East of the Sun Page 5

  She’s petrified, she thought. And why not?

  “For some, this could turn out to be a voyage into nightmare: it was vessels like these that took those who were hacked to death in Cawnpore out to India. Others will discover what it is like to want to die of heat; or they may be shot at, or have their children die of tropical diseases or taken away from them at an early age and educated half a world away.”

  Viva put her pen down. This, of course, would be the natural moment to tell them about her own father’s death. Or not. Experience had taught her that telling meant enduring other people’s moistly sympathetic looks, their embarrassment, the long accounts of other people they knew who’d lost people abroad, or, worst of all, attempts to think of some uplifting moral that would make sense of it all. And besides, the car-crash story now tripped off her tongue so easily it felt almost real.

  “And next, there are women like myself: single women with no sahib and no wish for one, who love India and like to work. You see, nobody ever really writes about them—the governesses, the schoolteachers, the chaperones—but we have our tales to tell, too.”

  “True, all like to work?????” she scribbled to herself. Well, it would do for now. She was about to describe their plumage, which in her case was quite atypical. Now she’d returned the woolly tweeds to Mrs. Driver, she was back in her own clothes—that morning, a scarlet silk dress, a dark ballet top left over from school, and a barbaric-looking silver necklace inherited from her mother.

  All of a sudden, her mouth filled with liquid and she put her pen down as the floor rose and fell along with her stomach. She glanced at the leaping room, its lamps and green leather desks—when did leather ever smell so sickening?—to see how the other passengers were doing. The walls creaked as she stood up. How hot-making! Not thirty-six hours out from Tilbury and she was going to be sick.

  “Excuse me, madam.” A waiter appeared with a gray and pink box and a glass of water.

  Oh no! Was it that obvious? She sat back with her eyes closed, trying not to feel the suck and swell of the waves. Breathe! Breathe! She tried not to listen to the faint tinkle of the glasses or the stupid laughter of people who thought rough weather was funny or the woman in the booth next to her who was asking for “a plate of egg sandwiches and some Earl Grey.” Egg sandwiches, uuggggh, how disgusting.

  “Missy.” The waiter stood at the door. He smiled kindly at her as she stumbled out onto the deck and into the deafening boom of the waves.

  “Thank you. I’m fine, thank you.”

  She rested her forehead on the railings and stayed there until she felt slightly better. The phrase she had been about to write swam mockingly in her head, the words dancingly disconnected. “You see I was not made for marriage, I was born with a knapsack on my back.”

  The steward brought her a deck chair and a rug. When she was sitting down, she thought, briefly, about Ottaline Renouf, one of her heroines, who’d gone halfway around the world in an eccentric variety of crafts: Danish fishing boats, banana boats, trawlers, Turkish caïques, never once mentioning seasickness. What if she wasn’t strong enough for this? What would that mean?

  By the time she stood up the sky was one huge gray and yellow bruise over the still-rearing waves. Night was falling and the lights had gone on. From the ship she could hear laughter and faint arpeggios of piano music rising and falling. How tinny it sounded against the animal roars of the waves.

  When she looked up again, she saw Guy Glover sitting on a deck chair behind a glass screen that sheltered him from the worst of the wind. He was wearing his black overcoat and smoking a cigarette. When he saw her looking at him, he held her gaze for a moment and raised his cigarette to his mouth. The look in his eye said Try and stop me. He inhaled deeply and exhaled, making a fishy shape with his lips as the wind blew his smoke ring away. He ground the cigarette under his heel and sauntered over to her. Pathetic, she thought, in his too large coat, trying hard to be what? Perhaps Valentino in The Sheik, complete with cape and dagger in boot, or maybe a rake on his first night at sea trying to decide which virgin to take to bed.

  He’s just a child, she tried to reassure herself, for the sight of him had made her anxious again, a foolish self-conscious child. Nothing to be frightened of.

  She’d shared a similar background, and her current thinking about him went as follows: like many boys of his class and background, he’d been turfed from the nest too young. Without parents on hand, or, in his case, siblings to chivvy him along, he’d become a permanent defensive guest, unsure of his welcome, uneasy in his skin. Underneath the studied indifference, the coldness, there was, she was almost certain of it, a boy hungry for love, angry about having to ask for it. She should at least try to understand him even if she couldn’t like him.

  “I meant to tell you,” he shouted over the waves, “there’s some people on board my parents want me to say hello to. The Ramsbottoms from Lucknow. They’ve asked us for a drink in the music room tomorrow night. I’d like you to come, too.”

  Well, well, well, he’d made one unsolicited remark to her.

  “Of course,” she said. “Perhaps you and I and the girls can have dinner together at the early sitting first. We can all get to know each other.”

  As she said this, she wondered again whether she should have warned the girls to lock their cabin, just in case Guy was still a little on the light-fingered side.

  He looked startled. “I’d rather not do that,” he said. “I don’t want to eat with other people.”

  “Why not?”

  He mumbled something that the waves drowned out.

  “I can’t hear you,” she shouted.

  “My parents said we’d be eating alone,” he shouted so hectically that she took a step back.

  “Shall we talk about this later?” She felt too sick to lock horns with him now, or to think about food for that matter, and the girls were hardly going to mind.

  “Of course.” He beamed his blank and insulting smile and shouted something else about parents that was swept away by the wind. He was going to be a handful; there was no doubt about it.

  After this exchange, Viva went down to the cabin she was sharing with a Miss Snow, a whispery and apologetic schoolteacher who was going back to teach in a school near Cochin. The two had come to this arrangement in order to save money, but hadn’t yet exchanged more than a handful of words.

  Miss Snow was asleep under a mound of bedclothes with a green pail underneath her bed. Viva put a damp flannel on her own head and lay down on her bunk and thought about Guy again and all the sympathetic things she’d thought about him earlier flew out of her mind. The scary thing was, she thought, that Guy Glover was her creature now, her responsibility and no doubt her punishment for the lies she’d told.

  A wave of anxiety swept over her. Why in God’s name had she taken all this on, particularly at a time when she had, at last, achieved a kind of independence?

  It couldn’t surely just be for the chance to open that wretched trunk—Mrs. Waghorn couldn’t have been more frank about the chances of her finding anything in it—but she had flung her life onto this slender thread. Why?

  She thought back almost longingly to her basement flat in Nevern Square, not an abode of bliss, to be sure, with its gas ring and narrow bed, but a home nevertheless.

  Her bathroom, shared with an elderly librarian and a woman who had an unusual number of gentleman callers, was behind a curtain in the hallway. It had a rough green bath, and was full of damp and dripping stockings and odd ends of slimy soap and a rusting green boiler called the Winterbourne, which, when you touched its innards with a match, exploded like a volcano for three scorching minutes and then went achingly cold.

  In winter she’d slept in her liberty bodice and a variety of jumpers; her blood, it seemed, had been thin ever since India. She’d sallied forth each morning for a variety of temporary jobs, going to work in the same foggy darkness in which she came home.

  An older person might have seen nothin
g but drudgery in this existence, but for her, young and determined to survive her tragedies, independence had been a kind of drug. No more school dorms, no more spare rooms where relatives had to move things around to fit her in. This room was hers. In a state of childish excitement, she painted its walls a pale pink—she had in her mind the kind of dusty pinks she remembered from houses in India—but the effect was more of calamine lotion.

  On a lumpy single bed near the boarded-up fire, she’d put her only real heirloom, an exquisite patchwork quilt, made up of sari fabrics in jewel-like colors: bright greens and yellows, pinks and blues, with a border embroidered with fishes and birds. It had once been on her parents’ bed in Simla, and in their other houses in Nepal and Kashmir, and the houseboat in Srinagar. She had a brass lamp, a few kitchen utensils hidden under the bed (“No kitchen privileges,” said the sign in the hall), boxes and boxes of books and typing paper and a Remington typewriter perched on a packing case. The secretarial course was only a means to an end. What she wanted more than anything in the world was to be a writer. After work each night, she changed into some warm clothes, lit up one of the three Abdullah cigarettes she allowed herself each day, touched her little green glass statue of Ganesh—Indian god of writers, among other things—and set to work.

  She found happiness in that room, hearing the clack of her typewriter and the occasional whoomph of the Winterbourne, the last lavatory chain being pulled. Around midnight, stiff and yawning, she undressed for bed, and as soon as her head hit the pillow, fell dead asleep.

  And then, via the agency she did temporary typing for, she was sent to work for Mrs. Nancy Driver, who was the real thing: a prolific writer of romances, two of them set in India, where her husband, now dead, had been a major in the Indian Cavalry. Mrs. Driver, who spent much of her day furiously typing in a camel-haired dressing gown, might have seemed at first, with her Eton crop and fierce pouncing style of conversation, like an unlikely fairy godmother, but that was what she’d been.

  She and Viva had settled into a routine together. At eleven-thirty, when Mrs. Driver had bathed and eaten her breakfast, she wrote furiously in longhand for an hour or so while Viva dealt inexpertly with her correspondence. After lunch, while her employer relaxed with another glass of sherry and a cheroot, Viva would type up the morning’s work and, if a large red cross was in the margin, she was allowed to add what were called “the spoony bits.” Mrs. Driver was convinced, quite wrongly, that Viva, being young and good-looking, was having lots of exciting romances.

  It was Mrs. Driver who subscribed to the magazine Criterion, and who first introduced her to the poetry of T. S. Eliot. “Listen to this! Listen to this!” She’d struck a dramatic pose with her cheroot still smoldering between her fingers and her eyes closed, declaiming:

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  And it was in this flat, typing and proofreading and drinking coffee, that it gradually dawned on Viva that as far as being a writer was concerned, she was in kindergarten. Before, she would bash out her stories and then, when she came to the last full stop, send them out. Now, she watched how hard Mrs. Driver struggled to find “the right way in,” how she paid close attention to the smallest and oddest things, often writing about them in her many notebooks; how she talked her stories out loud when she got stuck, how she’d leave them in drawers for several months to mature.

  “There is no magic recipe,” her employer said. “Each one cooks in its own way.”

  When Viva, shaking with nerves, told Mrs. Driver over sherry one morning that she had dreams herself of writing some stories, Mrs. Driver had been kind but pragmatic. She told her if she was serious and needed to earn money immediately (for Viva had been unusually frank about her dire financial straits), she should try and sell to women’s magazines like Woman’s Life and The Lady, the kind of gentle romances they published on a regular basis.

  “Awful tripe,” Mrs. Driver had warned. “And you will write from your own heart eventually, but it will get you started and give you some confidence.”

  She’d showed her how to prune her stories ruthlessly (“Sharpen, lighten, tighten,” she’d written all over her margins) and in the last six months, Viva had penned thirteen stories in which a variety of granite-jawed heroes seized women of the blond, helpless, and dim variety. Back had come ten rejection slips but three had been published.

  And oh, the impossible elation of that first moment of hearing that her first story had been accepted. She’d got the letter after work on a wet November evening, and run around Nevern Square on her own in the dark. She’d been so sure then—ridiculously sure in retrospect—that this was a turning point and from now on she would be able to survive by her pen. No more dreary jobs, or school dorms, no more spare rooms. She was young, she was healthy, she could just about afford the three guineas a week for her flat, and whoopee, she was now going to be a writer.

  So why, with everything at last moving in the right direction, had she decided to change all her plans? Surely not because some old girl had written to her out of the blue to say she had a trunk belonging to Viva’s parents. Or was all that just an excuse to get back to India, which, bizarrely, when you thought about everything that had happened to her there, she still missed—a permanent ache as if some vital organ had been removed.

  Miss Snow was still asleep, snoring with a puttering sound and occasionally moaning as though she was wrestling with her own demons. When she sat up suddenly, Viva’s typewriter fell with a clunk onto the floor, followed by a ream of loose paper.

  Kneeling to pick up her scattered pages, Viva saw navy blue water rushing past her porthole in coils like a snake. She went to the basin and washed her face. There was an hour and a half before the first sitting for dinner; she was determined to bash out a first draft of her article before she ate. She was still mulling over the title, “The Fishing Fleet” or perhaps “The Price of a Husband in India.” One day, even the memory of it would make her burn with shame.

  Chapter Eight

  Poona

  “Master,” Jack Chandler’s bearer called softly through the bathroom door. “Wake up, please, time is marching. Jaldi!”

  “I’m not asleep, Dinesh,” Jack Chandler called back, “I’m thinking.”

  He’d been lying in the bath for almost an hour. It was dark now; the new electric lights were still more off than on. His eyes were closed as he brooded about marriage and why men told lies, and Sunita, to whom he must soon say good-bye.

  Normally, this was a favorite time of the day, when he peeled off clothes that smelled satisfactorily of horse sweat and stepped into warm water, with a whiskey mixed just the way he liked it, and allowed himself the luxury of floating like an almost inanimate sea creature before Dinesh dressed him and he went to the club. But tonight, he was a bundle of nerves. That afternoon, he’d been to the dusty cantonment church to talk to the vicar, a faded uninspiring man, about arrangements for his marriage in four weeks’ time. He’d written down all the details on a piece of paper—Miss Rose Wetherby, spinster, of Park House, Middle Wallop, Hampshire—but the vicar had informed him that you didn’t need banns to get married in India, so many people, he had implied without actually saying it, did it on the spur of the moment here. And this exchange had further rattled Jack who was, generally speaking, a man with a logical brain who thought things through.

  “Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted” was one of the rules he’d lived his life by. A sergeant major had bellowed it out to his class of gawky recruits at Sandhurst in the first week of their terrifying induction there, and it had saved his life more than once since then. So why, well, it was too late to bother about this now, but why had he recklessly ignored this, jumped in eyes closed, in the matter of finding a new wife?

  He’d set himself the task of writing to Rose earlier that night and posting it to her in Por
t Said, where her ship would arrive in twelve days’ time by his calculations.

  “My dearest Rose,” he’d written. “Today I went to the church where we are to be married and—” He had crumpled up the letter, irritated with the banality of his thoughts and for not having the right words at a time when, surely, they should be tumbling out.

  But more and more, he found communications with her stilted, like a grown-up and more fateful version of the letters they had been forced to write during Sunday-morning sessions at his English boarding school. The excitement of their earlier letters had petered out into a dull exchange of plans beefed up with endearments—my own little fiancée, my soon-to-be darling wife—which now seemed to him artificial, if not downright overfamiliar.

  He owed Rose’s mother a letter, too. They’d met twice, the first time at an Easter party at her house, where a dozen random relatives covertly inspected him and congratulated him on his sudden engagement, and talked a lot of rot about India. Now Mrs. Wetherby had written him several letters, full of baffling bits of advice about the wedding, and, last week, to tell him that Rose’s father had come down with a bad case of bronchitis after her ship had sailed. “But probably better to keep this to ourselves,” she’d written. “They are very close and she has so much on her plate.” For some reason, the words “on her plate” had annoyed him, too, making him feel as though she regarded him as some sort of unpleasant green vegetable that would soon have to be faced and gobbled down. And if he was such an unknown quantity, why had these two sensible, fond people let the marriage go ahead? In certain moods he almost blamed them for it.