East of the Sun (29 page)

The boy, Savit, said he’d peed on it and then put ash from the fire into a paste.

“Well, God was on your side,” Frank told him gravely.

When both boys had been examined, and their wounds treated with antiseptic cream, they went away grinning as if all this attention had been a tremendous treat. Frank turned to Viva. “I think you should now tell Daisy the other reason why I’m here.”

“I was going to,” Viva said. She took a deep breath. “Daisy, do you remember me telling you a little about the boy on the ship? The little monster it was my misfortune to chaperone? Well, there’s a new episode. He punched one of the passengers on the ship, the son of a prominent Indian businessman. No charges were pressed at the time, but it seems that the victim’s family are now after some kind of revenge and I could be implicated.”

“Why you?” Daisy’s clever eyes blinked behind her specs.

“Because legally, technically, we were in foreign waters and he belonged to me.”

“That sounds absolute codswallop to me. Are you absolutely sure?”

“No, I’m not,” said Viva. “The boy loves dramas, he says all kinds of strange things to draw attention to himself, and this could easily be another, but the point is, he came round to see me the other night. He claims to have been bribing the police, and if he or they come round, I—Well, Frank thought I should let you know what’s going on.”

“Well, bribing the local police is hardly a big news story in Bombay.” Daisy seemed to be taking all this in her stride as Viva had hoped she would. “But I don’t at all like the thought of him turning up in your room. You must definitely tell Mr. Jamshed and get him to change your locks, and then I think…” Daisy closed her eyes, “I think you should leave town for a few days to put this young man off. I’ve been trying to persuade her to do this for a few weeks anyway,” Daisy explained to Frank. “I think she looks tired.”

He glanced at her impersonally, and she felt she had become, in that moment, another one of his patients.

“I’m not tired,” she said.

“It’s going to get even hotter than this soon, Viva,” said Daisy. “It’s imperative to take breaks. Don’t you agree, Frank?” Viva was surprised to see that her employer was almost flirting with him, certainly both of them seemed to be treating her as if she was public property.

“I do,” he said. “I think they’re essential.” He stood up and picked up his bag. “But, ladies,” he looked at his watch, “you’ll have to excuse me. I’m on duty at four. Leave a message for me at the hospital if you want any more help.”

“Gosh,” Daisy said after he left, “what a good-looking man,” adding more professionally, “and how useful for us that he works at the Gokuldas.”

“Yes,” said Viva. The suddenness of his exit had registered as a slight shock to her, a feeling that there were other things she’d meant to say.

Glancing through the open door, she saw him striding across the courtyard, opening the gate, then shutting it firmly behind him.

“And I think he’s absolutely right about you taking a few days off. Do go to Ooty,” Daisy urged. “It’s cool and beautiful and that guest house I was telling you about really is charming. Do you have a friend you could go with?”

“Well, I might have.” She remembered shouting at Tor that morning and felt guilty about it.

“It will do you nothing but good”—Daisy was beaming—“hills, cool breezes, little chalets, mountain birds.” As her square practical hands sketched out the vistas, Viva felt fearful. Something about the word “chalet.”
Rain, a woman crying.

“Are you all right, dear?”

When she looked up, the fan above her was clacking. Daisy was talking.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” she said.

“Oh good.” Daisy gave her honking hockey captain’s laugh. “Just for a moment there you looked as if you’d seen a ghost.”

I
t was Tor’s private opinion that Viva had been a little hard on Guy, even on the ship. Of course, he could be silly and affected, and maybe he did occasionally make things up, but what sixteen-year-old didn’t?

She herself had spent most of her sixteenth year in Middle Wallop imagining that Nigel Thorn Davies, her father’s red-faced land agent, was secretly and painfully in love with her, and that he would seize her and declare his feelings for her at any moment—at dusk in the summerhouse, or on a country walk somewhere leafy and private. Sometimes it seemed to her that she’d spent her whole life imagining things would happen that hadn’t.

And she still smiled to remember that moment on the ship when she’d played Guy the Jelly Roll Morton record. The satisfying way he’d yelped, how his skinny neck had jerked around like a ball on an elastic band. In that moment, he’d been what the Negro jazz musicians at the Taj called “a gone coon,” and wildness was something she wistfully appreciated.

But even so, she was tremendously relieved when Viva
phoned on Tuesday morning to apologize once more for her outburst. When Viva had suggested a short holiday in Ooty, she said she’d love to come.

“The timing could not be more perfect,” she’d added significantly. “You see,” she lowered her voice to a mutter, “
it
came.”

“What came?”

“You know,
it.
The thing I was worried about.
My friend
.”

“What friend?” Viva sounded baffled.

“
The curse.
” Honestly, Viva, for an intelligent woman, could sometimes be very obtuse. “I had so many hot baths I practically dissolved, but oh, the relief. It was the worst four weeks of my life, Viva. I thought I was going to have to waddle straight off the boat and into a home for fallen women.”

“Well, thank God for that. What a relief.”

“It was and I’m sure that’s what made me so switched off about the Guy thing. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t even eat, can you imagine. Also—” Tor looked around the room to see if any of the servants were in earshot. “Ci and I have had the most appalling row. I’ll tell you when I see you. I’ve started to hate her,” she whispered. “I can feel her marking off the days till my ship leaves. I honestly think she’s gone mad in the heat.” Tor said before she hung up, “I can’t wait to get away.”

Although Tor had tried to joke with Viva about her awful row with Ci, it had hurt so much. She thought about it when she put the phone down: which parts she could bear to tell and which parts must stay hidden inside her huge humiliations file and buried forever.

Even Ci must have known she’d overstepped the mark. She’d tried to blame it later on the heat and the fact that Geoffrey’s cotton factory was losing more and more money and maybe this was partly true: before the storm burst, the atmosphere in the house had felt positively electric.

The tension had begun building when Ci came back from her holiday in Mussoree, looking more drawn and tired than when she’d gone away. She’d started to stare at the phone in a funny way, to smoke more than usual, and on one shocking occasion Tor saw her smack Pandit around the face for bringing her a Gin and It without her usual ice. Pandit had stood there smiling and apologizing, but Tor had heard him mutter darkly as he raced back into the kitchen with the red mark on his cheek.

Tor was almost convinced now that Ci had a lover. Ollie had told her, with typical lack of tact, that most of the mems took them.

“I could honestly walk through the Malabar Hill at two o’clock on a weekday afternoon,” he’d boasted, “and make love to almost any woman I wanted, they’re so bored, and so desperate.”

He’d also told her, at first she’d so enjoyed these thrilling gups, that a hotel in Meerut, a favorite station for trysts, had taken the precaution of employing a blind porter to ring a two o’clock bell to warn all the lovers to get back to their beds at a decent hour.

Anyway, whoever it was that had been sending Ci flowers was no longer sending them and now she no longer cooed “Dahhllling” into the phone like a dove, and there was a look, almost feral, in Ci’s eyes as the scarlet talons ripped through the post in the morning before she tossed the letters aside. She was in a mood to draw blood and Tor was the closest victim.

The row began quite late one night when Tor was sitting at her dressing table, half undressed for bed, and Ci had walked into the room.

“Darling,” she said, “you know all those clothes I lent you when you first came out? I’d like them back, please.”

Tor wanted to cry at the meanness of this, for Ci had said
she could keep them. Also, she’d felt so fine in those clothes for a while, so sure that everything in her life would change.

“Do you want them now, Ci?” she’d asked warily, wondering if she’d have time to give one or two of them to the
dhobi
who she sometimes saw cycling down to town in the morning with Ci’s evening dresses sailing behind, all of them coming back in the evening beautifully ironed. She’d ripped one or two of the seams, and the Chinese silk jacket still had tar on its elbow, picked up on the night that Ollie had taken her to Juhu Beach. She’d stuffed it to the back of the wardrobe thinking she’d sort it out later.

“No time like the present.” Ci’s smile was a grimace. “Geoffrey’s just announced a cut in the clothing allowance, and I doubt you can fit into them anymore, can you?”

Then Tor, feeling bulky in her sleeveless nightgown, had been forced under Ci’s eagle eye to lay all the clothes out on the bed.

“Good God.” Ci had picked up her Wolhausmenson hunting jacket and pushed her talons through the rips under the arms. “Who on earth did this?”

“I only wore it once,” Tor had stammered, which was true. Ollie had taken her out on some “nags” he’d been lent at the racecourse. “It was rather tight.” In fact, ludicrously tight for a riding habit, but Ci always chose style over practicality. “And we were jumping an oxer and—I was about to get it fixed.”

“About to get it fixed.” Something peculiar had happened to Ci’s mouth. “What stopped you? You haven’t exactly been busy here.”

They’d glared at each other for a long moment.

“Darling, I feel I must say something to you,” Ci had continued in a new more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger voice. “You see, nothing happens to you in life without self-discipline. I mean, how much, for instance, do you weigh now?”

Her eyes had swept over Tor’s plump arms, her expand
ing girth.
I hate you,
Tor had thought.
I hate the way you talk, I hate the way you smoke, I hate the jokes you make about me to your friends.
For she could just imagine how Ci would soon be describing her at the club.
Huge, darling, fat as a pig again
, or
a returned empty—rather a large one, I’m afraid
.

And in that moment, it was almost tempting to wipe Ci’s sad, superior smile off her face by telling her that not only was she fat but she was expecting a baby, too, so she could see some things were even more important than her blasted clothes.

“Ten and a half stone,” Tor had said. A lie. She was too frightened to go anywhere near the scales. And now, because she was in such a state, Tor could almost imagine Ci saying in that same flat voice, “You’ve been crying a lot lately, Tor. Are you up the spout or something?” and hated her even more, but no, Ci was holding her green Chinese silk jacket up in front of her, the claws of her nails like pegs.

“What have you done to this?” she was shouting. “This jacket was embroidered in Paris.” Her voice rose into an undignified shriek. “It’s absolutely and completely ruined.”

“I wore it on the beach.” Tor wondered for a second who this woman was who was roaring at the top of her voice, and then realized with a queer thrill that it was her.

“I got tar on the sleeve,” she’d shrieked. “Clap me in leg irons, why don’t you?”

“Oh yes, that’s right,” Ci had roared right back, her eyes bulging. “Oh, very grateful! I mean, all I’ve done for you in the past six months is to clothe and entertain you, you
great fat fool.
”

After Ci said the “great fat fool” bit, her mouth had clamped shut. Even she knew she’d gone too far.

And only later could Tor appreciate the wonderful irony of what happened next. As she and Ci faced each other—red in the face, breathing heavily—Tor had suddenly felt the pop of air between her legs, the unmistakable stickiness of blood.
Shouting had done what gin and hot baths had failed to do. She’d suddenly beamed at Ci, who must have thought she’d gone mad. “I’m fine!” she said. “I’m absolutely fine.”

And it was at this moment she understood that not having a baby might, in certain circumstances, be every bit as magical as having one.

After speaking with Viva, Tor phoned Rose to see if by some miracle she could come to Ooty, too. Viva had said it would be fun if they could all get together.

“It’s supposed to be beautiful up there,” Tor wheedled. “Do try and come. Tell Jack I’m leaving India in the blink of an eye, that I desperately need you, and you’ll probably never see me again.”

“No need for any of that,” Rose said crisply. “I’ve already told Jack what I’m going to do.”

Well, bully for you,
thought Tor. Rose sounded so much more in control, almost steely.

The plan was that as there was a party at Daisy’s on Wednesday night, Tor would stay with Viva and they’d take the train to Ooty the following morning. Rose would meet them up there. That gave Ollie—Tor had worked it out on her fingers—four days in which to phone her and tell her he’d suddenly realized he’d made a ludicrous mistake and wanted to divorce his wife in England and marry her after all, or failing that, maybe she might meet someone wonderful up at Ooty. What a good story it would make at their wedding reception.
The most extraordinary thing, I was on the very point of going back to England when I looked up in this little hotel we were staying at and I saw…

Oh, what an idiot you are,
thought Tor, catching herself out in her own daydream.

Dreaming was what hurt most, better to face facts now. She
was fat and on the shelf, and there, barring a sudden miracle, she would stay.

Because they’d hardly spoken since their row, Tor was surprised when Ci insisted on driving her over to Viva’s house the following Wednesday afternoon. She wondered if it was because Ci, who could sometimes seem surprisingly sensitive to the good opinion of others, was trying to leave a good last impression, or perhaps make up for the row the week before.

All Ci said was, “Byculla, darling, is the absolute armpit of Bombay. I wouldn’t dream of you taking a taxi.”

The drive did not start well. After getting Tor to light one of her Abdullahs, Ci had filled the car with smoke and then started in on her again.

“This is absolutely the last thing I’m going to say to you about clothes,” she said as they wove in and out of a line of bullock trucks laden with sugarcane, “but are you absolutely sure I didn’t lend you my Lanvin jacket as well? That one’s part of a limited edition.”

“Quite sure.” Tor had been staring at the bullock’s bottom, wondering how a creature could be so thin and carry so much. “I tried it on,” Tor said. “And it was miles too small for me.” Ci often set these mean little tricks for her.

“Even when you lost all that weight? Months ago, I mean.”

“Even then.”

“How many pounds did you lose in the end?”

“Two,” said Tor. God, the woman was every bit as obsessed as her mother.

“Do you find the dumbbells helped?”

“Not really. Look, Ci, I don’t actually think I am all that fat, what I am is big-boned. I don’t have a lot of flab on me, and my waist is quite small.” This was true. “Curvy” Ollie had
called her in a rare compliment. “Statuesque” was the word one or two of her other boyfriends had used. Sometimes it felt important to fight back.

“God, look at that ghastly creature!” Ci suddenly exclaimed. A naked man covered with ash was walking between the traffic, shaking his bony fist at the car. “Two pounds—ah well,” Ci went back to ignoring the world outside the car, “I don’t suppose it will matter too much in Hampshire.” Whatever that meant.

Then Tor, never a great one for directions, managed to get them lost.

Somehow they’d ended up on the outskirts of the Bora Bazaar, the vast, sprawling, untidy market where it seemed half of Bombay congregated to sell their rubbish.

“Really, Tor,” Ci said as her skinny little ankle pumped the accelerator, “you are quite hopeless. I think I’d better have another ciggie.

“So where now?” Ci’s smile was a snarl by the time they got to the end of a road that led nowhere. “All this is terra incognita as far as I’m concerned.”

“Stop the car right now,” Tor longed to shout. “I’m sick of being grateful to you, sick of being your problem, sick of being wrong.” But back in the prison of politeness, she sat in the perfumed smoke of Ci’s car feeling sad and unworthy and hardly daring to breathe in case she said the wrong thing again.

When they finally got to Byculla and Jasmine Street, Ci, who’d sulked for the last twenty minutes, refused to park, saying it was far too dangerous and now too late. She would drive straight home.

“I’m sorry” were Tor’s last words to her, and Ci’s dismissive little shrug had hurt more than her anger.