1977 (25 page)

Chancery Lane just by me would actually find its way to a bank in Bombay and then to

wherever Tusker was which wasn’t always clear because the postmarks were sometimes

smudged and although he used regimental notepaper there was no address on it except the

one Tusker filled in himself which was always the bank. I got to know the insignia of the

Mahwar Regiment so well that I could have drawn it by heart—the elephant with the huge

tusks and the howdah on its back and the palm tree sprouting from the howdah. I didn’t

know it was called a howdah and I didn’t know how to pronounce Mahwar properly, neither

did Mr Smith. But not knowing only added to the glamour. Amid all those dusty boring files

and boxes and deeds which were nearly all about dead people it was this unknown young

officer serving in India who provided the single element of mystery and romance in my life,

Mr Turner.

“The girls in Litigation had much more fun, but Litigation was young Mr Coyne and I

hated it if I ever had to take dictation from him which I sometimes had to if Mabel Temple

was ill. He referred to me once as the Virgin from the Vicarage. Not to my face, but I heard

him, and I heard Mabel Temple laugh. She did her hair like Clara Bow and smoked what she

called gaspers. She wore black for weeks after Valentino died, and sometimes broke down

and cried when taking dictation and had to be comforted by young Mr Coyne. And welcome

she was to that. He was over six feet tall but very thin and I swear his nails were polished. I

once said to Martha Price that his height had gone to his head and that he made my flesh

creep. After that she started inviting me out. I was in digs, then, Mr Turner, because my twin

brothers had been killed in a motor accident the year before and the awful atmosphere in the

house, mother’s hysteria what we’d call her psychosomatic illnesses, her continual demands

on
me
, were affecting my work at Coyne, Coyne, Smith and Coyne, and not only that but

putting my job at
risk
, because I was always having to stay at home to look after her and

making excuses to Mr Smith. And one night Daddy found me crying because Mr Smith had

suggested that perhaps I ought to look for another job nearer home. It was forty minutes

there and forty minutes back on the Southern Electric and the ‘bus, every day, including

Saturday mornings. Coyne, Coyne, Smith and Coyne represented the only freedom I’d ever

had as a person in my own right, if you understand. Daddy understood, when he found me

crying. He called me Mops, the name he’d used when I was a child and my hair began to

grow again. I was twenty-five now. I’d been at Coyne, Coyne since I was twenty. It was my

first job and only job and I really was happy there in spite of not getting on all that well with

the other girls. Of course I realize I must have looked a perfect little goose to them when I

first went there, which would have been 1925.

“Being a vicar’s daughter I automatically dressed like one, skirts always below the knee—

and my hair! Heavens, Mr Turner, do you know I had it in earphones? Oh, dear, what a

sight. I never had it bobbed or shingled, mostly I expect because I hated the thought of

losing any of it again. In fact I didn’t have it cut at all until the year I was in digs. Daddy said

I mustn’t leave Coyne, Coyne, so he got me into the Y. I went home at weekends, although

not always then. I was awfully nervous and shy being on my own, but I was away from that

awful atmosphere of Mother’s ceaseless mourning for the twins, and after a while Mr Smith

said my work hadn’t only regard its original high standard but had even improved and he

gave me another seven and six a week. I used to get in early and never minded staying late

because there was no train to catch, and gradually I came out of my shell and got on better

with the others. They were a nice lot really.

“I didn’t stay long at the Y because Martha Price who was
old
Mr Coyne’s secretary got me

a bedsitter in a very strictly run house just round the corner from the flat where she lived

with her mother. That was in Bloomsbury. She was older than me of course and took me

under her wing rather. The other girls thought her a frump and I’d always been scared of her

so it was a terrific surprise that she loved dancing and was mad about the cinema. We never

went dancing but she taught me in her home, dancing to a little portable, she taking the

man’s part. As for the pictures, I was mad about them too or rather I’d loved them

whenever I was allowed to go but became mad about them now. We started going once or

twice a week and sometimes sat through the whole thing twice. It was a bit of a scramble

getting from the office to the cheap Saturday matinees they had in West End cinemas, but

we used to dash into Lyons and have something like patty and chips and a cup of tea, then

off we’d go. I liked it best in the evenings though, coming out aching in every limb, dazed

and dazzled by all the lights and advertisement signs but happy, so happy, clutching on to

one another to protect ourselves from being accosted. We felt tremendously daring walking

home through the West End, I assure you.

“Since then I’ve wondered about Martha. Perhaps her feelings for me were not entirely

natural, but I knew nothing about such things in those days. But she was very hurt when

Tusker suddenly came into my life.

“He’d come home on long leave and walked into the office one day without an

appointment and Mr Smith was engaged with a client. He said he’d wait, so I made him a

cup of tea and sat him down in my own little cubby-hole. My officer from India! Heavens,

how thrilled I was. Oddly I was only a little bit nervous. He wasn’t really at all as I’d

imagined him but at the same time he wasn’t a disappointment, and he was so kind and

somehow open with me, but reserved. He asked me a few things about F. J. Smalley Decd,

just by way of explaining what he wanted to talk to Mr Smith about so that I could get out

the necessary papers because he didn’t want to waste Mr Smith’s time. He seemed impressed

by my knowledge of the estate and of the changes the trustees had made in the investment

of the capital sum Tusker had a life interest in. He said, ‘Well, Miss Little, I scarcely seem to

need to take up Mr Smith’s time at all now.’ But of course it was only a joke.

“I’m afraid when he dies the interest on the capital sum dies with him—so far as
we’re

concerned. It’s never yielded much, but as a little cushion it’s always been helpful to him.

The money was his grandfather’s. His own father and mother died young and left nothing.

He was brought up by an Uncle, and his grandfather old F. J. Smalley willed him this life

interest. It helped to educate him, and it helped him in the army. It’s been particularly useful

to us in retirement, if only helping to defray the cost of what he has to pay into the Indian

Military Widows and Orphans fund to make sure I have some income if I’m left alone. His

army pension stops at his death, you know, and heaven knows it’s little enough. In England

it would put us on the poverty line. Whatever I get from IMWOF as we call it will probably

have to be supplemented by a Royal Warrant pension. I know he’s never carried much life

insurance and I know he’s never saved. Furthermore, Mr Turner, I know that the one decent

bit of capital we ever got our hands on, his compensation from the Indian Government

when he finally had to retire from the army in 1949 when he was only forty-eight, has all

gone.

“Yes, all gone. In what I call the débâcle. But I mustn’t talk to you about that. And I

forgave him long ago. And at least he didn’t do what one man did, and that was stop

contributing to the IMWOF directly he retired, when contributions were no longer

compulsory. But this man also compounded the premiums already paid in and when his wife

found out she had a fit because if he’d dropped dead the next day she’d have been left with

nothing except charity from the Royal Warrant. She had to spend virtually the whole of her

own little capital paying the capital sum back into the fund and then beg, borrow and scratch

to go on paying the annual contributions herself.

“So you see how a woman can be placed after years of following the drum in India? If

you’re a colonel’s wife people look at you and think, ah yes, they plead poverty but they’ve

had a good time and quite apart from the nice pension they must have, they must always

have had something behind them, a cosy bit put away or inherited.

“People always assume, certainly they did in my day, that officers and their wives are

comfortably off whereas of course service jobs are among the worst paid in the world.

Tusker couldn’t have
afforded
to be in a decent regiment at home, or a swanky one out here.

That bit of private income was a godsend to him. But I remember when I told Martha Price

that Tusker had proposed to me and I’d accepted and that in a few weeks we’d be off to

India and would she be a bridesmaid at the wedding, all she said was, Well congratulations,

you’ve done well for yourself haven’t you?

“No, she didn’t come to the wedding. It was the other girls who came, and I’m afraid, yes

afraid, and ashamed even to remember it, that when I saw them at the reception I thought,

oh dear, has it been a mistake? They look so common. What will Tusker’s relations think?

Not that there were many of those. An aunt who lived in Bayswater, Tusker’s old guardian

Uncle George who’d come up from Dorset and his cousin Cyril who inherited the bulk of

the F. J. Smalley estate and whose son Clarence will get his hands on the capital sum

Tusker’s had the income from directly Tusker dies.

“But the girls from the office were just about the only young friends I had, and there they

were, getting tiddly on the champers and standing for protection all in a group, all so

obviously dressed, so obviously overdressed because it was a wedding. And a bit

overwhelmed by the vicarage because it was old and large, a gentleman’s residence, but also

noticing it was shabby, with pictures on the walls and no chromium anywhere which made it

terribly unfashionable. And then, Mr Turner, they were disappointed because I think they’d

expected Tusker to be in uniform, even though none of us had ever seen him in uniform,

except in a photograph he gave me and which I showed them. I think they expected the two

of us to come out of the church with all his fellow officers standing making a little roof of

crossed swords over our heads. For all I know they might have expected to meet a

Maharajah too, with pearls looped round his neck and the Star of India in his turban. And

oh, I suppose in a way that is how I’d imagined it too.

“I’ve always had this tendency to imagine, to fantasize, to
project
. Like many young girls in

those days I was stage-struck but much too shy and nervous to do anything about it except

work for the local amateur dramatic society, which I more or less had to because it raised

money for the Church Hall. I used to help with coffee at the intervals. Then I graduated to

doing props and assisting the stage manager. It was a long time before they let me prompt

because I had such a quiet way of speaking they didn’t think my voice would carry even that

short distance. There’s nothing worse than a group of amateurs. They’re all so egotistical and

self-regarding and there’s always a little clique of older members who are jealous of the

young ones and won’t give them a chance. It was just the same here in India. We did
The

Housemaster
once in Rawalpindi and I longed to play the quieter sister, Rosemary, but of

course it went to a woman of nearly forty.

“At our Church amateur group only the daughters of the members of the clique got a look

in, so not many young people joined. But I knew every line of every play and the first time

they let me prompt they realized my voice was just right for that. And one day at rehearsals

when a woman hadn’t turned up I had to speak her part which I knew by heart already while

the others were still reading theirs, and I did, yes, forgive me for boasting, but I did surprise

some of them and the man who was producing said that next year I ought to audition if the

play they chose had a suitable part for me.

“But the next year was the year I met Tusker and the year I was in digs. Some of the group

came to the wedding. The producer, for example. And he said, Lucy I’m not going to forgive

you getting married and going off to India just when we’ve decided to be really daring this

November and do
The Letter
if we can and I’d been thinking what a perfect Leslie Crosbie