Meet Me in Bombay

by Jenny Ashcroft

  “I wonder,” he said, cutting her off before she could offer to take him to the arts and crafts room, “might I go to my room? It’s been a long morning.”

  “You must see Dr. Arnold first,” she said, “but I was going to show you the—”

  “Dr. Arnold?” For the first time, he looked straight at her. “Now?”

  “Well, yes,” she said, “he’s waiting to meet you.”

  “Then please, let’s not keep him.”

  “Of course,” she said, “of course.”

  She offered her hand again, but he didn’t notice, so she let it drop and led the way across the library, through the far oak door, toward the doctor’s rooms.

  Officer Jones was quieter yet as they progressed down the hospital’s back corridors, his attention fixed on the foggy, lead-lined windows and falling snow outside. Afraid that his thoughts might be running to the maudlin (why wouldn’t they? poor man), Emma tried to distract him with some history, and told him that the building had been a manor in Elizabethan times, but had been made into a military hospital the year before, specifically for head wounds. (She omitted to mention that it had previously been a lunatic asylum for hysterical women; as with the dearth of dinnertime conversation, it seemed for the best.)

  She came to a halt outside Dr. Arnold’s door. “Here we are,” she said, unnecessarily. “The doctor will ring for me when you’re finished, and I’ll take you upstairs.”

  “Thank you,” Officer Jones said, “you’re very kind.”

  “Not at all,” said Emma, and, despite his distracted air, felt another swelling in her chest. “It’s my absolute pleasure.”

  * * *

  He watched her bustle away, taking her chatter, her well-intentioned smiles, and her talk of manor houses with her. (He knew the hospital had been a lunatic asylum; the ambulance driver had told him. “There’s talk it’s haunted,” she’d said, with merciful disregard for his shattered nerves.) Once he was certain Sister Lytton was gone, he breathed deep, steadying himself with the silence, then raised his fist to knock on the doctor’s door. Exhausted as he was, he was happy to be doing it. He’d been waiting impatiently for his space at the King’s Fifth ever since his doctor at the London General had told him of Arnold’s reputation as a miracle worker.

  Jones (he loathed the name, but he’d learned to think of himself by it; to accept the unsettling sense of its wrongness, having no idea what was right) needed a miracle. He wasn’t sure how he was going to endure living in this morose, echoing place—the way those men in the drawing room had slouched in their chairs; the one who’d been shaking—but he had to believe that Arnold would help him leave, to mend.

  Remember.

  He needed, so desperately, to remember.

  The door opened. A lean, elderly man peered out. He had neatly combed white hair, an even whiter mustache, and wore slacks, a bow tie, and a waistcoat, a knitted cardigan over it all. He smiled, tipping his head so that he could look over the top of his spectacles. “Here you are,” he said, “I’ve been watching the clock.” He stepped back and extended his arm into the book-lined study. “In he comes.”

  He hadn’t called him Officer Jones. Or Tommy. Or Tom.

  Jones liked him for it instantly.

  Arnold gestured at the armchair to his left, next to the fire. Jones crossed over to it. It was warm in the room, such a contrast to the drafty corridor, the snowy outside. His skin, still acclimatizing, prickled beneath his convalescent blues.

  Arnold poured them both tea. “Have you worked out how you take it?” he asked.

  Jones gave a small smile. “Just milk.”

  “Same as me,” said Arnold, “excellent. Now let me tell you about what we’re going to do.…”

  He said that their session that morning would be brief, not even an hour. Subsequent ones would be longer, but he didn’t want to exhaust him. “I know you must be very, very tired.”

  Jones was. Tired was all he could recall being.

  “I’ll do most of the talking today,” Arnold went on, and was true to his word. He told Jones that all fifty-two men at the King’s Fifth were suffering from neurological disorders. Some had lost part of their memory, some—like Jones—all of it; others held on to far too much. “I can’t decide which is the lesser of the two evils,” Arnold said.

  “Perhaps they’re both as bad,” suggested Jones, who’d shared a room in London with an officer whose mind was locked in France, the trenches. He couldn’t leave and woke screaming, all the time, trying to claw invisible rats from his skin.

  “Yes,” said Arnold. “Maybe I’ll write a book on it one day. However,” he reached behind him for a leather-bound journal, “this one is for you. As I’m sure you’ve been told, we operate gently here. No shock therapy, no intervention, just … care, coaxing for your mind. The pages here,” he raised the journal, “are blank, waiting for your memories.” He held it out for Jones to take. “Anything that comes to you,” he said, “jot it down directly. View your past as a puzzle, one you must slot together. Don’t let any piece slide away.”

  “I don’t have any pieces,” Jones said.

  “None?”

  Jones hesitated.

  “What is it?” Arnold leaned forward, cloudy eyes sparking, the springs in his chair creaking.

  “They’re just dreams,” said Jones.

  “There’s no such thing as ‘just dreams,’” Arnold said. “Tell me about them.”

  “It’s hard to describe.” Jones stared into the fire, reliving the way he’d wake, covered in sweat, more often than not crying or panting with frustration, his mind a kaleidoscope that never came into focus. “I don’t see anything that means anything.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I can’t say exactly.” How to put word to those anonymous voices, the faceless faces?

  “Feel then?” said Arnold, persisting.

  “Heat,” Jones said. “I think I was somewhere hot.”

  Arnold nodded, gaze unwavering. “Anything else?”

  Another hesitation. Should he say?

  Was there any point?

  “Tell me,” Arnold urged. “What can it cost you?”

  Jones sighed. What could it cost him?

  He’d already lost it all.

  “There was a woman,” he said at length. “I’m sure there was a woman.”

  “Yes,” said Arnold, and smiled sadly. “There generally is.”

  * * *

  He dreamed of her again that night.

  He had his own room. He was grateful for that, for the silence. It was warm, carpeted, with a bureau, a reading lamp, and a view over the snowy front lawns. There was a hot-water bottle in the bed. He’d been in far worse, these past months.

  Dreamed in far worse.

  After a silent dinner (“I’ve squeezed you into the first sitting,” Sister Lytton told him when she came to collect him, “there’s trifle for dessert”), he’d escaped to it, with barely the energy to undress and wash before he fell into his bed. He lost consciousness within seconds. He always did. He didn’t know how long it took for the dream to begin, but soon it was all he knew. He left the ice, the dark, and felt heat beat on his face, his shoulders.

  He was in a tight street; buildings hemmed him in on both sides, colored canopies obscured the sun’s glare. Crowds of people surrounded him. There was a woman, in a lemon dress, a straw hat, buttery waves.

  It was her.

  He was sure it was her.

  He pushed his way toward her. He was trying to run.

  She kept walking, faster, faster, disappearing.

  He stopped, climbing onto a stone step, chest rising, falling. Then he saw her again. Too far away, a man in front of her, grinning toothlessly. He felt himself open his mouth, fill his lungs. He thought he might be about to call a name, her name …

  His eyes snapped open. Awake. Blackness surrounded him; a heartless contrast to the color of the place he’d just left. He blinked, trying to recollect where he was
now. His skin, beneath his sheets, was soaked. His pulse raced. His toe touched the cold hot-water bottle, and he remembered he was at the King’s Fifth.

  The dream was already retreating, gone as quickly as it had come.

  Shakily, he reached for his journal, and noted down the only things he could recall.

  Toothless man.

  Noise.

  A market?

  He let the pencil fall from his hand, and sank his head back on his damp pillow.

  He didn’t know what any of it could mean.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Bombay, Spring 1914

  Luke Devereaux’s postcard arrived on a Saturday, leaving three days until he’d be waiting for Maddy in that coffee shop. Three days. It seemed at once an age, and terrifyingly, thrillingly close. Maddy couldn’t make herself believe it would truly happen. Even as she planned how to escape the villa without questions from her mother (she decided to say she was meeting Guy for lunch at the Gymkhana Club; Alice would inevitably discover the lie, but Maddy could worry about that then), it seemed too surreal that she’d truly do it. She tried to imagine how it would be: herself walking into the unknown coffee shop and finding Luke Devereaux there; the two of them at a table, breathing the same air, looking one another in the eye, speaking about … what? She didn’t know. A shiver of pure nerves shot through her, every time she thought of it.

  She couldn’t settle to anything that endless, baking weekend. With the exception of church at St. Thomas’s Cathedral on Sunday morning, she and Alice spent the entire time at home. There wasn’t a polo or cricket match to break things up, no evening drinks nor dinner party to go to. The heat bore down relentlessly from the cloudless sky, scalding the lawn, the palms and jungle beyond, turning the villa’s shuttered rooms into so many ovens: all thick golden light and floating dust.

  Maddy looked for distractions. She took several baths, enjoying the brief respite of the cool water, the freedom from her corset and stockings. She tried to read, but found herself constantly going over the same paragraph, taking none of the sentences in. She started a letter to Aunt Edie—How are you, up there in Scotland? Have there been any signs of spring springing? I hate to think of you so alone. I wish you could come out to stay, that you’d let me at least ask Mama …—but ran out of steam before she finished the first, sweat-smudged page. She began another to Della—When on earth are you coming back?—then gave up on that, too. Her eyes strayed to Luke Devereaux’s postcard on her writing desk, the slant of those words.

  I shall be there at noon on Tuesday.

  Will you?

  Did he realize how little he needed to ask?

  She drifted from her desk to her closet, where she spent a shameful amount of time agonizing over which gown would be best for a coffee shop. (What would Sylvia Pankhurst think?) She took countless walks, fanning herself in the dappled shade of the garden’s trees, and even, on a whim, went back to the kitchen to see if she could help Cook bake his Sunday Victoria sponge.

  “Memsahib,” he said, “you are not liking my food?”

  “What?” she said. “No.”

  He stared. “No, you are not liking?”

  “No, I am liking, I am.…”

  He dropped his gaze to the workbench (legs in bowls of water, not a red ant to be seen), jaw set.

  “Oh God,” said Maddy, “truly, I just wanted to help. I love your food, especially that turkey curry at Christmas.…”

  He closed his eyes.

  She left.

  The weekend wasn’t a complete disaster. There was one happy occurrence, care of Alice, strangely enough.

  It was late on Sunday, just as the scalding sun was dipping toward dusk, bathing the villa’s lawn in ethereal light, and the sky behind the palms and dense jungle in a rush of red, purple, and gold. Kites swarmed in flocks from the villa’s rooftop to the trees, their battering wings and the clack of the cicadas’ chorus mixing with the laughter of the gardener’s children playing chase with the peacocks on the grass. Maddy, who’d been watching the three children from the veranda, decided they could do with a distraction, too. Fetching Alice’s oil paints from the drawing room, she sent them all in search of white stones, then sat with them on the lawn, covering the stones with color: monkeys, polka dots, patterns of every description. (She hoped the peacocks were grateful.)

  They’d worked their way through about half of the stones when Alice came down to see what they were all up to. She approached so quietly that Maddy didn’t realize she was there until she spoke.

  “I used to paint like this with you, Madeline,” she said.

  Maddy turned, meeting her eye. She was already dressed for dinner in a high-necked white gown, and had her arms folded as she bent, peering over Maddy’s shoulder.

  “We always used to do it,” Alice went on, talking as much to herself, Maddy thought, as to her.

  “I remember,” Maddy said, because she did. Unlike with the fireworks, the recollection of her hours cushioned on Alice’s lap, Alice’s chin on her head, her child’s hand guided by Alice’s slender fingers, was one she’d held on to. She’d even taken some of the stones they’d made together to England, struggling, the older she got, to reconcile the memory of that lap with the mother who never visited. “You painted orchids,” she said. “You were rather good at it.”

  Alice smiled one of her rare smiles. “Was I?”

  Impulsively, Maddy held out her brush. “Why don’t you see if you still are?”

  She didn’t expect Alice to agree. She was sure she’d demur, hold up her hands and refuse in the same way she’d turned Richard’s dance down at New Year’s.

  But Alice reached out for the brush. She gathered up her lace skirts, knelt down on the coarse grass, and asked the youngest of the children to pick her a nice flat stone. “Yes, Suya, perfect.” She ran her thumb over it, finding the smoothest surface, then dipped the brush in magenta, and proceeded to paint the most graceful, intricate flower. They all watched her, none of them speaking, the children’s breathing heavy with concentration. Darkness fell and the villa’s windows began to glow as the servants lit the oil lamps inside.

  “There,” Alice said when, at length, she added the final detail and turned the stone, examining it in the dusky light. “Not too bad.”

  “Not too bad at all,” said Maddy.

  “For you,” Alice said, holding it out for her.

  Maddy took it, touched and surprised in equal measure. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re most welcome,” said Alice, and for a second, just a second, she held Maddy’s eye, and the corners of hers creased in another smile.

  “Make one for me, Memsahib Alice,” chorused the children. “For me, for me.”

  “No, no,” said Alice, “it’s far too late,” but she laughed. Actually laughed; a soft, rippling sound that surprised Maddy all over again, but that the children didn’t seem as taken aback to hear.

  And even though Alice insisted that it was time for everyone to go inside, before the mosquitoes ate them, and was her usual quiet self again at dinner, Maddy placed the stone on her bedside table before she climbed into bed. She blew her candle out, and closed her eyes thinking of her mother’s smile, her laugh.

  Strange as both still felt, she was glad that she’d taken those paints into the garden.

  * * *

  The stone was the first thing she saw when she woke the next day. She reached out, touching her fingertips to the now dry paint, and, replaying Alice’s laugh, briefly considered offering to accompany her on that morning’s memsahib tea. For the first time it occurred to her that her mother might not be as indifferent to her going as she always seemed. She dismissed the idea as quickly as it came. After the drawn-out weekend, and a fitful night fighting to get comfortable in her tangled sheets, she felt perilously close to madness as it was; several hours of good housekeeping with Diana Aldyce and the rest might just push her over the edge.

  However, since another day in the steamy villa seemed ju
st as certain a path to lunacy, she resolved to go into town, as soon as Alice left. She stood, crossing to her closet, and pulled out a lemon dress, laying it on the bed. She moved quickly, skin dampening in the already warm room, relieved to have a purpose. She couldn’t quite believe how much time she’d watched slip by these past days. Back in Oxford, she’d always had somewhere to be: college, out with her friends, for meetings at the school she’d been meant to work at, on the train to Paddington for the theater, a rally … She wasn’t sure what had happened to that busy person. Maybe this sultry life was changing her. If she wasn’t careful, she’d become just another of those waiting for the sun to pass the yardarm so that her first gin might feel respectable.

  “Oh God,” she said, her voice filling the airless room, “no.”

  She reached for her bath sheet and decided that she’d spend the morning at a bazaar. There was one she’d been meaning to go to, not far from the terminus, as it happened. It was hardly the worthiest of pursuits, but would hopefully make the day pass more quickly than it otherwise might. Little wins.

  * * *

  She caught a tram to the Victoria Terminus, pressed into a window seat for the creaking journey into the city. The vehicle was hot, stuffy with stale sweat, and grew even more so as they moved further into the center, swapping the lapping sea, lush plants, and birdsong of Malabar Hill for dusty roads, shanties, and apartment blocks. More passengers climbed in, as many standing as sitting: women in saris carrying baskets of sweet-smelling fruits, laundry, and vegetables; men in loose trousers and tunics, a couple in starched blazers, off to work in British offices. It was a relief when they at last reached the terminus. Maddy ran gratefully down the tram’s stairs, deliberately not looking in the direction of her father’s nearby office, not wanting to tempt fate into making anyone there spot her.

  The sun-crisped streets surrounding the Gothic walls of the station were teeming. Camels and bullock carts vied for space on the dirt roads with rickshaws and automobiles, the dabba wallahs who rode bicycles laden with tiffin bags, delivering lunch to the sahibs. Porters thronged at the station entrance, handcarts at the ready, joking and laughing by the statue of Queen Victoria, eyes alert for approaching carriages and motors packed with luggage. Beggars slumped beneath the scant shade of the mango trees; Maddy flinched at their bony limbs, a baby, swaddled in frayed sacking, trying to feed from its staring mother. Most had their eyes closed, heads on their chests, ignored, just as they were at the port, in the gardens, on every city street. One forgets they’re there, Diana Aldyce had remarked, back at a tea on the Gymkhana Club’s pristine terrace, when Maddy had first arrived and naively asked whether something couldn’t be done, much nicer that way. Alice had given Diana a level look that still made Maddy wonder how much she really liked Diana after all. Alice hadn’t pulled Diana up on her coldness, though; no one had, all complicit in their silence. It made Maddy’s already hot skin burn. She reached for her purse, dropping coins onto the lap of the woman with the baby. The woman didn’t move, or nod her thanks, and Maddy didn’t blame her. In her place, looking at her British coloring and fine gown, she wouldn’t feel particularly grateful either.