—1—
The night before the bombs started falling was hot in London. Blackout curtains forced us to keep the French doors closed, though some of us went out to breathe between courses, shaking our clothing away from our skin. Pale roses climbed the wall, perfuming the air with unseemly innocence.
After a dessert of rosewater sponge, Jonathan, a man with the slim hands of a pianist, held up a tiny glass bottle. “These are cyanide tablets,” he said. “I have one for each of us.”
“Cyanide!” Reed exclaimed.
“Yes.” Jonathan passed the basket of bottles. “In case.”
The diners, eight of us, silently selected a bottle, as if there would be some difference to one or the other. A Bach cello symphony played on the gramophone, as bittersweet as the moment. When the basket came to me, I paused. “It’s come to this?”
“Hitler will invade,” Nina said. “What then?”
Paris had fallen just months before, once thought impossible.
I looked at my old friend’s sober face, the first friend I’d made upon arriving in England from India, furious and lost, at the age of fifteen.
A parade of images marched through my mind: my golden childhood in India, running wild in the hills; the halcyon years of dancing and kissing and drinking wine in London when my father’s inheritance brought us all back to England.
I thought of that picnic on the beach in Brighton when we were all so young and whole and completely unaware of what was about to happen, that last summer before the war.
The other war.
I looked at my husband, survivor of that last war, the husband who mostly hated me, my enemy and one of the central pillars of my life.
But not the only one.
I took a glass bottle from the basket and passed it on.
After the party, we traveled home late, Peter a bit too far in his cups to drive.
I navigated the dark, quiet streets carefully.
The blackout made driving an exercise in madness, and we should have walked, but Peter wouldn’t hear of it—his gout made walking painful, and I was not completely heartless.
I gripped the steering wheel so hard my hands sweated, and crept along like an ancient snail.
The vial with cyanide was tucked into an inside pocket of my coat, but Peter held his up. “Do you suppose anyone will use these?”
“I hope we never need them.” My mind ran through the potential horrors, Nazis overtaking London as they had Paris.
It still made my skin ache to think of it, my friends and all the beautiful streets in that city I’d grown to love, overrun by tanks and trucks.
The idea of German soldiers dictating our lives the same way made my stomach hurt, but would I give in to suicide? “It’s terrible to think about.”
“We need one for your mother,” he said, tucking the bottle back in his coat pocket to free his hands to light a cigarette. “We couldn’t very well leave her to the Nazis.”
“Please don’t smoke,” I protested. “It gives me a headache in the car.”
He blinked and tucked the cigarette in his mouth, then smirkingly lit it and blew the smoke toward the roof. I steeled my face to show nothing, hands on the wheel. Below the surface, fury battered the underside of my skin, tried to force its way out of my body.
“My mother would not take poison,” I said calmly.
And of course, she was the reason I could not, and the reason I remained in my marriage.
Peter and I were no more or less unhappy than many of our peers.
Our generation had been marked by chaos from the beginning, and now would face more.
It was difficult to keep up a sense of optimism.
“I wouldn’t, either,” he said. “Sounds hideous.” Relenting, he cracked the window, and we rode the rest of the way in silence, parking the Austin on the street in front of our town house.
Blackout shades prevented any light from leaking through the windows, but I knew my mother would be reading on the second floor, and I’d left a lamp on in my studio.
“I’m going to check on Mother,” I said. “Good night.”
He gave me a sardonic salute, standing on the sidewalk to smoke the rest of his cigarette, cupping his hand to hide the red tip.
I walked upstairs and found my mother tucked into her bed, a lamp close by to illuminate her book.
Spectacles slid down her nose, and her luxurious hair was thinning and laced with silver, but all her life she’d been a great beauty, and that remained true.
Illness had whittled away only the superfluous, lending her cheekbones and jaw a feline grace, making her large blue eyes all the more compelling.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “How was the evening?”
“Amusing enough.” I sat on her bed. “They’re a witty lot.”
She nodded. A faint yellow cast marked her skin, and her hands were cold. “How are you tonight?” I asked. “Do you need anything?”
“No, thank you. Betty brought me my ginger tonic before she went to bed.”
“And how are you?” I repeated, smoothing my hand on her wrist.
“Well enough,” she said, glancing away. She was seventy and suffering liver disease from a recurrent malaria infection she’d suffered from since my childhood. Ill health had plagued her repeatedly since, but this last round seemed far worse.
Always my mother, she patted my hand and put her book aside with a smile that did not mask the pain around her mouth. “I was only waiting up to say good night. Go paint now. I’ll see what you’ve done in the morning.”
I kissed her forehead and turned off the light, tucking her in as she’d so often tucked me, then headed upstairs to my sanctuary, the studio that had been part of the bargain I’d agreed to when I finally gave in to Peter’s wish for me to come home.
It was a wide-open space beneath the eaves, an attic meant for storage, but perfect for my purposes.
It was too hot in summer, too cold in winter, but in the daytime, I could look out over the treetops of Bloomsbury.
Within, the floors were spattered with decades of paint, and canvases leaned against the wall.
It was startling to see the reduced number—I’d sent more than two dozen to Helen Bonhome, a friend from art school who lived in the north, where we hoped they’d be safe from bombing.
I was in the process of finding places for the rest.
A bubble of worry burst in my diaphragm as I imagined any of them going up in flames.
The work of my life. I flipped through some of my earliest oils, the courtyard in Nainital with the laburnum tree, a portrait of my friend Gurdaya when she was still young.
I paused at the rendering of the maharani and my mother taking tea in a sunlit room, the light shining behind them, highlighting the crowns of their heads, the edges of their hands, shining through the delicate china of the cup my mother held.
I’d once been offered a small fortune for this particular work, but as with so many others, I found it difficult to let it go.
Foolishness. Especially now.
I wrapped myself in an oversize cardigan, opened my sketchbook, and found my peace in drawing the faces around the dinner table this evening, and the roses hanging in ghostly beauty in the garden. Art, as I’d learned so many times, could distract me from the harshest pain.
I remembered sketching the receding skyline of Bombay the day we left it.