Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

Wouldn’t it be supa?

Now, in this Bhutanese rest-house, I am completely happy and I hope Eddie is. He spends hours sweeping the view with his binoculars and peace on his face. The walls of the rest-house are made of crimson felt hung inside heavy skins. The red felt flaps and groans in the wind. It is damp to the touch. Monks and monkish people shuffle about. The appearance of the management puts the Savoy Hotel to shame. They wear deep-blue woollen coats, the Scottish kilt, long woollen socks knitted in diamond patterns like the Highland Games and dazzle-white cuffs turned back over blue sleeves. The cuffs are a foot deep. There’s a whiff of Bluecoat Boys and of Oliver Cromwell. Puritan? No. There must be a lot of sex about, for the villages team with children and (wait for it) all the government offices are painted with murals several storeys high, with giant phalluses (or phalli ?) on which Eddie sometimes lets his binoculars rest and even faintly smiles.

So, it’s all O.K., Lizzie-Izz.

Love you. Love you for not being at the wedding. If Eddie knew I knew you and was writing he’d send his love, but I’d rather he didn’t. I must keep hold of his love all to myself at least at first, until I understand it.

Dinner is served. Looks like langur fritters.

Your old school chum

Bets

(Letter stamped by Old Colonial Hotel, Hong Kong “To await arrival” and eventually thrown away.)

Two: A letter from the bride to her friend Amy of Kai Tak.

Amy, my duck, I’m writing from Dacca in East Pakistan but when I write to The Baxter (next one) I’ll call it Bengal and I have to say that Bengal suits it better, even sans Lancers. The climate remains the same. Every other change political and historical is on the surface. I can’t remember if you and Nick worked here? Actually you can’t see much surface for most of it is water. It is hardly “a land” but part of the globe where the sea is shallow and the sinuous silky people are almost fish but with great white smiling teeth. The “lone and level land” stretches far away and the crowds blacken it like dust drifting. Nowhere in the world more different than the last place, i.e. the first call in our Honeymoon Progress which is becoming global and all arranged in secret and string-pulling by Eddie.

First, Bhutan. We were dizzy there, not with releasing passions, but with altitude sickness. We were level with the eagles. There was also a bit of food poisoning. I managed not to buy the goat’s cheese they sell on the mountainside like dollops of soft cream snowballs set on leaves. “You would last one hour,” says my lord. In the rest houses the food came before us on silver dishes and looked ceremoniously beautiful: mounds of rice with little coloured bits of meat and fish and vegetables in it, warmish and wet, and only after a terrible day and night did we realise that anything left over is mixed in with the new stuff next day. Tourists are few. Probably mostly dead. The king hates tourists and you usually have to wait a year. Eddie was at Oxford with him after the war and I was all for dropping in our cards in the hope of getting some Oxford marmalade and Christ Church claret. Eddie said no. Eddie is. . but later.

First, beloved Amy, thank you from all parts of me for all you did for me and the speed at which you did it. I hope you liked Edward? He is monosyllabic in a crowd. He very much liked you and Nick and was full of admiration for you controlling and producing a family among the poor and needy and weak in the head. He never mentioned your children, which is a bit frightening. He doesn’t know I want ten — plus a nanny and several nursemaids and a nursery floor at the top of a grand house in Chelsea on the river. I can’t help it. I read too many Victorian children’s books of Ma’s in China. And I miss my Ma. But don’t worry. I’ll probably be marching against the Bomb, unwashed and hugely pregnant like the rest.

Eddie couldn’t believe you have always been my best friend ever. He thought you’d be pony club and debutanting and hot stuff on the marriage market. “She was,” I said. Do you find that much-travelled men are the most insular? Like Robinson Crusoe? If he hadn’t got stuck on that island, Robinson Crusoe’d have got stuck on another. Of his own making.

I’m writing myself into a mood to say real things to you and maybe I should now quickly write myself out of it. Do you remember that book about marriage (Bowen?) that talks about the glass screen that comes down between a newly wed couple and all their former friends? I’m not going to let this happen but I can see, after that terrifying 1662 marriage service, that it can eat into one. Well, it was you made me go through with it. Said I was at last being practical. I wasn’t sure that you still thought so when you met Eddie and I wish he hadn’t stared so steadily and so high above your head.

Loyalty. And so I’ll only say that we had a ghastly first night in Delhi, propped up in basket chairs because harlots had been using our beds. Then we went in a solid car (called “An Ambassador’) up the Himalayas to Darjeeling where we were greeted by old English types and cold mutton and rice pudding and porridge, and our own room looking directly at dawn over the Katmanjunga. The occasional English flag. There was early-morning tea and everything perfect between white, white linen sheets. In the middle of the night Eddie said, “I can’t apologise enough,” which I thought weird after his spectacular performances. “About the Delhi hotel,” he said.

There was some ghastly hang-up in his childhood. I don’t want to know about it. I’d guess half the men with his background are the same. Well, he was so happy in the mountains.

Then after Bhutan we came on here to Dacca.

I’ve seen a chair in a dark shop. It is rose-and-gold, a patterned throne from some old rajah’s palace, but all tattered. I longed. I yearned. Eddie said, “But we haven’t a home yet.” This had not occurred to me. “We could send it to Amy at first.” He looked at me and said, “She wouldn’t thank you.” You and I aren’t very good at domiciliary arrangements, Amy. You leave yours to God and I’m still imprisoned by the past, and expect it to come again. It won’t, any more than sherbet fountains. It’s to be “Utility furniture” now for ever. I said, “Sorry.” And he said, “Hold on,” and he went into the back of the dark shop and came out saying, “I’ve bought it. It can go to Chambers.”

And this, not the great rope of pearls he gave me, and not the ring and that, not the moment he saw me in the Baxter butterflies, was the moment. Well, I suppose when I knew I loved him.

I’ll write to the Baxter next and explain about leaving the veil behind. In twenty years I’ll come to your little girls’ weddings. During the twenty years I’ll have been endlessly breastfeeding in the rose-red chair, and anywhere else I choose. Times will have changed. Maybe we’ll be having babies on bottles? Or in bottles? Maybe men will be extinct too.

But women will always have each other. You gave me such a wedding.

Love to Nick and the babes — by the way has the new one come? Don’t let Baxter tears fall on its sweet head but give it a X from

Betty

Three: A picture postcard from the bride to Mrs. Hildegarde Maisie Annie Baxter of Mimosa Cottage, Kai Tak, Hong Kong.

Dear Mrs. Baxter,

This is only a note until I get home when I’ll write to thank you properly for the veil. I have left it for the time being with Amy but I think you should see it back in its box. I fear for it among the hordes in Sunset Buildings. It made the wedding.

I am sure we’ll meet again and I’m so glad you could come to the restaurant though I’m sorry about the bouillabaisse.