The Stars We Share

by Rafe Posey

  June wonders if Alec sailed from Bombay from this same pier. He was so small then, and her recollection is weighted by the tenderness she’s felt for him since she first saw that shock of pale hair above wide brown eyes, his face lost and sad in the vicarage drawing room. She wants to see the things he loved the most, but those will not be here in Bombay—here is chaos, and Alec’s India is birds and elephants and the mountains in summer. June glances to the north, although she knows she can’t possibly see the Himalayas. But even that adds to the guilt; whatever she sees, whether he would have missed it, she will never be able to bring it to him. That connection is sundered before it can even begin.

  He has been her boy as long as she’s known him—and yet in crossing the world for her work, the dots and dashes of her vocation stacking against everything she’s ever known, it seems impossible to proceed into any kind of future without somehow breaking his heart.

  It’s just as well that their arrival is so distractingly chaotic. The massive Gateway of India stands vigil over the harbor, the stones luminous as the early sun glints pink through the morning haze. The heat is bombastic and wet, and the press of Wrens trying to disembark and make their way to the train station is almost unbearable. The ship had been crowded, but now they are packed into an even smaller area, in this inescapable heat. June grips her valise, tries to ignore the slick of perspiration down her spine. The pier swarms with Wrens and sailors, a mad crush of people trying to make their way to wherever they’re going next. Most of the Wrens will go with her, to Madras, and then on to Colombo from there, but others will disperse to Delhi or Calcutta or any number of other places. A pack of Australian nurses slips past her, and June shivers despite the heat. What is it like for these girls, knowing how many of their sisterhood have been detained by the Japanese? How do the nurses left behind carry on in the face of all that?

  June steps back from the crowd as well as she can, sizing up the situation. The heat feels like a layer of damp, itchy cloth pressed against her by a flatiron. It’s madness to be out in it, even early. She doesn’t envy the Wrens their blue wool uniforms. She glances at her watch—only out of England a few weeks, and already her forearm bears the imprint of the sun. Half nine, which leaves her with hours before she’s meant to board the train to Madras. For comfort, she runs the recently memorized list of stations in her head, building a map of the foreseeable future. It’s hard to imagine a trip of this length: Bombay to Madras is more than twice the distance of London to Inverness, and nowhere near the extent of India. And even once they’ve made it to Madras, overnight and most of the next day on the train, there are two days of travel still ahead of them before they reach Colombo. And June, impatient and full of purpose, can’t wait to get to Ceylon and take up her pencil again.

  Years ago Alec had complained about the crush and racket of London, holding Bombay as a quieter metropolis, but how? She will never be able to ask him. The clamor batters her from all directions—Wrens and other new arrivals hailing their friends, vendors hawking shawls and wooden toys, porters and bearers and engines and gulls. She doesn’t know where to look first—there is too much movement, too much color, too many people. It’s madness, but it’s a glory, too.

  Just as well she doesn’t have to navigate this cacophony alone. Her cabinmate Pamela Glynn, another civilian attached to the Admiralty, has been processed off the ship now too, and joins June by the gangplank. “Bit much, all this.”

  June nods, relieved to see her. “Makes you miss the air on deck, doesn’t it?”

  “God yes,” Pamela says. They are bonded by their various shipboard travails and all those nights of cards and gin. Pamela’s fiancé is posted in Bombay with the army, and June has spent the last weeks hearing every detail of Pamela’s plan to leave the Foreign Office the very moment the war is over and she can be demobbed back into her regular life.

  Of course, she also wants to be somewhere “civilized,” as she kept saying, and June, looking around at the pariah dogs sidling along the edges of the crowd, can’t help but think that Bombay is probably not high on Pamela’s list. But how exciting, though, to be here, experiencing something that is not England.

  Pamela squeals. “Dennis!”

  A lanky man, perhaps a bit older than Pamela and clad in the khaki shorts and shirt of a British Army officer, raises his hand. Pamela waves frantically, and he smiles at her, moving genially through the crowd.

  “Hullo, Pammy.” He kisses her cheek and takes her hand, then turns to June, lifting his peaked cap. “You must be June. I’m Dennis Ruthven, Royal Fusiliers.”

  “It’s good to meet you,” June says, shaking his hand. “Pamela has told me so much about you.”

  His smile widens. “Only good things, I hope.”

  “I’m glad you’re coming with us for lunch,” Pamela says to June. “Apparently you’re an acceptable chaperone.”

  Dennis nods. “Had quite the time with the Wren Officer in Charge, trying to convince her I wasn’t unsavory.” He grins at June. “You’re not even Wrens, but she seems rather attached to the two of you.”

  June smiles. “I should think they’ll hardly miss us.” She looks at her watch again. It’s too early for lunch in the regular course of things, but a half day in Bombay on her way to Ceylon seems well out of the regular course of things, too. And although Pamela can be tiring, June is hungry, it turns out, and the idea of being off the docks has considerable appeal. She glances back around her, watching the sunlight scream off the grimy low waves as they curl against the piers in the shadow of the Gateway.

  Pamela pulls at her sleeve, and June clutches her valise and follows Pamela and Dennis out to the street. The sun is even harsher here, an inescapable glow that lends a vertiginous shine to everything. No wonder Alec complained about being cold all the time, if this was the kind of climate he thought correct. The walls that line the street are flecked with red, and she has a disquieting moment thinking it’s blood. But beneath her reflexive alarm there is a surge of curiosity, too. After a lifetime of aching toward faraway places on the globe, she has finally reached one of them.

  Dennis notes her gaze and smiles. “Betel nuts,” he says. “They spit the juice. Bit dramatic to look at, but nothing to worry about.”

  A turbaned young officer, a Sikh, stands at attention at the side of an official car with Union Jacks fluttering at the corners. He holds the door and they each climb in, June sliding to the far end of the wide cushioned seat.

  The long black car nudges its way through the bustling streets, and June watches Bombay pass through the open windows, dazed by the dense enormity of the sheer human presence. There is a part of her that wishes she could have gone looking for Alec’s past, but why? To what end, if she can never tell him where she is?

  The car is low-slung and wide, and everywhere they turn it seems to June that they are in danger of pushing up too close to people or buildings or, God help them, cows. The driver never stops; at intersections he creeps forward and the masses of people part for them.

  June peers out her window, trying to ignore Pamela and Dennis, cooing together on their end of the bench. There is so much to look at outside the car—she’s never seen colors like this. On a more prosperous block, flowers cascade from balconies. A trill of jasmine floats in, but it’s not enough to mask an underlayer of filth and rot.

  “Hanging Gardens,” Dennis says. He gestures at a park as they pass it, trees and greenery bursting with flowers, climbing up into a low hillside. “Lovely place, best view of the city from the top of Malabar Hill, but the Parsi leave their dead in the open air.” He grimaces.

  June looks up at the birds circling. “Are those vultures?”

  Pamela says, “It’s dreadful.”

  “It’s their custom,” Dennis says mildly. “Very philosophical chaps, the Parsi.”

  June watches the vultures recede. She has heard of suttee, Hindu widows of the higher castes
throwing themselves into their husbands’ pyres in a ghastly ritual, but this is new. She has an unwanted flash of Alec’s parents—his whole household—laid out for the scavengers, although she knows full well they were cremated because of the cholera. The car slows to pass a cart pulled by a bent old man, and June’s eyes fall on a gilded statue of a goddess with arms weaving like the eddies of a stream. What would her parents make of this, bound as they are to their stern, dogged Church of England?

  “Surely the city could make them change,” Pamela says.

  Dennis shrugs. “Millions of people out here. It’s not England. And the joss sticks help.”

  “It’s remarkable,” June says. She tries to accept the layers of scent, though she’s almost relieved when Dennis lights a cigarette. He reminds her a little of Alec—tall, fair-haired, good-natured, with a touch of something far away in his face. “Have you been here long?”

  “Grew up here,” Dennis says. “Parents shipped me to England for school, but . . . Damn glad to be posted back in India.” That’s what it is, that faraway look—it’s the same way Alec’s face lightens when he talks about India, some combination of homesickness and memory.

  “June’s fiancé is from here, too,” Pamela offers up. It’s been over a year since Alec’s proposal, but June still jolts at the word fiancé. Dennis looks as though he’s waiting for her to elaborate.

  “He was a boy here in Bombay,” June says hesitantly. She doesn’t want to hear from Pamela about how happy they’ll be when the war ends. But she has to say something. “He was sent to England when he was small. His parents died.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dennis says.

  “He’s a pilot now,” Pamela says to Dennis.

  “Ah,” Dennis says. “Bloody rough life.” He seems to realize how he sounds, and smiles. “But those chaps know what they’re doing.” He leans forward to the driver. “Singh, run us by the canteen, that’s a good lad.”

  The driver ducks his head and muscles the car around another corner.

  * * *

  • • •

  The day passes in a blur—first the canteen, where Dennis buys them sandwiches and tea, and then a street bazaar. Peddlers stand behind tables sagging and overloaded with all kinds of goods and souvenirs, shoes and bolts of shimmering cloth at one booth, lacquered brass kettles and lamps at another. Men in long tunic-like shirts throng the marketplace, and it’s a moment before June realizes that many of them have very English umbrellas tucked under their arms. At the base of a stairway, an elephant-headed deity watches them all benevolently, incense wafting up from a tray placed square atop his lotus-folded legs. Some of the peddlers squat along the edges, clearly not as well-off as the men with tables, but their wares are displayed just as carefully on worn blankets on the ground.

  June’s mind is overwhelmed with color and smell, the scent of food cooking at the innumerable small restaurants and roadside stalls, vats of richly colored sauces flecked with herbs, the heaviness of spice in the air, the unfathomable wealth of fresh fruits, most of which she has never seen before, the crush and reek of incense and bodies—there’s so much she doesn’t recognize. So much to learn yet. Cows appear on the roadside, sometimes laden with necklaces of flowers, and twice now a monkey has screamed at her from a tree. She’s glad to board the train that evening with Pamela, and gladder still when they make their way along the car to the compartment they’re sharing with two Wrens.

  * * *

  • • •

  The wrack and clatter of the train is relentless. There are no connecting platforms between the cars, and so they must climb down from the carriage to the platform during station stops to move along the train. June makes her way to the buffet car with a Wren from Northern Ireland who has been to India before. By the time they return to their compartment, June is replete with new scents and flavors. So many new words; the language fills her like another kind of code. Ghee, samosa, vindaloo, masala. Her eyes won’t stop watering from the chilies, and her fingertips are stained a greasy umber. She’s brought a couple of samosas back with her, wrapped in a bit of newsprint. Pamela eyes them dubiously, chewing delicately at the tired sandwiches she saved from the canteen that afternoon, but June feels right, somehow. Not all the foods are wholly new—Alec has talked of curries, and at the vicarage Cook had learned to make mulligatawny for him, but even the flavors she has encountered in some form before strike her completely new here.

  June pulls a light sweater from her valise and folds it into a tidy pillow. She doesn’t think she can actually sleep—the noise is impossible; the windows are open and slatted without glass—but the semblance of rest will do her good. It may also help her tune out Pamela, who is still rhapsodizing about Dennis and the horde of babies she will have with him after the war.

  So many of the girls are like this that she wonders if there is something wrong with her. More, though, she wonders how they can make space in their minds for the basic contradiction of these relationships—the violation of trust that some of their jobs require. How can you have a relationship with someone if you can’t even tell him what you’re doing or where you’ve been?

  It’s difficult too, to sit with these women who are on her side, who have joined the same fight, and not be sure what to say about the task that lies ahead. The Wrens are wireless techs or radio mechanics, operators or signalers, and there is no way to know who has signed the Act and who will be part of her team, writing down codes and turning them into information. Some of the Wrens may well have been at Bletchley Park; there are a couple who look vaguely familiar. But there is no way to know without asking, and even that may constitute a violation of the Act.

  For a moment her mind fills with an alarming image: the Emperor Hirohito hovering overhead, clogging the wireless lines and sending his kamikaze pilots after the codebreakers. After her. She swallows the fear. There is nothing to be done about it, and once she reaches HMS Anderson she can concentrate on the work—breaking codes, saving lives. Like so many women at home—even the royal princesses—June needs to be of service more than she needs to be safe. This is who she is now.

  The train sways through the night, dropping south and east across the subcontinent. June and the other girls in her compartment drift in and out of sleep, rarely more than a light doze. Each time the train stops, its whistles and the screel of brakes chase sleep away. Moths batter themselves against the window slats. Just after dawn, June wakes to the sound of an elephant trumpeting. She presses her face to the window—there it is, smaller than she would have thought, ankle deep in a river, a teenage boy clinging to its shoulders with his knees. The elephant’s ears beat, ragged and dignified, against insects. The boy leans down, his torso flat against the elephant’s massive brow, and strokes the trunk it reaches to him. Something in June’s chest opens, and she fumbles through her valise for Alec’s latest letter, a single page from Canada in the weeks before she’d left Britain. She has to squint to read it, even held up to the faint light coming in through the slats, but that’s all right. She has committed this, and his other letters, to memory.

  Darling June,

  Spring has come at last to the tundra, and I am beside myself with relief. Perhaps I will not perish of cold after all! There are any number of plants I’ve not encountered before. Even their names sound unlike what we would have at home! There are tulips, but also columbine, firewood, Labrador tea, Jack Pye weed, and a host of others.

  Were I to tell you a story, the bear would be a creature of the flatlands. There are the Rockies far to the west, and the mountains of Quebec not quite as far to the east, but nothing here, where it is as flat as wilted napkins at a midsummer luncheon. Beautiful country, to be sure, but quite unlike any part of England I know.

  The men here are in high spirits—eager and fresh, and most of them well-suited to the grind of the pilot’s life and the challenge of flight. They’ll make fine officers. I continue not to understa
nd why the powers that be thought to send Tim and me to Canada of all places, but now I’m halfway through my sojourn I’m glad we’ve come.

  The worst part of it—of everything—is missing you. I think about the scent of your hair, or how it puddles against your collarbones, and become weak with it. There is nothing about you that I fail to miss—nothing. Even the sure knowledge that you are struggling now with wanting to correct my “tundra,” above . . . Even that adds to the sureness in my heart.

  Consider the maps in your head, my darling, and draw your lovely finger along the latitude closest to those we share—not quite 50 degrees, both of us, but I promise you I shall feel that tracing to my marrow.

  Another half a year and I’ll be home, reunited with you and ready to rejoin my squadron while I wait to see where His Majesty and Mr. Churchill send me next. I would wait a lifetime for you—another six months is nothing.

  All my love,

  Your Alec

  F/Lt Alec St. John Oswin

  RCAF Station Ottawa

  The letter stabs at her—there is guilt, of course, in wondering if this is the right path, particularly when she lets herself be confronted by his certainty. By the raw need that boils out of him. By everything. The fact is she loves him more deeply than she can explain even to herself, but even so . . .

  She closes her eyes and lets the map grow in her mind—there is Ottawa, on the other side of the world, more than seven thousand miles away, and here is Bombay. Ottawa and London are six degrees of latitude apart; Alec is right that a single thumb could cover both in a single line. Before she left Bletchley Park, she could follow his instructions and make it work. But Bombay is at the 19th parallel, and Colombo even farther south. She quails away from the weight of Alec’s belief.