The Kashmir Shawl (39 page)

Remembering the last time, Mair insisted that she would much prefer tea. Aruna was despatched to make it. ‘I’ve brought a photograph to show you,’ she said, as soon as they were alone together.

Caroline’s white head turned. ‘Have you, dear?’

Mair knelt by her chair and held up the picture. ‘If I turn this light on, and hold it towards the window as well, do you think you could see it?’

Slowly, stiffly, Caroline took it and drew it so close that it touched her nose. She screwed up her eyes so that they were almost swallowed in loose skin crosshatched with wrinkles. Her other hand patted the folds of her clothing and retrieved a pair of glasses on a cord. By setting these in place and angling her neck to one side, she seemed able to bring it into focus.

She studied it for a long time.

‘Yes, that was the
Garden of Eden
.’ She pointed with a knobbly finger. ‘That’s Myrtle McMinn, with your grandmother,
Nerys, the dear creature. Look at us. We were girls, weren’t we? Hardly more than children ourselves.’

She let the picture drop on to her chest. Without warning, tears ran down her cheeks. She took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dried her eyes.

Mair whispered, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘Not at all. I’m just being silly. So long ago, you know. So long I can hardly believe I was once that girl.’

‘Can you remember who took the picture? Was it your husband? Or Mr McMinn? Or maybe my grandfather?’

‘Evan Watkins? Such a stern, sweet man he was. No, it wasn’t him.’

‘Who, then?’

Caroline shook her head. She smiled through her tears, a very old person’s wily, secretive smile. ‘It was the magician. My goodness, he was the pin-up. Whatever was his name? I can’t have forgotten.’ Her face clouded, then cleared again. ‘I remember. His name was Rainer,’ she said.

Mair actually heard a click, like a key fitting a lock.

At Lamayuru, the night before the terrible day, Bruno Becker had told her that his mountain-guide grandfather had worked for Rainer Stamm, the mountaineer. The two of them had almost died in an attempt to climb the north face of the Eiger. She could precisely recall the cadences of Bruno’s voice, and she could almost taste the cognac on her tongue. ‘Rainer Stamm?’

Caroline nodded in surprise. ‘Why, yes. That’s right. Do you know him?’

‘I don’t. His name was mentioned to me by someone else, when we were on our way from Leh to Srinagar.’

‘Who would that be?’

‘Bruno Becker. He’s Swiss, and he’s married to an American woman called Karen.’ She thought that the names just might mean something to Mrs Bowen. She added, ‘They had a beautiful little daughter called Lotus.’

‘They
had
?’

The forensic sharpness of the question took Mair aback. She said quickly, regretting her lack of foresight, ‘It’s a very sad story. I’m sorry, I didn’t want to bring you bad news.’

Aruna carried in the tea tray. There was a homely patchwork tea cosy, china cups and a battered silver bowl containing sugar cubes with a pair of clawed tongs. It all looked much more appealing than warm gin.

‘I don’t know these people,’ Caroline said. ‘Do you take milk and sugar? Please go on.’

Mair hesitated. ‘I met the Beckers by chance in Leh and we set out from there together. We were cut off on the way by a heavy snowstorm, and at the place where we were staying the little girl was bitten by a rabid dog. I heard a few days ago from her father. I’m afraid she didn’t survive.’

Caroline put down the milk jug. Her hand shook and china clinked on the tray. ‘I am so very sorry to hear that. How painful for her family. The death of a child is a great tragedy.’

Aruna took the filled teacup from her and passed it to Mair. ‘Don’t be tired,’ she warned the old woman. Over Caroline’s head she glowered at Mair.

‘I am so pleased you brought me the photograph,’ Caroline murmured, and sweetly smiled. She’s slipping into forgetfulness, Mair thought. The old lady didn’t really have any idea who her visitor was. The photograph represented a tiny piece in the mosaic of her memories, the pattern still bright and sharp in places but rubbed into a featureless monochrome in others.

Caroline seemed to be talking to herself now more than to Mair. She nodded. ‘Yes, it must have been precious to Nerys. The picture, and the shawl too.’

Mair took it out of her bag one last time and shook it out so it floated on the air between them. ‘When I showed it to you the other day, you said something like, “This was Zahra’s.”’

‘Did I?’

‘So … I wondered if you would like to have it? To give back to Zahra, perhaps?’

It was a stab in the dark, no more than that. But the
reaction was startling. Caroline threw up her hands. ‘Oh, no, no, thank you. Poor little Zahra. It was a way of paying for her, you see. Yes, that was what it was. Oh dear. Now I am going to cry.’

Appalled, Mair saw how Mrs Bowen crumpled like a winter leaf. She was completely at sea now.

Aruna marched forward and put her hand under Mair’s arm, propelling her to her feet. ‘Mrs Bowen must not be upset so much. I ask you to leave her in peace, not to come with these old things.’

‘I’m s-sorry, so sorry,’ Mair stammered.

Aruna almost frogmarched her to the door. Caroline’s face was hidden in her hands.

‘Please forgive me for upsetting you,’ Mair called to her.

Outside the room Aruna rounded on her. ‘Why do you come here to talk of these hurts? She lose her own little girl. You know so much but not this? Long time ago, but she spend many, many years in England in asylum. She come back here to Srinagar and life is quiet for her. Please respect.’

‘Of course. Of course I will. I didn’t know.’

Caroline called loudly, ‘The letters, Aruna. From Nerys. They are in a box. I want the young woman to have the
letters
. She is my friend Nerys Watkins’s granddaughter, you know …’ Her cracked old voice shook with urgency, but Aruna almost bundled Mair into the street. The door closed firmly on her. Mair waited for a moment or two and knocked again, but she knew there would be no answer.

The blue mountains were doubled in the flat lake water, and a twinned reflection turned every passing
shikara
into a strange insect suspended in glassy air. In the shallows beside the
Garden of Eden
, lotus flowers turned their creamy petals into the sunshine. Sighing with satisfaction at the view and the day’s springtime perfection, Myrtle drained her glass and held it up to let Majid know she needed a refill.

She had curled her hair, applied her favourite dark red
lipstick, and there was a determined gaiety in her manner. Nerys noticed how many drinks she had had, but she well knew that this was how Myrtle dealt with a low mood. The latest news of Archie was that he had been posted nearer to the front line but Myrtle would never express anxiety, even to Nerys and Caroline. She sparkled today as she always did, although there was a metallic glint in her brilliance.

‘Do you realise what we have here?’ she cried. ‘Three mothers and one daughter. That’s rather lovely, don’t you think?’

Nerys had brought Zahra down from Kanihama. The baby lay in her red and green woven wicker basket under the shade of an awning. She was a tranquil little creature, accepting her bottle from whoever was on hand to give it and gravely eyeing the world from Nerys’s arms or from her sling on Farida’s back. Sometimes Caroline could be encouraged to hold her, but the tense lines of her shoulders and her shadowed smile betrayed her uncertainty. The other two women didn’t try to force the issue. Ever since she had given birth, Caroline had been in a delicate mental state. Some days, Myrtle reported, she lacked the will even to get out of her bed in the houseboat. Myrtle didn’t think she was fit to go back to her bungalow in the compound, but Caroline had numbly insisted that this was what she must do.

‘Otherwise what will people think?’ she said. ‘I’ve completely recovered from my so-called fever. I told Mrs Dunkeley so. You have both been so kind to me. If only I knew what was going to happen to Zahra …’

Her eyes filled with tears all over again. Caroline cried too often these days, at a dead bird glimpsed by the roadside, a crippled child begging in the bazaar. Nerys and Myrtle hurried to reassure her. ‘Zahra is well and happy. As far as the world is concerned, she will be a mission orphan, just like Farida and her brothers. There’s nothing to link her to you or to Ravi Singh,’ Nerys said, for the hundredth time.

Myrtle adored the baby. She swept her up and rubbed her firm nose against Zahra’s soft button one, and covered her olive skin with lipsticked kisses.

‘Divine, so divine,’ she crooned. ‘I could eat you all up, ears to toes. Oh, God, Nerys, do you think Archie might let us adopt her when this bloody war ends?’

Nerys hesitated. She said carefully, ‘Srinagar will whisper that she’s yours and not Archie’s. We’ve given them every reason to jump to that conclusion.’

Myrtle cackled. ‘Who gives a damn about whispers? I don’t. When Archie comes home and sees her, I’m sure he’ll fall in love with her too. Don’t you think?’ Then she looked up from her contemplation of the baby and her eyes met Nerys’s. ‘But are you and Evan going to fight me for her?’

It was a joke, with a shiver of painful truth in it.

Nerys loved Zahra too. Sometimes she felt afraid of how much she adored the dark eyes and tiny curling fingers. But she could only shake her head. She hadn’t seen Evan since the previous autumn, and he was beginning to feel like a stranger to her. Who could predict what her husband might allow, or might refuse even to consider?

Zahra’s future was just one of the legion of uncertainties facing them all.

Majid brought Myrtle another drink. Picking up the basket, he announced, ‘Time for baby feeding.’

He had fallen for Zahra too, and whenever he could he spirited her away to the dim recesses of the kitchen boat to be cooed over by the cook and the boys and their retinue of aunts and sisters. As he took her off he said, ‘Visitor coming, ma’am.’

They looked up to see a gold-painted
shikara
gliding over the water. Against the gaudy cushions Rainer lay back and smoked his pipe. He waved and called to them, ‘Summer is here.’

In Kashmir May was the most beautiful month of all. The almond, apple and cherry trees were in bloom and falling petals blew in the breeze, like the antithesis of snow.

The boatman made fast and Rainer hopped up the steps to the shade of the veranda. He was strong and his burns had
healed quickly, but he never spoke about his excursion to Malaya.

He kissed Caroline and Myrtle twice on each cheek, then lifted Nerys’s hand and touched it to his lips. She blushed at the sudden tenderness in him. ‘I have come to take Nerys away,’ he announced. ‘It’s a day for a picnic in the Shalimar Garden.’

‘Off you go, then,’ Myrtle waved a hand. ‘Caroline and I will have tea and maybe a cocktail or two at the club.’

‘Won’t you let me try out my new toy first?’ Rainer had brought an elaborate new Leica camera with him, complete with tripod and a set of lenses. He lifted the camera body out of its brown leather case and fiddled with the settings. Then he pointed to the corner of the veranda framed by the carved-wood canopy. ‘Sit over there, perhaps, with the lake behind you.’

‘Whatever you say, Mr Stamm.’

Myrtle took her natural place in the middle, tipped up her chin and looked straight into the camera. Caroline edged beside her, smiling but looking to the other two for her cue as she and Nerys hooked their arms around Myrtle’s waist.

He said, ‘That’s very pretty. I shall name this portrait “Summer in the
Garden of Eden
”.’

Nerys always remembered Myrtle’s scent and the waft of cigarette smoke, the light catching the diamond in Caroline’s engagement ring and Rainer clowning behind the lens. He put a black cloth over his head and muttered inside its folds, then shouted, ‘
Hey presto!
’ As they laughed at him, the shutter clicked.

‘You haven’t disappeared in a puff of smoke,’ Myrtle pointed out. ‘And neither have we.’

‘I must be out of practice,’ he said.

A cloud licked over the sun, and for a second the shimmer faded out of the day. Nerys drew her cardigan over her shoulders and checked that Myrtle’s circlet brooch was safe.

‘Have you time for a drink?’ Myrtle asked. ‘Do just have
one, won’t you? Caroline and I might be quite blue once we’re left on our own.’

‘Please forgive me this time. I want to talk to Nerys,’ Rainer said.

The
shikara
man was waiting for them at the steps, idly dipping his paddle and watching the insects skimming over the water. Ripples briefly fractured the reflected mountains. Myrtle clapped her hands and her smile widened.

‘Of course. Have fun!’ she cried.

A moment later Nerys and Rainer were gliding towards the trees at the far end of the lake. Nerys was quiet because the afternoon’s loveliness seemed intensified by its fragility. Rainer’s arm rested over her shoulders, but she was thinking how opaque he had become. Or perhaps he always had been. She had learnt the shape and weight of him, his scent and taste and the various timbres of his voice, but he had given away so little.

In the great Mogul garden the fountains splashed between the beds of crimson peonies. They walked under the dappled shade of unfurling chinar leaves and Rainer talked of a new trick he was devising and an invitation he had received to perform magic to entertain British and American troops.

‘But
where
will you be going?’ Nerys asked, out of dread of his leaving and fear that he might stay. ‘And when?’ She had her own urgent reason for wanting to talk to him today.

They came to the top of the garden’s series of steps and turned to look back at the view.

‘Let’s have our picnic,’ he said.

As always, Rainer took pleasure in the precision of practical arrangements. From a canvas rucksack he produced a white cloth and spread it in the shade of a huge old tree. There was a metal flask of fresh sweet buttermilk laced with mint, and afternoon bread just an hour old, fragrant and crusted with sesame.