East of the Sun (36 page)

She’d smiled and tried to look sensible, but the truth was, she was frightened now, frightened at the remoteness of their house, frightened that when the baby came she’d drop him or forget him or that he’d be eaten by something or get malaria or blood poisoning.

On the way out of his office, the doctor had mentioned quite sharply that he’d had to deal with a fatal stabbing that morning between two warring tribesmen, as if to say, “This is the real world, not monitoring your baby twinges.” And in the tum-tum horse and buggy going home, she’d suddenly felt such a surge of anger she’d wanted to turn around and ask the stupid man to come with her and look at all those tiny mounds of earth, those temporary headstones. That was real life, too, and he had no right to talk to her like that.

Three letters to write, only three, then she could go and lie down, but the kicking had started again, regular as drumbeats, and nauseating. She staggered over to the glass; sweat was pouring from her.

When the kicking stopped, Rose took a deep breath and sat back down at her writing desk, relieved to be feeling normal again, whatever normal was nowadays. She picked up her pen, filled it with ink, and unzipped the red leather case her father had given her for her thirteenth birthday. At the time, its compartments marked “correspondence,” “stamps,” “bills” had thrilled her, made her feel so adult and capable, a person who could organize her own life.

In the stamp compartment, her father had tucked a feather, now faded to a dull beige, from the green woodpecker who lived in their crab-apple tree, and two perfect little shells he’d found for her on the beach at Lymington, where they spent their summer holidays.

She rolled the feather between her fingertips.
How typi
cal of him,
she thought,
first to notice and then to want to share this small but perfect thing with me
. If she closed her eyes, she could almost smell him, woody smells and wool, the spice of the tobacco he kept in his moleskin waistcoat. He was ill; she could feel it now by her mother’s silences, maybe even dead. She put the feather back in the writing case. That was it, he was dead and her mother didn’t want to tell her, because she’d been ill and was thousands and thousands of miles away from home.

Stop, stop, stop!
That was another thing that had to stop soon: talking to herself like an old lady.

The top two sheets of her writing paper were damp and smelled of mildew. She tore them off and threw them away.

Dear Mrs. Sowerby, Dear Mrs. Sowerby, Dear Mrs. Sowerby. Thank you for your letter. I am…
If she wrote this over and over again it might propel her to the next sentence.

She put down her pen and sat listening; through the thin walls of the house, she could hear the gentle padding of Laila. She was making up the new cradle; there was a squeak as she rocked it and any moment now she’d come into the room and ask her to look at it, this empty cradle for this baby not yet born.

She’d had some bad dreams about this baby. In one, she’d left it on a countertop in London while she’d tried on hats; in another, she’d carelessly sat its little bottom on a stove—that dream was so strong she had actually smelled its skin burning like crackling on roast pork; the week before, she’d left it underneath the mountain for days while she’d gone climbing. When she came down, the ayah was screaming and the baby all blue and still in its bassinet.

Rose stopped and put down her pen. The horizon shimmered and danced, the sweat had broken out on her forehead again. It was so stinking hot that if Jack hadn’t been away she would have slept on the veranda the night before, but she hadn’t dared, frightened of the thought of waking up covered in more stinkbugs or being licked by frogs.

“Memsahib.” Laila had brought a glass of lemonade for her.

“Thank you, Laila. I think we should unwrap the tea service today.” She pointed toward a packing case in the corner of the veranda. “When I’ve finished my letter, I’ll help you.”

Laila, who didn’t understand a word of this, smiled attentively. A few moments later, Rose was on her hands and knees taking china from bits of newspaper when she felt the odd sensation of a cork being popped between her legs.

Now water was streaming down her legs and splashing her shoes. How humiliating! She’d spent a penny on the floor in front of Laila. Her next thought, as she scrambled around trying to mop it up, was relief—thank God Jack hadn’t seen that.

But Laila seemed to know what to do. She held up her hand and smiled widely.

“Baby comes,” she said in faltering English. “Is all right.” She’d patted her softly on the back.

Rose, gasping from the shock of her first proper contraction, said, “Laila, get the doctor, please.
Daktar, daktar.
”

A few minutes later she saw Hasan whipping up his skinny horse and galloping toward town.

“Memsahib, sit.” Laila had made up a nest of cushions for Rose on the cane recliner in the corner of the veranda near the packing cases.

“It’s a false alarm, I’m sure of it,” said Rose, who was smiling again. “I’m not due for two more weeks.” She pointed toward the half-unwrapped china. “Carry on, carry on,” she said in one of her few words of Pushto. “I’m very well, thank you.”

When Laila had finished with the china, she carried it into the kitchen. Rose lay on her own under the mountains listening to the roar of the river and the cheep-cheep-cheep of birds she didn’t yet know the name of. She pulled the sheet up to her chin. She forbade herself to panic, even when another mule’s kick in her stomach surprised her and made her yelp. If by some chance the baby was early, it might not be such a bad thing. The doctor would come and she would surprise Jack with a bonny new baby on his return.

Oh, how wonderful that would be,
she thought, lying back on the cushions, panting slightly. They’d had such rows about her coming here; they’d raged for weeks in the privacy of their bedroom before he’d finally relented. The northwest, he’d insisted over and over again, was no place for a woman, particularly a pregnant one. There’d be no club for her—or at least no one there she knew, since most of the regiment had moved back to Poona—no companionship, and it could even interfere with his promotion.

“Why are you so determined to come?” he’d shouted on the night of their worst row. There’d been one moment then when he’d stood over her, his face looking so set and furious she thought he might hit her, and if he had, she knew she would have hit him right back; she could feel herself snarling.

“You know why,” she’d shouted. “Because I’m having our baby, because I don’t want to stay in Poona with all the gos
sips, and because if I lose you now I’m never going to find you again.”

That was how bad things had been between them since his confession about Sunita. She felt she was only hanging on to him by the slenderest of threads. That if she let that snap it would be over.

That night, he’d come home and told her there was a hospital in Peshawar where she could have the baby. The muscle in Jack’s jaw that twitched when he was angry had twitched during this announcement; she’d ignored it but was sad because she felt in that moment that she hated him.

Rose, lying on the veranda, was getting used to the slight twinges that her contractions brought. She’d been here for nearly an hour. She was waiting for the cup of tea that Laila was making her and wondering idly why Dr. Patterson from Poona hadn’t told her about the spending a penny thing, nor for that matter had
The Modern Woman’s Beauty & Hygiene Book,
which she had read obsessively in the months leading up until now. But what she was mostly thinking was,
Why do people make such a fuss of this? It really is no worse than the curse.

The important thing is to stay calm,
she told herself. The corkscrewing pains she was feeling inside her womb she pictured as waves, which could easily be jumped, and when they went away they left her on a smooth flat beach.

When Laila came back with a plate of biscuits, Rose felt reassured by her queenly bearing, her flashing smile. She was wearing her pale blue
shalwar kameez
. Rose would remember this for the rest of her life. She smelled so sweetly of roses and spice. Her fingernails were clean.

She drank her tea, slept for a while, and then the pain woke her up again. The sun had dipped behind the mountains and she could hear the river growling and tumbling in the distance.
“Hasan home?” she said. “
Daktar.
” She wasn’t sure that Laila understood her and was cross with herself for not making more effort to learn her language.

She’d started lessons with a
munshi
, a language teacher, but he was a dry old stick and the hot weather had made her so sleepy, so not much progress had been made.

Now Laila was standing at her elbow and leading her so respectfully around the veranda. When she suddenly doubled up with pain, Laila rubbed the small of her back. The sun continued its slow descent behind the horizon, Rose lay down again. The bird had stopped singing. Laila brought her a dried apricot, a slice of bread and butter, and encouraged her to sip the tea that had grown cold beside her. Rose had tried not to grunt too loudly in front of her. Hasan would come soon or Jack or the doctor.

“Oooh! Oooh!” she heard herself groaning like an animal. “Sorry, sorry,” she said when Laila leaped to her side and started to shush her softly. “OOOhhhh. Help!”

She looked at her watch. Seven o’clock and dark now; a scattering of rain was falling on the windowpanes. She’d never felt more alone in her life. “Where is Hasan?
Daktar?
Captain Chandler?” She was trying not to shout, but Laila just shrugged, and half waved as if they were on opposite sides of a canyon.

“Help me,” said Rose, who was still trying to sound calm. “I think it’s coming.”

Laila took her into her bedroom. She helped her sit down in a chair from which she stared out at the mountains. Laila took Jack’s striped pajamas from under the pillow and put them on the chair. She removed the sheet and put a clean tarpaulin on the bed with another sheet on top of it.

“Don’t worry about that.” Rose was watching her impatiently from the chair. She wasn’t hurting; all she wanted was to lie down. “Doctor here soon.”

“Memsahib, sorry, sorry,” Laila said.

Rose fought her off at first, she was unbuttoning her skirt, she was pushing her down on the bed.

She heard herself screaming. Nobody, nobody had told her it hurt this much.

“It’s fine, Laila,” she said politely, when the pain went again. “Thank you so much.” How awful to be seen like this.

And then the pain again: a bucking bronco kicking her to death from inside. When her screams stopped, she saw the purple rim of the mountain again, she smelled roses and sweat. Laila cradled her to her soft bosom, spoke soothing words. But suddenly, Laila was parting her legs and looking at her.

Laila started to mutter words she didn’t understand. She put both of her hands together to indicate a circle the size of a grapefruit.

But then nothing. The baby wasn’t coming. Rose muffled her screams in her pillow at first, but then she called out, “Mummy, Mummy, help me, Mummy.” Only pain now; she was on the side of a mountain waiting to fall. She didn’t care if the baby died, she didn’t care if she died, she wanted it to stop.

Laila’s hand was holding hers: a hardworking hand, tough, strong, skin like sandpaper. She squeezed it; Laila was her world now, the rope that stopped her falling.

An hour before dawn, when she felt she would die soon of the pain, the baby shot out and another woman, perhaps the village midwife, she never did know, burst into the room and cut the cord.

In the chaos that followed she felt Laila put the child in her arms. She heard herself shout, “My baby! My boy!” in a choked voice she hardly recognized as her own. Her first miracle. The pain was there, but in the blink of an eye it meant nothing. She looked out of the window. She saw a red sun burst over the mountains, and a feeling of vast exhilaration swept over her,
overpowering, unexpected. She wanted tea, she wanted food, she wanted to kiss everybody and everything in the world.

When Laila brought the boy back washed and in a muslin nightdress, she watched her rub his gums with a piece of date that she’d been chewing. She had no idea why she was doing it but she trusted her now.

“Give him to me, Laila.” Rose couldn’t stop smiling. The sky outside the window was bathed in red light; there was a cup of tea on a tray beside her bed. On the floor was the cushion where Laila had prayed during the night, and Jack’s pajamas.

“Give him to me, give him to me.” She crooned, her eyes brimming with happy tears, and the two women beamed at each other in delight.