by Rosie Thomas
Myrtle adored the baby. She swept her up and rubbed her firm nose against Zahra’s soft button one, and covered her olive skin with lipsticked kisses.
‘Divine, so divine,’ she crooned. ‘I could eat you all up, ears to toes. Oh, God, Nerys, do you think Archie might let us adopt her when this bloody war ends?’
Nerys hesitated. She said carefully, ‘Srinagar will whisper that she’s yours and not Archie’s. We’ve given them every reason to jump to that conclusion.’
Myrtle cackled. ‘Who gives a damn about whispers? I don’t. When Archie comes home and sees her, I’m sure he’ll fall in love with her too. Don’t you think?’ Then she looked up from her contemplation of the baby and her eyes met Nerys’s. ‘But are you and Evan going to fight me for her?’
It was a joke, with a shiver of painful truth in it.
Nerys loved Zahra too. Sometimes she felt afraid of how much she adored the dark eyes and tiny curling fingers. But she could only shake her head. She hadn’t seen Evan since the previous autumn, and he was beginning to feel like a stranger to her. Who could predict what her husband might allow, or might refuse even to consider?
Zahra’s future was just one of the legion of uncertainties facing them all.
Majid brought Myrtle another drink. Picking up the basket, he announced, ‘Time for baby feeding.’
He had fallen for Zahra too, and whenever he could he spirited her away to the dim recesses of the kitchen boat to be cooed over by the cook and the boys and their retinue of aunts and sisters. As he took her off he said, ‘Visitor coming, ma’am.’
They looked up to see a gold-painted shikara gliding over the water. Against the gaudy cushions Rainer lay back and smoked his pipe. He waved and called to them, ‘Summer is here.’
In Kashmir May was the most beautiful month of all. The almond, apple and cherry trees were in bloom and falling petals blew in the breeze, like the antithesis of snow.
The boatman made fast and Rainer hopped up the steps to the shade of the veranda. He was strong and his burns had healed quickly, but he never spoke about his excursion to Malaya.
He kissed Caroline and Myrtle twice on each cheek, then lifted Nerys’s hand and touched it to his lips. She blushed at the sudden tenderness in him. ‘I have come to take Nerys away,’ he announced. ‘It’s a day for a picnic in the Shalimar Garden.’
‘Off you go, then,’ Myrtle waved a hand. ‘Caroline and I will have tea and maybe a cocktail or two at the club.’
‘Won’t you let me try out my new toy first?’ Rainer had brought an elaborate new Leica camera with him, complete with tripod and a set of lenses. He lifted the camera body out of its brown leather case and fiddled with the settings. Then he pointed to the corner of the veranda framed by the carved-wood canopy. ‘Sit over there, perhaps, with the lake behind you.’
‘Whatever you say, Mr Stamm.’
Myrtle took her natural place in the middle, tipped up her chin and looked straight into the camera. Caroline edged beside her, smiling but looking to the other two for her cue as she and Nerys hooked their arms around Myrtle’s waist.
He said, ‘That’s very pretty. I shall name this portrait “Summer in the Garden of Eden”.’
Nerys always remembered Myrtle’s scent and the waft of cigarette smoke, the light catching the diamond in Caroline’s engagement ring and Rainer clowning behind the lens. He put a black cloth over his head and muttered inside its folds, then shouted, ‘Hey presto!’ As they laughed at him, the shutter clicked.
‘You haven’t disappeared in a puff of smoke,’ Myrtle pointed out. ‘And neither have we.’
‘I must be out of practice,’ he said.
A cloud licked over the sun, and for a second the shimmer faded out of the day. Nerys drew her cardigan over her shoulders and checked that Myrtle’s circlet brooch was safe.
‘Have you time for a drink?’ Myrtle asked. ‘Do just have one, won’t you? Caroline and I might be quite blue once we’re left on our own.’
‘Please forgive me this time. I want to talk to Nerys,’ Rainer said.
The shikara man was waiting for them at the steps, idly dipping his paddle and watching the insects skimming over the water. Ripples briefly fractured the reflected mountains. Myrtle clapped her hands and her smile widened.
‘Of course. Have fun!’ she cried.
A moment later Nerys and Rainer were gliding towards the trees at the far end of the lake. Nerys was quiet because the afternoon’s loveliness seemed intensified by its fragility. Rainer’s arm rested over her shoulders, but she was thinking how opaque he had become. Or perhaps he always had been. She had learnt the shape and weight of him, his scent and taste and the various timbres of his voice, but he had given away so little.
In the great Mogul garden the fountains splashed between the beds of crimson peonies. They walked under the dappled shade of unfurling chinar leaves and Rainer talked of a new trick he was devising and an invitation he had received to perform magic to entertain British and American troops.
‘But where will you be going?’ Nerys asked, out of dread of his leaving and fear that he might stay. ‘And when?’ She had her own urgent reason for wanting to talk to him today.
They came to the top of the garden’s series of steps and turned to look back at the view.
‘Let’s have our picnic,’ he said.
As always, Rainer took pleasure in the precision of practical arrangements. From a canvas rucksack he produced a white cloth and spread it in the shade of a huge old tree. There was a metal flask of fresh sweet buttermilk laced with mint, and afternoon bread just an hour old, fragrant and crusted with sesame.
Below them rolled the flowers and geometric water courses, sparkling with fountains, and beyond that the lake with its blue islands, the haze of smoke over the old town and the two Srinagar hills crowned with a fort and a temple. Perhaps he had brought her here to lay all this at her feet, like a Mogul emperor with his latest concubine. She turned abruptly to him but he stopped her with a finger to her mouth.
‘I have to leave Srinagar, Nerys. I would have gone already, if every hour with you didn’t make me wish for two more.’
It would be so easy to believe him.
Then he whispered, ‘Come with me. Stay with me.’
Briefly, the world contracted until it was no more than the twin points of light reflected in his barley-sugar eyes. His finger moved to rest in the notch at the base of her throat and, giddily, Nerys imagined the cities she would never see unless she followed Rainer, the journeys they might take, and the mountains he had promised to show her.
But when she tried to picture their homecomings, a home refused to materialise. There was no such place. Not even Rainer’s particular magic could frame one for the two of them.
It took the greatest effort she had ever made to clasp his warm hand and draw it away from her, but she managed to do it. His response was to move even closer so that their mouths almost touched. ‘Nerys, will you marry me? I want you to be my woman.’
She let the words run through her like Kashmiri honey. But then she straightened her back and looked into his eyes. ‘I am married already. We have been trying to pretend I’m not, that’s all.’
Rainer batted the objection away. ‘Divorce him. Or if we can’t marry, come and live with me. You are not a woman to be hedged by conventions. I know you better than that.’
And that proved he did not know her.
In her pocket was this morning’s letter from Evan, filled with the fussy details of the work he was obliged to leave in order to travel to Srinagar, details that he wished her to investigate in connection with the possible establishment of another mission in Kashmir, and all the silent, fretful constructions of her husband’s fear and anxiety.
She was a woman to be hedged by conventions, because those conventions were what she had pledged to uphold. It was only now that she was presented with the real possibility of flouting them that she understood how firmly she intended to stand.
> Her stomach turned over at the thought of what lay ahead. There was a single flicker of brightness in the vista, and that was pride in making – at last – the hardest decision of her life.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Evan will arrive in Srinagar later this week. He is bringing the mission to Kashmir, and I will support his work.’
Disbelief kindled in Rainer’s eyes.
She studied the creases in his skin, the humorous twist of his mouth, and realised that of all the times she had desired him in the months since Christmas she longed for him most urgently now.
He said, ‘Don’t give away your own happiness for another person’s sake. Don’t abandon your own life.’
And in her raw state she was suddenly angry with him. The uncertainties that had swamped her in the past weeks fell away. Whatever lay in store, she would be living her life by her own principles, not Rainer Stamm’s.
‘Abandoning my life? That’s an arrogant assumption. I am doing no such thing.’
A motor launch inched its way across the lake, spinning a silver thread behind it. Perhaps it was Ravi Singh’s, she thought.
‘I love you,’ Rainer said quietly.
He had never told her this before. She tried out the response in her head. I love you too. I’ll always love you. But she said nothing. The afternoon was loud with birdsong and the chirp of crickets yet silence bled between them, cutting them off from each other and sealing their separation.
‘I leave Srinagar tomorrow,’ he warned her.
She lifted her head. ‘Did you believe I’d follow you?’
He met her eyes. ‘I let myself hope.’
‘I am so sorry.’
As she studied his face, his expression changed. In a single second he became a different person. He smiled at her, a performer’s smile that he might have flashed at an audience before some feat of disguise or misdirection. ‘What a shame. But why are we so serious? Life is for enjoying, and that’s what we should do. If we can’t, pfffff.’ He shrugged and exhaled, and his foreignness struck her as it had never done before.
Scrambling to his feet, he held out his hand. ‘Come on. Why don’t we finish our walk? It’s a beautiful evening.’
They descended the long series of steps and crossed the terraces between fountains and water channels. On the lowest level of the garden there were great beds of scarlet tulips. To Nerys’s burning eyes, they looked like pools of blood.
Outside the walls they fought their way through the insistent crowds of beggars and trinket-sellers and chai-vendors brought out by the promise of summer, and she felt exhausted by the sheer hourly effort it took just to exist in India.
I want to go home, she thought, for almost the first time since she had come to Srinagar. The longing for Wales, for her own place and people and that other green valley threaded with streams, almost overpowered her.
At the jetty, the gold-painted shikara was waiting for them. The boatman handed her aboard and saw to it that she was comfortable on the mattress cushions. Instead of taking the place next to her Rainer sat opposite with his back to the boat’s prow.
‘So I can look at you,’ he said. The sun was slipping down the sky and the light had changed from blue to gold. When they reached the middle of the lake, where veils of mist were beginning to lift off the water, Rainer picked up the boatman’s spare paddle that was stowed beside his feet. He studied the familiar leaf-shaped blade and then inverted it. Pressed against his chest, it formed a heart.
They reached the Garden of Eden. There was nobody at home, but they heard voices from the kitchen boat. Rainer stood up, balancing against the shikara’s gentle rocking, and helped Nerys to the steps. Then he released her hand. ‘Goodnight,’ he said.
‘Goodnight, Rainer. I hope you have a safe journey.’
Wherever you are going.
She stood on the veranda under the carved-wood awning and watched the shikara glide away. Rainer still stood upright, with the inverted paddle close to his side. This was the image of him that she would carry with her: his shadow laid over the still water, cupped in the reflections of the boat’s high stern and prow, and the leaf-heart placed over his own, a shield as well as a declaration.
‘Good evening, ma’am.’
Nerys spun round. It was Majid in his white tunic, hands pressed together.
‘Majid, where is Mrs McMinn?’
‘I think club, ma’am.’
‘And the baby?’
‘She is here, ma’am.’
When Zahra woke up, Nerys gave her a bottle, bathed and changed her. The scrawny limbs had grown rounded and dimpled. When the sudden darkness fell she stood on the veranda and rocked the baby in her arms, her lips pressed to her black hair.
When Myrtle climbed out of the shikara that had brought her back from the club she stumbled on the steps and almost fell into the water. ‘Damn, blast it. That’s my last pair of decent stockings in tatters,’ she cried.
Nerys took her arm and tried to steer her to a chair. Myrtle resisted, and folded into the sofa instead. She put her head into her hands and massaged her forehead. ‘My wretched, dazed brain.’
‘I’ll get you some water.’
‘Have you heard the news?’
Nerys waited, her breath catching.
‘A poor boy has been knifed to death. They found his body in one of those brick alleys in the bazaar.’
She didn’t even have to ask the question, because Myrtle was already answering it. ‘A Muslim boy.’
Set upon in the dark by Hindu youths, themselves avenging some earlier attack by Muslims: the latest episode in the religious hatred that swelled under Kashmir’s smooth skin.
‘There’s rioting,’ Myrtle said. ‘At the club, just now, they were advising everyone to go home and stay inside until the morning. Otherwise I’d still be there.’
Nerys listened, and in the stillness she thought she could just hear the distant sound of shouts and stone-throwing.
‘I don’t understand India any more. It’s all I know, but I can hardly recognise the country where I grew up, or understand what’s happening to beautiful Kashmir. They want us to leave, and we will do, but what will happen after that? There’ll be nothing left, nothing but blood and destruction.’
Myrtle groped in her handbag and found her cigarette case. She lit one of her gold-tipped cigarettes and exhaled a blue cloud. As Nerys watched her, she lost her poise and her powdered face crumpled. ‘Everything is ending. What’s going to happen to us all?’
Nerys had never seen Myrtle cry. She held her in her arms and smoothed the tears that chased blackened streaks down her face.
‘God, I’m drunk. Pie-eyed. Archie doesn’t let me do it, you know. But he’s not here, and everything is so dismal, and I’m an apology without him.’
Nerys insisted, ‘No, you’re not. You’re a brave, strong, admirable woman, and the best friend I’ve ever had. I’ve learnt so much from you and that’s the honest truth.’
They gripped each other’s hands. The clamour in the distance seemed to be subsiding, leaving only the night noises of lapping water and owls hooting.
Myrtle sniffed and blew her nose. ‘Damn. So sorry. Stupid of me. It’s the drink and the news of a senseless murder. How was the Shalimar picnic? Where’s Rainer?’
‘He wanted to tell me that he’s leaving Srinagar tomorrow. Today was a goodbye.’
‘Oh, my darling. And here’s me with my tale of woe. To hell with it all. Come on, let’s have a nightcap. Don’t you think so? Mmm?’
‘No, Myrtle. No more to drink. Come on, let’s get you to bed.’
‘You sound like Archie. I rather like it.’ Myrtle stood up and made her unsteady way to Zahra’s basket. She leant down and turned back an inch of coverlet. ‘You are the future, aren’t you, little girl? Thank God we have you here to remind us there’s some point to this wicked world.’
Then she let Nerys help her to her room, where she submitted to having her shoes removed and her dress unbuttoned. With some d
ifficulty, Nerys settled her in her bed among the starched pillowcases, embroidered hangings and silk quilts. There was face powder scattered on the dressing-table’s glass top, a clutter of scent jars, discarded clothes piled on a carved wooden chair.
‘Stay with me,’ Myrtle begged. ‘Talk. Tell me, I don’t know … Tell me about you and Rainer.’
Nerys thought about it. ‘I shall miss him,’ she said in the end. She loved him, she might have added, but there was no sentence or suggestion that followed on from that admission. The mountaineer-magician and the missionary’s wife? She smiled. The end of their affair had been there all along, sewn up in its beginning.
‘When does Evan get to Srinagar?’
‘He said in his letter that there were two or three days’ work he wanted to finish in Kargil, then he’ll be on his way. So in a week’s time, at most.’
‘Rainer knows that, of course?’
‘Of course.’
‘Hah. He’s making a tactical exit, then.’
‘He asked me to go with him. He asked me to marry him.’
Myrtle drew in a breath and turned her head on the pillow. ‘And?’
There is no and.
‘I reminded him that I’m already married.’
‘And you’ll do your duty,’ Myrtle agreed. ‘All right. Tell me one thing, and please be honest. Do you feel guilty about last winter?’
Nerys looked at her. Myrtle’s eyes were growing heavy with sleep.
‘No,’ she said.
‘That’s good to hear. Because nothing corrodes a marriage like guilt, my girl.’
‘Evan and I will have to find a way to live. But I won’t be doing so as an apology, or an act of atonement for having committed adultery.’
Myrtle gave a spurt of drowsy laughter. ‘I like that. I’m impressed. Caroline should take a lesson from you.’
‘Caroline will find her own solution. But d’you think that’s what we’re really about, the three of us? Doing our duty?’
