The Girl from Cobb Street (14 page)

She wandered disconsolately into her bedroom. She supposed she must have an early night. She was feeling weary from the heat and from the day’s events and there was little else for her to do. Sleeping alone was becoming the pattern of her married life. The dresses she’d been trying on were still spread-eagled across the bed and she folded them into a neat pile for the tailor’s next visit. She no longer felt happy and excited at the thought of them, for what use were pretty frocks if her husband would not even look at her? Somehow she must break the pattern, somehow recover the ardent lover she had known in London. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow a new Indian dawn and despite her unhappiness, she realised she was looking forward to it. She went across to the bedside table and took from its drawer a small wad of papers held together by an elastic band. From this, she extracted a worn photograph and nestled it on her lap. Her mother looked out at her but Lily Driscoll’s expression gave little away. It was professional, business-like, without a hint of the trouble to come. And there had been trouble, Daisy knew. She’d told Grayson Harte that her father’s name did not appear on her birth certificate. What she hadn’t said was that in the space where it should have been, the word ‘Illegitimate’ had been scrawled in harsh black ink. Her mother had never married, despite the child she’d borne. Was that because her sweetheart had been sent to the Front and perished like so many others in the killing fields of France—the date was certainly right—or was it because she’d refused to marry, because her experience had been shorn of love and too much like Daisy’s own, a night of false promises?

She looked again at the photograph, peering intently at the image. There was the stiff white cap sitting proudly atop her mother’s soft waves, the sharp white cuffs, and the starched dress, caught at the neck with a pendant-shaped brooch. The very same emblem that she had seen this afternoon. She’d felt sure of it at the temple and she’d been right. So her mother had an association with this place, even though it was one bought in a shop on a distant shore. Nandni Mata meant ‘daughter’, and somehow that seemed significant. It was part of that strange feeling of belonging that from time to time had washed over her since she’d arrived in India. It was a feeling she’d not known before. She had never belonged at Eden House and never belonged with Miss Maddox, though that lady had been so very kind to her. But for the first time in her life, here in Jasirapur, she was beginning to feel a sense of connection, a connection that went far deeper than disillusion over her marriage and terror at a rogue snake.

She had fallen into a thick sleep and woke, bleary-eyed, several hours later. There’d been a noise, she was sure. Not from the cicadas and jackals and not from a man in the garden this time, but a noise loud enough to wake her from the deepest slumber. She tried to work out what she’d heard. It seemed to be coming from outside her bedroom door, a dragging sound across a wooden floor, something heavy, something too heavy to carry. She got up. Her watch showed two o’clock, the middle of the night, and the room was inky-dark except for stabs of starlight that found their way through the woven blinds. She could just see the outline of the door and she padded across to it. The noise had appeared to come from directly outside. She turned the handle and pulled, but nothing happened. She repeated the action, pulling harder this time. But still the door did not budge. She peered through the keyhole but could see nothing. She should be able to see something, unless—unless there was a key the other side. She’d not even known there was a key to the room, but surely if there were, it should be on this side of the door. Her dazed brain tried to make sense of what she was seeing. A key the other side of the door, and a door that wouldn’t open. She was locked in. Someone had locked her in!

CHAPTER SEVEN

A
fter that there could be no sleep. She was a prisoner in her own home. Who had turned the key on her and why was a frightening mystery and, though her mind restlessly sought to uncover a likely explanation, she could find none. She dozed fitfully, always alert for any sound that might help to make sense of her captivity. But nothing further occurred to disturb the peace of the night and when she finally crawled from her bed early in the morning and stumbled to the door, it was to find it opened to her touch. There was no sign of a key on either side of the door.

She padded into the sitting room as Gerald was about to leave. He was silhouetted in the doorway, his khaki shirt and shorts smartly pressed, and a
topi
in his hand. From beyond the veranda, she heard the harsh churn of a car engine. He was in a hurry, ready to say a hasty goodbye, when Daisy moved with surprising speed towards him and clutched hold of a pristine shirtsleeve.

‘I must talk to you.’

‘Not now. I’m late.’

She gazed at the corner clock whose hands had barely passed seven. ‘I won’t keep you long.’

He shifted impatiently but she was determined he would hear her out. ‘I woke in the night. Something woke me, though I’m not sure what.’

‘And you’re keeping me from work to tell me that?’

‘The noise isn’t important. Well, maybe it is …’ She encountered a scowl and stuttered to a close, but then gathered her forces again. ‘It was when I went to find out where the noise had come from, that’s what’s really important. I couldn’t get out of my room. The door was locked.’

‘Locked, Gerald!’ she repeated when he remained impassive. ‘Somebody had used the key to my bedroom and locked the door from the other side.’

‘That’s impossible.’ His laugh was not entirely easy. ‘You must have been sleepwalking.’

‘I wasn’t. I was as wide awake as you are now.’

‘Then if you weren’t asleep, you were in some kind of daze. Your door couldn’t have been locked. There are no keys to any of the doors. Even the front door has no lock.’ He turned once more to go but she moved in front of him.

‘I was locked in.’ She felt vulnerable and slightly foolish standing there in her thin nightdress and bare feet, but she knew she was right and she was not going to allow him to brush the matter aside. Hadn’t she spent half the night in fear?

He took her by the shoulders, his voice a little softened. ‘You
thought
you were locked in. Imagination, Daisy, very likely the effects of the sun. I warned you how bad it could get. You’ve been here a while and it’s beginning to cloud your judgement.’

Her lips shut tight. It wasn’t the heat playing with her mind, she was certain. But then, what else could it be? What other explanation? If Gerald were right and there were no keys at all in the bungalow, the door could not have been locked.

He seemed to sense his opportunity to leave. ‘You probably tried the door and it stuck a little. Then you imagined you were locked in, tried to tug harder and made the door jam even more. That can happen. Maybe you started to panic and think you weren’t going to get out.’

He was right. She had been in a panic. She’d crept back to bed, her pulse hammering and for a while hidden herself entirely beneath the bed’s one cotton sheet. Perhaps he was right, too, about the heat. It was creeping up on her unnoticed, just like Jocelyn had warned, creeping up and slowly turning her crazy, fermenting her imagination to invent the silliest of dramas. She didn’t know this country, didn’t know its power. Thinking she belonged here was so much moonshine. She didn’t belong, that was brutally clear.

Two days later, she rose even earlier than usual. The
durzi
was due today and she was dressed and waiting for him before the clock struck seven. But once she’d given him the dresses to finish, she was left with nothing more to do for the rest of the day except contemplate the bungalow’s four walls. And contemplate them alone. The solitude was beginning to play more and more on her nerves and she wasn’t sure why—the noises in the night perhaps, the locked door, a servant who was there and yet not there and, of course, the snake. She wanted to be as far away from the house as possible, but had no idea where to go. They lived a distance from anywhere she could name—from the civil station, from Jasirapur itself. She wondered why Gerald had chosen such an isolated place, when according to Jocelyn Forester, he could have rented accommodation within the cantonment. She supposed it must have been for money reasons and felt a familiar heaviness descend. He’d accused her of forcing him into marriage at too early an age, when he was unable to afford a wife for several years. What he hadn’t said was that he needed to marry money, or at least a woman with worthwhile connections. But Daisy knew it for the disagreeable truth.

She strolled onto the veranda. The morning was still early enough to be fresh and though she knew that would very soon change, the cool air on her cheeks reinforced her restlessness and made her itch to walk out. Except there was nowhere to walk and it would hardly be sensible to do so.

But a bicycle. Gerald had been collected by car this morning and the bicycle was still there, propped against the white plastered walls. He had no need of it so why could she not use it? She’d hardly ever ridden before, just a few wobbling yards along a London street beneath the wary eye of the senior footman, keen to protect his newly-acquired purchase. The tyres looked pumped, the chain greased, all things Robert had told her were important. She could see him now, urging her on, past the pillar-box, past the garden railings, his face puckered with concern. He’d been a friendly man, she thought, one of the few in Miss Maddox’s household who had shown her kindness. Thanks to his instruction, she’d managed for a while to master the rudiments of riding, so how difficult could it be to try again?

Quite difficult, she found, but she persevered, teetering up and down the pathway until she felt competent enough to make a small journey. The
durzi
was still sewing furiously outside her bedroom window, but one dress lay ready and she slipped it over her shoulders, thinking herself sufficiently smart to visit the civil station. Ever since that dreadful dinner at the Club, she’d hoped to find the library and something new to read. And there was no danger now of meeting the women from that night since they would be on their way to Simla. She called Rajiv and explained as simply as she could what she planned to do. As always, his face remained expressionless; he simply bowed and returned to his kitchen. At least they would know where to send a search party, she thought, and it had been sensible to tell him.

Dressed in the cream cotton sundress,
topi
wedged firmly on her head, she began nervously to cycle along the narrow lane towards the main road. She sensed Rajiv’s eyes following her from his redoubt and was relieved to round the first bend. She had escaped. It took her a while to navigate each of the curves in the lane but once she reached the main road, she turned right onto the straight thoroughfare that led to the civil station. The road surface was slightly better here and her pedalling picked up speed. As she pushed forward, she could feel the breeze on her face and smelt the hot, dried grass wafting upwards from the gully which bordered the road. It was invigorating. From time to time, she passed tiny stones painted red and dotted along the roadside at intervals, shrines to one or other of the Hindu gods. Several rickshaws passed her travelling in the opposite direction, their bells ringing cheerily, and in the distance she heard the muezzin’s call to prayer. Within minutes, the unaccustomed exercise had left her exhilarated but uncomfortably hot.

The civil station came into view and in her elation at reaching it, she lost concentration for a moment. It was enough for a peacock strutting across the road to almost unseat her. But she wrenched the bicycle upright and by the time she turned into the main entrance of the station, she was again riding smoothly. The guard came out of his sentry box, a perplexed expression on his face. A lone white woman on a bicycle was not a familiar sight. But when she asked for directions to the library, it seemed to reassure him and he readily pointed out the route she should take.

She opened the door to the library, pink but pleased. There was no one in sight and she had the place entirely to herself. But a brief glance around the sparsely furnished room suggested she’d expended a great deal of effort for very little reward. The far wall had been shelved from ceiling to floor, but elsewhere there were only crumbling cane chairs and an old oak table, whose surface told the story of a thousand scratched messages. She began to take down some of the books, searching for something that might help her understand more of her adopted country, but she looked in vain. There were thrillers, romances, popular authors—Stella Gibbons, Djuna Barnes, Daphne du Maurier. Any of these would provide bedtime reading, she thought, but the book she really wanted was nowhere to be seen. All the way here, as her aching legs had turned the wheels, she’d been imagining a precious volume that would unlock for her the secrets of Indian mythology and, in particular, tell her the story of the goddess for whom she already felt an affinity, Nandni Mata.

She was about to select one or two of the lightest books to slip into the bag she had slung across her shoulders, when the door opened and Jocelyn Forester stood on the threshold. Daisy stared at her, uncomprehending. The girl should be travelling to Simla with her mother and the other memsahibs. How was she here? Why was she here? The old suspicions thrummed into life, so sharp and so strong that she was in danger of drowning from them. Then she noticed the crutches. Jocelyn smiled a wide, cheerful smile and waved a crutch at her.

‘Can you believe what I’ve done, Daisy? I’m so annoyed with myself, I can’t tell you.’