The Girl From the Tea Garden

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘Ah, Miss Robson, you’ll be able to shed some light on the Nerikot affair. Did your native beau, Prince Sanjay, give the order to shoot or not?’

  ‘Mr Bracknall, I find your words offensive,’ she sparked back.

  ‘Well, he is your beau, isn’t he?’ Bracknall leered. ‘You’ve been holed up in his love nest for weeks. Everybody’s talking about it.’

  Sundar rose. ‘Please, sir, leave Miss Robson alone.’

  Adela shook with indignation. ‘Prince Sanjay would never fire on unarmed civilians, never.’

  ‘Oh, I think he’s quite capable of it,’ slurred Bracknall. ‘They don’t have the same scruples about fair play that we do.’ He threw Sundar a contemptuous look and moved on.

  When he’d gone, Adela asked, ‘Have people really been talking about me and Jay like this – in such an unkind way?’

  Fatima and Sundar exchanged uncomfortable looks. ‘What did you expect?’ Fatima said bluntly. ‘Unmarried memsahibs and Indians, even princes, are not supposed to fraternise, beyond the occasional cocktail party.’

  Adela blushed deeply to think how much further she had gone.

  ‘Still,’ said Sundar with bleak humour, ‘it’s nothing to the gossip that Sam’s caused with buying the girl.’

  ‘Oh, the silly man,’ Fatima said with impatient affection. ‘What on earth possessed him?’

  Adela’s heart twisted at the memory. She glanced around and dropped her voice. ‘I think it might have had something to do with your brother.’

  Fatima gave her a sharp look. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He was there too. I think he was going to make a song and dance about the confrontation. Sam pushed him out of the way and intervened instead.’

  Only as Adela spoke her thoughts aloud for the first time did she believe that might be the reason for Sam’s actions. She had been so angry, believing that what he had done that day was a deliberate rejection of her. But perhaps it was something else entirely. Had Sam just acted on the spur of the moment to protect not only Pema but Ghulam too? The idea threw her emotions into turmoil. Whatever the reason – even if it had just been gut instinct – Sam was saddled with his rash actions. And she was too. Adela felt a wave of panic. She had thrown herself at Jay and revelled in their romantic affair. But where was he now?

  A week later, with no sign of Jay in Simla, Fluffy ordered a listless Adela out of the house.

  ‘Go and see your friends at the theatre,’ she ordered. ‘They’ll be casting for Charley’s Aunt. It’s your last chance to perform before your trip to England.’

  Adela steeled herself to go that afternoon. The town was pearly grey under heavy clouds, the air sultry. Another storm was brewing.

  In the auditorium Tommy was handing out scripts and trying to herd a chattering crowd of players out of the wings and into seats. He was taken aback to see her. An awkward silence fell as Adela mounted the steps.

  Deborah came forward and greeted her. ‘Look who the cat’s brought in.’ She brushed Adela’s cheek with a kiss. ‘You’re brave,’ she whispered.

  Adela’s insides tightened.

  ‘Take a seat in the stalls, girl,’ Tommy said, smiling briefly, but avoiding her look. ‘You can listen in if you want.’

  ‘Listen in?’ Adela laughed. ‘I’ve come to audition.’

  To her left someone moved out of the shadows, and a familiar voice said, ‘What a shame you’ve missed the auditions. All the parts are taken, aren’t they, Tommy?’

  ‘Nina?’ Adela gasped.

  ‘Hello.’ Nina smiled. She missed her cheek with a loud kiss. ‘We meet again at last. I’ve been telling everyone all about our school days together and what a little terror you were.’ She gave a brittle laugh.

  Adela’s heart began to thud in dread. Even before anything was said, she knew that Nina had been spreading her poison. All she could do was to try and counter it with courtesy.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about your father’s death. It must have been such a shock for you and your mother.’

  For a moment Nina seemed thrown; then just for an instant her top lipped curled in that familiar gesture of contempt Adela remembered so well, before it changed to a smile of regret. ‘No need to be sorry. You never really knew him. We received so many letters of condolence; that was a great comfort. It’s a shame you and your parents never thought to write, even though your father had been a close friend of my mother’s. I can’t deny that was a little hurtful.’

  Adela stuttered, ‘I’m s-sorry, but I’m sure—’

  ‘I accept that,’ Nina said with a sad expression. ‘It’s not your fault you don’t know what it’s like to lose a dear father. Shall we just get on with the rehearsal? I’d rather not talk about upsetting things.’

  ‘Of course,’ Tommy said hastily. ‘Where were we?’

  Adela’s frustration swelled. Her mother had insisted on writing a note of condolence despite the smears by Mrs Davidge against the family. She threw a look of appeal at Deborah to stick up for her, but her friend was looking intently at her script.

  Adela retreated and sat in the stalls. At first the read-through was stiff and the atmosphere awkward – was that because she was there? – but soon Tommy was putting them at their ease and they began laughing at the comedy and making suggestions. Adela stayed on, stubbornly determined not to be hounded out of the group by Nina’s spitefulness, sugar-coated though it was. All the old feelings of inferiority and nervousness that the bullying girl had instilled in her five years ago came flooding back. But she had stood up to her then, and she wasn’t going to back down now. They were grown women; it was ridiculous to harbour resentments from when they were thirteen. Yet Nina had power over her; in her head Adela could hear the taunt ‘two annas’ as if it were yesterday.

  At the end of rehearsal she waited for Deborah, but her friend was hanging back with a group of girls clustered around Nina. Was her friend deliberately avoiding her? Adela steeled herself to walk forward and join them.

  ‘Are you going to Davico’s?’ she asked brightly.

  Nina half turned and spoke over her shoulder. ‘No, I’m having the girls back to our bungalow for tennis and afternoon tea.’

  ‘Adela can come too, can’t she?’ Deborah asked. ‘She’s great at tennis.’

  ‘So sorry,’ Nina said. ‘I don’t mind a bit, but Mother might be awkward – all that past history with Adela’s father.’

  Adela rose to the bait. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been saying, but my father did not jilt your mother. That’s just nonsense.’

  ‘Well, how would you possibly know?’ Nina asked with that sad smile that Adela was growing to hate. ‘Your father would never admit it, would he? But it’s a devastating thing for a woman to experience. Surely you can see that.’

  ‘Only if it were true!’

  ‘Mother would never lie.’ Nina put her hand to her mouth as if to stifle a sob.

  ‘Adela!’ Deborah remonstrated. ‘Don’t be so unkind.’

  ‘Okay, ladies,’ Tommy intervened, ‘time to clear off and let me lock up. See you at rehearsal tomorrow.’

  They scattered off with calls of goodbye and disappeared, leaving Adela and Tommy alone.

  ‘It’s been just three weeks since the last show, yet somehow I’ve gone from everyone’s best friend to the girl no one wants around.’ Adela fixed Tommy with troubled eyes. ‘What’s happened in three weeks?’

  Tommy met her look. ‘For starters, you and Prince Sanjay are what’s happened. They were jealous – I was jealous – you chose to go with him rather than with us to the after-show party. Should never turn your back on the pack, my girl.’

  ‘I regret that now . . .’

  ‘But they would have got over that,’ Tommy went on. ‘You were providing some juicy gossip going off to his country retreat – we love all that stuff, don’t we?’

  ‘It’s Nina, isn’t it?’ Adela guessed. ‘She’s changed people towards me.’

  Tommy sighed. ‘Yes, she’s been busy
with her wagging tongue. Nothing too bitchy, just little titbits dropped now and again with that sorrowful look in her blue eyes that she’s so good at. She’s a pro that one.’

  Adela gulped. ‘So you know . . . you know things . . . about my family.’

  Tommy nodded. ‘She’s made sure they all know about you being Eurasian – says your granny was a tea picker or some such.’

  Adela felt bile in her throat. She swallowed it down and said with emotion, ‘My great-grandmother was an Assamese silk worker – a skilled woman – and my grandmother was a teacher. My mother is a successful businesswoman who has run her own tea rooms in England and tea gardens in India. Why should the likes of Nina Davidge look down her long nose at me? Tell me that, Tommy!’

  Tommy gave her a look of pity. ‘You know why, Adela.’

  She gave a bitter smile. ‘’Cause my family have let the side down? ’Cause I’m not a pure-blooded English girl?’

  ‘It’s cruel, but that’s the way a lot of British still think. They like to feel superior – it’s been fed to them with their mother’s milk.’

  ‘Is that the way you feel, Tommy?’ Adela challenged. ‘Is that why you don’t want me in your play either?’

  ‘I would have let you audition if you’d bothered to turn up.’

  ‘Would you really?’

  Tommy dropped his gaze. ‘Sit down a minute, will you?’ Adela stood where she was, defiant. ‘Please.’ He tugged her gently into a seat and sat beside her.

  For a moment or two he said nothing. He looked around, making sure there was no one else there listening in.

  ‘Villiers isn’t my real surname,’ he said, his voice so low she had to lean in to hear him. ‘I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was adopted as a baby. My parents – my adoptive parents – had lost three babies, and my mother couldn’t bear the thought of another pregnancy, so they went to an orphanage and chose me.’ Tommy gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I must have been the palest skinned and the fairest haired they could find among the half-castes, ’cause that was what the orphanage was for: the babies the Brits disowned or the Indians were too ashamed to keep.’

  Adela struggled to take in his startling revelation. All this time they had been friends yet never known that they shared the same secret. She covered his hand with her own. ‘Sorry, Tommy. I had no idea.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t. We all keep it locked up inside like something shameful, scared witless in case people find out.’

  ‘That’s the worst thing,’ Adela agreed, ‘the shame you’re made to feel. Why should it matter so much?’

  Tommy shrugged and let out a long sigh. Adela squeezed his hand.

  ‘But you don’t know that you’re Anglo-Indian, do you? Your parents might have been British and died or something.’

  ‘Highly unlikely,’ Tommy grunted.

  ‘But possible. Have you ever gone back and tried to find out?’

  ‘Why on earth would I do that? I’m a proud Villiers through and through,’ he mocked himself.

  ‘Do you know where the orphanage was?’

  Tommy laced his fingers through hers. ‘Your neck of the woods I think. My father was posted to Shillong with the Public Works Department for a couple of years.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘They think I was born in 1907. There was a bit of the jitters going on around then – fifty years since the Indian Mutiny – and all the British were worried about attacks. Plenty of Eurasian babies being abandoned; my parents had the pick of the crop.’

  Adela gasped. ‘How strange.’

  ‘What is?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘It’s something I discovered a couple of years ago when I was home. My family told me of a tragedy that happened at our house – before we were living there. My Auntie Sophie and her parents were staying at Belgooree in 1907. Something terrible happened. Her father was ill – sick in the head – he must’ve been ’cause he shot his wife and then himself, leaving poor Sophie orphaned at six years old. But there was also Sophie’s baby brother. Their ayah – who later became my nanny too – said he was taken to an orphanage in Shillong.’ She looked at Tommy critically. He had brown eyes and light brown hair. Was there a passing resemblance to Sophie? He was staring at her aghast.

  ‘My God,’ said Tommy, ‘what an awful story.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Mother says Sophie still longs for the brother she never knew.’

  Tommy gave her a look of disbelief. ‘Don’t tell me we could be related.’

  Adela smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Sophie is no blood relation. But what if you were that baby—?’

  ‘Doesn’t do to dwell on what ifs,’ Tommy cautioned.

  ‘I suppose not,’ Adela sighed. ‘So can we carry on being friends?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But won’t you get sent to Coventry for fraternising with the enemy?’

  ‘I like living dangerously.’ Tommy grinned and kissed her fingers.

  She kissed his cheek. ‘Things would’ve been a lot simpler if we could just have fallen in love with each other, wouldn’t they?’

  Tommy looked rueful. ‘A lot simpler.’

  Despite Tommy’s promises to remain friends, Adela soon found that her presence at the theatre was unwelcome. Nina was outwardly friendly, but the other girls were cool towards her. She waylaid Deborah outside St Mary’s.

  ‘You know half the things Nina says about me are untrue.’

  ‘So half are true,’ Deborah mocked.

  ‘What difference does it make?’ Adela was impatient. ‘We’ve been friends for years. I’m still the same person I was a month ago, so why are you treating me like a leper?’

  ‘Because you’re not the same, are you? You should have been honest with me – with all of us – letting me think you were, well, like the rest of us.’

  Adela’s look was scathing. ‘I thought our friendship was stronger than that.’

  Deborah appeared uncomfortable. ‘If it was just up to me—’

  ‘It is just up to you, Deb. No one is forcing you to break our friendship – not even Nina can do that. The choice is yours.’

  ‘Don’t make me choose,’ Deborah said in annoyance. ‘Nina has been really nice to me, and her mother has offered to let me stay there after school finishes. My parents are pleased with the idea. Why don’t you just make a bit more effort to be kind to Nina?’

  ‘Kind to Nina?’ Adela was incredulous. ‘The girl who made my life hell at school.’

  ‘So you say,’ Deborah retorted. ‘Nina tells it differently. She still has a scar on her finger where you bit her. Sounds like you were the one out of control.’

  Adela felt sick at the way Nina had twisted things round to make her seem like the bully. Now she was doing her best to turn her Simla friends against her too. She gave Deborah a helpless look.

  ‘Listen,’ said Deborah, ‘just keep a low profile until all this hoo-ha with the prince and the shootings dies down. I’m sure in time we can all go back to being friends again.’

  Adela nodded, although she knew Deborah was just placating her to avoid a further scene. Deborah smiled in relief.

  ‘So what was it like?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being with Jay? Bet he’s an expert lover like they say.’

  Adela was winded by the unexpected remark. She answered without thinking. ‘You make it sound sordid, but it’s not. We love each other.’

  She turned and walked away quickly before Deborah could show her disbelief.

  In early June a letter came from Sophie.

  My dearest lassie,

  We have been thinking of you such a lot, Uncle Rafi and I. We have read the newspaper reports about the riots in Nerikot with great alarm and are greatly concerned about Jay’s involvement. I know you have a soft spot for him, my darling, so I thought you would want to know that he is back in Gulgat at the palace. I fear he has taken advantage of your affections, but he will tell us little, i
f anything, of his time in Simla. It is Fluffy Hogg who wrote and told us you had stayed at Eagle’s Nest.

  I hope you will be home for your eighteenth birthday and that we can all spoil you on your special day – especially if you will be away in England for a while afterwards. Tilly is growing ridiculously excited at the thought of your trip home together – she misses Jamie and Libby so much and can’t wait to see them again. It makes me rather wish Rafi and I were coming with you too. I should love to see Scotland again, though I have no relations left there since my Great Uncle Daniel in Perth died.

  Come home soon – it’s been far too long since we hugged and chatted! Give our greetings to Mrs Hogg. I imagine Boz is away on tour in the hills, but send love to Fatima.

  Your adoring Auntie Sophie xxx

  Adela sat down on her bed and wept. She had been waiting an age for word that Jay was safe, for him to return to Simla to be with her, but now he was hundreds of miles away in Gulgat. How long had he been there? He had not even sent word himself, but left her to hear of his return second-hand! Did he think so little of her? Or perhaps he was still in danger and was lying low? Maybe Sophie shouldn’t have told her and was putting him at risk by writing it down in a letter; the authorities could have intercepted and read it.

  Adela read the letter again, so full of tenderness, and felt ashamed at resenting Sophie for breaking the news. Jay had fled from the hills without a thought for her; otherwise he would have sent a message himself or tried to see her one more time before parting. Adela curled up on her bed and wept until she felt hollowed out.

  That evening she sat on the veranda with Fluffy watching an electric storm. It crackled and rent the sky into jagged pieces. She told her guardian about Jay being in Gulgat.