East of the Sun

by Julia Gregson

  “I don’t know who told me,” said Viva. “I was at school…I can’t remember now, somebody must have told me.”

  “Not necessarily. Sometimes adults fudge even the simplest facts of life when they talk to children. They might have said he sat on a cloud with an angel or something. Or that God had moved his furniture and let him in.”

  “Please,” Viva said quickly, “tell me everything. It’s all slipping away, and I can’t bear it anymore. I need to know what’s real and what I’ve made up.”

  “Surely your English relatives told you something.” Mrs. Waghorn’s expression was still guarded.

  “No, or at least I don’t remember. My parents were hardly ever there.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Now look here, I didn’t know them all that well,” Mrs. W. began cautiously. “But we did like each other.” She was tapping the pads of her fingers against her palm in an agitated way. “I’m not very good at talking about them either.”

  “Please.” Viva took her jittery hand in hers and held it there. “Don’t be frightened. The worst thing for me is feeling so cut off.”

  “Well.” Mrs. W. fiddled with her cigarettes and then lit one. “I’ve thought about this quite a lot; I’m talking about your mother now. Obviously, at first your mind goes round and round and you look for reasons.

  “Here’s what I’ve come up with. Your mother was a good-looking woman; you’ve seen the photographs. She was great fun to be with, an asset to your father, but I always thought of her as a Saturday’s child, or she should have been. You know, the one who works hard for its living, but it was frightfully difficult with your father moving so much. And he of course,” Mrs. W. swallowed hard and looked at her, “and of course he was a marvelous man. We all had a crush on him.”

  Mrs. W.’s old gray eyes looked into Viva’s. You loved him. You loved him, too.

  “His work came first of course, that’s the way it usually is out here. But your mother had gifts of her own. She painted very well, and of course, as you probably know, did these wonderful things. Have you seen them?”

  She leaned over and put a small, hard object into the palm of Viva’s hand. She took it to be a navy blue button at first: a toggle-shaped button of some elaborate design. Looking closer, she saw a woman, wrapped in a shroud or a shawl and carved out of a dark blue marblelike stone.

  She looked at it suspiciously, wondering if the old girl was offering it up as some kind of consolation prize for the soggy clothes in the trunk. The tiny figure, no bigger than her thumb, seemed to radiate life. It felt important.

  “I think I remember my mother doing pottery classes,” she said at last. The memory was so vague it was almost forgotten but it seemed important to keep Mrs. Waghorn talking in whatever way she could, so she turned the small figure over and over in her hand. “But never when we were around. But are you quite sure she did this? It’s like something you’d see in a museum.”

  “When she gave it to me…” Mrs. W. had taken the figure back. She was stroking it affectionately. “She wouldn’t let me thank her for it. She said, ‘It’s a gift from the fire.’ You see, one day, I’d walked into her studio unannounced. Well, it wasn’t a real studio, a hut shall we say, in the grounds of our school. She was on her knees, in tears in front of her kiln. The heat was too high, and hours and hours of work had ended in what looked like a row of burned cakes. We had a cup of tea, and I said to her, I can’t remember my exact words, but the effect was, ‘This doesn’t look much fun, why bother?’

  “And it was then she explained with more passion than I ever heard her express that sometimes when you opened the kiln there was something there that was so magical, a pot, a figure, so much more beautiful than the one you’d thought of that you tingled for hours afterward.

  “Tingled!” Mrs. Waghorn laughed delightedly. “She told me potters call these offerings, these divine mistakes, the gift of the fire. A damn shame she stopped, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.” Viva had a hollow feeling inside her heart, a feeling that she’d been cheated of something she’d never had. “I didn’t really pay much attention to it. But why did she stop? Was it when Daddy died? When Josie died?”

  “I can’t remember, I really can’t, but why does anyone stop? Husbands, children, moving too much. All I can tell you was that she left things of value, and that she worked very hard for them.”

  Viva was still a little suspicious: Mrs. Waghorn seemed so much more fluent suddenly and this all seemed a bit pat, a concocted story, the sweet before the sour course and everything a bereaved daughter might want to hear.

  “I don’t remember her like that at all,” she said, “but then I was a bit of a daddy’s girl. I only really remember her as, well, you know, somebody who did things for you: organized meals, name tapes, journeys.”

  The sketching. Out of the blue she remembered it. How the pencil and the book had often appeared with the picnic things and how cross it had made her—it was time taken away from her.

  “She was consumed with her work—the pottery, the paintings, the tiny sculptures—and felt guilty about it,” Mrs. W. went on, “so she tried to hide it. It was considered not the thing to do. Still is, but it was much worse then. For women that is, the men never stopped.

  “So she was a misfit. I was, too, with my school, which is probably why we got on so.” She chortled suddenly like a wicked girl. “She was tremendously good fun as well as everything else. A marvelous mimic. One of the very best things about her was that she didn’t take herself too seriously. But it was also her downfall, if you see what I mean.”

  Viva was trying not to look too astonished; five minutes into the conversation and they were talking about a complete stranger.

  She remembered her mother in two ways: rustling of taffeta or silk dress, waft of scent, the twinkle of earring brushing your face on her way out to some do at the club, or, in the mornings, permanently rushed, often tired and always in her father’s shadow.

  “Am I going on too much?” Mrs. W. asked. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”

  No, no, no, no.

  “Please don’t stop.”

  “Well.” The little dog jumped up onto the old lady’s knee. She stroked him and, it seemed to Viva, became a dotty old lady again for a few seconds, muttering and withdrawing and watching her from deeply pouched eyes.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, dear,” Mrs. Waghorn said, focusing. “What is it exactly that you do?”

  Viva could have screamed with impatience. In as few words as possible, she told her about the children’s home, and how she had for the past year been trying to write a book about it.

  “What a frightfully good idea that sounds,” Mrs. Waghorn pounced. She seemed fully alert again. “I can’t think of anyone who has let Indian children speak first. It’s a very, very good idea. When can we read it?”

  “I’ve stopped writing it.”

  “Stopped.” The word was like a brisk slap. “Whatever for?”

  “Oh, lots of reasons.”

  “You mustn’t stop; it sounds such a good idea. I’d have gone potty if I’d stopped teaching when Arthur died.”

  She didn’t have the energy to explain about the troubles at the school, or about Mr. Azim and Guy.

  “It’s a long story,” she said. “Tell me about your school. Do you miss it?”

  “Horribly,” said the old lady. “To find work you love is a treasure, isn’t it? But any chance you might start it again? The children would enjoy seeing their thoughts in print.”

  “I might. Some of the notes got lost.”

  “Well, you can always get them back surely?” The old lady was gazing at her steadily. “When you smile, you look so like her,” she said. “I expect everyone tells you that.”

  “No, they don’t,” said Viva. “That’s the point. Nobody I know remembers them.”

  “Ooof,” said Mrs. Waghorn, “awful.” She lit a cigarette and disappeared into smoke for a moment
. “It will get worse as you get older,” she muttered. “You’ll live in the past more and you’ll mind.”

  “I mind now: it’s always there and I’m always trying to forget it.”

  “I had an experience with my own mother once,” said Mrs. Waghorn, “which I’ve never forgotten. When my father was based in Calcutta, we saw them once every two years. She came home and I supposed I’d grown, or had my hair cut or something, but I was standing at St. Pancras Station, by the ticket office with my suitcase waiting for her, and there she suddenly was, walking toward me. I was so excited I could hardly breathe. She walked down the platform toward me, she looked at me and then she walked straight past me. I could never quite forgive her, I’m not sure why. It was very unfair of me when you think of it, but I think something died in me that day.”

  She patted her dog and then looked up. During the long silence that followed, Viva felt a moment of suspension—the old girl was still sizing her up, waiting to slip her into some garment she wasn’t sure she wanted. And now it came.

  “I’d like another glass of brandy,” said Mrs. W. “Help yourself, too. Now, are you the sort of person who likes the truth?”

  “Yes,” said Viva, “I am.” She felt her heart skip.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You see, I flunked it yesterday. I was so surprised to see you I didn’t know what to do.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh dear.” She felt Mrs. Waghorn’s hand close around hers. “Dear girl, please don’t cry. None of this is your fault.”

  “It is.” Viva could no longer stop the tears running down her face. “I should have come earlier.”

  “You are not to feel guilty.” Mrs. W. made this announcement with some force. “Do you hear? Guilt is a peasant’s pleasure and it was nothing you did. They wanted you away because nobody wanted you to know.”

  “To know what?” Viva felt her whole body freeze.

  Mrs. Waghorn started to mutter in some agitation to herself; she was talking herself into or out of something.

  Viva poured more brandy.

  “Tell me.” Viva dried her eyes, and made a huge effort to look in control. Mrs. Waghorn must not stop talking.

  The old lady took a sip then put her glass down.

  “Your mother took her own life,” she said. “I thought you knew.”

  Viva heard herself groaning. “No,” she said. “No.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Waghorn’s eyes were bright with tears. “But I must tell you this: she was the last person on earth who I thought would ever do such a thing. Oh, she had her ups and downs, of course she did, but she was so full of beans and she loved you so much, but such a lot went wrong. This is no consolation, but it happens to so many people out here. They get lost.”

  “Oh God.” When Viva put her head in her hands she felt herself floating hazily above her own body.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure,” said Mrs. Waghorn. “I was the one who found her.”

  “I’m going to stop talking soon,” Mrs. W. said a few seconds later. Her eyelids had turned blue and she seemed slightly drunk. “But it’s my belief that a good marriage needs a flower and a gardener to keep it…what’s the word?…what’s that word?…blooming. I could never have run my school unless Arthur had been on my side—been practical; it’s not enough to believe in other people. You’ve got to do the donkey work with them.”

  Her purple eyelids fell. “This is jolly tiring,” she said suddenly. “Can you come back later? We’ll talk about the ashes and other things.”

  She looked worn out: an emptied paper bag, sitting there in the gloom, brandy glass in her hand.

  Viva covered her with a rug; she took the glass from her. As she tiptoed around her, still light-headed with shock, she felt the strongest urge to kiss her on her forehead, but old habits die hard and she was almost dead with tiredness herself. She turned down the lamp and closed the door and told Hari that it was time for the memsahib to go to bed.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  She went back to the hotel room and lay on the bed rigid with shock, and then when the shock wore off she wept uncontrollably. She’d been so angry with her mother for so long without ever thinking about her as a separate person with her own complicated life. She felt ashamed, revolted by her own stupidity. How could she have got it so wrong—dramatizing her father’s death, burying her mother under a heap of carefully nursed old grudges?

  When she got up, exhausted and red-eyed, the day was over and there were stars outside her bedroom window, against a dark purple sky. It was nearly ten o’clock.

  She went into the bathroom and turned on the taps. Her body felt stiff as if she had been pummeled, and on her hands she could still smell the damp and camphor plus the slightly meaty smell of decay from the trunk.

  She stared at the dirt that was flowing from her; she had been buried alive. She scrubbed her neck, her legs, her breasts, her arms; she washed her hair and then she lay in the water until it got cold, thinking about her mother again.

  She felt already that sometime soon she might be released from the darkness. An easing, something like space or lightness.

  At least she knew now. Before, she’d blamed her, even hated her for so many things: for not keeping Daddy alive, for not wanting her, for not keeping her with her in India, when the truth was she’d been cut off from the two things that might have kept her going for a little while longer—her work and her child.

  Viva got out of the water and reached for a towel. She saw her face blurry and indistinct in the steamy bathroom mirror. Maybe she’d been a ghost for years without really knowing it. That line of poetry lodged in her brain years ago at school, something about being “half in love with easeful death.”

  Half in love with easeful death, the other half floating out from herself, longing to slip away into the darkness like a boat in the water, to where Josie and her parents waited for her.

  She climbed into bed, putting the little blue woman her mother had made on the bedside table. Before they’d parted, Mrs. Waghorn had pressed it into her hand.

  “Keep it.” She’d closed Viva’s fingers around it. “It’s yours. I want it to be the first thing you see when you wake up tomorrow morning.”

  She was calmer now and saw it more clearly: the careful arrangement of the woman’s shawl, the quizzical intelligence of her eyes as if she was in on some private joke. Its perfection hurt and thrilled her; how could something so small be so full of life?

  She turned out the lamp and lay in the dark thinking about her last conversation with Mrs. Waghorn.

  “My mother and I had the most terrible row the last time we were together,” Viva had confessed over tea. “I can’t for the life of me remember what it was about now, or why I was so angry. I think I might have told her I hated her. I can’t wait to go back to school. I wanted to hurt her as she had hurt me. It was the last time I ever saw her.”

  “You were ten years old. All children of that age are foul sometimes,” said Mrs. Waghorn. “Particularly when they’re about to be sent away. She understood.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.”

  “Look, you don’t have to say things to make me feel better.”

  “I’m not.”

  The old girl had given her a penetrating look when she said that. Her hand had stolen over her mouth as if she was in the process of witnessing an accident.

  “She was heartbroken.”

  “No, don’t say it, you don’t have to.”

  “I do. After she’d said good-bye to you she walked up to the school and had a drink with me. She was desperately upset; she knew she’d acted strangely with you, that she was losing her grip. I remember it so well because she said to me, ‘I couldn’t even kiss her good-bye,’ and she’d longed to—it was so horribly sad. Too much for everyone; but why should you take the blame for that?”

  Mrs. Waghorn had become emotional herself at this point. She�
��d squeezed her hands together and swallowed several times. “You see, he taught me so much, too,” she’d rambled, “and he wanted her to work, but she had to hide so much and work so hard, and then when he died—Oh, this is silly,” she’d half choked. She’d tapped her thumb on the top of her left hand for a few seconds.

  Viva sat there frozen and immobile as though parts of her had jammed, watching tears flow down the deep lines in Mrs. Waghorn’s face and drip into the collar of her dress. She had the sense of having trespassed into some private grief, of being one part of a series of interlocking mysteries that wouldn’t all be solved.

  When she had composed herself again, Mrs. W. had shuffled over to a locked cabinet and shown her several more pieces of her mother’s pottery. A celadon green teapot, a plate, a bowl. Beautiful things.

  Viva had pored over them, desperate for clues.

  “Why did she leave them with you?” she’d asked.

  “They were precious to her, and she’d lost so much in transit; she wanted me to take care of them.”

  There was a moment of farce when Mrs. W.’s wildly shaking hands had picked up a rattling cup and saucer. With a great effort, she held them up against the oscillating light. And then the urge to laugh had died in Viva. “Why the pots and not me?” she’d wanted to ask but the question sounded so nakedly self-pitying.

  “I still don’t understand why she sent me home?” she asked instead. “Did I do something?”

  “No, no, no, nothing like that.” Mrs. Waghorn had bowed her head. After a long silence she’d looked up. “Now, this is the point: it was my fault, I’m afraid. I said, ‘Send her back to England.’ I probably talked about the need for fresh air, the company of other children, not picking up a chi chi accent. All the things I used to say to anxious parents, and it was a ghastly mistake. And of course I did think at the time that she would eventually join you. I had no idea how desperate she was. I’m so sorry,” she said almost inaudibly.

  Viva had looked across to the bowed head, the wispy white curls and the pink scalp showing through them. She’d made the usual gestures of forgiveness, squeezing Mrs. Waghorn’s hand, saying it wasn’t her fault, she was only following the rules and so on, but another part of her cried out in agony.