Meet Me in Bombay Page 4

  Buoyed by the wonder of it, she planned to go farther afield the following Monday, take a rickshaw to the tram, from there into town and the spice market.

  It wasn’t a success.

  She’d gone out alone all the time back in England. Aunt Edie had never been the kind to insist on a chaperone, and at college they’d all been left to it by their tutors (who were far more concerned with who was attending the next suffrage rally than whether social niceties were being observed). But the broiling, unfamiliar streets of Bombay were hardly the cobbled alleyways of Oxford; to her mortification, she didn’t get much farther than the central tram stop. She hailed another rickshaw there, but after a minute of the driver weaving hectically through the camels, carts, and motor horns, she gave in to her nerves and told him she wouldn’t go all the way to the markets after all, she’d visit a nearby mosque instead. Flustered as she was, she felt horribly conspicuous as she stepped onto the heaving pavements outside the ornate domed building, too painfully conscious of her pale skin, blond hair, and cream dress. It got worse as she walked around the mosque’s gold-painted walls. She peered through the archways at the bald Jain monks praying within (Very good, she thought, you’ve seen another something new), pushed on around the walled gardens—countless eyes on her as the women, who sat in the shade eating rice from betel leaves, scrutinized her like the interloper she was—and somehow lasted a half hour.

  Her corset was soaked with her own anxious sweat by the time she returned home.

  Ridiculous, she told herself.

  She made it to those spice markets on her next trip. She had to draw a resolute breath before ducking through the low-beamed doorway into the cavernous warehouse, but duck in she did. She looked up from beneath the brim of her straw hat, eyes adjusting to the dim light, her ears to the intense noise: vendors shouting their prices, hundreds of locals haggling. The air was dense with trapped sunshine, a heady cocktail of paprika, saffron, turmeric, and cardamom. A shirtless boy hared past, barrow full of sacks, and she stepped back clumsily, only just avoiding being mown down (Not entirely less deathly, she wanted to tell Luke Devereaux), then, gathering herself, walked on, down the first pungent alleyway of stalls, full of bags brimming with chilies, feeling the heat catch at her throat, her lungs. Her eyes streamed, and she started to cough, fighting for air. The vendors laughed and, realizing what she must look like, she tried to laugh, too, but coughed more. One older man grinned and held out a chili, gesturing for her to come forward. “It good,” he said, “no fire, this one.” She went, hesitantly, and took a small bite, fully expecting to lose the lining of her mouth. But, “It is good,” she said, hearing her own relief. “Yes,” she smiled, “good.” Others called out to her, offering cinnamon, aniseed, allspice. She tried it all, thanking them, dhanyavaad, and found herself wandering on, farther and farther into the furor, stopping to buy a chittack of saffron for Edie, ginger for Cook.

  She stayed longer than half an hour.

  And this time she counted the days until her next adventure, to Elephanta Island in Bombay Harbour: Gharapuri, Luke Devereaux’s book read, the city of caves. Catch a boat from the quay and leave the heat of the city behind as you enter into these dark, echoing chambers of stone deities. She wasn’t the only European this time; they filled the cool caves, commenting with cut-glass consonants on Shiva’s many carved faces, how different it all was to anything one had seen before. Maddy, lost in the beauty of the statues, the thought of the sculptors who’d stood where she stood, all those hundreds of years before, forgot they were there.

  The next week, she went to the tomb, Haji Ali Dargah. Make sure to arrive at low tide, when a narrow causeway will appear, taking you to the dargah. She walked across the strip of rocky earth, rammed between jostling, sweaty hordes of other pilgrims, the sea all but touching the hem of her skirts. The white domes of the mosque sparkled, stark against the blue sky, the green palms surrounding it. Children ran up to her, some shyly eyeing her and then scampering away, others asking to touch her gown, her hair. She stooped, letting them, laughing at their astonishment, their excitement. The week following, she visited the huge outdoor laundries at Dhobi Ghat, staring herself, at the men, the dhobis, who worked without stopping in the sunshine, bent over the deep stone baths, scrubbing and slapping the mountains of linen: the vibrant garments of wealthy Indians, uniforms from the army, bedding from Bombay’s hotels and hospitals.

  She ached to write to Luke Devereaux and tell him about all she was seeing. It’s helped, so much.

  Thank you.

  She had no address, though. Her letters, her thanks, remained in her head.

  He kept writing to her, though. Every week or so, a new postcard arrived, making her catch her breath with delight. A long sandy beach in Pondicherry (I think one of my favorites in India. You haven’t lived, Miss Bright, until you’ve eaten a freshly baked pastry, watching the sunrise here), then, in early February, locals making flower garlands at a stall in Madras (If you were here, perhaps I’d have bought you one. Would you have liked that, I wonder? Why do I keep wondering such things?); later in the month came a majestic government house in Calcutta (Note the ubiquitous cows outside, reminding everyone who this country really belongs to), tigers in Bengal followed (How are you getting on with your tour?).

  Della wrote as well, full of tales of elephant treks, feasts in kings’ palaces, their wives (plural) hidden behind screens, as did Richard (less effusively, always hopeful that Maddy was all right, getting along with Alice, full of apologies that the trip had been extended, it will be late March at least before we’re home), but it was the possibility of another card from Luke Devereaux on the post tray that made Maddy wake earlier each morning, dress hastily, then pick up her skirts and jog down the stairs, eager for the day when one would arrive telling her something of himself, why he was on these cross-country travels, and when, oh when, Bombay was going to be his next port of call.

  February gave way to March, and the heat built by the day, toward the summer monsoon. Guy took her for another walk in the gardens, warned her off eating kulfi from a street vendor, and then for a trip to see some very sad-looking animals at the zoo.

  “No,” he agreed, “they don’t look like they’re having much fun. I’m not sure we are either. How about a long glass of something cold at the Gymkhana Club?”

  March crept on, edging toward April.… Maddy went to the docks to see the ground being prepared for the new Gateway of India—hundreds of sweating workers hauling rocks, dark skin gleaming in the dusty sunshine—avoided the Taj’s Sea Lounge and drank chai at a corner shop instead (The best you’ll find in Bombay), then visited more neighborhood mosques, the coriander-scented alleyways of Crawford Market. She kept checking the post, always hoping, feeling a little flatter every time the words she’d been waiting for failed to arrive.

  Until, at last, they did.

  On the back of a postcard from Poona: camels by a palm-fringed lake.

  As you can see, I’m a lot closer now to Bombay. I would like, very much, to see you, Miss Bright. Would you meet me? There’s a small coffee shop not far from the terminus (the start of chapter five, if memory serves). I shall be there at noon on Tuesday.

  Will you?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  King’s Fifth Military Convalescent Hospital, Surrey, 1915

  He arrived just before luncheon, on an arctic November morning. The ambulance that brought him progressed cautiously up the winding, icy driveway, wipers flipping back and forth, clearing snowy semicircles on the windshield. Sister Emma Lytton, who’d come onto the hospital’s front stairs to wait for him, jigged on the spot, rubbing the sleeves of her Queen Alexandra’s uniform in a futile effort to keep warm. She was a seasoned nurse—fifteen years now in the service, as many months of which had been in this hideous war—and ordinarily, in these final few minutes before a patient’s admission, would be focused on nothing but them, running through their notes in her mind. Today, though, all she could think about were the ro
aring coal fires inside, and that she’d left them a little prematurely.

  “Come on,” she instructed the lumbering vehicle, her voice leaving her in a cloud of fog. “Do come on.”

  The ambulance maintained the same sloth-like speed.

  She consoled herself that the patient’s room would be cozy, at least. She’d had one of the VADs stoke the fire, put a ceramic hot-water bottle between the sheets. A new girl herself, the VAD had wanted to know how they could be sure this patient—Officer Jones, they were to call him, Officer Tommy Jones (it wasn’t his name; no one knew his name)—wasn’t a spy.

  “What if he’s lying about his memory?” she’d said. “What if the Boche has sent him here to find out our secrets?”

  “Our secrets in Surrey?” Emma had said. “Silly girl. The poor man’s just lost.”

  The VAD had turned scarlet, spoken not another word as she refolded the corners of Officer Jones’s sheets.

  Emma wished now she hadn’t snapped. It was the long nights, the men waking constantly, screaming at their ghosts, then the short winter days trying to coax them into walks, conversation. And now this cold snap, which had frozen the old hospital’s pipes solid … Emma realized there were a lot more having to put up with a lot worse (she remembered them every evening in her prayers), but still, it all took a toll. She resolved to find the VAD later, take her some fruitcake from the sisters’ larder and apologize; it was hardly her fault she was so naive. Comforting really, when one stopped and thought, that the girl had managed to retain some innocence in this world run mad; that she’d still been green enough to believe espionage likelier than a catastrophic head wound.

  The ambulance crunched to a halt, interrupting Emma’s sad thoughts. She gave her arms one more vigorous rub, and watched the driver—another young woman, this time in the belted khaki jacket, calf-length skirt, and cloth cap of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry—climb down from the cabin.

  “Good morning,” Emma called.

  “Is it?” the FANY replied, rather curtly, lending weight to Matron’s oft-aired theories about the type of girl one might expect to operate a motor vehicle. “Too damn cold.”

  “Nothing a cocoa won’t fix,” said Emma, wincing inwardly at her own jolly tone, the same one she always found herself using with her most morose patients.

  The FANY wasn’t won over. (The patients never were either.) “I feel like my toes have fallen off,” she said, and stomped her feet, presumably to reclaim feeling, then made off round to the back of the ambulance to open the red-crossed doors.

  She swung them wide and said something indiscernible to the patient inside. Emma clasped her hands in front of her and waited for him to appear, but there was a delay. Emma felt a brief stab of panic. What if Officer Jones was less mobile than she’d been led to expect? She didn’t have a bath chair with her. Matron had assured her one wasn’t needed, but what if Matron had been wrong? Mistakes did happen. What if this man’s head wound had affected his movement? She would have to leave him in his freezing cabin with this taciturn driver while she went in search of an orderly. What a start. Why on earth hadn’t she erred on the safe side? Be prepared for every eventuality. It was her motto, one she passed on to all her probationers, and now here she was, not prepared at all.

  She was still berating herself when Officer Jones appeared at the doors in an army greatcoat, his back to her, perfectly agile. She permitted herself a brief, icy exhale, but before her relief was halfway out of her mouth, he turned, looking up at the hospital’s sandstone façade, and she stopped, staring, even though she knew one should never, ever stare.

  It took her a few seconds to realize she was even doing it.

  Then a few more for her to understand why.

  It wasn’t about his face, certainly. Perfectly drawn as his handsome features were, she wasn’t one for going weak at the knees over such things. (Not anymore.) No, no. It was something quite different about this officer that took her aback.

  Slowly, it came to her. Exhausted as he evidently was (she saw the telltale bruises shadowing his strong face, all too clearly), he didn’t look ill. Not at all. Not in the way her other patients did, with their eyes that had seen too much, shoulders that sagged and hunched, that waxiness to their skin. Officer Jones, he seemed so … so … alive. His spine was straight, his shoulders square, and his fists clenched in a way that spoke of so much vigor that she, who prided herself after fifteen years in the service (fifteen years!) of being nigh on unshakable, almost blurted out that he must have come to the wrong place.

  The FANY coughed pointedly, making Emma realize just how long she’d been staring. She felt heat spread through her frozen skin at her own lack of professionalism, then even more as she caught the FANY’s smirk, and realized the conclusion she’d leaped to.

  I swear it’s not about that, she yearned to correct the girl, there’s nothing left in me for any of that.

  She said nothing, of course. She’d made quite enough of a spectacle. (What would Matron think?) Sternly reminding herself that she was a nursing sister, Officer Jones her patient, and, whatever his appearance, anything but in the pink of health, she returned her attention to him. A hemorrhage of the mind, Dr. Arnold always said, can be just as critical as one of the blood. She repeated the words silently, then again for good measure, willing her embarrassment away. Pull yourself together. She took a step toward Officer Jones, who after all had served, given so much, and deserved the same care and compassion as all her other boys. The kind she hoped her darling fiancé, Freddie, had been given before he was taken at the Marne.

  The sort she needed to believe her younger brother, Billy, had known in his casualty clearing station at Loos. (No lying unattended, thirsty and in agony on a stretcher; please, not that.)

  She drew a sharp breath against the torturous, always ready images, and forced her attention onto Officer Jones instead, watching as he grasped the ambulance’s doorframe, jumped down onto the icy gravel, his posture proud. With her mind still half clinging to Freddie and Billy, she felt her heart swell for the soldier before her, this lonely, suffering man.

  “Officer Jones,” she said.

  He winced. She wasn’t sure why. The long journey getting on top of him, maybe. Nothing a cocoa won’t fix. She took a step forward, ignoring the snow that seeped through her nurse’s hood, the shoulders of her cape, and held out her hand in anticipation of taking Officer Jones’s arm, leading him inside.

  The poor man’s just lost, she’d told that VAD.

  Not anymore, she assured herself now.

  He’d found her.

  She’d look after him.

  * * *

  He was quiet as they left the driveway, talking only to thank the ambulance driver in a low, well-spoken voice, and then to assure Emma that he didn’t need her hand for help, really, and he could carry his own small bag. “I insist.”

  Emma, well used to brevity from her patients, was also well practiced in filling silences. As she led Officer Jones into the hospital’s warm, paneled entranceway that smelled of smoke, bacon from the basement kitchens, and Jeyes Fluid, she chatted, saying what a tonic it must be for him to be out of that cold ambulance. He didn’t reply. Thinking he probably hadn’t had much in the way of companionship from that driver, she decided he’d benefit from some light relief before his initial session with Dr. Arnold. She was meant to be taking him straight there, but …

  “Why don’t we go on a little tour?” she said.

  “A tour?” he said.

  “Yes, why not? Leave your things here, yes, just by the stairs. I’ll have them sent to your room.”

  “I can take them.…”

  “No, no need. Now, if you come this way.”

  She walked on, skirt swishing across the large front hall, past the burning oil lamps and open fire, to the dining room, with its mahogany table to seat twenty. “There are three sittings for every meal,” she said, “and we mix them up to keep everything sociable.” She didn’t add how little any
one talked at dinnertimes, or how many subjects had had to be banned from conversation (France, Belgium, Kitchener, the Boche … really anything to do with the war); plenty of time for him to find that out. Pressing forward, she took him to the drawing room, full of armchairs, landscape paintings, a handful of patients in their blues, and a silent gramophone. She told Jones they had to keep it off whenever certain patients were downstairs, and stopped, distracted briefly by the most damaged of them all: a tragic captain who wore a mask over his poor jaw and skull, wept whenever his mother visited, never wanted to let her go, and shook uncontrollably all the time.

  “What happened to him?” Jones asked, following her gaze.

  She hesitated, then lied, telling him she wasn’t sure, loath to upset him with the grim detail. With a sigh, she moved them quickly on, to the library. “See, we have a billiards table. Do you play?”

  “Billiards?” he said, and the muscles in his cheeks tensed, she wasn’t sure whether in the start of a smile or a frown. “I don’t know.”

  “Of course,” she said, cursing herself for her insensitivity. (It had been a frown, it must have been a frown.) “Well,” she said, “I’m sure we can find a friend to teach you.”

  He looked at the table, the bookshelves, appearing to ruminate.

  “Would you—” she began.