East of the Sun (6 page)

Partly to spare him from the miserable atmosphere at home, his mother had kept on getting her friends to ask him to parties, but the parties had thrown him. At one, he’d seen a couple openly copulating on top of a pile of overcoats in the spare room and had backed out scarlet with embarrassment and wanting to punch both of them for making a spectacle of themselves. At another, bewildered by a group of excited people sniffing up a pile of powder, he’d caused laughter by asking what they were doing, and been told rudely, “It’s naughty salt, you ignoramus. Cocaine.”

But Rose. She wasn’t like that. At the Savile Club, where he’d stood in his dinner jacket underneath the ceiling painted with fat cherubs, she’d appeared beside him, endearingly gawky in an evening dress that was too old and slightly too big for her, but unmistakably a beauty with her silky blond hair and sweet smile. The band had started to play a fox-trot and she’d raised her eyebrows slightly and smiled at him.

“Dance with me,” he’d said, and she’d stepped into his arms. They’d bellowed at each other over the music for a hopeless few minutes during which he’d stepped on her toes.

“Do you have a chaperone here?” he’d asked her after several dances.

“I do,” she said with her delicious smile, “but unfortunately she’s downstairs playing bridge.”

“Have you seen the pictures downstairs?” he said. “They have some wonderful portraits in the reading room.”

The oldest and corniest line in the world, but she’d said, with sweet gravity, “No, I haven’t, but I’d love to see them.”

And it was there, in the soft glow of the reading room, beneath a picture of a man wrestling with wild-eyed foaming horses, that he’d simply taken her in his arms and kissed her soft lips, feeling at first a shy resistance, a stiffening in her arms, and then her yielding.

“Um,” she’d licked her lips thoughtfully, like a child tasting
the last remnants of a sweet, “I don’t think I’ve been kissed before—not like that.”

And it was at that moment, with this divine, slim, fresh young creature in his arms, smelling of Devonshire violets, the same scent his mother used, that he thought of Sunita, his mistress, and how much he owed her. She’d taught him everything. After three lonely years of bachelorhood in the
mofussil,
he’d gone to her like a bull in rut, and she’d bathed him and oiled him, slowed him down. Teasing and laughter had also gone into it, a sense that lovemaking could be practiced and refined as well as sublime abandonment. He’d been like a man trying to play a symphony on a penny flute; she’d given him the whole orchestra.

They’d reached her street: a row of battered terraced houses with wrought-iron balconies that had seen better days. The same groups of rickshaw men were gossiping on the corner, waiting for their fares, and, as usual, she’d left a candle burning for him outside her door. Inside her room, she had a glass-fronted cabinet where all the little presents he’d given her—a silver box from a London antiques market, a bottle of scent, a scarf—were proudly displayed. But tonight, in his pocket, he had a check to give her after his speech, a donation he could ill afford, toward her future. His heart sank as he walked up the stairs. For the first time in her life she might feel like a prostitute. He felt like a brute, but he had to do it. Jack Chandler was about to be married.

Gibraltar

But she’d suddenly lain down on her bunk again and thought about her father and their last camping trip together in late summer.

They’d gone fishing on a small trout stream in Wales that he particularly loved near the village of Crickhowell. All the familiar paraphernalia had been loaded into the back of his ancient Daimler: the rickety Primus, the two dogs, with their beds, the big tartan thermos, rods, camp beds, and the stout old army tent that had seen active service in Africa. She’d loved these camping excursions as a child—Tor often came, too, and her father would instruct them in all kinds of boy things: épée fencing with pieces of stripped alder, trout casting, how to fold a tent, and make a tree house—he’d even brought up one of his guns once and they’d had a competition shooting tin cans out of a tree, which Rose to her amazement had won hands down and been called Dead-Eye Dick for the rest of the trip. She and Tor had swung on a rope over the river; they’d burned sausages over fires at night.

She’d only been dimly aware then of trying to be as brave as Simon, the boy her father had lost and wanted back so badly, but on that last trip, when they were alone together, the view had changed. One night, after they’d fried up the salmon they had caught and he had lit a fragrant pipe, he’d said to her clearly and urgently that he hoped he and Mummy hadn’t let her rush into this Jack thing. He’d said that he wanted more than any
thing else in the world for her to find a man who was worthy of her. He’d looked at her anxiously and his voice had trembled with emotion as he’d told her that finding the right person was the greatest gift of your life. And he’d suddenly looked so old and anxious, sitting hunched on his stool in the fading light, that she’d known that even if things weren’t a hundred percent perfect when she got to India, it was her turn to protect him now.

Kaisar-i-Hind,
150 miles from Port Said

T
or woke up in darkness hearing the noise again. It was coming from the boy’s cabin next door. A series of escalating moans, like something being held down and tortured, then broken words, then the sound of the bunk creaking, then silence.

She lay back in the dark, frightened. If the boy had been a friendlier type, she might have gone straightaway to see if he was all right, but she found him odd and disturbing. They often saw him on deck smoking and glaring out to sea, and only a few nights ago, at a ball in the Siena Room, he’d made quite a spectacle of himself. The orchestra had been playing, the kind of waltzes that appealed to the colonels and the older people, and he’d suddenly stood up and danced wildly and inappropriately by himself. Because they were, so to speak, neighbors, and because the older people had been tutting, she’d tried to smile at him, but he’d turned hurriedly away.

He’d also made that fuss about only eating with Viva, which was a great relief to them because he wasn’t exactly laughing
gas, but they were sorry not to have more time with Viva, who was, Tor had decided, mysterious and exotic.

“I bet I’m no more than three years older than him,” she’d complained to Rose, “but he makes one feel such a maiden aunt.”

“Don’t forget,” said Rose, always kinder about these matters than Tor, “how absolutely vile we could be at that age.”

“You were never vile, Rose,” Tor said. “I was vile for both of us.”

The noises stopped as suddenly as they had started, and because Tor wasn’t sure what to do, she put her head on the pillow to think about it and fell asleep and forgot all about him.

The sun woke her five hours later. She basked in it like a cat on a windowsill and thought, as she had almost every morning since she’d been at sea,
How wonderful. I’m free.

Only three months ago, she hadn’t even been allowed to wear face powder without her parents’ permission, or stay up after one-thirty a.m. or walk alone in London without a chaperone, and every other week, she’d had to go to deportment classes with Mrs. Craddock in Salisbury.

But today would start with tea in bed and a good gossip with Rose about the night before, then a wonderful breakfast, maybe kippers, or eggs and bacon, and delicious coffee, which she had only just started to drink and which made her feel so sophisticated. All kinds of games in the morning, and perhaps a turn around the deck with Frank, the ship’s junior doctor, who was so good-looking and who, yesterday, had appeared on deck just as she and Rose were looking out to sea. And then, at six o’clock Viva, who had been wonderful about leaving them alone during the day, would appear in the cabin, for what they now called a
bishi,
the Marathi word, Viva had told them, for a female party.

Last night, during their
bishi,
the conversation had turned to the topic of what qualities they should look for in a man, and Tor, without meaning to, had told Viva, who was a very good listener, about Paul, the man who had broken her heart last summer.

“Perfect at first,” she said sadly. “We met on the lawn of his parents’ house at Tangley, which is not far from where we live. He was very dark and sophisticated, sort of tortured-looking. He’d been away working in Rome as an art historian for three years; my mother was nudging me like mad as he was talking to me. She thought he was a wonderful catch because his parents have money and we’ve become quite poor since the war.”

She was trying to make them laugh at her stupidity, but it hurt even now to remember how fated that first meeting had seemed: the scent of old-fashioned roses; the clink of champagne glasses (it was his parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary); and this dream of a young man in a summer suit and panama hat, who had really talked to her and made her laugh and, at one point, playfully kissed her hand.

“He was three years older than me,” she said, still trying for a lighthearted tone, “and more interesting by a mile than the other men I’d met. He took me to concerts where he read the scores, lent me this book called
Middlemarch.
Have you read it, Viva? It’s rather good—he was horrified I hadn’t. He even told me what colors I should wear. I didn’t even know I had olive skin until he told me.”

“Do you remember that lovely letter he sent you?” Rose was going along with the joke even though she’d seen her sobbing in the summerhouse afterward.

“Oh yes, oh yes, hang on,” said Tor, “let me see if I can remember it,” even though it was branded on her mind. “‘The world is so rich,’” she recited in a stagy voice, “‘so throbbing with rich treasures and interesting people. Forget yourself.’”

“But he does sound interesting,” Viva had laughed—she seemed to love listening to their stories even though she never told them a thing about herself. “What happened next?”

“He disappeared.” Tor suddenly hadn’t felt like finishing the story. It wasn’t that funny and she’d run out of steam. And the truth, still too painful to admit, was that by the time summer was over, she’d been so sure it would work out, she’d all but named their children and dreamed of the houses they would have.

And then, for reasons she still didn’t understand, it had all gone so wrong.

This had happened one morning, it was in early autumn, he had asked her mother, who adored him even more now that he spoke to her in fluent French, whether he might take Tor on a picnic to Magdalen, his old college in Oxford. Her mother, sensing a proposal in the air, was ecstatic; she saw no reason why they needed a chaperone.

He’d gone to the Bodleian in the morning to look up some ancient manuscripts and after lunch, under a willow tree near some historic bridge, he’d rolled up a towel and tucked it under her head. And suddenly—it had happened almost without her thinking—she’d felt so bowled over by the river and the ducks and the smell of new grass and the blue sky and the fact that she was here with her own beau that she’d turned to him, taken his face in her hands and kissed him.

And then, horrible, he’d leaped to his feet almost shouting at her. “Please never do that again.” He’d brushed the grass from his trousers.

“Why not, silly?” She’d tried for a flippant tone that would not come.

He’d stood glaring and looking down at her with the sky all around him.

“I can’t do this,” he had said. “It’s ridiculous.”

She’d felt her sandwich go like a stone inside her. “I don’t understand,” she said, and even now it made her wince to think of it. “I thought we…I thought you said you loved me.”

“You do have an awful lot of growing up to do,” he’d said as if somehow it was all her fault, and walking back, to make it even worse, she’d caught her heel in the hem of her dress, which had come down and added to the crushing, humiliating sense that she had let herself down and him.

She’d cried all the way home, hating her tears and at one point begging him to reconsider. But he hadn’t. The next week he’d appeared, charming and kind again, to tell her a job had come up in Rome and he simply had to go. If he had, at any point, given her the impression of an engagement, he was terribly sorry. She was really the most terrific girl. Some other fellow would be very lucky.

Her mother had stopped speaking to her for two whole days. It was Rose who had held her in her arms, who had told her he was an absolute cad and swine, that he would regret the loss of Tor for the rest of his life. They had stayed up all of one night in the summerhouse talking about it, and she’d cried until there were no more tears to shed, and she’d smoked so many cigarettes that her tonsils were raw the next day. Rose’s kind words had helped, and being on the
Kaisar
was a tonic, but part of her was still bruised and bewildered, which was why she probably shouldn’t have embarked on the story in the first place.

“What fun it must be to be young on a ship like this,” Major Smythe, one of the passengers, had said to her wistfully only the night before. And so it was: the dancing, the games, the flirting, but what Paul had left her with was hunger. Hunger for the world of which he’d shown her a glimpse,
throbbing with rich treasures and interesting people,
hungry to be loved for
herself with her hair down and her corset off. Was that completely and utterly impossible?

The sun was rising in the sky, the sea a sapphire blue. Suday was walking into their cabin with a tray in his hands.

“Chai, my ladies.” Without a word of reproach, he walked around the dress and the feather boa that Tor had stepped out of the night before and left on the floor. “Chai and fruitycake-biscuit, hot roll,
irrawaddy
.”

Neither of them had the slightest clue what
irrawaddy
meant, but every morning their laughter made him laugh delightedly, like a child.

He poured tea for them with a flourish from a silver pot, and then took hot rolls from a napkin and put them on their plates. He smiled when they told him what an absolute brick he was and shut the door behind himself still beaming.

“I love Suday,” said Tor sentimentally when he had gone. “Now, get into bed with me, Rose, I need a gup.”

A gup, their new word for a gossip, was gleaned from the series of lectures they’d been going to called “Kitchen Hindi for Memsahibs,” given by Lieutenant Colonel Gorman twice a week in the Wellington Room. Rose had listened avidly; Tor had gone along to keep her company.

Rose climbed in at the opposite end to Tor. “Now don’t kick me,” she said, “else I’ll scald you with my tea.”

“First item on the agenda,” said Tor. “Marlene and Suzanne?”

Both of them were fascinated by Marlene and Suzanne, easily the two most glamorous girls on the ship. They had one of the best cabins, really a kind of suite, on A deck. “They’re only secretaries, really,” Mrs. Gorman, the colonel’s wife, had said meanly—it was rumored that Marlene’s last job had been with an Indian who imported carpets and was terribly rich—but Tor and Rose and half the crew were mesmerized by their
highly varnished bobs and succession of brilliantly beaded frocks, their smoldering eyes, their matching jet and pearl cigarette holders.

“I saw Marlene was dancing with Jitu last night,” Tor reported. “He had his hand on her back like this.” Tor demonstrated with her own hand placed near the elastic on her pajamas. “And while Mrs. Gorman and I were watching agog, she said she’d known another girl like that who went out to India last year. She’d worked in the scarf department at Lillywhites, was very pretty and smart, and she’d ended up in a maharajah’s palace, and guess what he’d asked her to do? He’d made her take six baths a day—that was all.”

Rose looked nonplussed. “Why?”

“No idea. I suppose he liked looking at her.”

“Golly.” Rose had gone a faint pink. “How very embarrassing.”

“Next item,” Tor continued quickly, hoping she hadn’t put her foot in it, although it was hard to imagine Captain Jack Chandler wanting to stare at Rose in a bath. “What were those terrible sounds last night?”

“What sounds?”

“From the boy next door. Didn’t you hear him?” Tor said. “‘Oh my God! Oh God! Oh! OH! OH!’”

“How awful.” Rose’s eyes were round and blue. “He must have been having a nightmare.”

“I don’t know.”

“But didn’t you go and ask him if he was all right?”

“Well, I meant to, but I fell asleep.”

“Oh, well done you. Brilliant. Just the kind of chap one wants to go into the jungle with.”

“I know. I was bad. But I had one of those Singapore Sling things and I was sleepy.”

“Well, we’d better ask him later,” said Rose. “And tell Viva. She’s usually in the writing room about now.”

“I tell you what, let’s forget it.” Tor was munching now on her second hot roll. “If anything bad happened, I’m going to feel a beast.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Rose pinched Tor’s toe, “and stop dropping crumbs on my foot. He probably ate too much like us and has the trotagees.” Trotagees was their made-up Hindi word for diarrhea.

Don’t get married, Rose,
thought Tor, listening to Rose laughing, and feeling her warmth beside her.
I’m going to miss you so much.

“I’m going to have a bath,” said Tor a few minutes later. They’d finished breakfast and were lying in the same patch of sun on the pillow.

“In a sec. I haven’t finished my gup.” Rose stretched out luxuriously. “Who were all those people you were dancing with last night? I got buttonholed by Mrs. Llewellyn-Pearse, who told me all about the forty-seven varieties of rhododendron she saw in Simla last year. I told her to be sure and show you the photographs.”

“Oh goodness, absolutely everyone. Philip, he is such a show-off. Colonel Green, who breathed garlic down my neck. Rose, if I gave you a chocolate would you put my bath on? I’m absolutely exhausted already.”

“And Frank?” Rose widened her eyes. “Were we dancing with Frank, Frank, Frankeee?”

“Oh, Frank.” Tor kept her voice carefully neutral. For the first time since the Paul fiasco, her heart had leaped when she’d seen him walk across the dance floor to ask her to dance. He was so endearing in his white dinner jacket and untidy hair. And a doctor was exciting, even though Mummy would think that was beneath them. But danger! her heart had said. Red alert! Don’t talk about him to anyone!