East of the Sun (41 page)

Mind you, she still hoped he wouldn’t tell the bird-under-
the-arm story too early on in his acquaintance with Viva and Rose. It did take time to know a person.

Later that afternoon, after the Christmas cake was given a decent burial, they decorated the house. Two hours later, there was barely a space left in the bungalow not covered with tinsel or candles or lights.

“D’you think we’ve overdone it?” Tor asked. Ci Ci had suddenly leaped into her mind, frowning and saying “Less is best, darling,” one of her style rules.

“Absolutely not.” Toby was winding pieces of tinsel around the knobs of their hideously ugly radiogram. “The rule at Christmas is that nothing succeeds like excess.”

She hugged him and kissed his ear.

“So what do you think?” she said, as they stood back arm in arm to admire their room.

“Quite magnificent,” he said. “An abode of bliss.”

And her heart had simply swelled with love again, for it was Toby she was really celebrating this Christmas: the greatest gift of her life so far. She so hoped the girls would like him, too.

A
fter her parents’ death, Viva had often spent Christmas in the houses of people she barely knew: cousins, and once, when nobody else could be found, with her school’s head gardener, whose childless wife had made it clear, during a sullen Christmas lunch, that she expected to be paid for the privilege of serving her turkey.

So when Tor’s invitation came—in the form of a lurid cardboard elephant on which she had written “Christmas at Amritsar—do come!”—her immediate response was to say no. She loathed Christmas with a passion, and even without Christmas, she was feeling awful.

Her escape from Mr. Azim had left her with a cut eye that needed five stitches, a cracked rib, headaches, and insomnia. It had shaken her confidence profoundly. She’d been interviewed at length by Sergeant Barker, an irritable Scot who’d sat sweating in his uniform and implying that if she, a single woman, chose to live in one of the less salubrious suburbs of Bombay and to ignore the advice of the British government, she’d had it coming to her and was lucky not to have been killed.

But at least she and Daisy had managed to find Guy a room at a Bombay rest home. Dr. Ratcliffe, the gentle, gaunt-looking man who ran the home, had once been a victim of mustard gas and was both sympathetic and successful with patients with nervous disorders. He, too, was of the opinion that the form of dementia Guy appeared to suffer from might be a kind of schizophrenia. He loaned Daisy and Viva a paper on the subject written by a Dr. Boyla, which stated that the condition once thought of as the symptom of an overactive, even a degenerate mind should be treated with more compassion. “It’s not enough,” Ratcliffe said as he’d shown them around, “to simply write ‘gone bonkers’ over a patient’s notes as some of my colleagues do. We’ve got to find a lifeline if not a cure.”

Guy was put in a tranquil sunlit room on the edge of a courtyard. They’d put him on a regime of nourishing foods and exercise. His room overlooked a small garden that Guy enjoyed working in.

When she was well enough, she went to see him. They sat together in the courtyard drinking lemonade, and the last time she’d visited, he’d actually said, “I’m sorry I hurt you. I didn’t mean to.” It was the calmest she’d ever seen him, the most happy and in control.

But four days after that, Guy’s father had arrived from Assam. He came to the home especially to tell Daisy and Viva that he didn’t hold with trick cyclists, and that the last thing Guy needed was women fussing over him. He said he’d brought a one-way ticket for Guy to get back to England again. An old pal of his was in the army there and they felt sure he would find a place for him in his regiment. In spite of everything that had happened, when Guy, looking pale and shaken, had come to see her for the last time, she’d felt the old tug of guilt and responsibility and a kind of quiet anguish that he was being thrown to the wolves again. Guy had asked Dr. Ratcliffe to drive him over to the children’s home especially so he could
say good-bye. They’d been sitting on a bench outside Daisy’s office when he’d suddenly put his arms around her and buried his head in the side of her neck like a child.

“I don’t want to go,” he’d said. “Can’t you do something?”

“No,” she’d said, and realized, finally, that this was true. She wasn’t his mother or his guardian. His parents didn’t trust her or Dr. Ratcliffe, who they thought was a quack. Guy was outside of her control. There was nothing she could do to mend his life.

He’d hugged her again.

“You’re beautiful” were his last words to her. “I’d like to marry you one day.”

The incongruity of this had made her head reel.

Afterward, Daisy, who was going back to England for Christmas, had more or less insisted that Viva go on holiday, too. She said there would be only six children at the home over Christmas, and Mrs. Bowden and Vaibhavi were happy to stay.

“Take two weeks off, you need it—and you are positively banned from worrying about that boy anymore or from doing any more on that wretched book of yours. Go!”

When the train arrived in Amritsar two weeks before Christmas, she was relieved to see Tor was on her own. She didn’t feel up to meeting anybody new.

“Viva!” Tor’s face broke into a huge welcoming smile. She hugged her hard then looked under her hat.

“Good heavens!” she said. “Your eye! What happened?”

“Oh, nothing,
nothing
really.” Viva had dreaded this. Her eye still felt like a badge of shame and, although she still lived in fear of Azim, she tried her best to gloss over the incident. “I had a little adventure, and then a fall. It looks far worse than it is. I’ll tell you all about it over supper.

“Oh, Tor, I can’t quite believe I’m here.” She took hold of Tor’s arm for support. “And what a day.”

It was: the sky clear as glass, a perfect untrammeled blue.

“Well, Toby and I are determined not to let a nasty little bit of sunshine spoil Christmas,” Tor joked as they walked arm in arm toward the car park. “He says he’s going to drop blobs of cotton wool from the attic, so everyone feels at home.

“Viva, I can’t wait for you to meet him.” Tor tightened her grip on Viva’s arm. “You’re going to love him. You really are.”

Viva hoped so. Did he know how vehemently she’d tried to talk Tor out of marrying him? Viva: the great expert on love and marriage! But she’d been so frightened for her.

While Tor drove the Talbot back to the school, Viva gave herself a stern talking-to. One of the results of being locked up with Azim was that she now suffered from a form of claustrophobia. She’d felt it on the train: the pounding heart, sweating palms, a swirling sense of suffocation. As she looked out of the car window, it was stealing over her again like a gray mist. She made an effort to focus on a dusty village they were passing, the man with his thin white horse, the old woman walking down the road with a bundle of twigs on her head.

She scolded herself as if she was her own whining child.
Shut up for a day or two! Go to the corner and sit down! Forget yourself.
This was Tor’s turn to shine. When she’d glanced at her a few seconds ago, she’d thought how beautiful she looked—pure and shining in her new happiness. Her own problems could be shelved for a few days. Was that too much to ask?

Half an hour later, Tor stopped near a gate with a huge coat of arms above it.

“This is it,” she said. “Home sweet home.”

They drove up a short drive, toward the flamboyant main school building, all flourishing carvings and mini turrets, and a
properly green front lawn where two peacocks strolled picking up seed. Behind them was a sign saying, “St. Bartholomew’s College for the Sons of Gentlemen and Maharajahs, aged seven to fourteen.”

“Not our house, so don’t get too excited,” Tor said gaily. “We’re the poor relations.”

The car bumped along a gravel path beside a cricket pitch, which announced that the score between St. Bart’s and Rawalpindi was 179 for 6, past a quadrangle of whitewashed stables and a polo field where a lone figure in breeches and a turban was playing stick and ball.

“Now,” Tor glanced at her as they headed toward a circle of trees beyond the cricket pitch, “close your eyes, we’re getting warm.”

It still hurt Viva to close her eyes. The doctor said she’d been lucky not to have lost her sight.

“Are we there yet?” Sunlight flickered in underwater patterns inside her eyelids.

“We’re getting warmer.” Tor swung around a corner; gravel swished under the wheels.

“Now!” Tor took Viva’s hand and squeezed it hard. “Open.”

Viva heard herself laugh out loud for the first time in a long time. She’d stepped into a child’s fairy tale. There was a fat Father Christmas sitting on the chimney; every window twinkled with candles; icicles made of string hung from the bougainvillea pots; scrolls of brightly colored paintings drawn with childish abandon had been hung to fill the empty squares of the veranda. One showed a plump wise man wearing a jeweled turban, another tobogganing children joined by tigers, cheetahs, and snakes.

Above the door, in silver letters a foot high, a sign said, “Happy Christmas.”

“We’ve put them up miles too early,” Tor said, “but we couldn’t wait.”

“It’s wonderful, Tor,” Viva laughed. “What genius lives here?”

“Well, genii actually, if that’s the plural.” Toby had appeared with two servants behind him all dressed up and carrying glasses, champagne, and cheese straws.

“Hello, friend of Tor’s,” he said, awkwardly stretching out his hand.

“No, no, wait! Wait!” Tor raced ahead of them, cranked up the gramophone and soon the room was filled with Ivor Novello singing “Ding Dong Merrily on High.”

“I’ve had to restrain her from lighting the fire,” Toby said. “The temperature’s only sixty-five in the shade.” Seeing him beam at his new wife, Viva thought how young he looked—tousled hair, slightly inky fingers, a shirttail that hadn’t quite been tucked in—and innocent: she’d imagined he’d be smoother and far more devious-looking.

“Darling”—Tor put her arm around his waist—“Darling, a quiet moment before we get silly. This is my friend Viva. About whom you already know so much. She’s going to tell us about her eye later, so don’t ask now.”

“Greetings, Viva.” He shook her hand warmly. “How about a glass of champagne?”

“I’d love one,” she said.

“Oh drat!” When he poured the bubbles straight over the glass, Viva thought,
He’s as nervous as I am.

When they’d got her a new glass, she took a deep breath, and then a sip.
See!
she addressed the part of her that was always frightened. See…there were already three things to celebrate: that she’d traveled here on her own; that Toby didn’t look like an obvious drunk or wife beater; that nobody had yet mentioned Frank, whom she didn’t want to talk about. So, even though the whole thing was kicking off earlier than she would have chosen, let Christmas cheer commence. No whining, no brooding, no dreading, no looking backwards or forwards.

She raised her glass toward Tor. “Happy Christmas,” she said.

W
hen Rose turned up the following day with four-month-old Freddie in her arms, Toby teased the girls for going gaga. But he was such a beautiful baby, with Rose’s silver-blond hair, a perfect little chiseled dimple in his chin, and intelligent and only slightly crossed blue eyes. When Viva held him in her arms, she was once again shocked that she felt, not exactly jealous—what would she do with a child?—but in awe of Rose for producing something quite so perfect, so powerful.

Even when he was only chuckling in his bath, or lolling around having his nappy changed, Freddie seemed to increase the emotional temperature of the house, as if he was a little fire burning away.

“Oh Lord,” Toby complained to the girls when he was at last allowed to hold him. “The memsahib is going to want to be in foal right away now,” and then, just as Tor had feared, he launched into his story about keeping the egg under his arm and what that had meant to him.

“So what happened to your bird?” Viva inquired gently.

“Two months after it had hatched, I trod on it. I was run
ning to get the post. Sorry, darling,” he said to Tor, “didn’t tell you that bit. I’ve only just been able to talk about it.” He was not joking.

“That’s dreadful,” said Viva softly. “You must have loved that bird.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I did love that bird.”

When Rose and Tor went off to supervise the bathing of the baby, Viva stayed on the veranda to watch the sunset and try and unravel her curious and unsettled mood. She was happy for Rose, but babies did change things for those left behind. Having one was definitely a mark of facing a physical terror—rather like those teenage boys flung from trees with a rope around one ankle in Borneo during initiation ceremonies. It was one badge of being a grown-up and, even now, there was a new quiet confidence about Rose, who’d admitted it hurt and had promised to tell them all about it when Toby wasn’t around. And even though Rose hadn’t said much about Jack yet, a baby also meant you’d put your trust in someone else, become a family.

Tor would have a baby soon. No question about it. That thought shouldn’t make Viva feel lonely, but it did: their friendships would change; everything would change. There was only so much energy to go around and babies seemed to suck up love and attention like giant magnets.

Some bad thoughts flew around Viva’s head. What did she have to show after her year in India? Clever old Viva, once regarded as the wise and worldly woman of their group. A nearly finished book that probably nobody would want to publish, no fixed abode, very little money, and no concrete plans for the future.

Why hadn’t they all seen right through her from the start?

The sun was shedding a lavish apricot-colored glow over the playing fields and the woods beyond where, from time to time,
a flock of dark birds rose and wheeled around in the sky, settling in the tops of trees. A few seconds later, it was dark and a scattering of stars had appeared on the horizon. Toby came out onto the veranda and sat down beside Viva.

“Are you all right there?” he said gently. “I mean, is this a private think, or can anybody join in?”

“Not private at all,” she lied. “It’s so lovely to have the luxury of not racing around like a mad thing. Tor seems so…”

“So…”

They both laughed.

“You first,” he said. “You’re the guest.”

“Well, I just wanted to say I’ve never seen Tor so happy.”

“Oh, I do hope so! I still can’t quite believe it.” He looked about eight when he said that. “I understand you had some doubts?” His grin in the dusk was mischievous.

Viva laughed, embarrassed. “Well, do admit, even by Indian standards it was rather fast.”

“I know,” he said. “We took the most gigantic risk, but they’re always the best, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. I’m not very brave like that.”

“Oh, come on, Tor’s been telling me about your work, your book. You sound very brave to me.”

She didn’t reply.

“Have a chota peg with me,” Toby urged, “and tell me about it. I don’t meet many writers up here.”

So they sat and drank and talked and Toby was so enthusiastic it encouraged her to tell him in more detail than she normally would, the story of Talika, and then, because he’d insisted, about two new inmates at the home, Prepal and Chinna, how they’d brought up seven brothers and sisters on their own after their parents’ house was burned to the ground.

“These children are so brave,” she said. “They laugh, they sing, they tell jokes. They refuse to go under.”

He was gazing at her intently. She could hear a bird rus
tling in the trees and the croaky cry of what sounded like a jackal in the woods beyond.

“They must trust you,” he said. “If they didn’t, they wouldn’t tell you these things.”

“Don’t most people like telling their stories?” she replied.

“It depends what you mean by stories. I think the English are neurotically private as a race—we’re the Western Orientals. Oh, I mean if you meet some old buffer at the club, he’ll tell you what regiment he fought in and what a shambles the government is, but most chaps won’t tell you what really hurts them or what they most love. Don’t you agree?” He looked at her directly and drained his glass.

“I do,” she said.

“So,” he said after a pause, “do you have a publisher yet?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Only an introduction to a man at Macmillan who liked a couple of chapters.”

“My publishers are called Stott and Greenaway,” he said. “I’d be happy to introduce you. You won’t get rich, but their books look beautiful.”

A peal of laughter coming from the baby’s room made them both look up. There was a loud splash and then Rose and Tor singing “Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do.”

Toby took a polo mallet from the corner of the room and thumped on the walls. “Pipe down,” he cried. “We run a respectable establishment here.” The girls sang louder; the baby chirruped like a small bird.

A few seconds later, Freddie appeared in Tor’s arms flushed from his bath and smelling of soap and talcum powder. “Say good night to Uncle Toby and Auntie Viva,” she said.

Viva kissed the baby’s forehead. His skin smelled like new grass. He waved his pink little fingers at her and struck her softly beside her eye where her scar was healing. She flinched, but kissed him again. “Good night, Freddie, darling,” she said. “Sleep well.”

After Tor left the room, Viva felt cross with herself for starting to feel low again. If she was going to be the ghost at the wedding, she should at least have had the decency to stay in Bombay.

“Have one of these.” Toby had returned with a plate of sturdy-looking mince pies. “Tor made them.”

She wanted him to stop being so nice to her now, to be left alone with her own dark thoughts.

“Um, delicious,” she said, scattering crumbs all over her lap. “You know, it’s awfully good of you to have us all.”

“The more the merrier as far as I’m concerned,” said Toby. “Shame, though, that your doctor friend couldn’t make it. Lahore’s really no distance at all from here, and I would have liked to talk to him about blackwater fever. It’s the most dreadful thing. We lost a couple of boys to it here last year.”

“What doctor friend?” She stared at him. “I didn’t know he’d been invited.” She put down her drink. “Who invited him?”

“Oh Lord,” he said. “I’ve put my foot in it?”

“No, no, no, not at all,” she said with a lightness she did not feel. “He was everybody’s friend on the ship. I hardly think of him but…” She looked at her watch. “I’m going to go to my room and freshen up—it’s nearly supper time. I enjoyed our chat, thank you for it.”

“Oh damn it!” Toby looked stricken. “I’ve blabbed, haven’t I? What an idiot.”

Upstairs, she locked herself inside her room, and sat doubled up at the foot of her bed. So this was the end of it: he’d been asked; he didn’t want to come. How much more clearly did she need to be told? And then she felt pain blooming inside her and there was nothing she could do about it. A winding kind of pain as if she’d been dealt a blow in the solar plexus.
This is
the end of it,
she told herself again.
He’d been asked, he’d said no.

Get this into your fat head,
she raged at herself,
and don’t you dare cast a cloud over Christmas because of it.

Five minutes later, she crept into the spare room across the landing where Rose and Tor stood in the glow of an oil lamp tucking the baby’s mosquito net around him.

“Tor,” she said in as natural a voice as possible. “Did you ask Frank to stay for Christmas?”

Tor’s face told her everything she needed to know.

“No, not really.” Tor turned for help to Rose, who was concentrating hard on the baby’s sheet and refused to meet her eye.

“Well, I suppose I might of, a little bit,” said Tor. “It was actually such a coincidence: we met up at a party in Lahore, it was such fun to see him, and I thought we all should, you know, meet up again.” She looked uncertainly toward Rose.

“Gosh,” said Rose, “I don’t believe you told me that.”

“And?” Viva tried to keep the wobble out of her voice. “What did he say when you asked him?”

“Well,” Tor couldn’t meet her eye, “it was such a shame. He’s working this Christmas, and had other plans.”

“Did he know I was coming?”

Tor fiddled with the mosquito net. “Yes.”

“It really doesn’t matter,” said Viva, who hated their sympathetic looks. “I hardly think of him now.”

“That’s good,” said Rose and Tor together, which meant that everybody in the room except Freddie was lying now.

Over supper, Toby, who said he was learning to carve and usually did it like an ax murderer, managed a decent job on a joint of roast beef. Jai came in and lit a flare path of oil lamps around
the veranda, and then they opened a special bottle of wine Rose had brought with her and they toasted each other.

The talk was jolly and open, and Viva did her best to join in.

Over pudding—a very good treacle tart—they had a conversation about the difference between a friend and the kind of chap you’d choose to go into the jungle with.

“I’d never choose you for the jungle,” Tor teased Toby. “You’d be crawling around on your hands and knees looking for the greater spotted titmouse or the meadow waxcap or some such and we’d never get out. No, I’d take Viva with me.”

“Why me?” she wanted to know.

“You’re brave and you don’t go on about things. I mean, take this mysterious thing that happened to you in Bombay that you were going to tell us about later and never quite got round to. If I’d had stitches in my eye, or been knocked out, I’d dine out on it for months.”

“Oh, these.” Viva touched the side of her eye lightly.
Trapped.
“Well…it was nothing really; well, it was
something
but not as bad as it will sound.”

She had rehearsed this moment on the train on her way here, but even her lighthearted version of her kidnapping, starring her as terrified maiden in red dress, Azim as pantomime villain, drew gasps of horror from them.

“But you could easily have been killed!” said Tor.

“Why didn’t the police come?” said Rose.

“Well, they did. But you know how these things get swept under the carpet here,” she said.

“Not usually when they concern English people,” Toby said drily.

“Don’t forget,” she reminded him, “that the governor has warned us twice to think about closing the home, but no one can bring themselves to. It’s a complicated situation.

“By the way,” she was keen to turn the spotlight away from
herself, “Mr. Azim went to a very pukka English boarding school near here, I think. He told me he was flogged there, that the games master broke his little finger, and that he never once celebrated Diwali there—it was called Guy Fawkes Night—can that possibly be true?”

“Yes,” said Toby simply. “It’s all horribly mixed up and we do walk a tightrope. Some of the upper-class Indians who leave their children here will not stand for their children being beaten by anyone but themselves; others seem to want a proper old-fashioned Western-style boarding school: fags, bad porridge, beatings, cricket, the lot.”

“But Guy Fawkes? Surely not.”

“Yes, they have it here. Even worse in some ways is how we cram Wordsworth and Shakespeare down their throats and ignore great Urdu poets like Mir Taqi Mir or Ghalib. It’s a great shame.”

The conversation ended when Tor put her finger to her lips and looked toward Freddie’s room. “Listen,” she said. The baby was crying, in a rickety sort of way that didn’t sound very serious. They all stopped and listened intently until they heard the click-clack of the baby’s cradle, which was being moved by a piece of string tied to the ayah’s foot, and then her crooning lullaby.

“What is she singing?” Viva asked Toby.

“‘Little master, little king, sleep, my darling, sleep,’” said Toby. “Nice to know women somewhere respect their damned men folk.” He gave them a brigadier’s glare.

Viva relaxed for a second as he filled up her glass with red wine. The story about the kidnapping had been successfully negotiated, and no one need ever know how much it had hurt her or how much of a fool it had made her feel, how it had taken away the kind of arrogance you need in order to feel you can make a difference in other people’s lives in a country so many miles away from anything you properly understand.