The world smells like water, loamy and dense. Alec lies still in the slanting angle of sunlight that creeps through the curtains, the light too low over the water, the chattering of birds too loud in the sagging hedges that line the lane on the other side of the dark stone wall. He’s been here in Fenbourne for two days. Shipboard feels like a dream, a stack of weeks he almost can’t remember. He had three days in London with Uncle Roger, the city smoking with industry, crowded in a way Alec doesn’t understand. Bombay was full of people too, sometimes so many it felt as though the whole world had come to live in the streets outside the compound, but they were tangible in a way that the London masses are not.
He’s lying in the patch of sun, thinking about the train from London to Ely, and the skyward reach of the old cathedral, when his uncle taps on the door and leans in.
“Time to face the day,” he says.
Alec pulls the thick woolen blanket tighter against his chest. He’s not sure the day needs facing, least of all by him. He can smell the English breakfast downstairs, and his treacherous stomach growls. Uncle Roger smiles. Alec pulls the blanket over his face. He wants the echo of the chaiwallah and the bright yellow birds that used to call to him from the moringa trees outside his bedroom window. Not two months before the cholera he had sat in the courtyard of his father’s friend, a merchant who told stories of the gods as if he had been part of them. Alec had rubbed the trunk and knees of an elderly elephant while his mahout told stories of the elephant’s youth and the campaigns they had fought together. India is all Alec knows.
“Alec,” his uncle says. “Time to get dressed.” He steps into the narrow room and pauses. Alec breathes in the slight mustiness of the blanket. It smells like water, too. The day before they had driven to Ely, the three of them in Aunt Constance’s Rover, and in a shop full of the fug of old cigarettes he had been fitted for what his aunt called “proper clothes.” She had bought him a jumper, the drape of its collar soft despite the innate scratchiness of the wool.
“They itch,” he says out loud, without meaning to. He means the wool and starched bright cotton of the clothes, but he also means England, and the cottage, and the low gray sky. The truth is that it’s the deep end of autumn outside, and he can tell already that the heavy clothes are better suited to the Fenlands than the flannels he wore in India, even in the cooler climates. He almost smiles, remembering the hill stations in Kashmir, when his father had galloped bareback on his tall black gelding with his collar open, singing songs that made his mother blush. Those summer mornings had made Alec feel as though he was closer to being a man like his father, the pair of them striding the mountains, his mother watching them with a smile, a light shawl bundled up around her shoulders against the faint whisper of a Himalayan breeze.
Uncle Roger sighs. “That they do.”
Alec lowers the blanket and looks at his uncle, who is staring out the window, lost somewhere else. Probably India, where he will return after Christmas to rejoin the Guides Cavalry in Mardan. Take me with you, he almost says, but then he thinks of his mother, who wanted him here if he couldn’t be with her. He takes a breath and holds it as long as he can, trying to acclimate himself to a world full of water.
He sits in a high-backed chair in Aunt Constance’s dining room, moving bacon and beans around on his plate. Uncle Roger has heaped his own plate with food, and Aunt Constance turns her attention from Alec to watch her brother eat, her plate nearly empty but for a poached egg and half a tomato.
“Honestly,” she says, after he goes back for more, “you’re going to make yourself as fat as Father.”
Uncle Roger laughs. “Never, darling Connie.”
Alec, who never met his mother’s parents, looks down at his bacon. The elder Tennants had left India and passed away long before he was born. Aunt Constance had visited once, after the Great War, when he was much younger. He only partway remembers her in Bombay, talking late into the night with his mother. Now, it’s the first time Alec truly understands what it means that Aunt Constance is his mother’s sister, not just Uncle Roger’s. Not just his aunt. He examines her face, looking for traces of his mother.
She turns her focus to Alec, lines forming between her eyebrows as she watches him with concern.
“You must eat, love.”
Uncle Roger says, “She’s right, Alec.”
“We have to go on,” Aunt Constance says quietly. She looks down into her coffee. “They would want us to.”
Alec blinks, the sharp welling of tears almost too much. What can he say to that?
As they make their way to visit Fenbourne’s vicar late that afternoon, Alec trails behind his aunt and uncle, kicking at small stones with his sturdy new boots. His aunt’s cottage sits at the northern tip of the village, just within sight of the spires of St. Anne’s, and the lanes they cross as they walk into Fenbourne run toward an impossibly distant horizon. The adults talk, laughing sometimes when one brings up something the other only half remembers. Alec falls farther behind, bewildered by the wholly flat world around him, and the lowness of the sky. He turns his attention to watching the way Aunt Constance walks, the way she carries herself, the deep chestnut of her hair where it peeks out from beneath her hat. Her shoulders are straight under her brown velvet coat, and she strides almost like Uncle Roger. His mother had walked like that, too. When they reach St. Anne’s, his aunt points at the bell tower, and Uncle Roger nods and says something about ringing changes. Alec follows the lines of the church with his eyes, memorizing them and wishing for his notebook. Later he will draw the dark and light of the stones, the sweep of the willow tree over the churchyard, the way the spires jut into the sky.
When his aunt and uncle step away from the church and cross to the vicarage, Aunt Constance puts out a hand to Alec. He takes it, startled by the strength of her grip. She pauses, bends a little at the waist, meets his gaze. He’s sure she’s going to say something—she has the look of having practiced a speech—but instead she smiles. He nods as if her smile is a covenant, overwhelmed. She has his mother’s dark eyes.
There’s a massive bronze lion’s head on the door, and Uncle Roger lifts it as high as it goes and lets it fall with a gratifying metallic thump. Alec smiles, and his uncle winks at him.
After a moment the door opens and a maid in a starched white apron appears. “Mrs. Fane.” She ducks her head.
“Good afternoon, Mary,” Aunt Constance says. “I believe Mrs. Attwell is expecting us.”
Mary ducks her head again and steps aside. Alec follows everyone into the house. It’s dark in the front hall, and almost as cold as it is outside. Mary leads them along a deep red carpet into the drawing room, where a woman stands, smiling, her hair pulled up into a complicated knot.
“Constance,” she says. She and Alec’s aunt embrace.
“Imogene,” Aunt Constance says, “you already know my brother, Captain Roger Tennant, and this is my nephew, Alec Oswin.”
“I am so pleased to see you again, Captain Tennant,” Mrs. Attwell says.
Uncle Roger bows gallantly over her hand. “The pleasure is mine.”
“And, Alec,” Mrs. Attwell says. She looks down at him. “I am very pleased to meet you.”
“Hello.” He puts out a tentative hand, which she shakes. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”
Mrs. Attwell smiles, but it’s a sad smile, nowhere near her eyes. She and Aunt Constance sit together on the long sofa, talking about the local hospital, and Uncle Roger settles himself into a chair. Alec, left standing, has no idea what to do with himself. He drifts closer to his uncle, who grins at him as if they’re sharing a secret, but Alec doesn’t know what it is.
Mary brings a silver tray laden with a tea service and sets it on a table near the sofa. She hovers, waiting.
Mrs. Attwell nods. “Thank you, Mary.” As the maid turns to go, the older woman says, “Please tell Mr. Attwell our guests are here.”
Mary slips out of the room, and Alec watches her go. In India most of the servants had been Hindu or Muslim men, except for his ayah and his mother’s maid. There had been a whole staff. At his aunt’s house there is only Mrs. Whittleton, cook and housekeeper both.
The heavy wooden door opens again, but this time it’s not Mary. Instead a man wearing tweed over the black and white of his vicar’s garb bustles in, followed by a girl in a blue dress with a sailor collar. She regards Alec with interest.
“Captain,” the man says, “Mrs. Fane. I’m so glad to see you.” His watery blue eyes cruise over Alec. “Well, young man, I am awfully glad to make your acquaintance, although I very much regret the circumstances.”
“Thank you,” Alec says.
Mrs. Attwell turns to the girl. “June, darling, why don’t you show Alec the conservatory?”
June nods, her eyes still on Alec. There is something about her gaze that holds him in place. Not just the color of her eyes, but their steadiness. They remind him of a piece of ocean glass he found for his mother when they went to the sea at Kerala.
“My name is June Attwell,” she says, as she leads him out of the drawing room.
“I’m Alec Oswin.”
“Yes,” she says. “I know.”
He treads quietly behind her, ever deeper into the house, trying to remember the way back to the others, distracted by the rows of portraits hung along the hallways.
“My mother says you’re from India.” She pauses beneath a picture of a stag, the oils dark and heathered, and looks him over again. “You don’t look it.”
“I’ve never been to England until now,” he says, although this does not answer what feels like a question. “It’s awfully gray.”
June leans hard on a golden-glassed door. “Not everywhere,” she says, as the door slowly opens. Alec follows her into the bright, open space, gravel paths and greenery dappled red and gold and blue by panels fit at random into the mullioned glass of the walls and ceiling. It takes him a moment to realize that he’s finally starting to feel warm again.
She watches him patiently, as if she can feel how much he wants to curl up under the massive leaves of an unexpected palm. It’s not India, it doesn’t smell like India, but it’s not the watery blur of the Fens either. He might cry.
June smiles. “Come look.” She moves along the paths so surely, the dark fall of her hair curling down against the broad collar of her dress. When she stops, she points down into a low marble fountain, where carp the color of sunrise swim just beneath the surface. “I call that big one Loomis because he looks like my father’s deacon.”
Alec laughs, surprising himself. June grins.
They stand together quietly, watching the carp.
“Tell me about India, Alec.”
He closes his eyes, concentrating on the smell of green things growing around him. “I don’t know how,” he says at last.
“Well,” she says, “in books, there’s ever so much jungle and wild animals. And soldiers.”
He thinks about it. “Sometimes.”
She waits, bending to pick up small handfuls of the pea-sized gravel and arranges it in shapes on the lip of the fountain.
“In the Himalayas, there is always snow,” he says, “and leopards.”
June stops making shapes. “Have you seen them?”
“Yes,” he says. There is a hill station at Gulmarg where the summer is full of flowers, and in the winter the snow there drifts as tall as his father, the Himalayas rising in the distance. “Here there is so much mud. There’s mud there too, but it’s not the same.” He pauses, thinking of the old men he saw from the car, catching eels and chopping at sedges. “Is all of England like this?”
“I expect not,” June says. “I’ve only ever been as far as Cambridge. Perhaps one day we’ll find out about the rest.”
“Perhaps,” he says. He likes the we.
June nods, and shifts a piece of gravel from one shape to another. She stares at the pattern for a moment, looks at Alec, frowns. “My father says you don’t have a mother or father anymore.”
He almost cries out. He concentrates on breathing, trying to count the stones on the fountain, watching the fish.
Her eyes pained, June says, “Mother says I ask too many questions.”
Does she? Alec doesn’t know. He has known her only a few minutes, but it feels like longer. For a split second he thinks he will ask his ayah if she can explain, and then he remembers everything again. It hurts.
“My mother died,” he says. “They all did.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. Her frown deepens. “Your aunt’s husband died in the War, in Palestine.”
Alec starts to speak, stops. He keeps forgetting that Aunt Constance has lost people, too.
“Well,” June says, “shall we get some cake?”
It’s impossible to keep up with her, but he wants to try. When June looks at him, he can feel his edges. He hasn’t felt this real in months. Since before his parents died.
She nods again, as if she’s reached a conclusion. “To the kitchen, then, Alec. Let’s see what Cook is doing.”