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.’‘Oh.There are so many high priests around.Maybe my wife knows something.’‘You’ve got a wife?’ asked Rita.She was surprised – and obscurely annoyed that he’d suddenly become less available.‘Yes, I have.’ But he didn’t elaborate.Sarah asked him if he’d ever seen any UFOs.He hadn’t.‘But I’ve seen an EFFO.’ I think this was another colonial joke.(Am I being mean? I shouldn’t be.Lin was so good to us.Dead now of course.God bless you, Lin.)At Doddabetta Peak the view was rich with meadows and moorland, woods and plantations.One gasped.But Rita’s rat-bite had swollen badly and was now filled with pus.Lin examined it.‘Not very nice,’ he said.Rita whimpered and looked about with nervous eyes while Lin, muttering, searched in the undergrowth.Eventually he grunted with satisfaction, tore at a bunch of leaves, crushed them slightly and, applying them to Rita’s calf, bound them in place with a strip of bandage from his first aid kit.‘You’ll be fine now.Where would you like to go next?’‘To the Ooty Club.I need a cup of tea,’ she implored.‘I’ll drop you off.It’s only a short distance from your hotel.You’ll be able to walk back.’‘Aren’t you joining us?’ asked Rita.‘I’m not exactly welcome there.’Fortunately we were.At the jumble sale we’d met its president, Jack Lawrence, who said ‘Do come up’.The Ooty Club – snooker was invented there – occupies a low cream villa, with a portico of fluted ionic columns, at the top of a hillside covered with white lilies.It was very quiet.In the season it fills up, which pays for the rest of the year when it is almost empty.The regulars hate the season when the ‘spivs’ arrive.We met a spiv on the terrace, an early swallow, about twenty-five years old.He was dressed in a yellow polyester shirt and black drainpipe trousers, with a narrow silver tie and winkle-picker shoes.His head shone with coconut oil and above his lip was an ink-line moustache, and hair grew out of his ears in wispy untended clouds.Inside, squeaky-clean boys in gallooned ducks padded barefoot over the polished floors of teak beneath the smiles of many a martyred beast.Doors opened in all directions to other rooms revealing portions of chintz, pale Indian rugs, brass and sparkling glass.And the smell – oh, heavenly – of beeswax and flowers.Mrs Hill supervised the housekeeping, a chain-smoking drum majorette, short and plump.Despite her efficiency, or perhaps because of it, there was something slightly unhinged about her which wasn’t dispelled when she told us her son worked in Aylesbury.Perhaps she was what a later age would call obsessive-compulsive.‘I live in Aylesbury!’ exclaimed Rita, happy to have made this connection (she’d been looking for connections and not finding them).A dark boy entered and asked me ‘Will you take tea on the terrace, Master?’Somewhat surprised by the mode of address, I pushed back my long curls and said ‘Very nice, yes, thank-you.’The only other person in the sitting-room was an ancient birdlike lady in the far corner.She lowered a copy of The Financial Times, combined a quick smile with arching eyebrows, and raised the FT again, shaking it into a papery roar.Her eyes, even across the room, were sea-green and her outfit drew on several civilisations in a manner we associate with the Ballets Russes: plum jacket and knickerbockers fastened below the knee, a blouse of oyster silk, a cream turban with a green toque held by a diadem, and patent shoes with silver buckles.Sleeping Beauty or Scheherazade?The glassed verandah was alight with flame-coloured cushions inside and the profuse scarlet of geraniums outside.An English soldier and his wife, on leave from the Persian Gulf, were bewickered among the full panoply of tea.I asked the soldier ‘Do you know who that extraordinary woman is inside?’‘Which extraordinary woman?’‘The one with buckles and feathers.’‘I think,’ he ventured, ‘it’s someone called Queenie Wapshare.’‘I bet she knows Bapsy Pavry.’‘They say she knows everybody.’‘No, they say she’s met everybody,’ corrected his wife.‘It’s not the same.’‘Apparently,’ the soldier continued, ‘the day India went off parity with Sterling she took up smoking again after thirty-six years.They say she met Queen Victoria as a child and that’s why she puts on a German accent – in deference.’‘Does she have a German accent?’‘Didn’t you speak to her?’‘No.’‘The BBC were filming here and she shot a coolie out of a fruit tree to show off.’Something about the soldier – he didn’t look absolutely solid.His thin, smart wife nibbled on a dry biscuit.‘I’m responsible for bringing Mervyn Peake to Muscat & Oman,’ she said.‘They’re all madly reading Gormenghast now in the desert.Would you like a sandwich?’‘This place is awfully good,’ said the soldier.‘But I must say, I’d love a drink,’ said his wife.We all agreed we’d love a drink but the bar wasn’t open.I can’t recall exactly how the liquor-allowance system applied to bars and hotels but I do know it wasn’t straightforward.As for Gormenghast I can see how it might chime with readers who live in the Gulf, a region where, intellectually, the future is knocking ever more loudly on a worm-eaten door.A note preserved from this occasion says ‘Sarah lit a cigarette and fixed her eyes upon a tureen of lilies’.Odd the things one sometimes jots down.A couple of days afterwards we were provided with an even more copious tea at Dolores and Richard’s.What I put in my notebook later was: -‘Collected by their good-looking driver in black Ford Zephyr.They live in a house called St Mary’s at Fernhill, a little way past the mothballed Mysore Summer Palace.We were served three varieties of bread, five of jam, two of fruitcake, two of Madeira Cake, plus biscuits, on English china, with French silver, all heaving on a table of Kashmir walnut, and served by a relaxed and charming Indian footman.But the atmosphere in the house was disjointed.Richard was polite but in low spirits and did not join us at the table.He slunk out to the ferns of the greenhouse and played 78 rpm.records on his gramophone.One was Does the Chewing-Gum Lose its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight.A mild, quiet man who must feel beached by history.The British ruled India but they did not colonise it.After independence virtually all the British left.Indians and Pakistanis subsequently came to Britain which they did not rule but which they colonised.’Dolores flapped her hands expressively and said she was trying to write something about Sir David Ochterlony.‘I can’t get going, I can’t get going!’I said what a wonderful name it was – presumably one of those Parsi names, or Sephardic Jewish names like Sas-soon, but it turned out to be Scottish.Dolores said ‘Spinach is a Parsi word.’I thought Dolores could be Parsi but she didn’t let anything slip [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]