by JH Fletcher
‘Very much. But it’s not as stark as I was expecting.’
‘Wait. It’ll be stark enough, later.’
A tributary flowed from a side valley and they followed it, climbing across a rock shelf until they reached an undulating meadow bright with flowers. Here the peat-dark water flowed through a series of deep pools on its way to join the main stream below. They pitched the tent and spent the night surrounded by the liquid sound of water. In the morning Mark caught two trout in the lowest pool and they had them for breakfast.
‘You’ll have to teach me how to do that,’ she told him. ‘I’d starve to death without you.’
She had always chafed at the idea of being dependent, but now she did not mind. Someone to whom she could be bound, yet remain free … All her life she had looked for such a man, had told herself repeatedly that such a creature did not exist. And now?
Superstitiously, she would not permit herself to follow the thought to its end.
All that day they worked their way uphill beside the stream. The sun was warm on Marie’s back: she saw hoopoes and kingfishers; far overhead loomed the splendour of the peaks.
By late afternoon they reached the head of the valley, where they camped, and the next day climbed up out of the world of meadows into the sternness of rock and ice that Mark had promised.
He glanced at her. ‘Stark enough for you now?’
She did not speak — she needed all her breath to climb — but smiled, and nodded.
They came at last to the frozen lake of Gangabal.
There was a vastness of mountains, grey and white, fringed by the icy tongues of glaciers. There was the lake itself, iced over most of its surface, the water between the floes green and still. There was wonder and reverence, and something that Marie had not known before: a sense of sharing that did not diminish but rather enhanced her feelings. One more thing: an increasing awareness of the man with her, heightened by a sense of worship that was closer to religious ardour than she had ever known.
‘I am a Buddhist,’ Mark said.
Marie had never heard of such a thing in a European, but it was all of a piece with a man whose depths she had barely begun to plumb, who she already knew would always retain the capacity to surprise her. It was typical of him that he should have waited until now, surrounded by the high mountains, before telling her so important and intimate a secret.
‘But not obsessive,’ he assured her. ‘I still talk to Christians.’
‘So I noticed. Among other things. Not that I would call myself Christian.’
‘I talk to other people, too. Sometimes.’
She laughed. ‘If you can’t avoid them.’
‘Some I don’t want to avoid.’
‘Tell me about them.’
‘People who feel as I do about the wilderness.’
‘Met many, have you?’
‘One or two.’
‘Sounds promising. I’d stick to them, if I was you.’
‘They would have to feel the same, of course.’
‘There’s always that.’
And there, for the moment, they left it.
* * *
They were high in the mountains, now. The air was thin and, at night, very cold. Their supplies were running low and Marie knew they would have to turn back soon. She did not want that; what had come upon her here was potentially the most important thing in her life, yet so fragile that it might not survive the realities of existence when they got back to the valley. She was apprehensive for another reason. He had asked her to move in with him and she had promised to give him her answer when they returned from the mountains, yet still she did not know what she was going to tell him.
All the same, they had to return and did so, turning their backs on the land of winds. During the time they had been away, they had not once talked about the future; it was as though the present were the future. Even in the evenings, hunched over the fire with mugs of soup in their hands, the reflection of the flames rosy on their faces, they had said little yet, in their joint silence, had said all that needed to be said.
They were two marches from the point where they would catch the boat back to the capital. Already they had travelled far from the realms of ice. They passed travellers making their way up to Sonnamarg; some small boys guarding mobs of thick-fleeced sheep waved as they passed. They had come out of the dead land. They reached a point where a defile led off the track. Mark said, ‘There’s a temple up there.’
Marie looked, but could see nothing.
‘You can’t see it from here,’ he told her. ‘Would you like to have a look at it?’
Something told her he wanted to take her there. ‘Why not?’
It took them an hour to reach the shrine. Set amid birch trees, it was constructed from white stone. It had a curved roof from which hung a number of tattered flags, a doorless entrance. They went inside. Set directly upon the rock floor was a bust of the Buddha with, before it, two candlesticks of tarnished brass. That was all: no residue of incense, no footprints upon the rock or in the grass outside the entrance, no hint that any human being had ever been here. There was only the wind. It shook the leaves of the trees about the shrine, blowing clean and cold about their faces, and Marie found there was something else, after all: an awareness of the supreme rightness of things. She had been sick with nerves, wanting only to get back to the houseboat and rid herself of the decision she had to make about their future, but now was glad that Mark had brought her here.
It occurred to her that he might want to pray. She started to move away, but at once he took her hand.
‘Stay.’
She stood silently, her hand in his, remembering how she had travelled down the Murray River with Neil Otway and how the atmosphere of the Outback had united them after all the days they had spent together.
‘Come,’ Mark said. He smiled at her, still holding her hand, but there was a new quietness about him as he led the way back into the open air.
Outside the temple she turned to look at him. Once again, he was staring intently at her. The expression that she had sensed in her own eyes she now saw reflected in his. Marie Desmoulins and Neil Otway on the banks of the Murray … Now it was Marie Desmoulins and Mark Talbot in the Himalaya. She thought how all lives run parallel to so many shadow lives: the might-have-beens that brushed against people’s memories whenever they revisited the past. Had she gone to Russia with Brett … Had she not met Greta Talbot in Paris … Had they not left the path so that Mark could revisit the shrine …
What decision would she have made? The shadows danced at the borders of her vision.
What in fact happened: they made love in the grass while the breeze moved the birch leaves and the ice blink of the distant mountains pulsed rhythmically in the haze. Afterwards, there was no discussion; they returned to the lake, to their separate houseboats and to the decision that she still had to make.
Marie had thought that she would be unable to sleep for thinking about it, but had reckoned without the fatigue caused by the long descent, and she was unconscious almost before she was in bed and slept until just before dawn.
It was still dark when she got up. On bare feet she walked onto the deck. The planks were cool and wet with dew, and there was the lightest of breezes riffling the surface of the lake. Somewhere a fish jumped. She stared in the direction of Mark’s boat, but could see nothing.
He had told her about himself: how he had been a major in the Indian Army, had enjoyed the life in the field, but had been uncomfortable with the social niceties so important to those wishing to climb to the higher ranks.
‘And people thought I was a bit strange, I suppose, which didn’t help. I inherited a bit of money: not much, but enough. I was entitled to a small pension. So I handed in my papers and came up here to live.’
‘Ever regret it?’
‘Never.’
‘Never thought of going back to Europe?’
‘No.’
He was, she thought, an enti
re man: totally, and unashamedly, masculine but aware of her, of himself, of everything about him. Something more: he was what, through her art, she had always attempted to be: at one with all things. He is what I would wish to be, if I were a man, she thought. He is the man I always longed to have, but believed I would never find.
But moving in with him would take courage. Did she have it? Her first commitment was, and would remain, to her art. But she had already told him that and he had not seemed to feel threatened by it, at all. With huge difficulty, she had also told him about the fits of madness that she had experienced in the past.
‘Not for a long time now, but there are no guarantees.’
He had accepted that, too.
Across the water, a solitary light shone from the hilltop temple. To the east, the first dilution of the darkness showed where the dawn was beginning to break. She discovered she was chilly; she put her arms around her shoulders and went inside to put on a robe and make herself a cup of coffee. Cup steaming in her hand, she came back and sat once more, watching the day take form about her. The sun was still hidden but, to the west, the very tops of the distant peaks were rose-red. She watched as the colour turned to gold, travelling swiftly down the mountains, first illuminating the lower slopes, then the poplars and horse chestnut trees on the far shore of the lake. The water itself suddenly sparkled; from the east, the light rushed upon her and, suddenly, there was a blink of light that strengthened and became blindingly brilliant as the sun rose.
Marie finished her coffee and went back into the boat. She had a shower, at peace both in her body and herself.
Later that morning, after she had eaten, she went to see Mark. She looked at him and thought, This, then, is life. Because until that moment she had not known that spirit of commitment to another human being, the sense of union and sacrifice that transcended all other duties, other joys.
They looked at each other, the Himalayan winds blew in Marie’s brain and she said, ‘If you still want me …’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
PART XII
THE WAY TO ZION
I have loved, love still, shall always love. So, however I have lived my life, I am complete.
— Kath Warren (Fire in Summer)
Alan
Marie had come home. For the first time she had found someone whose mind as well as body fitted precisely with her own.
They never married. Mark offered, pointing out that marriage would draw Lady Hardy’s fangs.
Marie shook her head. ‘That’s not a good enough reason.’
‘I want us to be together, always,’ he said.
‘You’ve got me for as long as you want me. Forever; before death and after it. There is no need for a legal contract, unless it will make you happier.’
‘Stop you running off with the Viceroy?’ he suggested.
‘You should be so lucky.’
So they remained unmarried, at least in law and in the eyes of the community, but even that changed, in time. For the work that Marie did during her years in the Himalaya carried her to the pinnacle of art, and her fame excused what would have been unacceptable in lesser mortals.
‘Eccentric …’ Lady Hardy was verging on the ancient, but as autocratic, and influential, as ever. ‘It is the way of artists.’
From that time on, Marie found herself cherished, the woman who had brought fame to their remote community. On a progress through Jammu and Kashmir, the Viceroy himself condescended to pay her a visit, to shake the hand of the woman who had brought lustre, so he told her, on the British crown. If Marie’s eyelids quivered in Mark’s direction, no-one but themselves knew what was in her mind. But Lady Hardy would have gone down on her knees, had age and gout permitted and, for the brief months remaining to her, liked to dwell fondly on the occasion when she had gone out of her way to welcome the famous artist into their midst.
Not that Marie cared; she had her own world, and it was enough. She had always been seen as one of the best of twentieth-century artists — potentially, at first, then later, in fact — but now she was the best, undisputed. In the eyes of many, she even eclipsed Picasso, although Picasso would certainly not have agreed. Marie did not care about that, either; she was in competition with no-one.
‘There are more ways than one to Zion,’ she told Hamish Charles, most famous of pre-war art critics, who had travelled to Kashmir to see her. He spent six weeks with her, talking and walking with her in the mountains and, after his return to Europe, wrote what became the first and, in many ways, the best of the many critical biographies that were to be written about her. Because he understood what many did not: that, in making her home in the Himalaya, she had achieved, with Mark and within herself, that synthesis of art and life — moral, ethical and spiritual — which she had sought all her life.
‘I wish to be,’ she told him. ‘Only that. To discover that place where I cease, where knowledge ceases, where there resides only a perfection of silence, of non-being. Because in that is the great awareness. In painting, in living, I am.’
It was this extra dimension, a spiritual intensity so utterly different from what she always believed was the mechanical analysis of the cubists, the nightmare fantasies of surrealism, that raised Marie above her contemporaries. People looked at her work and, without understanding why, were fulfilled in heart and spirit as well as intellect.
Her personal life, too, was a triumph. She and Mark understood each other as far as it was possible to understand anyone. They were completely happy, always discovering new things to enjoy in each other.
Not that they ever became totally inward-looking; Marie took care never to cut herself off from the world completely. Every second year she went to Europe. She visited Paris, where she saw Jules Sauvage, who treated her, so she said, like the Second Coming made manifest. She laughed at herself for saying it, being in no danger of believing the extravagant things that people said about her.
She made regular pilgrimages to Italy, to bathe her soul in the blood of the Renaissance: Donatello, Piero della Francesca, most of all Mantegna, with his wide-eyed awareness of the brutalities, and frailty, of Empire. He would have understood Lady Hardy, she thought, and the hooded eyes that regarded privilege as duty.
She kept an indulgent eye on the fads — Dadaism and what she called the hypocrisy of André Breton — but found herself increasingly out of sympathy with the crass violence and materialism of Western society. By contrast, she believed in rejuvenation: not, as Gauguin had believed, through a return to primitive barbarism, but through the redemptive power of art.
Nor were her concerns confined to visual art. In Europe, she haunted the concert halls. She never ceased to regret missing the first performances of Petruschka and the Firebird; she made up for it now.
She read: anything and everything. She went into Srinagar, banged the counter in Cockburn’s Agency, had books sent out to her by the ton, or so Mark complained.
In those years she also returned to her other love. She created another garden to replace the one beside the Seine that she had lost. She grew roses, gladioli, canterbury bells, a multiplicity of herbs. In these, she told me, she took especial delight.
‘Skirts were much shorter after the war, but fashions changed more slowly in India and I was glad. The early morning scent of herbs, grazed by a long skirt …’ She gave me a complacent smile. ‘Men will never know how delightful that is.’
Yet, fulfilled and loving though Marie and Mark Talbot were in their lives, they — like everyone — had their problems. Fourteen years after they began living together, they were brought face to face with what might be catastrophe.
Marie
1
Mark noticed that her palette was darkening, that in place of the brilliant yellows and blues of her earlier work, her tones now were brown and gold.
He said nothing but, a year later, Jules Sauvage wrote from Paris to say the same thing.
‘I paint what I see,’ Marie said.
B
ut what she was seeing now, at sixty-five, differed remarkably from what she had seen before. She spoke to Major Carson, the famous surgeon who was in Kashmir on holiday. The fierce little Irishman examined her, then stood back.
‘Cataracts,’ he said and glared as though they were her fault.
She put her hands to her cheeks. ‘It’s not possible —’
‘Of course not,’ he interrupted brusquely. ‘It never is. Nevertheless, Madam, you have cataracts.’
She tried to impose order on her scrambled wits. ‘What does it mean?’
‘An operation. Not here. In Delhi.’
‘What success does it have, this operation?’
He made a seesaw movement with his hands. ‘Fair. Better than fair. There are always risks, of course. If anything goes wrong, you could be worse off than you are now. A lot worse.’
She visualised perpetual darkness, with the demons loose inside her head. Managed, trembling, to put tongue to the word. ‘Blind?’
‘Unlikely, I would say, but possible.’
‘And if I leave things as they are?’
‘They will get worse.’
‘So I could be blind, whatever I do.’ Again she raised her spread fingers to her face. Delicately, she touched her quivering eyelids. She felt a surge of rage at the eyes that had betrayed her, could have used her poised nails to rip and rip. She took a deep breath, ordering herself to be calm. ‘Your recommendation?’