East of the Sun (44 page)

T
hey left for Lahore the following day. Tor at the wheel of Toby’s ancient Talbot, Rose with the map on her knee beside her, Viva in the backseat.

The car was too noisy for Viva to join in the hum of conversation, a relief since the idea of arriving unannounced at Frank’s suddenly seemed completely preposterous and she was half annoyed with the girls for talking her into it. The very thought of him less than an hour away from here—shaving or getting dressed, seeing patients, drinking tea—made her mouth go dry with anticipation.

To distract herself, she thought about Toby and his birds. He’d talked about them at supper the night before. At first she’d found Toby reassuringly kind, but rather too garrulous, the kind of man who, if he was a woman, you might say burbled prettily, but now he’d relaxed with her she’d discovered his dry sense of humor, and that his conversation was studded with gems. For the past few weeks, he’d been studying the migratory birds, the Arctic terns and some garganey ducks who, like the Fishing Fleet, came to India for the winter months.
He’d told her how orphaned birds would sometimes accept the most pathetic substitutes for their mothers—a pullover, a hot-water bottle, an armpit, or even a paper airplane—anything rather than nothing, but preferably something that moved.

With her head resting against the back of the seat, she decided that as a mother substitute William had more of the paper airplane than the hot-water bottle about him. He’d appeared in her life during her first bewildered weeks in London when she’d been lonely and desperate for any kind of companionship. He said he was a good friend of her parents, and that he would take great pleasure in taking her to a production of
Turandot
in Covent Garden. In the restaurants he took her to, she’d waited hungrily for stories about her parents, about Josie, but the feeling had grown that their names were a kind of taboo.

And William hadn’t turned out to be a storytelling kind of man anyway: he liked facts, certainties. He’d given her lots of advice about how to manage her money, where to live, the kind of people best avoided. And when, finally, he’d taken her into his bed his lovemaking had felt like a sleight of hand, something that both of them were trying to pretend was not happening, which had left her feeling empty and confused. He’d never been really curious about her either, except as a kind of project, a puzzle that he could solve.

How different Frank was. She could see this now. That night at Ooty, he’d taken her, with no apologies or wincing smiles, no sense that this was anything but natural, but what had really thrown her was the discovery of how interested in her he had been, and this had not been her experience with most men to date. Frank seemed to want to understand her as a separate human being. That was frightening—in fact, everything she’d been running away from for years—but amazing, too.

Viva glanced at her reflection in the car window. So now
she was about to humiliate herself in front of him, for he was also a handsome and impatient man who was used to women liking him and she’d treated him dishonestly, shabbily. He’d probably made other arrangements for himself by now.

A wave of nausea swept over her.
You think too much,
she told herself, staring out the window.

The day had perked up a little. A pale sun was shining on land that, from the distance, looked like an overcooked omelette. She watched two vultures swooping and diving in a long wavering line, then foraging inside the remains of what looked like a goat’s carcass. How hard life looked from here.

Now they were passing an old man and woman toiling along the road, almost obliterated by dust. Stone figures from a prehistoric age. Both barefoot, him leading a donkey, she carrying firewood on her head. Their car puttered by; the woman put her wood down beside a hovel the size of a coal-hole and stared at them.

In the front seat Viva and Rose were arguing about double de-clutching.

“No, Rose. Wrong,” Tor said, roaring up the engine and making the car leap forward. “This is how you do it. Foot down, foot up, foot down, forward.”

“It’s a car, Tor, not a pogo stick,” said Rose, rolling her eyes in the mirror, “but suit yourself.”

“Viva,” Tor flung over her shoulder, “attention, please. When we get to Lahore, do you want us to stay with you or shove off? Moral support and all that.”

“No,” said Viva quickly. “Don’t stay.” She couldn’t bear the thought of anyone watching this debacle. “Come and fetch me at four o’clock; that should be plenty of time. I’ll just walk around if he isn’t there,” she added as if this was, after all, nothing more than a sightseeing trip. “It’ll be fun. And of course, it’s quite likely he’s had a lot of invitations for Christmas by now,” she said. “But at least we’ll have asked him.”

She saw Tor glance at Rose, and then shake her head very slightly. She watched Rose give a soft sigh.

They’d reached the outskirts of Lahore, a flat city dominated by one high hill. Tor stopped the car and consulted the careful maps Toby had drawn for them. She could see now the Shish Mahal, the Palace of Mirrors, against the skyline, which meant that, according to Tor’s calculations, they were only a few miles from the hospital.

It took half an hour and lots of frantic hootings on Tor’s behalf to force their way through the narrow teeming streets, and then all of a sudden they were clear of the bazaar area and lurching up the drive toward a grandly dilapidated mongrel of a building with Mughal arches and vast shuttered windows, and a row of dusty-looking cactus plants leading up to its steps.

“This is it.” Tor’s foot pressed the brake. “We’re here: St. Patrick’s Hospital, home of Frank. Now are you quite sure, Viva, you don’t want us to stay?”

The two of them gazed at her anxiously.

“Absolutely certain,” she said, even though her heart was jumping in her chest. “You see, it really is all right either way.”

“Of course it is,” Rose said evenly. “We know that.”

Tor turned around and planted a fervent kiss on top of Viva’s hair.

“It’s just a lark,” she said. “But good luck anyway.”

While the girls were staring in the direction of the hospital, Viva sneaked a mirror out of her handbag. Her face looked pale and startled. She drew the mirror closer to her eye and peered at it closely: the faint crosses where the stitches had been removed were fading but you could still see the bruises. But surely in the right light, she tilted her face, you would hardly notice them.

When she looked up, Tor was smiling at her. “You’ll do for most known purposes,” she said.

Viva opened the car door and put one foot on the ground. “Well, here we go,” she said. “This should be character-forming.”

“Yes,” said Rose obediently. “That’s an awfully good way of putting it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Viva longed to add, “I’m perfectly fine, I enjoy my life. I can happily live without this,” but they’d disappeared in a cloud of dust, leaving her alone.

Inside the hospital, a uniformed man with an enormous waxed mustache was sitting at a desk cordoned off by a length of rope. Her shoes clicked down the marble floor toward him. When she stood in front of his desk, he stopped writing in his appointment book and looked at her.

“How may I assist madam? I am supervisor here.”

“I’m looking for a Dr. Frank Steadman,” she told him, but he was shaking his head before her words were out.

Weary with the weight of his responsibilities, he consulted the book. “No one here hails by that name,” he told her and then, just for good measure, rubber-stamped an empty page. “You must go somewhere else, maybe St. Edward’s: British peoples are there.”

She should have given herself more time—everything in India always took longer than you expected it to.

“I know he works here,” she said. “He’s been studying blackwater fever.”

“Wait here, please,” he said. “I will look.” He led her into a dark, muggy room crowded with patients; as she walked in, all of them stopped talking and stared at her.

When her eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, she saw an old man sitting on the bench opposite her. He was
fighting for breath, an expression of pure agony on his face; a family maybe—a wife, two sons, and a daughter—sat patiently on either side of him. They’d brought enough equipment with them for a camping trip, cooking pots and rolled-up mattresses.

They kept their eyes steadily on her as she sat down.
Please stop staring at me,
she wanted to shout. She was so het up and in no mood to be a sideshow.

The supervisor came back a few moments later. He took off his glasses, looked at her, and sighed heavily. He wanted the entire room to understand what a nuisance she was.

“There is no Dr. Frank Steadman here, he has moved elsewhere.” He flapped a hand over his shoulder.

“Look here.” Viva stood up and looked him straight in the eye. “I’m not here because I want treatment, if that’s what you think.” She broke into Hindi. “Dr. Frank is a friend of mine.”

“Sorry for mistake, memsahib. Please sign here, please.”

He produced a form, thudded it with stamps, shot out an order to a boy, who had appeared at her side. “Take Madam Memsahib to Dr. Steadman’s room,” he said. “Quick sticks.”

Walking down the gloomy corridor behind the boy, she caught a whiff of fried food and Jeyes Fluid and her stomach turned. On either side of her, she saw the silhouettes of patients lying in beds arranged against prisonlike windows. The visitors and relatives who clustered around the beds of the sick and dying seemed completely at home here, as if this place were another room in their house. Some lay on the narrow beds beside the patients; others squatted on the floor cooking meals on small Primus stoves; one woman was changing her husband’s shirt.

The boy stopped to chat with a skeletal figure lying on the floor; Viva looked into the eyes of a woman, his wife, she assumed, who sat cross-legged on the floor preparing a pot of
dhal for him. When the woman looked up, she surprised Viva with a radiant, almost intimate smile, as if to say, “We’re all in this together.”

“Careful, memsahib,” the boy said when they were halfway down the corridor. A stretcher passed them: an old man, wailing and wrapped in dirty bandages. When he leaned on his elbow and vomited a trail of green slime, she felt her own mouth fill with water. How could Frank stand this?

“Here.” The boy opened a door at the end of the corridor, which opened into a dusty quadrangle. A line of gray bandages hung on a washing line. “Mrs,” he pointed toward a small white house with peeling stucco, “Dr. Steadman is there.”

She dropped some coins into his open hand and, when he was gone, stood outside the door.

“Frank.” She knocked gently. “Frank, it’s me. Can I please come in?”

The door opened; he stood there half asleep, butterscotch-colored hair sticking up like a child’s. He blinked a few times. He was wearing blue-striped pajamas; his feet were bare.

“Viva?” He was scowling at her. “What are you doing here?”

There was a rustling in the shadows, the crack of a branch. The boy was staring at them both, fascinated. When Frank shouted, the boy sped off into the shadows, leaving them alone.

“You’d better come in,” he said coldly. “You can’t stand there.”

When he’d closed the door behind them, he looked at her and said, “You’ve hurt yourself.”

Her hand shot up. “It’s just a bruise,” she said.

“So why are you here?”

She forced herself to stand tall. “I was hoping we could talk for a bit.”

“I’d like to get dressed first.”

He put a pair of trousers over his pajamas; she looked away.

His room was anonymous, an exile’s room. The wardrobe behind his head had two large suitcases on top of it covered in P&O labels.

She remembered him carrying them the first time she’d clapped eyes on him. How he’d walked up the gangplank toward the
Kaisar
—the cocky walk, that devastating smile, quite irritatingly sure (or so she’d thought at the time) that scores of lonely women on board would fall at his feet. No outward clues of a man in mourning, desperate for his own new start, and she, who knew so much about disguises, had taken him at face value.

The sight of his suitcases gave her a moment of bleak comfort. He was a traveling man; he’d be gone soon. This would pass.

He lit a lamp, pushed a chair toward her.

“Why are you here?” he said in the same flat voice.

She took another deep breath. Now he was sitting opposite her and she could see his face properly: his skin, his hair, his full mouth. She felt such a wave of emotion she was almost in tears before she began.

“Why are there bars on your windows?” she asked.

“There are robbers here,” he said.

She took another deep shuddering breath, shocked she’d lost control of things so early.

“Would a glass of water be out of the question?” she said at last.

“Of course,” he said in a polite voice. “Some brandy in it?”

“Yes, please.”

He produced two glasses, swearing softly when he spilled some on his desk.

“What’s wrong with your eye?” he said when he sat down.

For one brief moment she considered pretending that this
had been the sole reason and purpose for her visit. By appealing to his professional pride, some bridges could be mended and he need never know why she’d come.