I’ve had large English breakfasts before, but this is…ridiculous.
“All right,” I say to the Deacon. “Why is this called ‘the Full Monty’? What does ‘Full Monty’ mean?”
“It means, approximately—‘everything’ or ‘the whole thing.’” He is already busy forking the fried stuff into his mouth in that insufferable way the Brits do—fork upside down and held in his left hand, blob of food teetering impossibly on the fork’s backside, keeping the knife in his right hand to carve through the gelatinous mass.
“What does ‘Full Monty’ mean?” I persist. “Where’d the phrase come from? Who’s Monty?”
The Deacon sighs and sets down his fork. Jean-Claude, obviously more interested in the view of the mountains than in his food, is looking out through the window at the bright Darjeeling morning.
“There are different etymological theories on ‘the Full Monty,’ Jake,” intones the Deacon. “The one I think most likely to be true comes from the tailoring business of a certain Sir Montague Burton, begun, I believe, shortly after the turn of the century. Burton offered that most oxymoronic of things—well-tailored suits for the common bourgeois man.”
“I thought all you English fellows had tailored suits…what did you call it when you bought mine in London?” I said. “Bespoke.”
“That certainly applies to the upper classes,” said the Deacon. “But Sir Montague Burton sold such tailored suits to men who might wear a suit just a few times in their adult lives—one’s own wedding, one’s children’s weddings, friends’ funerals, one’s own funeral, that sort of thing. And Burton’s stores specialized in lifelong tailoring of the same suit, so as the bourgeois gent expanded, so did his suit. Nor was the cut ever of such a sort that it would, as you Bostonians would say, ‘go out of style.’ Burton started with one shop, in Derbyshire, I believe, and within a few years had a chain of stores all over England.”
“So asking for the Full Monty means…what? I want the whole suit? The whole thing?”
“Exactly, my dear chap. Coat, trousers, waistcoat…”
“Vest,” I correct.
The Deacon squints again. Actually, this time, I have squirted him with juice as I knifed into one of the sausages.
I start to say something sarcastic but stop with my mouth open as the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen—or would ever see—walks into the room.
I can’t adequately describe her. I realized that decades ago when I first attempted to write these memoirs without the death sentence of cancer hanging over me. I had to abandon the attempt then when I came to describing…her. Perhaps I can tell you a little bit about what she was by describing what she was not.
This is 1925: stylish women have a certain look. To be stylish in 1925 means the woman has to be flat-chested as a boy (I’d heard that there are breast bands and other such underwear sold to produce that effect for those ladies not lucky enough to come by flat-chestedness naturally), but this woman entering the room with Pasang by her side definitely has breasts, although she isn’t flaunting them. Actually, her shirt—and it really is more of a shirt than a lady’s blouse—is of a fine linen but otherwise cut much like a working man’s field shirt. It does not hide her curves.
A fashionable woman in 1925 will have her hair cut short, parts of it curled—the floozies in Boston and New York and London go in especially for spit curls—or, better yet, especially for the smart set, bobbed short. This woman with Pasang has long hair, dropping in rich natural curls below her shoulders.
The fashionable hair color for ladies in 1925 is blond bordering on platinum; this woman has hair so dark as to be both blue and black at the same time. The highlights on the ebony curls flicker and dance with the movement of sunlight on her long hair. The sophisticated sort of society women I’d met through Harvard and the whores I’d met in Boston speakeasies had mostly plucked their real eyebrows and then penciled in the skinny, high-arched fake brows that Jean Harlow would soon make so popular worldwide. This woman striding toward our table has rich black eyebrows that arch only slightly but which seem infinitely expressive.
And her eyes…
When she is at the base of the stairway twenty-five feet away, I think that her eyes are blue. At twenty feet, I realize that I’m wrong—the color of her eyes is ultramarine.
Ultramarine is a strange and rare color: beyond sea blue, even beyond the deeper blue artists call marine blue. When my mother included ultramarine in her paintings, which was rarely, she would use her thumb to crush small balls of pure lapis lazuli into powder, wet the powder with drops of water from a glass or with her own saliva, and then, using strong, sure jabs of her palette knife, mix tiny amounts of that overpoweringly strong tone—ultramarine—into the seascape or skyscape on which she was working. In the slightest excess, it’s disturbing, unbalancing. In just the right amount, it’s the most beautiful color in existence.
This woman’s eyes have just the right shade of ultramarine to complete and complement the rest of her beauty. Her eyes are perfect. She is perfect.
She strides across the room with Pasang to her right and only half a step behind her, and both stop behind the empty chair at the head of our table, the Deacon on her right and J.C. and me gawking from her left. The Deacon, J.C., and I stand to greet her, although I admit that my standing is more of a springing upward. Jean-Claude is smiling. The Deacon is not. Pasang is carrying a pile of books and what appear to be rolled maps, but my eyes have no time to linger on Pasang or my friends.
Besides the beautiful linen shirt-blouse, this woman is wearing a broad belt and a riding skirt—breeches, really, but looking like a skirt—of what appears to be the softest, richest suede in the world. Suede well and evenly bleached to even subtler hue and greater softness by high Darjeeling sunlight. It’s almost as if she’s here in tea plantation work clothes (if work clothes were ever perfectly tailored). Her equestrian boots are such as those a lady would wear while riding in tall grass or snake country and look to be made of a leather so soft that I think it can only have been formed from the hides of newborn calves.
She stands at the head of the table, and Pasang nods to each of us in turn. “Mr. Richard Davis Deacon, Monsieur Jean-Claude Clairoux, Mr. Jacob Perry, it is my pleasure to introduce to you Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort.”
Lady Bromley-Montfort nods to each of us as we are introduced, but she does not offer to shake hands. She is wearing thin leather gloves that match her boots.
“Mr. Perry and Monsieur Clairoux, a pleasure to meet you at long last,” she says and turns to the Deacon. “And you, Dickie, my cousins Charlie and Percy used to write to me about you all the time when we were all young. You were quite the wild child.”
“We were expecting Lord Bromley-Montfort,” the Deacon says coolly. “Is he nearby? We have expedition business to discuss.”
“Lord Montfort is at our plantation only a thirty-minute ride up into the hills,” says Lady Bromley-Montfort. “But I’m afraid he will not be available to you.”
“Why is that?” demands the Deacon.
“He is in a crypt at the tea plantation,” says the woman, her amazing eyes remaining clear and fixed on the Deacon’s face. She seems almost amused. “Lord Montfort and I were married in London in 1919, before we came back to India, to the plantation where I had been raised and which I had been running. I became Lady Bromley-Montfort, and eight months later Lord Montfort passed away from dengue fever. The climate in India never really agreed with him.”