There were six berths in the cabin and a single small porthole. The woman and child had been assigned a middle and lower left, each with a cretonne curtain that could be drawn for privacy. The porter deposited their cabin bags and the man gave him his tip. As soon as they were alone the three of them inspected the little space and peered into the miniature bathroom.
‘I wonder who you’ll be sharing with?’ the man said.
They would be women, of course, whoever they were, and most probably also Indian. Perhaps they would be nuns, or scholarship students heading for England.
The child clung to the woman’s hand. His hair was cut short and he wore an everyday
kurta pyjama
.
‘Why can you not come with us now?’ the woman demanded.
‘I can’t, because I have a promise to fulfil. You don’t want me to break a promise, do you?’
It was a discussion they had been over many, many times.
‘Who will meet us in England? How will I know who they are?’
‘My friend will be at the docks, that is another promise. You have his photograph safe so you will recognise him?’
She held it up. It showed a smiling elderly man in leather
boots and knee breeches, his hat pushed to the back of his head and a pipe in his mouth.
‘Edward will take care of you both. And very soon, a matter of weeks, I will join you and we will go to my home in Switzerland. You’ll be happy there, I know. That’s promise number three, isn’t it?’
She smiled, at last. ‘You are very good.’
He took her face between his hands and kissed her forehead. ‘Remember, as soon as the ship leaves the dock you are safe. You can put her in her proper clothes again, and she will no longer be Arjun but the orphan daughter of friends you are taking to her father’s cousins in London.’
The woman nodded obediently.
‘Don’t worry so much.’ He kissed her again, then lifted the child off its feet and swung it to the top bunk. ‘You are the king of the castle up there, aren’t you?’
Later, with the klaxons sounding to warn those who were not sailing that they must leave the ship immediately, they reached the head of the gangway. Everywhere friends and relatives were hugging and weeping as the moment of parting approached.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ the man breathed. He kissed the two of them once more and ran down the sloping gangway. He stood on the dockside as the giant hawsers were released and the ship’s hooter gave three long blasts. Craning his neck upwards, he could just see the woman at the ship’s rail, the child held tightly in her arms. He waved until his arms ached, and watched the white
dupatta
fluttering in response. When finally he couldn’t see it any more across the breadth of water, he turned and threaded his way through the cacophony of porters and baggage carts. Ahead of him, towering over the Bombay docks, stood the giant arch known as the Gateway to India. The man began to hurry. He had to catch the Frontier Mail to Rawalpindi, where his American companions and their sherpas, recruited from Darjeeling, were waiting for him. Then they would begin the long journey north to the
mountain. It was already much later in the season than he had intended.
Ralph was still in the hospital, but the chief MO believed that he had turned a corner. The doctor told Caroline that she should be proud of her husband because he had an unquenchable will to live. She turned her eyes down to her hands, picking at the rags of skin until her sore fingers bled. A voice in her head, louder and more insistent than ever, continued to tell her that she wasn’t worth anything, couldn’t be, because she didn’t have the will to do a single thing, even to put an end to herself.
If you had an ounce of courage, you would do it, if you had an ounce of courage, you would …
When she was not at the hospital, she spent most of her time alone in the stifling bungalow. Nerys tried to persuade to come and stay at the mission, but Caroline was finding it harder and harder to be with other people, even Nerys.
‘I’m just tired,’ she whispered. ‘Tired and worried. When will there be any news from Rainer?’
‘I don’t know. We just have to trust him to do the right thing,’ was the only answer.
On 9 May, news of the unconditional German surrender was announced and Victory in Europe was declared. Srinagar broke into celebrations, although India still looked eastwards to the Pacific war. Multi-coloured lights dappled the black lake, and in the early hours of the morning, dance music still drifted out of the club.
Mr Fanshawe let the diminished British military and civilian population know that on the night of 10 May an impromptu VE Day party would be held in the gardens of the Residency.
‘Please come – come with Evan and Ianto and me. Just for an hour,’ Nerys begged Caroline.
‘All right,’ she finally agreed.
Making a huge effort, she had the
dhobi-wallah
air and press her silk dress, she put curlers in her hair, and even searched the tin cupboard in the bathroom for the lipstick Myrtle had
once declared was just the right shade for her skin. An hour before the party was due to start she sat down on the veranda chair to gather her strength. The air was hot and seemed thick enough to choke her. She rested her head against a cushion and fanned herself with an old magazine.
The clink of the gate latch woke her from a doze. A man stood just inside the fence, holding out an envelope. ‘Madam, for you,’ he said softly.
On legs that felt like tubes of jelly, Caroline tottered down the step to the path and held out her hand to take the letter. Worrying vaguely that she didn’t have a suitable coin, she asked him to wait, but the man had already closed the gate. His shadow passed behind the bushes and Caroline glanced down at the handwriting on the envelope. A cold hand clutched at her stomach.
Standing in the veranda shade she tore it open.
Ravi wrote that the child was dead.
The Swiss man’s ruined vehicle had been found in a ravine. No bodies had been recovered as yet but there was enough evidence to make it certain that the deaths had taken place.
A tragedy, of course. Ravi was sure that she would want to hear about it before the news became generally known. He conveyed his sympathy and good wishes.
Caroline dropped the letter. Soundlessly, she drifted through the bungalow’s cramped rooms, her eyes travelling over the familiar furnishings, the faded covers, Ralph’s books of military history and their framed wedding photograph.
In the bathroom she searched until she found Ralph’s old razor. Carefully she unfolded the blade and stared at the dull blue steel. There was a rime of dried soap near the handle and when she inspected it more closely she saw a speckle of dark stubble. Nausea swelled inside her but she fought it down and repeated the word
courage
. Courage, courage. Then she swiped the blade, first one wrist and then the other.
Hours later, in the garden of the British Residency, lanterns were glimmering in huge trees as the bandleader held up his
baton and bowed to the revellers crowding the lawns. An expectant silence fell, and then there was a huge
whoooosh
as the first firework streaked up into starry blackness. Scarlet sparks cascaded downwards as the victory cheers roared out.
Nerys broke away and murmured to Evan, ‘She said she was definitely coming. I’m going to the bungalow to find her.’
Evan didn’t care for parties and was glad to leave this one. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.
The adjoining bungalows were in darkness. Everyone was out at the victory celebrations, at the Residency or the mess, depending on rank, and all the house-boys had taken the opportunity to gather for a smoke and gossip in the cabin near the compound entrance. Nerys and Evan made their way along the lane, the sweet scent of stocks from some lady’s garden heavy in the night air. They were still yards away from the Bowens’ gate when they heard the noise.
The front door was locked but Evan threw his weight against it and the lock splintered away from the frame.
The bathroom was sticky with blood, the floor and whitewashed walls and enamel bowls and thin towels, and Caroline’s arms were rusty and caked as she cradled her head in them. Her blonde hair was matted, and congealing blood smeared the protruding knobs of her spine, which was all they could see of her as she lay curled in the corner, screaming and screaming.
Evan’s face was as white as paper.
‘Go to the compound gate. Get help,’ Nerys ordered him. Then she knelt down in the blood and tried to draw Caroline’s arms away from her head. The razor she had been clutching dropped to the floor with a clatter.
‘It was good of you to come all this way. Thank you,’ Ralph Bowen said stiffly.
Myrtle and Nerys picked their way along the dock in the Bowens’ shuffling wake, as the homebound passengers for the SS
Euphemia
flowed on to the ship amid a river of trunks and
cases borne by hundreds of coolies. A detachment of khaki-clad soldiers filed up the gangplank to the sound of a military band playing on the aft deck. Ladies in afternoon dresses and shady hats stepped out of cars, and the hooting and shouts and police whistles and all the cacophony of embarkation was stricken by the hammer blow of midsummer heat. Caroline hardly lifted her head.
The Bowens’ cabin was on an upper deck with a tiny porthole, giving a view of the davits of a lifeboat a couple of feet away. The cramped space was too small for the oversized bouquet the McMinns had sent in advance.
‘Thank you for these too,’ Ralph said, after he had read the card, briefly fingering one of the dark red Kashmiri cockscombs. He was spectrally thin, and what remained of his hair was pasted to his blotched cranium, but his colour was almost back to normal. As promised, he had been given an early military discharge, with a Military Cross to mark his conspicuous bravery, and now the Bowens were on their way back to England.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ he said to his wife.
Without raising her head, she let him steer her to one of a pair of miniature armchairs separated by a round table with the same circumference as a modest hatbox. The only other place to sit was on one of the two berths. Caroline’s wrists were bandaged but she kept the dressings hidden by clutching the cuffs of her cardigan. Her uncurled hair fell in a thick mat over her eyes.
Nerys and Myrtle stood awkwardly.
‘We could perhaps find somewhere to have a cup of tea? There’s time before we sail, I should think,’ Ralph offered.
Myrtle refused, politely, and his relief was evident.
‘Caroline?’ Nerys said.
She lifted her head in response, but her blue eyes were clouded. The sedation she was under made her confused and lethargic. It could have been worse, was Nerys’s mordant thought. Ralph and the doctors could have put her in a
strait-jacket. But maybe then the ship’s authorities would have refused to accept her on board.
There seemed not to be a healing word any of them could say.
‘You’ll be home soon. Just rest and enjoy the sea air,’ Nerys said. ‘You promise you will write to us, won’t you?’
‘Of course I will,’ Caroline answered, in the voice of a dutiful child.
‘Goodbye, darling.
Bon voyage
,’ Myrtle said. Her scent, when she hugged Caroline, must have stirred a happier memory. Caroline smiled uncertainly, and her eyes brightened. Nerys had Rainer’s photograph in her handbag, and for that brief moment Caroline could almost have been the girl in the picture again.
They left her sitting in the little armchair, staring at the Kashmiri blooms.
Ralph followed them out of the cabin, carefully closing the door behind him. All along the passageway there were glimpses of festive scenes in the other cabins and there was a bustle of porters and baggage. The three of them made their way to a vestibule at the end where a door leading to the deck let in some humid air.
‘You have been very kind to Caroline since … ah, since her illness, both of you,’ he said abruptly.
‘It was all Nerys’s doing. I’ve been in Delhi the whole time,’ Myrtle demurred.
‘Of course it is very sad that the poor child died and set all this off,’ he added. ‘I hope Caroline will recover in time. It may even be for the best, in the circumstances. She is so very fragile, the slightest thing …’
Nerys began a retort, but Myrtle’s fingers rested lightly on her arm.
‘Take care of her,’ was all she did say.
Ralph nodded. ‘Her stepmother and I are in complete agreement. Once we are back in England she will go into a nursing home for a complete rest.’
‘Perhaps that won’t be necessary, after the sea air on the voyage. And it will be so good for her to see England in summer,’ Nerys hazarded.
The newsreel pictures of bomb-damaged cities and exhausted people queuing for food were not sunny in the least, but in India everyone clung to the pre-war images of home.
Silently Ralph pressed his hands together.
Myrtle assured him there was no need to come with them to the gangway, and Ralph agreed that Caroline should not be left alone for too long. He shook both women’s hands and thanked them once again.
Then he strode away towards the closed cabin door.
Nerys and Myrtle didn’t speak much until they were in the dusty taxi heading back to their hotel. They made a circuit of India Gate in the honking traffic.
‘Zahra isn’t dead, we all know that,’ Nerys burst out.
Myrtle went on staring out at the solid press of rickshaws and bullock carts as their driver forced a route.
Nerys insisted, as she had done a dozen times, ‘It’s one of his tricks. He set it all up, the accident with the Ford, to convince Ravi Singh not to pursue them. I
know
he did. Rainer promised me she would be safe and I trust him absolutely to keep his word.’
For a month, ever since the discovery of the crashed Ford had been made public, she had been telling herself that the accident was no more than classic misdirection, or disguise, or distraction. But day after day had passed, and there had been no word from Rainer.
‘I don’t know,’ Myrtle murmured. ‘Perhaps we should just begin to get used to the possibility that it’s true.’