East of the Sun Read Free Page A

Victoria.”
    “Um…” Tor’s mother made the little pout she always made when she checked her face in the mirror. She adjusted her hat. “Let’s hope not.”
    I hate you, Mother. For one brief and terrible moment Tor imagined herself sticking a pin so hard into her mother that she made her scream out loud. I absolutely loathe you, she thought. And I’m never coming home again.

Chapter Three
    T here was one last arrangement for Viva to make and the thought of it made her feel almost light-headed with nervous tension. An appointment at seven o’clock at the Oxford and Cambridge University Club in Pall Mall with William, her guardian and the executor of her parents’ will.
    It was William who had, two months ago, inadvertently set off the whole chain of events that now led her to India by forwarding a letter, written in a quavery hand on cheap writing paper, telling her about a trunk her parents had left in India. The writer, a Mrs. Mabel Waghorn from Simla, said the trunk, which contained some clothes and personal effects, was being kept in a shed near her house. The rains had been heavy that year and she was afraid the trunk would disintegrate should she leave it there much longer. She said that after the funeral the keys to the trunk had been left with a Mr. William Philpott, at the Inner Temple Inn in London—if they weren’t in her possession already, she could collect them.
    William had attached his own letter to this. The sight of that careful cramped handwriting had brought a slap of pain.
    “Forgive me for being brutally frank,” he wrote, “but I don’t think you need do anything about this. I would send the old lady some money and get the trunks disposed of. I have the keys should you want them.”
    Though she hated to agree with him, Viva had at first been convinced he was right. Going back to India would be like throwing a bomb into the center of her life.
    And what would she find there? A Rider Haggardish child’s dream of buried treasure, a glorious reunion with her lost family?
    No, it was ridiculous, only pain could come of it. When she thought about it, she literally saw it in her mind as a step back into darkness.
    For, finally, after six months and two dreary typist’s jobs in London—one for a drunken MP, the other for a firm that made iron locks—she’d fallen into a job she adored as assistant to Nancy Driver, a kind, eccentric woman who churned out romantic novels at an impressive rate and who was generous with advice. Her new job paid thirty shillings a week, enough for her to move from the YWCA into her own bedsit in Earl’s Court. Best of all she had started to write herself, and had experienced for the first time a feeling of such relief, such pleasure it felt almost cellular. She’d found—or was it stumbled into?—what she knew she wanted to do with her life.
    She dreaded seeing William again—their relationship had become so soiled and complicated. She wrote to him asking if he could post the keys, but he’d refused.
    So why, given all these new and wonderful opportunities in life, had another vagrant part of her leaped hungrily into life again at the thought of seeing her parents’ things?
    In certain moods she could barely remember what her family even looked like. Time had blurred those agonizing memories, time and the relative anonymity of boardingschool and, later, London—where, at first, she had known nobody. Indeed, one of the things she most liked about the city, apart from all its obvious attractions—the theater, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river—was that so few people ever asked you personal questions. Only two ever had: first, the form-filler at the YWCA, querying the blank she’d left after “Family’s place of residence,” and then Fran, the plump friendly typist in the next bed in her dorm. She’d told them both they had died in a car accident years ago in India; it always seemed easier to dispose of them both at once. She