East of the Sun Page 6

  He stood up in the bath: a tall man with a fine, sensitive face; wary eyes; strong sloping shoulders and the long muscular legs of a horseman. He was far better looking now at twenty-eight than he had been when he first came out to India six years ago. Then, he was a tall boy just one year out of Sandhurst, skinny in spite of all the punishing exercise, the yard drills, the riding, the expeditions in mock deserts with thirty-pound weights on his back, all things designed to take the softness out of young men.

  “Sir, please.” Dinesh stood smiling at the door, a towel in his hand. He’d come to Poona three years ago, a refugee from a flooded farm in Bengal. Jack had first met him quite by chance in the house of a friend in Delhi, and had been struck, as was everybody, by the open radiance of his smile. Dinesh counted this job as his one blinding stroke of good fortune in a life full of tragedies. A sign that his karma, his wheel of fortune, had taken a turn for the better.

  Dinesh and Jack were a team now. The fact that Jack was a young officer with an Indian, rather than a British, Cavalry regiment and could—after quite a slog, for he was not a natural linguist—converse with Dinesh in almost fluent Hindustani was a point of pride with Dinesh, who, like many good servants, was a snob who looked down on the other servants in British regiments who had to speak English to their sahibs. They had been through so much together, some of the finest moments of their lives—the parades, the equitation school in Secunderabad, the yearly camps in the mountains where Dinesh, as thrilled as Jack had been by the adventure, had cooked for him over one of dozens of little fires that sprang up as soon as night had settled. He’d served with a reverence and a passion that both humbled and worried Jack, for the wheel was turning again. All of Jack’s servants—Dinesh and his wash man, his cook and her young daughter—were acutely aware of their various positions in the house; they watched each other like hawks for any changes in the pecking order. The arrival of Rose, no question about it, would ruffle their feathers, and Jack hadn’t found the words to explain that to her yet.

  He walked into his bedroom. In the plain, low-ceilinged room an ancient fan ground away over his single bed with a mosquito net above it. There was a rush mat on the floor and on the bare walls only one faded landscape of the Lake District, left by the last tenant. He’d asked the regiment’s stores for a double bed six weeks ago, but things moved very slowly here; he’d have to remind them again.

  On the bamboo chair in the corner of the room Dinesh had laid out a pair of linen trousers and a white shirt, all beautifully pressed. Against the wall Dinesh had draped a red cloth—it had taken him hours to do it when they’d first arrived—like an upright altar, against which he had hung whistles and spurs, the Sam Browne belt and sword.

  Beside his bed his servant had placed a silver bowl full of Eno’s fruit salts, in case he should need them after a heavy night at the mess and, touchingly, as if to say, “I am going to try and like her,” he’d surrounded the photograph of Rose with a garland of marigolds, as if she were a goddess.

  Now Dinesh came out of the shadows thrown by the hurricane lamp, dried Jack carefully with his towel, helped him put on his underpants, then held open the waistband of his trousers so he could put first one leg in and then the other.

  There was a time when Jack had loathed being dressed like this. The first time it happened he had offended Dinesh by laughing nervously and snatching his clothes away. It was embarrassing, demeaning, like two grown men dressing dolly. Now he rather liked it. The way he explained this to himself was that he now understood so much better what each job meant to each person in this house. But if he was honest, Dinesh’s tender ministrations made him feel less lonely here, and, also, his deepest instincts told him that such cosseting would not last for much longer.

  Everything was changing, everybody knew it. Nobody talked about it much, but it was always there, like the scuffling of rodents under the floorboards. On top of the house, while the masters were still having their bridge nights, their endless cocktail parties, the servants in the basement were burning the furniture.

  Amish, one of the high-class Indians he played polo with, had recently returned from a year reading law at Cambridge University. “And do you know what I most loved about Trinity?” he’d teased Jack in his lazy Home Counties drawl. “Having one of your lot clean my shoes and leave them at my door.”

  Only the week before that, Jack—he’d been in tennis flannels at the time strolling home from the club—had been spat at in the street. He’d stood there in absolute astonishment with another man’s phlegm on his shoulder, completely unsure as to whether to ignore him or strike back.

  He ate supper on his own in the dining room. A nondescript room with mismatched chairs and an annoying light that was belching out paraffin fumes. That would have to be fixed now, too.

  Dinesh brought him a simple kedgeree for supper. Normally, it was one of his favorite meals; tonight he pushed it around his plate, too nervous to eat much.

  He drained a glass of beer, thinking about how contrary a man’s mind could be. Six months ago, when he’d first met Rose, he’d felt an emptiness at the center of this life, which in many ways he loved so much, a hunger for someone to talk to about something other than politics or polo or parties, the staple diet at the officers’ mess and the club. But now, a goblin in his head was whispering to him about the bliss of bachelorhood: not having to tell anybody when you’re coming home from the club, being able to work until midnight when the heat was on, as it had been recently with the riots in the Punjab. The thought that his colonel, who was against his men marrying young, might exclude him from active service was unbearable.

  All of a sudden he stopped thinking, buried his head in his hands, and heaved a shuddering sigh. Why not be honest, at least to himself? It was Sunita who filled his thoughts tonight. Sunita, darling Sunita, who knew nothing about the changes ahead and had done nothing to deserve them.

  “Master, tonga man will come in ten minutes. Do you wish pudding? There is junket, jelly even.”

  “No, Dinesh, but thank you. The kedgeree was very good.” Dinesh took his plate. “I’m just not particularly hungry.”

  Jack went out onto the veranda to smoke a cigarette. The night was hot and humid, unusually hot for this time of the year in Poona—eighty degrees by the glass thermometer tied to the veranda railings.

  The fly screen closed with its usual squeak, the old pie dog that hung around their kitchen door waiting unsuccessfully for food slunk away into the violet shadows, and across the dirt, at the servants’ quarters, he could hear the sounds of laughter and a tabla being played.

  Could she take the heat? Would the dog with its revolting hairless tail scare her? Would the dreary cocktail party he’d been forced to attend last night, hosted by his colonel, have bored her as much as it had bored him? This was the area in which he had started to lose his nerve. He simply didn’t know enough about her.

  “Tonga is here, master.”

  A skinny old horse and tonga waited by the kitchen door. Inside its creaking interior, he sat tensely, feeling like a criminal and wondering why even the prospect of marriage had made certain areas of his life—Sunita, his bar bills, Dinesh’s ministrations, even his habit of liking to lie in the bath for hours when he had a problem to solve—seem like guilty secrets.

  Sunita’s house was in the old part of town—twenty minutes and a world away from his. No distance at all, really. Lots of men carried on with their women after they were married, but he didn’t want to. His own father—a hearty, distant man’s man—had been a cavalry man himself with the Eighth, his hero for years—an explorer, an adventurer, a county-standard cricket player. He, as he often reminded Jack, had known some proper fighting, in his case mostly in Mesopotamia. But he’d also been a philanderer, and the pain his lies had caused had seeped into all their lives like a slow poisoning.

  “All men lie,” Jack’s mother had once told him and his three sisters. “They can’t help themselves.”

  Only three y
ears ago, during one particularly wretched home leave spent at his parents’ house in Oxford, the atmosphere had become so intolerable that his father had eaten his meals at a different time from the rest of the family, in his study, although it may as well have been in the doghouse.

  Three days before Christmas, his mother, red-faced and wild-eyed after too many gins, had explained what the fuss was. His father, it seemed, had a new woman, a young girl he’d set up in digs in Oxford. The girl was about to have his child.

  “Do you know,” his mother had said, her face contorted with rage, “all my life, I’ve never really understood men and never really liked them. Now I do understand them and I hate them.”

  And he’d been horrified and repelled by the pain on her face, hung his head, and felt as guilty as if he had committed the act himself. He didn’t want that for Rose. In old-fashioned language that strangely appealed to him, he had plighted his troth. He knew he had his father’s wildness: loved shooting and riding horses too fast, getting drunk in the mess, making love, but he still prided himself on having a more logical streak. If he was to be married, this wildness must now be curbed. He wanted to make her happy, to earn her trust and keep it.

  So much of his life he already saw through her eyes now. Would she take to India in the way he had? He’d tried to be honest with her about the bone-shriveling heat of summers here, the poverty of the people, the constant moves, the hard life of the army wife.

  But he’d been desperate to woo her at the same time. Desperate in the way a man is who has fallen for a girl like a ton of bricks but who knows he only has a week’s home leave left. A certain hardheaded practicality had crept into his warnings.

  He’d met her first at a deb’s party in London, roped in as a spare man by a friend of his mother. “Decorative,” she’d called him, to his considerable irritation. He’d walked up Park Lane on his own to get there, more nervous and shy than he liked to admit. The London he’d visited during the grim, desperate last days of the war had been covered in wreaths, full of funeral processions, its parks frowsy and unloved. This new London had shining little cars buzzing up and down Park Lane, frightening the horses. The girls had horrible new hairstyles and blew smoke in your face.

  Partly to spare him from the miserable atmosphere at home, his mother had kept on getting her friends to ask him to parties, but the parties had thrown him. At one, he’d seen a couple openly copulating on top of a pile of overcoats in the spare room and had backed out scarlet with embarrassment and wanting to punch both of them for making a spectacle of themselves. At another, bewildered by a group of excited people sniffing up a pile of powder, he’d caused laughter by asking what they were doing, and been told rudely, “It’s naughty salt, you ignoramus. Cocaine.”

  But Rose. She wasn’t like that. At the Savile Club, where he’d stood in his dinner jacket underneath the ceiling painted with fat cherubs, she’d appeared beside him, endearingly gawky in an evening dress that was too old and slightly too big for her, but unmistakably a beauty with her silky blond hair and sweet smile. The band had started to play a fox-trot and she’d raised her eyebrows slightly and smiled at him.

  “Dance with me,” he’d said, and she’d stepped into his arms. They’d bellowed at each other over the music for a hopeless few minutes during which he’d stepped on her toes.

  “Do you have a chaperone here?” he’d asked her after several dances.

  “I do,” she said with her delicious smile, “but unfortunately she’s downstairs playing bridge.”

  “Have you seen the pictures downstairs?” he said. “They have some wonderful portraits in the reading room.”

  The oldest and corniest line in the world, but she’d said, with sweet gravity, “No, I haven’t, but I’d love to see them.”

  And it was there, in the soft glow of the reading room, beneath a picture of a man wrestling with wild-eyed foaming horses, that he’d simply taken her in his arms and kissed her soft lips, feeling at first a shy resistance, a stiffening in her arms, and then her yielding.

  “Um,” she’d licked her lips thoughtfully, like a child tasting the last remnants of a sweet, “I don’t think I’ve been kissed before—not like that.”

  And it was at that moment, with this divine, slim, fresh young creature in his arms, smelling of Devonshire violets, the same scent his mother used, that he thought of Sunita, his mistress, and how much he owed her. She’d taught him everything. After three lonely years of bachelorhood in the mofussil, he’d gone to her like a bull in rut, and she’d bathed him and oiled him, slowed him down. Teasing and laughter had also gone into it, a sense that lovemaking could be practiced and refined as well as sublime abandonment. He’d been like a man trying to play a symphony on a penny flute; she’d given him the whole orchestra.

  They’d reached her street: a row of battered terraced houses with wrought-iron balconies that had seen better days. The same groups of rickshaw men were gossiping on the corner, waiting for their fares, and, as usual, she’d left a candle burning for him outside her door. Inside her room, she had a glass-fronted cabinet where all the little presents he’d given her—a silver box from a London antiques market, a bottle of scent, a scarf—were proudly displayed. But tonight, in his pocket, he had a check to give her after his speech, a donation he could ill afford, toward her future. His heart sank as he walked up the stairs. For the first time in her life she might feel like a prostitute. He felt like a brute, but he had to do it. Jack Chandler was about to be married.

  Chapter Nine

  Gibraltar

  Mr. and Mrs. Percival Wetherby

  Park House

  Nr. Middle Wallop

  Hampshire

  October 21, 1928

  Darling Daddy and Mummy,

  We arrive in Gibraltar in about an hour’s time, so will try and post this then.

  I’ve been lying in my bunk—Tor is still asleep—reading my Spanish phrase book, and have just read this: Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto. (Thanks be to life, which has given me so much.) Isn’t that lovely? It made me think about all the splendid things you have given me: not just Park House as a place to grow up, but the ponies, the dogs, the camping trips, you and all the wonderful times we have had together.

  I hope you are not too sad at not having your Froggie at home, but rest assured she is excited about all that lies ahead, and Tor and I are having the most balloon times.

  There are so many nice people in first class, and also, don’t worry about Miss Holloway being so young. She is very kind and keeps a good eye on us and knows India like the back of her hand because she grew up there. We are also very spoiled by our cabin steward, Suday. I don’t know why people talk down to natives. I have nothing against them at all, and he is perfectly sweet.

  Every night there are parties or entertainments planned and supervised, and we have found it easy to join in. One of our new best friends is Nigel, who has a junior post in the civil service somewhere in the west of India; he is fairly quiet, but very clever and has a good sense of humor. Unlike most people on the Kaisar he is sick at heart at having to go back to India because he’s done four years there in a remote province and wants to stay home. Last year he said a local man came to him with his wife’s ear wrapped up in a piece of newspaper. He had cut it off in a jealous rage, but now he had forgiven her and was wondering if Nigel could think of any way of putting it back! The other bods on board are tea planters, army officers, and so on, also quite a few children and their ayahs.

  We’ve also met a friend of Mrs. Mallinson’s, Jane Burrell (rather horsey and noisy) and her three friends. Frank, the ship’s junior doctor, is a very good egg. He’s working his passage to India so he can do some research out there on some sort of malaria, can’t remember what, but a kind I hadn’t heard of. He’s also keeping an eye on us and now tells us lots of gruesome things about suicides at sea and doing operations during force-nine gales. He is great fun and very good-looking. I think Tor has her eye on him!


  Later.

  Sorry, didn’t finish! Will post in Malta.

  A party of eight of us went ashore, so there were lots of people to keep an eye on us. Frank (the doctor) knew a respectable restaurant overlooking the harbor with sawdust on the floor and a fat senorita who waddled around in her sandals.

  For lunch we had some sort of fish, caught that morning, and prawns, then she laid out three puddings of such deliciousness I thought I was dreaming. (Much more of this and I shall simply waddle down the aisle. Food is an obsession on board. There are about fifty dishes on the menu each night.) Frank made us laugh by telling us a story about one Fishing Fleet girl who got so fat on board that when she arrived in India her new husband didn’t recognize her.

  It was almost dark by the time we got out and Tor and I and assorted bods from the ship walked down toward the harbor and the sight of it all lit up and with music wafting out and so much for me to look forward to made me feel how wonderful it was to be alive.

  Mummy, darling, help, please. I’ve been reading my wedding etiquette book and getting into a fizz. For example, they say that speeches are out of fashion but if someone must prepare a toast it should be some old family friend. Who should I ask? I hardly know Ci Ci Mallinson so it seems rather forward. Could you write to Jack and ask? Also is it de rigueur in India to have a wedding breakfast? Do you think I should wear the pink silk georgette to that, or is it a bit much?