East of the Sun (28 page)

“Don’t come back again, Guy,” she said as she let him out.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said as if she’d asked for some kind of reassurance. “I’ve promised to pay you back and I’m going to.”

T
he following morning Viva phoned Tor in a fury.

“Tor, how could you? How stupid can you be? He’s going to haunt me now.”

“Hang on.” Tor sounded sleepy, as if she’d just woken up. “Who are we talking about?”

“Guy, you bloody idiot. You gave him my address.”

“He said he had your money. I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Pleased! He frightened the life out of me. He was lying in the dark waiting for me in my room, and now he says the police are after him.”

She heard Tor gasp at the other end of the phone. “Oh, Viva, I’m so sorry,” she said. “But he said he had a job and money, and I thought you w—”

“Tor, you weren’t thinking at all.”

Tor blew her nose and decided, unwisely, to change tactics.

“Are you sure you’re not blowing this out of all proportion, Viva?” she said. “I always got on with him rather well.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Viva exploded. “He’s completely doolally, even your darling Frank said so.”

“That’s mean,” Tor said. “He was never my darling Frank. If he was anybody’s he was yours.”

Viva thumped the phone down and instantly picked it up and dialed again.

“I’m sorry, that was mean of me,” she said.

“I know.” Tor was crying. “It’s just that I get everything so wrong now and I’m still so worried about you-know-what.” There was a clunk as she put the phone down and blew her nose again. “Why is life so
complicated
?” she wailed distantly.

“Tor, are you still there?” Viva heard the click clack of high-heeled shoes on a wooden floor, Ci’s sharp voice giving orders to a servant. Viva heard a rustle on the other end of the line, as Tor picked up the receiver again.

“Can’t talk now,” Tor whispered. “Can we meet somewhere for a drink? The Taj or Wyndham’s or your place?”

Viva hesitated. She was working the ten-to-five shift at the home that day and had planned to write that night.
Eve
magazine in England wanted two of her sketches of India, each a thousand words long and within a week.

“I’m not sure you’ll be able to find me here, Tor,” she said. “It’s slightly off the beaten track.”

“’Course I could.” Tor sounded relieved. “I’d love to see your place, and I could bring my gramophone. Look, thanks for forgiving me about Guy,” she added as an airy afterthought and before Viva had said a word, “but at least you’ve got some money now—I’m completely Harry broke.”

There were times when Viva wanted to crown her.

When Viva hung up the phone, she took the greasy bundle of notes out of the bedside drawer where she’d stuffed them the night before; she counted them again: three hundred and twenty rupees, exactly half the money she’d been promised for
the voyage out. She put it in a tin, got a piece of string, and tied it securely to the underside of her bed.

When she looked at her room, she saw Guy lying on her bed again: his strangely expressionless eyes on her; the imprint of his body on her parents’ bedspread. Last night, after he’d gone, she’d changed her sheets, as if to exorcise him, but she’d still hardly slept a wink.

The room she had grown to love, particularly with the comforting presence of the Jamsheds underneath, felt fragile and temporary again. The walls too flimsy, the frosted-glass door too easy to break.

At times like these, she longed for an older brother or a father who would give her bluff advice, and tell her not to be frightened of some stupid boy wet behind the ears, or who might offer to give Guy a fourpenny one if he became a serious nuisance to her.

But there was only Frank, and asking him for help seemed to throw her back into some old and outgrown role she’d had to play with William—the damsel in distress, the silly billy, needing masculine protection, and this time with the added embarrassment of knowing she’d ignored Frank’s warning that Guy might not be just another angry displaced casualty of the Empire but someone with serious mental problems. She’d also taken the money.

Pale and exhausted, she looked at her watch. Eight-fifty. It seemed important to make up her mind what to do before she set off for work. She walked about her room hugging herself, sat down on her bed, stood up, checked her watch again, and, finally, went out into a phone box in the street and dialed the number at the hospital Frank had given her.

She got through to reception.

“Gokuldas Tejpal Hospital,” said a singsong voice at the end of the line. “May I help you?”

“I need to speak to Dr. Frank Steadman,” she said.

She heard pages rustling. “I don’t know where he is,” said the voice at the other end. “Will you wait?”

She waited. Five minutes later, Frank picked up the phone.

“Frank, it’s me. Viva. I can’t talk for long, I’ll be late for work. I wonder if I could ask for your professional advice on one or two of the children at the home who aren’t doing very well?”

“It’ll have to be after lunchtime.” The crackling line made his voice sound impersonal. “Shall I come to the home?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Two-thirty all right?”

“Two-thirty will be fine,” she said. “I’ll see you then.”

At two o’clock that afternoon, Viva was sitting in the courtyard beneath the tamarind tree supervising a group of six children: Talika, Neeta, Suday, and three shocked little girls who’d been dumped outside the gates two days before.

Only the oldest one, a fierce-looking little girl with matted hair, had spoken; the others only gazed at her with eyes numb with misery, seeming to have no idea of why they’d come or where or who they were.

It was important, or so Mrs. Bowden had said, to get these new girls into some kind of routine of learning to take their minds off what had happened to them, and so Viva had spent the last half hour instructing them in what was known at the home as “social skills”—mainly a list of “thou shalt nots”: thou shalt not put rubbish in the streets, or spit in public, or defecate into an open drain. Suday, the joker, had just said, “And now, Miss Wiwa—please, you can teach me to wink also; that is a social skill.” She’d shown them, even though she knew that Mrs. Bowden would not approve.

Frank walked in as the children were laughing. He was car
rying his doctor’s bag. It worried her how happy she felt to see him again.

“Now, children,” she said, “settle down and be quiet for a while. We have a visitor.”

“My God,” he said. He’d taken the chair beside her. “I wish my ear for languages was that good,” and there’d been giggles and nudges as she’d blushed a deep, bright red.

“Daisy Barker’s been teaching me,” she said, “and it’s not as good as it sounds. I can only say ‘pipe down’ or ‘eat up’ or ‘go to bed.’ Do you know Daisy? She runs this place. She also works at the Settlement in Bombay; I thought you might have been to one of her parties.”

She felt she was babbling incoherently. The children were listening agog, their eyes moving from face to face as if they were watching a tennis match.

Viva looked at her watch. “Girls and boys,” she said, “we can break for half an hour’s play now. Say good-bye to Dr. Frank.”

“Good-bye, Daktar Frank,” they chorused, and raced off to play. A few moments later Talika came back with two glasses of lemonade on an old tin tray. Concentrating fiercely, she lifted each glass with both hands onto the table.

“Stay for a moment, Talika,” said Viva. “This is one of the girls I wanted you to see,” she told Frank. “Her name is Talika.” Viva squeezed the child’s hand, sad to see her looking so tense and fearful. She would like to have told him more about her, but was frightened Talika, whose English was improving, would pick it up and either feel ashamed or humiliated. “She’s not doing too badly; in fact, we’re very proud of her, aren’t we, Talika? But, as you can see, she’s very thin.”

“Can I listen to her chest?”

She went to get one of the cotton screens they used for consultations in the courtyard.

“Don’t be frightened, Talika,” she said. The screen was
around them and the child’s face bathed in its greenish patterns. “The doctor won’t hurt you.”

Frank got out his stethoscope. As he put it in his ears and listened gravely to the child, her large terrified eyes did not leave Viva’s.

“Your heart is strong, your chest is clear.” He tried to smile at the child but she wouldn’t have it. “I’m sure the clinic doctor has ruled out the usual,” he added. “TB, worms—she doesn’t look rickety.”

When he released the child, she shot back across the courtyard like a frightened fawn desperate to join her herd.

“Poor thing,” he said when she was gone. “She looks haunted.”

He looked up and held Viva’s gaze for a moment. “Do you have any idea why?”

“Not really. Her mother died of tuberculosis; at least we think she did, she still hopes that she’s alive. There was a flood in the slum where she lived and she was left at our gate. Sometimes she’s quite jolly. I mean, yesterday she was even dancing, but then something happens and she is almost unreachable and I don’t know why.”

“Maybe she’s homesick,” he said. He was sitting close enough for her to see tortoiseshell lights in his green eyes.

“There is a whole rich life going on in a slum—most Europeans don’t understand it.”

“And what about you?” He looked at her again. “What are you doing all this for?”

The directness of his question took her aback.

“I like it here,” she said. “I really do, and I’m still writing, in fact I’ve had a couple of things published.”

“But that’s wonderful, congratulations.” He did have a shattering smile, that was the problem, and when he looked at her like that, she felt a tug inside her, a longing.

“I’m all right, you know.” She stood up quickly.

“I know,” he said gently. “That’s good.”

He wound up his stethoscope, packed it away in his bag.

“Except,” she could feel him about to leave, “I may have done something rather stupid last night. Guy Glover turned up in my room. It was a shock. He said he’d come to give me my money back.”

“Did you take it?” He looked at her anxiously.

“Yes…or at least some of it.”

“I thought we’d decided you weren’t going to do that.” Frank flexed his knuckles; he was frowning at her now.

“I thought I might need it.”
Because I needed to do it my way,
she suddenly recognized.

“I wish you hadn’t done that.”

“I do, too, now, but I was…” She stopped herself saying the word “flustered.” “I was persuaded by him that the police might want to see me and that I’d need it for the bribes. Do admit, Frank,” it was her turn to glare now, “there is a certain logic to that.”

Frank’s expression was grim. “What he most wants is to go on pestering you. He’s an obsessive and you’re on his list. Why on earth did you let him in?”

“I didn’t. He was in my room when I came home. He was lying on my bed.”

Frank groaned. He thought for a while and said, “Look, Viva, I don’t want to worry you, but this could turn into a nasty situation. Is there anyone here at the home you can really trust?”

“I trust Daisy Barker,” she said. “Absolutely.”

“Well, tell her right away,” he said. “That way, when the police come round, she’ll be warned.”

“Do you really think they’ll come here?” Viva felt a sick sinking in her stomach.

“They might. They’ve probably already got their eyes on you anyway, a group of European ladies running a place like this at a time like this, when everything is so uncertain.”

“Oh, God.”

“Now I’ve frightened you,” he said more gently. “The police have plenty of other things to do at the moment, so don’t worry too much, but just be more careful, please.”

They found Daisy sitting in what was grandly called “the back office”—a dark, humid room in the depths of the building with a large overhead fan and an elaborately tiled floor. The room had a desk, a chair, an old filing cabinet, and on the wall a calendar, on which a woman in a sari floated down the Ganges in a boat extolling the joys of drinking Ovaltine.

“Daisy,” said Viva as they walked in, “this is Frank. He’s a locum at the Gokuldas Tejpal. We met on the ship.”

“Oh, greetings.” Daisy jumped up and pumped his hand. “Well, we’re never ones here to look a gift doctor in the mouth—if you ever have any spare time.” She took her glasses off and smiled winningly. “In fact, only last night we had two street boys in with minor burns, but one does worry in this heat. I wonder if you could have a quick look—could you? Oh, you are so kind.”

The boys, skinny and shifty-eyed, were produced. A brief case history supplied. Both had been residents in one of the local orphanages. They’d been beaten so badly they’d run away, finding shelter in a shed near the railway track two miles away from the Victoria Terminal, with six other boys. A fight had broken out over a pot of cooking rice, both had been scalded.

As Frank examined them, Viva became aware of his hands. They were beautiful hands, brown and long-fingered, now gently probing the wound on the boy’s leg.

“It’s actually healed quite well,” he said. “What did you put on it?” he asked the boy in Hindi.