East of the Sun (24 page)

For a moment she looked at him suspiciously, wondering if he was beefing up the danger in an effort to impress her.

William had been good at this: bundling her onto the inside of a pavement out of the path of a nonexistent car or horse, or lecturing her about men and what cads they could be—a bit of a joke in retrospect.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” said Frank, looking back at her.

“Not at all,” she said calmly.

“Nothing may come of it,” he said. “I’m simply passing on the facts.”

“Do you think the parents knew he was mad?” she said.

“It’s possible. It solves the problem of why they thought he needed a chaperone at his age.”

“All right,” she said after a pause, “but I still don’t quite see what I can do about this.”

“Lock your doors for a start, be careful about who you ask back to your room. One of the diagrams his mother found was of the house in Jasmine Street. She has a hunch he may have got himself a room nearby. There’s a distinct possibility he has a sort of fixation on you.”

“Oh God.” Viva shook her head. “What a mess. But I don’t ask people into my room,” she said, looking at him.

He looked straight back at her.

“Good,” he said.

“Is that all?” she said.

“No, not quite. There’s one more thing. The police came to see me. I have no idea how they found me, but they asked if I knew anything about the All India Muslim League. They’re a political party actively campaigning for a separate Muslim India.”

“Why would Guy be involved in that? He never said a word about politics.”

“No? Well, he may not be involved, but there are a number of young Englishmen out here actively working for them—some see themselves as radicals, others see it as a way of blocking India’s independence. Some of his new chums on the
fringes of the film industry are not what they seem: they’re revolutionaries, political hotheads. It suits their purpose to infiltrate a world where many Europeans and Indians mix more freely. Some of them are violently against Gandhi’s policies of nonviolence, if that makes any sense to you.”

“Not much.”

“Well, what it means is that when the time comes to boot the British out some of them think we should leave with a bloody nose.”

“I still don’t see what I’ve got to do with all this,” said Viva.

Frank blew out a plume of smoke. He looked worried.

“I don’t know yet either, and I might be wrong about all of this, but he’s an obsessive and you are on his list and my fear is that if he starts coming round to see you, he won’t stop and then the police will think you’re involved, too.”

While they’d been talking, she could see Moustafa out of the corner of her eye, hovering with menus, and now he broke into their conversation, chiding them for looking so serious, and insisting they ate tonight’s best dish, which was spicy meatballs and naan bread.

“He’s right, you know,” smiled Frank. “Let’s eat and forget the ghastly child.”

So they ate, and afterward they took their coffee out on the street where the air felt warm and heavy. “Somebody’s singing,” he said softly, and then she heard it, too, from the house across the street: the jostling sound of Indian drums, and then the sound of a woman’s voice, nasal and sad, swooping up and down the register.

“I’m starting to love it here,” she told him. “It’s really got under my skin again.”

“Me too,” he said. “And I don’t know why.”

It didn’t seem to matter what she wanted—some of the shyness had gone between them. Over their liqueurs, when he talked to her about Chekhov, whose short stories he had just discovered, his face lit up with pleasure, and it had occurred to her again that she may have misjudged him. He was intelligent and passionate about life. She liked the way you could see him working out a thought in his head, processing it like a philosopher before he spoke. The sight of the loose button on his linen suit made her feel she would like to sew it back on again, a feeling of tenderness she tried to squash. So many girls had had crushes on him on the ship that not being bowled over by him had given her a different kind of feeling, almost, you could say, a thrill.

She wanted to hold on to it.

In order to get back to this, she asked him what it was like to work at the hospital.

“It’s like Blake’s vision of heaven and hell,” he told her. “Some parts of it are so primitive, but it’s so interesting, too. I’ve been given more responsibility there after two months than I would in twenty years in England.”

Then he did something William had almost never done: he stopped talking about himself and asked her about her life.

“Have you been up to Simla yet?” he said.

With a shock, she remembered she must have told him at some point about the trunk without telling him about her parents. It was hard sometimes keeping all her evasions clear, even in her own mind.

“No,” she said, “not yet.”

“Ah,” he said. “That was where your parents lived.” It was more of a statement than a question, and she could feel him thinking again behind that intelligent gaze, trying to put it all together.

“Yes,” she said, “years and years ago.”

“Ah.” When he held her gaze for a moment, she felt cor
nered, a little panicked, so she told him about the children she was meeting at Tamarind: their gaiety; their incredible bravery; how determined they were to survive.

“Will you write about them?” he asked. He’d remembered that, too, and she could do nothing about the quiet spurt of happiness that followed. “That was what you said you’d come to do. To write.”

“If I could do that, well,” she said, “that would be something.”

“You’ll do it,” he said. “I can feel you will.”

That was all. And when he didn’t even try to kiss her on the way home, she was not disappointed.

He’s right,
she thought,
I will do it.

Lying in her bed an hour later, having drawn her curtains against the stars, she was surer than ever it was a job she needed, not a man.

Bombay, April 1929

A
pril came in like a fire-breathing dragon and Viva and Rose both got a telephone call from Tor. The Mallinsons, finding the heat unbearable, had taken themselves off to a hotel in the hill station of Mahabaleshwar for three weeks. Tor had the house to herself. She needed them to come and stay with her. Simple as that. She was tempted to add “It’s an emergency,” but hoped if she had enough baths and drank enough gin, she could keep one mortifying secret to herself.

Rose—the reliable—had phoned immediately, saying of course she would love to come, for a week if that was convenient. Jack was all for it (
Oh, hooray for Jack,
thought Tor sarcastically) because the weather in Poona had been almost as hot as in Bombay, and he knew she’d be more comfortable in Ci Ci’s house.

“If we swim,” she warned, “it has to be in private and you’re not to laugh at my cossie—I look like a baby whale in it.” She was four months pregnant.

Viva, to her considerable surprise, had also responded quickly. She said she was working at some children’s home,
and could stay only one night or two at the most. She’d work during the day but they could spend the evenings together. Tor could hardly wait to see them.

On the day before they came, Tor woke, as she had on every one of the mornings since her monthly period had failed to arrive, sweating with fear and pleading with God to put her out of her misery. For the rest of the day she made the
bhisti,
the water man, run up and down the stairs, bringing hot water in relays to her bathroom. She’d already taken five miniatures of Gordon’s gin from Ci Ci’s drinks cabinet and hidden them underneath her bed in the guest room. She’d almost fainted after her second bath and stubbed her toe painfully on her bed, but nothing had happened. Between baths, she’d stumbled around in the glare and scorching heat of the garden.

As she wobbled down the path, one of the gardeners had stopped her to show her a row of dead mynah birds, their beaks sticky with blood. He’d demonstrated to her with a graphic flapping of arms how the heat had burst their lungs, and then laughed as if this was a tremendous joke. And then, as if this wasn’t enough, when she’d sat in the pond garden in a state, all she could hear through the shimmering air was the cry of the brain-fever birds that got on everybody’s nerves at this time of year with their monotonous cries of
It’s getting hotter! It’s getting hotter! It’s getting hotter!
, as if anybody needed reminding.

Thank God Rose and Viva were coming, she thought. She was definitely going mad.

By three-thirty that afternoon, when the mercury in the thermometer was hovering at 107 degrees, she was determined to try one more time. She called Balbir, the water man, up to her room, and when she ordered him to fill up another bath with the hottest water he could find, she could feel the man, whose brown skin was already slick with sweat, practically rolling his
eyes in disbelief at her folly. What kind of mad madam sahib took boiling-hot baths in weather like this?

Someone, Ci Ci’s ayah probably, a sharp-faced little woman who padded around noticing everything, must have found the empty gin bottles. She’d pulled them out from under the bed and arranged them in a neat row on top of the dressing table as if to say, “I know what you’re up to.”

Rose was due at four, and while she waited for her, Tor padded around the house barefoot, leaving footprints on the wooden floors, trying to decide on the coolest bedroom to put her in. She settled eventually on a shuttered room at the back of the house that had pretty chintz curtains and a huge fan. She told Dulal, the boy who worked the tatti mats, that when Madam Sahib Chandler came he must work extra hard to keep her cool because she was, and she’d sketched the outline of a large tummy with her hands, like that. Dulal, who was young and handsome and rather impertinent, had stared at her and laughed out loud, bringing on a fresh burst of insecurity.

Why was he laughing at her like that? Did everyone know about the gin bottles now?

Rose was here. Plumper but still pale and beautiful, even with her bob half grown out. She was wearing a blue maternity dress and when she flung her arms around Tor and said, “Oh golly, I’ve missed you,” Tor felt the hard bump of Rose’s tummy against hers and had to bite the inside of her lip to stop herself crying. Why did Rose always do things so well, and she always get things so wrong?

Rose looked so happy to see her, and Tor, not wanting to spoil things immediately, took her out to the veranda for tea and cakes.

Rose sank into a deep chair. “Oh, thank the Lord,” she said, crossing her perfect legs. “What bliss to feel halfway cool again.”

They gossiped for a while about this and that, and after tea, Rose fell asleep in her chair in the dormouse way Tor remembered from their childhood when, after a day’s hunting, Rose would eat her boiled egg and collapse in a heap over the kitchen table.

Tor looked down on her while she slept. What a wonderful friend she was, coming to see her immediately and making it sound like the only thing she wanted to do. She put a cushion behind her head and crept upstairs again.

There was just time, she estimated, for one more bath before supper. Pandit, who had to go off to find the water man, who was probably in his hut having supper, stomped off downstairs and made no secret of his irritation this time. He was bound to tell Ci when she came back.

Quarter of an hour later, she sat in her bath, naked and weeping.
Please, God; please, God; please, God. Please don’t make me have this baby.
She drank another tumbler of gin from her toothbrush glass, crying “
Urggh
hideous!” as it went down. Even at the best of times she hated gin. After a few more minutes, feeling dizzy and sick, she got up and saw her lobster reflection in the steaming bathroom cabinet. She got out of the bath, dried herself slowly and cleaned her teeth, still waiting for the miracle to happen. Nothing—just that damn bird still mocking outside the window:
hotter, hotter, hotter…

Time to get dressed. To cheer herself up, she put on a favorite midnight blue dress, and then one of Ci’s embroidered jackets—too tight now that she was putting on weight again—a double row of pearls, “one row far too timid” was one of Ci’s maxims, and went downstairs. She was determined not to spoil the evening yet.

“Tor, are you all right?” Rose said, as she walked into the living room. “You look puce. Are you sickening for something?”

At that moment, Chanakya, the lighting man, walked in with a glowing taper to ignite the oil lamps on the veranda, and then another servant with a plate of cheese straws. Tor shot them a significant look. “We had one but the wheels fell off,” she said casually to Rose—their warning code to each other for as long as they could remember for “can’t talk now.”

Pandit arrived in his snowy evening uniform, his mustache bristling and officious, to ask them what time they would like to dine. He’d brought soda fountains and glasses with whiskey in them, and small bowls of olives and cheese canapés.

Tor, who always ate more when she was worried or upset, ate two canapés quickly. What was the point of following Ci’s ridiculous diets now?

“Come on, Piglet, out with it,” Rose said when Pandit had gone. “Something’s up.”

Tor took a deep breath and was about to answer when the doorbell rang. Viva had arrived, on the back of a motorbike driven by one of her friends from the children’s home. She burst through the door, her hair wild and dusty, and carrying her clothes in an old satchel.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “There was a huge demonstration opposite the VT Station. They were burning Union Jacks; there were fire engines, policemen. I didn’t actually think I’d get here at all.”

“Oh, they’re at it all the time now,” said Tor. “It took me a whole hour to get to the races the other day; the road was blocked by Gandhi supporters sitting down. They may call it a peaceful demonstration, but it blocked the traffic for hours. Do you think they’ll stop it soon?”

It was a relief to have something sensible to talk about, for she was aware of the worried way Rose was looking at her.

“No, I don’t,” said Viva. “Quite a few of the children we see
at the home are already Gandhiji’s girls. I think he’ll change everything forever.”

“Oh well, politics.” Tor dismissed the subject with a wave. “Geoffrey Mallinson’s so obsessed we actually fine him now for mentioning Gandhi—I mean, what a bore sitting there in his nappy spinning. Look, would anybody like a wash before dinner? V?”

Tor followed Viva up to Ci’s elegantly marbled bathroom. She poured water into the basin so Viva could wipe the dust from her face. “Thank you for coming, Viva,” she said.

“Well, you said it was an emergency.”

“Oh, that,” Tor said lightly. “Just an excuse to get you here.”

Viva gave her a searching look. “Sure?”

“Let’s have dinner first and talk later,” said Tor.

The gin had made her feel pleasantly blurry around the edges and sentimental. All she really wanted to do was to forget about her problems and have fun with these girls, her precious friends.

“Whenever you like.” Viva plunged her face into the basin. “Oh, water,
water,
” she murmured. “How divine. All I get from my tap at the moment is rust and dead flies. Would it be a nuisance if I had a quick bath before dinner?”

Pandit stomped up the stairs again with the water man.

When Viva came downstairs, she was wearing a simple coral dress that emphasized the slenderness of her waist and the dark abundance of her hair, which tonight hung loose around her shoulders. Her only adornment was a pair of long silver earrings she said she’d bought from a local market. Tor, looking at her, thought,
Why are some people just born impossibly glamorous without ever seeming to try?
Beside her, she felt fat and
overdressed, like a child who had raided Mummy’s dressing-up box.

Dinner was served early in a long candlelit room, kept bearably cool by fans whirling slowly overhead. The French windows were open; the air was saturated with the scents of mimosa and frangipani. Beyond the dimming outlines of the garden, the lawns and the terraces, a vast yellow moon was sinking into the sea.

Rose’s blond hair shone like a child’s in the candlelight. When they asked about her new baby, she said, yes, it was a lovely surprise, wasn’t it? Neither of them had really expected it, but Jack was delighted, and so was she.

“This is so grown-up of you, Rose,” Tor said, her eyes vast and scandalized.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it,” Rose agreed, but the only fly in the custard was that Jack’s entire regiment might be moved soon to Bannu on the northwest frontier, which was very dangerous, but they’d cross that bridge when they came to it, she said serenely. “Gosh, do look at that moon,” she said. “Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

All of them had looked up obediently, but then Tor put down her soup spoon. “Hang on, Rose, what does this mean for you? Will you have to go, too?”

“I’ve no idea yet. It hasn’t been decided if wives are wanted on the voyage.”

Rose said this calmly and cheerfully as if it was a joke, but Tor recognized the small muscle that was twitching in Rose’s cheek, just as it had when she was eight years old and steeling herself for something frightening.

“But don’t you have
any
say in this at all?” said Viva fiercely. “I mean, you’re having a baby.”

“No, I don’t,” said Rose. “I’m an army wife now, and it’s not exactly Jack’s fault.”

Tor could suddenly feel her own heart pounding.

How precarious all our lives are,
she thought. Night had suddenly fallen outside and she could see the leaping reflections of their candles against black windows. Rose, nineteen years old and pregnant, miles from home; Jack away, possibly in danger; Viva living in her hideous-sounding flat with dead flies in the taps; and herself, well, that didn’t bear thinking about, not until after pudding.

“Pandit,” she rang the small bell at her elbow, “is there any of that wonderful ice cream left, and maybe some mille-feuilles?” Why not enjoy what they could while they could.

“Viva.” Rose put down her ice cream spoon. “What about you? What about this job of yours? You’re always such a woman of mystery.” She punched her softly on the arm.

“Am I?” Viva said. “I don’t mean to be.”

“Well,” Rose was struggling with this, “you’re so different from most of the girls we meet, and so sort of changeable. In quite a good way I mean,” she added hastily.

“You are,” Tor agreed. Ever since Viva had walked through the door that evening, Tor had been trying to put her finger on a feeling Viva brought out in her: something like hunger or dismay.

“You make your own plans,” said Rose, “you earn your own money. Doesn’t that embarrass you almost?”

“Embarrass?” Viva smiled. “What a funny word to use. I’ve never even thought of it like that.”

“Are you still going to be a writer?” Tor asked.

“Well, I am, or at least I hope to be. I’ve just sold my first proper story, a small piece about the children’s home to
Blackwood’s Magazine.
” Threads of excitement ran like electric currents through Viva’s voice as she said this, even though her expression was carefully impassive.