East of the Sun (5 page)

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 nothing 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.

Poona

“M
aster,” 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 Port 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.

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 years 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.