“A photographer?” Tor was amazed. “Who for?”
“For a film company here,” he said. “They’re bringing talkies to Bombay, and some English actresses and they need—Look, this is awfully boring of me but I’ve got to go. Everyone is waiting for me outside.”
“So you’re better now.” Tor’s tone was unusually icy. “Viva will be relieved to know that.”
“Yes, much better, thank you.”
When he started to pat his pockets, first his top left then the right, Tor noted he still had dirty fingernails.
“Damn,” he said. “I’ve left all my cards at home. But if you see Viva tell her I haven’t forgotten her, she’s due a little windfall. And by the way,” he stepped back and gave Rose a prissy little smile, “love the hair. It makes you look like a beautiful boy.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Love the hair. When Guy left, Rose and Tor made each other laugh by imitating him, but now Rose felt less sure about her dashing new look.
Last night, as she’d stared at herself in the Mallinsons’ bathroom mirror and tried to see it through Jack’s eyes, she’d felt as if seeds of terror had been planted in her. Twisting and turning in the half-light she could see how fashionable she looked with it, but so different, too, like another kind of person, and here her nerve had failed and she’d felt angry at herself: it was only a stupid haircut for heaven’s sake, but she had no idea whether Jack would like it or not; there was still so much about him she couldn’t predict; in fact, when you got right down to it, whole slabs of him she didn’t know.
Recently, at the club, Maxo, Jack’s best friend, had told her—he’d been a little tight at the time—about some of the fun he and Jack had had together and she could almost hear him thinking, Before you came. Something about pinning a friend’s uniform to the door on the night before an inspection, also a mad guest night with the Fourteenth Hussars when they’d all drunk the Emperor’s health out of Napoleon’s jerry. “They’d captured it at the Battle of Waterloo.” Maxo was almost speechless with laughter at the memory again, and Rose had smiled politely, but the story made her feel sad. It seemed to her that he was describing a completely different person, someone schoolboyish and a little wild, someone she might have enjoyed knowing.
As the train approached Poona Station the sun poured down on the tubs of Canna lilies and the sky above them was pure turquoise. She could see Jack standing in his riding clothes on the platform, his head moving rhythmically from side to side as he looked for her. My husband, she thought, my spouse. As if changing the word could jolt her into feeling something.
She thought about how in films when young brides met up again with their husbands, they wrestled impatiently with door handles; they gasped with happiness as they flew down the platform on wings of love. So why the knot in her stomach as she watched him get bigger and bigger? She didn’t want to feel frightened of him like this; she wanted to love him with all her heart.
The train was slowing to a squeaking halt. She stuck her head through the carriage window and mouthed, “Jack!” She showed him her hair. “Do you like it?”
His expression froze, then he shook his head.
Jack didn’t tell lies. She knew that already—he’d pointed it out to her as a matter of pride. But wasn’t it better sometimes to be kind rather than to be absolutely truthful, particularly about things that really didn’t matter?
The train screamed and stopped. Porters in bright red jackets came rushing toward them, but he waved them away. He pecked her cheek and put his hand into the small of her back and pushed her through the crowd.
“Well, I like it,” she said out loud, although he couldn’t hear her, “I really do.”
But walking toward the car, his hand guiding her like the spoke of a propeller, she felt the same kind of queasy apprehension she used to feel at the end of the summer holidays when Mr. Pludd drove her back to school.
She’d had such a wonderful time with Tor in Bombay—swimming and riding, good laughs and long easy talks—but as he drove her home she felt all her happiness draining away.
She tried talking for a bit: she said she’d bought him a shirt at the Army and Navy; he said that was good of her. He told her about some dinner party they’d have to go to next week, a polo match he’d be playing in on Friday, but his voice was so flat she knew he was livid.
When they were home again, she looked around her dusty new garden. Nobody had bothered to water the geraniums while she was away and their leaves were brown and wrinkled, but now was not a good time to bring that up. Dinesh, looking fierce and warriorlike, helped carry her suitcases in, and he seemed to greet her stiffly, too. She thought, He resents me for being home again; he’d rather be with Jack on his own.
Durgabai padded in and handed Rose a cup of tea. A horrible cup with the usual bright globules of fat swimming on it, but she felt absurdly grateful for it and could have kissed Durgabai when she pointed toward her new hair and said, “Nice, memsahib.”
Dinesh, sensing the storm approaching, glanced toward Jack to see what he thought of the hair, but Jack turned away quickly and said he’d like a wash before he went back to work. In the same constricted voice he said he had a meeting with the polo club committee after work. Rose didn’t believe him.
“Big baby,” she muttered to herself. “It’s not that bad.”
Shortly after that Jack walked out of the house. He slammed the door hard, and left without patting her arm or smiling or anything. When he was gone, she ran into the bathroom to look at her hair again and saw how gaunt and pale her face looked in the mirror. She ran her hands through her bob. She liked the feeling of air on her neck, the freedom of it, but now when she looked at it again, she wasn’t entirely sure the new cut didn’t have just a touch of the Friar Tuck about it, which was how she and Tor always discussed other people’s bad bobs. But how mean of Jack to react like this. How utterly childish.
When she walked into the bedroom, a cluster of dead insects lay inside the glass light above the iron bed, one still buzzing in a halfhearted way. In the corner of the room lay a pile of their dirty clothes—his shirts, her jodhpurs—the dhobi had forgotten to collect them.
How futile she felt, flat as a pancake. She took the spotted cravat she’d bought for Jack in the gift shop at the Bombay Yacht Club from its wrappings. It lay in her hands, limp and foolish. He’d probably hate that, too, and tell her it was too expensive.
Aching from the train ride, she thought a bath might pass the time and calm her down. She walked into the garden to find the water man and saw Shukla sitting on the steps outside her mother’s hut, chopping onions. The girl leaped to her feet; she tried to close the door but Rose caught a glimpse of some cheap-looking statue garlanded with flowers. The smell of incense made her nose wrinkle.
Rose felt a surge of impatience. Where was the water man, and why did the simplest things here lead to exasperating complexities? At home when you wanted a bath you turned on a tap; here Durgabai, who didn’t like Dinesh, would have to ask him to find Ashish, the wash man, who lived in a squalid hut on the edge of their compound and who daily emptied their commode and fetched their bathwater. The water would then have to be heated in the two-gallon oil cans that stood in a row outside the bungalow and hauled inside. Poor Ashish, no wonder he was skinny as a ten-year-old boy. He was an untouchable, Jack had explained, the lowest of the low in the Indian caste system.
While she waited, Rose sat on a chair in her bedroom leafing without enthusiasm through the recipes at the back of The Complete Indian Housekeeper. Marmalade pudding, sago and tapioca jelly; that sounded a bit school-dinnery.
Jack had recently begun to hint that after the round of dinner parties welcoming Rose to Poona, they’d soon be expected to ask people back. This seemed reasonable, but because cooking was so new to her, her mouth went dry at the thought of giving a whole dinner party by herself. She’d heard already how ruthlessly catty the women at the club could be to those who failed. My dear, tough
as old boots. A horrid sauce, why have three cheeses in this heat?
She’d been trying to remember the kind of puddings Mrs. Pludd had cooked: apple crumbles, blancmanges—simple stuff—but the authors of The Complete Indian Housekeeper, authorities on everything from tapeworms in children to lizard traps, made it all sound so hard. First they said she must decide what kind of sweet: those made with farinaceous substances or cream, those stiffened with gelatine or clear jellies, or cakes and puddings. The chocolate blancmange came with a stern warning: “Indian cooks never boil this enough. They use too much flour and leave it with a raw taste.” Rose, who didn’t have a particularly sweet tooth anyway, sighed.
“Memsahib.” Ashish knocked on her door. “Water is here.”
Watching his skinny shoulders straining across the floor, she felt weary of it all: this man with his shifty look; the servants outside whispering and waiting; Jack and his bad mood, the ladies at the Poona Club, most of whom would know by lunchtime tomorrow that she’d had her hair cut.
When the big tin bath had been filled, she got down on her hands and knees to check there were no scorpions or snakes hiding in the plug or underneath it.
“It’s fine,” she told Ashish. “Thank you.”
And exactly one hour after she had first thought about it, she took off her dress and stepped into the bath.
She cried for a while, silently so the servants wouldn’t hear, and when she opened her eyes again she told herself she was behaving like a brat—sniveling in the bath and feeling so wretched. No wonder Jack could hardly be bothered to talk to her. She picked up her watch and rubbed steam from its face. Four o’clock. Four hours between now and Jack coming home for supper. Firming her jaw under her bath hat, she told herself to buck up now and behave like someone of nineteen, not nine. After she’d washed, she’d do what Mummy so often advised and pretend nothing nasty had happened: she’d put on a pretty dress, a little scent. She’d cook Jack his favorite supper, which was steak and kidney pudding and should, surely, be easy enough to cook.
Fired with enthusiasm, she sent Dinesh out to Yusuf Mehtab’s, the best butcher in Poona. Dinesh’s austere expression had softened when she’d explained that this dish was Jack’s favorite; he’d even laughed when she’d mooed elaborately and made her fingers into little horns and said with the aid of her phrase book, “I would like rump steak, please.”
Next, she took down a selection of pitted Bakelite dishes from the cupboard. She unscrewed the flour jar, slightly damp and clogged but surely serviceable, and remembered she’d forgotten to ask Dinesh to buy the two tablespoons of fat, Mrs. Pludd had said, for the suet crust. Well, ghee would have to do.
Shukla went out to see if there were any vegetables they could use; the spring greens she returned with looked a little yellow about the stalks, but they’d have to do, too—the vegetable wallah only came twice a week.
Flowers. Rose, followed by Durgabai and Shukla, went into the garden, where the only flowers in bloom apart from the parched geraniums were bougainvillea. Durgabai held the basket, Shukla the scissors.
“It’s all right,” Rose said. “I can do this on my own.” She snipped away at a few dusty stems.
“Please, memsahib.” Durgabai’s glorious eyes had pleaded as she took the basket with the two flowers in it. Durgabai’s husband was an invalid. He shrank back inside his hut whenever he saw Rose. The entire family, Jack said, lived in terror of losing the job and the shed that went with it. Rose understood, she sympathized, but she still wanted to cut her own flowers with her own scissors. It was one of the few jobs around here she was allowed to do.
When Dinesh brought the steak home, she could have cried. She’d smelled it coming through the door, and when he set it down on the table in the kitchen, she saw the muscles in his arms bulge as he tried to cut it. Also, she’d indicated kidneys by pointing under her ribs, but Dinesh had brought a string of evil-looking sausages instead.
“Thank you, Dinesh.” She’d pocketed the change. She’d been told, by more than one mem at the club, to punish lapses like this by fines, but she must have asked for the wrong cut and Dinesh had tried his hardest and, who knows, she might have said sausages by mistake or he’d thought she meant intestines. She’d confused him as she seemed to do a million times a day.
Before she started cooking, she tried to recall Jack’s routine at work, so the pie would get into the oven on time. Usually, he worked until three in the afternoon and then went to the polo ground to practice with the Third Cavalry’s A-team, or the Crackpots as they called themselves. Rose, a good rider herself, liked to go and watch him if she could.
It cheered her to see him thundering up and down the field on Bula Bula or Topaz or Simba, his favorite mounts: the way he tuned himself to them, listening to their breathing, anticipating their turns—for his horses were so well trained they spun round with the merest movement of his head. More than once, watching him on the polo field, laughing and dirty as a boy, she’d thought, This is Jack at his happiest, and wished that she could make him look like that.
After polo practices, they often went to the club, where she was already on first-name terms with half a dozen or so junior wives, and was occasionally nodded at by Mrs. Atkinson, the colonel’s wife, who she found glacial and condescending.
Before Jack had taken her there, he’d told her cautionary tales about junior mems who drank too much or who got too familiar with senior officers’ wives. He’d pretended to joke but she’d known he was serious. He’d encouraged her to drink weak whiskeys drowned in soda as a chota peg, which made her feel frightfully adult.
“It’s not considered common here,” he’d assured her, “it’s almost medicinal.” He warned her about gossip. “The same old stuff goes round and round because they don’t have enough to do,” he’d said, meaning the wives.
Well, that was certainly true—last week she’d heard twice about a Major Peabody’s wife who had got tight on the dance floor and danced very suggestively with a junior officer, and about the inedible meal someone else had cooked at a dinner party, which had given everybody a gippy tummy for days afterward.
Twice already, Jack, dressed in full uniform with miniature medals, had clanked off in his spurs for regimental dinners at the mess where, according to the indulgent gossip from the mems, boys behaved like boys. She’d heard the gup about a pony being brought in to jump a sofa at four o’clock in the morning. Jack had told her how he’d broken his wrist last year during a midnight steeplechase.
And again, these tales conjured up another, wilder version of Jack unknown to her yet, or only partly glimpsed, when he staggered home after mess nights, half-tight and smelling of brandy and usually wanting to make love. The last time he’d done this was awful: he’d gone all red-faced and blustery and hadn’t even bothered to take off his shirt.
“Relax, relax, relax, let me have at you,” he’d said angrily and intently, and for some reason this cry had reminded her of his urgent bellows of “Leave it! Leave it!” on the polo pitch when he wanted to score the goal. So horrible, so embarrassing—she’d hated every minute of it.
“He’s late.” Rose was looking at the clock above the dining room table, trying not to mind about the acrid smells coming from the oven, or the fact that the candle had just shed its waxy load over the polished candlesticks. Where was Mrs. Pludd when one needed her? she thought, trying to jolly herself into a better mood, because she’d put the pie in miles too early and had to turn the oven off and on twice since seven-thirty.
She moved into the sitting room and sat in the armchair nearest the front door. She’d put on a pale peach print floaty dress, something feminine, she’d reasoned, to offset the new hair, and her prettiest pearl earrings—they’d been inherited from her grandmother, a famous beauty with the same fine skin as Rose—a dab of Devonshire violets behind her ears. And now she sat feeling foolish and alone, an actress with no audience. She kicked off the silk shoes that she and Mummy had bought that day in London. The s
ight of them brought a pang. How childish that girl seemed to her now that she drank whiskey and slept every night with a man and knew about five different kinds of pudding.
When the car door slammed at a quarter to nine, she leaped to her feet. Jack walked in smelling of alcohol. When he looked at her hair again he winced—or was she imagining this?—as if to tell her in code that he still minded and she was not forgiven.
“Hello, darling,” she said in the same sensible voice her mother used when her father was fractious. “Would you like a drink before supper? It’s steak and kidney pie.”
“No, thanks,” he said, “I’m very hungry.” He looked toward the smoke billowing out of the kitchen.
Rose was trembling as she drew the curtains on the blackness of the night and lit an oil lamp. Earlier, she’d tried to make their dining room look special, which wasn’t easy with its rush matting and mismatched furniture. She’d got Shukla to polish the cutlery and put the last three sprays of bougainvillea in a vase on the table.
Jack picked up the vase. “D’you mind if I move these?” he said. “The smell puts me off my food.”
Well, bougainvillea didn’t smell but never mind.
“Not at all,” she said serenely. “Put them on the sideboard.”
Then Dinesh, proud as a show pony, burst from the kitchen holding the steak and kidney pie; he was thrilled to be serving Jack’s favorite dish.
Shukla, too shy to meet their eyes, scuttled in carrying the vegetables. The spinach had disappeared into algae like pools of slime.
“Shall we start?” There was an explosion of crumbs as Rose plunged her knife into the pie. Sawing through the crust, she talked brightly and emptily for a while about what fun it had been seeing Tor and how she’d like to have her to come and stay and that maybe they could all go hunting.
“Well, ask her then,” Jack said without any particular enthusiasm. She knew for sure now that he didn’t like Tor much, and to be fair to Jack, although she didn’t much feel like it at this moment, Tor did ham it up a bit in front of him—teasing him too much and becoming a little artificial and loud—but then you had to know Tor to realize that this was what she did when she felt shy or out of her depth.
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