The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  In the bathroom she searched until she found Ralph’s old razor. Carefully she unfolded the blade and stared at the dull blue steel. There was a rime of dried soap near the handle and when she inspected it more closely she saw a speckle of dark stubble. Nausea swelled inside her but she fought it down and repeated the word courage. Courage, courage. Then she swiped the blade, first one wrist and then the other.

  Hours later, in the garden of the British Residency, lanterns were glimmering in huge trees as the bandleader held up his baton and bowed to the revellers crowding the lawns. An expectant silence fell, and then there was a huge whoooosh as the first firework streaked up into starry blackness. Scarlet sparks cascaded downwards as the victory cheers roared out.

  Nerys broke away and murmured to Evan, ‘She said she was definitely coming. I’m going to the bungalow to find her.’

  Evan didn’t care for parties and was glad to leave this one. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

  The adjoining bungalows were in darkness. Everyone was out at the victory celebrations, at the Residency or the mess, depending on rank, and all the house-boys had taken the opportunity to gather for a smoke and gossip in the cabin near the compound entrance. Nerys and Evan made their way along the lane, the sweet scent of stocks from some lady’s garden heavy in the night air. They were still yards away from the Bowens’ gate when they heard the noise.

  The front door was locked but Evan threw his weight against it and the lock splintered away from the frame.

  The bathroom was sticky with blood, the floor and whitewashed walls and enamel bowls and thin towels, and Caroline’s arms were rusty and caked as she cradled her head in them. Her blonde hair was matted, and congealing blood smeared the protruding knobs of her spine, which was all they could see of her as she lay curled in the corner, screaming and screaming.

  Evan’s face was as white as paper.

  ‘Go to the compound gate. Get help,’ Nerys ordered him. Then she knelt down in the blood and tried to draw Caroline’s arms away from her head. The razor she had been clutching dropped to the floor with a clatter.

  ‘It was good of you to come all this way. Thank you,’ Ralph Bowen said stiffly.

  Myrtle and Nerys picked their way along the dock in the Bowens’ shuffling wake, as the homebound passengers for the SS Euphemia flowed on to the ship amid a river of trunks and cases borne by hundreds of coolies. A detachment of khaki-clad soldiers filed up the gangplank to the sound of a military band playing on the aft deck. Ladies in afternoon dresses and shady hats stepped out of cars, and the hooting and shouts and police whistles and all the cacophony of embarkation was stricken by the hammer blow of midsummer heat. Caroline hardly lifted her head.

  The Bowens’ cabin was on an upper deck with a tiny porthole, giving a view of the davits of a lifeboat a couple of feet away. The cramped space was too small for the oversized bouquet the McMinns had sent in advance.

  ‘Thank you for these too,’ Ralph said, after he had read the card, briefly fingering one of the dark red Kashmiri cockscombs. He was spectrally thin, and what remained of his hair was pasted to his blotched cranium, but his colour was almost back to normal. As promised, he had been given an early military discharge, with a Military Cross to mark his conspicuous bravery, and now the Bowens were on their way back to England.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ he said to his wife.

  Without raising her head, she let him steer her to one of a pair of miniature armchairs separated by a round table with the same circumference as a modest hatbox. The only other place to sit was on one of the two berths. Caroline’s wrists were bandaged but she kept the dressings hidden by clutching the cuffs of her cardigan. Her uncurled hair fell in a thick mat over her eyes.

  Nerys and Myrtle stood awkwardly.

  ‘We could perhaps find somewhere to have a cup of tea? There’s time before we sail, I should think,’ Ralph offered.

  Myrtle refused, politely, and his relief was evident.

  ‘Caroline?’ Nerys said.

  She lifted her head in response, but her blue eyes were clouded. The sedation she was under made her confused and lethargic. It could have been worse, was Nerys’s mordant thought. Ralph and the doctors could have put her in a strait-jacket. But maybe then the ship’s authorities would have refused to accept her on board.

  There seemed not to be a healing word any of them could say.

  ‘You’ll be home soon. Just rest and enjoy the sea air,’ Nerys said. ‘You promise you will write to us, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ Caroline answered, in the voice of a dutiful child.

  ‘Goodbye, darling. Bon voyage,’ Myrtle said. Her scent, when she hugged Caroline, must have stirred a happier memory. Caroline smiled uncertainly, and her eyes brightened. Nerys had Rainer’s photograph in her handbag, and for that brief moment Caroline could almost have been the girl in the picture again.

  They left her sitting in the little armchair, staring at the Kashmiri blooms.

  Ralph followed them out of the cabin, carefully closing the door behind him. All along the passageway there were glimpses of festive scenes in the other cabins and there was a bustle of porters and baggage. The three of them made their way to a vestibule at the end where a door leading to the deck let in some humid air.

  ‘You have been very kind to Caroline since … ah, since her illness, both of you,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘It was all Nerys’s doing. I’ve been in Delhi the whole time,’ Myrtle demurred.

  ‘Of course it is very sad that the poor child died and set all this off,’ he added. ‘I hope Caroline will recover in time. It may even be for the best, in the circumstances. She is so very fragile, the slightest thing …’

  Nerys began a retort, but Myrtle’s fingers rested lightly on her arm.

  ‘Take care of her,’ was all she did say.

  Ralph nodded. ‘Her stepmother and I are in complete agreement. Once we are back in England she will go into a nursing home for a complete rest.’

  ‘Perhaps that won’t be necessary, after the sea air on the voyage. And it will be so good for her to see England in summer,’ Nerys hazarded.

  The newsreel pictures of bomb-damaged cities and exhausted people queuing for food were not sunny in the least, but in India everyone clung to the pre-war images of home.

  Silently Ralph pressed his hands together.

  Myrtle assured him there was no need to come with them to the gangway, and Ralph agreed that Caroline should not be left alone for too long. He shook both women’s hands and thanked them once again.

  Then he strode away towards the closed cabin door.

  Nerys and Myrtle didn’t speak much until they were in the dusty taxi heading back to their hotel. They made a circuit of India Gate in the honking traffic.

  ‘Zahra isn’t dead, we all know that,’ Nerys burst out.

  Myrtle went on staring out at the solid press of rickshaws and bullock carts as their driver forced a route.

  Nerys insisted, as she had done a dozen times, ‘It’s one of his tricks. He set it all up, the accident with the Ford, to convince Ravi Singh not to pursue them. I know he did. Rainer promised me she would be safe and I trust him absolutely to keep his word.’

  For a month, ever since the discovery of the crashed Ford had been made public, she had been telling herself that the accident was no more than classic misdirection, or disguise, or distraction. But day after day had passed, and there had been no word from Rainer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Myrtle murmured. ‘Perhaps we should just begin to get used to the possibility that it’s true.’

  ‘No,’ Nerys said. It was a stony monosyllable.

  No bodies had ever been discovered, but the police – so the gossip went, although no one knew anything for certain, even Mr Fanshawe, since no British subject was involved – were prepared to accept that in a wild and lawless area, any one of a number of things could have happened to them. In the face of all the blood, the ransacked luggage an
d the absence of any other evidence, the authorities were ready to reach the convenient conclusion that there had been three fatalities.

  ‘No,’ Nerys reiterated.

  Somewhere, Zahra and Prita and Rainer were alive and safe. She was used to Rainer’s prolonged absences. He came and went according to his own devices. He had done ever since she had known him, and he would never change. She had never wanted to change him and – even if she had been free – to marry or even live with him would have been to do just that. Their beginning would have contained the end, and although she missed him in every waking moment, she understood that much.

  The reason why there was no news would become clear. He would come. He had struggled back up to Kanihama, hadn’t he, as soon as he could travel, even with serious burns, because he had made a promise?

  The last time she had seen him Rainer had touched her forehead with his lips. Don’t worry if you don’t hear anything. She will be safe, I promise you. And I will come back.

  They reached the little hotel, and rather than retreat to their room, where a sluggish fan did nothing but stir up the heat, they went into a cavernous bar off the lobby. Palms drooped in brass pots and there was a grey smell of stale smoke. As soon as he saw them a solitary young waiter sprang up from his post, switching on a wide smile of welcome.

  Nerys would very much have liked a stiff gin but nowadays Myrtle would only ever touch lemonade, so she ordered the same for herself.

  The waiter’s vigil obliquely reminded her of Farida, who would be sitting as she did every day on her accustomed step outside a village house in Kanihama. She kept watch on the sparse traffic up and down the mountain tracks, and she raced to meet every new arrival, in case Zahra was coming.

  This thought made Nerys so sad that she was ashamed of her own selfish, mute yearning for the missing child.

  Myrtle lit a cigarette and clinked her tall glass against Nerys’s as if they were drinking cocktails at the Lake Bar of the Srinagar Club. She blew out a plume of smoke and leant back with a sigh. ‘That was a fairly dismal farewell,’ she said. ‘But we had to come, didn’t we?’

  Nerys could only agree. ‘We did. I’ll go and see her as soon as Evan and I get home. She’ll be better, I’m sure. And, of course, there’ll be news of Zahra to tell her by then.’

  Myrtle turned her speculative gaze on her friend. She was much thinner now and her cheeks were almost hollow, but she still laughed all the time. Men still turned to look at her as she passed.

  ‘Maybe. What have you heard from Shillong?’

  Nerys told her that she and Evan would be leaving Srinagar for Shillong in the next month. With the agreement of the central mission they would travel, as Evan had wished, over the mountains to Kargil and Leh to revisit his handful of converts, and then, by the mountain passes that they had first traversed, back to Manali. The privations of the journey that had seemed so notable then would be much less striking now, Nerys thought. They were all used to the absence of comforts.

  ‘Do you remember our great journey across to Srinagar?’ Myrtle smiled.

  ‘I’ll always remember it. I don’t think I knew how to be me until I met you,’ Nerys told her. She knew how much she owed to the McMinns.

  Archie now held a part-time administrative post with the Indian Railways, and had used his engineering skills to adapt a car in which he could drive himself. It made a big difference, he cheerfully reported. His tops, the fine sets of antlers that he had bagged on his Ladakh shooting holiday, had found a permanent place on the wall in their Delhi house. Neither shooting excursions nor lakeside seasons in Srinagar were a possibility any longer.

  ‘Everything changes,’ Myrtle said, looking away again. ‘I wish you weren’t leaving India.’

  ‘Will you and Archie stay on?’

  ‘We don’t know anything or anywhere else,’ she said.

  From her chair Nerys could see across the lobby to the main door, guarded by a man in a dark red turban and long coat, and a slice of the open street that lay beyond. Dust-heavy air shimmered in the heat, and throngs of Indians crowded the road, all classes and religions, mixed up with servicemen of a dozen nationalities, who had poured in as demobilisation began, the pedestrians diving between packed buses and shiny cars and carts pulled by coolies. All of this busy humanity streamed every hour of the day past the chai-wallah, who sat on the kerb with his spirit lamp and tin cups, staring into infinity with an unfathomable smile.

  Only a few hundred yards from here was Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, with its soaring arches as grand as any cathedral. Tomorrow Nerys would take a train north and Myrtle would return to Delhi.

  Nerys understood that she loved India, and she would miss every brutal and beautiful fragment of it.

  She shook herself, and dug into her bag for a linen-wrapped package. She turned back a corner of the wrapping to show Myrtle the shawl. ‘I was going to give it back to Caroline before they sailed. But the moment never seemed right.’

  ‘No,’ Myrtle agreed.

  Caroline believed that her daughter was dead, and the Kashmir shawl was woven with guilt as well as loss.

  ‘I’ll keep it safe for Zahra myself,’ Nerys decided.

  ‘All right.’

  Myrtle had been trying gently to persuade her friend that all three of them were dead – why else had there been no word from Rainer? – but she had had no success, and had lately decided that it was kindest to let Nerys come to terms with that truth in her own time. She said, ‘Shall we go crazy and order ourselves another lemonade, perhaps?’

  Nerys smiled. ‘Let’s do that.’

  In a brown envelope in her bag was the gilt-threaded lock of Zahra’s hair. She didn’t tell even Myrtle about that. It was her talisman, her remaining link to the laughing little girl who had run at her and shouted, ‘Ness, Ness.’

  The lake lay as flat as a mirror. Evan and Nerys had taken a shikara ride across to the Shalimar Garden, because this was their last evening in the Vale of Kashmir.

  At the mission Evan’s books and their few significant pieces of furniture and kitchenware stood packed and prepared eventually to be freighted home to Wales. Their travelling bags and baskets of supplies were ready for the bus that would take them to the end of the Srinagar road, and from there they would pick up the pony men and their animals and begin the long ascent out of the Vale, up to the heights of the Zoji La and beyond that across into Ladakh.

  Early August was already frilling the chinar leaves with ochre, and over the old town lay the familiar autumnal veils of lavender-coloured smoke. When the two of them reached the uppermost terrace, they turned to look at the spreading view. The water was criss-crossed with tiny boats that from this distance looked no bigger than water beetles, the floating gardens were ripe with vegetables and fruit, and over everything the mountains rose in pleats of purple and grey.

  Evan was coughing almost absent-mindedly, like a tired sheep in a pen. This year he had fallen victim to a series of chest infections and Nerys was worried that his health and strength might not be up to the long journey ahead.

  ‘Don’t fuss about me, Nerys, please,’ was all he said, when she tried to talk to him about it. She glanced sideways at his profile now, familiar as always in his abstracted contemplation of his work, the mission, and the ways of the Almighty. He was gaunt, suntanned from bicycling in and above Srinagar, shy and awkward as he always had been, and dear to her.

  He felt her gaze on him and turned abruptly. He said that he would have to get back soon, because there were two or three final matters that he needed to discuss with Ianto Jones.

  Nerys nodded her acceptance and they fell into step as they began the descent. She took his arm and slid her hand beneath it and he held it there, gently pressed against his body.

  For the sake of economy they had paid off their first shikara man, but there was a small flotilla of them waiting near the jetty and one soon came gliding towards them in the hope of a fare. Within the little sanctuary of flower-printed curt
ains looped back with raffia strings, they sat back against the cushions as the lake scent rose and caught in their throats. The boatman pushed away from the mooring and, glancing back at him, Nerys saw that he was holding his paddle close to his chest. The inverted leaf made a heart shape, and the memory pierced her like a blade.

  Almost three months.

  Rainer, with Prita and Zahra.

  Vanished, as if into thin air.

  Her grief was like a stone, but she contained it within herself. It was only for tonight, her last in this lovely place, that it seemed too much to bear.

  She turned her head so that Evan might not see her face, and kept her eyes fixed on the fringe of houseboats that clung to the lake shore.

  SEVENTEEN

  The tiny coronet of blue flame seemed too fragile to survive in this place of howling wind. One of the men grimly hung over it, steadying the rim of the pan on the burner as the rough scoops of snow refused to melt. His companion lay huddled in his bag, his eyes closed as the storm hammered and roared at the canvas walls. The tent swelled like a pair of lungs labouring to suck in a breath of thin air, and then, with a bang and a shriek, collapsed inwards again. Trying to shout above the din took more energy than either of them had to spare.

  After an hour, just enough snow had melted to allow them to mix a cup of powdered soup apiece. One man held the two precious warm drinks because the other insisted on laboriously unzipping the tent opening before he drank. Snow drove in at them and the tent pegs only just kept the flimsy capsule anchored. It was absurd, the watcher belatedly realised, to have imagined that he might see anyone coming – or, indeed, that any living thing could move in the thick of this storm. Altitude and exhaustion were eroding his judgement. He struggled to close the flap again.

  They hunched over their soup.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Quarter after six.’

  It was thirty-two hours since the man they referred to as Martin Brunner and his companion had set off from their tiny camp. At 20,000 feet, they were more than five thousand feet above the base camp established at the foot of the Rakhiot icefall. Since they had left their base the three mountaineers and Pasang Pemba, the strongest and most experienced of their sherpas, had been carrying loads and leapfrogging their slow and painful way up the mountain to this point. It was now mid-July and the weather had been atrocious. Snow had fallen every day and filled in their laboriously cut steps, and in places it had swept away their fixed ropes.