East of the Sun (40 page)

“I shall be walking right behind you,” he said. “If you try to run away, I will shoot you, not now but later, and nobody will ever know what happened to you. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

He barked at the rickshaw driver. The little carriage stopped.

“Get out,” he said.

A firework went off about ten feet from her as she stepped out into the street. He prodded her in the back and they walked through the doors and into the market where she was deafened by the sound of bleating sheep and goats and the screech of caged birds.

She was starting to panic. The taste of metal in her mouth was fear. The sounds inside the building seemed to swell unbearably. She scanned what felt like a solid wall of sounds and faces with no plan yet apart from escape.

Two young girls were walking very slowly ahead of her. They were dressed up to the nines in their saris and jewelry, thrilled with their new clothes and nattering happily to each other. When they blocked her passage down the aisle, she felt she could have throttled them. Azim couldn’t see them; he was prodding her in the spine with his gun. “
Jaldi, jaldi,
” he said.

“I can’t go any faster,” she said.

Now she could see the vast door at the end of the market open beneath rafters where pigeons sat. Beside the door were the caged birds: each cage lit tonight with Diwali lights.

Outside the door, she saw another crowd, moving swiftly in the direction of another teetering
pandal
surrounded by musicians. In the crush, she felt the strong tug of the crowd, like an undertow, and then the hardness of his gun in her back warning her not to run, but she had no choice now, nor did he. She heard someone laugh and then a scream. The smell of smoke in the air, someone else shouting, “
Jaldi!
” and then she fell, and a scuffed shoe kicked her hard in the teeth and she heard a sharp crack. A jarring pain in the side of her head, thousands and thousands of feet thundered through her brain, and then nothing.

S
he woke up with the taste of old fruit in her mouth and then thought all her teeth must have been kicked in because of the pulpy feeling around her lips. She was lying under a table, her left elbow jammed in a chicken crate with a few soiled feathers inside. A million feet were rushing by her, inches from her head—feet in sandals, bare feet, hennaed feet with complicated patterns on them, large black men’s shoes, some with no laces. The sight of them made her so dizzy she fell back into the dirt, trying to hide herself in an old sack.

Moving made something trickle down her temples and brought a sharp pain. She touched the pain, looking at the blood on her fingers as if it belonged to somebody else.

More feet rushed by; voices piercing her skull and bringing sick into her mouth.

She made herself wait, first five minutes and then ten. Judging from the racket above her, the crowd that had swept her away from Azim was still thick, but she could not risk him
coming back.
Wait, wait, wait,
she told herself wearily, feeling herself come and go.

It was dark when she woke again. She was somewhere else, lying on a lumpy mattress. When she touched her head it was bandaged and she had the most excruciating pain in the roots of her teeth as though they’d all been pulled. Her eyes flickered open, but the light hurt too much. A young Indian woman with a calm, gentle face was bathing her forehead.

“
Mi kuthe ahe?
” Where am I? she asked. When her eyes flickered open again she saw, in one brief bilious flash, a slatted roof, a dirty window. She was in a slum or
chawl
.

“
Kai zala?
” What happened? she said.

“You were knocked and kicked,” the woman demonstrated. “Don’t worry,” she added in Marathi, “you’re all right now, they are coming to take you home.”

Coming to take you home.
She fell on the soft words like a mattress.
Home soon, home soon. Daisy will come.

She opened her eyes again, a new ceiling: sticky, yellow. Above her was a naked lightbulb, some dead insects, a low beam covered in cobwebs. When she touched the side of her head, she felt the stickiness of old blood through the bandage. The pain in the nerve endings of her teeth was still excruciating, but when she checked gingerly with her tongue, her teeth were still there.

From behind her bandage, she heard a door open, voices, the creak of wooden floorboards.

“Daisy?” she said.

Nobody answered.

“Daisy, is it you?”

When she tried to sit up, she felt a hand close around her wrist. A mouth came close to hers, so close she could smell something sweet and stale.

“It’s Guy,” he said.

She closed her eyes so tight that more blood trickled underneath her bandage.

“Guy,” she whispered, “why are you here?”

“I don’t know.” His voice sounded jerky and hard. “I can’t help you; I don’t know why I’m here.”

“What’s happened to me?” When she tried to sit up bright lights went on in her skull.

“Some stupid person in the market found you knocked out. They said an English girl was hurt. I wanted to help, but now I don’t—you’re frightening me like that.”

“Calm down, calm down.” Her mouth felt frizzy and distended as if it was packed with cotton wool. “All you need to do is to go to the home and get Daisy Barker; she’ll help me.”

She heard his bark of frustration, the thud of his own hand hitting his head.

“I can’t, they’ll catch me. I’m in too much trouble myself.”

“Guy, please, that’s all you have to do.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow, I told you that. Ask someone else to do it,” he mumbled.

He was drumming the pads of his fingers on a tabletop and humming in the way he had on the ship when he felt most agitated. She heard the scrape of a match. Her mind felt swollen, unreliable, but she must speak.

“Guy, why did all this happen to me? What did you do?”

No answer. While she waited she forced herself to remain conscious.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Yes, you did,” she said. “I know you did now.”

“I wanted to get you out of the home,” he whispered at last. “It was bad for you there.”

When she tried to shake her head, she moaned, “No.”

She felt his mouth draw close to her again, smelled the acrid smoke on his breath. “Listen,” he whispered. “Listen very
hard.” She felt his hand brush her temples. “You’re
my
mother. I chose you.” The faint mist of his spit on her cheek.

“No! Guy, no! I’m not her!”

“Yes.” She heard the slow exhalation of his breath. “You saw that school. They hung me out of a window there on sheets. My other mother chose that school; she wanted me to stay there.”

“Guy,
listen
to me. This isn’t right.”

“I loved you.” He was panting and she was frightened again.

Through the exploding lights in her head she thought,
He hates me now.

“I can tell you a story about my mother,” he said. He was standing up now and his voice was throbbing with rage. “When I was twelve years old, both of them came back to England. I hadn’t seen them for a long, long, long, long, long, long time. My father said it would be a good joke to dress me up as a waiter and let me take her breakfast in. A surprise. I took the tray up to her room. I said, ‘
Mummy,
’ tried to kiss her.” His face contorted. “She screamed for my father who was in the next room. Oh, that was a hell of a good joke. She loved me so much she didn’t even know who I sodding well was.”

“That was wrong of them,” said Viva. The effort of following all this was making her sweat. When she reached out and tried to hold his hand, he pulled himself away. “A silly trick to play.”

“I want to kill her,” he said calmly. “She jams up my wireless. Don’t look at me,” he instructed her when she hauled herself up on her elbow. “You’re frightening me. I don’t like you looking like this.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “Turn your back on me if you don’t like the bandage but listen hard. I know exactly what you’ve got to do.”

“Um.” He’d turned his back on her; his shoulders were
slumped, the toes of his shoes turned inward. He clicked an invisible switch behind his ear. “What?”

“I know you’ve been worrying about a lot of things for a very long time,” she said. It was hurting her to speak this clearly but she made herself do it. “And you need to stop for a bit, to rest.” She watched his body sag.

“I can’t,” he said. “They’re after me, and you. That’s why I have to go back to England again.”

“What did you tell them about me?”

“That you couldn’t go on working at the home. That I needed you.”

“There were other things, too,” she said.

“I can’t remember them, they’ve all got muddled. Mr. Azim was trying to hurt me—he was frightening me.”

“All you have to do is go back to the home now; tell them where we are.”

“I can’t,” he said in a muffled voice. “They’ll find me and hurt me.”

“Well, find someone to take a message there,” she said with her last ounce of strength. “It will be much better for both of us in the end. Tell them to come and get Viva, Guy, and then, if you like, you can come back with us and we’ll find people who can look after you until you’re better again, too.”

He got up and walked around the room hugging himself. “I’m not so bad, you know,” he said. “I didn’t mean to mess up your room.”

“I know, I think you just got tired.”

“Not sure, not sure,” he said. “There are too many people on my airwaves at the moment. My father’s looking for me, too,” he said. “He’s angry as well. He gave me a thrashing after I got off the ship; he said I was rude to him.”

“Here.” She leaned forward and turned off his invisible switch. “Turn them off if you don’t want them. Nobody outside of you can control you. They can say things, they can ask you
to do things, but you can say yes or no. All I’m asking is for you to let me help you. I won’t let you down.”

“Everyone lets me down. No one likes me.”

“I know you think that, but it’s not true and there comes a point in your life when you can’t go on getting so angry with other people.” He was listening to her intently, but he looked perfectly blank, and she had the strangest feeling as she looked into his eyes that there was nothing behind them. But she could still hear herself almost like a separate person—quite lucid, determined to survive this.

“A point in your life when you’ve got to take up your bed and walk, otherwise all you’ll do is spread unhappiness. I know about this, I’ve struggled with it every day of my life since my own parents died.”

“Don’t talk about that,” he shivered. “It’s horrible.”

“People will love you if you let them,” she continued.

His head was turned away from her, but she could feel one ear cocked and listening.

“You can’t,” he said. “I’ve asked you.”

There was a silence. “I think we could be friends,” she said at last.

“And walk into the sunset,” he was sneering at her again. “Holding hands.”

“No, don’t be silly. What I mean is, I’ll listen to you. I think you’re tired of running and you need some rest.”

She prayed to God she had hit some sort of target, but the effort of talking had worn her out. Her head slipped down the pillow and she was fast asleep again before she heard his reply.

St. Bartholomew’s, Amritsar, December 1929

S
ometime before Christmas, Daisy wrote to Tor out of the blue saying that Viva had been hurt in an “unfortunate accident” during the Diwali celebrations but was well enough to travel again now. She herself was going home to England for an indefinite period, and the home was virtually closing down; was there the slightest chance that Viva could come and stay during the Christmas holidays? She needed a change of scene, she said. All would be explained when Viva saw her.

Tor was surprised that Viva hadn’t written herself, but then Viva never did things in quite the same way as other people, and although she was upset to hear she’d been hurt, Tor was excited at the thought of seeing her again. She wanted Viva to explore her wonderful new life in Amritsar, to see the new bungalow, but mostly, she wanted her to meet Toby and see what a prize she had bagged.

An idea gradually snowballed in her mind: if Viva was coming for Christmas, why not Rose and Jack, too, but because her own mother had always made such an incredible fuss about guests, she broached the idea to Toby nervously at first.

“Why are you sounding so Tiny Tim about it?” he’d said, surprised. “There’s tons of extra room in the school if our house gets too small.”

“Our house,” how she loved to hear him say the words. Their three-bedroomed bungalow was a miniature version of St. Bart’s, as everyone called the school, which was a large and eccentric hotchpotch of a building that boasted Mughal arches, Tudor beams, Victorian windows, elaborately carved verandas, and steep roofs shaped like witches’ caps.

The bungalow itself sat in a glade of mango trees between the school’s cricket pitch and a wild garden. The previous occupant had retired some five years ago and vines had grown like wild hair over its windows. Damp and mildew had left large mossy areas on their veranda floor.

It still made her heart swoop with pity and love to remember that when she’d first seen the bungalow, Toby’s bedroom was the only properly lived-in room. She’d looked at its iron bed; the thin, green chenille bedspread; yellowing mosquito net; and framed insects on the wall and thought it looked like the room of a boy left behind for the holidays in a deserted school.

The damage to the handsome little bungalow had proved quite superficial. After a day set aside for unpacking, Tor, in an enormous rush of energy, set about redecorating it with the help of two new servants: Jai and Benarsi, bright, good-looking boys from the local town who adored Toby because he spoke fluent Hindi and made them laugh.

Then, to her astonishment, her mother had sent a check for fifty pounds, stipulating that it must be spent on furnishings. The money came in handy—Toby was only teaching part-time at the school this term while he finished his book,
The Birds and Wildlife of Gujarat.
In a fever of excitement they’d gone out and bought their first double bed, then a bedspread from the local bazaar embroidered with birds and flowers. A new sisal
rug went on the floor. Next, Tor had supervised whitewashing, carpentry, and floor scrubbing.

The garden had been cleared and replanted. Their little sitting room had fresh coir matting, an old sofa, and the two cane chairs Toby called Bombay fornicators. She had a proper table at last for her gramophone, and Toby had spent five nights designing and putting up what he called the Châteauneuf-du-Pape of shelves for his books and her records.

“So, I really can ask them?” She’d looked at him suspiciously. It was sometimes so hard to believe she had this kind of freedom. He kissed her on the tip of her nose.

“Last Christmas,” he said melodramatically, “was so awful I almost went home and drank arsenic.” He’d spent it in the club in Rawalpindi, drinking port, and wearing a dusty paper hat with a drunken tea planter and a missionary. “I can’t believe how my life has changed,” he added quietly. That was one of the best things about being with Toby: so silly and playful one moment, and in the next, so able to say what mattered most.

Anyway, Rose had written back almost immediately to say she’d love to come and that Jack, whose regiment was off doing something frightening in the mountains, would try and come, at least for a day or two. But would it be too stinking fish of her to stay for longer? She was dying for Tor to get to know Freddie.

In early December, Tor told Toby to stop being a boring swot and have a what-the-hell day with her. For the past three weeks, he’d been working feverishly on his book trying to get it finished before Christmas. He pulled her down on his knee, squeaked “Sorry, dear,” in his hen-pecked-husband voice, then kissed her and said, “What an excellent idea.”

They made love early the following morning, underneath
their mosquito net, leaped out of bed ravenous and suddenly rowdy, and spent the next few hours working together. They moved Toby’s telescopes and bird books, his sitar, his piles of wildlife photographs from the guest room into the main school. Then Tor looked up Christmas pudding recipes in Margaret Allsop’s
Christmas for Colonials.

Toby went into the woods to look for a Christmas tree. He came back with a gnarled-looking baby monkey puzzle tree, which he planted in a pot and said he would water until Christmas and then plant outside again. After supper, he put on some Beethoven and they painted the tree’s tips with gold and then they turned off the lights and danced together through the moonbeams that fell through the windows of their sitting room.

The next day they went to the bazaar in Amritsar to buy the ingredients for Christmas cakes. Toby chatted to the stallholders, and then she’d got out her list and he’d ordered heaps of sultanas and raisins. Cinnamon and nutmeg were plucked from huge, brilliantly colored mounds of spices, weighed on large medieval-looking copper scales, and put into tiny twists of paper.

They were on their way to have a chota peg at Murphy’s Bar on the main street when Toby stopped and put on his glasses, and from a chaotic stall bursting with old coins and broken glasses, plucked a box with four glass globes in it, each one about the size of a duck egg and exquisitely patterned. “As good as Fabergé,” he said, blowing dust from them, and then as he lifted them up to the light, their colors, red and purple and green, swirled against his face.

“They’re perfect,” he said. “Aren’t they, darling?”

“Can we afford them?” she said. He’d warned her already that the bird book was never going to make them rich.

“Yes,” he said at once. “For our first Christmas, we can afford them, and champagne.”

And looking at him, she felt her senses blazing with happiness.

Pure love.

She had Toby, who she waited for eagerly each night, she had a house of her own—well, almost—a whole thrilling life ahead of her, and as if all this wasn’t enough, Rose and Viva were coming for Christmas.

This glorious mood did not last: five days later, she was in the throes of a full-scale domestic crisis. Bloody old Margaret Allsop had written in ridiculously small print in her recipe book that she should have had her Christmas cake wrapped in greaseproof paper and in a tin by mid-November.

“I was supposed to be feeding it all month?” she lamented. “Why on earth would you feed a cake? I thought it was the other way round.”

Toby, who’d been working in the summerhouse, had just wandered into the kitchen, his fingers covered in ink, his hair endearingly on end. He said he was sure it didn’t matter a damn. He was practically certain that his own mother had made her cakes on Christmas Eve.

Tor was soothed by this. She tied up her hair, lashed on an apron, lined up her ingredients, and, after telling Toby she felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice, began to weigh out the flour, the cherry, and the raisins and then throw them into a big bowl on the kitchen table.

Jai and Benarsi watched her intrigued as she stirred it all up, adding a pinch of cinnamon, a dab of mace, then the eggs and butter, and only grating a little bit of her knuckles into the orange peel, all the while keeping up a running commentary. Miss Allsop said it was important to show the servants new skills, and really, Tor was thinking, as she poured the whole fragrant mess into a cake tin, why had her mother made such
a fuss about it? Cake making, she explained to Toby when he put his head around the kitchen again, was an absolute doddle. Mudpie making for grown-ups.

The cake was smoothed down and wrapped in brown paper. Jai carried it ceremoniously toward the woodstove and stoked up the fire. Toby went back to work; his typewriter click-clacking from across the lawn, such a comforting sound. With three hours to go before the cake came out, Tor thought she’d go for a ride. It was such a beautiful morning and maybe her last chance before Christmas.

After the ride, she’d stopped for a natter with Elsa Chambers, one of the school secretaries. Elsa, a stout girl from Norfolk who’d come to India originally as a nanny to a high-caste Indian family, said that she was thinking of flying home next year on an aeroplane, which Tor thought was amazingly brave. Then Tor had been called back to the stables by a groom to look at a lovely little filly that had just arrived for one of the young maharajah pupils. Tor was rubbing its ears and chatting to it when she let out a piercing yell, sprinted back across the quadrangle and into the kitchen.

“Good God, what’s happened?” Toby appeared at the door looking shaken.

Tor fixed her huge eyes on him and then on the cake lying in a cloud of evil smoke on the table.

“Oh dear, oh dear.” Toby dropped a shower of blackened currants on the floor as he cradled the cake in a towel in his arms. “Mr. Kurtz, he dead,” he exclaimed dramatically.

None of them had the faintest idea what he meant—it was his tragic look that made laughter explode like air from a balloon. First Jai and Benarsi squeaked, and then Toby was whooping and wiping his eyes. “Sorry, darling, sorry!” he spluttered. “I’ll help you make another one tonight and then we can write a poison-pen letter to Margaret Allso—” He couldn’t finish. Tor was laughing so hard she had to sit down and clutch
her sides. Wave upon wave of laughter until finally she’d shaken her wooden spoon at them. “You are a silly lot,” she said in a weak voice, wiping the tears away. “Absolute oafs the lot of you.
Memsahib tum ko zuroor kastor ile pila dena hoga.
”

Tor so hoped that when Viva and Rose came to stay they would see Toby like this: silly and full of life, and incredibly clever, too—he’d read all kinds of books. Naturally they were suspicious of him. He’d proposed so quickly they probably imagined that he was either desperate or criminal or unappealingly overconfident. He was none of these things. He could be terribly shy and awkward with people he didn’t know. He had been with her at first.

The day after their registry office wedding in Bombay, her mood of reckless euphoria had sunk like a blancmange. They’d driven north in his battered Talbot, and he’d talked for what seemed like hours and hours in a monotonous drone about shops and clothes. He told her later his mother had once said the way to a woman’s heart was to take an interest in her, so he had at least tried. But on that day, when he’d asked her whether she preferred a cloche to a flowered hat, what colors she liked best, pinks or greens, Tor had sat in growing panic. The man was a crashing bore! She’d made the worst mistake of her life.

On and on the car had chugged, farther and farther away from Bombay, through miles of desert, then tiny, increasingly deserted-looking towns and dun-colored plains, until it got too hot to talk, and she drifted off to sleep.

When she woke up and saw the gold band on her finger, she thought she should at least ask him to explain in some detail what he did. He’d perked up immediately. He had already told her that he taught history and science at St. Bart’s, but then he said that he was also writing his life’s work, a book on the
thousands of extraordinary birds there were in India, many of them sacred. He’d then glanced sideways at her across the car and asked if she’d mind if he told her a secret.

“Not a bit,” she’d said, glad that things were loosening up between them. “I like secrets.”

Then he told her how one morning he’d been walking across the school playing grounds when he’d found a small bantam’s egg lying on its own in the grass. It had lost its mother, so for the next six weeks he’d held the egg under his arm until it had hatched. He’d felt the shell crack, the fluffy little head emerge, not ticklish at all but so soft. “So now I know what it feels like to have a baby,” he’d said softly and she’d glanced at him in the darkening car.

“Gosh,” she’d said, “how sweet of you.” But really thinking,
What if he turns out to be barking as well?
“What a marvelous story,” she’d added, thinking she sounded exactly like her mother.

On that night, she’d tried to tell herself that she must think of this marriage as a more or less practical arrangement: in the same way one might think of, say, laying out money for a last-minute holiday or buying a piece of furniture in a secondhand shop: if you didn’t expect too much, how badly wrong could it go?

Now it pained her to remember she had ever thought of him in such a cold and practical way. The bantam story, so typical of his kindness, melted her heart. She also loved the way his hair felt silky when she ran her hands through it in the morning. The way he went to sleep with his arms around her. His jokes, the cups of tea he brought her in the morning with some special treat to eat. The way he pursued his work with energy and passion, the way he read to her at nights: Joseph Conrad, Dickens, T. S. Eliot—all the books she’d once thought she was far too dim for.