by JH Fletcher
Marie rejected the idea, emphatically, although she had said the same to Eugénie, once. ‘As a separate person, I do not exist. In my spirit, I feel I am one with the mountains, the river, the sea, with all things. When I paint them, distil their essence onto the canvas, I am painting myself. For the rest, I am nothing.’
Jules had shut his ears to her words. ‘A duty to yourself, too,’ he repeated. ‘And to those who love you.’
Love … The word cracked like ice in the spring melt, letting free the bound waters. ‘I want to marry you,’ he told her. ‘I ask you to be my wife.’
All his life, Jules would be doomed by his instinct for the melodramatic. Marie could have laughed, had she wished to be cruel, but did not. She was moved by his sincerity, his willingness to sacrifice himself. Because a sacrifice it would be; she could see it in his eyes.
‘My dear,’ she said gently. ‘Thank you so much. But it would not be right, for either of us. If I said yes, you would come to hate me, in time.’
‘Nonsense …’
But she was right, and they both knew it.
He made one last effort, his expression showing, even before he spoke, that it would fail. ‘These wild mountains on the far side of the world … What culture will you find there? What will you do?’
She remembered Greta Talbot speaking of her brother-in-law. ‘Perhaps I shall learn to live.’
8
Kashmir was a dream made manifest.
Outside Srinagar, the capital, was the Dal Lake, where houseboats could be rented by the day, or the year. Marie rented one for a month, with an option to renew.
In the mornings she sat on the upper deck that extended above the living quarters and looked at everything around her: lines of slender poplars like green spears, reflected in the dun water; the shrine on top of a neighbouring hill, its dome golden in the early sunlight.
Voices called from across the water, where gondola-type boats called shikaras crossed and re-crossed. Every day, men — swarthy, be-turbaned — came in boats, selling pansies and roses, which she bought in huge bunches and placed in pots and jugs everywhere around the houseboat.
There were other flowers: blood-red poppies amid the lush grass, irises like blue-grey sentries standing in clumps along the roadsides. The air sparkled and the ice glint of the encircling mountains gleamed in a cloudless sky.
Jules had been right, she thought. All this was far away, indeed, from the world she had known. Weeks on the boat from Europe followed by the train journey from Bombay to Rawalpindi; days on the road winding high into the mountains past turbulent, rushing streams grey with ice melt, the scars of recent landslides. And, finally, to this remote place of beauty and peace, so far from the world.
Or not quite.
Because Marie was a European, and Europeans had a position to maintain.
She received an invitation to tea from Lady Hardy, a widow of authority who had lived in India for forty years and knew all there was to know, and more. Marie understood that it was not an invitation to be refused. It was, indeed, an honour — or would be, if she survived it.
There were others, both women and men, at the tea party which was held, not at Lady Hardy’s home, but at the Club adjoining the Residency, where the local representative of the King Emperor exercised supreme, if invisible, power.
Those who understood the ways of local society knew that the purpose of the invitation was to examine this new arrival, who was rumoured to be of dubious quality. An artist and, so the rumour claimed, a Colonial. Or, far worse, French. There were few who believed that Marie Desmoulins would make the grade. The name was against her, for a start.
‘Do you play bridge?’ Lady Hardy wondered.
‘I’m afraid not.’
Glances met. Oh dear.
Marie heard what was being said, and not said. She did not care; she had not come to India to become a doyenne of society. She had never liked starch-stiff functions, whose purpose had nothing to do with pleasure, but only with maintaining the position of those with status and those without it.
Lady Hardy was gracious, speaking to the Frenchwoman for almost five minutes, but then she moved on. It was a signal; Marie did not think she could leave so soon after arriving but, her company not in demand, soon found it possible to slip away as far as the veranda, which overlooked the tranquil stretches of the lake. She stared at the water. Since arriving in Kashmir, she had felt no inclination to paint or even to draw. Now, for the first time, she felt the slow stirring of the creative impulse and was at peace, knowing that things were beginning to come right at last.
‘I was right to come here,’ she said to the lake, to the trees and birds and sky.
A voice at her shoulder said, ‘I am glad to hear it.’
She turned. A man perhaps ten years older than herself, tanned and lean, with neat grey hair, stood smiling at her.
She smiled back. ‘You weren’t supposed to hear that.’
‘I would have heard it sooner or later, in any case.’
‘Why?’
‘Sneeze in your bath and people will ask you about your cold. It’s that sort of place.’
‘You live here?’
‘I wouldn’t live anywhere else.’
She knew; it was impossible, yet she knew. ‘Are you Mr Mark Talbot?’
She had hoped to amaze him, but had failed; his smile widened. ‘And you are Marie Desmoulins.’
‘Everybody here knows that.’
‘But not everybody has a letter from their sister-in-law saying so.’
‘She was the one who told me about this place.’
He watched the water for a minute before turning to look steadily at her — really at her, as though he wanted to know her — and she saw that his eyes were the same washed blue as the sky above the distant peaks. ‘Remarkable,’ he said.
‘That she should have told me?’
‘That you should have packed up and come here.’
‘A friend of mine in Paris told me I was being irresponsible. He complained that I behaved as though Kashmir were just across the road.’
‘It’s a lot further than that,’ he said, and she had the impression that he meant more than simply the physical distance. ‘And do you think you were being irresponsible?’
She turned her head and looked out at the mountains shimmering in the haze. ‘I am beginning to think it was the most responsible thing I ever did in my life.’
The next day he called on her at her houseboat. It was still early; she had not had time to arrange the day’s supplies of flowers and was sitting on deck, surrounded by roses and eating her breakfast, when a call made her look down at the water. He was in a small canoe that he was paddling himself. She tried to make out his expression, but could not; the sun, reflecting from the rippled surface, surrounded him in a shimmer of light.
‘Good morning.’ His voice came out of the shimmer.
‘Hullo.’
‘I thought I would take the liberty of calling to see how you were.’
She was not spruced up for company, but did not care. People who come so early must take me as they find me, she thought. In any case, she doubted very much that this man would care, either. ‘Come aboard. Then you’ll be able to see better.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘There are the people in the kitchen boat. No-one else. Why?’
‘Remember what I said about sneezing in the bath?’
‘What about it?’
‘People will know I’ve called on you and that you invited me aboard.’
She was amused. She knew what he was saying, but had never been able to take such things seriously; she was not about to start now. ‘Do you plan to attack me?’ Thinking that she might not mind very much, if he did.
‘Lady Hardy won’t like it.’
‘Lady Hardy can take a jump.’
He laughed. ‘So long as you know.’
She knew, and did not care. ‘You think I’ll ever be accepted by Lady Hardy and her friends?’
‘Then why are we wasting time talking about it?’
Again he laughed, a single note, and thrust the blade of his paddle into the water.
She settled him beside her on the deck and offered him coffee, which he accepted. She poured it and handed him the cup, thinking how right it felt that he should be here.
‘This wasn’t part of my plan,’ she said. And waited, giving him the chance to ask why, if he wished to do so.
‘Why?’
‘I intended to spend all my time here alone.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Feeling.’
He seemed to understand what she meant. ‘This is a good place for that.’
Is that why you’re here? But did not ask the question, determined not to intrude into his space. She knew already that this was an unusual man; she guessed he might need more space than most. Time, too, although she suspected that he would act decisively enough, when he wanted.
A few minutes later he proved her right, in that at least.
He finished his coffee, put the cup back in the saucer and looked at her: the same disconcertingly direct look he had given her yesterday, at the Club. ‘I came to ask if you’d like to spend the day with me.’
‘Are you making up a party?’ The idea of spending a day with Lady Hardy and her friends did not appeal.
‘No. Just the two of us.’
To local society, that would be outrageous conduct, indeed.
‘I shall never get to meet the Viceroy that way.’
‘Do you want to meet the Viceroy?’ He sounded impatient, a man intolerant of the verbal fencing that society called conversation.
‘Not particularly.’
‘I thought we could take a couple of horses. There’s some rough country hereabouts. Horseback is really the only way to see it.’
‘I’m not much of a horsewoman.’
‘I shall be there to catch you if you fall off.’
Yes, she thought, he probably would. This was a man who would be capable of doing many things, a practical man with practical hands, yet one who understood the importance of feeling.
She poured herself another cup of coffee, which she sipped, thoughtfully. A voice carried across the water from a distant shikara, to be answered a few seconds later, shrilly, by a woman standing on the deck of another houseboat a hundred yards away. Her rose-coloured sari shone in the sunlight and, beyond the fringes of the lake, the misty ramparts of the ice-clad mountains rose against the sky.
She said, ‘Yes.’
She discovered that she was not quite as hopeless with horses as she had feared, or perhaps the horse itself helped. They were more ponies than horses, shaggy and used to the mountains, and she felt in no danger at all of falling off.
The track wound up steeply into the hills in a series of corkscrew bends until the lake glistened, green as malachite, far below them. She could see the bungalows along the shore, the houseboats lying to their moorings; then the track passed beyond a spur of rock and she could see it no more. Mark had been right; the countryside was indeed rough, the hooves of the ponies clashing and clattering on rivers of loose shale, the sunlight shining patchily through the leaves of the trees. Further on they came to a forest of fir trees growing, not in ordered plantations, but wild along both banks of a river twenty yards across. It was grey and wild, leaping between boulders as it shouldered its thunderous way downhill. Under the firs the shade grew close about them. The air was cool and smelt sharply of resin.
The country grew rougher still as they followed the course of the river ever higher into the hills, until eventually they reached a patch of soft, level grass beside a deep pool, where the river, for the moment, flowed peacefully.
Mark kicked his feet free from the long stirrups and leapt down, giving her a hand as she dismounted, more decorously.
‘Sore?’
She laughed, ruefully. ‘I probably shall be, in the morning.’
She looked about her: crags on all sides, the ranks of fir trees, the river flowing in its rocky bed. ‘What a place!’
‘I like it here.’
Just that, but it said everything.
He had brought a bottle of wine. He tied a line securely to the neck and lowered it into the pool, then started to assemble a fishing rod. ‘For lunch,’ he said.
She stared into the pool’s dark depths, but could see nothing. ‘What happens if you don’t catch anything?’
‘We go hungry.’
He opened a small tin, took out a squirming worm which he impaled on the hook.
‘I thought you were supposed to use flies?’
‘You are. I want to catch fish.’
He caught two: brown trout, about half a pound each. She watched the deft movement of his hands as he built a fire on the river bank, starting it with some dry moss, then feeding the thin flame with scraps of dry timber that he found under the trees. When the fire was burning to his satisfaction, he took a pan from his saddlebag and, in no time, the fish was ready, accompanied by the cool wine and a herb-flavoured salad that he had also brought with him. A practical man, indeed, as he proved later in other ways as he made slow and wonderful love to her beside the river.
She felt the voice of the river enter into her as the man, too, entered her. Afterwards, replete in every respect, she lay slack-limbed at his side. The sound of the river came more peacefully now, the wind blew softly in the branches of the trees and she was at peace.
Later he made them some smoky-flavoured tea over the still-smouldering fire. As they sipped it, drinking it black, the hot liquid burning their lips, he said: ‘Will you paint while you’re here?’
She had painted nothing since leaving Paris. Now she could, and would. ‘Yes.’
She looked around her at the utter loneliness of this place that was not lonely, at all.
‘A long way from the real world,’ he said.
‘I don’t think so.’ She saw his eyebrows rise in unspoken question. ‘I think the real world is here.’
‘You are only the second person I have ever met who thought so.’
‘Who was the first?’
‘Myself.’
Later they packed up. They put all the bits and pieces back in Mark’s saddlebag, buried the fish bones, poured water on the embers until they were well and truly out. They climbed back on the horses and made their way down the mountain until they reached the lake. It was late by now and turning chilly. Mark’s houseboat was moored alongside a tiny, fenced paddock that he told her he leased from the Indian owner. It had a small, iron shed at one end and a chenar tree on the bank, with a small bench underneath it. They unsaddled the horses, turned them loose in the paddock, put the saddles and other gear in the shed. Then he invited her on board for a drink and she accepted, as she had known she would, and after the drink he made love to her a second time, as she had known he would, and it was as wonderful as it had been before.
‘It’s not only the horse that’ll be making me sore, at this rate.’
‘Complaining?’
‘Furiously.’
‘You’d better stay the night, then.’
She stretched, luxuriously, and smiled at him, at herself, at the whole situation in which, so unexpectedly and delightfully, she found herself. ‘Bye bye, Viceroy,’ she said.
The next day they had a serious conversation.
‘Are you planning to stay in Kashmir?’ he asked her.
‘I’ll have to let my agent in Paris know what’s going on. Organise how to freight my paintings to him, how to get the paints and canvas that I need — that sort of thing. But, provided all that can be worked out satisfactorily, I shall stay here, certainly for some time. Yes.’
‘Then I have a suggestion. I want you to move in with me.’
She inspected the idea, and him. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve never been one for sneaking around back doors.’
‘Hmm.’
&nb
sp; ‘You don’t fancy the idea?’ He didn’t sound petulant or angry; simply wanting to know.
‘I fancy it very much.’
‘But?’
‘It’s a big decision. Like it or not, the Lady Hardys of the world carry a lot of clout. I’ve a hunch she could make life awkward, if she wanted to.’
‘I’ll lay odds she already knows what’s going on.’
‘No doubt. But, the ways things are at present, she can pretend she doesn’t know. Moving in together will be like sticking a finger up her nose. She won’t be able to ignore it any longer.’
‘She can’t do anything.’
Marie wasn’t so sure. ‘Let me think about it.’
‘While you’re thinking,’ he said, ‘I’ve another suggestion.’
His idea, this time, was that they should go on an expedition together. ‘Into the real mountains,’ he told her. ‘To the Gangabal Lake.’
She had never heard of the Gangabal Lake, but that didn’t matter. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I would like that very much.’
9
There were boots to buy for Marie and all the gear that they would need had to be got together.
‘Not a lot,’ Mark said. ‘What we take we have to carry.’
‘No porters? I’ve read that Himalayan explorers always use porters.’
‘I don’t like porters, except on really big expeditions, when you can’t avoid them. I want to be alone with you.’
Which suited her very well, indeed.
The expedition started with a night ride in an open boat to the mouth of the wild Sind Valley. Afterwards she would always remember the lights of the boat reflecting in the blackness of the water, the plash of paddles and creak of wood, the soft breathing of the crew as they drove the hull along. The night hugged her close. The stars were brilliant, the deck lanterns gleamed upon the shapes of fish that leapt about them to fall back splashing into the water. The sense of magic was so strong that she half expected the stars to sing while, faintly through the darkness and far closer now, gleamed the grey and luminous shadows of the peaks.
It took them three days to backpack their way up to Sonnamarg, at the head of the valley, and it was steep going. Mark told her that Sonnamarg meant golden meadow and so it was, lush and green and gold, enclosed by dark masses of fir trees, of sycamore and silver birch and, on the far side, a wall of rock and ice soaring thousands of feet into a brilliant sky. There were strawberry flowers beneath the trees and anything less like the stern majesty that she had anticipated it was impossible to imagine. A tumultuous stream, smaller and less turbulent than the one Mark had shown her on their first ride together, worked its way into the mouth of the precipitous valley up which they had come. Mark smiled at her. ‘Like it?’