Meet Me in Bombay

by Jenny Ashcroft

  Alice hadn’t replied, not at first. She’d stared, blue eyes wrought, almost afraid, as though these were questions she’d long dreaded, making Maddy start to wish she’d never asked them.

  Even more so when Alice had spoken, each syllable taut, forced; an agony. “It did break my heart, Madeline,” she’d said. “It was the hardest thing I ever did. I wanted so much to go with you.”

  “But…”

  “It was impossible,” Alice had said. “It felt impossible.”

  “Impossible?” Maddy had echoed, as confused as ever. “Because of Edie?” she’d hazarded. “You used to be friends. Did you row?”

  Alice had sighed, which Maddy had taken as “yes,” but before she could think how to press her mother to say more about the long-suspected disagreement, Alice had gone on, assuring her that Edie had had nothing to do with her not sailing. “Nor did Fitz. I would never have let something like that stop me.”

  What happened between you, though? Maddy had almost asked.

  Only then Alice had moved, touching her hand to her waist, brow denting in what had looked like another pain. Assuming it was, and feeling awful for her—guilty, too, certain that she’d somehow helped cause it—Maddy simply hadn’t been able to bring herself to add to her upset.

  To Luke’s, and Della’s, frustration, she hadn’t raised any of it again.

  Just as she didn’t now, as she spun on the spot, looking past her simple white lace gown at Alice’s ashen reflection in the condensation-smeared mirror—“Perfect,” Alice said quietly. “Like a picture”—feeling a churning in her own stomach at what Poincaré had promised, and the terrifying unpredictability of what was coming next.

  “I want them all to stop,” she said to Luke, “I want to go over there and order them to stop.”

  “You should,” he said, kissing her throat. “I’d really rather not be a soldier again, and they’d listen to you, I’m certain.”

  But she didn’t go over, obviously, and on July 23, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia dictating that they should be given free rein to carry out an inquiry into the archduke’s death, which Serbia rejected out of hand.

  And then, with just a few days left until the ceremony, the dominoes fell.

  On July 31, after Maddy had risen before sunrise and gone with Ahmed and Della to Bombay’s fragrant, glorious flower markets—the three of them sheltering beneath bowed umbrellas amid the early-morning throngs, jostling their way through the groaning stalls to select cartloads of damp, sweet petals for the church—the grim news arrived that the Russians had mobilized in support of Serbia.

  “It doesn’t mean…” began Della, then stopped.

  Even she couldn’t try and pretend it wasn’t happening anymore.

  They still sent the flowers off to the cathedral, though. They all told each other that nothing else could really happen until after the wedding. Surely not.

  But the very next day, while Maddy was in the villa’s kitchen, making all the right noises about Cook’s quite genuinely breathtaking wedding cake (fruit, not sponge), Luke arrived to break it to her that the Germans had moved into neutral Belgium.

  “We’re still getting married,” he said, once they’d retreated to the privacy of the empty drawing room. “Nothing’s going to stop that.”

  “But afterward…”

  “Is afterward,” he said, pulling her to him. “We’ll manage it then.” His eyes met hers. “It will be all right.”

  She sighed, sinking against him, gladly letting herself be convinced—for the moment at least. “You’re not running off anywhere now, are you?” she said.

  “I have to be at the cantonment.”

  “I’d rather you stayed with me,” she said.

  “I’d rather that, too,” he said, with a lingering kiss. “And that’s my plan, just as soon as this mess is over. I intend to do nothing else.”

  “And will that really be by Christmas, like everyone says?”

  “Maybe even sooner,” he said.

  She hoped to God that he was right.

  She hoped it again the next day, when France and Belgium began full mobilization. She went to collect her dress from the Taj, stopping to stare at the broadsheets on display in the lobby—the pictures of happy English bank holiday crowds, the headlines declaring that the country, in the grip of a heat wave, was ready for battle—and silently prayed that all of this would be nothing more than a short interlude of madness.

  Inevitably, Britain issued an ultimatum to Germany, commanding them to move out of Belgium or face a declaration of war. By the time the morning of the wedding dawned, all British and Indian troops, active and reserve, had been placed on standby. Luke and Peter were, inevitably, among them.

  Beside herself as Maddy was (and she was terrified), she still woke far too early for the wedding, a smile stubbornly tugging at her cheeks, full of unquenchable euphoria at the day ahead, the thought of Luke waking up in his rooms, and the shivering, wonderful reality that within hours they’d be married.

  Married.

  Her excitement took over as she bathed, dressed in her white gown, and shakily pinned her hair. Her fear over everything else retreated as she drove with her father to the church, held his hand with her trembling one, then took his arm and ran through the driving rain to the doors of St. Thomas’s, veil trailing behind her on the slippery front steps. She stood at the head of the marble aisle, looking down toward Luke at the altar—so handsome in his morning suit (not uniform, not yet), so happy as he stared up at her, her—and thought only of him, and what they were about to do. She took a step, dizzy with her own short breaths of excitement, and her mind emptied of the reserve mobilization points that were being pulled up all over India. She forgot the empty vessels steaming, even now, to Bombay, ready to carry the army away. She didn’t think of which army was moving across which forbidden border, or how grim her mother looked in the wooden front pew, or that Guy had sent another card declining to attend the wedding. I’m sure it will be quite wonderful without me. She came to a halt at Luke’s side, her veil falling around her shoulders, and he leaned toward her; the touch of his low voice against her ear. “This is it,” he said, and she felt like she had never been so happy.

  She hardly listened to the bishop’s welcome. She felt Luke’s arm beside hers, the warmth of his presence, and kept sneaking looks at him, just as he did at her, both of them trying to suppress smiles that couldn’t be suppressed. The bishop announced the first hymn, the organ’s chords rang out, and as everyone shuffled to standing and sang about amazing grace, Luke leaned over again, and told her how much white suited her.

  “Thank you,” she whispered back.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “You look very pure.”

  She felt her smile grow. “Do I?”

  “Yes,” he said, moving closer to her, “I might almost be deceived…”

  She laughed, winning a disapproving frown from the bishop, which deepened as she laughed more, just because of the way the bishop was looking at her.

  “Stop,” said Luke, dark eyes dancing, “you’re getting us in trouble.”

  Della read from Corinthians, beautifully (“She’s been practicing,” said Peter afterward), they all sang another hymn, this time of hopefulness, the bishop gave his sermon (mercifully short), and then asked if anyone knew of any just reason why Luke and Madeline shouldn’t be lawfully married, and no one—not even Alice—spoke.

  They exchanged their vows, not taking their eyes from one another as they promised to love one another until death did them part, and ran from the church in a flurry of monsoon-dampened confetti, on to the small wedding breakfast back at the villa; all they’d wanted. With rain drenching the lawns, the palms, and a string quartet playing beneath the veranda awning, they cut Cook’s magnificent cake, drank champagne, danced and laughed and spoke not a word of war, then, with darkness falling, headed out into the weather again, in a flurry of kisses this time, back to Luke’s apartment.

&n
bsp; “I’ll love you forever,” Maddy said to him, as he carried her from the motor, into the hot, silent shelter of his rooms. “I’ll love you even longer than that.”

  “Good,” he said, lowering her to the floor, his words on her lips, her neck. “I intend to hold you to it.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Alice really hadn’t felt well enough to go to the wedding. She hadn’t felt well enough to go to the dress fittings either, but she’d have as soon missed those as she would have watching Madeline walking down the aisle; even as she’d sat in the pew, that seamstress’s shop (my daughter, she’d thought, eyes on her beloved face, my daughter), she’d known she was forming memories to join the thousands of others she stored, ready to be replayed endlessly in the months and years ahead. In her most hopeless moments, she almost wished Madeline had never come back; it would have been easier, in some ways, not to have had to lose her all over again.

  She’d struggled to keep her composure in the church, then again through the afternoon at the villa. (She’d been so relieved when Madeline had asked they make it a low-key affair, no pomp, no fuss. No fuss, she’d thought, I can manage that.) She hadn’t danced. She’d barely managed to sit up straight. Her stomach pains these past weeks hadn’t been a pretense, or an excuse to hide her grief and fear behind (although they had also been that); they’d been very real, and growing worse, her nausea with them. She’d thought it all to do with anxiety.

  “No,” Guy said softly when he came late the next evening, “your appendix.”

  Richard had called for him. That was after Alice had spent the entire day in bed, feverishly dipping in and out of consciousness, dreaming of the wedding, Madeline as a little girl crying and begging her, Alice, not to make her go to England (I don’t want to go, no thank you. I’ll stay better, I promise), then again as an adult, gone, walking up the gangplank of another ship, a ship that Alice was so very certain she’d never be able to bring herself to set foot on. As the hours had passed, the agony in her stomach had intensified, her whole body had started to shiver uncontrollably with heat, the villa around her an oppressive island, swaying in the clattering Bombay rain.

  “You should have come to see me, Alice,” said Guy, his kind face tired, creased by concern. He pulled out a needle from his case, told her it would help with the pain, and then pierced her arm.

  She closed her eyes, feeling the opioids ooze through her, blissfully blanketing feeling, and moved her head in a heavy nod. She should have.

  He moved away. She heard him speaking with Richard just outside her bedroom door, their hushed voices only just audible above the rain. Something about moving her to Guy’s hospital, operating. Groggily, she thought she should be afraid of an operation. She floated past the feeling. Really, so long as the pain stopped, what did it matter?

  “It’s ruptured, I think,” said Guy. (Perhaps that mattered.) “I’d like to do the surgery myself, with your permission.”

  “Of course,” said Richard, “of course.”

  Even in her deadened state, Alice registered their stiffness. They’d spent so little time in each other’s company lately; none of their dinners, or drinks. She herself had only written to Guy of Madeline’s engagement, then again to invite him to the wedding. They’d been avoiding each other. Had to, she thought. They all knew too much of how the others felt, most of it unspeakable, so (as Alice often found to be the case) it really was easier not to try and speak at all.

  Not that she could speak now, even if she wanted to. Her lips were full of weights, her face, her limbs, growing denser by the second. Hazily, she realized Richard had returned to her. The room pitched and spun as he picked her up, carrying her downstairs; the always surprising gentleness of his vast arms. Then she was lying on the warm leather backseat of the motor, her head in his lap, his hand on her hair. How many such midnight dashes had they made? All those babies …

  They lurched into motion. She must have lost consciousness, because when she opened her eyes she was being lifted once more, placed on a bed that moved and made an odd noise on the tiles below. A trolley, she thought, we’re at the hospital. It was a muted kind of knowledge. Even her panic when a man placed a mask over her face and told her they were taking her to theater now, Major Bowen was waiting there, seemed to live somewhere other than inside herself.

  All she knew with any clarity was that Madeline was going to leave, very soon, and she wanted her to stay. She wanted her daughter. She wished she’d been able to tell Madeline that, to say how much she loved her, and explain … everything.

  It was her final thought as liquid dripped down onto her mask.

  That, and that someone else in the room might have just said that Britain had declared war on Germany, but the mask had started to taste very strange; the voice disappeared. She was swimming, not in water, which she hadn’t been within touching distance of in many years, but in blackness. Only blackness.

  * * *

  The rain-sopped messenger came in the early hours of dawn on August 5, hammering on Luke’s door, waking Maddy and Luke, who’d been asleep on the low bed, the bedsheets tangled beneath them, the mosquito net limp in the heavy, damp heat.

  Maddy lurched to sitting, heart reverberating at the wrench into consciousness, her blood chilling in the instant as her mind caught up, telling her what the intrusion must mean.

  They’d been waiting for it.

  Reluctant as they’d been to leave the apartment, even for a minute, their worry about how long they were going to have with one another, and whether Germany had responded to Britain’s ultimatum, had been too strong to ignore. The evening before, they’d driven to the colonel’s office in the main cantonment to find out what he knew, hoping, desperately, that it was that Germany had withdrawn from Belgium.

  “Afraid not,” Colonel Whittaker had said with a sigh, pulling a bottle of rum from his desk drawer, “and they only have a few hours left.”

  He’d offered them a tot to drink. They’d refused, already turning for the door. When Whittaker had tried to insist, saying he and Luke really did have a deal to talk about, specifically that Ernest Aldyce and numerous other officers had left several hundred men a CO short, Luke had tightened his hold on Maddy’s hand and told him, “Tomorrow. We can do that tomorrow.”

  They’d escaped through the steamy rain to the motor, Luke driving fast through the downpour, in silence for the most part, neither of them talking about what came next (and that it almost certainly wasn’t going to be their voyage home), Maddy for one feeling like she might choke if she even mentioned it. As soon as they’d got back to the apartment, they’d turned to one another, kissing, pulling their soaking clothes free, letting them fall on the trunks they’d left by the door, ready, heartbreakingly ready, for their trip. They hadn’t made it as far as the bedroom. Neither of them had slowed, not with time now the most precious of luxuries.

  Their clothes were still draped over the trunks. Luke, in a hastily pulled-on pair of trousers, passed them on his way to the front door. Maddy, fingers to her throat, watched him move through the dark room, the black shapes and shadows, the sultry silence. He opened the door, letting the noise of the storm in, the telegram from London, too. She saw how he took it from the messenger, read it, then, with a few short words of thanks in Urdu, closed the door and leaned forward, hand on the wood, as though for support.

  She hardly needed him to turn, to see his set face, to know what the telegram said.

  She really didn’t need to read the message for herself.

  But she did anyway. As he came back to her, kneeling beside her on the mattress, offering her the soggy paper, she took it with cold hands.

  Britain at war with Germany STOP Do not return to England but report to Colonel Whittaker STOP All officers on ground in India needed STOP Congratulations on your wedding STOP Most grateful for your service and patience STOP

  “So we’re not going anywhere,” she said, and the words felt strange, far from real, and so deeply wrong.
/>   Luke said nothing.

  She looked up at him. His eyes were bright, livid with anger.

  “Do you know,” he said, “how many times I’ve told people like Colonel Whittaker to cancel all home leave for officers?” His voice was low, only just controlled. “If they’d listened,” he said, “there’d be plenty of officers here. I could go home with you, enlist there, but instead I’m having to look after Ernest Aldyce’s men while he’s in Dorking with his feet up, and a wife he bloody loathes.”

  She laughed then, a strange, strangled sound that was trying too hard not to be a sob, and surprised her by coming out at all. It was the thought of Ernest and Diana trapped together in Dorking, how much Diana must hate not being surrounded by staff, perhaps even having to butter her own toast. Luke continued to stare at her, not laughing, because nothing was funny, and then she wasn’t laughing either, but crying, really, really crying.

  “Don’t,” he said, pulling her to him. “Please…”

  “I can’t help it.” She buried her head in his chest, feeling his warmth, his heart, the awful breakability of him. “You’re going to be a soldier again.”

  “I am,” he said.

  “I should have spoken to Poincaré.”

  “You should have,” he said.

  “I can’t bear it,” she said, the tears still coming. “I can’t.” She couldn’t wrap her head around it. There’d be no voyage for them, no cabin just the two of them, or August in Richmond. He was going to fight, perhaps be hurt, or … “I’m scared,” she said. “I’m so scared.”

  He held her tighter, saying nothing. She thought perhaps he was scared, too, and it made her feel even worse. All this time, she’d thought she was prepared, ready—that awful, needling sense that everything would turn wrong; don’t trust it—but she wasn’t ready at all. Somewhere along the line, she seemed to have started trusting in everything, and now her excitement, her happiness, was bleeding from her, and she couldn’t stop it. She didn’t know how to.