Prue looked closely at her, then agreed. ‘Now, where’s your baggage?’
‘At the hotel.’
Prue laughed, throwing her head back. ‘No child of Annie’s will stay anywhere but under my roof. Ibrahim,’ Prue raised her voice. ‘Please send the mali to bring Miss Armstrong’s bags.’
Sarah put down her cup and leaned forward. ‘Prue, I need to talk to you.’
Prue poured more tea, her finger on the silver lid. ‘And I to you, my dear, but not tonight, tomorrow. Tonight we have guests for dinner – you will like them. It is a girls’ night.’ Prue waved at the Chinese lanterns hanging on the trees. ‘You see, it will be fun. Now, in a moment I shall show you your room and then I have to go and supervise affairs in the kitchen. I have this total fascination with my stomach, as you will know already – it and I spend many happy hours together planning its next extravaganza.’
Prue led her now to the bedroom. ‘Good, Ibrahim has organised towels and so on. Do please make yourself at home. You will find your clothes in the wardrobe. Please leave anything you would like washed in the bathroom. We now have flush lavatories my dear. Such a treat, one almost wants to go in there, just to admire.’
Prue smiled at her and Sarah grinned. ‘There,’ Prue said. ‘That’s the Sarah I remember from the photographs. Tomorrow we will talk.’
At half past seven Sarah was introduced to Mrs Carter, Mrs Smythe and Mrs Taylor. She sipped her gin and tonic and looked at the lanterns, the town, its lights, its noise. It was so cool, so fresh – how Ravi’s patients would improve if they were here.
Mrs Carter sat next to her. ‘I just love your skirt, the colours are so vibrant. Did you make it yourself? I expect you’ve been on an ashram somewhere, have you, exploring Hindu philosophy and religion, or some such thing? One hears that so many are doing that sort of thing these days. So many lost souls.’
Prue cut across the conversation, leaning back in her chair which was beside Sarah’s. ‘Oh Veronica, for heaven’s sake, let the poor girl get a word in edgeways.’ She patted Sarah’s knee. ‘This old girl has chronic verbal diarrhoea, always has had. We were at school together in Devon, you know, and she looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but she was a devil.’
Veronica held up her glass. ‘Enough, Prue, good grief, this child doesn’t want to hear stories from the past.’
Sarah smiled at her. Oh yes she did, but she’d hear those tomorrow. Tonight it was enough that she was here.
Ibrahim poured more gin and they ate canapes while Prue told them how they had been ‘talked to’ by the biology teacher, about men’s and women’s ‘things’, which had puzzled them all greatly until they read Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Whereupon Veronica had been sent from morning service for changing the words when singing All Things Bright and Beautiful from ‘he made their glorious plumage, he made their tiny wings’, to ‘things’.
Sarah laughed with the others and moved to the table where coq au vin was served. Prue winked at Sarah. ‘I do so like a treat from time to time.’
Mrs Taylor asked. ‘Where have you come from?’
Sarah drank her wine, it was cool, dry – a Chardonnay. Where was Sam Davis, still giving parties? Where was Carl?
‘I flew into Delhi, then on to a clinic north of there.’
The chicken was good. She ate carefully, listening to the women talk of Delhi as they had known it, long ago. The parties at Government House, the silver plates, the toast to King-Emperor, the desserts.
‘Oh yes, the desserts, darling,’ Prue gushed. ‘I mean those sugar baskets, girls.’ Prue’s eyes were bright. ‘Sarah, they were magnificent, stuffed with fruit salad. The cooks would compete, positively compete, to create the most splendid and fragile concoction, spinning crisp brown sugar until it looked like a translucent amber dish. The trick was to serve the fruit salad and then crack the bowl and serve that. It must have broken their hearts to have seen all that work go down the gullet. But so delicious. I just can’t tell you.’
Prue looked down at her chicken. ‘Sorry, girls, tonight we just have fruit salad, couldn’t rise to the sugar basket. Chocs after, I promise.’
‘I remember sleeping under an apricot tree when I was very young,’ Mrs Smythe said quietly as she finished her chicken. ‘I can remember the crickets singing me to sleep and being woken by Daddy’s regimental band – it all seems so long ago.’
Sarah sat back and looked at these women, lined, content, at home. ‘Did you never want to go back to England?’ she asked.
There was silence for a while and now there was the scent of jasmine on the breeze. Mrs Taylor spoke at last, smiling at Ibrahim as he took away their plates. ‘It’s not the same as it was before Independence, but something about the country gets under your skin.’
Prue poured more wine. ‘There’s a spiritual quality to his land. It haunts you somehow, and the richness of its history soaks into your bones. I missed it when Dick and I came to England after the war. We couldn’t stay, it wasn’t home. You see, Sarah, we were born out here, we know its patterns, its rituals, its timelessness. Daddy couldn’t go home either.’
Mrs Smythe said, ‘I remember our parade ground on Independence Eve. We dined at the House, then sat in stands around the parade ground. The whole place was floodlit, I remember, and we watched the small British contingent march on behind all the Indian troops. The band played as all the floodlights were doused, leaving just the flagpole lit. I remember the Union Jack fluttering, there was a slight breeze, you know, quite chilly really.’
They were all silent now, not drinking, just listening.
‘I remember the Union Jack being lowered as everyone stood to attention. It was so quiet. It must have been the same all over the country. I dropped my programme. As midnight struck the Indian flag was raised. We all sang the Indian national anthem. It was so strange, so dark, so different.’
No one spoke or moved until Mrs Taylor said, ‘We all thought it was the end but it was a new beginning. We stayed on, lived differently, better because we weren’t contained within a cantonment, having to abide by rules, by tradition. We could be ourselves.’
Prue looked at Sarah and lifted her glass. ‘To new beginnings,’ she said softly.
Next morning Sarah woke to see pale light spreading over the mountains and slowly filling the town, the valley. They ate chota hazari, little breakfast, and Prue sat in her dressing gown, buttering toast, drinking fruit juice. ‘Squeezed by Ibrahim,’ she said, pouring some for Sarah. ‘We’ll bath, then go to the bazaar for food. Then we can have bacon and eggs if you wish?’
Sarah smiled. ‘No, I’ve had sufficient.’
‘Oh how disappointing, then I may not indulge either.’
‘I would like to talk to you, please Prue.’
Prue smiled. ‘Then we will return for coffee and to talk.’
They walked down the road the tonga had taken and always there was the freshness of the air, the glory of the mountains, the valleys, the trees.
‘Are there walnut trees here?’ Sarah asked.
‘Many. Your father wrote to your mother about them, didn’t he? It made her feel closer to him because Sarah Beeston had a walnut table in the hall.’ Prue pointed out the trees. ‘And over there is an apricot.’
‘Is there anything you don’t know about my mother?’
Prue spoke softly. ‘Very little. We had many years to talk to one another, many long years.’ She wasn’t smiling now and the lines were deeper around her mouth.
They were in the bazaar. Sarah stopped at a khadi stall.
Prue stood with her. ‘It’s the locally woven cloth, a relic of Mahatma Gandhi.’
Sarah loved the colours, felt the loosely woven cloth, talked of the designs that would suit them best, the muted colours of the landscape transferred to them, the vibrant colours also.
Prue laughed. ‘You’re your mother’s daughter all right.’
They bought vegetables from the stall. ‘It’s produce our mali sell
s from our kitchen garden.’
‘Why d’you let him?’
‘Why not, it’s a sensible cycle, leaves everyone with some dignity.’
They walked back past the cinema, into the garden, passed the delphiniums, stocks. There was a garden shed amongst the vegetables. Did this smell the same as the one at home? She stopped, opened the door. No.
This time they took coffee in the sitting room, leaning back on cane furniture whose cushions were covered with Wassingham Textiles upholstery sent by Annie, and now Sarah could wait no longer.
‘Please tell me why my mother couldn’t nurse.’
‘It wasn’t a question of your mother being unable to nurse.’
‘Well, why wouldn’t she nurse?’
‘Neither is it a question of your mother being unwilling to nurse,’ Prue said quietly. ‘I need to explain some things to you, so that you can understand others. It is a time of my life that I discuss with no one, just as Annie does not because its shadows could reach out and scar us all over again. But you have your own shadows, my dear Sarah, and they must be seen off.’
She told Sarah then of the camps – of the endless years of brutality, of heat, hunger, misery. ‘We nursed in the hospital that we built ourselves. We had no medicine, no tools but a wonderful doctor, Dr Jones from Australia. All day, every day we nursed, scooping ulcers, calming the dying, boiling bandages, rags, burying our friends. We were beaten for many things. Have you seen your mother’s finger? Yes, that was because she was late on parade. They beheaded our friend Lorna Briggs. It was raining, her blood was so very red.’
Prue wasn’t looking at Sarah, she wasn’t looking at anything but the past.
‘They made us write postcards. Your mother was frightened to write to your father in case it tempted fate and put the mark of death on him. They found the cards at the end of the war in a box. They’d never been sent. They found medicine too, and Marmite, boxes and boxes of Marmite – we could have saved so many of our friends. Dr Jones wept, they all wept. I say they, because I was not there, not in mind, only body.’
Prue touched her lips, swallowed and then continued. ‘Near the end of the war diphtheria raged. I became ill, your mother nursed me but I lost my mind. I wandered the camp and was almost shot, so she tethered me to her wrist, day and night with a piece of rope and fed me, because I wouldn’t eat. She would take a spoon and make the rabbit go into the hole.’
Sarah sat quite still remembering her mother running from her father’s side after she had tried to make the rabbit run into the hole. It was when she returned to the room that she had spoken to him firmly and Sarah had hated her until the nurse had told her that her mother was right.
‘I ate,’ Prue continued, ‘though it was rice, which by then made us want to vomit because we had eaten nothing else for more than three years. I still can’t eat it today, neither can your mother.’
Oh yes she can, Sarah thought. She ate it when she came down with the inflatable chairs, she forced it down through love.
‘I wondered why she wouldn’t nurse. I’ve always blamed her for it,’ Sarah whispered. ‘I couldn’t have done what you both did. I know, I’ve tried in a very small way and I couldn’t bear it either.’
‘Let me finish,’ Prue said, her hands clasped together, her bracelets still on her motionless wrists. ‘Please. Your father found her camp after the war and took her back to India, where he was stationed. One night the rains came, hammering on her roof whilst he was away defusing a bomb. ‘Does he want to die, is that why he does it?’ she asked me before I left her that evening. Later she took too many sleeping pills – it had all been too much – her life had been too much. You see, her father killed himself and left her alone. The war had nearly killed her, now perhaps her husband wanted to die too. So she tried to leave this life, Sarah, and the only way your father and I could make her walk, make her drink in order to save her life, was to shout at her in Japanese. She obeyed out of fear.’
Prue’s voice was quite calm though there were tears running down her face, like an endless stream. ‘It nearly killed your father and it was he who refused to allow your mother to nurse, though she had conquered her past. He refused through fear for her and through the need for an edge to his life, the same edge that defusing bombs had given him. The same edge that your mother now had to live with again. She agreed out of love, though it nearly broke her again.’
Prue rose now and still the tears were falling but it was as though she didn’t know. ‘Now, come with me, Sarah, and read the answers to all the questions you would like to ask me. It is better that way for both of us.’ Sarah followed Prue into the study stacked with the Peak Frean tins that they had sent her every year.
Prue touched the tins. ‘I sorted these out last night, while you were asleep. There is nothing in this box that is personal to me, but it might hold the answers you need. If not, come and find me. I shall be in the garden. It is where I go when I need to hold on to the present.’
Sarah sat at the desk and touched nothing for a long moment because her tears were also falling and she could not see to read. She began after Ibrahim entered and brought her lime juice with ice. All morning she read and by noon she knew the truth of her mother’s love for both her and her father, her respect for their dignity and the death of her beloved Betsy.
She left at two p.m. taking the bus back down the winding road. She had borrowed money from Prue and had asked for the address of Dr Jones in Sydney.
At two-ten, Prue telephoned Annie, telling her that Sarah had been and gone, but she didn’t know where or why.
‘Be patient, my darling Annie,’ Prue said over the crackling line. ‘Be patient for just a bit longer.’
Sarah barely noticed the long journey back through the Himalayas. She stopped at the same rest house and slept on the verandah, she ate vindaloo at lunch time and mangoes at breakfast but tasted neither. All she could think of were the letters she had read in her mother’s writing, the love, the pain, the hope, the steadfastness of the woman whom she loved and now respected above all others.
As the train rattled across the plain she didn’t feel the heat, or the stirring of the air as the fan whirred, she just felt the love her mother had always borne her and grieved for what she had done. She grieved, too, for the life her mother had led, not just the war and after, but her lack of a mother’s love. So many had come and gone. First her real mother, then Aunt Sophie, then Betsy until Sarah Beeston had taken her away. They were all dead now, except perhaps for Sophie. Sarah looked out of the window, willing the train to hurry. Except perhaps for Sophie, she echoed.
Sarah flew from Delhi to Sydney and it was strange to travel without the cacophony of hens clucking, or the singsong of Urdu, or the smell of curry, or the beating heat. She missed India already.
Sydney was bright, smart and still warm, though the summer was nearly over. The buildings were clean and European. There were cars, but no rickshaws or tongas, no dust. There was a harbour that glistened, the clipped accent that was almost, but not quite, like home.
She stayed in a hostel with other girls. She nodded and smiled when they asked if she too was travelling round the world, filling in before or after college, breaking free from the family, seeking experience.
‘Something like that,’ she said, lying on the bed in the dormitory which in some ways was the same as in Delhi, but also so very different. She looked at the address that Prue had given her. Dr Jones lived in Vaucluse. She would take the bus out there tomorrow and hope that the woman her mother had worked with in the camps still had access to hospital records. After all, Aunt Sophie had borne a child, perhaps it had been delivered in a hospital. Perhaps there was an address.
The bus left at ten and this time there was no driver gesticulating, no dust, no sea of humanity into which the driver eased. In Vaucluse the houses were large, gracious, moneyed. There was so much space, so much sky, established gardens, an air of ease.
Sarah stood at Dr Jones’s front door.
This time the woman who answered the door would not know her, would probably think she was mad.
Dr Jones did not think she was mad. She drew her out to the back garden, sat her down with coffee and listened as Sarah spoke of her mother’s wartime life and some of the years that had gone before, and all the years that had come after.
Dr Jones cupped her mug in her hands. ‘I remember your mother. I remember everyone and everything about those years. How could any of us forget? Prue writes occasionally and so I knew Annie Manon had married her Georgie Armstrong. I knew, too, that you were missing. I did what I could here.’
Dr Jones frowned at Sarah, and now the lines that Sarah had thought could be no deeper on that thin, old face, were. She continued. ‘But that is past. Your mother knows you are safe so why are you here and not at home with her?’
Sarah put down her mug, looking out across the clipped camellia bushes with their glossy leaves, their blooms had been and gone. ‘I can’t go home yet. I’ve hurt her too much. All along, people have hurt her too much. She’s gone to them with her arms open, only to see them slip away. I want to try to bring one of them back to her.’
Sarah explained that Aunt Sophie had left for Australia when Annie’s father had returned to Wassingham after the First World War.
‘He took her away from Sophie and Eric, Don too, to live at the shop with him and Betsy. Don had already been staying on and off with his Uncle Albert, he didn’t care about Sophie and Eric – I wonder if he cares about anyone – but Annie loved them, and they her. They sent her letters and cards and in one they told her that their own daughter had been born. She was called Annie too. Mum never replied, she thought she had been replaced. The correspondence died out after she moved to Sarah Beeston’s. A few years ago she placed advertisements in the Australian newspapers trying to find them again, but there was no response.’
Sarah handed Dr Jones the details she had written down last night – the year of Sophie’s daughter’s birth, the date of their arrival in Australia, all that she knew of them. ‘Please, can you use your contacts – perhaps the new Annie was born in hospital. Or perhaps I should trace the registration of her birth, but then I won’t have an up-to-date address, though there would be something to go on.’ Sarah was leaning forward, pushing the paper towards Dr Jones.
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