The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  Nerys peered through a chink in the makeshift curtains rigged up at the back of Rainer’s plinth stage, which had been transferred from his house and erected by a team of bearers. Her stomach was a mass of butterflies. In the sea of faces she could see Caroline, wearing a black velvet evening cape with a hood trimmed in ermine, borrowed from Myrtle, and Myrtle in a voluminous empire-line swirl of midnight-blue satin.

  Mr Fanshawe made a speech of welcome and Nerys took her place in the wings. She looked across at Rainer, poised on the spot where the curtains would part to reveal him. Unlike his regular evening clothes, his stage costume was spruce and his white tie starched and pristine. She had been intending perhaps to blow him a good-luck kiss, acknowledging their intimacy as well as her stage fright, but then she saw that his eyes were closed and he was completely absorbed in himself.

  A mountaineer first, then a magician, she remembered. After that, a man.

  The Resident boomed, as if he were a music-hall master of ceremonies, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Rainer Stamm’s mysterious medley of magic!’

  With two bearers out of sight in the wings hauling on the ropes, the curtains swept aside and the show was on.

  For the first segment Rainer ran through a series of tricks with the linked rings, playing cards, billiard balls and scarves. The audience was pleased, and applauded vigorously. Then came the moment. He announced that he would be joined by Miss Soo Ling, just arrived in Srinagar all the way from distant Shanghai.

  Wondering if she was actually going to faint from nerves, Nerys pulled down her black carnival mask, patted the black straw hat that hid her hair and swept on stage. She folded her hands inside the sleeves of her flowing Chinese robes and gave a deep bow to acknowledge the storm of clapping.

  As she did so, something strange happened. Her fear completely evaporated. She felt calm, clear in the head, and utterly exhilarated.

  To start with, the part she had to play in the magic was merely supportive. There was the water trick, in which she passed Rainer the crystal jugs, the trick with the doves that he plucked out of the air, in which she had to make sure their basket was placed in exactly the right spot where it was not visible to any section of the audience, and then the mango tree, where she planted the seed from which – with the aid of mirrors – a mango tree magically grew and fruited. Miss Soo Ling picked the ripe fruit, and ceremoniously presented it to Mrs Fanshawe who was sitting in the middle of the front row. All through this, Nerys played the silent role that she and Rainer had devised. She was pert, sometimes refusing to do what he told her. The children loved the show of disobedience.

  By the time it came to the last trick, the show’s finale, Nerys knew that nothing could go wrong.

  The trick was the magic box. The real responsibility for pulling it off was hers, not Rainer’s, but they had rehearsed it so meticulously that she was looking forward to performing it to perfection. Laughter and applause rang in her ears and she soaked it all up; it was as if another of Rainer’s tricks had finally hatched this glamorous performer from the chrysalis of a quiet schoolteacher and wife to a Presbyterian minister.

  The box, a red-painted structure made in three sections with a series of shuttered portholes painted with silver moons and stars, was carried on by two bearers and positioned on the plinth. As soon as she saw it, Nerys was to drop all her cheeky airs and try to run offstage. Rainer made a show of barring the way and marching her to the box. The audience took sides, cheering either for him or for Soo Ling.

  The box was just big enough for her to stand up inside it. He opened the door, demonstrated that it was empty, bundled Nerys in and turned the key in the lock.

  Once she was incarcerated, Rainer gave the audience a wink. He lit a cigarette, strolled away to a gramophone placed on a side table and selected a record. The music was Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. They had rehearsed the precise progress of each phase of the trick to the rising beat of the music.

  Rainer cast his cigarette aside. From the wings, he brought out a huge silver sword and polished the blade with a silk handkerchief. With a horizontal sweep of the blade he sliced cleanly between the top and middle sections of the box. The audience gasped. He did the same with the second and third sections. Then he lifted the top third away, and put it down on the plinth. The second box followed.

  Flat on her back, sliding on a wheeled trolley in the confined space within the plinth, Nerys heard a child’s clear voice call out, ‘Chinese lady cut in bits, Mummy.’

  There was a muffled gale of laughter, and Ravel was getting louder and faster.

  All she had to do was slide very fast between the three trapdoors in the floor of the plinth, get into a crouch and pop her head into one box for Rainer to open the porthole, slide back as he juggled with the boxes, slip her arms into place to wave through the portholes in the second and, as the trick gathered momentum, to stand on her head beneath the third so that her black-stockinged legs and feet in Chinese slippers stuck out upside-down.

  She was sliding in the airless space when she felt a sudden jolt and a sideways tilt. Instead of making a smooth glide the trolley jammed at a standstill. At first she couldn’t work out what had gone wrong but, gasping for breath, she squeezed her body into place just as Rainer snapped open the next porthole to reveal her serene masked face. She could hear the laughter and clapping and the relentless crescendo of ‘Bolero’. Below, the trolley was now a barrier to her next desperate moves. She scrambled from box to box, losing the sequence in her panic. The inevitable moment came when the shuffle of boxes got ahead of her and a porthole was opened to reveal thin air.

  ‘My God,’ Rainer yelled, and there was a burst of laughter. He slammed it shut again.

  Recovering herself, Nerys managed to fold her bruised limbs into place. He slammed the door, rapped twice on the box, and when he opened it the second time, there she was.

  She made the next position, choking with dust, wildly kicking her slippers in the air to gales of laughter, but as she wrestled for the final place a nail in the floorboards tore a long rent in her sleeve and in the soft flesh of her arm beneath. Biting back a scream of agony she swarmed over the ruined trolley and forced herself upright again in the three boxes that Rainer had now restacked in their original position. Over the last bars of music she heard the tap with the key that indicated he was about to open the door. She pasted a smile on her face.

  The door swung open, exactly on the beat.

  ‘She is mended!’ shouted the same child.

  Rainer took her hand and led her out to take a bow. She smiled harder beneath the mask and held his fingers tight, keeping her arm clamped to her side because she could feel that her sleeve was soaked with blood.

  The curtains finally fell to a storm of clapping and stamping.

  He spun on her, hot with anger. ‘What the hell were you doing? You nearly ruined it.’

  ‘I nearly ruined it? How dare you? The wheel must have come off the blasted trolley. I damn nearly killed myself for your bloody stupid trick.’

  Flooded with pain and rage, Nerys swung her good arm at him but he caught her by the wrist before she could slap his face. ‘You’re a wildcat. I’ve never heard you swear before.’ He was grinning, relishing this unexpected aspect of her.

  ‘I couldn’t slide the trolley. It blocked the way. I had to crawl on my stomach, and I’ve ripped my arm and—’

  His smile vanished. ‘Let me see.’

  There were drops of blood on the stage and her hand was smeared with it. Rainer rolled back the soaked sleeve and saw the wound. He took in a breath. ‘I’m so sorry. Forgive me. Here …’ He whisked a string of knotted handkerchiefs from inside his spotless waistcoat and roughly bound up her arm. Over his shoulder he told the nearest Residency bearer that he was taking Mrs Watkins away to have a cut urgently dressed. Then he lifted her off her feet and ran to the makeshift dressing room, bundled her into her pheran, which had been hanging there on a hook, and raced past startled faces to the back of the big hous
e.

  ‘I can walk,’ Nerys protested, as they burst out into the navy-blue night. Rainer was staggering a little under her weight, and his heavy footprints wavered in the carpet of silver frost.

  ‘Don’t you want to be abducted?’ He groaned.

  ‘You can’t abduct me. I’m the free spirit, the woman who doesn’t need cushions, remember?’ She squirmed out of his arms, linking her good hand in his as they raced across the yard past Mr Fanshawe’s staring grooms and guards, and through a gate into a lane. By a stroke of luck they came upon a tonga making its way to the front driveway in the hope of picking up a fare at the end of the party. A moment later, for the second time in two days, they were under a swaying canopy as the driver whipped his horse into a flying gallop.

  As ever, it was cold in the raftered room overlooking the Jhelum river.

  ‘Take this off,’ he ordered her. She unbuttoned the Chinese robe and let it drop at her feet. Rainer kissed her naked shoulders before wrapping her up in a pashmina shawl. Then he lifted her chin and kissed her mouth, holding her against him as if she weighed nothing.

  ‘You are magical,’ he murmured, after a long time. With difficulty he stepped back. ‘Wait. Sit here. Let me dress your arm.’

  He brought a bowl of water and bathed the ragged cut, announcing that it was just a flesh wound and she must be healthy to bleed so freely. Then he flooded it with iodine and she yelped and swore again.

  When he had finished bandaging her he gave her a glass of his good cognac.

  ‘I should thank you for rescuing the box trick from disaster,’ he said, in a solemn voice.

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’

  ‘The trolley wheel must have been damaged when the porters carried it over there.’

  ‘You did your own rescue, when my arms didn’t wave out of that box. They loved it, I could hear.’

  Rainer clinked his glass against hers. She could see the weatherbeaten furrows of his lion’s face. ‘We make a good team,’ he said. His praise was precious to her.

  Then, very gently, he took her hands and helped her to her feet. They looked into one another’s eyes.

  Rainer said, ‘I think now it is the right time. If you agree?’

  Nerys inclined her head. She felt like his friend and coeval now, and this touch of intimacy reignited her desire. For all the moral questions and the guilt in anticipation that had plagued her, and despite her emergence as a woman who could make her own choices, now that the moment had come it didn’t seem to be a question or even a choice. It was simple, and inevitable.

  He lifted her up and carried her to his bed. Then he untied the hangings, so they fell and curtained off the glimmering room.

  ‘This is all the world,’ he told her. ‘For tonight.’

  He knelt over her, and took off her remaining clothing piece by piece. She let him do it, and was surprised at her pleasure in his admiration.

  At last he whispered, with a quaint formality that touched her heart, ‘If you will permit me?’

  She did. She permitted him everything, and she took all the freedom he offered her in return.

  She might never have known this, she thought.

  She might easily never have learnt this language that in the end came naturally, and the delight would have been locked away for ever, like a wonderful unperformed trick hidden in one of the magician’s boxes.

  But a long time later, as she drifted into sleep, it was Evan who hovered in her thoughts. She saw him with the eerie clarity of a dream, her husband with his awkward innocence and the anxiety that constantly stalked him. She felt a surge of tenderness towards him, and a prickle of shame at what she had just done. But even so she couldn’t regret it. She suspected that she might never do so.

  With his arms tightly wound round her, Rainer was already asleep. She listened to his breathing, and in the end she surrendered her drowsy inquisition and slept too.

  There was a distant banging, and a voice calling. As Nerys surfaced she had the sense that the noise had persisted for quite a long time. Rainer’s arm lay heavy across her chest and she twisted to disengage herself. Opening a chink in the bed’s curtains – This is all the world, for tonight – she let in a shaft of dim grey light. It was very early, but the day had come.

  Someone was hammering on the door downstairs. The voice sounded like a child’s. Nerys’s clothes were scattered, tangled up in the bedcovers, and she remembered that the bloodstained Chinese robe lay somewhere across the room.

  ‘Rainer, wake up.’ She shook his muscled shoulder and he opened his eyes. ‘Listen.’

  He uncoiled himself, already reaching for his clothes and dragging them on.

  ‘Wait here,’ he ordered, but she ignored him. Wrapped in a blanket she was at his heels as he reached the door. Her arm felt stiff and sore, but she forgot it instantly.

  On the step was the little girl, the yarn-spinner’s daughter. Her dirt-covered face was seamed with the tracks of fresh tears. Her fists pulled at Rainer’s legs as she gabbled at him.

  ‘What’s she saying?’

  ‘The mother’s ill. She wants help, food.’

  Nerys stooped and hoisted the child in her arms. Her response was to twist and spit, beating her hands on Nerys’s shoulder and howling into her face.

  She called to Rainer, ‘Tell her we’ll come. We’ve got to get dressed.’

  While they scrambled into their clothes the girl darted through the room, snatching fruit off a plate and tying it in the cloth from her head. The desperation of her feral rummaging struck dread as well as pity into Nerys. With the child haring ahead of them, they raced through the icy mud and refuse heaps of the alleyways until they came to the doorway with its shred of protective sacking.

  The little boy was sitting in the corner of the bare room with the silent baby in his lap. The whites of their eyes showed in the dim light. The mother was lying stretched out beside her spinning wheel.

  It was immediately obvious that she was dead.

  The girl crouched beside her and pulled at her arm. Then she gave a low wail like an animal’s cry and flung herself across her mother’s body.

  ‘Take the children out of here,’ Rainer murmured.

  Nerys looked round. There was nothing in the bare room except the wheel and the bed of rags. Even the shawl, in its cloth wrapping, had gone. With dry eyes and stiff hands she lifted the baby from its brother’s arms and folded it inside her pheran. She took the younger child’s cold hand, and with Rainer’s help, she detached the now silent girl from the mother’s cooling body. There were no more tears and, after that one terrible wail, not a sound.

  ‘Take them to my house. I’m going to find the head man of this quarter and report the death. Then I’ll be back,’ he said. His face was like a stone.

  Nerys led the children back the way they had come. She wasn’t sure of the route through the labyrinth of alleys, and she was too angry to try to ask any of the silent men who stood in the shadows to watch them pass. The girl refused to take her hand. She walked in silence, stiff as a small robot.

  At last they reached the river and the tall old house. Nerys sat the boy on Rainer’s bed and drew the covers across his thin shoulders. The baby was stirring and whimpering and she rocked it as she moved round the room. The girl went to the window and stood with her back to them, staring out at the snow that had begun to fall.

  In Rainer’s kitchen Nerys unearthed some roghani bread and a dish of apple sauce. Unlike everyone else in Srinagar, Rainer employed no servants. She boiled a cup of milk on the bottled-gas ring, and placed it on the windowsill to cool while she fed spoonfuls of bread and apple to the boy. When he had eaten something she was able to persuade the girl to turn away from her sentry position. She snatched some bread and, holding it in two hands, gnawed at it as she returned to her place.

  Nerys was holding the mute baby in her arms and feeding it warm milk from a teaspoon when Rainer came back. He brought fresh warm bread and a pot of lentil stew. He set out the food and
the girl seized her plate and took it back to the window.

  ‘She had fever,’ he said. ‘She had been ill for a few days.’

  ‘Why didn’t anyone help her?’

  ‘She was an outcast. That’s the way it is with them. Maybe it’s true – maybe she had been with another man – I don’t know. No one will know, now.’

  Nerys looked from one child to another. They hardly seemed children at all, more like small, carved effigies.

  She was aware that a great deal had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and that there was much more to come. Her own concerns, so gripping an hour ago, had become entirely unimportant. ‘What can we do for them?’ she whispered.

  Sombrely he considered the question. ‘We’ll take them back to the village. To her family, in Kanihama.’

  ELEVEN

  Two days after Christmas, Nerys and Rainer drove the little trio through the snow from Srinagar to Kanihama. The boy and girl huddled behind the seats of the truck and the baby wailed in Nerys’s arms.

  The children’s grandfather and great-grandfather came out of the village house to meet them.

  ‘We have very little,’ the man with the crescent face complained. ‘Not enough to feed the mouths already.’

  ‘These are your daughter’s children. She is dead, and if you and her family do not care for them they will die too,’ Rainer said.

  ‘May the woman rest in peace,’ the older man murmured piously. His son’s mouth set in a hard line.

  The children’s teeth were chattering from the cold. In the end a woman came out of the houses and led them away. Nerys would never forget the glance of smouldering accusation, quickly blanked out, that the girl, Farida, shot back over her shoulder. She hadn’t uttered a word since her mother had died, and this was the first sign of emotion she had shown. She had grabbed all the food she could lay her hands on, not even waiting to see if her brothers had a share, and the rest of the time she had stood or sat with her face turned away.