Page 75 of The Sapphire Child
Stella turned it over.
P.S. I hesitate to put this in the same letter but time is short and I thought you should know. Last week, I was in Edinburgh seeing a film with my girlfriend when I bumped into an old acquaintance of yours – Hugh Keating...
Stella gasped. Her hands shook.
He was there with his cousin Caroline. We had a brief chat and it turns out he’s still working in India (though not in the agricultural service). He’s with McSween and Watson Agricultural Agents in Calcutta.
He asked after you and said he was heartbroken that you’d never replied to his letter, so I took the liberty of telling him that you had very much wanted to but his letter had been lost. I also told him you were still at the Raj and (as far as I knew) fancy-free. I’ve since rather regretted doing so – in case it causes you embarrassment if he contacts you. My girlfriend seemed convinced his so-called cousin was actually some other man’s wife – based on nothing but instinct, so perhaps unfair on poor MrKeating. Anyway, it’s done and you’re forewarned. If I know anything about you, Stella, it’s that you are perfectly capable of handling amorous Irishmen and the like, if needs be.
Stella’s heart pounded. What a shock to hear about Hugh after all this time. He’d asked after her. He was still in India! Had he enquired about her just to be polite or did he still have feelings forher? She could just imagine him claiming to be ‘heartbroken’ in his joking, self-deprecating way.
She passed the letter to Esmie who read it quickly.
‘What a very loving letter,’ said Esmie, her eyes shining with emotion. ‘Andy puts it so well – how much everyone loved Charlie.’
‘Yes, he does.’ Stella could feel her cheeks burning.
Esmie eyed her. ‘And this Hugh Keating?’
Stella knew she could say anything to Esmie in confidence and she longed to unburden herself about Hugh. ‘I met him on the ship to Britain,’ she said. ‘We started a romance but I think Andrew put him off – he was being overprotective, I suppose – even though I was meant to be the one looking after him.’ Stella gave a rueful look. ‘Hugh wrote to Ebbsmouth and asked me to be his girl. But I’m pretty sure Lydia destroyed the letter and I couldn’t remember the address in Dublin he gave me. I wrote to him in Baluchistan too – but it was sent back, as he’d left government service and there was no forwarding address.’
‘So, is this welcome news that you know where MrKeating is?’ Esmie asked.
‘Yes,’ Stella admitted. ‘Very welcome. I’ve never felt such an instant attraction to any man before or since.’
Esmie gave her a smile of understanding. ‘Will you write to him in Calcutta?’
Stella hesitated. Andrew had bumped into Hugh over four months ago and yet Hugh hadn’t attempted to get in touch so far. Of course it was possible he was still in Scotland and hadn’t been able to get back out to India – even so, he could still have written. Tom had been full of an anxious story the other day about a ship full of evacuees from Britain being torpedoed in the Arabian Sea just a couple of days away from Bombay. Lives had been lost. Suddenly she was worried that Hugh might have been on it.
‘No, I’ll wait and see if he writes to me.’ Stella met Esmie’s look. ‘I know that I still feel strongly for Hugh but I don’t want him feeling sorry for me or that he has to reply out of a sense of duty. If he does contact me then I’ll know it’s because he really wants to see me again.’
Esmie covered her hand with hers and squeezed it. ‘That sounds very sensible.’ She smiled and gave back the letter.
Stella knew she would be racing to check the post every day from now on.
The summer passed swiftly, but no letter came from Hugh. Stella wavered in her resolve not to contact him first. What harm would there be in sending him a note via his company to say that Andrew had told her about their chance meeting in Edinburgh? But she resisted. Some instinct told her to be patient.
The Lomaxes were cheered by a letter to Tom from Andrew saying that he was in good fettle and back with his regiment on defensive duties. He was sad to report, though, that his good friend Noel Langley had been taken prisoner in France.
August came and Tom kept Stella informed of the increasingly grim daily bulletins about the war at home with air raids, mass casualties and destruction.
The talk on the hotel veranda was more about the situation in East and North Africa where the Italians had captured British Somaliland and were now bombing Egypt and the Suez Canal. Airmail had once again been stopped and troops were being mobilised in India.
‘This is where the Indian Army will come in,’ said a police officer on leave from Lahore. ‘We’ve run down our fighting force since the Great War but now we’ll be needed.’
Stella turned twenty-eight. She dwelled on the thought that life was passing her by. What had she done with her life since returning from Scotland? She had been content to carry on helping run the two hotels with no real ambition to do anything else. She was nearly the same age as Yvonne, yet her sister-in-law had shown far more initiative. Not only was she making herself indispensable at the Raj, she was a wife and mother.
It made Stella realise how much she wanted to be a mother herself. But there was no point hankering after something she couldn’t have; that joy would only come once she was married. She wondered if Monty wanted to be a father. They had written very spasmodically to each other while he was away training at Roorkee. She suspected that he wasn’t any more enthusiastic about marrying her than she was at being his wife.
Stella decided that, now she knew that Hugh was still in India, she would break off her courtship with Monty once and for all. Even if nothing came of it with Hugh, she wouldn’t hold Monty back from finding someone he really loved and could love him back in the way he deserved. She knew that her feelings for Hugh were still strong and she wouldn’t settle for a husband whom she didn’t love wholeheartedly.
In this new determined frame of mind, she also decided she would take her future in hand and do something for the war effort. She would volunteer in Rawalpindi for the Women’s Auxiliary Corps of India.
Stella told the Lomaxes of her reasons why she wished to return to Rawalpindi more promptly than in previous years. ‘Apart from wanting to sign up for the WAC, I’m missing baby Charles,’ she admitted. ‘He’ll have changed so much in the past four months. I hope you don’t mind?’
‘Of course not,’ said Esmie. ‘The numbers are dropping off now and we’ll soon be shutting up the hotel.’
‘And it’s a fine thing you’re doing,’ said Tom, ‘offering to help out as a volunteer.’
