The Kashmir Shawl (15 page)

She listened contentedly. She was warm at last, and Bruno’s description of home was familiar, not so much in the precise details but in the way he talked about the rhythms of farming and the small doings of rural valleys. She also clearly heard what he was not saying, in as many words, about his deep-rooted affection for the place and – she was certain – his longing for it. It made her think of her own home. She wasn’t homesick, as she had been in Leh, but rather sharply alive to the memories of a place that was lost.

Bruno was telling her how the Swiss mountain farmers in the first half of the nineteenth century had known the hidden ways across the high passes connecting remote valleys. They were poor people, and when the first tourists had begun to arrive in the Alps, the Beckers and their neighbours had discovered they could earn good money by guiding visitors. Until then, he said, no one had ever explored the peaks and glaciers just for pleasure. To travel to the neighbouring valleys to find work or to sell their cheeses or even to make a pilgrimage to a mountain shrine, perhaps, but not for the mere satisfaction of it, or even for the sake of some obscure scientific observation. But then the gentlemen mountaineers and amateur scientists had arrived, and ventured up in the tracks of the local men, and after they had conquered their peaks, they rushed home to describe their triumphs and catalogue their discoveries.

The news spread, and more and more of them flocked to the Alps. Soon the wealthy
messieurs
were arriving in their hundreds from all over Europe, and the Beckers were among the first to offer themselves for hire as professional mountain guides.

‘My great-grandfather, for example, he was Edward Whymper’s guide,’ Bruno said.

Mair had never heard of Whymper, and admitted as much. Bruno raised an eyebrow. ‘He was British. He made the first
ascent of the Matterhorn, with his Zermatt guides. There was a tragedy on the way down and four men died, but Whymper himself survived. He came regularly to climb in the Oberland and he often took Christian Becker as his guide. In the next generation – that was in the twenties and thirties, my grandfather Victor and another client made an early attempt on the Eiger’s north face, only just escaping with their lives from a terrible storm. Victor saved the client’s life.’

‘You must be proud of that.’

He gave a quick nod. ‘We are.’

‘I don’t know any mountaineers.’ But now another memory came to her. ‘I saw a memorial in Leh, in the European cemetery. Nanga Parbat.’ She could bring to mind the name of the mountain, but not that of the dead man.

Bruno supplied it for her. ‘Matthew Forbes. He was a mathematician from Cambridge University, a brilliant young man.’

‘You saw the memorial too?’

‘I visited it, yes. That Nanga Parbat expedition was led by a Swiss named Rainer Stamm, and he was the man whose life was saved on the Eiger by my grandfather. The two of them were close friends from that day on.’

So she and Bruno both had their reasons for visiting the cemetery. The link between them seemed significantly strengthened by this association of history. What with this and the snow, and the altitude-enhanced effects of the cognac, she could almost imagine how she might let her head tip sideways, gently and slowly, until it came to rest on Bruno Becker’s shoulder.

And when she glanced at him she realised, with a faint shock of pleasure as well as a clutch of utter dismay, that he was imagining the same thing.

She levered herself upright and pressed her spine into the cold stone. Bruno shifted his position too.

They were further distracted by the presentation of a vat of mutton stew, the ladle held invitingly above it. Mair hunted for her tin plate and accepted a spoonful, and Bruno did the
same. They took a simultaneous taste and Bruno pressed his lips together.

‘You were right.’ Mair giggled.

The rice that accompanied the stew and a pot of dark brown dhal were slightly closer to being edible.

‘We may as well finish this off,’ Bruno remarked, unscrewing the cap of the flask once more. ‘I’ve told you more than enough about my people. Now it’s your turn.’

By now, it seemed easy to do. She began at the first point that came into her head. ‘After my father died, my sister and brother and I decided to sell the old house, the one we grew up in. It was hard to do, but in a way it would have been harder to keep it on. Empty most of the time, just a holiday home, accumulating dust and cobwebs and melancholy. But I can still feel the thread connecting me to the place. It’s taut tonight.’

‘I understand that,’ Bruno said quietly. ‘Go on.’

Mair began to tell him about her last morning at the house. She hadn’t tried to relate this to anyone else: if she had been asked she’d have said there was nothing to tell, not really.

Eirlys and Dylan had both left early. Eirlys went first, her car loaded to the roof and her clipboard and master-list of lists placed next to her on the passenger seat. Dylan held the yard gate open and he and Mair waved to her as she drove away, leaving the home of her childhood as if she had been crossing off another item on her daily to-do list.

When Dylan was ready, he and Mair stood in the yard. She noticed that a thrush’s nest was held in the twigs of the white lilac tree. Dylan took her hand. ‘Don’t be too sad,’ he said.

‘It’s a positive sort of sad,’ she replied. ‘It was a happy place, wasn’t it?’

‘Childhood?’

As they stood there, the yard and the front garden seemed crowded with earlier versions of themselves.

Mair answered her own question: ‘Yes, it was. I didn’t realise it at the time, though.’

This made them both laugh. As a girl Mair had been blind to the charms of rural life.

Dylan kissed her forehead, then he drove away too.

She was glad to have a last hour alone. She walked through the empty rooms, closing the doors behind her. In the kitchen she rescued a trapped bumble bee, scooping it out to safety in her cupped hands. She followed it outside and leant on the stone wall of the garden. She took in the grey shape of the house, the blots of yellow lichen on the slate roof, the way the windows seemed punched into the thick walls and the whole structure hunkered down against the curve of the hill, so long settled into the ground that it had become as immutable as an outcrop of rock.

There was just one more thing to do.

She scrambled over the wall, using the same footholds she had adopted as soon as she was old enough to follow Dylan out into the fields to play. She walked on a diagonal through the soaking grass, away from the hill crest and the lambless grazing flock, and entered a little wood. The bluebells grew here and in that May week they were at their best, all the ground under the leaf canopy hazed with soft colour. Mair picked a small bunch, the stalks giving a familiar milky snap between her fingers and the scent rising around her. She wrapped the cool stems in a tissue from her pocket.

The bunch of bluebells was the last thing she put into her car, placing it on the passenger seat where Eirlys had stationed her clipboard. She sat for a few moments, looking at the house and the hill behind it. Then she drove away, following her sister and brother down the lane.

When she reached the village she stopped at the gate of the graveyard. On the other side of the street Tal Williams was coming out of the newsagent’s. It was his family that had farmed the hills behind the old house for more than a hundred years. He waved his folded paper awkwardly at her, his windburnt face turning redder. Twenty years ago Tal had been Mair’s first kiss.

She waved back, but he didn’t come across the street. He had been at Huw’s funeral, scrubbed up in a black suit and a stiff white shirt, and he would guess what her errand must be today.

She went on through the gate and walked along the path past a yew tree. Beside a tap in the wall she found a glass jam-jar and splayed the bluebells in it. Carefully, so as not to spill any of the water, she carried it across and put it on the mound of her parents’ grave.

Then she sat on a sunny bench, reading the inscriptions on the nearby headstones although she knew them all by heart.

Bruno was a good listener. When she stopped he ducked his head in a quick gesture of appreciation. By this time they had finished as much of their food as they could manage, and their fellow diners were swaddling themselves in ragged quilts and rolling over, ready to sleep.

He said, ‘You could have stayed at home, never left that place – is that what you’re thinking? Perhaps you could have married your farmer and lived happily ever after.’

Mair was amused. ‘No, I could not. He’s not mine and I never wanted him to be. He’s getting married to his long-time girlfriend this year. But still there’s a yearning for what might have been in all of us, don’t you think? There must be times when you think that you could have stayed in the mountains, and taken the cows up to pasture every spring.’ And married Heidi, maybe, instead of being drawn to Karen’s bright flame.

Bruno’s eyes glinted with amusement too. Mair wondered how she had ever thought he was forbidding. ‘I do think that – you’re right. And, like you, I knew I didn’t really want to stay. It wouldn’t have suited me. We like the lives we’ve got, don’t we?’

Mair said yes, because it was true.

‘Anyway, these days, instead of cows, my family’s pastures support several chair lifts and a high-speed gondola. Winter skiing, summer hiking,’ he added casually.

Mair understood that the Beckers were therefore not too concerned about money. ‘Does Karen have a might-have-been home in her heart too?’

Bruno said, ‘Ah, Karen’s a free spirit.’

The men across the room had collapsed into a silent jumble of shrouded heads and crooked knees. It was time to brave the cold before trying to sleep. Bruno upended the flask to check that it really was empty, and Mair clambered to her feet.

The floor tilted unexpectedly and she put out her hand to steady herself. Bruno caught it in his. With his free hand he clicked on his head-torch.

‘Oh dear.’ Mair laughed. ‘Good cognac.’

‘And good company,’ he added.

The force of the blizzard hit them full in the face. The snow in the courtyard had drifted above knee-height and Bruno told her to follow in his footsteps as they battled their way to the opposite corner. The faint yellow cone of torchlight seemed solid with whirling flakes. The door leading to the cell rooms had blown open and a bank of snow was now piled in the freezing stone corridor. Bruno found a shovel in the angle behind the door and he dug furiously to clear a path while Mair directed the light. Working together they managed to force the door shut, and latched it securely with a wooden beam between two iron brackets. Their shadows wobbled on the stone walls.

‘Do you have a torch?’ he asked.

‘In the car,’ she confessed.

‘Take mine for now. We’ll retrieve yours in the morning.’

‘But …’ She stopped. It was obvious that they would be going nowhere tomorrow. She also realised that she didn’t mind all that much. Be careful, she warned herself. Don’t even
begin
to imagine.

It was the drink affecting her, and the altitude, and the cold, nothing more. Tomorrow she wouldn’t even remember these inappropriate yearnings. She wasn’t a daydreaming schoolgirl, after all.

‘Get some sleep. I hope you won’t be too cold.’

‘Goodnight,’ Mair said firmly.

The torch-beam glimmered on the damp stone wall beside her mattress. She took off the top layer of her clothes but kept everything else on, adding a fleece hat and mittens and a second pair of socks. She crawled under the covers, switched off the torch and closed her eyes, shivering. Immediately an image presented itself, of Karen and Bruno lying together with Lotus between them, the vivid threads of their hair all tangled. She pressed her mittens against her face, obliterating everything except cartwheels of torchlight imprinted in her retinas. She listened to the howling of the wind and eventually, intermittently, she dozed.

She woke to early daylight the colour of lead. All she could see through the tiny window was a patch of featureless grey. Her bones were stiff and her feet and fingers numb. When she tried to move she realised also that she was parched with thirst, and a jagged bolt of pain shot through her head. She stretched out her arm, using extreme care, and found her water-bottle. The contents were frozen solid.

It didn’t take long to dress. The courtyard was furrowed with paths dug through the night’s snowdrifts. The wind had dropped and in its place there was a blanketing fog, out of which spiralled a few lazy snowflakes. Still moving carefully, Mair plodded through the muffled chill. The kitchen seemed crowded but the figures hunched on the mattresses resolved themselves into the Beckers and last night’s drivers, restored once more to sitting positions. Bruno was talking to their own driver, who was gesticulating with his purple mobile phone. Decals glinted all over it. Everyone was grim-faced, except Lotus and Karen, who beamed identically at her.

‘Hi, I’m real sorry about last night. I was just laid out. I guess Bruno looked after you,’ Karen called. She was pale, but otherwise her usual self.

Mair nodded. All she could think of was finding some water to drink. There was a plastic jug standing on a crate next to the bathroom, and even though she knew this was only filtered,
not boiled, she jettisoned all her careful hygiene principles and swallowed two full mugs, straight off.

Lotus was turning the pages of a picture book and telling herself the story in a low voice. Ringlets of pale hair spilt from under her hat and whenever the two indifferent cooks looked her way they smiled at her in spite of themselves.

Mair was hunched over a bowl of warm rice porridge by the time Bruno finished his conference with the driver. He included her in his terse relaying of the latest news.

‘Gulam has just spoken to a friend of his down in Kargil. The roads are blocked but the army and the Border Roads crews are working to clear the route in both directions.’

‘So what does that actually mean?’ Karen sighed.