The Kashmir Shawl (42 page)

Mair was in her bedroom on
Solomon and Sheba
, packing to go home. She was rolling up the last T-shirts and stuffing them into the crevices of her rucksack when Farooq knocked on the
door. He had already been twice on different pretexts, his hennaed beard twitching with curiosity, so she sighed and told him to come in.

‘Very much luggage,’ he said, peering into her open bags.

‘Really? I call this travelling light.’

‘Visitor to see you. It is one young man.’

She made her way down the creaking passageway, nodding to the male half of the Australian pair of aid workers who had recently arrived, and stepped along the gangplank to the lake shore. Mehraan was sitting astride a mosquito-sized motorbike, cradling his helmet in his lap.

‘Mehraan, is this machine yours?’

‘I have just bought it. It is useful.’

‘It must be. I’m glad to see you. I’m leaving Srinagar tomorrow and I thought I’d come to the workshop later to say goodbye.’

‘So I save you the trouble.’ He smiled. ‘Also I have done some small pieces of work for your friend, the English lady who has hurt her leg.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘Srinagar is not all bombing and throwing stones, you see. The lady’s house is old, and some parts will fall down if we do not help to prop it. Yesterday I am there and her nurse gives me this package for you.’

‘What is it?’ Mair asked.

‘
I
do not know,’ he said.

Inside a folded piece of sacking tied with string was an ancient cardboard box with collapsing walls. Mair lifted one of the flaps and saw a bundle of old letters. There was a note attached, written in an almost indecipherable looped handwriting on lined paper.

My eyesight is now too poor to reread your grandmother’s letters. Perhaps you would like to see them. Please do not trouble to return them.

Sincerely yours,
Caroline C. Bowen

‘Oh,’ Mair said aloud.

‘Something is wrong?’

‘No, nothing at all.’ She was astonished that Caroline had remembered their conversation and then actually hunted out the cache of letters. She was trying to decide now whether she should go across town now to thank her in person for this treasure, but quickly concluded that it would be better not. She didn’t think Mrs Bowen was being confined by Aruna, but her carer obviously preferred her not to be upset. The way she had been hustled out at the end of her last visit made her reluctant to risk causing another disturbance.

‘Can you wait here for five minutes, Mehraan?’

She raced back to her room and found a large picture postcard of the Shalimar Garden. On the back she wrote a message of thanks for the loan of the letters, and promised that she would make sure they were returned safely even if she couldn’t deliver them in person. ‘I hope, though, to hand them back to you myself,’ she promised, and signed her name.

Then she put the card into a big envelope, addressed it and gave it to Mehraan. ‘Next time you visit her, will you give her this from me?’

Aruna would read it to Caroline, at worst.

‘I will,’ he said. He put on the enormous helmet and pressed the bike’s starter button.

Mair would have liked to give him a hug, or at least shake his hand, but she limited herself to a warm smile and a nod. ‘I hope we’ll see each other again, Mehraan, next time I come to Srinagar.’

‘
Inshallah
.’ He kicked off the stand and zoomed away towards the Bund.

Early the next morning, Farooq waved her off in a taxi to the airport.

‘Soon safe back with family in England,’ he said gleefully, palming her generous tip and slipping it into the pocket of his shirt.

When the Delhi flight took off at last, Mair peered out of the window to watch as the lovely valley dropped out of sight and the brown plains opened beyond. Now that she was actually on her way, she was profoundly sad to be leaving Kashmir and all of India behind. She reminded herself that she was going home, and at the other end of her journey, Hattie would be waiting at the airport to meet her. Her spirits immediately lifted.

She would come back to Srinagar. She had already half promised Caroline Bowen that she would.

On her lap, still in its brittle envelope, lay the single letter that she had taken out of the box to read on the flight.

THIRTEEN

The chapel was small, austere and brown-varnished. The windows were clear glass with a view of grey hillside through the drizzle. As she took her black hymnal out of the slot in front of her, Mair thought of the abandoned chapel in Leh. She touched the folds of the brown pashmina tucked inside the collar of her best coat.

The minister took his place, the organist brought a meandering voluntary to a close and the congregation rustled to its feet. The bride came down the aisle on her father’s arm, and Mair’s old friend Tal turned to look at his Annie. His red face was anxious and, just as it had done since he was a boy, his stiff shirt collar looked as if it was half an inch too tight for his neck.

All weddings are the same, Mair thought, however different the superficial trappings. Anxiety and eagerness and the fizz of happiness popping just like a bottle of champagne.

The minister welcomed them all in Welsh, and her thoughts turned again to Nerys and Evan Watkins.

Afterwards, in the hotel receiving line, they shook hands with Annie’s parents and then Tal’s, and Mair batted away their well-meaning questions with ‘Oh, I’ll have to meet Mr Right first.’ The bride and groom smiled, acknowledging their rightness for each other.

Dylan, Eirlys and Mair moved into the crowd of guests.
Weatherbeaten faces nodded over best suits and farmers’ meaty hands gripped thin-stemmed glasses. Huw Ellis would have enjoyed this gathering of neighbours at the highly suitable joining together of two local families. He had always mildly regretted that not one of his three children had chosen to stay at home in Wales, although he had never complained. He had never even really objected to Mair and the circus.

‘I wish the old man could have been here,’ Dylan said, speaking for them all.

The reception was followed by the early meal and then long speeches, by which time a dozen exhausted children were chasing each other between the tables. Eirlys’s husband Graeme rose from his place next to Annie’s aunt, the headmistress from Liverpool, and announced that he would remove his boys and Dylan and Jackie’s little girl, and put all three of them into bed at the holiday cottages where they were staying.

‘No, really, I don’t mind,’ he insisted. The tables were being cleared and in a corner of the room a deejay was setting up his decks under a row of coloured lights. Mair withdrew with Dylan, Jackie and Eirlys to the bar.

From somewhere near waist-level, a voice chirped to Mair, ‘Hello, dear. You’re the image of your mother, aren’t you?’

She looked down. The corner table was occupied by a little old lady wearing blue brocade and a spray of white carnation with maidenhair fern. Her rakish fascinator looked all the more so for having tipped forwards over one eye. Mair slipped into the empty chair beside her.

‘I’m Mair Ellis,’ she said, not certain that she hadn’t been mistaken for someone else.

‘I know that. I said, you look like your mother. I’m old enough to remember when
she
was born. Not long back from India, were they, your
nain
and
taid
Watkins? Gwen must have come as a surprise to them.’

Nerys had been forty-one – Mair knew that because she had verified the dates. She had half hoped that her mother and therefore she herself might have had a closer connection to
India, but when she consulted
Hope and the Glory of God
again she had been reminded that the minister and his wife finally left the missionary service in 1947 and Gwen hadn’t been born until 1950.

‘You’re a proper Watkins in your looks,’ said her new friend. ‘Your brother, now, he favours your dad’s side.’

‘And me?’ Eirlys wanted to know. Of course, she had missed none of the exchange even though she had also been negotiating a drinks order and a simultaneous conversation with Tal’s brother.

The old lady pursed her lips. ‘Well. Very proud of
you
, Gwen was. Always top of the class, she’d say. Doctor now, isn’t it?’

Dylan put his arm round his sister. ‘Consultant.’

Eirlys smiled, turning slightly pink. With her abrasiveness melted by a few glasses of wine she looked younger and – almost – carefree. ‘Were you a friend of our mother’s?’

The explanation, involving several farms, intermarriages and cousins on Tal’s mother’s side, was far too complicated for Mair and Eirlys to follow, although they nodded politely. Mrs Parry told them she had gone to chapel as a girl to hear Parchedig Watkins preach; that was before Gwen was born. Then in the school holidays she used to push the new baby out in her pram, while Nerys was doing her housework. When her own husband died, twenty-five years ago now, she had moved down to live with her sister near Caernarfon. ‘But the old place, I still think of it as home.’

That was how it was, Mair reflected. Holiday homes pocked the hillsides and caravan parks scurfed the coast, but if you belonged here you didn’t distinguish those as much as the fields and stone walls and valley lanes that hardly changed in a lifetime.

When her eyes met Eirlys’s she saw that she was occupied with the same thought.

The house was sold but they hadn’t lost their place, because they shared the root familiarity. Mair was happy that they had all made the journey back to Tal’s wedding. Eirlys had been quite right to insist they did.

Through the open door Mair could see a slice of the dance floor. Tal led his wife into the centre of the empty space and they began the first dance together.

‘Tell us about Mum,’ Eirlys said.

Dylan joined them now. The Ellis children were like fledglings with their beaks open, always eager for any new crumb of information about their mother.

Mrs Parry nodded her white perm and the fascinator feathers bobbed. She evidently liked an audience. ‘She was a precious gift, that girl. Into his fifties, your grandfather was, by the time Gwen came along. They both worshipped her, of course. I remember seeing Mr Watkins in his black coat, coming along the road with Gwen toddling beside him holding his hand. She was all dressed up in a coat and hat too, like one of the little princesses. Talking away to each other they were, no need for another soul. You always knew they were a happy family, the Watkinses. Lovely to see, it was.’

Eirlys stroked the knuckle of one finger across the corner of her eye. Then she squared her shoulders. In the next room the music was loud and the dancing was getting under way.

Mrs Parry sipped her drink. ‘Of course, they’d seen the world together, hadn’t they? It seemed really exotic to all of us, I can tell you, Mr and Mrs Watkins having lived all that time in India. It must have been nice for them to look back on it together, while the reverend was still alive.’

Mair thought of the photograph, her grandmother’s laughter, and the backdrop of lake water and lotus blooms. Caroline had said that Rainer Stamm took the picture, and he was the pin-up. She realised that she very much wanted to see Bruno Becker again.

Bruno knew the Swiss side of the story, but she wasn’t sure how to ask him about that.
I’m so sorry your daughter died. Now, tell me about long ago.
But it wasn’t just for the information he could maybe provide that she wanted to see him: it was for himself.

Mrs Parry leant forward and tugged the knotted fringe of
Mair’s shawl. ‘It was the best time of her life, Nerys used to say. Kashmir, you know.’

‘Did she? Did she really?’

‘Mair’s just been out there for three months. Visiting the places where they worked,’ Dylan put in.

The old lady wasn’t impressed. ‘I expect it’s all changed, like everywhere. Mind you, most of them are over here anyway, aren’t they?’

Mrs Parry was the opposite of Caroline Bowen, Mair decided.

Tal came into the bar. His tie was undone and he looked hot and ridiculously happy. To Mair, he said, ‘Do I get a dance, then?’

He took her hand in his huge fist and they worked their way into the thick of the dancing. Crimson faces and sweating bodies bobbed all around them. Mair could see Annie in the middle of the mob. She had removed her veil and tiara and the sausage ringlets set in her hair were gently unravelling.

Tal still danced the same way he always had done, with wild arm swings and pumping legs. He caught Mair’s eye and smiled like a shy boy, and she was taken straight back to her sixteenth birthday party when Tal was the nearest thing she had had to a boyfriend.

It was quite possible that the record had been ‘Love Is All Around’ then as well as now.

Her talk with Bruno at Lamayuru was loud in her mind and, as if to amplify it, the one-time possibility of her parallel life was humming and judging, gossiping and letting its hair down all round her. ‘We can’t jive to this, Tal,’ she shouted, and he hollered back, wiping his forehead and grinning, ‘Why not?’ His legs somehow kicked sideways, defying his knee joints.

Mair was sixteen, and thirty, and her imagination was like a warp thread in the Kashmir shawl, holding its pattern on the way to sixty and beyond.

All this afternoon and evening she had been sifting memories, pasting scenes and conversations on top of each other: her childhood and adolescence, the ruined mission at Leh, Dylan
and Eirlys through all the years, Srinagar, Hattie, Tal, her father and mother, the Changthang plain, Nerys, chapel, mountains, her nephews and niece. Lotus.

Giddily she steered her thoughts again. Maybe this was what getting older meant: more and more you are aware that everything that happens overlays another memory, sets up more ripples of association, until each event seems as much a resonance of something else as fresh reality. She guessed that this was what life was like for Caroline Bowen in her quiet room in Srinagar, and for Mrs Parry nodding and reminiscing in the corner of the bar.