by Rosie Thomas
She murmured, ‘Welsh, didn’t you say?’
‘Yes. My grandmother’s name was Nerys Watkins. I have a photograph of her, with you, here in Srinagar.’
‘Nerys was my friend. And this,’ she held up a bunched handful of soft wool, ‘this is Zahra’s. Her dowry.’
Caroline’s carer came back with the medicine, and found them with the shawl drawn between them like a narrative.
TEN
Winter came. In early December 1941 Japanese troops invaded Malaya. The Indian Army units defending the Malay coast were forced into surrender, and even though they were heavily outnumbered, the Japanese continued their advance down the peninsula towards the Allied stronghold of Singapore. At the same time, almost to the day, Japanese bombs fell on the US Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor.
The war in Europe had spread to Asia, and in response the Americans began the biggest mobilisation in history.
Far from Srinagar, Captain Ralph Bowen and his company of the Indian 11th Infantry were drawn back to defend the naval base at Sembawang, in the north-east of the island of Singapore. At the same time Archie McMinn, the Indian Railways engineer, at last succeeded in his attempts to get into uniform. Almost at once he found himself co-ordinating rolling stock and personnel to supply the troops in Malaya, and preparing to evacuate thousands of wounded men in the opposite direction.
Across the Himalayas in Kargil, the conscientious objector Parchedig Evan Watkins preached in an almost empty Presbyterian mission hall, and spent his lonely evenings in the mission’s tiny, bleak residential quarters tuned in to the war news via the Overseas Service of the BBC. His main consolation, as the cold tightened its grip and the futility of his efforts became harder to deny, was to think of Nerys in the relative comfort and luxury of the Vale of Kashmir. He missed the home she had made for them both in Leh, the noise of small children clapping and singing in her schoolroom, even Diskit’s cooking. He prayed humbly for the gift of fortitude, trudged miles through the icy days to small settlements – whose inhabitants received him with frank bewilderment – and realised how intensely he was looking forward to the coming of spring and the reunion with his wife.
For Nerys, Srinagar had a wintry loveliness that the society migrants of the summer season could hardly have imagined.
Smoke from countless wood and charcoal fires curled into the white skies; bare trees were policed by brooding birds; the clopping of tonga horses’ hoofs was amplified by the frozen silence. When she woke up one morning the lake water was filmy, as if covered by a layer of oil. The next day it had developed a skin of thin, glittering plates, like the markings of some huge reptile, and the one after that it was frozen solid. Moorhens and wagtails left necklaces of spiky prints in the powdery rime, and garlands of icicles festooned the houseboats’ carved eaves.
In delight at the beauty of it, she asked Myrtle, ‘Does this happen every year?’
‘Only about every fourth winter. Before the war, in the years when the lake did freeze, there would be skating parties and sleigh rides. One year the Resident – not this one, his predecessor – held a Jacobean ice fair. It was before I was married, and it was sheer heaven. Everyone wore fancy dress and there was a band playing for the skating and dancing, the Residency cooks roasted kids and a lamb on huge spits on the bank and there were chestnuts on braziers out on the ice. It was the best party of the whole year – people came up from Delhi and Jammu especially for it.’
She sighed for bygone days of glamour. ‘There won’t be anything of the kind this time. There isn’t a soul here and every damned thing is scarce or rationed or unobtainable.’
‘I’m here, and Caroline. We’ll just have to devise an ice celebration of our own. Rainer will help.’
‘I hope so. We need something to look forward to,’ Myrtle agreed. She poured herself some more gin and added a small splash of lime juice.
Rainer had become a regular visitor to the houseboat, appearing at the veranda steps almost as regularly as Caroline did. Myrtle was intrigued by his introductions to Srinagar people on whom she had never set eyes before and who were never going to cross the threshold of the club or pop up at Residency parties.
On the day after Pearl Harbor Rainer took both women to call on his friend the professor. Nerys and Myrtle drank tea with his wife, the musician daughter and other female relatives, while the men sat in another room sharing a pipe and discussing politics and war. Myrtle didn’t protest at this automatic segregation, although Nerys had expected her to do so. The professor’s women were sharp and surprisingly talkative, as well as slyly funny, and when they got back to the Garden of Eden that evening Myrtle declared it was the most interesting time she’d spent in ages.
She had decreed that Caroline should also go out and about as much as possible before her shape became too pronounced. As December passed they took tea or coffee in the echoing confines of the club almost every other day, and were becoming such a familiar sight in their usual corner that the handful of regulars did no more than raise a hand as they shuffled past on their way to the bar or the bridge table. Whenever they left the houseboat the women were slow-moving, shapeless mounds of wool, sheepskin, pashmina and thick tweed. Quite quickly, Nerys recognised that Myrtle’s absurd plan was in fact rather a clever one.
However, Rainer had only seen the women together twice before he asked Nerys, the next time they were alone, if she would please tell him what was going on with Mrs Bowen and the pherans.
‘Pherans?’ she asked, with what she hoped was wide-eyed innocence.
‘That’s right. The three of you looked like a row of galleons under sail at the club yesterday afternoon, and I’m sure there will be questions in the book about the heating because lady members seem obliged to wear their outdoor garments in the drawing room. Hmm?’
‘I feel the cold,’ Nerys offered.
She had acquired a kangri and was genuinely glad of it. The fire-pot was a bulbous earthenware container, about the size – well, she admitted to herself, with a flicker of laughter, about the size of a full-term pregnancy – encased in a wicker basket. Every morning Majid filled it with a scoop of glowing embers from the stove in the kitchen boat and brought it to her bedroom. She hugged it against her belly while she summoned up the resolve to slide from under the blankets and dive into her clothes, and once she was dressed she settled it within her various layers before scuttling down the chill planks to the saloon, where the stove was already glowing and Myrtle was huddled beside the coffee pot. Myrtle wore a lambskin hat with flaps that covered her ears, and a pair of fleece-lined gloves with the fingertips cut off so she never had to remove them. Within a radius of three or four feet of the stove it was warm enough to sit and talk, but beyond that lay the realm of ice.
Rainer merely shook his head. He curled a long arm and rubbed his hair so that it stood out like a mane. ‘Have I ever listed the four principles of stage magic for you? Please stop me if I have.’
‘No, I don’t believe so.’ Nerys was already laughing. They were always having conversations like this, mock-solemn and formal, yet bubbling under the surface with amusement and flirtation.
‘The four principles,’ he counted them off on his fingers, ‘are misdirection, distraction, disguise and simulation. If, for example, you tell an audience that a jug seemingly full of white liquid is in fact full of milk, that audience will automatically believe you because their collective mind looks no further. I think you three ladies are cleverly employing all four principles to your own ends. As a professional I admire the technique, but as a friend I cannot help feeling somewhat excluded.’
The plaintive note he managed to project made Nerys laugh harder. ‘It’s not my secret to share,’ she protested.
‘Ah, well, then. But if I were to offer a fellow illusionist’s advice, it would be, ah, that too much of a distraction only attracts attention.’
‘I see. Thank you,’ she said.
That evening she warned Myrtle and Caroline that Rainer had been asking questions. She t
hought it would be a good idea to tell him what was happening because he might be useful to them in the future.
Caroline was uncertain. ‘Is he discreet?’ she asked.
Nerys said that she was absolutely sure he was, and Myrtle had something else to add. ‘Rainer Stamm is one big secret himself. You remember those two Americans we met at his house, Nerys?’
She did, and Myrtle smiled. ‘One of them had had a couple of Scotches, and took rather a shine to me.’
Nerys remembered that, too.
‘Well. I thought he might be a spy, but he believes that Rainer really is one.’
Nerys was amused. ‘Our side or theirs, do you think?’
Caroline looked from one to the other. ‘Surely he’d be on our side. He couldn’t be a Nazi, could he? Even though he’s Swiss?’
Myrtle patted her hand. ‘I should think all the best spies have that couldn’t-possibly-be quality, darling. But don’t worry. I’m inclined to trust Mr Stamm, and Nerys is right – he could be helpful to us.’
It was agreed that Nerys should take him into their confidence.
She was at Rainer’s house the next evening, while Myrtle and Caroline were putting in an appearance at a sale of handicrafts and gifts to raise funds to send sweets and cigarettes to the men in Malaya. Myrtle had said that she for one didn’t care if she never saw another item of local papier-mâché, and certainly didn’t intend to present anyone she knew with a pen tray or a card holder. If she received any such Christmas gift herself, they should take note, she would wait for the lake to thaw and then pitch it in.
Caroline nodded. ‘I shall remember that,’ she said.
Myrtle and Nerys were sometimes unsure whether she was joking or merely being solemn.
It was very cold in Rainer’s room. The sky beyond the uncurtained window was a shower of stars, hollow with frost. They were sitting looking out at the black river water and the yellow points of lamplight showing from houses on the opposite bank. In their wire cage, the pair of white doves he used for some of his tricks were asleep with their heads beneath their wings.
‘Who is the father?’ Rainer asked, once Nerys had outlined the facts.
‘I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you that.’
‘I can probably guess.’
‘You probably can. You don’t miss much.’
There was a small silence. Rainer’s mood could dip into sudden melancholy. ‘I do miss things,’ he said, in a low voice.
‘I didn’t mean that sort of missing …’
‘I know what you meant.’ He leant forward. Nerys was swathed in blankets as well as all her clothes, and his hand slipped between the outer layers to find hers and then clasp it. ‘You are warm.’
‘I am. Mine is an exceptionally good pheran. I don’t even need my kangri in here.’
‘This plan is Myrtle’s, I take it?’
‘Yes. But we are all agreed. Any one of us could be pregnant, or all three, or none.’
‘Aren’t you worried about your reputation, Nerys?’
‘No,’ she said, after reflection. She didn’t care what Srinagar might think.
He came a little closer, his head blotting out the window and the stars. ‘Mrs Watkins,’ he whispered. Briefly, he lifted her hand to his lips.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Rainer was looking at her with minute attention. She didn’t believe that anyone else had ever looked at her with this degree of precise and steady scrutiny. ‘Nerys, you do understand what is happening between the two of us, don’t you?’
‘Of course. I’m not Caroline Bowen,’ she said, with a touch of heat. He couldn’t think she was so innocent or so obtuse as not to know.
Not rebuffed in the least, he smiled. ‘You are a thousand times more desirable than Mrs Bowen, pretty and English and adorably pliant though she is.’
They sat quietly for a moment. Nerys’s pulse steadied until she could hear the creak of old wood and the gentle hiss of the fire, not just the pounding of her heart.
Understanding what was happening meant acknowledging the moral dilemma that faced her, but it was also to do with anticipation; the fine control of a serious decision weighed in the balance. To become Rainer’s lover – or not – was her choice as much as his, that was what he was indicating, and she was intoxicated by the oxygen of independence that it gave her. She had a sense of the meek selves, the effacing and mildly baffled versions of herself, that had advanced to this point. As if she had been a caterpillar, then a frozen chrysalis, and now was on the brink of becoming a surprising butterfly.
She sat upright. ‘I think we both understand quite well,’ she said. She held out the small, thick green glass that he had given her and indicated that she would take another half-inch of Rainer’s French cognac. Decent drink of any kind was becoming hard to find in Srinagar. Then she settled herself in her cocoon of blankets, her back comfortably against the wormy old panelling. Brandy fumed pleasantly in her head as she sipped it. ‘Do you know,’ she said, in amusement, ‘that various people suspect you of being a spy?’
‘Do they, indeed?’
‘And are you?’
He enjoyed his reputation, she could see that. He almost tossed his mane.
‘No, my darling. I’m a mountaineer, and a magician.’
‘In that order?’
‘Always in that order. I make my living as a stage illusionist and I have given shows all over Europe. I could mention crowned heads, if I were trying to impress you. But, in my heart, the mountains are always first. I will get to Nanga Parbat whatever the British have to say, and I will claim the peak for my friend Matthew Forbes.’
Images of cruel white peaks as jagged as sharks’ teeth glimmered in Nerys’s head, and anxiety stirred. She didn’t want even to imagine Rainer meeting the same fate as Matthew. ‘When?’
He laughed at her, widening his red mouth, pleased to note her concern. ‘When I can. But now, with the war so close,’ he shrugged, ‘I have other concerns. I wish to help the Allies, naturally. The alternative is not to be thought about. I am an expert in camouflage, and in other forms of deception that may have a military value, and I have offered my services to the British. But, as you can see, they have not yet taken me quite seriously.’ He waved his hand at the room, and its strange clutter of painted props.
‘They ought to,’ Nerys said. She wasn’t quite sure whether or not she believed Rainer’s innocent account of himself.
He lowered his voice. ‘Thank you. We shall see. In the meantime … I find that Srinagar draws me, and holds my heart in a way that I never expected.’
A small silence fell as they turned their heads in the same arc to gaze over the lights in the labyrinth of the old town.
‘I need your help,’ Rainer said, after a while.
‘Of course I’ll help you. Tell me how.’
‘Wait until you hear. You may change your mind. Because of my various projects I am eager to maintain cordial relations with the Resident, your friend Mr Fanshawe.’
‘He’s hardly my friend. I’m not even on the social scale,’ Nerys protested.
‘Mr Fanshawe has asked me to put on a morale-raising magic performance on Christmas night at the Residency. It will be for the entertainment of the staff and their families, what’s left of the regimental headquarters, Srinagar society of a certain sort. You will easily imagine.’
Nerys could.
‘To manage a show properly, however, I will need a stage assistant. It’s usual for the assistant to be female, and preferably of exotic extraction. Mysterious Madame Moth, Miss Soo Ling straight from Shanghai, that sort of thing.’
‘I see. Rainer, I’ve never been on a stage in my life. And Welsh is not exotic.’
‘You are not following me. The four principles, remember? Disguise. You will have to remove your pheran, I’m afraid, but it can be replaced by flowing robes. Chinese, I think definitely. A little round black hat, a mask. Charming.’
‘Will I be sawn in half?’
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br /> Their eyes met.
‘I haven’t devised the programme yet. That may only be the beginning. And I am not an amateur, Mrs Watkins. We shall rehearse, and rehearse, and then rehearse some more. Are you willing?’
‘Ready, and more than willing,’ she managed to answer.
And later, when she mentioned that Myrtle was nostalgic for the glamorous pre-war ice parties, Rainer said that in return for Nerys’s services as stage assistant he would come up with an idea for a Christmas celebration.
Nerys reported all this back to Myrtle and Caroline before they set off for Delhi, avowedly to retreat from the punishing cold and to shop for Christmas, but in fact discreetly to consult a doctor about the progress of Caroline’s pregnancy.
‘You seem very happy,’ Myrtle said, looking at her face.
‘Yes,’ Nerys agreed simply.
‘Are you in love with him?’
Nerys glanced round to make sure that Caroline was out of earshot. ‘I don’t think that would be entirely welcome.’
‘That doesn’t answer my question. Have fun, remember. Caroline and I will be back in Srinagar on the twenty-third.’
The excursion to Delhi was not enjoyable. The journey, by road and then train, was excruciatingly slow and uncomfortable, and Caroline was anxious and tearful. The Hindu doctor they had found examined her and brusquely informed her that she was quite healthy and could expect to deliver in approximately fourteen weeks’ time. He was more interested in where she planned her confinement, and wanted to know why, if her husband was in the army, she was not under the care of the military hospital.
They hurried away, and Caroline declared that whatever else happened she wasn’t going anywhere near that doctor ever again. Even worse, on their way back through Connaught Place from his office to Myrtle’s bungalow, Caroline stopped to lean against a pillar and catch her breath. Delhi was warm after Srinagar and they had had to put aside their pherans, swathing themselves instead in loose silk duster coats and trailing scarves. At that very moment there was a cry of recognition. A woman stepping out of her car at the kerb turned out to be the sister of the major’s wife, Caroline’s next-door neighbour.