Meet Me in Bombay

by Jenny Ashcroft

But she didn’t. Because it was Guy, whom she’d hurt enough. And because she really was so very tired of sitting sadly by herself.

  “Yes,” she said, making room on the bench. “Of course you can.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  King’s Fifth Military Convalescent Hospital, 1920

  The King’s Fifth was closing, the following summer. Luke had only recently returned to the hospital. He’d grown increasingly desperate, back at the start of 1918—angry at his own failure to recover—and had persuaded Arnold to refer him to a different kind of institution: less kind, less comfortable, but (he’d hoped) effective. Arnold had tried to dissuade him against such places, warning him of the brutality of medical electrics, the dangers of more surgery, but Jones had insisted.

  He’d gone that spring of 1918, to a converted Hertfordshire priory, and the care of Dr. Gibbon. It had been hell. Two years of hell, which Jones had been beyond relieved to leave behind when—after all the excruciating procedures to relieve the pressure beneath his skull, the countless rounds of shock therapy and hypnosis—Gibbon had told him he’d done his best, all he could, and was optimistic, it was time for Jones to go back to Surrey, wait, see, be patient.

  Sister Lytton had come to collect Jones in the ambulance. She’d never stopped visiting while he was away, arriving on her fortnightly days off, a thermos of cocoa in her bag. As time had passed, she’d taken to bringing the ever-lengthening missing-persons advertisements, too. Together, she and Jones had scoured them—the tragic pleadings of parents and wives looking for their loved ones—waiting for a name to leap out: his name. But there were too many thousands to go through, in so many different broadsheets; it had been impossible to look at them all. All they’d ever found in those pages was sadness.

  The trips Arnold had suggested Jones and Sister Lytton go on, whenever Jones wasn’t in recovery from treatment, had been happier. The two of them had caught trains into London, out to different parts of the country, down to the coast, all in the hope that they’d stumble across a sight or sound or smell that would spark his memory back into action. He’d felt close to … something … recently, in Windsor. They’d walked by the river, the grassy banks and willows bathed in summer sunshine; he’d stared at the rowing eights crews, their blades slicing into the water, and had felt filled with the warmest sense of belonging.

  “Yes?” Sister Lytton had said eagerly, her pink face full of excitement beneath her straw hat. “Anything else?”

  He’d wanted there to be, almost as much for her as himself.

  But there hadn’t been.

  And now here he was, back at the King’s Fifth.

  Waiting.

  Arnold hadn’t broken the news of the hospital’s closure to all the patients yet. When he told Jones about it, as the two of them sat in his study one rainy afternoon, he asked him to keep it to himself, so that no one became unduly alarmed.

  “Everyone will be taken care of,” Arnold said, shifting creakily in his armchair to reach for his tea. “We’ve almost a year before it happens, and no one’s going to find themselves turfed out on the street. There’ll be plenty of hospitals left open. I’m off myself to Swansea,” he peered at Jones over his cup, “and hoping I won’t be taking you with me.”

  Jones hoped it, too.

  “What about the nurses?” he asked, thinking not of Poppy (who’d eventually given up on him just before he’d left in 1918, then been dismissed when she was caught in flagrante with a cavalry captain who might have forgotten how to ride a horse, but hadn’t forgotten everything), only of Sister Lytton, who he now knew had no parents as well as no brother or fiancé, just a bed-and-breakfast in her hometown of Norfolk where she’d admitted she stayed for her solitary leaves.

  “We’ll find them jobs, too,” said Arnold. “And Sister Lytton is not your responsibility.”

  “She feels like my responsibility,” said Jones. It wasn’t only how much she’d done for him, these past years (grateful as he was for it); no, it was the thought of why she’d done it. She’s told me you make her think of her younger brother, Arnold had once said. Jones had never forgotten it. And the better he’d come to know Sister Lytton, the more he’d grown to hate how very alone she was. He couldn’t stand to think of her uprooted now, having to start again somewhere else, taken from this place that was as close to a home as she had. She, with her cocoas, her heart, her early starts to help poor Ernest—her spots of leave whenever she couldn’t cope with the sadness of more death—deserved so much better.

  He wished he could give it to her. She’d as good as told him she wished it, too, on the train back from that trip to Windsor. He’d been quiet in the upholstered carriage, still straining to think what it was about that river that had so resonated, and she’d stared across at him, brow furrowed, chapped hands clasped, swallowing, frowning, swallowing again, until at last he’d asked her what was wrong, and she’d spoken—in a rushed way that made it obvious how nervous she was—saying that she didn’t want to upset him, she didn’t, and she wanted him to remember, she did, she did, but had he ever thought there might be a chance he could be just as happy, or at least happy enough, starting again?

  “Starting again?” he’d said.

  “You’re still so young,” she’d said, her gaze earnest, full of compassion. “I know what it’s like to … lose…” She’d raised her hands to her chest. “… but I just hate to think of you losing any more…”

  “Sister Lytton—”

  “You could find a job,” she’d said, talking over him, seemingly unable to stop now she’d started. “I’d help you. I have money, I could buy a … cottage, or whatever you like. We could be each other’s … companion. Nothing more. Just … dear friends.”

  He’d waited before saying anything further, choosing his words carefully.

  “I can’t do that,” he’d told her softly. “I can’t give up. Your fiancé, he wouldn’t have, I’m sure.”

  “He’s dead, Officer Jones.”

  “And I’m so sorry for that,” he’d said, “so deeply, deeply sorry. But I’m not. I have people; they’re waiting for me to remember.”

  “Yes,” she’d said, shaking her head too quickly, swallowing again. “Yes, yes, of course. Silly of me.”

  “Not silly, Sister Lytton.”

  She’d drawn a wobbly breath, he’d been sure on embarrassment, disappointment, and he had ached for her.

  “You have people,” she’d said, repeating his own words stoically, “people you belong to.” She’d given a firm nod. “We must get you back to them.”

  It wasn’t long after that that Jones’s dreams had started to change. Gibbon had claimed the credit, putting it down to the final surgery he’d performed. Arnold had said maybe, but it was as likely to do with the years Jones had spent with him before that, in Surrey, finally paying off. Jones wasn’t sure which of them was right. He didn’t much care. All that mattered to him was that the dreams were now much more frequent, longer.

  Always full of her.

  He’d seen himself at an altar, her faceless form beautiful in white lace beside him. He’d almost wept with joy and grief when he’d woken that time. She was his wife. He had a wife. A wife he worshiped, who stared at fireworks in black sequined evening dresses, drank champagne on window ledges, and kissed him endlessly in the sea.

  A wife who sat for a photograph, cradling a baby in her sepia arms, the shadows of palm trees playing on her hands, the child’s perfect, tiny toes.

  His daughter’s toes.

  He had a daughter, too.

  His heart raced with panic every time he thought of her: at how much he’d already missed, and how much he was still missing. The days had an extra cost to them now. Each one he let slip by without getting back to her was another she’d grown up without him.

  If only Diana Aldyce would get in touch.

  It was Ernest’s divorce papers that had given Jones her name. Diana’s lawyer had brought them, just the month before, the week after Jones had r
eturned to the King’s Fifth. Ernest’s aged mother, who might have come, had tragically died in the influenza epidemic at the end of the war. To Jones’s sadness, Ernest—without remembering anything—still turned expectantly to the drawing room door every time a visitor came through it. Needing to do whatever he could to help his friend, Jones had knelt beside him when the lawyer had arrived, held his shaking hand and convinced him he wasn’t to cry, there was no shame in it but he shouldn’t be scared either, he’d be much better off once this was all done with. The lawyer, who’d had the good grace to look mortified at Ernest’s distress, had apologized and handed Jones the papers. Jones had taken them and seen the Diana right there in black-and-white. He’d felt his spine lengthen, mind moving to his journals upstairs, the name he’d written down the first summer after he’d arrived at the King’s Fifth; the only name he’d ever remembered. Diana’s been having a field day. He’d stared at the ink on Ernest’s paper, replaying the one time Diana herself had visited the hospital, living it all over again.

  As soon as he’d helped Ernest with his signature, he’d run, straight to Arnold’s office.

  “I recognized her,” he’d said to Arnold, breathless with urgency. “It was why I looked at her twice. And she looked back at me. I thought it was Ernest she was looking at, but it was me. I’m sure she recognized me, too.”

  “She’d have spoken,” Arnold had replied, “surely.”

  “I think she did,” Jones had said, his every muscle straining with adrenaline and fury, remembering how Poppy had walked Diana out; the way she, too, had glanced back in his direction, then behaved so oddly afterward. (You have nothing to say? he’d asked her. Not as much as you, she’d said.)

  It had been Sister Lytton, with her boundless kindness, who’d gone to such lengths to track Poppy down these past weeks, eventually finding her waitressing at a coffee shop in Kingston. She’d persuaded her to admit that Diana had indeed mentioned that Jones looked like someone she’d once known; someone with a wife, a daughter.

  But Officer Jones isn’t married, Poppy had apparently said, feigning stupidity. How could it have been him?

  “Selfish girl,” said Sister Lytton, when she’d returned to the King’s Fifth. “Selfish, unthinking girl.”

  Arnold had written to Diana directly. He’d telephoned her new husband’s house, too. But, to Jones’s desperate frustration, there’d been no reply, not that time, or the twenty others Arnold had tried.

  They supposed she must be away on honeymoon.

  Torturous as it was, all they could do now was wait for her to come back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Bombay, 1920

  Guy didn’t stay with Maddy for long on that bench in the Hanging Gardens. He’d sensed her reserve when he’d asked if he might join her, and even if Peter hadn’t warned him of how much she was still grieving, he’d have realized it, just from the sadness sitting like a veil over her slender shoulders; the lost way he’d caught her staring out to sea. He’d known even before he’d said hello that he’d be a fool to rush her. He couldn’t rush her, not into … anything. So after they’d spoken for just a few minutes—about how it felt to be back in Bombay (“Strange,” he said, “wonderful.” You’re here, he yearned to add), then little Iris, who he learned had dark curly hair, and loved drawing, picnics on the beach, “and cake, lots of cake”—he forced himself to say he must leave her in peace.

  “You don’t have to,” she said.

  He insisted, hoping he didn’t imagine the flicker of regret in her dark blue gaze.

  He trod gently after that, very gently. He declined Alice’s invitation to dinner, twice, and took her and Richard out to the Taj instead: two perfectly enjoyable evenings where they ate in the chandelier-lit dining room and caught up like the old friends they were—him speaking as little as possible of France and Egypt, because really what was the point in dwelling on all that, and all of them talking about the growing movement toward independence in India, whether it could ever really happen (“I would have said no,” said Guy, “but then I’ve seen so much that I’d have thought impossible happen in the past six years”), and how Richard, now in his mid-sixties (Guy was forty-eight; how had it happened?), was starting to think of retirement, a move to the quieter south. Only one subject remained entirely off-limits. Guy, acutely conscious of his suspicion that Richard had never approved of his interest in his daughter, kept himself from mentioning Maddy. Richard, to his dismay—but not surprise—didn’t bring her up either. Alice, treading as gently, Guy suspected, as he was, also remained silent where her daughter was concerned.

  By a force of will Guy steered clear of their villa for the week that followed. He didn’t go to the Hanging Gardens, or walk by the tiny jungle-rimmed school he’d heard she was teaching at so that he could pick his way through the trees, peek in through the ramshackle windows, catch a glimpse of her surrounded by children, reciting times tables. And when Alice asked him for another dinner, he refused that, too.

  “Are you avoiding me?” Maddy asked when he finally went to church and let himself bump into her, leaving the morning service at St. Thomas’s Cathedral, ten days after he’d first sat with her in the gardens. Her parents, talking with some of Richard’s staff, were still on their way out. Maddy, coming down the steps, stood just inches from Guy in the sunshine, close enough that he could see the sheen of heat on her collarbone, the teasing outline of her silhouette beneath her calf-length blue dress. Beside her, holding her hand, was a child who could only be Iris: a little girl whom Guy had been rather anxious about meeting, and who peeked curiously up at him from beneath her straw boater, as pretty as her father had been striking, and who was in fact the living image of Luke, but that she had her mother’s eyes.

  “Of course I’m not avoiding you,” he said, and was relieved at how relaxed he managed to sound.

  “Guy,” said Alice, joining them. “Do you have plans for lunch?”

  “I was going to work,” he said, quite truthfully. He had a stack of papers to go through: research bursary requests from some of the senior surgeons, procurement orders, a proposal he was working on to modernize the theaters.

  “Come to us instead,” said Alice, not treading so gently anymore. “It’s Sunday. You can’t work on a Sunday.”

  “Ahmed works on Sundays,” Iris helpfully volunteered. “So does Cook. And everyone, actually…”

  Guy laughed before he could stop himself.

  “Iris,” said Alice gently.

  “From the mouths of babes,” said Maddy.

  “I’m not really a babe anymore,” said Iris, then made a goldfish movement with her mouth, as though wondering what else might come out.

  Guy smiled again. It really was impossible not to.

  Iris beamed cheekily back at him, making him glad he had.

  “Tell Guy, won’t you,” Alice said to Maddy.

  “Honestly,” said Guy. “It’s fine.”

  Maddy looked up at him, eyes shaded by her hat. He couldn’t decide whether her expression was affectionate, concerned, or wary. Perhaps a balance of the three.

  “Don’t spend the day alone,” she said at length. “Come.”

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, but not without another pause that made him think she wasn’t.

  He went, though, unable to resist now that he’d stood before her again, back to the villa he’d been so bereft to leave her at in 1914. He filled his cheeks with an anxious breath as he turned his motor in to the driveway, approaching its grand, balconied walls. Welcoming as he knew Alice would be, and yes, bright, delightful Iris, too (she liked him, she really did seem to like him; he felt such a swelling of pride at that), he still wasn’t sure he should be coming. It wasn’t just Maddy’s reticence that worried him. Richard wasn’t going to be unreservedly happy to see him either. Would the entire affair be hideously strained?

  To his relief, Della, Jeff, and their children were already out on the veranda when Ahmed s
howed him through, Peter with them. “Hello, you,” Della called, lifting the strain with her wide smile.

  “Guy,” said Jeff, coming forward to shake his hand, helping, too.

  “Wine?” said Peter. “It’s lovely and warm.”

  They ate on the veranda, the children with them, drinking and talking until dusk. Guy, relaxing by fractions with each course, made funny faces at Iris, laughed at the increasingly creative ones she threw back at him, chatted with Jeff about their colleagues at the hospital, asked Della how she’d enjoyed her short foray into nursing there (“Not quite as much as I’d envisaged,” said Della. “There’s nothing romantic about bedpans.” “No,” Guy agreed, “there isn’t”), felt relieved to hear Peter sound so much like himself again, see him smile, and smiled himself at Maddy opposite him, whenever he chanced to catch her eye. She was quiet, though, much quieter than he remembered, and spoke mainly to Richard and sweet Iris, who sat to either side of her. As the dessert plates were cleared, he hoped Maddy would get up, come and sit beside him.

  But it was Iris who did that, picking her way around the table in her lace pinafore, black curls bouncing.

  “Are you really a doctor?” she said, placing her warm hand on his with an easy familiarity that he was almost absurdly touched by. It had been just a few short hours, yet he could already feel himself wrapping—quite willingly—around her perfect little finger.

  “I am,” he told her, and fought his smile this time, because she looked so very grave.

  “So you can sew people up?”

  “I do my best,” he said.

  “My doll has a torn tummy,” she said.

  “Oh dear,” he said.

  “Suya did it,” she added darkly.

  He nodded like he understood, despite having no idea who Suya was. (“Our gardener’s youngest,” Alice enlightened him afterward.)

  “Can I bring her down for you to look at?” Iris said.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Fetch me a needle and thread, too.”