East of the Sun (32 page)

How false she sounded, even to herself—like somebody’s maiden aunt.

“Yes, they’re marvelous, quite fascinating.” Bunty had heard all this, or something similar, a million times before from other guests and was clearly eager to get back to talking to Frank about his doctoring, as she rather archly called it. “I mean, you honestly work in a
Bombay
hospital,” she said, as if he’d descended to the last circle of hell. “How awfully brave! Are you what the natives would call a
niswarthi
?”

“What does that mean?” Tor asked bluntly. She’d been gazing at Frank while he spoke.

“It’s a Hindi word for a selfless man.” Bunty beamed at him.

“Oh Lord, no, not that.” Frank stretched his legs out and smiled the smile. “I’m only doing it for the beer and cigarettes.”

And there he was again, Viva decided, a fine young male animal surrounded by a pride of admiring females. The same Frank she’d mistrusted on the ship. Well, it was a relief at least to have got that straight.

Bunty retired after tea to supervise the clearing of the gutters and to check that all the animals’ shelters were rain-proof. Sometimes in May, she said, speaking directly to Frank, they got a curtain-raiser to the monsoon, which could be frightening. Last year, during a freak storm, twenty inches of rain had fallen in twenty-four hours and a large chunk of their drive near the house had collapsed.

“Heavens,” said Rose weakly. “Never a dull moment.”

After she’d gone, a servant entered the room. He drew the
curtains, lit the lamps, and adjusted their wicks before closing the door behind him.

“So, Frank,” teased Rose, when they were on their own again, “tell us about this spot of bother in Bombay, or was that all a ploy to come on holiday with the glee club?”

“Unfortunately not.” Frank had moved to a wing-backed chair near the window. His playful manner had gone. “The Muslims and the Hindus have been rioting in the streets for two days now. Nothing unusual about that, but some of it has been fierce: I saw them set light to a man in the street. They poured petrol over him. He went up like a guy on Bonfire Night.”

“Oh my God.” Viva was thinking of the home, of Suday and Talika and Daisy and Mr. Jamshed.

“Don’t worry yet,” he said. “It’s all fairly localized in the hutments around Mandvi. Byculla’s quiet, and so’s Malabar Hill. It will all die down as soon as it starts. But I didn’t like the idea of you traveling home alone and I had two days off.”

He looked directly at Viva as if explaining himself to her.

“We thought you should get back before Tuesday—there’s a big Congress meeting then and there could be riots around the VT Station. They’re certainly laying on extra beds at the hospital. Your husband phoned, Mrs. Mallinson,” Frank told Rose. “He was going to take the Poona train down to Bombay to meet you, but he can’t—all leave is canceled.”

Rose’s expression did not change.

“You’ll be fine in the ladies’ carriage back to Poona,” Frank assured her. “After all, this has nothing to do with us, they’re fighting each other, but he’s naturally concerned.”

“Naturally,” said Rose drily. “How kind of you both to think of it, but I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.”

Rose stood up, her yellow hair swinging against the lamp and almost touching the flame. She said she was very tired and
thought she would go to bed. She turned at the door and said it had been a wonderful day and she would never forget it.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” she said again.

“Who’s worried?” said Tor, standing up. “Anything that stops me going home is fine with me.” They all laughed as if she was joking, but she wasn’t.

Rain had begun to fall with a hard splintering sound like pebbles against the window.

“I’m going to bed, too.” Viva stood up.

“Stay for a moment,” he said. “There’s something else I need to tell you. Sit down first.”

He reached over and held her hand.

“I’m afraid there is no easy way of saying this, so I’ll say it quickly. There’s a rumor that Guy’s been murdered. I’m so sorry.”

“What?” She stared at him stupidly for a while. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s a rumor,” he said. “It may all be wrong, but the police say he’s not in his lodgings, and when his parents were contacted, they said they hadn’t seen him for weeks. A burned overcoat with his name in it was found in a street near your house. Apparently, he moved there a month ago.”

“He was up here just last week.” Viva felt her stomach tighten. “I don’t know why.”

“I don’t know either.”

“Why did you say nothing had happened in Byculla?”

“Nothing did, apart from this.”

“Does Mr. Jamshed know?”

“No. At least I don’t think so. And none of this may be as bad as it sounds, but I thought you should know, or at least be warned.”

“Who told you?”

“A policeman, one of the Byculla locals. He’s the one who’s had his eye on Guy.”

“Oh no!” She felt water gush into her mouth. “Are you saying they torched him?” She thought she was going to be sick.

Frank steered her into a chair.

“I don’t know,” he said again.

She rubbed her eyes and shook her head. “Tell me what happened.”

“Nobody really knows yet, but the policeman told me that the brother of the man Guy beat up on the ship is named Anwar Azim. He’s very powerful, very political, and he is part of the All India Muslim League, which Guy, for reasons still unclear, has got himself involved in. Azim made his own inquiries about the incident on the ship—that was probably just a case of bribing a few lascars—and then took matters into his own hands.”

“But surely our police will do something about this?”

“Not necessarily. Quite frankly, it’s all too messy. It couldn’t come at a worse time.”

“Is it that bad?”

Her voice had started to judder. He put his arm around her, but she drew away.

“Nobody really knows.” He was trying to soothe her.

“No, please,” she protested. “Don’t soft-soap it. Tell me the truth. Oh, Guy!” She pictured him suddenly: like a cloth doll in flames.

“I don’t know the truth yet,” said Frank. “Only random facts.”

“Such as?”

“Well,” he watched her anxiously, “there could be a big split soon in the party, and then anything could happen, or nothing, nobody really knows.”

“Who told you all this, about Guy I mean?” Her mind seemed to be going backwards and forwards.

“The police. They gave me this.” He handed her a thin
wallet and a packet of photographs. “They said they were his. They asked me to give them back to his parents.”

“Perhaps we should look at them first.”

“I already have. Some are of you. Look.” He pointed toward a close-up of Viva walking in the street near the children’s home. She was wearing a summer dress, she was smiling at Parthiban, the man who sold her mangoes on her way to work. Underneath it, he’d written in black ink, in a childlike scrawl, “
Mataji
”—my mother.

In the second photograph she was sitting on the Chowpatty Beach, with Talika asleep on the sand beside her. Behind them was a sky full of kites. Underneath it, he’d misspelled her name, Miss Viva Hallaway, and written,
“Is she Cain, or is she Abel?”

“He’s been following me,” she said.

“If it hadn’t been you, it would have been somebody else,” said Frank. “He’s desperate for someone to love, or blame.”

“How horrible.” She was starting to shake. “I didn’t love him at all, I almost hated him. I should never have taken him on.”

She felt Frank’s arm around her shoulder. “This is not your fault,” he said gently. “He was sent back to England, alone, at the age of six. He was warped from that moment on, even he knew that. I’m also more and more convinced he has serious mental problems.”

A flame flared up in the fireplace. She saw Guy in it—his eyes staring, the teeth bared, grinning.

“I don’t think we should tell Rose and Tor until it’s confirmed,” she said. “What’s the point of frightening them until we’re sure it’s true?”

Frank screwed up his face. “I thought about that all the way up,” he said. “But it’s a lot for you to have to carry on your own.”

“Does Daisy know?”

“Not yet.”

She got up with the vague idea of going to bed; she was dizzy and felt his arm again.

“Let me help you,” he said gently.

“I’m in the cottage across the lawn,” she said.

As they walked across the sodden grass, a gust of wind flung her coat around her and a faint, bilious wash of light lit up the hills across the valley.

“There’s a big storm coming,” he told her.

“Horrible, horrible, horrible.” She was crying now, thinking of Guy’s hair burning, his clothes on fire. “He didn’t deserve it.”

She felt Frank’s arm around her shoulder.

“We don’t know yet,” he said. “Hold on to that—the place is alive with rumors.”

There was a boom in the distance, another flash of light, the rain unleashed itself in one sudden sheet of water and both of them were drenched.

Her hands were trembling so violently it took her ages to find her key in her handbag. When she handed it to him, she saw his wet shirt showing every rib and the hollows of his shoulders, the curve of a young man’s waist.

“You’re wet to the skin, Viva,” he said. When he touched her, she cried out and then he touched her very gently again, her shoulders, her belly, her arms, and she closed her eyes and put her head on his shoulder.

There was one small light burning beside the bed in Viva’s room. She’d left a dress on the floor and on her desk her pens, a carafe of water, her journals.

He took a towel from the stand beside the bed, he rubbed her face dry. She had no words for the tears that poured down
her face, or for the shivering that had started in her body. Tenderly, he rubbed her hair; he took off her soaking coat, then her cardigan and dropped it on the floor. He wrapped a dry towel around her.

“Stay with me for a while,” she said, feeling him about to leave. Her teeth were chattering.

When he lay down, she hugged him like a child with her eyes squeezed shut. Somewhere dimly in the background she could hear the sharp pebblelike sound of the rain falling on a tin roof. She heard the moaning of the wind, and everything became simple as she pulled him on top of her: her hunger and his young man’s body on top of hers, blocking out death.

When it was over, he looked at her. He shook his head and both of them looked at each other in fear and wonder. Then he gathered her up, all of her, and groaned and shook his head again.

“Don’t say you love me,” she said.

F
or their own safety, Frank insisted they travel first class on their way home, but even so Tor felt like crying—everybody seemed so out of sorts. Frank and Viva sat across the aisle from her, as far away from each other as possible. Rose was silent and bunched up near the window, and Tor, finding nobody wanted to talk, felt all her high spirits draining away.

She brooded for a while on her weight gain. Last night, after supper, she’d sat down with a clunk on the large sitting-down weighing scales that Jane kept on the landing floor, underneath a picture of the Ooty polo team, lean, fit-looking men every one of them.

Jane had boasted that these ornately carved scales were exact replicas of the ones in the Bombay Yacht Club and were accurate to the ounce, which was why her heart had sunk as she watched the needle rise toward eleven stone. Even at her heaviest, in London, she’d never been eleven stone; her mother would have plenty to say about that.

“I’m vast,” she’d complained a few moments later to Rose,
pinching her flesh in front of the cheval mirror. “A hundred-and-fifty-four-pound baby elephant, and d’you know, what’s really upsetting is that it only makes me want to eat more.”

“You’re not fat.” Poor Rose had heard this a million times before, but still managed to sound indignant. “You don’t want to look like a ghastly stick and you’ve got those great big blue eyes that one day a man is going to drown in,” she’d added in her fortune-teller’s voice.

“No, he won’t,” Tor had said gloomily. “I’m practically deformed I’m so hideous—and look at these spots on my back.”

“I’m not getting out of bed to look at your spots, Tor,” said Rose, who’d been propped up on two pillows at the time. “But Tor,” she whispered, “do you want to see a proper baby elephant?”

And right there and then Rose had shocked her by pulling down the coverlet, and pulling up her nightdress—something Rose would never have done before her marriage—to show off the hard swelling of her stomach and her belly button, which protruded like an acorn.

“Touch it,” she said. “Can you imagine how vast I’m going to look at nine months?”

Tor put the flat of her hand on the dome, and then cupped both sides.

“Oh God, Rose…isn’t that”—Tor almost said horrible—“isn’t that…” she touched it gingerly with her fingertips, “peculiar. You don’t look big yet, but it feels so different, and it’s so funny to think of a baby sleeping inside. Has Jack seen it yet?”

“Yes,” said Rose.

“What did he say? Did he kiss it? Did he cry?”

Rose had looked at her.

“You’re so romantic, Tor,” she’d said flatly. “I don’t think he said anything.”

And again, Tor felt she’d crossed a newly drawn line in Rose’s life, and that beyond it lurked a world full of adult wor
ries—worries that Rose thought she was too thick or inexperienced to share.

The train chugged on, and now Tor, her cheek pressed to the window, was brooding about India. In two weeks’ time all of this—the huge blue sky, the mud huts flashing by, that donkey, that woman in a pink sari waving at the train—would be gone, and would soon become faded in her mind like pictures in an album. How bloody unfair that was when, in spite of everything that had gone wrong, she had been so marvelously happy here.

Her sigh left a circle of condensation on the windowpane, and then, as the train
whooshed
past fields of sugarcane, a happier thought bubbled up: maybe the riots in Bombay would get so bad that nobody would be allowed to leave, and if this happened the ship would be canceled, and then perhaps she might go and live with Rose for a while, at least until she had her baby, for she didn’t imagine that Ci Ci would want her much longer.

Or perhaps Ollie would, at the last minute, fight his way through the crowds to rescue her. He would wrest her P&O ticket from her hands and tear it up on the gangplank; the pieces would flutter into the breeze. They’d dance together again like they had that night at the Taj; he’d tell her with tears in his eyes what a lucky man he was to be given a second chance.

Errrgh. What an idiot.
A crick in the neck ended that daydream. When she opened her eyes, Rose was looking at her.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “You’ve been twitching.”

“I don’t want to go home,” Tor blurted out and then regretted it. There had been an unspoken agreement between them on this holiday not to discuss the unthinkable: in two days’ time, Rose was going to take the train to Poona, and then what? Jack was supposed to get home leave every three or four
years. But who knew if he’d take it, or where they’d go. They might never see each other again.

“I’m sorry, too,” said Rose carefully. She looked out of the window. “It is going to be funny being back in Poona again after having such fun with you chaps.”

Tor glanced at her. “Rose, I was just thinking. If I ever did come back to India, or found some way of staying, could I come and live with you for a while?”

“Gosh.” Rose looked quite thrown. “Do you mean after the baby’s born or something?”

“Yes.”

“Well…maybe.” Rose wasn’t exactly jumping at this. “Obviously, I’d love it, but I’d have to ask Jack. And I mean, what would you do? I mean, how would you live? Would your pees support you?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Tor slumped against the back of her seat. “I don’t know…It was just a silly train thought. Forget I mentioned it. I mean, I can’t just dump myself on you, can I?”

“It’s not that, Tor,” Rose said after a long silence. “It’s just that there’s quite a lot going on at the moment.” To Tor’s horror, she’d turned red and her voice had cracked.

“Rose,” Tor said, “I’m trying so hard not to pry, but
is
everything all right?”

“No,” Rose said when she could speak, “I mean, yes—it’s just that Jack really might be sent to Bannu soon for operational experience. Most of the regiment have come home, but they’ve been threatening this for months and, you know, my life’s not my own anymore.”

“I know, Rose.” Oh, poor Rose, she looked so upset and embarrassed. To change the subject as quickly as possible, she looked across the aisle to where Frank and Viva were sitting.

“What on earth is going on there?” she whispered. “They look so mis, like stone statues.”

“Very odd,” Rose whispered. “This is not gossip, well, I suppose it is, but I saw him leaving her room early this morning. I couldn’t sleep and was watching the sun come up. But now look at them, they haven’t spoken one word to each other almost for the entire trip. Did something happen?”

Tor shrugged. “I don’t know,” she mouthed. “Do we dare ask her?”

While Rose mouthed, “No!” Viva half opened her eyes, looked in their direction, and closed them again. She wasn’t very good at pretending to be asleep.

When their train arrived at the Victoria Terminus, it was raining. Geoffrey Mallinson, red-faced and agitated under his umbrella, elbowed his way through the swarming crowd to meet them. Over the roar of the station, he explained in a hearty bellow that he’d driven himself in the Daimler because walls had ears and he didn’t entirely trust his servants at the moment. Frank got into the back with Viva and Rose. Tor sat in the passenger seat.

On their way out of the station, the Daimler swished through muddy puddles littered with discarded placards from the demonstrations.

“Well, you chose the right time to leave town,” Geoffrey said, half turning so he could speak to Frank. “We’ve had a dickens of a time here: first the rain—seven inches in one hour—then the riots. It took me two hours to get to work yesterday.”

Tor pretended to shudder. “Do you think they’ll go on for ages?” she said hopefully.

Geoffrey didn’t seem to hear her; he was one of those men who, if there was another man present, ignored the women. “I hope you’re all coming for lunch,” he suddenly boomed. “Ci’s laid on a marvelous spread.”

Tor saw Frank and Viva glance at each other and hesitate. They still hadn’t spoken.

“Do come.” Geoffrey glanced at them anxiously through the rearview mirror. “The memsahib’s been cooped up at home for five days now because of the troubles; and, who knows, you might not see us again at Tambourine.”

“What do you mean?” said Tor.

“Well,” Geoffrey’s eyes struggled to find Frank’s, “London’s getting windier and windier about these demonstrations, and of course there’s been a tremendous slump in profits since the war. I don’t suppose we’ll hold out much longer.”

Tor gasped. “What?”

“How many factories have already closed?” Frank asked.

“Well, certainly five or six—mainly jute and cotton—in the past few months, and we’re only hanging on by our fingernails. Tragedy really, when you think of how hard we’ve worked and all the years it’s taken us to build the thing up.”

The car lurched as Geoffrey swung suddenly around a bullock cart blaring his horn. “Hurry up, you blithering idiot!” he yelled out of the window. “Get over! Get over now! But not a word to Ci over lunch,” he said when the car was purring smoothly forward again. “This has all been far more of a shock than she lets on.”

Beads of sweat had formed across his forehead like a line of unpopped blisters. He mopped them with his handkerchief.

“And of course, it may well all be a storm in a teacup,” he comforted himself, adjusting his large bulk against the car seat. “I mean, it’s not as if we haven’t seen it all before.”

“Darling sweets.” Ci pounced the moment they entered the hall. She was wearing an orange silk dress, more suited to an evening party than lunch. Her mouth was carelessly smeared
with red lipstick, some of which she left like a brand on Tor’s cheek.

“Lovely, lovely,
lovely
to see you all,” she said. “And who does this divinely good-looking young man belong to?” Visibly brightening, she put a hand on Frank’s arm. “Pandit,” she shouted, “I think we all need rather a large gin—in the drawing room, if you please.” She snapped her fingers.

“How do you think I look?” she asked Tor suddenly as they walked across the marbled hall.

Tor said, “Wonderful, Ci Ci, quite wonderful, and how very kind of you to stay in for us.”

She understood now the frantic paddlings going on beneath the polished surfaces of Ci’s life—the dumbbell sessions, the daily eyebrow pluckings, the shrieks about clothes.

“
Stay in for you.
” Ci turned to look at her. There was something birdlike, frantic about her eyes. “I haven’t stepped foot out of this house
for five days
. I’m actually speaking to you from the grave. When I woke up this morning there was no color in my cheeks at all.”

“Well, it’s even more kind of you to ask us for lunch,” Rose rescued Tor. “Were the riots horribly frightening?”

“Not a bit,” said Ci Ci grandly, “they’re two-hatted oafs.”

“Cecilia refers to the fact that Hindus often carry Muslim hats in their pockets, so they can change if they wander into the wrong area,” Geoffrey said helpfully, always happy to translate.

“And vice versa,” Ci added indignantly, “and it’s all rot, so let’s all have a very large gin and forget about the lot of them. Pandit! Where are you?”

“Well, actually,” said Frank, “I’m afraid I can’t.” He looked at his watch and frowned. “I’m on duty at six.” He was speaking to Viva as if she was the only person in the room, but Viva shook her head and turned away.

“Oh, don’t go. One little drinkie won’t hurt.” Ci was almost pleading. “I’ve done the whole thing for you really, to thank you for rescuing the girls. And everything’s on the table. Our chauffeur will drive you both back—you won’t have a hope of a taxi from here, not at the moment.”

Frank and Viva looked at each other again, and there was another awkward pause.

“How very kind,” Frank said eventually. “But I must be gone by four at the very latest.”

He looked most peculiar, thought Tor, and again she saw that when he glanced at Viva, she turned away.

Four liveried servants, one behind each chair, leaped into life as they entered the dining room. They salaamed deeply.

The light, well-proportioned room gave out onto a terrace where there were large tubs of heliotrope and arum lilies all in bloom. The enormous crystal chandelier, switched on quite unnecessarily given the brightness of the day, floated bubbles of light over a table set with damask cloths, Venetian glasses, and small bowls of tuber roses.

Ci Ci sat down unsteadily at the end of the table. “Pandit,” she said, “forget the gin and charge everyone’s glasses for a celebration glass of champagne.”

“I’ve forgotten, my love, what it is we’re celebrating exactly?” Geoffrey said nervously.

“Life, Geoffrey,” she said, giving him a beady look. “Life. He’s got no sense of occasion,” she told Frank. “He never had. Come on, hurry up.
Jaldi,
” she said to the three servants who were handing around plates of salmon mousse and Melba toast. There was a pop as Pandit opened the Moët & Chandon with an expert twist.

“Now,” Ci said, when everyone had taken their first sip.
“I’ve been sitting here,
God help me,
with Geoffrey for the last few days, so what I need is a good gup. Tell me something I don’t know. Astonish me.” She gave a curious grimace.