Page 164 of The Secrets of the Tea Garden

CHAPTER 35

Newcastle, early September

James was glad of the excuse to get out of the house. Tilly and Josey were engaged in a frenzy of packing and Mungo had gone ahead a week early to StAbbs to stay with his Uncle Johnny and go sailing. Since Tilly had discovered that Adela and Sam were leaving Newcastle, she had been all the more determined to press ahead quickly with the move to Jesmond, as if she feared he might have a change of heart too. In some unfathomable way, James felt his wife was blaming him for the young couple’s decision to return to India. ‘If you hadn’t kept going on about Belgooree ...!’ Tilly had accused him.

James was just as sad as Tilly that Adela and Sam were soon to be going – they had a passage booked from Marseilles at the end of the month and were talking about a few days in Paris on the way – but he had to keep stopping himself from reminiscing about Belgooree in front of his wife. That had been easier since Adela and Sam had moved out. Rather than go to the Robsons’ new home, they had arranged to spend the last few weeks living with Sam’s mother in Cullercoats. He envied the young couple their closeness and ease with each other – the way Adela’s eyes lit up when Sam came into the room – and wondered if it would ever be like that with Tilly again. Perhaps it never had been; it certainly wasn’t now. Tilly continued to look at him as if he were atiresome guest who kept getting in the way – that’s when she looked at him at all.

So on the days leading up to the move to Jesmond, James kept out of the way. He’d been up to Willowburn twice that week and was finally going to visit his former fellow planter, Fairfax – now well into his nineties – in his nursing home at Tynemouth.

The place had a pervasive smell of urine and boiled vegetables. He found the old man in his room, sitting in an armchair by the window dozing. James peered around before waking him. The room was a shrine to Fairfax’s time in India. The bed and chairs were covered in faded Kashmir woollen blankets and the room was cluttered with Indian tables displaying sports trophies, brass bowls and ivory ornaments. The walls were hung with framed photographs of Assam: hunting trips with men standing in front of tents or with their feet proudly on the animals they had just killed. There was one of a polo team. With a start, James recognised both himself and his cousin Wesley in the photograph.

Wesley had been a superior horseman to James and had taken quickly to the game of polo. In fact, Wesley had embraced the tea planting life with gusto the minute he had arrived in Assam. James had a stab of grief for his younger cousin. Often they had clashed over business, as well as over his marriage to Clarrie, which James had thought would be a disaster. But latterly, he had enjoyed Wesley’s company more and more, and come to realise that his cousin had the perfect life in India with his attractive, spirited wife and his family around him. Poor, dear man!

‘That you, Ali?’

James swung round to see his old mentor awake and peering myopically at him. His head was sparsely covered in a few wisps of white hair and his jowly face sagged like a bloodhound’s. But he still sported a bushy tobacco-stained moustache below his beaky nose.

‘No, sir; it’s Robson.’ He crossed the room. ‘James Robson.’

He held out his hand.

Fairfax frowned in confusion. ‘Robson?’ he queried.

‘From the Oxford Estates,’ James prompted. ‘We worked together before the Great War – and you were my best man here in Newcastle, remember?’

The old man’s faded brown eyes lit with recognition. ‘Young Robson!’ He took James’s hand in a surprisingly firm handshake. ‘How very good to see you!’

‘And you, sir.’ James thought it incongruous to be called young at the age of seventy but he had slipped straight back into his junior role in calling his old bachelor friend sir.

‘What brings you here, Robson? Home on furlough? How is the old place? I don’t get to hear from anyone these days. All my contemporaries are long in the ground.’ Fairfax waved a scrawny hand. ‘Pull up a chair, Robson. Sit close and speak up – hearing’s not tip-top these days.’

James sat on the chair opposite. ‘I’ve retired too,’ he said. ‘Been back in Newcastle since July.’

‘Not long then,’ said Fairfax.

‘No, I suppose not; though it feels like it.’

Fairfax snorted. ‘Give it ten years and you’ll feel part of the furniture. I still dream about the place though ...’ The old man looked reflective.

James felt a familiar tension in his gut. His frighteningly vivid dreams of the plantation had hardly plagued him since returning to England. For that reason alone, he would stick it out in Newcastle with Tilly. He could cope with her aloofness towards him as long as he had peace of mind. Physical closeness would return given time.

‘That nice wife of yours,’ said Fairfax, ‘came to visit me while you were away. Cheery sort, Polly.’

‘Tilly,’ James corrected.

‘What?’

‘Tilly is my wife’s name.’

‘Yes, kind of her. You can count the number of visitors I get on one hand – or two thumbs!’ He broke into wheezy laughter.

James felt guilty for not coming sooner. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to but somehow he had kept putting it off. Was it his reluctance to talk about Danny Dunlop’s parentage and where such questions might lead? Ironically, it was Tilly who had suggested the visit, no doubt to get James out from under her feet while she organised the house move.

‘Let’s have achota peg,’ suggested Fairfax. ‘Glasses and bottle are hidden in that bedside cabinet. Nurse doesn’t let me touch it before tiffin but this is a special occasion, eh what?’

Once James had poured them both a generous whisky, they fell to reminiscing about long-ago days on the tea plantation. An hour passed and the old man began to tire. His head was drooping and he was beginning to lose the thread of their conversation. James realised that if he didn’t ask about the Dunlops now then the chance would be gone.

Bracing himself, he pulled out the envelope from his inner jacket pocket. It was crumpled from being carried around for so long, but still unopened.