Page 150 of The Sapphire Child
‘Don’t badger Stella,’ Hugh interrupted his wife. ‘Let her go and enjoy her evening with her young man.’ And then he winked.
It was too much for Stella. ‘You don’t need me here to tell you how I’ve been, Moira. You can just ask Hugh.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ask him about my life at The Raj Hotel – he’s been there often enough – and ask him about the week he spent with me up in Gulmarg before he disappeared off to Singapore.’
Moira looked at Hugh, baffled. ‘Hugh?’
Flustered, he tried to laugh it off. ‘I’ve no idea what she means.’
‘Really?’ Stella challenged. ‘Then you have a very short memory. Because I remember it all too clearly. The last time I saw you, you’d just bought me a sapphire engagement ring. Don’t you remember that, Hugh?’
He was no longer smiling. Stella could see fear in his expression and it made her feel complete disdain. She was sorely tempted to tell Moira about Belle but stopped herself. She wanted to protect her daughter from any association with this contemptible man.
Instead she said, ‘But you’re welcome to him, Moira. And I hope you give him hell if he so much as looks at another woman.’
Linking her arm through Gerald’s, Stella made swiftly for the entrance, leaving Moira berating a downcast-looking Hugh.
Outside, Gerald gave her an admiring look. ‘Well, you certainly told him where to go.’
Feeling relief and exhilaration, Stella asked, ‘Do you like jalebi? I know this amazing place in the old Delhi bazaar.’
‘Well, I’ve no idea what jalebi is,’ he admitted, ‘but I’m willing to try.’
‘They’re delicious and ridiculously sweet,’ said Stella with a smile, ‘and just the way to celebrate the start of 1944.’
Chapter 56
Mayu Range, Burma, January 1944
Andrew sat smoking on a camp chair, a sketch book in his lap. He’d begun drawing again for the first time since leaving Ebbsmouth and wished he could talk to Dawan about it. His latest pencil sketches were of the coastal strip of Burma that they had been patrolling since December. First, he’d drawn a man in a lungi cycling along a network of paths between rice fields, holding an umbrella against the sun, then a fishing boat with a pointed prow that reminded him of the shikaras on Dal Lake and, finally, a village of thatched-roofed bamboo houses.
They didn’t convey the vivid colours of the emerald paddy fields, khaki-green fishing pools or the piercing blue of the sky. Dawan would probably call them ‘wishy-washy’ but they kept Andrew absorbed in the tense hours between patrols and skirmishes with the enemy.
He’d found drawing had been the saving of his sanity in the hard months of training after his leave in the hills in July. His encounter with Stella had left him in turmoil and he’d welcomed the ‘toughening up’ that their commander ordered. They’d undertaken gruelling route marches through dense jungle in broiling heat and relentless monsoon rain. They’d crossed swollen rivers, stripped naked and carrying their kit on their heads, while dislodged stones whipped their flesh andshingle cut their feet. They’d tried out new machinery, taught mules to cross rivers and shared wet rations crawling with weevils.
Andrew’s muscles had ached and his legs had become like iron rods, but it had stopped his feverish thoughts. Blistered, soaked, hungry, caked in mud and with only a sodden groundsheet to sleep on, Andrew had welcomed the exhaustion that delivered him into dreamless sleep.
They’d carried out mock skirmishes against West African troops who had neatly ambushed them and captured their weapons. But they had quickly learnt how to march in silence and to track through jungle without leaving detritus to betray where they’d been.
Their commander told them bluntly, ‘We’ve failed in the past because our enemy has proved the master of jungle warfare – infiltrating and encircling us and cutting off our line of command. We have to be just as cunning in the jungle – and to help us will be the RAF and our allies in the air.’
Their superior liked to quote the charismatic Brigadier Wingate whose guerrilla force, the Chindits, had been dropped behind Japanese lines and supplied by courageous airmen:‘Have no Lines of Communication on the jungle floor. Bring in the goods, like Father Christmas, down the chimney.’
Before leaving for the front, John had been promoted to captain and Andrew to first lieutenant.
Sitting in the sunshine in the shelter of a scrub-covered slope in Burma, with the new year just a few days old, Andrew found himself reflecting once more on his feelings for Stella.
He had been electrified by her kiss at Tiger Fall. It had nearly felled him. Just beforehand, she’d started to cry and said how she cared for him. He’d hugged her and the feel of her wonderful body pressed against his was like sweet torture. He remembered pushing aside her straggly wet hair and touching her face – that beautifulface he had loved for as long as he could remember – and knowing that he wanted to kiss her.
But it was Stella who had kissed him – and with a passion that had shocked and excited him. It was a moment he had dreamt of for years and yet as soon as it had happened, they had both sprung apart as if they knew it shouldn’t have. Within seconds he was feeling remorse and she was reminding him about his fiancée – apologising – which had just compounded his feeling of guilt towards Felicity.
At the same time, he’d wanted to tell Stella how he felt about her and how he knew he should regret what he’d just done, but didn’t. She hadn’t allowed him to speak and had fled. Nothing he’d done with Felicity had ever affected him in the way that brief embrace with Stella had.
All the way back to Chota Nagpur, Andrew had agonised over what to do. Did it mean that Stella really loved him too? Not just in the way of good friends but with physical desire, like he did? He had been on the point of writing to her several times to make his feelings plain and then she had written to him. Her words had been devastating – she’d regretted the kiss, and didn’t want to come between him and Felicity.
It had filled Andrew with renewed shame over his fiancée and he’d buried his feelings for Stella by writing a long letter to Felicity instead. He was still mortified that it was Stella who had reminded him of the right thing to do. When the war was over, and if he came through it unscathed, he would return to Scotland and pick up his old life there.
