Meet Me in Bombay

by Jenny Ashcroft

  “You’ll get burned,” he warned.

  “I don’t care,” she shouted back.

  “Take my hat,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I never get to not wear a hat.”

  They hugged the land. The city sprawled to their left, that other world of heat and bustle, sewers and dust. To their right was the haze of the horizon, the silhouette of yet another P&O liner moving languidly toward England. She caught the way Luke looked at it, the sudden seriousness in him, and thought maybe he was thinking about his own voyage home. She didn’t want to know if he was. She never wanted this voyage to end. She loved that he’d taken her on it, that they weren’t now sitting in the back of a stuffy staff motor, stuck in Bombay traffic.

  She thought he was probably taking her for lunch back at the Yacht Club. Or the Taj Hotel. Both were by the water. But they passed first the grand domes of the hotel, the Sea Lounge’s tables on the shore’s edge, then the red roof and yellow walls of the club, the stairs she’d sat on at New Year’s, and he kept their course set straight.

  It was only when she’d given up ever knowing where they were going that he called for her to duck, then changed the sail, steering them back toward land, a long stretch of beach. Its sands were packed, absolutely teeming with people from shore to road; even from a distance she could hear the vast thrum of voices, the carrying sitar music, the steady beat of street drums. As they got closer, she saw that in between the patchwork of saris and tunics were blankets bearing jewelry, sweet-smelling incense, ornaments, rugs and fabrics. It was another market, only like none she’d seen before. Smoke rose from vendors’ charcoals: grilled vegetables and paneer, sizzling fat. Boats hugged the shallow waters, overflowing with vegetables, bags of rice, huge bunches of coriander and curry leaves, soaked in sunshine.

  She turned, meeting Luke’s smiling eyes, smiling herself, because of the way he’d obviously been watching her, waiting for her to speak.

  “This isn’t in your guidebook,” she said.

  “I wanted to bring you somewhere new,” he said. “And we need to get your aunt her gift.”

  “It’s incredible,” she said, looking around once more, amazed, now that they were here, that she’d ever thought they might go to the Taj. She pictured the carriages and saloons lined up at the entrance, the formal dining room inside—the expressionless punkah wallahs, hot, stale air, clinking crockery, and polite, tinkling laughter—and couldn’t have felt sorrier for everyone who was in it.

  She felt that more and more as the afternoon passed. They went ashore, stopping at the stalls to buy Edie a woolen shawl, then kebabs rolled in naans, which they ate on a wooden jetty, the stallholders splashing through the shallow waves asking them to come, look, buy, buy.

  “Later,” they both said, “later.”

  They talked, so much, the words coming effortlessly, freely, just as they had the night before. In response to her prompting, Luke told her more about how he and Peter had become friends, the polo they’d used to play.

  “Peter plays polo?” she said.

  “He plays Peter’s version of it,” said Luke, “which, if it hasn’t been banned yet, should be.”

  He described his house in Richmond, tone becoming wistful as he talked of the peace of it, even so close to London, how the Thames ran by the bottom of his garden, the boat he kept, and went out in whenever he could.

  “Hence you being so handy with a sail,” she said.

  “No, actually,” he said, “that I have my father to thank for. I grew up in Sandbanks; he used to take me out on the Solent. Still does, when I go to visit.”

  She smiled, enjoying the image of him with an older version of himself, in thick woolen jumpers, out on the cold, choppy sea.

  They finished their kebabs, fetched kulfi. She didn’t say how Guy had warned her off eating the ice creams. She didn’t think of Guy at all. She spoke more of the small Oxfordshire village she’d grown up in, holidays in the Lakes, her time at Somerville, all the rallies in London.

  “Were you ever arrested?” Luke asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Don’t sound so disappointed,” he told her.

  One hour turned to another, on and on, the intense heat ebbing, mellowing, until, without either of them stopping to acknowledge it was happening, the crowds thinned, the waters emptied, the boats all packed up, on their way home.

  He arched his neck, brown curls brushing his collar as he looked up at the darkening sky, then across to where the sun was bleeding into the horizon, stare narrowing, as reluctant as Maddy felt.

  “We have to go?” she said.

  “I promised your father we’d be back by nightfall,” he said. “He didn’t seem to have much faith in my ability to sail in darkness.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Such a worrier,” she said.

  He smiled. “Wait here,” he said, “I’ll bring the boat to you.”

  The journey back in the deepening dusk was, if possible, even more beautiful than the one out had been. Slower, too. The wind had changed direction, leaving the sea calmer, inky, filling the sail just enough to push them softly along. They sat next to one another. Luke showed Maddy how to work the tiller, guiding her hand with his. She stared down at their fingers, hers pale, his dark, marveling at her earlier nerves, her coyness; it seemed like something someone else must have felt. The city’s lights came on one by one, glinting on the shoreline, and she dropped her head against his shoulder, breathing in the trace of the beach’s charcoals on his shirt, his scent of soap and heat. She closed her eyes, relishing the breeze, warm on her burned face, and the vastness of the sea, stretching all around.

  The stars were out by the time they reached the beach. All the fishermen had gone home. Luke dropped the anchor, jumped into the sea, and turned, pulling the boat toward him.

  She placed her hands on his shoulders, felt his come around her waist.

  She looked down, her hair loose, falling forward. “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?” he asked.

  “This day,” she said.

  “You know I planned it,” he said, “just for this excuse to hold you.”

  “I thought as much,” she said.

  Slowly, feeling each beat in her chest, she dipped, toward him.

  This time, there was no Peter to interrupt them. There was no one.

  She thought she knew what was coming. It wasn’t her first kiss, after all. There’d been boys back in Oxford; a handful of stolen moments in dark hallways at balls, college parties.

  Only, they’d been different.

  This was different.

  His lips brushed hers, then again, and she felt herself fall, from the boat, into his arms, with an abandon that shocked her. She didn’t question it. He kissed her more, scooping her close, and she didn’t think at all. She pressed into him, the strength of him holding her tighter, the kiss going wonderfully on and on.

  She wanted to be nothing but entirely happy. She almost was. But, as they pulled apart, and she rested her forehead against his, her skirt dipping in the shallow sea, she saw the way he looked at her, the movement of his thoughts behind his dark gaze, and, out of nowhere, was reminded of how he’d watched the P&O liner leave earlier, only this time it was impossible to push the prospect of his going aside. Instead, eyes in his eyes, she found herself thinking of what had brought him to India in the first place—this war that she wanted to believe could never come, only she’d read too many articles on the arms race in Europe, the lands everyone wanted off one another—and felt the spike of her old fear return: that this happiness, so unexpected, so surreal, wouldn’t last; a shadow, moving over the perfect day. Don’t trust it.

  He held her tighter, as though he guessed some of what she was thinking.

  He didn’t ask her about it, though. Just as she hadn’t asked him, when they’d seen that liner disappear before.

  He kissed her again, and she tried to let her fear go.

&n
bsp; What was the point in holding on to it?

  There, in the blackening darkness, the sea rippling, silence all around, keeping the world out, and them, just them, in, she told herself that there was no point, no point at all.

  It’s all going to be fine.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It’s all going to be fine.

  Alice told herself that as she waited by the drawing room window, pained eyes on her daughter and this Luke Devereaux, barely visible in the now deep night, coming through the gates, meandering up the leafy driveway, toward the house. She rested her fingers on the window, watching the slow way they walked, hand in hand, their heads tipped toward one another, so oblivious to everything else around them, and even in spite of her reservations (which were legion) felt her heart pinch, the start of the saddest kind of smile: part memory of what it felt like to walk that way with a young man; part grief, that this was the happiest she’d seen her daughter since she’d arrived in India; part fear that Luke would leave (Richard had said he had less than a week left in the country), either compelling Madeline to follow, or hurting her horribly.

  She pressed her hand harder against the warm glass, brow creasing as she realized Madeline was wearing no hat. Her blond curls were disheveled, falling down her back. She’d been sailing, of course; Richard had told Alice that, too, when he’d got home from the office an hour before. Alice had been furious with him, for not trying to stop her.

  “Our daughter’s been out on a boat?” she’d said. “All day?”

  “There are worse things, Alice.”

  “Are there?” she’d said. “Do I really need to tell you what people will say?”

  “Who gives a damn?” he’d said, pouring them both brandies. “Let them talk. What does it matter?”

  “It matters plenty,” she’d said, “whether it should or not.”

  “She’s a grown woman, whether you like it or not.”

  “Perhaps I’d like it a deal more if I hadn’t had her childhood stolen—”

  “No,” he’d cut her off, “no. I am not doing this again.”

  He’d turned, gone upstairs, leaving their brandies untouched. The lead-crystal glasses were still sitting on the sideboard; a fly had landed in one, drowned in the alcohol. (It seemed a happy enough end. There are worse things.) She hadn’t seen Richard since. She wanted to be angry at him still (it was a familiar battle), especially now, seeing their daughter in such a state of disarray. And yet, as she continued to watch her approach, sun-kissed and happy, she couldn’t manage to be. She found herself picturing Madeline out on the waves, head thrown back—that gurgling laugh she, Alice, had been so terrified of forgetting every day of the past fifteen years—and felt the pull of another smile.

  “Are you ready?”

  She started at Richard’s voice, breaking through the humid silence. He was by the doorway, dressed for supper in white tie. She could tell from the softness in his weathered face that he’d caught her smile.

  “You’re talking to me again?” she said.

  “I’m always talking to you, Alice.”

  He crossed the room, running his arms around her waist. She stiffened, but didn’t pull away. Whatever her resentment toward him, she never really wanted to do that.

  “It’s like I keep telling you,” he said, “Guy’s not the right man for her.”

  “He’s the perfect man for her,” said Alice.

  “No. He’s just not going to leave. That’s not the same thing.”

  “He’d look after her, Richard, you know he would.”

  “She has two perfectly good parents.”

  “I don’t think Guy wants to be a parent.”

  “I’m not sure I want to think about that,” he said.

  Alice sighed.

  “He’s nearly the same age as you,” said Richard, “almost twenty years older than Maddy.”

  “You’re almost twenty years older than me,” she said, which he was. He was sixty to her forty-four. They’d become engaged when she was twenty-one and heartbroken (thank you, Fitz; thank you, Edie). Richard had been on home leave in Oxford. He’d taken her on walks along the river, for teas in Oxford’s cobbled alleyways, convinced her everything could be all right again. They’d married quickly—he’d said he was terrified of her changing her mind (which she’d never had any intention of doing)—and, to her parents’ lasting fury, had set sail for Bombay the very same day. Madeline (a name Alice had always loved, and could never bring herself to shorten) had been born ten months later, the only one of her treasured babies to survive a pregnancy; all that mattered, from her very first breath.

  “Was I wrong to marry you?” she asked Richard now.

  “It was the cleverest thing you ever did,” he said. “But Maddy isn’t you.”

  “She’d be happy with Guy,” she said. “He thinks the world of her.”

  Richard said nothing.

  She returned her attention to the window. They were almost at the house. Hidden by the shutters, she studied Luke as she hadn’t been able to earlier that day, when she’d tried to make him out from her bedroom. He was much younger than Guy, thirty perhaps, and undeniably handsome, with the kind of face one noticed. That alone didn’t worry her. Guy was handsome, too, albeit in a fairer, somehow more gentlemanly way. It was the warmth in this stranger that unsettled her, the almost … magnetic vitality. The way he was looking at Madeline; how she was looking at him.…

  A fresh spike of dread shot through her. “I can’t lose her,” she said to Richard. “Not again.”

  He didn’t tell her it was too soon to worry about that. He didn’t insist that she’d be able to go, too, to England, if it came to it. He’d been with her, after all, that one time she’d gone back. That awful summer after he’d first taken Madeline.

  “Stop pushing her away then” was all he said. They both turned, hearing footsteps coming into the porch, along the tiled hallway. He squeezed her shoulders. “Invite Luke to dinner,” he said. “Try.”

  She nodded slowly, swallowing on her nerves. So odd, to be shy with one’s own daughter. But she would do as Richard said. Much as she hoped that the entire affair would end as quickly as it had begun (with as little pain as possible), she knew she needed to. The other night in the garden, when she’d painted that stone, Madeline’s smile had meant … everything. She’d kept peeking into Madeline’s room ever since, just to check the stone was still there on her bedside table. They’d been getting somewhere, the two of them. She’d ruined that, with her feigned headache earlier. She couldn’t risk doing that again.

  She had to try. She had to.

  It’s all going to be fine.

  She turned to the door, eyes moving over Madeline’s face as she came into the room, suffused with joy. You look like you’ve had a lovely day, she meant to say to her.

  She wasn’t sure why “You seem to have lost your hat” was what came out.

  * * *

  “Was she angry?” Della asked Maddy the next morning.

  Maddy had come to call on her, as she’d promised she would, at Peter’s house: a small villa in between Malabar Hill and the city. They were having a breakfast of soft rolls and honey in his postage-stamp garden, trees hemming them in on every side, mercifully blocking the already hot sun, but not the noise of traffic and tram bells, the thick buzz of voices carrying from the streets.

  “About the hat?” said Maddy.

  “About any of it,” said Della.

  “Disappointed, I think,” said Maddy, swallowing her mouthful.

  “Oh no,” said Della. “That’s always worse.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” said Maddy, feeling fairly disappointed herself. To think she’d actually been glad to see her mother waiting there in the drawing room; relieved, that she’d been willing to meet Luke after all. “You should have heard the way she asked him to stay for dinner,” she said to Della. “She might as well have been inviting him to pull her teeth.”

  “And he didn’t stay?”

&n
bsp; “No, he had to be at one of the cantonments for nine. He’s coming tonight, though.”

  “For dinner with your parents?”

  “No, they’ve got something for Papa’s work. He’s taking me out; I don’t know where.”

  Does it matter? he’d said when she’d asked him before he’d left, the two of them alone in the driveway.

  No, she’d said as he took her hand, pulling her close, pushing all thoughts of Alice’s curt manner aside, I don’t suppose it does.

  “You’re smiling,” said Della. “Like a lunatic. And your face is very burned, by the way.”

  “I know,” said Maddy, touching her sore cheekbones tentatively. “I’m just hoping it fades before I see Diana Aldyce again.”

  “God, yes,” said Della.

  “Let’s hope we don’t get freckles,” they both mimicked, and burst out laughing.

  “She’ll be chomping at the bit to see you,” said Della, reaching for the pot. “She was full of questions about how you and Luke know one another when you disappeared the other night. Not that I said anything.”

  “Thank you.”

  “A pleasure,” said Della. “Frustrating Diana might just be my new favorite sport. You realize she’s going to have all sorts to say when she gets wind that you went out unchaperoned.”

  Maddy shrugged. “If it wasn’t that, it would be something else.”

  “And is your mother so relaxed about it?”

  “Hardly. Which is rich, as she never had an issue about me going anywhere with Guy, and apparently used to go out unchaperoned with my father all the time.” Richard had said as much over dinner, when Alice had tried to make a fuss again about Maddy’s doing it now. Maddy was still absorbing the revelation. “I’ve never pictured her doing something like that.”

  “I quite like the idea,” said Della. “Alice, the rebel.”