‘You have my word.’
Ned held out his hand. ‘Shake on it. By week’s end, at the Nundydroog dance, you’ll have your answer.’
‘That soon? Such confidence! And if I win her?’ Jack asked, as he reached for Ned’s hand. ‘You have no guarantee of your success.’
‘I’ll leave KGF for good,’ Ned said without hesitation.
Jack shook Ned’s hand and they both realised in that instant that their friendship had breathed its last. Jack didn’t feel proud of backing Ned into this corner. He was closer now to having Iris as his wife than he’d ever thought possible since they’d exchanged frigid goodbyes at her garden gate – and yet he felt no triumph as he watched Ned cycle away down the hill and out of his life.
37
Jack’s motorbike, known as a Fanny B, arrived a couple of days later and, in spite of his morose mood, he couldn’t help grinning alongside Gangai and the mali, who were waggling their heads with appreciation.
‘Very, very nice, sir,’ the mali said, his grubby dhoti reminding Jack that both he and the new gardener should have more than a couple of loincloths to rotate.
‘You will look most prosperous riding around KGF on your beautiful new machine, sir,’ Gangai added.
Jack nodded. Beautiful was certainly the word. Its engine drove a two-speed gearbox with an aluminium case, painted a shiny bright red. It was the first of its kind to have foot-boards with toe guards. He’d have loved to share this moment with Ned but he had no one who really cared. He missed Elizabeth’s quiet presence terribly. The food had been wretched since she’d left and chores were being neglected. Gangai did his best, but little jobs like winding the clock, oiling the timber, airing the house, beating the carpets and even feeding the chickens regularly were overlooked.
Jack was surprised to find he missed the fresh flowers and the scent of sandalwood, too. He often thought he heard the soft tinkle of bracelets or anklets and he’d look up, expecting Elizabeth, but it was his imagination. The smell of roasting spices or freshly ground herbs was definitely lacking in the house; even the tea was tepid again.
He understood now how much he’d taken for granted the smooth running of the household under Elizabeth’s quiet, firm hand, and although it was hard to admit it, he would re-employ her in a blink if she would return. But he suspected she was far too proud and he knew hell would freeze over before he lowered himself to beg her to come back.
‘Are you going to take it out for a spin, as they say?’ Gangai asked, his dark eyes dancing with excitement.
‘Of course!’ Jack said.
He ignored the leather helmet but pulled on the goggles. His new toy started with a purr and he revved the engine deliberately to see his onlookers’ collective grin grow wider. The audience had increased with the mali’s three sons and the chokra. The four boys ran alongside him as he gently set off but they were soon standing in a cloud of dust as he roared down the hill, making a tremendous racket that gave him his first good reason to laugh out loud in weeks.
He drew level with the officers’ bungalows at Marikuppam, before swinging left past the Top Reef’s mine superintendent’s house and onto the main street that led into Funnell’s Hill. Men raised their hands, waving from the verandah of the mines hospital, which was about where Jack kicked down a gear and hit a decent speed as he passed the turnoff to Robertsonpet. He took a grim pleasure in making as much noise as he could as he charged past the electric department’s compound and the Walker house as he entered Oorgaum.
Towards the club a couple of men fresh from an early round of golf had likely heard him coming for more than a mile and had strolled out to see what the noise was all about. But he didn’t slow until he’d passed Bullens Shop, frightening the women doing their groceries. It was fast enough for him to create a satisfying screech as he hurtled around the Five Lights junction. He didn’t pause, simply swung around and went back over the same path until he was pulling up over the gravel of his own driveway to the applause of his audience.
The exhilaration of the ride had blown away the cobwebs. Jack showed up for work feeling and looking the best he had for several days, which was reassuring for his boss, who had begun to wonder whether making Jack the youngest senior engineer they’d had at KGF had been the best idea.
Jack threw himself into his work with vigour – it was a busy week with some visiting executives from head office in Britain. The days passed with his mind occupied and then too tired to fret about Ned. He had been given the role of guide.
And so Jack had shown the two men first through his section, enjoying their awe at the size of the two dynamos that generated the power to work the motors that turned the great winding drum to lower and raise the men or ore. Jack made sure the men had scrubbed the black-and-white tiled floor and cleaned down every inch of the generators so that their black paint shone like a pair of well-polished boots. The Victorian-style buildings erected in KGF for the Taylor mining operation were among some of the finest he’d seen. The tall, red-brick buildings with gothic-style windows and soaring ceilings brought comments from his guests that made him feel proud.
He introduced them to various key people including the Punjabi guardsmen and the Anglo-Indian ‘banksman’, who took note of every cage of men going up or down, but especially of the quartz being sped along the tracks to the mills. He walked them through the crushers, where enormous hammers smashed the rock into smaller chunks. Here Jack couldn’t talk, for the noise was so loud. The visitors simply watched in shocked amazement and then continued following Jack through the various chambers that each had their own processes to extract the gold from its ore.
This area was strictly off-limits to Indian workers and was essentially run by Anglo-Indian men. Their journey drew to a close at the concentrate plant, where gold was finally viewed landing onto ‘James’ tables that rhythmically shook the now-released niblets of gold from all the other stone and dust. The table had a rippled surface and small holes that, when shaken, permitted the heavy gold to slip through, while the debris skimmed across the top and was taken away.
The visit ended in the smelting room, where furnaces melted the raw product, and liquid gold was poured into steel moulds that would cool and form the ingots to be stamped and transported out of KGF.
It took Jack almost three hours playing host but he was given a very solid pat on the back the next day. For Jack it was nothing more than a diversion; he cared about his work, took pride in it, but Iris was rarely far from his thoughts.
His shoulder was feeling better; another week or two and he reckoned he would be as good as new. He spent one afternoon organising work to begin at the shop in KGF; the remodelling on the house at the back would start first. He’d made the initial overtures on this project, which pleased him immensely, and by the time he was taking a smoke on the verandah that night, he felt calm – not exactly at peace with himself, but looking forward to the Saturday night dance. He didn’t have a formal invitation and certainly no partner. Jack was going along simply because he knew the Walkers would be there. He had to see Iris. It had been nearly four weeks since their day in Bangalore.
He’d ensured his new tuxedo was ready, his shirt was laundered and pressed, and his dress shoes were polished so highly he could see his own reflection in them. Gangai had done well but had not been so successful in finding a replacement cook.
‘What do you mean there’s no one?’ Jack asked, irritated when he realised Gangai had been forced to prepare his evening meal again.
‘I have tried, sir. There is no one suitable at the moment but I will have a cook for you by next week, sir. That I promise.’
Jack knew Gangai’s cooking was woeful. ‘Give it to your family, Gangai. I’ll head down to the club this evening, I think.’
He rode down to the club, more quietly this time, and noticed the Walker household was fully lit with voices, women’s giggles and the odd bark of a man’s laugh, drifting from within. He rode by slowly on his bike, finally pausing in t
he shadows on the other side of the street, imagining Ned among them and feeling instantly dislocated from the lives most others were leading in KGF. The truly active members of the community were the Anglo-Indians and he wasn’t integrated into their lives – he rarely attended their gatherings and quietly envied Ned his ease with the various members of mining life. Despite Ned’s quiet manner, he was a well-liked and respected member of the community, as popular with the Brits as he was with the local Indians and very much part of the fabric of Anglo-Indian life.
Ned ruffled no one’s feathers and had an enviable knack for getting the locals to do his bidding without ever making it sound like an order. It was the quality Jack perhaps most admired about his old friend and yet he couldn’t match it. He thought about the way he had treated Elizabeth. She had deserved better, but as with all the women in his life, he’d shown that unenviable tendency to shatter a relationship through his self-destructive ways. He knew she was one of the few people in his life who wanted to take care of him, despite his seeming determination to make himself impossible to like.
Ned had suggested that the girl’s attachment went deeper. Jack didn’t think so. Her expression had been one long look of disapproval when she’d been at his house. He remembered how Ned had stood up for her at the dinner party, and Jack realised that Ned was right – he probably had offended her regularly with his offhand manner. And still she had tried to care for him. She’d been judgemental, but a small voice reminded him that nothing she’d said was misguided.
It looked like a dinner party at the Walkers’ – perhaps Geraldine had introduced her new beau to the family, or more likely Rupert had finally emerged from his room and his fiancée had been invited to meet Iris. Jack felt badly that he hadn’t seen Rupert since hospital and he doubted now that he’d ever be welcome near the Walker family again. It didn’t matter. His isolation kept him strong and independent, or so he told himself.
He revved gently and took off in the dark, only turning the headlight back on when he had cleared the Walker property.
On Saturday morning Iris was going through a trunk and discovered an evening dress she had forgotten all about. She’d packed it carefully in a satin pillowcase and now it tumbled out in all its pale-pink glory. The scooped neckline and short sleeves had been all the rage last summer in London and she had spent many evenings escaping her loneliness by using the dressmaking skills she’d inherited from her mother.
Iris’s excellent memory allowed her to copy dresses she’d seen in salon windows or patterns she’d glimpsed in her employer’s magazines. With little else to spend her paltry wages on, she’d bought fabric and never turned down an old silk dress or scarf thrown carelessly her way by her employer bestowing a rare favour. As a result, Iris had created a small but superb selection of outfits in the latest styles.
This dress would probably cause a stir at the dance because it was so daring. The young women in KGF were still wearing cotton lace tea dresses, nothing nearly so slinky as this. The narrow line and loose hang of the dress suited Iris’s boyish figure. She recalled the hours of beading involved in the exquisite shimmering design. But really it was the colour and rich silk that spoke the loudest; she’d made the dress from a stunning Chinese silk dressing-gown she’d been given. She’d never worn the dress, too frightened that her employer would see its magnificent reinvention and demand it back.
Iris scoured the trunk for its accompanying scarf and found the smoky grey gauze, a long piece of near-transparent silk she would drape loosely around her neck and let trail down her back. She’d have to borrow her mother’s long strand of pearls and matching earrings to complete the look.
As if on cue, Flora Walker arrived. ‘Iris, dear, I’ve promised your brother some dhal and pepperwater with rice and I’ve run out of asafoetida. Everyone’s deserted me today.’ There was a plea in her expression as much as her voice.
‘All right, I’ll go, if you’ll hang this out to air,’ she said, lifting the dress out of the trunk.
‘Don’t tell me you’re wearing that! It looks like a slip.’
‘Mum, in London, this is the height of fashion.’
‘Well, London can keep it. You’ll look naked.’
‘I’ll look dazzling.’
Flora smiled and her accompanying sigh said, Of course you will. But that poignant moment was ruined by her awkward pause. Iris watched her mother’s mouth twitch with determination and knew something important was about to erupt.
‘Iris, please don’t drag this out any longer. Have you made a decision yet?’
‘I promised Ned an answer by tonight. But, Mum, don’t push me. I have to be sure in my own mind, not just because you and Dad – and everyone else, it seems – love Ned to bits.’
‘To have someone love you as much as he does is rare, my girl. Don’t squander it.’
‘I know. But it’s not as simple as it was for you. You married Dad when you were sixteen and he was the first man you ever kissed.’
‘I’m not sure I like the sound of this. I hope none of Bella’s accusation is true.’
‘Stop. I’m just trying to explain that it’s more complicated now. We don’t have to marry the first person who asks us, simply because our parents approve. I have to be sure I can spend the rest of my life with Ned. Now, let me go and get that asafoetida before I change my mind.’
‘You’ll have to try the petty shop in Marikuppam. Spencer’s is out of it.’
‘Well, you’ll have to lend me your string of pearls tonight, then.’
‘All right. Just get going, please.’
It was a lovely morning anyway and Iris could almost smell Christmas in the air it was so deliciously cool. She wondered whether Jack Bryant might ride down the road again. She’d seen him last night; he couldn’t have known she’d been in the garden, talking quietly with Jim about her marriage decision.
‘That’s a motorbike,’ Jim had said, looking through the branches of the tamarind tree to the headlights shining in the distance.
Iris’s belly had twisted. There was only one person she knew who threatened to have a motorbike in KGF. Sure enough, they had watched Jack slow down and then pause. Jack had stared towards the house.
‘Nice bike,’ Jim had whispered. He was the only one who didn’t seem to judge Jack. ‘Look at him pining for you, Iris,’ he’d teased.
And she’d pinched him in the darkness.
As she rode now to the petty shop, she recalled the spike of guilty longing she’d felt. She’d not forgotten his heated embrace, that amazing moment of triumph when they’d enjoyed the full intimacy of each other’s passion. Whenever she tormented herself with these recollections she could taste Jack, but with each passing day the madness of that day trickled away, replaced by a more recent memory of how it felt to risk losing Ned.
Ned had called by yesterday before his afternoon shift. He hadn’t stayed, simply inquired as to whether she would be going to the Nundydroog dance.
She’d wanted to kiss him but something in his manner had forbidden it. She’d said she was planning to go with the family. He said his shift finished at ten p.m. but he’d see her afterwards and hoped she would give him her decision. Iris recalled how she’d nodded dumbly, and then he’d gone and she’d got involved in preparations for a dinner party with her siblings and their families to introduce her to Rupert’s long-time girlfriend and likely the woman he would marry. Iris had liked Jennifer immediately – although Rupert was now officially an invalid, the lovely young woman had not changed her affections towards him.
Jack’s arrival had stirred up her emotions again. There was no denying her attraction to him but his love felt too big, too deep, too intense.
After he’d gone yesterday she had realised she’d been holding her breath and had to let it out silently. Jim had grinned at her in the dark. ‘What’s it going to be, sis?’
‘Never you mind,’ she had scolded, but she thought now as she rode laboriously up the hill that she did know. She just ne
eded a simple sign that her decision was the right one.
Iris was surprised to see Jack’s servant in the petty shop. She couldn’t recall her name. She was tidying some shelves and Iris had to assume that her family owned the store.
Iris was the only customer so it became uncomfortably necessary to acknowledge the young woman’s presence, now that she’d turned and was looking gravely at her.
‘Er, hello. We met during the accident,’ she began.
‘Hello, Miss Walker. I remember.’
Iris felt embarrassed that the tall woman had recalled her name and spoke such fluent English. She hesitated.
‘Can I help you with something?’
‘I … I thought you were working for Mr Bryant.’
‘I was.’
Her gaze was unnervingly direct. Those striking pale eyes seemed to look through her, searching her.
‘Er, I’m s-sorry,’ Iris stammered, momentarily lost for words.
‘Are you looking for something particular?’ she asked, her irritating calm making Iris feel even more awkward.
‘Yes,’ she said, steadying her thoughts. ‘Asafoetida.’
The woman nodded. ‘I have some.’ Iris followed, realising she had been standing in the tiny stationery section.
On her first brief meeting with this woman Iris had felt ungainly and somehow inadequate beneath her gaze and nothing had changed.
‘Here,’ the girl said. ‘It is the highest quality.’
Iris looked at the pale powder that was a crucial addition for digestive purposes when eating lentils or vegetables. ‘Thank you. I’ll take a small scoop, please.’
Iris followed the woman to the counter, watched her elegant movements, heard her gold bracelets jangling pleasantly as she ladled the spice into a small packet and sealed it carefully.
‘Do you miss him?’
The grey eyes flashed. ‘Who, madam?’
‘Your employer, Mr Bryant?’
‘Perhaps he misses me.’
Fields of Gold Page 38