Page 39 of The Secrets of the Tea Garden

Libby was dismayed. ‘For how long?’

‘Ten days, but I’ll be back in time for your birthday, I promise.’

Why hadn’t he told her before? Ten days seemed like an eternity.

He grinned. ‘And perhaps we can arrange a night out alone sometime soon?’

Libby smiled and nodded. He leant forward and pecked her on the cheek. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do while I’m away,’ he said.

She watched him hurry back to the waiting car and climb in beside Flowers. Libby felt a tug of jealousy. They waved. She raised her hand in farewell and watched until the car was out of sight. She was encouraged by George’s increased ardour towards her at the picnic but was left wondering what it meant. Did George want her for his girl or not?

Flowers lived in busy Sudder Street behind Hogg’s Market. Libby arrived by taxi. Since George had taken to organising her social life, her Aunt Helena had stopped fussing about Libby venturing out on her own. The taxi driver sounded his horn as he inched around bullock carts, porters, street sellers, cows, mangy dogs, shoe-shine boys and rickshaws. Stepping out of the car, Libby was almost deafened by the cries of vendors, the blare of horns and the shriek of scavenging birds.

The block of flats where Flowers lived with her parents was set back from the pavement behind tall iron gates and fronted by a small dusty courtyard with a banyan tree full of noisy sparrows. Flowers was looking out for her.

‘We’re on the second floor. I hope you’re hungry.’ Flowers grinned. ‘Mum has laid in provisions for a small army.’

Whereas the Khans’ living quarters had been sparsely furnished, the Dunlops’ sitting room was crammed with dark, heavy mahoganyfurniture. Ornate side tables jostled for space with high-backed upholstered chairs, a chaise longue, a sideboard, a dining table and chairs and a harmonium. The walls were covered in old prints of Calcutta, gilt-framed mirrors and sconces that must once have held oil lamps. The walls were papered in faded green stripes and any parquet floor that wasn’t hidden by furniture was covered in red durries.

A small, friendly-looking woman greeted her. ‘I’m Flowers’s mother – welcome to our home! We are so pleased to meet you. Call me Winnie.’ She was dressed in a flowery frock and had dark hair kept in order by tortoiseshell combs.

Flowers’s father was propped up in a long cane chair. Despite his baldness, he looked much younger than Libby had imagined, with a trim moustache and light-coloured eyes under bushy eyebrows. But then most of her contemporaries had fathers far younger than her own. MrDunlop didn’t look Anglo-Indian either. Flowers evidently got her darker looks from her mother.

‘How do you do, Miss Robson?’ He reached for his sticks and Libby saw at once that he had only one leg.

‘Please don’t get up, MrDunlop,’ she said, quickly crossing the room to shake his hand. ‘It’s very nice to meet you.’

He beamed. ‘The pleasure is mine.’

Flowers tried to help her father to the table but he shrugged off her attempt with an impatient ‘I can manage’. He beckoned Libby to sit beside him. It struck Libby how a man of his age – he didn’t look more than fifty – must find enforced retirement a trial.

Tiffin was a four-course lunch of mulligatawny soup, chicken liver on toast, fried fish with tartare sauce, mashed potatoes and cabbage, finished off with a pudding of pink blancmange and stewed apple. It was washed down with iced jugs of homemade lemonade.

All the while, MrDunlop asked Libby questions about life in Assam and he reminisced about his time in the railway colony at Srimangal in East Bengal where he was once stationmaster.

‘We were happiest there, weren’t we, Winnie? Things went downhill when I was moved to Calcutta during the War. Realised too late I had diabetes – lost my leg.’

‘It’s not so bad here, Danny, dearest,’ said Winnie. ‘There’s more to do than up-country – and we have family here.’

‘Your family,’ he muttered.

Libby saw Flowers roll her eyes. Libby tried to distract MrDunlop from thoughts of his reduced life in Calcutta.

‘Flowers tells me that you are from a tea planter family from Assam too,’ said Libby. ‘I don’t know any Dunlops. Whereabouts in Assam?’

Danny Dunlop gave a regretful shrug. ‘That I don’t know. You see, my parents died young and I was raised in an orphanage – so many planters succumbed to disease in those days; it’s a tough climate. But I don’t need to tell you that. I was always told they were British and that my father was Scottish. It’s obvious from my name, isn’t it? Dunlop is Scottish.’

Flowers said, ‘Dad’s always wanted to go back and trace our family one day, haven’t you, Dad?’

‘The journey would be too much for you,’ fussed Winnie.

‘You’re probably right,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Still, I would have liked to go back to Shillong and seen where I grew up.’

‘Shillong?’ Libby looked at Flowers. ‘Isn’t that where you and Adela went to school too?’

‘Yes, we overlapped for a short time,’ said Flowers. ‘Adela left and went to Simla but she was the best friend I had in that place. The other girls didn’t treat Anglo-Indians like us very well.’

‘You were just as British as they were!’ MrDunlop protested. ‘They had no right to be so unkind.’