Meet Me in Bombay

by Jenny Ashcroft

  He told her as much, later. “What were you thinking? Did you not see the way he was crying?”

  “Where were you?” she said. “Writing another of your letters?”

  “What the hell do you know about my letters?”

  She stared back at him, not answering, biting the insides of her cheeks, whether against tears or a smile he frankly couldn’t tell and cared even less.

  “You have nothing to say?” he asked.

  “Not as much as you,” she said.

  Was she joking?

  He didn’t ask. “Stay away from my things,” he said, turning from her.

  He made no note of the whole sorry incident in his journal. He knew he’d remember it all too well.

  It wasn’t the present he struggled with, after all.

  It was the past. Only the past.

  * * *

  Diana’s strange note arrived at the villa on a sunny, breezy morning at the end of 1916. The house was quiet. Richard was at work. Della and Peter had moved out earlier in the year—Della, happily married to Jeff, to live just a few hundred yards down the road; Peter, who’d grown better at walking, and put on just a little weight, back to the old government bungalow at the base of the hill. He still came to the villa most evenings, though, for dinner and to talk about Luke with Madeline, read stories to Iris, partly because he loved them both, Alice was sure, but also, she felt, to atone for Luke’s death, which he’d never accept wasn’t his fault. Just as Luke had always blamed himself for what had happened to Ernest.

  Ernest, whose wife had written.

  Alice’s brow creased, seeing the slope of Diana’s hand on the envelope. She picked it up from the silver post tray cautiously. It had been more than two years since she’d heard a whisper from her. What could she possibly want now?

  Sympathy, it seemed, for her lot as a widow in all but name. Approval, too, for her apparent plan to divorce poor Ernest and remarry.

  Just as with Edie and Fitz, Diana said, I’m hopeful of a new start of my own. I know so many can be sniffy about these things, especially at the club (I may have been guilty myself in the past), but feel sure that with your own sister-in-law a divorcée, you won’t judge. Glass houses, and all that. I am still so young, and have a whole life ahead of me to share. My thoughts had turned to one old friend, but I was reminded that your daughter has many admirers.

  Alice set her teeth in irritation. Was she talking about Guy? An old friend? Guy had never had any time for Diana. Surely even Diana realized that.

  In any case, Diana went on, I’ve met a rather lovely man in Whitehall who would be very keen to sample life in our Raj, should Richard be amenable.

  So now they got to it. Alice almost set the letter aside. She had absolutely no interest in helping Diana return to Bombay.

  But then a word caught her attention. A name: Luke, at the end of the page.

  Frowning, more wary than ever, she read on.

  Honestly, this man was the image of him. One never imagines they’ll encounter a face like that twice. I even asked the VAD about him, the resemblance was so stark, but she assured me he had no wife or children. She rather gave me the impression there was an understanding between the two of them. Lucky Poppy Reid, I say. How funny, though.

  Finding nothing remotely amusing, Alice clenched the paper, the words creasing before her as she read them over. One never imagines they’ll encounter a face like that twice. Mouth dry, she looked out, down the garden to where a newly pregnant Della was with Madeline, both of them clapping and exclaiming as eighteen-month-old Iris pointed at the trees, leaves, and peacocks, naming them in turn. Madeline crouched, the shorter skirts so many women had started wearing exposing her stockinged ankles, and scooped Iris close, tickling her tummy, making Iris throw her glossy black curls back in delighted screams.

  “Monkey,” said Madeline, laughing, too: that beautiful laugh, which Iris, and Iris alone, could draw from her, and which the rest of them still heard far too little.

  It had been torture, watching her become such a shell of herself this past year and a half. Alice couldn’t remember ever having felt so powerless, so heartbreakingly unable to help her own daughter. She’d savored every second of their growing closeness after she’d come out of hospital back at the start of the war—the mornings at the school, their hours decorating the nursery, their walks, their talks, then the utter joy of Iris being born—but it was as though she’d been given Madeline back only to lose her after all.

  They’d all lost her there for a while.

  Although she was doing better these days, much better, Alice was certain she hadn’t given up on Luke. She saw the hopeful way she still looked to the gate every time the telegraph boy arrived with a message for Richard. She never went to any party or club—too terrified, Alice was sure, of enjoying herself, or being asked to dance by another man.

  She was waiting.

  Alice hated it for her. However much she’d dreaded her leaving, she’d give Luke back to her in the blink of an eye if only she could. But Peter had seen him die. They’d been sent his bullet-torn jacket, his letters, his papers and cigarettes. He was gone. Buried by a man Guy, Guy, had met.

  She looked again at Diana’s crumpled letter. It would be too cruel, surely, to tell Madeline about it. Alice had wasted so many years of her own life grieving for losses that could never be changed, how could she encourage her daughter to do the same?

  She pushed the letter slowly back into its envelope, and, not wanting to let herself weaken, sat down to reply to Diana then and there.

  I’m sure Richard would be glad to help your friend. I ask only one thing. This man you saw at Ernest’s hospital could not have been Luke. It’s impossible, Diana, and I simply cannot allow Madeline to hope. The disappointment would kill her. I need you to promise that you will never breathe a whisper of what you saw to anyone, least of all her.

  Diana’s reply came less than a month later.

  Absolutely, darling Alice, she wrote. My lips are sealed, you have my word.

  FOUR

  YEARS

  LATER

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Bombay, 1920

  It wasn’t until the end of September 1920, almost two years after the armistice finally ended the war, that Guy, who’d remained in Alexandria to help with the casualties of the disastrous Middle Eastern campaign, came back to Bombay.

  It was a sadder place. Too many of the men who’d drunk and smoked at the Yacht Club’s New Year’s party at the start of 1914 had disappeared: the sunburned sailor, almost all of Peter’s friends; that drawling officer who’d told Maddy and Della they were breaking his heart. Of the one and a half million Indian troops who’d left to fight, more than sixty thousand never returned. The city felt changed without them. India was changed. It wasn’t only the sense of loss, everywhere; after the high casualties, there was a new edge to the hot, eastern days, a festering tension that Maddy couldn’t remember being there before. Even before the hideous losses at the Dardanelles, her father had been back and forth to Delhi for emergency meetings on how to subdue the growing number of protests and demonstrations against British rule, but she’d been too caught up in her grief for Luke, caring for Iris, to pay close enough attention. While her father had spoken of his concerns over the new measures eventually implemented through the Defence of India Act, enabling government to imprison without trial or warrant any Indian suspected of threatening the Raj, it wasn’t until provincial officials started to abuse their powers, making too many arrests and causing even more discontent and violence, that she fully absorbed why Richard had been so worried. It had got worse the year before, in 1919, when, with those like Mahatma Gandhi calling for independence, the viceroy’s council, panicking, had voted to extend the Act, despite the war being over, causing uproar everywhere, in the very highest levels of Indian society, and nowhere worse than Punjab, where hundreds of rioters had been killed by British fire.

  “Women and children, too,” Richard had sa
id brokenly, when he’d come home with the news. “We should all be hanging our heads in shame.”

  “And yet,” said Peter, who was still in his old bungalow, still working as Richard’s deputy, “there’s only one kind of hanging going on.”

  They deserved all the animosity they received, Maddy was grimly conscious of that. It amazed her that more weren’t hostile. But the schoolchildren, whom she’d started teaching again back when Iris was three, were as exuberant as they’d ever been, their parents every bit as smiling and grateful. The gardener’s trio, too old now for chasing peacocks, played with Iris as if she were their little sister. Cook, who’d gone to such pains to help Maddy with her morning sickness, and then to tempt her into eating properly again after Luke had vanished (making her the curries and kathi rolls he’d somehow got wind Luke had helped her develop such a love for), had, against the odds, slowly become a friend, Ahmed as well; they often drank chai together in the kitchen, arguing in Urdu over whether Hardy’s books were depressing or beautiful, talking politics, Cook’s and Ahmed’s families in Goa and Poona, the heartbreak of the younger brother Cook had lost to Gallipoli.…

  Still, out on the streets, there were enough accusatory looks and hard stares thrown around that Maddy couldn’t feel as comfortable as she once had going anywhere alone.

  “Then stop doing it,” said Della. “Please. For your own sanity, if nothing else.”

  She couldn’t stop. All these years on, she still spent hours sitting alone amid the dragonflies and brimming flower beds in the Hanging Gardens, on the bench she and Luke had once shared, imagining the heat of his body next to hers, hearing his voice (let me see if I can distract you), staring out across the sea toward the city he’d left so empty and that she was becoming increasingly, brokenly afraid he’d never return to. Some nights, unable to sleep, she crept out of her parents’ villa, down through the steamy, nesting forest to hail a rickshaw to his old rooms, tracing her fingers along the windowsills, peering through the shutters at the vacant silence within, then sitting on the front steps, often until sunrise, just because he’d touched those steps, too.

  It’s the same for me, said his mother, Nina, who still wrote all the time; long, warm letters that somehow brought Luke closer, for the time Maddy was reading them.

  I’m sure I’ve mentioned this, but he came for lunch, just before he met you in India. We had the most wonderful day, walking Coco on the beach, drinking too much wine by the fire. Luke fixed a broken cupboard for me. I’d been asking his father to look at it for weeks. Luke didn’t do it properly—all that wine—and it still hangs crooked. Sometimes, I can lose a whole Sunday morning, looking at that door. I hope you come and see us. We’d so love to meet you, and finally hold little Iris.

  They were going soon. Edie, who’d given in and let Fitz buy her, out of guilt, a cottage in Sussex, had written, too, asking if Maddy and Iris might like to visit for Christmas.

  “It’s time,” Maddy had told her mother. “It will just be a holiday. You know I’d never take Iris from her life here. I wouldn’t leave you.”

  “I know,” Alice had said. “I do know that.” She’d managed a smile. “You sound excited.”

  Maddy was: about seeing Edie again, sleeping in Luke’s house, breathing the air of the rooms he’d grown up in, meeting his parents, walking his spaniel, Coco, on that beach.… It was the first time she’d looked forward to anything in such a long time. She was planning to take Iris to see a show in the West End, buy a toy at Hamleys. She’d visit Ernest at last, too. Poor Ernest, whom Diana—returning to India herself in the new year—had just that month finally managed to divorce.

  “He won’t know you, I’m afraid,” Peter had warned her.

  “That’s all right,” she’d replied. “I’ll know him.”

  “Your passage isn’t for a couple of months, though,” said her father, the hot, airless evening after Guy had docked.

  Maddy, just down from tucking Iris in for the night (she’d left her nodding off beneath her starry mosquito net, and the watchful eye of her grandmama), agreed that it wasn’t.

  Richard reached for his cigarettes on the veranda table. “Why not channel this newfound energy into some fun here,” he said. “Twenty-nine is too young to live as a recluse.”

  “I’m almost thirty,” said Maddy.

  “Quite ancient,” he said dryly, flicking his lighter. “Go to the club tonight, please.”

  “Yes, do,” said Della, who’d come with Peter for dinner. Jeff was on his way; he’d been on a late shift at the hospital and was dressing at home, kissing his and Della’s two daughters good night: three-year-old Lucy, who was the picture of Della with her wild brown waves, round cheeks, and round eyes, and one-year-old Emily, who had (as Jeff was the first to lament) inherited Jeff’s strong bones and oversize chin. (“We’re hoping she’s got my sunny personality, too,” said Jeff, “which will obviously make up for everything.”)

  “If you hate it, Maddy darling,” said Peter, “I’ll escort you straight home.”

  “She won’t hate it,” said Della.

  “You just want me to see Guy,” said Maddy, who was oddly nervous about doing that. He’d written to her a couple of months after Luke had vanished, telling her how sorry he was. She’d replied, thanking him, saying how much she hoped he was well and keeping safe—which she had hoped, very much—but hadn’t admitted how much it had meant to receive his letter, or asked him to write again. Tempted as she’d been to lean on the comfort of his friendship, it would have felt like a betrayal, to all of them, to have done that.

  She’d heard nothing from him since. It had been so long. Would he even want to see her again, now that he was back?

  “Us wanting you to come out for once has nothing to do with Guy,” said Della.

  “He’s working tonight anyway,” said Richard, exhaling smoke.

  “Oh,” said Della flatly, giving herself away.

  “A shame,” said Peter. “He owes me a drink. I need to let him know I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Guy aside,” said Della, “when was the last time you set foot in the club after dark, Maddy?”

  It wasn’t really a question, and Maddy didn’t answer it. They all knew she hadn’t done it in years. Why would she? She’d only end up looking over her shoulder; that aching whisper of hope he’d surprise her again.

  “Time to rip the dressing off,” said Della. “You’re coming, and that’s that.”

  She didn’t go, so she wasn’t there when Peter, Della, and Jeff arrived at the bar to find that Guy had dropped by on his way home from the hospital after all. She didn’t see Guy look up, spot Peter, and smile slowly, or smile herself as he strode across the room and pulled Peter into an embrace. (“You would have,” said Della. “I almost sobbed.”) She didn’t hear Guy congratulate Della and Jeff on their marriage, their children, and ask after her, Maddy. She didn’t notice him glance toward the door, as though checking to see if she was going to come through it. (“It was obvious,” said Della.) Nor did she look at the new lines around his eyes, the definition in his jaw, and feel a bit weak because he’d become even more handsome with age. (“Honestly, Maddy, utterly like heaven.”) She was resettling Iris, who’d woken from a nightmare—and feeling relieved that she was there to soothe her—when that all happened.

  It wasn’t until the following afternoon that she saw Guy herself for the first time.

  She’d left Iris wrapped in a giant apron, making pistachio biscuits with Cook, and had walked slowly up the hill to sit on her usual bench in the Hanging Gardens. The post-monsoon sun was blazing, beating down on the garden’s red-dirt paths, the green lawns and pink flowers. Beneath her cloche hat, she was sweating. Her loose dress stuck to her silk stockings, her back. She closed her eyes, thinking of the English December waiting for her, how nice it would be to feel cold for once, and to have a respite from sitting alone on this bench, replaying the same worn memories over and over again. She told herself, as she always told herself,
that she should go home now. This is doing you no good.

  It was then that she heard his voice, just behind her.

  “Hello, Maddy.”

  She started, turned, shocked from her reverie, a silent oh forming on her lips as she saw that it was him.

  He smiled down at her. That gentle smile, which showed those new lines that Della had mentioned, and made her heart soften, despite her shock at his appearance, because she could only imagine what had put them there.

  Squinting, she raised her hand to the rim of her hat and slowly took the rest of him in. He wasn’t in uniform, but a white blazer and flannel trousers. He held his panama by his side. He looked leaner, and there were shadows in his cheeks, but he was still the old Guy. She saw that from his smile, the affection in his eyes. Apprehensive as she still was—almost more so, now that he was suddenly here—she smiled with him.

  “What a lovely surprise,” she said, for something to say, but also because she meant it.

  “It’s not a coincidence,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No. Peter told me you like to come here.” His gaze held hers. “I’m tempted to tell you that you shouldn’t be walking around alone, but I still remember what happened the last time I tried that.”

  She laughed sadly, remembering it, too; how he’d intercepted her in that packed bazaar. She still kept the golden silk Luke had bought her in her bedside drawer.

  “I’m sorry I was so cross,” she said.

  “I think I probably deserved it,” he said. Then, “It’s so good to see you, Maddy.”

  “It’s very good to see you, too,” she said.

  “And you’re a mama now,” he said.

  “I am,” she said. “Iris is five. And a half, she’d tell you, if she was here.”

  It was his turn to laugh. As he did, he took a step toward her. “Can I sit?” he asked.

  She hesitated. It’s Luke’s seat, she almost said.