Where Earth Meets Sky (6 page)

But when they reached the goods yard all this was wiped from his mind because, to his astonishment, there was the Daimler! Of course this should not have been any surprise, but it still felt like a miracle.

‘Amazing,’ he muttered to himself, a delighted grin spreading over his face. ‘That anything works in this hellhole!’

He hadn’t seen her since the docks when they craned her on to the ship, and hadn’t actually seen her taken off when they arrived in Bombay. He’d still been feeling so dicky when they arrived that he hadn’t been able to leave the cabin, so a fellow had brought him a docking paper to sign. But now, here she was, paintwork shining, parked up there like a familiar face in all this foreignness, so that he almost wanted to go up and kiss her, as if she was his woman waiting out there for him.

‘There we are, sir . . .’ For one second he thought Hodgkins was going to salute the car, but he managed to restrain himself. ‘I say, the horseless carriage! I’m looking forward to seeing you start her up!’

Sam was looking forward to it too. He knew that car, every inch of her, like he knew Helen’s body. He could show Hodgkins a thing or two. While he was getting the starter handle in place, Hodgkins went to put his bag in the back, but the next thing Sam heard was a strained kind of grunt and when he straightened up he couldn’t see Hodgkins anywhere.

‘Damn and blast it!’ came from the rear somewhere.

Hodgkins had sprawled flat on his face in the dirt, and by the time Sam got round to him he was jumping up quick, brushing himself down, putting his
topi
back on straight. The silly bugger had tripped over his own bootlace.

‘All right?’ Sam asked, keeping his face straight.

‘Yes, of course,’ Hodgkins snapped, with puce cheeks.

Sam strolled round to the front again, cool as you like, and cranked the handle. The Daimler started up like a dream.

Until then, he hadn’t given much thought to meeting Captain Fairford. The journey itself had been adventure enough: the sea voyage through Suez to Bombay, then the long train ride to Delhi, and north-west to Ambala. He’d had no real idea, until then, of the true size of India. He had to hand it to those engineer boys – building railways here was some feat. The few paper inches the journey had traversed on the map translated into hour upon hour of baked country.

In fact, the notion of seeing the Daimler again and delivering her safely hadn’t seemed real, but now it felt marvellous to be behind the wheel. With Hodgkins barking out directions, he drove along the edge of the ‘native town’ to the cantonment, where Captain Fair-ford would be waiting for his car. Sam’s job was to instruct the captain and his staff in driving and maintaining her.

‘The native town is pretty much off-limits,’ Hodgkins was saying.

‘Many motors here?’ Sam was having to watch the road carefully, what with all the carts and bicycles, the dogs, children and cows all gawping as they passed and meandering across the dirt road.

‘Just a few. Not all as fine as this one though. The captain is very
pukka
.’

At a glance, in the bright sunlight, Sam saw glimpses of side streets, jumbled messes of hovels heaving with dark-skinned people. He shuddered, but he wasn’t going to show Hodgkins. He wanted to be seen taking everything in his stride. But it was the smell that was most overpowering. A pall of foul smoke seemed to lie over the native lines, the air tinted brown.

‘Dung.’ Hodgkins had seen his grimace. ‘The fuel they use. Cow dung. The stink gets right into your nostrils until you don’t notice. But you don’t want to have anything to do with the natives. The only chaps who take themselves off there are after a bit of . . . well, you know . . .’ Sam didn’t have to turn and look to see the smutty expression on his face. ‘A bit of recreation, let’s say. By crikey, you’d have to be desperate – that’s all I can say. Oh – and for Christ’s sake don’t go hitting any of the cows. You’ll have every Hindu in the neighbourhood down on you in a pack. Sacred, you see, old man. Top of the pecking order, the cow.’

‘I see,’ Sam said.

‘Now – this is the cantonment,’ Hodgkins announced proudly.

He hardly needed to say. They were on broader roads, trees on either side, and larger buildings set back from the road. After the glimpses of the native part it seemed very orderly and quiet. There were a few individuals on the road, in khaki drill, and a horse and trap came trotting towards them, with a jingling of bells. A red stone church tower appeared on their left.

‘Just down here,’ Hodgkins said.

Blimey, Sam thought as they swung into the drive of the dazzling white residence. He was nervous now. There was serious money here. As they turned in, a native child who’d been squatting by the gate leaped up and dashed towards the house on legs thin as hairpins, shouting and waving his arms. He must have been waiting to pass on the news, Sam realized, because a moment later people started to appear and by the time he’d cut the engine off there was quite a crowd gathering outside the arched frontage of the house. In the sudden quiet, the billowing cloud of dust the car had raised blew in a slow swirl across the lawn.

Hodgkins leaped out of the car, looking immensely important and pleased with himself. Sam just had time to take in that the whole household seemed to have come out and there was quite a gaggle of natives, all staring, with a few white faces scattered among them. One figure pushed through the rest and walked smartly towards them. Sam felt himself tighten inside. Captain Fairford. He had to spend the next six weeks or so at the man’s side. He braced himself for all the class and army superiority which would come off him like sweat.

At last Hodgkins had a viable reason to salute, which he did with tremulous gusto, heels clicking.

‘At ease,’ Captain Fairford said. ‘Thank you, Hodgkins.’

Hodgkins lowered his arm, took two steps back, tumbled over one of a row of flowerpots neatly arranged along the front edge of the lawn and lurched backwards, ending up flat on his back on the grass. Titters came from the female members of the party. With an effort, Sam kept his face straight.

‘Are you all right, Hodgkins?’ Captain Fairford, who had been striding towards Sam, diverted for a second.

‘Yes, sir. Quite all right, sir.’ Once again, Hodgkins scrambled to the vertical, hat in hand, bending to right the pots of fledgling chrysanthemums.

‘Splendid.’ Captain Fairford held out his hand, eyes not quite managing to convert their twinkling amusement at Hodgkins’s antics into something more formal. ‘Captain Fairford, Twelfth Royal Lancers. You’re the Daimler mechanic? So glad you’ve arrived at last. The house has been on tenterhooks.’

The captain was younger than Sam had expected, lightly built with dark brown, wavy hair and a sensitive face that would have seemed more in place on a scholar than a soldier. And he had a modest, neat ’tache, much like Sam’s own. There was keen intelligence, shrewdness, and the dark brown eyes, though still tinged with laughter, took Sam in at a glance. However swift the glance and with whatever upper-class etiquette, Sam knew he was being measured up. But he felt himself relax. He liked the look of Fairford, so far.

‘Ironside. Motor mechanic.’

‘Well – welcome to Ambala.’ He looked properly at the car then. ‘I
say
,’ he breathed.

The captain circled his new acquisition, making admiring noises and firing questions and the rest of the household edged forward. Most of them seemed to be native servants. Among them, though, Sam’s attention was caught by a European woman holding a sleepy-looking boy in her arms. She was dark-haired, her features voluptuous and extraordinarily striking. He thought he had never seen a face with so much life in it, the dark eyes seeming to flash with energy as she looked at the car, and yet there was a closedness in her expression which he found immediately intriguing. She held the boy to her very tenderly, his fair curls bright against the dark stuff of her blouse. After a moment Captain Fairford seemed to remember something and looked round.

‘Where’s Sus— er, Mrs Fairford?’

‘She’s with
Ayah
and Isadora,’ the dark-haired woman said. Her voice was soft and well-spoken.

Captain Fairford nodded, and turned his attention back to the car. The servants were gathered round now, chattering quietly, inquisitive fingers marking the dust on the hot bonnet.

‘Well, Ironside,’ the captain said, hands on hips. Sam could see the man was excited and he liked him for it. He was a car man, all right. It just got hold of some men and wouldn’t let go. ‘We must get you a drink, and as soon as you’ve had a wash and brush up, we’ll take her out for a spin.’

‘Why not before?’ Sam said, holding his gaze. ‘Sir.’

A grin spread across Captain Fairford’s face. The fact that the establishment where Fairford was educated would have been far superior to Sam’s Coventry Board School was of no account in those seconds. They were like two eager lads in a school yard.

‘Well, Ironside, if you’re game – why not?’

Charles Fairford was a gentleman. From the moment Sam arrived in the cantonment the captain went out of his way to put him at his ease, treating him almost like an equal. The same, however, could not be said of his wife.

Sam disliked Susan Fairford on sight, and it was pretty clear she felt the same about him. Of course, he thought, it was hard to tell with these stuck-up little English misses what their actual feelings might be about anything, but she certainly went out of her way to pull rank and put up every social and class barrier she could get away with.

That first afternoon Sam took the captain out for a quick spin. They weren’t alone. From the crowd of servants, Charles Fairford called out a tall, thin native fellow. With everyone else watching – that was something Sam was discovering about India, the way everything seemed to be done to an audience – he introduced the fellow as his
syce
, or groom, Arsalan. He had been chosen to learn about a new ‘horse power’ they were developing in the modern world of industry.

‘I want you to teach me, and Arsalan here, everything you know,’ Captain Fairford said. ‘He’s my right-hand man.’

Sam hadn’t expected that, not entrusting the Daimler to a native. The chap had probably never learned to read and write, so it seemed a bit rich to expect him to get to grips with the workings of the internal combustion engine! But it wasn’t his place to argue. As they got into the car he caught sight of the dark-haired woman carrying the sleeping boy along the veranda. Something about the way she moved drew him and he had to be careful not to stare.

This Arsalan fellow sat up at the back and Sam drove the two of them out along the cantonment roads, which all looked pretty much the same to him. The sun had sunk low as they made their way back and the light turned bronze, then pink.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen light quite like this before, sir,’ Sam said, very taken by it.

‘Best time of day in India,’ the captain replied. They had to speak up to be heard over the engine but even so, Sam could still hear the fondness in his voice. ‘Nothing like the Indian sunset, except the dawn, of course, which is beautiful almost beyond description. Or at least by me.’ He gave a chuckle. ‘I’m no poet, I do know that.’

‘You must miss home though?’ Sam said.

‘Ah, but this is home. I was born here, you see. So talking about England as “home” is merely a turn of phrase for me. Though I was at school there, naturally. For my wife, it’s quite different, of course. She grew up in Sussex. Where do you come from, Ironside?’

‘Coventry, sir.’

‘Of course. How ridiculous of me. And you don’t have to keep calling me sir.’

When they braked back outside the house, Captain Fairford said something over his shoulder to the
syce
, who leaped from the car and hurried off into the dusk, then turned to Sam.

‘Well – it’s marvellous: just what I was hoping for! I can hardly wait to find out all about it and take the wheel myself. Now—’ He leaped energetically from the car and turned on his heel to say, ‘We dine at seven-thirty, and you’ll join us, of course. Consider yourself one of the family while you’re here, eh? Now – let’s get someone to show you your quarters.’

Sam made sure he was dressed and ready by seven-thirty. He’d brought his Sunday suit, thanks to Helen.

‘They’re bound to dress for dinner,’ she’d said. ‘You’ve got to look right. And there’ll be church on Sundays.’

He felt pretty intimidated when he first went into the house. This was how the other half lived all right! Posh was hardly an adequate word to describe it. As for his quarters, he had never slept in a room like it before, although by their standards it was probably quite simple. There was a deep red carpet on the floor, a wide bed draped in mozzie netting and an array of dark, polished furniture and a long gilt-framed mirror, all of first-class quality. On the washstand stood a pitcher decorated with pink roses, all ready, full of warm water.

Before leaving the room he checked his appearance. The suit was quite run-of-the-mill and he wondered if he would measure up. Pulling his shoulders back he was at least reassured by his strong, manly stature. Keen as mustard, that was the impression people had. And he didn’t come across as some office-
wallah
, that was for sure. Sam knew he was good-looking. Smooth dark brown hair, alert grey eyes, strong brows. And he knew he was good at his job. ‘Cocky sod, isn’t he?’ he’d heard himself described at the works. But he was going places – he knew it. And he wasn’t going to be intimidated by the wealth of the Fairford mansion.