The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  On the morning of the previous day, Martin and Pasang Pemba had left camp to reconnoitre the rock formation they called the Moor’s Head. This ugly and threatening rock wall blocked their access to the high saddle of the mountain and the summit beyond, although the summit itself had been almost constantly veiled in cloud.

  At first light yesterday, however, they had woken to a clear sky and a view of the mountain rearing to its full height above them, cold and crystalline.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Martin had said to Pasang. They were the stronger pair. Taking minimal food and protection with them, they had planned to climb to the rock head and assess how serious an obstacle it really was, then return to camp to rest and prepare a load to carry for the assault. The next camp would have to be established above the Moor’s Head.

  They would be back that evening, Martin assured their American companions.

  The two men set off up the slope, chipping their way upwards until they were no more than black specks moving amid the rock and snow. Finally they were swallowed up in the immense distance.

  By mid-afternoon of the same day, an ominous nimbus encircled the sun. The wind began to blow and clouds whipped across the upper heights. The two men left behind watched and waited, but as darkness fell the snow and rising wind drove them into the inadequate shelter of their tent. They waited all that night, and through the following day, but the storm only gathered force. They couldn’t retreat, any more than they could go upwards, and the younger one was now suffering from chest pains and disturbing intervals of dizziness and confusion.

  The elder lay as quietly as he could, assessing the situation.

  Brunner and the sherpa had with them only basic supplies. They would have had to bivouac in the open overnight, and now the second night was upon them. It was inconceivable that they could survive two successive nights outside in conditions such as these.

  Once the storm had blown itself out he himself would have to help his companion down to where their support team waited for them above the icefall at Camp I, and he thought they would be quite lucky to make it. There was no question of launching a rescue attempt.

  Martin Brunner and Pasang Pemba would certainly be Nanga Parbat’s latest victims.

  He remembered the advice of the American consul back in Calcutta, who had warned him to take no risks that might have potentially disastrous consequences. Of course the consul was thinking in political as well as human terms, because the bestowal of permits for future American expeditions depended to some extent on the absence of a tragic outcome to this one. And as expedition leader, at least in name, he didn’t think they had been reckless – just unlucky.

  But, considered separately, Martin Brunner was a different matter. He climbed with implacable strength and determination, almost like a machine, and this brutal focus meant that he was careless of the weather and of himself.

  ‘If I have to go solo, I will do that,’ he had said once. ‘But I will get to the top.’

  The leader understood his determination. He knew that Martin had been to the mountain before, and on that expedition his companion had been carried to his death in an avalanche.

  Martin had returned to Nanga Parbat for a boy called Matthew Forbes and his family, as much as for himself – he had always been candid about that. And the current team all recognised that this would almost certainly be his last chance of reaching the summit. During the war he had several times been refused a climbing permit on his own behalf by the British authorities, but the name he had been using during those earlier negotiations had been different.

  On the new permit, the very first to be issued following the end of the war in Europe, he was named as Martin Brunner and that was what the mountaineers called him. He had thanked them, laughing as he did so, for their indulgence. The possibility of such subterfuges wouldn’t endure for long. As the world slowly returned to normal, men, their names and their whereabouts would be more carefully monitored.

  He said, ‘There will be no more cloak-and-dagger days, no more now-you-see-me-and-now-you-don’t times. We will all be ticketed and documented again, even more than before. So let us enjoy our conjuring tricks while we can.’

  Shivering, the expedition leader lay down in his sleeping-bag and drew the frozen folds of it around him.

  He must have dozed.

  He was startled out of a dream by a heavy weight collapsing against the tent and the sound of a voice calling out. The wind had dropped and the canvas gently sucked and bellied in the remaining draught. He scrambled out of his sleeping-bag and tore open the tent zip. A man’s boot blocked the opening, a huddled shape lay in the snow. Overhead, tatters of cloud streamed across a sky pricked with stars.

  ‘Martin? Pasang, is that you?’

  The body stirred and gave a groan. The leader saw that it was Pasang Pemba.

  Between them the two Americans hauled him into their shelter. The man was more dead than alive, but they fed him sugared drinks and cradled his body between them until some warmth crept back into him. When they stripped off his gloves they found that his thumbs and fingertips were frozen solid. He would lose them, but he would survive.

  ‘Martin?’ the leader asked gently.

  The sherpa shook his head. The frozen fingers drew a flat line in the air.

  More than two thousand feet above them, in the tiny scoop at the foot of a rock face, a hummock of ice infinitesimally stirred and became a man again.

  He was in no pain now, even though his leg had been smashed in the fall.

  He was flushed with warmth and his dreams had been vivid and detailed. He had seen Srinagar again, in the full glow of summer, and the lovely reflections of the city and mountains were shimmering in the mirror waters. A little girl had been running towards a woman, shouting a childish version of her name.

  Rainer floated closer to the surface. It was night again but at last there was no wind, and there were stars overhead.

  He turned his head with the greatest difficulty and registered that he was alone.

  Pasang had gone. That was good. The sherpa would reach camp if he was lucky. He was a strong man; he had made only one mistake.

  His head fell forwards again and was enveloped in the frozen hood of his parka.

  The sense of a job not done, of dispensations that should have been made, was like a faint tinnitus inside his skull. But he was too far gone to attend to his conscience. The languorous dreams were rising around him again and he gave himself up to them.

  His lips moved to form a word.

  ‘Nerys,’ he said.

  EIGHTEEN

  Mair spent that Christmas with Dylan, Jackie and their smaller daughter, after a run-up to the holiday behind the till in the bookshop where she was now working. She was back in time for New Year, after which Hattie and her latest boyfriend left for two weeks in the Caribbean. When they came back, suntanned and smiling, Mair knew that Hattie had finally found the man she wanted. The two of them were finishing each other’s sentences, and had adopted a series of new pet names.

  When Mair mimed sticking two fingers down her throat Hattie only grinned. ‘I know, I know. But I’m buying into it. Coupledom, you know? I never thought I would, but …’ She shrugged, delighted.

  ‘Does being a couple have to include calling him Edbo instead of just Ed, and other cringey things?’

  Her friend raised an eyebrow. ‘I think you’re jealous.’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody well jealous.’

  Hattie was just the same as she always had been, but happier. And busier, it also had to be admitted. She wanted nothing more than to be with Ed, and although the two of them regularly included Mair in their plans, there was simply less time nowadays for Mair and Hattie on their own.

  Mair insisted to herself that it was Ed’s monopoly of Hattie’s company that made her jealous, not the quicksand condition of being in love.

  The two women embarked on determined jokes about how Mair might compensate by taking up new hobbies and Internet datin
g sites, or even revisiting old flames to see if there was still a flicker of warmth.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘You’re not making any effort.’

  ‘I’ll take up macramé then, how about that?’

  ‘Really hot.’

  But then Hattie became serious. ‘Do you want to be with someone, Mair? I mean, it’s not the only way, is it?’

  ‘I do,’ Mair answered, after some thought. ‘But then again I don’t.’

  She didn’t want to be any more explicit. There was nothing to be explicit about, in any case, just a vague longing that wasn’t even as defined as a wish. She only knew that she was restless and incapable of fixing her attention on anything in particular because it was already subliminally, troublingly, focused elsewhere.

  In February Mair heard that Tal and Annie were expecting a baby, and emailed her congratulations. A laconic message eventually came back from Tal, saying that it would be good to have another pair of hands for next year’s lambing. This made her think of the last evening in the old house, when she had first seen the shawl, and the Williamses’ sheep out on the hill had been crying for their vanished lambs.

  The weather was harsh, with snow lying on the ground for almost a month, which meant that footfall in the bookshop diminished to almost zero. She asked her friend, the bookseller, outright whether she could really afford to keep her on.

  Her friend said, ‘It may come to that, but let’s hang on and see what happens when the spring comes. If it ever does.’

  The lack of job security didn’t worry Mair any more now than it had done in the past, but what was new was a sense of impermanence and a growing detachment, as if she were somehow not quite occupying all the corners of her own life and couldn’t make herself care enough to change anything. She kept busy with the humdrum affairs of the shop, with her wider circle of friends, and even began going to the gym again and practising some of the old routines she and Hattie had developed in their circus days. Being more supple and fit was a partial antidote to her strange and intractable state of mind.

  During all this time she read and reread her grandmother’s letters.

  There were three dozen in all, written over the fifteen years between 1945 and 1960. Mair unfolded the pages carefully so as not to crack them along the folds, smoothing them out in order to puzzle over dates and the sequence of events before arranging them in chronological order once again. She concluded that quite a few must be missing, because some of the events that Nerys mentioned in passing were never related in full.

  In her imagination, the young Nerys Watkins became her daily companion. And at the same time the known Caroline, the very old woman sitting with her leg propped up in the quiet room in a quiet suburb of Srinagar new town, merged with the sad unknown one who – Mair came to understand – was in a long-stay hospital somewhere within sight of the Malvern Hills.

  The very first letter that she read, on the flight from Srinagar to Delhi, was an attempt by her grandmother to comfort her friend during her illness. From an address in Shillong, Assam in September 1945, Nerys wrote that it must help Caroline – even if only a tiny little bit – to have such a beautiful and perfectly English view to look out at from her window. And then, in the sad but reconciled voice of a missionary’s wife who hadn’t seen home for six years, she touched on the heat of India’s summer, the latest epidemic that was overwhelming the mission hospital, and her wish to see her own Welsh valleys again before too long. There was some more Indian news, related with determined cheerfulness, partly of Myrtle, the dark-lipped beauty of the photograph that Mair had carried with her for so long. Nerys wrote that Myrtle and ‘Archie’, presumably her husband, had been up into the hills for a little break from the heat, but now Archie was back at his work in Delhi. ‘Myrtle suffers, but puts a good face on it. They both do.’

  No matter how many times she read the next lines, her grandmother’s absolute faith in the mysterious pin-up never failed to strike her. The name ‘Rainer’ always jumped out at Mair. Nerys wrote that there was still no word or news from him, not yet. But he always kept his promises, Caroline knew that, didn’t she? Zahra would be safe in Rainer’s care; Caroline was to try not to worry; they would reappear like magic when Rainer was ready and there was no more danger, and between them they would make sure Zahra reached England. Caroline would be well again by that time, and Nerys would bring Zahra to see her: ‘We’ll have a picnic, sitting in the cool grass on the riverbank, you and me and the little girl. Hold your faith in that, if you can, darling. And of course Ralph need never know a thing about it – if that’s worrying you in the least.’

  But there was a note of underlying desperation in the passage about Rainer and the little Zahra – whoever she might actually be – and urgency even in her grandmother’s handwriting that had troubled Mair from the very first reading of the letter. It sounded as if Nerys was battling to reassure and convince herself, as much as Caroline, that there would be a happy outcome. ‘Rest, Caroline dear, and let the doctors take care of you. You’ll soon be well, and in the world again. Write to me when you feel up to it. With love always, Nerys.’

  One of the first things Mair had done was to look up the address on the envelopes: Mrs Ralph Bowen, Carteret Ward, Calderton Hall, Calderton, Nr Malvern.

  The top entry that came up under Calderton Hall was a property developer’s prospectus. It showed a gaunt grey stone mansion set in sweeping grounds, now in the process of being divided up into luxury apartments with startling price tags attached. There was no mention of the history of the place after the Calderton heirs had sold it in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it took some more digging before Mair discovered that for more than a hundred years it had been a secure mental institution.

  Further researches drew her into an unexpected underworld of lunatic asylums, the gaunt institutions where families used to deposit their deranged, damaged or occasionally just egregious relatives, then largely and conveniently forget about them. Her laptop and its patient, dispassionate connectivity led her deeper and deeper into the history of such institutions, and into the sad individual stories of mental illness. She began to read widely, ordering books and pamphlets as her interest intensified. Calderton Hall Hospital had been closed down more than a decade ago, after public disclosures relating to inhumane treatment of the long-term residents. Several had been locked up for as much as fifty years and some had originally been no madder than it needed to be odd, or friendless, or the mother of an illegitimate baby.

  Mair’s sympathy for the unknown younger Caroline grew to the point where she felt as if she knew her, even though the real sequence of events that had taken her into Calderton, out again eventually and back to Srinagar, was no more than a tissue of guesswork stitched together from research and clues in Nerys’s cheerful letters.

  Mair worked out that Caroline must have suffered a breakdown in India, and on her return to England had been immediately committed by her husband to the long-stay Carteret locked ward at Calderton.

  That made sense of the tiny amount of information Caroline herself had given Mair, and Aruna’s strange manner, which seemed to combine servant and nurse with just a touch of jailer. And there in Carteret Ward Caroline had presumably stayed, until at least 1960 because that was the date of Nerys’s last letter, or the last letter from her that Caroline had kept.

  This one was short and written from the same familiar address in North Wales as all the others, except the first few:

  I have some very sad news. Poor Evan died five days ago, finally succumbing to pneumonia. We buried him yesterday. As you know, he had never been strong since our years out east. He was very peaceful at the end, I was with him all the time and Gwen was able to say goodbye while he was still conscious. We will both miss him so much.

  If only I had talked to Mum, Mair thought. If only any of the three of us had ever thought to ask her about Grandma in India.

  The shawl lay in its usual place, folded over the back of an upright
chair where she could see it whenever she looked up from her laptop. The colours rippled in the grudging daylight reflected off grey snow. The shawl, the lock of hair and the letters themselves were Mair’s only physical link to the story that remained full of obstinate knots.

  One of Nerys’s letters had described the joyful upheaval of the return to Wales. In 1950, almost shyly, she wrote about the birth of her daughter. After that the letters became domestic recitals, sympathetic but general attempts to keep Caroline in touch with a world that was steadily leaving her behind. Mentions of Rainer and Zahra in the chronology became less and less frequent, and the certainty that they would reappear seemed to fade into puzzlement and, finally, the sad silence of acceptance.

  Mair had scanned the pages so often that she knew some of them off by heart, and there were no more obvious clues that she could follow up.

  She had plenty of evenings to spare, though, and she devoted many to the Internet. The National Archives eventually led her to Captain Ralph Bowen’s regimental records. He had been decorated for his bravery in Burma, and honourably discharged in 1945. He had died in 1978, without issue. There was no mention of a wife to survive him. Poor Caroline had been erased.

  By searching the Scottish Family Records online, after many false starts she eventually uncovered Archibald Fraser McMinn of the Indian Railways. His wife Myrtle, née Brightman, had predeceased him, but Archie himself had lived on into the 1970s and had died in Edinburgh. The McMinns had had no children either.