The Kashmir Shawl (17 page)

On the third day of imprisonment, Karen wanted to take Lotus up to the monastery to be blessed by the lama.

‘No,’ Bruno said. His weary face tightened.

‘I want to.’

Bruno turned his head. ‘Mair, would you take Lotus outside for a minute?’

She grasped the child’s hand and they went out into the courtyard. Filaments of mist twisted over the rough roofs. The sky was nowhere; the world was thick and grey. Lotus was fretful and hung off Mair’s hand, refusing to walk another step. Karen came out to join them. Her white face was tinged with grey.

‘C’mon, Lo, back to Pappy. Wait for me, Mair?’

When she emerged once more, she begged Mair to come up to the monastery with her.

‘My husband,’ she began precisely, ‘won’t let our child be blessed. He calls what I believe in
mumbo-jumbo
.’

Mair remembered the praying.

Inside the inner door of the prayer room, Karen fell to her knees. In smoky lamplight, the rows of monks sat cross-legged in front of their bound texts. Their mumbled chanting was without beginning or end, rising and falling, under the ancient dim wall paintings of pot-bellied gods and beasts and the blank eyes of golden statues. The beams of this hall, at the heart of the monastery, were hung with dozens of mask-faces but all were swathed in blackened muslin because they were too terrible to behold.

Staring straight ahead of her, Karen was weeping. Tears ran down her face and she mouthed a prayer.

Mair cried too, out of impotence.

On the fifth day, the mist broke up. A filmy layer obscured the sky for another hour, and then a tentative blueness appeared.

Bruno rasped hoarsely into the mobile phone and at last he lifted his head. ‘A helicopter’s coming. We’ve got to get her down closer to the river where they can land it.’

Lotus was hastily bundled up and her father lifted her in his arms. A procession wound down the steps from Lamayuru village to the appointed place. At last, against the hazy blue, a black dot appeared. Mair pressed a scrap of paper with her email address scribbled on it into Karen’s fist. ‘Please. Let me know.’

‘I will.’

Bruno’s eyes were fixed on the sky. The Indian Army helicopter briefly landed, the Beckers ran beneath the rotors, the doors closed on them and they were lifted away.

Mair waited in Lamayuru for another four days, until the Kargil road was cleared for traffic. Then she and Gulam made the long day’s drive over the pass, through Kargil and onwards to Srinagar.

SIX

The two women picked their way between tables and parasols, passing busy waiters who swivelled under trays of cocktails. The pontoon rocked gently on the lake water and Nerys put out a hand to steady herself.

‘Here we are,’ Myrtle announced over her shoulder. ‘The Lake Bar, Srinagar Club.’ She slipped into a seat at a table for two and indicated its partner to Nerys. When they were settled Myrtle took out her cigarette case and lit one of her gold-tipped cigarettes. She reclined against the cushions, blowing out smoke through clenched teeth and looking at the throng. ‘The centre of the universe, to some people.’

‘Not to you?’ Nerys asked lightly. She felt intimidated. The tables were full of smart women, and men in well-cut riding clothes or the uniforms of the various cavalry regiments. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, and to be extravagantly at ease, laughing a lot as if they were all in on some enormously amusing joke. Myrtle had been greeted by at least a dozen people on their way in.

A white-jacketed waiter bowed in front of them and wished them good afternoon.

‘Are you having a cocktail?’ Myrtle asked.

Nerys shook her head. ‘Just some tea.’ Myrtle’s eyebrows rose and Nerys hesitated. ‘Well, maybe …’

‘Two gin fizzes,’ Myrtle ordered briskly. ‘No, it’s not the centre of the universe to me.’

‘Darling, where have you been?’ a voice cried. A woman swooped out of the crowd and pressed her powdered cheek to Myrtle’s. ‘You’ve missed a heavenly season. Such fun, honestly. Just look at you! You’re so thin – you’ve gone quite
jungli
. What on earth were you doing up in those mountains? Is Archie with you? Because I’m going to tell him just what I think of him, dragging you off into the wild for weeks and weeks like that. And
did
you hear about Angela Gibson?’ She lowered her voice and murmured in Myrtle’s ear.

Myrtle gently disengaged herself. ‘Frances, let me introduce you. Nerys, this is Mrs Conway-Freeborne. Frances, my friend Mrs Watkins.’

Mrs Conway-Freeborne’s glance slid over Nerys’s plain linen skirt and home-stitched blouse. Nerys felt even dowdier, if that were possible, under this fashionable person’s scrutiny. ‘How d’you do?’ the woman said perfunctorily. She spoke quietly to Myrtle again, but her avid expression contradicted the discreet murmur. Nerys only caught snatches of the conversation. ‘Bolted again,’ and ‘He won’t take her back this time, mark my words.’ She tried not to overhear any more and gazed at the view instead. This was only her third day in the Vale of Kashmir. She was still not quite convinced that what she saw could be real.

Behind her lay the windows and flags and awnings of the club, where Europeans in Kashmir gathered to eat and gossip and play. A little distance away was the Bund, the main street of Srinagar’s new town. It was lined with shops with strange names like ‘Poor John’ and ‘Suffering Moses’, selling silver and beads, papier-mâché and rugs, shawls and silk hangings. In the distance was one of the city’s seven bridges spanning the Jhelum river. A horse-drawn
tonga
clopped slowly across it, forcing a lone car heading the other way to a standstill. The river was
the old town’s central thoroughfare. It wound between wooden frontages and ancient stone
ghats
, and was crowded with barges and water taxis, and lined with markets. Nerys shifted in her chair. There was so much to explore and so much to discover, yet she was sitting here in front of another gin fizz hearing nothing but shrieks of laughter and titbits of gossip about people she didn’t know.

A snatch of swing drifted out of the club’s french windows as someone turned up the gramophone. She was struck by the incongruity of the juxtaposition – dance music with this dream landscape. Straight ahead of her, beyond the pontoon ropes, lay the lake. The water was shadowed at the margins by tall poplar trees where dragonflies ringed the black mirror surface, and out beyond the moored boats it was a vast sheet of dappled amethyst and silver. A sudden breeze fanned it and the reflections of the high mountains trembled and broke into fragments, their snowy crests scattering into white and pewter ripples. The late-afternoon sun was hot, but as soon as it dipped Nerys knew the evening would be deliciously chill and scented with charcoal smoke.

A pair of Kashmir kingfishers perched on a loop of rope, only a yard away. Their plumage was an intricate marbling of black and white. The birds returned her gaze out of unwinking eyes, rotating their black-crested heads in unison.

‘I am so sorry.’

Myrtle’s apology broke into Nerys’s thoughts. ‘Why? What for?’

Mrs Conway-Freeborne had gone away. Myrtle swallowed half her gin fizz and began to pleat the stiff cover of a Srinagar Club matchbook. ‘The club chatter, I suppose. Always the same. Always malicious, never charitable.’

Nerys had noticed Myrtle’s changed mood since their arrival. On the road she had been humorous, affectionate and curious about their surroundings. Here her manner was more brittle and her impatient attention danced too rapidly from one subject to the next. But there was so much else for Nerys to take in,
Srinagar seeming such a dazzle of sights and scenery after sleepy Leh, that up until now she hadn’t given this difference much thought.

She studied Myrtle’s face. Vertical frown lines marked her friend’s forehead and her wide mouth turned down at the corners. ‘You seem to know everyone,’ she began cautiously.

Myrtle hitched one shoulder. ‘It’s rather a small circle. The old faces passing round what they think is new gossip. That’s why I’m so pleased to have you here. You are, as they say, a breath of fresh air.’

The McMinns had made Nerys extravagantly welcome. Their home was a houseboat, moored under the shade of trees on the far side of the lake from where they now sat, but it was not the kind of houseboat that Nerys could ever have imagined. The local laws prohibited Europeans from owning property in Kashmir, but the British and others had neatly sidestepped this by buying or building boats to live in. Rows of opulent floating palaces lined the banks of the lake, and whenever the owners fancied a change of scenery, they had only to summon the barge men and have their home poled to a different location.

All the boats had fanciful names:
Cleopatra’s Delight
,
Maharajah’s Palace
,
Royal Pleasure
. The McMinns’ was called the
Garden of Eden
. It was a broad, imposing wooden structure on a flat barge base, painted a soft shade of pale toffee brown. There were twisted pillars and intricate wooden lattices, carvings and pinnacles, a deep veranda at the front, with a sweeping view of the water, and sparkling white awnings all down the sunny side to shade the windows. Within, every surface was lined with carved or inlaid cedarwood. Nerys had never actually seen a cigar box, but she imagined that this polished, sweetly scented interior must be rather like a giant one. Her bedroom contained a huge canopied bed and a miniature chandelier; it was hung with crewel embroidered curtains and lined with rugs. Her bathroom was as elaborately panelled as everywhere else, and pairs of dim mirrors reflected her pale nakedness
into infinity. Whenever she wanted a bath or tea – or anything else she could think of, most probably – Myrtle had instructed her to ring the little brass bell that stood on her windowsill. A moment later Majid, the McMinns’ chief house-boy, would tap softly on her door. Another much smaller boat, where the cooking was done and where the servants lived, was linked to theirs by a gangplank. All day long smoke rose from its crooked chimney topped with a conical tin hat.

‘Yes, ma’am? Hot water for you?
Masala chai
? Small
chota
, maybe?’

Nerys seldom rang. She didn’t want to give Majid unnecessary work to do, although she knew that if she even hinted this to Myrtle she would be scolded.

The
Garden of Eden
seemed just that, and it amused her to imagine Evan’s reaction to the decadent luxury of it all. But already Nerys was feeling anxious about trespassing for too long on the McMinns’ hospitality. She thought vaguely about looking for a room to rent, ready for when Evan arrived, perhaps in one of the tall wooden houses that jutted imposingly over the Jhelum river in the old town.

‘You
will
stay, won’t you?’ Myrtle insisted, as if she were reading her thoughts. ‘You’re looking slightly less like a ghost, but you’re not fit yet, you know.’

Nerys stayed in bed late every morning, where Majid brought her breakfast of rice porridge with delicious Kashmiri honey and fresh bread rolls. When Myrtle went off to pay a call or to shop or to accompany Archie on what she dismissed as some tedious business socialising, Nerys could spend hours reading, choosing books at random from Archie’s imposing shelves, or just sitting amid the deep cushions of the veranda, watching the light as it slid over the water. She already felt more robust, as if her body had been remoulded over a firmer set of bones.

‘I’m better,’ she protested.

Myrtle snapped her fingers at the waiter and pointed to their empty glasses.

Nerys had noticed how she would drink two or three strong cocktails, and then over dinner she would be at first brightly talkative, teasing her and Archie, then argumentative, and finally sleepy. In the argumentative phase Archie would put out his hand to catch his wife’s gesticulating one, as if he were trying to net a butterfly, and murmur to her, ‘That’s enough, old girl. Time for bed.’

Myrtle would snatch hers away. ‘It’s early. Put on a record, darling. Let’s have a little dance.’

Nerys said very firmly, ‘I don’t want another, thank you.’

Myrtle sighed and her frown deepened. ‘Oh dear. I’d forgotten how boring Srinagar can be. Don’t you ever get bored, Nerys?’

‘Not in the same way as you, I don’t think.’ You need something useful to do, Myrtle McMinn, she thought. From what she had seen so far, Myrtle’s days seemed to consist of telephoning, getting dressed to go out, going out, and then recovering from either the boredom or the alcoholic excesses of going out by undressing and wrapping herself in a silk kimono. What else
did
all these women do, apart from laugh and sip cocktails and paint their nails?

Myrtle scratched a line in the air to indicate that their drinks were to be put on the McMinns’ bar tab. She smiled at Nerys, squeezed her arm and let it go. The furrows were erased from her forehead. ‘You’re quite right. Archie will be home early tonight, and we should go and keep him company. I’m sorry to be so witchy. Frances Thingummy-Thingwig quite got to me, with her evil stories. Poor Angie Gibson wouldn’t hurt a fly, and if she’s finally left her horrible husband for good then I wish her luck. She deserves better. Now, let’s go. Am I forgiven?’

‘For nothing,’ Nerys insisted. They linked arms and made their way past the emptying tables. It was the soft blue time by the lake that wasn’t quite afternoon any longer but hadn’t yet become evening. It was the hour when Europeans went
home to dress for dinner before meeting yet again later at the club or elsewhere.

A little wooden bridge linked the pontoon to the stretch of close-mown grass in front of the clubhouse. As they crossed it, their heels clicking on the wooden planks, the first bat of the evening flitted from the trees and skimmed overhead. The lights in the club drawing room were on, and a group of people was silhouetted in front of the windows.

Nerys saw a man with a head of curling tawny hair, chopped off anyhow, unlike the tidy military crops of his companions. His face was sunburnt and his clothes looked as if he had shrugged them on without much thought as to whether they were even clean, let alone pressed. He had deep-set eyes, a broad chest, and although he was of only average height he seemed bigger than his companions. He was talking in a resonant voice, in English but with a noticeable foreign accent, and Nerys heard him demand, ‘Why not? The answer should be yes. In the mountains no is never an answer, my friends. We must ask again …’