The Sapphire Child (The Raj Hotel #2) - Janet MacLeod Trotter Page 0,138
often for fear of upsetting her.
She found it very hard to visit Ada. While Stella had been away, her cousin had given birth to a baby girl called June – named after the month in which she’d been born – who was now five months old. It was the age Belle had been when Stella had last seen her. She had met Ada on a couple of occasions, but not with the baby. Eventually, in early November, Stella forced herself to visit. She went round to Lalkutri one afternoon, still dressed in her uniform.
To watch baby June sitting propped on cushions waving a rattle and giving gummy smiles was purgatory for Stella. June looked nothing like Belle; she had a shock of dark hair kept in place by mother-of-pearl hair slides and solemn brown eyes framed by dark lashes. But her gestures and smiles made Stella’s heart ache.
‘You can hold her,’ Ada encouraged. ‘She won’t cry.’
Stella steeled herself to take the proffered baby and sit her on her knee. Her powdery baby smell nearly made Stella sob out loud. She masked it with a cough and handed her back. ‘Sorry, don’t want to give her my cold.’ Stella fumbled quickly in her handbag and blew her nose.
It was almost preferable to have Ada bombard her with questions about Hugh than to have June in her arms.
‘I don’t understand why you aren’t prepared to wait for Mr Keating,’ said Ada. ‘Surely he’ll come back to India as soon as he can? He has a good job in Calcutta.’
‘I don’t know if he will,’ said Stella, ‘but even if he does, I no longer love him.’
‘Does he have someone else?’ Ada guessed. ‘Have you found out he’s cheated? Is that it?’
Stella decided that was as near the truth as she was prepared to admit. ‘Yes, he was unfaithful to me.’
‘I knew it! What a swine.’
By the time Stella left, Ada had convinced herself that she had always known Hugh was a bad one and that she would do her best to find Stella a good husband from among Clive’s friends.
Stella laughed and hugged her friend. ‘I don’t need a matchmaker, thank you all the same.’
‘I think you’ve proved that you do,’ Ada retorted.
‘Leave Stella alone,’ said Clive, picking up June, who had started to grizzle. ‘She can make up her own mind.’
‘I’m really quite happy being fancy-free,’ said Stella.
‘But I want you to get married and have a baby like me,’ Ada persisted. ‘So we can be mothers together.’
Stella’s throat tightened. She tried not to gasp for breath. ‘Maybe one day.’ She kissed her cousin and Clive on their cheeks and left quickly.
Walking home in the mellow sunshine, she pondered the future. It was already the start of the cold season and soon the usual round of social events would begin in this army town – perhaps even more feverishly, given that the war front had come to India. The parade grounds and streets of the cantonment rang to the sound of troops being drilled and there were more regiments than ever passing through Rawalpindi.
She wondered if Andrew’s battalion would be given leave from the frontier. The Lomaxes had received a note from him shortly before Stella left for Rawalpindi, saying that he’d had a touch of fever but was now ‘right as rain’. He’d met one of their old friends in Taha, a Scottish padre that Esmie had talked about with fondness. Esmie had also been encouraged that the message had been addressed to them both. Stella had been too distracted at the thought of leaving Belle to dwell on Andrew’s letter but thinking about him now, she realised how much it would lift her spirits to see him again.
She admired Andrew for joining up and following where his conscience led him. She determined that whatever she did next with her life, she would do something brave to atone for her abandoning of Belle. Perhaps she would volunteer for general service with the WAC rather than local. The thought of leaving Pindi and going somewhere totally unknown on her own was in a way terrifying. Yet the more she thought about it, the keener she was to put all her effort into war work, as Andrew was doing.
She could type fast and do bookkeeping, arrange diaries and take minutes of meetings. She would get Jimmy to teach her to drive. Then she could offer herself as a secretary-cum-driver to the forces or any of the branches of the civil service.