The Kashmir Shawl
Rosie Thomas
For fans of The Tea-Planter’s Wife and Victoria Hislop comes a gripping story of doomed love and secrets in 1940s Kashmir.Within one exotic land lie the secrets of a lifetime…In 1938, young bride Nerys Watkins accompanies her missionary husband on a posting to India. Up in Srinagar, the British live on beautiful wooden houseboats and dance and gossip as if there is no war. But when the men are sent away to fight Nerys is caught up in a dangerous friendship.Years later, when Mair Ellis clears out her father’s house, she finds an antique shawl with a lock of child’s hair wrapped up in its folds. Tracing her grandparents’ roots back to Kashmir, Mair uncovers a story of great love and great sacrifice.
Rosie Thomas
The Kashmir Shawl
Dedication
For my father
The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
Contents
Title Page (#uf75d86fe-7265-5523-917c-36bd52d2bbbc)
Dedication
One
Mair made the discovery on the last day at home…
Two
Back in Leh, Mair spent a day trying to find…
Three
He had taken their candle behind the screen with him.
Four
When Nerys came round, it was to see a circle…
Five
To get across the mountains from Leh to Srinagar, Mair’s…
Six
The two women picked their way between tables and parasols,…
Seven
The band struck up and the maharajah himself led out…
Eight
Solomon and Sheba was close-moored in a line of other…
Nine
‘It’s not too cold,’ Rainer insisted.
‘Zahra’s Shawl’
Ten
Winter came. In early December 1941 Japanese troops invaded Malaya.
Eleven
Two days after Christmas, Nerys and Rainer drove the little…
Twelve
A startling crash in the undergrowth, then a long rattle…
Thirteen
The chapel was small, austere and brown-varnished. The windows were…
Fourteen
‘Do you know for certain?’ Myrtle asked. A plume of…
Fifteen
He was as handsome as always, and as secretive. She…
Sixteen
The launch drew closer, its bow pennant drawn taut by…
Seventeen
The tiny coronet of blue flame seemed too fragile to…
Eighteen
Mair spent that Christmas with Dylan, Jackie and their smaller…
Nineteen
The house was in a leafy street in south Delhi,…
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Books by Rosie Thomas
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
Mair made the discovery on the last day at home in the old house.
The three of them were upstairs in their father’s bedroom. They had come together for the melancholy business of sorting and clearing their parents’ furniture and possessions, before closing up the house for the last time and handing over the keys to the estate agent. It was the end of May and the lambs had just been taken away to market. Out on the hill the sheep were bleating wildly, loud, incessant and bewildered cries that were carried in with the scent of spring grass.
Mair had made a pot of tea and laid a tray to carry upstairs to her sister Eirlys. Their brother Dylan came behind her, ducking as he had had to do from the age of thirteen in order to avoid hitting his head on the low beam on the landing.
Eirlys’s energy was prodigious, as always. The floor of the bedroom was squared with neat piles of blankets and pillows, towers of labelled boxes, crackling black bags. She stood at the foot of the bed, resting a clipboard on the bedpost and frowning as she scribbled amendments to one of her lists. With the addition of a white coat and a retinue of underlings, she could easily have been on one of her ward rounds.
‘Lovely,’ she murmured, when she saw the tea. ‘Don’t put it down there,’ she added.
Dylan took a cup and wedged himself on the windowsill. He was blocking the light and Eirlys flicked an eyebrow at him. ‘Drink your tea,’ he said mildly. ‘Go mad, have a biscuit as well.’
Mair sat down on the bed. The ancient pink electric blanket was still stretched from corner to corner, and she thought of the weeks of her father’s last illness when she had come home to the valley to nurse him, as best she could, and to keep him company. They had enjoyed long, rambling conversations about the past and the people her father had once known.
‘Did I ever tell you about Billy Jones, the auctioneer?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘He had a stammer.’
‘How did he manage?’
Over the top of his spectacles her father had glanced at her. ‘We weren’t in such a hurry, you know, in those days.’
In the low-ceilinged room the old man seemed very close at hand, and at the same time entirely absent.
Eirlys was pointing out which bundles were to be taken away to charity drop-offs and what exactly the house-clearance people could be left to deal with. There was a question about the linen bed-sheets that had been stored in the same cupboard for as long as they could all remember and were mysteriously kept for ‘best’, probably according to some long-ago edict of their mother’s. But when the sisters had unfolded the top sheet they saw that it was worn so thin in the middle that the light shone straight through. Eirlys pursed her lips now and briskly consigned it with its partner to one of her graded series of bin-bags.
The sun was slanting through the window, painting Dylan’s jumper with a rim of gilded fuzz.
Mair found that she couldn’t sit still any longer and let the wave of memories engulf them all. She jumped up and went to the bow-fronted chest of drawers facing the end of the bed. Their mother had inherited it from her own mother – she remembered hearing that. Gwen Ellis’s clothes had been stored in here after her death, until at last her widower and her elder daughter had recovered sufficiently to be able to give them away.
The pair of split drawers at the top was empty. Eirlys had even removed the lining paper. The middle one had recently held their father’s vests and pants and folded shirts. As he had grown weaker, Mair had helped him dress in the mornings. In the vain hope of making his bones feel warmer, she would hold the underclothes in front of the electric fire before handing them to him. A heap of these things now lay on the floor.
‘We’ll have to put those bits and pieces of his in the bag for recycling.’ Eirlys nodded. ‘They’re no good for anything else.’
Mair slid open the bottom drawer of the chest. She saw a few yellowing pillow-cases, and the tablecloth with the cut-work centre panel that was taken out once a year without fail to be smoothed over the Christmas dinner-table. The white fabric was stained in places with rust. Reaching beneath the cloth, her fingers came into contact with tissue paper. She lifted out the cloth to investigate what lay beneath it.
The tissue paper was very old and limp.
When she folded it back her first impression was of wonderful colours. Silvery blues and greens sprang at her, like a distillation of lake water and spring skies, with starbursts of lavender and vermilion flowers caught in the depths. She looked more closely and saw the intricacy of the woven pattern; the sumptuous curved teardrop shapes with curled tips, the ferny fronds and branched stems and tiny five-petalled flowers. The only sound in the room was the distress of the sheep as Mair shook out the layers of soft wool. It was so light that it seemed to float on the air.
The shawl was a lovely thing, and she had never seen it before.
An envelope had fallen out of the folds. It was an old brown one, ordinary, creased in half, with the glue long ago dried from the flap. Gently Mair eased it open. Inside there was a single lock of hair. The curl was very fine and silky, dark brown, with a few coppery threads shining in it. She pinched it between her fingers.
‘That’s Grandma Watkins’s shawl,’ Eirlys said, in her authoritative way.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ Mair whispered.
Eirlys was the only one of the three who had known their mother’s mother, and even she had no recollection of her because she had died when Eirlys was still a baby. All any of them knew was that she had been out in India with her much older missionary husband. The couple finally came back to Wales and had had their only child when Nerys was already in her forties. That daughter, Gwen, had married a neighbour from the same valley, handsome Huw Ellis, when she was only nineteen. She had always said to her own three children that she didn’t want them to grow up with elderly parents, the way she had done.
‘Whose hair can this be, do you think?’ Mair wondered.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Eirlys said.
Mair thought about it. Grandma Watkins wouldn’t have kept her own hair, would she? Was it her husband’s, then, or more probably her child’s?
No. This wasn’t the hair of an elderly missionary, and it wasn’t Gwen’s either, she was fairly sure of that – hers had naturally been a quite different, much lighter colour.
Whose, then?
The question intrigued her, but it seemed to have no answer.
She pressed the shawl to her cheek. The fabric was so fine that she could enclose it in her two fists. For the first time, she breathed in its faint scent of spice.
‘We’ve still got a lot to do,’ Eirlys said, as she finished her tea.
Thoughtfully Mair slipped the lock of hair back into its envelope.
Later, when most of the packing and boxing were done, the three of them gathered in the kitchen. The back door stood open and midges floated in on the breeze. The noise of the sheep grew louder and more plaintive as twilight crept up. Dylan had opened a bottle of wine, and Mair was putting together a picnic supper of cold ham, with baked potatoes from the microwave. Dylan had bought it for their father a couple of years back and Huw had used it regularly to heat up supermarket ready-meals for one, declaring that they were very tasty. Eirlys had disapproved, pointing out that ready-meals were high in fat and salt.
The machine pinged and Mair took out the potatoes. She could just see their father winking and silently going heh-heh-heh-heh.
Without warning, tears threatened to spill out of her eyes.
They all knew that this was the last evening they would ever spend together in the old kitchen. Mair was determined not to make it more sorrowful by indulging in any fit of weeping. She smiled instead, at Dylan who was sitting with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and then at Eirlys, with her hair hooked behind her ears and her eyes looking very shiny behind her glasses.
‘Should we eat in the other room?’ Mair asked.
The table in there was a better size for three than the drop-flap one wedged in the kitchen corner, where the memory of their father sitting alone with his cup of tea and the newspaper was very clear.
The business of taking the food through and finding the last pieces of unpacked cutlery carried them through the moment. Dylan found some candle stubs and Eirlys put them in a saucer. The glow made the stripped-out room look inviting again, blotting out the dust squares on the walls where pictures used to hang.
‘We should talk about the good things,’ Eirlys said, when they were all sitting down.
For a second Mair thought she meant the happy times they had spent as a family, and the uncharacteristic sentiment startled her. Then she realised that her sister was talking about the two or three pieces of furniture and old silver that were all there had been of real value in the house. Since the reading of the will they had known that the proceeds from selling the house were to be divided equally between them. The smaller items they hadn’t really talked about.
There was the grandfather clock, with a painted face showing the sun and moon, whose sonorous tick had measured out the long afternoons of her childhood. Huw had mentioned it once, in the last weeks, referring to it as ‘Dylan’s clock’. Mair had deliberately ignored him because she didn’t want to acknowledge what he meant.
‘You’ll take the clock, Dylan,’ Eirlys said. ‘Mair?’
The other two were married, and they owned houses with hallways and alcoves and shelves. Mair was not, and she lived happily in a rented one-and-a-half-room flat. She didn’t need, or even want, her mother’s bow-fronted chest or silver teapot. They would find a better home with Eirlys. She laid down her knife and fork and cleared her throat.
‘I would like to have Grandma’s shawl,’ she said. ‘If that’s all right?’
‘Of course it is.’ Eirlys nodded. ‘If you agree, Dylan?’
He looked at Mair. There were quite deep lines at the corners of his eyes, these days. He and Eirlys were both shortsighted, and Dylan tended to screw up his eyes when he was concentrating.
Awareness of how much she loved her brother wrapped round her like a blanket. All her life he had been her ally, whereas as children she and Eirlys had constantly squabbled, mostly because they were each other’s embodied opposites. Not that they had quarrelled recently, of course. The loss of their adored father had made them considerate of each other, even wary.
‘Do you know where it might have come from?’ Dylan asked her.
She said, ‘No. But maybe I could try to find out.’
This idea only came to her as she gave voice to it. She was surprised by the curiosity that the mysterious shawl aroused in her.
That night Mair and Eirlys went to bed for the last time in the room they had shared as children. Mair could tell that her sister wasn’t asleep, although she didn’t twist and turn between the damp sheets like Mair was doing. In the end she whispered, ‘Eirlys, can’t you sleep?’
‘No.’
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘The same as you, probably. Once your parents are both dead, you really are it, aren’t you? You’re responsible, because there’s no one standing in front of you. Do you know what I mean?’
Sympathy flooded through Mair. Her sister had been behaving responsibly for her entire life. She had been a prizewinning medical student and had just been appointed to a consultant’s post at her Birmingham hospital, yet she had still found time to marry and have two boys. All her life she had been studying and looking after other people, and now her vision of this latest phase of their lives was of yet more weight falling on her shoulders.
Mair thought, Ever since I could walk and talk, I’ve been skipping away from the path my sister and brother trod ahead of me. Instead of following them to a good university she had left home and Wales at seventeen, fulfilling a long-standing promise, halfway between a family joke and a rebellious threat, to run away and join a circus. And at Floyd’s Family Circus she had met Harriet Hayes, or Hattie the Clown. Together they had worked up a simple trapeze act. Their nights at the circus were a long way behind them now, but they had been close friends ever since. In the intervening years Mair had also been a dress-shop manager, the singer in a band, a receptionist, a PR, a nursery assistant, a bookseller, and several other incarnations in the job market, with varying degrees of success, but usually some satisfaction.
No, even Hattie wouldn’t call me responsible, she acknowledged. And Hattie was quite a lot more frivolous than Eirlys.
Mair’s heart began to pound against her ribs and a white light blazed behind her eyes. Her body felt suddenly as light as a feather, and she realised that what she was feeling was free. She wanted to capture this blessing, and at the same time she longed to share some of it with her sister. Her fingers reached out and touched the fringes of the shawl, which lay on the chair beside her bed. ‘Yes, I do know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Eirlys, I’ve been thinking. I might do some travelling. You know, now Dad’s gone and, like you say, there’s just us left behind. I was wondering about going to India – perhaps see what I can find out about Grandma and her shawl. I’d be unravelling some family history. Why don’t you come with me? We could spend some time together. We haven’t done much of that lately.’
There wasn’t so much as a second’s hesitation before Eirlys replied, ‘I couldn’t possibly. There’s the hospital. It’s difficult for the whole team, with the latest cuts. And who’d look after Graeme and the boys? You should go, though, if that’s what you really want to do. I saw the way you looked at the shawl.’
Mair knew there was no point in trying to change her sister’s mind. Eirlys was decisive enough for two people. ‘I do think it might be interesting,’ she said.
She didn’t try to articulate the feeling of rootlessness that had troubled her since their father’s death. Eirlys and Dylan were settled, and she was far from being so herself. Perhaps uncovering some family history might help her to feel her place again.
‘You might not find out anything at all. India’s a big country. But you deserve a break and a new horizon. Grief can take all sorts of different forms, you know. And you took on most of the burden of looking after Dad. Dylan and I are really grateful for what you did, giving up that job and everything.’
Mair blinked hard in the darkness, but hot tears still escaped from the corners of her eyes. After the funeral Eirlys had remarked that the baby of the family was so busy being unconventional that it didn’t leave much time for her to focus on anything else. That had stung Mair, but now she reflected that grief did indeed take many forms. Eirlys’s caused her to be more tart than usual. The realisation made her sister’s kindness now seem even more touching and valuable. She murmured, ‘It was a privilege. I’m glad I was free to do it.’
‘Take some time, have a trip to India. If you need a reason and the shawl gives you one, that’s fine,’ Eirlys concluded. ‘Now, can we go to sleep?’
Outside, the bleating of the sheep had finally subsided. Mair knew why. Once night had fallen, the ewes understood that their lost lambs could never be called back. The occasional despairing cry still rose to the stars, but the flock was settling into silence.
Mair woke up and lay in the narrow bed, trying to work out where she was. She had been dreaming of a dog barking and animals stirring in response, a rustle of alarm passing among them before the leaders broke away and scudded across the bitten ground. Then sunlight flooded a hillside with sudden colour and the moving animals flowed into grey-on-green paisley patterns against the grass. A sheepdog chivvied them towards a stone enclosure where a farmer was holding the gate open.
In the way that dreams unfold, a familiar and beloved place had become merged with another she hadn’t yet visited. The room was cold and she shivered, pulling the blankets round her shoulders. As she did so the first call of the muezzin broke through the shutters.
The skin at the nape of her neck prickled, not just with the chill but with anticipation.
She remembered.
She opened her eyes wider, struck by anxiety in the grey dawn. The hotel room was cramped and liberally strewn with her belongings. Last night she had burrowed through her bags, searching in a power blackout for pyjamas and bed socks. But the shawl was safely there, neatly folded over the back of the room’s single chair. The light wasn’t strong enough yet to reveal the colours in their full glory, but they were vividly printed in her mind’s eye.
Mair pushed back the covers and sat up. It was too early, but she knew she wasn’t going to fall asleep again.
She had decided to give herself a full day to acclimatise. So, after a solitary breakfast in the hotel’s chilly and deserted dining room, she made her slightly nervous preparations. Into her shoulder-bag went the sketch-map of the town that the smiling Ladakhi receptionist had given her, a bottle of mineral water, some antibacterial gel and a well-rinsed apple. She was uncertain enough of what lay ahead to experience a breathless flutter beneath her diaphragm that had almost nothing to do with the effects of altitude.
Mair had never been to India before, not even to the beaches of Goa or the sights of Jaipur, let alone to a remote town in the Himalayas. Nor was she – in spite of her declared independence – at all used to travelling alone. Holidays, when she could afford them, had in the past usually involved the Greek islands or Spain, with a new boyfriend or one who was on the way out, or some looser combination of friends almost always including Hattie. As usual, Eirlys had been right when she had pointed out that Mair didn’t often break off from her studied absence of routine.
Mair smiled again as she locked her hotel-room door. She was free now, wasn’t she? Days and weeks of formally unallocated time stretched ahead of her. Thanks to the sale of the old house in Wales, she had some money, and time to spare for the strange project that had gnawed at her imagination for months in a way she didn’t properly understand. She hadn’t talked very much about the undertaking, even to Hattie, because it would have been too difficult to make her compulsion sound intelligible.
Just the same, the vaguest of vague plans had brought her all the way here to Leh, on an open ticket, with no fixed return date in mind to confine or comfort her.
She walked down the concrete path from the hotel, past beds of zinnias and cosmos and gaudy marigolds, and out into the street. Heading towards the centre of town, she gazed round her in fascination. It was the end of September, and she saw that Leh’s short tourist season was practically over. Already many of the craft shops and travel agencies lining the road had rolled down and locked their permanent metal shutters ready for winter, and the Internet cafés that catered to backpackers and trekkers were almost deserted. The high peaks ringing the town glittered with fresh snow, and the poplar trees in hotel gardens rustled with dry golden leaves.
In a month’s time the real snows would come, and the high passes linking the Ladakhi capital with the Vale of Kashmir to the west and Himachal Pradesh to the south would be impassable until the spring thaw came. For six months the only way into Leh would be by air, as Mair had arrived yesterday, flying from Delhi into the little airport beside the Indus river. As she walked she was trying to picture what it would be like here in midwinter, when the narrow alleys of the town would be clogged with snow and the roof of each house piled high with sheaves of dried fodder for the family’s animals. But she was distracted. The imminent disappearance of tourists meant that the town’s salesmen were urgently trying to make a last few rupees. In the main street three of them cut off her progress with a practised pincer movement.
‘Hello, madam, where you from? Look at my shop, please.’
‘I have beautiful pashmina, I make you a very good price today.’
The third man pouted when she experimentally shook her head. ‘But looking is free, madam. Just looking. What is the great hurry?’
She was in no hurry, that was true. Laughing, she followed the nearest merchant up the steps into his cluttered shop and let him show off his stock. From Tibet there were trays of silver, coral and turquoise jewellery, from China painted Thermos flasks and furry nylon blankets in electric hues. There were prickly hats and waistcoats, locally knitted from goat’s hair, woven bags with tassels, and racks of T-shirts in every size and colour – mostly bearing a machine-embroidered yak on the front and the slogan ‘yak yak yak Ladakh’. Her eyes were acclimatising to the dim light of the shop’s interior. Against the walls there were ramparts of samovars and copper dishes and crewel-work rugs.
‘It’s very nice. Thank you for showing me. I’m not shopping today, though.’
The man was Kashmiri, and therefore born to sell. ‘You want pashmina.’ It wasn’t a question. At the back of the shop floor-to-ceiling shelves were stuffed with layers of folded fabric.
‘Show me.’
Immediately he began to whirl shawls off the shelves. A drift of colour built up on the tiny counter, yellows and blues and fuchsia pinks. ‘See? Feel, beautiful. Best quality. Pure pashmina.’
Mair knew a lot more about fine shawls than she had done four months ago, when the exquisite piece that was now locked in the hotel safe had first come into her possession. She understood the quality of the craftsmanship, and its likely value. ‘Pure?’ she said. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, pure silk pashmina mix. Twelve hundred rupees. Look, this pink one and this lovely blue-turquoise. Christmas is coming, think of gifts for your friends. Three for three thousand.’
‘Do you have any kani woven shawls? Or embroidered pieces?’
The man looked up. ‘Ah, yes. You know the best, madam. I show you.’
He unlocked a cabinet and brought out another pile. Like a magician he shook out more coloured breadths of fabric, whisking and flourishing them in front of her. Mair picked up the nearest one and let the folds slide through her fingers. She bent her head briefly to examine the floral design in reds and violet, then wound the shawl over her shoulders.
‘So nice,’ the Kashmiri approved. ‘These colours just right for you.’
It was nothing like the other one. This fabric felt stiff, lumpy around the margins of the flowers, and it hung awkwardly, with none of the fluid drape of her shawl. When she took it off again she could almost hear the crackle of the fibres. She didn’t know for sure how the design had been woven, but from a glimpse of the reverse it looked like cheap machine work. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured.
‘Nine thousand. Good price.’ He knew she wasn’t going to buy. ‘And this one, see, embroidered. By hand, all of it.’
Royal blue, this time, with a band of white flowers sewn at either end. The flowers had certainly been done by hand, but the design was haphazardly stitched and threads trailed on the reverse. The outlines of the blocked pattern were visible beneath the stitching. It could not have been more different from the other, on which the double band of floral embroidery was worked over the woven design in the same shades and in stitches so tiny that they were invisible to the naked eye, all of it executed so perfectly that the right side and the reverse were indistinguishable. The effect of such minute and effacing work was to emboss a broad swathe of the woven pattern, giving the paisley shapes and entwined foliage an opulent three-dimensional effect.
‘It’s very nice,’ Mair repeated.
The man looked offended. She wanted to get out of the shop now, back into the sunshine. She picked out a pair of coral earrings from the display stand next to the door, paid for them quickly and made her escape.
‘Come back soon,’ the merchant called after her.
The other two salesmen reattached themselves to her side, but half-heartedly. She was able to sidestep them and make her way on down the sunny, dusty street past a row of women sitting at the kerbside with baskets of cauliflowers and apples for sale. Shoeshine men with their brushes and tins of polish set out on squares of sacking tried to attract her attention, even though her scuffed Converse were clearly visible. Scooters and rickshaws jolted over the potholes in the road. The noise of traffic was deafening. Mair peered up the shadowed alleyways leading off the street and chose one at random to explore. A mangy dog loped by, its distended teats swinging.
It was cooler in the shade and she pressed deeper, past barbers’ shops and butchers’ stalls where goats’ heads oozed on wooden slabs. A black, buzzing object nailed to a beam revealed itself as an animal’s severed tongue, presumably fixed there to draw flies away from the rest of the meat. Mair glanced at it, swallowed, and groped in her bag for her bottle of water. She took a determined swig and pushed on. Canvas tarpaulins were laced overhead now, and the alley grew dimmer and narrower. Overripe vegetable remains and less identifiable waste squished underfoot. Women in saris brushed past, and others in burqas hurried in the opposite direction. Stallholders called out and children vaulted over the gutters. It was a busy, cheerful scene and every aspect of its unfamiliarity served to highlight her alien status.
The alley opened into a square and she squinted as the sunlight struck her face. To one side a small brown bullock grazed with apparent relish on a pile of smouldering refuse. To the other, a crimson and gold prayer wheel was mounted beneath a painted canopy. As she stood there an ancient monk in saffron and burgundy robes wandered out of the crowd and set it turning clockwise. He stepped with it as it rotated, murmuring and counting the beads on his rosary. Mair took a photograph of him, then wondered if she had been intrusive.
She moved off down an alley, which ran in yet another direction, into the heart of the bazaar. Down here the stalls were heaped with white trainers and brown plastic sandals. Overhead, backpacks and holdalls swayed in their hundreds like misshapen fruit. Girls’ dresses made of glitter and tinsel hung in electric tiers.
And it was here, framed against the blue smoke rising from a food stall, that she first caught sight of the Becker family. The trio would have presented a striking picture anywhere, but in the chaotic market they made a tableau so unearthly that it had an almost religious quality to it.
They were the only Westerners she had noticed since leaving the main street. The woman was tall, slender and ethereally pale-skinned. She had a mass of red-gold hair that sprang over her shoulders. She was wearing a loose white shirt over a tiered blue linen skirt and a pair of mud-encrusted boots. She was talking, pointing and laughing all at the same time. The man with her was looking in the other direction. He was even taller than his wife and suntanned, with coal-black hair and eyebrows and a half-grown beard. Between them was an angelic child, a little girl of about two. She had the same curling mass of hair as her mother, but the colour was white-blonde. Her head rotated as she looked from one parent to the other. Then she stuck her tiny arms into the air and yelled, ‘Carry.’
The woman was still laughing and gesturing. She stooped and, with the other arm, swept the child off her feet. She settled the little girl astride her hip and strode across to the food vendor. The air shimmered above a vat of boiling oil. The child pulled out a coil of her mother’s amazing hair and peered down through it, as if it were a veil, at the heads passing beneath her.
The man turned to see what his wife was pointing at. The vendor fished in the boiling vat with a ladle and brought up some shiny toffee-brown squiggles. He tipped them into a paper cone and handed this over in exchange for some rupees. The woman dipped in her fingers and extracted a deep-fried squiggle. She blew casually on it, then handed it to the child. The little girl bit into whatever it was with relish.
The woman tilted her head back and dropped some of the food into her own mouth. She chewed eagerly and laughed, wiping the grease from her chin. Health and satisfaction seemed to shine out of her. Her free hand floated lightly to her husband’s hip and rested there. It was a gesture of possession and affection, as intimate as it was casual. She steered him away from the vendor, and from Mair’s scrutiny, even though none of the three had so much as glanced in her direction. They strolled deeper into the maze of stalls. She followed them with her eyes, the red-gold and black heads, with the child’s pale one bouncing between them, until they turned a corner and passed out of her sight.
She stayed rooted where she was, despite her urge to run after the family. The food vendor shovelled another scoop of his mysterious wares into the cauldron; the oil sizzled and spat.
In the hubbub of the market Mair’s loneliness intensified.
She had plenty of friends, and had had the usual series of relationships, but there had been no one she could imagine spending the rest of her life with, not the way her sister Eirlys had undertaken to do with her Graeme, or Dylan with his Jackie.
She made herself take a deep breath of bazaar smells, and noted the ambling cows, the hens scratching on a hill of rubbish, the Buddhist monk returning from his trip to the prayer wheel, and the steady surge of people going about their business. Colours and scents and fresh impressions flooded her head, and her spirits floated again. She turned and retraced her steps, deliberately heading in the opposite direction to the glorious strangers.
The drive out to Changthang, eastwards from Leh, almost to what had once been the border with Tibet – and was now China – took the best part of a day. The other members of the sightseeing tour in a small Toyota bus were two portly, middle-aged Dutch couples and three Israeli boys, who managed to be rowdy yet noticeably unfriendly. They sprawled in the back, guffawing over the separate accompaniments of their MP3s. Curled up in her seat and braced against the jolting, Mair had plenty of opportunity on the long drive to reflect, and remember.
Before leaving for India she had done as much research as she could into her grandparents’ history. Three months ago, in the on-line edition of a book called Hope and the Glory of God, subtitled With the Welsh Missionaries in India, she had read the entry for Parchedig Evan William Watkins (1899–1960).
Evan Watkins had been educated at the University College of North Wales, and the College of the Presbyterian Church of Wales. After his ordination he had heard the call to work in India, and in 1929 he had travelled out to Shillong in what was then Assam. Subsequently he served as district missionary to Shangpung.
Since reading his clerical biography, she had regularly tried to conjure images of Evan Watkins, in his black coat and dog collar, as he gamely preached Nonconformism to the people of remote Indian hill villages. Had he thundered from his makeshift chapel pulpit on a steaming day with the monsoon rains drumming on the tin roof?
Since her arrival in the Indian Himalaya she had tried harder still to picture him, but the clash of cultures was too brutal to generate any kind of image.
According to his entry in the book, Parchedig Watkins had returned to Wales in 1938, where he had met and married Nerys Evelyn Roberts, born in 1909. In 1939 the couple had sailed from Liverpool, bound for Bombay, aboard SS Prospect.
That was easier to picture. Mair saw the sunset over the Suez Canal, and heard a band playing for the dancers in the second-class saloon. Probably the minister wouldn’t have had much time for the foxtrot, but she wondered if the young Mrs Watkins had been of the same mind, or whether she had sipped her lemonade and watched the laughing couples with a touch of wistfulness.
The Reverend Evan and Mrs Watkins were subsequently called to give service to the new mission of Leh, far up in Ladakh, where the minister became responsible for the work of missionary outreach throughout the region. Many roads in his territory were impassable for seven months of the year, the biographer noted, and electricity was almost unknown.
Mair looked out of the bus window at the stark landscape, and the purple-grey mountains rearing into the empty blue sky. The unmade road ahead zigzagged towards a distant pass in a series of pale hairpins scratched out of the rock and dust. Along this road giant trucks with painted fronts like fairground rides hooted and skidded. The small figures of the Welsh preacher and his wife still refused to take shape in her imagination, here or anywhere else in the Himalaya.
The rest of the entry was brief. After the war, the clergy-man’s poor health had forced him to return to Wales. Evan Watkins retained a strong interest in the work of the missionary services, but his health never recovered from the rigours of the Indian climate and he had died in 1960, leaving his widow and one daughter, born in 1950.
That daughter had been Mair’s mother, Gwen Ellis, née Watkins.
Gwen had died suddenly from a cerebral haemorrhage when her youngest child was barely into her teens. It was one of Mair’s greatest regrets now that, as an averagely self-absorbed and dismissive thirteen-year-old, she had never asked her mother to tell her a single thing about Evan and Nerys’s exotic years as missionaries in India.
The bus pulled in at a roadside stall selling tea and snacks. The Israeli youths leapt up at once and barged their way past Mair and the Dutch couples. Before climbing out to ease her cramped legs, Mair picked up the rucksack from the seat beside her and slipped the strap of it over one shoulder. She kept it pinned to her side with the pressure of her elbow.
‘Where are you from?’ one of the Dutch wives asked her, as they sipped heavily sweetened tea from the vendor’s Thermos. A column of Indian Army trucks ground slowly past, part of the border defence forces. Young soldiers with guns at the ready peered at them over the tailgates.
Instead of saying ‘England,’ and naming the pleasant south-coast market town where she lived within easy reach of Hattie and several other friends, and where her most recent job had been located, Mair surprised herself by answering, ‘North Wales.’ Her childhood home was now occupied by a businessman from Manchester and his young family, so there were no ties left, except her brother and sister and their memories. But even so, or perhaps because of this, the valley and the years of her childhood lived within its limits were much in her mind. She missed home, now it had been sold and she could never go back. She clung to the thought of her grandparents and their lives in this strange place.
‘And you?’ Mair returned quickly.
‘Utrecht. Are you on holiday?’
‘Ye-es. Just travelling.’
The rucksack lay against her hip. The shawl was folded in a pouch inside it.
The woman sighed. ‘We are not finding it so easy on these roads. My husband is unwell.’
From behind the bus came the unmistakable sound of someone throwing up. Between themselves, the Israeli youths found this uproariously funny.
The bus ground over one more high pass and a huge vista opened ahead. Their destination was a high, flat, remote place north of the mountains. Geographically, it was part of the Tibetan plateau although still within India.
Changthang was where the nomad peoples of eastern Ladakh traditionally herded and grazed their flocks of goats. Up here, the climate was so cold and harsh that the animals produced the densest, lightest fleece to insulate themselves. The nomads moved the flocks throughout the year in search of the sparse grazing. The goats’ fodder and the water they drank were unpolluted, and their wool was the purest it could have been.
From her reading, Mair knew that this was where the finest pashm came from, the raw material for Kashmir shawls, so it was from here that her precious, mysterious shawl had almost certainly begun its journey as the wool of a pashmina goat.
When she was finally alone in her tent at the tourist camp, she took the pouch out of her rucksack and examined the shawl once more by the light of her head-torch. The faint spicy scent caught in the soft folds, she now knew, was the scent of India itself. The central motif of the shawl’s woven design was a peacock’s tail fan. A deep double border enclosed the centre panel, with lush paisley shapes filling the angles, and there were broad bands of exuberant foliage at either end. The bands, which were partly embroidered, gave an almost brocaded effect. For all its beauty, though, the shawl was battered and worn. There were lines of fading that showed where it had lain for decades in the same folds; the intricate embroidery was unravelling in places, and in others it was rubbed away altogether. There were blotches of ink in one corner, an irregular yellow stain in another. Mair drew it over her knees, absently tracing the arabesques of embroidery and smoothing the knotted fringes, trying to read the shawl’s history as if it were a map.
Early in the morning their guide rounded up Mair, the Dutch and the Israelis while it was still barely light, and drove them up a track that was no more than a slightly less rocky channel between the grey boulders littering the plain. They reached the shores of a vast lake, where the water was filmed with ice and the ground was powdered with snow. At the lake’s edge stood a handful of single-storey houses, little more than huts, set between a line of bare poplars. Yaks, with their long hair almost brushing the snow, moved ponderously between the rocks. In preparation for winter the Changpa nomad families were bringing down their herds from the more remote pastures. There were circles of low stone walls close to the lake, and the early arrivals had flung goat-hair tarpaulins over these to make shelters for themselves and their animals. Smoke rose in thin columns from the ventilation holes at the apex. A woman with a bent back trudged up from the water’s edge carrying a full bucket.
The goats stank – there was no other word for it. The nomad camp was also redolent of kerosene and animal dung and woodsmoke, but the dominant, throat-clogging smell was of unadulterated goat.
A display was laid on for the tourists. Three men in rough tunics and yak-skin boots drove a handful of their animals into a stone-walled enclosure. Mair pulled the flaps of her fleece hat over her ears and shivered in the keen wind. She could almost feel the layer of ice thickening on the lake. The goats were shaggy creatures, white and brown and black, with curved horns and disturbing long-pupilled eyes. They allowed themselves to be hobbled and tipped on to their sides where they lay, stiff-legged and reeking. From the recesses of their garments, the men produced wooden implements like hair-brushes, set with fierce, incurved stiff metal prongs. With synchronised vigour, they each set to work on a goat, rasping and tugging at the wool of the throat and chest. Matted clods of hair began to yield to this treatment, coming away in chunks with the embedded dirt, dung and grease. The goats protested and the men countered with a throaty, ululating song.
‘They are singing to the goats, telling them to give some good pashm in return for the sweet grass they have eaten and the good water they have drunk,’ explained the guide.
A woman gathered up the tufts of hair as the men disentangled them from the combs, taking care to retrieve every last wisp, and stuffed them into a frost-stiffened polythene sack.
‘Each family has between eighty and two hundred goats. The animals are combed in May and September. Each animal’s combing yields approximately two hundred grams of raw wool,’ the guide intoned, in his chipped English. At least she didn’t have to translate all this again, Mair reflected, unlike her companions.
‘How much money do they get?’ asked the Dutchman who hadn’t been travel-sick.
‘Sixteen hundred rupees for a kilo,’ the guide told him. ‘Maybe more, maybe less, depends on quality. After cleaning and processing, that kilo of raw wool will yield only three hundred grams of pure fibre ready for spinning.’
Mair stared at the sack. It would take a lot of combings to add up to one kilo and probably a whole herd of goats’ combings to fill that one bag. And it was very hard to conceive how those filthy, greasy bundles could ever be transformed into the feathery elegance of her shawl.
‘So what happens next?’ asked one of the Israeli boys, although he didn’t sound all that interested.
‘The wool traders come out by truck from Leh. They buy the pashm, and take it back to town for processing,’
Another of the boys had retrieved a rusty can from the detritus scattered across the Changpa camp. He set it on a rock and aimed pebbles at it.
‘Is that all?’ his friend wanted to know. A fusillade of stones clattered against the can until it bounced off the rock.
The guide looked offended. ‘This is the traditional way for the people. It has happened like this for hundreds of years.’
‘But is this all there is to see?’
‘This afternoon we will visit the monastery. There are some fine paintings.’
‘Yeah.’
The demonstration over, the men freed their goats and chased them out of the pen. Their leader waited for a cash hand-out and the others hastened towards the nearest tent enclosure. Mair hoped they were going to spend the rest of the day sitting by a log fire, singing goat-herding ballads and drinking chang. She unbuckled her rucksack, checking yet again that the shawl was wrapped inside, and took a five-hundred-rupee note out of her wallet. The man’s blackened fist rapidly closed on it, but not so quickly that the guide didn’t see how much. He would think she was a careless Western pushover because the tip was far too generous, but she didn’t care.
‘Julley,’ she murmured. It was the all-purpose Ladakhi word for ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘thank you’.
‘Julley,’ said the man. He was already on his way over to the Dutch.
Mair had planned to unwrap her shawl and spread it on some sun-baked rocks, with the goats browsing in the background, to take an artistic photograph of its beginnings to show Eirlys and Dylan – but she would have had to weight it with small rocks to stop it blowing away and there were pellets of windborne ice pinging against her cheeks. The whole scene was just too bleak for anything more than a mental acknowledgement that this was where the fine, light wool had originated perhaps seventy years ago. Nothing would have changed since then. And she was glad she had made the visit. She contented herself with taking a picture of the lake and the trees, with a white-wool long-haired goat glaring in front of them.
There was no way to capture the smell, but that wasn’t a matter for regret.
As for her grandparents: now that she had been here herself it seemed implausible that even an emissary from the Welsh Presbyterian Mission to Leh would have penetrated this far. Surely Evan Watkins would have found enough preaching to do in the villages along the Indus and Zanskar rivers without pursuing the Changpa people out here. He couldn’t have reached this spot in winter, because the snows would have cut it off.
Her companions were trudging back across the plateau towards the white speck of the Toyota. Mair took one last look at the goats and their backdrop and headed after them.
‘Back in the bus, guys,’ the leader of the Israeli boys shouted. The other two tramped eagerly after him.
TWO
Back in Leh, Mair spent a day trying to find the caretaker who held the keys to the European cemetery.
‘This afternoon maybe he will be here,’ predicted an old man, sitting on a step with his hookah.
But in the afternoon there was no old man, and no caretaker or keys. Mair stood in frustration on the wrong side of the fence as leaves like gold flakes rattled from the trees and drifted over the gravestones. In Ladakh, she was learning, life was lived at its own pace. She walked back into town, intending to go to a café to drink chai and make a plan.
In the main street in front of the mosque, she caught sight of red-gold hair, blazing above the white caps and grey backs of men heading for prayers. The woman and child were fully occupied, the child in having a tantrum that screwed her face into a crimson knot and the mother in mildly remonstrating with her. There was no sign of the saturnine husband.
‘Non, non!’ the child cried, kicking her feet in the dirt.
‘That’s enough,’ the woman ordered, in American-accented English. ‘Stop it right now.’ There was amusement as well as resignation in her expression. Her arms were weighted with shopping bags, and she put down one load in order to have a hand free for the child. But the little girl had already noticed Mair watching her. She blinked her eyes, in which there were no signs of tears, only outrage. The yells changed from private fury to operatic display.
Mair glanced round. There was open space behind and in front of her. She lifted one finger and locked eyes with the child. The tantrum abruptly faded as curiosity took over. As soon as she had the little girl’s full attention Mair drew a breath, gathered herself up and executed a standing back-flip.
It was quite a long time since she had attempted one, and she rocked on landing, but otherwise it was fairly satisfactory. The child’s mouth fell open and her eyes made two circles of amazement. Mair clapped hands at her, and did two forwards linked hand-springs. Hattie and she had synchronised this routine as part of their act, and even now she could probably have done it in her sleep. The second somersault brought her up quite close to the mother and child. The little girl grabbed Mair’s leg and gazed up at her. A smile lit her face.
‘Again! Encore une fois!’
The mother was laughing. ‘That’s pretty neat. And it’s way better than a candy bribe.’
Mair was slightly embarrassed to realise that her intention had probably been to attract the mother’s attention as much as the child’s. They had also drawn a fair-sized crowd of onlookers because there weren’t many other distractions on offer in town on this end-of-season afternoon. She hoped the spectators would quickly move away.
‘It seems to have done the trick. Can I give you a hand with these?’ Mair brushed dirt off her hands and picked up the shopping, leaving the mother to scoop up her daughter and settle her across her hip with the same easy movement she had used in the bazaar.
‘Jumping lady,’ said the child in wonder, stretching a small hand to pat Mair’s face.
‘That’s right,’ her mother agreed. ‘Pretty amazing, huh?’ Her voice had a touch of the American south in it.
‘As a matter of fact it was rather shaky. I’m not quite sure what came over me. I wanted to stop your daughter crying.’
The other woman sighed. ‘You and me both. She’d set her sights on being with her dad this afternoon and ended up stuck with me instead. He’s gone to sort out guides and ponies – we’re leaving on a trek tomorrow. That’s what all this shopping’s about – what do you take in the way of supplies? Where are you heading? I’m Karen Becker, by the way. And this is Lotus.’
Lotus raised her hand and gave a queenly wave.
‘Mair Ellis. Hello, Lotus.’ Mair smiled.
The child was extraordinarily beautiful, with a broad forehead and a mouth like a cherub’s in a Renaissance painting.
‘I was on my way to get a cup of tea,’ she added.
Karen nodded across the road. ‘Great. We’re going to the salon, Lo, aren’t we? We have to get ourselves a pedicure before we trek a single step. Come with us, and we can chat. I’m sure they’ll give you tea.’
Mair was glad to escape from the staring crowd. The two women stepped over the gutter and picked their way between bullocks and auto-rickshaws to a glass-fronted shop with windows heavily draped in lace. ‘Ladies Only Beauty’, said the sign in the window.
Inside they found a cracked floor, not noticeably clean, dusty bare shelves, and a row of barber’s chairs. There was a smell of old-fashioned perming lotion mingled with incense and boiled laundry. A small flock of women in bright saris instantly surrounded Lotus, lifted her out of Karen’s arms and bore her off to the back of the shop. They started combing her white-blonde hair with trills of admiration. Lotus accepted the attention as no more than her due.
A smiling girl with a red-cheeked, perfectly round Tibetan face relieved them of the shopping. A moment later they were installed in adjacent chairs, facing their reflections in a blotchy mirror.
‘Go on. You may as well.’ Karen grinned.
Mair allowed her Tibetan attendant to unlace her Converse for her, then to steer her feet into a pink plastic foot spa. The motor thrummed under her soles and the water seethed. The whole scene was so incongruous that she couldn’t help laughing.
In the mirror Karen’s blue eyes met hers. ‘Tell me. You must be something like a capoiera dancer, right? We saw some of those street performers in Rio. Have you been there? A-mazing. I’d so love to be able to move like that. Not in a million years, though.’
Mair laughed again. ‘What? No, I’m not any kind of dancer. I worked in a circus years and years ago.’
‘In a circus? Do you come from a circus family? Go on, your dad was the lion tamer, wasn’t he, and your mom was the lady in spangles who did pirouettes on the elephant’s back? You were born in a showman’s caravan, and as soon as you could walk you were dressed up in a tiny costume for the parade. Don’t tell any of this to Lotus, please – it’ll only give her ideas.’
Karen had plenty of imagination herself, evidently. Mair was fascinated by her spectacular looks and her vivacity, but she wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. ‘Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid. My father was a farm-supplies salesman and my mother was a primary-school teacher in North Wales.’
‘So, how come?’
Mair might have deflected these questions, but she was the one who had been guilty of exhibitionism and she thought the least she could do was give a straight answer. ‘I was a rebellious child, and I’d been threatening for so many years to run away and join a circus that when the time actually came it would have been a loss of face not to do it. Ours was quite a right-on show. No lions. In fact, no animals at all, because that would have been cruel. My friend and I had a trapeze act, and in the kids’ show we were the clowns as well. We did that for about four years, and then it was time to grow up.’
‘I see.’ Karen’s eyes narrowed. ‘Do I believe all this? Or is it one of those versions of oneself that one does for passing encounters with strangers? If it is, I’ll find out, I’m warning you. We’re going to be friends. I’m always right about these things.’
A young girl arrived balancing a tin tray of tea glasses. Mair took one and sipped. The tea was milky and thick with sugar, but it was welcome. Her attendant lifted one of her feet out of the bath and dried it in her lap. Then she set to work slathering on handfuls of some gritty potion.
Karen chatted on: ‘How could I pass up the chance of making friends with someone who turns somersaults in the air before she’s even spoken?’
Across the room, Lotus had a dozen ribbon bows in her hair. Her tiny fingernails were being dabbed with glitter polish.
Mair decided it was time to seize the conversational initiative. ‘What are you doing in Leh?’ she asked.
Karen’s eyes widened. Her face in the mirror became a pale, intent oval. ‘We arrived here from Tibet. I’m a Buddhist, you see. It’s been a pilgrimage for me.’ She began to talk about the monasteries she had visited, and the devotions she had made. She had been blessed by the senior lama after the annual unveiling of a spectacular thangka painting, which had been one of the most spiritual experiences of her life. Did Mair practise? Really not? Had she never felt the call to do so? Did she know that one of His Holiness’s summer residences was actually here in Leh? Had she seen the huge golden Maitreya out at Thikse Gompa?
‘Yes,’ Mair managed to say to the latter. Brisk massaging of her foot and ankle was showering the floor with dead skin and caked foot cream.
Karen’s leg was undergoing the same treatment. She paused in her monologue and turned her glancing attention to the young girl, who had come back with a small selection of polishes on the tea tray. ‘Pink or red, do you think?’
‘Red,’ Mair replied automatically.
‘Hmm. Yeah, but I’m going to go for the pink. Don’t want to frighten the ponies, do I? Lotus, what colour are your toes?’ she called.
‘Pink, shiny,’ Lotus chirped.
‘How pretty. Daddy will love them.’
‘And now you’re going trekking.’
Karen waved a languid hand. ‘That’s my husband’s partiality. It’s a reasonable trade-off, I guess. My monasteries for his mountains. Although we met in New York, we’re based in Geneva right now because Bruno is Swiss. These days, he gets to go skiing and mountain climbing pretty regularly from home, but we agreed that this holiday shouldn’t be all Buddhist. Lotus would protest about that too, although she’s generally pretty easy-going. Not that she looked that way when you saw her this afternoon, I admit, but she doesn’t often freak out like that.’
‘You’ll take her on the trek with you?’
Karen looked surprised, then shrugged. ‘Sure. Why not? Bruno carries her in a backpack most of the way. Everywhere we go, Lotus comes along. That way you get a balanced, open-minded kid.’
The child wriggled away from her admirers and came to show off her manicure, spreading her small hands on Mair’s knees and beaming up at her. The ribbons fluttered in her ringlets. There was logic in Karen’s theory, Mair thought. She remembered her first glimpse of the little family in the bazaar and the intimacy that had impressed her then. Lotus was certainly the most confident two-year-old she had ever met.
‘You look lovely,’ Mair told her. ‘Just like a picture.’
‘Oui – comme Maman,’ Lotus agreed, admiring herself in the mirrors.
The door of the salon opened, setting the lace curtains fluttering. A dark head and shoulders were framed in the doorway. ‘Karen?’
Karen glanced up from her scrutiny of her toenails. ‘Hi. Did you get everything fixed up already?’
‘Pappy.’ Lotus dashed across and leapt into her father’s arms. He swung her off her feet. ‘Jumping lady,’ she clamoured, pointing at Mair. ‘Jumping high.’
‘Bruno, this is Maya,’ Karen called. ‘My new friend.’
‘Hello,’ the man said, nodding at her. There was a smile buried in him, Mair thought, but it wasn’t close enough to the surface to break through. She started to explain her name, which Karen hadn’t quite caught.
Mair was Welsh for Mary. When she was young she had tried to persuade her friends to adopt this more sophisticated version, but it had never caught on. ‘Mair, Mair, pants on fire,’ the local kids used to chant. She didn’t actually utter any of this, though. Something about Bruno Becker’s level, interrogative stare silenced her.
‘Mair,’ she said quietly. ‘Hello.’
The introductions were cut short because the beauty-parlour staff were shooing Bruno out of the door. Ladies Only Beauty clearly meant what it said.
He carried Lotus with him. He indicated to his wife that they would see her back at the hotel when she was ready. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, over his shoulder, to Mair, and was gone. The introduction of a new friend of Karen’s was clearly nothing unusual.
Karen stretched out her toes and smiled. ‘Peace. That means you and I can go and eat cakes once we’re through here. We can have a proper talk.’
Mair felt like a pebble being tumbled along by a tsunami, but Karen Becker was too insistent – and too interesting – for her to make any real attempt at resistance. In any case, what else would she be doing?
Once their toenail polish had dried to Karen’s satisfaction they strolled down a nearby alley to the German bakery. Over apple cake and coffee Karen confided that she had wanted to come to this part of the world for years, really ever since she had gotten interested in the Buddhist way in her early twenties. So far it had totally lived up to her expectations. These places were holy – they touched your soul directly. You hardly ever encountered that depth of spirituality in Europe, did you? And never in the US of A. Not that she had ever recognised, anyway, Karen concluded. Did Mair – was she pronouncing it right? – did she know what Karen meant?
Mair thought of the whitewashed hilltop gompas she had visited in the last few days. The dark inner rooms with dim wall paintings and statues of the Buddha were thick with the scent of incense and wood ash, their altars heaped with offerings, often touchingly mundane ones like packets of sweet biscuits or posies of plastic flowers. The murmured chanting of monks rose through the old floors, and windows gave startling views of braided rivers and orchards far below. There was a divinity here, she reflected, but more than anything it troubled her with its elusiveness.
At one monastery the guide had beckoned her into the kitchen where an old monk was tranquilly preparing the community’s dinner. With a wooden ladle he scooped water from a bucket into a blackened pot set on a wood-fired stove. Cold balls of rice were gathered into cloths ready for distribution. Kneeling beside him at a rough table, a boy monk of about ten chopped vegetables from the monastery garden. The old man nodded to indicate that he was satisfied with the effort as successive handfuls of carrot and onion were dropped into the pot. The two worked in silence, and it had occurred to Mair that, apart from her presence, this scene would have been exactly the same two or three hundred years ago. The monks’ quiet service to the unending routines of cooking and providing for others had touched her more eloquently than any of the religious rituals.
She tried to describe this tiny epiphany to Karen.
‘But I understand completely,’ Karen interjected. She reached out and covered Mair’s fingers with her own. ‘There are many paths to recognition, but they are all the same road. You do know what I’m talking about. I was sure you would. I felt it in you as soon as I saw you.’
‘Even though I was turning somersaults?’
‘Because of that, as much as anything else. Why suppress what you wanted to emote? You are the complete you. I endorse that.’
Bruno wasn’t spiritual in the same sense that she was, Karen continued, but he understood where she was coming from because he related to the mountains. They were his temples, and he made his own pilgrimages among them. ‘Take Lotus, for example. I believe in letting her experience the whole world as essentially benign. I want her to grow up as far as possible without fear, without unnecessary restrictions, without petty rules, so she can become her intended self within the stream.’
Mair wondered if Lotus – quite understandably – dealt with excess benignity by having a tantrum or two.
They had finished their coffee and cake. Karen dotted up the last of the crumbs with a fingertip and licked it. She said, ‘I must go. What are your plans? We’ll be out of town for four or five days.’
‘I’ve got some stuff to look into here. I don’t know how long that’ll take.’
Karen studied her, her finger still resting against her lips. Mair noticed how the two or three other tourists in the bakery couldn’t help gazing at her companion.
‘You’re very mysterious, you know,’ Karen said.
‘No, I’m not,’ Mair protested.
‘But you’ve never let on why you’re in Ladakh. You’re not just here for a sightseeing holiday, I can tell that much.’
Mair wasn’t going to try to describe the shawl to Karen, or the lock of hair, or the blanks in the family history that had colonised her imagination with such force. Awkwardly, she said, ‘My father died recently.’
At once, Karen’s face flooded with sympathy. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said warmly. ‘That’s sad for you. You were drawn to a Buddhist country for a reason. Have you heard of punabbhava? It means “becoming again”. That’s the belief we have in rebirth. It doesn’t annihilate grief or loss, and it isn’t meant to, but contemplation of it provides comfort. Sometimes it does, at least.’
Her new friend meant well, Mair realised, and the way she talked might sound alien but it was certainly sincere. ‘Thank you.’ She smiled.
Karen squeezed her hands and stood up. She paid for their tea, waving away Mair’s proffered money. ‘Where are you staying?’
Mair told her.
‘So we’ll see you when we get back.’
The next day Mair went to visit the Leh Pashmina Processing Plant. The weather was changing, as if to underline the Beckers’ absence. The gilded autumn sunshine Mair had begun to take for granted was filtered out today by low, thin grey clouds as the last leaves were chased down from the poplar trees by an insistent wind.
A small man in a baseball cap emerged from one of the plant’s grimy buildings to meet her. ‘My name is Tinley. I am assistant manager of production. This way to see the magic, ma’am,’ he joked, as he led her across the yard to a concrete shed. Mair followed, not sure what he meant.
Inside, four women squatted in a circle. They had shawls drawn over their heads and across the lower half of their faces. Between them towered a heap of fleece, thick curled clods of raw goat’s hair matted with dung, grease and twigs, looking exactly as Mair had seen it when it was stuffed into bags up on the plateau. There was no doubt that this was the untreated pashm fibre as it arrived by truck from distant Changthang. The women were teasing out the clumps by hand, removing the worst of the filth and sorting the hair into smaller heaps according to colour, from palest grey-white to dark brown. The air in the bare room seemed almost solid with the rancid odour of goat.
Tinley made a small gesture of regret. ‘This is a colour-separating process. It can only be done by the human eyes.’ Then he brightened. ‘But, as you will see, the rest of our process is modern. Highly mechanised. Come this way, please.’
A metal door slid open on runners and Mair stepped into the next section of the plant. She had been aware of the hum of machinery, but she blinked at the sheer size of what lay beyond the door. The machine must have been fifty yards long, a leviathan of rotating belts and spinning flywheels, vast rubber rollers and steaming tanks. At the end of the line was a drying chamber from which the wool emerged cleaner and softer, but still with thick coarse hairs and fragments of dirt trapped in it.
‘What now?’ she asked, as she twisted a hank between her fingers.
A second metal door opened ahead. A wave of humid air, heavy with the smell of wet wool, rolled over her.
‘Why is it so hot? And so damp?’ she choked out.
‘It is a humidified chamber,’ Tinley said proudly. ‘It makes the wool easier to work. This is the dehairing section, see?’
They peered into the machinery. At each stage the remaining wool emerged whiter and softer, as the pure fleece – the goat’s innermost insulation against the Himalayan cold – was separated out.
At the end of the line, after another drying chamber, the belt turned back on itself. One man sat in reverent attendance as the cleansed and blow-dried end product billowed from the jaws of the machinery.
Mair couldn’t help herself. She stepped forward and plunged her arms up to the elbows into pure pashm. It was like handling a cloud, weightless and pure, and exactly the same colour. She remembered that one kilo of the greasy, reeking wool she had seen at the beginning of the line produced a mere three hundred grams of this airy fleece. ‘It is a kind of magic,’ she agreed.
Tinley’s eyes glinted. ‘Come with me.’ He settled his baseball cap squarely on his head and led the way out of the processing plant.
The back lanes were too narrow for two to walk abreast, and were overhung with washing lines, the branches of knotty old trees and the projecting balconies of houses. Tinley walked so fast that Mair had to concentrate on keeping up. At a collapsing set of gates in a whitewashed wall he suddenly stopped and nodded her through. Hens scratched in refuse and the call of the muezzin rose over the housetops.
‘Julley,’ Tinley called, to a man leaning on a broom.
Up four stone steps and through a narrow door, they came into a roomful of women seated at wooden looms. There was a steady creak of floor treadles and the flash of shuttles as they worked. They were weaving plain pashmina lengths, in soft shades of grey and brown. These workers, Tinley told her, were producing shawls for sale through the state-sponsored craft-industry outlets in Leh. ‘Very traditional methods preserved, nice work for women here. They can work what hours they can, make some money, and also take care of families.’
‘That’s good,’ Mair acknowledged. But she was puzzled by how different these pieces were from her own.
They passed through the weavers’ studio and the women looked up at her and smiled as she passed. The front of the building, to Mair’s surprise, opened out on to a view she recognised – the main street, with the minarets of the central mosque rising against the hill crowned with the old palace. Via the backstreet labyrinth they had come into a shawl showroom, lined with the now-familiar shelves. A salesman grinned a flash of gold incisor at her as he began to slide his wares out of their plastic bags.
Leh could sometimes seem like one large wool-based retail opportunity.
There was no question of withholding her custom, though, after Tinley had patiently taken her through the manufacturing processes. Mair obediently picked out three shawls: a pearl-grey one for Eirlys, a toffee-brown one for herself, and a cream one for Hattie, which would suit her friend’s dark colouring. She paid twelve thousand rupees in all, and reminded herself that it was not such a great deal of money for all the work that had gone into producing the pashmina fibre.
The salesman took her purchases away to wrap, and on a sudden impulse Mair opened her rucksack and pulled the folded pouch from the innermost recess. Tinley watched curiously as she unfolded her grandmother’s shawl and gently spread it on the shop’s plain wooden counter. The colours of water and blossom made a pool of brilliance in the subdued light of the shop. The goods on the shelves appeared suddenly drab and coarse in comparison. Tinley gave a sharp sniff as he bent over to examine the shawl more closely, and the salesman swung round to take a look.
‘Can you tell me anything about this?’ Mair asked.
Tinley picked up a small hand lens from behind the counter and minutely examined the weave, running his fingers over the embroidery before flipping the fabric to examine the reverse. He traced the outlines of the paisley shapes and peered even more closely through his lens at one corner of the piece.
‘This is Kashmiri work,’ he said. ‘Kani weaving. We don’t do this here in Ladakh.’
The salesman said something to him.
‘You are selling it?’ Tinley casually enquired.
‘No. Definitely, no. It belonged to my grandmother. I am … just trying to find out something about the shawl’s history, and maybe through that a little about my grandmother. I never knew her, you see.’
Tinley put aside his lens and straightened up. ‘Then you must go over the mountains to the Vale of Kashmir,’ he said.
‘I think my grandparents were here in Leh, though. During the 1940s. My grandfather was a Christian missionary.’
‘A Catholic? Moravians?’
‘No. He was Welsh, a Presbyterian.’
Tinley shook his head, shrugging. This clearly meant nothing to him. ‘The Europeans came, not many stayed. They opened some clinics and founded schools for children and for that we owe them a debt.’ The unspoken rider was that for other things the missionaries had attempted, presumably the work of religious conversion, less gratitude was due.
Mair said, ‘I wanted to take a look at the European graveyard here, but the gates are always locked and I can’t find out who has the key.’
Tinley grinned, showing good teeth, and pushed his cap to an angle. He spoke rapidly to the storekeeper and they both laughed.
‘That’s easy. Tsering, my friend here, his uncle is the caretaker.’
The two men exchanged more information and Tinley told Mair that if she came back to the shop tomorrow, perhaps at three o’clock, the uncle would bring the key and take her to visit the graveyard.
She thanked them both and promised she would be there promptly. She began to fold the shawl again, but Tinley touched her wrist. ‘You have seen this?’ he asked, pointing to one corner of it. He put the lens into her hand, and she leant over to see what she hadn’t noticed before. There was a tiny embroidered symbol, like a stylised butterfly or perhaps the initials BB, with the first letter reversed, and next to it another indecipherable mark. ‘What is it?’
‘It is the maker’s signature, and the numbers “42”, which is perhaps the date of completion. It is a fine piece, and it would have taken many months, even years, for the craftsman to weave and then embroider. Probably it was made for a bride, as a wedding shawl for her to take with her to her husband’s home.’
For Grandmother Nerys Watkins, as a gift from her husband the Welsh Presbyterian missionary? Mair thought the shawl was far too opulent for that. Nothing she had learnt about her grandparents’ circumstances or their restrained faith matched its rarity and value. The mystery seemed only to deepen.
She put the new shawls into her bag with the precious old one, thanked the shopkeeper, and repeated that she would be back at three the next day.
Tinley smiled broadly. ‘You must be wearing your new pashmina. The cold weather is coming. Winter is early for us this year.’
As she walked through the old town the next afternoon, she saw how the place was turning in on itself under a bitter wind scything down off the mountain ice fields. She could smell snow in the air, as Tinley had predicted, and she was glad of the warmth of her muted brown shawl round her throat. Most of the house windows were now protected by old wooden shutters, and almost every roof towered with bundles of wood and stored animal fodder. There were fewer people about in the bazaar and she passed only one or two Westerners. In another week or two the last of the cafés and guesthouses would be closed, the summer migrant workers would head down to the beaches and hotels of Goa for the winter season, and Leh would sink into its winter isolation as the snow piled up on the passes. She thought of the Beckers, and wondered how they were coping in their tent in this cold weather.
At the showroom there was, of course, no sign of the uncle with the elusive key. Tsering the shopkeeper waved his hand at her impatience. He wanted to show her a new consignment of shawls, just arrived from the finisher. They drank masala chai and nibbled almonds and dried apricots as Mair admired the wares. She was learning that the ritualised exchanges of buyer and seller must take place even though they both knew that money and shawl were not going to change hands today.
After a pleasant half-hour, the door that led to the weavers’ studio clicked open. A tiny, ancient man in a fur cap and felt boots bound with strips of leather tottered on the threshold.
‘My uncle Sonam.’ Tsering beamed, putting a heavy arm over his shoulder. ‘My grandmother brother.’
Mair shook hands with the venerable figure, thinking that it was hardly surprising he didn’t spend much time caretaking. He looked too old to do anything except sit and doze in an armchair.
‘Good afternoon, Sonam-le,’ she said, giving him what she had learnt was the polite honorific. The old man darted a bright-eyed appraising look at her. He spoke in an undertone to Tsering and jerked his thumb towards the shop door.
With alacrity Tsering pulled on his Adidas jacket. ‘We’ll go,’ he said.
‘You’re going to leave the shop?’
‘My uncle does not speak English. Anyway,’ he shrugged and spread his hands, his face creasing, ‘I do not see any customer.’
He locked the door behind them and the three of them set off, Sonam’s long, belted tunic swishing around his ankles and his fur cap bobbing as they crossed the bazaar. He could move surprisingly fast. Within minutes they had reached the familiar locked gates of the European cemetery. Sonam reached inside his layers of clothing, rummaged for a moment, and withdrew a huge key. The gates at last swung open and Mair passed through, under the gaunt trees and between the crosses and headstones. The ground was covered with fallen leaves, their buttery gold already brown and lifeless. The cold stung her cheeks.
‘What are you looking for?’ Tsering asked.
Mair tried to interpret the German inscription on the nearest stone. ‘I don’t know,’ she confessed.
To her relief, the two men retreated to a small green lean-to placed against a sheltered wall. She wandered along the haphazard rows. There were several tiny graves, one with a stone that read simply ‘Josephine, aged 7 months’. She tried to imagine how European women so far from home had struggled to look after their children in this remote place, and how they must often have prayed in vain.
She came to one small group of headstones bearing Welsh names, the Williamses and Thomases and Joneses of her own home valley, who could only have belonged to the Presbyterian mission. She took out her notebook and copied down the names and dates to look up in Hope and the Glory of God next time she had access to the Internet. She recognised one line of Welsh that was utterly familiar because she had seen it most recently in the graveyard at home, engraved on a stone just a few feet from her mother and father’s. Hedd perffaith hedd. Peace, perfect peace.
Homesickness closed on her, unexpected but as tight as a clenched fist. She experienced a moment’s confused longing to be back in the valley. She could see her father at the kitchen table, his head bent over his newspaper and the inevitable cup of tea at his elbow.
She steadied herself by looking towards the white battlements of the Himalayas and the clouds that mounted above them. Evan and Nerys Watkins might well have stood in this same spot and gazed at the same view. Nerys must sometimes have been painfully homesick too, and it would have been further to travel then, and much harder for her to communicate with the people she had left behind. For the first time since she had come to India, Mair felt emotionally connected to her grandmother.
She walked slowly on until she had completed a circuit of the enclosure. It was disappointing, but there was nothing except the three or four Welsh names on gravestones. She was about to cross to the hut, where Tsering and his uncle were huddled out of the wind smoking bidis, when she noticed a plaque set into a wall.
She read:
In Memoriam
Matthew Alexander Forbes, St John’s College, Cambridge Lost on Nanga Parbat, August 1938, aged 22
Mair wasn’t sure what or where Nanga Parbat was, but she guessed it was a mountain. Twenty-two was very young.
‘How are you, ma’am?’ Tsering was calling to her. ‘Did you find something?’
She shook her head. ‘From the names there are some Welsh buried here, but there’s nothing to connect them to my family.’
Sonam turned his head and studied her. He looked so old, but he was as alert as his great-nephew. He muttered a question and Tsering shrugged and translated for her: ‘He says, why not say first that you are interested in the Welsh people?’
Mair blinked.
Sonam stood up and gestured over the wall. She nodded agreement and he led the way out of the cemetery and down a lane that meandered behind it, with Mair and Tsering doing their best to keep up. She hadn’t explored this quarter of the old town, and she looked with sad interest at crumbling stone walls and gaping potholes. The old buildings were mostly sinking into dereliction. A woman carrying a bundle of kindling on her head greeted Sonam as he sped by.
The lane petered out at a blank wall flanked by two abandoned buildings. One was of plain stone with tall windows veiled in layers of ancient dust, and it struck Mair at once that in its absolute lack of pretension it resembled a Welsh chapel. The one opposite was no more than a wall with a collapsing door in it, but at Sonam’s nod Tsering pushed open the door. It gave on to a little paved courtyard surrounded by single-storey buildings. Weeds and saplings tilted the old paving stones, and all the glass in the small-paned windows had gone. A pair of starved dogs appeared in a dark doorway and gave them a yellow-eyed glare.
Tsering and Sonam consulted.
‘This is old mission, with school and medical clinic, my uncle remembers well. Across there, that was Welsh church. Then it became Hindu temple, but now there is new one built by them. These days, nothing here.’ He gave a shrug without a glimmer of optimism in it. Mair had noticed a similar gesture too often during her conversations in Leh.
Sonam was nodding harder, waving at her to indicate that she should feel free to explore this desolate place.
Avoiding the dogs, she peered into the tiny rooms. The first two were empty, except for weeds poking up through the floors, scattered refuse and torn sacks, but in the third lay some rotten sticks of furniture. One piece was just recognisable as a schoolroom chair, with a small shelf on the back for books. There had been chairs quite similar to this one in the infants’ class at her own school. Mair bent and tried to set it upright but the shelf came away in her hands. At her feet lay the remains of a book, a sad remnant with swollen covers that had been half protected from the damp and cold by the shelf. She picked it up and looked at the ruined pages, and out of the pulpy grey mass two or three words were just distinguishable.
It was a Welsh hymnal.
Mair lifted her head. She had half thought that the two men might have been trying to please her with a visit to a compound that could have belonged to any of the various missions to Ladakh, or might not have had any missionary connection at all. But now she knew for sure.
Seventy years ago Evan Watkins would have preached in the chapel across the lane, and his wife must have tried to teach the children, perhaps in this very room. She tilted her head to listen, as if she could catch the sound of their voices, but all she could hear was dogs barking and the screech and hoot of distant traffic.
‘This is what I wanted to find,’ she said quietly, to her companions. After a moment she stooped and replaced the hymnal in its resting place.
The three of them retreated into the fresh air. Sonam took hold of Mair’s arm. He began to talk with great animation, words pouring out of him as he shook her elbow and peered up into her face. He had no teeth and his face was crosshatched with deep lines, but he suddenly looked much younger than his age.
‘Tell me what he’s saying?’ she begged Tsering.
‘He remembers the teacher here, when he was small boy. She was nice. She gave the children apples and they sang songs.’
Nerys Watkins, who had followed her husband to India and brought back the wedding shawl with a lock of hair hidden in its folds.
‘That might have been my grandmother. Does he remember her name? What songs did they sing?’
The shake of the old man’s head was enough of an answer, but another rush of words immediately followed. His hands measured out a chunk of the air and he grinned as he pretended to totter under the weight of it. Remembering the long-ago was a pleasure for him, she understood, just as it had become for her father. Tsering patted his uncle on the shoulder, telling him to slow down.
‘He says there was a wireless here, the first one my uncle had ever listened to. He liked the music that came out of it. The wireless was this big, and heavy. It had a battery, and it needed four men and a cart to take that battery all the way down to the river to be charged at the generator. Then the people would come in close and listen with serious faces. The children wanted to laugh, but it was not allowed. That was when there was the war in Europe, and then it came to Asia.’
Evan and Nerys, listening sombrely to the radio news in one of these low rooms, with the oil lamp throwing their shadows on the wall. She could see them so clearly now, at last: Evan in his preacher’s black, and Nerys with an apron covering her plain skirt and hand-knitted jersey.
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘That was when it was.’
There was nothing more to see in the abandoned compound. Tsering was interested and he made another circuit with her, looking through every doorway, but they made no further discoveries. After his flash of recollection Sonam seemed weary, all his energy spent. Mair gently put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to have come here.’
They made their way back down the lane, Sonam walking much more slowly and with his great-nephew’s support. The twilight was deepening and lights shone out of the windows of houses nearer to the cemetery until there was a blink, then another, and the power failed. The single street lamp in the distance went out. Mair and her companions halted under the navy-blue sky as Tsering searched an inner pocket for a flashlight. The old man put out a hand to Mair to steady himself, and she took his arm. Linked together, with the thin torch-beam picking out the deep holes and collapsed walls in their path, they stepped carefully onwards to the road.
At the junction where she turned off towards her hotel, she said goodbye to the two men. The money she gave Sonam disappeared in a flash into a slit in his tunic. He grasped her by the wrist and angled his head to peer at her in the gloom. Tsering translated for the last time.
‘In those days, the old times, it was very hard to live here. There was not much, for any people. But it was good, just the same.’
The old man was telling her that Evan Watkins and his wife had not experienced undiluted hardship here in Leh. There had been happiness too.
Mair could understand that.
She shook hands with them.
Tsering grinned, his teeth white in the darkness. ‘You are looking for history from your shawl. Now you will be going to Kashmir.’
‘I will, yes.’
‘Safe journey,’ he said.
They wished her goodnight. As she watched them making slow progress down the deserted street, the power came on again. Their moving shadows slid over the old stone walls.
THREE
India, 1941
He had taken their candle behind the screen with him. It was only a hinged wooden frame with brown paper pasted across it, and the light, placed on the hidden washstand, threw his enlarged and distorted shadow on to the paper. Nerys turned to face the other way, in order not to see her husband washing himself. She studied instead the plain wooden crucifix that hung on the wall beside the bed.
The yellow glow of the candle flickered as he carried it from the washstand and placed it on the night table, so she knew it was all right to turn on to her back again. The mattress, stuffed with yak’s hair, gave out its familiar rustle as she moved. There was a whiff of carbolic soap with a lingering trace of male sweat as Evan picked up the Bible that always lay next to his pillow. He sank to his knees beside the bed. Nerys at once made a move to push back the blanket and join him in his prayers, but he told her that she should stay where she was.
‘The Lord sees everything. He won’t frown if you take a few more days’ rest, Nerys.’
‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she murmured, but she lay still because she felt so tired. She listened as he read in Welsh from the Book of Job, one of his favourite resorts. ‘Amen,’ she said, when she thought he had finished. There was an interval as he prayed in silence, and she attempted the same herself. Among other things, she asked God if He could somehow make a better wife of her.
At last Evan sighed and got to his feet. He took off his thick dressing-gown and hung it on the hook, peeled back the blanket, letting a blade of cold air into the bed, and hovered for a moment in his striped flannel pyjamas, as if to lie down beside her took a positive effort of will.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
He blew out the candle and got in. The mattress sank under his weight and she tensed her hip and leg muscles in order not to roll against him. Not that she didn’t long for the comfort of his arms and the warmth of his skin, because she felt so sad and empty that she craved physical reassurance without any of the pitfalls that words could lead to, but it had been a long day and she didn’t want to place even this much of a demand on him.
‘Goodnight, my dear,’ he said, after a moment.
‘Goodnight, Evan,’ she said quietly.
It would not be long before he fell asleep. She lay with her fingers interlaced across her breastbone and reviewed the day.
The smaller children gave her the greatest pleasure. She loved the sight of them in class, with school pinafores tied over their ragged clothes, sitting in a neat line with their shining eyes fixed on her as she wrote words and numbers on a blackboard balanced on an easel. One, two, three. Boot, hat, apple, hand. They bore this part of the day patiently, just as they did when she read them stories from the Bible, but what they really enjoyed was singing and dancing and clapping games. They chanted their own words to ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘The Farmer’s in His Den’, and she tried to copy what they sang because her efforts made them laugh so uproariously. Or with her harmonium and their drums, whistles and tambourines they pounded out made-up songs that filled the room with rhythm and needed no language at all.
The older children were less rewarding. Nerys knew they only came to school because of the mission’s free midday meal, soup and rice with a thick stew of lentils. They fidgeted and murmured among themselves as she talked, and as soon as the class finished at three o’clock they raced each other across the yard, happy to be free from her lessons even though the rest of the day would be spent working in the fields, or bent over a weaving loom. She could only hope that the food they ate and the minimal medical attention she could offer, for their racking coughs, gummy eyes and running sores, was a compensation for the two hours of mutual incomprehension they shared with her. By the age of eight or nine, most of them stopped coming altogether. They were too valuable to their parents as extra pairs of hands.
Nerys listened as Evan’s breathing slowed and deepened.
However positive she tried to be, it was hard not to feel that they were wasting their time in this place, two ignorant outsiders battling against the primitive conditions, an obscure language and centuries of history.
Of course, Evan wouldn’t have agreed that they were ignorant. But Nerys didn’t share her husband’s absolute conviction that the Word was the only truth, and bringing it to the heathen the only thing that really mattered. She was even afraid that she might be losing her faith altogether, although the mere acknowledgement of this, in silence and under the safe cover of darkness, made her wince with anxiety. How could there be a missionary’s wife who didn’t believe in the Lord?
Ironically, it was India that had brought her to this precipice of doubt.
Back in Wales, she had first met the Reverend Evan Watkins when he was on home leave from his Indian mission and she was in teacher training, and it had all seemed perfectly straightforward. Their God, the one she and Evan shared, was a daily matter, of course. He was Grace said before meals, prayers at bedtime for family and the sick, the King and Queen and the unfortunate heathen. He was chapel on Sundays, the thick black Bible, Nonconformist hymns, and a whole way of life that she was accustomed to and took comfortably for granted. Even after Evan had proposed (and she had hoped – even prayed – that he would ask her), and during their short engagement, the wedding, their honeymoon in Anglesey (she wouldn’t dwell on that now) and all the preparations for India that had followed, she had never questioned the basic premise. Evan had heard the call to do missionary work, and she was proud to be accompanying him. She would help him and support him in every way she could, and they would succeed together.
At Shillong, the centre of the Presbyterian outreach mission to India, where they had lived for their first months of married life, it had not been so very difficult. Within the compound there was a large school run by the mission, where the teaching was excellent and the local families seemed prepared to accept the Christian message that accompanied it. As well as the big chapel, with its regular services for mission families and respectable numbers of converts, there was a medical clinic for first aid and minor ailments, classes for local women in domestic skills, hygiene and vegetable-growing that Nerys had enjoyed helping with, and all the support of a small but determined religious community. There was even, at a little distance, a mission hospital, with a resident qualified doctor and three nurses, where women could come to give birth in safer and more sanitary conditions than were available anywhere else in the area. Lepers were treated there too, and TB patients, and sufferers from septicaemia and rabies and all the other shocking ailments of India. Nerys could see that they were doing some good through their work, she and her husband, even though it was in a small, oblique way.
India itself had shocked her. She had only been able to conjure up the most pallid images in advance so the actual vastness, the brutal heat of the plains, so fierce that it flayed her skin and bleached the skies, the swarming people, the solid torrents of monsoon rain, the harsh colours and stink of it all, the flies, the crippled bodies and the raw poverty she saw every day had almost unpinned her. When she tried to confess her dismay to Evan, he had looked annoyed.
‘The work is what we are here to do, my dear, with God’s help. There is no time for considering ourselves or our misgivings.’
She had begun to retort that she wasn’t afraid of work, and she wasn’t being self-absorbed, she had only wanted to talk about what they both saw all the time. But she had stopped herself. Evan didn’t want to talk about anything except the routine of their days. He had a focus on his work that was so tight, so unwavering, that she began to suspect he was afraid of where speculation might lead him.
In any case, her confusion didn’t last. In time she began to see a vitality in this seething country, a kind of dogged appetite that brought babies bawling into the world amid all the desperation, reflected in the eyes of a beggar as he reached up with cupped hands to receive a half-pice coin, in the backs of women bent double in the fields, and in the man who sat all day beside the churning traffic with his spirit stove, brewing delicious chai to sell to passers-by. Nerys used to stop on her daily walk and drink a cup with this man, sitting on his little three-legged stool while he squatted in the dust. Unfortunately she couldn’t see how any of these people might be affected, for either better or worse, by the Christian message that she was supposed to be bringing them. Their situations were nearly all desperate and they had their various religions already. What difference could a merely different one make?
It was a dry, unwelcome seed that took root in her, but its growth was rapid.
Evan worked all the time, preaching, writing, reading and travelling to outlying villages. Even with teaching at the school and trying nervously to deal with the house servants, whose grinning expectation of her orders she found embarrassing, Nerys had plenty of hours to spare. She began helping out at the hospital where the nurses offered much livelier company than the other mission wives.
Her favourite duty was in the labour and delivery room. Her memory of the first baby she saw being born was as vivid as if it had happened that morning. The mother was younger than she was, had borne two children already and had been screaming for two long hours while Nerys sponged her face and struggled to soothe her. But as soon as he was born she reached her arms out for this new infant with a smile that filled the room. Nerys had had to turn aside and wipe her own eyes with a towel.
Her hands slid lower now, an involuntary movement that she tried and failed to suppress, over the corrugated twin arches of her lower ribs, to rest in the slack bowl beneath them. Since her own first pregnancy had miscarried, less than a month ago, she had tried to tell herself that there would soon be another baby on the way. She felt sick and exhausted, and it had taken more than long enough to conceive this one, but still, they would manage, wouldn’t they?
Unless this was God’s way of punishing her for not believing in Him.
Nerys smiled grimly into the darkness. If she didn’t believe, how could miscarriage now or failure to conceive again at some time in the future be a divine punishment for anything?
Think about something else, she advised herself. Her husband sighed in his sleep and curled on his side, facing away from her.
When Evan had been offered the chance to go all the way up to Leh, where the resident Welsh missionary had died of dysentery, he had explained to Nerys that they did not have to go. They should see it as an offer, an opportunity for greater good, not an order. The posting would be a hard one, he warned. Leh was at a considerable altitude; it could be reached by only two possible roads, and those were closed by snow for at least half of each year. They would probably be among only a tiny handful of other Western people, there was no proper hospital, and the local population were likely to be even less receptive to the word of Our Lord than they were down here in Shillong.
Nerys had looked into his eyes.
Evan wanted to go just because the posting would be difficult and uncomfortable. Leh would give him the chance to prove his missionary zeal to God and to his superiors, while providing him with even more opportunities for self-denial. She was beginning to realise that poor Evan secretly had a low opinion of himself. Doubting the value of what he achieved within the mission, all his conscientious work and insistence on taking the hardest route was probably his way of dealing with an absence of self-confidence and self-love. He wouldn’t even feed himself properly, however hard she tried to devise meals that would nourish him. He was gaunt, and his face had developed hollows beneath the cheekbones. He was often ill, with fevers or stomach complaints.
I will love you more and better, she silently vowed, to make up for what you can’t do for yourself.
She had cupped his face between her hands and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Of course we must go. I’ll be very disappointed if we don’t. Even the journey sounds like an adventure.’ She had already heard the legends of the road from Manali to Leh.
That night in bed Evan had taken her hand and whispered, ‘My dear?’
That was his signal. She had moved closer, her nightdress rucking round her thighs, and murmured, ‘Yes.’ She made sure that her mouth was almost touching his, so he felt the warmth of her breath.
He probably didn’t think that doing it was actually sinful, she reflected. After all, they had been married, in chapel, by Parchedig Geraint Rhys, his friend and teacher, and in front of their two families. It was just – probably – that he didn’t think he deserved this much pleasure. Certainly he never tried to prolong the act, or to intensify the sensations for either of them. He submitted to the base urge, as he no doubt thought of it, then detached himself as quickly as possible.
For herself, Nerys didn’t care whether she deserved pleasure or not, but she knew from the very first fumbling time her husband came into her that she loved sex. At the beginning she had tried to imagine a marriage where both of you liked it equally and wanted it as much as she did. You’d never get out of bed, she thought. After two years of marriage, she had learnt to keep her imagination under stricter control.
Evan accepted the Leh posting, and the Watkinses made the long journey up into Ladakh. Nerys enjoyed the train journeys to Calcutta and on to Delhi, even though the summer heat of the plains was crushing after the relative airiness of Shillong. At every station food vendors clambered into their carriage with tiffin baskets containing rice and curries, chai men rang their little bells, and women imploringly held up cloth slings filled with ripe fruit to the dust-coated windows. She bargained for these goods along with the other train passengers, and arranged little picnic meals in a white napkin to tempt Evan whenever he glanced up from his book. And for hour after hour she gazed out at India as it rolled past the train. Paddy fields, buffalo carts and mud villages gave way to sweltering towns and cities of blistered slum tenements, and ever more hopeless camps where families lived under a tattered canvas awning on one patch of dirt beside the railway lines, with the smoke of countless fires thickening the already viscous air. Then the train would steam out into the countryside again, edging across a vast brown plain as if the acrid city had never existed.
In Delhi they were staying in a missionary house when Nerys finally heard the news of the Dunkirk evacuation on the BBC Overseas Service. Awaiting her were letters from her parents, containing accounts of air raids and food shortages, and of little boys she had known at school who now appeared on lists of men killed in action. It was hard to hear of the terrible changes that her known and loved world was undergoing when she was in such a strange place herself. Anxiety for the people she had left behind filled her thoughts, and India and their work there seemed even more unrelated to anything she understood. She ached to go home; the depth of her longing was physical, almost frightening. Evan came back one afternoon from a mission meeting and found her struggling to breathe at an open window, although the air outside was dense with soot and heat. A woollen sock she was knitting lay on the floor beside her. She had heard that it would be cold crossing the passes on the way up to Leh, and although the notion of chill seemed to have slipped out of the world altogether she was worried in an abstract way that they did not have enough warm clothing.
‘I think we are ready to leave.’ Evan frowned, choosing either not to see or not to remark on her distress. ‘I shall order the tickets for Chandigarh.’
With the advice and help of the Delhi mission they had accumulated a mountain of supplies, ranging from thick felt boots and blankets to tins of butter from the Delhi Dairy Company. Everything had been packed into travelling baskets fastened with leather straps.
Nerys stooped to pick up her knitting. ‘Are we doing the right thing, Evan? Do you ever worry that … that our efforts might be better expended at home?’
He put down his armful of papers and books. ‘Because of the war?’
‘Yes.’ If they were at home, she supposed, her husband would be a forces’ chaplain and she would be school-teaching in the place of men who were away fighting.
‘I have been called here, Nerys. I know that I am doing God’s will.’
That’s all very well for you, she almost retorted, but what about me? I don’t know anything of the kind. What is God’s will for me?
She had never once actually asked him.
She had always bitten her tongue, knowing that the only safe direction for the conversation to take was for her to agree that she was Evan’s wife, and her duty was to be no more or less than that. In any case, all of this, every step that had brought her here, had been her own choice. If she had not chosen to marry him she would be at home in Wales, and tomorrow she would be a spinster schoolteacher making her way to a classroom full of children whose lives she could comprehend, instead of a married woman on her way to Ladakh.
Through the window came the noise of vendors shouting, street children playing in the gutter, a baby’s wail, the tinny notes of amplified music. Nerys stood very still, her fingers feeling like melted wax on the knitting needles.
‘Are you unwell?’ Evan laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘Would you like me to call Mrs Griffiths?’
Mrs Griffiths was their hostess, a Delhi missionary wife whom Nerys hardly knew. ‘No, thank you, Evan. I’m not ill. I agree with you. We’re ready to go, so you should get the train tickets.’
At Chandigarh they left the train and travelled overland by truck, with their luggage roped under canvas on the flat bed of the vehicle, up to a town called Manali. There was another outpost of the mission here and Evan had to arrange the last details connected with their posting to Leh, so they stayed for three days. Manali lay in the foothills of high mountains and the blissfully cool air was crisp and sweet-smelling. The folded ridges that rose above the valley were covered with dark pine trees. The views made Nerys think of Switzerland, although she had never been there. She went for walks beside a crystal stream and watched eagles gliding over high crags. Her spirits lifted like the birds.
On their last evening, she and Evan ate dinner by candlelight in a little wood-panelled room overlooking a garden. When he put down his knife and fork she jumped up and went to him, resting her arms over his shoulders and putting her cheek against his hair. ‘I am so glad we’re going. I’m sorry I doubted the wisdom of it,’ she whispered.
‘I prayed you might have a change of heart,’ he answered.
Nerys knew that night would be their last in a proper bed until they reached Leh. She had learnt on their honeymoon that she must never make any overtures to her husband, but while he was out of the room she touched a dab of perfume to the nape of her neck and put on her wedding nightdress.
‘My dear?’ Evan asked, as soon as he blew out the lamp.
At first light the next day, a train of fifteen ponies assembled. It took two hours for all of Nerys and Evan’s baggage to be unpacked and redistributed into separate loads that were shared out between the pony men and their animals. A wiry little man called Sethi was in charge of their caravan. It was three hundred miles from here to Leh, over an ancient trading track that crossed the Himalayas. They would ride, and camp each night along the way.
‘Come, Memsahib.’ Sethi helped Nerys into the saddle of her pony, put the woven bridle with its bells and pompoms of bright wool into her hands, and slapped the animal’s rump. It started forwards and their procession wound out of Manali. Thirty miles of steep ascent lay ahead, to the first high pass on their route.
Nerys often thought back with a kind of dizzy disbelief to the rigours of that long journey. The days were a blur of jolting on the back of the pony, or dismounting with aching legs and numb buttocks to trudge in its wake. The track was often no more than a gash leading between tumbled rocks, or a muddy ledge perched over hundreds of feet of empty air with a silver river winding far below. The ponies picked their way along, encouraged by clicks and whistles from the pony men. Their loads rhythmically swayed, sometimes tipping far out over the void. At night Sethi and his men pitched the tent and Nerys and Evan crawled inside and rolled themselves in their blankets. Cold winds battered the canvas and sliced between the tent wall and the groundsheet. The cook-boy lit a fire and in time a tin billycan of mutton stew and another of steaming rice would be passed through the tent flap. Nerys had never felt so hungry in her life. She ate ravenously, devouring everything that was given to her. Evan lay in his blanket cocoon with his eyes closed. He suffered from the high altitude, waking up every morning with a headache and coughing weakly all through the day. Nerys dosed him with aspirin and cough mixture, and coaxed him to eat.
‘Just a spoonful of rice, dear. You must have some food, or you won’t have strength to do your work when we arrive.’
He raised himself on one elbow, and ate a small amount of his dinner.
They slept fitfully at night, propped up on saddles to ease their breathing, waking to the sound of the wind or the men talking and chuckling round their fire. In the morning the whole process started all over again.
But as the days passed Nerys found that she grew steadily stronger, and with the strength came a new happiness. She gazed at the changing scenery, thinking of how its barren grandeur dwarfed the peaks and valleys of Snowdonia yet reminded her of home. She realised that she felt more at ease in this inhospitable landscape than she had done anywhere in boiling lowland India. She joked with the pony men, using sign language because they had hardly a word in common. Sethi became her ally, riding just ahead of her on his shaggy white pony or patiently leading her mount when her aching body protested too much and she had to climb down and walk for two or three miles.
‘Memsahib very strong,’ he said meaningfully. He didn’t even glance at Evan, drooping over his pony’s reins.
Nerys knew that she would never forget the afternoon of the long, gasping climb up to the Baralacha Pass. When at last she staggered up to the highest point, at sixteen thousand feet, it was as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of her brain and her blood, leaving her whole body as limp as string. Evan was grey and gasping, hardly able to sit in his saddle. A man had to walk on either side of his pony to support him.
Then Nerys looked back. Behind her, to the south, stretched the whole of India. She turned in a half-circle. Ahead, to the north, lay the unknown territory of Asia. She straightened up and sucked in a deep breath of the glassy air.
Sethi was watching her. ‘Welcome, Memsahib.’ He smiled.
The days of riding, camping, sleeping and riding again drew on, and then suddenly they were done. Their little caravan wound up a low hill, and at the crown they found themselves looking out over the Indus valley. There were orchards and walnut trees and cultivated fields stretching along the riverbanks. The town of Leh spread over a sunny slope facing a range of high, white-iced mountains.
It was the end of August, and more than a month had gone by since they had left Shillong. As they rode into Leh, passing pony carts loaded with sheaves of dried barley stalks, flocks of goats, and women walking back from the fields, Nerys thought of the cold sliding down the mountains behind them and tightening its grip on the passes they had just crossed. Already there had been snow higher up, melting into slush in the midday sun and refreezing into treacherous ridges as soon as the dark came. Once they had unloaded their ponies the men would set out again for Manali, travelling fast and light against the weather, but the slow journey Evan and Nerys had made couldn’t be reversed. Not until winter had come and gone again.
Here we are, Nerys thought, as they passed to the left of a long mani wall on the outskirts of town. Thousands of carved stones were piled on it, each one engraved with the mantra Om mani padme hum. She bowed her head respectfully towards the wall. Here we are, and here we shall stay.
That had been almost a year ago.
Nerys turned to lie in the same position as Evan, but not quite spooned against his body in case she disturbed him. She inhaled his soap-and-sweat smell. Now that he was deeply asleep, she would complete her review of the day by considering this evening.
They had been eating their early dinner. Diskit, the woman who cooked and served their food, had withdrawn to the kitchen. She had been widowed and left with a young family so she was glad to be attached to the mission, whatever religious allegiance it obliged her to demonstrate. They could hear her opening the door to stir the ashes in the iron cooking stove, then piling in more yak-dung fuel to cook tomorrow’s stew for the school. The smell of boiling mutton drifted in to them. Evan turned a page of his book. Without even glancing at him, Nerys knew that a shadow had crossed his face. The homely kitchen sounds set up a chain of unwelcome associations in his mind.
The early Moravian missionaries had arrived in Leh in 1853, before the Catholics and long before the fledgling Welsh Presbyterians. They had established themselves successfully. They had introduced the sturdy little stove that was now a fixture in every Ladakhi kitchen, set up the first printing press, and the post office, and had translated the Bible into Tibetan.
Evan felt keenly the precarious position of their own much younger mission, and the pitiful size of his congregation compared with the numbers who made their way to worship at the Moravian church. He condemned himself for his lack of achievements, practical as well as spiritual.
‘You don’t have to think of it in that way. They are our Christian brothers, and we are doing the same work,’ Nerys had once said.
Their fellow missionaries were currently an Englishman, who had spent all his ordained life working for the Moravian church in India and was soon to retire, and a middle-aged Belgian couple. For the endless months of the winter they had been almost the only other European residents in Leh, and Nerys had grown to like all three of them. It had been Madame Gompert, with Diskit, who had nursed and comforted her through the blood and grief of the miscarriage.
She hadn’t said anything this evening, and it had been Evan who had put down his knife and fork and closed his book. ‘Nerys, I have something to discuss with you.’
‘What is it?’
‘It will soon be winter again.’
She could hardly be unaware of that. This year, now she knew about the depths of cold and silence, the monotony of eating the same food, the frozen water in their washing jugs, and the isolation of their little world, she thought that she would deal with it better. ‘Yes.’
‘I can’t sit here in the mission all that time. In summer when I go out to villages and the nomad camps, the people are almost all out with the herds. But if I went in the winter, do you see, they would be in the settlements. They will have less work to do and I would have their attention.’
Nerys considered this. There were tracks out to villages in the valley, and hazardous routes over the mountains to outlying gompas and clusters of huts surrounding them, but she could only just imagine what it would be like to travel through snow and wind when the temperature fell to nought degrees Fahrenheit.
‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.
Evan was silent.
Look at me, she willed him. At last their eyes met.
He wasn’t hostile towards her, neither did he blame her in the least, but the loss of the baby had tipped them over the lip of a divide. As much as he had wanted the child, Evan also needed her to be strong and dependable in the joint enterprise that preoccupied him. Her physical frailty since the miscarriage and the unspoken weighty mass of her sadness suggested that her strength was no longer available for him to draw on. In some recess of his consciousness he resented the withdrawal, and that resentment must loom in his mind as yet another of the personal failings he was obliged to atone for.
They were at an impasse, Nerys wearily concluded. They couldn’t talk to each other: it had been his child as well as hers and, of course, Evan grieved for it, but he put up too many defences against her and she had lost the will to try to break through them. She felt the beginnings of anger, too, at his weakness, which was so determinedly masked with stubbornness.
‘I couldn’t agree to that,’ he said, in his most wintry voice. ‘You must take better care of yourself than I could undertake to do if we were both out in the field.’
Nerys looked away from him. She closed her mouth, knowing that it made a tight line in her white face. ‘You would prefer it if I stayed here alone?’
Evan was surprised. ‘You won’t be alone. You will have the schoolchildren, the congregation, the Gomperts, Henry Buller and our other neighbours. And the servants will look after you.’
Very slowly Nerys folded up her napkin and replaced it in the wooden ring. She stood up, supporting herself briefly with her hand on the back of her chair. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
She went across the passage to the kitchen door. Diskit was sluicing plates and cutlery in a tin basin, her pomaded hair wound up in a cloth because Nerys had told her it must always be covered when she was working. The red of the material matched her cheeks. Two men were sitting on a bench against the wall, their yak-skin boots discarded beside the door leading to the yard. Diskit dropped a fistful of forks on to a metal tray and Nerys inwardly winced at the noise. ‘Diskit, what’s this?’
‘Mem, Leh very busy. My cousin brother,’ she nodded to one of the two men, ‘come from Alchi.’
‘Julley,’ the men murmured.
The girl had learnt a smattering of English from Evan’s predecessor, and Nerys had picked up a basic level of Ladakhi. They communicated well, these days, only rarely having to resort to sign language.
Leh was busy. It was trading season and the caravans were in town, from Lhasa, Yarkand and Kashgar in the east and from Punjab in the west. The merchants from Tibet and Turkestan brought carpets, gold and silver to trade with their Indian counterparts for cotton and tea. The local people had wool and woollen goods for sale, every quality from coarse yak fibre to finest pashm, and the bazaar seethed all day with different faces and national dresses, and a clamour of languages. The British joint commissioner was also in residence. He was responsible for traffic and trade, and every trader had to apply to him for a passport to enable him to retreat in whichever direction he had come before the winter snows cut off the ancient routes.
The next day the commissioner was holding his annual tea party and entertainment at the Residency, to which Evan and Nerys had been invited along with everyone else of any standing in Leh. They had arrived just too late last year, and Nerys was looking forward to this great event as a rare break from their dutiful and monotonous routine. She had few decent clothes to choose from, but the dhobi man had laundered her best blouse and she had ironed it herself, to avoid the creases he invariably pressed into the collar along with a liberal sprinkling of ashes from the iron. She had just finished knitting herself a cardigan. It was soft cream wool, locally spun and the best available, and her job this evening was to add the finishing touch of a dozen pearl buttons.
‘Mem, I tell you,’ Diskit’s cheeks turned even redder, ‘my cousin, on road. Sahib and memsahib, English people. Leh tomorrow. Next week Srinagar.’
The two men nodded vigorously. The cousin did some voluble explaining, from which Nerys was able to decipher that a shooting party was returning from the Nubra valley. There were bearers and cooks, a shikari, or huntsman, camp-boys, a great bag of game heads, ponies, guns, tents and mounds of luggage, all the trappings of a serious expedition. The shooting party consisted of an English gentleman and lady.
This was real news.
English travellers passing through Leh were a focus of attention whoever they might be, but it was most unusual to hear of any Western woman undertaking the journey out to the remote east. Nerys wondered what she could be like. Curiosity, the prospect of the party, and the hope of some fresh conversation and unusual entertainment revived her to the point that she felt almost herself again. She forgot all about Evan, sitting over his book at the dining-table.
‘Mem, I tell you,’ Diskit was insisting. There was still more news to impart.
Nerys gathered that the travellers on the way out had stayed in the dak bungalow between Leh and Thikse, which was why she had not met them before. This was a small house provided for British government or other officials who were in the area and needed temporary accommodation. She knew that it was a comfortless place with mildewed walls, and drifts of dead flies on the windowsills, and she was not at all surprised to hear that the visitors were looking for alternative accommodation this time. Because of the party tomorrow, the Residency was unfortunately already overcrowded.
She said at once, ‘They must stay here.’
The Watkinses had welcomed very few visitors to the mission, because most of the Europeans passing directly through Leh either went to the Residency or stayed with the Gomperts. Henry Buller’s house was generally better avoided. She was already running through in her head what needed to be done. Air the sheets, light the fire under the boiler so there would be enough hot water. Jugs and basins. Towels, a posy of flowers for the bedroom table. How to add some elegant touch to their sparse menus for the next few days?
‘Diskit, first thing tomorrow you will clean bedroom. Wash floor, all dusting, inside cupboard, everywhere.’
Diskit nodded, serious at the importance of this charge. ‘My cousin, tell sahib on road?’
‘Yes, yes.’ Nerys turned to one of the men on the bench. ‘Go back to the camp, say they are welcome here. Can you remember that? Welcome.’
When she had finally gone to tell him the latest, Evan had still been sitting at the table with the remains of dinner at his elbow. ‘Where is Diskit? What do we pay her for? Am I to do the washing up, or might she find the time?’
‘Evan, we’re going to have guests tomorrow.’
He had listened with a frown. Nerys’s reaction had been curiosity followed by anticipation, but his was defensive. The arrival of strangers in their home meant disruption and threatened worse: exposure, or some unnamed humiliation. His expression had made Nerys want to draw his head against her breasts and stroke his greying hair, telling him that he shouldn’t worry or fear so much, but there was no longer any protocol between them for such a move. The weariness that she had felt earlier had descended on her again.
‘Diskit will come in a moment. Her cousin brought a message from the road, and I gave her a list of things to do before the morning. I’m going to bed now, Evan. Tomorrow will be a busy day.’
‘I won’t be more than half an hour,’ he had called after her.
Now sleep was a long way off. Nerys battled her rising resentment that Evan had slid so easily into unconsciousness while she lay wide awake and lonely, and increasingly disturbed by the latest disagreement between them.
She wondered if her husband was even aware that they had fallen so far out of sympathy with each other. It was quite possible, she reflected, that she didn’t come high enough on his list of considerations to have made any recent impression at all.
Stop it, Nerys warned herself. You will only cause more destruction if you think like that.
Sleep. Just try to sleep.
Her bones ached with the effort of not touching her husband’s oblivious body. She was too tired to let herself relax. The hours crawled by until the cocks started crowing.
It was a little past the usual time for lunch when the travellers arrived. Nerys had taught the youngest children’s class, and she had told the older ones that they could go home once they had eaten their rice and lentils. The stragglers were still playing and chasing each other in the mission courtyard when laden horses picked their way to the street gate. Nerys and Evan heard the usual confused shouting and barking dogs that meant something out of the usual was happening. The schoolchildren crowded at the stone gateway and Nerys hurried across the cobbles to greet the guests.
She saw a trim man in well-cut riding clothes and a wide-brimmed hat, and a woman holding the bridle of her pony and affectionately rubbing its nose. She was wearing puttees and breeches, and a long muslin veil was tied over her sola topi. A string of bearers and pony men were bringing up mud-and dust-caked bags. The woman looked up and saw Nerys. At once she passed the bridle to a pony man and with one gloved hand she rolled up her veil. She smiled a broad, frank smile, held out both hands and grasped Nerys’s. ‘Mrs Watkins, thank you so much for rescuing us like this,’ she said, in a warm, husky voice. ‘I can’t tell you what it means to Archie and me. One more night in a tent would have killed me off.’
She was about Nerys’s height. Her eyes were the colour of peat, framed by arched black eyebrows. When she took off her sola topi it was a surprise to see that her dark hair was cropped short, like a man’s, but even in her riding clothes there was nothing else that was mannish about her. She had a luscious figure, with a narrow waist and long legs that were elegant even in breeches under a rough tweed coat.
‘Welcome to the mission.’ Nerys smiled back at her. ‘It’s not the Savoy, but it’s better than the dak bungalow.’
The man had issued crisp instructions to his servants and now he came to introduce himself. ‘Mrs Watkins? How d’you do? I’m Archie McMinn. We’re in your debt.’ He was sandy-haired, tanned from the sun, with good-humoured blue eyes and a growth of wiry beard. He spoke with a slight Scots accent.
‘Myrtle. I’m Myrtle.’ His wife laughed.
‘Nerys.’ As they shook hands Nerys had an odd sense of recognition, as if she knew this woman already. She looked at Myrtle McMinn and she thought distinctly, I knew you must be somewhere. Here you are at last.
She only said, ‘Come inside. You’ll want hot water, food on china plates, and clean sheets. I remember what it feels like, camping for weeks on end.’
Evan came out into the courtyard, standing like a dark pillar in the sun. He shook hands with the newcomers, telling them that the Presbyterian mission was their home for as long as they needed it. Nerys gave him a quick smile of gratitude. Mission children slid between the four of them, gaping at the McMinns. Myrtle peeled off her gloves and rummaged in the pockets of her coat, bringing out sweets and distributing them between a thicket of hands.
‘Julley, all of you.’ She held the bag upside-down and shook it to show that it was empty. The children fell in behind her and followed her to the door of the house. Nerys firmly told them that it was time to go home, and shooed them away. She led the McMinns to their room.
‘You’ve made it so pretty,’ Myrtle cried. ‘Look, Archie. What luxury.’
Nerys told them that Diskit would come with hot water and they were to ask her if there was anything else that they needed. Archie McMinn said that all they required was the pair of canvas holdalls that their bearer would carry in, once the worst of the dust and mud had been brushed off them. Everything else, including his game heads, would be taken with the ponies to camp near the polo ground at the southern edge of town.
‘His game bag is really all that matters, you see,’ Myrtle teased. ‘Two heads of giant mountain sheep with curly horns, two pairs of magnificent antler tops attached to their stags, and every other beast that was included in Archie’s permit as well. Otherwise we’d still be out there, you know.’
‘It was a shooting expedition, dearest girl,’ Archie said calmly. ‘What else did you expect?’
The McMinns gave a relaxed impression. They were easy with each other, Nerys thought, happy to have reached civilisation and company after their demanding excursion into the mountains. But she thought they would have been just as happy to find themselves alone together. Diskit brought in the first of a series of hot-water jugs, and Nerys left the guests to change.
Their arrival had lightened the tense atmosphere in the mission house. Diskit was singing as she crossed the passage, and Evan didn’t ask how much longer it was going to be before he could have his lunch. Nerys adjusted the spoons and forks on the table, then went across into the kitchen to check on the thukpa, the local vegetable stew that was Diskit’s most reliable dish.
The guests soon reappeared. Archie had shaved off his beard, exposing a paler crescent of jaw and cheek. Myrtle was still in trousers but they were loose flannels now, worn with a pale shirt and a single strand of pearls. ‘I would have put on a frock,’ she said apologetically to Nerys, ‘but I haven’t got one with me. Do you mind?’
Nerys smoothed the front panel of her old tweed skirt. ‘Of course not. You look … very pretty.’
‘No, I look like my brother.’
Even as she ran her fingers through her short shingle with a dismissive shrug, no one would ever have mistaken Myrtle for a boy.
Evan drew out Myrtle’s chair for her. Both the McMinns bowed their heads while he said a lengthy grace and the thukpa steamed in its bowl. Sun poured in through the small-paned window opposite Nerys, and she was glad to close her eyes for a few seconds and allow its warmth to fall on her eyelids. After her sleepless night she was so tired that she felt not quite real, as if she were missing a physical dimension. When she opened her eyes again, Myrtle was looking at her. Nerys didn’t mind her scrutiny. The feeling of recognition seemed to mean that there was nothing to conceal.
It was a cheerful meal. Evan liked Archie McMinn, that was clear, and he almost laughed at Myrtle’s tales of their adventures. No remote nullah had been left unexplored in Archie’s relentless pursuit of game. The McMinns had waded through rivers and crawled over mountain passes, slid down scree walls on the other side, to camp on bleak plains where hailstorms and gales had battered their tent. There was no firewood, no food for sale or barter, no human life for dozens of miles. Archie was up every morning, regardless of weather, eager with his guns and the huntsmen.
‘Myrtle’s friends are all in Srinagar, playing tennis or drinking cocktails at the club, but she insisted on coming out here with me,’ Archie protested. ‘What is a man to do? I would sacrifice anything for my wife – except sport, of course – but I cannot make a shooting trip comfortable for her.’
Myrtle looked delighted. ‘Do you think I would have missed almost drowning or freezing to death? How many cocktails would it take to create such excitement? I don’t mind coming second to your love of stag hunting, darling. And I know you’ll understand why I had to come.’ She turned to Nerys. ‘Because you have accompanied your husband all the way up here.’
‘I wouldn’t have wanted to be left behind,’ Nerys agreed. ‘That wouldn’t make a marriage, would it?’ She couldn’t have defined what did, but the McMinns seemed to have discovered the secret.
Evan wore an old-fashioned pocket watch, and Nerys guessed that he was longing to glance at it. He would have a sermon to work on or important letters to write. She was surprised, therefore, that when Archie said he would go outside for a smoke, Evan affably said he would come with him. They strolled into the sunshine and sat in lounge chairs, Evan lighting the pipe he rarely allowed himself.
Myrtle put her plate aside and sat back. ‘Well.’ She smiled.
Nerys’s mind ran on what had to be done in the house before she could be ready to leave for the commissioner’s party. Diskit or the house-boy would have to be given very clear instructions about leaving out a cold supper for their guests, in case they were hungry later. Hot-water bottles were to be filled. Then she remembered her new cardigan, still unfinished. ‘Oh,’ she said.
Myrtle leant forward and touched her hand. ‘Is something wrong?’
Nerys would have liked to tell her. What did recognising a potential friend mean, if it didn’t include honesty? She said only, ‘I forgot a job, that’s all. Some sewing I was going to do before the party. Now I’ll have to wear something different. It doesn’t matter.’
Myrtle regarded her. Her gaze was shrewd. ‘There’s still time. Let’s go and have a look, shall we?’
Nerys didn’t try to protest. Myrtle sat on the bed while she showed her the cream cardigan. They agreed that it would be a shame to sew on the buttons in too much of a hurry.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Myrtle said. She went to her bedroom and came back with a brooch. She held it out and Nerys saw a circle of pearls and brilliants backed by a substantial pin. ‘You could wear this at the front, so, and it will hold the edges together, and it won’t matter if the sleeve buttons are missing for today. Look, you can turn the cuffs like this. It’s beautiful knitting. You’re very good at making things, aren’t you?’
A small cloudy mirror was propped on the dressing-table, and Nerys and Myrtle faced their reflections. Their eyes met as the brooch brilliants sparkled in the sunlight slanting through the shutters.
‘May I really borrow it?’
‘Of course. You probably think it’s insane to have brought jewellery on an expedition like this. It was my mother’s, and I like to have it with me. The necklace too.’ Myrtle touched the pearls round her neck.
‘Thank you.’
‘Good. That’s solved. Why don’t you have a lie-down now? The men are talking, and I should try to write up my journal.’
The recognition extended in both directions, then. Myrtle had seen her weariness. ‘The servants …’ Nerys began.
‘… will manage quite well, I should think.’ Myrtle turned back the coverlet. ‘Here.’
Nerys sank down, and found her new friend helping her off with her shoes. The bedclothes were lightly drawn over her shoulders, and the shutters folded to cut out the sunshine. She closed her eyes, and let herself sink.
The Residency garden was packed with a dense crowd of all the people of any importance in Leh, and a large proportion of the travelling merchants who would soon be departing for home. The party marked the last glimmer of summer, and once the decorous tea and sweet pastries phase of the afternoon was over, the talk and music swelled into a tide of noise. Local people and travellers were intent on making the most of the night. The commissioner, a short, jolly man with a scarlet face, had made his speech of welcome from a wooden dais and now circulated among his guests with a whisky-and-soda in one hand. The light turned moth-grey as evening approached, the first stars came out and the white tops of the mountains shone an unearthly apricot in the last gleam of the sun. An area in the centre of the gardens had been roped off, and a huge bonfire in the middle roared into flames as men doused it with kerosene and flung burning torches into its heart. More torches tied on tall poles blazed everywhere in the grounds, licking the passing faces with lurid tongues of colour as plumes of black smoke swirled into the air.
Nerys had slept deeply and she had to drag herself back through layers of dreams and what felt like centuries of time, even though it was less than an hour later that Evan was shaking her awake. Her head was splitting, and she forced two aspirin down her parched throat before trying to get dressed. The effort of putting on her clothes and pinning the cardigan with Myrtle’s brooch took almost all the strength she could summon. When she looked briefly in the mirror, her pallor was startling.
They walked the short distance to the Residency with the McMinns. Myrtle scrutinised her. ‘Are you sure you want to come?’ she whispered.
Nerys nodded. Myrtle accepted the assurance.
She had felt better sitting in the shade of the trees, smiling at people she knew and watching the parade of strangers in different national dress. But now she had to move away from the bonfire’s heat, and the coils of kerosene smoke that chased her sent waves of nausea to her stomach. Yarkandi men had performed a Cossack dance against the backdrop of flames, kicking and cartwheeling to the pounding of drums, and now their show was giving way to a procession of monks in traditional masquerade costumes. Two men in grotesque masks swayed in front of the blaze, followed by vultures’ heads, towering stags, fluttering peacocks and a paper dragon with thirty human legs, its body lit from within so it glowed like a dancing lava stream. The looming mask faces, all giant eyes and teeth and lolling tongues, seemed more real than reality. The dark mass of trees and prickling sky closed, then receded. The music pounded in her head. She was going to faint. Gripped by panic Nerys stared round, but she could see no one she recognised. The ground tilted and yawned, a giant bird’s head pecked in her direction, and she fell forwards into nowhere.
FOUR
When Nerys came round, it was to see a circle of Ladakhi faces peering down at her. Her head was resting in someone’s lap.
‘Tell them to step back and give her some air, for God’s sake.’
It was a relief to hear Myrtle’s voice, and then to see Archie McMinn holding back the onlookers. A bottle of smelling salts was waved under Nerys’s nose and she coughed violently. She tried to sit up and Evan’s face came into focus. He was kneeling beside her, distress in every line of his body. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
‘What for?’ Myrtle wanted to know. It was Myrtle’s lap Nerys was lying in, and Myrtle’s hand on her forehead.
‘Archie, make all these people go away, can’t you?’ she ordered.
There were fireworks going off somewhere close at hand, showers of crimson sparks falling out of the sky. The commissioner arrived, his face blooming even redder with embarrassed concern.
‘Mr Watkins, we’ll organise a stretcher party to carry your wife into the house.’
Nerys fought her way to a sitting position. ‘I’m all right now. Please let me get up.’
Several pairs of arms supported her, some urging her upwards and others restraining her. Nerys twisted so she could see Myrtle’s face. She looked straight into her eyes. ‘Help me,’ she begged.
Myrtle understood what was needed. She supported Nerys as she got to her feet and let her lean on her arm. ‘I think you can walk, can’t you? That’s good. Come inside the house with me.’
‘Nerys …’ Evan began.
But she didn’t have the strength to reassure him, not at this moment, or to smooth over the acute discomfort her fainting in public would have caused him. ‘I’ll be all right with Mrs McMinn.’ She tried to smile. ‘I fainted, that’s all. It’s nothing.’
‘Myrtle will take care of her, old chap,’ Archie said, in a tone that implied they shouldn’t involve themselves in women’s business.
With Nerys still leaning on Myrtle’s arm they began to walk slowly, the commissioner sailing ahead of them, like an ice-breaker cutting through the floes of the crowd. When they reached the veranda he explained that every guest bedroom in the house was occupied: would Mrs Watkins mind if he escorted them to his own quarters? He added that a runner had been sent to fetch the Leh doctor, who unfortunately happened not to be at the Residency this evening.
Myrtle put her hand on his arm. ‘Won’t you go back to your guests now, and let your bearer look after us?’
He looked thoroughly relieved at the suggestion. A moment later a servant showed the two women into a masculine bedroom with the shutters closed against the noise of the party. Nerys saw polo prints on the walls, a brass-framed bed, and a pair of highly polished tall boots with the knobs of boot trees protruding. Luckily there was a day-bed with a plaid rug folded on it, pushed back against a wall. She didn’t think she could have made herself comfortable on the commissioner’s own bed.
Myrtle shook out the rug. ‘Lie down here. Could you drink a glass of water? Or maybe some sweet tea?’
Nerys ran her tongue over dry lips. ‘You’ve been so kind. This afternoon, and now.’
Myrtle sat beside her, took her hands and massaged some warmth into them. ‘You need looking after. Is Leh quite the right place for a woman in your condition, even a missionary’s wife?’
Nerys couldn’t stop herself. She tried, drawing up her shoulders and clenching her jaw, but it was too late. The first sob caught in her chest and then exploded out of her. Tears rushed out of her eyes and poured down her face. She gasped, between sobs, ‘I’m not … I’m not expecting a … baby. I was, but I lost it.’ The words were half obliterated and she gave up the attempt to speak. It was a relief to cry. It was the first time she had wept properly since the miscarriage.
The other woman enveloped her in a hug, the warmest embrace Nerys had had for long weeks. Myrtle whispered in her ear, ‘Oh, God, how clumsy of me, how stupidly clumsy. Please forgive me. I just assumed. Was it bad? It must have been, and you haven’t properly recovered, have you? You poor, poor thing. Go on, cry all you can.’
She held on to her and stroked her hair, muttering soothing half-sentences, and Nerys went ahead and cried like a two-year-old.
At last, the sobbing slowed and stopped. Nerys lifted her head, revealing a streaming red face. The collar and yoke of Myrtle’s blouse were soaked, but Myrtle only dug in the pockets of her flannel trousers and produced a large linen handkerchief. She dried Nerys’s cheeks before putting it into her hands. ‘It’s one of Archie’s. Little lacy things are no good out here, are they? It’s camp laundered too, scented with eau de kerosene. Go on, blow.’
Nerys blew hard, and then sniffed. She realised she felt distinctly better. ‘I’ve been very feeble today, haven’t I? It’s not the impression I wanted to give, honestly. It’s not what I’m really like.’
‘Feeble, eh? Living up here, cut off all winter, the only British woman for a couple of hundred miles, single-handedly running a mission school, tra-la. Yep. I’d say that’s as weak as water.’ Myrtle was smiling as she thumbed the last tears from Nerys’s cheek. ‘Take me, by comparison. Lotus-eating half the year on the lake in Srinagar, then venturing out for a dainty hunting trip with just five servants, eleven ponies and my devoted husband. You make me feel feeble, my girl. Feeble and spoilt.’ In an automatic gesture she reached with her fingers to twist her pearl necklace.
Nerys’s stomach turned over. She realised that, as well as being covered with dust and grass stalks, her cream cardigan was hanging open. Her hands clutched the place where the brooch had been. ‘It’s gone!’ she cried.
Myrtle burrowed in the opposite trouser pocket. She held out the circlet in the palm of her hand. ‘It had come undone. You were lucky it didn’t skewer you through the heart when you fainted dead away.’
They looked at each other, and then they began to laugh. Myrtle comically scratched her hair so it stood up in a cocks-comb, and Nerys rocked back against the buttoned cushion of the day-bed. They were still laughing when the commissioner’s bearer knocked at the door. ‘Madam, doctor here.’
Dr Tsering bustled in, looking puzzled. He was the only doctor in Leh and, like the commissioner, he spent just a few weeks of the year in town. Nerys knew that he was overwhelmed with sick people clamouring for cures for all their ailments before the snow came – as if leprosy or TB could be cured with a brown bottle of pills – and she regretted that he had been summoned all the way to the Residency to attend to her trivial problem. She collected herself. ‘I am much better,’ she said.
‘Laughter very good treatment, ma’am,’ he answered. He unclipped his bag and uncoiled a stethoscope. ‘Now, lying back, please.’
Four days later Dr Tsering paid Nerys another visit, this time at the mission, and declared that she was fit to travel.
In surprise she protested, ‘But I’m not planning to travel anywhere.’
Myrtle’s company had restored her spirits. They had enjoyed their hours of what Archie McMinn called pincushion time, although the only actual sewing they did was to make simple costumes for a playlet acted by the children. Mostly they had played games with the smallest infants, and walked in the bazaar, and exchanged details of their contrasting histories. Nerys had talked about Wales, and startled herself by describing the low grey crags and mist-filled valleys with a longing she didn’t even know she had been feeling.
In turn Myrtle explained that she was the daughter of an Indian Civil Service official, and her childhood had been parcelled out between relatives in England and annual visits to India. ‘I didn’t see much of my ma and pa,’ she said succinctly.
Archie was a railway engineer, and in a few days’ time his annual long leave would be over. Myrtle and he were going back to Srinagar, and Nerys already knew how much she would miss her new friend.
Archie had been busy every day, paying off his hunting servants and pony men, making arrangements for the heads he had bagged, engaging more men for the return journey to Kashmir, and visiting the commissioner and the other Leh notables. But one morning, looking grave after returning from the Residency, he strolled from the mission veranda into the room where Evan’s predecessor’s old wireless stood. ‘It would be useful to get the BBC news,’ he murmured.
‘That wireless has never worked, I’m afraid,’ Evan explained stiffly. ‘Not in our time.’
Archie nodded, and unscrewed the back to investigate the innards. Within an hour he had established that there was nothing wrong except that the massive battery was flat. The Residency had a wireless and so did the Gomperts, so the most important news from the outside world reached them quite quickly, but for everything else the Watkinses had to wait for newspapers and letters to make their way overland. Evan agreed that it would be most useful if the mission’s wireless could be coaxed back into service. That same day, four coolies and a bullock cart ferried the weighty lead-acid battery down to the Indus, where it was hooked up to the water-powered generator. The next day, accompanied by a parade of dancing children, it made the reverse journey.
With the children still looking on, Archie went to work with pliers and a screwdriver. After a few minutes a sudden torrent of static burst out of the fretwork front panel. The startled audience screeched and fell over each other to get away from it. He twisted the knobs and the static dissolved into a babble of voices, and then the jaunty cadence of an English folk song. The children’s eyes widened with amazement.
Archie brushed his palms together. ‘There we are.’
That evening after Diskit had cleared the dinner plates, they pulled their chairs close to the dusted and polished set and listened to the news.
German troops had reached Leningrad, and the city would soon be surrounded. The European war was creeping closer. Even Leh no longer felt removed from the threat.
Evan slid a bookmark between the pages of his Bible before he closed it. ‘Nerys, I think it would be a good idea if you were to go with Mr and Mrs McMinn to Srinagar. Mr McMinn has kindly offered to escort you.’
Nerys let her knitting drop. Myrtle’s eyes met hers, and she read surprise in them. This was an idea the two men had hatched, without reference to their wives. Dr Tsering was evidently in on the plot too. To contain her anger she made herself count five stitches in her work, then asked composedly, ‘Why would I do that?’
‘You might enjoy a short holiday, and it would consolidate your strength before the winter.’
‘And what about you?’
He paused, then said, ‘We have spoken about this, my dear. I am going out of Leh to visit a few of the villages, and the more far-flung settlements. I must take the Lord to the people, not sit here expecting the people to come to the Lord.’
Out of the corner of her eye Nerys saw Archie McMinn stretch out his long legs. She resumed her steady knitting. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we shouldn’t bore our guests with this debate. We can talk about it later.’
Myrtle said gently, ‘I would love to have your company, Nerys. If it’s helpful for you to know that.’
But later, once Evan had brought the shaft of cold air into their bed, enquired if Nerys was ready and blown out the candle, he merely said, ‘Goodnight, my dear.’
She turned her head on the pillow and glared at his dark shape. ‘Is that all?’
He drew away from her, by no more than half an inch, but she felt it. That small movement told her everything. Evan no longer saw her as his companion and supporter but as yet another source of anxiety. He would feel easier without her, and he would be freer to carry the mission work out of Leh. He didn’t want to abandon her altogether, though. To send her off to Srinagar with the McMinns must seem the perfect solution. She could follow his thinking exactly, and all she could really object to was his suggestion that what she needed in order to recover from the loss of their baby was a lakeside holiday without him.
‘All?’
‘I don’t want to go to Srinagar. Thank you for thinking of it, but I don’t want to go anywhere if it means leaving you behind.’
‘Separation is one of the penalties of the work I do, Nerys.’
He was like a wall, she thought. A blank wall that shut out the view, and endlessly denied that there was anything to be seen.
She tried another tack. ‘What about my schoolchildren?’
‘I expect they will enjoy a holiday too.’ He sighed with the beginnings of exasperation. ‘I don’t know why you are objecting to the idea. I thought you would be pleased. You like Mrs McMinn, don’t you?’
‘Yes, very much.’
‘Then go and stay with her, enjoy a rest, recuperate. I will cover the ground between here and Kargil more slowly, and investigate the work that might be done in future, if we ever have more people. Then I will come down to Srinagar to meet you, and we shall travel back to Leh together.’
‘All this, before the snow comes?’
‘It is only the beginning of September, but if the weather happens to be against us the Lord will direct our actions.’
‘Do you really want me to go?’
The mattress rustled as he minutely shifted his weight. ‘I think it would be a good idea.’
‘Very well,’ Nerys said, in a cold voice that she didn’t want to acknowledge as her own.
Three days later, her bag stood in the mission courtyard beside the McMinns’ luggage, waiting to be loaded on to the first relay of ponies. Nerys handed out apples and dried apricots to the scrum of Leh children, not just her pupils, who were staring through the gate at all the activity. Diskit’s three grimy offspring were among them, and Diskit herself stood on the house steps in tears. She wasn’t wearing her headcloth. Nerys put down the fruit basket and went to her. ‘Don’t cry. I’ll be back in two months’ time. Sahib will bring me home.’
Diskit only sobbed more loudly. Nerys put her arm round her shoulders, inhaling the ripe smell of her hair. ‘Don’t forget your scarf. Always when you are working. Look after Sahib for me.’
Diskit wiped her nose on her sleeve and sniffed. ‘Yes, Mem.’
‘The ponies are ready,’ Archie announced, from beyond the gate, as hoofs rattled on the dried earth. Myrtle had put on her sola topi, with the muslin veil tied around her face, and Nerys had a wide straw hat.
Evan stood to one side, looking unhappy now the moment of parting had finally come. Nerys went to his side and reached up for a kiss. Awkwardly he knocked her hat askew as their dry lips touched. He stood back at once and patted her shoulder. ‘It won’t be so long. God bless you, my dear.’
She mumbled a goodbye, conscious that Diskit, the house-boys and the schoolchildren were watching, although the McMinns had tactfully busied themselves out in the street. The bolder children flung themselves at her, clasping her knees, and she bent down to hug and kiss each of them, instead of her husband.
Archie and Myrtle were mounted and Nerys’s pony was waiting. Archie’s bearer helped her to clamber into the padded saddle, then took the reins and turned the pony’s head to the road for her. She twisted round to wave goodbye. The procession moved off down the lane, past the chapel and into the street leading to the bazaar, leaving Evan’s solitary black silhouette outlined against the stone wall of the mission compound.
It was a cloudless day. As they wound the first miles along the Indus valley, Nerys felt heat strike through her straw hat, and wished she had brought cotton gloves to protect her hands from the blazing sun. After a time, on a high spur of land, she saw the prayer flags and brass spires of Spitok rising above the towering walls. This was the first of the great gompas on the route, and it was the furthest point she had travelled from Leh in more than a year.
Myrtle had gone ahead, but now she reined in her pony and waited for Nerys to catch up. Archie and the string of pack ponies were already far in the distance, enveloped in a puff of swirling dust.
‘Would you like company?’ Myrtle asked. Only her dark eyes were visible between the swathes of veil. ‘Or would you rather be left to yourself?’
Nerys looked up at the mountains ahead. The surprising strength that she had discovered on the long ride up from Manali seemed within her grasp again. ‘Company, please,’ she said.
Myrtle reached out of the saddle to pat her knee. ‘Good.’
They faced west, and rode on.
Nerys soon discovered that travelling with the McMinns was a completely different experience from her journey with Evan. At night they stayed in the rest houses set along the route, commandeering the places regardless of who might have arrived ahead of them. As a British sahib and a proper daughter of the Raj, Archie and Myrtle automatically took the precedence they saw as their due. They felt no compunction in ousting Ladakhi or Kashmiri travellers from the shelters, even on one evening a Muslim man, with a hennaed beard, who was accompanied by several veiled wives and half a dozen small children and babies. Evan and Nerys had always been confused and unwilling to impose themselves over other people, even the humblest. Whenever they came to a guesthouse, to sleep beside the road in their draughty tent had often seemed the easier solution.
The rest houses were often no more than two-roomed shacks, a living and sleeping room and an attached kitchen, and they were generally dirty and lacking any but the most basic amenities, but Sahib McMinn and his party were always greeted by the owners with extra civility and efforts to please. It wasn’t hard to deduce why, because although Archie demanded a full account of what was owing and didn’t overpay by a single anna, he invariably understood what the fair rate should be and handed over the money promptly and cheerfully.
Their camp servants always first arrived at the rest house, and by the time the McMinns rode up, their yakdan bags had been untied from the ponies and set in the room for them. Camp beds were erected because Myrtle refused to use the charpoys provided, saying they were alive with bugs. Archie always pretended to be dismayed by his wife’s fussy behaviour, but affectionate amusement twinkled out of him. There were plenty of warm blankets, and even linen sheets, which were unpacked and repacked each day. The McMinns’ servants bought food locally to supplement the supplies the pack ponies carried, and their cook made the dinners, which were served with plates and cutlery rinsed daily in a solution of potassium permanganate. Sometimes there was even the opportunity to take a bath. A collapsible canvas structure was erected and part-filled, and Nerys was able to sit in it and luxuriously scoop warm water from an enamel jug over her skin and hair.
At the end of each day’s journey, sitting in their camp chairs under the cobwebby guesthouse rafters, there was plenty for the three to talk and laugh about. Myrtle gossiped and joked about people they had encountered, or the various foibles of the pony men.
‘Do you think they have a rota?’ she speculated, about the Muhammadan and his wives.
‘No, I should think he favours the prettiest one,’ Archie replied. ‘I would.’
‘How can he tell?’ Myrtle wondered.
‘They don’t go to bed in their veils, darling.’
Myrtle hooted with laughter. She smoked thin black cigarettes with opulent gold tips. The first time she lit one, Nerys glanced at her in surprise and Myrtle blew out a long plume of smoke. ‘I was on my very best behaviour, you know, when we met. We were staying in the mission house. Will you disapprove hugely when you really get to know me?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Nerys laughed.
Last thing at night, the bearer brought in mugs of hot cocoa. Archie tipped a slug of brandy into his own and Myrtle’s, and raised an eyebrow at Nerys.
‘Yes, please,’ she said. This was a custom to which she had quickly adapted.
There was only ever the one room at the rest houses, but she soon also got used to sharing with Myrtle and Archie. In bed Myrtle wore pearl-grey silk pyjamas with a Parisian label. ‘Much better for travelling, you know. The coolies drop lice in the beds when they make them up, but they slither off the silk.’
She was right. Lice had been a feature of the Watkinses’ journey up to Leh, clinging snugly in the seams of Nerys’s flannel nightgowns.
With Archie’s rhythmic snoring and Myrtle’s breathing as its accompaniment, Nerys found that she slept better on the Srinagar road than she had done lately in the mission house. Every morning, as soon as it was light, the bearer brought in their bed tea. After they had drunk it Archie went outside in his dressing-gown to shave in daylight while the women got dressed, and then it was time for hot porridge, scrambled eggs and the cook’s delicious fresh bread.
They walked or rode all day, through tiny villages with narrow fields of ripe grain winding beside the rutted track, where bedraggled hens pecked at the verges and stray sheep went scudding ahead of the ponies. Banks of tattered rose bushes spread on either side, now hung with orange hips, like jewels sewn on devoré velvet. When the track rose out of the sparse villages, the immense land was rocky and barren. The mountains loomed over them again, shadowed in sepia and purple, the most commanding ridge sometimes crowned with the massive white walls of a gompa.
At Lamayuru, a few miles before the Fotu Pass, which was the highest point they would have to cross on the route, they stopped for the night in the shadow of the biggest monastery. It was a lowering, piled-up mass of white walls and red-painted wooden slabs, small-windowed, topped off with the squat domes of a dozen chortens with black and gold twisted spires that glittered like spun sugar. The ponies toiled up hundreds of irregular steps to reach the cluster of buildings clinging to the skirts of the monastery. Prayer flags danced against the blue sky overhead and Nerys was reminded of Spitok gompa, past which they had climbed on the road out of Leh. With a prickle of guilt, she realised she had been so busy with the small adventures of the road, and laughing about them with Myrtle and Archie, that Evan had hardly been in her mind. At this distance he seemed a dark, disapproving figure, in contrast to the light-filled days she had been enjoying.
At Lamayuru they were staying in the inevitable rest house, but this one was much bigger than the roadside versions because of the stream of visitors to the monastery. Nerys was shown to a room of her own, no more than a tiny stone slot with a single narrow window. It looked out over a huge drop, with black choughs gliding below the sill.
Their dinner that night was unusually subdued, as if the proximity of the monastery and the columns of red-robed monks quietened even Myrtle.
Afterwards, instead of going back to her cell Nerys went outside and, on an impulse, climbed more steps to the walls of the monastery itself. She tipped back her head to look at the great edifice towering above her, black against the curtain of stars. Patches of faint yellow light glowed like veiled eyes in a few of the windows and she shivered in the wind. She thought she could hear the rise and fall of voices, chanting a prayer. Archie had murmured over dinner that Lamayuru village was a bleak place to live because the tributes and food demanded by the lama to sustain the monks left too little for the villagers themselves. It certainly seemed a desolate place tonight, as she pressed deeper into the angle made by a stone wall to find a scrap of shelter. From somewhere among the tiers of ramshackle houses beneath her rose the sound of a dog howling. She tried to imagine what Evan could achieve in a place like this, offering the promises and threats of a different religion to people who would be better off providing for their families and keeping their rice and mutton for themselves.
All she felt towards her husband was an exasperated tenderness, and she wondered whether this diminished affection, against her own belief that what he did was futile, would be anything like enough to carry her through the years ahead. I could do it, she thought, and anything else he wanted of me, if we had our own children.
She was thoroughly cold now. The monastery loomed so high and dark it was as if it was going to topple over and crush her. She pulled her coat closer around her shoulders and made her way back down the steps. Archie’s bearer was waiting at the door of the dingy rest house.
‘Come now, ma’am,’ he called, and she felt guilty that she had kept him in the draught when he could have been reclining on his blanket with a pipe.
‘I’m sorry, Hari.’
He lifted the oil lamp and led the way up the wooden stairs, past curtained doorways to her cubicle. He lit the candle that had been left for her on a little shelf and stood back. ‘I bring cocoa, ma’am. Coming now.’
‘I won’t have cocoa tonight, Hari, thank you. I’ll go straight to bed.’ She wanted to close her eyes, and for daylight to come quickly. Lamayuru was an oppressive place.
After she had blown out the candle she lay listening to the darkness. There was a series of scraping sounds, probably made by rats in the ceiling. Wind gusted through the cracks between the wall and the tiny window frame. Then she heard another noise. It was no more than a woman’s voice giving a low cry, something between a moan and a sigh, followed by a series of rising gasps. And then, as a postscript, a conjoined bubble of laughter followed by a whispered ssssh.
Nerys twisted under her blankets and pulled the crackling pillow hard over her ears. She didn’t want to have to listen to Myrtle and Archie making love; there seemed too many things tonight that she didn’t want to hear or know or think about. Her own life seemed small, solitary and devoid of purpose.
The next day their route led onwards, over the high pass and through the town of Kargil. With Lamayuru a long way behind them, the travellers were in high spirits. More long but ultimately satisfying days passed, until only the jagged walls of the Greater Himalaya lay between them and the Vale of Kashmir. With the mountains in the distance it seemed impossible that their caravan could find a way to the summit via the Zoji Pass, but as they came closer they were able to pick out the crooked filament of a track zigzagging upwards. In one place there was a dart of brilliance as a mirror ornament or a fragment of polished metal on an ascending pony flashed the rays of the rising sun. Myrtle was reassuring when Nerys reined in her mount to assess the extent of the climb.
‘It looks harder than it actually is. Remember, you’ve already climbed higher than eleven thousand over the Fotu La, and on your way up to Leh last year.’
‘I’m not worried. I know we’ll do it. I’m just wondering what the view will be like from the top.’
Myrtle’s eyes shone between the folds of her veil. ‘Like nothing you could imagine. It will be like looking down into Paradise.’
This thought sustained Nerys through the long, baking ascent. Dust clogged her nose and throat and her water-bottle was soon empty. The sun rose higher, beating down on her head and shoulders. While she rode, her pony walked more and more slowly and she felt its shudders when the pony boy whipped its quarters. When she slid to the ground the stones dug up through the soles of her boots and the sun blazed fiercely. The jingle of the ponies’ harness set up a rhythm that was only broken by the occasional whistling of marmots from their burrows among the rocks. Black lammergeiers cruised the empty air spaces, lazily turning on their fretted wings.
The pass itself was obscured by intermediate outcrops, and Nerys thought grimly that they would be climbing for ever. Archie was far ahead but Myrtle matched her pace to Nerys’s. They exchanged occasional words of encouragement, but most of their energy was taken up with just placing one foot in front of the other.
As they mounted higher, Nerys began counting the number of bends still to be negotiated. There were seven, then five, then only one more.
‘Is this it?’ she begged Myrtle, dreading a false summit and a concealed cliff still to be negotiated.
Whenever she glanced backwards the wide brown desert of Ladakh had receded further, and she knew that they were crossing into a different country.
‘Nearly,’ Myrtle puffed. ‘Why must Archie dash ahead all the time?’
They came out on to a broad stretch of ground with chortens outlined ahead against the sky. Archie and the forward party were waiting for them. Down the slope Nerys glimpsed the picked-over bones and hide of a dead pony that must have fallen from the line of a caravan. It was a still day, but the air surged around her and she retied the strings of her straw hat.
They crossed the saddle of the pass, thankful for the almost horizontal ground, until they drew level with the chortens. The rough stone mounds were strung with hundreds of flags, faded or still bright, with ragged white streamers festooned between them.
Myrtle and Archie stood with their hands linked, silently looking west. Nerys came up beside them, and stopped short. Spread beneath her feet, unrolled like the most magical of carpets, was the Vale of Kashmir.
The folds of land swept up towards them, lower ridges cloaked with ranks of sombre fir trees and the higher ones bright with silver birches. Long seams of snow lay in the shaded gullies, and waterfalls laced silver threads down purple rock faces. A haze of warmth blurred the great hollow of the Vale, but she could see distant pasture lands, ripe fields, and the curves of a river. After the bare grey and brown landscape she had just crossed, the soft blend of a thousand shades of blue and silver and lavender mingled with pale green and gold seemed too sumptuous to be real. She stared at it for a long time, with the scent of rich earth and sweet water drifting up to her.
Myrtle had not been exaggerating.
It was the most beautiful place Nerys had ever seen.
FIVE
To get across the mountains from Leh to Srinagar, Mair’s options were to take the public bus, to find a group of people who were making the trip and needed another passenger to fill their vehicle, or to hire her own car and driver for the two-day journey. The buses ran every day, but they halted briefly overnight in Kargil and left again at one in the morning. Soldiers at the army checkpoints on either side of the Zoji La closed the road at five a.m. in order to leave the hairpin bends clear for army convoys, so official civilian traffic was supposed to be up and over the pass before then. She had seen notices pinned up in some of the Internet cafés offering spare seats for shared expenses in trucks or cars, but when she made her way to a phone office and called one of the numbers, she found herself talking (she was almost certain) to one of the Israeli boys who had been on the Changthang excursion. She made a hurried excuse and rang off. The option of her own car and driver had seemed by far the best until she went into the last travel agency that was still open for business and enquired about the price. She would just have to square up to the legendary discomforts and adrenalin shocks of the bus journey. She packed her bag, ready to leave Leh the next morning, and headed out for a last dinner at the best of the Lonely Planet Guide’s recommendations.
‘Hi there,’ a voice called, out of the frosty twilight, as she turned downhill towards the bazaar. ‘We were really hoping you were still in town.’
It was Karen Becker, zipped up against the cold in a duvet jacket, her hair bundled under a fleece cap.
‘How was the trek?’ Mair asked, as they fell into step.
Karen gurgled with dismay. ‘Full on, and then some. We went up high and there was snow up to my knees. Everything in the tent froze overnight. Bruno adored every second of it, naturally.’
‘And Lotus?’
‘She was good. But Lo’s always pretty good, and she likes the snow. Look, why don’t we meet tomorrow? I’d say come over tonight but Bruno’s got some work thing to sort out, endless phone calls to make, and that’s not easy around here, as you know.’
Mair did know. All foreign mobile phones were automatically blocked and the only way to make calls other than from a phone shop was by buying a Jammu and Kashmir mobile. She hadn’t done that, and she was feeling the lack of communication with home. The power supply was too variable to make email a reliable option either.
‘I’m leaving on the bus for Srinagar in the morning.’
‘Nooo,’ Karen wailed. ‘Don’t do that. You mustn’t. I’ve heard it’s a terrible ride.’
‘Well, it’ll be an adventure.’
Karen put her arm through Mair’s. ‘I’ve got a much better idea. Stay one more day, and come to Kashmir with us. We’ve booked a car. There’s room if you don’t mind sitting in the back with Lo and me.’
Mair hesitated. ‘What about Bruno?’
Karen twitched her elegant shoulders. ‘He’ll be fine with it. He likes meeting new people just as much as I do.’
Mair’s first impression of Bruno Becker had suggested otherwise, but she didn’t say as much. ‘Well … it’s tempting. I’m not so sure about the bus, if I’m honest.’
‘Hey, then it’s a deal. We’ll pick you up at your hotel, day after tomorrow. It’ll be early, I’m warning you. Bruno’s a complete fanatic about that sort of thing.’
It seemed that the arrangement was made.
Karen danced along the edge of the dirt road, waiting for a truck to grind by. ‘How was your week, by the way?’
Mair began, ‘It was interesting. I found out some history …’
But Karen was already crossing through the cloud of exhaust fumes. She waved back at Mair. ‘Great. See you tomorrow.’ An auto-rickshaw driver had spotted her and swerved to a halt. Karen leapt aboard without negotiating the fare. Mair continued in the opposite direction towards the twinkling lights of the bazaar.
With a day to spare, she went back to the Internet café. In an email to Hattie she described the discovery of the chapel and the ruined mission building, but only in the lightest way. Even to Hattie, she wasn’t willing to admit quite how intriguing the story of the shawl had become to her. She clicked send, while the power held.
Then she checked her inbox. The messages scrolled in, arriving at a pace slower than that of a limping man carrying a cleft stick. She saw one from Dylan and opened it with delight. Her brother wasn’t a regular correspondent, but his occasional emails gave her more pleasure than anyone else’s.
This time there was only one disappointingly short paragraph, but it promised that she would be interested in the attachment.
Dylan had taken away their father’s small collection of photographs, stored over the years in a couple of old shoeboxes in Huw’s chaotic study. He had said vaguely to his sisters that he would go through them when he had an hour to spare, and would scan the good ones into an iPhoto album for them both. It was the kind of assignment he excelled at. Eirlys had replied that she was grateful for the offer, because she’d never have time to do it herself. Dylan had smiled covertly at Mair, and she had been struck then by his increasing resemblance to their father. How unwittingly you stepped into your parent’s skin, she thought. Probably by now she was more like her mother than she would ever know.
Smiling, Mair set about opening Dylan’s jpeg attachment. At first the system refused to co-operate, but she kept trying until she succeeded.
She stared. The photograph was an old black-and-white snapshot, faded and creased. Three women were grouped against a background of water partially covered with lily-pads. The upper left-hand corner of the view was cut off by a diagonal of carved woodwork, so it looked as though the three had been caught on a balcony overlooking a lake. The woman in the middle was posing with her chin up, darting a look of frank amusement straight into the camera’s eye. Her wide mouth had full lips that looked black, but must actually have been painted with dark red lipstick. Her wavy dark hair was swept up at the sides and her striking appearance was emphasised by the wide lapels and exaggerated shoulders of her chic jacket. There was a deep shadow in the V of her neckline.
The woman on her left was much more girlish in appearance. She was in three-quarters profile, smiling with her eyes turned to her companions, and she had curled pale hair and a swanlike neck.
The third woman had been captured in a burst of delighted laughter. Her head was thrown back and she looked so alive and full of merriment that it was several seconds before Mair recognised her. It was her grandmother.
Gazing with increasing fascination into the joyful faces, Mair speculated on what Grandpa Evan could have said from behind the lens to make his wife beam with such clear happiness.
Or – perhaps the photographer hadn’t been Evan Watkins at all.
Whereabouts was that stretch of dappled water? It didn’t look like Leh, that was certain.
Then an idea came to her. There were lakes in Srinagar. Mair referred back to Dylan’s message. He had written,
This was loose inside an album of Grandpa’s India photographs, mostly very boring. Chapel people standing on steps, looking solemn, etc. So it caught my eye straight away. Who can Grandma’s happy friends be?
The longer she looked at it, the more enigmatic and intriguing the photograph became. The three young women seemed so absorbed in their friendship, as well as in the immediate comedy of the moment. Their faces shone with so much life, it was hard to believe that the picture had been taken almost seventy years ago.
Mair badly wanted to find out more about them. The possibility that the picture might have been taken in Srinagar only intensified her desire to get there.
The Chinese woman who ran the Internet shop frowned at her. Over each work station was a laminated sign that read, ‘No uploding No downloding’.
Mair pointed from the picture on her screen to the antique printer perched on a bench near the door, and made an imploring gesture to connect them. It wasn’t until she took out her wallet and started peeling off notes that any response came. After that there was an interval of button pressing and cable checking and muttering, and finally a five-by-four print emerged from the slot. It was murkier than the original, and the small size reduced the sheer joyous impact, but it was good enough.
Mair carried it back to the hotel and put it safely in the envelope that also contained the lock of dark brown hair.
The Beckers and their driver in the standard-issue white Toyota four-wheel drive drew up in front of Mair’s hotel at six thirty the following morning. Karen waved from the back of the car. ‘All set?’ she called. ‘This is going to be fun.’
Lotus was strapped into a child’s booster seat. The local driver, clearly already infatuated with the little girl, flashed gold teeth across the seat divide and patted her cheek. Bruno Becker stepped out of the front passenger seat. He looked at Mair with a glimmer of a smile that made him seem slightly more approachable.
‘This is very kind of you both,’ she said.
‘I’m glad you’re joining us. Is this everything?’ He indicated her holdall. Mair nodded. She carried her rucksack slung over her shoulder, with the shawl, the lock of hair and the photograph secure inside it.
‘You travel light. Karen could take a lesson from you.’ He swung the holdall into the luggage compartment of the Toyota on top of a sizeable pile of baggage.
‘Hey, it’s mostly Lotus’s stuff.’ Karen laughed. ‘Come on, jump in.’
Mair took her place next to Lotus. The child’s hair was a mass of pale spirals in the steely dawn light.
‘Let’s go,’ the driver said. They headed down the main street, past the prayer wheel and the long mani wall. Mair turned to catch a last glimpse of the town. Thick bars of low cloud masked the circle of mountains and the trees were iron-grey scribbles against brown rock. It was very cold, and the streets were deserted.
Karen tilted her chin to the front seats. ‘They’re worried about the weather,’ she announced across Lotus.
‘Forecast of snow,’ Bruno said briefly, without turning his head. ‘We won’t be hanging around on the way up.’
Mair settled back in her seat. At first the car ate up the miles of valley road along the bank of the Indus. Karen chatted, and Mair passed Lotus items from the inexhaustible supply of toys and books that surrounded her seat.
Heavy wagons and army trucks moved by in both directions, and as the road began to climb they passed the rough roadside camps of maintenance gangs who worked to keep the route open. Women as well as men carried stones on their backs or shovelled dirt into potholes.
‘What a tough life. Look, that woman’s got a baby on her back,’ Karen breathed. Two more tiny children sat on a rock, watching the steady grind of traffic.
To increase the general bleakness it began to rain, the swollen droplets bouncing steadily off the windscreen. The wipers hummed and the car slewed over deeper and deeper ruts. They came to a police checkpoint and the driver ferried their passports to a hut for scrutiny, while bored soldiers in camouflage swung their guns to marshal loaded trucks. Beyond the checkpoint was a sign that read, ‘Border Roads Organisation. The Enemy is Watching You.’ The highway ran close to the Line of Control between India and Pakistan, and the heavy Indian Army presence wasn’t window-dressing.
They drove on, heading steadily westwards as the road began to climb. It edged past huge precipices, the wheels of the Toyota sometimes seeming to hang over the lip as they bucked round yet another blind bend. Mair averted her eyes from the yawning drops, only to gasp as a truck howled round the corner and headed dead at them. Their driver never seemed to flinch as he steered past the oncoming metal with one inch to spare between solid rock or thin air. The road surface became so rough that the passengers had to hold on to the straps to stop their heads hitting the roof. In the midst of this, seemingly lulled by the relentless jolting, Lotus fell asleep.
‘Don’t they ever use tarmac around here?’ Karen groaned.
Bruno looked over his shoulder. ‘It wouldn’t last six weeks. This mixture of stone and compacted hardcore is the only thing that stands up to the weather and the trucks, and it takes constant maintenance to keep the road even this usable.’ That was the longest remark he had made since leaving Leh.
‘Uh-huh. Ouch.’ They all bounced in their seats. Stones sprayed from under their wheels and pinged out into space. Far below, Mair caught sight of the pewter thread of a river. She offered up a prayer of thanks that she wasn’t crammed into a forty-seater public bus with an exhausted driver at the wheel.
‘The road between Leh and Srinagar only opened to wheeled traffic in the sixties,’ Bruno said. ‘Before that it was a track, and the transport was ponies.’
‘However long did it take?’
‘It’s two hundred and fifty miles. A week would have been really good going.’
Mair added, after a moment, ‘In the eighteenth century it was impassable even on horseback. Porters carried everything on their backs, all the way from Tibet to Kashmir. Going this way the traffic was mostly wool, for the pashmina trade.’
Bruno turned to look at her. For the first time, their eyes met directly. ‘You’re interested in the history of the old trading routes?’
‘Yes.’
‘So am I,’ Karen interjected.
Her husband swivelled towards her and smiled. Mair realised that he was a noticeably attractive man, and the unease she had felt in the Beckers’ joint presence suddenly lifted. Although at first sight she had envied their intimacy she had begun to suspect that they were actually connected by mutual antagonism as much as shared adoration of their child. But now she thought she must have been mistaken. There was affection as well as amusement in Bruno’s smile.
‘I know you are,’ he said warmly.
Mair peered ahead as they swung round yet another corner and saw, through a slash in the clouds, a white wall of snow in the distance.
After an hour, Lotus woke up and began to grizzle. She pulled at her seat straps and turned her face away from the drink Karen offered her. ‘We’ll have to stop for ten minutes,’ she told the driver. ‘How far is it now to Lamayuru?’
The men shook their heads.
‘Still far,’ the driver said.
They pulled in at a roadside tea stall. Rain had turned the road to a wretched ribbon of mud, and sprays of filthy water were flung up by every vehicle that passed. The westbound stream was constant. Mair understood that every driver was under pressure to get up and over the Fotu La before dark or before the snow seriously set in, whichever came first. In the last few minutes the rain had become sleet, hitting the car’s windscreen in dismal splotches.
Their little group huddled under the canvas shelter. Lotus cheered up as soon as she saw people. Bruno put her down and she set about making new friends while Karen investigated the contents of the stallholder’s saucepans. She chose a thick stew and a ladleful of rice, and fed most of it to Lotus. More cautiously, Mair snacked on a bar of chocolate and a handful of nuts. Their driver stood in the doorway, muttering with the other drivers and surveying the weather.
As soon as they had finished, Bruno hurried them back to the car. Karen sighed. ‘What a shame not to be able to see the approach to Lamayuru. In the pictures, it’s set right up on the skyline like a fantasy castle, all spires and turrets.’
‘Karen, we really can’t stop at your monastery,’ Bruno said.
‘What?’
‘We need to get over the pass as soon as possible.’
‘Oh, come on. An hour won’t make any difference.’
The driver was sitting forwards now, his shoulders hunched close to his ears. The oncoming vehicles all had their headlights on and a long line of their little yellow cones was visible, snaking at an improbable angle upwards into the murk.
‘It will, darling.’
Karen was angry. ‘Listen, what is this? I know it doesn’t interest you much but this is the oldest gompa in Ladakh. It dates from before the tenth century. There are frescos, thangkas, like nowhere else. We’ve got to see it.’
‘Not this time.’
Silence fell, and Mair could feel the silent battle of wills. The wipers smeared away a ruff of sleet that was instantly replaced by another. Lotus quietly sang to her doll.
‘It’s just a sprinkling of snow, Bruno. Why are you so cautious all of a sudden?’
The driver broke in: ‘We go straight to Fotu La. Get down to Kargil.’
That seemed to settle it. Karen’s jaw set, but she said no more.
The going got harder but the driver pushed on. Snow was falling now, piling on the heaps of stones at the edge of the road. Fewer vehicles were coming the other way. Mair focused her attention on keeping Lotus occupied, and tried to ignore the precipices that must be only a foot away. It was much more alarming, she discovered, not to be able to see the worst and to be left imagining it.
She glimpsed another quirky Border Roads sign: ‘Are you married? Divorce your speed.’
They seemed to have been climbing for a long time. The wheels skidded once, took purchase, and skidded again. Karen’s annoyance at missing the monastery had subsided. Bruno and the driver conferred in low voices. They went more slowly, in the lowest gear, following the tyre marks of the vehicle ahead, which quickly faded to nothing more than faint grey ridges in a grey expanse.
‘Snow very bad,’ the driver said abruptly.
A moment later, on a steep incline, the Toyota’s wheels spun and the car began to slither backwards. For a panicky moment Karen and Mair’s eyes locked over Lotus’s head. Disorientated, Mair tried to work out on which side of them the drop currently yawned.
Bruno was already out of the car. He kicked a rock under one of the rear wheels as the driver leapt out to join him. Karen and Mair sat tensely waiting.
‘Get out,’ Lotus chirped.
‘Not now, honey. Look how hard it’s snowing.’
The men shovelled roadside dirt under the tyres but the Toyota edged forward only a few yards before it began to slide backwards again.
‘No good,’ Bruno shouted through the snow.
‘No good,’ the driver agreed.
The doors slammed.
‘We’re not going to make it. We’ll have to go back down.’
‘Go back?’ Karen cried. ‘After all this?’
‘It’s five miles or so back to Lamayuru. We’ll stay the night there.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. It’s either that or spend the night up here in the car. So you’ll get to see your frescos after all.’
Karen scooped up a double handful of red-gold hair and fastened it back from her cheeks. She flashed a grin at Mair, perhaps realising that she had been intransigent. ‘Sorry about this. But that’s travel, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ Mair agreed.
The driver made a complicated reverse manoeuvre, slithering in the limited space between rock wall and vanishing road. They began the crawl downhill.
Mair could see nothing except falling snow. She felt a queasy pressure beneath her diaphragm, like a weight of foreboding.
The darkness seemed impenetrable. Mair groped her way along the clammy stone wall, trying to remember which way she had come and wishing she hadn’t left her head-torch in the car. She reached a corner, tripped at a shallow step and almost fell, noticing that the air was even icier here. The way to the courtyard must be close at hand.
When her outstretched fingers finally met the door she felt for the iron ring handle and twisted it. The door banged inwards, letting in a blast of wind and snow.
She stumbled outside. The woman who had led her to her room had pointed out the guesthouse kitchen, but with the thick snow now masking all the low doors that enclosed the courtyard she had lost her sense of direction. She didn’t glance upwards, aware that the monastery walls loomed so threateningly overhead that they seemed ready to topple and crush the house on its precarious ledge. They would hardly have been visible now, in any case. Gusts of wind drove the snowflakes horizontally and even upwards, half blinding her as she ploughed through the drifts. She ducked under a ledge of snow that blanketed a rough porch, and saw a light.
Another door crashed open and she fell inside, shaking off snow like a dog emerging from water. She put her shoulder to the door and managed to latch it behind her.
‘Hello, My,’ Lotus called out.
The room was dimly lit by a single kerosene lantern. There were mattresses on the floor against three walls, and in the centre a small stove with a chimney pipe that oozed smoke into the chill, grease-scented air. The woman Mair had seen earlier was stooped in front of the stove, tossing pancakes of dried dung into its cold heart. Several men, probably truck drivers also stranded by the storm, sat hunched on two of the mattresses. They had been smoking and talking in low voices but now they broke off and stared at her. The third mattress was occupied by Bruno and Lotus. The little girl was zipped up in a padded sleep-suit and swathed in a blanket so that only her rosy face was showing. The whole cocoon of her was snugly held inside her father’s coat, her head tucked under his chin.
Mair felt distinctly envious.
Any warmth would be welcome in these circumstances, she told herself hastily.
‘Do a jump,’ Lotus begged. ‘S’il vous plaît?’
‘Lotus, it doesn’t really work indoors. You have to be outside.’
‘Go out,’ the child said, and pointed, as if this was so obvious it was hardly worth saying.
‘I’ll do one for you tomorrow,’ Mair promised.
‘It’s snowing, Lo, remember?’ Bruno told her. ‘We’re all staying right here, inside, where it’s warmer.’
He moved aside and indicated a space on the mattress to Mair. She picked her way between a tower of blackened saucepans and a wicker coop containing a dispirited hen to sit down beside him. The men resumed their conversation and the woman slammed the stove door.
Bruno said, ‘Karen’s got a migraine. She took one look at the bathroom and went straight to bed.’
The bathroom was a couple of yards away, located just to the left of the door. It consisted of a metal drum with a tap, a drain-hole in the floor and a pink plastic soap-dish with a cake of grey soap. The lavatory, Mair had already discovered, was in a lean-to on the edge of the courtyard. It was a long-drop, with several hundred feet of air yawning between the foot-rests. At present, snow was bracingly blowing up through the hole.
The guesthouse attached to the monastery was packed with a large group of German tourists whose bus had failed to get over the pass. The accommodation further down in Lamayuru village also was full of earlier fugitives from the weather, and the Beckers’ driver had done well to find this place for them. When they had first arrived, battling the ankle-deep iced mud of the paths, it had looked less like a dwelling than some roughly rectangular deposits of rocks and planks. But there were two slits of rooms in the warren that led off the courtyard, chipped into the rock like hermits’ cells. The driver had ushered them into this shelter and gone off to stay with his cousin, who apparently lived nearby. Any further victims of the storm would have to bed down on the mattresses in the kitchen.
Mair asked, ‘Can I do anything for her?’
He shook his head. ‘But thanks.’
Mair added, ‘It’s not exactly luxurious but it’ll definitely be warmer than spending the night in the Toyota.’
Bruno’s arms instinctively tightened round Lotus. ‘Yes. That would have been quite difficult.’
Snow as heavy as this would have built up a drift against a stationary vehicle. Overnight the car might have been buried, and escape on foot on a road as isolated as the one they had just travelled would have been dangerous, maybe impossible.
Mair shivered. Despite her show of optimism, she didn’t like this place, not for its lack of home comforts but because of the bleakness and the air of indefinable gloom that hung about it. But it was still a safe haven tonight. She glanced at Lotus’s pink cheeks. The little girl’s thumb was in her mouth. ‘We’ll be snug as bugs, won’t we, Lo?’ She smiled.
A square of sacking that masked an inner door was pulled aside and another woman emerged. She was carrying a saucepan with a feeble wisp of steam rising from the contents.
Bruno took the pan and thanked her. He sat upright and said gently, ‘Lotus, look, here’s your supper.’
He began to feed her spoonfuls of warmed-up baked beans alternating with chunks of flatbread. She wriggled half out of her blanket cocoon and ate with relish, smearing her chin with orangey sauce.
Over her head Bruno said, ‘We always carry a couple of cans of beans with us. Lotus will eat them day or night, whatever else goes awry.’ He dropped his voice. ‘We may find ourselves envying her later.’
A blackened cauldron had been lowered on to the stove. The two women squatted on the earth floor and began to slice onions, tossing them into the pot and exchanging remarks with the group of truck drivers.
‘It’s only one night.’ Mair laughed.
But Bruno didn’t laugh with her. ‘I hope you’re right.’
She thought how forbidding he could look, with his dark face and the black eyebrows drawn together in a thick line. He and Karen seemed so markedly different that she could only conclude theirs was one of those partnerships of opposites.
Lotus finished all the baked beans and caught at the pan to make sure that there wasn’t another spoonful in the bottom. Soot coated her hands and Bruno patiently cleaned them with his handkerchief, telling her that she couldn’t get into bed with Mummy and leave black handprints all over her, could she? He took an apple from his pocket, peeled and quartered it and fed that to Lotus as well. By the time she was on the fourth slow chunk, her eyelids were drooping.
‘Time for bed,’ Bruno whispered. He rearranged the child’s coverings so that only her eyes and nose were visible, before hoisting her in his arms. Then he slid a glance at the food preparations. ‘May I join you later for dinner?’ he asked Mair formally, but at the same time his black eyebrows rose in amusement.
‘Of course. I’d like some company,’ Mair answered.
While he was gone she sat propped against the wall and watched the cooks at work. The stove was heating up and the smell of boiling vegetables hung in the air. Condensation dribbled down the tiny window panes, but the kitchen didn’t seem to have got any warmer. She was thinking that she could easily have ended up here with the Israeli boys for company rather than the Beckers, and offered a quick thanks to the gods of Lamayuru for the lucky escape.
Fifteen minutes passed before Bruno returned. After brushing off the snow he took his place beside her on the mattress, watched by the drivers. He waited until they lost interest, then, from his well-stocked pocket, produced a flask. He rummaged again and brought out a pair of collapsible metal beakers, and waved a finger over them. ‘Cognac?’ he murmured, and poured.
They clinked their beakers. Bruno took a long gulp from his. Mair followed suit and the alcohol instantly glowed through her chilled bones.
‘Aaah. How’s Karen?’
‘She’s lying in bed reading one of her Buddhist texts. I put Lotus in beside her – she instantly fell asleep.’ He added, after a moment, ‘She has great reserves of power and determination, my wife, so she suffers when we have a situation like tonight, when there is nothing even she can do to alter the circumstances. In fact, Karen’s brand of Buddhism seems to involve a great deal of determination overall. You might even call it a need for control. I’m not quite sure how that aligns with the teachings. Technically speaking.’
Their eyes met. Bruno’s manner was extremely dry but there was a strong reverberation of humour in him. He was Swiss but also quite un-Swiss. That made him interesting as well as attractive, Mair thought. ‘Are you religious?’ she asked.
He shook his head decisively. ‘No. You?’
‘Not at all. But my grandfather was a missionary. He and my grandmother were out here in the 1940s, with the Welsh Presbyterian mission outreach to Leh.’
‘That’s why you’re here now?’
‘My father died recently. His parents were part of our lives because they lived nearby, but we never knew my maternal grandpa and grandma. My mother died when I was in my early teens so that part of the story was lost. I want to try to uncover some of it.’
Mair rarely talked about her mother, even to Hattie. Her instinct was to protect the bruise that had been left by her death. So it was startling to find herself confiding to Bruno Becker this intimate detail, and to realise that since their first encounter and her explanation of the somersaults she hadn’t told Karen one thing about herself.
She had begun to, she remembered, but something else had always intervened.
But Karen was a bright flame, and everyone was drawn to her. It was only the strange circumstances, the snowstorm and their temporary captivity under the shadow of the monastery, that were making Mair talk so unguardedly to Karen’s husband.
She took another hasty mouthful of cognac. Her hand was unsteady and the metal rim of the beaker rattled faintly against her teeth.
‘Go on,’ Bruno murmured.
She told him about the shawl, and her discoveries in Changthang and Leh. He listened attentively, his black head tipped against the stone wall and his eyes on her face. The cook measured some scant handfuls of rice into another pan of water as the scent of mutton swirled through the kitchen.
Bruno enjoyed the story of Tsering’s great-uncle, and the old man’s early memory of listening in amazement to the mission’s wireless set. ‘And now you’re following the shawl thread onwards to Srinagar,’ he said at length.
‘Yes. Who knows what I’ll find there?’ I will find out about the photograph, she thought.
He unscrewed the cap of the flask and poured them both another drink. She sipped hers, stretching out her legs and letting her shoulders drop. The long day of bouncing over potholes had left her muscles aching.
Bruno rotated his beaker, thoughtfully examining the reflections in the polished surface. ‘I am lucky in that both my parents are still alive. They divorced long ago and my mother remarried. She lives near us in Geneva now – she adores Lotus. My father is still physically strong but his memory has almost gone. My sister and I agreed that he would be safer and happier in a special hospital, which is not nearly as bad as it sounds, by the way.
‘When I went to see him just before we came out here, we were sitting on his balcony looking at the mountains and I was talking – I have to talk a lot on these visits. He likes to hear about the rest of the world and everyone’s lives, although I’m not sure how much of it he remembers. I was telling him about all the places we’d be visiting, and he seemed to be listening, nodding, the way he does.
‘Then he reminded me that an Indian friend of our family was originally from Kashmir. Memory is a strange commodity. He remembered the minute circumstances of the friend and her mother coming to Switzerland after the war, yet sometimes he can’t even quite recall who I am. He made me promise that I’d look up the daughter when we get to Delhi.’
Mair nodded, recalling how her father in his last weeks had travelled further and further into the past.
‘The mother would have been the same generation as your grandparents. She was a Christian, a Roman Catholic. Perhaps they knew each other.’
‘Is that likely? It’s a long way from Leh to Srinagar.’
Bruno sighed. ‘And that’s in good weather. Tonight Srinagar might as well be located in South America.’
‘I don’t actually know if my grandparents would ever have come this far west. But it’s not impossible.’ She thought of the photograph again.
‘It would do no harm to ask our friend. If we’re in Delhi at the same time, perhaps you could come with me to visit her.’
Their eyes met again.
‘I’d like that,’ Mair said.
They sat back, relaxed by brandy and conversation.
The languid cooking of dinner continued and a small girl made a circuit of the mattress seats, dishing out metal plates and spoons. Bruno got up once and went to look out at the weather, coming back with a grave face. ‘Getting out of here is going to be difficult,’ he said.
Deep snow would by now be blocking the mountain roads in either direction. Mair could envisage the scale of the work that would be involved in clearing it.
One of the drivers looked across at Bruno. He gave a shrug and an expressive flutter of one hand. ‘Very bad. Very early,’ he called.
Bruno nodded. ‘Very bad,’ he agreed. He folded himself on to the mattress again, telling Mair, ‘We’d have trouble dealing with a sudden huge snowfall like this in Switzerland, let alone here.’
Remembering what Karen had told her, she asked, ‘Are you from Geneva originally?’
Immediately his angular face lost some shadows and he leant closer, almost confidingly. Unwittingly Mair had touched something in him.
‘I have to live in horizontal Switzerland, these days, because that’s where my work is. I’m an engineer. But my home and my roots are in vertical Switzerland, in the mountains. I come originally from the Bernese Oberland, near Grindelwald. Do you know it?’
‘No.’ The claustrophobic room, the knowledge that they were all temporarily captive, made Mair long to be transported by a story. In her mind’s eye she saw a Heidi-picture of sunlit Alpine meadows and dark fir trees. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘My people were farmers,’ he began. ‘In summer they took the cows up to the Alps to pasture. In winter there was snow.’
She listened contentedly. She was warm at last, and Bruno’s description of home was familiar, not so much in the precise details but in the way he talked about the rhythms of farming and the small doings of rural valleys. She also clearly heard what he was not saying, in as many words, about his deep-rooted affection for the place and – she was certain – his longing for it. It made her think of her own home. She wasn’t homesick, as she had been in Leh, but rather sharply alive to the memories of a place that was lost.
Bruno was telling her how the Swiss mountain farmers in the first half of the nineteenth century had known the hidden ways across the high passes connecting remote valleys. They were poor people, and when the first tourists had begun to arrive in the Alps, the Beckers and their neighbours had discovered they could earn good money by guiding visitors. Until then, he said, no one had ever explored the peaks and glaciers just for pleasure. To travel to the neighbouring valleys to find work or to sell their cheeses or even to make a pilgrimage to a mountain shrine, perhaps, but not for the mere satisfaction of it, or even for the sake of some obscure scientific observation. But then the gentlemen mountaineers and amateur scientists had arrived, and ventured up in the tracks of the local men, and after they had conquered their peaks, they rushed home to describe their triumphs and catalogue their discoveries.
The news spread, and more and more of them flocked to the Alps. Soon the wealthy messieurs were arriving in their hundreds from all over Europe, and the Beckers were among the first to offer themselves for hire as professional mountain guides.
‘My great-grandfather, for example, he was Edward Whymper’s guide,’ Bruno said.
Mair had never heard of Whymper, and admitted as much. Bruno raised an eyebrow. ‘He was British. He made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, with his Zermatt guides. There was a tragedy on the way down and four men died, but Whymper himself survived. He came regularly to climb in the Oberland and he often took Christian Becker as his guide. In the next generation – that was in the twenties and thirties, my grandfather Victor and another client made an early attempt on the Eiger’s north face, only just escaping with their lives from a terrible storm. Victor saved the client’s life.’
‘You must be proud of that.’
He gave a quick nod. ‘We are.’
‘I don’t know any mountaineers.’ But now another memory came to her. ‘I saw a memorial in Leh, in the European cemetery. Nanga Parbat.’ She could bring to mind the name of the mountain, but not that of the dead man.
Bruno supplied it for her. ‘Matthew Forbes. He was a mathematician from Cambridge University, a brilliant young man.’
‘You saw the memorial too?’
‘I visited it, yes. That Nanga Parbat expedition was led by a Swiss named Rainer Stamm, and he was the man whose life was saved on the Eiger by my grandfather. The two of them were close friends from that day on.’
So she and Bruno both had their reasons for visiting the cemetery. The link between them seemed significantly strengthened by this association of history. What with this and the snow, and the altitude-enhanced effects of the cognac, she could almost imagine how she might let her head tip sideways, gently and slowly, until it came to rest on Bruno Becker’s shoulder.
And when she glanced at him she realised, with a faint shock of pleasure as well as a clutch of utter dismay, that he was imagining the same thing.
She levered herself upright and pressed her spine into the cold stone. Bruno shifted his position too.
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