East of the Sun (35 page)

“After a few days of being sent to Coventry by Ci, I was so desperate to get out that I phoned him at the Willoughby Club. I felt I had nothing to lose, and Mummy had sent me a list of materials and things she wanted me to bring home and I knew I had to get her a present. But with Pandit gone and Ci upstairs, I needed a lift.

“He came straight over. His car was so scruffy—simply jammed with clothes and books—and Ci, who’d come down hoping someone fun had arrived, looked him over as if he was something the cat had sicked up.

“He was tongue-tied for a bit and I was almost sulking. You know what I’m like, Viva, so stupid really. I sort of compare myself to those people you read about in
Tatler
and so forth—idiots, really, in their wonderful clothes, their cars—and all this seemed so ordinary.

“He wanted to take me first to a place called Bangangla. It sounded jolly boring to me—something about burial grounds and a lake. I put my foot down and said I really had to go shopping. I explained about the materials and how I would have to buy Mummy a present and why it was important to suck up to her.

“Well, to nutshell it, he drove me to the Army and Navy Store. ‘Tell me what she’s like,’ he said when we were in the hat department. ‘I’m good at presents.’ ‘You won’t believe this,’ I told him, ‘but she’s tiny, like a bird.’

“And then he reached out and put one of those dreadful ostrich-feather pith helmets on his head and squawked like a bird, and we both looked at each other and had complete hysterics. It’s never happened to me with someone I don’t know,
but it was bliss—if there was an aisle we would have rolled in it. Sheer nerves probably, or else I was just relieved to be with someone my own age and away from the Mallinsons.”

“So what happened then?” Viva was starting to enjoy this.

“We ended up buying her a teak elephant. Toby told me that the elephant’s head must always point toward the door for good luck—I think that’s what he said, either the head or the bottom. As soon as it was wrapped up, I knew she wouldn’t like it—she’s never liked any of my presents, they almost seem to make her angry. Anyway, all this is beside the point. After the shopping, he drove me to this place, Bangangla. It’s such a funny place, a sort of secret lake, right in the middle of Bombay, with steps all around it. It was so peaceful.

“We ate lunch at a little restaurant near there, and afterward we sat on the steps and talked and talked and talked, first about his work—he’s a biologist, or a bird man or something like that, but he’s working in a boys’ boarding school up north to make money—and then about absolutely everything: our childhoods, our parents, all the ordinary things I don’t like to talk to men like Frank and Ollie about because they’re so good-looking and I always have people like Ci or my mother drawling in the back of my mind, ‘Sharpen,’ when I get too sincere, or when I don’t think I’m good enough for them. Do you have a headache powder, Viva? Sorry, I know I’m talking too much but I will get to the point soon.”

The powder was dissolved in water. Tor lay down for a second with the damp flannel over her temples, and then she sat up.

“Here is the best bit,” she said. “All the time we were talking I noticed what a nice mouth he had and that if he had a decent haircut, he’d be almost handsome. And then he started to say some poetry to me and I said, ‘Look here! I must warn you, I’m very dim and I only know one poem and it’s called “Ithaka” and I think it’s codswallop.’”

Viva laughed. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘Because it’s a lie. It’s all about finding diamonds and pearls on your travels and coming back a richer person, but if anything, being in India is going to make me feel much poorer, because if I hadn’t come, I wouldn’t know how wonderful life can be.’

“He didn’t say anything for a while; in fact we sat in silence. A small funeral party had come down to the lake and we watched this man strip down to his dhoti, wash himself, and scatter his father’s ashes on the surface of the lake. That was quite sad and Toby explained how the man was saying good-bye. That was interesting, and then I told him the whole story about Pandit and he was horrified, too.

“In the car going home he said that he didn’t agree with me about ‘Ithaka’ being just about the joys of setting out into the unknown, he thought it was about finding yourself, something like that anyway.

“Then he stopped the car near Chowpatty Beach. The sun was setting and he kissed me. Oh, Viva, have I finally gone mad?” Tor’s big blue eyes lit up.

“Go on! Go on!” Viva was the one on the edge of her seat now; Tor was in a trancelike state.

“He said, ‘I have a preposterous idea to put to you. You don’t want to go home and I want to get married, so let’s get married. It’ll be an adventure, and I already know you make me laugh.’”

“Oh no, no, no!” Viva put her hands over her ears. “This can’t be true.”

“It’s true.” Tor folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them.

“Tor, you went out with this man for one afternoon. You can’t do it, you simply can’t.”

“But it’s not like that.” Tor put the flannel back on her forehead. “That’s the funny thing. You know how sometimes you just know.”

“No, I don’t,” said Viva. “Not like this.”

“Toby says it’s more like an Indian marriage except that we’ve arranged it ourselves.”

“But it’s nothing like that, Tor,” Viva protested. “You know nothing about him or his parents and they know nothing about you.”

“I know that his mother lives in Hampstead with his father, who is an architect, and that she writes poetry and that she goes swimming in a pond in Hampstead Heath every morning with a kettle in her hand.”

“Oh well,” Viva said, “everything’s understood now.”

“It’s to make the water warmer,” Tor added helpfully.

“Wonderful.”

“Oh, Viva.” Tor clasped her hands together like a child. “Try to understand. I don’t have to go home to Middle Wallop this way. I shall have a house of my own. He said our life together would be a journey of exploration—like those Buddhist monks who go into the forest in order to find their ant-man or something like that.”

“
Atman,
” said Viva. “It means inner essence, and none of this sounds remotely monklike to me.”

“Oh, Viva,” Tor said suddenly. “This headache really is a corker. Do you have another powder?”

Viva dissolved some more Epsom salts in a glass of water.

“How old is he, Tor?” she asked more gently. She was surprised to feel herself almost panting with alarm.

“Twenty-seven and a half, and he earns one and a half thousand pounds a year teaching at a school for Indian boys in Amritsar. It’s called St. Bart’s or something. We’ll have our own house there.”

“I thought you said he was much older than you?”

“I’ve told you already, he was wearing his father’s dinner jacket. It made him look vast—he’s really quite slim.”

“And has he actually proposed to you yet?”

Tor looked secretive. “Well…”

“Come on, Tor, out with it.”

After a tremulous silence Tor said, “I am already bethrothed.” She rolled back the cuff of her dress and showed Viva a silver bracelet around her wrist. “He gave me this—in the Hindu religion it means ‘beloved.’”

“But you’re not a Hindu, Tor.”

“I know, and I couldn’t give a fig. We went to the Bombay Registry Office yesterday and I have this, too.” She showed Viva a gold band, which she’d hung on a chain inside her dress. “We’re eloping tonight. I shall leave a note for Ci Ci and I’ve already sent a telegram to my mother, and the best thing of all about this, Viva,” her eyes blazed with excitement, “is that it’s too late for anyone to do anything about it.”

W
hen Tor had left with the same speed at which she’d arrived, Viva sat down on her bed, poleaxed by her news. The madcap speed with which Tor had donated herself to this Toby person was surely insanity, and the thought of her driving north in a few hours’ time in his ancient car made her shudder with terror. Her friend was in a paper cup heading for the rapids. The only thing she was grateful for was that Tor had been so bound up in her own news she hadn’t asked a thing about Frank.

Viva didn’t want to talk about him. It was over.

She’d sent a letter to Frank a week ago informing him that Guy was still alive, and it seemed that his “death” had been some sort of prank that had fooled them both, but as a result of it, she had had to move from Mr. Jamshed’s.

“It was kind of you to try to be our knight in shining armor,” she’d written, and then thinking this sounded sarcastic, she’d put, “to escort us home, but I think it would be better for us not to see each other again.” In her first draft she’d put, “at least for
a very long time,” and then crossed that out, thinking a swift amputation was better than death by slow cuts.

“Mr. Jamshed and Daisy,” she’d continued, “have made it clear to me how important it is at the moment to do nothing that would harm the reputation of the home.” Her pen had wavered here—if they hadn’t slept together, perhaps she might have told him about the desecration of her room, and Mr. Jamshed’s painful accusations, but now he seemed part of that shame.

“I want to finish my book now, and when it is done, I shall go to Simla and pick up my parents’ trunk,” she’d said in her last but one sentence. “Good luck to you in your future endeavors. With kind regards, Viva.”

The last bit, about traveling to pick up the trunk, had been a bit of bravado, and maybe (she hadn’t thought of this at the time) a way of consoling herself because the letter, which had taken her over an hour to write, had left her body slick with sweat and her mind so disordered that, after the envelope had been sealed, she had taken down her notebooks, determined to work. When that seemed impossible, she’d walked around her room hugging herself and almost panting with distress.

Later in bed, and unable to sleep, she thought of how it had been in that little guest house in Ooty in the pouring rain and pain turned to anger at herself. She deserved everything she’d got, and now the thought of her tears, her moans, the way she’d clung to him dismayed, repulsed her, and she wished with all her heart she’d kept her distance. This keeping of distance was no mere figure of speech for her. After Josie and her parents died, she learned—and partially succeeded, right up until the William fiasco—not to trust, not to hope, and, above all, not to reveal. Life was easier that way.

Frank wrote back two days later.

She was sitting on her bed in her new room as she read the letter. Afterward, she’d crumpled his words in her hand and thrown them in the wastepaper basket, and then, in a mood of feverish energy, picked up a broom and swept the floor. When the dust was collected, she scrubbed out the large wardrobe with carbolic soap, relined it with paper, and with finicky neatness arranged her few clothes inside. She’d lined up her writing paper, pens, and typewriter on her desk, put her pile of notebooks in order of date on her one shelf, and finally pinned a timetable on the wall near her desk. Good, her life was back in some sort of order again. Let work begin.

Later that night, exhausted and numb, she’d lain down in her iron bed near the window. Drifting toward sleep, with her own arms wrapped tightly around her, the last thing she heard was the cry of a baby owl who was nesting with its mother in the tamarind tree. Talika had told her once it was an omen for disaster. She was glad she did not believe in such things.

T
he telegram Tor sent home to Middle Wallop—S
ORRY
S
TOP
N
OT COMING HOME MARRIED INSTEAD YEST
S
TOP
I’
LL WRITE AND EXPLAIN
S
TOP
V
ERY HAPPY
S
TOP
L
OVE
V
ICTORIA
—led to a fusillade of letters and telegrams passing between Ci Ci Mallinson and Tor’s mother, Jonti—both convinced the other was to blame.

Jonti Sowerby fired the opening round by asking how it was possible for a girl to have been so unsupervised that she had simply disappeared into the wilds of India like this. Had Ci Ci even heard of this Toby person? Did anyone know what his father did? She asked Ci Ci to suggest what she should now do with a single ticket she had purchased for Victoria, at a time when they could barely afford it. The cost, “in case she was at all interested,” was sixty pounds.

Ci Ci, minus Pandit and in the throes of packing to go home, wrote back by return of post, asking Jonti whether she was familiar with the old saying: no good deed goes unpunished.

“May I point out,” she continued, “that your original request
was for Victoria to stay with us for the duration of the Bombay season, which runs from November until February at the very latest. Had Victoria not been ‘conveniently forgotten,’ none of this would have happened.”

Since Jonti had been vulgar enough to bring up the money question, might she also point out the money saved by not having Victoria around. “She is, as I may have to remind you,” Ci had added spitefully, “quite fond of hot baths and eating.”

Ci had, however, softened this blow by saying she’d made a few inquiries about “this Toby person” locally. The word at the club was that things might not be as serious as they might have seemed. His parents, though intellectuals, had come out to India last year and stayed with the Maharajah of Baroda, who in her opinion was anti-British.

Ci enclosed with this letter a dressmaker’s bill for Tor, and said she had left “a rather old twinset” at the back of Ci’s wardrobe. If Jonti felt like sending her a postal order for the stamp, she would return same.

Jonti wrote to Rose’s mother next. She asked if she could shed light on the elopement, which had “broken a devoted mother’s heart.” “Only another mother could imagine how excited I was getting at the thought of seeing dear Victoria again,” she’d ended poignantly.

Mrs. Wetherby, who had had Tor to stay for more school holidays than she could count, took this with a large pinch of salt, but promised to send the letter on to Rose anyway.

“Rose,” she wrote, “has recently moved up north to the frontier station of Bannu. We tried to persuade her to stay in Poona, which we understand is far safer, but she was adamant. She is also, as you probably already know, nearing the last month of her confinement, so you may not get a letter back immediately!

“We, quite unusually, haven’t heard from her for several weeks, in some ways a blessing in disguise, since my husband
has had a serious heart attack and none of us have had the heart to tell Rose yet—she has so much on her plate already. Anyway, here is the new address: Married Quarters number 312, c/o Bannu Cantonment, Northwest Frontier, India.”

Jonti’s letter took three weeks to reach Bannu, the grim little town where Rose and Jack now lived in what was called by the army “emergency married quarters.” After months of speculation, Jack and twenty other members of the Third Cavalry Regiment had been sent there to plug some gaps on the northwest frontier after a raid that had killed five members of an infantry column. His job now was to take two-or three-day treks into the hills in order to decide which areas were suitable for future operations. After the first morning’s ride, the hills were so steep that the only communication with Bannu was with the carrier pigeon.

Jack had begged Rose not to come. Everybody knew this area, with its steep mountains and treacherous ravines and fierce, trigger-happy gangs, was one of the most dangerous places on earth. Some years ago, a woman, Mollie Ellis, was kidnapped in Kohat. Since then a large barbed-wire fence had been erected around the cantonment, and no Englishwoman was allowed to step outside the barbed wire without permission.

But Rose had insisted on coming. They’d expected to live in Peshawar Cantonment, where there was a reasonable military hospital, but a flash flood two weeks before they arrived had made the fifty or so houses there uninhabitable. The only other alternative, or so the duty officer had said, was that Jack move into the officers’ mess and for Rose to return to Poona.

“She’ll stay,” Jack had said woodenly. “If you can find us another house.” He knew it was pointless to argue with her anymore.

On a baking-hot day in late August, they’d been given the keys to this deserted-looking bungalow surrounded by red dust and scrub. Rose had felt the hammer blows of heat strike her as she got out of the car, and looking toward a shimmering horizon, she’d felt it travel up through the soles of her feet. She’d felt sweat dripping between her breasts, now the size of large ripe melons.

In shock, she’d walked around the house with Jack, almost unable to focus her eyes, feeling the heat radiate off the walls. In the room where they were to sleep, their iron bed had bird droppings on its straw mattress; the walls in the dusty sitting room were covered in a green moss left from the last monsoon. The last tenant—a drunk, the duty officer had told them—had left a half-eaten tin of bully beef on the kitchen table; the broken commode in the bathroom was full of dark brown urine.

Outside her kitchen window was a woodwormy veranda, beyond that the red dirt track leading to Bannu, four miles away. On the other side of the track the Kurran river ran down the valley with a light roar that sounded all day and all night. Above the river, high mountains, and on the other side of them, the great numerals that marked the end of the British Empire. She pictured chaos over there: blood and chaos and wars. She should never have come, it was her fault, not Jack’s; he’d tried to warn her over and over again.

Jack had arrived in a fearful temper—Bula Bula, who he’d brought up by train to ride in the hills and to play polo on—had come down with prickly heat and was looking miserable, and then Jack had the great fright of temporarily mislaying his rifle en route—the loss of a rifle was a court-martial offense and a great disgrace, but thankfully Rose had found it for him under a mound of clothes in the bedroom of the rickety hotel where they spent their first silent night together.

When he’d first seen the house Jack had shouted, “Oh for Christ’s sake, what a fucking shambles.” It was the first
time she’d ever heard him swear, although they had had several shouting matches after he’d told her about Sunita. He’d ignored her attempts to joke about her not expecting him to carry her over the threshold this time. If she hadn’t been here, his glare informed her, he could have done what he’d wanted to do all along and lived with his friends in the mess.

Ten minutes later there had been a knock on the door and a tall Pathan woman arrived, dazzling them with the magnificence of her eyes and her imperious posture. She wore a dark blue
shalwar kameez
and had a gold ring through her nose. Addressing Jack in Pushto, she said her name was Laila and she was from the next village. She would help them in the house, a statement rather than a question. Standing behind her was her husband, Hasan, as handsome as she was, with piercing green eyes. He said he would be their driver and gardener, although there was no evidence of a garden in the rocky soil outside. When Jack asked her if she had any children, she told him she’d had six but that three had died. When Jack said he was very sorry to hear that, she replied it was the will of God.

It had taken Rose and Laila four days of scrubbing with carbolic soap and endless pots of water heated up on a wooden stove to get the place even half habitable.

When it was clean, Baz and Imad, Laila’s two sons, who worked in Bannu in a carpenter’s shop, came and put up shelves, mended the bed and the hinge of the wooden box bought for the new baby’s clothes.

And today, with two weeks to go before the baby came, Rose was in what was to be the new baby’s bedroom trying to sort out its clothes. She’d been on her own for the last week—Jack was on patrol near the village of Mamash, an area where tribesmen had killed one of the soldiers. He hoped to be back in the next few days, but with him you never knew.

Dripping with sweat, she stood in a smock, barefoot and with her hair tied back off her face; her ankles swollen like
an old lady’s. As she folded the new baby’s tiny shirts, the ridiculously small trousers, the flannel liberty bodices, the pile of nappies, she had to remind herself that this was one of the moments she’d so looked forward to, because now it had come the heat and the horrible house made it feel completely unreal. She felt as if she was dressing up a ghost dolly that would never really come.

Jonti’s letter arrived, along with one from her mother, by mail lorry with the weekly newspapers, Rose was sitting on a chair in the sitting room, surrounded by a black and sticky carpet of stinkbugs. They’d arrived the night before, from nowhere it seemed, and then two enormous frogs had leaped in from the veranda when she’d opened the door and gobbled some of them up. She left them where they were, made herself a jam sandwich and took the battered envelope that held her mother’s longed-for letter back to bed with her. She read it greedily, so many questions she didn’t know how to answer. She’d hardly heard a word from Tor herself except to say she was madly in love and was never going to go home again, but people made things up in letters all the time. Were you supposed to pass them on?

Since Jack had told her about Sunita, she’d told nothing but lies to her parents and she was just so sick of this new person she’d become: outwardly huge and lumbering, inwardly thin-skinned, unreliable, unsure of everything.

She got out of bed to look for her writing paper. She would have to answer it. From the shelf above her desk, she took down her box of shame, a wooden box full of letters from relatives and friends, telling Rose how clever she was to be having this baby, and how delighted she and Jack must feel. She’d hardly answered any of them yet: since Jack’s revelations she’d felt bruised and disorientated and at the same time so cross
with herself. At least Jack had had the courage to tell her the truth. He’d sworn he would not see Sunita again. Surely she should be grateful for that?

She was not. The atmosphere was so strained between them now that when Jack left the house, Rose experienced a physical feeling of relief like a tight hat being taken off. On the nights he was home, their conversation was so stilted she sometimes had this image of them all out to sea on a dark night in two small and separate boats drifting farther and farther apart.

She didn’t blame him for all of it; there were so many other things bothering her now and she was cross with herself for being so wet.

Other people managed without fuss the perfectly natural business of having a child. What right had she to feel so fuzzy in the head, so lazy and feeble-minded? On the night before he’d left, Jack had ticked her off quite sharply for leaving a dish of roast goat on the sideboard, which had immediately seethed with ants, and she’d had some sympathy for him. The man was living with a halfwit.

Rose had planned her morning. If she sat at her desk near the window and didn’t move until she’d answered four of her letters, that would be a start.

As she was sealing the envelope, the distinct outline of her baby’s foot appeared through the side of her smock. She doubled up with pain, and then felt a whole new swarm of anxieties. She felt so ill prepared, but didn’t want to make a fool of herself by admitting herself into the very basic military hospital in Peshawar too early. She’d been looking forward to seeing the garrison doctor the week before; she’d taken a list of questions with her. Was it normal to feel so much kicking in the night? She’d hardly slept for the last week. Was it all right that she felt giddy sometimes? She’d actually fainted in the kitchen two days before; she’d been talking to Laila and woken up on the sofa.

Well, maybe he was tired, too, but the garrison doctor had looked over his glasses at her and made her feel as if she was being a complete fusspot, even though she hadn’t admitted about the fainting. “What a lot of things you’re finding to worry about, Mrs. Chandler,” he’d said in a voice of strained patience. “It might have been better for everyone if you’d stayed close to a bigger hospital like the one in Poona.”