For Molly, Jonah and Rafferty
A Letter to Somebody, from Somebody Else
Tonight, I cannot recall what year it is. Try as I might, I can’t think how long I’ve been here, in this residential home that’s really a hospital – this place of the old, the infirm, the forgotten … and the forgetful. I asked a nurse – a young woman with freckles and a quiet voice – to remind me, but she wouldn’t. She said I would panic again, that I mustn’t fret; time isn’t important. And yet, it feels so important to me. I am sure, you see, that I’ve been in this place too long. I have an awful sense I’ve been here for very many years.
I know that it was 1915 when I became a patient. I remember that much at least. And that I marked the date in the book I was given then: a leather-bound journal, handed to me during my first session with Dr Arnold to take note of all the things my broken memory mightn’t keep hold of. Anything that comes to you, Arnold said, jot it down directly. His words have somehow stayed with me; for all I’ve forgotten, I can hear his voice even now, picture the open fire in his study, feel its warmth, quite as though I am still sitting before it, my skin prickling beneath my convalescent blues. View your past as a puzzle, he said, one you must slot together. Don’t let any piece slide away. I haven’t seen Arnold in a long time. I cannot recall when or why we parted. Perhaps he gave up on my puzzle.
Something I can never let myself do.
Today, after morning tea, I fell asleep quite suddenly. It happens like that. I never fight it. My dreams are all I have left of that other world: the one I’m sure I once belonged to. It was full of heat, light and colour; so much life. There was a party, on the banks of a sea. Nothing like the tame affairs we hold here – no finger sandwiches, diluted cordial, and crackers that don’t make bangs. It was loud, packed with people; the music of a ragtime band.
A figure, a woman in a silk dress, stood in the darkness with her back to me, gloved fingers touching a chair.
It was you. I am certain it was you.
The sky seemed to explode above. I watched you look up, the arch of your neck. I waited for you to turn, to see me. Something – a memory? – told me that you would.
Cheers filled the night, the opening chords of a song I cannot place, and still, I waited.
Slowly, you dipped your head. Your chin tilted, over your bare shoulder; the hint of your cheekbone coming round.
I held my breath. Even as I slept in my chair, I wasn’t breathing.
When I woke, as I always wake before you allow me a glimpse of your face, there were tears on my cheeks.
I have no recollection of what you look like, and yet I know that if I saw you, I’d recognise you instantly. I am certain you are beautiful. I want to think that we were happy together once. I try to believe our story was a wonderful one. But I am here, old and alone, and you are not, so I don’t know how that can have been.
To return to you is all I need, yet it feels more impossible with every passing day. Because however often I dream these dreams, however patiently I wait for my broken mind to conjure just one starting clue that might lead me back to you – an initial, the name of a place, just the smallest detail – it never does. I don’t know where you’re from, who you are to me, or if you’re even alive. I try so hard, every hour of every day, to remember, but sometimes I can’t even recall that I’m meant to be remembering your name.
And I still have no idea, after all these many, many years, of where I’ve been, what events took me from you, how I came to be in that hospital in 1915.
Or who on earth I am.
Chapter One
Bombay, 31 December 1913
It always seemed so strange to Maddy how, within the space of moments, life could go from being one thing to another thing entirely – with no hint, no warning sense of the change afoot. After that New Year’s Eve of 1913 especially, she’d often pause, bewildered by how oblivious she’d been in those hours leading up to midnight, caught up in the furore of the Royal Yacht Club’s party, never once suspecting what was just round the corner. But that night, as the clock edged towards 1914 and the ragtime band struck up a fresh set, filling the club’s hot, candlelit ballroom with Scott Joplin, and the vibrating dance floor with couples – a throng of sequinned gowns and evening suits, racing across the boards in another sweaty quick-step – she thought of nothing but the heat, the music.
She had absolutely no idea of everything that was about to come her way.
She kept to the edge of the floor. Having danced the last five, she was happy to spectate for now, catch her breath and feel the cool relief of her iced gin and tonic pressed to her cheek. Rolling the glass on her baking skin, she let her eyes move over the opulence surrounding her. It was a lavish party, even by Bombay’s standards, and she, fresh from the soft, cosy world of her aunt and uncle’s in Oxfordshire, had to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t trespassing on a theatre set, but actually now belonged in this steamy, foreign land. White-clothed tables fringed the dance floor, groaning beneath platters of curry puffs, naan and exotic fruits. At the long wooden bar, tureens of punch jostled for space with buckets of champagne. Coloured lanterns burned everywhere – on the tables, the walls – casting the panelled room in tinted light; their waxy scent mixed with perfume and hair pomade, the muggy heat which wafted in through the ajar veranda doors. There was no Christmas tree – apparently none could be got in India – but instead an arrangement of mango and banana tree branches had been decorated with baubles and balanced precariously by the ballroom’s grand entrance. It was rather an odd-looking construction, certainly like no fir Maddy had ever seen, and somehow succeeded in making it feel less rather than more like Christmas – much like the humidity-dampened paper hats Maddy’s father, Richard, had insisted they all wear on Christmas Day. It had felt so incongruous to be eating a turkey lunch out on the villa’s sun-baked veranda, peacocks sauntering by.
Richard was wearing another hat now. It was impossible not to laugh at the sight of him across the room – the head of the Bombay civil service, every inch the distinguished colonial servant in his pristine white tie – with a purple polka dot crown tipping jauntily on his greying hair. He was trying to coax Maddy’s mother, Alice, into a dance. Alice – who unlike every other person in the room still looked as cool as a Pimm’s cucumber, fair curls in place, not even a hint of sheen to her porcelain skin – held her gloved hands up, refusing. Maddy wondered if there was even the tiniest part of her that was tempted to do the opposite, say, ‘Yes. Yes, please. What the devil?’ Maddy wished she would. It would be rather nice to see her let loose for once, take Richard’s arm and career into the fray with the same happy abandon as everyone else.
But Richard was already turning away, creases of resignation on his weathered face. Maddy felt a stab of pity for him, then again as he pushed his chin up and set off towards the bar. Why couldn’t Alice have just danced with him? Maddy, pulling at the damp neckline of her dress, didn’t even attempt to answer her own question. For all she’d been in India two months now, back living with her parents after more than a decade in England (she’d gone home for school, like almost all children of the Raj, but also to escape the tropical fevers she’d been so prone to as a child. ‘We couldn’t keep you well,’ her father had told her sadly, many times. ‘It was terrifying … ’), she often felt she understood her crisp, contained mother no better than she had that sweltering October day she’d docked in Bombay and met her again.