They left the room together. Rud took off his spectacles, wiped them and put them back. He was not in doubt of what he wanted. No room for uncertainty there. But at the same time everything that he’d ever learned told him to hold back. To his relief, he saw that Harrison was swaying and looking distinctly the worse for wear.
‘Shall I take you into the air, old man?’ he offered. Holding the other’s head as Harrison vomited against a wall of crumbling damp-rotted brick, Rud experienced only gratitude for his escape.
* * *
The season for moving up to Simla had come round again. His fifth. And last, if he had anything to do with it.
The Mater was not so sure.
‘Ruddy darling, all in good time,’ she responded when he announced that he planned to leave India in the New Year.
‘The moment’s come to try my luck in London,’ he insisted but she shook her head at him, smiling.
Though he’d been longing for the scent of pines and the whispering freshness of the hills, Rud was already beginning to feel trapped. With the Viceroy and the Administration in residence, came all the petty rivalries of a court. A British community seven hundred strong, ten times the size of the one in Lahore, should have offered more variety. Yet its feverish tone, its liaisons, its gossip, its all too legible adulteries and romances had become deadly predictable from year to year.
And now all that falseness had infected Trix. Constant scenes of stagey emotion over Fleming. Rud couldn’t abide them.
‘Hasn’t that fellow gone yet?’ he growled, from the narrow hall.
In common with most of the cottages available for rent in Simla, the walls were woefully thin but Rud was not troubling to lower his voice.
But Trix was beyond embarrassment. Stifling her sobs, ‘Really Jack, I do mean it this time. It’s too soon. I mean, I want –’
Jack Fleming did not let go of her hand but stood so close, she could see every hair in his moustache. He was so much taller than her, she shrank back.
‘I cannot understand you, Trix. I thought we’d got this settled once and for all. Plenty of girls get married at twenty.’
‘I’ve tried and tried to make you see, Jack. I just feel I – that we should –’
He didn’t wait.
‘If you didn’t mean to stick by me, why the dickens did you call me back? We’ve been going through the same scenes for months now but I thought this time you knew your own mind. I call it damned unfair.’
She saw that he coloured under the bronze.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he apologised, without changing his resentful tone. ‘But Trix, I thought we were so happy. Only yesterday you were reading Mrs. Browning’s sonnets to me out in the pinewoods. Now you’re behaving like a regular hill-station jilt – off with one romance, on with the next.’
‘How dare you, Jack, how dare you?’ All at once her voice cleared. ‘Please go and don’t try any more to make me change my mind.’
Fearing that he might attempt to put an arm round her, Trix stepped out of his reach and held the door open.
Baffled, Captain Fleming strode from the room, almost forgetting to pick up his hat from the rickety table by the front door.
Within a day or two Rud was reporting to Lockwood.
‘As we feared, Pater. Trix spent the entire afternoon out in the woods with me, weeping. Says she can’t bear it, now she’s sent Jack away. Good riddance, I told her, but she won’t hear a word against him.’
Lockwood Kipling’s usual calm failed him.
‘I’m at my wits’ end with her; we all are. The whole circus will now start up again. Whatever’s the matter with the girl?’
That afternoon Trix made an attempt to explain herself. Standing beside her father under the porch, watching the drips from the eaves and waiting for the shower to stop, she broke out.
‘You’ve no idea of the strength of his will. I sometimes feel like a prisoner when I’m with him. Then I know I have to escape.’
Lockwood had never heard anything like this. As a daughter, Trix delighted him, she was so lovely and so quick. But she’d none of her mother’s unyielding confidence. He’d done his best to encourage her, though who could guess what she needed? He had such limited experience of young women.
This last time she’d sent Fleming packing Lockwood had really thought Trix meant it. She’d looked positively relieved. Now he spoke with all his tact.
‘Jack seems to make you so unhappy, dearest, I’m sure it’s best if you’ve decided to break with him for good.’
The face she turned to him was haunted.
‘I do wish I could. But it’s not so easy. Jack’s determined to marry me.’
‘Not against your will, surely?’ he was aghast.
‘It’s so hard to be sure what I really want. You see, however angry, however sure of myself I am when I tell him to go, it doesn’t last. For a day or two I feel quite exultant, then those terrible feelings come back. It’s already started.’
Trix looked away and began to stab the tip of her umbrella into the moist earth beyond the tiles of the porch.
‘What feelings?’
He really didn’t want to have to deal with this but neither did he want to cut her off.
Trix went on poking and stabbing with the umbrella.
‘Darling Trix, hadn’t you better explain?’
She dug harder, as though trying to get at something that was buried.
At last she raised her head and looked squarely at him.
‘It’s, it’s Hell,’ she stammered.
He tried not to show that her use of strong language shocked him. A good thing Alice wasn’t there to hear.
‘It’s this simply dreadful feeling I get when I send him away. I know I’ve been wicked and that I’m going to be punished. I get so frightened. I’ll be left with nothing and no-one. Then all I want is to go home to Southsea but I can’t.’
It broke his heart to hear the misery in her voice. But her actual words left him baffled. Home to Southsea? Left with nothing and no-one? She sounded more like a three-year-old who’d got lost. But perhaps this was just a sign of hysteria? Unmarried girls did seem to get over-excited. He must do his best to steady her. Strengthen her resolve.
‘Going to be punished? My dear girl, whatever makes you think that? You’ve a right, a duty, to make your choice of who to make your life with, you’re not a child.
She looked sternly back at him.
‘Aren’t I Papa? Sometimes I feel that I shall never be properly grown up.’
‘Nonsense, darling. You’ve worked yourself into a state of nerves over Jack, that’s all.’
Her eyes dropped and she bit her lower lip, uncertainly. Before she could speak again, he took her arm.
‘Come along now, it’s clearing’.
She didn’t seem to hear.
She made him wait while she finished smoothing over the place where her prodding had disturbed the earth.
* * *
Rud had few regrets on leaving the family home to take up his new position at the Pioneer. He scented a new freedom. In moving to Allahabad, six hundred miles to the south, he exchanged the cramped alleys of old Lahore for a place of open spaces: after the 1857 uprising the British had set fire to the native quarters then rebuilt the whole city on modern lines. When Rud arrived, its Muir College had just been incorporated as Allahabad University. The Professor of Physical Science, Alec Hill, and his wife, Edmonia, known as Ted, soon invited him into their own home, as a paying guest.
‘Won’t you have any breakfast at all?’ Ted Hill was trying to keep her temper. She was almost beginning to wonder whether she and her husband Alec had been wise to invite Ruddy Kipling to share their home. It had served him for a while to live under his employer’s roof when he moved down to work on the Pioneer but that arrangement couldn’t go on forever.
Up to the present the arrangement had seemed most satisfactory.
‘Really Rud, that’s not very flattering.’
He was taken aback. ‘Flattering?’
She gave up. He was standing by the sideboard, drumming his fingers while the lid of the coffee-pot jumped erratically in response. Following the direction of his gaze, where he stared unseeing at the wall, she noted that the damp marks which had appeared during the last monsoon seemed to be spreading.
‘Do you know where you’re planning to ride? Shall I tell the kitchen you’ll be –’
A snarl, there was no other word for it, interrupted her.
‘I don’t know, I tell you. I don’t know.’
She heard him clattering down the steps of the bungalow, calling the while, peremptorily, for his horse.
‘Splendid,’ she thought to herself. ‘Spread misery through the household.’ Her own morning ride would be shortened by the time she would have to spend in conversation with Govind the sais, restoring his self-esteem after what promised to be a bruising encounter with her house guest. It was true that the cook, Amal – she did prefer to use their given names – didn’t strictly need to be given numbers. Rud knew that as well as she did. The awareness of having been seen through heightened her sense of frustration, lacing it with shame.
Nevertheless, Ted knew that she was doing her best. She had observed that it was not uncommon among the British here in Allahabad for a husband to speak to a wife in such a manner. No American woman would have tolerated it. By any account, though, this was truly extraordinary behaviour on the part of a guest. And Ruddy could be so thoughtful. It was the sweetness in him, as much as the cleverness which had moved them to offer their invitation.
He had touched them. She and Alec had agreed that Rud deserved something better than those miserable flimsy structures that passed for bachelors’ quarters at the Club. He could come as their paying guest. The money wouldn’t be unwelcome: Alec’s stipend was modest. They’d all lived companionably together for weeks now and there was no question but his company and his conversation made them feel alive again, after the suffocating social observances of the other Britishers.
‘I’m going to get you honorary American citizenship; you’re way too adventurous for a Brit,’ she’d teased.
That evening they were all sitting together after a rather silent dinner. Evenings had been like this all week. Coming home after work, Alec had picked up the atmosphere as soon as he entered the house, wordlessly raising his eyebrows, to show he guessed the source of trouble and being careful to say little. They felt like parents at times, though Rud wasn’t really much younger than they were.
With a jerk he began to apologise.
‘I know I’m behaving abominably.’
Fearing that her husband was about to dismiss the matter, Ted spoke first.
‘That’s so. Is it something you’re writing?’
A look of startled gratitude from Rud warmed her.
‘I thought it must be something serious. Fever never brings out the beast in you like this.’
He laughed, shamefaced. Alec threw his wife a look. He got to his feet.
‘I’ve not completed the report on my tour of the Satpuras and it’s due in very shortly. Forgive me.’
She waited for Alec’s retreating footsteps to patter away into silence. Give Rud time.
‘Would you feel like reading it to me, what you’re working on?’
He so often did but today might easily be different. She braced herself yet there was no rebuff. Instead, Rud sprang up, to return within a few minutes, an untidy sheaf of papers in hand. He took a seat closer to the lamp. Looking up at her before he began, he appeared unusually shy.
‘It’s about two children, called Punch and Judy. I haven’t finished it yet. This is only a draft.’
As she listened, there unfolded a story of two small children who found themselves abandoned among strangers in a foreign land. Cruelty followed, from a woman who spoke of God and from Harry, her well-instructed son. The little boy, who had been lord of an Indian household, now learned what it was to be beaten.
‘“But I’m not an animal,” he had stammered, shocked. But that was not the end of it: Harry entered and stood afar off, eyeing Punch, a dishevelled heap in the corner of the room, with disgust.
“You’re a liar – a young liar,” said Harry, with great unction, “and you’re to have tea down here because you’re not fit to speak to us. And you’re not to speak to Judy again till Mother gives you leave. You’ll corrupt her. You’re only fit to associate with the servants. Mother says so.”
Having reduced Punch to a second agony of tears, Harry departed upstairs with the news that Punch was still rebellious.’
The sweat stood out on the young man’s forehead as he read.
‘Of course it’s me, it’s about me. And Trix,’ he added, as he laid the last sheet down on top of the others.
Ted knew she needed to be careful. Leave Rud to himself and the story was going to be just a hymn of hate. He would be left horribly exposed, for it was obvious that his plan would be to publish it in The Week’s News. Why not? He was editor, no-one would challenge his decision. She’d always thought he had a bit too much freedom there. Readers would back away, they’d dismiss him and his story, say he was crazy. It could break him.
She had known, vaguely, that he’d not been happy when he was small and sent to England for his education but she’d never imagined this. What a terrible race the English were, what they put their children through! She knew he was waiting, without looking at her, for her response.
‘My dear,’ she began very quietly, ‘I think you are a miracle.’ He relaxed. He had not withdrawn. She could go on.
‘This is an astonishing piece. But I was wondering, your people as you call them, won’t they –’
He looked not a bit embarrassed by the implied question but genuinely surprised.
‘They know what happened to me as a child; it’s not new to them. Those arrangements were made by them.’
‘Well, yes,’ she conceded, objecting silently, ‘But can they possibly have faced the bitterness of the adult?’ Speaking aloud again, ‘Your sister, what does she think about it all now?’
‘We don’t speak of it. We never have.’
‘What, never? Not to each other?’
‘Well, in the first year or two, when we were small we used to. We tried to work out why they’d done it, gone away. Left us in Hell. Afterwards, when she came back, we were just so glad to see our mother. Later on, I think we might have been afraid. I don’t know. To be honest, until now I haven’t wanted to face it and I imagine Trix has felt the same.’
‘So the two of you didn’t come right out and tell your parents what a dreadful mistake they’d made, the lasting impact –’
Looking affronted, he got to his feet and began to fiddle with his spectacles. He held them up to the light, then took out a crumpled handkerchief.
‘Lasting? I consider we’ve made a good recovery. At least I have. Trix does seem to be at sea where men are concerned, that I admit.’
‘I didn’t mean to suggest there was anything exactly wrong with you, Rud.’ Her own heart was thumping. Did she dare go on? ‘I was just wondering, you must have been confused. How on earth could you be sure about anything? What to believe? Who to trust?’
She waited. Rud seemed sullen but he didn’t explode.
‘I mean – you might have been afraid to tackle your parents in case they took Mrs. Holloway’s part –’
He was folding his arms.
‘You’re so desperately angry –’
The sense of being blocked brought her to a halt. Rud was taking it all as an attack on him, closing down before her eyes.
‘What could we say? Face-to-face, it would have been too much.’
It was not clear to her who he’d wanted to spare, whose collapse, whose violence he had been anticipating. This business of parents and children, the relations between them, was just too complicated for her. It only confirmed the general principle she’d always suspected. She rather hoped she would get away without children of her own.
It was certainly not her job to protect his family. She must do what she could, though, to protect Rud from himself.
‘There’s only one suggestion I want to make. I think it might help the story as a whole if you could maybe heighten the contrasts. A word or two in there suggested to me that you rather liked the woman’s husband. Tell me about him.’
To her carefully concealed delight, Rud sat forward, the tension melting from his face and began to talk.
Before he slept that night Rud had drafted the paragraphs which brought back to life the old man who had held his hand and taught him about the sea.
Rud lost no time in getting his new story into print.
In the Wonder House, as the Lahore Museum was known to the sellers of watermelon and paan who took advantage of the shade by the gate, Lockwood Kipling walked to and fro between the blandly smiling heads of stone. Ever since they had come under his care, these sculptures, part Greek part Buddhist, had drawn him to them.
‘Ravishing, ravishing,’ he murmured under his breath, running a hand along curves that lay chill and faintly gritty under his touch. He wanted to understand the people who had made these things. But he would have to get the day’s letters out of the way before he could get back to his reading. That was the worst of being director, the endless official projects and the correspondence. Well, that was the price he paid. It gave him the authority to advance the ancient skills of Indian artists. To win them respect.
‘Sahib, Sahib, Kipling Sahib –’ He whirled round in alarm at the familiar voice of the khitmutgar, who should have been at home in the Mozung Road harassing the sweepers at that hour. Sandals flapping, a scuffle of white drapery and even before he got up to his employer Ali Beg was panting out, ‘Memsahib say home now, now this minute, Memsahib say now.’
To his relief he found Alice not incapacitated but pacing the drawing room, irritably swerving as she was impeded by the crowded furniture.
‘It’s her own fault,’ he found himself thinking irrelevantly, ‘that’s how she likes a room. Tables everywhere. Fuss.’ He saw she couldn’t contain herself. She would never expose herself to public gaze in that state, though, even to walk on the verandah. Till he saw how angry she was, he had been terrified that it was the children. That Trix had been thrown from her horse or that Ruddy had fallen ill again. The boy’s health was always going to be a concern. While as for Trix, he shuddered to recall what she’d put them all through over the past year, with her engagement to that dreary fellow, Fleming. On, off, on again.
‘It’s not Trix?’ Anything was possible.
Alice ignored his question. ‘Have you seen this week’s News? The Christmas number, I mean?’ The newspaper was brandished at him like a weapon.
His first thought was of some undeserved promotion, an acquaintance who had been advanced beyond what she considered his due. But of course not, she surely wouldn’t interrupt his morning for that.
‘Read it, just read it. I’ve never been so mortified. I cannot believe that Rud would do this to us. That boy has changed dreadfully over the past year –’
With raised eyebrows, Lockwood took the paper and pushed up his spectacles for a closer look.
‘Baa Baa Black Sheep? Is that the piece you mean?’ As he scanned the first paragraphs, a weight of dread closed down on him. Looking up, ‘I think I’d better sit down to concentrate on this. No, not now, no chai,’ he dismissed the hovering, pleasurably agitated servant.
He forced himself to keep on reading, though as he went on he could hear what seemed the groaning of another man. When it was done he let the paper drop and covered his face.
‘Well?’ Alice was biting the twin thumbs of her clasped hands. ‘Well, Jack, well?’
He slowly raised his head.
‘Alice, don’t press me. This is almost too much to bear.’
‘Don’t I know it. Can you imagine, the whole of India will have read this by tomorrow morning. Held up to them by my own son. And how are we to keep it from Trix? Oh, it could ruin her prospects!’
He waved at her impatiently. ‘You shock me. Try to think more clearly. In the first place, do you think this will be news to Trix? She was with Ruddy in Southsea, she’s in the story herself. See, Judy, the little girl.’
‘I’m sure it’s all exaggerated beyond recognition, like everything Ruddy writes.’
‘I can only pray God that’s indeed the case.’ Without noticing, he’d fallen back on the language of that Methodist upbringing he had so adamantly rejected. ‘If we have been responsible, even through ignorance, for putting them through anything approaching this, I can never again look my children in the eye.’
‘You mean you’ll tackle Ruddy?’
There was a lengthy silence.
‘No, I’ll not do that. Nor will you, Alice.’ His raised hand preempted a rush of response. ‘We are not going to speak of this with Ruddy, not going to discuss it with Trix. We are going to go on as a family, as before.’ He saw that this exertion of authority had succeeded. He would have his way. Alice was subdued. Though she fidgeted under his gaze, she would abide by his decision.
That evening, however, he found he could not prevent himself. When Trix bent over to kiss him, as she entered all fresh in her white muslin before dinner, Jack Fleming’s pearls at her throat, Lockwood covered the hand she had laid on his shoulder with his own.
‘Trix, lovey, this new story of Ruddy’s, about those two little children, it’s all made up, isn’t it?’ he pleaded.
‘Oh Papa,’ she faltered, ‘Papa, I don’t –’
Alice joined in. ‘Come along, daughter of mine. You know what Ruddy’s imagination is. Why are you hesitating?’
Transfixed, Trix turned her head from one parent to the other but she made no sound.
At the sight of the single tear which began to glide down his daughter’s cheek, Lockwood Kipling rose to put himself between the two women. ‘Darling girl, really there’s no need for this. No-one is angry with you. Just, that story makes us terribly distressed. We’ll say no more about it, at present.’
‘You must be able to understand that at least,’ Alice had softened her tone. ‘I find it impossible to make sense of Ruddy’s behaviour. He’s setting out to hurt us, he must be, to ruin things for us out here, now he’s set on leaving India.’
A hiccupping sob burst from Trix.
Now the moment she had been dreading was here, Trix found herself as though struck dumb. Ruddy’d warned her there would be a scene when they read his story but she’d never imagined this.
Darling Papa, how could she deny him comfort?
But why, why did they want to go on so, pressing her to deny how wretchedly unhappy she and Ruddy had been?
She felt a bolt of anger.
Could she really be certain, though, that life in Southsea had truly been as full of cruelty as Ruddy swore?
But if he was right, why did the thought of Auntie make her feel peaceful and safe?
None of it made sense and it was all her parents’ doing. It was a shock to find she could hate them.
‘Ruddy could’ve been here, within reach, for another year,’ Alice insisted, as they waited for Trix to return from bathing her face. ‘If only he hadn’t written that silly poem accusing poor Sir Frederick Roberts of giving jobs to his friends. So naïve. What does he expect of a Commander-in-Chief? After that his employers had to make sure Ruddy left sooner rather than later. Couldn’t he see that it was one thing to attack public policy on drains and quite another to turn on the top people?’
Lockwood chose not to challenge this. Surely Alice remembered Ruddy telling them months ago that he’d be leaving in the New Year.
‘I still think that we should allow him to take the consequences of his own actions, Alice. There’s nothing we can do about this latest poem about the Viceroy, for instance.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, Jack, darling I’ve seen to that. I couldn’t rest, once it had been intimated to us how very deeply the Viceroy had been offended. It took me the whole morning to write it but I sent off a letter of apology to Lord Dufferin last week.’
‘But you had done nothing, Alice, it was Ruddy’s work.’
‘I wrote on his behalf, of course. As his mother.’
She was fidgeting with her cuffs: always a sign she had something to hide.
‘It’s not that simple. It might have been my fault. I’m not sure.’
His eyes widened. He waited.
‘You see, Lord Dufferin had told me things. In confidence. About his plan of publishing a book of his mother’s poems. I may have mentioned it to Ruddy, I don’t know.’
Lockwood recalled that Rud had written something about Dufferin’s mother and her poems. The tone was perfectly respectful. He was baffled.
‘Lord Dufferin accused Rud of invading his privacy.’
Her mouth was trembling.
‘This is a bit of a storm in a teacup, dearest,’ he said, putting his arms round her. Try to forget about it.’
He didn’t care to imagine the pleading, the humiliation that his wife had put herself through. And to what end? Ruddy was twenty-three, he’d books out and selling well all over India, even being reviewed at Home. He was going to make his career in London. The Viceroy’s favour was nothing to him. Was Alice under the impression that she was protecting their own place in this tight little world?
Dinner was subdued that night and quickly over. Neither of the women ate much and Lockwood was soon left alone with his pipe. As he drew away on it, however, he could not find satisfaction or peace of mind. The problem Ruddy posed to him could not be dismissed. The boy – he must stop calling him that – couldn’t seem to resist attacking those who wished him well.
He’d been so full of joy, seemed to feel so honoured, that day in Simla when Fred Roberts asked him what mattered to the men in barracks. Then, almost the very next week, Ruddy published that really quite scurrilous attack on Roberts. Lockwood was not confident in his own mind that he knew how to account for his son’s behaviour. Terms like ‘integrity’ or ‘the duty of a journalist’ did not quite seem to fit the case.
Six weeks later Rud himself showed up in Lahore without warning. He fairly burst into his parents’ home, slinging his old tweed overcoat down before the bearer could take it from him. ‘Revered elders, pray show yourselves to an unbeliever’– his cry had carried to Alice as she stood out on the verandah behind the house, cutting her to the heart. It was a farewell that he had come to take; his evident joy smote her. But he would only be with them for a few days. She had been sipping from a cup of tea and gazing out at the hesitant blades of fresher green here and there in the dusty garden as she waited for Trix to return from her morning ride: now, taking a firmer grip, she sang out to him in her most musical voice.
‘Darling boy, at the back of the house: come and kiss your old mother.’
There had been so little notice. Of course, she’d known he planned to leave India – he’d put it to her brutally enough. But not yet. Between one mail and the next, it seemed to her, the plan had been fixed. It was true that Mrs. Hill, in whose house he had been living, had been desperately ill since before Christmas: four weeks or more really quite raving with malaria and heaven knew what else, according to Ruddy’s letters, which had shown an almost excessive degree of distress. But the idea that Mrs. Hill should undertake a long voyage as a means of recovery quite so soon appeared strange. However, the Hills seemed perfectly set on it.
‘We’re all to travel together,’ Rud repeated, eyes shining, over a late breakfast. ‘We’ll be taking the long route, Burmah, Japan and then across America; Ted wants to show me her country.’ Eyes still fixed on his mother, he continued more gently: ‘It’s no good. I do have to go, you know. I can’t stay here. If I’m going to do anything with my writing I need to leave India.’
Alice thought bleakly of how she had humbled herself in apologising to the Viceroy – ‘no-one regrets his offences more keenly than do his parents…’ she had assured Lord Dufferin. And still that had not sufficed to keep Ruddy with her.
Her son did not appear to notice her silence. ‘I have to take my chance – and now I’ve got them to bring out my stories in the new Railway Library Series I want to catch the tide –’
‘In the affairs of men?’ But the fizz had gone out of what had been a favourite game, capping quotations. ‘My boy, my dear, dear boy, I can’t bear to see you go,’ broke from her. Mother and son sat staring, horrified, at each other.
Back in her own bedroom, swathed in the becoming folds of her morning wrapper, Alice Kipling gazed across at herself in the blotched looking-glass and saw that she was old. This was not what she had wanted. Rud, with his absurd moustache and his station slang, was her boy, her own.
This pretence that he was a man and living a life he had chosen was tolerable so long as he was at least living under her roof. When they had all been together, the four of them in Lahore, they had all been happy. She pushed away the memory of her son’s black moods and Trix’s awkwardness. Letting Rud go off to work on the Pioneer, in Allahabad so far away to the south had been a mistake. She’d always sensed it.
Alice had her own opinion of Edmonia Hill – an American, a woman who let herself be addressed as Ted, a woman who had never fitted in. It had been a bitter day for Alice when Rud had accepted the Hills’ invitation to take up lodgings in their house. But she must make an effort. There was nothing for it but to make this Mrs. Hill into her friend too.
When the SS Madura set sail for Rangoon on 9th March, in Rud’s pocket as he stood waving from the deck lay a charming note addressed to Edmonia Hill by his mother.
* * *
Another three months and Trix too was about to leave home.
Her twenty-first birthday and her wedding day.
‘You’ve beaten me by a length,’ Maud teased in her letter. Maud was going to have to wait a whole year before she could marry that nice man she was engaged to, Tom Driver. But she did sound happy. ‘Of course you know better, my dear, but he thinks every word I write glitters with genius.’
Now the day had come, if she’d allowed herself, Trix would have wondered whether she was sure about Jack after all. But the giddy triumph of winning through, of forcing, yes, forcing Mama’s agreement had been so intoxicating it had carried her aloft until today. Once Mama was on her side, she had known Papa would not be able to hold out for long. Remembering that made her uncomfortable, almost guilty. She’d never liked the way he couldn’t stand up to her. Surely Papa would come to appreciate Jack, in time. Not everyone was at their best in general company.
She didn’t even want to think about Ruddy, not today. He had been so harsh.
Ruddy simply didn’t understand. She and Jack had proved that they belonged together: the misery she’d suffered during their engagement surely made that obvious. Every time that they’d quarrelled and she’d sent him away she’d been utterly wretched. That first autumn when she broke off the engagement and they were apart for months and months it had reduced her to despair. What did it matter if Ruddy threw up his hands when she finally called Jack back to her?
But now, where was Ruddy on her wedding day? Across the world in San Francisco, travelling with friends. Time for him too to make a new life, he’d claimed, a life among other writers. Her wedding had already been fixed for June but he hadn’t put off his departure.
These sad feelings were not ones to be entertaining today. Think of the future. An end to being edited by Mama. No more playing second fiddle. She danced a few steps, pointing the toes of the little scarlet slippers brought down from beyond the Frontier; she’d pounced on them when she saw them in the bazaar. Of course she was going to be a good wife, manage the servants and all that – why, she’d already started collecting recipes and hints to copy into a commonplace book. She’d gone through Mama’s, copying down all the dishes that she might have to teach her Indian cook, from beef stew to junket and rice pudding.
But it was the thought of a different kind of writing, writing that would be her own that made her thrill. She was going to escape from that horrid sense of being stifled.
As mistress in her own house, with Jack, who though undeniably rather silent was utterly devoted to her, she would be free.
Flies buzzed among the flower vases, loud in her ears as the gasping of the organ, when Trix paused on her father’s arm. She felt sweat trickle at the back of her neck and wherever it could find a path beneath her tight bodice. Could her nose have gone shiny already? At least Mama had gone over it with papier poudré for her.
Kicking aside the folds of silk, where the toe of her white shoe had caught, Trix looked squarely past the congregation, with its fans and mopping handkerchiefs, to the altar.
How well Jack looked in his dress uniform.
So tall and straight with his best man, that fellow-officer, Joe Johnson, beside him.
Of course Papa and Ruddy couldn’t help being short. But from now on she was going to belong with these splendid men. The Daughter of the Regiment – Ruddy would laugh at that.
As she hung there, her father’s hand came round to cover her own.
With renewed courage, Trix stepped forward.
After this she and Jack would never be separated again.
September, and the June heat in which Trix had stepped up the aisle had eased. Who could have predicted that she’d be back in Lahore within such a short space?
There was so much to get used to and none of it foreseen. She’d not expected it, the pushing and grunting. Mama made it sound as though a key turned in a lock. But nothing had seemed smooth or familiar about this being a wife.
And how strange to be back living at home in the Mozung Road.
‘You’d better go to your parents while I’m off on this Burmah posting,’ Jack had decided. She couldn’t have imagined staying on alone in Calcutta.
Tonight there was that dinner party at the Osbornes’. She would have to play the part of a bride. Smile charmingly, accept her new precedence with a becoming grace, not let them see – at the very thought of the performance demanded of her she felt exhaustion. If she’d not made a great effort, she feared she might have felt rage.
It was disconcerting but Jack seemed to offer almost more of a barrier to the writing than Mama had. Living at home, Trix had quietly determined to keep her drafts to herself, all wrapped in a favourite scarf of coral silk. Not that she wasn’t delighted too by the tucked lawns and the smooth folds of cashmere but these, she murmured fiercely, these were her real trousseau…
Heart racing, for Jack she unwrapped her treasure and put all her writing into his hands. When days passed without a word from him, she braced herself to ask.
‘Oh, was I expected to read them? Pixie, you know you’ve married a soldier, not a damned bookworm.’ The phrase ‘like your own people’ hung unspoken.
When she sobbed in confusion he went on, meaning to be kind, ‘I know we used to read poetry to each other. That foolishness has no place when a couple takes on the duties of married life.’
He went further: ‘I’m sure there’ll be some other wife on the station to share your scribbling. I think I remember Fortescue’s wife with an album people used to write in.’
* * *
When Jack wrote from Burmah to say he’d been taken ill there, at first Trix didn’t understand what a piece of luck that was for her. Not that she liked to think of it in that way. Jack had been ordered Home Leave. It meant she would be with Ruddy once more.
By the time they reached London she was keyed up, longing to talk about her writing. The novel was close to being finished, she needed Ruddy and his advice. She was allowing herself to realise just how much she’d missed his company.
But his looks, when she ran him to earth in his lodgings in Villiers Street off the Strand, the puffy eyes and the pallor that even his dark skin couldn’t hide put all that out of her mind.
‘Don’t stare at me like that, Trix. I’m just a bit out of sorts,’ he insisted.
‘Why don’t you come back tomorrow, when I’ve finished this piece?’
She left him hunched over the battered Pembroke table, his papers cascading from the sofa with its trail of torn braid. It didn’t look as if the room had been swept for some time.
Was this what success as a writer meant? On arriving in London, Ruddy appeared to be instantly famous, in demand everywhere, according to the newspapers. The Times had just compared him to Maupassant. Alongside her pleasure in Ruddy’s success Trix sensed something else, feelings she didn’t care to look at. He deserved it, she told herself firmly. All that hard work.
As the days passed and she saw a little more of him, her resentment was displaced by anxiety. He was so driven, he worked till he was exhausted and nerve-racked. Trix felt only alarm.
As for his incoherent involvements! Now she viewed them with increased dismay. No sooner out of India but he’d been looking for a wife. Before he even reached London, he’d engaged himself to the sister of that nice Mrs. Hill, Caroline Taylor, a girl he’d only known for a fortnight. Another month or two and that was all off again, which was no great wonder. Next thing, he was back in love with that girl she once knew, Flo Garrard, the one he’d fancied himself engaged to when he was a schoolboy. He even seemed to be planning a trip to Paris in pursuit of Flo.
Why, if it had been a young woman exhibiting such frantic emotions, such a desperate need to attach themselves, she’d have been written off as an hysteric.
Thank goodness their parents would soon be with them in London. It was no good talking to Jack about any of this. But she doubted whether they’d see those love affairs in terms of something profoundly amiss, as symptoms or signs of something deeper, as she did. They’d prefer to focus on the headaches, which everyone liked to believe were brought on by overwork and eye strain.
Jack was spending his mornings at the Royal Geographical Society, so she was free, that is, she was obliged to make her own plans until after lunch. She’d arranged that they should meet the de Morgans at the South Kensington Museum later on. It had been kind of Jack to agree. She hoped he would at least try to make a show of interest.
Meanwhile, shopping or art? She was moved by a desire for guilty pleasures. A compromise: Liberty’s – that was almost as good as spending time in a gallery. As she stepped out of the hotel, still struggling with the fastening of her glove, out of the corner of her eye she noticed a rather seedy figure, lurking against the railings, who appeared to be trying to attract her attention. She kept her gaze turned away. It was painful to find so much want here at Home.
‘Trix,’ the urgent whisper clutched at her.
‘Ruddy!’ Her own voice was harsh with shock.
He was hatless, unshaven, a button dangling loose from the familiar overcoat.
‘What’s happened?’ She took a step towards him. ‘Are you ill? What are you doing here?’
Only yesterday she’d left him, in low spirits, true enough, but not looking like a tramp.
He said nothing.
‘Why didn’t you come into the hotel and ask for me?’ Could this just be a dream? It felt horribly strange but also true at the same time.
At last, ‘I like being outside.’
That was all she could get out of him.
‘I don’t know,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t know.’
Trix gathered herself. He wouldn’t come back into the hotel with her. He shook his head when she suggested a cab to take them to his rooms near Charing Cross. Very well, they would walk. Perhaps they could find him some coffee at the station. Meanwhile she would try to take this in and decide what to do.
‘I like walking,’ he offered, as they made their way down from Bloomsbury to find the Charing Cross Road. ‘That’s what I was doing. Couldn’t sleep, so I walked.’
He was like one coming out of a trance, she thought, disturbed.
‘All night? Was that really a good idea, Ruddy?’ she asked gently, taking his arm.
She glanced at him as they went along, monitoring his progress.
As if in response to her attention, he passed his hand wearily over his face and looked up startled.
‘I don’t seem to have shaved.’
A good sign? She simply couldn’t tell.
As they came in sight of St. Martin in the Fields a watery sun broke through.
Trix had seen enough of Ruddy’s grim lodgings to prefer the station tearoom. With a pang she noticed that he had to use both hands to keep his cup from spilling.
‘I couldn’t sleep. Just couldn’t. Too many stories. But not the right ones. I wanted something else in my head, or nothing at all. So I walked. I walked and walked. Down east, along the river, you know. I’ve done it before.’
‘But isn’t that dangerous? Is that where –’ she threw a look at his overcoat, where it lay tossed over a chair and about to lose that button. Now she saw that the collar was ripped too.
‘It was a gang of lascars. I was listening and they thought I had it in for them in some way so they went for me.’
‘Asian seamen? You were looking for opium?’ He’d told her he ranked it with tobacco and getting the dose wrong might explain everything. ‘Surely there are easier ways –’
‘Not at all.’ He was impatient now. ‘I wanted to hear their language. Other tongues. Hindustani perhaps, I thought there might be a chance –’ his voice broke. Recovering, ‘I’d gone east, back to the spice warehouses again. Did you ever smell anything like it, in London, Trix? The air round those warehouses, it’s the bazaar. That’s when I came across those lascars.’
‘Dear Ruddy, you do take the most frightful chances. We’ll go down there together and you can show me, but in the daytime. Come on, let’s get you home.’
He consented to lie down on the shabby couch in his sitting room, while Trix, armed with the landlady’s sewing basket, took a chair beside him, where she sat at work, mending the damaged coat.
She had time now to realise how angry she was. With herself, for giving up her plans for the morning. With Ruddy, for being so helpless. When was he going to grow up?
After another week, in which she sat with him every morning while he worked, he was looking better.
‘Sleeping, actually sleeping, too, Trix, I promise you.’
Every day he sounded steadier in himself. It appeared that her company alone had done the trick. This left Trix anxious, tempted to believe that she was indispensable to him but also alarmed. Would he fall back into a state of disturbance once he found himself without loving support? That frantic writing of his, all in isolation, seemed to bring it on.
But now Rud was himself again, she could venture to ask about her own difficulties with writing. It was becoming so much less fun than it used to be. And yet it seemed impossible to give it up.
‘Not writing makes me feel – oh I don’t know, as if I’m suspended. Not living. Dead inside. Or maybe brought to a halt.’
‘No-one knows that better than I.’ His face was sombre.
Reaching out, Trix stroked his hand. Turning his own hand palm upwards, Rud clasped her surprisingly cold fingers in his own.
‘Look here, you know, have you managed to get anything at all finished?’
Needing no further encouragement, she offered to bring her work round to Villiers Street later that day. They would meet to talk it over the following afternoon, while Jack was having his teeth seen to.
‘You know, Infant, I shall have to stop calling you by that name if you show such command of language.’
She couldn’t speak for pleasure and relief.
‘That image from the mind of the girl who has got engaged against her better judgment: “It appeared to May that she was entering a dungeon worn by the steps of those who had passed before.” It’s very strong. I’ve never been a girl but I’ve often thanked my stars that I didn’t have to make that choice – find a man I could at least bear and who could keep me, so I could get away from home.’
‘I haven’t shown it to Mama.’
‘I think that’s wise. Let’s wait till we have the publishing sorted out. Maybe wait till it’s actually in print and we can put the book into her hands. Unless I’m very much mistaken, it would be just the thing for the Indian Railway Library. Set in Simla, intrigues among the wives and daughters –’
‘You don’t think it’s too like what you’ve already published in the Railway Series? I don’t mean as good,’ she added, her face crimson.
‘Heavens, no. People out there have an endless appetite for seeing their lives in print. Anyway, you’ve written a whole knitted-up novel – all right, a short one – not just collections of sketches, like me. Let me send this to my fellows when it’s complete. You do have another copy, I hope? Always keep a second copy.’
Her technique wasn’t what you could call finished, of course. If she’d asked him, he’d have got rid of that note of apology which occasionally crept into the narrator’s voice. But she hadn’t asked him. She was intent on keeping the work her own. You couldn’t fault her for truthfulness, he had to admit. Such a level tone too, most of the time, as though everyone else could see all that she saw, all that secret inner life of feeling. Before he pushed the thought away, he wondered whether his own sparkling effects didn’t sometimes verge on the meretricious.
He did ask himself what people would make of this story of a sensitive literary girl bound to a silent man blessed with all the imagination of a turnip. If only Trix had stuck to her guns when she kept sending Fleming away. But it seemed to reduce her to despair. Perhaps she simply couldn’t bear hurting the fellow? Then the whole performance would start over again. Try as he would, and God knew he had done his best to listen to Trix, Rud could make neither head nor tail of her behaviour.
They could be confident at all accounts that Fleming himself wouldn’t dream of reading any novel, even one that was written by his own wife. He’d never met a man with so little interest in books. But for those who knew Trix, would it not be read in terms of her own marriage? She might have depicted the heroine as struggling to be fair to her husband – but what about the fact that the novel killed him off at the end? That told a different story, one that was more troubling. And Trix had barely been married a year.
There was no question; they had better find a pseudonym. ‘Beatrice’, ‘Beatrice Grange’ sounded reassuringly composed. He savoured the dangerous sport of disguising Trix under the name of Beatrice; people had often imagined that Beatrice was her given name. Curious, though, he admitted, the fact that nobody ever used the name to which Trix had a legal right, Alice. It was the name she shared with her mother.
The Mother, two days back in London, was stitching steadily, very upright in the hotel chair. She appeared to hold herself away from its worn plush. Rud suspected that this rigour of deportment was only going to increase. She would be averse to taking on any appearance of age.
‘So you see, Ruddy, why I’m asking. If you could make use of your connections on her behalf, it would mean a great deal to your sister. Poor love, she’s had so many disappointments.’
He put up his hand to stop her. Any confidences concerning her life must come from Trix herself.
‘You can’t doubt that I’d move heaven and earth for Trix –’
‘But here she is,’ Alice interrupted, with a tight smile.
‘Dearest girl, we were just talking about you and your writing. Ruddy’s so anxious to see it, aren’t you, my son?’
Conscious of her brother’s suppressed irritation, Trix hesitated, blinking. Clearly, their mother had no idea that the two of them had been forging ahead without waiting for her.
Trix was relieved that Ruddy was staying on an even keel, though he suffered badly from headaches.
‘My eyes aren’t quite right, either,’ he finally admitted.
As she’d anticipated, their parents readily agreed with the doctors. This was clearly a case of overwork. After all she’d seen, Trix couldn’t help suspecting that something more was amiss, but she was sworn to silence and Ruddy was sent off to Italy for a holiday.
Not long after his return December brought news of other visitors from India.
‘It really is quite too bad of you, Ruddy.’
‘Do leave the boy alone, Alice.’
‘Not so much of the boy, if you please, Pater.’
Startled, Lockwood gazed more keenly into the face of his son. Evidently Ruddy was still on a very short fuse. That trip – the doctors had been so sure it would set his nerves to rights – appeared to have banished the worst of Rud’s symptoms but he was still a good deal strung up.
Alice was continuing, unabashed. ‘Poor Mrs. Hill, losing her husband like that to typhoid, such a terrible shock. Her whole life to make over again. Packing up and leaving India – though some would call that a blessing in disguise. I cannot understand, Rud, why you’re not planning to spend time with her when she passes through London on the way back to America. Don’t you think you owe her some attention? I say nothing of Miss Taylor. You do know her sister’s travelling with her?’
Lockwood spoke. ‘Have a little imagination, my dear. There are reasons why Ruddy and Miss Taylor might prefer not to meet.’
That at any rate was safe to be mentioned. A brief engagement, hastily terminated, was sufficient to account for any disinclination for further encounters. He guessed, though, that that was not the whole story. Lockwood had never dared to share his speculations concerning his son’s feelings for this Mrs. Edmonia Hill. He had half expected Rud to set off at once for India when the news of Professor Hill’s death had reached them. But no. Instead of greeting the opportunity to be at the widow’s side, of perhaps declaring himself after a decent interval, Ruddy had reacted to the news that she was free with a kind of nervous prostration. In his father’s view, Ruddy had taken doctors’ orders as a licence to flee. Italy was just a convenient bolt-hole.
‘I really don’t know what you mean, Pater.’ His son’s voice had an edge. ‘I am on terms of the most perfect civility with both Miss Taylor and her sister.’
‘Hadn’t you better do the civil thing then, Ruddy? At least offer your services to them.’ Alice had not given up.
‘Services? They’re experienced travellers, not helpless females adrift in the great world, you know.’
Alice threw up her hands. Her always competitive spirit was roused.
‘Well, I at least shall make every effort to meet them. I can’t forget how good Mrs. Hill has been to both my children. Not just to you, Rud, and that over months, I may say. She was kindness itself when Trix was passing through Allahabad earlier this year.’
Rud appeared relieved to have his own debt compared with that of Trix. ‘Very well, where did her note say they were putting up? The Metropole? I suppose I could call on them one afternoon. And now I must leave you: I’m lunching at the Savile, with Gosse.
‘Just so long as he doesn’t see too much of that dreadful pushy little American girl, Carrie whatnot.’ Her son was scarcely out of the room before Alice spoke.
‘Balestier, Carrie Balestier,’ Lockwood corrected. ‘I thought she was a rather decent little thing myself.’ Even as he appeared to be paying attention to his wife’s plans for the rest of the day, Lockwood’s mind was taken up with his son. He wished he could be more confident that the boy knew what he was doing. Ruddy liked to speak grandly, man to man, of his intention of ‘marrying’ but there was no evidence that he was equipped to choose a wife.
And in a matter of months they’d have to leave him alone in London once they returned to Lahore and Trix went back to Calcutta.