Meet Me in Bombay

by Jenny Ashcroft

  No one had let her see him. By the time she’d woken, he was already gone. Buried at sea, Richard had told her, and she’d screamed, screamed and screamed, refusing to let him come near her because he’d let them do it; she’d blamed him, she hadn’t been able to help herself.

  She’d blamed herself, too. Of course she had. He’d warned her against traveling to England, after all. It’s too much, too tiring. The summer before, when he’d first taken Madeline and she’d been carrying another child, she’d listened to his caution that it was impossible for her to travel and stayed in Bombay. She supposed a small part of her had been relieved at the excuse not to see Edie and Fitz—to have to look Edie in the eye while she stole something else of hers—but it was a tiny, meaningless part; mostly she’d regretted not going, from the second Madeline had left. Even more when she’d miscarried anyway, while Richard was still gone.

  Two children lost, that year.

  Every day that had passed after that, she’d looked forward to the moment she’d board a ship of her own, imagining how it would be to hold Madeline again in her arms.

  Only, Madeline had kept running to Edie when Alice had arrived in Oxford, choosing her, just as Fitz (the first person to kiss Alice, give her a ring) had chosen her. The grief of watching Madeline hide in Edie’s arms, her little face peeking tearfully over Edie’s shoulder. The hideousness of Edie insisting on explaining Madeline’s behavior to Alice; her own daughter. It’s just because she knows me now. The awkwardness of Fitz, handsome, entitled Fitz, looking at Alice as though he pitied her. All. The. Time. Don’t pity me, Alice had wanted to scream at him, don’t you dare do that.

  Her own mother hadn’t pitied her. She’d still been furious at her, for losing Fitz, then running off to India, no care, no heed. She’d been so frosty the one time Alice and Richard had taken Madeline to visit that Alice had wished they’d stayed away.

  “You’ll never convince me you’ve made my daughter happy,” Edna had said to Richard as a parting shot. “Look at her. Sadness ages one, you know, Alice.”

  Alice’s father, already declining with the lung illness he’d eventually died of, had said nothing, just looked so horribly sad and old himself.

  That was the day Madeline had hugged Alice for the first time without Alice having to ask her. I don’t like them either. After that, she’d shown no interest in Edie, or even Richard, but had wanted only Alice, coming into her bed every night (that warm little body), begging her to take her back to India. Please, Mama, please.

  “Can’t we?” Alice had said to Richard. “She’s bigger now; she might not get so ill.…”

  “She’s bigger because she hasn’t been ill,” Richard had said. “You know that, Alice.”

  She had. Deep down. She’d never have given in otherwise. As with their little boy at sea, though, it had felt easier to blame him.

  Had it been her fault that he’d died? Had she let herself become too tired, too overwrought?

  No, Guy had told her at the time, of course it wasn’t your fault.

  It had felt like her fault. But no one talked about such things. After she’d left hospital, no one had even mentioned that there’d been a child at all. She’d known she was meant to forget, but she’d never wanted to do that, because then it would be as though his little kicks, his hiccoughs inside her, had never happened.

  She never had been able to get on another ship. She’d tried, many times. In those first years, she’d asked Richard to book her passage after passage. But the second she’d set foot on a gangplank, felt the sway of the boards beneath her, the press of the other passengers, and smelled the steam, the salt, she was back in that surgeon’s room, screaming again, thinking of that tiny body somewhere out there, buried at sea. She’d back away, turn and make for the edge of the quayside, breathing, but not breathing, barely seeing, dripping in sweat.

  Eventually, she’d given in to her own terror, given up on going to the quayside at all. By then, she’d already lost so much time with Madeline, years of her life; it had been easier, in some ways, to believe there was no point anymore in her hopeless attempts to get to her. So she’d stopped, feeling Madeline inch farther away from her with each birthday and Christmas, gradually becoming as distant as her brothers and sisters.

  Until, she’d come back.

  And now she was here, no longer talking to Della, but sitting again, holding her hand.

  Tell her. Richard had said it to Alice, countless times. She’ll keep blaming you until you do.

  Could she do it? Tell her?

  All this time, she’d convinced herself she was protecting Madeline with her silence, from the sadness.

  She realized now that she’d really been protecting herself.

  From her shame.

  * * *

  Slowly, she became well again. Very slowly. On the seventh, she was still in the throes of her fever, and Maddy—stiff and exhausted after another night failing to sleep in her chair—barely thought about her liner pushing back from Bombay’s dockside, building speed, moving farther out to sea. She stared at Alice with sore, dry eyes, petrified at how she seemed to have left her own hot body, trying not to let in the very real possibility that she was dying. She struggled to be comforted by Guy’s assurances that he’d seen this many times before, it always got worse before it got better; now that it seemed that she truly might lose her mother, all she could think of was the sound of her laugh, and how she hadn’t given her nearly enough reasons to do that. She wanted to hear her laugh again.

  “We all want that,” said Richard.

  She didn’t laugh the next day, but she did become cooler, and lucid enough to open her eyes and meet Maddy’s. (You’re here, Madeline, she meant to say to her. I’m so happy you’re here. She wasn’t sure why “You look like you need a bath” was what came out.)

  In spite of her sadness, Maddy smiled. “Hello, Mama,” she said.

  By the next day, her temperature was normal again, and the swelling around her scar had eased. Guy, who took Maddy and Richard out into the corridor to warn them of the possibility of secondary infections, said that he wanted Alice to stay in hospital for at least another fortnight, until the scar was well healed.

  “But the danger’s passed for now, though?” said Richard.

  “For now,” said Guy, and sounded almost as relieved as Maddy felt.

  “Thank you,” she said, impulsively reaching out to hug him, pulling away just as quickly when his whole body went stiff.

  “I really didn’t do anything,” he said, his tanned face a color she’d never seen before.

  “You did plenty,” said Richard.

  That afternoon, Maddy returned to the villa for the first time, taking the bath she so sorely needed, and changing her clothes—which were, thanks to Della, already unpacked, back in her closet. She stood in front of the wardrobe, heavy with tiredness, the reality of being back in the room she’d left so happily just a few mornings before, and let her mind—liberated of some of her fear for her mother—move to Luke, her longing for him.

  She was still at the villa when his wire came; it was almost as though he’d sensed how much she needed to hear from him. He told her that he and Peter had arrived safely in Karachi, giving her the address of the hotel they were boarding at while they waited for the Lahore troops, all of whom were traveling overland across monsoon-flooded ground.

  Write please write STOP We’re not going anywhere yet STOP

  She did it then and there, telling him everything that had happened since he’d left, and most of all how much she missed him. I’m coming, too, just as quickly as I can.

  The next day, with Alice’s temperature still stable, Richard started going in to the office again; they were short on staff with so many summering away, and several others, like Peter and Luke, already in uniform, but the presidency still needed governing. There were trade contracts to be approved, goods licenses and building tenders under review, wage disputes, water shortages, rail repairs.

&nbs
p; “I can’t but wonder if all we’ve brought to India is red tape,” he said wearily, when he returned to the hospital that evening. “I’m missing Peter already.”

  “I suspect he’s missing you, too,” said Della, with a smile that was more brave than amused. “I cannot picture him as a soldier.”

  “Well, quite,” said Alice.

  And they all exchanged looks, needing to be sure that the others had heard, too wary to believe that she really was sounding so much like herself again.

  For the first time in almost a week, they left her alone that night, and Maddy went to bed in her old room. She didn’t dwell on the sadness of being back there this time; she didn’t even close her mosquito net after she’d collapsed on the soft sheets. She looked at Luke’s telegram, next to her on the pillow, listened for a second to Della moving around in the room next door, then closed her eyes and slept. Slept and slept and slept. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done it so deeply, or for so long.

  It was the same for the nights that followed. She’d thought that with all her anxiety, she’d struggle to go off, but the opposite happened: she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She escaped to bed earlier and earlier, often (to Della’s chagrin) as soon as she returned from her day at the hospital. Sometimes she didn’t even last that long and nodded off at her mother’s side, her head resting on her folded arms.

  “Rest,” Alice, who never woke her, said. “You obviously need it.”

  She didn’t sleep all the time she was there. She talked, too, and so did her mother, both conscious of how close they’d come to not being able to do that again, neither inclined to waste this second chance. (Thank God for that, wrote Luke, I only wish I was there to see how relieved it must be making you, and her. I wish I was there for quite a lot of reasons.) Perhaps it was partly thanks to the opioids, but without Maddy asking, Alice even raised the subject of her prior stay in the hospital; that surgery at sea.

  “I was here before, you know,” she said, the first day after her fever broke. She didn’t lift her blue gaze from Maddy as she spoke. It was obvious she was making herself do it.

  “Yes?” said Maddy, quietly, not wanting to risk anything that might make her stop.

  “Yes,” said Alice, and left such a long pause that Maddy feared she’d leave it there.

  She prompted her. “Papa said you were unwell on the voyage from England,” she said.

  “Unwell?” said Alice, and her cheeks twisted with pain. “No, Madeline, I wasn’t unwell.”

  It didn’t all come out as one admission, no single outpouring of the many things Maddy only wished she’d known long ago. Rather, after that first tearful revelation that Maddy had once almost had a baby brother (“Oh,” choked Maddy, “oh, Mama, I am so sorry”), Alice divulged it piecemeal, over a course of days, each loosened secret seemingly freeing the next. That tiny little boy, buried at sea, and Alice’s long weeks in hospital afterward. “The ship’s surgeon wasn’t … experienced. I was never able to … hope, for another, after that.” How Fitz and Edie had been unable to have children themselves, but had had her, Maddy.

  “If I’d known…” said Maddy, without any idea of how to go on, or what she could have done, only that she wanted desperately for it to be something.

  “You were too little,” said Alice.

  “I’m glad you picked Papa instead of Fitz,” said Maddy.

  “He really picked me,” said Alice. “But I’m glad, too.”

  Then, the other babies, eight in total, who’d never been; one the same summer Maddy had first gone to England. (“You should have told me,” said Maddy, understanding about why her mother hadn’t come with her finally washing through her, pressing on her heart. It was impossible. It felt impossible. “I didn’t know how to,” said Alice.) The long years Alice had tried so hard to leave Bombay, never managing it.

  “Your letters,” said Maddy. “They were always…” She broke off, wiping her tears with the heel of her hand. “You never seemed to … care.”

  “Oh, Madeline.” Alice’s blue eyes swam. “I am so sorry, for that.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t all miraculously changed between the two of them. They’d spent so long locked in awkwardness, it was a difficult habit to break. And Maddy, stricken by how much Alice had been through, couldn’t let herself relax, slip and speak of anything that would hurt her more—not least how much she was still determinedly planning to travel back to England, home, start her life with Luke there.

  But they read together, ate the tiffin Cook sent care of the dabba wallahs, worked on several crosswords, talked about Luke, how much Maddy missed him, how scared she was about him fighting, then sometimes just sat, in a silence that slowly ceased being something to fear. The days passed and, before Maddy’s very eyes, Alice regained some of the weight she’d lost; her awful pallor faded. Guy assured them that, if she kept it up, she’d be ready for home by the end of the month.

  “Thank God,” Alice said.

  Thank God, Maddy thought.

  News trickled in from Europe: battles between French, German, and Belgian forces on the German-French frontier, then of German advances, and the landing of the British Expeditionary Force, which everyone said would end the war within days, only the Germans kept beating them, too, pushing the line back from Mons, toward Paris, mile upon mile of French land slipping into German hands. The troops are all here now in Karachi, wrote Luke, although half of them are sick with malaria, and no one has winter uniform. We embark tomorrow, and I hate that I’m sailing in the opposite direction to where you are. Maddy, I’m so sorry, but we’re not going to England. I can’t tell you where we’ll be, only that it’s somewhere in France.

  Somewhere in France, Maddy wrote back, desolate. I can’t tell you how that terrifies me.

  “It terrifies me, too,” said Della, no longer even attempting to smile at the idea of Peter as a soldier, not in the wake of all the defeats in France. He’d written himself, joking about them all arriving in Europe in tropical kit, even though it would be almost October by the time they landed and it really wasn’t funny. “I don’t have a nice feeling, Maddy.”

  “No,” said Maddy, who didn’t either, and was feeling an ever stronger compulsion to ignore the pull to remain with her mother, and travel to England, as soon as possible. Even with Luke in France, she was sure she’d feel better once she was back. It wasn’t just the thought of getting to their home in Richmond. It wasn’t even mainly that. It simply felt so very important that she should be there.

  “Just wait until your mother’s out of hospital,” her father said.

  “I’ll go when you go,” Della told her.

  The broadsheets brought fresh news daily of the ongoing retreat from Mons: a race to the sea that no one wanted to talk about, because it was such a very unspeakable phenomenon for the British to be pushed anywhere. Troops arrived by the trainload in Bombay, ready to embark and lend their weight to the defense. The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel was overwhelmed with officers, all in the same uniform Luke would now be wearing, only none of them were him. Maddy, who went for tea at the Sea Lounge with Della—a welcome break from her long days in the hospital’s unforgiving chairs—caught herself sitting up in her rattan lounger a couple of times, spine lengthening, thinking, for just a fraction of a second, that she might really have glimpsed his dark hair, the hint of his profile turning a corner, into the hotel, then sagging, because of course she hadn’t. It was unbearable. She watched them all, smoking and laughing in the foyer, out on the lounge’s sheltered veranda, and wondered if they were only pretending to be so gung-ho about whatever came next.

  “Not at all,” said one of the many who offered her and Della something stronger than tea (a prospect Maddy found increasingly nauseating). “It’s like I tell my men, it’s all a grand adventure. Just hope it’s not all over by the time we get there.”

  “I’m going to hope the opposite,” said Maddy, “just so you’re aware.”

  At the port, va
st rows of tents were set up to house Bombay’s temporary residents. Maddy could never look at the canvas village, so gray and bleak in the rain, without thinking that Luke must have had something to do with planning it, perhaps even signed it off. Those who didn’t sleep in the tents were housed in the port’s warehouses, or in cabins on the lumbering ships waiting in the glassy monsoon sea. Each day, as Maddy drove to the hospital, she saw the sepoys out on hastily organized sightseeing tours of the city—hundreds of them holding hands, staring in wonder at the trams, the traffic—and thought that if she hadn’t been so very tired (and female), she could have volunteered her services. Della, who was volunteering (in a gender-acceptable position at one of the port canteens), made her smile with a story of a Gurkha regiment who’d never seen the sea before and had tried to wash in it. “Apparently they couldn’t understand why their soap wouldn’t lather,” she said, “or why the water made them even thirstier.”

  “We actually had a couple of them in here,” said Guy, who was in Alice’s room reading through her chart when Maddy related the tale. “Salt water doesn’t just make you thirsty.”

  Maddy turned her lips, imagining the taste.

  “Well, Alice,” said Guy, looking up from the chart. “I think you’re about ready for home.”

  “I am?” said Alice, pushing herself up on her pillow, blond hair loose on her shoulders, making her look so much younger. “Guy, thank you.”

  “You’re most welcome,” he said. “I’m glad to see you better before I go.”

  Maddy didn’t ask when he was going. She didn’t tell him she’d miss him, which she would. Someone in the hospital had started cooking rice and the steamy smell had just hit her, pushing her over the edge the thought of drinking that seawater had taken her to. She only just made it to the room’s large enamel sink before the need to vomit overwhelmed her.

  She clutched the basin with both hands, her breakfast of yogurt and mango reappearing, so utterly grim that it made her heave and heave again, then cry, because she always did cry when she was sick, and Guy and her mother were both mortifyingly there, watching, and she wanted Luke. She wanted him.