The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘I’m not surprised it costs the earth. It’s exquisite.’

  The children had crowded in to watch the transaction. Even the two shepherds had penned their animals and come to join the others. Rainer waved his arms and gathered them all into a circle. ‘Come on, come and look,’ he called.

  ‘Keep them amused for a minute,’ he casually instructed Nerys, and strolled away towards the red Ford. Nerys blinked at two dozen expectant faces, and at the men and women who were leaving their work to see what might happen next. Her mind went awkwardly blank until she remembered her little schoolroom at the mission in Leh.

  Hoping for the best, she began to sing ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’. In her strong, chapel-trained contralto voice she gave the nursery rhyme full volume and emphasis, complete with actions. By the time she got to ‘they were neither up nor down’ bemused stares had given way to ripples of laughter, and Rainer was back again.

  ‘Not bad. Maybe I will offer you a job as my assistant,’ he said.

  From the depths of one of his canvas bags he produced four silvery rings, linked in a chain. With a bow he presented the chain to the bearded head man, and indicated that he should give it a good tug and try to pull the rings apart. The man did so, with a great show of strength, but he couldn’t break the links. Rainer took them back, turned them once between his thumb and forefinger, and held up four separate rings. There was a hubbub of amazed shouting, which he pretended not to hear, throwing the rings in the air instead and juggling with them. When he caught them again he held them up for everyone to see, and they were linked. This time he passed the chain to the head man’s wife, and she giggled within her shawl as she failed to separate the rings.

  Nerys loudly clapped, and now the villagers joined in the applause. She and Rainer were hemmed in on all sides as everyone tried to edge in for a closer look. She noticed how he seemed to grow taller and to become more lion-like with the attention of the crowd.

  He dropped the rings into his bag and just as casually brought out a flat sheet of plain glass. He held it up towards the sun and the light shone straight through it. He turned the square through every plane, then tapped the surface so that it rang a clear note. Shrugging, he passed the glass to the nearest spectator to hold and began to search through his own pockets. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he pointed to the smallest girl, who had a pocket in her apron front. That was empty, so Rainer made a show of thinking hard. Then he waved his hand over the head of another child, and unravelled a yard of black velvet ribbon from his left ear. The child cupped a hand to the ear and scuttled away sideways like a crab. All the others hooted with delight. Rainer looped the ribbon between his fingers and snapped it taut. Then, with a polite bow, he retrieved his sheet of glass and threaded the ribbon straight through the middle of it.

  There was a gasp, and then a collective whispering. The ribbon curled free on the reverse side, and Rainer handed the glass to the head man’s wife. She breathed on it, then wiped the mist away with her sleeve. Sunlight flashed off the smooth surface as she examined it. Rainer coiled the ribbon and presented it to her, taking back the glass and stowing it in his bag.

  The spectators were too amazed to applaud this time. The children were all dumbstruck, and slightly frightened.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.’ Rainer smiled and bowed. In the midst of an astonished silence he took Nerys’s arm and they returned to the Ford. They drove out of the little square and down the hill out of the village. He glanced sideways at her as they jolted over the ruts. ‘Was that too much?’

  ‘I was impressed.’

  He sighed. ‘I always mean to offer a little less show, a little more substance. Unfortunately I fail to live up to my good intentions, because illusion is easy and the truth is always so very hard. Shall we have our picnic now?’

  ‘Yes, please. Is the truth so very difficult, Rainer?’

  ‘I know you don’t find it to be. That’s because you are good, Nerys, as well as beautiful.’

  She was good, Nerys decided, because there had so far been very few other options. But no man had ever told her that she was beautiful. With colour rising in her cheeks she stared through the windscreen at the snowy rampart of the Himalayas.

  They found a sheltered hollow in the angle of two huge boulders on the lip of a tree-lined ravine. Out of the wind, and with the warmth of thin sunshine held by the stone, it was almost comfortable. Rainer hoisted a rusty drum pierced with rough holes from the back of the truck and set about gathering armfuls of dead wood. In minutes, a fire glowed in the brazier and an old tin kettle was filled from the stream that ran through the ravine. When the water boiled the kettle whistled, the incongruous domesticity of the sound in this wild place making Nerys smile. She made tea while Rainer chopped an onion and unwrapped a chunk of dark red meat. He sliced it into cubes with a pocket knife, and fried it with the onion and a fistful of spices. With the rising scent of cumin and fennel seed, Nerys realised she was ravenous.

  ‘Is there anything you can’t do?’ she asked him.

  ‘I can’t stay in one place,’ he answered, without looking up. She understood that this was the truth, and she could take it as a warning if she chose.

  They leant back against the rock to eat the curried lamb inside folds of bread, and finished up with rich, thick yoghurt, apples and walnuts. Rainer cracked the shells of the nuts for her and arranged the kernels on his outspread handkerchief.

  Nerys made more tea, and poured it into the two tin mugs. ‘I want to hear about our spinner now. Why does she live all alone in Srinagar, if she was born up here?’

  Rainer sipped his tea. He told her that the girl had grown up in Kanihama’s extended families of spinners, dyers, weavers and embroiderers. But then she had fallen in love with a man, one of the pedlars who came through the villages selling oil, aluminium saucepans and trinkets, and she had married him against her father’s wishes. The man was from Srinagar and she had gone to the city to live with him in his mother’s house, as all the young women did here, because after marriage they no longer belonged to their own family but to the husband’s.

  The pedlar had turned out to be a bad man, as the father had known all along, although the wife had three children before her husband abandoned her. The mother-in-law then threw the girl out, claiming that she was an adulteress because her son had told her as much, and insisting that the three children must have been fathered by some other man. Left alone, the wife couldn’t go back to her own family in the village because they had disowned her on her marriage, so the only option left to her was to try to support her children single-handed. Otherwise they would all starve.

  Nerys had seen for herself what that struggle was like.

  She had been listening as intently as if to a fable. But now she collected herself, remembering that it was the truth and not a story at all. ‘That is brutal, as well as sad.’

  ‘Yes, I am afraid it is.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  Rainer shook his head. ‘Beyond offering a little money, some food here and there? Nothing. That is the way it is here.’

  But nothing wasn’t any good, Nerys thought. Even the little she had been able to do for the children in Leh was much better than that. Evan wouldn’t have accepted nothing, either. He would extend a hand, in his pure conviction, to help a sinner, as he saw it.

  Nerys closed her eyes for a moment. Evan had been in her mind ever since this morning when the postman had paddled up to the steps of the Garden of Eden with the letter.

  ‘There is a good deal of sadness in Kashmir,’ Rainer murmured, ‘but I don’t like seeing it reflected in your face.’

  He was looking so hard at her that she had to meet his gaze. In confusion, she thought how recognisable he had become. She knew him, and he knew her.

  ‘Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?’ he whispered.

  Nerys squared her shoulders. ‘I had a letter this morning from my husband. I was expecting him to join me very soon
. But he has decided to spend the winter in Kargil, because his work there has absorbed his attention and he is valuable to the mission. He believes that it would be better and safer for me to spend the winter season here in the Vale, with Myrtle, and then he will travel to meet me after the snows melt again. Then we’ll resume our work together.’

  This last was what she told herself, but she didn’t know for sure. Nor would there be many more mails arriving from Kargil this year. The passes were barely negotiable now, and in another week Ladakh would be cut off within its lines of mountains.

  The truth was, Nerys didn’t add, that Evan found it simpler to preach and work when she wasn’t there to reproach him with her various needs. He could love God’s creatures more generally without suffering the daily and specific reminder that he and his wife were not in love at all.

  ‘I don’t know your husband,’ Rainer answered, ‘but he sounds like a fool.’

  He took one of her hands and very gently kissed the knuckles. She didn’t snatch it away.

  Nerys had learnt quite a lot about men and women since meeting Myrtle McMinn. She had seen the way Myrtle wove her way through the parties and tennis games and cocktail hours in Srinagar, flirting and laughing and attracting admiration wherever she went, and she had also seen – and heard – her at home with Archie before he had gone away. Nerys was in no doubt at all that Myrtle did love her husband, but the world wasn’t either black or white as far as love went. There were infinite permutations of colour, and a hundred thousand grades of feeling, between loving and not loving. To deny as much, she began to think, was to deny not only the obvious truth but your own humanity.

  Nerys wanted Rainer to touch her. She felt dizzy with the force of how much she wanted him to touch her. She was beginning to understand what Myrtle had been talking about when she had advised her to have some fun.

  My dear?

  But Rainer only touched his finger to the rescued brooch at the neck of her blouse. There was a sudden rustle and snapping of twigs from the line of trees and they looked up to see a bearded goat gazing at them. A goat meant a goatherd not far away.

  ‘I think we should go back now.’ Rainer smiled.

  The telephone rang in the saloon. A dense scribble of wires slung from wooden posts on the bank brought a telephone line as well as electric power to the houseboat, but its jangling bell always startled Nerys. She had been half reading and half watching the kingfishers out on the lake, and Myrtle was writing letters. Myrtle put down her pen and picked up the phone.

  ‘This is the Garden of Eden,’ she announced.

  Nerys could just hear a woman’s voice at the other end. It sounded high and hysterical.

  ‘Not at all. Don’t worry,’ Myrtle murmured, raising an eyebrow in Nerys’s direction.

  The voice went on. It was half a minute before Myrtle managed to say, ‘I think you should just get into a shikara and come straight here … Yes, come now … Of course … Of course … See you soon.’ She hung up. ‘That was Caroline Bowen. It sounds like more trouble.’

  ‘Oh dear. Should I go out somewhere?’

  ‘No, stay here. You could ring the bell for some coffee, perhaps.’

  Myrtle went over to the veranda window. She lit a cigarette and leant against the glass, watching for the boat to come gliding over the water.

  When she arrived, Caroline was swathed in her pheran with the hood pulled down to hide her face. She waited until Majid had served the coffee and withdrawn, and as soon as she showed herself they saw that her eyes were crimson and swollen almost shut from prolonged crying. Myrtle tutted in sympathy, settled her on the sofa and gave her coffee.

  ‘Caroline, dear girl, you have to tell us right now exactly what the real trouble is. Otherwise we can’t help. Can we, Nerys?’

  Nerys had less confidence in their joint powers than Myrtle. Caroline tried to speak, but at first the girl couldn’t find the words and she wouldn’t look at either of them. Finally in a low, hoarse voice she managed to say, ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  Myrtle nodded, entirely unsurprised. ‘Are you? Why is that making you so unhappy?’

  Caroline lifted her eyes now. ‘It’s not my husband’s child.’

  ‘Is it Ravi Singh’s?’

  Her miserable silence was enough of an answer.

  ‘Does Ravi know? Does Ralph know?’

  She shook her head. ‘No one does, except you two now. Oh, God, I’m so glad to have told you. It’s such a relief, you wouldn’t believe. I’ve been going mad. I’ve tried absolutely every single thing I could think of, drinking gin until I threw up, taking hot baths, going riding and putting the horse to fences at a gallop, but nothing worked. I felt terribly ill and tired, and then that sort of passed and now I’m just …’ she passed her hand over her middle ‘… getting bigger.’

  ‘How many months is it, do you know?’ Nerys asked gently.

  Caroline bit her lip. ‘About four, I should think.’

  Myrtle was making calculations. ‘What have you heard from Ralph?’

  ‘Just the usual letters. He’s … not all that good at writing. Everyone thought they would be going to North Africa, but it’s Malaya.’

  ‘Is there likely to be any home leave for the regiment?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’ She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘That’s what I hear. Ralph hasn’t mentioned anything.’

  ‘All right.’ There was a pause before Myrtle went on, ‘This is a rather personal question, I know, but we’re having no more secrets. How do you know it isn’t Ralph’s baby? He was here in Srinagar all summer. The timing would be right. And if it were his, he’d be rather pleased, wouldn’t he? Especially if it’s a boy, I should think. And even if it’s not his, with Ravi Singh being so light-skinned … It wouldn’t be the first time in history such a thing has happened, would it?’

  Nerys had said nothing but she tried to flash a warning to Myrtle. Be careful. Don’t assume more than you can know.

  It was too late. Caroline’s face crumpled and her empty coffee cup fell from her fingers and rolled on the rug. Her hands came up to her mouth and her whole body shook.

  ‘What is it?’ Myrtle cried. ‘What have I said?’

  ‘It can’t be Ralph’s baby, you see. That’s just it.’

  ‘Can’t?’ Myrtle persisted.

  It was Nerys who stood up, retrieved the cup and put it back on the brass tray, then went to sit at Caroline’s side. She took the girl’s hands and looked into her ravaged face. ‘I think I understand,’ she murmured. ‘You don’t have to say any more if you don’t want to.’

  Caroline seemed reassured by this. She collected herself and firmly shook her head. ‘No, I want to – need to talk about it. I came over here to Mrs McMinn, I mean Myrtle, and to you, because I knew I must. There hasn’t been anyone I could ’fess up to before, and that’s what has made it so bad. I mean, my stepmother has been decent enough, but she’s at home and I’m here, and we’ve never had that sort of a motherly conversation. That’s to say, before Ralph and I were married I knew I had to arrange matters so when I was in Delhi to buy my wedding dress I saw the doctor there – Mrs Fanshawe gave me an address – and he fixed me up with the hideous rubber thing you’re supposed to put in.’

  Her eyes held Nerys’s.

  A three-letter man, Nerys remembered. That was what Archie McMinn had called Captain Bowen.

  ‘I had it in its box on our wedding night, all ready to put in like the doctor told me. But Ralph had drunk too much and he more or less passed out. I wasn’t all that surprised, I’d seen him drinking before, so I tried to laugh about it the next day, you know, saying something about making up for lost time. Ralph didn’t think it was funny, not at all. He made an excuse that night about feeling ill, and slept on the camp bed. After a few more days I didn’t think it was funny either. I’d be putting talcum powder on the rubber thing, and going to bed in my pretty nightdresses, and my husband never did what he was supposed to.’
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  ‘Never?’ Myrtle whispered. Nerys could see how difficult it was for her friend to imagine such a thing. For herself, it wasn’t such a leap.

  Caroline held up her head. ‘Never.’

  ‘My poor duck.’ Myrtle sighed.

  ‘I thought it must be me. Not that I was thinking I might be repulsively deformed or anything like that – I was at boarding school and I’d seen everyone else so I knew I was actually on the decent side of ordinary, if that doesn’t sound too conceited. I mean, just not being alluring enough. But after a while I started to think, Bloody hell, if I want to and he doesn’t, that can’t all be my fault, can it? Sometimes we’d get near to it, but I always felt he was closing his eyes so as to be somewhere else while it was happening, and never managing to detach himself quite enough actually to be able to do it. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Yes, it makes sense,’ Nerys assured her.

  ‘Well, after the honeymoon he was mostly with the regiment anyway. Ralph’s a soldier, so was his father, and his father, all the way back to the battle of Waterloo or some such, and soldiering comes first, before everything else. He took the trouble to warn me about that, before we got engaged, and I was keen enough on being married to convince myself I could either change him or live with it. I mean, being realistic, how many other proposals was I going to get? I’d come all the way out here and I couldn’t go on living at the Residency for ever. Ralph was quite handsome and he seemed to want me.’

  Even Nerys understood that an ambitious soldier would need a wife. The colonel and the colonel’s lady. Caroline would have been a very suitable choice.

  Caroline looked down at her engagement and wedding rings. ‘It was a happy ending, wasn’t it? I was going to be Ralph’s wife, the mother of his sons. Oh, God.’

  The tears started up again, running down her smooth pink cheeks. Myrtle passed her a handkerchief and said, ‘What about Ravi Singh?’