Guests can take afternoon tea in the sitting room, dominated by a picture of the youthful Elizabeth II, or in Daisy’s Music Room. It was in the latter that I drank the ‘Champagne of Teas’ (not quite as terrible as the coffee made with Art) and then had a Bloody Mary. The pianist, playing on a slightly less tinny upright, entertained me with standards by Cole Porter, Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Noeël Coward. As she tickled the ivories with her customary panache, I flicked through some of the many photograph albums on a side table. They dated back to 1912 – the year the chain-action water closets were installed. Daisy was the daughter of the original owner of Windamere, and can be seen kitted out for tennis or on a croquet lawn with her parents. The photos tell the story of the Raj in miniature – men in linen suits or in the uniform of their regiment; a whole ensemble of bored-looking women, their pearls on prominent display, daring the camera to conceal their boredom. Everybody dressed for dinner, and everyone got blotto (the mot juste) at Christmas, to judge by the expressions captured for posterity.
In 1994, the Windamere was ruled over by the beaming woman I had seen in the restaurant. She walked with the aid of a stick. The pianist told me that Madam, as she was addressed by the ‘boys’ and maids who worked there, was related to the Sikkim Royal Family. Madam came into Daisy’s Music Room, mid-Gershwin, and said to the pianist, ‘Tea in the private dining room at four tomorrow.’ The musician was overcome. ‘In the private dining room, Madam. What an honour.’
When her bravura performance was done, the pianist and I went out on to the terrace, with its breathtaking view of the Himalayas. ‘I sigh for the old England,’ she announced. She gasped for breath at the end of each sentence. ‘No more lovely pounds, shillings and pence,’ she boomed. ‘Nothing but decimal, decimal.’ Yes, she had lived in London, but not when the socialists were in power. And yes, she was Anglo-Indian, but with the emphasis very much on the Anglo. Would she go back to London? ‘Good God, no. Not while Harrods is owned by an Arab.’ I said how much I loved the music she had just been playing, and she observed that she was trying, with little success, to bring her repertoire up to date. ‘There only seems to be Mr Lloyd Webber on the musical horizon.’
On my last morning, I ordered scrambled eggs again, hoping that something pleasingly yellow would appear on my plate. It was a vain hope. They were as grey as before, but there was no mashed potato. A curled-up strip of bacon, mostly fat, was the only accompaniment.
Mitalee came to the hotel for a farewell lunch. We were on the terrace when the pianist appeared, clutching a gin and tonic. ‘Are you going to entertain us for lunch?’ I asked. ‘No, no, no,’ she responded. ‘I only do cocktails and dinner. If I did luncheon as well, I’d be whacked.’
We travelled back to the city of plump sacred cows and famished stray dogs, of vibrant life and reeking death, by overnight train. I was glad to be returning to the real world after my brief sojourn in that make-believe Raj, with its dreadful, ultra-English food, and those diminutive servants literally bowing and scraping.
Shortly before I checked out, I saw Madam talking to an American. I learned that he had married into her (royal) family and was now the proud owner of the Windamere. The myth of the undying Raj was being sustained from the other side of the Atlantic. Perhaps it still is, and no doubt the scrambled eggs are still grey.
I phoned Jeremy from Calcutta, telling him about the Windamere and its antiquated ways. And he assured me that Circe was in exuberant health, bothering the bewildered Max with her unsubtle advances.
Scrap
The house on the corner was owned for many years by a one-eyed Serb with a mouthful of metal teeth. Its occupants were notable for the pall of depression and failure that hung over them. They were men of all ages, each one of whom had a woefully familiar story to tell, if anyone had ever felt inclined to listen to it. They lived in the upper rooms, which were sparsely furnished – wardrobe, bed, table, chair – beneath a solitary light bulb dangling from the ceiling. They came and went, these drifters – some making their exit in the middle of the night; others dying on the premises or in the local hospitals. The house on the corner would have been the perfect setting for The Lower Depths, Maxim Gorky’s play about the terminally dispossessed in a town in Tsarist Russia.
There was one regular tenant, who lived on the ground floor. Brian was very fat when I first saw him in the 1970s, but in two decades he grew to be enormous. He was a scrap merchant, dealing in anything discarded he could sell for a small profit. His lorry was often parked outside a nearby betting shop. I can’t remember when he abandoned his profession, but it must have been towards the end of the 1980s, when the lorry became a permanent fixture yards from my front door. Brian was now too large to fit into the driver’s seat, and the strain of adjusting his belly behind the wheel was making him angry and upset.