this chest thing is much more serious than they’re letting on.”
“Why do people skate round things so in letters home?”
“I don’t know,” said Rose. “I don’t even know what the truth is yet.”
“Please tell me what’s wrong, Rose.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m married now and you can’t just blab. It’s not fair.” Rose’s voice had risen. “It’s not fair to the person you’re married to: you only hear one side of the story.”
Tor flopped back on her pillow. This was exhausting. Her dearest, most loved friend. When she put her arm around her, Rose clasped her hand hard.
“Sorry if I seem nosy,” Tor said.
“Not nosy,” said Rose in a muffled voice. She’d turned her back to Tor. “You’re the best friend ever.”
Tor waited again, but nothing, and then Rose fell asleep.
Tor lay awake for the next few hours with her eyes open, listening to the wind and the monkey sounds and Rose’s calm, even breaths.
She had a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, like when you’re swimming and you want to put your feet down on something solid, but the water’s deeper than you think and there’s nothing there.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The following morning Jane Stephenson strolled in after breakfast, a Pekinese dog under her arm, and suggested they might have a picnic that day at Pykara Lake. They were very welcome to take her tonga.
“Is the pony quiet?” Rose asked anxiously.
“Bombproof,” said their hostess.
“Mind you,” she couldn’t help adding, “I do think your husband’s brave letting you come away like this.”
Tor, who was sitting behind Jane tucking into toast, rolled her huge eyes at this and sagged in her chair.
“Isn’t he?” said Rose pleasantly.
When Viva, Tor, and Rose stepped into the morning sun after breakfast, it was dazzling: every leaf and flower seemed to have been rinsed clean by the rains the night before and the air was full of birdsong.
“Do you love birds as we do?” Bunty had followed them out of the house with a large, well-thumbed book. “If so, you are in for such a treat: the Kashmiri flycatcher, the blue robin, the laughing thrush—he’s a frightfully noisy fellow, you’ll hear him chuckling. Do take these.”
The bird book and a pair of binoculars were thrust into Rose’s hands, and then their tonga arrived, pulled by a smart Welsh mountain pony that Bunty said she had bottle-fed when its mother died.
Their driver, a handsome fellow in crimson turban and white puttees, salaamed them into their little carriage. A touch of the whip on the pony’s fat little bottom and they flew down a winding road overlooking blue hills and lakes, and a vast expanse of blue sky beyond.
Tor was being silly with the binoculars: “I say,” she said, in Bunty tones, “is that the slatyback forktail? By jove, it is!” and then hearing them laugh, their driver turned around and started to sing them some wobbly songs that he said the memsahibs would enjoy, and they all joined in for a while. Viva even knew some of the words—she’d sung them with her children—which amazed and pleased the driver.
At lunchtime, their driver found them a fine picnic spot under a group of banyan trees overlooking the hills. As soon as they sat down, a group of large gray monkeys, hard-eyed and muscular, swung down from the upper branches of the trees and inspected them minutely.
Tor stood up and stared right back.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here today,” she said in the tones of their ex-headmistress, Miss Iris Wykham-Jones. “Well, from now on, no fleas whatsoever to be eaten from armpits during assembly. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
A monkey furled back its lip and screeched.
“No staring. No bottom washing in public!”
“Don’t upset it,” Rose begged. “Tor, please, that’s not funny. I hate them.”
“Calmness, Rose,” said Tor, “they’re much more frightened of us than we are of them.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t,” Tor admitted. “It’s one of those things people say.”
The driver had leaped to his feet at the monkey’s cry. He showed his white teeth to the girls, bashed the tree with his stick, and laughed heartily as the monkeys fled.
“Hanuman, the monkey god,” Viva said, “is supposed to be good at answering prayers.”
But Rose still looked pale. “They’re horrible,” she said, “I really do hate them.”
“All gone now,” said Tor, rolling out a tartan rug and opening the picnic hamper. “So let’s eat—I’m starving as usual.”
They unpacked freshly made rolls packed in blue-and-white-checked napkins, thin slices of roast beef, curried eggs, fresh mangoes, a