East of the Sun Read online

  Tor took a deep breath. Shoulders back. Head up. Smile. Walk. Her destination was the other side of the crimson deck where she could see her group drinking and laughing.

  “Heavens,” said Nigel, bowing elaborately. He was wearing a sharkskin dinner jacket and a fez. “It’s Nefertiti, and how, um, how ravishing she looks.”

  “Thank you, Nigel.” Tor kissed him on the cheek.

  “Who are you?” she asked Patricia Ormsby Booth, the strapping young woman by Nigel’s side, who was not a natural candidate for the sari.

  “Unsure,” came the good-natured reply. “Someone foreign.”

  “Thank you, darling.” Tor took a glass of champagne from Nigel and arranged herself casually against the deck railings. Her golden mask was in her evening bag in case it all got too much. “Isn’t this divine?”

  “It’s our last proper sea before India,” said Jane. “How are we ever going to adjust to real life again? I—”

  She was interrupted by a group of people saying, “Ooooohh!” Rose had appeared in brilliant pink silk, and as the band struck up “Ain’t She Sweet?” she did a little jig in the direction of the colonels and the mems who were sitting at their own table. “I’m Scheherazade,” she told them gaily, “and I’ve got lots of stories that I’m not going to tell any of you.” They laughed indulgently.

  The band flared, trumpets sounded, and there was another general intake of breath. Marlene and Suzanne had appeared masked and in daring and sumptuous evening dresses, followed by Jitu Singh, swaggering across the deck and flashing his eyes and teeth. He was wearing a blue silk jacket, baggy trousers, and soft leather boots into which, Valentino-like, he had casually stuck a dagger. Around his waist there was a leather belt with some cartridges in it and on his head a silk turban with a large diamond.

  “Jitu,” they called, “come over here and tell us who you are.”

  He smacked first Marlene and next Suzanne gently on their bottoms and then walked over and salaamed deeply, touching eyes, mouth, and chest.

  “My name,” he announced, “is Nazim Ali Khan. I am a Mughal emperor. I bring gold and perfume and diamonds.”

  As he nuzzled Tor’s hand with his lips, she hoped Frank was watching.

  After the sun set in a final blaze of glory, the stars came out and the partygoers danced and then ate sitting on silken cushions arranged inside the tent. Afterward, they played a parlor game called Who Am I?, in which you had a strip of paper stuck on your forehead with the name of somebody famous on it. You had to ask the others questions to guess who you were. It caused great mirth and when it was ended most of the elderly passengers went to bed.

  The Egyptian musicians were ferried back to their villages—their boats causing a brilliant bubbling mass of phosphorescence. The resident band appeared and played breathless foggy late-night music; couples danced cheek to cheek; shadows were seen kissing in the far corners of the deck.

  Tor watched it all from a table littered with snapped streamers and lipsticked cigarettes. Her dress was damp with perspiration and she had the beginnings of a blister on her heel. Nigel had just left and she was summoning up the energy to go to bed when Frank suddenly arrived at her side. He looked pale and out of sorts.

  “Have you had a good evening, Tor?” he said with unusual formality.

  “Marvelous,” she said. “How was yours?”

  “I’m tired. I need a drink.” He poured some wine. “You?”

  “No, thank you.”

  They listened to the waves swish and the sleepy croaky sound of the trumpet player.

  “Tor,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Hang on a moment.”

  He looked at her very intently and for one heart-stopping moment she thought she’d got it wrong and that he might kiss her after all, but instead, he removed a piece of paper from her forehead and gave it to her.

  “‘Virginia Woolf,’” he read. “No, I don’t think that’s you at all.”

  “Who do you think I am?” she asked. She’d hoped the question would sound lighthearted, but waited, absurdly tense, in the moonlight. “Theda Bara? Mary Queen of Scots?”

  He shook his head, refusing to play her game.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I don’t think you do either.”

  She felt her face grow hot with dismay. And then she stood up and called, “Jitu, don’t sit on your own, come and have a drink with us.” Not because she wanted him to but for something to do.

  “None of us know.” Frank was staring glumly into his glass. “We—”

  But Jitu had arrived. “I’ve been summoned by a goddess,” he said, sitting next to her. “Might a mortal even dance with her?”

  She opened her bag and put her mask on, just in case, for Frank’s reply had really hurt her, and the whole evening put her in a strange, unhappy, slightly unhinged mood. When a tear rolled down underneath the cardboard she was glad it was too dark for anyone to notice.

  She smiled at Jitu, stretching out her arms to him. “She will dance with you. Thank you for asking her.”

  He led her out to the dance floor where he held her in an expert impersonal grip. A few couples were dancing cheek to cheek. The band was playing “Can’t Get Enough of You.” She was shocked to see Marlene kissing a cavalry officer she’d seen her with earlier, in full view of the kitchen staff.

  “I love this song,” she told Jitu, whose hand had moved an inch or two up her back. “It’s so balloon.”

  Why was she always saying things she didn’t mean? This song was making her feel miserable, she was longing for bed.

  She felt him move closer toward her, his fingers splayed and casually probing her spine. His long-lashed eyes were fixed on hers, as if to say, “Can I go this far? How about this?”

  “So, Jitu,” she was trying to keep him at arm’s length, “did you have a good time tonight?”

  He gave that most Indian of gestures: neither yes nor no but a wiggle of the head from side to side.

  “It was fine. A necessary party.”

  “What a funny word to use.”

  “Well, you know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “One more sea to cross, then I’m home.”

  “But isn’t that good?”

  “Not for me. I’ve been away for a long time.” He sighed and moved closer, bringing a whiff of spicy perfume with him. “I’ve been so free in Oxford and in London,” he said. “You know, parties, cosmopolitan things. I shall miss naughty girls like you.”

  She wanted him to release her now. He was too male, too highly scented, but she was the one who had summoned him out of the shadows, showing off and commanding him to dance. And now, with such skill that she hadn’t noticed, he had danced her off the small moonlit floor and into a dark cozy corner near the ship’s funnel.

  “You have wonderful eyes,” he said when her back was wedged against the wall. “So big, so blue.”

  “Thank you, Jitu,” she said primly.

  He put one hand swiftly between her legs and tried to kiss her.

  “Jitu!” She pushed him away, horrified.

  “You’ve been drinking,” he admonished, pushing her back. “You wicked thing,” he breathed.

  She felt the tip of his tongue in her mouth. He guided her hand toward the big rubbery thing that had sprung out of him.

  “For God’s sake, Jitu. Stop it!” she said.

  It took every ounce of her strength to push him off, but before she ran downstairs she turned and saw him smack his head with the side of his hand; he was as confused as she was.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The day after the party, Viva, pale-faced from lack of sleep and air, sat on a deck chair in the shade trying not to think about Guy for a few moments. They’d just passed Steamer Point and the Kaisar was surrounded by a tribe of young Arab boys in little canoes, all of them naked except for white loincloths. They were waiting for coins to be flung into the shark-infested waters around them. When the anna coins were
flung, the boys hurled themselves into the bright green depths, vanished from sight, and then, after a long interval, burst out again, appearing one after the other, their woolly heads dyed red with lime and henna leaves and usually with a coin between shining teeth.

  The contrast between these exuberant boys and the white and sluglike Guy, who had not stirred from his cabin for days now, could not have been starker. Viva, looking longingly down toward the water, checked her watch and with a deep sigh went down to his cabin again.

  When she walked in, he was lying in bed playing with a crystal wireless set, unshaven and miserable-looking. He had a sheet and a blanket wrapped around him even though the temperature was around ninety-seven degrees.

  The cabin was now littered with papers and old sweet wrappers and some nuts and bolts that he’d removed from his wireless. He’d forbidden the cabin steward to enter his room for the last two days and became irritable when Viva tried to tidy up.

  She switched on the fan. The smell of old socks and stale air moved around the room and a few sweet wrappers flew away.

  “Are you feeling any better this morning, Guy?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied. “I’d like you to get off my airwaves for a start.”

  Her heart sank. She hated this wireless talk.

  “I’m not quite sure what you mean when you say that,” she said.

  “You do know,” he said. He gave her a bright I-wasn’t-born-yesterday sort of look. “You know you know.”

  “Guy,” she tried again, “Dr. Mackenzie is coming to see you today. He needs to decide the best thing to do with you. We’ll be in Bombay in five days’ time. Your parents will be there.” He closed his eyes when she said that but she plowed on. “The thing is that Dr. Mackenzie says there are quite a few people in the ship’s sanatorium with upset stomachs, but he can easily make room, if that’s the best place for you.”

  “I’m not ill.” He pulled his lips back over his teeth and looked over her head. “Why do you keep telling people I am?”

  She ignored this.

  “What do you want me to do today?” she said. “I think Frank will be looking in on you, too, in half an hour.”

  “Stay until he comes and then go.” He sounded half asleep again, and was thumping his pillows.

  “Before you nod off, Guy, I do think you should wash yourself and get the steward in here to clean your cabin,” she pleaded. “Do it before Dr. Mackenzie comes.”

  “Can’t,” he mumbled. “Too tired.”

  While he slept, she watched him warily. Dr. Mackenzie, who’d talked to him once but only for five minutes, seemed keen to avoid having him in the san.

  Frank wasn’t sure. Every night now since Port Said, he’d come down to sit with her in Guy’s cabin. When Guy had fallen asleep, she and Frank had sat together in the half-light, talking to each other about a range of things—books they liked, music they liked, travel—nothing too personal except for one night when he’d told her about his brother, Charles.

  “He didn’t die at Ypres,” he said in a scarcely audible voice. “It’s just easier to say that to most people. He was invalided home. He had injuries to his throat and trachea, and he wrote down on a piece of paper that he would like me to stay with him until the end. He asked me to talk, so we held hands, and I wittered on.”

  “About what?” Viva felt herself stiffen—too much emotion in the room.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” his voice was far away, “daft things: family cricket matches at Salcombe where we went for summer holidays, camping trips in the New Forest, eating Eccles cakes in Lyons Corner House, a trip to the National Gallery where we saw the Turners for the first time, family meals, the usual sort of stuff. It was difficult for him though; he would whisper something to me and then I’d tell him what I remembered.”

  Frank said it had been the strangest five nights of his life and the saddest, and that afterward he had felt so relieved it was over that he’d gone out and stolen a chocolate cake from the pantry and eaten it all by himself and then felt dreadfully ashamed, but it was the sheer relief of knowing that his brother wouldn’t have to live with his dreadful injuries.

  Viva fell silent after this outburst—what was she supposed to say? What if he cried in front of her?

  “Do you think that’s why you became a doctor?” she said at last.

  “Possibly,” he’d said, standing up. “It’s a fairly impressionable age, eighteen—Charles was ten years older than me.”

  He’d turned toward Guy and adjusted his blanket. “I’m worried about this chap,” he said in a brisk new voice, “and the amount of time you have to spend with him. It’s not healthy, and it’s not much fun for you.”

  She’d gazed at him mutely, conscious of having failed as a confidante.

  “No, it’s not,” she said. “But what can one do?”

  “It’s tricky, but I think it’s time to explain the situation to Rose and Tor, for their safety if nothing else. They must be wondering where you are.”

  “I sort of explained my absence by saying he was ill with an upset stomach.”

  She didn’t tell him the rest—that when she’d told Tor she’d reacted very strangely.

  “Oh, don’t bother to make up a story,” she’d said with an icy look. “I knew it from the start.” And then she’d walked off in the other direction.

  Dr. Mackenzie was due in half an hour. She sat down to wait for him.

  Reading was impossible in Guy’s cabin, because he liked to sleep with the curtains closed, and writing seemed temporarily beyond her; all she felt capable of at the moment was a kind of dull worrying about him and about her. Everything was starting to feel precarious.

  But then came a small break in the clouds. She’d just crept to the sink in his bathroom to wash her face when she heard him singing softly behind the thin partition wall. It was a song she remembered her own ayah singing “humpti-tumpti gir giya phat.”

  She put her head round the door. But the mound of bedclothes was silent again.

  “Talli, talli, badja baba,” she sang to him and his pleased snort felt like the first bit of good news she’d heard all morning.

  “Did they all sing the same songs?” He opened one bloodshot eye.

  “Probably,” she said. “Mine told me lots of stories that began ‘dekho burra bili da—there was a large cat,’” she said singsong, like an Indian.

  “You can tell me a story if you like.” His voice sounded softer, more childish.

  Her mind raced furiously and then went blank.

  “Tell me about your school.”

  “Um, well, dekho burra bili da,” she said to play for time. “I’ll tell you about the first time I went back from India and saw my prep school if you like.”

  The mound under the bedclothes moved again; she heard another soft grunt.

  “Well, it was a convent boarding school in North Wales. I was seven years old. My mother, my sister, and I came back on the ship together, we stayed at a small hotel close to Waterloo Station in London, and there Josie and I changed into our gray uniforms and blue shirt and tie. Is this boring you, Guy?”

  “No, no, keep going.” He shifted impatiently.

  “My mother had seen our school, but we hadn’t. I remember that we walked up a pebbly beach together and I looked up and saw this gaunt, gray, forbidding place on the edge of the cliff. To stop my mother crying I said, ‘Don’t worry, Mummy, at least it isn’t that place.’ She had to tell me it was.”

  “Did they beat you?” His face had appeared above the blankets. His mouth had dropped open into a perfect round. “Were they horrible, too?”

  “They were very strict, we were hit on the hands with rulers and made to do penances, but that wasn’t the worst thing. Homesickness was, missing India.

  “In India we’d step over beaches as soft as silk, we swam in water as warm as milk. At school we had to crunch over huge, sharp pebbles into gray waves that smacked you bracingly round the face. The nuns had all sorts o
f strange punishments—one of them, Sister Philomena, she wore a leg brace, used to make us stand in a bath if we were naughty, then she’d turn the hose on us.”

  He gave a short bark.

  “Go on, go on,” he said eagerly, “you’re good at this.”

  She hesitated. This was the part she wasn’t sure about telling him.

  “I was so unhappy that I decided to make myself really ill. I used to pour the contents of my water jug over my blouse at night and sit by an open window and hope to get some tragic kind of illness that would make everyone feel sorry for me and make Mummy come and take me back to India.”

  “What happened then?” His breath smelled when he left his mouth open like that. She reminded herself to try at the very least to get him to clean his teeth before he saw Dr. Mackenzie.

  “Nothing much. I got a very bad cough and spent a week in the san, and then things got better. I made friends.”

  Damn. Not very tactful, when he’d seemed so friendless.

  “Looking back,” she resumed quickly, “I just wish somebody had told me that schooldays are often a pretty dreadful time of your life, but that they go so fast, they really do, and other things like being independent, making your own money, your own decisions, are so much more fun later.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to have fun later,” he said. He sat up and lit a cigarette and when the smoke had cleared, looked her in the eye. “You see, I’ve more or less decided to kill myself.”

  “Guy, please. Don’t even say that as a joke.”

  “It’s not a joke,” he said. “I wish it was.”

  She knew that she should reach out to him, touch his hand, put her arm around him, but the smell of his socks, the heat, the pointless gloom of it all, made it impossible.

  “Guy, please! Get up, get dressed, clean your teeth, do something. There’s so much to look at outside, the canal is so narrow in places you can stand on the ship and see children and flamingos, pelicans, geese. It’s extraordinary. Do get up. I’ll take you up, I’ll stay with you.”