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dancer, and at first they’d both been hopelessly flustered and tongue-tied bouncing around the floor together to the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.
    He’d asked her to come downstairs so they didn’t have to shout, and then she had asked him about India. And been initially impressed rather than bedazzled. He seemed to her a proper grown-up man, and to have done so much: pig-sticking and chasing tigers and helping Indian people learn so much about themselves. He was very modest about this, saying he was simply doing his bit, but she could tell he’d been brave.
    Now she wanted so much to love him in what Woman’s World called “not a dull rub-along sort of way,” but to try, as they suggested, “to intrigue him and keep a sense of mystery alive.” So far, the mystery part had been easy—he’d proposed four weeks after that first meeting and gone back to India a week later. But the real test, the only one that counted, would be when they were alone in India together.
     
    A soft knock on the door: her father. She hoped he couldn’t see how red her eyes were from the big blub in the summerhouse. He looked slowly around the room at the packed trunk, the rose dress, Jack’s photograph on her bedside table.
    “Do you think you’ll be all right, Froggie?” he asked.
    “Yes, Daddy, I will.”
    He sat down on the bed beside her. The fervent way she said “I will” must have made him think of the wedding. “I’m jolly well going to try and make it,” he said. “I’m quite jealous of him, Frog.”
    “Daddy, no!”
    “I am.” His fingers, papery and old-looking in the lamplight, were plucking at the bedspread. “My darling girl.”
    When he turned, she was shocked to hear him swallowing, the breathless rasp of his lungs. The first time she ever saw him cry. Outside her window she saw the dark branches of the cedar tree moving in the wind. That tree had shaded her pram, held her tree house, been part of the den she built with Tor.
    “So, who are these blasted poodle-fakers?” he said in quite a different voice, picking up Vogue magazine and glaring at the mannequin on the front. This was their game when she was young: he was a ferocious character called Colonel Bluff who roared at her in a way he never had in real life. “Extraordinary kit! Waste of good British money.”
    She put her arms around him, burying her head in the softness of his moleskin waistcoat. How thin he was now! She inhaled him, pipes and soap and dogs, and fixed him somewhere deep inside of her.
    “Good night, Daddy. Sleep well.”
    Good night, sleep tight, hope the fleas don’t bite.
    “Good night, my darling, darling girl.” She felt his shuddering breath under her fingers.
    “Would you mind turning off my light?”
    “Will do.” The door clicked and the room went dark. She knew, and he did, too: it was their last night together under the same roof.

Chapter Five
    T he S.S. Kaisar-i-Hind would sail the next day, and now Viva’s taxi was passing through an avenue of dripping rhododendron bushes toward St. Christopher’s School in the village of Colerne, near Bath.
    It had rained steadily since she’d woken up early that morning. From her basement in Nevern Square she’d watched the usual procession of mud-splattered ankles, galoshes, and buttoned shoes tramping through puddles on their way to work. In the train, the mist had drawn in so tightly she felt as if she was moving through a gray fur tunnel.
    The taxi was splashing through puddles toward a large and gloomy Victorian house. To her right, a group of boys ran like small gray ghosts around the edges of a field, watched by a herd of cows hock deep in mud.
    A maid showed her into the visitors’ room, cold and sparsely furnished. A small fire in the hearth had two upright wooden chairs on either side of it.
    “I’ve come to pick up Guy Glover,” she told the maid. “I’m his chaperone. I’m taking him back to India.”
    “Mr. Glover’s in the parlor,” the maid said,