Meet Me in Bombay

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Meet Me in Bombay Page 18

by Jenny Ashcroft


  “Madeline,” she heard her mother say from the bed, “Madeline…”

  “Oh my God,” she breathed, wiping her mouth.

  “Madeline,” said her mother again.

  Knowing she’d have to do it sooner or later, slowly, she turned.

  “Did you eat something?” said Alice.

  “I don’t know,” said Maddy, which wasn’t exactly true, but she wasn’t ready to voice her suspicions, not yet. They were too precious, too wonderful. Don’t jinx it.

  Guy, though, was staring at her very strangely. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He moved, as soon as he realized she was looking at him, telling her he’d fetch her water, but not before she’d been shaken by his stillness, his taut expression.

  It was almost like she’d been watching something in him break.

  * * *

  To her sadness, he left for Europe three days later, sailing on the first convoy from Bombay, along with almost all of the men who’d drunk champagne in the Taj, the ones who’d slept in the canvas village, too. The sudden emptiness wouldn’t last for long; already, the next wave of men were entraining around India, ready to come to Bombay and embark.

  Before Guy went, he called at the villa to say goodbye. He was for France, too, tasked with setting up one of the new casualty clearing stations being established along the emerging front line. They all told him to take care, be careful, and Maddy ached because she couldn’t imagine what he was going to, and he really was so very alone.

  She saw him out to the porch. At the door, he slipped her a card: the details of a doctor.

  “He’s the best,” Guy said. “Don’t see anyone else.”

  “Guy—” she began.

  “Please,” he said, cutting her off before she could make them both die inside by apologizing for something neither of them wanted to acknowledge, “don’t travel. Not when you don’t need to. The rain might have stopped, but the water will still be very rough.”

  “I hope you’ll be all right,” she said, not agreeing to anything, and thinking, too, as always, of Luke; how he and Peter would be managing with their already ill men on the bashing seas.

  “I’m made of stern stuff,” said Guy, and she knew he wasn’t just reassuring her about the waves.

  She stood on tiptoes, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  He didn’t tell her he’d miss her, too.

  He paused only to give her one last, brief smile, then turned, hastening through the porch to his motor. That motor that had carried all those bottles of boiled water.

  She still intended to travel herself. While she hadn’t been able to bring herself to broach the subject with her mother, she’d told her father that she had to be in England by the time Luke was given his first home leave; she’d spend the rest of the month with Alice, then get a passage out, and come back to visit just as soon as she could.

  But on September 5, the first German U-boat attacked and sank the British battleship HMS Pathfinder. Not long after, with the Battle of the Marne waging in France, finally stopping the German advance at the River Aisne, several other British warships went down in quick succession. Maddy hardly needed Della and her father to tell her that sailing anywhere would be sheer lunacy. All she cared about now was that Luke would reach France safely, Guy and Peter, too. But although to her, and everyone else’s, shuddering relief, telegrams did eventually arrive from somewhere in France, reassuring them that they all were safely on land, it was hard to feel happy, not now the casualty lists from the Marne had been published. More than one boy Maddy had known at university was on them; killed in action, wounded, missing and presumed … It crushed her to think of them gone, just like that. She wanted to believe it wasn’t real, that there’d been a misprint and they still existed somewhere as she remembered them—cycling around Oxford, scarves flapping, cheeks flushed with summer sun as they drank warm beer in riverside gardens—but the world felt emptier, so much sadder.

  There was only one piece of truly good news, delivered by the rather elderly, highly distinguished, and wholly gentlemanly Dr. Tully whom Guy had told Maddy to see.

  “He apologized before examining me,” Maddy, fuchsia with the ordeal, told Della, once she returned to her in the waiting room. “I don’t think I’m ever going to stop cringing.”

  “But…?” said Della.

  “But,” said Maddy, and her cheeks pulled, a smile overtaking her, of disbelief that she really did have this little person growing within her (their little person), and utter, overwhelming joy. “I’m going to be a mama, Della,” she said, laughing, opening her arms for her friend’s hug. “I’m going to be a mummy.”

  Even with all her happiness, she was nervous about telling her parents. Knowing all they’d suffered, she felt conspicuous in her euphoria at what was happening inside her, almost guilty. Her legs shook later that same evening as she walked beside Della out to the veranda, where they were both having aperitifs by the light of scented citronella lamps. The citrus oil caught at her throat; she was still feeling very sick (“A girl, I wager,” Dr. Tully had said, “with no scientific reason, other than they always seem to make their mamas the most poorly”), and she had to swallow before speaking, but, with Della’s elbow nudging her side, she forced words, not vomit, out.

  “I hope you’re not going to be busy in March,” she said.

  “Why’s that?” asked Richard.

  “Because, and you especially seem too young for this, Mama, you’re going to be grandparents.”

  And, their faces. Their faces.

  Richard hooted, actually hooted. Alice gasped, placed her hands to her mouth, looked from Maddy to Della to Richard, back to Maddy. “A baby,” she said. “Here?”

  “I think so,” said Maddy, who wouldn’t now dream of chancing the U-boats, and had started to accept that, however much she hoped for the opposite, nothing was going to be over by Christmas. She wasn’t sure how she could have coped with the agony of it, were it not for the wonder of her growing little bundle.

  And it was almost worth the pain of staying to see her parents’ happiness, the tears in her mother’s eyes. She loved that she’d given that to them. She did.

  But she still would have traded it in a heartbeat, not to have had to tell Luke he was going to be a father by wire.

  As it was, his smile, his joy at the news, would only ever now exist in her imagination.

  * * *

  The wire didn’t reach him until mid-October, chasing him from base camp in Marseille to Orléans, where his batman—a young sepoy who’d traveled, along with him and Peter, from Bombay—handed it to him in the middle of a wet, windswept artillery practice ground. All around the wire fences, locals gathered, braving the weather for yet another look at the sepoys; a novelty they couldn’t seem to get enough of. The men themselves, who’d mostly recovered from the malaria that had made their long crossing to France even worse than it might otherwise have been, were lined up in rows on the stone flagging, their thin uniforms sodden in the drizzle, their turbans dripping, unloading and reloading their rifles, hands moving fast, despite the cold, firing at the strung-up sandbags as their captains, a shivering Peter included, shouted the order.

  Luke watched Peter as he bent, helping one of his men to unjam his rifle. He breathed ice as he talked (doubtless murdering some more Urdu); it was freezing for October. They were all freezing, still wearing their Indian uniforms, despite Luke’s repeated requests to the quartermasters for greatcoats and thick serge khaki. He arched his neck, staring into the misty sky, feeling the moisture on his face, and frowned at the thought of the weeks ahead in the boggy fields of Ypres. A line of sorts had been formed there—part French, part Belgian and British forces—trying to keep the Channel ports from falling into German hands. It was working, but only just, and with no other trained British troops yet in France, it had fallen to the Indian Army to dig in and help. Colonel Whittaker, also now in Orléans, was going, too. They’d entrain the next night, to God only
knew what carnage. Orléans had seen its fair share of men come through, fresh from fighting. Luke had been shaken by more than one tale of companies decimated by machine-gun fire, the power of a howitzer’s shells.…

  All of that left his mind, though, as his batman came running and handed him the flimsy telegram. He tore at the paper, knowing it was from her, craving her words, any words, like an addict. With the staccato of rifles and Urdu commands all around, his eyes moved across the typed message.

  Aren’t we clever STOP Little boy or girl getting ready for a spring arrival STOP Now you have another reason to stay safe STOP

  He drew breath: a gasp of elation that not even Maddy’s imagination had been able to do justice to. A child. Their child.

  “My God,” he said, reading it again, smiling, laughing, not believing it. He pictured her, in the Bombay telegraph office, in one of her pale dresses, skin flushed with the kind of heat that taunted him, writing, smiling, too, and for a second, just a second, he was there, with her.

  He wanted to be with her. He felt the need in every part of him.

  Stay safe, she’d written.

  Stay safe, he told himself, then started as a bullet from a misfired gun wisped too close to his face.

  “Sorry,” called Peter. “Still jammed.”

  Luke refocused, returning to the ground, the drizzle and cold, the men who never complained, and who tomorrow he’d march into battle for the first time.

  Stay safe.

  He had to do it. Somehow, he had to, and get back to her, this baby; their family.

  Nothing had ever felt so important in his life.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Germans didn’t reach the Channel ports that winter. Day after day, the shells screamed, bullets rained, but despite relentless attacks and counterattacks by both sides across Ypres’s plains of flooded, impassable land, the line barely moved, and all that was achieved was devastation. During scarce breaks in the fighting, Luke entreated the men to lay down their bayonets, rest; still in tropical kit, they huddled for shelter beneath smashed trees, trying to sleep in freezing mud baths and forget the bodies, everywhere, the heavy guns that might at any second point their way, do to them what had been done to their brothers, their friends; the invisible, always-watching snipers. This is not war, wrote a havildar, in one of the letters home Luke censored each night, crouched in a shell hole, his mac raised to shield the paper from the rain, it is the end of the world.

  Men kept dying, every day, in ways Luke could never have believed permissible had he not been there with them—screaming at them to move, just a split second too late; holding them as they went.

  “It’s the look in their eyes,” said Peter, clutching a cigarette one stormy night, the lighthearted façade he wore like a shield for once slipping. “The way they stare.” He stared himself, at Luke; a naked despair that made Luke reach out, squeeze his soaking arm, as though such a thing could help. “I don’t want this to be the last thing I see,” Peter said.

  “Then for God’s sake, let’s not let it be,” said Luke.

  “You have a plan?” said Peter.

  “It’s evolving,” said Luke, who of course didn’t, and had become grimly certain by now that surviving this travesty came down to nothing more than a macabre game of chance.

  Peter sucked on his cigarette, knowing it, too. But, “Keep me updated,” he said, and dredged up a smile, since he was Peter, and that was what he did.

  The days ground on, each impossibly worse than the last. How they kept managing it, Luke didn’t know, but he, who felt sick at the hand he’d played in dragging everyone over here, and wanted only to send them home (himself included), was ordered to drag his companies wherever support was most needed by the BEF, moving constantly up and down the salient, thrown from fight to fight. They rarely slept; they were always freezing, always hungry, living off tins of cold bully beef. Luke’s own CO was badly burned by an exploding shell and sent to one of the new plastic surgeons in Blighty. (“Plastic,” he said, mumbling through melted lips when Luke said goodbye to him at the heaving field hospital. “Sounds like torture.”) The rank COs—men Luke and Peter had traveled with from Karachi, men who’d drilled and trained and kept the troops going; men with families of their own, lives and hopes—they disappeared. I’ve been made a lieutenant colonel, Luke wrote to Maddy, there’s no one else left to do it. Peter’s now a major. Promotions come quickly on the Western Front. I don’t know how we’re both still alive. It’s begun to feel like we’re each other’s lucky charm. Hardly any of the captains who came over with us are left, and it kills me. We’ve been given new British NCOs, but their Urdu is even worse than Peter’s. They’re trying, but no one can understand them, and we’re losing them, too. Maddy, most of them were at school this time last year, little more than children. The snipers target all of us. They know officers wear peaked caps, not turbans.

  For God’s sake, she wrote back, in late October, start wearing turbans.

  It was, of course, an excellent idea.

  “A plan, in fact,” said Peter. “Well done, Maddy.”

  All of Luke’s officers replaced their caps before they set off on their next attack, charging at dawn across the cratered floor of Nuns’ Woods, or Non Bochen; another frantic, smoke-filled advance, this time to push the Germans back from their attempted grab for the Menin Road. Whittaker didn’t like the change in uniform, and he refused to wear a turban himself. You’re in the army now. But then he got killed, too, taken down by a sniper in that same attack, even though he wasn’t meant to be involved, but had insisted on lending his weight, saying the men were entitled to hear the order to charge in their own tongue, dammit. He was shot before they’d even had a chance to reach the German position, take the hypothermic soldiers there prisoner. (“Danke,” the men stuttered. “Danke.”) Luke wrote to Whittaker’s wife later that day, as he and the rest of the uninjured men collapsed in the stone ruins of a chapel, the eerie glow of searchlights arching overhead. His pen moved on the damp paper, repeating the same useless platitudes of bravery and quick ends that he’d already said far too many times before.

  Maddy wrote as well, constantly: daily letters that arrived in bundles that always took too long, and lifted him from the horror with talk of the life he craved, and that she spoke of as though they were beside one another—on a beach, at a restaurant, in bed—as if she, too, was imagining that was where they were. She described the movements of their growing, still unbelievable child, told him, at his request, of each of her appointments with Dr. Tully (He keeps speaking about the baby—who’s apparently rising very nicely—as though it’s one of Cook’s cakes. Cook who, by the by, is not only speaking to me again, but speaking in Urdu. Urdu! I’m sure he’s feeling smug because his chutneys helped so much with the sickness), and how she’d started teaching, at the local school her gardener’s possessed children attended, where there were no ridiculous rules against female teachers who were married (or related to those who were divorced).

  I’m so glad you’re doing that, he wrote. Are you enjoying it?

  Very much, she said, I should have started long ago. Mama comes sometimes, too.

  How is your mama? he asked.

  So different, she said, I can’t tell you. All better now, and still quiet (Papa says he thinks she’s forgotten how not to be), but softer, less … furtive, so really rather nice to be with, and much easier to talk to—even Della thinks so—especially when it comes to anything to do with the baby. She’s embroidering him or her a brand-new mosquito net, covered in the most wonderful stars and moons. Now I know who sewed all those monkeys on mine! She is, of course, astonished I’ve remembered those. I’m starting to see just how much she adores children, and feel so desperately sad that she didn’t have more than me. Whenever she comes to the school, she says it’s only to make sure I’m not tiring myself out on the walk, but the second she enters the classroom and the children ask her to paint with them, she agrees, quite as though she wasn’t inte
nding to stay all along …

  And do the children know you’re expecting a baby? he asked.

  They do, she said. They like feeling it wriggle and kick.

  What would Diana Aldyce say? he replied.

  What wouldn’t she say? she answered.

  I’m jealous, he wrote back, rain bouncing off his shoulders, seeping down his neck. I want to feel those kicks.

  It got colder. Luke’s mother, who’d never been one for baking, sent him a greatcoat. Take good care of it please. No tears. No holes. We’re with you every second. Never forget that you hold our lives in your hands, too. You’re all we have. Luke lent the coat to his batman, who before this hell had never known a temperature cooler than a Bombay night. His batman asked if he might let his brother, one of the privates, a naik, in Peter’s company, wear it, too, and after that the men all took turns; savored moments of warmth. It wasn’t until late November, with the year’s battle for Ypres finally at a fizzling, inconclusive end, and the salient stilled by a broken silence, that, with white coating the obliterated landscape, thick serge winter uniforms finally arrived. There were too many of them. Almost half of the men for whom they’d been issued were gone, buried in the frozen ground, never to return to the heat of India they’d so longed for.

  I haven’t forgotten it, Luke wrote to Maddy. I feel it sometimes, in my dreams. I can never see you, though. Will you please get your photograph taken? I need so much to look at your face.

  She did as he asked, sending a sepia portrait Richard had taken of her on the veranda. It found Luke in a new position up the line, near the German-held town of Neuve-Chapelle, where his new CO—a harassed colonel from Ipswich—had ordered him to march the battered remnants of his division to entrench for the winter. It was a quieter sector, although there were whispers of a spring offensive. More livable, too (everything being relative), with deep trenches built by the engineers, boarded walkways to keep their feet from the icy puddles, and small luxuries like sandbags to protect their heads from sniper fire. Dugouts, too, where they could sleep out of the rain, the wind.

 

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