Sail Upon the Land (2 page)

So he wasn’t going to kill her. Relief washed through her, but she had no intention of answering and concentrated on relaxing her muscles. Said sorry? She didn’t think that quite covered it. Had he been crying? More likely to be sweat dripping off his forehead. She sensed him move away from the bed and risked opening one eye. The moonlight revealed the door closing. She listened for a key in the lock but it didn’t come. She lay still for a few heartbeats longer, thinking around her body for damage. There were no obviously sore places, and her
salwars
were pulled back up around her waist. She was just uncomfortable and panicky. What if he changed his mind and came back in? She had to move fast but when she stood up the room swam around her. She lay back down on the bed, thinking she’d just rest for a moment to get her strength back before escaping.

When Damson awoke, daylight flooded the room. She lay on an enormous mahogany four-poster bed in a Victorian time-warp. For a moment she struggled to remember what she was doing there. Every surface in the room was dimmed with neglect. It looked as if no one had been in there for decades. She caught a whiff of stale horse shit, eau de Cologne and sweat and fear detonated in her mind. She leapt off the bed and ran to the door. It wasn’t locked.

Opening it very slowly, she peeped out, heart pounding. Nothing moved in the passage barred with dust-dimensioned sunlight. The corridor stretched away from her, the heads of tigers, sambar and other game mounted all the way along to the top of the stairs at the end. She glanced the other way and saw dark pictures on the walls, rugs and animal skins backed with pinked red felt on the wooden floor and more stuffed heads.

Ronny’s ‘guests’ never set foot in the Hunting Lodge as far as she knew. She went back into the room and closed the door, crossing to look out of the window and find out exactly where she was. She must get herself over to the Guest House undetected.

Skin crawling and desperate to wash, she tied the cord of her
salwars
more tightly and pulled her
kameez
down decently over her bottom. There was nothing much she could do about her hair, which was loose and all over the place, stuck with grubby straw. She combed it as well as she could with her fingers, then plaited it tightly and looked around for something to tie the end, pulling a piece of cording off the edge of a velvet cushion. Tiptoeing to the door, she opened it a crack and listened. Nothing. She slipped out and padded barefoot, her sandals in her hand, to the top of the stairs. She stopped again. The house seemed deserted. Fear grabbed her. Heart banging she ran down the stairs as fast as she could towards the front door, skidding across the chequerboard floor, praying it was unlocked. She still had no idea what time it was or who would be about.

It wasn’t locked. The dusty space outside was empty, so she slipped through the crack and ran across the overgrown carriage sweep, glancing back once at the windows. Some were broken, and there was a small peepal tree getting an invasive grip on one corner of the house.

She was out of breath when she got back to her room in the Guest House. Hoping no one had seen her, she locked the door behind her with her padlock and went straight into the squalid little bathroom shedding clothes as she went. She scolded the stupid deluded moron who had been herself before she left that room the night before. Still no point in wasting time beating herself up. She was very lucky no one else had.

She knew she’d get nowhere reporting him for rape to the local police. They would laugh and say she deserved everything she got, being an unmarried young woman flaunting herself and her long fair hair around India without a father or husband to protect her. Even in England, she wouldn’t get far with a rape charge when she had been seen flirting with her assailant and going off with him in the dark.

Stripping herself naked and shuddering with disgust, she filled a bucket with water from the tap by the squatter loo and began to scrub herself all over her body and across her mouth with her flannel and the sandalwood soap. It hurt but she didn’t stop, rubbing hard to get rid of what had happened to her. She opened her mouth to howl like a beast but something stopped her from making a noise. However stoned her fellow guests, they might hear and come to see what was the matter. Her instinct was to hide

She forced herself to calm down, taking huge sobbing breaths. Having roughly dried her stinging body, she got dressed from the pile of clothes delivered by the
dhobi wallah
outside her door that morning: faded jeans, plain white man’s
kurta
. She laced on Indian army boots.

Groping in her body belt, she found her Swiss Army knife and opened the tiny scissors. Holding her thick wet plait in her left hand, pulling it as hard as she could, she began to cut it off, sawing and snipping and stabbing until her scalp screamed.

At last she was wrenching the last hairs out of her scalp and dropping the plait to the floor. Her head seemed to tilt forward, weightless. She sat down abruptly, her vision blurred and darkened.

Then she packed, upending her sponge bag and replacing only the toothbrush, toothpaste, sunblock and lip salve, her soap and deodorant. Lip gloss, eyeliner, mascara and Rive Gauche stayed on the bed. The one dress she had with her she left, along with the pink
salwar kameez
she’d been wearing last night. Her drop earrings, matching necklace and a strappy top and wraparound skirt were also discarded. She took the two greying cotton sports bras and left the lacy one. Only plain white knickers went back in, anything feminine she left on the charpoy for the sweeper to take. Then she strapped her body belt around her waist under the
kurta
, stuffed with passport, her watch with its broken strap, travellers’ cheques and money, all luckily still intact.

She went back into the bathroom for a last pee and caught a glimpse of herself in the little mirror. Her hair looked bizarre, longish bovver-girl strands hanging around her face. So she took the scissors out again and trimmed them off, trying to cut everything fairly close to her scalp. She sat down on the side of the charpoy to think what to do. Ronny or one of his servants took people who were leaving up to Hunters’ Halt in the Jeep. There were two trains on the track. One cranked itself at walking pace up the mountain in the afternoon and spent the night at Girigarh, a cool and airy hill station built by the British Raj to spend their summers away from the blistering heat on the plains. It then reversed down again, stopping at Hunters’ Halt around eight o’clock in the morning. The other moved a little faster and went up and down within the day, spending the night at the bottom. She fumbled for her watch in her body belt, hit by intense relief when she realised it was only seven. The Halt was less than half a mile away. She could walk, particularly as her rucksack was now so light. It was just a question of escaping without being seen.

It was far too early for heads sore from country wine and balls of off-white grubby opium to consider getting up. There was no one to say goodbye to. She swung her pack on to her shoulders and, having unlocked and unhooked her padlock, she left Ronny’s compound.

From Rikipur at the end of the rack train line in the valley below she would get a train to New Delhi more than two hundred miles away. There she’d need to change her flight, but she planned to hole up for a week or two in a small clean hotel first before facing her father and stepmother in England. Then there was Cambridge. Thank God for Cambridge. She was more determined than ever to qualify as a doctor.

As she left, she glanced back at the house. Nothing moved in the early morning sunlight. She could hear a horse in the stable stamping its iron-clad hoof on the concrete floor. She turned and set off.

Sarah Bourne wanted to scream. It was a typical Monday morning and Mummy was pretending to be in charge as usual. The ghost of Abbots Bourne past seemed to have taken up residence in her mother’s bones. It was less than fifty years since Sarah’s great-grandfather Big George Bourne had built the great red-brick pile to celebrate his rise to nobility on the froth of his popular coloured raising agent. And Mummy – the current Countess of Elbourne – was infected by far grander ideas than her own background or circumstances would justify. The great house was already peeling and cracking.

What was Abbots Bourne now but a glorified private hotel? In place of grand pre-war house parties that went on for weeks, the house was full of paying guests. Originally refugees from Belgium and from zeppelin raids on London, they’d stayed on as a useful source of additional income after Armistice.

Mademoiselle Droge had arrived as a terrified sixteen-year-old without luggage from Belgium when her parents had sent her to England as the German Army advanced. With her witchy long nails and disdain for housework, she’d evolved into the children’s governess. And Mummy, or Mama as she preferred, had fled there with her widowed mother in 1917 and married the heir – excused from military service due to his extreme myopia – two years later. It was never mentioned, but Sarah knew that the place they had escaped from was called Penge. Her mother cultivated a vague air whenever anyone asked where she’d been born.

When she was cross with her mother, Sarah would mutter
Penge, Penge, Penge
under her breath until it was divorced of all meaning. She had no idea where Penge was, or why it should be something shaming. But she did know that Granny and Mummy (and Mummy’s deceased Daddy) had lived in a small house with no one living in before they came to Abbots Bourne. Mummy would tell morning callers how Abbots Bourne had teemed with servants in Sarah’s great-grandfather’s day.

‘They all got so spoilt,’ she would grumble to some caller’s eager listening ear half-concealed by an outmoded cloche hat. ‘That ghastly war wrecked everything for people like us.’

She would try her hardest to carry on as if nothing had changed at all since Big George’s day, even though her ideas about what that had been like were as vague as she was and mostly gleaned from
The Making of a Marchioness
.

For the former Claire Ditsworth catching the short-sighted eye of William Bourne – only son and heir to the second Earl Elbourne – had changed everything. Which was why Monday mornings in particular made Sarah fume.

‘Sarah, darling, would you go and ring the bell? I need Cook to come up and discuss menus.’

Sarah would sigh and stamp over to the fireplace. She knew it was childish and she should practice her gliding, but stamping seemed to relieve her feelings about Mummy’s silliness.

‘Ladies don’t stamp, dear,’ said her mother automatically.

‘Cook always cooks the same things, so what is there to discuss?’

‘It’s the done thing. I must discuss menus with Cook, darling, as it is Monday. Please go and ring the bell.’

The ringing of bells was a hit and miss affair. Often no one heard, let alone responded, and if someone did come up, a huffy atmosphere blew into the room with them. Her mother seemed impervious to it, but it made Sarah’s skin crawl.

These days there were just daily women from the village to keep on top of the dirt, a gardener, an odd-job man (essential for the endless leaks) and a put-upon maid or two, distinguished mostly by giving notice after a couple of weeks. No butler or footmen of course – they’d never come back from the Great War.

Built at a time when servants had servants who had servants, Abbots Bourne had once been inhabited by a large and thriving community whose sole purpose was to wait upon the tiny family perched on top like a hut on a mountain. Now the remaining staff had abandoned the enormous servants’ hall and the quality of their service had dropped off considerably, as had any sense of loyalty.

While Big George Bourne was still active and Queen Victoria on the throne, the family could not get by without a French chef, butler, housekeeper, lady’s, house, parlour and chamber maids and six-foot liveried footmen who still powdered for gala occasions. There was even a between maid and boot boy, never perceived by the family, their role being solely to look after the upper servants. Their livery was still hanging in dark basement and attic wardrobes breathing ancient sweat like ghosts of an army that had passed through and vanished.

It was made discreetly clear to the paying guests that they were responsible for their own cleaning, and must bundle and box their laundry for the van that came on Thursdays. The latest kind of Hoover had been purchased, and this was parked in the upper corridor in the mornings, the idea being that the PGs would take it into their rooms and wield it vigorously. This happened only sometimes.

Then there was Cook, who – due to the absence of butler and housekeeper – was at the pinnacle of the dwindled servants’ hierarchy. A necessarily stout woman without a creative bone in her bolster-like body, Mrs Jones wore her ceremonial wedding ring with pride. She managed to overcook all the produce from the farm and the kitchen garden, and everything was served cold because the kitchen was so far from the dining room. Sarah minded very much, although nobody else ever mentioned the food at all. It was rude to talk about eating, like mentioning where babies came from or bottoms and lavatories.

In her great-grandfather’s seldom visited library, she’d tried to assuage her childhood boredom with books. Most of them weren’t very interesting – sermons, political works and geographical tracts. With no one to guide her, she read her way through everything that did catch her imagination. In social histories, old novels, diaries and memoirs, she was led outside the limits of her family home and into a realm where people ate for pleasure.

She suffered genuine stomach pangs at Pepys’ description of a hot venison pasty, wondered what Beau Brummel’s favourite capon stuffed with truffles had tasted like, swooned over dishes designed by Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel, and dined in her imagination with Oscar Wilde at the Café Royal. All far from the pale and chilly strips of translucent cabbage exuding a faint satanic whiff of sulphur, the lakes of fatty-globuled tasteless brown gravy with carrot lily pads, served every day except Friday. On Friday, in accordance with some half-forgotten religious urge, Cook boiled cod into a kind of white mattress stuffing. Sarah had to eat so she wasn’t hungry, but she knew full well that there was a whole world of delicious food out there that did not resemble the Jones cuisine in any way at all.