by Threes Anna
The summer before, she roamed the grounds of the school alone, which is how she met Perry, the gardener’s son. He taught her to smoke and to ride a bicycle, until she took a fall and skinned her knee. Mrs. Blackburn, the principal, didn’t believe her story about stumbling over a curb, and forbade her to leave the school grounds. But Perry knew a lot more places within the boundaries of the school grounds than Mrs. Blackburn, and smoking a cigarette together became part of their daily routine. Until the gardener caught his son giving Charlotte kissing lessons. He was afraid of getting the sack, and sent the boy off to stay with an uncle fifty kilometres away. The rest of the vacation was just as lonely and monotonous as all the others for the past nine years. During the day she read, or hit balls against the wall of the school. In the evening she ate alone in the deathly still dining hall, beneath an enormous painting of Queen Victoria. Charlotte had never really understood why she couldn’t spend a month or so in India, or stay with an aunt or uncle in England, but her father had written to tell her that he had no relatives in Great Britain, and that her mother’s sister wanted nothing more to do with the family after her mother died of black water fever. Charlotte did try to contact the aunt in Glasgow, but the operator told her the number did not exist, and that no one else was registered under that name.
“Shall we have something to eat here?” the captain says, pointing to a rather sober establishment on a corner.
“As long as there aren’t any portraits of Queen Victoria, I’m not bothered.”
“The last few years there have been fewer paintings of the royal family around,” the captain says in a serious tone.
She’s beautiful, he thinks, with her long hair. Her eyes twinkle, her lips are perfect, and her laugh is bell-like. She looks around her as if everything is new to her, and she has a question or a remark about everything she sees.
“I’ve missed India,” Charlotte says, as she helps herself to lamb curry and rice.
“Yes, a lot has changed,” the captain observes as he fills their glasses with cold water.
“According to my father, everything has remained the same.”
“What does your father do for a living?”
“The same as you, he’s in the army. He’s just been promoted to lieutenant colonel. And what do you do?”
“I’m a surgeon.” He toys with his food. He isn’t hungry. “When war broke out, I was called up,” his voice softens, “like most of the British men here. They made me a captain immediately because I’m a doctor. I was sent to Burma.” He looks out the window, absently stirring the curry with his fork.
“That was when your leg . . . ?” she says softly.
The captain nods his head, and his gaze wanders back to the window. He doesn’t see the horse and cart passing. A man with a handcart shouts something to a mate, a hawker tries to peddle his flowers, and in the distance a tram goes by. He doesn’t see any of this. “The war was cruel,” he says, his voice almost inaudible.
“My name is Charlotte,” she says.
He starts, then straightens up. Putting out his hand, he says, “My name is Peter. Peter Harris.”
THEY WALK BACK to the harbour together. At the entrance to the shipping office, they look at each other, and then quickly look away again. The office is closed. Charlotte knocks, but there’s no sign of life inside. She looks through the window and tries to make out whether her note is still hanging on the notice board.
“Do you suppose he found it?” She straightens her hat. “If he was here, that is . . .”
Again the captain carries the suitcase with all her belongings. Where am I supposed to go? she thinks. Donald is still at boarding school in the north of England and Mother is dead. Charlotte realizes that she has no idea what her father looks like. Perhaps he was there that morning but they didn’t recognize each other. Every year, at Christmastime, he sends her a copy of his temporary address. First there were various army missions, and later on he was sent to the front. Under the address he had written, in his precise hand, merry christmas, father. Is he bald? Maybe he has a beard or a moustache. Does he wear glasses or is he perhaps missing an eye? She doesn’t know. After she received that one photograph taken in front of the house when Donald was two, she received no other pictures. She has longed to return to Rampur, but suddenly she no longer knows why. There is no one there that she knows. There’s no one waiting for her. Years ago she prayed and begged to be allowed to come home. It wasn’t that boarding school was all bad, but she always dreamt of India.
She has no idea where the captain is taking her, and she doesn’t want to ask. She wants to keep on walking beside him. As long as she’s walking beside him, she’s not alone.
HE WAS RIGHT. She was standing on the exact spot he had indicated and she was wearing a blue hat. Except that her dress had circles on it instead of stripes. Peter didn’t believe the maharaja’s astrologer when he told him that his wife would be waiting for him at the harbour, wearing a striped dress. He laughed and said that he didn’t have a wife, and wasn’t in love. After the horrors of the front, all he wanted to do was enjoy the quiet and luxury which the maharaja had promised him. After consulting his calculations, the astrologer concluded that this was his only chance. He was to put on his uniform again and not waste any time, since the day after tomorrow the stars would be in the right position. So without even informing his host, the maharaja, he threw a few things into a valise and headed for the station. It was all totally counter to his inclinations, but the astrologer had insisted, and in the end he managed to make the night train to Bombay. He spent the whole night and the following day on the train, going over the scenarios, thinking up ways he could make contact with an unknown woman, and then discarding them again. He approached the harbour terrain without a plan and filled with apprehension.
He had spotted the blue hat when he was still some distance away. The woman proved to be a young beauty who had only just turned sixteen, and he fell in love with her as if he had been hit by lightning. In love . . . he had never imagined that it could happen again. He hears that she is out of breath, and he slows down. It feels right that she’s walking next to him.
THE HOTEL IS on a narrow street. Peter doesn’t know where that special hotel is located where British girls travelling alone spend the night, so he takes her to his hotel, where Charlotte registers and asks for a room with a bathtub. She gives him a quick smile and walks down the corridor with the key in her hand. Peter has no idea what to do next. He has never seduced a woman before. He’s only been in love once, when he was just about her age, and the girl didn’t even know it. He was going to tell her the day he left for India, but she didn’t show up. He cycled over to her house and waited there for hours, but he never summoned the courage to ring the doorbell. He must not allow such a chance to slip by a second time.
At the end of the corridor there is an outdoor café. He moves his chair to a spot where he has a view of the corridor, and orders a whisky. He wants to be there for her if she can’t sleep or feels like company. He wants to be able to comfort her if she has a bad dream. He wonders if she realizes that the India she is returning to is a totally different country than the one she left as a young child. Does she know that the power of the British is waning, and that the army is being deployed to put down riots organized by freedom fighters? He believes in an independent India, but now that he is in uniform again, he does not dare say so out loud.
HE AWAKES WITH a start. Charlotte is sitting next to him, wearing a long white nightgown. The doors leading to the corridor are closed. The stars twinkle above.
“I couldn’t get to sleep,” she says.
“Have you been here long?”
“You snore,” she says with a giggle.
“Do I snore?”
“Very softly. No one else heard you, only me. And you wiggle your nose while you’re asleep.”
“My nose?”
/> Charlotte wiggles her nose up and down very fast.
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“You look like a rabbit.” He chuckles.
“You’re the one who looks like a rabbit, not me. I was just imitating you.”
“I don’t believe a word of it.”
“It’s true.” She smiles. “And you talk in your sleep, too.”
Peter looks at her in amazement.
“You said you liked the girl in the blue hat.”
Peter looks at this girl who is flirting with him so openly and innocently. Does she realize what she’s doing? Should he stop her, send her back to bed, and then take a cold shower? She puts her hand on his hand. She runs her forefinger over the spot where his little finger should have been.
“Did it hurt?”
“Not at first. But it did later on.”
“And now?”
His whole body aches. His heart is beating a mile a minute. He closes his eyes and feels her finger glide across his hand. She must stop.
TINY DROPS APPEAR over his dark eyebrows. His lips open ever so slightly. Charlotte sees how his nostrils quiver. Her forefinger moves across his arm. Is this what Mrs. Blackburn was protecting her against all those years? This delicious sensation? Charlotte is no longer thinking about school, or her father, or Rampur, or sleep, or tomorrow. For the first time in ten years she is happy.
1995 Rampur ~~~
CHARLOTTE HAD BEEN planning to hail a rickshaw for the Tuesday-morning meeting, since thanks to the sale of her china service, she finally had cash on hand. But when she saw the electricity bill, she’d grabbed her bike and decided that she would have to economize even more.
Behind her someone honked. Without looking around, she raised her hand. The driver did not pass and continued to honk his horn. Charlotte’s hair clung to her forehead, and when she looked over her shoulder, it interfered with her view of the traffic behind her. That morning the thermometer had hit forty-seven degrees, and the air was like treacle. The driver in the car behind her continued to honk, and Charlotte stopped.
The wife of Nikhil Nair beckoned to her. Charlotte leaned her bicycle against a tree and walked over to the car. The door opened.
“Jump in!” came the order from inside the air-conditioned car.
Charlotte entered the cool interior.
“Akhilesh, go lock the bike,” said the woman in her pink trouser suit to her chauffeur.
“Please, ma’am, the key.” He reached out his hand to Charlotte.
At the club she always parked the Raleigh near the entrance, and at home in the shed. “The bike doesn’t have a lock,” she said.
“Then I needn’t have bothered to stop,” muttered the buxom lady.
“Is there something wrong?” Charlotte inquired, revelling in the cool of the car interior.
The wife of Nikhil Nair rolled her eyes dramatically and waved her hands to reinforce her story. “You know that the nail specialist was going to arrange everything. Well, the man never called back. It appears that he’s arriving this week. We figured that since it’s going to benefit all of us, the shed next to the tennis court at the club would be a good place, seeing that the old workplace has already been rented out to a bookbinder, but now the secretary says that the shed is to be used to house the books, since the library is going to be refurbished in the next few weeks, in connection with the fete, since there will be important guests there, and he says that in honour of your father the library must be preserved in a proper state for the sake of future generations. The Karapiets’ extra room in the servants’ quarters is occupied because they’ve just taken on a cook with five children. Yesterday I spent the whole afternoon calling around. Time is getting short. He’s already on his way here, and we still don’t have anything, so we thought that — since you have so much space — you might have room for him.” Panting, the woman put her hands to her bosom.
“Room for whom?”
“For the tailor.”
“In my house?”
“Not in the house, of course, but there must be servants’ quarters?” The wife of Nikhil Nair, and everyone else, knew that except for Hema, Charlotte no longer had any personnel, while in the past there must have been at least forty servants, many of whom lived on the premises. The wife of Nikhil Nair saw the hesitation on Charlotte’s face and said, “Of course, he’ll be paying rent.”
Charlotte wanted to ask how much he would be paying. But because she knew that was what the wife of Nikhil Nair wanted to hear, she replied that she would think about it. She stepped out of the car and into the suffocating heat.
IT HAD ALREADY occurred to Charlotte that taking in lodgers was an honourable way of making money, but after the fiasco with the couple from Kerala who were schoolteachers, she hadn’t tried it again. Of course, two teachers who were constantly at each other’s throats was not the same thing as a tailor. Charlotte thought back to the evening when she drove by the workplace of the old darzi around eleven o’clock at night. She had remembered that she had a length of cotton in the car, and when she saw a light burning, she stopped and knocked on the door, assuming that he was still at work. A little girl opened the door, and behind her a whole family was lying asleep on the floor. Sanat jumped to his feet when he heard her voice, and with a smile he took the piece of material from her.
“I make beautiful dress, ma’am,” he had said, “round neck — sleeves short?”
She really wanted a square neck and long sleeves, but she had nodded and gone home. That evening she walked through all the unused rooms in their spacious house and decided to take in lodgers.
But the idea of a tailor coming to live and work on her property simply did not suit her. It would mean that all the women in the club would come to her house for fittings, and naturally they’d all stay for a cup of tea. The last thing she wanted was all those inquisitive female eyes in her house. There was already enough gossip about her — and besides, she had just sold her Wedgwood cups.
SHE PARKED HER bicycle near the entrance to the club. All her brooding about the tailor had almost made her forget about the oppressive heat, but when she saw the wife of Nikhil Nair standing near the entrance with a hopeful expression on her face, the heat engulfed her like an oppressive blanket.
“Everyone thinks it’s a wonderful idea!” called out the wife of Nikhil Nair.
She didn’t know where the other women had come from, but she was suddenly surrounded. The wife of Ajay Karapiet clapped her hands and called her their knight in shining armour. The widow Singh smiled at her encouragingly. The wife of Alok Nath, the goldsmith, pressed the length of material she had bought for a new dress into Charlotte’s hands, as if she were the tailor, and the wife of Adeeb Tata said that her Paris dress had to be shortened. The women were all talking at once. The enormous sense of relief was palpable. Charlotte, by contrast, broke out in a cold sweat. She had to put a stop to this. She had to explain that this was not what she wanted, that she was too busy, that her house was not suitable, that the servants’ quarters were home to scorpions and snakes and close to collapse, and that there was no way she could house a poor tailor.
She was ushered inside as if she was a hero. Someone handed her a glass of cold, sparkling lemonade and a homemade biscuit. The women gave themselves over to speculation about when he would arrive: one person said today, another thought it would be tomorrow, but it was clear to everyone that he could not be far away.
1937 Queen Victoria College ~~~
CHARLOTTE IS COLD. She wears two pairs of pyjama pants to bed, one over the other, and a heavy woollen sweater. That’s not allowed during the day, so she puts on an extra woollen shirt under her school uniform and wears a pair of tights.
The cold didn’t seem to bother her friend Iris, who often forgot to put on a coat.
“There’s snow in the air,” says Iris.
Charlotte looks up at the steely skies and shivers. “I don’t see any snow.”
“You can’t see it, but you can smell it.”
She sniffs. It smells the way it always smells: like coal-fired heaters and the pine trees next to the school. Smells she associates with her first six months in England, when almost no one talked to her and she spent entire afternoons alone in the library, reading. Now that she and Iris are friends, school isn’t that bad. The two of them make fun of the gym teacher’s nose and Miss Brands, who teaches handicrafts and always has spots on her skirt. “I’ve never seen snow,” she says.
“Don’t they have snow in India?”
“There’s lots of snow in the Himalayas, sometimes fifteen metres deep, but I’ve never been there. India is a very big country.”
“Snow is nothing but frozen water.”
“Does it hurt?”
Iris laughs. “Only when you fall on your backside.”
The two girls walk down the path leading to Albert Hall, where Mrs. Blackburn is going to read the Christmas story to the children in the lower grades. Charlotte’s gaze keeps returning to the sky. It reminds her of the period just before the monsoon, when the clouds hang lower and lower and the sky turns a darker shade of grey.
The girls are already seated on benches around an empty chair in the middle of a room with a high ceiling. On the walls there are paintings of old men, and a fire is burning in the fireplace. Everyone’s chattering away and the smell of freshly baked biscuits hangs in the air. Charlotte and Iris find a spot near the windows. Outside, the first flakes start to fall: on the path, on the grass. Then there are more of them, and they’re larger. It’s magical. The trees in the field are gradually covered by a blanket of snow, and the huge Victorian school building on the opposite side of the road disappears from sight.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Charlotte whispers.
Iris smiles.