JUST AS THEY WERE ABOUT to dock, Aunt Constance’s migraine struck with full force. She had barely the strength to protest as Sophie helped her to bed.
“But Sophie, I must see you safely arrived . . . ” Aunt Constance’s voice was faint with pain.
“And so you have,” said Sophie, as she drew the curtains against the light. “What you must do now is to rest. Someone is to meet me on the quay, and I’ll be perfectly fine.”
“But . . . ” With a groan Aunt Constance fell back on her damp pillow. “You have the Delhi address? Promise you’ll write the minute you’re settled?”
“I promise,” said Sophie as she leaned down to kiss her aunt’s cheek.
“My brave girl!” sighed Aunt Constance.
If only that were true, thought Sophie. How she had dreaded this parting, from Aunt Constance and from all that remained of her old life. Yet there was impatience, too, in the midst of her sadness, to discover what might lie ahead.
Encumbered by her cases, Sophie disembarked with the other Calcutta passengers into an immense confusion of noise and heat and jostling crowds.
Beggars, porters, street hawkers, goats, cows, baggage-laden travellers swarmed over the quayside. The air was thick with the acrid reeks of charcoal smoke and rotting vegetation. Queasy and disoriented, Sophie gazed round in despair. A determined looking Indian porter was pushing his way in her direction. But how much would he want to be paid, and could she trust him not to run off with her belongings? She shook her head, no.
Where in all this crush of humanity were the relatives who were meant to collect her?
Just then she caught sight of a tall Englishwoman who, from the vantage point of some nearby steps, was peering anxiously into the crowd. Sophie snatched off her hat and waved it frantically. The woman smiled, waved back, mouthed something Sophie could not make out. Then, closely followed by an Indian manservant, she forged her way towards Sophie.
Buoyed by the hope of rescue, Sophie called out “Mrs. Grenville-Smith?”
“Sophie! At last! I was afraid I’d somehow missed you. How was your voyage? Are you quite exhausted?”
“A little,” said Sophie, wiping her damp forehead with her pocket handkerchief. In the clammy heat her long-sleeved shirtwaist was clinging to her skin, and her stays were pinching. She was beginning to feel quite faint. She envied Jean Grenville-Smith her loose-fitting tunic dress in teal-coloured silk, and sensible wide-brimmed straw hat.
“Good heavens,” said Mrs. Grenville-Smith, “You look quite done in! We’ve brought the motorcar, and we’ll get you home at once.” Sophie stayed close behind her as she threaded her way through the crowd, the servant following with Sophie’s cases.
Though freshly waxed and polished, the motorcar, a Ford four-seater, had dented fenders and looked as though it had seen hard use. The manservant took the wheel, expertly maneuvering his way around rickshaws, bicycles, bullock-carts and heedless pedestrians.
They drove past rows of palatial white buildings, splendidly domed, colonnaded, and porticoed, surrounded by trees and set in expanses of green lawn. The City of Palaces, thought Sophie, remembering Calcutta’s old imperial name. None of it was quite what she had expected, and she started to say so — then paused, flustered.
“Oh dear, what shall I call you? Should I call you Aunt Jean?”
Jean Grenville-Smith laughed. “How elderly that sounds! What sort of relations are we, Sophie? Second cousins?”
“I’m Tom’s first cousin once removed, I think,” said Sophie, who had taken the trouble to look it up.
“Well, then. To Tom’s cousins at whatever remove, I’m Jeannie.”
Playing tour guide, Jeannie pointed out the sights as they turned from the Esplanade onto the Chowringhee Road. Here was the vast green parkland called the Maidan, with the high grey walls of Fort William beyond, more white palaces and villas, and the Indian Museum where Tom Grenville-Smith worked. Just ahead they could see towering cranes where construction of the Victoria Monument was in progress — “remarkably slow progress,” remarked Jeannie. “One despairs of ever seeing it finished.”
“And what is that?” asked Sophie, pointing to a slender column that rose from the Maidan, piercing the smoke-veiled upper air.
“That,” said Jeannie,” is a monument to Major-General Sir David Ochterlony, the conqueror of Nepal, who kept a harem of thirteen wives, and paraded them about on thirteen elephants. Or so the story goes. One day we’ll climb the two hundred and eighteen steps, Sophie, and you can look out over the whole of Calcutta.”
Presently they left the crowded thoroughfare of Chowringhee Road for Park Street, and came into an area of wide, quiet streets lined with cassia trees and solid mid-Victorian houses standing in their own walled gardens. Their driver turned into a side street, drove through wrought iron gates and drew up in the shady driveway of a tall veranda-encircled house, with white pillars guarding the entrance.
A stern looking manservant, turbanned and black bearded, greeted them at the door. Sophie, stepping into the cool interior and looking round, exclaimed, “What a marvelous house!” How different this was from Aunt Constance’s cottage, with its dark mahogany furniture and faded carpets. They were standing in a long, high-ceilinged room with white-painted walls. Vivid Afghani carpets lay scattered over the marble floors. For furnishings there were some light bamboo chairs and settees piled with silk cushions, a carved rosewood cabinet, a few small brass-topped tables. Embroidered Indian hangings shared the walls with delicate botanical prints and drawings of exotic animals. It was just the sort of house where Sophie imagined a zoologist and an author would live—though in her experience, things seldom lived up so well to expectations. It was not home, any more than Aunt Constance’s cottage had been home, but to Sophie it felt like a house where people could be happy.
“It is quite marvelous, isn’t it?” Jeannie was saying. “And far too grand for this family. A few years ago when Calcutta was still the capital, we never could have afforded a house like this. It belonged to a government official, you see, and when they all decamped to Delhi, it was left standing empty, and so we seized the chance to lease it.”
Their driver came in with Sophie’s cases, and Jeannie broke off to say, “In the west bedroom, please, Thekong.”
“The house is convenient, being close to the Museum,” she went on, “but if it weren’t for the small army of servants that came with the place, we should rattle around in it like three peas in a very large tea chest . . . Sophie, my dear, you must be exhausted. Let me show you to your bedroom, and then we’ll have tea.”
She led Sophie into a large, airy room with windows facing west. “We haven’t done much in the way of decorating,” she said, “as we thought you would like to choose your own things.” Sophie could not imagine what else she might need, or want. There was a wood-framed bed with a bright Indian spread, a rosewood bureau and a comfortable chair, a large gilt-framed mirror, and on the floor a thick, soft rug in shades of red and purple and gold. A little Indian servant-girl was busy unpacking and putting away Sophie’s clothes. Already, Sophie knew, they had begun to smell of Calcutta — that pungent mixture of smoke and vegetable decay.
After tea, served on the veranda by a waiter in impeccable whites, Sophie wandered out into the garden. This late in the year it was still ablaze with roses and crimson hibiscus. Bougainvillea clambered over a sundrenched wall. A girl of ten or eleven, clearly the daughter of the house, was sprawled on her stomach in the shade of a flowering tree, a book spread open in front of her.
“Hello,” the girl said, glancing up at Sophie’s approach. She was bare-legged, sandalled, wearing a faded cotton frock. “Are you Sophie?”
“I am.”
The girl closed her book and sat up, pushing back a tangle of red-gold curls. “I’m Linnaea Alexandra Grenville-Smith.”
“I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance,” Sophie said.
“But for everyday I’m Alex, so if you prefer you can call me that.” She gazed at Sophie with wide-set green eyes. She had a lively, intelligent face, generously daubed with freckles. Her expression was friendly enough, but all the same, Sophie felt that she was being discreetly judged.
“I believe I will,” said Sophie. “It’s easier to remember. But Linnaea Alexandra — what a pretty name.”
“I know,” said the child complacently. “It’s Linnaea for Mr. Linnnaeus, who classified the plants and animals . . . ”
“A fine name for a zoologist’s daughter,” Sophie agreed.
“And for a botanist too. That’s what I plan to be, when I’m older. And Alexandra is for my mother’s friend. My mother says I am a petite sauvage, just as Alexandra was at my age.”
“And is that true?” asked Sophie. “Are you a wild child?”
“Not usually,” said Alex, after a moment’s consideration. “I believe the other Alexandra was a good deal wilder. She ran away from home when she was only five.”
“Good gracious,” said Sophie. “And where does she live, this other Alexandra?”
“I suppose, not anywhere in particular. Right now she is exploring the Himalayan Mountains.”
Sophie, intrigued, made a mental note to ask Jeannie about this.
“My mother says you have come to live with us,” said Alex.
“That seems to be the plan.”
“Because of the war?”
Sophie nodded.
“That’s why I’m here as well,” said Alex. “I’m meant to be at school in England, which undoubtedly I would hate. My sister Diana’s in England, learning to be a nurse, and she doesn’t like it one bit. So I suppose in one way the war is a good thing.”
“But surely not in any other way,” said Sophie. “I can’t imagine that war can ever be a good thing.”
“I suppose not,” conceded Alex. “I used to read those books by Mr. Henty — you know the ones, With Clive in India, The Young Buglers — and I imagined how splendid it must be to carry a sword and march in parades. But then I heard my mother say that she was glad she had only daughters, so she would not have to send her children off to war, for it was bad enough to have to send them away to England. So it was foolish of me, I suppose, to want to be a boy . . . ”
“Yes,” said Sophie. “Yes, I believe it was.”
Just before sundown Tom Grenville-Smith — a tall, soft-spoken man in vigorous middle age — arrived home from the museum. Dinner was served in the echoing vastness of the dining room. “There was a definite chill in the air this morning,” said Jeannie, as they settled round the table. “We’ll be needing a fire soon” — though Sophie, sweltering in her lightest cotton dress, found this difficult to imagine.
Aunt Constance’s cook had sometimes produced what purported to be curry — chicken or lamb covered in a bland yellow sauce, with some nuts and raisins mixed in. It bore no resemblance to the exotically spiced dishes offered by the dignified manservant. Alex, now scrubbed and brushed and demure in her starched white frock, explained each dish to Sophie as it was served. There were vegetable-stuffed pastries — samosas, Alex said — as well as fish curry served with rice and accompanied by crisp puffs called luchi. Afterwards, instead of the sturdy pudding beloved of Aunt Constance’s cook, there was fresh fruit — bananas, oranges, papayas, the last mangos of the season — and little coconut flavoured cakes called pitha .“We don’t have those very often,” said Alex, surreptitiously helping herself to another. “I asked cook to make them for you as a special treat.”
“And what do you think of Calcutta so far?” Tom Grenville-Smith asked Sophie.
“I’m a little confused, “confessed Sophie. “I’m not sure what I was expecting . . . ”
Tom laughed. “No doubt you’ve been reading Mr. Kipling’s Calcutta sketches? ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ and so forth?”
Sophie nodded. It was in one of many books she had brought to read on the ship.
“The smells and gross darkness of the night, in evil, time-rotten brickwork, and another wilderness of shut-up houses,” said Tom, quoting. “But Kipling was not wrong. His Calcutta is as real as this one. There are not one but many Calcuttas, Sophie, as you’ll discover.”
Much later, listening to the soft whir of the electric fan and the mysterious sounds of the Indian night, Sophie was exhausted but far too wrought up to sleep.
Nothing was quite as she had imagined it — from the noise and oppressive heat, the city’s rank smells and crowded streets and lush unexpected gardens, to the calm and grace of this beautiful house. And the most agreeable surprise, thought Sophie, who had been prepared for the dullness of a settled middle-aged household — were these lively, youthful-seeming cousins.
Jean Grenville-Smith must be over forty now. Sophie had imagined her as another Aunt Constance — a solid, comfortable shape, imposing of bosom and broad of hip. But Jeannie’s figure was slender still, her hair a vivid shade of reddish-gold, her green eyes lively. Aunt Constance had told Sophie something of Jeannie’s history. She was the daughter of a Scottish schoolteacher, whose family, with the father’s death, had fallen on hard times. “Once,” said Aunt Constance, “hard as it is to imagine now, Jean worked in the fields as a common farm labourer.”
Perhaps not entirely hard to imagine, thought Sophie, now that she had met Jeannie Grenville-Smith. There was a firmness of jaw, a plain-spokenness about her that in another woman might seem intimidating. She was a memsahib, after all, and that, Aunt Constance had emphasized, demanded dignity and presence. But when something particularly amused Jean Grenville-Smith — and more often than not it was one of Alex’s sage pronouncements — her eyes danced, and she would turn away to hide a mischievous smile.
And Tom Grenville-Smith? Surely he must close on fifty — not bent and scholarly, as Sophie would have guessed, but tall and tanned and energetic. It was apparent to all that Jeannie and Tom doted on each other. When their eyes met, it was as though they shared some secret that the rest of the world was not to know.
. . . And then there was Alex . She was not quite sure what to make of Alex.