East of the Sun (31 page)

Ootacamund

I
t rained heavily on the night before they arrived, and as the tonga carrying Tor and Viva clip-clopped up the steep hill that led to the Woodbriar Hotel, the ground was strewn with dashed rose petals and the air smelled of roses and wet grass. They breathed in deeply. After twenty-four hours on the train, their limbs ached and it was bliss, they agreed, to feel almost cold again.

At the end of a pine avenue, they climbed toward a house on stilts that seemed to float in mist on the edge of a hill. A hazy figure stood up on the veranda and began to wave frantically.

“Rose!” shouted Tor. She leaped from the tonga and, narrowly avoiding the horse, ran up the drive, up the stairs, and then flung her arms around her friend.

“Darling Rose.” She beamed, hugging her hard. “Look at you! You’re vast!”

A slight exaggeration this, as Rose’s mound was small and neat and hardly showed under her blue smock.

“Oh, Tor.” Rose squeezed her eyes shut and hugged her again. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“Viva’s been horrid to me,” Tor complained as they walked arm in arm into the house. “Not only did she make me travel third class, but she forced me to listen to this girl who sang like a gnat for three hours, I swear. And it was boiling and everybody smelled.”

“How dare you be nasty to my friend,” said Rose, giving Viva a hug. “And stop that horrid noise,” she said to Tor, who was making her own gnat sounds, “and come inside and have some tea. You’re going to love this place.”

The hotel’s owners, Mrs. Jane Stephenson and her friend Bunty Jackson, were the merry widows of army officers. Lean and vigorous, they bred Welsh mountain ponies, adored their garden, and served up the kind of food—shepherd’s pies and rhubarb fools—that made their mainly British clientele misty-eyed with nostalgia. In the sitting room there were comfortably dilapidated chintz sofas set beside roaring fires, mildewed copies of
Country Life
resting on antique tables, and, on the walls, Stubbs’s prints and photographs of favorite dogs and “the girls” riding winners.

Over coffee on the veranda, Rose told them she had got a lift up to Ooty from a friend of Jack’s, a Colonel Carstairs and his wife. Both of them had ticked her off for traveling in her condition. “‘You’re looking frightfully peaky, dear,’” Rose mimicked with a gentle smile. Rose was never mean about people.

“Nosy old biddy,” said Tor.

But Viva thought that Rose looked peaky, too. There were dark circles under those formerly cloudless blue eyes. She also looked older in some way that Viva found hard to define, more wary.

“Did Jack mind you coming?” she asked. After all, it was not exactly normal for a man to allow a wife in this condition
to travel alone in India, which was probably why the Carstairs’s eyebrows had been raised.

“I don’t think he minded.” Rose fiddled with her biscuit. “The heat in Poona has been frightful, and he’s been so busy, and this really is my last…well, it’s just so lovely to be here.”

There was a silence. Rose’s cane chair squeaked as she moved. “Oh, complete change of subject, but I must tell you a terrible story that Jane told me last night about dogs,” she said in a brighter voice.

Rose’s story was about a local maharajah, rich and spoiled, who went every year to England to buy the champion of the Crufts dog show. Once back in the fearsome heat of his castle in Madras they were kept like discarded teddy bears in a filthy dungeon underneath the house. A friend of Jane’s had been to lunch at the palace a few weeks ago and the dogs had been dragged blinking into the sunlight, thin and with their coats matted. When one of them had been made to “die for the queen,” she’d felt like crying.

While Viva and Tor expressed shock, Bunty strode in wearing a tweed hacking jacket and stood with her legs apart like a young subaltern. “It’s absolutely true,” she said. “I’m afraid it’s a case of monkey see, monkey want. You see, they don’t have the experience with animals,” she said.

“Some do surely,” Viva protested.

“Almost none of them.” Bunty closed the subject. “Completely different attitude to ours, I’m afraid.”

Jane then asked if they’d mind ordering their supper in advance—they were doing
She Stoops to Conquer
at the club and there was a seven o’clock rehearsal. Dinner would be set up for them in a private room where they could talk in peace. Would a mulligatawny soup, local trout, a dish of pommes dauphinoise, and apple amber for pudding fit the bill?

“That sounds delicious,” Rose said politely. “But where are the other guests?”

“Oh, only four this week, and all either fishing or riding,” said Jane. “We’re very small here, and you’ll hardly be aware of them, which reminds me—there’s something I’ve been meaning to show you.” She disappeared toward the smoking lounge, returning a few moments later with a green leather visitors’ book in her hands.

“One of our guests last week said he was a friend of yours, look.” She pointed at a childishly round signature, halfway down the page. “Oh, hang on—” One of her servants had called her to say that her horse was ready. “If I don’t ride now, it will be too late. D’you mind?”

“Good Lord,” a lock of Rose’s blond hair fell over the book, “how odd.”

“Wonderful views, excellent fare. I shall return. Guy Glover” he’d written in the comments column. He’d left an untidy blot to the right of it.

Viva felt a coldness in the pit of her stomach.

“What in the hell was he doing here?” she murmured, looking toward Tor.

“Well, don’t blame me,” Tor said defensively, “I mean, how odd is it really? Lots of people come here when the weather’s hot. Ci Ci told me she’d been here.”

“I’m not blaming you,” said Viva, although she was still irritated.

“Has he tried to contact you again?” Tor asked.

“No,” said Viva shortly.

She heard Tor ask Rose for another scone, the scrapings of curtains being closed upstairs. It would be dark soon outside.

“I expect he was up here doing some photography,” she said casually to both of them.

She was trying to remember exactly how much they had been told about the incident on the ship, about the police. Her instinct then and now had been to protect them.

“He only stayed for a few days,” said Tor. “But what difference would it have made if he’d stayed longer?”

“None whatsoever.” Viva forced a smile. Tor was right, not everything had to mean something.

After supper, it was arranged that Viva should take the cottage—a small, attractively furnished guest room separate from the house—and that Tor and Rose would share a room on the first floor in the main part of the house. After Viva went to bed, Tor and Rose went upstairs to their room. When they’d washed and put on their nightdresses, Rose went to the window and opened the shutters.

“Look,” she said.

The rain had ceased and a pale moon had stopped between their muslin curtains; it hung there in a skein of mist.

“Do you remember,” said Rose, “how we were once completely convinced that there was a man in the moon?”

“What halfwits we were.” Tor poked her in the ribs. She wasn’t in the mood to be wistful.

Rose’s bed was near the window and had been made up with beautiful crisp linen sheets. They both got into it, and opened the shutters wide so they could see the outlines of the hills, vast and purple, in the distance. The rain was falling with a gentle shushing sound outside the window, and they could smell the faint lemon and honey of the old-fashioned roses that had been put on their bedside table.

Rose closed her eyes and pulled her eiderdown up over her stomach.

“Close your eyes, Tor,” she murmured, “and tell me we’re at home. Mrs. Pludd will be up any minute now with cocoa. Copper is munching hay in the field outside.”

Tor shut her eyes obligingly, but she didn’t like the game.

“Perfect, Rose,” she said. “All those lovely walks up to your
waist in mud, ice on your washstand water in the morning, chilblains.”

But then she felt mean. Rose was entitled to feel homesick with a baby on the way and other things, for she’d confided over supper that her mother had written to tell her that her father had had a chest infection and was “not feeling one hundred percent,” which, in Wetherby speak, meant he was practically at death’s door. It was more than likely that Rose would not see him again.

“Do you miss it very much, Rose?” In the glow of the lamplight, she could see the fluff of baby hair at Rose’s temples, her flawless skin. She looked too young to be having a baby.

“Sometimes.” When Rose squeezed her eyes shut, the golden feathers of her eyebrows turned downward. “But I suppose there are days when everybody hates it here: the heat, the stinks, the club.”

This from Rose who never complained.

Tor fiddled with the charms on Rose’s bracelets: the gold fish, the lucky horse, her tiny St. Christopher.

“Do you remember you wore this on the night we sent Queen Mary to sleep?”

This was the way they always described their presentation at court.

Rose was smiling. “I was
so
nervous,” she said. “Do you remember Mummy gave us champagne for the first time and then the charms in the red leather box? For some reason they thrilled me more than anything. I remember her saying, ‘This was Granny’s, now it’s yours.’ It felt like being given the keys to the kingdom.”

“Like the beginning of everything.” Tor undid the little gold catch and the bracelet fell with a clunk in the dish on the bedside table. “Do you remember how grown-up we felt having our own taxi to Buckingham Palace, and all those hours getting dressed? And then, what a joke: old meat pies and queu
ing for two hours in the pouring rain and finally! The Queen! Practically in a coma, the poor woman was so bored by us.”

“Did you ever wear your dress again?” said Rose.

“Don’t,” said Tor. “I looked like a tent in mine: all that hideous satin and that dusty tiara. How stupid it seems now. It almost bankrupted my parents, as my mother has never ceased to remind me. What was the point of it, Rose?”

“No point,” said Rose, and then more diplomatically, “but it was sweet of our parents to try.”

“Well, hang on a sec.” Tor turned to look at her. “Didn’t you at least meet Jack at one of the parties?”

“Oh yes, Jack,” said Rose. She shifted the eiderdown off her stomach. “I met Jack.”

The curve of her belly moved as she turned over.

“Is everything all right, Rose?” Tor asked.

“Fine,” said Rose.

“It must be jolly hot having a baby,” Tor said helpfully.

“It is hot sometimes.” Tor heard the rustle of a handkerchief. “It’s…odd when you feel it moving.”

“Is that exciting?”

“Yes.”

Tor inwardly rolled her eyes. Why would Rose never say when she was upset about something?

There was a sound outside the window, an almost human shriek. Tor shivered. “What on earth was that?”

“Monkeys.” Rose held her hand. “Jane says there’s a family of them in the trees near the tennis court. They’re huge and gray and look like people, you know.”

“Rose,” Tor tried again, “look, I know we’ve agreed not to talk about this, but I’m going home very,
very
soon now. When I see your mother, what do you want me to say about you?”

“Only tell her good things.” Rose’s voice came hesitantly through the dark. “Say I’m having a balloon time, that the baby is fine, that Jack is…that Jack is fine. But do, if you can, find
out the truth about Daddy. I know this chest thing is much more serious than they’re letting on.”

“Why do people skate round things so in letters home?”

“I don’t know,” said Rose. “I don’t even know what the truth is yet.”

“Please tell me what’s wrong, Rose.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m married now and you can’t just blab. It’s not fair.” Rose’s voice had risen. “It’s not fair to the person you’re married to: you only hear one side of the story.”

Tor flopped back on her pillow. This was exhausting. Her dearest, most loved friend. When she put her arm around her, Rose clasped her hand hard.

“Sorry if I seem nosy,” Tor said.

“Not nosy,” said Rose in a muffled voice. She’d turned her back to Tor. “You’re the best friend ever.”

Tor waited again, but nothing, and then Rose fell asleep.

Tor lay awake for the next few hours with her eyes open, listening to the wind and the monkey sounds and Rose’s calm, even breaths.

She had a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, like when you’re swimming and you want to put your feet down on something solid, but the water’s deeper than you think and there’s nothing there.

T
he following morning Jane Stephenson strolled in after breakfast, a Pekinese dog under her arm, and suggested they might have a picnic that day at Pykara Lake. They were very welcome to take her tonga.

“Is the pony quiet?” Rose asked anxiously.

“Bombproof,” said their hostess.

“Mind you,” she couldn’t help adding, “I do think your husband’s brave letting you come away like this.”

Tor, who was sitting behind Jane tucking into toast, rolled her huge eyes at this and sagged in her chair.

“Isn’t he?” said Rose pleasantly.

When Viva, Tor, and Rose stepped into the morning sun after breakfast, it was dazzling: every leaf and flower seemed to have been rinsed clean by the rains the night before and the air was full of birdsong.

“Do you love birds as we do?” Bunty had followed them out of the house with a large, well-thumbed book. “If so, you are in for
such
a treat: the Kashmiri flycatcher, the blue robin,
the laughing thrush—he’s a frightfully noisy fellow, you’ll hear him chuckling. Do take these.”

The bird book and a pair of binoculars were thrust into Rose’s hands, and then their tonga arrived, pulled by a smart Welsh mountain pony that Bunty said she had bottle-fed when its mother died.

Their driver, a handsome fellow in crimson turban and white puttees, salaamed them into their little carriage. A touch of the whip on the pony’s fat little bottom and they flew down a winding road overlooking blue hills and lakes, and a vast expanse of blue sky beyond.

Tor was being silly with the binoculars: “I say,” she said, in Bunty tones, “is that the slatyback forktail? By jove, it is!” and then hearing them laugh, their driver turned around and started to sing them some wobbly songs that he said the memsahibs would enjoy, and they all joined in for a while. Viva even knew some of the words—she’d sung them with her children—which amazed and pleased the driver.

At lunchtime, their driver found them a fine picnic spot under a group of banyan trees overlooking the hills. As soon as they sat down, a group of large gray monkeys, hard-eyed and muscular, swung down from the upper branches of the trees and inspected them minutely.

Tor stood up and stared right back.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here today,” she said in the tones of their ex-headmistress, Miss Iris Wykham-Jones. “Well, from now on, no fleas whatsoever to be eaten from armpits during assembly. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

A monkey furled back its lip and screeched.

“No staring. No bottom washing in public!”

“Don’t upset it,” Rose begged. “Tor, please, that’s not funny. I hate them.”

“Calmness, Rose,” said Tor, “they’re much more frightened of us than we are of them.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” Tor admitted. “It’s one of those things people say.”

The driver had leaped to his feet at the monkey’s cry. He showed his white teeth to the girls, bashed the tree with his stick, and laughed heartily as the monkeys fled.

“Hanuman, the monkey god,” Viva said, “is supposed to be good at answering prayers.”

But Rose still looked pale. “They’re horrible,” she said, “I really do hate them.”

“All gone now,” said Tor, rolling out a tartan rug and opening the picnic hamper. “So let’s eat—I’m starving as usual.”

They unpacked freshly made rolls packed in blue-and-white-checked napkins, thin slices of roast beef, curried eggs, fresh mangoes, a large bouncy Victoria sponge, and homemade lemonade carefully wrapped in pages from the
Ootacamund Times
so it didn’t drip.

“This is the best picnic I’ve ever had,” Tor said between mouthfuls of her sandwich. “By the way, why did our driver show you that terrifying dagger in his belt, Viva?”

“To protect us from the
badmash,
the villains, on these roads. But we’re safe, or so he says. This is Snooty Ooty after all and the locals like English people.”

“Just what they thought at Amritsar,” joked Tor, “before they sliced off their heads.”

Viva said, “They didn’t slice off their heads, they—”

“Don’t talk about it,” Rose said suddenly. “I’m sick of that sort of talk. It goes on all the time now in Poona.”

“You’re right, Rose,” Tor poured the lemonade, “no gloomy talk on a what-the-hell day, so don’t mention ships or home or my mother. Let’s drink to us. To the
bishi
.”

At the clink of their glasses a huge gray monkey swung down to the lower branches of the tree, his eyes flirting at them
through the foliage. He swung to another branch where he furled back his lip and laughed at them silently.

“Horrible.” Rose froze. “My doctor tells me they snatch babies.”

She was close to tears and Tor felt worried. She’d never seen Rose so jumpy and she wished she knew why.

After they’d eaten, Viva took out her journal and started to scribble.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Viva,” Tor teased, “put that thing down and behave like a normal person for once.”

Viva hardly heard her. In the tonga, she’d been thinking about Talika; how, on the night before she’d left Bombay, Talika, perhaps fearful that Viva wouldn’t come back, had come into the office on some pretext or other, hauled her skinny little body up into the chair opposite Viva’s and asked her if, when she came back, they could go out into the streets again and try and find her mother.

Viva had said, “We’ll try.” But her heart had sunk to her boots. Daisy had already tried and failed several times.

Talika had talked about her mother, “because I am forgetting her,” she’d said, fixing her coal-black eyes on Viva.

She showed her a picture she’d drawn of a shack, surrounded by slashes of rain.

“
My house,
” she said. There were three stick figures outside it with pots on their heads. “This is the place where my mamji cooked chapattis.” She’d pointed to a little fire on the ground. “This is me helping her. There’s my grandmother.” She pointed to a horizontal figure on a charpoy. “I am making dhal for her.”

Her eyes were clouded with sadness as she recalled these memories. “They’re my
bhoot kal.
” She’d folded up the piece of paper and put it in her dress pocket.

“What does
bhoot kal
mean?” Viva asked Daisy later.

“Ghost time,” Daisy had said.

Viva stopped writing for a few moments. The hills in the distance, the taste of lemonade in her mouth, reminding her of one vague strand of memory, like a gap in the mist, elusive, upsetting, through which she saw another tree of monkeys, a woman frightened of them, English voices raised, one laughing, one scared.

A thought broke through like a wrecking ball: her own mother was crying in the middle of a family picnic. Why did her father lead her away outside the rim of trees? Was he telling her off? Was he comforting her? Why did it hurt to think of these things?

“Viva.” Tor snatched away her pencil. “You’re looking serious. Have some of this.” She put a piece of cake in her hand.

Viva put a piece in her mouth. It was delicious—buttery and springy and with a tart lemon icing.

“That’s perfection, isn’t it?” Tor was watching her eat and smiling. “Doesn’t that make you sing all over?”

“Delicious.” Viva smiled at her. One of the many things she had come to like about Tor, and knew she would miss when she went home, was her enthusiasm for small things—lemon cakes and Jelly Roll Morton, dogs, sunsets.

Enthusiasm. Viva was half watching a line of iron-gray clouds that were moving above her head. How ironic it was that William, the least enthusiastic person she had ever met, was the one who’d told her what the word meant. In Greek of course.

“It means to be possessed by a god,” William had told her in his clear precise voice.

On that same evening—they’d been sitting at the time in Wheeler’s Restaurant in Soho, eating a rather good chocolate mousse—William had just announced that suffering was at the core of human life. It was one of the few facts, he said, on which both Buddhists and Christians agreed.

When she’d said to him that she enjoyed lots of things in her life and sometimes couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning, he’d all but winced at the vulgarity of it.

“I’m not talking,” he’d said in a strained and impatient voice, “about, I don’t know, dollies and ponies and the smell of coffee brewing, all those things that everyone talks about when these conversations occur: I’m talking about real and lasting happiness. I believe that if it exists at all, it comes from work, from self-discipline, and not expecting more from people than they can give because they’ll usually let you down.”

Now she wondered why she’d listened so obediently to these sour little lectures of his, when part of her had recoiled from them and known at the time they were only partially true. Of course having work you liked was a great thing, almost everybody in the world knew that, but it was only part of the picture. Now she thought of Talika on Chowpatty Beach dancing barefoot with her kite—sometimes happiness really was that simple.

She stretched out on the rug, closed her eyes, and let thoughts of William drift away. How lovely this was after the busyness and heat of Bombay, to doze on a rug and feel your friends nearby, to see the purplish patterns of sunlight behind your eyelids, to hear wind through pines, like gentle waves on the seashore. As she drifted off to sleep, she could still taste lemon in her mouth and before she could stop it, felt the soft brush of Frank’s lips on hers.

“Oh God!”

She sat up quickly, bumping into Tor, who was lying beside her.

“What happened?” said Tor sleepily. “Were you stung by a bee?”

“I’m all right.” Viva hugged herself. “I’m all right. I nearly fell asleep.”

But she lay there with her heart racing as if she’d escaped some crash or fall.

She mustn’t think of him like that, she told herself, trying to think of all the things she didn’t like about him. For a start: too attractive, and some puritanical part of herself felt this might lead to conceit or carelessness or laziness, because the advantage was unfair and unearned, like being dealt a five-card trick every day of your life, or until your looks faded. She acknowledged she may have been a little unfair to have overlooked some of the pain in his life, and the fact that he clearly took his medical studies more seriously than he let on…and oh, he dressed rather shabbily and his hair always looked as if it needed a cut. But that smile, that wonderful sudden smile, she’d seen on the ship how it melted other hearts, and how she must keep herself aloof from it. Yes, that was definitely it; she still wasn’t at all sure about him.
Charm
—William had taught her the ancient origins of that word, too—charm, he’d said, was not a superficial or a glossy thing; it meant
capable of casting a spell.
So maybe that was what she’d felt in Frank’s arms when they had danced, a little giddy, a little unhinged, but nothing she couldn’t put right. He could cast his spells on weaker creatures, she thought, hovering on the edge of sleep. To survive, she’d need all her wits about her.

It was starting to rain again. When she stood up, their driver was approaching them. He was pointing toward the other side of the valley, where thick gray clouds were massing.

“Blast!” said Tor. “We’re going to get soaked.”

The gray pony cantered all the way home, but they were still drenched by the time they got back to the hotel.

They were running under umbrellas toward the veranda when Rose stopped so suddenly that Viva banged her nose on the back of her head.

Frank was standing near the door smiling at them. He was
wearing the same crumpled linen suit, carrying his hat in his hand.

Viva felt her heart cartwheel when she saw him, and in the next moment, she almost hated him. What cheek to imagine he could just turn up in the middle of their holiday as if that was all they wanted.

“Madam.” He bent facetiously over Rose’s hand, and brushed it with his lips. “There’s been a spot of bother in Bombay. I thought I should come and escort you all home.”

“Oh, come on, Frank!” Tor was dripping with rain and scarlet in the face. “You can’t fool me; I know exactly why you’re here.”

Viva glared at her. She dug her fingers into the palm of Tor’s hand.

“Frank.” She coolly took his hand. “What brings you here?”

“I’ve ordered tea,” he told her, “in the parlor where we can talk.”

They ran upstairs and changed quickly out of wet clothes and then they walked into the parlor together where the red curtains were open still on what were now sheets of rain. Frank sat down on the fender with his back to the fire and with his legs sprawled easily in front of him.

When Bunty appeared with a tray of tea and scones, she’d changed into a floral dress—the first dress they’d seen her in—and put a faint breath of powder on her weather-beaten cheeks. Viva felt another flash of anger. How dare a man feel so confident, so sure of himself, for he must feel it? How the house’s pulse rate seemed to have gone up since his arrival.

Bunty gave Frank the first cup of tea, and made a fuss about scones and jam for him. Viva heard the ticking of the grandfather clock near the window and then became aware of him looking at her over his teacup. Flustered, she turned away and made a point of telling Bunty what a perfect day they’d had.
She asked her about the blue robin she’d read about in the bird book. Was it honestly blue, and was it as cheeky as an English robin?