East of the Sun Read online

  After Rose and Jack’s car disappeared in a cloud of dust down the drive, she went up to her bedroom. It looked different already—the servants had been in during the reception, straightened the eiderdown on Rose’s bed, polished her table, and tidied all traces of her away. Tor lay down in her bridesmaid’s dress on Rose’s bed. She closed her eyes, and slept fitfully for about half an hour, dimly aware of the shouts and laughter of Ci’s guests in the distance, the clatter of dishes being taken away.

  When she woke up, she went to the window, and watched the sun go down over the sea, and felt homesick for the first time since she’d arrived, a sense of the vastness of India all around her, of millions and millions of people not known to her out there having babies and dying and living and of herself being an unimportant little speck living on the wrong side of the world.

  She took off her damp bridesmaid’s dress and went back to bed in her underwear. She pulled the sheet over her head and was almost asleep when she heard Ci shouting at her from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Tor, come and play with me. I’m having a drink on the veranda.”

  “Coming,” Tor shouted back reluctantly. She didn’t dare say no, but she still felt shy on her own with Ci Ci.

  She got dressed and went downstairs. Ci was lying in the half-dark in a kimono on a wicker lounger; a cigarette drooped from a languid hand.

  “I’m a rag,” she said. “How are you?”

  She must have noticed Tor had been crying for she pushed a glass of brandy toward her. They sat drinking together while the servants cleared away the wreckage of the day. Then Ci Ci said out of the blue, “Most Bombay weddings are damp squibs, darling. But she’ll be happy by now.” She smiled at her slyly. “He’s a wonderful-looking man.”

  Tor looked at her. “I don’t like him,” she said. “I think he’s…”

  “Think he’s what?” Ci sounded impatient.

  “Cold,” said Tor bravely. “I kept wanting him to look happier.”

  “What a silly thing to say, darling,” Ci protested. “None of us even know him.” As if that proved anything. “And besides,” she added, “most people aren’t exactly childhood sweethearts when they marry out here.”

  An awkward pause followed, they both took sips of their drinks, and then Ci stubbed out her cigarette and took Tor’s hand in hers. She ran her fingernails along the palm of Tor’s hand, and said lightly, “Might a chap say something? This is probably as good a time as any.”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t be too fussy, darling; I’d hate to have to send you home a returned empty.”

  Tor winced. Ci laughed as if she was half joking, but Tor knew she wasn’t.

  Ci put a fresh cigarette in her holder, lit it, and as the smoke cleared, gave her a long appraising look.

  “Darling,” she said after a longish pause, “would you mind if I was incredibly frank with you? Because I think I could help you if you’d let me.”

  “Of course.” Tor steeled herself for the worst.

  “You’re a big girl, aren’t you, but you don’t have to be if you don’t want to be. All it would take would be no cake for two weeks, lemon and water in the morning, and I rather think,” Ci stretched out and held a lump of Tor’s hair in her hand, “we need a hair conversation with Madame Fontaine. With half an inch off this, you’ll be fighting them off with a stick. Do you want to fight them off with a stick?”

  “Yes,” said Tor, and even though at this precise moment she felt she could have died of shame, she made herself smile. “I rather think I do.”

  But then, the following night, something amazing happened. Ci Ci walked into Tor’s room with Pandit behind her, his arms piled high with bright silk dresses, beaded shifts, shawls of shivery softness, headbands, feathers, necklaces, even earrings. Ci took the clothes from his arms and flung them carelessly on the bed.

  “Darling, do me a favor and keep these,” she said. “I need an excuse to buy some new clothes.”

  “I couldn’t!” Tor, still smarting from the conversation the night before, felt both thrilled and shamed.

  “Why not?” Ci Ci said. “New toys are much more fun, and some of these are just un peu mouton.”

  For the next two hours Ci, smoking and squinting, watched Tor try on the clothes. Apart from the few hems that needed taking down and waists out, some of the dresses fit perfectly and Tor couldn’t wait to wear them: she’d never felt such silky silk, such soft cottons, or for that matter, had a woman with Ci’s flair show her where to place a brooch for maximum effect, or how much better three long ropes of pearls looked than the skimpy row she’d been given by her aunt Gladys for her eighteenth birthday, which she’d been instructed by her mother only to wear for best and never in the bath.

  The following morning Ci drove her to the Taj Mahal Hotel, where the clever little Frenchwoman Madame Fontaine, a closely guarded secret who saw only a few cherished customers, held up a lump of her hair and said, “What is this!” which made Ci laugh. For the next hour, Madame, who Ci said was an artiste, danced around her snipping, regarding, adjusting, while the pile of hair on the floor grew and Tor, watching herself in the mirror, saw a different kind of girl. Madame showed her how to apply kohl to emphasize what she said was her best feature. “Those wonderful eyes.”

  An hour or so later, Tor sat with Ci in the bar of the Bombay Yacht Club awed by her transformation. She hadn’t had her hair so short since Doreen of Basingstoke had cut the disastrous shingle, but this felt so different, so suave and silky and modern.

  Across the bar, two young naval officers drinking together had actually stopped talking as she’d walked in. One of them was still sneaking looks at her now.

  “I’m going to buy my little Cinderella champagne.” Ci looked at her for the first time with real approval. “Lots of glass slippers from now on, I think.”

  “It feels like magic.” Tor couldn’t stop herself grinning.

  “It is magic,” said Ci. She winked. “And it’s all done with mirrors—you’ll see.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  YWCA, Bombay. Extract from Viva Holloway’s diary, January 7, 1929

  Down to Thos. Cook’s, one letter from William. Regretting his absence on the quayside when the Kaisar had left, due to “unexpected court appearance,” and hoping my future will be “a happy and profitable one.” And that we may meet again on my return.

  William, I wanted to tell him, we will not meet again. My biggest mistake yet. Yes, mine—old enough to know better now, clutching at straws, or dry sticks in this case—mustn’t blame others, but we will not meet again.

  Today: write to Tor and Rose, go to Grindlays to see if postal order there. Budget for today five rupees, do not exceed. Learn ten new words.

  Her original plan had been to go straight to Simla to collect the trunk so she could tick this painful task off her list, and then get on with the rest of her life. But the plan had gone out of shape because she had no money or almost none now; and also, her mind seemed to be playing tricks with her: one voice saying “Go ahead,” another hesitating, a third creating nothing but fear.

  “You utter fool,” this last voice said, “to think you could come back here on your own and make a life for yourself without the others.” Or sometimes, “A writer, what a joke—you’re a complete failure in love and life.” In this mood her mind slid down the snake of the darkest memory of all. She was standing, aged ten, with her suitcase on the railway platform at Simla. Josie and her father were dead. Mother had shown her their gravestones. Mother bundling her onto the train. Why didn’t she want her to stay with her? Why was she slamming the doors and turning away? What had she done wrong? Did she kiss me good-bye?

  When these voices pounced, they made her almost hate Mrs. Driver for telling her you could do practically anything you wanted if you set your mind to it in the right way. What if this was sentimental tosh, the cruelest lie of all?

  She’d battled with these feelings for several days now, but this m
orning, for no reason she could fathom, she’d woken feeling more optimistic. She opened her eyes and heard for the first time birds singing in the banyan tree outside, and the choice seemed almost laughably clear: she could sink or she could swim, and she was ready to swim again.

  A job. That was the first thing she needed: a tent pole around which everything else could fall. She got out of bed and consulted her notebook. Before she’d left, Mrs. Driver had scribbled down in her dashing hand the names of a few people in Bombay who might help her. Top of the list was Miss Daisy Barker, the same name she’d seen on the YWCA’s noticeboard when she arrived. Underneath, Mrs. Driver had written, “Mr. Woodmansee, retired correspondent Pioneer Mail (ancient, but sound, loves giving advice).”

  Viva picked up her pen and underlined Miss Barker’s name twice. She’d phone her after breakfast. Pleased to have made at least one decision, she walked down the hall and into the communal bathroom where the wooden pulley above the bath sagged with the weight of wet stockings and yellowing camisoles and knickers. She filled the basin with water, stripped naked, and washed herself vigorously, hair, face, teeth. How good it felt to wash like this again as if you believed in yourself. She put on her red dress and plunged a silver comb in her hair. Poor she may be, but she could still look good.

  The dining room at the Y was a bright room on the first floor overlooking a dusty park. Each morning, two kinds of breakfasts were laid out: for the English girls, scrambled eggs, sausages, bread, marmalade, and tea that was weak and never quite hot enough; for the Indians, the small buns they called pavs, eggs, and poha, pounded rice.

  Three Bengali girls whom Viva knew by sight but not by name smiled as she walked in. They’d come to Bombay, she’d been told, to train to be schoolteachers—a momentous step for them, too, to leave home and live like this. They were friendly enough, joined in the prayer meetings and so on, but kept themselves separate, probably, Viva thought, because they were Hindus at heart, and preferred not to eat with non-Hindus.

  They stopped talking when they saw her, and waggled their heads from side to side.

  “Your dress is nice,” one told her shyly.

  “Thank you,” she said. “How is your training going?”

  “I am loving it,” said the girl, smiling. “We were saying just now we are like birds outside the cage.”

  Viva suddenly felt ravenous. During the days of her nerve storm, she’d eaten practically nothing.

  She put some eggs, a sausage, and some rice on her plate, and sat down on a chair near the window. From where she sat she could see, down in the park, a small boy chasing a kite. The wind lifted it out of his chubby hands; he was running, laughing. From the kitchens the sound of singing and the hot sweet smells of the lunchtime curries being cooked. She ate until her plate was clean.

  After breakfast she telephoned Daisy Barker before she lost her nerve.

  “Hello?”

  The cut-glass voice at the other end of the line was brisk but friendly. Viva asked if she could see her today. Miss Barker said she was teaching a class at the university that morning, but they could meet after lunch at her new flat in Byculla. Did she happen to know the area? No, well, it was somewhat off the beaten track, but she would give precise directions for getting there. “Bus or rickshaw?” she added, which Viva found a relief; taxis for the time being were out of the question.

  It had rained overnight, and the pavements were steaming when Viva, dressed in her chaperone suit and best pair of shoes, ventured out into the street again. With the four hours she had to kill before her appointment with Miss Barker, she decided to go first to the Thos. Cook office in Hornby Road to collect her post, and then to Grindlays Bank to check on her dwindling account balance and, if necessary, talk to the manager there.

  As she crossed the road, she felt the city stretch out all around her: the rumble of bullock carts, the screech of brakes from the gaudy new lorries, a donkey somewhere braying, an incredible crush of bodies, living, dying, getting to work.

  “Morning, missy,” said the palm-juice seller who sat cross-legged on a charpoy at the corner of the street. She’d started to buy a cup of juice from him each morning, the sweet taste reminding her always of Josie, who’d loved palm juice and begged their ayah for it. Since she’d been back in India, Josie, for so long pushed to some place in her mind where she wouldn’t hurt, was real again: she could see them both running, skinny-legged, in the rain, cackling with laughter, or riding in the hills, sitting on the deck of that houseboat in Kashmir.

  Dear Josie. She took her first sip. My sister.

  As the palm juice touched her lips, the juice man opened his own mouth by a fraction like a mother bird. She’d watched him sometimes from her window at the Y, sitting on this dusty street corner, for ten, twelve, sometimes sixteen hours a day, until the stars came out and he lit his kerosene lamp and wrapped himself in a blanket. She had no right to think of her life as being especially hard.

  “Delicious.” She handed the glass back to him; he smiled as if they were the oldest of friends.

  She struck out toward Hornby Road, stopping at the next corner to let three women in saris pass like brilliantly colored birds. Their murmuring voices, their easy laughter, made her think of Tor and Rose; how strange to find she really missed them. First, they’d been her meal tickets, nothing more, now something else—she hesitated still to use the word “friends,” she who had always felt on the outside of things (or was this the fate of all expatriates?), but she did miss drinking little nips of crème de menthe with them and hearing their stories; Tor winding up her gramophone and teaching her the Kaisar stomp.

  And Frank. This was too silly for words. She’d watched him walk away on his own, down the gangplank. That jaunty, slightly bandy walk, hid, she now knew, a more complicated and thoughtful person. He was wearing his civilian clothes again, a linen suit, a hat with his butterscotch-colored hair showing underneath it. A bird of passage, like herself, she thought, jumping quickly onto the pavement, for a bullock cart had almost knocked her over. She could have called out on that last day on the ship, but she was standing with the Glovers, and the atmosphere was so fraught and confused she’d lost her nerve. She felt an ache inside her when she thought of this, and then irritation with herself. Why should it matter that they hadn’t said good-bye? He was probably somewhere else by now, charming a whole new set of women. Some men did that without even trying: it was a freak of nature, the right kind of smile, an air of easy confidence that few women could resist. She’d made up her mind not to see him again.

  The uniformed staff at Thos. Cook & Sons were stuffing letters into the small brass boxes when she arrived. Her box, number six, was near the door; as she took its brass key out of her purse she felt frightened again.

  There were two letters in her box—one an advertisement from the Army and Navy Store advising her of special offers that week on “silver sardine tongs” and “double terai felt hats in nigger beige and other shades.” Nothing from Mr. Glover. Jail sentence suspended, she joked with herself, and she was locking the box again when the clerk handed her a scarlet envelope with Tor’s large, loopy, schoolgirl writing on it.

  Dear Chaperone,

  Exciting news for you. I will be all on my own in this house for two weeks from Jan. 20 onwards. A car, too!!! The Mallinsons are going shooting. So please, please come and keep me company, for a night even if you can’t manage the whole two weeks. Plenty of spare rooms for you to write in. I’m trying to get Rose to come down, too, so we can have a bishi. I’m having a ripping time, hardly time to breathe, let alone write.

  x0x0x0x0

  Tor

  P.S. What news of the ghastly Guy?

  As she walked back up Hornby Road, Viva could feel herself being torn this way and that by Tor’s offer. The wedding reception at the Mallinsons’ house had been ludicrously grand. There’d be servants there and copious hot water, wonderful food, plus the fun of seeing Tor and hearing all her news.

  But could s
he bear to stay in the dreaded Ci Ci Mallinson’s house? She really couldn’t stand the woman. At Rose’s wedding, every time she and Tor had tried to exchange a few words, she’d swooped down on them like some terrible bird of prey telling them to circulate, or making strange remarks about how “short of new blood” Bombay was.

  “Where do you hang your hat in Bombay, friend of Tor’s?” she’d said at one point in her affected drawl when they met near the champagne tray. When Viva said “The YWCA” Ci Ci had gasped audibly, plunged her nails into Viva’s arm, and said, “How ghastly for you, darling—I hear the women there are absolute heart-sinkers.” She’d turned to one of her friends and added, “It’s not India at all, you know.”

  Well, maybe Ci had been a little tight, or overexcited at the time, for the reception had been such a bun fight, but the desire to pour her drink very slowly over Mrs. Mallinson’s daringly coiffed head had been strong. Even thinking about it now made her seethe.

  How dare she mock the midwives, social workers, and schoolteachers who stayed at the YWCA? She had no idea what they were like, or how hard they worked.

  She was the kind of woman who thought all Indian women were dim and downtrodden. She was an idiot.

  And where was this real India that Ci Mallinson went on about, and, if she was part of it, why the two armed guards, the Alsatian at her gate? At one point in the day, they’d been talking about some recent riots near the esplanade; she’d told them the natives had never been so restless.

  Viva ate a mango for lunch at Crawford Market, sitting on the side of a fountain, carved with snakes and tigers, birds and red dogs. And now she was on the bus, heading for Daisy Barker’s house at Byculla. The hair of the woman sitting next to her smelled of coconut oil, and the feeling of her soft pillowy body next to hers made her feel hungry, for what she couldn’t remember. The woman had a baby across her lap. While it slept, its eyelashes sweeping on almond cheeks, she gently batted away the flies. A man, hanging on a strap in a sleeveless vest with wet hair underneath his arms, was telling a story to some men at the back of the bus. When he reached its conclusion, there was such an explosion of giggling and thigh-slapping she found herself laughing, too, even though she didn’t understand a word of it.