of liking to lie in the bath for hours when he had a problem to solve—seem like guilty secrets.
Sunita’s house was in the old part of town—twenty minutes and a world away from his. No distance at all, really. Lots of men carried on with their women after they were married, but he didn’t want to. His own father—a hearty, distant man’s man—had been a cavalry man himself with the Eighth, his hero for years—an explorer, an adventurer, a county-standard cricket player. He, as he often reminded Jack, had known some proper fighting, in his case mostly in Mesopotamia. But he’d also been a philanderer, and the pain his lies had caused had seeped into all their lives like a slow poisoning.
“All men lie,” Jack’s mother had once told him and his three sisters. “They can’t help themselves.”
Only three years ago, during one particularly wretched home leave spent at his parents’ house in Oxford, the atmosphere had become so intolerable that his father had eaten his meals at a different time from the rest of the family, in his study, although it may as well have been in the doghouse.
Three days before Christmas, his mother, red-faced and wild-eyed after too many gins, had explained what the fuss was. His father, it seemed, had a new woman, a young girl he’d set up in digs in Oxford. The girl was about to have his child.
“Do you know,” his mother had said, her face contorted with rage, “all my life, I’ve never really understood men and never really liked them. Now I do understand them and I hate them.”
And he’d been horrified and repelled by the pain on her face, hung his head, and felt as guilty as if he had committed the act himself. He didn’t want that for Rose. In old-fashioned language that strangely appealed to him, he had plighted his troth. He knew he had his father’s wildness: loved shooting and riding horses too fast, getting drunk in the mess, making love, but he still prided himself on having a more logical streak. If he was to be married, this wildness must now be curbed. He wanted to make her happy, to earn her trust and keep it.
So much of his life he already saw through her eyes now. Would she take to India in the way he had? He’d tried to be honest with her about the bone-shriveling heat of summers here, the poverty of the people, the constant moves, the hard life of the army wife.
But he’d been desperate to woo her at the same time. Desperate in the way a man is who has fallen for a girl like a ton of bricks but who knows he only has a week’s home leave left. A certain hardheaded practicality had crept into his warnings.
He’d met her first at a deb’s party in London, roped in as a spare man by a friend of his mother. “Decorative,” she’d called him, to his considerable irritation. He’d walked up Park Lane on his own to get there, more nervous and shy than he liked to admit. The London he’d visited during the grim, desperate last days of the war had been covered in wreaths, full of funeral processions, its parks frowsy and unloved. This new London had shining little cars buzzing up and down Park Lane, frightening the horses. The girls had horrible new hairstyles and blew smoke in your face.
Partly to spare him from the miserable atmosphere at home, his mother had kept on getting her friends to ask him to parties, but the parties had thrown him. At one, he’d seen a couple openly copulating on top of a pile of overcoats in the spare room and had backed out scarlet with embarrassment and wanting to punch both of them for making a spectacle of themselves. At another, bewildered by a group of excited people sniffing up a pile of powder, he’d caused laughter by asking what they were doing, and been told rudely, “It’s naughty salt, you ignoramus. Cocaine.”
But Rose. She wasn’t like that. At the Savile Club, where he’d stood in his dinner jacket underneath the ceiling painted with fat cherubs, she’d appeared beside him, endearingly gawky in an evening dress that was too old and slightly too big for her, but unmistakably a beauty with her silky blond hair and sweet smile. The band had started to play a fox-trot and she’d raised her eyebrows slightly and smiled at him.
“Dance with me,” he’d said, and