“Then I’ll write to the college, ask his London address.” Her eyebrows rose hopefully. “Or I could send him a letter, in care of Sedgwick Tea!”
He’ll want nothing more to do with me, Catherine thought, recalling how quickly he had disappeared after they came across each other at Byrde’s. The fact that he hadn’t asked why she didn’t write back was proof that he had decided she was too much bother. She shook her head. “Just forget about it.”
“But—”
“No!”
Peggy flinched as if she’d been slapped, then stared at the carpet with lips trembling. A tiny bit of pity penetrated Catherine’s outrage, but she pushed it away. She could feel the weight of Milly’s stare and resented that the two were hoping she would swallow her hurt and act magnanimously.
Indeed, Milly said in a tentative voice, “At least she owned up to it, Catherine. She could have kept silent, and you would have never known.”
That was so. But had Peggy somehow injured her physically, she would not be expected to up and forgive while the wound was still throbbing. “I’m very tired,” she murmured. “I’d like to go to bed now.”
No one moved for several seconds. Laughter drifted from somewhere down the corridor. Peggy nodded resignedly. “I love you, Catherine,” she whispered just before turning for the door.
Catherine did not reply. When the door closed behind Peggy, she said to Milly, standing behind her. “I’m just not ready.”
“No . . . um . . . of course not.”
At the sound of a sigh, Catherine turned. Milly’s face was a mixture of somberness and uncertainty. She made an awkward little gesture. “But perhaps I should . . .”
“Go ahead and look in on her,” Catherine said.
“Are you sure you—”
“Yes, I think you should.”
And she meant it, though it disgusted her that a tiny part of her wanted to make certain Peggy would not go and do something rash. She paced the floor after Milly left, wishing she could go outside and run, anything to burn up the emotion surging through her.
The following morning she did not go to breakfast, but gathered up her last-minute things to leave early for Cambridge Station. She could not imagine sharing a carriage with Peggy. What would they talk about?
She had just pinned on her hat when Milly knocked to wish her farewell.
“I know I’ll have to forgive her eventually,” Catherine said as they embraced. “But I can’t imagine the friendship ever being the same.”
“I just thought with her helping you study . . .” Milly said uncomfortably.
Et tu Brute? Catherine thought, but it was nothing that she had not said to herself several times during the long night. “I just don’t know.”
She waited at the farthest end of the station platform, seated next to a tall, dark-haired woman of about thirty who said she was traveling alone and would be happy to share the bench. Catherine preoccupied herself with scanning the gathering crowd in the hopes of not seeing Peggy, and the woman, seemingly occupied with her own thoughts, did not attempt any idle chit-chat. The perfect seating companion, Catherine thought, and determined she would try to share the same carriage with her too.
But when a trio of male Indian students passed by, the woman snorted and said, “Do you imagine they ever bathe?”
Catherine turned to her. “I beg your pardon?”
The woman wrinkled a pert little nose and nodded in the trio’s direction. “They always look so smarmy, those—”
“What an ignorant twit you are!” Catherine seethed, rising and ignoring the gasp of outrage from the bench. It felt good to have a target for her anger, and for two shillings she would have lingered to deliver a lecture on prejudice. The remaining benches were occupied, so she stood off to herself. She caught no sight of Peggy, who must have decided upon a later train. She also caught no sight of a shock of wheat-colored hair.
****
During her three days in Hampstead, she managed to push aside thoughts of Girton and her disappointment with Peggy. She explored the nooks and crannies of the magnificent house, shopped with Sarah and Naomi at T.J. Paxton’s and Harrods for gifts for her family and their servants, read storybooks to Bethia and Danny in the garden, and pedaled Sarah’s bike north across the Heath.
After breakfast on Tuesday the twenty-eighth, Uncle Daniel and Bethia accompanied Catherine on the thirty-mile journey to Tilbury to meet the steamer and her chaperone. It was through Uncle Daniel’s association with William Blackwood and Sons that they had corresponded with an editor’s aunt, a Mrs. Jennings from Norwich, who desired to visit her daughter and the daughter’s army colonel husband in Bombay.
“You really didn’t have to escort me,” Catherine told her uncle in the London and Tilbury railway carriage. “I know you’ve a book to write.”
Uncle Daniel smiled at her. “Bethia and I were ready for an adventure. Besides, I’ll rest easier when I’m certain Mrs. Jennings is there.”
“And what will you do if she isn’t?” Catherine teased. “Send Bethia in her place?”
She kicked herself mentally when her young cousin’s countenance brightened. “Oh, may I, Father?”
“I’m afraid not,” Uncle Daniel said with a hand upon her shoulder. “However would we manage without you for two whole months?”
The girl’s blue eyes took on a faraway glaze as if her four-year-old mind was considering how the family would manage. Presently she gave Catherine a look that said I’m sorry, but my parents need me. “She’ll be there, Catherine,” Bethia assured her. “Why would she write you if she wasn’t going to come?”
Catherine tugged gently at the braid resting upon the girl’s narrow shoulder. “Why indeed, Bethia?”
Mrs. Jennings was waiting in the Bursar’s office of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. She was a hardy-looking woman of sixty years or so, with weathered skin, light brown hair drawn into a no-nonsense knot, and a taupe gown devoid of bustle and frills.
“I took the liberty of reserving a portside cabin so we may avoid the worst of the sun,” Mrs. Jennings said after introductions were made. “Starboard upon return. That’s where the term posh originated, you know—Port Out, Starboard Home. And I’ve a gallon of ginger biscuits for the both of us. Good for seasickness. Not that I expect to need any, for my constitution is exceptionally sturdy.”
“I can see you’re in capable hands,” Uncle Daniel said with a smile.
Twelve
It so happened that Mrs. Jennings was the one in capable hands, as this was her first trip abroad, and her information was gleaned from letters from her daughter and newspaper travelogues. Once the S.S. Heron met the treacherous waters of the Bay of Bascal, she alternated between berth and deck railing, her complexion greenish like verdigris upon copper.
“I wish I could die!” she would moan.
“Try swaying gently against the roll so your head stays vertical,” Catherine advised, between wiping the woman’s face with a damp cloth, fetching the ship’s doctor, and coaxing ginger biscuits upon her. She suffered only warning twinges of sickness herself, such as when she attempted to read Homer. But the waters became calmer once the ship entered the Suez Canal, in spite of almost daily showers from the monsoons swelling in from the southwest. It was calm enough to allow Catherine and Mrs. Jennings to join two dowagers, Mmes. Horton and Mead, in the ladies’ public room for games of Whist. And thirteen days after leaving Tilbury, Catherine stood with Mrs. Jennings on the upper deck under the shelter of the bridge, watching the rain-muted panorama of Bombay grow more and more vivid as the steamer rounded Colaba Point into Bombay Harbor on the eastern side of the peninsula.
“I’m glad I didn’t know how rough the trip would be beforehand,” Mrs. Jennings said, fanning herself against the steamy heat. “Or I should never have had the courage to come.”
Catherine smiled at her. “I think you would have, still.”
The woman gave her an appreciative look and took her h
and. “My daughter will want to meet the young woman who kept her mother from pitching herself into the sea. We’ll be sending you and your family an invitation to lunch—you’ll join us, won’t you?”
“I’m sure we would enjoy that,” Catherine told her.
Once the ship tied up at pier in the P & O Dockyard, passengers under umbrellas began moving toward the gangplank. Native porters in rain-soaked white uniforms swarmed against the flow, calling out “Luggage! Baggage! Luggage! Baggage!”
Catherine’s father and Mrs. Jennings’ son-in-law, Colonel Timbs, were waiting on the pier, having made each other’s acquaintance minutes earlier. The officer was a compact man, with dark eyebrows almost as thick as his mustache. After introductions and a repeat of Mrs. Jennings’ promise to invite them for lunch, they bade each other good-day and parted company. The clouds veiling the sun cresting Malabar Hill were streaked dark crimson, and Bombay’s congested streets were difficult enough to navigate in the daytime.
“How was your journey?” Father asked, drawing Catherine into the shelter of his umbrella as he escorted her to a hired horse-drawn gharri. Two porters followed with the trunk.
She smiled. “It had its ups and downs.”
He chuckled at the old family joke. Girton and Hampstead seemed like other worlds entirely—albeit drier, more sedate ones. Even in the rain the pier was thick with people of countless nationalities moving amid a clamor of languages and dialects. The mile-and-a-half ride to the Byculla area took three-quarters of an hour. Her family lived in a red sandstone cottage within the walled school grounds, next to the administration and hospital buildings. Little diamonds of light seeped out between the slats of the chick screens, fashioned to keep out bees, wasps, grasshoppers, squirrels, snakes, and monkeys while allowing in the scents of jasmine and tuberose, hibiscus and lotus. Father’s hand was inches from the knob when the door opened, and a girl pitched herself into Catherine’s arms.
“Catherine!”
Smiling, Catherine squeezed the girl tight. Her sister’s arrival in the Rayborn household over nine years ago was nothing short of a miracle, for Mother had given up hope of having another child. Cosseted by family and servants alike, she was remarkably unspoiled.
“How I’ve missed my Jewel!” she said, kissing the top of the ash brown head. “And I’ve paper dolls for you in my trunk.”
“Oh, thank you! My others are starting to—”
“Ladies?” Father said in a long-suffering voice from behind. “If you please?”
Mother came into the hall and embraced her, while manservant Dasya slipped out to assist the driver with the trunk. The women servants, Jarita and Neerja, waited with shy smiles to greet her, and Naeem, the Muslim cook, had prepared a special meal of patrani machi, hilsa fish topped with chutney and baked in banana leaves, and a dessert of gulab jamun, fried cakelike balls in rose-scented syrup. Afterward Catherine and her family chatted in the parlor. It warmed her heart that her parents and sister remembered the names and situations of the friends and classmates from her photographs and letters. She did not tell them of her hard feelings against Peggy.
“My heart aches for poor Milly,” Mother said. Plump, dark-haired, and grey-eyed, she possessed a sort of energy and efficiency that made her seem younger than her forty years. “And her little motherless siblings. It will only get worse if her stepmother has a baby, you know.”
Father wanted to know more details of her lectures. Jewel, allowed a rare extension of bedtime, asked, “Whatever happened to those men who tricked you on the train?”
“I saw one of them at a bakery once,” Catherine replied casually.
“You ignored him, of course,” Mother said with an indignant narrowing of the eyes, and Father nodded, though he looked away when the briefest of smiles touched his lips.
Not wishing to lie, Catherine covered a convenient, though authentic, yawn. She was just too travel fatigued to submit to a lecture, no matter how lovingly delivered.
But the lecture came from within, as she lay in her bed an hour later listening to the persistent whine of a mosquito foiled by the netting draped from the canopy. You have to stop thinking of him, she told herself. For all she knew, Hugh Sedgwick could have written that he was engaged to be married or going off to join the foreign service after graduation, and Peggy had spared her some pain.
She immediately withdrew that thought. Not knowing was far worse.
But you have only four weeks to be with family, she reminded herself. And would she rather store memories that would tide her over the coming year, or waste time dwelling on what might have been? She chose the former. She rose long enough to light her lamp and bring The Iliad into her fortress of mosquito netting. A chapter would surely put her to sleep. But Homer proved powerful enough to transport her to the Land of Nod after three pages.
The following morning, after Father had left for the school office, Catherine sat on the parlor carpet cutting out paper dolls with Jewel while Mother sat behind the marble and teak tea table, unscrewing the back from a clock ruined by humidity. Through the windows came the tree frogs’ nasal quank-quank-quank.
“I do wish you could stay here forever,” Jewel said, her sparsely lashed green eyes following her scissors around the image of Princess Vicky.
“You have Allyson,” Catherine reminded her, carefully trimming around a pink dress. Allyson was the daughter of one of the schoolmasters. They shared lessons with Miss Purtley, the governess who had taught Catherine and who was home in Devonshire for the summer.
“Yes, but she’s not the same as a sister.”
“I know. I’ve missed you too. But what would I do here?”
The girl thought for a minute. “You could help Miss Purtley tutor us.”
“Your sister wishes to finish college, Jewel,” Mother said, going over a rusted coil with fine sandpaper. She looked at Catherine. “But speaking of governesses, your Aunt Phyllis’s letter says she’s looking for one for Muriel and the twins.”
“Oh, my. Better to tend lions at the zoo.”
Jewel ducked her head, hiding a smile. Mother smiled too, even though her tone admonished. “Catherine . . .”
“Forgive me, Mother. But why a governess?”
“She’s been told that Sheffield’s schools are lacking, and can’t bear the thought of sending the children to boarding school. When I wrote back I suggested that a male tutor would be more appropriate—after all, Bernard and Douglas are nearing twelve.”
“Sheffield?”
“Uncle Norman’s imminent transfer. Which you would have learned of if you had visited your aunt before you left.”
Catherine grimaced. “I know, Mother. But I only had three days . . .”
“And so you couldn’t spare an hour?” Her mother set the coil and paper on the table. “Now, Catherine, I’ve told you how Aunt Phyllis came to stay with us a whole month after you were born. I was very weak, you know, and could not have managed the household without her. She may dote excessively upon the children, but she does love her nieces.”
“I’ll visit before I go back to school.” When her mother looked skeptical, Catherine added, “I’ll even spend a couple of days with them.”
In the time it took the latter thought to travel from her lips to her own ears, Catherine regretted it and added quickly, “If they invite me, of course. But if they’re planning to move, I certainly wouldn’t want to be a hindrance.”
“Catherine . . .”
“You’ve always said that we shouldn’t take anyone for granted. Even family.”
“Very well.” Mother was pacified enough to resume sanding, and Catherine resumed manipulating the scissors around the paper dress. Yet the issue was evidently still in Mother’s mind, for presently she said, “After all, once they move away you’ll see them only at Christmas. If that often.”
The thought was not too distressing. Catherine winked at Jewel, who grinned and winked back. Truly, she loved her aunt and cousins. Some relations were just easier
to love from a distance.
****
The majority of the school’s one hundred and nineteen male students had joined their families for the summer. Still, Father had much to do in planning the next term. But he made time to accompany Catherine, Mother, and Jewel on Saturday shopping forays at the Crawford Market and Chor Bazaar, and on strolls through the Hanging Gardens. On Sundays they walked to Saint Thomas Church, a steepled stone structure that could have been transplanted from any London neighborhood, though the congregation was more colorful with the scatterings of military uniforms and some natives in English dress.
Father took the whole day off on the twenty-sixth of July, Catherine’s nineteenth birthday. Her parents presented her with a strand of jade beads with gold clasp and matching earrings, and the family took the ferry to the island of Elephanta to picnic and tour the caves. When they returned there was a note from Mrs. Jennings, written in a sprawling hand.
My dear Miss Rayborn,
Please forgive me for not extending this invitation sooner, but Colonel Timbs, my son-in-law, was called away on official business to Bangalore shortly after my arrival, and has returned only yesterday. Will you and your lovely family pay us the honor of joining us for lunch next Tuesday?
During the monsoon season, invitations between acquaintances living some distance apart tended to be more for lunch than supper, for there was always that uncertainty of rain—an inconvenience during the day, but a hindrance to safety on the roads after dark. On the second of August, Catherine’s family took a hired gharri four steamy miles down the Colaba Causeway to the point of the peninsula, to the garrison of the Durham Light Infantry, 2nd Battalion. Officers and their families resided in a row of tan brick bungalows, from the Hindustani word bangala, one-storey cottages with low roof lines extended to create verandahs. A manservant in white kurta pajamas ran out to meet them and led them to Colonel Timbs’s bungalow and into a parlor strewn with colorful dhurrie rugs. Two men in scarlet coats trimmed in gold rose from chairs, along with two women from the sofa.
Catherine's Heart Page 14
