East of the Sun (30 page)

T
or had sounded so low on the phone that Viva was amazed to see how radiant she looked when she opened the door.

“Excuse my humble home,” Viva said as she led her upstairs. Mrs. Jamshed had been cooking up her famous shrimp patio that morning and the smell of garlic and cumin in the hall was so strong you could taste it.

“Excuse it!” Tor said. “I’m so happy to be here I could practically burst. Oh, Viva, what a wonderful place,” Tor said when she opened the door to her room. “So bohemian. I love it!” She looked at the ceiling, now covered with children’s kites, ran her hand over the silk bedspread and bounced on the bed.

“It’s going to be a bit cramped,” Viva said, “but I’ve borrowed a camp bed. I don’t mind sleeping in it, and we’re going to Daisy’s tonight, and we’ll leave first thing, so what the hell.”

Viva got them both some lemonade, and they went out on the balcony and Tor made Viva roar with laughter when she told the story of the Ci Ci row.

“The only thing I am so grateful about,” Tor’s eyes looked huge with shock at the thought of it, “is that I didn’t tell her about…you know…possible problems in the baby department. That would have been the final straw. And the club! Just imagine. That would have kept the old biddies going for months.”

“Why do you care so much what people think?” Viva said. “You can’t win them all.”

“I do care,” said Tor. “I want everyone to love me and they won’t. I wish I was more like you.”

“What do you mean, more like me?” Viva pushed a plate of biscuits toward Tor. “Come on, dig in.”

“A cat that walks alone. Look at all this.” Tor gestured toward her room. “I could never do this on my own.”

“Be broke, you mean, and live in a house that smells of curry? Poor Tor.”

“No, don’t tease. I mean live like this and know that one has done it oneself.”

Viva didn’t want to spoil Tor’s good mood by telling her how lonely and desperate she’d felt here at times, or how scared after Guy had turned up. She took a sip of lemonade.

“I don’t think earning your own living is as hard as it used to be,” she said. “If it’s independence you want.”

Tor heaved a sigh. “I don’t think I do.”

“What do you think you want then?”

“A husband.” Tor’s big blue eyes looked absolutely serious for once. “Some babies, a place of my own. For me the rest is just being brave.”

In her usual frame of mind, Viva might have raised plenty of bracing objections to this: have encouraged Tor to get some sort of training; offered to introduce her to the already wide variety of women Daisy knew—teachers, archaeologists, lan
guage experts, social workers—who found dozens of other things to do in India apart from hunting for husbands. But tonight, she felt strangely disinclined to urge Tor toward serious goals.

Frank was coming to the party.

Daisy had dropped this casually into the conversation earlier.

“I thought I’d ask that nice young doctor friend of yours,” she said. “He said he’ll come if he’s in town and not on duty.”

Why this piece of news should have made her feel so annoyingly hectic, she had no idea. She’d planned to write for an hour or so before Tor came, but instead had spent the time jumping on and off a chair and trying to line up her reflection with the only mirror in the room, which lay in the shadows opposite her bed on top of a chest of drawers.

Wobbling on the chair, she’d tried on her best dress—it was a flame-colored silk, its long darts emphasized her small waist and she liked the small bow at the back. Then she tried a blue embroidered jacket she was particularly fond of. She’d ripped the jacket off, tried on the only other presentable outfit she owned, a cotton shirt made of some white gauzy material. It looked pretty, she thought, against her coral and silver earrings.

She was enjoying herself when the sight of her eager, happy face in the mirror frightened her.
He’s not going to come,
she’d warned herself.
And even if he does, you don’t want him.

“So what do you think?” she was asking Tor now, in an offhand voice, as if this was the first time she’d tried the flame silk dress on. “I could wear it with these.” She clipped on the silver and coral earrings that had belonged to her mother.

When Viva saw her face in the mirror again, she saw that her pep talk had done no good. She was still horribly excited.

“I think you could wear a jockstrap and opera glasses and still look beautiful,” said Tor. “Which is quite unfair, because you don’t seem to give a damn about all that.”

Daisy’s party was in full swing when they arrived. They could hear, from the street below, bursts of laughter, some jazz—the clownish kind with lots of whistles and squeaks. A row of colored lights shone from the balcony.

“Come in! Come in!” Daisy, beaming and wearing a bright pink dress, opened the door on a roar of conversation. Although Daisy lived on a shoestring, she loved giving parties and entertained with a reckless aristocratic confidence that Viva admired. With Daisy, there was no careful mixing of people of the same kind, no placement, or particular show, instead she threw all the people she liked—children, academics, local musicians, neighbors—into the pot, fed them well, wound up the gramophone, and let them get on with it. It was a real lesson in life.

“Come on!” She steered them toward the balcony, where they heard bursts of music and laughter. “I want you to meet everyone.”

“Everyone” was the usual rich mix: Mr. Jamshed and his two stunning daughters, Dolly and Kaniz, one of whom was dancing the Charleston. There was a large and stately Swedish sculptress in a caftan, on her way to study the carvings at the Elephanta Caves. Social workers, academics, writers, a fat man who was a professor of music and in Bombay to record. Some of them sat on sofas on the balcony under the starry sky, others were dancing.

Tor was immediately swept off by Daisy to talk to a Bombay advocate, Mr. Bhide, who she said had bravely defied convention by marrying a Hindu widow. (The widow turned out to be twenty-five, shy, and clever.) Viva stood for a few moments on
her own at the edge of the roaring crowd. She was sipping one of Daisy’s lethal punches, hoping to calm her nerves.

For the next half hour she wandered through the groups of people, chatting and laughing, her senses trained like a pistol toward the front door. He hadn’t come after all. Well, good in a way, she reassured herself; it made things far less complicated.

Halfway through the evening, Daisy’s servants brought out bowls of steaming rice, three different kinds of curries, chutneys, and poppadums. They set them down informally on the balcony on low tables with cushions around them. Someone had put “Lady Be Good” on the gramophone and the foggy sounds drifted across the balcony and down the streets below.

“Please join us.” Mr. Jamshed beamed at Viva and Tor. He was sitting cross-legged beside a low brass table. His plate was piled with food; his girls were all around him. “
Chalo jumva avoji,
” he said, “Come, let us eat. My girls are teasing me for being old-fashioned and I need you to give them stick,” he said to Viva in his beautiful English.

“You see,” Dolly appealed to Tor, who was goggle-eyed at all this, “we are discussing education, and what my poor father fails to understand is that we have actually skipped a generation. My mother behaves as your grandmother, but I am as modern as you.”

“No, wrong,” said Tor with that peculiar intensity that Viva liked about her. “Viva tells me that you’re studying law at the university, so you’re miles ahead of me. I left school at sixteen. I can barely add up.”

“I’m sure you’re very clever also,” Dolly said tactfully.

“I’m not,” Tor said. “I’m quite dim, and, by the way, none of the girls at my school went to university either. We learned to sew and speak bad French instead. But I can dance the Charleston if that’s any good to you.”

“Yes!” Dolly and Kaniz said together. Their white teeth
gleamed in the moonlight. They were entranced with their new friend.

“Absoludol,” said Tor, standing up. “But first I need to get us all another drink and powder my nose. Will you come with me, Viva?”

As they stood side by side in the bathroom, Viva saw Tor was both tipsy and happy. She thanked Viva twice for bringing her here and walked with particular care, as if she were on castors, back through Daisy’s sitting room and onto the balcony again, into the milky softness of the night.

“A wonderful, wonderful party,” she said on her way through. “The strangest thing—I’ve hardly given Ollie a thought all evening. It’s such a relief.”

“I’m glad, Tor.” Viva, who’d been glancing toward the door all evening, felt like a complete hypocrite. She checked her watch surreptitiously one more time. Eleven thirty-five. Frank wouldn’t come now. Too busy after all maybe, or perhaps not busy at all but writing to some girl in England she knew nothing about, who he was madly in love with, or out at another party. There were always so many reasons for things not happening in the way you thought they might.

Mr. Jamshed had appeared again. He was shouting at her over the laughter and the talk and the smoke about some concert that was coming up, some wonderful new composer, very like Bach in his symmetry—she could feel herself smiling and nodding, but could hardly concentrate, she suddenly felt so tired.

Her dress was sticking to her back, her feet hurt, she thought longingly of bed and normal life again. And then, when she looked up, Frank was standing near the door looking at her.

“Will you excuse me for a second?” she said to Mr. Jamshed. “I…” and she was gone.

Without a word, Frank took her arm and pulled her toward him.

“I’m late,” he said. He looked disheveled and a little wild-eyed, as though he had been through an ordeal of his own in the past few hours. “And I’m ravenous.”

“Are you?” She almost hated the clamor in her heart.

She got him some food, and when he’d eaten, they danced. First one dance, and then the next.

About three-thirty in the morning, Frank, Viva, and Tor sat on the balcony together.

“Just like old times,” said Tor. “We could be on the old
Kaisar
again.”

When Viva looked at Frank she saw him shake his head slightly as if in disbelief.

A faint pink flush was showing in the distance where the sun would soon be rising. The raggle-taggle rooftops were taking shape one by one.

“I’ve drunk too much,” said Tor, who was on her fourth or fifth gin fizz, and who was lying on a charpoy with a cushion behind her head, “but may I just say that that was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. Wonderful,
wonderful,
beautiful people, such fun. I honestly think Byculla is one of the jolliest places on earth.”

“You’re right, Tor,” Frank said seriously. “It was a very good party.”

Viva liked his smile so much—it was so charming, so sudden—it lit her up. There wasn’t much she could do about that.

Tor lay dozing on the charpoy.

“How am I going to get her up in the morning?” Viva needed to know suddenly. “The train leaves for Ooty at ten-thirty.”

“I know,” he said. “Tor’s just asked me to come, too.”

He leaned over and took a strand of damp hair from Viva’s forehead. He tucked it behind her ear.

“How would you feel about that?”

Viva hesitated. “I’m not sure,” she said. The casual touch of his fingers on her hair made her senses blaze. She felt so out of control, and didn’t like it.

“I’ve got some time off from the hospital,” he said casually. “And, also, you might just be better off with a man around at the moment.”

“Is it Guy?” she said quickly.

“Yes, partly. I got a letter from the police two days ago. It sounds like something else has cropped up. They want to talk to me about him.”

“When do they want to see you?”

“Next week.”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“Because you looked happy.”

They looked at each other for a few seconds, and then Tor stirred.

“Tired,” she murmured, “very, very tired and very, very hot. Up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire.”

And Viva returned to her senses.

“I’ll be back by then,” she said lightly and cruelly. “And Ooty is a girls’ outing. Sorry.”

W
hen Viva told Tor that she’d booked them third-class tickets on the train to Ooty, Tor said that was fine with her. She was short of money, too, and if they were kidnapped by white-slave traders it would almost certainly be more fun than Christmas in Middle Wallop.

But the sledgehammer heat of May, even this early in the morning, made Viva worry that she’d made the wrong choice as they boarded the train at the Victoria Terminus Station.

They’d entered the splendid building, with its flying buttresses and stained-glass windows, early in order to avoid the crowds, but already their carriage was a writhing, roaring sea of humanity: picnicking families, capering schoolchildren, grannies in saris, one man with a stained cotton bed rolled up on his lap.

Tor sat down next to a smeary window; Viva was in the middle, opposite a plump young mother holding numerous greasy packages on her knee. It was a relief to feel the slight movement of oily air as the train slowly chugged out of the station and into a shimmering heat haze.

For the first hour, Viva enjoyed watching Tor’s big blue eyes
nearly pop from her head at the sight of a naked sadhu who’d leaped onto the train at the first station, his skin shrunken, buttocks barely covered by a thread. Then came the chai wallahs and food merchants who sped through the train as if their trousers were on fire, selling tea, omelettes, biscuits, soup, dhal, and chapattis.

But now three hours had passed and the heat had parboiled the smells of sweat and hair oil, spicy food and flatulence, and the glass of the window was almost too hot to put your head on. Tor, already groggy from the gin fizzes the night before, had started to groan and say she felt sick.

Viva seemed to hardly notice it. This was the first time she’d left the city since she’d arrived, and a strange kind of exhilaration had grown in her as she stared out of the window at the tiny railway stations, at women with water pots on their heads, and then, on the edges of a scrubby plain, a small camel train appearing and dissolving in the dust.

Daisy was right; it was wonderful to be in motion again, just what she’d needed.

The train clattered down narrow gullies, across parched plains,
clackety clack,
again the murmurs of Indian voices. Viva closed her eyes and fell into a vague dream in which William, not Tor, was traveling with her.

They’d never traveled well together. When they’d first met, he’d taken her away on two holidays with him. On the first, a touring holiday in Switzerland, they’d stayed in a series of predictable, irreproachable hotels, all of them known to him, and one night, near the lakes of Berne, he’d gone into a terrible sulk when their reservations had been canceled by mistake.

She’d sat on her own on a balcony overlooking a lake, and this was the moment when she’d understood that William, underneath the intelligence and the slashing wit, was a timid man who wanted travel to provide as few shocks as possible, and to be as much like home as could easily be arranged. She hadn’t
blamed him for this, but had felt something inside her fighting for air, for light.

She imagined him across the aisle from her; the elbow of his smart suit resting in the greasy packages of her new friend’s picnic. He was angry with her for subjecting him to this, irritated by her enthusiasm.
What is the point of this,
she could feel him saying,
when we can easily afford to travel in the first-class carriage? What are you trying to prove?
And bit by bit the fun of the day would be leached away.

Frank wasn’t like that. He got excited by small, unexpected discoveries—he’d loved Moustafa’s scruffy café that night, told her with excitement about some of the unexpected places he’d discovered in Bombay, like the Thieves’ Market, and—
Oh God.
She was awake now and looking out at stunted thorn trees. She must not think of him in this way. When they’d danced the night before, her body had felt so sweet, so light, the smell of him woody and tart like lemon trees, and something denser and deeper that drew her to him.

She shook her head suddenly. The memory of that dance was somehow imprinted on her body: his hand on the small of her back, the glow that seemed to come off his skin, the way he’d closed his eyes for one moment as if in pain as she had moved her face closer to his.

She made herself think of William again as a necessary corrective. For months after he’d left her, she’d felt broken and dirty as if she’d been run over by a truck, and what had made it so much worse was that with her parents gone there’d been no one around to pick up the pieces. She’d lost her pride, wandering around like some stricken animal waiting for him to claim her again, to tell her that it had all been a silly joke on his part. If it hadn’t been for work—for that was the time she’d started as Mrs. Driver’s typist and started to write herself—she would surely have gone mad.

Remember this.

The train went from light to dark; they were moving through
a tunnel blasted out of rock. If Frank did come to Ooty (for Tor had woken up and overheard her saying it was a girls’ outing and protested sleepily that Frank could come, too), if he did come, she must understand clearly that his interest in her was protective, brotherly. Or that he’d just come to be with Rose and Tor—how conceited, after all, to think she was always the main attraction. Whatever happened, she would not lose control of herself, not in the hateful way she had before. That was a promise.

The carriage burst through into sunshine again, the train shrieked and Viva opened her eyes. The plump little woman with the mustache who sat opposite her was tapping her gently but insistently on the knee; she was starting to take food from packages on her lap. Nuts and fried chickpeas, small evil-looking fritters that left circles of oil on the brown paper they’d been wrapped in.

“Eat with us,” the woman said in Hindi. Her clothing and sandals were cheap; her smile radiant at the thought of offering food to total strangers.

“How kind you are,” Viva replied. “Where are you going to?”

“We came from near Bombay and we are going to Coonor, near Madras,” the woman said, delighted to find that Viva spoke even a smattering of Hindi. She said they were going to visit relatives there and also hoped to see Gandhiji at a rally. “I got up early this morning to prepare this food.” She saw no paradox in offering them to an English person. “They’re Bombay delicacies, please try.” She unwrapped some more
bhel puris,
puffed rice flavored with onions and coriander; she handed Viva some spicy potatoes served in a bun.

Tor woke up and opened one eye. “Viva,” she said with a pleasant smile toward the woman, “if you’re expecting me to tuck into that you have another think coming.”

Viva took one of the fritters and ate it. “Delicious,” she said to the woman, “but unfortunately my friend is unwell. Would you like one of our sandwiches?”

She unwrapped the picnic they’d slung together that morning—cheese and pickle sandwiches on day-old bread. The woman turned away, clearly embarrassed. Maybe it was against her religion to eat the food of untouchables.
There are so many ways of getting it wrong,
thought Viva.

When they’d finished eating, the woman wiped Viva’s hand with a damp flannel she had in her bag and then she pointed to the fat girl of about fifteen who’d sat beside her eating stolidly. Her daughter, she said, would like to sing for her. She had a fine voice; she could sing for four hours and hardly take a breath. The woman indicated this by placing her hand on her own chest and inhaling mightily.

“I want you to look pleased when I tell you this,” Viva said to Tor. “This girl is going to sing for us and it is a very great honor.”

The girl fixed her huge velvety eyes on Viva, and took a deep breath. She began to sing, her voice high and clear and sad.

Viva could only pick out a few words: I adore, terrible despair, I love, I want. “It is the love song of Sita and Ram,” her proud mother explained. “It is her present for you.”

The girl, lost in her song and totally unself-conscious, had moved closer to Viva, so close she could see the engravings on her nose ring, her quivering tonsils.
We’re so different,
Viva thought.
You could live here for a hundred years and never really understand.

The girl’s song had swooped now into a plaintive keening sound that made her think of unhappiness and William again. Two weeks before they’d parted, he’d taken her up to a small hotel he knew near Edinburgh. There he’d told her, more in sorrow than in anger, that he found what he called her “obsession” with her work too difficult to bear.

(It was only later she found out it had nothing to do with this. There was another woman in Bath, who had phoned Viva hysterically one night saying William had promised to marry her, too.)

But on this night, at the Buchan Hotel, he had gently but firmly told her off: she was young, yes, and parentless, but life must go on and it would never go on happily for her unless she learned not to be so self-engrossed. He was pleased she had her writing to do, but, if she would allow him to be so blunt, a self-engrossed bluestocking was unattractive to a man.

She had wept at the time, not tears of remorse exactly, more tears of anger and puzzlement. He told her he was only saying all this for her own good and later, in bed, had made love to her and she had accepted him, rather than dare look into the pit of loneliness she felt waiting for her outside that cold hotel.

Three weeks later, he’d moved in with the young widow near Bath, who turned out to be rich and very boring—or so he said—and six months later when he wrote to her, not to ask her to come back (he was too clever for that) but to say that as her unofficial guardian they must build bridges, stay friends, they owed it to her parents to do so.

That was when she told him about her plans to go to India, and it was only then that he mentioned casually what he had meant to say before, that her parents had left some furniture and a couple of trunks for her in Simla. “Nothing of great value,” he’d been led to believe, but she might want to pick it up some day. The name of the woman who kept it there was Mabel Waghorn. He had her address if she wanted it.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she said.

“Your emotions were too raw,” he said in that careful, precise way he had of making everything seem true.

And in a way, he’d been right. If he hadn’t been, why was she still procrastinating about going back to Simla, and why did it still feel like the most dangerous thing she could do?

The girl eventually stopped singing. Viva said, “That was beautiful, thank you,” and the mother, who’d been watching Viva’s face,
gave her another gentle pat on the arm and her mouth briefly crumpled. She was clearly in awe of her talented daughter, now eating a handful of chickpeas.

Tor lifted a corner of the damp flannel she’d draped over her temples. “Is it safe to come out now? I seriously thought she might sing for the full four hours.”

“Lovely,” Viva said to the woman. “Thank you, quite charming.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” said Tor when they were back in their own world again. “I was thinking about going home and then about Ollie, and that I might send him a telegram when we get to the hotel. Maybe it’s true that his wife doesn’t understand him anymore; I mean, if she did really love him she wouldn’t let him go away all the time, or maybe he’s waiting for me to say I forgive him. I’ve got nothing to lose, Viva.”

Yes, you have,
thought Viva, feeling a terrible stab of pity for her.
Your pride, your life, even.

“Is he really what you want?” she said instead. Tor’s face looked so flushed and hopeful.

“You’re right, you’re right.” Tor put the damp flannel back on her temples.

A few seconds later, her large blue eyes appeared again over the cloth, this time with a look of deep confusion in them. “I don’t know how anybody ever really knows they’re in love,” she said. “I mean, in books and films it seems to come to people in a blinding flash and off they rush onto boats or trains, and then the music comes up and then ‘The End.’ Why is life so much more complicated?”

“I don’t know,” said Viva, and meant it.