Page 74 of The Girl from the Tea Garden
On the thirteenth of June, Adela’s aunties arrived for her birthday, Tilly with ten-year-old Mungo and Sophie with Rafi. Harry shrieked with excitement to see the older boy, who at once started showing him his homemade catapult. They ran off into the garden to try it out.
‘Uncle James sends apologies and happy returns,’ said Tilly, kissing Adela, ‘but it’s too frantically busy at the Oxford Estates for him to get away. Doing as much as he can before the monsoons make the roads impassable.’
‘I quite understand,’ Adela said. ‘I’m just sorry he’ll miss the picnic.’
She hadn’t wanted a big fuss made of her turning eighteen; somehow she felt so much older. It embarrassed her to hear her parents make teasing comments about their little girl being so grown up now and ready for the world.
They went down to the river and swam in her favourite rock pool, where the waterfall gushed out of the steep cliff and tiny fish flashed beneath water lilies. Harry and Mungo splashed so much that Adela gave up and lounged on the rocks in her bathing suit next to Tilly, who was eating a slice of the massive ginger cake with buttercream icing that Mohammed Din had made for the picnic, and sweating under a large topee.
‘Don’t you look gorgeous and trim?’ Tilly said between mouthfuls. ‘You are made for the silver screen with a body like that, Adela.’
Adela self-consciously pulled her knees to her chin and swiftly changed the subject.
Late in the afternoon they returned to the compound and played tennis on the uneven court of dry grass at the side of the house: she and Rafi against Sophie and Wesley, with the boys rushing about fetching balls from the bushes and under the house. Adela and Rafi won. Rafi was still athletic and fast, and she knew her father had paired her up with Sophie’s husband so that she would win on her birthday.
‘He didn’t always used to beat me, you know.’ Sophie smiled. ‘Rafi, do you remember the first time we ever played?’ Sophie reminisced. ‘With Boz and Auntie Amy in Edinburgh?’
Rafi’s mouth twitched in amusement. ‘I will never forget it. You beat me three sets to one and totally ignored me. I was smitten from that very moment.’
‘No, you weren’t.’ She laughed. ‘You thought I was a snobby little memsahib and I wasn’t very nice to you.’
‘You’ve made up for it since,’ he said and grinned, catching her hand and pulling her to him for a quick kiss on the lips.
Adela thought with a pang of Jay’s sensual kisses. He’d been wrong about Rafi and Sophie; anyone could see how in love they still were after years of marriage. They didn’t seem to need anyone else to make them happy, and it threw her once again into a dilemma about whether to mention Tommy Villiers.
At dinner that night Wesley announced their present to her.
‘A shikar trip to Gulgat, just like I promised.’ He beamed. ‘The Raja will accompany us too. Isn’t that an honour?’
Adela’s heart thudded at the mention of Gulgat. ‘Yes, it is. How wonderful!’ She glanced at Sophie who was watching her with an anxious frown. ‘Will ... will anyone else be going with us?’
‘Rafi of course,’ said her father, ‘and probably Stourton, the British Resident. He never misses a chance to bag a tiger.’
‘Tiger?’ Adela said in excitement.
‘There’s a pair of tigers the Raja wants shooting,’ Rafi explained. ‘They’ve been carrying off cattle from a riverside village.’
‘It’s worse than that,’ Sophie said. ‘A villager has gone missing, a grass cutter. They think the tigress might be lame and has attacked the man as easy prey.’
‘A man-eater?’ Clarrie gasped. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
Tilly exclaimed, ‘Don’t tell Mungo, or he’ll want to go. I can’t think of anything worse. Stuff of nightmares. James can’t understand it. He thinks hunting is the best thing about being in India.’
‘We won’t take any risks,’ Rafi assured Clarrie. ‘Adela will be kept out of harm’s way.’
‘But man-eaters are cunning,’ Clarrie fretted.
‘You must trust me to look after our daughter,’ said Wesley. ‘You would have jumped at such a chance at her age, Clarissa.’
Clarrie smiled. ‘You’re right of course. I used to go with my father on shikar. I’ll stop fussing.’
‘Oh, I can’t wait,’ Adela cried. ‘My first tiger shoot. We better get some rifle practice in before we go, Dad.’
‘We’ll go out at dawn,’ he promised with a wink.
Two days later Tilly and Mungo departed. ‘Next time we meet will be in Gawhatty’ – she beamed and gave Adela a clammy hug – ‘on our way home! Isn’t that exciting?’
Adela tried to sound enthusiastic, but she hadn’t really given the trip much thought. She had agreed to it to please her mother, yet somehow it didn’t seem real. England, Aunt Olive and the Brewis family were a place and people she had no memory of; if it wasn’t for Cousin Jane’s chatty letters, she wouldn’t know them at all. Her thoughts were consumed with the pending hunting trip and the possibility of seeing Jay again.
