East of the Sun

by Julia Gregson

  Rose had a wonderful laugh, warm and throaty. Its hint of wildness was what stopped her seeming too good to be true. She scrunched her eyes up like a child and abandoned herself to it.

  When Viva looked up, the moon was chasing their boat, spinning a faint golden mist over the haze of stars.

  “It must be so strange for him going back to India.” Rose sipped her brandy. “After all those years on his own.”

  “Ten years,” said Viva, trying to calm down. “And it is hell leaving India as a child—one moment, sun and freedom and blue skies, and lots of people running around after you who adore you. The next, well, he hasn’t spoken much to me about it, but you’re breaking the ice on a washbasin in some freezing school.”

  “Like being kicked out of paradise,” Rose said.

  “Yes, but India isn’t paradise. It has other ways of being awful.”

  “Examples, please, but nothing too horrid.”

  “Well, the heat for one thing. You have never, ever felt anything like it in England, it’s like being clubbed over the head sometimes, the flies, appalling poverty, but if you love it, as I do, it gets to you, it bores its way into your soul. You’ll see.”

  This was the longest proper conversation they’d had together since coming on board. Although her part of it had brought Viva close to tears, she was glad to be having it.

  “It’s so odd to think I’m going to be married there soon,” said Rose. The tip of her perfectly straight nose was showing above her stole, which she’d pulled up like a blanket. “There is quite a lot to think about.”

  Frightened, thought Viva. All of us.

  Rose had confessed to her the day before, as if it was a splendid joke, that she’d only met her fiancé a grand total of four times, five if you counted a point to point they’d been to near Salisbury.

  And Viva had wondered, How could you give yourself away so carelessly? Why had her parents allowed it? It wasn’t even like an arranged marriage in India where the families would have known each other for generations.

  “Yes, I can imagine,” said Viva. She wanted to touch her childish soft hand, or to put an arm around her, but she couldn’t. Instead, she thought of her own mother in her wedding dress, her laughing brown eyes, the gaiety of her expression. It made you feel dizzy to think about it. I’ve been frozen, she thought, since that moment.

  “It’s been such fun on the dear old Kaisar.” Rose was twisting the sapphire ring on her wedding finger, her voice dreamy and far away. “All our new best friends, the sense that you’re always on the way to somewhere else. In fact”—she looked at her watch—“we should be able to see Port Said soon, or so our waiter told us.”

  She jumped up and walked toward the ship’s railings, her dress like butterfly wings in the moonlight.

  “Look. Oh, do look!” She pointed toward the horizon. “You can see the lights already.”

  Viva didn’t want to move. She shouldn’t have said all that to Guy.

  “Do come! Do look! It is so thrilling. Is it Port Said? It must be.”

  Together they looked out at a faint necklace of lights across a dark and crinkling sea. A foreign town where foreign people were cleaning their teeth and washing up their supper dishes and thinking about going to bed.

  “Is it true we’re allowed to sleep on deck now? That sounds such fun.”

  When Rose beamed like that, you could see how sweet she must have been as a child.

  I hope he’s a nice man, thought Viva. I hope he deserves her. What a hideous gamble.

  “Do you know it?” Rose’s voice broke through her reverie.

  “Not really. I’ve been there twice before.” She had been six or seven the last time she was here. She remembered it in snapshots: her first taste of fresh orange juice in a café in the square; her father playing horsey with her up on his shoulders.

  “Tor’s desperate to go ashore,” Rose said, sounding anxious. “Frank’s going with a group and he’s asked us all. What do you think of him, by the way?”

  “Not sure,” said Viva. “Except that he seems rather sure of himself and of his effect on women. I hope he doesn’t hurt her.”

  “I do, too,” said Rose. “She had such a rotten time during the season. I don’t know why men aren’t nicer to her.”

  She tries too hard, Viva thought. She doesn’t mean to but she does, because she thinks she’s not pretty enough.

  “Colonel Patterson told me yesterday that Frank had an older brother who was killed at Ypres,” she heard Rose say in the middle of these thoughts. “That’s why he became a doctor. Colonel Patterson thinks Frank puts on a jolly front because he’s still getting over it. He said it only came up because the colonel’s son was killed there, too.”

  “Are you sure?” It took Viva a few seconds to absorb this information and feel the jolt of shame that came with it. I do this all the time with people. I write them off before I know them, or I think that friendliness, a certain kind of openness, is a form of weakness.

  “That’s what the colonel said.” Rose’s beautiful blue eyes suddenly gleamed with tears. “My older brother died in France—the one I used to row with, because I was so much younger than him and wanted to do all the things he did. Oh, let’s not talk about it now. It’s too awful. I can’t bear it sometimes. I think it’s part of the reason my parents sent me away, because they can’t bear it either and it’s awfully quiet at home now. The thing is,” she said in a firmer voice, “Frank knows the most wonderful restaurant there, and a trip we can do to the Pyramids. Tor’s simply longing to go, but I did promise my pees I wouldn’t go without a proper chaperone, so would you?”

  “I’d love to come.” Viva tried not to sound too eager. “I mean, I don’t know it that well but—”

  “There’ll be other people coming,” said Rose, “but they’re boys, and I don’t want it to look wrong. People do gossip so. I shouldn’t mind, but I do.”

  “I understand,” said Viva, “of course I do.”

  “But what about the boy?” Rose’s expression was warily polite. “I mean, he can come if he likes, but we probably seem like a crowd of ancients to him.”

  “He wasn’t keen when we talked about it earlier,” said Viva. What he’d said was, “So, camel stools, perfume factories. How splendid,” his voice breaking on the splendid.

  “He might actually like a day on his own.” Rose sounded hopeful. “But do bring him if you have to.”

  No, no, no, thought Viva. I don’t have to. He has made it perfectly clear he wants a day on his own.

  She had made up her mind already, and one day she would pay for it.

  Chapter Twelve

  Port Said, 1,300 miles to Bombay

  Tor got up early, woken by the shouts of the boatmen in Port Said Harbor and a sense of queasy excitement about the day ahead. Picking up a bundle of clothes she crept around Rose and headed for the bathroom. She locked the door and put on a white toile dress first, the one her mother had insisted she buy in Swan & Edgar. She stood on the stool and lined up her reflection in the mirror. She took the dress off again. Too sugared-almondy and twee.

  Her linen suit with its short jacket seemed boxy and ordinary. Ten minutes later, sweating and agitated, she stood in the middle of a clothes mountain in a pale green cotton frock and a pair of jade earrings, trying to imagine what Frank would think of her in this.

  She lifted a hand mirror up to see what she looked like in profile, moved her lips in conversation to see how she appeared to others when she was talking, and finally gave a silent and experimental laugh.

  “Oh God,” she came back to earth with a bump, thinking, “why is it that every time I like a man I turn into my mother?” If she wasn’t careful, soon she’d be checking her reflection in restaurant spoons, or wearing frownies—those sticky bits of canvas her mother wore between her eyebrows at night to prevent worry lines.

  While her bath was running, she thought back to that awful afternoon at home before she’d left for India, a turning poi
nt in a way. For months the argument about whether she should be allowed to go or not had been batted backwards and forwards between her parents. Her father, who spent most of his days in a book-lined shed (he called it his bunker) researching lady-birds, listening to music, and trying to resist his wife’s furious attempts to change him and the house, had been against it.

  “I like Tor here,” he said. “And I think we’re in for a bumpy ride in India.”

  One night, over a stormy dinner, he’d begged her mother to just for one second stop talking about parties and polo matches, and consider the impossibility of two thousand Englishmen trying to control one-fifth of the world’s population. Her mother had said, “Pouf,” and told him to stop trying to frighten Tor, it was very mean of him. She’d slammed the door and left the room.

  Tor had tried one morning after a sleepless night to confide in her mother about the Paul fiasco.

  They were in the flower-arranging room. Her mother, who seemed now in a more or less permanent huff with her, was cutting rose stems and thrusting them into wire baskets with unnecessary force.

  “Have you quite finished?” her mother had said when Tor’s tearful outburst was over. “Because I’ve made up my mind to be very frank with you, my darling.” She’d put down her flower scissors. “You see, when you are young, you think the time for being chosen and married will go on forever and it doesn’t, and if a mother doesn’t tell you these things, who will?” And then, worse than the rage really, she’d taken Tor’s hand and given a regretful smile. “Darling,” she said after a sufficient pause. “How shall I put this? You are a reasonably attractive girl; you’ll do for most known purposes. When you put your mind to it you can be a very nice girl, but you’re no oil painting, and in general, you,” and here her mother had spaced the words out, “Are. Going. To. Have. To. Work. Much, much harder, because it is work.”

  Any moment now, Tor could feel it coming, her mother would be producing one of her lectures about love being like a ballet performance, a beautiful lie, a twirling, smiling lie that masked the pain. Mother even had a special masklike smile she produced during this talk.

  “Mother! Please!” She had covered her ears with her hands. “I was trying to tell you about Paul and what went wrong. I mean, he didn’t even want to kiss me.”

  Then her mother, scarlet with indignation, had let her have it with both guns.

  “You went and had your hair cut like a ridiculous boy. What did you expect? You wear shoes like baby shoes. You make the most ludicrous fuss about wearing nice clothes. If Daddy and I are spending all this money on your coming out, the least you could try and do is to look nice. That’s all. Now, is that so unreasonable?”

  Her mother had stormed off again, this time to play bridge; her father had bolted out the front door; Tor had sat in the summerhouse—where she and Rose had played dolls, and vets, and schools—and downed half a bottle of kitchen brandy.

  Later, she’d gone up to her parents’ bedroom half drunk; she’d stripped down to her knickers and brassiere and decided to face the truth at last. Was she ugly, perhaps hideously so?

  She’d sat at her mother’s kidney-shaped dressing table—a shiny pink confection underneath which her mother always kept her pink satin slippers with their frou of ostrich feather on the toes. When her foot had wedged in them she’d kicked them halfway across the room.

  She’d stood up and looked at herself in the long cheval mirror near the window. She was taller, it was true, than was strictly speaking necessary, and browner than was fashionable. Her body was broad-shouldered, athletic. But she was not fat. She was not fat. Her hair was an undistinguished mid-brown with no curl in it whatsoever. She had her father’s huge, blue, tragicomic eyes; they were what people always commented on. A perfect mongrel, she decided, watching them fill with tears.

  She’d lain on the carpet and looked at herself in the mirror again. The early-afternoon light was remorselessly bright.

  “I love you,” she said, wondering how she’d looked to Paul that day. Ugly, ugly, ugly, a goblin voice said back.

  “Kiss me, Paul,” she’d said to her reflection, watching her face contort with tears, for she was very drunk by now.

  She’d unlocked the large walnut wardrobe that dominated the room. She’d taken out her mother’s pride and joy: a peach silk Balmain dress—hand-pleated, each sequin sewn on by hand, as her mother never tired of telling her—bought in Paris years ago for a glamorous life that had never quite taken place. It felt blasphemous even to unzip its cloth bag and remove its complicated straps from the hanger.

  It had surged over her head—a flood of apricot silk. She’d shivered.

  “You could make yourself beautiful if you tried harder,” that’s what Mother said.

  She put the dress on without doing up its poppers and sat at the dressing table. Three versions of her face looked back at her. She’d opened the drawer underneath her and found, next to the hair pins and the swansdown powder puff, a packet of cigarettes. Narrowing her eyes, she smoked a cigarette from a long ebony holder. She drained her glass, and helped herself to a blast of Shalimar from a cut-glass bottle with a tassel on its lid.

  She’d put on some lipstick and looked at herself in the mirror and said at last, “I don’t want to be you, Mummy, I really don’t.”

  Her father, who’d come up to look for his slippers, had walked in and found her crying. For the first time since she was little he had taken her in his arms, had really hugged her.

  “I think you’d better go to India,” he’d said. “I’ll talk to her tonight.”

  But now she was feeling all wobbly and chameleonish again, which was annoying, only this time it was Frank, and to nutshell the problem, she had the most hideous crush on him. When he’d asked her, in the most casual way possible, if Rose and she had any plans for Port Said, she’d been sitting in the bar chatting to Jitu Singh. Jitu was the urbane young maharajah, down from Oxford and rumored to have at least twelve servants in the hold, organizing his immaculate suits and writing paper and special food. Beside him, Frank, who had just worked a five-hour shift, looked adorably rumpled and creased. Frank had said he’d be off duty at twelve the next day and maybe they could all meet for a drink and lunch. When he’d smiled, she’d felt her hand go clammy around her glass and her heart skip. She’d started to look forward to him arriving every day, rehearsing in advance amusing things she could say to him. Only yesterday, he’d walked around the deck with her and, in between saying polite good mornings to the Groans (anybody over thirty), muttered scandalous accounts of their lives under his breath. Murdered wife’s best friend in a moment of sordid passion, he’d said as they passed Major Skinner, quietly settling down to a few deck quoits with his family. Senior member of opium gang, toward Miss Warner, who had been sitting on her deck chair at the time reading her Bible.

  “Well, it’s certainly a thought,” she’d said to him, when he’d told her about the quick trip to Cairo they could do from Port Said. “It sounds rather fun.” He’d added that they would go by train to Cairo and pick up the ship at Port Tewfik, which was a couple of hours drive from Cairo.

  She was proud of herself for sounding as if they had a million other possibilities there.

  “I’ll be up near the purser’s office at ten tomorrow morning collecting my post,” he said. “No need to let me know before then.”

  How spontaneous.

  “Honey pie,” Rose’s voice came through the keyhole, “any chance of using the bathroom before we get to Bombay?”

  “Oh Lord!” Tor yelped. “What time is it?”

  “Don’t panic, it’s only nine, but do come and look, you can see Port Said—all kinds of funny little men in boats are selling things. I can’t wait for today.”

  Fifty minutes later, Tor saw him standing near the purser’s office.

  “Oh, hello, Frank.” She was annoyed by her silly grin. “Did you sleep well?”

  Oh, how wonderfully original.

  “Hardly at
all,” he said. “I was on call and we were quite busy.”

  “Any good scandals?”

  “Lots,” he said. That devastating little pulse was going in his jaw again. “But I’m not allowed to tell you, or at least not until I’ve had at least three grenadines in the Windsor Bar.”

  “Beast,” she said. “Well, you may get one because we’re coming.”

  “I can’t come until lunchtime,” he said, “but I’ve got you a safe driver, he’ll take you to the station at twelve-fifteen when the train leaves and we’ll get to Cairo about four hours later. We can have lunch on the train. You’ll have time to shop this morning if you want to.”

  She felt a warm glow as she watched his tanned hand scribbling. He was so much manlier than the pale and artistic Paul Tattershall. She hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he seized her.

  When she went upstairs, Viva and Rose were on A deck ready to leave the ship. It was a dazzlingly bright day, a blue sky stretching to a shimmering horizon, and below, the harbor buzzed with small crafts all filled with excitable men trying to sell them things. A gully-gully man was shrieking and bringing birds out of his armpits; small boys dived for coins.

  The wind was frisky. Holding the hem of her green dress down, Tor, thrilled by all this, leaned over the side of the ship. And then the most embarrassing thing happened.

  “Mummy, Mrs. Queen, look here!” A small man, his arms covered in bracelets, shouted up at Tor from a boat down below. “Mummy will buy!” He put his head endearingly on one side and gave her a white-toothed grin.

  He was the most naked man she’d ever seen—nothing but half a handkerchief held round his waist with a thread.

  “Yes, please, Mummy. Mrs. Queen. Very nice.”

  She and Rose started giggling but stopped suddenly. A gust of wind had blown the scrap of cloth aside; Rose, Viva, Miss Snow, and Brigadier Charley Haughtington all saw his “thing”—a length of conker-colored piping surrounded by luxuriant reddish-colored hair. It was enormous. Miss Snow shrieked. Tor’s mouth went dry. So this was it, she thought, that mysterious bit of male plumbing for which continents were crossed and lives ruined. Rose, holding a letter from Jack in her hand, turned away aghast.