The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  The man bowed. He was of average height but broad-chested and muscular, with a mane of tawny hair. She already knew where she had seen him before.

  ‘Would you like to follow me?’ he asked politely. He dropped his rope length into a pocket, sheathed the knife somewhere about himself and shouldered the coils once more. A couple of turns down the alleyway, and a lane thick with weeds brought them out to a wide loop of the Jhelum river. There were lights everywhere, in the tall houses and on the bobbing boats, and music gaily echoed over the water.

  The man stopped and bowed again. ‘My name is Rainer Stamm,’ he said, and held out his hand.

  They shook, his huge fist enveloping hers.

  ‘I am Mrs Watkins.’ This sounded cold so she added, ‘Nerys Watkins.’

  ‘How do you do, Mrs English Watkins?’

  He was laughing at her. Nerys withdrew her hand. ‘I am Welsh,’ she said.

  ‘I apologise for my mistake.’

  Swiss, or something, was how Myrtle had dismissed him. He wasn’t British, anyway, Nerys was sure of that. He was too confident, too taunting, with his wide smile. Altogether too … leonine, was that it? ‘Thank you for rescuing me.’

  Her handsome hero looked at her. ‘You didn’t need rescuing. You were looking after yourself. I just provided a moment’s diversion.’

  ‘How did you do that, by the way?’ Nerys pointed to an end of the rope trailing out of his pocket.

  ‘Ah, it’s known as the cut-rope trick. Would you like me to show you? It might come in useful, next time you lose your way in the bazaar. My house is just there. I could offer you a drink with the lesson, perhaps, now that we have introduced ourselves.’

  Rainer Stamm pointed a few yards along the ghat to one of the fine old Srinagar houses, built of brick and wood and decorated with carvings. Its gabled windows projected over the water.

  ‘Thank you, no.’ Nerys smiled politely. ‘I must go. My friends will be wondering where I am.’

  ‘Of course. I saw you at the club with Mrs McMinn, I think. Let me call a boatman.’ A moment later a shikara came gliding to the step where they waited.

  ‘Those little devils didn’t rob you, did they?’ he asked casually.

  Nerys’s hand flew to her throat where the neck of her blouse gaped. ‘That big one took my brooch.’

  ‘I want you to have it,’ Myrtle had insisted. ‘It suits you better than it does me.’ Her mind was made up and Nerys had known that there was no point in protesting. Since then she had worn the brooch almost every day.

  Rainer Stamm bent forward and gently placed his finger in the notch at the base of her throat. ‘I’m sorry for that,’ he murmured.

  Nerys stiffened, but he had withdrawn his hand. The boatman whistled softly between his teeth and she turned to the river.

  Rainer offered her his arm, but she made not to see it. She clambered awkwardly into the boat, which rocked violently, causing her almost to lose her balance and the boatman to call a warning from his perch in the stern. Nerys collapsed on to the cushions, irritated by her gaucherie. She would have to borrow the fare money from Archie when she got back to the houseboat. But, as if he had read her thoughts, Rainer gave the man a note.

  ‘Thank you again,’ she called, from beneath the awning.

  Rainer touched his forehead. He said crisply to the boatman, ‘Dal Lake, the Garden of Eden boat.’

  He wanted her to know that he knew where she lived. It would be difficult, she already sensed, to keep ahead of Rainer Stamm.

  The man dipped his paddle and the boat swished forwards.

  ‘Goodnight,’ the magician called, across the width of water.

  SEVEN

  The band struck up and the maharajah himself led out Mrs Fanshawe for the first waltz of the Resident’s Autumn Ball.

  Nerys watched from the thicket of gold chairs at the side of the ballroom. Mrs Fanshawe in silvery lamé, with feathers nodding in her hair, was entirely outshone by her partner, who wore a jade-green brocade frock coat with a massive emerald fastened among a cluster of lesser gems in his turban. After a respectful interval the floor slowly filled with other couples, European wives and daughters wearing elbow-length white gloves with their ballgowns, as Residency protocol demanded, partnered by a sprinkling of uniformed British and Indian officers, portly dinner-jacketed civilians, handsome men of the maharajah’s retinue, and representatives of the various upper echelons of Residency staff. There was a scent of dried lavender, camphor and face powder.

  The wives of the Hindu guests didn’t dance in public but they had been present at the dinner beforehand, splendid in silk saris that made them look like a flock of exotic birds. Nerys wondered if they had withdrawn to one of the Residency’s salons to admire one another’s cascades of gold jewellery and privately indulge in unrestricted gossip. Over the silver plate and crystal glasses at dinner the general talk had been of the unseasonably cold weather, the looming probability of war in Asia, the inconvenience of forthcoming rationing and – in whispers – of the latest Srinagar social scandal. Nerys had been in the city for only three weeks but she had already met Angela Gibson, the wife at the centre of the latest murmurings, and her husband had been pointed out to her at several gatherings.

  It was odd to realise how quickly you could be drawn into this vortex, even someone as socially marginal as herself.

  The thought of the whispers and gossip made her sit up and smooth the skirt of her dance dress, the first she had ever owned. It was rose-pink silk, made up for her by Myrtle’s tailor from a pattern in The Colonial Lady’s Fashion Companion, and she was wearing it tonight with a corsage and a pair of long white gloves borrowed from Myrtle. Myrtle had also rolled up her hair for her, dabbed French perfume behind her ears, and even applied some makeup.

  When she had finished, Myrtle had stood back to admire her handiwork. ‘Nerys Watkins, you have a mouth like a film star,’ she proclaimed. ‘If I were a man, I’d want to join the queue to kiss it.’

  ‘What?’ Nerys examined her own barely recognisable reflection.

  Myrtle snapped open her beaded evening bag and stowed away her gold cigarette case and lighter. ‘I said if, darling. I’m not that way, not even at my hideous boarding school, where such behaviour was not unknown, believe me. But if we all have to do without our men for much longer, who knows?’

  Smiling at the memory of this exchange, which until recently would have seemed deeply shocking, Nerys glanced round for her friend. Myrtle was in dull-gold satin, exotic among her powdery British compatriots because of her short black hair and scarlet lips. Naturally enough she was at the animated centre of a circle of interested men, but Nerys would have wagered her grandparents’ legacy – or what was left of it, after she had made the substantial payment to the tailor – that Archie McMinn had nothing to worry about.

  Rubicund Mr Fanshawe now foxtrotted past, steering a plump woman decked in dowager’s purple. Nerys wasn’t nearly high up enough in the pecking order to be honoured with a dance herself, but the Resident had greeted her cordially at the reception before dinner. ‘Mrs Watkins, welcome to Srinagar. Is Mrs McMinn looking after you? Will your husband be joining us soon?’

  She had explained that Evan was still very busy with outreach work in Kargil, but that he hoped to reach Kashmir in good time before the winter closed in. As she said this, she heard the warning of the cold wind, sharp with ice, that rattled the branches of the chinar trees in the Mogul gardens.

  ‘I’ll look forward to meeting him,’ the Resident said, in his polished way, and the line of guests shuffled forward.

  Nerys studied the pearl buttons at the wrist of her glove. What would Evan think if he could see her now, dressed up and lipsticked, slightly dizzy and fond with the Residency’s fruit punch?

  She told herself that, as he wasn’t here, it really didn’t matter what he might or might not think.

  The gold chair directly in front of her was twirled aside. ‘Good evening, Mrs Watkins,’ a voice said. �
�Our acquaintance did begin in an unorthodox manner, but maybe you will overlook that.’

  She looked up to see tawny hair and a wide smile. ‘Good evening, Mr Stamm,’ she rejoined.

  He didn’t wear patent-leather dancing pumps, like the other male guests, but a pair of serviceable black oxfords lightly rimmed with riverbank mud. The rest of his evening clothes were unremarkable, except that they were unbrushed, but still he seemed more notable than any other man in the room, including the maharajah.

  The band played a little louder, in a faster tempo, and the chandeliers sparkled even more brightly.

  ‘Shall we dance?’

  It wasn’t like any other dance, in her extremely limited experience of such things. His right hand grasped hers at the proper angle and with the required firmness, and she felt the warmth of his fingers through her white kid glove. His left hand rested precisely in the small of her back and its caress made her sharply conscious of the three discrete layers – in her mind she counted them – of slippery fabric that separated her naked flesh from his.

  They skimmed over the floor. When she finally met her partner’s eyes, she saw they were bright with pleasure and amusement. He was humming the waltz tune under his breath and he was so close to her that she felt these vibrations pass from his ribcage into her own body, connecting the rhythm of their steps so that they turned as one person, perfectly attuned and with their eyes still locked together. He was a good enough dancer to convince her that she was just as good.

  Nerys thought she had better say something. ‘Your rope trick was very clever.’

  ‘Thank you. You must let me show you some of my other effects.’

  ‘Are you a magician, then?’

  ‘There’s nothing magical about magic, that’s the sad secret. It’s all practice and presentation.’

  ‘Oh dear. And I believed that my blowing on the knot was what did it.’

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ he murmured.

  When the waltz ended they stood in a bubble of quiet, hands clasped, until the next began. They chatted now as they danced, like friends.

  It was a little while – or perhaps a long time – later that Nerys noticed Myrtle watching them from the edge of the floor, her head cocked to one side and the light catching her diamond dress clips.

  ‘We have attracted the attention of your chaperone,’ Rainer Stamm said.

  Nerys drew back from him, pretending to be offended. ‘Mr Stamm, I’m a married woman. I have no need of a chaperone.’

  His laugh rose from the same place as the humming. ‘Won’t you please call me Rainer?’

  ‘Yes, Rainer.’

  ‘Nerys,’ he repeated softly, fitting the syllables to the music. ‘So, Nerys …’

  With a catch on the r and a sibilant finish, she thought his pronunciation made her prosaic name sound beautiful. ‘May I ask you something?’ she began, and he inclined his head even closer. ‘The children I was with when you rescued me the other evening, the smallest ones, did you see them?’

  ‘I didn’t rescue you. But, yes, I saw them.’

  ‘I’d been at their house because they were trying to sell me a shawl. They’re very poor.’

  ‘Many people in Srinagar are very poor.’

  ‘I know that. It just happened that this family found me, and I feel that I let them down.’

  In the intervening days, she had thought a good deal about the little family and their one bare room, the girl’s sharp-faced persistence and her mother’s exhausted smile.

  ‘What is it you want to do for them, Nerys?’

  ‘I’m a missionary’s wife,’ she began.

  Rainer spun her into a turn a little faster than necessary and his hand weighted her spine. ‘Are you? So you want to convert them, is that it?’

  ‘No. It’s not that I don’t support my husband’s mission, of course, but I don’t have quite the same … the same desire to save souls.’

  ‘Assuming that they are not already saved by a different route?’

  ‘Yes, if you like. Last year we lived in Leh.’

  He looked at her and she noticed now that his eyes were the colour of barley sugar. ‘I know Leh.’

  ‘I taught the school there. I don’t have any illusions about the value of what I was doing, but it was better for the children than nothing at all. They were fed a decent meal, and we played games and sang.’

  ‘There are schools in Srinagar.’

  She sighed. ‘Yes. Of course there are.’

  Another dance was ending and there was a drift of people towards the supper room. Nerys caught sight of the girl Myrtle and she had met at the club – Caroline Bowen, that was her name – standing in the centre of the room. There were two bright red patches on her cheekbones. Her partner was a tall, conspicuously handsome and autocratic-looking young Kashmiri man, who now gave her an exaggerated bow and stepped backwards.

  Nerys felt the minute disturbance of the air as Rainer’s fingers traced her spine without actually touching it. She had to make herself concentrate on his words as his other hand gently released hers.

  ‘It sounds as if these people are pashmina-fibre spinners. The sad truth is that the traditional work they contribute to, kani shawl production, is beautiful and slow and no longer much sought after. The mills in England and Scotland can reproduce the old designs much more cheaply, and they turn out Kashmir-look shawls for a fraction of the price. The goods are exported back east, and the local people are squeezed out of the market.’

  Kani: that was what the child had kept saying.

  Nerys glanced round the room, at the wives, the bold, flirtatious girls and all their conscious displays of fashion, probably not quite the latest thing – even she was aware of that – because of the distance from Europe and the demands of the war but, still, there was so much money here.

  ‘Are you rich, Nerys?’ Rainer was asking.

  She shook her head. ‘The opposite.’

  His face softened and she noticed the pale creases around his lips and eyes where the sun hadn’t quite reached. ‘Maybe there is something you could do for this family. I am too distracted to talk about it now, watching out for the cavalry officer who’s going to pounce at any second and claim you for his partner.’

  ‘I don’t know any cavalry officers.’

  ‘I am relieved to hear it. May I escort you to supper, madam?’

  Nerys took the arm he held out. She felt giddy from the way their connection was racing ahead of her, hurdling the fences of convention and galloping towards – she didn’t know where or what. She must tell Rainer that Evan would soon be arriving in Srinagar and make it clear that they planned to return to Leh, most probably now in the spring, to continue the work of the Nonconformist outreach there. That would be quite proper.

  There was a sudden disturbance in the centre of the room.

  A girl’s voice had been raised briefly and now there was a whisper as the crowd parted.

  Nerys first saw the aquiline man with the imperious bearing, smiling in his formal long silk coat. Then came Caroline Bowen, her head down to hide her flushed face. She was walking away from him so fast that the heel of her shoe snagged the train of her dress and she almost stumbled. Nerys caught her arm and held her as she passed, and they swayed awkwardly before the girl regained her balance. ‘So sorry,’ she cried. She looked as if she might burst into tears or into a hoot of laughter, as if she didn’t know which way her emotions might swing.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Nerys asked.

  ‘Perfectly,’ she insisted, with an air of wild gaiety. ‘Perfectly. Hot, you know. Fresh air.’ She fanned her fingers in front of her face and broke away from them both.

  ‘Let me come with you,’ Nerys said. Making her way out of a knot of watching faces, some smirking, some concerned, others flatly curious, came Myrtle. They fell in on either side of Caroline and the three women swept out of the room. Nerys just had time to glance back over her shoulder at Rainer, who calmly nodded.

  In the
Residency’s wide entrance hallway there were fewer inquisitive onlookers. Myrtle steered Caroline’s gloved elbow. ‘You know the house. Where can we go that’s private?’

  The girl hesitated. She looked much closer to tears than hysterical laughter now. ‘I can’t think. Wait a minute – there’s the salon.’

  She led the way. A closed door was guarded by a Residency servant in scarlet livery, but he bowed respectfully and opened it for them as soon as he recognised Caroline.

  The Residency salon was a replica of an English country-house drawing room. There were sofas with chintz covers, backed by tables piled with books and magazines. A grand piano stood in the curtained window bay and only the flowers, scarlet cannas, puckered cockscombs and vivid gladioli, instead of sweet peas and delphiniums, gave a clue that this was not the home counties. Myrtle steered their charge to one of the sofas and sat her down. At once Caroline’s whole body began to shiver. She put her hands up to her face and smothered a sob as tears ran down her cheeks and soaked into her gloves.

  Myrtle took hold of her shoulders and briskly shook her. ‘Listen to me. You cannot, you must not, make a spectacle of yourself like this. Never again. Do you understand me? However bad it is – and you’d better tell us right now just how bad – you have to keep up public appearances. That is your job. Your husband is an Indian Army officer, you are a family friend of the Fanshawes. At the very least you owe them all dignified behaviour. You owe yourself much more than that, incidentally.’

  The girl’s sobs grew louder. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she choked. ‘I love him.’

  Myrtle sighed. She patted Caroline’s silky pale shoulder and waited while the storm of sobbing reached its peak and then showed signs of blowing itself out. She shook a starched handkerchief out of her evening bag and handed it to her.

  ‘Should I go?’ Nerys murmured.

  ‘Yes,’ Caroline gulped.