East of the Sun (16 page)

YWCA, Bombay. Extract from Viva Holloway’s diary, November 9, 1928

I
must write down what happened before it fades. Guy Glover is a rat, he laid a trap for me; he begged me to stay behind with him to meet his parents, who had taken a four-day train journey from Assam where Mr. Glover is a tea planter. Given Guy’s state of mind (incredibly erratic over the last few days: he says he hears voices through the wireless, or some such nonsense; hasn’t slept, smells, no washing, etc.), I felt this right thing to do. Also wanted to collect the balance of the money agreed toward my fare.

Frank had agreed to stay behind to give his professional medical opinion on Guy (Dr. Mackenzie having washed his hands of the whole thing), in case things got sticky for me, but at the last minute was needed urgently in the san. So I was left to deal with things on my own.

Ten minutes before they arrived, he started to chain-smoke and, at one point, got up, went outside, and banged his head against the wall. When I went to see him he said, to my utter amazement, “I tried to love you, but you’ve made things very
difficult for me.” All I could think of to say was, “Guy, why don’t you sit down and have a cup of tea.” How ridiculously English!

Eventually, thank God, they came. She, Gwen Glover, drab, tearful little partridge of a woman; Mr. G., a red-faced blusterer who immediately shook Guy’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Well done, old boy, you got here in the end,” etc., etc. “Nice and hot, isn’t it?” to me, and “Have you both had fun?” Fun! wld not be my word for it.

For the first five or ten minutes, Guy played the part of the prodigal son quite well, but when we started to collect his things, Guy suddenly left the room, slamming the door behind him.

While Guy was out of the room I handed over the two letters the school had given me for them. Mr. Glover stuffed them in his pocket. He said he didn’t have time to read them now, which made me wonder whether he didn’t know already about the thieving, the exam results, etc.

I tried to explain (v. quickly, and perhaps, in my anxiety, not v. well) the nervous strain Guy appeared to have been under on the voyage out, and how he’d been under doctor’s orders, and then—it only seemed fair to tell them—about how he’d been seen banging his own head against the ship’s railings.

“But this is preposterous,” Mr. Glover said, turning redder. “Are you suggesting my son is not mentally sound?”

“Yes, I think I am,” I said. Perhaps I should have been more noncommittal.

Mrs. Glover started to cry and said something like, “I knew something like this would happen,” and “It was only a matter of time.”

Mr. Glover said, “Shut up, Gwen,” and then, to me, “How dare you.” He then marched outside and got Guy.

“Sit down on that bed, Guy,” he said, very much the black
and white man who would sort this silly mess out in no time at all. “Miss Holloway claims you got involved in some fisticuffs on board. Thumped a fellow or got thumped or something.”

Guy seemed to have forgotten his declaration of love a few moments before. He looked at me very coldly and shook his head. “She’s a liar,” he said. “And she drinks; she said to put it all on your bill.”

At that precise and hideous moment, Guy’s steward came in with another armful of chits, still unpaid from our bar bill. Mr. G., with the air of one handling contaminated mouse droppings, spread them out on the bed. (Mrs. G. by this time whimpering and plucking at her dress.)

Mr. G. got out a pad and a silver pencil: “One bottle Pouilly-Fuissé, one bottle Beaumes de Venise…” By the time he was finished, the bill was nearly ten pounds—the little rat had been drinking on the sly.

Mr. G.’s head seemed to swell with rage like a puff adder’s. I was accused of being a drunken, irresponsible liar. If I hadn’t been drinking so much I would have been more sensitive to the finer feelings of a boy who hadn’t, due to circumstances beyond their control, seen his parents for ten years and was understandably nervous. In conclusion, he had no intention of paying me my money, I was jolly lucky not to be handed over to the police.

Perhaps there was some fear behind his bluster: when I invited him to talk to the ship’s doctor to verify my story, he didn’t reply, but instead offered magnanimously to pay off the bar chits, provided I signed a note saying I would pay him off in installments. While all this was going on, Guy, who is either very mad or very clever, stared grandly at the wall as if he had no part in it.

They left on the night train to Assam. One of my last gestures to Guy was to put the packet of phenobarbitone in his pocket. He walked off between his parents, and then ran back
to me, whispering, “
Non illegitimi te carborundum
—don’t let the bastards get you down.” How dare he!

While Guy was trying to hug me, I caught sight over his shoulder of a smartly dressed Indian man staring at both of us. He took our photograph, shook his head, and sneered at us as though we disgusted him. It was a very odd moment and all I can assume is that we had offended his modesty by touching in public. There was a man beside him trying to pull him away.

Guy left, and I was on my own again in the middle of Apollo Bunder…with dozens of porters swarming around me. I asked a tonga driver to take me to the YWCA, which Miss Snow had told me was a cheap, clean, respectable safe place to stay.

I’m paying two rupees a night here for a single room. The double is three but I simply couldn’t stand the idea of sharing, not after what happened. My room, though small (about twelve foot by ten), overlooks a huge and beautiful tree (must buy tree book). It has a single iron bed, a table, and a cupboard in the hall where I can hang clothes.

The clientele, as far as I can make out, consists of a mixture of working Englishwomen and Indian women, most working in Bombay as missionaries, students, or teachers. The management seem friendly tho’ authoritarian. LOTS OF RULES.

I can just about afford the per diem, but even this small amount frightens me. I HAVE NO MONEY, or practically none, and if the check for my first article does not come through, must try and start any kind of paid work right away.

Later

The lights-out bell here goes at 10:30 p.m.; doors are locked at 11:00 p.m.

Toward dusk, I went out into the street where the air felt warm and silky. At the corner of the street, an old man was
sitting on his heels making bhel puris in a frying pan. The taste of them overwhelmed me.
I’m home,
I thought. Ridiculous, really, because Bombay was never home to me. The puri seller was delighted by my custom—and my groans. When I was finished, he washed my hands in a bowl of water he kept beside the frying pan. Then he produced a melon and peeled it and sliced it expertly. It was delicious, but I felt I had to pay him extra. I am very worried about money.

The next morning

Woke to cries of water man in street, a cow mooing, motor car, somebody laughing next door.

After breakfast—I ate chapattis and dahl, delicious—I went to look at the noticeboard where three jobs for “respectable English girls” were advertised.

1. Teacher wanted at a local missionary school. Query. Do you have to be very religious (hypocritical in my case) to teach in such a place?
   
2. Lady companion to a Mrs. Van de Velde, who lives near the Jain Temple on Malabar Hill and wants reliable person to organize correspondence, and hopefully play bridge with her. Unless absolutely desperate, I think I’ll avoid being anyone’s companion for a while. G.G. has scarred me for life.
   
3. Advertising agency: J. Walter Thompson seeks English secretary, good typing and shorthand skills. Laxmi Building, the goddess of wealth. Promising. Pity about my nonexistent shorthand. I’ll write anyway.
   

When I asked the lady at the front desk about rents for flats in Bombay she alarmed me very much by telling me that no self-
respecting Englishwoman on her own would live anywhere but either Malabar Hill or in the Colaba district, where the rents are high. But she then told me that some daring souls—mostly social workers and teachers—had moved out into less salubrious suburbs. One Daisy Barker, apparently a “damn fine egg,” has come out here to teach at Bombay University Settlement, an organization based in England that has come to India to teach Indian women at university level. I want to meet her.

Another Englishwoman has also recently passed through, en route to teach at an English school up north. The lady at reception seemed anxious to point out that she was a close friend of the governor’s and could have stayed anywhere but had come here to meet a friend. Although these women are probably exceptions, this conversation gave me courage. So not all women out here are of the Gin and It, pig-sticking crowd. It also gave me an idea: why not a series of interviews (perhaps for
Eve
magazine) on these maverick souls? Will write outline tonight.

Work will—
must
—come.

Bombay, four weeks later

A
week before Rose got married, Tor sat on the veranda of Ci Ci’s house in Malabar Hill with her feet up, her face gently stroked by blossom-scented breezes. She was writing a long-overdue letter to her mother, who wrote lengthy letters full of unanswered questions every week. The weather in England was, her mother said, beyond dreadful; Mr. Thaw, the gardener, had been laid up after slipping on wet leaves and breaking his wrist in the drive; it was impossible to find decent hats in Winchester. But anyway, how was Tor, having a wonderful time? Lots of parties and so forth? How did Rose feel about the wedding being put off for two weeks? Jolly cross, she imagined.

Tor, her pen dithering over the page, didn’t quite know how or where to start, for as a matter of fact, far from being cross that the wedding had been delayed, Rose had seemed relieved. “It’s given me breathing space,” Rose had explained in that rather careful way that Tor found worrying. And from a perfectly selfish point of view, Tor had felt thrilled to have two extra weeks with Rose in this fairy-tale house.

The house. Well, how to tell her mother, without sending her completely mad with jealousy, quite how perfect this place was and how well her cousin had done for herself, for Mr. Mallinson, whom Ci said had done clever things in cotton, seemed to be stinking rich even by the standards of Malabar Hill.

From where Tor sat she could see a curved sloping lawn that led down to the Arabian Sea; a terrace bursting with bougainvillea and jasmine blossoms; a dazzling blue sky; and everywhere houseboys, maids, gardeners, sweeping and tidying, raking, washing, picking up, and generally making things perfect.

At this precise moment, six servants were putting up the spectacular maharajah’s tent that Ci had planned as the centerpiece at the wedding reception next week.

The tent—flamenco pink and inlaid with pieces of glass and rich embroideries—was typical of Ci’s famous “touch.” While the other large houses in this exclusive and largely European part of Bombay had plodding names such as Mon Repos or Laburnum, Ci’s was called Tambourine. Inside its marbled hall, a huge glass bird was suspended in a west-facing window where it glowed and spun at sunset as if it had caught fire. Ci’s drawing room was full of sherbet-colored silks and low sofas. In the upstairs guest room, which Tor and Rose shared, there were thick towels in the bathroom and jars of bath salts with wooden dippers in them; a silver-topped biscuit barrel with imported French wafers in it; and a leather stationery folder full of thick cream crested writing paper. She and Rose had hardly been able to believe their luck when they first landed here.

The food was heavenly, too—not all those warmed-up leftovers, or
réchauffées
as her mother preferred to call them, you got at home: nest of warmed mince and tapioca puddings and such like. Here, there were fresh pineapples in the morning and mangoes and oranges warm from the trees. And no one
ever nagged about bathwater or turning lights off or starving people in Africa.

Thinking about it, as Tor was now, chewing the end of her pen, the only real fly in the custard was Geoffrey Mallinson, a large florid man with caterpillar eyebrows, who did go on a bit about the state of the cotton industry in India, which according to him was about to collapse. But even Geoffrey conveniently disappeared each morning, puttering off in his chauffeur-driven car to God knows where, reappearing each night at the chota peg, the cocktail hour.

Tor unscrewed the top of her pen and sighed. This was agony; there were so many things her mother seemed to want to know. Clearly, her main question—“Are you meeting lots of nice young men out there?”—hid the cruder sum of “Has our expenditure on frocks, tickets, etcetera, made the overall investment worthwhile?” And the simple answer to this, given the nonstop round of parties and picnics Ci had organized, could easily have been: “Mother, it’s looking promising.” For there were dozens of single men here.

And, one morning while they were drinking coffee on the veranda, Ci had spelled out in clinical, and to Tor slightly shocking, detail exactly the sort of young man she should look for during her time here.

“The civil service is usually absolutely top drawer,” she’d drawled, “and a very good catch dead or alive—you get three hundred a year as their widow, so in some ways,” a big wink here, “better dead than alive. I’m joking of course, darling.”

Tor had already forgotten the other categories of people Ci had suggested, but remembered cavalry officers being high on the list—preferably members of English rather than Indian, which was a bit of a slap in the eye for Jack.

Her hostess had also given her dire warnings about the Chi Chi girls, the half-Indian, half-European girls, some of them, according to Ci, impossibly glamorous and “real predators—
they have absolutely no scruples about moving in and breaking up engagements. But don’t worry, my petal,” this disturbing little chat ended with a pat on Tor’s knee, “they’ll be falling over you soon, particularly if we…” but the sentence had ended vaguely in a haze of cigarette smoke, and this time anyway Tor was determined to err on the side of caution. Although several men had taken her telephone number, no one had actually made a pass at her yet, and she knew enough about her mother now to know that when she got her hopes raised high she was dangerous.

When Ci suddenly appeared wearing a lilac-colored kimono and ballet slippers and trailing Arpège, her favorite scent, Tor had to fight the temptation to fall over her page like a child in primary school. Her letter suddenly felt so dull and pedestrian.

During Tor’s first days at Tambourine, almost everything about Ci—the bright red lips, the slouchy walk, the chic clothes—had made Tor feel huge and slow-witted and obvious. But now awkwardness had grown into a kind of hero wor
ship. Careful examination of Ci, Tor felt, could teach her how to be sophisticated and fun and not care so much about what other people thought about her.

“So how’s our little orphan this morning?” Ci ran her long fingernails through the parting in Tor’s hair.

This orphan tag was a new joke between them, for Ci actually had two children of her own—a boy and a girl at boarding schools in England—ghostly figures in silver frames on the mantelpiece. She rarely spoke of them, except in jokes, “my rug rats,” she’d say, or “the ghastly creatures.” Sometimes she read out their faltering communications in piping voices.

Neither child seemed to have made deep imprints on Ci’s life or imagination; all Ci had said about Flora, who seemed on the evidence of the photo to have inherited her father’s rather doggily devoted eyes, was that twelve was a dreadful age and that she hoped by the next holiday she would have become “halfway human.”

“Well!” Ci was glancing through a pile of invitations that had been placed near her chair along with morning coffee. “We are
so
in demand today I don’t know if I can bear it.”

She sliced open the first letter. “Chrysanthemum show. Jan. tenth, Willoughby Club, with tea on the lawn afterward. Thank you, Mrs. Hunter Jones, but no.” She made the letter into a dart and skimmed it into the wastepaper basket. “The most boring woman I’ve ever met.”

Tor giggled.

“Could I trouble you for half a cup more?” Ci ran her red nails along the next envelope. “No sugar…
this
sounds more like it: a moonlight picnic on Chowpatty Beach with the Prendergasts. They’re very good value and have a handsome son. Put it on our possible pile, darling.”

Tor propped the card on the mantelpiece in front of Flora’s hopeful face, now obliterated by a stack of invitations to supper parties, picnics, polo matches, and shoots.

The phone rang. “Malabar 444,” said Ci in her thrilling drawl. She rolled her eyes and handed it to Tor. “
Another
man,” she said audibly, handing the phone to her. “He says his name is Timothy.”

This was a small red-headed man Tor had met the week before at a party at the Taj. Something in forestry. He wanted to know if he could take her out to dinner that weekend. Sorry about the short notice and all that.

“How sweet,” Tor replied. “Do you mind awfully if I phone you back in ten minutes?”

“I’m not sure I want to go,” she told Ci.

“Then don’t, darling,” said Ci. “Plenty more
poisson
.”

This was true in a way, already at the club and at the Taj, where she’d been to cocktail parties and dances, she’d met young naval officers, yummy-looking in their white uniforms, and cavalry officers, businessmen in Bombay to make some killing in jute or cotton, and even though her brush with Jitu had made her more cautious on this count, some high-caste Indian men, some very seductive with their liquid eyes and perfect skin. And although it was true that no one had exactly seized her yet, there’d been plenty of flirting. After the many small humiliations of her London season Tor could hardly believe that now she had some choice in the matter.

“Oh, marvelous!” Ci Ci was opening a large scarlet envelope with a gaudy crest on the back. “Oh, what fun.” She was reading the letter inside. “Goofers will love this. Cooch Behar has asked us to go shooting with him in three weeks’ time. He’s got the most wonderful place.”

Three weeks’ time,
Tor thought.
By then Rose will be married and gone. How strange that’s going to feel.

“‘Sadly places are numbered,’” Ci read on, “‘so please write back at early convenient.’
Early convenient.
I thought he’d been to Oxford. We’ll have to find a babysitter for our little orphan, won’t we, darling. I’m assuming you’ll still be here?”

As she swept her eyes upward, Tor experienced a moment of panic. Where else would she be? At the moment she had no other plans.

“I’d love to stay on for a bit more, if you’ll have me,” she said humbly.

“We’ll see how you behave,” said Ci. “Oh damn.” She had opened another letter and was looking cross. “The Sampsons can’t come to Rose’s wedding, what a bore, which reminds me, I meant to ask you this earlier. Your advice. Last week,” Ci took a quick sip of her coffee, “I had a slightly tense discussion with old frosty knickers, Captain Chandler or whatever his name is, about the reception. I thought it was a bit of a cheek actually, because he seemed to be saying he only wanted about five people he knew really well to come to the party afterward, but our lawn looks completely wrong like that—naked and sort of golf coursey—and I am the hostess, so I’ve invited a few amusing chums of our own to swell the ranks. I don’t think Rose will give a damn either way, do you?”

Tor, flattered that Ci Ci should ask her advice, said without thinking, “No, of course she won’t mind, why should she?” At the time she was rather pleased to hear herself add, “We’ll need a few extra caps and bells,” because it was the kind of confusing but clever remark that Ci might have made. In fact, when she thought about it later, Ci had said it in the club a few nights previously.

And now, how the week had sped by, there were only twenty-four hours to go before Rose’s wedding, and Tor had woken up covered in sweat. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was Rose’s ivory silk wedding dress, hanging up outside the wardrobe; Tor’s bridesmaid’s dress hung beside it like a fat sister.

Tor lay in bed for a moment brooding about the recep
tion. All through the week, the phone had rung more or less continuously, and every time Ci had said, “Darling, do come, you’ll swell the ranks,” Rose had looked pensive and Tor had kept her mouth shut because when she’d relayed the information about the extra guests to Rose, she’d left out the bit about Jack minding, because it was too late to do anything about it and Rose was already in a state and had got quieter and quieter as the wedding day drew nearer.

When Tor went to the window she saw that, outside in the garden, Pandit and his helpers were putting the finishing touches to the maharajah’s tent, which looked magnificent. She watched an antlike stream of servants moving from the house into the garden. They were putting kerosene flares around the edges of the lawn. They were polishing glasses, and hauling tables from the house into the garden. Lots and lots of tables.

At eleven o’clock she and Rose went to have their hair arranged in the salon at the Taj Mahal Hotel, where Rose’s gold silk hair was exclaimed over, as it always was. Both of them were tremendously aware of time that day, remarking on how the hours crawled by in the hot dead afternoon, and then, oh God, only nineteen hours to go and then eighteen hours and so on.

When darkness fell and it was time for their last supper together, they went downstairs, quieter than they usually were and awed by all that was ahead. Rose had been firm about wanting a quiet evening with Tor, and for once, Ci (now upstairs and changing for dinner) had let them decide.

Tor and Rose sat side by side on the veranda listening to the thump of the sea in the distance. In front of them, the darkening shoreline was dotted by thousands of tiny pinprick lights from the kerosene lamps and the open fires of the native quarters—