East of the Sun (33 page)

Tor, Rose, and Viva shot desperate looks at one another; Ci swallowed another mouthful of champagne.

“Well, they say they had a very jolly time in Ooty, dear,” Geoffrey prompted helpfully.

“Oh, did you?” she asked Frank. “Any amusing people there at this time of year?”

Rose gamely stepped in. “Well, it was quite quiet, but it was such fun being together again, Ci Ci,” she said. “And the Woodbriar is every bit as nice as you said it would be, and Jane spoiled us and packed us splendid picnics and we saw some wonderful flowers and it was so nice to feel cool again.”

She sipped some water and came to a sudden halt—Ci’s eyes over the rim of her glass had gone perfectly blank, like a goldfish who’d come to the surface of a bowl and found no food there.

“And what about our Tor?” At last Ci had swiveled around to talk to her. “Any decent men there, or was it all picnics with the girls?”

“No men at all.” Tor hated the faint air of salaciousness that hung around her question and was, suddenly, not in a mood to placate her. “But lots and lots of lovely lemon cake.”

“Oh, I remember that
wonderful
cake.” Poor Geoffrey was all over the place like a man who’d invited a semi-wild tiger into his sitting room to entertain the guests.

“So Tor’s been eating again,
what
a surprise,” said Ci Ci.

“Darling!” Geoffrey jumped up so quickly he dropped a crystal fingerbowl on the floor, and shards of glass and water spread over the Persian carpet. Ci looked at it perfectly expressionlessly for a few seconds.

“God, you’re a clot, Geoffrey,” she said at last. “A clumsy clot.” A shred of meat had clung to her teeth. “Really. I mean it.”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha,” Geoffrey laughed as if this was a splendid joke; he clapped his hands. “D’you know, she’s right for once? Vivash will clear it up,” he said.

“Not for long, Geoffrey,” Ci reminded him softly.

Before Ci went upstairs for her afternoon siesta, she remembered that a man had called for Tor and she’d meant to give her the message.

“Oh heavens, who?” Tor tried to sound unconcerned.
Oh, Ollie, please, please, God, let it be Ollie.

“Now, who in the hell was it?” Ci put down her cigarette holder while she thought. “Oh, I know, I know. What was his name? Toby Williamson. He said we’d all met at the Huntington’s; I had no memory of it. He wanted to know you were safe in the riots. He left a telephone number.”

Tor’s heart sank instantly. “How kind of him,” she said.

“Was he the one with the insect collection who wrote poetry?” Ci’s expression was satirical. “Such fun,” she told the others. “She read some to me. ‘My heart is a tool / I’ve been such a fool…’” she improvised gaily. Tor felt her cheeks flush with shame.

How cruel of her to have shown his very nice poem (actually about birds and eggs or something) to Ci, who had doubtless amused her circle at the club with it, too. She’d met Toby at some do at Government House. A sweet man, she remembered, who did something to do with teaching boys at a school somewhere. He’d talked to her about birds, and then, she remembered, about women’s clothes and she, totally, in the grips of Ollie obsession, had hardly heard a word. All she could really remember of him was that he had a kind smile, and, oh yes, that was it, they’d had a hot-making conversation about modern poetry until she’d had to explain to him she was a complete ignoramus and he’d have to speak to her friend Viva
about things like that. He hadn’t sneered at her about that, but looked at her thoughtfully.

“I’m envious,” he’d said. “You have it all to come.”

I was just phoning to see if you were all right.
That was kind, but when she tried to remember what his voice sounded like, she couldn’t.

When Ci had left the room, Rose said, “Will you phone him back?”

“Not sure,” said Tor, who was suddenly feeling very tired. “He was a bit of an egghead.”

“Nothing to lose,” said Rose lightly. “Except your ticket home.”

“No,” agreed Tor.

“Shall we toss for it?” Rose got out a three-rupee coin. “Snakes you do, squiggles you don’t.”

She flung the coin in the air, then clapped it in the palm of her hand.

“Snake wins,” she said.

W
hen Viva and Frank got in the back of the Mallinsons’ car after lunch, she pulled the seat rest down between them.

“I can’t stand that woman,” she exploded as soon as they were in motion. “How dare she speak to Tor like that?”

“Careful.” Frank looked at the chauffeur, who was driving with an ear cocked in their direction. “Maybe she drinks because she is frightened,” he said in a low voice. “Everything is ending for her, too.”

“Well, I really do hate her,” Viva muttered. “She’s pure poison.”

She felt his hand touch hers.

“Viva,” he said, “I’m worried about you going back to Byculla on your own. Let me stay with you for a while.”

“No,” she said. “No. You can’t come back.”

“Talk to me, please,” he said. “There’s hardly any time left now.”

“I am talking to you,” she said childishly, pulling her hand away. “I’m talking to you now.”

“We can’t just pretend nothing happened.”

Yes we can,
she thought. She’d done it before and she could do it again.

The most disturbing thing of all was that she felt so intensely alive sitting next to him like this, so aware of his thigh muscles under the lines of his trousers, his hand resting casually on the seat rest. Her body was blazing with sensation in a new way, and all of this felt wrong and muddled up because Guy could be dead, and surely nicer or better people would be in mourning, not in lust.

“I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on, and Mr. Jamshed’s there, and look,” as they drove up the Queen’s Road, she pointed outside the car window at the calm streets, the palm trees, the sea beyond. “Everything looks perfectly normal again. It’s as if the riots never happened.”

She heard him take a sharp, impatient breath, turn toward her and turn away again.

“I want to see you again,” he said. “I must. What happened has nothing to do with the riots or with Guy. You know that’s true.”

She said nothing because that felt safer.

She was trying to hold on to the idea that the night before had been a moment of temporary madness, a lapse in discipline. Nothing hurt as much as love, that was what she had to remember.

“Not yet,” she said. “It’s all been too soon, and so…”

When the words were out, she felt vaguely nauseous again. What she most wanted was to wash, to sleep, to stop thinking for a few hours.

“Are you worried about me coming up to your room?”

When he moved his head closer to hers, she could smell his hair, his skin.

“Yes.”

“I thought you didn’t care what other people thought of you. I like that about you.”

When he smiled at her, she trembled.

“Well, I do care,” she said. The car had stopped at the traffic lights, near Churchgate, and on the curb, not ten yards from them, two men were soaping themselves, splashing water from an old bucket over their heads. “Everyone cares in the end,” she said. “Unless they’re mad or ill.”

A swarm of beggar children clustered around their car, fighting to polish its gleaming body work. When Frank rolled down the window to give them a handful of annas, his arm brushed hers and her body sang as if it led a separate life of its own.

“When will we know?” she said when the car was moving again, past the Flora Fountain and in the direction of the hospital. “About Guy, I mean. Have the police told his parents yet?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I expect some news at the hospital when I get back. Shall I leave a message or come over?”

“Leave a message,” she said. “Don’t come over.”

He looked at her and said nothing.

“I was horrible to him,” she said. “If he was ill—I mean seriously, mentally ill—I should have got help.”

“Viva,” he tried again, “you weren’t horrible. Don’t forget, I was there, too, and it wasn’t your fault.”

“How far is it to the hospital?” She was longing suddenly for his confusing presence to be gone.

“Two streets from here.”

“It’s beginning to feel like ‘Ten Green Bottles’ with Tor and the Mallinsons going back.”

She could hear him trying for a more conversational tone. “Are you leaving, too?”

“Not yet,” she said. “What about you?”

“I’ve been offered a job in Lahore,” he said. “That research job I told you about.”

“Will you take it?” She looked straight ahead of her.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

One side of her mind now watched the street sellers setting up their stalls, the lights being lit around the Flora Fountain, the wispy clouds in a rainbow-colored sky; the other wondered if she would regret it for the rest of her life if she let him slip through her fingers like this. While the chauffeur parked the car, she followed Frank up the steps toward the main entrance.

“I should probably thank you for coming to Ooty to rescue us,” she said, “but I don’t know what to say anymore. I don’t think I’ve quite taken it in yet.”

He stopped with one hand on the door. “About us or about Guy? Please don’t forget it’s only a rumor—I did tell you that.”

“Both.”

He looked exhausted, she noticed, and pale. His eyes searched her face for clues. “Don’t say anything you don’t mean,” he said, “but promise me that you won’t feel ashamed.”

“I’m not ashamed,” she said. “I feel as if I’ve been through an earthquake.”

He gave her a steady look. “I know,” he said.

He was about to say something else, but she put her hand over his mouth.

“No,” she said. “Don’t. Please. Not yet.”

There were no signs of riots as the chauffeur took her back through Byculla, the same old potholed streets, crumbling houses, street markets, flower stalls.

She let herself into the house—everything the same here, too: bicycles in the hall; the smell of Mrs. Jamshed’s curries in the air.

Mr. Jamshed was in his front room in the middle of his afternoon prayers. He was facing the sun and wearing his
sudreh,
the shirt he prayed in tied three times with the
kusti
cord he wore to remind him, he had once explained, of the three principles he lived his life by: “Good words, good thoughts, good deeds.”

She stood at the door waiting. In prayer, his normally jolly face looked guarded, forbidding, like an Old Testament prophet.

When the door squeaked, he opened his eyes. “Miss Viva.”

“Forgive me for interrupting you, but is everybody all right?” she said. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

“We are tolerably well,” he told her. He looked at her, polite, distant. “No riots in the streets, thanks be to God, and I have heard nothing to the contrary from your school or your home or whatever it is you call it.”

“Oh good. What a relief.”

“Well, not really.” He still had that strange look on his face. “Other things have been going on here that I am not happy with. Come.” He gestured toward the open door. “It’s better I show you myself.”

He put on his battered sandals and padlocked the front door behind him, something she’d never seen him do before.

“You see,” he explained as they were walking upstairs, “while you were away, an unruly element broke into our house. They made a mischief in your room and did other things. At first I thought it might be hooligans, now I think it might be a friend of yours.”

“A friend of mine?”

“Wait.” He held his palm up at the threshold of her door. “I will explain to you in a minute.”

When he opened the door, she cried out with shock. The curtains were closed, but even in half-darkness she saw her typewriter slung on the floor; her dresses, knickers, blouses, pictures lay in random heaps. A suspender belt had been draped on an empty picture hook on her wall.

“Oh no!” She ran to the little pine cupboard beside her bed where she’d kept the first draft of her book. It was still there.

Mr. Jamshed drew the curtains with a scraping sound.

“That’s not all,” he said. “Look.” He pointed to the wall. Gazing into the half-light, she saw above the washstand a photograph of herself leaning against the railings of the
Kaisar-i-Hind,
next to Nigel, the young civil servant. The wind was blowing her hair, and Nigel, looking spivvy in a striped blazer, was poking her in the ribs. A photograph nailed on the opposite wall showed her leaving Daisy’s party, her shoes in her hand, looking drunkenly dazed and happy. “Whore” was written in large untidy letters across the corner of it. In the third picture, she and Frank were leaving Moustafa’s. On the bed, beside a hammer and a pile of nails, was an out-of-focus photograph Tor had taken of her and Guy side by side on deck chairs.

Moving toward it, she felt the crunch of glass under her foot. She’d stepped on a small votive pot, with a spent candle inside it.

“All these pictures had candles alight underneath them when I found them,” Mr. Jamshed said. “My house could have burned to the ground.”

She sat down on a heap of clothes on her bed and shook her head.

“I know who did this,” she told Mr. Jamshed. “But he may be dead. I don’t know yet.”

As soon as the words were out, she realized how peculiar they sounded. “You must think I’m mad,” she said.

“Madam,” Mr. Jamshed spoke very formally, “I don’t think you’re mad, but I cannot allow you to bring danger and other things to our house.”

“What do you mean?”

He gave a snort of disgust. “You know what I mean. How can your father or your brothers let you live like this?”

“I don’t have a father or a brother,” she said.

“I don’t know anything about you,” he said. He was standing a few inches from a picture of her laughing and carousing with Tor and Frank. “And I’ve never spoken to you about my beliefs, but I will tell you something now. The god I was praying to when you came in, his name is Ahura Mazda. Nothing happens in my life except through him. When I see all this”—he gestured toward the photographs, the underwear—“I know I have let him down. I am like a child who has brought a dangerous toy into the house. No! No!” He held his hands out when she tried to protest. “I must finish what I have to say. This is partly my fault, because my girls so want to be modern like you and I want them to be educated, but this is the danger. In our religion purity is at the heart of everything we do, and this is…” Words failed him and he threw up his hands, looking stricken. “This makes my house feel unclean.”

“These are my friends.” She could feel the ground moving under her and didn’t know what to do. “You saw us at the party. You liked them.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know them. And him.” Mr. Jamshed jabbed his finger at the picture of Nigel. Who is he? And him?” He pointed to Guy. “Is he another man who comes to your room?”

“He’s just a boy. I brought him over on the ship. I was paid to do it. I didn’t even know him before.”

“
You didn’t know him,
” said Mr. Jamshed. “And you, a young girl, were paid to bring him? No, I don’t believe. Even in England, they wouldn’t let this happen.”

His eyes were large pools of suffering. His forehead deeply furrowed.

“Madam, I am a Parsee, we are broad-minded people, but I found alcohol bottles in your room, too, and now this. And I’m very worried for my family. I already get stick from some local people for letting my girls go to the university—more shame
for me. And what about those children you are supposed to help?” He smacked the side of his head to show how impossible this was.

She lowered her head. All their previously intriguing differences had suddenly become a chasm impossible to leap.

“Mr. Jamshed,” she said, “I understand how this looks, but I must ask you something as a matter of urgency. Did anyone see this boy in the building?” She pointed toward the picture of Guy.

“This boy?” Mr. Jamshed examined the photo closely. “My neighbor Mr. Bizwaz described a fellow like this. He said he looked like an Englishman. He went out into the street; he took off his coat and shoes and set light to them. He shouted after him but he ran away.”

“Only his coat and shoes?”

“Only his coat and shoes.”

It took a while for this news to sink in.

“Are you sure?”

“Mr. B. does not lie.” He glared at her when he said this.

“Oh God,” she cried. “But this might be good news. We thought he might be dead.”

“You thought he was dead?” Mr. Jamshed had begun to scratch his head as if bad thoughts swarmed over him like cockroaches. “Mrs. Daisy Barker told me you were a very respectable young English lady, and now this, too.” He stopped scratching and looked at her. “Crisis for me, Miss Viva,” he said. “I can’t let you stay here. Not tonight, because it’s dark, but tomorrow you must leave. You can’t stay here.”

“Mr. Jamshed,” Viva protested, “I honestly can explain everything. Let me bring Mrs. Barker over to speak with you tomorrow, she—”

“Madam, forgive me.” He held up his palms like a shield. “But you are both foreigners, so you don’t know everything. I can only repeat: there are men who live around here who are
very fanatical. They already think women like you are—” He stopped, unable to say the words. “Not pure,” he said. “I have been sticking up for you with them. I can’t now. It’s too dangerous.”