Meet Me in Bombay

by Jenny Ashcroft

  Maddy raised an eyebrow. “I’ve asked her to trust me anyway. And promised that we’ll be back by midnight.”

  “The fairy tale witching hour,” said Della.

  Maddy didn’t laugh at the quip. Neither did Della, who was suddenly eyeing her with what looked like concern, making her feel fairly wary herself.

  She asked her what was wrong.

  “It’s just…” Della began. “Well, Peter said…” She sighed. “Has Luke told you he’s leaving?”

  “Oh,” said Maddy flatly. (So that’s what it was about.) “Yes.” He’d spoken to her about it on their walk home from the beach. “It’s not long, is it?”

  “Not long at all,” said Della.

  Maddy’s brow creased. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Best of luck with that,” said Della. “And are you not thinking about Guy either?”

  “Very good,” said Maddy. She’d been carefully not thinking about him all morning. Just as she’d been determinedly ignoring the strangeness of Fraser Keaton telling Luke the two of them were engaged (another thing Luke had passed on during their walk home. “What?” she’d said, stopping in her tracks. “What?”), not to mention whether Guy knew about the rumor, if he’d done anything to correct it, or if he’d been hurt that she’d failed to even say hello to him at the Gymkhana Club. (Also, all those bottles of boiled water.)

  Della stirred her tea. “I expect Guy will be steaming when he hears you and Luke went sailing.”

  “I’m not sure Guy gets steaming,” said Maddy, struggling to imagine him, so gentle, ever being angry, feeling instantly worse, because he really was so very, very kind. “Can we speak about something else?”

  “All right,” said Della. “Since it’s you.”

  As she talked on, trying to guess where Luke would take Maddy that night (“A restaurant? Or another beach? No, that would be too much for nighttime; you’d be ruined”), Maddy felt herself relax once more, readily distracted by the tantalizing thought of being ruined by Luke, repeating to Della what she’d told him the night before.

  She didn’t care where they went.

  Which she didn’t. She really, really didn’t.

  Not that night, which wasn’t a beach, or another boat, rather a drive just the two of them in Luke’s borrowed motor to the old Portuguese part of town. They parked in a tiny cobbled side street, beautiful European houses with latticed shutters and balconies on both sides, and ducked through the low doorway of a tenement. Luke took Maddy’s hand, leading her up a narrow stone staircase toward the scent of curry leaves and steamed rice, laughing over his shoulder at her intrigued smile, then opened another door, revealing the most beautiful rooftop restaurant, all burning lanterns, incense and smoking tandoors, Indians dressed in their finest silks, women dripping in bangles.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “Like it?” she said, amazed he could ask. “I love it.”

  They sat at a low table, a single flickering wick in a saucer of paraffin between them, the burr of Urdu all around. The owner—a portly middle-aged man in a linen tunic and trousers—brought them soft naans, platters of spiced vegetables, which they must have eaten, only Maddy wasn’t aware of them doing it. She couldn’t recall taking a bite afterward, once she was home and alone in her bed, replaying each second of the night (smiling, like a lunatic); all she could remember was how it had felt to hold Luke’s hand when they’d climbed the stairs, the moment he’d held her stare, asked her how she’d feel about him wiring his contact at General Staff, staying in Bombay longer.

  “You can do that?” she’d said, scared to even ask, to believe he might.

  “I don’t see why not,” he’d said, eyes shining, happy, it felt like, that she was so happy. As though she could have been anything else. “There’s plenty of work still to do.”

  “Oh my God.”

  He’d laughed. “Is that a yes, you’d like me to stay?”

  “Of course it is,” she’d said, laughing, too, at the relief, the shock, the wonder that he really would. But, “You don’t want to get back to your river in Richmond?”

  “Very much,” he’d said. “It’s not going anywhere, though.”

  “But what if they don’t want you to stay?”

  “Then I’ll take a holiday,” he’d said, laughing more, as though trying to make sense of himself. “You are not very easy to leave, Miss Bright.”

  He didn’t need to take a holiday. His contact wired by return, saying General Staff would be glad to keep him on in Bombay. He drove over the next day between meetings to tell Maddy, surprising her out on the veranda, where she’d been agonizing over when they’d know, also having tea with her mother (who herself had been acting rather surprisingly by bringing the tray out in the first place, then quizzing Maddy, albeit stiffly, on her meal the night before. “It sounds very … interesting. Was the food quite safe?”).

  It was Alice who asked Luke how long he’d be staying on now for, talking for Maddy (who’d momentarily lost the power of speech).

  “I don’t know,” he said, his eyes holding Maddy’s. He wore another dark suit, a crisp white shirt. A smile played on his lips. “I think it all depends on what happens. Certainly another month.”

  “A month?” Alice said.

  A month, Maddy thought, heart pummeling. A whole month.

  Luke went on, saying it could be longer, and Alice asked him if that meant his stay was indefinite.

  “No,” he said. “I will go back. Certainly by the summer. I’m afraid I’m not cut out for life in the Raj.”

  Alice stared, as though not quite comprehending.

  Maddy comprehended. Much as she’d started to enjoy her time in India—the past couple of days especially—she wasn’t cut out for a lifetime here either. Loath as she was to get ahead of herself (that old superstition again), she was already picturing a soft lawn beneath a willow tree, a boat bobbing on a summery Thames.

  Meanwhile he was staying on, truly, truly staying on. For her. Her.

  “A month,” she said, rediscovering her voice. She wanted to get up, throw her arms around him, kiss him like she’d kissed him in the sea.

  His eyes sparked from across the room. He held his whole body still, like he was containing the urge, too. “At least a month,” he said.

  She beamed, squealed, looked from him to her mother (not beaming), then straight back to him. “Is this madness?” she said.

  “Probably,” he said, laughing.

  Alice sighed. “I think you’d better come to dinner tonight,” she said.

  He did.

  And it was fine. Nothing like as relaxed as the hours they’d now spent just the two of them, but perfectly … fine. Despite Alice’s all too clear reluctance to even think of starting to like Luke, she did go to an obvious effort, even making a special trip to the Taj’s kitchens to fetch oysters fresh enough to trust for the first course, then dressing the dining table herself. And she was polite when he arrived, thanking him for the flowers he brought (“And you weren’t even late buying them,” said Maddy quietly. “I didn’t think that would be the best idea,” he said), offering him a drink. She just didn’t speak very much from then on. Luke tried to draw her into conversation several times through the meal, asking her about everything from her childhood in England to places she’d visited in India, but she gave only the barest minimum by way of reply. She told him she’d grown up in Oxford (information Maddy already knew and had passed on), had been to lots of places in India, but no, she wasn’t sure she had a favorite, although she liked the cool of the hills.

  “You used to love sledging with Maddy,” said Richard. “You’d do it for hours.”

  “I remember,” she said.

  “Maddy,” he turned to her, “do you?”

  “She’ll have been too young,” said Alice.

  “I think I do remember, actually,” said Maddy. She didn’t say it to be kind. Or at least, not just for that. Now that she tried, she was sure she could
recall trudging up a slope, hanging on to long woolen skirts, hearing a breathless voice. One last time. Or had that been Edie? Maddy had had so many more winters with her in Oxford, it was hard to know.

  “Do you go up there these days?” Luke asked Alice, interrupting her thoughts.

  “I haven’t been since Madeline left for England,” said Alice. “Now, has everyone finished?”

  “It’s not you,” Maddy said to Luke as they walked together to his motor once the meal was over. It was baking, despite being almost eleven. Her evening dress stuck to her damp skin. The nights were getting ever hotter; the air was laden with the scent of the day’s sun on the earth, the steamy perfume of the garden’s overflowing flower beds. “It’s just the way she is.”

  “Is it?” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the house, seeming to think about it, his strong face contemplative in the darkness. “Do you notice the way she looks at you?”

  “Looks at me?”

  “It’s like she can’t quite believe you’re there,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “She watches you, all the time. She adores you, Maddy.”

  Maddy laughed, because it was such a strange, if sweet, thought. “She barely came to see me in Oxford,” she reminded him. “Only once.”

  “Have you ever asked her why?”

  “I asked Papa, Edie…”

  “But not her?”

  “I—” Maddy began, then stopped. “She wouldn’t tell me if I did.”

  “Maybe you should try her,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said, noncommittally and with no intention of doing it.

  He gave her an exasperated look, then turned to open his door. “I shall see you at seven tomorrow,” he said.

  She smiled. “Where will we go?”

  He smiled, too. Stealing another look at the house, he ran his hand around her neck, sending tremors right through her. “Does it matter?” he said.

  “No,” she said, leaning forward for his kiss, “I don’t suppose it does.”

  He took her to a dimly lit curry house on the outskirts of the city, at the end of a lane so dark as to be almost black. It was full of locals who stared when they arrived, but otherwise ignored them, caught up in their own laughter, their meals, which they ate with their hands, and their noisy, indiscernible chatter. Maddy’s evening gown brushed the earthen floor as she followed Luke to one of the few spare tables (“You seem to have ruined your hem,” said Alice, who was waiting up when she returned). She breathed in steamed rice and spices, the kerosene used to fire the stoves, and the musty throng of bodies, the cows who lurked, waiting to eat everyone’s banana-leaf plates. They ordered dal and roti, chai in murky cups, and he told her of his day, the many things he was working on (“I’ve decided you’re not a spy after all,” he said. “Excellent,” she said, “then I’m doing my job well”), how hard it was to track the reserves in such a vast country, to know their skill levels, then the additional railway and ship transportations needed on standby, training requirements in India, at grounds in England. “It’s endless,” he said.

  “And hopefully pointless,” she said.

  “Hopefully,” he said, and she wished he could have sounded more convinced.

  “I wish I could, too,” he said.

  The following night, as a concession to Alice—who was still far from happy about them going out so much alone—they took Peter and Della with them and went to the restaurant at Watson’s Hotel, not far from the cricket oval. There were other British there this time, but mainly tourists, and no one that any of them knew. They all sat in a corner of the buzzing dining room, talking, laughing, eating until Maddy felt as though her stays might burst (“I think mine already have,” said Della), the hours flying by. In response to Maddy’s quizzing, Luke spoke more of his own family, how his father was a lawyer, his mother a doctor.

  “Oh, a doctor,” said Maddy. “I feel even worse now for not being anything.”

  “You’re not nothing,” he said.

  Later, as they left Peter and Della behind and walked slowly up Malabar Hill, hand in hand, the motor parked at the bottom, just so that they might have some time together with no one else watching, Maddy spoke more of Oxford, confessing how she’d always liked to think of her mother growing up there, when she’d lived in Edie and Fitz’s village. “It made me feel closer to her, I suppose.”

  “Are her parents still there?”

  “No,” she said. “They died when I was young, I barely knew them. Edie did. She said they were always very strict with my mother.”

  “She and Alice were friends?”

  “Good friends,” said Maddy, “once. Edie said they drifted apart after school. I’m sure there’s more to it.”

  “Is this another thing you haven’t asked your mother about?”

  “Aren’t you clever?”

  He smiled. “Did your father know your mother back then?”

  “No, he was already working here. Edie said he came back on leave when she and Mama were eighteen and fell head over heels, but Mama didn’t want to know. It was only when he came again, three years later, that she agreed to marry him.”

  “And then you came along.”

  “As you see.”

  “Well, thank God for Alice agreeing,” he said, and slowed, pulling her to him, face serious, dark eyes dancing. He raised his hand, touching her cheek, and she turned, pressing her lips to his palm, hearing his intake of breath. He leaned down, closer: another kiss she never wanted to end.

  * * *

  One week ran into the next, each passing faster than the last. They went again to the rooftop restaurant, more curry houses, and while there were other occasions when Peter and Della came with them (“Leaves for plates,” said Peter. “Such larks.” “Do be quiet,” said Della), mostly they kept it just them, losing hours in hidden garden restaurants bursting with mango trees and frangipanis, giving the Aldyces and their friends plenty to talk about. (“They’re all electrified at the club,” said Della, “although of course keep very quiet whenever your parents are near. I wish you could hear them, though, Maddy.”)

  On the weekends, Luke came to the villa, persevering with Alice, talking to her of Bombay, how much it was growing, the noise that was so easy to forget when not here, and did anyone want to stop those children torturing that peacock?

  “I’ll do it,” said Maddy, setting off toward where Suya was standing between her siblings, little legs akimbo, the squawking peacock’s tail in hand. “Suya. Suya.…”

  “Suya,” called Richard, following in Maddy’s wake, “what did that bird ever do to you?”

  Suya didn’t respond. She kept tugging at the peacock’s feathers, her angelic face tense with effort as it screeched and battered its wings.

  “Stop,” called Maddy.

  “Enough,” shouted Luke from the veranda, half laughing, half scolding.

  Suya beamed back at him. With her brother and sister delightedly egging her on, she gave one final yank, and, just as Maddy and Richard reached her, hooted in victory, released the terrified bird, and raised her stolen feather to the beating sky.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Richard.

  Other times, Maddy and Luke went for walks up to the Hanging Gardens at the top of the hill, where they’d stroll around the manicured lawns, dragonflies filling the air, birds circling—vultures among them, lured by the bodies the local Parsi community left out for them at their nearby Towers of Silence.

  “No,” Maddy said, horrified when Luke told her about the tradition.

  “Yes,” he said, laughing at her face.

  “Well, now that’s all I’m going to be able to think of when I come here,” she said.

  “That’s no good,” he replied. “Let me see if I can distract you.”

  They stopped to talk as briefly as possible with the other people they ran into there (“Goodness me,” said the sunburned sailor, “Maddy. You’re becoming a rarity. What an honor”), and s
at in the shade of the palms, her head on his shoulder, hand in his hand, both of them staring at the sea and city stretching beneath.

  I never want this to end, she thought.

  Please, never let this end.

  They returned to the beach they’d sailed from, taking a picnic Maddy had asked Cook to package up (attempting to charm him with the Hindustani she’d asked Luke to pass on. “Perhaps you are talking now in English,” Cook said. “So I am understanding”). The fishermen were all back, lining the shore. Luke paid them for fresh snapper to have with their saffron rice and tomato salad, and made Maddy laugh until her eyes streamed by trying to light a fire to grill them on, failing abysmally, until she dug in her bag and produced the matches he’d posted back to her after New Year’s, and which she’d kept all this time.

  He narrowed his eyes. “Did you really not know you had them?” he asked.

  “I forgot,” she said, still laughing, “I swear it. Don’t use too many of them, I want to keep them.”

  “I only need one now,” he said, kneeling again in the sand.

  As April moved toward May, and no word came from England asking him to return, he left the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and moved into private rooms by the water, near the docks. He told Maddy he preferred the privacy, the certainty that he wouldn’t run into the Aldyces of the city in the lobby. (“One sympathizes,” said Richard with a sigh.) Maddy didn’t visit him there. She feared that to be caught disappearing into his apartments would be a step too far, even for her. She was sorely tempted, though. She was desperate by now to be alone with him for something more than a few stolen moments before they returned to the villa, back for a midnight that always came too, too soon. Each time they kissed, it was harder to pull away. She could tell, from the tense way he forced himself from her, that he felt it, too.

  “Maddy,” he said, “I’m not sure what you’re doing to me.”

  She wasn’t sure what he was doing to her.

  May passed. The temperature soared, edging the mercury ever upward. She struggled to sleep through the broiling hours until dawn. She thought of nothing but him, whether he was lying awake and restless, too. What it would feel like, to be by his side.