Kamila Shamsie - A God in Every Stone

— Heave-ho!

Mr Forbes hoisted the spade, scooped up a few books and knocked others onto the floor to make space for Viv on the sofa. The liveried man moved forward to lift up the books, and Mr Forbes waved him away, the spade in his hand making the gesture a dangerous one, for which he laughingly apologised before sending the young man to the kitchen with instructions for tea. He excused himself as well, holding up his soiled hands in explanation. While he was away Viv made a pile of all the books on the floor, and carefully brushed away the clinging mud which had transferred itself from the spade to a thick book with soft leather binding. There was a welcome peace in watching the mud fall to the speckled stone floor in a room heavy with the scent of jasmine buds, strings of which hung from the rotating ceiling fan.

— Mrs Forbes should be with us in a few minutes.

Mr Forbes, still in his grass-stained trousers but with hands that were well scrubbed, sat down on the armchair adjacent to Viv, nothing in his lined face with its ruffled eyebrows indicating that there was anything untoward about Viv dropping in during the middle of the afternoon when Mrs Forbes was undoubtedly taking an afternoon rest.

— I’m so sorry to disturb you. I just didn’t know where else to go, or who else to ask.

— What is it, my dear?

— What happened yesterday on the Street of Storytellers?

— I shouldn’t worry about it, Miss Spencer.

— Mr Forbes, if I can be very frank?

— Perhaps we should wait for Mrs Forbes?

— I worked as a VAD nurse in London for almost every day of the war that I wasn’t in Peshawar. You can guess what I saw, what I heard. Do you think I’m not equipped to cope with news of a skirmish in the Walled City?

Mr Forbes sighed, and sat back, his fingers bridged together, trembling against the tip of his nose. He had been one of the leading surgeons in Peshawar before his retirement and though Viv had never known him during his professional life his palsy struck her as an example of life’s cruelties.

— Things got out of hand.

— What does that mean?

— There was some inexperienced fool — allowed himself to get worked up by a baying mob and called in the armoured cars when it wasn’t necessary. And then — well, Pathans. In so many ways the finest men you’ll ever meet, but the first sign of a fight and the blood rushes to their brains.

— How many died?

The door opened and the liveried man entered with a tray on which there were biscuits and the usual sort of tea for Viv, and kahwa, scented with cardamom and almonds, for Mr Forbes. Fifteen years earlier she’d asked him when he planned to move back to England and he’d repeated the word ‘England’ back to her as if it were a strange vegetable that he had no intention of adding to his diet. They sat silently until the Native man left the room, closing the door behind him on Mr Forbes’ instructions.

— All things considered, it was something of a miracle. Several injuries. Broken bones, lacerations, that kind of thing. One fellow got his finger shot off, but if a man can’t hold on to his own gun he probably deserves it. Oh, and a horse was shot dead. Mrs Forbes is particularly upset about that. But the only chap who died was a dispatch rider — Bryant. Ignored orders, and rushed in where he wasn’t supposed to go. Right into the path of the armoured car. Terrible thing. And then, I regret to say. . well, never mind.

— VAD nurse, Mr Forbes.

— The savages set him on fire.

— While he was still alive?

— Probably not, but does that matter?

— Are you saying the only Englishman who died was killed by our armoured cars?

— There’s no need to sound disappointed by the ability of our troops to withstand attack.

— I’m struggling to understand, that’s all. And how many Peshawaris died?

He shook his head and picked a book off the side table, turning it round in his hands, examining its bindings as though it were the Gutenberg Bible rather than a tome on military campaigns of the North-West Frontier.

— Were there any women among the dead?

— Have you been listening to some Congress propaganda? They don’t waste a moment! Here comes Mrs Forbes. We mustn’t talk about this in front of her.

The rules of the Peshawar Club were clear: if you were an Englishman you could apply for membership; if you were an Englishwoman you could enter as the guest of a member. But there were other rules in place which governed the interaction of the Indian guards with the ruling race, and when Viv arrived after dinner at Dean’s, uninvited, unaccompanied, she merely showed the guards a profile of sufficient disdain to ensure they wouldn’t question her right to be there. How badly she’d behaved with Remmick, accepted his favours as if they were her due — no, as if she were doing him a favour by allowing him to claim her as his guest. No one should ever be beautiful and young at the same time; it deranged the mind. Not that it excused his behaviour, of course. She wondered where in the world he’d got to by now.

Viv stopped along the pathway leading to the familiar single-storeyed club house with its multi-arched verandah, bracing herself against a palm tree with one hand so she could remove the drawing pin which had lodged itself into the heel of her python pumps. The days of derangement had passed. Now, however fashionable her hemline and heels, she was a spinster nearing forty, one of the tragic-but-uncomplaining women in a generation which had lost its men to the Great War. This was the story assumed of her, and she supposed it was true in its own way. There had been other men since the war ended — before the war ended, in fact — but joining one’s life to any of them in perpetuity always seemed to entail more loss than gain.

Indoors, the Club was as crowded as she’d ever seen it except during a ball but there was nothing of a festive atmosphere in the rooms heavy with smoke and whispers. Viv stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether or not to enter, until a slightly hysterical high-pitched laugh, which came from a man, decided it. Backing out, she walked around the club building and through the trees to the swimming pool from which no sounds of splashes and merriment issued despite the warmth of the night.

Beyond the rectangle of liquid darkness, a group of men sat on deckchairs and loungers, the ends of their lit cigarettes tracking the movements of their arms as they jabbed at the air. Sounds swooped across to her, too tangled for words to emerge. All the men seemed to be speaking at the same time. She took off her shoes — the grass prickling her foot through silk — and, still unseen in the shadow of a palm tree, slipped off her rolled garters and stockings and stuffed them into her handbag. Beneath the high diving board the darkness was particularly concentrated, and it was here she sat, her legs stockinged in water beneath the knee.

Eventually she heard the muffled tread of a man’s shoes on grass and though she held herself very still he walked straight towards her, stopping a few feet away to climb onto the low diving board, fully clothed. He walked to its end and, disappointingly, sat down, legs dangling just above the water’s surface. He didn’t look at Viv at first, but she knew he was aware of her. She had seen him — red-faced as ever — as she stood in the doorway, and it was unsurprising that he’d either seen her too or else been informed she was there by someone who knew he was a man who liked to know everything that went on in this city. There seemed barely any change in him since he’d walked into Dean’s on her second day in Peshawar, which said more about how middle-aged he’d looked in his youth than how young he looked in middle age.