The top two sheets of her writing paper were damp and smelled of mildew. She tore them off and threw them away.
Dear Mrs. Sowerby, Dear Mrs. Sowerby, Dear Mrs. Sowerby. Thank you for your letter. I am… If she wrote this over and over again it might propel her to the next sentence.
She put down her pen and sat listening; through the thin walls of the house, she could hear the gentle padding of Laila. She was making up the new cradle; there was a squeak as she rocked it and any moment now she’d come into the room and ask her to look at it, this empty cradle for this baby not yet born.
She’d had some bad dreams about this baby. In one, she’d left it on a countertop in London while she’d tried on hats; in another, she’d carelessly sat its little bottom on a stove—that dream was so strong she had actually smelled its skin burning like crackling on roast pork; the week before, she’d left it underneath the mountain for days while she’d gone climbing. When she came down, the ayah was screaming and the baby all blue and still in its bassinet.
Dear Mrs. Sowerby,
How lovely to hear from you. I have only had one or two letters from Tor and she sounds very happy and well. Although I do appreciate what a shock it has been for you, I don’t think you should worry about her too much.
Thank you for your kind words about my confinement. The doctor has told me to expect the baby in two weeks’ time. I am going to have it in the cantonment hospital in Peshawar, which is not too far away and has better facilities than our local hospital. I am feeling v. well, thank you.
Our new house has been quite an adventure. In front of me I can see…
Rose stopped and put down her pen. The horizon shimmered and danced, the sweat had broken out on her forehead again. It was so stinking hot that if Jack hadn’t been away she would have slept on the veranda the night before, but she hadn’t dared, frightened of the thought of waking up covered in more stinkbugs or being licked by frogs.
“Memsahib.” Laila had brought a glass of lemonade for her.
“Thank you, Laila. I think we should unwrap the tea service today.” She pointed toward a packing case in the corner of the veranda. “When I’ve finished my letter, I’ll help you.”
Laila, who didn’t understand a word of this, smiled attentively. A few moments later, Rose was on her hands and knees taking china from bits of newspaper when she felt the odd sensation of a cork being popped between her legs.
Now water was streaming down her legs and splashing her shoes. How humiliating! She’d spent a penny on the floor in front of Laila. Her next thought, as she scrambled around trying to mop it up, was relief—thank God Jack hadn’t seen that.
But Laila seemed to know what to do. She held up her hand and smiled widely.
“Baby comes,” she said in faltering English. “Is all right.” She’d patted her softly on the back.
Rose, gasping from the shock of her first proper contraction, said, “Laila, get the doctor, please. Daktar, daktar.”
A few minutes later she saw Hasan whipping up his skinny horse and galloping toward town.
“Memsahib, sit.” Laila had made up a nest of cushions for Rose on the cane recliner in the corner of the veranda near the packing cases.
“It’s a false alarm, I’m sure of it,” said Rose, who was smiling again. “I’m not due for two more weeks.” She pointed toward the half-unwrapped china. “Carry on, carry on,” she said in one of her few words of Pushto. “I’m very well, thank you.”
When Laila had finished with the china, she carried it into the kitchen. Rose lay on her own under the mountains listening to the roar of the river and the cheep-cheep-cheep of birds she didn’t yet know the name of. She pulled the sheet up to her chin. She forbade herself to panic, even when another mule’s kick in her stomach surprised her and made her yelp. If by some chance the baby was early, it might not be such a bad thing. The doctor would come and she would surprise Jack with a bonny new baby on his return.
Oh, how wonderful that would be, she thought, lying back on the cushions, panting slightly. They’d had such rows about her coming here; they’d raged for weeks in the privacy of their bedroom before he’d finally relented. The northwest, he’d insisted over and over again, was no place for a woman, particularly a pregnant one. There’d be no club for her—or at least no one there she knew, since most of the regiment had moved back to Poona—no companionship, and it could even interfere with his promotion.
“Why are you so determined to come?” he’d shouted on the night of their worst row. There’d been one moment then when he’d stood over her, his face looking so set and furious she thought he might hit her, and if he had, she knew she would have hit him right back; she could feel herself snarling.
“You know why,” she’d shouted. “Because I’m having our baby, because I don’t want to stay in Poona with all the gossips, and because if I lose you now I’m never going to find you again.”
That was how bad things had been between them since his confession about Sunita. She felt she was only hanging on to him by the slenderest of threads. That if she let that snap it would be over.
That night, he’d come home and told her there was a hospital in Peshawar where she could have the baby. The muscle in Jack’s jaw that twitched when he was angry had twitched during this announcement; she’d ignored it but was sad because she felt in that moment that she hated him.
Rose, lying on the veranda, was getting used to the slight twinges that her contractions brought. She’d been here for nearly an hour. She was waiting for the cup of tea that Laila was making her and wondering idly why Dr. Patterson from Poona hadn’t told her about the spending a penny thing, nor for that matter had The Modern Woman’s Beauty & Hygiene Book, which she had read obsessively in the months leading up until now. But what she was mostly thinking was, Why do people make such a fuss of this? It really is no worse than the curse.
The important thing is to stay calm, she told herself. The corkscrewing pains she was feeling inside her womb she pictured as waves, which could easily be jumped, and when they went away they left her on a smooth flat beach.
When Laila came back with a plate of biscuits, Rose felt reassured by her queenly bearing, her flashing smile. She was wearing her pale blue shalwar kameez. Rose would remember this for the rest of her life. She smelled so sweetly of roses and spice. Her fingernails were clean.
She drank her tea, slept for a while, and then the pain woke her up again. The sun had dipped behind the mountains and she could hear the river growling and tumbling in the distance. “Hasan home?” she said. “Daktar.” She wasn’t sure that Laila understood her and was cross with herself for not making more effort to learn her language.
She’d started lessons with a munshi, a language teacher, but he was a dry old stick and the hot weather had made her so sleepy, so not much progress had been made.
Now Laila was standing at her elbow and leading her so respectfully around the veranda. When she suddenly doubled up with pain, Laila rubbed the small of her back. The sun continued its slow descent behind the horizon, Rose lay down again. The bird had stopped singing. Laila brought her a dried apricot, a slice of bread and butter, and encouraged her to sip the tea that had grown cold beside her. Rose had tried not to grunt too loudly in front of her. Hasan would come soon or Jack or the doctor.
“Oooh! Oooh!” she heard herself groaning like an animal. “Sorry, sorry,” she said when Laila leaped to her side and started to shush her softly. “OOOhhhh. Help!”
She looked at her watch. Seven o’clock and dark now; a scattering of rain was falling on the windowpanes. She’d never felt more alone in her life. “Where is Hasan? Daktar? Captain Chandler?” She was trying not to shout, but Laila just shrugged, and half waved as if they were on opposite sides of a canyon.
“Help me,” said Rose, who was still trying to sound calm. “I think it’s coming.”
Laila took her into her bedroom. She helped her sit down in a chair from which she stared out at the mountains. L
aila took Jack’s striped pajamas from under the pillow and put them on the chair. She removed the sheet and put a clean tarpaulin on the bed with another sheet on top of it.
“Don’t worry about that.” Rose was watching her impatiently from the chair. She wasn’t hurting; all she wanted was to lie down. “Doctor here soon.”
“Memsahib, sorry, sorry,” Laila said.
Rose fought her off at first, she was unbuttoning her skirt, she was pushing her down on the bed.
She heard herself screaming. Nobody, nobody had told her it hurt this much.
“It’s fine, Laila,” she said politely, when the pain went again. “Thank you so much.” How awful to be seen like this.
And then the pain again: a bucking bronco kicking her to death from inside. When her screams stopped, she saw the purple rim of the mountain again, she smelled roses and sweat. Laila cradled her to her soft bosom, spoke soothing words. But suddenly, Laila was parting her legs and looking at her.
Laila started to mutter words she didn’t understand. She put both of her hands together to indicate a circle the size of a grapefruit.
But then nothing. The baby wasn’t coming. Rose muffled her screams in her pillow at first, but then she called out, “Mummy, Mummy, help me, Mummy.” Only pain now; she was on the side of a mountain waiting to fall. She didn’t care if the baby died, she didn’t care if she died, she wanted it to stop.
Laila’s hand was holding hers: a hardworking hand, tough, strong, skin like sandpaper. She squeezed it; Laila was her world now, the rope that stopped her falling.
An hour before dawn, when she felt she would die soon of the pain, the baby shot out and another woman, perhaps the village midwife, she never did know, burst into the room and cut the cord.
In the chaos that followed she felt Laila put the child in her arms. She heard herself shout, “My baby! My boy!” in a choked voice she hardly recognized as her own. Her first miracle. The pain was there, but in the blink of an eye it meant nothing. She looked out of the window. She saw a red sun burst over the mountains, and a feeling of vast exhilaration swept over her, overpowering, unexpected. She wanted tea, she wanted food, she wanted to kiss everybody and everything in the world.
When Laila brought the boy back washed and in a muslin nightdress, she watched her rub his gums with a piece of date that she’d been chewing. She had no idea why she was doing it but she trusted her now.
“Give him to me, Laila.” Rose couldn’t stop smiling. The sky outside the window was bathed in red light; there was a cup of tea on a tray beside her bed. On the floor was the cushion where Laila had prayed during the night, and Jack’s pajamas.
“Give him to me, give him to me.” She crooned, her eyes brimming with happy tears, and the two women beamed at each other in delight.
The baby’s head had a fuzz of blond hair on top of it, soft as chicken feathers. His skin was mottled from the furious exertions of the night before, his eyes looked weary and knowing as Rose flopped him under her chin.
Then Laila put the baby on her breast. How funny it felt, but she loved the snuffling sounds he made. She had never felt so tired or so necessary.
“Sleep, memsahib,” Laila said softly when the baby fell asleep on her breast. When she turned down the lights and straightened Rose’s blanket, Rose had the most incredible urge to kiss her good night, but she didn’t, because she knew that if she had, Laila would probably have had to wash for about four days to purify herself. Indians didn’t like to be kissed, at least not by memsahibs.
“Thank you, Laila,” she said instead. “I can never thank you enough.”
Laila put the palms of her hands together. She bowed her head. She smiled at her, a smile of sweetness and understanding that seemed to convey an equal joy, a delight that she’d been there, too.
At ten o’clock that night Jack went into the bedroom where Rose and the baby were asleep. He lifted up the oil lamp he was carrying and in its glow saw his son first as a tiny heap of clothes, a shroud. Creeping closer, he saw that the baby had a garland of marigolds around its neck, and it was so red, like an old colonel with high blood pressure or a very ripe tomato. Rose looked pale lying beside him, and there were dark circles under her eyes.
“Darling.” Jack put out his hand. “Darling.” He touched the baby’s hair softly, and then Rose’s hair, still damp with sweat. He saw its minute fingers, like the pale tubers of a small plant, flex over the bedclothes.
When she woke up, he was standing in his sweaty jodhpurs, crying so hard he couldn’t speak. She used the corner of her nightdress to dry his eyes, and then he kissed her.
“He’s beautiful,” he said at last.
She put her hands over his lips, and smiled at him radiantly.
“Yes,” she whispered, holding their baby toward him. “The most beautiful thing.”
Jack couldn’t find his pajamas, so he got into bed in his underwear and lay down beside them.
“The doctor will come soon,” he whispered. “He’s on his way now. There was a small landslide on the road, it’s cleared now. I can’t believe how brave you’ve been.”
They lay in the dark holding hands. The baby lay on top of them, a sleeping Buddha.
“I have a son,” he said out of the dark. “I don’t deserve him.”
He could feel his son’s head against his arm. The soft silk of his hair.
Rose squeezed his fingers. “You do,” she said.
Chapter Forty-four
Viva was playing tennis with her best friend, Eleanor, when the nun came to tell her that her mother had died. Sister Patricia, a raw-boned Irish girl, had beckoned her off the court; they’d walked back down the path toward the school, and all Viva could remember now was how hard she’d had to concentrate not to put her feet on the cracks in the crazy paving. And how blank she’d felt inside—a muffling feeling like snow.
It was months before she had properly cried, and that was just before the Christmas holidays, which, it had been agreed, she would spend with a distant cousin of her mother’s who lived near Norwich. The cousin, a tall pinched-looking woman who looked nothing like her mother, had taken her out to tea, once, in a nearby hotel to finalize arrangements. Over lukewarm tea and stale scones, she’d made it clear to Viva that this was quite an imposition, that she’d hardly known her parents. “They spent all their time in India,” she’d said reproachfully. “They said they loved it there.” As if dying had been an act of carelessness on their part.
Viva had thought little of it—she didn’t think much at all about her insides in those days—but two days before they broke up, the school had taken a group of girls to a pantomime in Chester. Viva, sitting in the darkened theater with a bag of Liquorice Allsorts, had been enjoying herself, until the prince sat on a tinseled tree and sang to Snow White “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” Her father’s favorite song. Viva had to leave the theater with a cross, postulant nun who’d been enjoying this rare treat. The nun had loaned her a used handkerchief and watched her, standing under the Christmas lights outside Brown’s department store, heaving and sobbing and pretending to look at the mannequins in the windows, until she’d collected herself sufficiently to join her own group again.
Everyone had thought it kinder to ignore this outburst, and on the way home in the bus, she felt so ashamed that she’d told herself that this must never happen again. That the world would set traps and that she must from now on avoid them, and that the best way to avoid them was to hang on to the frozen feeling that had, up until now, kept her safe. It was songs and soppiness she should beware of.
This by-now-ingrained training persuaded her to feel glad after Frank left, relieved he’d gone, glad that he had not tried to contact her again. Daisy had told her in a casual aside that she’d heard that he had gone to work in Lahore and what a fascinating project that sounded. Blackwater fever was the most ghastly business and the quicker they could find a cure for it, the better.
He had not called to say good-bye, which was go
od, too.
Work was what mattered now. Now at night, long after the children had gone to bed, she would sit at her desk near the window. She would listen for a while to the gurglings of the ancient plumbing, to the owls still hooting in the trees outside or a child calling out in its sleep. And then she would write, often until the early hours of the morning, these children’s stories. Children who were often described as plucky and resilient, as she herself had been once, but who mostly had learned not to step on the cracks.
The book was harder to write than she thought it would be. Although Daisy had several times tried to warn her against such lazy thinking, somewhere at the back of her mind she had always imagined that living at the Tamarind must, for many of these children, be an amazing treat, a glimpse into a style of life most of them had only dreamed of. Now she saw that this view was both sentimental and arrogant. Some, it was true, were grateful for the food and the bed; others felt uneasy at this living between two worlds. They missed the rich, broiling, rough-and-tumble life of the slums; they worried that other people in the streets outside might think they had become “rice Christians” and were selling their souls for a hot meal; a couple of the boys told her flatly and defiantly that they may be here for the time being but they were first and foremost Gandhiji’s boys.
But whatever they said, she was determined to record it faithfully and bit by bit, day by day, the sheets were piling up on her desk. Daisy had already shown some of the stories to a friend of hers at Macmillan, the publishers, who’d said if she could produce more chapters of this quality, they might be interested.
She was now so concentrated on this work, so determined to do it and do it well, that when she opened the Pioneer Mail and saw the announcement that Captain Jack Chandler’s wife, Rose, had had a baby boy, Frederick, she’d felt surprised and shocked at herself for feeling…well, what was it? When she tried to chase down the feeling, she wasn’t sure. To say she was jealous was putting it too crudely, but certainly powerful and dismaying emotions had been stirred. By nipping the Frank business in the bud and concentrating on her book she had hoped to find a cleaner, harder version of herself, and in some ways this had worked. Long hours of concentration had brought a kind of quiet joy, a feeling of being emptied and made full by her own efforts. But sometimes, particularly when she was on the margins of sleep where everything is allowed, she felt his arms around her again, the terrible intimacy of his kisses, all the things that had shaken her to the core and made her feel so frightened.
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