Page 23 of A Thousand Painted Hours

Sassy, her housekeeper and cook, answered, looking weary. “Afternoon, Miss,” she said. “Mistress is in the garden. You can go right through.”

“Thanks.” I gave her the cloth bag full of vegetables. “Maybe you’ll find this useful. I’ll take the pear to Nina.”

“She’ll like that.”

Inside, the rooms were as elegantly undisturbed as ever. The parquet floors gleamed, the Turkish rugs precisely in place. A vase of late roses and dahlias bloomed on the square table of the sitting room. Light, golden with so much dust, poured through generous windows, the blackout curtains shoved behind the velvet draperies. Such order gave me a sense of peace, and I found myself exhaling.

Nina lounged on a chair on the patio, a large brimmed hat shading her face and torso. “Hello, you,” I said, coming out the French doors. Had it only been two nights ago that we’d had dinner around the table there? I offered her the pear and sat down sideways on the bench beneath the shade of an enormous catalpa tree.

“Oh, what a beauty!” She held the fruit in her palm, admiring it. The fat bottom half blushed reddish pink, the narrower top shading from yellow to green. “Let me call Sassy to bring me a knife and we can share it.”

“No, I had one. But—” I scrambled in the satchel I carried everywhere for my sketchbook and pencil. “But hold there for a moment if you would.”

She chuckled, but held her palm steady so I could capture the visual—her lean palm and elegant fingertips, the slightly misshapen pear. It was quick, gestural.

“Done,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Always.” She examined my face. “How did you fare? Did the cellar hold up all right?”

“Yes, but I fear my mother will not navigate the steps well over time. How was it here? Was Jon home?”

“No, they all stayed to strategize.” She relished the pear, one bite at a time. “He’s still there, actually. He rang briefly, but of course the navy is on full alert.” Jon, too frail from the last war to serve in combat for this one, had risen in naval circles for his brilliant strategic mind. “Was Peter home?”

“For the first round.”

She allowed me the dignity of leaving it there. “Perhaps work will ease his nerves as time goes by.”

“Perhaps.”

Sassy brought out a pitcher of mint tea, leaves floating appealingly in the jug. “’Tisn’t sweet,” she said apologetically, “but cooling on a summer day.”

“We drank mint tea in India,” I said. “Very wise of you, Sassy.”

She nodded and shuffled off.

I sipped the tea, and despite the lack of sugar, it transported me to a day on the veranda, rocking with my mother and the maharani, looking out toward the mountains, lost in a haze of sunshine and heat. I sighed. “I have been terribly nostalgic this summer.”

“Yes, so have I.” She waved a fly off her skirt. “When the air-raid sirens were going off, I kept remembering the summer we spent in the country, right before the war. I don’t know why I was thinking of it then.” Gazing into the distance, into the past, she said, “We had no idea what was coming, did we?”

“Thank God. Our innocence made us very happy.”

“Innocence?” She laughed. “Not a single one of us were innocents. Rather an orgy all summer as I remember it.”

I laughed, too. “Ignorance, then.” I thought of the swimming pool, and the lake, and the long dinners, and Tanveer, as free as I’d ever known him, laughing with my friends, telling jokes. Rocky had adored him, of course, and they struck up a clever duel over one long weekend. “We were so young and drunk on love, all of us. Maybe that’s why you’re remembering it.”

She shook her head, sobering. “I’m afraid, Elsie. It’s been coming all summer, but I just don’t know how to do this, another war, more losses.”

I reached for her hand. Her fingers were cold. “Of course you are afraid. Who wouldn’t be?”

She gazed into the flower garden, looking so ordinary. “Do you think the Nazis will invade?”

“I have no idea. But even if they do, it isn’t happening today. Maybe that’s the only way to bear any of this, one day a time.”

“Not today,” she said, smiling wanly.

To distract her a little, I said, “Tanveer called this morning.”

“From India! How did he manage that?”