THE TOWER ROOM
Page 5
‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,’ and turning, she saw a young man beside her, gazing raptly at the sunrise, quite unaware of her presence. He was of medium height, with dark hair flopping forward in rather Byronic fashion, and as he drew back from the railing he looked straight through her and she saw that his shining grey eyes were the eyes of the young Thomas Tankerville.
‘Why me, Thomas?’ she asked again, though no sound came and the answer came in her head, in an old man's voice, not from the young man beside her.
‘Because you needed love in your life, so I gave you India.’
Next morning she began to doubt what had happened. It was absurd, an old woman's maudlin fancy she told herself. High time she pulled herself together and found a worthwhile occupation, so she embarked on a high-powered campaign of assistance with the church fete and busied herself night and morning.
The dreams of India continued with regularity, though not every night and she scarcely recognised how vital they were to her well-being, how devastated she would be if they ceased. In spite of her endeavours she couldn't resist continuing her researches about Indian history and soon had a bulging box-file full of notes, cuttings and pictures. She learnt about the Mogul Empire and the grandson of the great Akbar, Shah Jehan who built the Taj Mahal.
She studied the early trade routes, the jockeying for position of the Portuguese, the French, Danes and Dutch and, of course, the English. When she read that the East India Company established a trading centre in Calcutta in 1690 she wondered if that could be the waterfront city she had seen, or would it more likely have been Bombay, the gateway to India? By the time Thomas had arrived in India just after the turn of the nineteenth century the East India Company's supremacy was an acknowledged fact, thanks in part to the efforts of Clive and of Richard Wellesley, brother of the Iron Duke. Pickings were rich for an energetic, intelligent young man, she thought cynically, no wonder Thomas had done well.
Emily had been at Tower House for three months when her great-nephew Stephen came to see her, distraught at failing his first-year exams at university and bowed with the disappointment and disapproval of his parents. Emily was his godmother, his mother was her nearest relative, and although she sympathised with Geraldine and Peter, she felt a rueful liking for the boy who cheerfully confessed that his failure was a combination of too much social life and not enough hard grind. His parents had reluctantly agreed to finance him for a retake of the first year, but insisted that he take a year out and work, to hammer home his lesson.
Pouring tea for him in the drawing-room Emily felt someone looking at her, but there was nobody else in the room beside the two of them. Drawn irresistibly she looked up at Thomas and met his eager grey eyes. Now what do you want I wonder, she mused.
‘I know,’ she exclaimed abruptly, interrupting Stephen's catalogue of jobs applied for and rejections received. ‘You shall go to India!’
‘Huh?’ The boy looked at her in astonishment. ‘What for?’
‘I don't know, how on earth should I know?’ she said crossly. ‘It isn't my idea.’
At his expression she pulled herself together and grinned at him. ‘Don't worry, dear, I'm not losing my marbles quite yet. I was just thinking aloud. What I meant to say was that I am prepared to finance you, pay your fare and give you a small allowance, provided you spend your year out doing something useful in India. You can surely find some charity or other that could make use of you. You're young, strong, intelligent, there must be something they can give you, especially if you're paying your own way.’
She refused to listen to his protestations of gratitude and still less to the misgivings of his mother who descended on Tower House the next day, worrying about dysentery and cholera and AIDS and tsetse flies.
‘Aren't those an African problem?’ enquired Emily with interest, about the latter. ‘Or are they a universal threat in the tropics?’
She ignored all their qualms because she knew she had done the right thing. All these weeks of dreaming of India and becoming more and more conscious of Thomas confirmed her suspicions. The stories of the haunted Tower Room had come about because Thomas was trying to pass on his obsession, his adoration of the country that had been his best-beloved.
Until Emily's advent nobody had been sufficiently receptive. She was too intelligent to delude herself that it was her sensitivity that had been the key. Rather it was the aridity of her nature, the emptiness where her heart should be. Her affection for her parents and now for her few living relatives seemed a poor thing to show for a lifetime. No grand passion, no love of her life, just a well-meaning existence. Had Thomas recognised this in her, this lack? Was this what had called out to the Tower Room, so full of Thomas's presence and his enduring passion for another country?
