When Elizabeth had been nearly two years in Paris her mother died abruptly of ptomaine poisoning. The wonder was that she had not died of it sooner. Elizabeth was left with rather less than a hundred pounds in the world. Her uncle and aunt cabled at once from Burma, asking her to come out and stay with them, and saying that a letter would follow.
Mrs Lackersteen had reflected for some time over the letter, her pen between her lips, looking down at the page with her delicate triangular face like a meditative snake.
‘I suppose we must have her out here, at any rate for a year. What a bore! However, they generally marry within a year if they’ve any looks at all. What am I to say to the girl, Tom?’
‘Say? Oh, just say she’ll pick up a husband out here a damn sight easier than at Home. Something of that sort, y’know.’
‘My dear Tom! What impossible things you say!’
Mrs Lackersteen wrote:
Of course, this is a very small station and we are in the jungle a great deal of the time. I’m afraid you will find it dreadfully dull after the delights of Paris. But really in some ways these small stations have their advantages for a young girl. She finds herself quite a queen in the local society. The unmarried men are so lonely that they appreciate a girl’s society in a quite wonderful way etc. etc.
Elizabeth spent thirty pounds on summer frocks and set sail immediately. The ship, heralded by rolling porpoises, ploughed across the Mediterranean and down the Canal into a sea of staring, enamel-like blue, then out into the green wastes of the Indian Ocean, where flocks of flying fish skimmed in terror from the approaching hull. At night the waters were phosphorescent, and the wash of the bow was like a moving arrowhead of green fire. Elizabeth ‘loved’ the life on board ship. She loved the dancing on deck at nights, the cocktails which every man on board seemed anxious to buy for her, the deck games, of which, however, she grew tired at about the same time as the other members of the younger set. It was nothing to her that her mother’s death was only two months past. She had never cared greatly for her mother, and besides, the people here knew nothing of her affairs. It was so lovely after those two graceless years to breathe the air of wealth again. Not that most of the people here were rich; but on board ship everyone behaves as though he were rich. She was going to love India, she knew. She had formed quite a picture of India, from the other passengers’ conversation; she had even learned some of the more necessary Hindustani phrases, such as idher ao, jaldi, sahiblog, etc. In anticipation she tasted the agreeable atmosphere of Clubs, with punkahs flapping and barefooted white-turbaned boys reverently salaaming; and maidans where bronzed Englishmen with little clipped moustaches galloped to and fro, whacking polo balls. It was almost as nice as being really rich, the way people lived in India.
They sailed into Colombo through green glassy waters, where turtles and black snakes floated basking. A fleet of sampans came racing out to meet the ship, propelled by coal-black men with lips stained redder than blood by betel juice. They yelled and struggled round the gangway while the passengers descended. As Elizabeth and her friends came down, two sampan-wallahs, their prows nosing against the gangway; besought them with yells.
‘Don’t you go with him, missie! Not with him! Bad wicked man he, not fit taking missie!’
‘Don’t you listen him lies, missie! Nasty low fellow! Nasty low tricks him playing. Nasty native tricks!’
‘Ha, ha! He is not native himself! Oh no! Him European man, white skin all same missie. Ha ha!’
‘Stop your bat, you two, or I’ll fetch one of you a kick,’ said the husband of Elizabeth’s friend—he was a planter. They stepped into one of the sampans and were rowed towards the sun-bright quays. And the successful sampan-wallah turned and discharged at his rival a mouthful of spittle which he must have been saving up for a very long time.
This was the Orient. Scents of coco-nut oil and sandalwood, cinnamon and turmeric, floated across the water on the hot, swimming air. Elizabeth’s friends drove her out to Mount Lavinia, where they bathed in a lukewarm sea that foamed like Coca-Cola. She came back to the ship in the evening, and they reached Rangoon a week later.
North of Mandalay the train, fuelled with wood, crawled at twelve miles an hour across a vast, parched plain, bounded at its remote edges by blue rings of hills. White egrets stood poised, motionless, like herons, and piles of drying chilis gleamed crimson in the sun. Sometimes a white pagoda rose from the plain like the breast of a supine giantess. The early tropic night settled down, and the train jolted on, slowly, stopping at little stations where barbaric yells sounded from the darkness. Half-naked men with their long hair knotted behind their heads moved to and fro in torchlight, hideous as demons in Elizabeth’s eyes. The train plunged into forest, and unseen branches brushed against the windows. It was about nine o’clock when they reached Kyauktada, where Elizabeth’s uncle and aunt were waiting with Mr Macgregor’s car, and with some servants carrying torches. Her aunt came forward and took Elizabeth’s shoulders in her delicate, saurian hands.
‘I suppose you are our niece Elizabeth? We are so pleased to see you,’ she said, and kissed her.
Mr Lackersteen peered over his wife’s shoulder in the torchlight. He gave a half-whistle, exclaimed, ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ and then seized Elizabeth and kissed her, more warmly than he need have done, she thought. She had never seen either of them before.
After dinner, under the punkah in the drawing-room, Elizabeth and her aunt had a talk together. Mr Lackersteen was strolling in the garden, ostensibly to smell the frangipani, actually to have a surreptitious drink that one of the servants smuggled to him from the back of the house.
‘My dear, how really lovely you are! Let me look at you again.’ She took her by the shoulders. ‘I do think that Eton crop suits you. Did you have it done in Paris?’
‘Yes. Everyone was getting Eton-cropped. It suits you if you’ve got a fairly small head.’
‘Lovely! And those tortoise-shell spectacles—such a becoming fashion! I’m told that all the—er—demi-mondaines in South America have taken to wearing them. I’d no idea I had such a ravishing beauty for a niece. How old did you say you were, dear?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Twenty-two! How delighted all the men will be when we take you to the Club tomorrow! They get so lonely, poor things, never seeing a new face. And you were two whole years in Paris? I can’t think what the men there can have been about to let you leave unmarried.’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t meet many men, aunt. Only foreigners. We had to live so quietly. And I was working,’ she added, thinking this rather a disgraceful admission.
‘Of course, of course,’ sighed Mrs Lackersteen. ‘One hears the same thing on every side. Lovely girls having to work for their living. It is such a shame! I think it’s so terribly selfish, don’t you, the way these men remain unmarried while there are so many poor girls looking for husbands?’ Elizabeth not answering this, Mrs Lackersteen added with another sigh, ‘I’m sure if I were a young girl I’d marry anybody, literally anybody!’
The two women’s eyes met. There was a great deal that Mrs Lackersteen wanted to say, but she had no intention of doing more than hint at it obliquely. A great deal of her conversation was carried on by hints; she generally contrived, however, to make her meaning reasonably clear. She said in a tenderly impersonal tone, as though discussing a subject of general interest:
‘Of course, I must say this. There are cases when, if girls fail to get married it’s their own fault. It happens even out here sometimes. Only a short time ago I remember a case—a girl came out and stayed a whole year with her brother, and