How to Disappear by Duncan Fallowell

Author:Duncan Fallowell [Duncan Fallowell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

The night winds dropped, the following day was again sunny, and Eigg glowed with warmth. The principal house of the island is called the Lodge and is the seat of the Laird. I found it down a winding lane among sheltered woods. The tranquillity was deep and birdsong enhanced it. Even the sea which is everywhere at hand on Eigg could not be heard here. Propping my bike against mildewed gates, and trusting that the weight of the machine would not bring to ground the tenuous fretwork of wood, I ventured up the drive. The site was deserted. Rhododendrons and blue & white hydrangeas, running continuously along either side, were interrupted every so often by outrageous palm trees. At the top of a low rise, and at a considered angle, a villa appeared in a glade. It had a steeply pitched roof and was flanked by matching pavilions. To the left was a derelict tennis court, to the right an orchard thoroughly overgrown.

I stood for some time staring at the broken red clay of the tennis court and I recalled another lodge, of exactly the same reddish colour as the court, which I’d visited many years before with Sarah Moffett in New Delhi, the Viceregal Lodge of the Viceroys of India. There is endless debate about the correct term for this Versailles of British India. Someone told us it should be called ‘Viceregal Lodge’ without the definite article. Someone else said no, it should be called ‘Viceroy’s House’ because ‘Viceregal Lodge’ was the place up at Simla – which does make more sense. And I recalled those wartime invitations to Bapsy Pavry which I’d seen in Winchester – they’d been sent from ‘The Viceroy’s House’, but of course war changes things, even little things like that. What I remember most poignantly from that morning in 1975 when Sarah and I had tea with the President of India, in what was no longer called Viceroy’s anything but ‘the Raj Bhavan,’ was that she and I broke away from the main party, left them to their porcelain cups and pink and lemon iced cakes, in order to explore the gardens. Sadly these were neglected. The peacocks had vanished, the ornamental fountains and tanks were dry. And we came to a tennis court similarly derelict, and we sat beside it with the long grass round our legs until I detected a lump beneath my foot, and rummaging in the tangled undergrowth I extracted an ancient blackened tennis ball which had obviously been struck and forgotten many years before by a departing British Raj player. I wish now I’d kept it as a souvenir, that very last viceregal tennis ball, but instead I flung it the length of an unkempt terrace where it disappeared once again into the maw of history.

A rasping arpeggio of bird noise recalled me from the Indian Empire to the Lodge at Eigg where my two feet were firmly anchored to the earth. The bird spoke again – a magpie – that unpleasant rattling call.

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