Where Earth Meets Sky (17 page)

‘Yes, of course I would.’ He forced himself to sound kind, and he wanted it to be true, but secretly he wasn’t sure if it was.

When he had spilled out the story to his mother, she sat looking solemnly at him.

‘Now, Sam,’ she said emphatically. ‘What you’ve got to do, boy, is stick by her and not let this make any difference. She was young – she wasn’t the first this has happened to and she won’t be the last. Heaven knows, it wasn’t her fault, the poor little thing. She didn’t do it to hurt your pride, my boy, and you’re none the worse off, are you? You’ve made your vows and even if this has upset you, you’ve got a lovely new daughter – a family to look after. Now you take yourself home, Sam, and do your best. Life has its ups and downs like this, boy. And it’ll all be the same in a hundred years.’

Cycling home along the Kenilworth Road that night in the mellow evening light, Sam’s thoughts were in turmoil. It was June, and warm. He had a good cycle, a Starley, Coventry-made, of course, and pushing down hard on the pedals was an outlet for the strong feelings surging through him. He rode like a fury, batting away the tickling midges that flew into his face. Soon, though, he realized that at this speed he would get home before he really wanted to and he stopped at the Grove, a fork in the road, where he dismounted and sat down in the shade of the trees.

‘
Damn
it!’ he erupted, banging his fist on the ground in fury. He was too het up to care that he startled a matronly looking woman who was walking past pushing a perambulator. ‘Damn and
blast
it!’

It wasn’t helped by the fact that sitting there in the Grove reminded him of that picnic with the Fairfords, in the stronger Indian light but also on a still evening like this one, when he had felt so full of hope and such a sense of expansion. And he had sat talking to Lily. God, how could he have sat there so casually when she was close to him? An ache spread right through him. What he wouldn’t give for her to be here now.

Pushing his sleeves up, he lay back and looked up into the leafy branches above him. His thoughts rolled over those months in India. It had been like a book in two volumes. First there was Ambala and Lily, the extraordinary miracle of falling in love, he realized, for the first time in his life. But then their leaving for Simla, and the way it happened between them was still an agony to him. Her face, when she discovered that he was married, had snapped shut, enclosing all the pain he had given her, and he had felt completely helpless, and then she was gone, holding tightly to Cosmo, and he could not reach her.

After that he had spent more than two weeks on the road with Captain Fairford and Arsalan, and it was something he would never forget. The car had fared excellently, and they had rolled on through villages and towns, camped, and stayed in cheap lodgings, gone out shooting game, and gradually wound their way to the foothills of the Himalaya with their precarious terraced cultivation, and then higher up, among the bare peaks with their gigantic screes and icy green streams. Sam saw country of a grand scale and awesome wildness that he could never before have imagined. And he felt it change him, as if the shutters of his mind had been flung wide open to let in all the sights. He understood, humbly, that there were places and people very different from what he was used to. And the captain was like a different man. Away from the routines and domestic obligations of Ambala Cantonment, he seemed to come fully alive. He spoke in a more animated way, laughed more, and Sam could see that he was in his element. He wondered if the captain even liked being married and he wondered the same thing about himself.

One evening when they had camped out in the foothills, the three of them built a fire and were sitting round it in the chill darkness. Arsalan was a complete equal to them for the entire journey. Sam’s respect for his capabilities and sheer likeableness grew by the day, and he sensed that of everyone he had seen the captain with, he was most comfortable with his
syce
.

‘How long have you worked for the captain?’ he asked Arsalan, who was squatting on his slim legs, prodding the fire with a stick.

But Charles Fairford answered, ‘Oh, Arsalan and I go right back, don’t we?’ He made some joking comment in Hindustani and both men laughed. ‘We grew up together, you see, Ironside. Arsalan’s father was
syce
to mine; they each had sons within the same year, so we were playmates, and it went on from there. We’ve scarcely ever been apart, except when I was at school.’

Sam saw just how much Charles Fairford could never have anything like this close understanding with his nervy, Sussex-born wife.

He looked back upon that journey as sheer heaven, only marred by his aching heart over Lily, and the thought that he might never see her again. When he boarded the liner for home it had felt like being wound in like a kite, the string shorter and shorter as they approached England’s shore. Now his life was contracted back between the walls of the factory and those of their little house in Kenilworth with Helen, who, for all her solid sweetness, could never ever arouse in him the feelings he had known with Lily. It felt all the crueller that now even the wife he had left behind was not quite who he had thought.

After a time he sat up, brushing himself down, and looked out soberly across the road. He thought about what his mother had said.

‘Well, pal,’ he murmured to himself. ‘You’d better pull yourself together and knuckle down.’ Immediately he thought of the one thing that did not seem to disappoint: the motor car. He was good at his work, he knew it, and it was satisfying. At least there was something he could pour himself into, heart and soul.

Climbing on to his cycle he pedalled on more soberly than before. He had a good job, and now a family. He had responsibilities. Fulfilling those was a way of showing he was a man. He rode home, thinking hard thoughts about life’s limitations. He felt doors closing in his mind.

Mussoorie, India, 1909

The night train from Delhi rocked its way across the Dun valley towards the northern railhead at Dehra Dun, which nestled between the toes of the Himalayan foothills.

Lily was travelling during the July monsoon. The rain was tippling down outside as she looked out, in the grey dawn, at the soaked green paddies stretching into the distance. She saw families crouched together under pieces of sacking, under bridges and against haystacks, anywhere they could find shelter from the relentless rainfall. Droplets blew in gusts against the train windows and ran streaming from the roof, spattering down on to the oozing mud.

The rain had brought the summer temperatures down to a manageable balminess, and in the cool of early morning Lily even felt the need to pull her shawl round her. The other passengers in the ladies’ compartment were still sleeping.

Yesterday, she had left Ambala and the Fairfords for the last time. The wrench of it was worse even than she had expected. Her heart was like a heavy stone and her eyes kept filling with tears every time she thought about Cosmo on his sea voyage to England, and Susan Fairford’s distraught face when she had kissed Lily goodbye, before the
tonga
pony trotted off, taking her out along the drive for the last time.

‘
Chai!
’ The insistent voice of a tea vendor rang along the corridor. ‘
Chai, garam chai!
’

Lily quickly wiped her eyes, fumbled in her purse for a few
annas
and opened the compartment door.

‘Yes – one tea, please!’

The man poured a little cup of steaming tea into a clay cup and handed it to her. She thanked him with an inclination of her head and cupped the little pot of fiercely sweet liquor between her hands. That was how she felt, like a child needing comfort.

She had said goodbye to Cosmo a week ago. They had sent him before the summer vacation so that he could spend some weeks acclimatizing on the family estate in Warwickshire, before starting at his prep school in the Michaelmas term. Accompanying him on the long sea voyage was an elderly missionary lady called Miss Spurling, who was returning to England on furlough and had offered to make herself useful on the journey.

Parting with Cosmo was an agony. For several days she had been overwhelmed with grief, as if all the losses in her life so far culminated in this one. She had made Cosmo the centre and solace of her life, especially over the past two years after Sam. Sam Ironside: his name was engraved on her heart however much she tried to cast him out. Her love for him and his betrayal of her stayed deep and raw in her. It was only by turning all her attention and affection, her need, onto Cosmo that she had been able to survive and start to imagine a future.

For these two years she had watched Cosmo develop each day, from a child of four to one of nearly six, and he was her joy. His lively body slimmed down as he grew taller, and he became agile and already a promising horseman. His face was thinner now, but his blue eyes were always full of the loving trust that she had seen in him when he first arrived. And he loved Lily. Loved and trusted her as he did Srimala, both loving, female presences who were always there. And now they had all been snatched away from each other. Lily knew she would miss Srimala very much as well, since the girls had become such friends over the years. What made it even worse was Susan’s lack of faith in Uncle William, Charles’s brother in England.

‘Charles calls him eccentric,’ she told Lily bitterly. ‘I’d say he was unhinged myself.’

‘He won’t be unkind, will he?’ Lily asked anxiously.

‘Not unkind. He’ll probably just forget Cosmo’s there most of the time, my poor little lamb. The housekeeper will be the one who looks after him and I gather she’s kind enough.’

Sipping the last of the warm tea, Lily slid the window up wide enough to throw the little cup out onto the tracks, where it would sink back into dust. From her bag, she slipped her precious pictures. Before he was sent away, Susan Fairford had engaged a photographer to take several portraits of Cosmo – and one of Isadora, which seemed almost an afterthought. And at the end, Susan said generously, ‘Perhaps you would like to pose for a portrait with Cosmo, Lily? It would be something for you to keep.’

Lily was touched. She was delighted to have the picture of Cosmo, but it was also the first picture she had ever seen of herself. The two of them had been photographed in a formal pose, with her sitting, her hair arranged prettily. Susan had fastened it up for her and pinned some small white flowers in it with little pearls at their centre. For the first time, Lily had taken out the seed pearls from Mrs Chappell’s velvet-lined box and put them on.

‘I say,’ Susan had said admiringly, feeling their warm lustre. ‘Lily, you are a beauty, you know. Now it really is time you stopped looking solemn and put a real smile on your lovely face.’

Startled, Lily smiled dutifully at her. Did Susan have any idea that she still grieved for Sam? She had managed a radiant smile in the photograph, dressed in her high-collared blouse and long, green skirt, with her beloved Cosmo standing at her knee. He wore a favourite sailor suit, his hair a cloud of pale curls. Despite the solemnity of the occasion, there was just the trace of an impishness in his face, with his raised, slanting brows. It captured him excellently and Lily adored the picture. Looking at it now, she smiled, her heart aching, and kissed his face.

‘There, my little darling. Your Lily is thinking of you. Oh, I do hope you’re all right, my little dear, and that Mrs Spurling is taking good care of you. And you know Lily will never leave you, darling. I’ll be thinking of you and I’ll write to you, always.’ It was the only way she had been able to manage the separation, by making this pledge. She would be there, like his guardian angel, watching over him, if only from a distance.

She sighed, carefully stowing the picture back in her bag. They were coming into the town now and the other three women in the compartment were on the move.

‘I say, Minnie,’ one of them urged. ‘Do hurry up. We’re nearly into Dehra Dun.’ She pronounced it ‘Derra Doon’.

Lily looked out, her stomach clenching with nerves. She was on the way to a new post in the hills, not as a nanny this time, but as housekeeper to a Dr McBride and his invalid wife. She had applied for the job because she had liked Simla when the family spent the summer up there, the town nestling precariously in the cool of the immense mountain landscape, and she knew she was going to like Mussoorie. When she heard about the job she thought, I’ll go there. I don’t want to go to another family, not yet. I couldn’t ever replace Cosmo. This still felt like the right decision, but she found the change terribly hard, the thought of beginning again, having to make her way so alone in the world.

She straightened her back and positioned her feet together determinedly. How frightening could a middle-aged doctor and a sick woman be, after all? Breathing in deeply, as if to fill herself with courage, she waited until the train eased its way into the tranquil railhead at Dehra Dun.

The bus wheezed laboriously up the mountain road which snaked between the dark trees, all topped with thick swirls of cloud. The rain fell and fell and twice they had to stop while the earth from landslips was cleared from the side of the road. The bus was a very recent newcomer on these mountain tracks.

Lily had eaten a breakfast of poached eggs in the railway station at Dehra Dun and now her stomach turned queasily as they switched back and forth round the bends. As they climbed and climbed, though, and the rain stopped for a brief interval and there were shreds of sunlight, she caught her first glimpses of the hill station of Mussoorie and her spirits lifted excitedly.