by Rosie Thomas
‘How divine to see you both. Are you going out to tea? Would you like a lift?’
Caroline told Nerys that she jumped six inches in the air, absolutely certain that she had been resting with her hand on the top of her bulge. The woman was staring at their unconventional turn-out. It was only through Myrtle pretending to be ill, claiming that she was going to be sick or perhaps faint, that they managed to make their escape into the crowds.
‘Our driver is waiting. Do give my best wishes to Mrs Dunkeley,’ Caroline called over her shoulder, adding, ‘That poisonous witch,’ for only Myrtle to hear.
Myrtle told Nerys, ‘Delhi’s too dangerous. There are too many people with nothing to occupy them but gossip. Unless Caroline spends the next three months in purdah inside the Garden of Eden, sooner or later someone we know will catch a glimpse of her and within minutes the entire Empire will hear of it.’
Nerys agreed. ‘We’ll think of something,’ she said.
At eleven o’clock sharp on Christmas Eve, in crackling cold under a colourless sky, two teams assembled on a swept-clean expanse of lake ice directly in front of the Garden of Eden. Rainer’s idea was a cricket match.
The Residency staff seized on his scheme with enthusiasm, and had in the end taken it over from him.
‘After all, I am only Swiss. What do I know of team sports?’ Rainer murmured.
The British team was made up of the handful of young men who represented the wartime skeleton of diplomatic staff in the city, some Residency bearers, and the very few army officers who had managed a few hours’ Christmas leave. The team captain was Mr Fanshawe. The Srinagar side was captained by Rainer’s Pandit friend, the university professor, who was a passionate cricketer. He had assembled an impressive-looking team of colleagues and students, Muslim as well as Hindu. The wicket-keeper was a majestic Sikh.
Stumps and balls had been extracted from the Residency stores and the players warmed up with sprints on the pitch. Most of them wore cricket whites over many layers of woolly insulation, and the effect was of twenty-two very fat men squeezed into small boys’ clothes. There had been some difficulty over how to embed the stumps in the ice, but Rainer produced a tool designed for fixing ropes into glaciers and bored six neat holes of the precise depth and diameter required. He filled in the waiting time by juggling with the ball and some apples borrowed from one of the vendors who had eagerly crowded down to the boundary. The Srinagar side won the toss and elected to bowl, and Mr Fanshawe called out to him, ‘Now then, none of your magic tricks with that ball, Mr Stamm.’
‘For that you will have to wait until tomorrow, sir.’
The veranda of the Garden of Eden served as the pavilion, and it was packed with batsmen and spectators. Inside the crowded houseboat Majid and his helpers served hot toddies, fried pakoras and plates of mince pies. Under Majid’s sceptical eye Nerys had managed to bake the pies in the oven of the kitchen boat, in between the long hours of rehearsal that Rainer insisted upon.
‘How is the magic going?’ Myrtle enquired.
‘Actually, it’s hell. Really hard work, mental and physical, and I’m not allowed even a flicker of a mistake.’
‘We’re all anticipating quite a spectacle.’
Nerys pulled a face of extreme apprehension.
Rainer put on a white coat, oddly matched with a pair of crampons, and crunched out to the umpire’s position midwicket. He produced a tin whistle out of the air and blew it to signal the start of the game.
The cricket match had drawn a large crowd. The boundary was ringed with food-and chai-sellers, their glowing braziers supported on bricks. There was a strong smell of spiced mutton and delicious bread. Men jostled each other to get the best view and a few veiled women strolled in inquisitive groups over the ice from the bank. Children screamed and raced each other until the first ball sailed overhead for a six and everyone scattered. The biggest boys chased the fielder as he skidded after the flying ball.
Some of Mrs Fanshawe’s friends and the club wives had persuaded tonga drivers to edge their vehicles on to the ice and now they sat under fur wraps beneath the tonga canopies, applauding the batsmen as they slithered between the wickets. Mrs Fanshawe herself sat in a large wicker chair like a throne.
In the background the horses blew into their nose-bags, clouded breath rising as their harnesses jingled. The drivers cheered wildly with everyone else when the Residency third secretary, the star batsman, was clean bowled.
Every single person present was so heavily wrapped and scarved against the cold that they looked like dumplings on legs, taking careful steps over the slippery surface. Caroline’s cheeks glowed. The end of her nose and the tips of her earlobes were bright pink. ‘What fun,’ she called to Nerys.
There was a howl as Mr Fanshawe was spectacularly caught in the slips. The fielder skidded over the ice on his belly, the ball triumphantly held aloft. The Residency team was crumbling under fierce pressure from the professor’s eleven. It had been agreed that the match was to consist of just twelve overs each side, and faced with the need to score quickly, the batsmen were risking everything. In rapid succession they pulled on their gloves and descended the steps of the houseboat, striding out to the wicket with bat tucked manfully under one arm. Three minutes later they would make the return journey, raising their caps to the Resident’s wife. More familiar than Nerys with the rules of village cricket, Myrtle, Caroline and all the other wives laughed and clapped at this absurd version of the game. More hot toddies and the sherry decanter circulated freely.
Every time another man was out, the players and spectators on the ice leapt and yelled, punching the air and hugging one another with glee.
‘Most unsporting,’ tutted Mrs Fanshawe.
Small boys glissaded across the wicket and Rainer chased them off. At the end of the twelfth over, the scorer chalked on the blackboard propped against the houseboat steps, British Resident’s XI, 32 for 8.
By the interval, in which Majid and his helpers served Christmas cake, with the option of tea or more alcohol, the party had become thoroughly festive.
‘Such a clever idea. You are a genius,’ Myrtle said to Rainer, and Nerys felt the glow of reflected glory. Rainer accepted the praise as his due and went crunching out again to resume his umpiring duties.
The Srinagar opening batsman was out first ball. There was a roar of dismay. Mr Fanshawe, in the deep field, permitted himself a tiny smile. The new batsman, magnificent in an enormous pair of blindingly white pads, was the professor. He made his slow way to the wicket, took his position and hit a six. Three balls later, he did the same again.
Even Nerys found herself edging to the front of the crowd. The sun now emerged as a flat disc of silver, striking rainbow glimmers off the tips of icicles. Myrtle and Caroline excitedly nudged beside her and, shoulder to shoulder, they made an insulated wall of scarves and pherans.
The game didn’t last much longer. The professor hit his sixth six and a forest of arms shot into the air, with a cheer and a drumming of feet ecstatic enough to be welcoming independence for Kashmir. The players streamed back across the ice, the fielders’ cold-nipped faces beaming with pleasure. The vendors immediately closed up their tiny stalls and pushed the braziers to the bank.
‘Bad luck,’ called the professor, from amid a crowd of supporters.
‘Jolly well done,’ Mr Fanshawe replied, as the scorer chalked up Professor Pran’s XI, 36 for 1. ‘We must make this a regular event whenever we have ice. Good show, Mr Stamm.’
Rainer bowed, and Nerys wondered how much longer it would be before the Nanga Parbat permit was granted.
Majid was making another circuit with the drinks, but most of the players and guests were beginning to take their leave. Everyone wished each other a very merry Christmas.
‘So pleasing to see the men enjoying a game, Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Sikhs all together, don’t you think?’ Mrs Fanshawe said, as she stepped into the Resident’s flagged car.
‘If only
religious understanding and mutual tolerance were quite as simple as she is,’ Rainer murmured, in Nerys’s ear.
For the last few minutes he had been in an animated conversation with the Sikh wicket-keeper. His eyes glittered. ‘Come with me,’ he said. He took her arm and steered her towards the bank.
Two of the waiting tonga drivers had harnessed up again and drawn their vehicles behind a line gouged in the ice. The wicket-keeper leapt into one as Rainer handed Nerys into the other. The drivers brandished their whips and the horses’ breath rose in clouds. The tongas creaked and strained and impatient hoofs clattered on the ice. A scowling man in a flat Pathan cap took his place with one foot on either side of the line and raised his arm.
‘What’s going on?’ Nerys demanded. Her voice was sharp with alarm.
Rainer settled back in the creased leather seat. ‘A small wager. Look at our horse – he’s a fine specimen.’
‘What?’
The man’s arm dropped. The drivers whipped up and the horses started off at such a speed that Nerys was flung backwards. Rainer circled her with one arm.
‘You have a ringside seat. It’s a race to the other side and back.’
The two horses reached a gallop, their nailed shoes sending up showers of chipped ice. It was incredible that neither of them skidded. The old tongas swayed and groaned in protest at the flying speed. Nerys’s hands covered her mouth as the wind flayed her cheeks. She didn’t know whether to scream or weep with terror. Rainer only slid to the edge of the seat, urging their driver to go even faster. As they reached the far bank the man reined in, and as soon as the pace slackened Rainer jumped out. The instant his feet smashed on to the ice he was running. Reaching the bank, he seized a branch from the old mulberry tree that grew there and raced back again. Waving his own branch, their opponent was only three seconds behind them as they wheeled for the opposite shore.
They were heading back towards the houseboats, following the arrow of their outbound tracks. The thrill of the race surged through her but at that moment Nerys heard a crack like a pistol shot. She felt their horse check itself and almost stumble. Her eyes were stinging with cold but she saw huge webs of fissures radiating ahead of them as the ice started to give way under the tonga wheels.
‘Faster,’ Rainer howled. He bounded forwards to thump the driver between his shoulder-blades. ‘Go faster, man. It’s the only way.’
The whip flailed and somehow the horse recovered itself and galloped on. In their wake, icy water welled up and flooded like pools of quicksilver to cover the cracks. Off to one side the other driver had seen their difficulty and veered aside to the safety of thicker ice. Rainer knew that the race was theirs if they could outpace the ice breaking up, and the horse instinctively sensed it too. It was tiring, its head plunging from side to side, but it kept going as the driver’s whip stung its lathered flanks. Long seconds later, they floundered to the margin of safer ice and the mirrors of water lay behind them.
The small crowd of remaining guests had been watching, transfixed by horror. Rainer’s winning tonga drew up and the horse shuddered to a standstill, its hoofs splayed and head hanging piteously. Rainer triumphantly brandished the winner’s mulberry branch but everyone was too shocked to applaud. Myrtle came forward and took Nerys’s arms as her trembling legs almost gave way on the tonga step. ‘You’re all right now. There was a moment when I was afraid you weren’t going to be,’ she murmured to her.
‘Me too,’ Nerys gasped.
‘Nothing venture. We won, didn’t we?’ Rainer returned. He took out a roll of banknotes and began to count money into their driver’s outstretched hand. Nerys patted the horse’s sweat-blackened side and made her unsteady way back to the Garden of Eden.
The other horse trotted up and Rainer beamingly shook hands with his vanquished opponent.
Myrtle was still outside, saying goodbye to the shocked stragglers, when Rainer shouldered his way into the saloon, seeming too large and too elated for the confined space.
Nerys rounded on him, anger making her cheeks blaze. ‘What did you think you were doing? We could all have drowned.’
‘I know,’ he whispered to her, coming so close that his breath was hot on her face. ‘But we didn’t, and you were excited, weren’t you? Don’t pretend you’re not a hundred times more alive at this moment than you felt an hour ago.’
It was true. She was aware of every square inch of her own skin, and every detail of her surroundings. She was minutely aware of the vivid colours of Myrtle’s silk cushions, of the breath flooding her lungs, the sweat of fear that was cooling the nape of her neck.
Life was precious, every gleam in the wood panelling, each tiny pucker of fabric, was exquisitely beautiful, and when she looked up at Rainer he caught her shoulders and drew her even closer. ‘You see? You do feel it. You didn’t faint or scream or make any female display. You don’t need cushions, or allowances made, or a man who will protect and diminish you. I knew it. We have the same spirit, and I recognised you the first time I saw you.’
Their mouths touched for an instant. Longing for him raced through Nerys’s veins, flooding after the surges of fear and the sweet thrill of finding herself alive.
It was only Myrtle coming up the steps and the sound of her footsteps kicking the ice off the veranda that forced them apart. Nerys was struggling to breathe as Rainer stepped away.
‘I think the match was enjoyable, don’t you?’ he said smoothly to Myrtle.
‘It wouldn’t have been an enjoyable day if my best friend had drowned in front of my eyes,’ she snapped.
‘But I didn’t drown. I didn’t even get my feet wet,’ Nerys said.
Rainer inclined his head to Myrtle. ‘I’ll leave you both now. I must go and rehearse for tomorrow evening. I wish you a very happy Christmas.’
Nerys followed him out into the crystalline whiteness.
‘Don’t forget to run through the routine in your head,’ he ordered. ‘I don’t want a single thing to go wrong with one single trick.’
‘Nothing will go wrong,’ she answered.
His eyes moved over her face, as explicit as a touch. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. He didn’t mean the Residency magic show.
She raised her hand to shield her eyes against the light and watched him walk away.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, she repeated. The word and the anticipation expanded to fill her head with wicked gold.
Myrtle had shed her pheran and was reclining in her chair next to the stove.
‘Don’t be disapproving,’ Nerys begged.
Myrtle waved her cigarette. ‘When have I ever gone in for disapproval? What I am experiencing is jealousy, my girl.’
‘You know you said about not wanting to see your best friend drown?’
‘Yes.’
‘Am I really your best friend?’
Myrtle blew out a calculated smoke-ring. ‘Yes, Nerys, you are.’
Nerys had never had a best friend before. There had been the girls at teacher training college and from her grammar school, but none of them was anything like Myrtle McMinn. Even with the glimmer of tomorrow meshing her consciousness, Nerys thought that this simple statement was the best Christmas present she would ever receive.
The next morning, Caroline joined them and they walked the short way through thin spirals of blowing snow to the English church. The wooden pews were packed with the hardy remnants of Srinagar Club society. Mr Fanshawe read the lesson, and the congregation sang the familiar carols. The stoves on either side of the nave had been lit in good time, but still they could see their breath clouding the air as they listened to the Christmas sermon. The three women would only have been conspicuous if they had not been wrapped from head to foot in their thickest clothes.
Back at the Garden of Eden, as they exchanged non-papier-mâché gifts and laughed over Majid’s loyal but approximate interpretation of a traditional Christmas dinner, Myrtle warned that they would have to make a new, more ambitious plan for the next three months.
/> Caroline nodded her agreement. She was biting her lip as she said, ‘It’s getting harder to hide my shape from the servants.’
Nerys put in, ‘At the very least you must move in here with Myrtle in the new year.’
‘But where will you go?’
‘Don’t worry about that. I need to find a little place of my own to live. As soon as the passes open, Evan will be here.’ She gave the statement deliberate emphasis.
Tomorrow had turned into today.
Caroline said, ‘The snow always melts in the end. I wonder, will it ever be the end of the war?’
‘That must come too,’ Nerys said.
A small silence fell as they looked at one another. The world beyond the fragile, lamplit capsule of the houseboat was rocked by dangers known and unknown, and to imagine what might happen drew the bond between the three women even more tightly. Caroline placed her hand over her stomach, where the baby had begun to kick. Their own future seemed just as uncertain as whatever lay ahead for her unborn child.
Myrtle broke the silence by producing a bottle of champagne that had been immersed in a bucket of lake ice. ‘This, my dears, is one of the last bottles of decent bubbly remaining in the entire twenty-one-gun state of Kashmir.’ She filled their glasses. ‘Happy Christmas, and here’s to us and all those we care for.’
Nerys and Caroline echoed her words, but it was a sombre toast.
‘This evening, we have Nerys’s grand stage début to look forward to,’ Myrtle recalled, once she had drained her glass. Nerys covered her face with her hands, because she didn’t need reminding, and they were cheerful again.
The ballroom at the Residency was decorated with a huge Christmas tree. Wives of the regiment, with their children who were too young yet to be at school in England, their ayahs, Residency staff and most of the congregation from this morning were sitting in rows of small gilded chairs. There was an atmosphere of festive anticipation.
