Where Earth Meets Sky (3 page)

Lily dipped her pen into the bottle of ink, and began, painstakingly, to copy out the references again, well instructed in mimicking Mrs Chappell’s elegant hand. At the top of the page, in large letters, she gave her name:
LILY WATERS
.

‘Miss Waters?’

The maid had shown Lily into the parlour of the Chislehurst house to face a small, plump woman with a harassed expression and faded blond hair curling round the edge of a white bonnet. She found herself appraised by pale blue eyes, but somehow the experience was not as frightening as she expected. The house, though a fair size, was shabbier than the one in Hall Green! And she could hear children’s voices, squabbling in the background somewhere.

‘My name is Mrs Burton,’ the woman said, distractedly. ‘I am Mrs Fairford’s sister. Please, do take a seat.’

She indicated an upright chair with a slightly moth-eaten seat cover, while she perched on another wooden chair nearby, her feet, in their laced brown boots, barely touching the floor. For a moment they both looked at one another. Mrs Burton seemed at a loss. She was obviously not used to the job in hand.

‘Well, you’re here, anyway.’ There was a pause in which Lily wondered what she was supposed to say, but this was followed by, ‘You have come all the way from Birmingham, I take it?’

‘Yes, I have.’

The woman pressed the tips of her fingers to her forehead as if to gather her thoughts, then said, ‘My sister, Mrs Fairford, has asked me to find a nanny for her son, Cosmo – he’s just two years old. If my sister was in the country herself, she would be doing the interviews.’

There was another awkward silence in which it occurred to Lily’s interviewer that she might peer at the references provided, holding them as far away from her as her short arms would permit.

‘These are very good –
very
!’

‘Thank you.’

Mrs Burton rested the paper in her lap and squinted slightly. ‘Are you a
proper
nanny?’

‘Yes,’ Lily said, as Mrs Chappell had told her to, speaking slowly in her best, well-spoken English. ‘I’ve had a very good training and considerable experience of looking after five young ones. I don’t think I’d have any problem with one little boy.’

‘No, quite. And . . . What about India? You did realize you’d have to sail the seas? Live quite the other side of the world!’

‘Yes. I should welcome the adventure.’

‘Well, Susan hates it!’ This seemed to slip out by mistake and the colour rose in Mrs Burton’s cheeks. ‘Lord, I shouldn’t have said that. Most indiscreet of me. But she does. All those diseases. Of course, that was what led to . . . Oh, dear me, my mouth does run away so . . . She tries to make the best of it, though, dear Susan does. But the poor darling does so need help, what with Isadora being so . . .’ Once again she stopped. ‘Cosmo is not Susan’s only child. She has a daughter, who is . . . rather difficult. But she would not be your responsibility. Do you think you could adjust and be a help to my poor sister?

‘Well, I hope so – very much.’

‘Well—’ Mrs Burton stood up. ‘That’s very hopeful. I’ll be letting you know. But I expect you’ll take the post? You look the adventurous sort.’

On the long train ride home, Lily already felt she had indeed begun on an adventure, was discovering in herself a taste for it. She kept saying her new name to herself.
Lily Waters
. That’s who I am now. It made her feel strong.

Three days later a letter arrived, saying that her interview had been successful and if she was still willing to accept, the family would book her passage on a P&O liner to India.

Ambala, India, 1905

Lily’s first months in India were full of mixed, sometimes overwhelming, emotions.

There was the journey to begin with, exciting, daunting, setting out to the other side of the world with nothing but hope and excitement, a small tin trunk containing her possessions and no clear idea of what she was going to find. The P&O steamer was an adventure in itself. She made friends with another nanny called Jenny, who was blonde and good-humoured and was on her way back out to a family in Poona after delivering one of the children to relatives in England.

As they progressed east, the temperatures gradually rising, the two young women often walked out on the glaring deck to take the breeze blowing from the sea. Jenny, in a big sisterly way, was able to brief Lily about India.

‘You get used to it after a while,’ she said cheerfully. ‘The summer months can be hellish if you don’t go up to the hills, of course, though I expect your family will. And there’s a lot of social fun – parties and so on – for the adults and children. Just make sure you drink boiled water and wash your hands a lot. Lots of carbolic soap! It’s all right out there, really it is. You’ll soon settle in. Beats living in a backstreet in rainy old England, I can tell you.’

The morning the boat gently nosed its way into the harbour at Bombay was one Lily would never forget. She stood on deck beside Jenny, the sun high, the humid heat alleviated by the breeze over the sea. The ship was rolling gently, the sea was a deep, ruffled green, and gradually the land came more clearly into view.

‘Dear old Bombay,’ Jenny said, shading her eyes with her hand. ‘D’you know, I loathed it all when I first came. But it’s grown on me. See the coast there – they call that the Ghats, that part rising from the sea – and then the mountains behind.’

Lily thrilled with excitement at the sight of it. The high land in the distance looked a dull sandy colour, stained with patches of verdure lower down. Jenny had said the monsoon rains were not yet over and all the land was bright and green during the rainy season. As they moved closer, she began to see the city, a wide hotch-potch of white buildings, brilliant in the sun. The breeze dropped and gradually smells began to reach her, strange, alluring, sulphurous and scented. She felt the damp, heavy heat wrap round her. By the time they slid into the dock she was sweating profusely, her clothes limp with moisture, but she barely noticed, so enthralled was she by the sight of the bright colours and seething activity on the quay below, the white-uniformed band playing a toe-tapping marching tune and the busy, brown-skinned,
different
people of India.

She said tearful farewells to Jenny at Victoria Terminus in Bombay as they both went to board different trains, Lily north to Delhi, on another leg of her long journey.

‘You’ll be all right, Lily, dear,’ Jenny assured her as she kissed her goodbye. The two young women had grown very fond of one another. ‘You’re one of the ones that will feel at home in India – I can tell.’

It was true. Though it was all new and bewildering, beggars and teeming streets and everything strange, the heat, the food, the temples and mosques, yet amid all that she felt immediately happy and at home, as if this was a place where she was somehow born to be.

The long train journey to Ambala Cantonment, across the great Punjab plain north of Delhi, was exhausting, as were the first days of getting used to the town and its ways. It was half native town, half army cantonment, and riding in a
tonga
that first afternoon, along a wide road through the cantonment, she caught sight, with an astonished gasp, of the huge, elegant residence of Captain Charles Fairford, in whose employment and family she had now placed herself.

‘So – you are the nanny they’ve sent?’ Susan Fairford held out her hand.

‘Yes,’ Lily said, shrinking inside. Her employer seemed as remote and frozen as the Antarctic.

Mrs Fairford was petite in stature, with hair of a pale honey colour and a strikingly pretty face, with Cupid’s bow lips and wide blue eyes. She was dressed in a beautiful ivory gown with bows and flounces in the long skirt, the whole outfit nipped in tightly at the waist and showing off a slim, well-proportioned figure. As she spoke, Lily saw that she had little white teeth almost like a child’s. What was absent was any sense of warmth. The hand that she took to shake in introduction was small and unresponsive, like a dead thing.

‘Do sit down.’

They sat opposite one another and Lily waited, hearing the ticking of the small ormolu clock from the mantelpiece. The room was at least pretty and feminine after the opulent, but creepy, hall, a museum to dead creatures whose heads and skins decorated the walls and floor. From the garden came the sounds of crows cawing.

‘My sister wrote to tell me that she thought you had sufficient experience as a nanny for my son. She also said that she liked the look of you. Knowing Audrey, I suppose she meant that you are pretty, though whether that is a qualification remains to be seen. I have had to trust my sister, being so far away. I hope she has made a wise choice.’

All this was said in a distant, rather languid tone. Lily began to feel rather like a cow which has been brought from the market by proxy. Her heart sank further, but she told herself not to get upset. She had only just arrived and she had not met the boy yet. He was what mattered!

‘Well, I hope you think so,’ she murmured. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting your children.’

‘You only need to concern yourself with one of the children,’ Mrs Fairford said sharply. ‘I don’t know if my sister explained to you that we need a nanny for our son Cosmo, to prepare him for going home to school in England. Our daughter, Isadora, will not be going home. She is not . . . She . . .’

Lily watched the woman’s face. For a moment her composure had slipped and an expression of pained confusion passed over her face.

‘Isadora is not fully able to be educated. She has certain – difficulties. Unfortunately she is much attached to her
ayah
, the Indian girl who continues to look after her. We’ve tried several times to prise her away from the girl, but it’s no good.’ Now there was bitterness in her voice.

She’s jealous
, Lily saw. It was a chink in the woman’s armour, and even though she found her cold and intimidating, she could see that Mrs Fairford suffered because she thought her daughter loved an Indian girl better than her own mother, that there was much that lay behind this frosty mask.

‘Cosmo is to be your charge.’ For a second her tone softened a tiny fraction, but immediately grew cool again. ‘We don’t want him brought up by natives. When he’s old enough he’ll go home to Eton, like his father, away from this beastly country. He will learn to be an English gentleman. In the meantime we want you to speak with him – in English, of course, always: you must stop his native prattle. Teach him songs and games from home, his letters and numbers and so on. Above all—’ suddenly she looked very directly at Lily as she spoke, with a tone of pleading – ‘be a friend to him.’

‘Yes, Mrs Fairford.’ She was not sure what else to say to this odd, naked request. She felt very discouraged by what she had seen so far of this chilly household. What on earth could Captain Fairford be like? She imagined a tight-lipped, forbidding man and wondered if that was the reason why Mrs Fairford seemed so tense and unhappy. Because she could see straight away that she was not looking at a contented woman. She decided to take the woman’s plea for her son as a sign of hope.

‘When am I to meet your little boy?’ she asked.

‘He and Isadora are resting at present. I suggest you go and do the same. I’ll send one of the servants to bring you to the nursery at teatime.’ It was a dismissal.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Lily said.

‘You may call me Mrs Fairford. I don’t enjoy being called “ma’am”.’

‘Yes, Mrs Fairford.’

Her employer stood up. ‘You may go.’

Lily left the room, feeling low and close to tears. Was she wrong to expect Mrs Fairford to ask her a single thing about herself, about her welfare after her long journey, or to give some indication of welcome or gladness?

You’ve been too used to Mrs Chappell, she told herself as she slipped along the passage to her bedroom. Not everyone’s like that. You’re going to have to get used to the fact that you’re a servant and nothing else.

But as she lay down on her bed, having crawled in under the swathing mosquito net, it was a dispiriting thought, and her heart ached with unshed tears. On the journey to get here she had felt only excitement and expectation, but now she felt chilled and lonely.

To her surprise she was awoken by a servant in a maroon uniform bringing a cup of very sweet tea which revived her spirits. The sight of his friendly face also made her feel better and he provided a pitcher of warm water with which she washed, then changed her clothes. Some time later the servant returned.

‘I am to take you to the nursery – Mrs Fairford sent me to fetch you.’

As she made to leave the room, he added politely, ‘Your name is?’

She gave him her name and he said his was Rajinder. His would be the first of many names she had to learn of the family’s large retinue of servants.

The nursery consisted of two adjoining rooms, one for each of the children. Mrs Fairford was waiting for her with both the children: Cosmo on the floor, head bent over a box of wooden bricks, and the girl on a big rocking horse at the side of the room. Lily was delighted to see that they had a magnificent array of toys.