East of the Sun (3 page)

Middle Wallop, Hampshire, October 1928

O
n the night before she left England, Rose Wetherby had such an attack of cold feet that she seriously thought about going to her parents and saying, “Look, scrap the whole thing; I don’t want to go,” but of course it was too late.

Mrs. Pludd, the family cook for fifteen of her nineteen years, had made her favorite supper: shepherd’s pie and gooseberry fool. When it came Rose wished she hadn’t asked for it, because the nursery food made her feel even more desperate and clinging, and everyone was making a huge effort to pretend nothing special was happening. Her father, who looked even paler than usual, tried to tell them a joke he’d obviously saved up for the occasion: a terrible joke, about a man who really thought cuckoos lived in clocks, and when she and her mother fluffed their parts and laughed too quickly and in the wrong place, he’d given her such an unhappy smile that the shepherd’s pie had turned to stone in her stomach and she could have wept.

I shall miss you so much, Daddy; Jack will never replace you.
The violence of this emotion surprised her.

After dinner she’d gone into the garden. The last puffs of smoke from a bonfire of leaves rose and drifted above the tall branches of the cedar tree. It had been a cold but perfect day, with the sky clear as polished glass and frost on the trees in the early morning. The garden, stripped of its summer finery, but still with the skeletons of summer roses among the Virginia creepers and bright, fresh rose hips, had never looked more beautiful.

She walked past the orchard where her ponies, Smiler and Bertie, had been buried under the apple tree and where she and Tor, dressed in solemn robes and holding candles, had buried all the rabbits and dogs. Her feet flattened the rougher grass as she took the shortcut from the orchard to the stables.

She was going, and now that the light had changed, what was usually taken for granted felt almost unbearably painful and precious: the crunch of gravel, the smell of the bonfire as it rose into the darkening sky, the silky slither of the stream disappearing beneath the drive.

She looked back at the house and thought of all the life that had gone on there: the laughter and the rows, and shouts of “Bedtime, darlings,” the blissful sound of the supper gong when she and Tor and her big brother Simon, whom they’d idolized, had been racing around in the garden building dens, or playing cricket or pretending to be Germans, or playing pirates in the stream. Big brother Simon baring his teeth and threatening the plank to all dissenters.

Her last pony, Copper, had his head over the stable gate. She gave him his bedtime apple, and then, looking furtively to the left and to the right, let herself into his stable and collapsed over him weeping. Nothing in her life had ever made her feel this sad before, and at a time when she was supposed to feel so happy.

Copper pushed her gently with his head, and let her tears fall into his mane. She knew she wouldn’t see him again, or the
dogs, Rollo and Mops, who were getting on. Maybe not even her parents. Her father’s wretched bout of pneumonia only last winter had left him with what he called a dicky motor and the doctor called a serious heart condition. He had not recovered. They talked about her wedding as if he was bound to make it, although both of them knew he probably wouldn’t.

She was aware, too, of all the painful thoughts tonight would bring to all of them about Simon. Darling Simon, so tall and gangling and blond and half grown, had had all her father’s goodness and gallantry as well as his steelier qualities. He was killed in France in the last month of the war. It was ten days before his twenty-first birthday. Her parents rarely spoke of it, but it was always lurking there, like an iceberg under the sunny surface of things.

Now she was sitting in the garden shed, on a stack of piled-up chairs surrounded by the neat boxes of apples twisted into tissue that her mother had put away for winter, and a dusty collection of wicker chairs and croquet mallets and old cricket bats. Across the lawn, a light went on in her father’s study, casting a dark square shape onto the grass. She pictured him bending over his books with that look of desperate calm he wore when he was trying not to think of upsetting things, knocking ash from his pipe into the brass ashtray he’d bought in Egypt, or winding up his gramophone to hear his beloved Mozart. Her fixed point, her magnetic north—but now everything was being moved. She wished she smoked, like Tor did. Tor said it really did help when one was in a state.

She stayed for a while, desperately trying to calm herself.
Soldiers’ daughters don’t cry.

Going up the backstairs to her room, her mother called out from her own bedroom, “Are you all right, darling?”

“Yes, Mummy,” she said. “Absolutely fine, I’ll be in in a minute to say good night.”

Inside her room, all her new clothes had been hung outside
her wardrobe like ghosts waiting for their new life to begin. They’d had such a lovely day up in London with Tor and her mother, Jonti. They’d bought such pretty things—a floaty dress with pink tea roses on it from Harrods; new pink suede shoes to go with it; a tennis dress that Mother had frowned at but was too sweet, with a sort of kick pleat in the back and satin bindings.

Her mother had taken her to a powder-puffy little salon in Beauchamp Place that Tor’s mother had recommended, all ribbons and chandeliers and flattering peach lights. They’d bought her trousseau there: thirteen pairs of cotton drawers; a corset that laced at the back; nainsook bloomers; two silk petticoats, and then the long peach silk negligee with a lace trim that made her feel like a glamorous stranger. After Madame had taken her measurements and complimented her on her “perfect proportion,” Rose had looked at her reflection in the mirror.

Her shoulders, her waist, even the small buds of her nipples seemed on display and scandalous. The next time she wore this, she’d be in Jack Chandler’s bed. Mummy, whose face had suddenly swum into view behind her in the glass, must have been thinking along these lines, too. She’d given a funny little grimace and shut her eyes. This was all so new for both of them.

That might have been the best time to have asked her about the bedroom side of things, but she’d been too shy. All that had happened in that department was a hot-making visit to Dr. Llewellyn, an old family friend who hunted with her father and had offices in Harley Street. Blushing furiously and avoiding her eyes, he’d fished around inside her, hurting her horribly, and then handed her a small sponge. He’d said she was to use it when she was no longer a virgin. “You put it in like this.” The back of his tweed suit had strained as he’d creaked into a squatted position and poked it between his legs. He’d given her a little cloth bag, into which it must be returned, washed and powdered, when it wasn’t in use.

She longed to ask her mother for more information about the terrifying event that would bring this thing out of its cloth bag, but her mother, who’d left her at the gate of the doctor’s surgery almost scarlet with embarrassment herself, had said nothing. She wanted to ask Tor, in fact had asked her one night, when they were joking about kissing boys, but Tor had been irritatingly vague in the way she was when she knew nothing.

And now, her enormous new Viceroy trunk stood in the corner of the room. Earlier in the day she’d half packed it, clothes carefully wrapped in sheets of tissue paper with heavy things at the bottom; she was trying now to learn to be sensible and womanly like Mummy. She got into bed with the pile of women’s magazines that had been her constant companions since Mrs. Sowerby had handed them over. Mummy, who subscribed only to
Horse and Hound
and
Blackwood’s Magazine,
thought they were a frightful waste of money, but she found them her only source of information on “it.” On the problem pages of
Woman’s World
a writer named Mary said her readers could ask her anything.

“Dear Mary,” one girl wrote. “I am getting married shortly and have asked my mother to tell me the facts of life. She says I am thoroughly nasty and morbid and shall find out soon enough.” It was signed Ignorant Betty.

Mary had written back: “Send a stamped addressed envelope and I will tell you all you need to know.”

Rose had thought, several times, of sending her own letter to Mary and enough stamps to get any reply to Bombay, but the thought of Ci Ci Mallinson, or her husband Geoffrey, opening it by mistake was too mortifying. She also hoped there would be time to find out on the voyage, not in a practical way of course, but because there were bound to be lots of parties and older people.

She turned to an article about how men simply love women who are a little bit secretive. “Keep him guessing just a little bit,” said the writer. “Besides, you will be much more appealing if, instead of telling him all your hopes and fears, you ask
him
about himself.”

She’d met Jack at her friend Flavia’s twenty-first, at the Savile Club in London; he’d told her he’d been asked along as a spare man and he had seemed so much older and more experienced than the other silly boys. He was handsome, too, with his fine tall physique and blond hair. He wasn’t at all a good dancer, and at first they’d both been hopelessly flustered and tongue-tied bouncing around the floor together to the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.

He’d asked her to come downstairs so they didn’t have to shout, and then she had asked him about India. And been initially impressed rather than bedazzled. He seemed to her a proper grown-up man, and to have done so much: pig-sticking and chasing tigers and helping Indian people learn so much about themselves. He was very modest about this, saying he was simply doing his bit, but she could tell he’d been brave.

Now she wanted so much to love him in what
Woman’s World
called “not a dull rub-along sort of way,” but to try, as they suggested, “to intrigue him and keep a sense of mystery alive.” So far, the mystery part had been easy—he’d proposed four weeks after that first meeting and gone back to India a week later. But the real test, the only one that counted, would be when they were alone in India together.

A soft knock on the door: her father. She hoped he couldn’t see how red her eyes were from the big blub in the summerhouse. He looked slowly around the room at the packed trunk, the rose dress, Jack’s photograph on her bedside table.

“Do you think you’ll be all right, Froggie?” he asked.

“Yes, Daddy, I will.”

He sat down on the bed beside her. The fervent way she said “I will” must have made him think of the wedding. “I’m jolly well going to try and make it,” he said. “I’m quite jealous of him, Frog.”

“Daddy, no!”

“I am.” His fingers, papery and old-looking in the lamplight, were plucking at the bedspread. “My darling girl.”

When he turned, she was shocked to hear him swallowing, the breathless rasp of his lungs. The first time she ever saw him cry. Outside her window she saw the dark branches of the cedar tree moving in the wind. That tree had shaded her pram, held her tree house, been part of the den she built with Tor.

“So, who are these blasted poodle-fakers?” he said in quite a different voice, picking up
Vogue
magazine and glaring at the mannequin on the front. This was their game when she was young: he was a ferocious character called Colonel Bluff who roared at her in a way he never had in real life. “Extraordinary kit! Waste of good British money.”

She put her arms around him, burying her head in the softness of his moleskin waistcoat. How thin he was now! She inhaled him, pipes and soap and dogs, and fixed him somewhere deep inside of her.

“Good night, Daddy. Sleep well.”

Good night, sleep tight, hope the fleas don’t bite.

“Good night, my darling, darling girl.” She felt his shuddering breath under her fingers.

“Would you mind turning off my light?”

“Will do.” The door clicked and the room went dark. She knew, and he did, too: it was their last night together under the same roof.

T
he S.S.
Kaisar-i-Hind
would sail the next day, and now Viva’s taxi was passing through an avenue of dripping rhododendron bushes toward St. Christopher’s School in the village of Colerne, near Bath.

It had rained steadily since she’d woken up early that morning. From her basement in Nevern Square she’d watched the usual procession of mud-splattered ankles, galoshes, and buttoned shoes tramping through puddles on their way to work. In the train, the mist had drawn in so tightly she felt as if she was moving through a gray fur tunnel.

The taxi was splashing through puddles toward a large and gloomy Victorian house. To her right, a group of boys ran like small gray ghosts around the edges of a field, watched by a herd of cows hock deep in mud.

A maid showed her into the visitors’ room, cold and sparsely furnished. A small fire in the hearth had two upright wooden chairs on either side of it.

“I’ve come to pick up Guy Glover,” she told the maid. “I’m his chaperone. I’m taking him back to India.”

“Mr. Glover’s in the parlor,” the maid said, “but Mr. Partington, his housemaster, would like a quick word with you first.”

Mr. Partington, an exhausted-looking man with nicotine-stained white hair, entered the room softly. She thought he looked old for a schoolmaster. “Miss Viva Holloway, if I’m not mistaken.” He shook her hand limply. “Well, well, well, off to India then.” He rubbed some chalk off his trousers and cleared his throat.

“Yes,” she said, “tomorrow morning from Tilbury. We’re going down tonight.”

She waited for him to say the usual things masters say when boys are leaving, “Good chap” or “We’ll miss him” or some such, but nothing came.

“Do you know Guy?” he said after an awkward pause. “I mean, are you a friend of the family?”

“No, his parents contacted me via an advertisement in
The Lady.
”

“How strange,” he said softly.

“What do you mean?”

“The way people lead their lives. Hah!” He seemed to have some constriction in his throat. “So,
hrggghh
!—you don’t know them at all?”

“No.”

He led her into a cold and sparsley furnished study where they both sat down.

He looked at her for a while, pressing his lips together and tapping his pen against the desk. She heard the squeaking of shoes in the corridor, above them someone was playing the piano badly.

“I’ve got something for you to take with him.” Mr. Partington slid a letter from under the blotter and across the desk toward her. “It seems, hah! that nobody has told you.”

Their eyes locked.

“Told me what?”

“Guy’s been expelled. Two boys in his dorm reported money missing; another boy lost a traveling clock. He owned up right away. It wasn’t a great deal of money, and there are some mitigating circumstances, hah!” When Mr. Partington drew out his handkerchief to blow his nose, a shower of elastic bands flew to the floor. “His parents keep him very short of funds. In fact he had to borrow from us last term. But the point is, it’s led to certain problems with the other boys,” his pale eyes blinked at her, “an understandable lack of trust. We sent a letter saying all this to his parents a few months ago, but they didn’t reply except to send a telegram last week to say you were coming.”

Partington plucked another letter from underneath the blotter. “Would you mind awfully giving this to them, too? His report and his exam results. A disaster, I’m afraid—all this blew up before them. Shame. Hah! On the right day and given a fair wind, he’s perfectly capable of passing them, depending on his mood, of course.”

“On his mood?” Viva took the letters and put them in her bag, trying to sound calmer than she felt.

“He’s not a strong boy mentally at the best of times. But his parents reassured me you were responsible and experienced and I—” He was about to say something else when a bell rang, and there was a scattershot of feet in the hall outside. The piano above them stopped; she could hear the squeak of its lid as it closed.

The maid appeared. “Mr. Bell wants to speak to you in the lab,” she said to Mr. Partington. “You may have to take his class there. He’s forgotten to tell you he has to go to the dentist.”

“Oh God,” sighed Partington.

“Well, I won’t keep you.”

Mr. Partington took her hand in his. “The boy’s waiting for you just across the hall. Take him when you feel like it. We’ve said our good-byes.” He pointed toward the door opposite and
then scurried off in the opposite direction down the corridor. He seemed in a hurry to get away.

She walked into another chilly reception room across the hall. It had a highly polished sideboard on which was a green vase with peacock feathers in it. A tall pale-faced boy stood up without smiling. He was wearing a long black overcoat; pimples stood out on his chin through the beginnings of a beard.

“Hello, my name is Viva Holloway. Are you Guy Glover?” she said.

“That’s the name,” he said.

“Well, I’m very pleased to meet you.” When she held out her hand, he shook it reluctantly.

“Charmed,” he said. “I’m sure.”

When at last he smiled, she noticed he had the same buck teeth as his aunt. Also that his eyes couldn’t quite meet hers. She could feel herself starting to dislike him already, but felt that this was very unfair of her. If anyone should understand how awkward a person could feel being picked up at a school by a perfect stranger, it should be her.

“Well, shall we collect your things?” she said. “The taxi’s waiting outside; we’re going straight to Tilbury.”

“Who’s paying for it?” he asked her sharply.

“Paying for what?”

“The taxi, of course. I haven’t got a bean.”

“Your aunt,” she said, determined not to resent his tone. Their arrangement was five pounds in travel expenses.

As she followed his long thin legs upstairs, she tried to neutralize the sense of panic she’d felt at Mr. Partington’s words. Her own trunk was packed, the entire trip organized, she couldn’t afford to exaggerate his crimes; after all, she rationalized, lots of children did a bit of amateur thieving. She and her friends had pinched the occasional pear drop or something harmless like a pencil from the sweetshop near school. They’d done it for dares; it was almost part of growing up.

“So, how long have you been here?” They’d reached the first landing and she stood beside him.

“Ten years.”

“Gosh, long time.”

“Um.”

“It must feel rather strange leaving.”

“Not really.” His voice was so completely without expression. She felt she must stop asking him questions. For all his assumed nonchalance, he might be upset, even mortified, at the thought of leaving this place under a cloud.

The door at the top of the stairs had a large wodge of felt underneath it to keep drafts out. When he’d pushed the door open with his foot, she saw a row of white beds, probably ten in all, with green counterpanes folded neatly at the base of them. At the end of the room, a large window looked out onto a sky ready to dump more rain onto sodden fields.

He led her to a bed halfway down the room with two suitcases beside it.

“My trunk’s gone on ahead,” he told her.

She was struck by the silence, the cold in the dormitory, and then relieved to see a note pinned to his pillow with his name written on it in an untidy schoolboyish scrawl, assuming it was someone wishing to say good-bye. Without reading the letter, he tore it up and dropped the pieces of paper into a wastepaper basket underneath the bed.

“There,” he said. “All done now.”

The note had brought a flush of color to his otherwise chalk-pale cheeks. His young man’s Adam’s apple bulged in his neck. She pretended not to notice.
He is more upset than I realize,
she told herself, remembering how she’d both hated and felt safe at her own freezing-cold convent boarding school in North Wales.

“Shall I put these in your case?” she asked. There was a razor strap and a soiled vest under his bed. The vest had worn thin and had yellow sweat marks under the armpits.

“No, I’m leaving them behind.”

“So,” she said with an attempt at brightness, “shall we be off? I’ve already spoken to Mr. Partington.”

“Yes.” He was moving around his bed like a large stunned animal, looking about the room for the last time.

“Do you want this?” She picked up a photograph that had been facedown on the washstand.

When she turned it over she saw a tall, square-shouldered man in khakis making a self-consciously jokey face at the photographer with what looked like mile after mile of bleached sand dunes behind him.

“My father,” he said. He unclipped his suitcase and crammed the picture on top of some badly packed clothes.

“Are you sure it won’t break there?” She was conscious already of sounding like an irritating grown-up.

“I’ll risk it,” he said. He closed the suitcase.

She carried one of his cases downstairs; he took the other. They crossed the polished hall together. She closed the door behind him and it was only when she was sitting in the taxi and they were halfway to the station that she realized that nobody—no boy, no maid, no servant, no master—had come to the door to say good-bye to him.

When their taxi drove through the iron gates at the end of the drive, he turned in his seat and looked back toward the school. “Bastards,” he whispered, and then, with a bright insincere smile, “I’m sorry, did you think I said something?”

And her thought was:
The sensible thing now would be to ask the taxi driver to turn round and drive him straight back to school.
She would say, “I’m very sorry, but I don’t think this will work.” But that would mean no ticket and no India, so she ignored her feelings and told the driver to take them to the railway station in Bath.