How dare he suggest that?
“He’s desperate,” whispered Della. “That’s how he dares.”
Maddy gave an agitated sigh. “Don’t,” she whispered back, “I cannot feel sorry for him.”
“Well, you’ve never been able to help that,” said Peter.
Another truth. It was one of the reasons she wasn’t meeting his eye. If she did, and allowed herself to see the inevitable concern there, she knew she wouldn’t find it so easy to maintain her fury. And she wanted her fury. She needed her fury.
It would be so much harder to keep battling him without it.
“You’re not really going to let him be there when Luke meets Iris, are you?” said Peter.
“Of course I’m not,” she hissed.
She had no intention of complying with any of Guy’s conditions. Not only would she simply make him accept that Iris had to be allowed to get to know Luke unobserved, she’d continue to see him alone herself. Every opportunity she could find.
She’d just be very careful not to let Guy discover that’s what she was doing.
She pushed her untouched sundae away uneasily. She couldn’t help it; the thought of the deception didn’t sit easily on her. Not at all. Badly as Guy might be behaving, he was still Guy. She didn’t need to look at him to remember that. Or how he’d loved her all these years.
And how long he’d fought to make her happy.
“Darling Maddy,” said Peter, who of course understood.
He’d always thought the world of Guy, too.
She stared out at the blinding sea, the fishermen in their colorful boats, thinking of Luke’s words earlier. I can’t stand this being furtive. She really couldn’t either.
But Guy had all the cards in his hand. And he had asked for this month.
What choice did they have but to give it to him?
* * *
“None, apparently,” Luke said when, much later that same day—after Guy had gone back to the hospital, and Iris to Della’s—she finally managed to get over to his rooms.
She couldn’t stay for long. Guy had said he’d be home for dinner, and the sun was already dipping toward dusk. She could see it through the back windows, drenching the glassy Arabian Sea in color: that view she remembered so dearly. Luke hadn’t lit any lamps; the apartment’s white walls and mosaic floors were darkening by the second, bathed in the last pink rays. She didn’t want to leave it. She rested her head against Luke’s chest, and once again couldn’t think of leaving him.
“I want to go over to the hospital,” Luke said, “tell him what I think of him.”
“You can’t,” she told him, in much the same way as she had her father earlier, after they’d dropped Iris at Della’s and she’d enlightened him and her mother as to what Guy had said.
I’ll talk some sense into him, Richard had said, gripping the steering wheel.
You think I didn’t try? Maddy had replied.
“We need him,” she said now to Luke. “Otherwise it will be years of fighting, scandal. Even then, he might not ever agree to end the marriage. Iris would always be that child…”
“I know that,” Luke said, and she saw the reflection of her anger in his dark gaze. “I just hate that he does, too.”
“It’s only a month.” She said it to herself as much as to him. “Just a month.”
“A lot can happen in a month,” he said.
“Not this one,” she said. “We’ll get through it, go home married, like we’ve always been. And you’ll have time to get to know Iris here, before we take her anywhere.”
It was Alice who’d helped Maddy see that particular silver lining. While she, unlike Richard, had been very careful not to cast any actual blame in Guy’s direction (naturally), and quietly insistent that it would be a good thing for Maddy not to be hasty in making any decisions, she hadn’t said a word against Luke either. Never once had she tried to make Maddy feel guilty for talking about going with him back to England, in spite of the awful terror Maddy knew she must be feeling at their leaving.
And she’d only seemed shocked by Guy’s suggestion that he should play chaperone to Luke and Iris here, in India.
“I can’t imagine how I’d have felt if Edie had done that to me,” she’d said.
“She never would have,” Richard had said quietly.
“No,” Alice had conceded, quieter yet, the two of them still being so inexplicably stiff with one another. “But,” she’d gone on, speaking once more to Maddy, “you need to remember that you’re talking about upending Iris’s entire world. It’s not something that should be rushed.”
She’d suggested then that Luke meet Iris at their villa. Neutral ground. “I’ll speak to Guy about it,” she’d said, with a sigh that made it obvious she didn’t relish the prospect. “I’m sure he’ll see it will be kinder on Iris this way. And it might make him feel better that I’ll be there.”
Richard had looked at her askance, clearly as taken aback as Maddy felt at her apparent impartiality. He, like Maddy, had obviously assumed she’d be wholly in Guy’s corner.
It had touched Maddy, so very much, that in spite of everything, the only side her mother seemed to be picking was her own.
“Come over tomorrow,” she said to Luke now. “See Iris after school.”
“You’re sure she’s ready?” he said.
“I don’t know what ready might even look like,” she said, truthfully. “But she’s been asking after you, wanting to know where you are.”
“I’m terrified she’ll be scared of me again,” he said.
“No,” said Maddy. “No. We won’t let that happen. It will be different. And my mother will help.”
“I wish she didn’t have to,” he said. “I wish…”
“I know,” she said, reaching up, taking his face in her hands, pressing her lips to his, as though it could be possible to kiss his anxiety away—her own, too. “It will get easier,” she said, pouring the conviction she was desperate for them both to feel into every word. “You’ll see. One day it will be as though none of this ever happened.”
He nodded slowly. She could see how much he wanted to believe her. She could feel his need.
Believe, she thought, kissing him again, please believe.
Then I can, too.
She’ll never believe in us, unless we do.
* * *
She left it too late to leave, of course. She barely had time to race over to Della’s to collect Iris, and then quickly bathe herself—clear any trace of her stolen hour with Luke from her skin—before Guy returned to the villa, too.
He found her in her bedroom, just as she was finishing pinning her hair for dinner. She looked up at his weary reflection in her dressing table mirror, and saw to her dismay that he had a bunch of flowers in hand.
He told her, as he crossed the room and offered them to her, that Alice had indeed been to see him. “I’ll stay away when Iris and Luke are together,” he said, “if that’s truly what you want.”
“It is,” she said, turning to face him, but not thanking him, despite her rush of relief. She refused to be grateful for this.
She certainly didn’t feel it when he went on, telling her that if he wasn’t going to be present for the meetings, someone else had to be.
“Guy,” she began, ready to protest.
“It has nothing to do with me not trusting you,” he said, which was enough to silence her. He took a step closer, still holding the flowers, his forlorn expression at once contrite and begging for understanding. “I just don’t think I can stand to be in surgery, thinking of the three of you out alone.” He stared. “I feel sick, actually, Maddy, at the thought of it.”
At the anguish in his eyes, his voice, she felt her heart soften, entirely against her will. It was the very thing she’d feared happening at lunch. She fought to cling to her anger, and didn’t entirely fail—there was still far too much to be furious about—but, as he proffered the flowers once more, she found herself taking them, to
o sorry for him not to. Well, came Peter’s voice, you’ve never been able to help that. She sat quite passively while he leaned forward and brushed her cheek with his lips; the cheek Luke had so recently kissed with rather more urgency, her back pressed to the wall, her body wrapped around his. She nodded when he said he might go and read Iris a bedtime story, and didn’t interrupt them, not even when she heard them both chatting and started to worry that he might become suspicious if Iris happened to tell him of her protracted play over at Della’s.
If Iris did mention it, he said nothing of it to Maddy over dinner. They talked of very little as they ate the meal out on the dark, leafy terrace, and only then in murmured incidentals (the weather, Iris’s reading, staffing at the hospital) that Maddy forgot as soon as the words left either of their lips. She, thinking of Luke, imagining what it would be like if she were to get up, leave the table—the flickering lamps, the frying mosquitoes—and go to him, as she was so very desperate to go to him, had no idea how she managed to keep playacting with Guy at all.
She supposed she rediscovered her strings.
She could only let them take her so far, though.
As she and Guy walked upstairs to bed, she turned to him, telling him—before he could even think of asking if he might—that she’d prefer to be left alone that night.
“For all of this month, actually,” she said. “I need time.”
He didn’t protest. He nodded, in apparent understanding.
“I want you to have it,” he said, every bit his old, gentle self again. “Maddy, my dearest,” he kissed her softly on the forehead, “time is all I ask.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Guy got his time. Twenty-nine days of it.
Maddy and Luke couldn’t be alone for every one of them. Guy, without ever suggesting it was what he might be doing, made it as hard as he possibly could for Maddy to escape anywhere by herself. Liberated by the Poona staff who arrived to help at the hospital, he came home earlier each evening, always with flowers in hand, ready to read Iris more stories, have a nice long dinner with Maddy. Sometimes, he appeared without warning at the school (which Maddy had now given notice to, wanting to leave them as much time as possible to replace her), or at Della’s (if Maddy had mentioned she might take Iris there), just to say hello. With his movements so unpredictable, Maddy didn’t dare risk hailing a rickshaw to Luke’s rooms nearly as often as her longing compelled her to.
But Guy couldn’t be present all the time. He still had surgeries to perform—the steady round of appendectomies, splenectomies, and fixes to injuries sustained on the drill grounds and polo fields that kept the hospital so busy—and the odd, unavoidable night shift. Maddy didn’t waste any of them. Every minute, every second she could grab with Luke, she took it. He was always waiting on his steps for her when she arrived, his hair often damp from a swim, his skin darker by the day under the intensifying summer sun. She lived for the moment when he’d see her at the end of his alleyway, and stand, smiling (that smile), opening his arms, ready to scoop her close and warn her that this time he wasn’t going to let her go.
“Don’t,” she’d say, “please don’t.”
As she sat each evening with Guy, picking at her food, she’d fantasize about being back in Luke’s bed, her head in the crook of his neck, his fingers moving up and down her spine, both of them sweating, breathless; together.
She worried about him, though, so much. She saw the shrapnel scars on his chest, his back and neck, and never forgot what he’d been through. Sometimes, when they were talking, he’d stop in midsentence, forehead creasing on one of the sudden pains he’d admitted had started to plague him since he’d returned to the heat, the mayhem of India. She’d wait, gripping his hand, staring at his agony, holding her breath for the time it took to pass, kissing him when it did, hating that there was so little else she could do.
She never let herself fall asleep when they were together; no matter how tired she was (and she was so very exhausted), she always kept one eye on the time. But occasionally he slept, and she’d lie next to him on the pillow, staring at his flickering eyelids, picturing his dreams, flinching as he flinched—when a distant exhaust banged, or a firecracker went off—horribly aware that he was back there, in the trenches she couldn’t follow him into, and which he’d so recently remembered.
“It’s like I only just left,” he told her, early in their first week together. “It seems like it must all still be going on. It doesn’t feel real that it’s not, especially here. I keep thinking of Richmond, the river, its peace…”
“We’ll be back by summer,” she said, loathing the uselessness of her own words in this, their endless present. “I wish we could go tomorrow.”
“And what would Iris think about that, I wonder,” he said.
She had no answer for him there.
In those initial days, Iris continued to be a worry they both struggled to know what to say about.
The first meeting was strained, as Maddy supposed it was always going to be. It didn’t help that Guy took it upon himself to tell Iris it was happening, before Maddy had even come down to breakfast that morning.
“Why did you do that?” she asked him as she left Iris at the table and followed him out to his motor, not even trying to contain her irritation. “Have you seen her face? She’s going to be anxious about it all morning.…”
“Maddy,” he said. “You couldn’t just spring it on her.”
“I wasn’t going to,” she said. “I was going to talk to her after school.…”
“Well, now you don’t have to,” he said, quite as though he’d done them all a favor.
Iris assured her, as they walked to the schoolhouse, that she wasn’t worried. “I’m going to do my best to like him,” she said, which seemed such a strange thing for a child to say.
Frowning, Maddy asked, “Did Guy tell you to say that?”
Iris shook her head. Then again when Maddy pressed her.
But she was once again uncharacteristically quiet all through morning lessons. And she clutched onto Maddy’s hand afterward, as they went up to her parents’, undoubtedly nervous.
Maddy was nervous herself. Her mouth felt uncomfortably dry as she tried to distract Iris by pointing out the various birds up in the leaves, the monkey who sat on a high branch, peering down at them. Her hands were clammy in her gloves. They were all too nervous, of course, too mindful of how well they needed the meeting to go. Alice especially was awkwardly stiff. For all her talk of being there to help smooth things over, she was, to Maddy’s despair, as reserved as she’d ever been with Luke, flushing scarlet when he arrived, and whispering what sounded like thank you when he kissed her hello (another incredibly odd thing for someone to say). She remained very quiet as they took tea on the stifling veranda, pulling at the collar of her cream tea dress, looking everywhere but at Luke and Maddy, until even Iris—glued to Maddy’s lap, her new doctor’s kit clutched in her chubby hands—felt compelled to ask her if she didn’t feel very well.
“I’m just hot,” she said.
They were all that.
Not even Peter, who’d taken the day off work at Richard’s suggestion, ready to lend his support to the proceedings, could lighten the fraught atmosphere. He kept up a steady enough patter of conversation—telling Iris that her daddy was an expert polo player, didn’t she know, asking Maddy how school had been, saying what a luxury it was to be at his leisure on a Monday, forcing a laugh when Luke smiled and said that it was possible to have enough leisure—but struggled, like they all struggled, not to keep casting anxious looks at Iris, wondering when she might come out of her shell.
Luke at least realized that he mustn’t push her. He didn’t take his eyes off her either. Maddy watched the wonder in his gaze as he soaked up her bowed head, the quiet way she examined each of her miniature doctor’s instruments in turn, and knew she was seeing something she would never, not ever, forget.
“I kept thinking of her little sepia foot in that ph
otograph you sent me,” he told her afterward.
He asked Iris just a very few questions: about her friends (“Suya and Lucy,” she whispered), what she liked to do at school (“Painting,” she said, eyes fixed on her kit), at the weekend (“I don’t know,” she whispered again), and almost, almost, made her smile by inquiring if Suya had taught her how to terrorize the peacocks.
“Yes?” he said. “It’s a yes, isn’t it? I can tell. Those poor peacocks.”
But it was only as he and Peter left that he did what Maddy was certain he’d been desperate to do from the second he saw her, and got up, coming to crouch by their side.
“Iris,” he said, “am I right in saying you feel rather shy?”
She said nothing, just looked up from her toy, warm body tensing on Maddy’s lap: an obvious yes.
“That’s all right,” Luke said. “You don’t know me yet. You can be as shy with me as you like.”
More silence.
He smiled at her. Maddy had no idea how he managed it.
“Do you like horses?” he asked. “Is that why Peter told you I play polo?”
This time, she nodded. Her sweaty curls bounced.
“Well then, how about we go to the cantonment tomorrow?” he said. “I happen to know a few of the cavalry officers there. We can see if we can arrange a lesson.”
Maddy felt her heart lift at the suggestion. It was a good one, she thought.
She had high hopes that it would be a better day.
Especially when Della said she and Lucy would come along, hopefully help take some of the pressure off everyone.
* * *
Maddy stood with her at the edge of the sand paddock, watching as Luke and a couple of lieutenants helped the girls into their saddles and led them around in the blazing sunshine, coaxing them into slow trots. Lucy laughed the faster they went, squealing at Della and Maddy, asking if they were watching.
“We’re watching,” Maddy assured her. “Don’t you worry about that.”
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