Page 101 of The Sapphire Child
Esmie glanced over anxiously. She rose. ‘Stella?’
Stella stood, her legs nearly buckling underneath her. The airmail pages scattered to the floor as she hurried from the room, reaching the thunderbox just in time to vomit into it. She retched and retched. Gradually she became aware of Esmie standing over her, gently rubbing her back.
Without asking any questions, Esmie led her into the small bedroom that Stella was using and helped her under the covers.
‘I’ll get a hot water bottle and some tea with honey.’
Before she went, she stoked up the fire.
Stella lay – her throat and stomach sore from being sick – numbed to the core. Through the wall she could hear Tom’s raised voice asking anxiously after her. When she felt the baby kicking, her tears came. She buried her head under the covers and wept. Esmie returned and tried to comfort her, coaxing her to sip the hot sweet tea. Bit by bit, Stella told her what was in the letter.
‘What a cowardly man!’ Esmie said in contempt. ‘Even if he is estranged from his wife, he should have told you about her. You would never have got engaged if you’d known – and none of this would have happened.’
‘I don’t know what to believe,’ Stella said in distress. ‘How can I trust that he’ll come back and support me when he’s kept such a big secret from me?’
Esmie stroked the hair from Stella’s brow. ‘You can’t trust him. What do you really know about him?’
Stella was no longer sure. Long ago, on the ship from India, Hugh had told tales of daring deeds in Baluchistan that had captivated Andrew. Yet when Tom had questioned Hugh about Quetta, he had been vague about the tribal outpost and seemed to know little about the army cantonment.
Hugh had told her that he was a farmer’s son from somewhere outside Dublin and had stayed on in Ireland to help his mother and sister after his father died. But all the time he must have been married to this other woman. All his talk about supporting the family farm might have been fabricated to make him appear in a good light. What she did know now was that he had a wife in Ireland for whom he had such contempt that he sometimes forgot she was there. And who was it in Edinburgh that Hugh had been with when Andrew and Felicity had met him?
She was gripped with a sick fury. How had she allowed herself to be taken in by his charm and promise of marriage, which he was in no position to fulfil? He had seduced her knowing that. For years, she had chased a ridiculously romantic dream – that there was only one man for her – a handsome, sensual Irishman. She had been so certain of this that she hadn’t stopped to question why he had suddenly turned up in her life after years apart and single-mindedly wooed her. Had it been nothing more to him than an opportunistic affair while he was thousands of miles away from his wife?
And yet, his letter insisted that it was she, Stella, whom he really loved.
‘He says he still wants to be with me,’ Stella said, ‘and that he’ll divorce his wife as soon as possible.’
Esmie shook her head sadly. ‘So why hasn’t he done so before now? What if she turns out to be like Lydia and refuses a divorce? Are you prepared to put up with that? It’s not just you, Stella – you have your unborn child to consider. Do you trust that he will take on the baby?’
Esmie had never been so forthright with her; it was a measure of how upset she was. Stella could only imagine what Tom would have to say about Hugh’s deception.
Her eyes stung with fresh tears. ‘I don’t know if I do,’ she whispered.
Esmie let out a long sigh. She leaned over and kissed Stella tenderly on her forehead, like a mother would her child. ‘Try and rest for now,’ she said kindly. ‘All this upset is not what your baby needs. You and your child are what matter to us, Stella, not MrKeating.’
She stood and lifted a small brass bell from the tea tray. ‘Ring this if you want anything. I’ll look in on you later. Sleep, dear lassie.’
After she’d gone, Stella lay staring at the fire, trying to empty her mind of everything except the dancing pattern of the flames. Her baby stirred. It felt like it was somersaulting in her womb. It brought her sudden comfort. Whatever happened after today, she would love this child of hers with her whole heart and do whatever was best for him or her.
Chapter 37
Bombay, India, January 1942
The converted troop ship dropped anchor in the night. Standing at the rail, there was little to see, but Andrew could smell India on the night breeze: warm, pungent and oily. There was general euphoria on board that the long sea voyage was over and they had safely dodged the underwater terror of the U-boats.
Yet Andrew’s pulse raced not from relief but from nerves. He had left India as a boy of thirteen, and now – eight and a half years later – he was returning as an adult. He gripped Dawan’s talisman tightly in his pocket. The last time he had been here, he had clung to his father at their emotional parting, thinking that he would only be gone for the summer holidays. How he had worshipped his father in those days.
Over the past years he’d discovered from his mother how difficult a husband Tom had been: short-tempered, neglectful and ultimately unfaithful. Lydia had been even more vitriolic about Esmie.‘She usurped my place as your mother for years – I can never forgive her for that.’Yet his Auntie Tibby – who always thought the best of everyone – had painted a different picture of his father and Esmie.‘Don’t you think that the main reasonthey pretended to be married might have been to give you a stable, loving home?’
As a youth, smarting from discovering the deceptions, Andrew had taken his mother’s side. But adulthood had moderated his opinion. Relationships could be complicated, with no one side being completely guilty or innocent.
He let out a long breath. All those years ago, standing on the Bombay dockside, he had been embarking on an adventure with Stella by his side. If she had never gone with him, she would never have met Hugh Keating. How strange were the twists of fate where spur-of-the-moment decisions could lead to momentous consequences. Over the years, it was Stella’s chatty, loving letters that had kept alive his connection to India. Now here he was, finally about to step back onto Indian soil – and somewhere on this vast subcontinent she was still here.
Then he chided himself for thinking more of her than of Felicity. He would write to his fiancée once he got to their headquarters in New Delhi.
As dawn broke, business on the dockside stirred. Andrew watched as coolies did their ablutions and heated up pans of chai. Acrid cooking smells filled the air and porters weaved among the squatting tea-drinkers with large bundles balanced on their heads. He’d forgotten the mark of the porter in India: a red cloth wound around his crown to give some modest protection from his burden.
Andrew caught a whiff of aromatic smoke: bidis. He remembered being in the compound at The Raj Hotel trying one of Sunil’s small brown cheroots; it had ended in him having a coughing fit. Charlie Dubois had roared with laughter and promised not to tell Andrew’s parents. His eyes smarted to think he would never see Charlie again.
