East of the Sun (45 page)

“I had a fall,” she said. “In Bombay, in the market, I hit my head on the curb. I’m much better now.”

He leaned toward her. He ran his finger along the length of her eyebrow, and looked at her.

“Daisy told me you were abducted,” he said.

“She did?” She could feel herself burning with shame.

“She was petrified,” he said. “She thought you were dead and that’s why she contacted me.” When he looked up, his face was full of a quiet, confused pain. “You could easily have died.”

A pale dirty-yellow light was coming into the room through the barred windows. From a distance she heard the rumble of trolley wheels, the splash of water.

“I sent two letters to the home, and I didn’t hear from you or from Daisy for that matter. After that, I didn’t want to know. Look,” he said angrily, “I’ve stopped thinking like that. I don’t want to anymore. I don’t even know why you’re here.”

She heard herself babbling. “I didn’t get the letters, I swear. They were all intercepted; everything’s such a mess there now. The home is in a shambles. Daisy’s been told to close the whole thing down, and it turned out, it turned out,” and suddenly, to her disgust, her cheeks were wet with tears, “that half the children hated being there anyway.”

He said nothing for a while, and then, “Did you finish the book?”

“No,” she said. “Most of the typed pages were destroyed. Oh, I’ve got the notebooks, but I don’t think I could do it again. So there we are. I’m sorry if I gave you a shock.”

She blew out air as if someone had punched her very hard in the stomach.

It was the first time she’d told anyone about the book; most of the manuscript pages had been either torn or defaced while
she was at Azim’s. They’d been waiting for her in her cupboard when she returned. She’d pretended with Toby that night; it was too painful to talk about it.

A terrible silence fell between them.

“I’m staying at Tor’s house near Amritsar,” she said at last. “I don’t know how much of this you know, but Tor got married, to a man named Toby. Rose is there with her new baby. They asked me to persuade you to come for Christmas.”

“I know,” he said. “Tor was the one who told me you were all right.” The muscle in his cheek had started to work again. “She’s already asked me; I’ve said no.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’m not sure.”

She felt a crushing sadness all over again.
I’ve lost him,
she thought,
and it’s all my fault.

“I don’t blame you,” she said.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of it. So!” He tried to smile, then looked at his watch as though he couldn’t wait for her to leave.

There was so much pain in the room, such a weight of things that could not be said, that she stood up and wrapped her arms around herself.

“Is there anything I could say that might help you change your mind?” she said. “There’s still time.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think there is. You see, I don’t like people who pretend.”

Viva felt fear under her ribs. “I wasn’t pretending.”

“Ah, well, all better now,” he said drily.

“All right. Look,” she was almost shouting, “I’m sorry. Does that make you feel any better?”

“No,” he said it so sadly that she knew he wasn’t trying to be unkind. “Funnily enough, it doesn’t.”

She took his hand. “Look, I
was
dishonest about Ooty. It frightened me.”

“What?” He shook his head.

“Can’t you understand?”

“No.”

When she looked up, she noticed he’d grown thinner in the past few months. There were the beginnings of lines around his mouth.
I’ve done this to him,
she thought.
I’ve made him look older and more wary.

Outside the hut, water was being splashed on hard ground. A dog was barking. When she looked at him she knew that if she didn’t make a stand now, it would soon be too late.

“Please come for Christmas, Frank,” she said. “I can’t say everything to you all at once.”

He got up and rested his head on the bars of the windows.

“No,” he said. “I can’t change everything on a whim again. I have patients here, things to do.”

She’d passed on her hurt to him. She saw it in the way he held himself, by the look in his eyes. She’d never seen it quite so clearly before.

“Frank,” she took a deep breath and decided to jump, “I’m not using any of this as an excuse, I couldn’t, that would be disgusting of me, but do you remember on the ship when I told you my family had died in a car crash? That’s not true. They all died separately.” She gripped the arms of the chair to stop herself shaking.

“My sister died of a burst appendix. If we’d been closer to a hospital she would have been all right. She was thirteen months older than me, almost like a twin.”

He looked at her sadly for a long time and then said, “I know what that feels like. Don’t you remember we did talk on the ship?”

“I know.”

She saw how his face had turned pale even thinking about it.

“Viva,” there was an edge of anger in his voice again, “you should have told me. I would have understood.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I don’t think you have any idea how closed off you can be. It’s like a moat appears around you. But go on, your father.” He was listening intently. “Tell me now.”

She took another deep breath. “My father was killed shortly after; he was found with his throat slit on a railway track near Cawnpore with seven of the men he was working with. They think bandits killed him.”

“Oh God. What an awful thing.”

“It was. The worst thing possible. I hardly ever saw him, he was obsessed with his work, but I loved him so much. He was always in my life. He was a brilliant man and he tried so hard to be a good father to me.” She looked at him wildly. “The awful thing is, I can’t properly remember now what he sounded like, or what he looked like. If Josie hadn’t died we could have reminded each other, but the memories are all fading. I hate that.”

“But what about your mother?”

“No, no, she died a year later.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Someone said of a broken heart—is that really a medical possibility?” She tried to smile but he didn’t smile back. “And anyway, we were never really close,” she continued. “And I can’t really remember why, perhaps it was something simple, she might have preferred my sister.

“Shortly after my father’s death, she took me down to the railway station in Simla and put me on a train back to my boarding school in England. I don’t know why she didn’t want me with her. I never saw her again.”

“You should have said this before.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

She felt exhausted. “I don’t know. Partly it’s because I can’t bear people feeling sorry for me.”

“Did you think I made love to you at Ooty because I felt sorry for you?”

“No.” She could hardly speak. So many things were going through her head, pain and tenderness, fury at her mother for sending her away.

When she looked up at him he had turned away again.

“Look,” she said, “please come for Christmas. We all want you to come.”

He finished his brandy.

“No,” he said. “I’m glad you felt you could tell me, but I can’t.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“Look,” he said at last, “when you left, I had to rethink everything. Even this.” He pointed angrily toward her eye. “You don’t trust a living soul, do you? And it’s just so wearing.”

“I—” She started to speak but he put his hand over her mouth then took it away again as if she were on fire.

“Don’t say anything,” he said. “Let me finish. What happened that night at Ooty didn’t surprise me. I knew it would happen and I thought you knew it, but afterward you made me feel, you made me feel…” his voice broke, “like a kind of rapist when I was already so in love with you.”

“No, no, no, no,” she said. “It wasn’t like that.”

He pulled her toward him, then pushed her away.

“You’ve had months to get in touch with me, even if you didn’t get my letters. At first I waited, and then I thought, I’m going to be slowly murdered by her if I go on like this.”

She took his face in her hands and then stopped. Outside their window, she could see Tor and Rose being led into the quadrangle.

“This is hopeless,” she said. Any minute now, they would burst into the room, everything would change again. “Listen,” she said quickly, hearing the crunch of their feet on the gravel, “I’ve just decided. Before Christmas, I’m going up north to Simla. It’s where my parents are buried. I’ve got a letter from an old girl there. A trunk I was supposed to collect years ago. Once I’ve faced that, maybe…”

He was about to answer when the door flew open.

“Frank!” Tor flung her arms around him. Rose stood behind her with two parcels in her hand. “Gosh, are you all right, Viva?” Tor said with her usual tact. “You look as white as a sheet.”

Frank offered them a drink but seemed relieved when they said no. Rose, who’d read the atmosphere correctly, walked to the door and said that she could already see one or two stars had come out. It would be safer for them to drive home before dark.

S
o this was it.

When Viva explained to Rose and Tor the following morning that she was going to take the train up to Simla to pick up her parents’ trunk, she tried to keep her voice as calm and as even as possible, so they didn’t realize how frightened she was. When they offered to come, too, she said no, she’d be back in time for Christmas and it was better they stayed put.

The whole trip felt like a child’s dare: a breathless dash into the monster’s cave and then out again.
Make it quick and painless,
she’d told herself,
don’t make a meal of it.

Now she was sitting in the window seat of the Himalayan Queen, the train her father had helped to build and maintain on its circuitous route up through the Himalayan foothills, through semitropical vegetation and toward the towering silvery snowline of the mountains. As the funny little toylike train worked its way through tunnel after tunnel, in and out of bright sunshine and shadowy rocks, she tried to stay calm and at one remove. Home was only a word. It needn’t mean anything if you didn’t want it to.

But even sitting here hurt: this train had been her father’s passion, his joy. (A passion shared, she dimly remembered, by a colonel somebody-or-other, who had shot himself through the head when two sections of the track had not joined up.)

Today it was packed. An elderly woman sat beside her whose callused feet didn’t touch the ground. She was clutching a variety of stained parcels on her lap. On the seat opposite, so close to her that their knees were almost touching, was a young couple who looked innocently happy. Newlyweds maybe. The girl sat radiant and shy in a brand-new cheap pink sari; the skinny young husband darted fervent looks at her. He could not believe his luck.

On Viva’s lap was a book of poems by Tagore, randomly selected from Toby’s shelves—since her abduction, her concentration had been poor.

Her feet were resting on her mother’s old suitcase. She was fond of this scruffy old thing with its thinning straps and faded labels, but the stitching was worn at the seams—she’d have to replace it soon. Inside it, she’d packed the keys to the trunk, a change of clothes, and Mabel Waghorn’s address: “I’m in the street behind the Chinese shoe shop,” she’d written in quavery old-lady writing. “Close to the Lower Bazaar—you can’t miss me.”

Of course, it was perfectly possible, Viva thought, resting her head on the train’s window, that Mrs. Waghorn had died since she wrote that letter. She’d met her once or twice as a child; her memory was of a tallish, imposing woman, much older than her mother.

If she was dead, she wouldn’t have to go through with this. The relief she felt at this shocked her, but it felt important not to build her hopes up, although hope did not describe the mounting panic she felt at finally being on the train.

The train left another nondescript station. She put down her book and looked out of the window at houses made of
cardboard, twigs, mud, old bits of wood.
I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.
Not much huffing or puffing needed there. They chugged past a signal box where a group of men huddled in blankets sat gazing at her. Three filthy-looking children appeared at her window. Barefoot and with running noses, they waved ecstatically at the train.

She was nothing special, she thought, waving back at them. Home was a luxury half the world did without. During the first few years of her childhood, when her father had been most in demand as a railway engineer, it had never even occurred to her to want a permanent place that you could call home. It was the happiest time of her life. All of them—Viva, Josie, and her mother—moved on together like a gypsy caravan with her father every few months. Some of the places—Landi Kotal, Lucknow, Bangalore, Chittagong, Benares—she vaguely remembered; others had dissolved into a misty past that sometimes played tricks on her. On her way to Ooty, for instance, she’d made an ass of herself when she’d told Tor she recognized a little railway station—the faded blue windows, the row of red buckets—only to find exactly the same red buckets and blue windows at the next station and the next.

The train had begun its climb through dense scrubby trees toward the foothills of the Himalayas. Several seats behind her, a booming English voice was explaining to someone, probably his wife, that the track was only two foot six inches wide, and the whole thing a miracle of engineering and that they’d shortly be passing through one hundred and two tunnels blasted through the rocks. “
One hundred and two!
Good Lord,” a bored, affected voice exclaimed. “What a thing.”

And suddenly she felt a proud daughter’s urge to boast, to say on his behalf, “My father helped to build this. He was one of the best railway engineers in India and it was something.”

But their voices had a bubbling distant sound now, drowned
by the train’s roar as it passed through a tunnel and into the light again.

How she’d loved this traveling as a child, felt sorry for children who didn’t constantly have new houses to explore, new trees to climb, new animals, instant friends. She was a child of the Empire, she could see that now.

Another thought came with the force of a blow. Home was where they were, Daddy, Mummy, and Josie, and she’d been running ever since.

Daddy, Mummy, Josie
—such a long time since she’d dared to say all their names together. She worked it out on her fingers: she was eight, maybe nine, when she’d sat on this train with them for the last time. How strange to have got this old without them. Her mother had often packed a special picnic for trips like these: lemonade, buns, cut-and-come-again cake, sandwiches. On their last ever journey together, Josie sat next to her mother and Viva sat opposite them in a patch of sunlight next to her father. She felt again the sun on her hair, her joy at being beside him. This slender, reserved man with his gentle hands and clever face had never told her he loved her, that wasn’t his way, but he did and she knew it, always; it was like moving inside an invisible magnetic field.

They’d wanted a boy but when he hadn’t come, she’d stepped in without even thinking about it. She was the one who most liked to hear him talk about the things that excited him: steam engines; the point at which a horse took the strain when it was pulling a cart; the idea that the steam that came out of your kettle was an energetic dance of molecules. “They’d be flying around like billiard balls, if you could see them,” he’d once told her.

He was there again. As her eyes wandered over the dusty villages, the towns, the parched places in between, she wanted him back with a savagery she hadn’t felt for years. To talk to him again about this railway for instance. At home while he
was helping to work out the complex problems of maintaining it, he would pull a large wooden box, labeled “The Queen,” out of a cupboard. He’d pour the contents onto the grass matting in his study: miniature plaster of Paris bridges, escarpments, trees, papier-mâché boulders. How cleverly he’d made what was life to him seem like a game to her. And what a hopeless task this ambitious route must have felt at times, with mountains this steep, those huge rocks to blast through.

Viva sighed so vigorously she had to apologize to the lady beside her. Why do this when it hurt so much? Apart from Frank, who still had no proper understanding of what it meant, who would give a damn if she got out at the next station, turned around, and went back to Amritsar? All traces of home could be disposed of by throwing Mabel Waghorn’s letter and the keys to the trunk out the window.

The train chugged on relentlessly. At Kalka, a tiny little railway station clinging to the side of a cliff, a man with a basket of food leaped into the carriage, then ran through it as if his trousers were on fire shouting, “Water, fruity cake, ’freshment,” but she couldn’t eat, didn’t want to.

She watched the young man opposite her jump from the train, dash down the platform, and buy plates of dhal from a kiosk. His young wife sat rigidly to attention, her eyes trained on him like a pistol.

In the end, it was simple, Viva thought, seeing her relief when he came back.

Home was knowing you were at the center of someone else’s world. She’d lost that security when her parents died. Nobody had been actively unkind to her after they’d gone—she wasn’t beaten or sent to the workhouse, no need for sobbing violins—what had changed was that she’d begun to feel—what was the phrase?—surplus to requirements.

In relatives’ homes, she’d slept in the bedrooms of grown-up children; their dusty dolls and wooden trains had stared at
her from the tops of wardrobes. During the school holidays when she’d stayed at the convent, she’d been made to sleep in the sanatorium, which had made loneliness feel like a special kind of irritating illness. The relief of finally being old enough to make her own arrangements and move into that first tiny bedsit in Nevern Square had been intoxicating. She was finally and properly alone and didn’t have to feel grateful to anybody.

In the same half-dream, she thought of Josie. It was horrible the way her memories of her sister were beginning to fade like a piece of music you play and play until it loses its power. Black curls, blue eyes, long legs leaping like a mountain goat from rock to rock. “Hurry up, slow coach, jump!”

Her best memory was camping with Josie in the foothills of the Himalayas; the whole family had ridden with pack ponies and supplies and camp beds and servants following behind. They’d slept in tents under diamond-bright stars listening to the sounds of their ponies munching outside their tents, the roar of the mountain streams, their parents sitting beside a campfire taking turns to tell stories. Her father’s favorite made-up story was of Puffington Blowfly: the boy who was strong and brave, and never ever moaned about anything.

Later, they moved to Kashmir; the exact name of the town had gone, just as so many houses, schools, friends had. She did remember a bridge somewhere had collapsed and needed her father’s attention. They’d stopped off for a holiday at a lake in Srinagar, where they hired a houseboat. She and Josie had been excited by their gay little craft with its chintz curtains and paper lanterns on the deck and their own miniature bedroom with its elaborately painted bunks inside. But Viva remembered crying, too—something about a dog they’d had to leave behind—a dog she’d loved with a child’s reckless single-mindedness and would never see again. To cheer her up, Mother said they could
sleep on deck for a treat. She and Josie had sat under the same mosquito net watching the sun bloody the whole sky and finally ooze like a giant melted toffee into the lake.

Was that the night when Josie, who had a mathematical brain like her father’s, had calculated the unimaginable catastrophe of one of them dying young and leaving the other on their own?

“It’s one in four in India,” Josie had said. “We may not make old bones,” she’d warned her.

Viva said, “If you die, I’ll die with you.”

She hadn’t. Another shock that felt like betrayal—she could live without them.

After Josie’s appendix burst, and they’d taken her to the cantonment graveyard, Viva had been obsessed for months and months with the thought of her turning into a skeleton there. She’d seen freshly dug earth around all the other little gravestones; she’d pestered her mother for details of how the other children had died. There was a small boy, she recalled, who had toddled over to a snake and tried to shake hands with it; a baby who died of typhoid the day after Josie.

Did she ask too many questions? She must have. Or maybe her mother couldn’t bear her for looking like Josie but not being her, or because she’d refused stubbornly for a while to accept that Josie had gone. She had said so many prayers. She’d put Josie’s pajamas on the bed at night, put a biscuit under the sheets so when she came back she wouldn’t be hungry, gone to the temple and put rice and flowers out before the gods, before she’d given up believing all together.

Shortly after, she’d been sent home to the convent. Her memory was that she’d gone alone, but surely not? She was ten years old. There must have been a companion. Why had her mother not come? Did she kiss her good-bye? These were the details that silted up your mind and made you feel like a liar to yourself and to other people. Frank was right about that, but
now she still felt angry with him for butting in; yes, butting was the right word for it, into something so terrible, so final.

Twenty miles or so away from the station she found herself weeping uncontrollably. She shouldn’t have come, she knew it,
she knew it.
It took her a while to get back in control, to mop up the tears, to stifle the sobs by pretending she was having a coughing fit. And then she fell asleep, and when she woke, the woman opposite was tapping her on the arm. The train had reached the end of the line. She was back in Simla.

She stood for a moment in the spot where she’d stepped down from the train. She looked at the trees dusted with snow, at the thin horses covered in burlap sacks, waiting for passengers. The one place she would never forget.

Flakes of snow fell on her hair. She watched the Englishman, still gesticulating and instructing his wife, pull away in a taxi and drive up the hill.

In front of her, in the station forecourt, was a tonga driver, feet up and sipping chai. He rang a silver bell to get her attention.

“Are you waiting for your sahib?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, “I’m by myself. I’d like to go here,” she handed him the piece of paper, “and then on to the Cecil Hotel.”

Frowning, he looked at Mabel Waghorn’s map, his face green with cold.