Виктория Холт: Secret for a Nightingale

The musky smell hung about the air; there were other smells less pleasant. If I had shut my eyes I should have known by the smell that I was in India. I was fascinated by the brilliantly coloured saris of the women who were unveiled because, said my ayah, they were of low caste. I said they were a lot prettier than the higher caste ones with their shapeless robes and veiled faces.

Mrs. Fearnley told me that Bombay was called the “Gateway to India’ and that it was given to us when Charles the Second married Catherine of Braganza.

“What a lovely wedding present!” I exclaimed.

“When I get married I should like a present like that.”

“It is only kings who get them,” said Mrs. Fearnley, ‘and they are often more of a burden than a blessing. “

We would ride in the pony cart up Malabar Hill and I could see the Governor’s house looking grand and imposing on Malabar Point; and around it were gardens and the clubs frequented by the officers and British residents. Mrs. Fearnley was almost always with me on these jaunts and she made use of every opportunity to improve my education.

But sometimes I was with my ayah who told me more of the things I liked to hear. I was far more interested in the burial grounds where the naked bodies of the dead were left out in the open to be stripped of their flesh by the vultures and their bones to whiten in the sun which, said my ayah, was more dignified than leaving them to worms than of accounts of how the Moguls had once dominated the country before the coming of the East India Company, and how fortunate the Indians were now because our great Queen was going to look after them.

Often in school holidays during those years in England I would sit in my bedroom in the rectory overlooking the graveyard with its grey stones, the inscriptions on many of which had long since been half obliterated by time, and think of the hot sun, the blue sea, the chanting voices, the colourful saris and mysterious-looking eyes seen through the slits in veils. I would think of the servants who had looked after our needs the boys in their long white shirts and white trousers; the shrewd and wily Khansamah, who ruled the kitchen and sallied forth each day to the markets like a maharajah, with his menials a few paces behind ready to rush forward at his command and bear off his purchases when the conference, which each transaction seemed to demand, was over.

I thought of the carts pulled by the patient-looking, long-suffering bullocks; the narrow streets; the vicious, persistent flies; the bales of brilliant coloured silks in the shops, water-carriers, hungry-looking dogs, goats with bells round their necks which tinkled as they walked, country women, come in from the nearby villages to sell their wares; coolies, peasants, Tamils, Pathans, Brahmins, all mingling in the colourful streets; and here and there would be a dignified gentleman in his beautifully arranged puggree with a smattering of brilliant jewels. And in contrast the beggars. Never would I forget the beggars . the diseased and the deformed, with their appealing dark eyes which I feared would haunt me forever and of which I dreamed after my ayah had tucked me in and left me under my protective net which kept me safe from the marauding insects of the night.

Vaguely I remembered my mother tender, loving, gentle and beautiful.

I was four years old when she died. Before that she seemed to be always with me. She used to talk to me about Home, which was England, and when she did so there would be a great longing in her voice and in her eyes which, young as I was, I was aware of. It told me that she wanted to be there. She talked of green fields, the buttercups and a special sort of English rain soft and gentle and a sun which was warm and benevolent and never or hardly ever fierce. I thought it was a sort of Heaven.

She would sing English songs to me. Drink to me only with Thine Eyes, Sally in Our Alley and The Vicar of Bray. She told me about the days when she was as little as I was. She had been in the Humberston rectory then, for her father had been the rector. Her brother James had taken on the living on his death, so when my turn came to go, it was not an entirely strange place, for I felt I had been there with my mother in those early days.

Then came the day when I did not see her and they would not let me go to her because she was suffering from some sort of fever which was infectious. I remembered how my father took me on his knee and told me that we had only each other now.

I was perhaps too young to understand the tragedy in our household, but I was vaguely aware of loss and sadness, though the magnitude of the disaster did not strike me immediately. Well-meaning ladies officers’ wives mainly invaded the nursery; they made much of me and told me my mother had gone to Heaven. I thought it was a trip to a land where there would be green fields and gentle rain, like going to the hills, only more exotic, and perhaps taking tea with God and the angels instead of officers’ wives. I presumed that she would come back after a while and tell me all about it.

It was then that Mrs. Fearnley came. The same fever which had killed my mother attacked her husband who had been one of the officers. He died during the same week as my mother. Mrs. Fearnley, who had been a governess before her marriage, was very uncertain about her future and my father suggested that while she made up her mind what she wanted to do, she might act as governess to his motherless daughter.

It seemed a Heavensent opportunity both to my father and Mrs. Fearnley and that was how she came to me.

She must have been thirty-five years old; she was well-meaning, conscientious and determined to do right by me. I was fond of her in a negative way. It was my ayah who was a source of excitement to me, alien, exotic, with soulful eyes and long dark hair which I liked to brush. I would lay aside the brush and rub my fingers through it. She would say: “That soothes me, little Su-Su. There is goodness in your hands.” Then she would tell me about her childhood in the Punjab and how she had come to Bombay to be with a rich family, and how her good friend the Khansamah had brought her into the Colonel’s household and that the great happiness of her life was to be with me.

When my mother died my father would be with me almost every day just for an hour or more, and I grew to know him better. He always seemed sad. There were tea-parties with a number of people and they talked to me and asked me how I was getting on with my lessons. There were one or two children with the regiment and I would go to parties arranged by the parents and then Mrs. Fearnley would arrange for me to return this hospitality.

The ayah used to come and watch us while we played games. Poor Jenny is a-weeping and The Farmer’s in His Den and musical chairs with Mrs. Fearnley or one of the other ladies playing the piano. My ayah used to sing some of the songs afterwards. Her rendering of Poor Jenny was really quite pathetic and she made The Farmer’s in His Den sound like martial music.

The officers’ wives were sorry for me because I had no mother. I understood this as I grew older and realized that her journey to Heaven was not the temporary absence I had at first imagined it to be.

Death was something irrevocable. It happened all around. One of the houseboys told me that many of the beggars I saw in the streets would be dead the next morning.

“They come with a cart to collect them,” he said. It was like the plague of London, I thought, when I heard that.

“Bring out your dead!” But the beggars on the streets of Bombay did not have to be brought out, for they had no homes to come out of.

It was a strange world of splendour and squalor, of bustling life and silent death; and memories of it would be with me forever. Flashes of it would come back to me throughout my life. I would see the Khansamah in the market-place, a smile of triumph on his face, and I knew later that meant he was making a profit on all his purchases. I had heard the wives talking about it and telling each other the sad tale of Emma Alderston who had thought she would outwit her dishonest Khansamah by doing the shopping herself, and how the market salesmen had conspired to charge her so much that she was paying far more than the Khansamah’s ‘commission’. “It is a way of life,” said Grace Girling, a captain’s wife.