East of the Sun Page 21

  “How lovely to be here,” she said, tilting her face up for a kiss.

  She hoped he couldn’t see how disappointed she was. She’d pictured, what? Well, something more like one of the many beautiful and spacious-looking bungalows they’d passed on their way here, with their wide verandas and majestic trees. Not quite such a small dead-looking garden or this dark pokey corridor smelling a bit of damp. But he had warned her that theirs was a junior officer’s house, that they’d get something bigger when he was promoted.

  “So, this is it,” he said brightly. “Is it all right?”

  “Darling, I love it, honestly,” she said. “Why, do you think I don’t?”

  It was starting to embarrass her how often she used that word lately. I love it; lovely to see you! lovely to be here; yes, I’m having a lovely time; that was lovely! There must be other words to describe so much newness.

  He took her into the sitting room, which was small and unfurnished, apart from a bamboo sofa facing a single-bar electric heater. There was a picture on the wall of what looked like Scottish moorland, with a stag in the foreground with many branched antlers looking plaintively in her direction. A bird squeaked through the window, and then it suddenly felt so quiet, as if the whole house waited for her to pronounce on it. She looked at the picture again with exaggerated curiosity.

  “Oh, that poor little deer,” she said, “it’s too sweet.” She blushed again; what a ninny she sounded.

  “Look, we can get more furniture,” Jack told her hurriedly, his mouth went very small when he was cross, “and bits and pieces from the bazaar.”

  “I adore arranging houses,” she said. But in fact, apart from lining up dolls on her bed at home, or pinning up her rosettes in the stables, she’d never really done it.

  “We will have to watch the pennies for a bit.” Jack turned his back to her. “But lots of people hire furniture, particularly now.”

  “Hire? Gosh, I’ve never heard of that before.”

  “Well, things change very quickly here. People move all the time and, look, I’ll tell you all about that later.” He was looking at his watch again.

  She gazed at him silently; he looked huge, too big to be contained by this small house. They walked back into the hall together where a collection of calling cards sat on a small brass table.

  “These came for you,” he said, handing them to her. “The ladies at the club can’t wait to meet you. One or two are battleaxes, but most are very nice. And two letters.” He read from one of the envelopes, “‘To Mrs. Jack Chandler.’”

  “One’s from Tor.” She smiled properly for the first time that day. “I’m not sure about the other.” Rose didn’t recognize the writing or the address of an Indian hospital written on the top left corner.

  Jack told her to read them later. He only had half an hour for lunch and wanted to show her the kitchen first. “Of course, darling,” she said. “I wouldn’t dream of reading them now.” She put them back in her pocket, but part of her did mind: it was the second time today he’d kept her from Tor.

  The kitchen was a dark room at the back of the house. Jack seemed pleased that the servants of the previous tenant—a captain in the Third Cavalry who’d broken his neck in a polo accident—had left a collection of mismatched glass jars with small amounts of lentils and sugar in them on a wooden shelf. He said it would save money. Rose saw a pot of rice bubbling on its own on the stove.

  “Where are the servants?” she said suddenly.

  “Are you up to meeting them yet?” he said gently. “I told them to go to their huts until you’d had a chance to look around.”

  “Of course, of course!” she said, although she felt like hiding. “But can I see the rest of the house first?” She managed to make this sound like a treat.

  “Well, there isn’t all that much left.” He smiled at her, a bashful smile that wrung her heart. This was such a big change for both of them.

  It would be so much easier next week, she consoled herself, when Jack was back with his regiment again and she could roll up her sleeves and get on with something.

  And after that he’d hinted he might be away for two weeks doing something secret in a place she’d forgotten, the name of which sounded miles away from Poona. He’d already told her that she must go and stay with Tor while he was away. Was it a bad sign, she’d wondered, that she was already looking forward to this so much?

  They’d finished looking at the kitchen and now he put his arm around her and led her down another short corridor, whispering, “Our room.”

  “I’ve never slept in a downstairs bedroom before,” she told him gaily, making this sound like a treat, too. He opened the door on a small room crisscrossed with bars of sunlight falling through the latticed blinds. In the middle of the room was a double bed with a white candlewick bedspread on which somebody had placed twigs to form the word “Greatings.”

  “Durga and Shukla must have done that,” he said softly. “How sweet they are.”

  She bobbed her head and blushed. The bedside of things still made her feel rigid with embarrassment and strangely giggly.

  “Where are our clothes?” she said quickly, because even though it was daytime he was looking at her in the gleaming way that made her heart sink.

  “Here.” He moved away from her and opened the door into the next room. “It’s a bit of a shambles, I’m afraid, but I wasn’t sure you’d want the servants touching your things.”

  Her wedding dress lay in a cotton bag on the floor like a dead body. Beside it was her cabin trunk, now scratched and covered in labels, her tennis rackets, a pile of dresses, the riding clothes she’d worn at school, all in a messy pile with his polo mallets, uniforms, and a heap of old regimental magazines.

  “I’ll sort all this out,” she said. She was determined to be efficient like Mummy, to take charge of domestic details without fuss. “It’s my job now.”

  “Don’t forget you have four servants of your own now,” he said. “You actually don’t have to do a damn thing if you don’t want to.”

  Ci Ci had already warned her that the idea of servants cutting down on work was a common myth all husbands had out here. She’d made Rose hoot with laughter with her tales of some straining soup through their turbans, and one (she swore this was true although with Ci Ci you could never tell) using his toes as a toast rack.

  “They’ll be your biggest test out here. Rule one,” she’d raised her finger and bulged her eyes for emphasis, “they are children in everything but name.”

  “I know,” Rose told Jack, “but I’d like to do some things myself.”

  “Well, do them then,” he said. And did he sound a bit peppery at that moment, or was she simply starting to read too much into everything?

  “But I am looking forward to meeting them,” she said just in case he was cross again.

  So now, one by one, the servants came out of the shadows to be introduced to her.

  First came Durgabai, the maid and cook, a fine-looking local woman with jutting cheekbones and large luminous brown eyes; then Shukla, her seven-year-old daughter, a beautiful replica of her, hiding behind her skirts.

  Next came Dinesh, stick thin and immaculate, who bowed without smiling. Jack said Dinesh had been his bearer for the past three years. Next came Ashish, the wash man, the dhobi wallah, who had a withered leg and milky eye and was as shy as the little girl. Durgabai was sweet to her, smiling and wobbling her head and saying, “Greetings, memsahib,” as if to make up for the awkwardness of the others.

  Over lunch—pea and ham soup and a dry lamb chop—Rose confided to Jack, partly as a joke, that she found it awfully tricky remembering Indian names, even the faces bewildered her, so many of them looked the same.

  He put down his knife and said, quite sharply, that she’d better concentrate because it wouldn’t do at all to offend them. He told her some story about an Indian major in his regiment who had known the names of every man within a week.

  She stared miserably at he
r chop. What a stupid thing she’d said. When she looked up again, two pairs of dark eyes were staring curiously at her from around the door.

  Jack barked out some Hindi words and Rose heard staunched giggling as the door closed suddenly.

  “What did you say, Jack?” she asked him.

  “I told him if he didn’t stop staring at the memsahib, I’d come to his house and stare at his wife.”

  “Jack!” she said. “You are naughty.”

  “Memsahib,” Durgabai was back again and talking to her directly. “Sorry for interrupting your vital but the dhobi wallah is at the back door.”

  Rose looked helplessly at Jack. “What shall I say?”

  Jack put down his knife and fork again. “Tell him to come back when we’ve finished lunch, that we do not want to be disturbed. Good practice for you.”

  “We are eating our lunch,” she said in a quavery voice to the man. “We do not wish to be disturbed. Sorry.” The door closed.

  She swallowed and looked at her hands. “I don’t know if I’m going to be any good at this,” she said. “There’s an awful lot to learn.”

  “Give it time,” Jack said. He scratched his head and sighed.

  After lunch, Jack took her out to show her what he called “the grounds”—a stretch of concrete with a tiny lawn in it and some clay pots with roses inside that looked as if they could do with a water. All of it would have fitted into their vegetable garden at home.

  At the end of the garden was a trellis beyond which she saw a woman sitting in the dirt outside a hut feeding a baby.

  “Do you normally have lunch at home?” she’d asked him politely, as they crunched up the gravel path together.

  “No, at the mess, or on the trot usually,” he said, flooding her with relief. “But it’s lovely to come home and see you here.”

  “Thank you.” She shot him a swift glance. “Heavens,” she squinted up at a cloudless blue sky, “can this really be winter? It’s so beautifully hot.”

  “Yes it is, isn’t it?” he said. “But nothing like as hot as summer.”

  “I love hot weather.”

  “Good.”

  He asked her to excuse him for a moment, and he walked back into the house. She stood in the sun in her new sola topi, which felt rather tight, listening to the tinkle of water in the water closet and him clearing his throat. When he came back he seemed pleased to remember something new to tell her.

  “Rose,” he said, “Mrs. Clayton Booth may call on you tomorrow. She’s an absolute mine of information about where to shop, servants, and so forth. I hope you don’t mind me fixing this up.”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” she said. She stood on her toes and had more or less decided to kiss him when she heard leaves rustling behind the trellis.

  “Darling,” Jack pushed her aside, “don’t do that in public anymore. It doesn’t do in front of the servants.”

  “Oh.”

  “It offends their modesty.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “Oh, Rose, don’t look like that, there is so much to learn.”

  What was she supposed to look like? Oh drat, she wanted to run into the house now and cry. “Sorry,” she said again in a breathless voice.

  When he went inside to collect his things, she stayed in the middle of her new garden, wondering if she’d made the worst mistake of her life.

  When she woke up the next morning, Rose remembered she hadn’t even bothered to read Tor’s letter yet—it was still in her pocket along with the other one.

  She’d been dreaming about marmalade, such a strong dream she could almost smell it. Every year, about this time, her mother and Mrs. Pludd made a great to-do of buying the oranges and washing dusty jam saucepans, rinsing jelly bags and writing the labels, and finally unearthing from the cutlery drawer the special spoon, stained from decades of jam, to stir it all up with.

  For days the house would smell of oranges. Stars were another thing, or at least the thought that the same stars that twinkled down on you were above her sleeping parents half a world away. Or yesterday, the sight of two young girls jumping over a hose at the club had made her homesick for Tor, not the grown-up Tor, whizzing around Bombay in Ci Ci’s Ford, but the old one who used to go riding with her, or lie on the lawn, dress tucked around her battered knees, sucking daisies and looking for four-leafed clovers and nattering about nothing much in particular during those summer days when time stood still, and there was precious little to worry about.

  She got out of bed quietly and felt around in her dress pocket for the two envelopes. So Viva was working, she had a place to stay of her own, how amazing, and then Tor’s invitation to stay making a trickle of tears fall down her cheeks. She ached to go, but knew it would all depend now on so many new things. She sat down at her dressing table, brushing her hair in long rhythmic strokes, and wondered if Jack even liked Tor. Probably not. It bewildered Rose how most men seemed not to see how absolutely wonderful she was—funny and kind and openhearted and all the things you’d think they’d want.

  She put her brush down quietly on the dressing table and turned around to look at Jack. He was fast asleep, one long brown leg over the sheet.

  While she was watching him, he made a soft smacking sound with his lips; he raised his arms in a bow above his head and put them down on the pillow. She could see the tufts of damp blond hair showing in his armpits; the fingers that had touched her, there and there. Oh, for goodness’s sake, you silly woman, she chided herself, feeling an earthquake of sobs waiting to come out of her. Whatever was the matter with her? She mustn’t cry, not again.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Bombay, February 1929

  It was starting to get hot in Bombay, a soupy, steamy kind of heat that weighed down on you and made you long for a cleansing burst of rain.

  Tor, who had prickly heat, was sitting in a bath of Jeyes Fluid when she heard the phone ring.

  A few moments later, Ci, who was getting increasingly snappy about phone calls, shouted through the door, “Someone called Frank, ship’s doctor, wanting someone called Viva. Don’t know what in the hell he’s talking about.”

  Tor still felt her heart flutter.

  “Hello, stranger in a strange land,” she said when she telephoned him back twenty minutes later. “So, what brings you here?”

  Frank said they must meet up and he would tell her all his news later, but in the meantime, did she have any idea where Viva was. He had some urgent news for her.

  “Well, that sounds rather exciting,” Tor had drawled. “Might a chap know what it is?”

  Maybe he would have explained and maybe not, but Ci Ci had appeared at that moment smoking furiously and pointing at her watch so there was only time to give him Viva’s address and get off the phone.

  Tor had honestly only felt a brief twinge after she’d hung up. In her heart of hearts, she’d always known he was keener on Viva than he was on her. And besides, she had more than enough on her plate now. She was in the throes of what Ci Ci called an amour fou, a mad passion.

  The affair had begun on December 21, 1928, at about ten-thirty at night, when she’d lost her virginity to Oliver Sandsdown in a hut on Juhu Beach. She made a careful note of it afterward in the little leather diary that her mother had given her for traveler’s tales, “Juhu. Thank God,” later drawing a yellow line around the date and adding some stars. The only casualty of the evening was Ci’s silk Chinese jacket, which got tar on its sleeve.

  Ollie had turned up at the Christmas party she and Ci had given at the Bombay Yacht Club. He was a twenty-eight-year-old merchant banker who loved sailing and who had been burned brown by the sun. He was short and dark, and even though Ci didn’t particularly approve—he was too far down her categories—Tor thought him fearsomely attractive because he was so confident. When they’d first met, he’d danced with her and said with a very social smile plastered on his face, “I’d really like to go to bed with you,” which she found both funny and naughty.
On the way out to the beach they’d sung “Oh, I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” in the car that he’d driven at a reckless speed. When they’d got to the beach they’d taken off their shoes, and the sand felt warm and heavy between her toes. The moonlit sea had surged onto the beach in a mass of silver and blue lights and on the horizon they had seen the silhouettes of fishermen setting their nets. And then he’d kissed her—not a boy’s let’s-see how-far-I-can-take-this kiss, but a man’s kiss that seemed to claim and demand. Her knees had literally buckled.

  The hut itself, which smelled, not unpleasantly, of seawater and dried fish, had a low string bed in the middle of it where he’d taken her efficiently but without any particular ceremony. Afterward, he’d made her stand still in front of him while he arranged her pearls against her nakedness and then he’d chased her into the sea. What her mother would have said about pearls in seawater wouldn’t bear repeating, but she hadn’t given it a thought. Swimming in sea as warm as milk, she’d felt savagely happy. A feeling she’d never had before. And she’d been glad, at that moment, that he wasn’t the thoughtful type who needed to put everything into words. He’d held her again in the water; they’d trailed phosphorescence with their fingers turning the water into ropes of diamonds, and she had felt absolutely exhilarated and released. It was done! Wonderful! Perfect. She didn’t have to worry about it anymore, and she was sure in time she’d get to like it very much indeed.

  After they’d swum, he dried her with an old towel, kissed her quickly and buttoned her up clumsily into the silk jacket, getting all the buttons wrong. She’d hoped then he might turn a bit poetic and that they’d stay on the beach and watch the fishermen come home and talk about life, but he said some pals of his were in town and he wanted to have a nightcap with them in the Harbor Bar. They’d ended up in the water splash at the Taj Mahal Hotel.