A pale flat light showed outside the windows without making its way into the room.
Though the breakfast table had been cleared for more than an hour, there was still a heavy reminder of food in the air. It was the time of day Rud most feared, alone face-to-face with the work that he must do if he was to make a life for himself here. On his own once more in London, he was struggling.
But at least he had a new project, a joint venture.
A brief knock and Wolcott Balestier was with him. With hardly a word they sat down together, one each side of the scarred mahogany table. It was not twelve hours since they had parted after one of those evenings at home with the Balestiers that he looked forward to. Wolcott’s sister Carrie made a fellow feel at home, even if she did laugh at him.
‘Why of course we’ll set a place for you every night, Rud, if that’s what pleases you. Lord knows you keep enough of your wardrobe here.’
He could stand feeling a bit sheepish.
‘Your turn to start,’ Rud nodded and Wolcott prepared to read aloud.
‘I just had this idea for the fourth chapter, late last night: see what you think.’
Throwing himself back till his chair tilted under him, Rud gazed up at the ceiling as he listened. He took out his pipe and reached for tobacco, yet his whole attention was fixed on the other man. He felt himself expand in Wolcott’s presence, become more intensely aware. The moment the reading came to a halt, he sat back up again.
‘It’s damned good, you know, we’re getting on famously.’
Other people were more doubtful about this collaboration.
‘I thought Mr. Balestier was an agent, not a writer,’ Aunt Georgie, who was not uninformed about literary London, had objected.
More bluntly, ‘What the devil is in this for young Kipling?’ they had asked at the Savile Club: one or two, already trembling for Wilde in his recklessness, had hoped that whatever happened they would be discreet.
Rud was excited. He leaned over the table to lay a hand on the other’s sleeve.
‘You really think that McClure will give us a contract for the novel even before it’s finished? And he likes the name? I wondered whether The Naulahka was too enigmatic but it seems you were right, it intrigues, even if people don’t know what it means – it’s always the way. A hint of the inscrutable, a pinch of the Arabian Nights but not too much.’
Wolcott turned his lazy smile on his friend. He found something quite intriguing in Rud himself, in that paradoxical combination: the still boyish mouth under that heavy moustache, the clipped English spoken out of a face that was almost dark enough for a native. He looked down at the hand as it lay on his sleeve then back up at Rud. There was a pause. He did not want it to be removed.
To his disappointment, Rud sprung to his feet, scattering tobacco, his face darkly flushed. ‘That book I was telling you about – I found it last night; let me give it to you before I forget.’
Sighing, Wolcott prepared to leave: he must get to his office in Westminster Yard by twelve-thirty at least. Then he saw that the hand which held the battered volume out to him was trembling. Stepping forward, he laid his own hand lightly on the other’s shoulder, up by the collar; he could feel the warmth of the skin he could not quite touch. ‘My dear fellow,’ he began but got no further than ‘My dear’ before he was leaning forward into an embrace. His lips brushed Rud’s hair.
Rud shivered. All the fear he’d felt at the house of the boy whores thrilled in him, the rush to escape, the desire – Wolcott was his only real friend, all that mess of feelings could swamp everything. It was always the same, that sex thing ended in leaving him more alone.
He stepped aside, hands raised to fend Wolcott off.
He was shaking. ‘You don’t understand. There are terrible risks. I never want to go through it again.’
‘As you wish, Rud, as you wish. But you must know how you make people feel. You’re so open, you seem to invite, it makes –’
Once the battered door had closed behind Wolcott, Rud waited and then turned the key. How to retain this friend, this companiable presence which kept him writing? The thought of going back to working in isolation filled him with dread. In Lahore, working on the CMG, he’d been desperate to have time for his own work. He’d never realised that the demands and the pressure had been also a support. The truth was that he’d seemed to be falling apart in London, left to himself. He didn’t want to go away on rest cures, he hated the fishing holidays recommended by doctors, he wanted to write.
It was after ten and the handsomely furnished space Wolcott kept for entertaining was clearing. The evening had gone well, thought Carrie Balestier. As usual she almost dared to tell herself. Her brother so wanted these occasions, their salon, as they giggled together, to be a success. His plan of campaign as a newcomer was based on making themselves the nerve centre of London letters. She guessed only a Yankee could be so brash and get away with it.
Bram Stoker had stayed on, having arrived late from the Lyceum but Henry James was clearly about to leave. Hat in hand he was beside her, smiling down gravely. They could always count on him to show up for their literary evenings.
‘Carrie, my dear’ he bent over her. A genuine Boston Brahmin! Those exquisite manners of his would have made her feel awkward if she hadn’t been sure of his kind heart.
Yet she did hope he wouldn’t linger. Rud Kipling was standing by the fireplace, absorbed, arguing with her brother and she longed to join them.
To her disappointment, Rud broke off as she watched and began to look about ineffectually for his things.
‘I believe I ought – there’s something. Do forgive me.’
With a smile and a touch of the hand, she turned from the older man.
‘I see that I must let you go,’ James laughed gently. She could feel his benevolent gaze on her as she crossed the room.
Earlier, as she grew warm in the crowded space, she’d been about to cast off her shawl when she caught sight of Rud’s coat on the back of a sofa. She’d dropped her own garment to cover it, hardly knowing why. Now, coming up to Rud, with a showman’s gesture she revealed his lost overcoat.
As he shrugged it on he mumbled apologetically.
‘I’m just off to Gatti’s, the music hall by my lodgings. Don’t want to miss the late show. A song I wrote might be on the bill tonight.’
She could have just swallowed her regret. But no. Before she realised what she was doing, she heard her own voice asking,
‘Won’t you take me along with you to hear it?’
He paused in his struggle with a sleeve that was the wrong way out. Seeming startled but also pleased he looked straight at her.
‘You’d come just with me? No chaperone? I know Wolcott isn’t free to come with us, he’s just told me he’s working late.’
Delight. And a tremor. But what had she, Carrie Balestier, ever cared for the proprieties? She’d stuck out like a sore thumb back in Brattleboro: ‘way too opinionated in her dress and conversation’ they’d complained. Here in England, they didn’t expect an American woman to match their notions of a lady. She meant to explore.
The man on the door was muffled in a heavy topcoat, though the month was June and the evening warm.
‘Old soldier,’ Rud hissed when she looked at him questioningly. ‘Years in the tropics, feels the cold.’
When they arrived at the head of the queue, ‘Evenin’ sir, we’re seeing you pretty regular these days and glad of same.’
‘Likewise, Hobbs.’ Then, with a gulp – was it embarrassment, could it possibly be pride? – ‘This is my friend, Miss Balestier.’
Hobbs touched his hat and gave an awkward bow but Carrie held out her hand.
‘I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance Mr. Hobbs,’ which was no more than the truth. This was a new world, newer and more thrilling than that evening of decorous conversation they’d left behind.
Rud handed over a shilling and they were inside. Deafened at first by the roar of voices, they gasped in air thick with smoke.
‘Take my arm,’ he ordered ‘I’ll get us to a seat, just hang on to me.’ With a thrill of pleasure she felt the warmth of his arm right through the sleeve. She shut her eyes wanting for that moment only to be aware of him.
When she looked about her once more, she saw that the audience, men and women mixed, were seated around a central ring. It brought back the trip she’d taken out West, with Wolcott. A boxing match she’d witnessed in a remote lumber camp. Far more women here, of course but the same energy. Something raw that made her tingle.
‘A pint of porter comes with those sixpenny tickets. Can I leave you while I collect mine? I don’t suppose you –’
‘But I want to drink beer too. I’m going the whole hog this evening, Rud. Other women are drinking…’
‘So you’re going to join the four and eleven penny bonnets are you? Want “one of them glasses like a lidy”?
She frowned.
‘Is that some kind of criticism? Of these women?’
Under the crude flare of the gas lamps she couldn’t be sure but he seemed to flush.
‘It’s just a way – a way of describing them,’ he said lamely.
‘I’m sorry, Rud, to me it sounds downright snobbish. Hateful. I didn’t think it of you.’
Silence fell between them, louder than the surrounding noise. Then she remembered Hobbs and Rud’s lack of ‘side’, as the Brits called it. ‘Swank’ was good enough for her.
‘Well, I guess we can’t turn you into an American overnight, Wolcott and I. But Rud, I’ll make a democrat out of you yet.’
‘I think you might,’ he answered quietly, as he rose to make his way over to the bar. Business was brisk: it was several minutes before he wriggled his way back through the crowd, a glass in one hand, a pewter mug in the other.
She took a sip of the dark porter. How bitter it was. Strange. After that awkward outburst she felt more at ease with him than before.
‘Plenty of soldiers up in the gallery,’ he pointed overhead. ‘It’s a good sign. They’ve heavy boots and when they stamp out the chorus, they take the whole house with them.’
The thinly padded bench hard beneath her, ears ringing, she laughed, feeling more alive than in weeks. A relief from books and writers. She settled to the show, with its tumbling sequence of acts. Queens of song followed comic vocalists, dancers capered in top boots. And then came a man dressed as a woman – very stylishly – who also warbled. She’d certainly heard of such things but this was the first time of seeing. A new world. But underneath her own pleasure, she knew that beside her there was tension, a waiting.
Then, ‘That’s my fellow, here he is,’ Rud exclaimed.
A stocky figure, topped with a soldier’s forage cap, had appeared. With a flourish, arms thrown wide, the Master of Ceremonies, in his white tie and tails announced ‘The Great and Only Mr. James Fawn, Consort of the Muse.’
‘He won’t sing mine first, it’s not quite so new now,’ Rud told her, over the din as the orchestra broke into the Consort’s first number. He had the audience in the palm of his hand at once. Just like Rud himself when he talked: he could hold a room spellbound.
He was clutching her wrist to get her attention. The intimacy of it. As though he was sure of her, knew he had a right. A flush was mounting her face, she could feel it: how glad she was to have come.
‘Here he goes. This one’s mine.’
‘At the back of the Knightsbridge Barracks’
The crowd shrieked with joy at the familiar opening.
She would have missed the second line if the singer’s timing hadn’t been so good. He hung on till he could be heard again.
‘When the fog was gatherin’ dim
The Lifeguard talked to the Under-cook
An’ the girl she talked to ’im.’
The audience, men and women together, yelled the chorus at the top of their voices.
‘Don’t try for things that are out of your reach
And that’s what the girl told the soldier.’
Between verses the singer broke into a little routine, prancing about so that the large brass spurs at his heels jingled. Making fun of the Lifeguard with his fine uniform and his ambitions.
‘My idea, that,’ Rud called into her ear.
She turned to smile back at him and saw his face was blazing, triumphant.
With the final stanza she saw, the song was a story, a simple moral tale and this audience liked it for that. It was all about courting and finding a match. Trying for the well-paid undercook was too ambitious, so the soldier had to make do with a housemaid.
Aha, that’s what ‘mashing a tart’, must mean, that strange phrase early on that baffled her. Rud had picked up a whole new language, learned to see the world from a different angle. And no cheap glamour – that was what some complained of in his Indian stories – no cheap glamour about it. She regarded his glow of pleasure with respect.
But the song wasn’t over. Again and again, four times in all, she counted, the audience howled out the final chorus. What he’d written had spoken to them. He could reach anyone. It was uncanny.
Dazed, dim, she found herself out on the pavement, at his side. Pale under the streetlights, he appeared equally exhausted.
‘I suppose, I mean, should I look for a cab?’ he hesitated.
Whatever he could do with words, he was helpless out in the world. Like a much younger brother.
Confident all at once, ‘I believe I’d prefer to walk. I know I’m incapable of sitting still,’ she replied.
‘Really? Would you be happy to walk back to Westminster Yard? Or perhaps Wolcott will have left the office for home. All the way to Neville St. might be rather far for you – ’
‘Rud, I can see you don’t know me. I could walk you off your legs, given half a chance.’
She’d made him laugh.
‘But I’ll have to keep hold of your arm,’ she added, daring. ‘I’d better look respectable at least, out at this time of night, with a man. I’d better look like a wife.’
The words had passed her lips before she’d had time to think.
‘You make a pretty good fist of it,’ he said lightly ‘though I don’t know many wives with your taste for adventure.’
Stepping off into the warm darkness, linked to him, she could face anything.
*
Rud was at last settling into a congenial home-life. He had taken to staying on, talking with Carrie, on those evenings when Wolcott withdrew to work on a contract.
‘I’m going to get every author worth having on my books,’ he would boast. With his drive and his flair for seeing his way round difficulties, it seemed quite possible he would succeed. He was negotiating with publishing houses across Europe and was often away. Nevertheless, Rud continued to call, spending his evenings, feet up on the fender, exchanging talk and stories of past adventures with Carrie.
‘When I was out West, with Wolcott,’ she would counter to his, ‘Up on the frontier, waiting for the Amir’.
It was a pleasure to him to be challenged.
Carrie was straightforward. Nothing flirtatious or coy about her, an independent well-informed mind. He hadn’t got on so well with a woman since he’d met Mary Kingsley, back from West Africa.
‘You know, Carrie, you’ve gone one better than Mary Kingsley,’ he teased her towards the end of one evening. ‘She might be a brave explorer but she was scared of the proprieties: Mary hadn’t the nerve to ask me in without a chaperone. Not like you, Carrie. Look at us: here together, many an evening without Wolcott.’
‘No-one can say anything. After all, Rud, you’re as good as a brother.’
He surprised himself as well as Carrie with his quick, ‘I don’t know about that.’
There was a long pause.
A new awareness, low in his body. Did it tug at her too?
Getting up to take his leave at last, Rud hovered, uncertain. She was not to be trifled with, for all sorts of reasons. But did he dare take the plunge? He’d told the Pater he meant to marry soon, of course he had, wasn’t it time? But the words had rung empty, shaming him.
To have her with him always. But the risks. This pull between them. It might spell only danger. Yet he’d seen her with Wolcott. Like his own sister, she knew how to be a friend.
He put away thought and took a step in her direction. Carrie appeared to have been waiting for his sign.
‘Carrie,’ he repeated, ‘Carrie,’ as he fumbled to put his arms round her. A delicious shock as their lips met. Her passion – and she a white woman – was a surprise to him. And a delight.
When Wolcott Balestier finally returned, ten days later, he found his friend established as Carrie’s accepted lover. He greeted the decision with his familiar lopsided smile.
‘Not a word, just yet,’ he agreed, in response to Rud’s nervous proviso. For the present it was their secret. It would keep them all together.
From the first, Carrie’d had no scruples about teasing him. ‘Rud, you have Go fever, anything but stay in one place.’ But now after all that had passed between them, he did not know how to tell her that he was off again. He stuttered, faced with her direct question, her look of pain and surprise.
‘You regret getting in so deep with me?’ she asked. He could make no reply, though later that evening he sat down to write to her.
‘My own dear girl,’ he began,
‘You know that I regret nothing. Not one atom of all we have become to each other. But perhaps you may not understand, even yet, what a gypsy you have joined yourself with.
Since they’re not going to let us marry over a bonfire and make off in a painted wagon, I need a little time to wear out my last impulses towards the wandering life.
Bear with me.
I know that Wolcott will watch over you for me till I return.
dearest love
your Ruddy’
Quite apart from what the doctors were always telling him about taking a holiday, he was longing for sunlight. That was about as close as he could come to it. Sunlight and the dry smell of spices. In his mind’s eye, as it cleared in the process of writing, a sareed figure, so close that he could all but brush the fabric, sat crouched, working a pestle. Jeera… Haldi… Once away on the high seas, there was no knowing how far he might go. Stevenson out in Samoa was always pressing him to come over there on a visit. The very thought of such remoteness made him quiver.
In the end, the Kamakurahe steamer schedules had been impossible. He’d failed to get beyond New Zealand. Here he was, four months after leaving London, Christmas Eve and back in his old stamping ground, Lahore. Such happiness, being served again by a rejoicing Kadir Baksh. The dear fellow had actually got leave from his new employer to attend him during his visit. Apart from that, Rud felt his return a bit flat. It wasn’t the same.
How could it be? Yesterday, visiting the old office, there was scarcely a face he recognised in the print room. Still, the parents were pleased that he’d be with them for Christmas. A Punjab Christmas – he remembered the drill only too well. The pudding – one sent out from Harrods if you were lucky – if not, the sawdust flavoured version knocked up in the Club kitchens. At least there would be the Children’s Party later on. The little beggars were always fun. Perhaps he could help out with that.
A step grating on the gravel outside pierced his reverie. Rud amused himself with speculation. Catching the words ‘chit from the Telegraph office for the Sahib’, he fancied it might be some hitch with the Journal of Indian Arts. Was the Pater still editing that, surely he must be going to retire before long? Wondering idly why the telegram had come to the house rather than the Museum, he took up the newspaper. He was scanning it with the critical eye of a former editor when his mother appeared.
‘Ah, there you are, Rud; this seems to be for you.’ It was the curse of his success, the amount of negotiating with publishers, of confirming the dispatch and receipt of manuscripts that fell to him. But surely now he’d taken on Watts to act for him, there should be less of this? Resigned, with a nod he put out his hand.
‘Wolcott dead stop come back to me stop.’ He had to read the words three or four times before he could begin to take them in. At his choked exclamation, his mother had stepped across to him: he saw his own bewilderment mirrored in her face.
‘I… I… Wolcott? Dead? But he’s supposed to be in Leipzig,’ Rud babbled.
Alice raised her eyes from the telegram in order to direct a keen glance at her son.
‘Who sent this?’
‘Carrie, yes, Carrie, I suppose.’
‘“Come back to me?” Come back to Carrie Balestier?’
Rud shivered. He had risen and was walking about the room, staring at the familiar chairs as though they held the answer to a question he could not formulate. He went back and reread the message. He wheeled round.
‘There’s nothing for it. I have to go.’
‘What, now? You’ve only just got here. Rest is what you need after that awful journey. There’s nothing you can do for the poor fellow that can’t wait now. And Christmas is just –’
Rud looked at his mother with loathing. Did she always have to know better?
‘If I leave in half an hour I can just catch the mail at Umballa. I need you to wire ahead for me to Bombay, about my passage.’ He left the door swinging.
In Bombay, he found himself condemned to a wait of only twelve hours. The Mater had been efficient, he had to concede. Depositing his baggage in Watson’s Hotel, where he had eaten – what, he could not recall – he set off to calm himself with a stroll in the familiar purlieus of the School of Art, through the gardens where he’d played beneath flowers tall as chimneys twenty years before. His heart stuttered. Those endless prairies had shrunk away. Absurd to be surprised, he told himself: to a child the world is vast. It did not quiet his echoing sense of loss.
But he could bring it all back. Within himself it all remained unchanged. The screens blew and flapped in the afternoon as he lay in his cot after lunch, Ayah beside him singing. Her husky voice mingled with other sounds, the occasional clatter of a plate as the kitchen boy washed up, the squabbles of birds in the mango tree. Looking around him, he saw it was the breeze off the sea that freshened the houses along the Esplanade, jerking the wooden screens. But in those days it had seemed that a single voice made itself up out of a consort of sounds and was singing him to sleep under the tent of white netting.
The blank of his initial horrified shock had given way to a sort of urgent listlessness. He knew he must get home. But he found himself utterly passive. In that condition new ideas, one after another, began to move through him, like the waters of an imperceptibly returning tide. This marked the end of India for him. There would be no more of these days of light: he was here now in Bombay for the last time.
He would, he must, find Ayah.
As if in a dream he unhurriedly made his way to the house of the Franciscans. There was no difficulty in obtaining the directions he needed. Native converts were not so many that the Fathers lost track of them.
When he turned the corner, she was standing by the entrance to her compound, one hand on a lintel, the other shading her eyes against the sun’s stabbing brilliance to look along the alley away from him. Though her face was hidden, he had no doubts. This was her outline, her stance, though the saree was white. Yet he could scarcely get the words out to greet her. As though she knew, the old woman who once was Ayah turned to face him, holding out her arms.
‘So fine young man,’ she sighed at last, fingers smoothing his wet cheek. ‘Always best, Ruddy Baba, always best.’
As he sipped luxuriously at the nimbu pani he had watched her make for him – ‘once more, once more, Ayah, show me again’ – Rud gestured towards her garments of white.
‘Great sorrow, friend to my life.’
‘Many years past. “To have and to hold”, isn’t it, the words they speak over you in your English church? If we cannot hold through all the days to come, better to have what is good, even for a little while, not so, Ruddy Sahib?’
He gestured his distaste for the term of respect but she went on.
‘In my heart is always Ruddy Baba but today I see before me Ruddy Sahib. And you, Ruddy Sahib, have you yet made that choice which all must make?’
‘Truly, one waits for me in my own country.’
‘Then I send her many blessings. May you return in peace to her.’
Only on his way back to the docks did the proverb learned from his munshi come to mind:
‘Lend me your child for the first three years and hear him call me mother for thirty.’
Now he knew what he wanted and knew there need be no delay. For God’s sake, he was twenty-six. He would get a special licence the moment he got to London.
*
Without Henry James, it was hard to see who would have given Carrie away. Her only remaining brother, Beatty, was in the United States like the rest of her male relatives. Having been devoted to Wolcott, James was as close to family as could be mustered.
Once he’d helped her out of the hired brougham and they were standing on the pavement of Langham Place, outside the vestry door of All Souls, James paused and took breath. With the greatest hesitation he laid a gloved hand briefly on her arm, a touch so fleeting he could not be sure that it registered with her.
He was doing his utmost to fill, for this one day, the terrible breach left by poor dear Wolcott’s death. Someone had to come forward to give Carrie away to that terrifyingly clever young Kipling, since he apparently insisted on laying claim to her, who could say why. There’d been not a syllable of indication.
Not that Carrie was an inconsiderable young woman, by any means. Talking with her in the big black and silver coach on the way back from the funeral, he’d come to appreciate her quality. ‘Force, acuteness, capacity, courage’, as he praised her to Gosse. When she described her ferocious struggle to keep Wolcott in life, the nights of watching, her eyes brimmed but she shed not a tear. All was clarity and elucidation: the emotion so channelled, she could have been a man. Wolcott had been taken ill on his way to Leipzig and diverted to Dresden. The rose spots on the chest and abdomen – James shuddered – confirmed that it was typhoid. Only when she came to speak of the end did she give way.
‘He just gave up. Wolcott gave up and left me.’
Like enough, news of Kipling’s wedding would be in the papers that very evening, whatever the effort to avoid public notice. What a mercy there would be no trumpery music, no vulgar straining of guests to look at them. The wedding party could hardly be smaller, or more awkwardly composed, between himself, Gosse and his family, Heinemann and a single Kipling cousin. The bride’s mother and sister, so he had been told, were lying sick with the influenza in their hotel. It was true: all London was brought low in the epidemic.
In the dim light of the January afternoon, made more grey by the fog that was veiling the streets, he saw with relief that Rudyard and Ambrose Poynter, his best man, were already waiting with a surpliced figure by the altar. Carrie had caught sight of him too. James knew it by the way she thrilled at his side and he marvelled at her. Passionately as she was mourning, she was still capable of elation in this moment.
They were still several feet away from Rudyard, his tanned face inscrutable above the gleam of his collar in the church dusk, when Carrie dropped the arm that she had taken so gratefully and moved forward, drawn away towards Rudyard.
As the familiar drone of ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together’ began, there was no mistaking the intensity with which Rudyard clasped Carrie’s hand and looked into her face.
James felt obliged to lower his gaze before such naked feeling.
So they were a match for each other, after all! He’d anticipated nothing like this. He only prayed that good might come of it: every atom of Carrie’s force and courage would be needed to handle that brilliant, agitated boy.
* * *
Once back in Calcutta, Trix was beginning to feel her new status as an advantage. A married woman had a right to her views, she had seen the world without the blinkers nice girls had to wear.
When she rose at last from her desk to stretch high into the air, the seams of her yellow muslin creaked warningly under the arms. Her smile only widened. She was breaking her way out of the ugly old thing. It was only fit for writing in anyway.
She could tell she’d done enough for that day. It was like flying but she’d better stop for now. The story was beginning to hang together; she could feel it.
Now the sapping humidity began to tell on her. All around, Calcutta lay stewing in the sluggish airs of the delta: it kept the city from enjoying any breeze from the sea. Writing had made her oblivious, though she realised, fingers at her throat, that she must have instinctively undone the buttons of her high collar.
After dinner that evening, when she stepped outside, there wasn’t the least movement of air. Yet in appearance, the garden lay cool as though under water, flooded by silver.
‘Jack, darling, before you brought me here, you told me that everyone says it’s quite splendid, the sight of the open space of the Maidan under moonlight.’
‘Did I really? Someone must have told me. I’ve never actually seen it for myself.’
‘Oh do let’s go out there, this must be the perfect night for it,’ Trix raised her eyes beseeching. She could tell from the way he hesitated that he would rather have sat reading over Survey reports. She herself had always found maps dull, if not baffling, yet Jack simply revelled – if that was quite the word for it – in everything to do with them.
She knew that if she rested a lingering touch on his sleeve, he wouldn’t be able to refuse. ‘You shall have your wish. Mind you, though, you may get more than you bargained for, my dear. Don’t forget the native element. The Black Town. It comes alive at night.’
In the tikka gharry – Jack claimed his means would not run to a carriage of their own – Trix forgot her unsavoury environment, the cracked leather and the lingering, unidentifiable smells. As the great Maidan hove into sight, its grass stretching emerald under the moon, gold mohur trees in full burnished flower, she drew in a sharp breath.
But the gharry had scarcely covered another fifty yards before a wild chorus, an uneven cry of mourning, broke up the night. It appeared to be getting closer.
‘What is it? What is it?’ she reverberated with alarm.
‘Jackals, dear, just a pack of jackals. The Old Town’s full of them. They don’t usually come this close to Government House.’ He was patting her hand, smiling at her ignorance, when the cries grew abruptly louder and a thrusting horde of dogs poured onto the Maidan directly beside them. From the pack leader’s mouth there dangled something at which his pursuers snapped.
‘Why, what – Trix, what are you doing?’ She’d thrown herself against him, eyes squeezed shut, but not before she’d made out the shape of a human arm.
There was no longer any pleasure in the night. Once home, Jack sat her down and took a chair directly in front of her.
‘I know you’re convinced that’s what the creatures were fighting over, but Trix, I do assure you that you are mistaken. I tell you it was animal bones, probably goat that they’d scavenged from the slaughterers. The native quarters reek with every kind of refuse.’
She was obliged to subside. Of course Jack knew what he was talking about. And it was not the first time she’d been told to set aside her fears as groundless. That no-one else could see anything to prompt alarm.
*
Jack Fleming carried Trix up to Scotland to visit his family when his regular leave came due within the following year.
‘Aunt Christiana, my good old godmother, has read your book and she’s most anxious to meet you. You’ll get on like a house on fire with her. She’s a splendid old girl and, like you, a great one for the books.’ Passing on the invitation, Jack didn’t seem prepared for the little exclamation of pleasure that broke from Trix. At last, a positive response addressed to her herself, not merely a civil welcome to her husband’s wife.
From the beginning of this her first visit to them in Scotland, the Flemings had left her stranded. A guest in Gattonside House, the home of Jack’s elder sister, Moona, she had learned to raise no topic of her own. When she once volunteered ‘I’m so looking forward to the next instalment of Tess; do you admire Mr. Hardy’s novels?’ she was met with nervous politeness. Instead, she now took her cues from family conversation. Country doings, a neighbour’s plans to extend his estate, last Sunday’s sermon, the beasts and their prices at market, planned repairs on the little footbridge over the Tweed that linked the village with Melrose, all appeared of inexhaustible interest.
There wasn’t a shop for miles, not anything you could call a proper shop. She imagined that the business of selecting material and ordering a dress was a rare penance grimly endured by her new female relatives. Or perhaps there were bolts of ancestral tweed and black bombazine kept piled in a remote but orderly corner of the great grey house.
At first, it seemed to her that the world in which the Flemings conducted their sober lives was surprisingly like the hill-stations of home. Pine-clad slopes with stern stone buildings which regarded her narrowly, were confusingly reminiscent of Simla.
Only the human element failed to match. Where was all the life that pulsed in the bazaar? There the hoarse cries of vegetable women rose above the murmured enticements of silk merchants and sellers of embroideries. It was true that the bazaar’s jostling wooden structures appeared makeshift and straggling when compared to the isolated, unyielding edifices put up for their occupation by the British – that is, by her own people, she quickly corrected herself. Their four-square homes of stone might be imposing but they were always a little awkward to run and inclined to damp. That was also true of most of the houses in Scotland where she’d been a guest.
Living among her new family made Trix ashamed to discover how much pretty fabrics and a graceful line in the turn of a shirtwaist meant to her. She found herself taking out an Indian shawl and burying her face in it. The faint sandalwood from the chest it lived in at home in Calcutta brought tears to her eyes.
‘Quite unsuitable,’ her mother-in-law dismissed it the first evening she put the shawl on to go down to dinner. ‘Have you nothing less heathen?’ With a rebellious heart Trix put on her sweetest smile. She wouldn’t set a foot wrong if she could help it.
Aunt Christiana’s house lacked even the simple charm of a setting in the Melrose countryside. A dark tower of a town house, where, Trix suspected, the air was haunted by the steam of suet puddings boiled hour after hour in sodden cloths.
The maid who’d opened the door had known Jack as a boy. ‘Master Jack, it’s awful guid to see you. The young imp that you were coming home with your breeks torn from the brambles and always making off with the bannocks still out on the table, cooling from the uin.’
It was evident that the woman considered herself wedded to truth so Trix would have to try to believe in this figment, a Master Jackie who had been ‘a young limb of Satan but the best heart in the world on him’.
‘Christiana may sound a bit fierce but she’s an old pet really, you’ll see,’ Jack whispered as their outer clothes were whisked away.
Looking around her in the receding cavern of the drawing room, Trix could see no books lying casually about or even neatly ordered on shelves. Only as they got closer to the seated figure awaiting them at the far end of the room – its white cap, edged, she noticed, with the finest Brussels lace – did Trix register the presence of a black bible. It was slack from much handling, she saw at once from the way it sagged open on the table at Christiana’s side. The filmy pages were lightly creased, like aged skin.
The old woman did not rise, and Trix was not invited to sit.
‘Jack, my laddie, indeed and you’re very welcome. And yon’s your bride. Well, Mistress Alice Fleming, you’ve made your way to Scotland at last.’
The pretty courtesies drying on her lips, Trix put her shoulders back. She, who had withstood the wrath of the Vicereine, Lady Dufferin, wasn’t going to allow herself to be put down. ‘I am very happy to be meeting so many dear members of Jack’s family,’ she replied civilly, with an inclination of the head.
‘Indeed. It’s my own acquaintance you’ll be making this day and I’m thinking, Master Jackie – why, you’ve not given me a kiss yet!’ She put up her pale dry cheek. ‘So, I’m thinking your wee wife and I should get on best if we have a little chat on our own. Away now, to the kitchen. Bessie’s been beside herself ever since she heard you were coming. She’s baked your favourite shortbreads.’
Jack appeared to think that this was going splendidly. He wheeled about and left without another word.
The light of afternoon was grey in the high room. The silence was only briefly interrupted by muffled exclamations as the door down to the kitchen opened and closed. Those must be greetings for the prodigal limb of Satan, Trix thought tartly.
She made as if to move towards a chair.
‘Not there, if you please. I’d prefer to have your face in the light, missy.’
A seat shiny with black canvas and packed rigid with horsehair was indicated.
The old woman put the fingers of her mittened hands together. Trix could see that a hole in the crochet work of the right thumb had been exquisitely repaired. Perhaps handicrafts, needlework and so on would be possible topics for this afternoon. She was becoming accustomed to examining the prosier reaches of her experience to find common interests with the women of her new family. Before she could frame an opening, the attack was loosed.
‘Have you no shame, young mistress, no shame in writing that wicked story and bringing dishonour on the head of your husband? I say nothing of the disgrace to our family name. And the sly way you went about it. Only that a dear friend, a minister who has dedicated himself in the mission field among the pagan Hindu heard our name linked with that story of yours, none of us would have been any the wiser.’
Trix felt the blood drain from her face. There’d been nothing to forewarn her. The dull light brightened to a dazzle. She grasped at the unyielding black arms of her chair.
‘It’s clear that you have no natural delicacy of feeling. It’s no surprising that coming from your background there has been a lack of proper teaching. Writing in itself need be no bad thing, though it’s not for every Tom, Dick and Harry to take it up. Improving stories have their place. But for a young woman newly married to write in such terms. “Reading the marriage service gave her new cause for fear and hesitation. Duties from which she shrank”, indeed. Is this language to be proud of? Where is your sense of what is sacred, of what is decent?’
Remembering Jack’s weight on her, the suffocation as she endured his thrusts, Trix clenched her hands.
‘We all know that marriage is no bed of roses. Our Saviour never meant it to be. But how dare you, wife to that good man, how dare you give the impression of being personally acquainted with such feelings –’
Trix did hope that she was not going to faint. She felt dizzy. She wanted to interrupt. How could she be guilty of defiling the name of Fleming and of concealing it at the same time? She was confused. But she wasn’t sure that she could command her voice. Perhaps it’d be best just to sit it out. She found that she could quite simply step back inside herself and watch the white face of the old woman while the mauve lips formed the words of accusation which Trix could no longer hear.
That she did not put out her hand on leaving did not seem to be observed. The moment she heard Jack’s step out in the passage she was on her feet, steadied by a hand on the back of her chair. He looked surprised and gratified when she clung to his side. Trix allowed him to make the farewells, the promises of a swift return, longing only for the open air and the world of the street.
‘Now, did you two have a good talk?’ he asked, looking down and patting her small hand. Trix made an attempt to squeeze his arm and smile in answer but she could only tremble, filled with shame at her own weakness and confusion. As they set off along the granite terrace, she felt weightless, her head a gas-filled balloon, her feet barely making contact with the pavement.
She would have stepped directly into the path of an omnibus at the crossing, if Jack hadn’t hauled her in quite roughly.
‘For heaven’s sake, Trix, look where you’re going.’
But Trix had no idea where that might be.
* * *
Their leisurely honeymoon journey had now reached Japan, where they made Yokohama the base of modest expeditions. Rud was eager to visit nearby Kamakura. ‘There’s the most wonderful bronze Buddha. Forty feet tall, standing in the open air, the Pater says it’s a master work.’
Four grapefruit made a pyramid in the dish placed in front of the giant statue. Rud removed his hat and stood in silence, his wife beside him, before the figure of the Buddha. After a considered moment, he cupped her elbow with his hand, steering her towards the shade of a grove of bamboo. In the light of the news she had given him the night before, he must take special care of her.
‘Really, Rud, there’s no need. I was a little nauseous in the morning this past week or so but I feel fit as a fiddle this afternoon. Truly.’
He relaxed. She was straight as a die; he could take her word for it. But it might be wise to cut short their travels. Stop honeymooning and settle down like grown people with responsibilities. It would mean, blast it, that he still didn’t get to Samoa: was he never to meet Stevenson? They must discuss it later.
Carrie went on, ‘Tell me about all this –’ gesturing towards the towering statue, into whose hollow back some sniggering tourists were climbing, in defiance of the modest notice asking for respect. ‘Americans,’ she noted. ‘It makes me ashamed.’
‘It makes me want to thrash ’em.’ She found his lurking violence rather exciting. So long as it could be contained.
‘Rud, Rud, don’t take it so personally. They’re just –’
‘Uneducated Christian bigots, not a brain between them. Do you know, I’ve heard one such presumed to use it as a pulpit? Chanted the doxology!’
‘Don’t let them spoil this day for us. Come now, you say you’ve brought me to the East so that my eyes can be opened. Explain what it means to these people,’ nodding towards the grey-robed figures with their vivid sashes passing silently back and forth. ‘I’m not sure I trust the accounts of Buddha and the Way that are printed in the guidebooks.’
‘It’s the stories that matter. They carry the teaching. It’s all in the stories.’
‘Tell me.’
Carrie straightened on the spare wooden seat and prepared herself. His beautiful voice deepened in resonance. She had told him it was his voice that had made her fall in love with him.
‘First, there is the tale of Prince Gautama himself, who was the Buddha and also’ – he looked tenderly into his wife’s dreaming face, now lightly filmed with sweat – ‘the tale of Maya the virtuous and beautiful, his mother.’
Carrie sighed with pleasure. ‘And after that?’
‘After that, O most gracious and overheated one, come the Jataka tales. Which concern the beasts. Lessons about living together, really. I heard them first from my ayah but you find them all over the East.’ He broke off to tickle her face with a leafy blade from the grove rustling about them. ‘I think we should find someone to give us a pot of that green tea before I get going. Then when you’re really comfortable, you can decide: shall I begin with the tale of Brahmadatta, King of Benares, and the noble monkey who taught him to rule with love? Or with the tale of the wild dog who brought the King to understand justice when the palace dogs chewed up the harness of the royal chariot?’
Enchanting alternatives hung on the air as they moved towards the small pavilion.
The following morning, Carrie was still asleep when he slipped out of bed. He was about due to send off another of his Travel Letters to The Times. The obligation could be tedious: they weren’t travelling about much so there wasn’t a lot of colour to charge his brush but at £25 a column it was worth the effort. And with this new responsibility to come, keeping his name before the public, was more important than ever now that cursed New Oriental Bank had failed with all his savings. Some honeymoon. He was still not sure that this success could last – it was too rash, too unadvised, too sudden. It might kiss and consume, like the lightning in Romeo and Juliet.
Today, though, he felt the squirm of excitement deep in his belly. There was a poem on the way.
Carrie was sleepily fishing for the end of her shawl as she came into their sitting room to find him.
‘I’ve been up for hours.’ He was exuberant. ‘Just listen to this:
“Oh ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet flare to Judgement Day –”’
He broke off. ‘That’s those Christian bigots who destroy childhood with their threats of Hell fire. I’ll give you a story of mine about that to read some day.’ He went on:
‘“Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!
To him the Way, the Law, Apart,
Whom Maya held beneath her heart
Ananda’s Lord, the Bodhisat
The Buddha of Kamakura.”
You see, a quite different tradition: closer to the mother, to that human love.’
Carrie laid her cheek against his. Her husband went on:
‘“For though he neither burns nor sees,
Nor hears ye thank your Deities
Ye have not sinned with such as these,
His children at Kamakura;”
The blind arrogance. Worship for any but their own god a sin, imagine! And they’d be amazed and put out to be told that the Trinity sounds rather close to polytheism.
“Yet spare us still the Western joke
When joss-sticks turn to scented smoke
The little sins of little folk
That worship at Kamakura.”
If they can’t find it in the Prayer Book, it must be ludicrous, if not actually sinful. All that Christian focus on sin is simply deathly. There’s more but I’m still working on the rest of it. What do you think?’
Wide awake now, Carrie hesitated. ‘It’s beautiful, Rud.’ She kissed him lightly. ‘But is it safe to publish? Won’t it give offence?’ This was no time to put their income in jeopardy.
‘I wager that it will pass over people’s heads – all Eastern exotica. Except for those who share my sentiments. You’ll see.’
* * *
Trix had now been married to Jack, stationed with him in Calcutta, for almost four years and her writing was not going as well as she’d hoped. She used to imagine she’d never look back if only she could get work of her own into print. Not as Rud’s sister, the junior partner. That’s how it’d felt when they’d published Echoes together. Nor as one corner of that blessed ‘family square’ that the parents were so fond of. All working together to write a Christmas number for the CMG had been fun but once was enough.
She was no longer a girl living under her father’s roof but a married woman, a woman of experience. Surely now her work deserved to stand on its own.
She’d thought that was really going to happen, a year or so back, when her novel was accepted for publication, with the title she had chosen for herself, The Heart of a Maid. Jack had raised no objections, once she’d explained that it would not be coming out under her own name. It had felt like the start of a new life. She’d begun to feel confident that she was indeed a writer. So she hadn’t been prepared for the way that confidence could drain away.
It was no good blaming Jack’s aunt. She’d resolved not to complain; besides, she would’ve died rather than relive the scene with that horrid woman. She’d spoken of it to no-one. Yet she didn’t seem able to write as fluently as before. After a morning spent at her desk Trix was constantly dissatisfied nowadays. There was often so little to show for all her labour. She would stare in dismay at a sheet heavily marked with crossings-out.
She used to be so eager to get people to pay attention, to make them see what she saw, hear what she couldn’t help hearing. There were things that you knew that you couldn’t always account for even though you could put them into words. Like Mama taking one look at that little Carrie Balestier, one look, and declaring, ‘That woman’s going to marry our Ruddy.’
Papa had laughed at the time. ‘Alice, you are incorrigible. Spare the poor girl – there’s no need to take fright at every young American woman Rud meets. Do give the boy credit. He’s perfectly capable of making these decisions for himself when the time comes.’
But Mama was proved right. And now Ruddy was married and a father, settled in Vermont, oceans apart from them all. He was having a new adventure. When he wrote of being lapped to the tip of his nose in robes of fur, of driving a sleigh between sparkling pines, of roads banked high with snowdrifts blue and green in their depths, she had shivered, even as black kites screamed above her in a sky of brass. With a certain effort she could enter into her brother’s joy in his new world. But she wept to see him beaming over the head of baby Josephine, in the photographs.
‘What about me?’ she wanted to cry aloud.
Her head was aching, as it did most days, once into the Calcutta Hot Weather. Trix gave herself a little shake. Better to admit that she wasn’t going to be able to write today. She’d spent another morning at her desk staring blankly.
‘What is the point of trying?’ She laid her head down on the desk. She’d had the little desk inlaid with mother of pearl sent on to her, when she left her parents’ house in Lahore.
‘Other women seem happy enough,’ Jack had expostulated, baffled, when he found her silently weeping over it one afternoon.
Ruddy meant to be helpful, she knew. ‘Don’t waste time wondering whether you’re a writer, just get down to it. That’s what a writer is, someone with a pen in their hand getting sheets of paper covered,’ he wrote.
He had as good as promised to get her next story published.
‘I can’t understand why it’s so difficult to get started. Wives out here are supposed to be dying of boredom; time ought to be hanging heavy on my hands,’ she scrawled on the glaring empty page.
It was a relief to be able to find some words, even words for her failure, and to set them down on paper.
The servants were a constant worry and interruption. Amit Khan, the khitmatgar, was supposed to oversee all the others but she couldn’t feel confident in him. Seeing an unfamiliar dhobi leaving from the back gate one morning, his back bent under the load of the household washing, Trix paused in confusion. What had happened to one-eyed Abu, with the crimson rag tied round his head?
‘Madam, madam, this man was an evil-doer,’ Amit Khan had insisted, head shaking in reproof.
Determined to stand her ground, Trix looked him in the eye.
‘But Amit Khan, did the Colonel Sahib give orders? Did he ask you to send Abu away?
‘The Lord Sahib requires many clean shirts, multitudes of clean shirts.’
She was immediately distracted. ‘Did we get back all of the Sahib’s shirts last week? Have you counted them?’ She brushed a damp wisp of hair back off her face.
‘I will check Madam. Correct number one English dozen,’ and he was out of the room.
Game, set and match to Amit Khan, she conceded.
Yet it was really no laughing matter, living with a man you couldn’t quite trust. She insisted on seeing their silver counted back into the velvet slots of the canteen each evening before Amit Khan was dismissed for the night. Jack himself wasn’t observant. That was one thing to be thankful for. But it meant that stupid details, housekeeping and the required social visits seemed to have taken over her life.
Before she could stop herself, she was rubbing at a mark she hadn’t seen before on the polished table
No, she admitted painfully, she allowed herself to be distracted. There was after all some trace of sweetness in keeping order, in doing what was expected of her. Whereas when she sat down to write, she came up hard against something she could not name.
It wasn’t as though she had nothing to say. So often she longed to argue with pieces in the journals that Papa sent on to her every month. And it wasn’t only ideas that made her want to write. People had such extraordinary ways of behaving towards each other. Not enough attention was paid to that.
Later that very day, at the Babacombes’, Trix saw something she’d have liked to write about, if she dared. Changing the names, of course.
‘Oh, I’ve cut myself,’ Edith Plowright cried. Trix had been hurrying to her side when she was forestalled.
‘How can you be so stupid, Edith? It’s always the same.’ Mrs. Plowright threw down her own sewing to stride across to her daughter. The other women, gathered for their weekly morning of conversation over their sewing, hesitated uncertain. Trix knew what they were thinking: another scene from Agnes Plowright. The less attention they paid, perhaps the less embarrassment for all of them.
Edith’s habitually mousy look gave way to one of terror.
‘Oh it’s nothing,’ she babbled, ‘nothing at all. I was just unpicking some stitches when I must have –’
‘Let me see.’ Pause. ‘Oh, you’ve ruined that shirt you were supposed to be finishing off for me. Just look at the blood! Heaven knows whether I’ll be able to get it out.’ Her temper was definitely rising. With a look at Trix, Major Babacombe’s wife rose to intervene. They were in her drawing room; the responsibility was hers.
‘Agnes, my dear, I have a perfectly infallible method for removing bloodstains, tried and tested through several campaigns.’ The little joke broke through the tension. ‘Why don’t you come with me and we’ll have it out in a jiffy?’
Once Edith’s mother was out of the room, Trix took the white-faced girl by the hand, to examine the welling slash in the ball of her thumb. She slid Edith’s cuff back, to keep it clear of the blood. ‘You poor thing, Edith,’ she murmured. ‘It does look rather deep. Perhaps we should get the doctor to look at it –’
‘Oh no, please not, I’m sure it will stop bleeding directly,’ Edith pleaded, her voice sharp with fear. Trix could imagine that the suggestion of a doctor’s visit would be tinder to Agnes Plowright’s rage. But what about the risk of infection?
Stuck with so much to write about. Yet the words, even when they came to her, looked wrong. That evening, Trix was restless. Dinner over, she stood picking at dead blooms amongst the bouquet in her yellow Liberty vase, then opened an old magazine and put it down again.
Even Jack noticed: ‘You’re too pale y’know. Better see the quack.’
Planning to argue, she carried a lamp over to the looking-glass and was frightened by the wan, tight-lipped image thrown back at her. Where had she gone, ‘Rose in June’, the Grecian beauty who had once been the toast of Simla? If that girl’s smile had been tremulous, the narrow lips parting only hesitantly, Trix did not recall it now.
Her hand quivered as she replaced the lamp. Turning back to her husband, she resolved to make more of an effort. Jack was a fair-minded, decent man, who didn’t run after other women, she was lucky to have him. It wasn’t his fault that he saw the world differently. When she tried to talk to him, her thoughts did seem to fray apart into nothing as she spoke. But perhaps if she persevered…
‘I do wonder why Mrs. Plowright is so hard on her daughter. Could she be angry with her for not being more attractive? Edith’s a sweet girl but I’ve noticed that she doesn’t get many partners when we have a dance at the Club.’
‘Can’t say I’ve paid much attention. I expect you’re exaggerating.’
‘No, really, Jack. Round her wrist there were scars. Like cuts. Some were quite fresh. There’s something wrong there, I can’t help wondering…’ In the face of his blank silence, she felt her voice die away. But she had taken those nursing classes. She knew what a scar from a cut looked like.
Her fingers danced an angry tattoo.
Jack did like to listen to her singing. ‘Ah, there’s nothing like the old songs,’ he would exclaim, evening after evening, as she rose from the piano. But it was the ‘How about a kiss for me, Mrs. Fleming?’ that she really dreaded.
It was months now since Trix had written anything, without crossing it out or tearing it up that same day.
‘Being married to Jack is driving me mad.’
Horrified, she stared at what she’d written. She looked round, quickly. Silly, stupid girl, there was no-one watching. Not here in her dressing room, where she’d moved her desk so she could write when she couldn’t sleep, nor in the deserted drawing room at the other end of the house. Probably not in the kitchen either, she thought with a hysterical giggle, for the cook would slip out for a smoke and a chat by the gate with the chowkidar even through the rain. His small assistant would be deep in the garden hunting the huge mottled wet-weather frogs. The wooden bungalow heaved and settled round her under a brief period of sun. It would rain again by afternoon.
‘I want to kill myself.’
Who had made those marks on the page?
Recently she’d taken to writing in pencil. Then gone over to rubbing out. When she’d asked Jack to bring home one of the large official erasers from his office he’d been pleased. She could tell that he was glad that she’d asked for something he was able to provide.
Trix was afraid to look at the sheet of paper, now. What other words would have escaped to confront her there? Best to burn it.
Head averted, she turned the enemy witness face down. Somewhere in the tall almirah there were her curling tongs and the little spirit stove she used for heating them. But she couldn’t delay, couldn’t send for her maid. Kneeling, careless of her skirts on the unswept floor, she rummaged with increasing agitation. By the time she had her hands on the familiar metal box overprinted in blue, her breath was coming in sobs.
But she couldn’t remember how to go about lighting the lamp. Trix sat staring at the tufty charred wick, then played for a while with the fretted metal of the surround.
‘Eeny meeny miny mo…’ she was counting the patterns aloud.
A huge blind effort and she was back on her feet, pushing the scramble of boxes back into the woody darkness and leaning against the doors.
Perhaps Mama would be able to advise her, once they got home leave. But that might not be till ’95. At the thought of opening her heart to Mama, however, Trix found she couldn’t imagine how she could explain. What would be the right words? Mama could be so sharp, so dismissive.
There was only Mama. Papa was never going to be fair to Jack. He would blame Jack for everything and she knew that wouldn’t be just.
As for Rud. She flinched. It was savage, the things he’d said. He’d had no business telling her she wasn’t fit to marry. If she was now beginning to feel that he might have been correct, the fear remained buried. She would keep her distance from him. But she couldn’t dispel the lingering sense of shame.
‘Anyway, you’ve let them all leave you behind,’ she said aloud.
The best thing was to occupy herself. That’d been Ruddy’s salvation, he’d told her so himself, having to work and work, ten or more hours a day when he was second in command at the CMG. That was when he began on his stories.
She too could find a way to be useful, surely? She didn’t have to be left out; there must be something that Jack needed copying. Or maybe there was something in the journals she could take up and explore. Develop new interests. Forgotten, the incriminating sheet lay on her desk. Finding it later that day, she shuddered. Snatching it up, she hastened to the window, holding the paper out below the eaves until it turned to pulp in her fingers, washed in the streams that poured down without remission.
* * *
For the moment, Rud and Carrie were renting a small house, Bliss Cottage, outside Brattleboro, Carrie’s home town. They were preparing to build a house of their own.
From the window of the tiny space he called his study, Rud noticed the mailman plodding up the path. That morning he had dug out the snow again, gleefully throwing spadefuls right and left. It was something new to feel himself so fit. He could work outside for hours here. The sharp dry cold of these winters just set him up.
‘There’s so much work to do on it. Bliss Cottage? “The Blizzard” would be a better name,’ he grumbled. ‘Are you sure it’s worth it for the few months we’re going to be living here?’
‘Rud, how can you ask? With Baby coming. And the new house – heaven knows when it will be ready to move in. The joiners and carpenters won’t come down from Quebec to start work before the snow’s gone.’
Carrie would never allow Brattleboro gossips to say they were inhabiting a shack. Though the word ‘respect’ hadn’t passed her lips, he knew that she was desperately sensitive about her standing in the eyes of local people. Had she really meant that about having uniforms for the servants? He had no wish to attract unnecessary attention, himself. It had been a mistake, driving into town with the tiger-skin over the back of the sleigh. And the newspapermen were already after him, even out here.
‘When the house is finally ready – they do say July – do you know what I’m most looking forward to?’
‘Don’t tell me, Rud. A proper bathroom? You fuss every night over that tin tub.’
‘You have no poetry in you, Carrie. It’s all the fun of making the garden. Finding what will grow here, what suits, what will flourish.’
Now that his daughter was a living, breathing reality, however, he found himself instead planning a path lined with flowers, with hollyhocks and sunflowers, for the Joss to trot down to play with her small cousin, Beatty’s daughter, Marjorie.
‘The Joss?’ He grinned to recall how Carrie’s mother had raised an eyebrow, registering the pet-name for the first time. You could all but hear the words: The Lord alone knows what that boy Rud will think of next. She knew that the Baby had been named Josephine for her aunt, Carrie’s sister. Nevertheless, she was positively suspicious of ‘the Joss’.
Carrie was not dismayed. ‘Come on Ma, it’s a kind of pun. And a remembrance. That’s what they call an idol in the East, like that giant Buddha I showed you in the photograph. You’re not going to say we don’t worship the little duck –’
Somewhat placated, her mother appeared to subside.
And when the Joss could set off by herself down that path, what sort of little girl would she turn out? Carrie shook her head at him but he couldn’t stop his imagination hurrying ahead. Baby would take her own time growing up, Carrie was right, of course.
But the foundations for the new house were already in, grey stone with the moss still on it. Once it thawed, the lumber mills would be starting up and the timber would arrive. And he could pay for every inch of it, make all this happen, just by writing!
He took a few waltz steps on his way to the door, to take charge of the bundle of letters and papers. There was another possibility: dances in the barn, once they had got one of their own built. The only thing he missed about Simla was all the waltzing. He ruffled through the bills and correspondence to see if there were something from Trix buried amongst them. Business matters he could safely hand over to Carrie – or would be able to again, in a month or so. For the moment she was lost in a new heaven.
‘I had no idea that a baby – that the Joss – would have an effect on me too, on my work, that is,’ he had admitted to their neighbour, Molly Cabot, when she dropped by at teatime one afternoon.
‘You mean it’s a surprise that she keeps you awake nights?’ Molly’d made it clear she had no illusions about his grasp of practical affairs. ‘No, do go on, I didn’t mean it,’ she cried as he made a feint of throwing a cushion at her. ‘I do want to understand, really.’
‘It all happened on the one day,’ Carrie put in, from her deep armchair. ‘Rud wrote and finished this new story, about the baby and the wolves, and the Joss came into the world.’
‘But it was the feel of writing it. I’ve had it before, the sense that I was almost taken over as I wrote, acting under direction –’ gesturing, he knocked the spoon from his saucer and bent to pick it up.
‘Like Socrates with his daemon?’ he could tell Molly was serious, in spite of her mocking tone. ‘Or would it be more up-to-date to say like spiritualism and automatic writing?’
Carrie sat upright. ‘Not at all, Molly. Rud’s perfectly in command of himself when he writes. He just feels… stronger,’ she finished, lame even to his ears.
‘No, really, Carrie,’ Molly was clearly not convinced. ‘It’s an important question. I don’t see what’s so different about automatic writing. Surely you don’t believe in some kind of outside force that takes people over?’
He got to his feet and moved over to perch on the arm of Carrie’s chair.
‘If Rud can sometimes draw on energy he can’t find every day, mightn’t automatic writing work the same way? I mean, come from somewhere inside the individual, too?’
He was still brooding over that comparison. He didn’t care for it at all. For one thing, he didn’t invite that sense of being taken over; most of the time he wrote with no such sense of direction from outside. He was content not to understand what it was that drove him when those moments came. He just knew it by the working deep within his guts.
He wandered into the living room, where his daughter lay on a pillow placed across a wide chair, her mother at her side. Carrie was turning out a trump. Not a tremor out of her when they found the bank had failed, taking all their savings, right in the middle of her honeymoon. She had just set to with him and made a plan.
Carrie looked up from retying a ribbon on her daughter’s jacket.
‘This satin is way too slippery to be practical. And how are you going to keep your wife and child in proper comfort, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, if you don’t peg away at that desk in there? We won’t come by and visit if you don’t keep your side of the bargain.’
She was joking. They’d both been astonished. He’d been able to retrieve their fortunes so fast. And all by means of his writing, what with royalties from Barrack-Room Ballads on top of all the stories he had in hand. The new house was going to be a stunner, and good value at $25,000. It might be more, of course, by the time they were through.
Rud bent to kiss the hands the sleeping baby had thrown above her head. He took the mother’s hand then, tracing the palm slowly with the tips of his own fingers.
‘I have threats of my own, Miz Carrie. One more word and no massage for you tonight.’ His wife’s colour deepened as she looked up at him. ‘I’ll get down to work if you both promise to come in to me as soon as she’s awake.’
He turned back to his mail. A little whoop of pleasure escaped him as he caught sight of the stamp on a well-stuffed envelope. It was not the Mater’s hand, though it was hard to tell the two apart.
Trix had sent him a chapter for his approval; ‘written some time since, alas’, she must be in need of support. Her letter admitted as much, poor kid. He did not really see why, after getting that little ghost story of hers into the Christmas number of Black and White. And under her own name that time. ‘Mrs. Fleming’ could take the credit due to her. It was slight enough, and not exactly new, the dead lover who shows up at the ball, but that fancy was well taken, her bouquet turning up far away on the grave of the dead man. He had shuddered briefly at her account of the heroine ‘who was seen walking across the room alone, head a little inclined to the left as though she were talking to someone’.
When he thought about it, though, wasn’t that story she had written for the Christmas number of the CMG, years and years ago, a ghost story too? About a small girl who’d died and kept reappearing to another child? He pushed away the thought that Trix was just repeating herself, going for what was safe. Difficulties, thrashing about to find your own line, were inevitable at the start.
She appeared to have no intention of giving up the struggle. He knew only too well what not writing did to a fellow. Trix was quite correct: ‘suspended’, ‘brought to a halt’, those were the words. He must find a way to keep her going. ‘Thrice-honoured daughter of my mother,’ began his reply. ‘I’ve been wondering whether you are being too hard on yourself. Trying to be good, you know, get it right the first time. Only William could do that. But we don’t happen to go by the name of Shakespeare. I have to work on draft after draft.’
Would that help? He thought he knew the terror of getting it wrong, which might be haunting Trix.
No wonder she was falling back on repetition.
All the same, though he hated to admit this, he did not much care for her new device of sticking scraps from the poets at the chapter head. They drowned out her voice, instead of amplifying it. He did make use of epigraphs himself but they were ones of his own making. They worked like a lens through which to read the stories, at least he hoped that was the effect. Striving to imagine how it was for her, writing, he did see that these literary insertions would make her feel safer. A link with writers who were recognised, with other poets. With himself too, of course.
She was losing her nerve, afraid that if she let go of him she’d sink on her own. How could he be sufficiently tactful? There was no-one like Trix, no-one so acute, so fine. And so in need of him and his support, he would have added, but the Joss now made her entrance in Carrie’s arms, her head turning, he swore it, in search of him.
‘I’m not sure that it’s working yet, Infant,’ his new paragraph opened, once he got back to his letter. ‘Why don’t you lay the novel aside for a while? That often helps. Come back to it later. Think how many years I’ve been working on Mother Maturin. The end’s still not in sight and I’d already been struggling with it for years before Wolcott and I wrote The Naulahka.
(That spelling’s all wrong, by the way. It should have the ‘h’ after the ‘k’: didn’t spot it on the proofs and the Pater won’t let me forget it. But did I tell you that’s what we’ve decided to call the new house “Naulakha”? In memory of Wolcott)
Novels really can take forever. Who knows whether I’ll ever manage to finish another? But stories are a different matter. What’s more, there’s a solid public for them out there. How about another story for the magazines? That’s the public I write for – all my stuff comes out first in the magazines.’
The new house outside Brattleboro was almost ready. While it was building, they’d paid Beatty, Carrie’s brother, to oversee the work. It had seemed such a good idea, Beatty honestly employed for once but she’d come to dread the sight of him. Every encounter led to a fight.
‘Carrie, will you quit lording it over me?’
Beatty had always been a bully, Carrie reminded herself, stiffening. She didn’t care to imagine the way he spoke to Mai, his wife, when nobody was by. No wonder Baby Marjorie had such an anxious little face.
Now he stood blocking the doorway of her sitting room, his raised voice threatening to disturb Rud, at work on the other side of the wall.
‘We’re not going to talk about it in here,’ she led him back through the narrow hallway, out into the sun.
When they fixed on building a house for themselves in Brattleboro, it seemed obvious to make brother Beatty a kind of clerk of works. While he was alive, Wolcott had struggled to keep Beatty on the straight, to counter his recklessness and ruthless greed. Even on his deathbed, delirious, Wolcott moaned Beatty’s name. Since Beatty was now their responsibility, they’d decided the best thing would be to employ him. As a farmer Beatty was supposed to be practical and used to managing men. But she should have guessed, should have remembered…
No wonder Mother was so taken with the idea. ‘The dear boy needs something to absorb his energies and he’s so full of notions and fun it will work out perfectly for all of you.’ Yet she must have known that Beatty had never stopped drinking.
This was not the first time Carrie’d had to challenge him about the accounts. A load of wood that had never made its way up to the site. Hire for two men for a week: they hadn’t been seen either. There was more. Documents that she didn’t recall seeing, that had been signed in her name.
‘I suppose you want everyone in town to hear you bawling me out.’
Carrie thought she caught the smell of liquor, though it was ten in the morning.
‘Beatty, this is a country road, for heaven’s sake, who’s to hear?’
‘Me for one.’ Rud emerged from Bliss Cottage, exasperated.
He took in Carrie’s shame and irritation. The man was as good as a family curse, dammit.
‘Your wife’s been giving me a real hard time, Rud.’ Beatty sent an arc of brown tobacco juice into the flower border. ‘I was just asking her about a small loan.’
Registering Carrie’s look of amazement, Rud guessed that nothing about a loan had been said. Trust Beatty to switch the conversation, to throw off pursuit. He breathed deeply.
‘I thought we’d agreed that your last advance would be paid back by the end of June?’
It was now August. Next week they would move into the new house.
‘Well, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, if you’re going to be as tarnation small-minded as your dear wife, my high and mighty sister, I’m not going to hang around for you folks to insult me further.’
He was off, climbing heavily onto his mare and trotting fast away towards town, and the friends who expected him in the bar of the Brooks House hotel.
Once in Naulakha, the little family could expand into wide-panelled spaces. Carrie had a study all to herself, on the ground floor, right next to Rud’s. Baby Jo took possession of the suite designed entirely for her, a bright airy day nursery standing above her father’s study and a night nursery behind, without the view. No sooner had she learned to walk, though, than the thudding of her triumphant feet overhead was too much for Rud.
‘I just can’t think straight,’ he fretted.
‘It’s fine, Rud, we’ll just switch them over. The day nursery can be at the back. Calm down.’
*
‘You do understand that if Mr. Kipling goes, Baby and I will have to leave too,’ Carrie observed slowly. ‘I won’t let any of them leave me again,’ she added more firmly.
Hearing her mistress speak of going away, Evelyn, the nursemaid, took no particular account of it at the time, as she explained later. Her employers were always full of plans. She just went on with washing out Baby’s things. Only when she went downstairs with her basket of wet clothes and out of the side door in the basement to the washing line did she grasp that Mrs. Kipling’s words were not a plan but a threat.
Stealing a moment by the flower garden, shading her eyes, Evelyn happened to glance aloft. There, up on the first floor was her mistress, standing out on the very edge of the wide sun porch outside the night nursery, Baby in her arms. The sun porch that stood over a drop onto broken stone. As Evelyn watched, she drew back and began to pace up and down.
Panting with effort, stumbling, Rud left the road and ploughed uphill through the meadow’s ragged golden rod. The long stand of Naulakha, backed by pines, rose ahead on the crest. Out on the open sun porch up on the first floor, Rud made out the figure of his wife, Baby Jo in her arms, standing in the corner, at bay.
A few feet from them stood Jim Conland, who had delivered Jo. Approaching below, Rud could make out the doctor was speaking quietly, his voice low and steady. Carrie did not appear to be listening, her fingers did not cease plucking at the baby’s shawl. Yet as he drew closer, Rud saw her raise her eyes briefly to Conland’s, if only for a moment. As Rud came within reach of the stone steps, the doctor, sensing his approach, motioned him to be still. The quiet voice never paused in its unhurried speech.
‘It’s getting a little cooler now and I was wondering whether we ought to take Baby inside. What do you think, Carrie?’
The plucking fingers paused. The mother’s head turned back, withdrawing her gaze from its determined stare across the distant hillside to look in surprise at her own hands. ‘Why Jim,’ she exclaimed, ‘I believe you are right.’
His arm under her elbow, the doctor steered Carrie with her little hostage back through the open door into the nursery.
Should he follow? Rud was shaking. The baby, the baby was safe. In the exquisite relief of the moment he felt giddy. The silent shriek vibrating against his ribs softened away. Fury rose in him. What had he ever done, that Carrie should be capable of this? A disagreement, that was all that had come between them that afternoon. Didn’t he have a right to go out on his own without a crisis like this? Surely, other men did?
Still fixed in place below the sun porch, he didn’t notice the continuing drop in temperature but a change in the light, a suffusing colour, roused him. He was about to make his way round to the side door on the lower level, when Jim emerged, surprising him. He seemed unruffled though his tone was sober.
‘That wife of yours is altogether too hard on herself.’
This was so unexpected that Rud thought he had misheard. Apparently registering his surprise, Conland smiled. ‘I know Rud, I know. She’s just put you through as severe a fright as she could manage. Other people too. I can’t say I enjoyed it myself but I do usually manage to talk them down.’
‘Them?’
‘The desperate ones who want you to understand but don’t know why. If it won’t offend you, I’m going to play host in your house, Rud, and call for some whisky. We can talk more easily about this if we sit and take things quietly for a while. Evelyn’s taken charge of Baby and I’ve left Carrie sleeping. I think we’ll stay down here, out of the way.’
Rud was too shaken to offer any lead of his own but mutely followed Conland as he led the way to the study. The English maid who finally brought the tray with its decanter and siphon and the two heavy glasses was subdued, darting her eyes at each of them in turn, furtively looking for an explanation for the trouble of the afternoon. Conland’s smile was wry.
‘I guess the kitchen’s not recovered from the sight of Evelyn in hysterics. It was your cook’s quick thinking located me and sent the boy running for you, Rud. But all’s well now.’
In spite of his friend’s attempts to calm him, Rud could not remain seated. When he paused in front of the bay window to stare out, it took both hands to steady his glass.
‘She’ll be her old self in the morning, you’ll see,’ Jim encouraged him. ‘And I’ve seen no other sign of instability in Carrie. Rather too much steady determination for her own good. But let me ask you –’
‘How much of it do you think she took in? I mean the Joss. The Baby. Baby Jo.’
Jim Conland was startled. It was the child Rud was panicking about, not the mother. Stroking his hair back off his forehead, he paused to consider.
‘I truly believe that Baby Jo slept through most everything: she only cried a little when I handed her over to Evelyn – I think that woke her.’
Rud came to a halt. ‘Are you sure of that?’
Conland showed his surprise.
‘Why would I tell you so, otherwise?’
Rud’s face changed and he looked embarrassed. A healthy sign.
‘And I haven’t even thanked you, or begun to thank you –’ his voice wasn’t quite steady.
‘Come now, Rud, do sit down, or I’ll feel I have to join you in this march around your property.’
At last Rud subsided, sinking into an armchair.
‘Do you think it would be useful if you told me a little about what happened today, anything that might have made Carrie act that way this particular afternoon?’
Conland trod delicately, not wanting to suggest any hint of blame – no blame of any person or act. That would get them all nowhere. And it was no good just jumping in with his own ideas: of course, he had plenty of those, he hadn’t lived in Brattleboro as a doctor these twelve years without knowing something about the family histories that were still astir in present lives.
And once Carrie Balestier had come back to town as Mrs. Rudyard Kipling it had revived people’s memories concerning the Balestiers of Beechwood and the orphan children of that failed lawyer, the no-account Henry Balestier:
‘Dying young, let alone leaving a widow and three young children, was just his final and most tiresome way of acting feckless,’ Conland had heard Mrs. Goodenough declare to her particular friends, as they sat with their sewing out on the porch of her house on Main St.
That afternoon all the windows had been standing open against the heat. He couldn’t avoid overhearing, in the ground floor bedroom where he was dressing the ulcers on old Ma Goodenough’s leg. Taking it as his professional duty to know all he could of these walking chronicles, his patients, he’d lingered over his task.
‘It beats me why that eight-year-old child should have set so much store by him,’ another voice – Mrs. Harrison’s? – took up. ‘They say Carrie shrieked and screamed when they told her he was gone. She made out as she wanted to sit up with the body because she believed she could make him come back.’
‘Oh, my stars’ – several rockers creaked violently under agitated movement.
‘They didn’t let her?’
‘Never in the world. They got the doctor to give her a sleeping draught so she was out of the way until the funeral was over.’
‘I believe Mr. Balestier was real attached to that little girl,’ a different voice interposed.
There it was, the individual detail, the critical one that betrayed the inner shape of things. So that was Carrie Kipling.
‘No good doctoring if you were only interested in bones,’ he always said. ‘They’re not all that shape us from inside.’
Now the doctor in him waited for Rud to respond to the cautious investigation he’d set in train. An angry flush was already darkening Rud’s face.
‘Perhaps you can understand it, Jim, but I’m blowed if I do. I simply told Carrie that I would be out for some time. I just wanted to go out. And suddenly she was crying and pleading with me not to go. It was the same this morning, now I think of it, when I showed her the invitation from Norton. A few days away, that’s all it would have meant. It’s all very well for her to say she can’t leave the baby but there are men I need to talk to over here, men like Twain and Norton down in Harvard. Not to say Henry Adams and all those Washington folk. Over here they’re the ones with their hands on the tiller and there are things they need to hear.’
The doctor looked on, encouragingly but in silence, somewhat taken aback by Rud’s presumption, his confidence in the universal value of his opinions.
‘I have a little experience of these things – my mother’s highly strung, you know – it was all quite out of proportion and I told Carrie as much. I was coming back for dinner…’ Indignation raised his voice half a tone.
‘Does she usually offer objections?’
Conland raised the decanter enquiringly but Rud shook his head.
‘Not like today. Of course she does get lonely. I’m awful busy, but I can’t live her life for her. She needs to make friends; this is her home town, for heaven’s sake.’
‘I guess that you may have put your finger on it, Rud. It is Carrie’s home town, in a way. But I’m not sure that’s to her advantage. Her family, the Balestiers of Beechwood, are big folks round here. Yet Carrie didn’t necessarily get much appreciation or respect herself, the summers when her mother brought them down from New York. No father, no cash, her brother Beatty the favoured one.’
‘Heaven knows why. Dear old Wolcott was worth ten of him. But Beatty’s still the blue-eyed boy round here; the family won’t hear a word against him.’
Conland poured himself a finger of whisky. He had heard there was trouble in that quarter. When the young Kiplings appointed Beatty to act as a kind of clerk of works for them, locals knew it was only a matter of time before they fell out. Beatty wasn’t exactly crooked but you wouldn’t call him straight.
‘From the start, there was way too much spirit in Carrie for Brattleboro – the spirit that took her off West with her brother, even before she shipped to London to keep house for him. Your wife’s a very high strung woman. There are advantages to that as well as the disadvantages you’ve seen today.’
His listener was on his feet again. Two of a kind.
‘Do you mean the child isn’t safe with her?’
‘Good God, no. Carrie lives for that baby, same as she lives for you. Today, I’m ready to wager, was an exception. She’s been under a certain amount of strain – I believe she had sole responsibility for your move into Naulakha, in your absence? And of course, business dealings with family can bring their own problems.’ He didn’t care to make more explicit reference to Beatty’s loud and public complaints about Carrie and her tight control over the petty cash.
‘No, it’s my belief that there are cues – perhaps triggers you need to avoid or work round, that’s all.’ He put down his glass and fixed Rud with his gaze.
‘Carrie lost her father at a young age. Then, as you told me yourself, Wolcott, the brother she was close to, died, in spite of all her efforts to save him. That leaves its mark. All I would say is, think carefully, talk it over quietly with Carrie, when you have to leave her yourself.’
Rud continued standing, now looking depressed. ‘Carrie used to be game for every kind of lark. Now she doesn’t dance that dance any more –’
The doctor rose to face him and putting his hand on the younger man’s shoulder said quietly:
‘We all have to make these accommodations, you know, me included. We’re all just a mite crazy, in parts.’
Riding home, Conland recalled that Rud’s father would be back at Naulakha to continue the visit he was making in a day or two. From the moment he had chanced on Lockwood Kipling, sitting across from Baby Jo on the nursery floor, drawing animals for her, with sound accompaniment, Conland had recognised a benevolent presence. Lockwood Kipling would steady the ship.
*
Life in Naulakha did pick up its even tenor, soothed by Lockwood’s presence. Eighteen months later, however, long-standing tensions flared up once more.
‘Beatty is way too much for me,’ Carrie finally complained to her mother. ‘You know we give him fifty cents bonus on every man he hires for us? Well, I’ve just found out that he takes the bonus then sets them to work on his own farm. But that’s not the worst of it. We’re not the only ones he cheats. He’s bringing shame on the whole family between that and his drinking.’
‘Drunk or sober, Beatty is a gentleman,’ was the response. Carrie might have known Anna Smith Balestier would countenance no criticism of the son who remained to her.
Controlling her rage at this betrayal she pressed on.
‘Mother, surely you agree we ought to help him to go straight. A shock might do it. We both hold mortgages on that farm of his. What if we foreclosed on them?’
The stare of affronted withdrawal told her she had gone too far.
Rud attempted to reason with Beatty more than once, making his way up to Beechwood, Beatty’s place, hoping for a serious talk.
‘If you could see your way to give up the bottle, old chap, for a while, and get yourself really dug in at work – that farm of yours could be a wonderful asset if you put your back into it –’
Beatty continued to regard him with an amiable smile.
‘Of course it won’t pay at first but that need not be a difficulty. I’d see that Mai and little Marjorie have all they need.’
‘Sounds a swell offer, Rud.’
‘You think you might?’
‘I guess the right time to start would be the beginning of next season. I’m thinking of going into hogs.’
And so it went on, from one month, one year, to the next.
There was something unknowable, something that wouldn’t, couldn’t, play fair in Beatty, that looked to do harm. Impossible to complain to Mother of more private, more disturbing evidence. They would have to deal with it themselves. Rud hated being interrupted when he was his writing, so Carrie put off sharing her concerns till he emerged from his study for lunch. Sitting at her desk, she looked up at him.
‘Jo’s malted milk has started disappearing from the icebox. It’s not you, is it, Rud? I thought not. It must be Janet. Though I did think she was more reliable.’
His cheerful, ‘end of a well-spent morning’ smile faded.
‘Come on, Carrie, you don’t know that. Better get the girl in and ask her about it.’
But the local girl who was employed to help the cook seemed angry. ‘No, sir, I ain’t had nothing out of the icebox. If you’re sure you want to know,’ she looked hard at Carrie, ‘best keep watch first thing.’ She would not be drawn further.
At daybreak next morning, Rud was standing guard, bleary-eyed, in the kitchen. While the sky was still pale, hearing the tap of the latch of the basement door, he drew back into the shadows of the hall.
A cautious step on the stairs and Beatty emerged into the kitchen and reached for the icebox.
‘Can I help you, Beatty?’
Before the usual charming smile fixed itself, the look of a trapped animal rearranged the intruder’s features.
‘His excuses were so fluent, if I hadn’t begun to know his depths, I might have been tempted to believe him,’ Rud told Carrie unhappily, sitting on her bed as he waited for his bath to fill.
After that, Carrie could never feel quite as safe at home. Beatty had always had to have the best and always, as Wolcott used to say, at the expense of someone else.
* * *
Calcutta remained stifling, in every sense, but Trix had found a solution to her difficulties. A new outlet. No more tears and exclamations over Jack and over her writing. She was more at peace than she’d been for some time. Also, more hopeful, even exultant. Experimenting with the ‘automatic writing’ that everyone was talking about, seemed to have released something in her. And it came to her so easily. Of course, Mama had always prided herself on having ‘the sight’, but as a daughter she’d looked on the claim with scepticism. Be that as it might, here she was, picking up messages and scraps of poetry from who knew where and passing them on, as directed, by who knew whom.
But here lay the great joy of it. Discovering this unsuspected gift had somehow freed her to write stories again. When her new one, ‘The Little Pink House’, came out in the Pall Mall Magazine she felt she was really back to her old self. She had even dared to sign her own name to it this time: ‘Trix Kipling’. It was tiresome that the editor had thought ‘Trix’ too undignified and had corrected it – as he thought – to ‘Beatrice Kipling’.
Never mind. She’d started another novel. In such good heart she could even face with equanimity the prospect of going back to Scotland when they were on home leave later in the year. It would have been more than a little sad, if it’d not been so comical, the clash of taste between Jack’s family and her own. She could laugh at it here at home in Calcutta where the menace of the approaching Hot Weather was already to be felt. The skies had lost any depth of blue and were paling day by day, a reminder of the white glare that was to come. Lying awake at night, she fancied that she caught the snarl of tigers, carried on the stifling airs from the mangroves of the delta.
In Simla, the early arrivals would be bracing themselves for a different challenge. Turning their experienced gaze around the cottages they’d rented for the season, making sure before the world started arriving that they had their full quota of chairs. Better to get their order in early, well in advance of the rush on light cane armchairs that was certain to come. Charm had to be imported forcibly by those who could not do without it; the darzies would be sitting out on the verandahs of the sensitive, one foot at the wheel of their little Singers. Both hands feeding through the printed muslins at three rupees the length, for the curtains that would make such a difference. It was a pity that Mama took so little interest. Some people had their muslins specially dyed. ‘A hue between apricot and shrimp-pink’ as she dreamily recalled, was particularly flattering to the complexion, day or night.
Another year when she wouldn’t be lingering among the wild white roses along the Mall at Simla. Perhaps it was as well to give up all that their frail moonlit scent brought back. To forget Ian Hamilton – really no more than a boy then – and the look of worship on his face when he asked if he might show her his poems.
How brief that moment had been. At the first sight of Miss Muir, after one dance with her, Trix Kipling, had been forgotten.
Once more she saw the trails of flickering light that marked the evening of a party. Flaring cotton seeds in saucers of oil laid out ceremoniously in welcome. Yet the points of light started guttering, threatening to die. With a shake of her head, Trix fought to clear her blurred vision. Lucky to have been young and reasonably pretty, lucky now to be safely married to a good man like Jack. You couldn’t expect to keep them, those sharp-edged feelings forever. For a moment they might return, with the memory of a flaring lamp outdoors. A night touched with delicious chill.
Her heart sank at the thought of the chill that awaited them in Scotland. In fact, chill was too mild a term for the fierce damp that prowled through most of the houses she’d visited in Scotland. But before she had to face all that again in September she was going to see Rud. True, she wouldn’t have him to herself. They would all, Carrie and Rud, Jack and herself, be expected to gather at Tisbury – wherever that was – she imagined, summoned together at the ancestral altars. ‘Not very kind,’ she admonished herself quickly. Only the meanest spirit could grudge her mother the relief of having left India for good, though Trix was less sure that Papa was quite ready for the life of retirement.
Rud had never brought Carrie out to India. Trix had known he wouldn’t. He’d never come back, never be allowed, or more likely, never take the risk. A few years back, he’d described finding Ayah, still alive and living in Bombay. She herself really couldn’t bring back any memory of Ayah yet Trix envied how much that had meant to him. He’d drawn a line under that meeting, she was sure. India was over, for him. But not for her. It made her feel rather lost.
Well, before the close of July, Rud and Carrie would at least be joining them all in Tisbury. Maybe not staying at ‘The Gables’– couldn’t they change that name? – certainly not, when she thought about it. Not only was there no room but she was sure Carrie would arrange things so that she had Rud entirely to herself for part of the time. Trix knew he wouldn’t resist but she did wonder how long this attempt to graft himself onto the Balestiers could last. Loyal as he was to Carrie, his letters hinted that relations with Carrie’s brother Beatty were becoming strained. Rud always hated the feeling that he was being cheated.
Trix didn’t like to admit it but she was secretly glad, on the whole, that she wouldn’t be meeting baby Josephine. It was surely wise, the plan to leave her with her Balestier grandmother. Mama hadn’t a talent for babies.
Rud wanted to see what she was writing, now that she had managed to get started again. She wondered whether to tell him about the automatic writing when she saw him next month at Home. He ought to be interested and approve; heaven knew he was convinced that at times he found himself writing in a sort of trance.
Alice and Lockwood did succeed in gathering their children to them at Tisbury in their detached grey stone house on Hindon Lane. Trix and Jack Fleming were to stay with them at The Gables, while Rud and Carrie put up at a nearby hotel. Struggling to find her feet in the silent, unacknowledged tussle with Alice, Carrie was careful to keep her mother’s counsel in mind.
‘You’ll never win, Carrie, if you try to get a man away from his mother.’
It took all her self-discipline but she usually managed to swallow her resentment and look pleasant when Alice appealed to ‘Ruddy darling’ for his opinion. She never wanted to know what Carrie thought.
‘Of course, I’m only the little American wife,’ Carrie would mutter as she brushed out her hair at the end of another evening when only Lockwood engaged her in conversation. She kept to herself the dawning confidence that she was again pregnant.
If she was, would that make matters worse, between herself and Trix? No sign of any children in that quarter and everything so chilly, so stiff between the Flemings. Perhaps that was why Trix acted so difficult with her, contradicting everything she said while always making a ridiculous fuss of Rud.
Carrie recalled an evening when Alice and Lockwood had retired early, both with colds coming on. They were barely out of the drawing room before Trix was on her feet:
‘Ruddy, you do remember Ian Hamilton? I’ve had such a letter from him, he’s been up on the Frontier and ran into Dunsterville. If you’re very good I’ll let you read it.’
She tripped across the room towards him, two or three sheets of paper held fluttering above her head.
Rud pretended to snap at them, like a terrier. They fell laughing onto the sofa.
And they were off, heads together, talking India. As they went on, their voices increasing in pitch, she’d picked up phrases she took to be Hindustani.
‘No, you’re wrong, Trix, you’ve forgotten. You’ve never had a head for topography. The Kashmir Bazaar is closer to the Delhi Gate.’
Rud was enjoying himself.
Carrie believed Trix cast a glance of triumph in her direction as she bore her brother off to the Pater’s study, in search of the books that would settle their argument.
For the moment she had to stomach Trix’s behaviour. It was a mercy that Trix would be going back to India with her long streak of a husband, while she herself would be returning to Brattleboro with Rud in tow. She liked being indispensable. He entrusted her with organising every detail of their travels.
* * *
Jack Fleming didn’t care for automatic writing and all the flummery that went with it from sitting in dark rooms, to table-tapping and calling on spirits of the dead. He’d made his views very clear and imagined that would be the end of it. Yet it seemed Trix wasn’t prepared to give it up.
Solar topee still in his hand, unregarded for a moment, Jack was trembling with rage. ‘I cannot believe that you would so defy me. My own wife.’
Trix shuddered as she came back to herself. With a bruised look about the eyes she registered the fact of his presence.
She was wan but when she responded her voice had an edge.
‘I can’t give it up. It’s made me sure that what I’m writing in my stories is true. I can believe in myself again. Without it I’d never have finished my novel.’ Her tone softened a little. ‘You seemed so pleased that Heinemann are going to bring out The Pinchbeck Goddess and with my own name, “Mrs. J.M. Fleming”, on the cover.’
For some moments he didn’t know how to continue.
He’d returned from camp some days before he was expected. The Survey’s planning had been unusually ineffective and there was nothing for it but to return to Calcutta, the job half done. They’d intended to finish mapping that remote district before the monsoon. Striding into the drawing room unannounced, he’d found it empty.
The khamsamah had assured him that the Memsahib had spent the morning at home ‘Writing, writing, Colonel Sahib’ and had not yet left for her usual game of tennis at the Saturday Club.
Glancing at the row of invitations on the mantelpiece, he’d made for his study, to put down the map cases he was carrying. Far too valuable to leave in the office, he preferred to keep his current work under his hand. But it was the expression on his wife’s face as he’d glimpsed it through the open door of her dressing room that brought him to a halt. Rapt, eyelids lowered, he’d known even before he’d taken a step closer that her right hand would be stretched out quivering before her.
He’d thrown the door wide open.
Now his anger, unassuaged, lent him words.
‘Good God, Trix. You promised there’d be no more of these damned trances. I cannot believe that you would deceive me in this fashion.’
The colour returning to her cheeks, Trix rose to her feet. ‘Deceive, Jack? What can you mean? You know very well that I have never given you any such promise. You’ve indicated that you mistrust the world of psychical research but –’
‘Mistrust – it’s a lot of foolery, dangerous foolery and I’ll not have my wife mixed up in it.’
With that he slammed his fist down on her desk.
‘Then you should have taken a different wife,’ she glared back at him. ‘I can’t choose to keep apart from that world, it’s part of me. Whether I like it or not. And I don’t always enjoy these powers I seem to have been born with – I can’t shake them off or suppress them. They will have their way.’
He hated hearing this. Hated the way it took her away from him into a world from which he recoiled.
There was nowhere to put the topee down in here.
‘Could you not stop cultivating them? I’m sure it does you no good. Undermines your health, which is a thing none of us can afford out here.’
Sweat was trickling down inside his collar.
‘Oh Jack, just the reverse is true.’ Trix was clasping her hands now. ‘I’ve found that I get dreadful headaches and pains in my arms if I resist when the impulse comes over me.’ He was frowning, uncertain. ‘Besides, it’s explained so much to me. About my own writing, my stories. I’ve been really afraid. What if I was describing in them might be just fancy. No better than lies, really…’
At sea now, he looked at her helplessly. He turned towards the door.
At once her voice took on that familiar conciliatory tone.
‘But you’re tired, my dear. Let me give orders. What would you like?’
He put her aside with a gesture.
‘Nimbu pani? Tea? It’s a little early for a peg.’
Stiffly. ‘I’ll take the lime juice. With salt.’ He wished she would not use the native lingo with him.
Seated in a long chair, the drink in his hand, he began again, methodically.
‘Tell me what you mean. I don’t understand how it helps you. I find it very implausible.’
‘Jack, automatic writing isn’t something I invented. I only gave it a try after reading about it in the Review of Reviews. It’s a form of research, into energies, invisible forces, like electricity. We’re only starting to tap the world of the unseen. Clever, eminent people take it very seriously.’
She took a sip from her glass.
‘I know that’s what they tell you. It doesn’t make it any better.’
‘How can I explain if you will interrupt? I can’t tell you how surprised I was when my hand began to write – real messages – to transmit them, actually. At first it was just scribble, nonsense rhymes. But then there came words that made sense.’
It wasn’t going to work, Jack’s face was stony.
‘Looking them over, afterwards, I found I’d written a whole poem. And I realised, all of a sudden, that it was about a painting of St. George I once saw. One by Papa’s old friend, William de Morgan.’
She’d only made him look dazed.
‘De Morgan the tile maker? What has he to do with all this?’
How to explain? It all seemed so simple when William had encouraged her. Her poem made sense to him and to Evelyn his wife. ‘We have a duty to explore these things,’ he’d told her, in response to her shy but excited letter.
Trix braced herself.
‘I knew Mr. de Morgan would want to read my poem and I was right. He said it had a political meaning that it referred to our policy in the Transvaal.’
She attempted to stand tall, defiant, before him.
‘Our policy in the Transvaal? What utter nonsense. De Morgan, forsooth. I’ve never heard the man was blessed with any common sense.’
He pushed his glass away.
She would not be silenced.
‘I do believe this special writing has meaning for the world beyond myself. Since then it’s happened again many times. Real messages come through. That’s how I’ve come to think it’s all real. It’s out there. Not just in my own head.’
She’d so often repeated the arguments comparing spiritualism with the telegraph for his benefit. She could tell he was no more convinced this time.
Wearily, he rose to his feet. But Trix hadn’t finished.
‘It’s a gift – I have it and so do many other people. You might be able to do it yourself if you only gave it a chance.’
His face reflected such alarm that she broke into nervous laughter.
‘I think you’re playing with fire. While you are under my roof, I’ll not have it if I can help it. I’ll away to my bath.’
She knew he would say no more on this or any other topic for many days.
* * *
It was early in February, and Jo had just turned three, when Carrie gave birth to a second daughter. Elsie, they’d called her, a name his mother sometimes used. What with the monthly nurse, for a while there’d been too many women in the house for Rud’s taste. By May, though, all anxiety and disruption around the birth, together with the long Vermont winter, were at an end. Full plumes of white lilac leaned over the fences.
Sweat was running into Rud’s eyes as he pushed his bicycle up the hill, pausing every now and then to suck at his grazed wrist. Falling off made him no better than a kid. He should have worn a lighter jacket: spring was rushing into summer faster than he’d thought. Perhaps he’d rest once he got to the stretch of road they called The Pines on the way past dear old Bliss Cottage.
Beatty was level with him, in his buckboard, before he knew it. Rud no sooner put up a hand in salute than he was obliged to drop it in order to clutch the handlebars and brake sharply. What the devil? Beatty was turning round and coming back to overtake him. He was blocking the road.
‘I’ve a bone to pick with you, Rud Kipling. That is if you can spare me some of your precious time.’
A breath then he stood silent. He wasn’t going to reply to abuse.
‘I happen to know that you’ve been spreading lies about me. Goddamned lies, all over this town,’ Beatty slurred.
He wanted to wipe the sweat off but he didn’t dare let go of the bicycle.
‘If you have any message for me, speak to my lawyers.’
‘Going about town boasting that it’s you and your cash that’s the only thing keeping me from bankruptcy. I’m going to whip the goddamned soul out of you for it.’
Beatty loomed over him, from his seat in the buckboard, a big man red in the face, swaying and waving his hands.
Rud caught the familiar taint of whisky: he could see himself being swatted like a fly. No-one around, nothing to get in Beatty’s way.
Keep talking, keep looking into his eyes. Grip those handlebars, then the trembling won’t show. Keep the voice steady.
‘Do you mean personal violence?’
His words sounded thin and abstract, out there on the road.
‘This is what I mean, Mr. Famous Kipling. I’m going to blow your goddamned brains out if you haven’t publicly retracted your lies within a week.’
Beatty jerked at the reins and was off.
Rud sank to the dusty road, shaking all over. Hearing the rattle of approaching wheels he tried to get up, ready to defend himself, but his legs wouldn’t hold him. Tears of relief started to his eyes, as Matt Howard, their own coachman jumped down from his seat in the buggy with a cry of concern. He allowed himself to be taken home.
Beatty Balestier taken to court by his own brother-in-law! Laughter filled the upper floors of the Town Hall, as men in dusty overalls and women in gingham sun hats crowded along the benches.
‘It’s good as a comic show.’
‘Just as well they’ve moved it out of Justice Newton’s office. Blamed newspapermen’re almost crowding out real Brattleboro folk.’
‘It’s way overdue, putting that young whippersnapper, Rudyard Kipling, in his place. Asked for a private post office to be set up, just for hisself, a while back. Can you credit that?’
‘Fool writer-fellow’s bringing a case against his own brother-in-law for threatening his life. I guess that high and mighty Carrie put him up to it. There’s no love lost there.’
‘You mind your mouth, young man!’ a woman’s voice broke in. ‘That Beatty Balestier may sound like a fine fellow when he’s got a glass in his hand, but he surely is a torment to his family. This is a black day for his sister, however you look at it.’
The men turned their attention back to the attorney for the defence, George B. Hitt. Sharp as a whip. He was going to run rings around that little British prig of a writer.
There was no formal court setting. Rud just sat where he’d been told to, at the front of the room. He kept twisting his hat between his hands, putting it down, then picking it up again. The world had gone mad around him. When he went to his lawyer about Beatty he was in fear of his life. Carrie’d insisted on it: Beatty had to be brought to heel somehow. He never imagined that before he knew it, the State’s Attorney would file a complaint and Beatty would be arrested.
The blasted fellow knew what that meant to Carrie. He’d taken a positive pleasure in refusing to let them go bail for him. Beatty meant to rub Carrie’s nose in it. Make her watch her brother being marched off to the lock-up.
But apparently that was the process here: take the evidence, in a ‘hearing on probable cause’ in a ‘justice court’ then decide whether to proceed to trial. It was all out of his hands. Even worse. He still couldn’t quite believe it. He himself, the injured party, had to be cross-examined in public.
Wiping his spectacles, replacing them, he came to. George B. Hitt with his mean little mouth was standing in front of him. The fellow was evidently waiting for a response. But what was the question?
‘Can you confirm the date of your marriage?’ Hitt repeated.
Years, dates danced wildly in his head. He stuttered.
‘In ’92, I think. Summer of ’92.’ That couldn’t be right. When was Jo born? ‘Or spring.’
The first murmurs of laughter began.
One question followed another, relentless. Hitt’s tone was hatefully familiar.
‘I’ll give you “forgot”. I’ll give you “thought”, you little liar.’
The voice of That Woman in Southsea, her very tone, waking sensations that just unmanned him.
He hadn’t meant to throw her beastly book away, he just forgot.
Brattleboro, the Town Hall, were dissolving round him: he stood trembling, dizzy under her anger, helpless. Would he never, never escape?
Once more he fought to hang on to what was true, what had really happened. But what if no-one believed him here either? His head throbbed.
‘Mr. Balestier seemed not in his right senses, crazy. He yelled, sort of.’
It didn’t sound convincing, even to him.
‘You felt your business dealings with Mr. Balestier were too complicated, I believe?’
Now that vile, pushy little attorney was demanding that he expose their private financial affairs.
Sweat broke out on him again and again as he forced the words out.
‘He would send up and get all the ready cash he wanted for his own affairs and pay us back when he felt like it, in kind. Work it out months afterwards, that kind of thing. Get advances all along the line.’
Was there no respect at all for privacy? Hitt was pressing him to reveal his most intimate motives.
‘You claim that you had been “holding Mr. Balestier up by the slack of his pants”. Has that been your mission?’
He thought he might be sick. No sign of a glass of water.
The pledge made in Wolcott’s memory: that he and Carrie would look after Beatty, keep the wild younger brother on the straight. Must that too be dragged out of him?
‘I have done my best. I came here to Brattleboro for that purpose, to help the boy if I could.’
The words came out awkwardly. Throat too dry.
‘This has been your main object?’
He managed to force the word out.
‘Yes.’
Laughter broke out all round him as Hitt drawled, ‘And incidentally you have written some, I suppose?’
The old dizziness claimed him. He couldn’t get his head clear. Yet he must, there was no-one else to stand up for him.
Hitt had stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat. Mountebank.
‘When did you last see Mr. Balestier before this incident?’
‘Not since the end of April, I believe.’
‘Is it not the case that you encountered him at least three times during that period, on May 1st in passing on the road and twice on the day following in town?’
It came back to him now. Nothing for it but to agree. Through clenched teeth:
‘I believe that is correct.’
Hitt only wanted to undercut him. He tried to be honest: he agreed that he chose to avoid some people. Immediately Hitt was in there with, ‘I didn’t suppose you were prepared to speak to reporters.’
Laughter. Were those shouts of applause? He knew he’d become notorious for turning reporters away. People didn’t like him.
Hitt tripped him up again; nothing he said was allowed to carry any weight. He couldn’t make them see how mad and dangerous Beatty had been.
He tried once more, his voice squeaking dangerously.
‘He looked perfectly crazy. I swear I think he was raving.’
‘Shouldn’t you have got him examined for insanity, then, rather than accusing him of violence?’
Was this really happening, this public mockery? Not just a dream?
‘I mean, his face was actually blue.’ How could he make them see?
‘Do you believe that colour to be a sign of insanity?’
Feet were stamping as if at a show.
His left eyelid wouldn’t stop twitching. He shook his head.
‘Have you ever at any time seen Mr. Balestier out with a gun?’ Hitt demanded.
‘No.’ But wait, that’s wrong. ‘I mean, yes. No, I have seen him with one, out gunning.’
‘Then he was gunning for game, not gunning for Kiplings?’
He was utterly powerless but he would not surrender.
A pause. Hitt was pretending to consult his papers.
‘What was the reason you didn’t stay to hear out Mr. Balestier’s complaint?’ he shot out.
Rud summoned himself. ‘It was the first time I’d had my life threatened and I didn’t know the etiquette.’
The room fell still around him.
Even as some composure returned to him, he hesitated: that wasn’t true. In Southsea, when there was no-one to hear him, he’d felt as though he were going to die.
‘Can you explain why you didn’t just agree to take back whatever language of yours had offended Mr. Balestier, in order to calm him down?’
Rud was ready now: ‘I wouldn’t retract a word for fear of death from any living man.’
For a second he caught Beatty’s eye where he stood apart, hands on hips, hat tipped over his eyes, a cigar in his mouth. Beatty sneered.
The State’s Attorney seemed appalled by the morning’s work. When the court resumed at two o’clock and it was his turn to put questions, he spoke softly.
‘Now Mr. Kipling can you explain to us what had made Mr. Balestier so angry, in your own opinion?’
The relief. Being addressed civilly. An intelligent face.
‘I believe he was incensed at some offers of help I had made him, instead of dropping him altogether as I ought to have done. Because I suggested that under certain conditions I would pay his creditors.’
He had his voice under control now.
‘Why did such an offer seem appropriate to you?’
A reasonable question. Looking the State’s Attorney straight in the eye:
‘He always seemed on the edge of financial break-up, always in deep water.’
‘Can you describe the course of your business relations with Mr. Balestier?’
‘There was a period of about six months that he worked beautifully at overseeing the construction of our new house then he tailed off and didn’t do much. Some while back we had to stop using him.’
He’d never felt so tired.
‘Can you say why?’
It was unpleasant but he’d better come out with it.
‘He was not altogether sober generally. In fact,’ feeling a spurt of energy, ‘he was just plain ugly in the morning.’
He turned to look across the room. Beatty was making an attempt to swagger then he pulled his hat low and made for the door.
Rud was too worn out to take it in at the close of the afternoon, when Justice William S. Newton placed Beatty Balestier under bonds to appear at the County Court at its September term, to face charges yet to be drawn up.
At home once more, Rud was sitting on the floor of his study, down by the bookshelves. Though the volume on his knees lay open, the pages swung back and forth, unmarked. At least now he was shaved. It was the first day they had not spent in court.
‘Rud, won’t you see Doctor Conland? He’s got Mr. Childs with him and another friend.’ The effort to dredge up the name was just too much for her.
He came to, as she’d hoped, at the sound of Jim Conland’s name.
‘Where is he?’ and Rud shambled after her, through her study and into the middle room.
It was a deputation. They wanted him to know that he was held in undiminished respect. ‘And to keep honouring us by your presence here, where you have so many friends who love you and hold you in high regard.’
The three figures swam before her. Carrie steadied herself.
Rud was slowly shaking his head.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. But I appreciate – I am grateful –’ he turned away, his hands waving helplessly, and left the room.
The men lowered their eyes then turned to Carrie. Each took her by the hand. As from a distance she heard the kindly meant phrases: ‘soon himself again, sensitive temperament, Hitt no gentleman’.
Their steps were heavy on the porch as they went away.
The following morning there was no question of shaving. Rud slept on through the afternoon. It was all she could do to persuade him to take a bath before he stumbled back into bed. For a fortnight or more Rud retreated into sleep, either in bed or on the sofa in his study. Nothing roused him, not even Jo, when she begged him to play with her.
‘Dadda, be my tiger for me again, my tiger that I ride.’
Rud looked through her. Carrie hurried the child away.
Carrie did her utmost to hide the reports in the press. Rud asked for the newspapers almost feverishly but she put him off. ‘Nothing come through from the city, problems at the railhead.’ She trusted that he would never see the cruel parody of his poem Danny Deever’ in the Boston Post.
‘What’s that a-lopin down the lane? asked copper ready-made
It’s Rudyard running for his life the first selectman said.’
Stanza after stanza, mocking her too.
‘What makes his wife look down so glum? asked copper ready-made.
It’s family pride, it’s family pride…’
They could endure no repeat of those days in court. They must be out of Brattleboro before the hearing in September. The case against Beatty would be allowed to drop.
Meanwhile, what was to be done about Rud?
She thanked God for Jim Conland, their own doctor, who finally pulled him round, by means of company and fishing trips as much as his bottles of tonic. That nerve specialist in Boston with his advice to give up tobacco was no help at all. But Jim, having been a seaman in his youth, had more at his command than medicine.
‘What do you say to a little trip into Massachusetts, maybe to the port of Gloucester, since you’re always at me for information about life on the cod banks for that book you’re working on?’ he asked, casually.
The light was coming back to Rud’s eyes on his return.
‘By Jove, those fellows are tough.’ He could hardly wait to get inside the house to begin telling her what he had learned.
It set him off on a new tack: always what he needed. Not that she herself greatly enjoyed Captains Courageous. The tale of a spoiled boy saved by spending time before the mast didn’t mean much to her, though it seemed there were readers enough for that kind of yarn. It was a trap, really, Rud’s versatility. There were things he got involved in writing that weren’t worthy of him.
‘We both know it, Carrie,’ Rud said soon after his return. ‘Our life over here has been poisoned. There’s nothing for it but to make our retreat, go back to England.’
She could only agree. Leave the country, at least for a while.
She wanted to believe that they would come back home, in time. Celebrate Thanksgiving, tap their maples for sugar once more. The barn was so handsome: they would have dancing out there after dinner again, with cider and sandwiches, kerosene lamps and simple stuff gowns. They would. Her fists clenched: Brattleboro was not going to drive her out for good.
On the morning of their departure, their old friend Molly Cabot found them both overwhelmed, Carrie for once weeping openly, Rud quite frozen. Sad enough herself, Molly was astonished to hear him choke out:
‘It’s the hardest thing I have ever had to do.’
She hadn’t been prepared for such an unqualified statement.
Before handing over the key to Matt Howard, who would be acting as caretaker, Molly wandered back through the wood-panelled hall into the deserted space of Naulakha.
In the kitchen, wood still burned in the great black range. Absently she put up a hand to close a cupboard door that stood ajar, as she passed on and into the dining room with its blank oval table, its dozen empty chairs. The Tiffany lamps on the sideboard stood drab, unlit.
With the folding doors standing open, she could see right through the middle room into Carrie’s study beyond, and even further into the study that had been Rud’s. In the afternoons they’d gather for tea in there, served from the brass tray that came from Benares. A wedding present from his sister, Carrie had told her.
That wasn’t the only sign of India. Those printed cottons that hung at the windows came from Lahore, sent by Lockwood following a request from Rud. He’d found the embroidered wall-hangings for them out there, too.
Molly recalled now how Lockwood had laughed at Rud.
‘Vermont won’t ever turn into India, if that’s what you want.’
She pictured Rud, defensive in his reply.
‘I like the feel of these stuffs hanging about. They remind me. I want Jo – and Elsie too, of course – to be as happy here as I was then.’
Remembering his words she shivered as she stood alone in the newly-abandoned house.
Surveying the painted screens, the tiger-skin that still hung over the back of a wicker chair, Molly saw India, anxiously reassembled on that rocky outcrop, camouflaged by those outer walls of bland green Vermont shingles.
‘Of course,’ she said aloud, glimpsing a child’s intent fantasy.
Molly ceased to wonder that it cost so much to give it up.
* * *
Impossible to get back to sleep. Since arriving here in England, Carrie lay awake most nights, unlike Rud. It was reassuring to hear him breathing so regularly over there in the other bed. It was also frustrating. He retreated into oblivion whenever he could. That was not her way. She’d put up a bold front. Fortifications, even. She smiled wryly to herself in the dark. Rock House, the new home she’d leased for them in England, had battlements, and stood in imposing acres above the cliffs.
She lay dwarfed under the vault of its master bedroom, unsure in the darkness how long she could keep it all up. As a girl, visits to Brattleboro had always made her conscious of the whiff of humiliation and misfortune that clung to her family. Once she was ensconced in Naulakha, though, a married woman with a famous husband, and living in real English style, she’d felt able to look anyone in the eye. Sitting up in her own phaeton, driving the matched pair Rud had bought for her, she knew herself skilful, daring, poised as a queen.
All that was behind her now.
Maybe she’d be more comfortable if she turned the pillow? A moment’s struggle and it was done, the smooth chill soothing under her cheek.
She was sliding away into unconsciousness, when a distant shriek made her sit upright.
Was that Baby Elsie, crying, away in the nursery?
It might be just a seagull. As the sound died away, Carrie relaxed and lay back down, drawing up the covers. Nurse must be dealing with her.
‘I don’t know how I got through those early weeks, last February, with all the worry of Beatty on top of the exhaustion after Elsie’s birth,’ she’d admitted to Rud, once they were back in England.
‘It was very different when Jo was born,’ he’d said heavily. ‘Then we both had no thought for anything but the child.’
She’d been surprised to hear him say that. Had he forgotten? At the time his immediate concern had been her own safety. It’d taken a day or two before he’d fallen in love with the baby.
Jo was so like him, she’d always been too easily excited. Elsie seemed a calmer child altogether. Just as well, now that another baby was on the way.
As if in response to that thought, a faint fluttering came, deep inside her. She laid a hand low on her belly.
‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘yes, little creature, I’m awake too.’
And felt the blood rise in her cheek at her own foolishness.
Less than five months to go. Maybe this one would be a boy. Rud would like that.
A grayish light was already leaking round the curtains. Contemplating the inert form in the bed across from her own, Carrie’s smile died. Rud lay turned away from her, curled tightly into himself.
Her hands clenched, watching him.
Rud was still refusing to speak of Naulakha. He could not bring himself to read so much as a newspaper article about America. Let alone any letter arriving from Brattleboro since they’d fled. That handsome Theodor Dunham had proposed to her sister Josephine and had been accepted but Carrie hadn’t dared to break Rud’s embargo. She’d contained herself.
She stirred, impatient, against the coil of the sheets.
It wasn’t just to lay all the blame at Beatty’s door, much as she’d like to. Rud had become restless even before the court case, at a time when Carrie, for one, had no thought of leaving Brattleboro. Absurdly, to her mind at least, he began to take conflicts between nations to heart, take them quite personally, as though it were about himself, not the interests of whole peoples. This seemed to get worse as relations with Beatty went downhill. When it looked for a while as though the United States might go to war with England over some crazy border dispute in Venezuela, Rud confided that he was not going to be safe in America.
‘I could be killed,’ he insisted, baffling her.
‘Really, Rud, it’s nothing to do with you, as an individual. Why should you imagine it is?’ she’d asked.
He’d ignored her.
That same week he’d turned on Molly Cabot, a woman he was really fond of, and Carrie’s unwilling suspicions were confirmed. He was lost to the real world and was at war with phantoms.
‘If we wanted to, the naval power of England could wipe out your three largest cities; it would be good bye to New York, Boston and Philadelphia,’ he’d threatened.
Molly’s calm, ‘I don’t see the end of the United States coming just yet,’ sent him stalking out of the house, too angry to speak further.
A tiny disturbance to the room’s silence. It carried on. Rud was grinding his teeth again.
Carrie’d always known there was violence in him. He usually kept it under wraps, though shows of Evangelical piety brought it out. But this aggression, these unwarranted intimations of danger, continued to trouble her. And once Beatty threatened him, of course, it was as though all his fantasies were confirmed.
She’d imagined that being back in England would restore Rud to common sense. Yet the tone of his concern over international affairs continued to disturb her. Endless ranting on the topic of Imperial Federation: it made her angry being obliged to listen to him. There was a strain of unreason, an investment of emotion, that she couldn’t fathom. As though Rud himself were in need of being federated and held together by law.
Since they’d been back in England, she’d done what she could to pre-empt his outbursts, to get him to speak about it coolly. As they waited for guests from London to arrive, late one morning, she’d asked him straight out ‘Why does it matter so much, I don’t understand what Imperial Federation means to you, Rud?’
Again he’d dismissed her.
Perhaps worrying about Imperial Federation took his mind away from dwelling on what they’d given up. Just as long as others didn’t find it as off key as she did herself.
The tooth grinding had stopped. Rud had rolled over, he’d soon be awake.
The raw daylight was catching his spectacles, where they lay on the bedside table. Without them his face was exposed, offered to her open and free of guile as one of the children.
On the instant, Carrie’s heart quickened.
All she wanted now was for Rud to get back to writing. It wasn’t simply the contracts that might not be honoured. In that sense his position – and their income – were pretty much secure. It was dangerous for Rud himself not to be writing. She’d seen what happened when his friend Stevenson died and Rud couldn’t write for weeks. Every day that he didn’t write he sank deeper into himself and away from her. He seemed to give up, to let go of life. As though, like Wolcott before him, he were drifting away and leaving her. Like Father.
If Rud left her too, she couldn’t go on living.
He would never be allowed to enter that realm of shadow again, not if Carrie had anything to do with it. From now on she must be vigilant, alert at all times to signs of danger.
‘Stand still a moment.’ Carrie bent over in order to settle the heavy folds of her small daughter’s dress. Josephine was particularly attached to the navy serge with the big square white collar.
‘Do I really look like a little English sailor-girl?’ Jo asked in fascination. ‘But I am still American, aren’t I?’ It made her parents laugh, the way she would turn off her slow Vermont drawl at will and speak instead in the clipped tones that she heard used by her father and his English friends.
‘Guess I’m real British today,’ she announced at breakfast, arms out from her sides, inviting them to admire her outfit once her mother had done fussing.
As an experiment, she had been promoted from the nursery meal.
‘It will be calmer for her,’ Carrie decided. ‘She does get so easily worked up. If only she were a better sleeper.’
‘And what fun for us, Carrie. We don’t want to waste her company on Nurse Holder any more than we have to.’
Carrie ate slowly, not properly hungry but at least no longer nauseous. Breakfast was a protracted affair as Carrie preferred to settle plans for the day ahead in detail with her husband. Once Jo had finished her boiled egg and drunk most of her milk, a friendly wave from all parties would see her depart, so long as she’d wiped her mouth. Today she clambered down from her grown-up dining chair and went cheerfully off to her governess while Rud and Carrie were still opening their mail.
‘Another one for you, my dear.’ Rud flipped it across to her. The pile by Carrie’s plate grew yet more threatening. The business correspondence she could trust to no-one but herself. There was also the problem of the cook. The woman’s manner was truly unfortunate, so over familiar. Carrie was not completely satisfied with any of the servants; she’d not been able to vet them herself, setting up house in England at such short notice. She’d had to rely on a London agency. There would be barely time enough to get a moment with Baby Elsie.
It was some time after lunch, which Jo took with her governess, when she reappeared to tug at Carrie’s hand. Her mother was wearing a distracted frown after an agitating encounter below stairs. The woman would have to go.
‘Come on, Mummy, come on and see the game we’re playing, Father and me.’ Reluctantly, Carrie allowed herself to be drawn along in Jo’s wake. To her surprise, for she imagined they’d be making for the study up on the first floor, Carrie found herself led instead along a remote tiled passage towards the boot-room, a cheerless unheated space situated at the end of a wing, close to a back door.
Jo’s grip on her hand was growing tighter as sounds that she could not identify began to reach them. A sort of rhythmic chanting, as she would describe it later to Rud’s Aunt Georgie. From their first meeting Carrie had sensed that confidences would be safe with Georgie. Throwing open the door, she feared that Rud was teaching Jo to play at Hindu festivals again. It was so hard to explain away to the other mothers. He never thought of that.
But no, at first she could not make out where Rud was, though his voice seemed to emerge from every corner. Boot racks and umbrella stands had been moved together while the garden rug was draped between folding chairs to make a tent. Or was it a wall? On the far side of it crouched her husband, cross-legged on the livid tiles, rocking himself as he chanted.
‘I think Daddy’s sad,’ the child whispered to her mother.
Opening his eyes, her father looked startled. ‘I thought you were still in here with me, Infant.’ Registering Carrie’s presence and her look of alarm, Rud struggled to his feet.
‘I suppose you want all this tidied up.’ Before she could reply, he had set about restoring the room, with an air of sullen obedience.
Before they’d left Naulakha, when she was trying to find them a suitable place over in England, Rud insisted that they must find one by the sea. She went along with that without questioning, especially when they were offered such a fine handsome place as Rock House and relatively close to his old school. For her part, the principal consideration was to settle at a distance from her mother-in-law. Perhaps she should have paid more attention, had been too hasty. Could she have made a mistake?
The day they first set foot in it, Rock House had seemed so inviting, even reminiscent of Naulakha in its own way, though so much grander. The wide rooms were flooded with light, sunshine bringing to life the gaudy birds that hopped among the curling flower designs of the drawing room wallpaper. Yet within ten days, a week, of their moving in, she unwillingly found herself remarking on a sense of darkening, of deterioration beneath its roof. The air was chill with a damp that drained the colour from the brightest day. Her sensitive nose picked up a suspicion of drains. Surely it hadn’t been like this when they first arrived?
‘So you see,’ she concluded in the letter sent off to Aunt Georgie, at home in North End House in Rottingdean, ‘even though we lose money by it I’ve decided to give up the lease.’ She held back from speaking of the black mood which seemed to have settled over Rud there, a darkness that was beginning to seep into her own life.
* * *
‘Together again for Christmas, Ruddy!’ Trix was standing by the drawing room window, looking out. ‘And it’s almost like when we were small, with Aunt Georgie and Uncle Ned only just across the green!’
She watched as her parents emerged from the porch of The Elms, the house Ruddy’d taken in Rottingdean. Arm-in-arm, they were on their way to spend the afternoon with Georgie and Ned over at North End House. Both were wrapped about with scarves over their topcoats, her mother stooping a little.
A dull sinking in her chest. They were growing old.
It would be a good thing if she could come Home like this more often.
She’d been about to remind Ruddy of the first Christmas they’d spent at the Grange, how he’d lifted her up to reach the bell-pull. But turning back to the drawing room, she realised that he wasn’t listening, had no attention to spare for her. Instead he was down on the carpet, snarling and pawing the air menacingly over little Jo, where she lay hiccupping with delicious terror.
Stung to anger, at the same time Trix was embarrassed. Absurd to put herself in competition with a child. Yet she felt a vacuum open inside her. She used to be the one he turned to first.
From the sofa across the room, Carrie caught her eye.
Worse and worse. Carrie had seen it all.
Trix was still shocked by Carrie’s appearance. On first sight of her, the day Trix had arrived in Rottingdean, she’d felt the smile freeze on her lips. Blowsy was the word that came to mind. Also shapeless. Overflowing. Carrie sat now, her baby beside her, asleep where she’d laid him down. She did look worn. Of course it was only four months since Baby John was born but if that was what having babies did to you… maybe it wouldn’t be an absolute disaster if she herself was never to be a mother. She would make an effort to believe that.
‘Would you like to hold him?’ Carrie offered, startling her. ‘I really ought to go up to the nursery and see how Elsie’s getting on with Nurse. All day in bed with a cold is hard when you’re barely two.’ Despite her words, Carrie remained leaning back wearily against the tasselled upholstery. ‘It’s almost time for Baby’s feed, so you mustn’t mind if he wakes, it’ll be nothing you’ve done.’
The kind thought, the wish to compensate her for Rud’s default, brought tears to Trix’s eyes. Then it hit her: perhaps Carrie understood because she too now played second fiddle.
‘Don’t move, I’ll come to you,’ Trix replied. In a moment she was across the room and bending to take possession of Baby John, swathed in his Shetland. Trix had held other babies but the warm delicious weight, the delicate powdery smell of Rud’s baby’s scalp sent a shiver through her. When the time came to give him up her arms were left cold and empty.
The others had already gone up, ‘I think I’ll just lie down for an hour,’ Mama and Carrie had each murmured. Papa was poking about in the library. And here she was, alone with Ruddy in the drawing room. At last. There was still half an hour before they must dress for dinner. She moved closer to the fire, settling down on a low chair, its tapestry cover not quite so ugly in the dimness.
‘It’s quite strange you know, meeting you as paterfamilias. So grand too, in this great house. And seeing what kind of home you and Carrie make together.’
Oh no. That sounded scratchy.
‘Don’t judge us by the furnishings, that’s all. Three guineas a week – yes, that’s our rent – buys you everything but beauty.’
He got up and stirred the fire, then cursed and brushed flying sparks from his trousers.
Why couldn’t he be more natural? All that success was coming between them. It was a relief when he turned back to her, saying,
‘You would have loved Naulakha, Trix. My word, we made that beautiful. But we just locked the door and left. It’s still there, waiting.’
Forgetting all she had meant to tell him, everything but his sadness, she stretched out her hand. Without looking at her he seized it and clung on tightly.
‘Forgive me, you’ve had a horrible time, one way and another,’ she said. ‘That business with Carrie’s brother –’
‘The court case? It was hideous. The interrogation. Worse than … than The House of Desolation.’ He spoke hoarsely. ‘I didn’t think I could ever feel like that again. But time only seems to have made it worse. Strange, isn’t it?’
He didn’t want a reply. She dared to stroke the back of his hand.
It was as close as he’d ever come to speaking about their life as children in Southsea.
The effort had left him struggling for composure.
Trix waited. Here and there light pooled steadily from the heavy lamps.
‘Living close to Georgie has been the best medicine. For both of us’, he said more calmly. ‘The baby was born in their house, you know. Carrie will never forget her kindness.’
What to reply? In the long pause the silence began to weigh on her.
‘Will you excuse me,’ he added, after a few moments, releasing her hand. ‘The girl hasn’t drawn it properly and it fidgets me.’
Stepping across the room, he straightened a curtain before returning to pull up a chair next to her own.
‘Tell me, O famous author of A Pinchbeck Goddess, are you beavering away on another novel? Or is it single stories?’
She let out a slow breath.
‘Ruddy, I don’t know what to do. I’ve been just longing for the chance to talk. My writing –’
‘We all get in difficulties from time to time, you know that, Trix.’ His voice steadied her at once. ‘Nothing like talking it out with another workman. Go on, tell me.’
He moved a nearby lamp so they could see each other.
‘I have started stories, more than one, but I haven’t managed to finish them. They just hang there. It’s as if I’ve forgotten how.’
‘Is that all? I’ve got notes, notebooks full of unfinished stories. They’re not stalled, they’re waiting. And by Jove don’t they make you wait too. No alternative. When they’re ready the way forward will open and they’ll allow themselves to be written At least, that’s what I’ve found.’
She reflected, staring deep into the burned out logs as they slowly collapsed. Seeing the fire low, rather than ring for a servant, he bent and made it up himself.
‘I think it might feel different if I had more behind me, if I’d managed to finish more. I know I had some positive notices for Pinchbeck but others were dreadfully dispiriting. The Daily Telegraph called it ‘a budget of inane chatter serving no artistic purpose”’.
Echoing on her own voice, the words made her angry.
‘That’s what you get if you try to write about women and their lives,’ she realised.
But he failed to take it up.
‘Come on, Trix. You had a good spread of notices, there must have been a dozen. And I saw The Scotsman used words like ‘original’ and even ‘brilliance’.
‘But what about “trifling incidents and vapid dialogue” or my “very ordinary love affairs and commonplace colonels?”’
As she repeated the insults, she felt anger rising till it threatened to choke her.
‘You simply can’t let yourself be subject to these people, Trix. You know what they said about Barrack-Room Ballads: “coarseness, insufficiently redeemed by humour.” Pretty crushing.’
‘That was years ago. They don’t say anything like that now.’
‘Look Trix, you’ll always have some readers who pick holes.’
His reasonable tone made her feel like a child and she looked away.
‘You have to be prepared to listen. It’s a question of trust: whether you value the other person’s judgment.’
He waited. After a pause she met his eyes again.
‘Believe me, I was hauled over the coals with the greatest publicity only a year ago. The man who did it was a friend, and he was writing in the Atlantic.’
She’d missed that. She sat up.
‘I was “too ready to be distracted into work that was unworthy of me.” Try that on for size.’
She couldn’t forbear laughing.
‘Oh Ruddy, that man’s got your measure. He could be your brother.’
‘That’s better, Trix. You see, all is not lost.’
His spectacles glinted in the firelight.
He was always good to her. It would be safe talking to Rud about the automatic writing. He’d see its possibilities. Not like Jack.
‘You win. It’s true, my news isn’t all negative,’ she nodded, settling back comfortably in the chair. The bell still hadn’t rung. ‘You must’ve noticed that interesting piece in Review of Reviews. About automatism? I’ve become tremendously interested in it. Spirit writing, I mean. There really seems to be something in it and it turns out I have a sort of gift, it comes to me completely naturally. I –’
She stopped. He’d gone rigid beside her.
‘Don’t tell me you believe all that dangerous nonsense. Trix, do you know what you’re getting involved in? I suppose you sit and wait for the spirit to take over your pen?’
A flush rose from her collarbone, mounting her face. She sank further into shadow.
‘Have you read about what happens to the people who lay themselves open by doing that? Myers doesn’t tell you that, does he?’
She made herself sit up and face him, though her voice wavered.
‘Rud, I thought you of all people would understand. You’re the one who talks about being taken over when you’re writing. Taken over by something almost like an outside force.’
‘That’s just where you’re wrong, Trix. It’s not outside. It’s my daemon, something in me that speaks through me, when I get in tune with myself. Nothing external at all.’
She gave up, humiliated. He refused to accept what she had learned.
Rud was against her.
Her ears were ringing.
‘Besides, what you’re doing is known to be downright dangerous. There’ve been cases of mental collapse, you do realise that? Living in India, you are in no place to trifle with the unseen. Trix, do have a care.’
Whatever he said, she wasn’t going to stop.
The sound of the bell brought her escape.
*
‘Home again in Calcutta.’ Trix sighed, resigned, on their return. Two ‘homes’ were rather hard to live with. Could she manage here on just the amusements proper to an army wife? Dinners with the same couples, tea parties and tennis with the same women friends. Tiffin at the Saturday Club. In spite of Rud, she thought she’d have to keep up her experiments. She had a duty to follow them through, having this gift that let her see what others couldn’t.
So the words ran in her head.
But this was too much.
‘I can’t tell them. No, it’s too awful. They couldn’t bear it. It can’t be true. It must not be true.’
But she had seen it, passing before her eyes. The crystal had shown it to her. In her panic, Trix had stepped away from the table on which the crystal sphere, small as a hen’s egg, still lay on its mat of black velvet. Alongside, the precious lacquered box Papa had made for her stood open. She liked to keep her crystal safe in there. She stared at the tabletop now, breathing heavily.
‘What shall I do, oh, what shall I do?’
Her first step, the automatic writing, had come so easily. Almost as a relief too – no need to make any decisions. Just be patient and wait. Yet in spite of all the arguments she had so determinedly advanced, in defending herself against Jack, Trix’s confidence had begun to waver. She wasn’t sure that she really liked it when she held out her writing hand and something powerful that she could not control took possession of it.
The crystal-gazing hadn’t seemed like such a big step, after all, Mama dabbled from time to time. It was just the sort of party trick any of the station wives might perform for charity. Even some of the Fleming relations looked favourably on reading fortunes from the cards. Trix knew that as a child she had seen things that nobody else seemed able to and it had frightened her but she put that knowledge behind her.
It was more difficult to ignore her brother’s hostility. Rud had been so absolute in his dismissal. He’d meant well, of course, with his ‘Trix, do have a care’.
Care. She would be bringing him something worse than care if she let him into the secret. Her mind went back, flinching, to the images that had swelled into life once the crystal had darkened and cleared: tiny but vivid and clearly focused she had watched them in growing dread. At once she had recognised her niece, the six-year-old Josephine. Mama thought her the picture of Trix herself as a child. But in the crystal, Josephine was grey-faced and struggling for breath. She was being carried down a flight of steps in the arms of a man Trix did not recognize. The sphere had clouded then; it might have been with snow. It cleared to reveal only a white coffin.
Trix attempted to choke back the wailing that was coming from her without her volition. Conquering it, she remained fixed, clasping and unclasping her hands. It was in this state that her friend Mabel Hastings found her. Sailing into the room, already in spate with details of the absurd outfit that Mrs. James was proposing for her daughter’s wedding, Mabel stopped herself abruptly. At the sight of the stricken figure she instinctively stretched out her arms.
‘Trix, dearest! Tell me what has happened.’
To her dismay she saw her friend draw back, as a look that could only be described as crafty came over her.
‘It was as though her face had become, I don’t know, warped,’ Mabel wept later, as she struggled to give an account of her visit to a mutual friend.
‘No, there’s no telling anybody. I mustn’t tell what I’ve seen today. You mustn’t ask me.’
‘Why, Trix, whatever can you mean? Explain. Stop making mysteries.’ She must have hoped that the touch of wholesome asperity in her voice would help to restore the conversation to a tone that was more normal. But Trix was backing away from her, putting a chair and then the table between them. Mabel took in the lacquered box and the crystal.
‘Trix, you haven’t been upsetting yourself with those messages? It’s very draining, you know. You told me so yourself.’ Met with silence, Mabel longed, with an alarm that was new to her, for someone else to take charge of this situation. She and Trix had been going to lunch together at the Club but that was clearly out of the question.
Was there any request for information, she wondered, that she could safely put to Trix? Could it be a touch of the sun? For a moment she almost persuaded herself that was all it was. No, what she was watching felt too intimate, too exposed. It made her horribly uncomfortable. Should she send for Trix’s husband, Colonel Fleming? Common sense told her at once that his wooden Scottish uprightness would be utterly at a loss. Only a doctor could be asked to face this.
Standing out on the verandah, the Medical Officer shook his head.
‘We all know that Trix, Mrs. Fleming, has a highly wrought constitution. She’s overdone it in some way. That wretched writing, I shouldn’t wonder.’ He left it unclear whether he knew about the special writing, or was merely deploring the wish to write fiction.
‘I have to get back to the hospital. I’ve got three surgical cases I daren’t leave for long. Can you make sure she takes two of these?’ He held out a wad of small packets that looked like cachets fièvres to Mabel’s sceptical eye.
‘Frankly, Major Gilchrist, I don’t think I can. She shies away whenever I get near.’
His response took her aback. ‘Her maid, perhaps? Mrs. Fleming was native born, or as good as, she told me herself. She does have an Indian maidservant, I believe.’ He was not wrong. Whatever it was that the wrinkled woman in the blue saree murmured, for Mabel herself could not follow the Hindustani, the words calmed Trix and she allowed herself to be led away.
When Jack Fleming returned, summoned from his office by a hastily scribbled chit, he found Mabel, head on hand, seated in the drawing room, and learned from her that his wife was safely asleep, as she remained all night.
Clattering up the steps of the bungalow at an early hour the doctor was not looking forward to his interview with the husband. Always worried about his own health, was Fleming; how was he going to cope with this? A fortnight had passed, with Trix kept in a kind of purdah, visited by women friends, their voices lowered and their smiles uncertain as they left.
‘Well, Gilchrist, she’s no better. Your potions don’t seem to be doing the trick at all. And I’m off on a three-month camp next week. She’s supposed to be coming with me. I’ve told Trix she needs to pull herself together in time for it, but I’ve had no effect.’ Major Gilchrist cleared his throat. He felt no reason to be optimistic about this case. The pretty, girlish Mrs. Fleming he had known had been replaced by a tousle-haired figure, her once delicate features somehow blurred. He foresaw, at best, a long haul.
‘Would you consider sending your wife home to her family? A mother’s care and all that – calm and home is what she needs, I’m convinced. As it happens, I know a very experienced and reliable nurse, a Mrs. Bonnington, who could travel with her and take charge of the case. By good fortune she’s free, just at the moment and looking about for employment that will take her back to London. Mrs. B. could accompany your wife on the voyage home.’
Fleming startled the doctor by the speed with which he acquiesced. With only a brief farewell he had hurried away to make the necessary bookings.
‘Not a quibble about cost, though I thought he had rather a name for being close with money. Poor chap,’ the doctor thought, ‘he’s completely out of his depth.’