East of the Sun (20 page)

“Durga and Shukla must have done that,” he said softly. “How sweet they are.”

She bobbed her head and blushed. The bedside of things still made her feel rigid with embarrassment and strangely giggly.

“Where are our clothes?” she said quickly, because even though it was daytime he was looking at her in the gleaming way that made her heart sink.

“Here.” He moved away from her and opened the door into the next room. “It’s a bit of a shambles, I’m afraid, but I wasn’t sure you’d want the servants touching your things.”

Her wedding dress lay in a cotton bag on the floor like a dead body. Beside it was her cabin trunk, now scratched and covered in labels, her tennis rackets, a pile of dresses, the riding clothes she’d worn at school, all in a messy pile with his polo mallets, uniforms, and a heap of old regimental magazines.

“I’ll sort all this out,” she said. She was determined to be efficient like Mummy, to take charge of domestic details without fuss. “It’s my job now.”

“Don’t forget you have four servants of your own now,” he said. “You actually don’t have to do a damn thing if you don’t want to.”

Ci Ci had already warned her that the idea of servants cutting down on work was a common myth all husbands had out here. She’d made Rose hoot with laughter with her tales of some straining soup through their turbans, and one (she swore this was true although with Ci Ci you could never tell) using his toes as a toast rack.

“They’ll be your biggest test out here. Rule one,” she’d
raised her finger and bulged her eyes for emphasis, “they are children in everything but name.”

“I know,” Rose told Jack, “but I’d like to do some things myself.”

“Well, do them then,” he said. And did he sound a bit peppery at that moment, or was she simply starting to read too much into everything?

“But I am looking forward to meeting them,” she said just in case he was cross again.

So now, one by one, the servants came out of the shadows to be introduced to her.

First came Durgabai, the maid and cook, a fine-looking local woman with jutting cheekbones and large luminous brown eyes; then Shukla, her seven-year-old daughter, a beautiful replica of her, hiding behind her skirts.

Next came Dinesh, stick thin and immaculate, who bowed without smiling. Jack said Dinesh had been his bearer for the past three years. Next came Ashish, the wash man, the dhobi wallah, who had a withered leg and milky eye and was as shy as the little girl. Durgabai was sweet to her, smiling and wobbling her head and saying, “Greetings, memsahib,” as if to make up for the awkwardness of the others.

Over lunch—pea and ham soup and a dry lamb chop—Rose confided to Jack, partly as a joke, that she found it awfully tricky remembering Indian names, even the faces bewildered her, so many of them looked the same.

He put down his knife and said, quite sharply, that she’d better concentrate because it wouldn’t do at all to offend them. He told her some story about an Indian major in his regiment who had known the names of every man within a week.

She stared miserably at her chop. What a stupid thing she’d said. When she looked up again, two pairs of dark eyes were staring curiously at her from around the door.

Jack barked out some Hindi words and Rose heard staunched giggling as the door closed suddenly.

“What did you say, Jack?” she asked him.

“I told him if he didn’t stop staring at the memsahib, I’d come to his house and stare at his wife.”

“Jack!” she said. “You are naughty.”

“Memsahib,” Durgabai was back again and talking to her directly. “Sorry for interrupting your vital but the dhobi wallah is at the back door.”

Rose looked helplessly at Jack. “What shall I say?”

Jack put down his knife and fork again. “Tell him to come back when we’ve finished lunch, that we do not want to be disturbed. Good practice for you.”

“We are eating our lunch,” she said in a quavery voice to the man. “We do not wish to be disturbed. Sorry.” The door closed.

She swallowed and looked at her hands. “I don’t know if I’m going to be any good at this,” she said. “There’s an awful lot to learn.”

“Give it time,” Jack said. He scratched his head and sighed.

After lunch, Jack took her out to show her what he called “the grounds”—a stretch of concrete with a tiny lawn in it and some clay pots with roses inside that looked as if they could do with a water. All of it would have fitted into their vegetable garden at home.

At the end of the garden was a trellis beyond which she saw a woman sitting in the dirt outside a hut feeding a baby.

“Do you normally have lunch at home?” she’d asked him politely, as they crunched up the gravel path together.

“No, at the mess, or on the trot usually,” he said, flooding her with relief. “But it’s lovely to come home and see you here.”

“Thank you.” She shot him a swift glance. “Heavens,” she squinted up at a cloudless blue sky, “can this really be winter? It’s so beautifully hot.”

“Yes it is, isn’t it?” he said. “But nothing like as hot as summer.”

“I love hot weather.”

“Good.”

He asked her to excuse him for a moment, and he walked back into the house. She stood in the sun in her new sola topi, which felt rather tight, listening to the tinkle of water in the water closet and him clearing his throat. When he came back he seemed pleased to remember something new to tell her.

“Rose,” he said, “Mrs. Clayton Booth may call on you tomorrow. She’s an absolute mine of information about where to shop, servants, and so forth. I hope you don’t mind me fixing this up.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” she said. She stood on her toes and had more or less decided to kiss him when she heard leaves rustling behind the trellis.

“Darling,” Jack pushed her aside, “don’t do that in public anymore. It doesn’t do in front of the servants.”

“Oh.”

“It offends their modesty.”

“I’m sorry, Jack.”

“Oh, Rose, don’t look like that, there
is
so much to learn.”

What was she supposed to look like? Oh drat, she wanted to run into the house now and cry. “Sorry,” she said again in a breathless voice.

When he went inside to collect his things, she stayed in the
middle of her new garden, wondering if she’d made the worst mistake of her life.

When she woke up the next morning, Rose remembered she hadn’t even bothered to read Tor’s letter yet—it was still in her pocket along with the other one.

She’d been dreaming about marmalade, such a strong dream she could almost smell it. Every year, about this time, her mother and Mrs. Pludd made a great to-do of buying the oranges and washing dusty jam saucepans, rinsing jelly bags and writing the labels, and finally unearthing from the cutlery drawer the special spoon, stained from decades of jam, to stir it all up with.

For days the house would smell of oranges. Stars were another thing, or at least the thought that the same stars that twinkled down on you were above her sleeping parents half a world away. Or yesterday, the sight of two young girls jumping over a hose at the club had made her homesick for Tor, not the grown-up Tor, whizzing around Bombay in Ci Ci’s Ford, but the old one who used to go riding with her, or lie on the lawn, dress tucked around her battered knees, sucking daisies and looking for four-leafed clovers and nattering about nothing much in particular during those summer days when time stood still, and there was precious little to worry about.

She got out of bed quietly and felt around in her dress pocket for the two envelopes. So Viva was working, she had a place to stay of her own, how amazing, and then Tor’s invitation to stay making a trickle of tears fall down her cheeks. She ached to go, but knew it would all depend now on so many new things. She sat down at her dressing table, brushing her hair in long rhythmic strokes, and wondered if Jack even liked Tor. Probably not. It bewildered Rose how most men seemed not to see how absolutely wonderful she was—
funny and kind and openhearted and all the things you’d think they’d want.

She put her brush down quietly on the dressing table and turned around to look at Jack. He was fast asleep, one long brown leg over the sheet.

While she was watching him, he made a soft smacking sound with his lips; he raised his arms in a bow above his head and put them down on the pillow. She could see the tufts of damp blond hair showing in his armpits; the fingers that had touched her, there and there.
Oh, for goodness’s sake, you silly woman,
she chided herself, feeling an earthquake of sobs waiting to come out of her. Whatever was the matter with her? She mustn’t cry, not again.

Bombay, February 1929

I
t was starting to get hot in Bombay, a soupy, steamy kind of heat that weighed down on you and made you long for a cleansing burst of rain.

Tor, who had prickly heat, was sitting in a bath of Jeyes Fluid when she heard the phone ring.

A few moments later, Ci, who was getting increasingly snappy about phone calls, shouted through the door, “Someone called Frank, ship’s doctor, wanting someone called Viva. Don’t know what in the hell he’s talking about.”

Tor still felt her heart flutter.

“Hello, stranger in a strange land,” she said when she telephoned him back twenty minutes later. “So, what brings you here?”

Frank said they must meet up and he would tell her all his news later, but in the meantime, did she have any idea where Viva was. He had some urgent news for her.

“Well, that sounds rather exciting,” Tor had drawled. “Might a chap know what it is?”

Maybe he would have explained and maybe not, but Ci Ci
had appeared at that moment smoking furiously and pointing at her watch so there was only time to give him Viva’s address and get off the phone.

Tor had honestly only felt a brief twinge after she’d hung up. In her heart of hearts, she’d always known he was keener on Viva than he was on her. And besides, she had more than enough on her plate now. She was in the throes of what Ci Ci called an
amour fou
, a mad passion.

The affair had begun on December 21, 1928, at about ten-thirty at night, when she’d lost her virginity to Oliver Sandsdown in a hut on Juhu Beach. She made a careful note of it afterward in the little leather diary that her mother had given her for traveler’s tales, “Juhu. Thank God,” later drawing a yellow line around the date and adding some stars. The only casualty of the evening was Ci’s silk Chinese jacket, which got tar on its sleeve.

Ollie had turned up at the Christmas party she and Ci had given at the Bombay Yacht Club. He was a twenty-eight-year-old merchant banker who loved sailing and who had been burned brown by the sun. He was short and dark, and even though Ci didn’t particularly approve—he was too far down her categories—Tor thought him fearsomely attractive because he was so confident. When they’d first met, he’d danced with her and said with a very social smile plastered on his face, “I’d really like to go to bed with you,” which she found both funny and naughty. On the way out to the beach they’d sung “Oh, I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” in the car that he’d driven at a reckless speed. When they’d got to the beach they’d taken off their shoes, and the sand felt warm and heavy between her toes. The moonlit sea had surged onto the beach in a mass of silver and blue lights and on the horizon they had seen the silhouettes of fishermen setting their nets. And then he’d kissed her—not a boy’s let’s-see how-far-I-can-take-this kiss, but a man’s kiss that seemed to claim and demand. Her knees had literally buckled.

The hut itself, which smelled, not unpleasantly, of seawater and dried fish, had a low string bed in the middle of it where he’d taken her efficiently but without any particular ceremony. Afterward, he’d made her stand still in front of him while he arranged her pearls against her nakedness and then he’d chased her into the sea. What her mother would have said about pearls in seawater wouldn’t bear repeating, but she hadn’t given it a thought. Swimming in sea as warm as milk, she’d felt savagely happy. A feeling she’d never had before. And she’d been glad, at that moment, that he wasn’t the thoughtful type who needed to put everything into words. He’d held her again in the water; they’d trailed phosphorescence with their fingers turning the water into ropes of diamonds, and she had felt absolutely exhilarated and released. It was done! Wonderful! Perfect. She didn’t have to worry about it anymore, and she was sure in time she’d get to like it very much indeed.

After they’d swum, he dried her with an old towel, kissed her quickly and buttoned her up clumsily into the silk jacket, getting all the buttons wrong. She’d hoped then he might turn a bit poetic and that they’d stay on the beach and watch the fishermen come home and talk about life, but he said some pals of his were in town and he wanted to have a nightcap with them in the Harbor Bar. They’d ended up in the water splash at the Taj Mahal Hotel.

And Oliver wasn’t the only man interested in her. There was Simon, an ex-Etonian, out in India for the season, mainly for the shooting, who’d taken her out for dinner at the Bombay Yacht Club, and Alastair de Veer, a rather bloodless young civil servant, with whom a fox-trot on the veranda had led to a bombardment of calls that she’d found off-putting. Things were moving in the love department, often, if she was to be honest, faster than she felt she could control, so Frank’s phone call hadn’t ruffled her feathers at all.

Since the night at Juhu Beach, she and Oliver had had sev
eral afternoon assignations in his flat at Colaba Beach. For several days she’d had to powder over the faint bruises he’d left on her neck and right shoulder.

Ci had noticed. “Don’t let him mark you like that.” She’d raised one plucked eyebrow at Tor’s shoulder. “It’s common.”

Which was when Tor, who had gone beetroot red, had tried to change the subject by asking Ci for a huge,
huge
favor. Would it be an awful bore if Rose came for one or two days the following week and had a what-the-hell day?

Ci Ci had introduced Tor to the whole idea of what-the-hell days when she’d first arrived in Bombay. These were days of pure hedonism when you weren’t allowed to be a grown-up and only drank cocktails and saw amusing people and did exactly what you wanted to do for once. She said there was far too much seriousness in the world.

When Ci smiled and replied, “Darling, what a good idea,” Tor’s heart lit up. The Mallinsons’ trip upcountry had fallen through, and Tor had felt the need to defer the invitation to stay that she had extended to Viva and Rose. It had been a shame, as she was longing for a good heart to heart with Rose. There really were times, like now, when so much was happening so fast, when nobody else would do. Rose really listened, really cared, whereas Ci, well, she was fun and wonderful and many things, but not someone you felt you could safely confide in. She was too impatient for that; also Tor was beginning to think it was rather mean of her to talk about other people so wearily as if they were nothing but a bore, or to read out her children’s letters in the squeaking voice she used for them. The girl Flora, who’d been in the san recently with some horrid-sounding thing called impetigo, seemed so homesick, so desperate for love.

Also—or was Tor imagining this?—Ci was changing in other ways. Before, as soon as Geoffrey’s car had puttered down the slope, she’d been full of plans for them both; now she
seemed more secretive, more aloof. She’d shouted at Tor the other day for hogging the phone.

The servants seemed to have noticed, too. Yesterday, when Tor had asked Pandit where the memsahib was, he’d given her an odd sneering look, then opened his palms to show how empty they were. Very disrespectful. Afterward, she’d heard the servants laughing in the pantry.

It made Tor wonder if everybody here knew something she didn’t, or if she was outstaying her welcome, which would be such a shame because she was still having the most wonderful time.

Anyway, Ci had been instantly enthusiastic about Rose coming; she’d even offered to lend her the car. If she hadn’t had wet nail varnish, Tor would have kissed her.

“Are you sure about the car? Why are you so nice to me?”

Ci Ci, who wasn’t a great hugger, had popped a kiss into the air. “Because you’re fun and because your days are numbered. I got a letter from your mother this morning asking me to book your ticket home after the season ends in February.”

It had taken Tor at least a couple of hours to absorb the full impact of this bombshell, and even then she refused to believe it was true. Surely someone would propose to her, or something would turn up. At any rate, it now seemed absolutely and crucially important for her to see Rose as soon as possible.

Jack had answered the phone.

“Please can Rose come out and play with me?” she’d said in her whiny-child voice. “I’ll scream till I’m sick if you don’t.”

And, oh, what a stuffed shirt he was, he’d replied as though she’d been completely serious.

“I’ll have to check diaries, but I think that will be fine.”

He’d droned on about a visiting colonel and company orders as if she was asking him, too, which she definitely wasn’t. Then there was a brief
whoompf
down the line and a thump.

“Tor, oh, darling Torrie,” Rose sang. “I’m so happy to hear you.”

“Rose, this is an emergency,” she said. “You have to come and see me. You can take the Deccan Express and we’ll have a what-the-hell day and a good gup.”

“A what?” Rose’s voice faded through the crackles.

“Play truant, drink champagne, eat chocolates. Rose. I’m bursting, I have so many things to tell you.”

“Hang on a tick.” Subdued murmurings in the background.

“That’s absolutely fine, darling.” Rose was back. “Jack says the ladies’ carriage is perfectly safe.”

Tor didn’t need Jack to tell her that.

But then Jack had surprised Tor by ringing back an hour later and whispering, “I want to give Rose a surprise. Will you buy her a bottle of champagne when you go out to lunch? Tell her it’s from me.”

She doubted whether Ollie would have thought of that.

But then all men found Rose irresistible. Tor had accepted this long ago; she knew she’d always have to work harder.

On Thursday the following week, Tor was sitting crouched forward in Ci’s car sweating with fear. Rose’s train was due in half an hour, and now she was at the wheel flying solo, wondering if she hadn’t slightly exaggerated her competence as a driver. She’d had three lessons in her father’s Austin, lurching up a muddy farm track, and a couple of drives in quiet lanes, but nothing that even remotely prepared her for the seething chaos of Bombay traffic.

Also, Ci’s car, the bottle-green Model T Ford, had been shipped out to India in the hold of the
Empress of India
the year before and was as much revered as a household god at Tambourine. Every morning, Pandit polished the rims of
its chrome headlights to an eye-piercing shine. He tenderly washed the running boards, using an old toothbrush to get between the cracks, and filled up its water tank with fresh water. He put beeswax on the leather seats, and refreshed the mints that lived in the glove box alongside Ci’s kid gloves and little onyx lighter. Tor was sure he would have put garlands of flowers around the mirrors and offerings of rice on the seats had he been allowed.

Bug-eyed with concentration, she turned right into Marine Drive. The traffic wasn’t too bad here. At the traffic lights she stopped and took a deep breath. As she flipped out the little orange indicator and turned left into a whirling maelstrom of rickshaws, bullock carts, bicycles, horses, donkeys, and motor cars, her heart was thumping so loud she could hear it.

“Help,” she cried, veering around the thin form of a rickshaw boy who’d casually drawn out in front of her.

“Oh no!” at the bullock ambling across the street.

“Sorry” to the banana man who had, bent double under his load, made his way barefoot across the street.

Ten minutes later she drove through the gates of the huge and majestic Victoria Terminus Station. She swerved to avoid a beggar and came finally to a head-banging halt in a parking space underneath a palm tree.

She parked the car and ran through the crowd just in time to see the Poona train pull in and Rose, looking almost bizarrely pink and gold in the middle of so many brown faces, step out of first class. She was wearing the pale blue dress they’d chosen together in London. Porters were fighting to carry her case.

“Oh, Rose.” Tor flung her arms around her. “Dearest Piglet. I’ve missed you so.”

As they drove back into the city again, Tor couldn’t resist showing off. “Cigarette, please, young Rose,” she said. “They’re in
the glove box on the left. Oops!” She had to swerve to avoid a man selling peanuts at the gate. “Sorry!” she sang out gaily.

“So,” said Tor when they stopped at the traffic lights, “here’s the plan: first stop, Madame Fontaine’s to get the hair done. There’s a girl there called Savita who is a wonderful cutter. Then, lunch and a good gup at the club—I haven’t properly told you about my party yet—and then I’m going to drive you home to the Mallinsons’ for a chota peg and then some friends may call, and we might go out dancing.”

Rose clapped her hands. “Oh, Tor,” she said, lying her head lightly on Tor’s shoulder. “I can’t believe you’re allowed to do all this.”

“Well, I am,” said Tor, breathing out smoke in a film-starry way, “but for God’s sake, don’t tell my mother. The silly woman already wants me home.” She said this so lightly that Rose said nothing and Tor was glad—the last thing she wanted Rose to feel on a day like this was sorry for her.

When they turned down Hornby Road they both shrieked at the sight of a small boy and his father urinating against a wall.

“Isn’t it awful how they just let fly here,” said Tor and they started to laugh. “I thought we’d outlawed it. So rude!” she said in the voice of their old headmistress.

“Oh, that reminds me.” Rose took a shopping list from her handbag. “One minor request. Would it be a frightful bore if we looked at net curtains at the Army and Navy? I’ve seen some plain white muslin ones in their catalog for twelve and six. I need some for my spare room.”