on she would be able to survive by her pen. No more dreary jobs, or school dorms, no more spare rooms. She was young, she was healthy, she could just about afford the three guineas a week for her flat, and whoopee, she was now going to be a writer.
So why, with everything at last moving in the right direction, had she decided to change all her plans? Surely not because some old girl had written to her out of the blue to say she had a trunk belonging to Viva’s parents. Or was all that just an excuse to get back to India, which, bizarrely, when you thought about everything that had happened to her there, she still missed—a permanent ache as if some vital organ had been removed.
Miss Snow was still asleep, snoring with a puttering sound and occasionally moaning as though she was wrestling with her own demons. When she sat up suddenly, Viva’s typewriter fell with a clunk onto the floor, followed by a ream of loose paper.
Kneeling to pick up her scattered pages, Viva saw navy blue water rushing past her porthole in coils like a snake. She went to the basin and washed her face. There was an hour and a half before the first sitting for dinner; she was determined to bash out a first draft of her article before she ate. She was still mulling over the title, “The Fishing Fleet” or perhaps “The Price of a Husband in India.” One day, even the memory of it would make her burn with shame.
Chapter Eight
Poona
“Master,” Jack Chandler’s bearer called softly through the bathroom door. “Wake up, please, time is marching. Jaldi!”
“I’m not asleep, Dinesh,” Jack Chandler called back, “I’m thinking.”
He’d been lying in the bath for almost an hour. It was dark now; the new electric lights were still more off than on. His eyes were closed as he brooded about marriage and why men told lies, and Sunita, to whom he must soon say good-bye.
Normally, this was a favorite time of the day, when he peeled off clothes that smelled satisfactorily of horse sweat and stepped into warm water, with a whiskey mixed just the way he liked it, and allowed himself the luxury of floating like an almost inanimate sea creature before Dinesh dressed him and he went to the club. But tonight, he was a bundle of nerves. That afternoon, he’d been to the dusty cantonment church to talk to the vicar, a faded uninspiring man, about arrangements for his marriage in four weeks’ time. He’d written down all the details on a piece of paper—Miss Rose Wetherby, spinster, of Park House, Middle Wallop, Hampshire—but the vicar had informed him that you didn’t need banns to get married in India, so many people, he had implied without actually saying it, did it on the spur of the moment here. And this exchange had further rattled Jack who was, generally speaking, a man with a logical brain who thought things through.
“Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted” was one of the rules he’d lived his life by. A sergeant major had bellowed it out to his class of gawky recruits at Sandhurst in the first week of their terrifying induction there, and it had saved his life more than once since then. So why, well, it was too late to bother about this now, but why had he recklessly ignored this, jumped in eyes closed, in the matter of finding a new wife?
He’d set himself the task of writing to Rose earlier that night and posting it to her in Port Said, where her ship would arrive in twelve days’ time by his calculations.
“My dearest Rose,” he’d written. “Today I went to the church where we are to be married and—” He had crumpled up the letter, irritated with the banality of his thoughts and for not having the right words at a time when, surely, they should be tumbling out.
But more and more, he found communications with her stilted, like a grown-up and more fateful version of the letters they had been forced to write during Sunday-morning sessions at his English boarding school. The excitement of their earlier letters had petered out into a dull exchange of plans beefed up with endearments—my own little fiancée, my soon-to-be darling wife—which now seemed to him artificial, if not downright overfamiliar.
He owed Rose’s mother a letter, too. They’d met twice, the first time at an Easter party at her house, where a dozen