The Kashmir Shawl (44 page)

The garden was busy with families picnicking in the shade of the huge trees, with strolling soldiers on leave, and vendors of fruit and drinks. Zahra’s eyes and mouth widened when she saw the glitter of fountains and the glaring brilliance of the flowerbeds. She fought to be put down and as soon as her feet touched the grass she swayed ahead, in and out of pools of shade, her head rotating as her attention was caught by dancing yellow butterflies, a waddling lapdog, a child’s pram being wheeled by an ayah.

‘She looks so happy, doesn’t she?’ Caroline said. She couldn’t quite let herself be proud, but relief and gratitude for this afternoon were clear in her eyes.

Nerys bought an ice-cream from the vendor on the first terrace and gave it to Farida. The girl let a fold of her headscarf fall in her eagerness to lick it, but then hesitated and looked to Zahra as if she ought to give her the first taste. ‘No, it’s all for you,’ Nerys assured her. ‘Zahra is too little.’

Farida closed her eyes to concentrate on this treat. They climbed a broad flight of steps, at Zahra’s slow pace, with Zahra just deigning to hold on to Caroline’s finger for balance. At the top of the steps they all turned to look back at the mirror of the lake, shimmering with heat at the centre of its ring of mountains. Srinagar seemed more beautiful today than it had ever been.

‘This is almost like old times,’ Myrtle said. Nerys slipped her arm around her friend’s thin frame as they turned to climb higher, with Caroline a few paces ahead. To their left an elaborate picnic was taking place under the stateliest chinar tree. There were ladies in folding chairs, some holding parasols, several men sitting on the grass, and servants standing at a discreet distance.

Zahra chased after a butterfly. Moving too fast she overbalanced and fell, hitting the grass and knocking off her sunhat. Farida was busy with her ice-cream and it was Caroline who dashed to pick her up. In the two seconds of silence while Zahra sucked in her breath and prepared a scream of shock and outrage, Caroline swept her into her arms and kissed her bare forehead.

A man stood up and slowly strolled towards her from the picnic group. He was immaculate in a white
kurta
under a sleeveless coat of pale cream linen.

‘I hope the child is not hurt?’ Ravi Singh said.

Zahra howled and Farida threw aside her ice-cream.

Caroline’s eyes met Ravi’s. ‘It was only a little tumble.’

She let Farida take the baby out of her arms. Farida whispered and soothed, and the crying quickly stopped. Ravi’s gaze didn’t move from Caroline’s face.

She looked much older than the girl who had married Ralph
Bowen. The two years she had lived through had faded the pink English rose, but the more pronounced cheekbones and the shadowed eyes gave her a sombre kind of beauty.

‘Who are these children?’ Ravi Singh asked. His voice was like ripples in silk.

‘You remember my friends, Mrs McMinn and Mrs Watkins?’

Ravi’s manners were formally perfect as always. He bowed to both of them. ‘Of course. Good afternoon. A beautiful day for the Shalimar Garden.’

‘Hello, Ravi,’ Myrtle nodded. She placed a cigarette between her crimson lips.

Nerys said, ‘I teach some children in one of the districts of the old town. These two are staying with my husband and me at the mission. They are both orphans, unfortunately. We do what we can to help them.’

Ravi did shift his gaze now. Zahra’s long black eyelashes made a damp curl against her honey-gold cheek. One plump foot dangled in a tiny kidskin shoe. Farida glared at him. ‘I see,’ he said.

‘Please don’t let us keep you from your party,’ Myrtle drawled.

‘I am grateful for the reminder, Mrs McMinn.’ He bowed lower, his handsome face taut. ‘Good afternoon.’

He turned, but at the same time he put his hand to Caroline’s elbow and drew her aside. She couldn’t do anything but follow him. His mouth softened at once into a smile and he lowered his head to murmur into her ear. ‘I have missed you, dear Caroline.’

‘Have you? Why is that?’ A pink flush spread up her throat and coloured her cheeks.

‘I would like very much to see you again. You can tell me what has happened to you since we last met. Whatever it is …’ he paused and examined her again ‘… it has changed you from a girl into a beautiful woman.’

Caroline pulled herself upright. She detached her arm from his grasp and took a step away from him. The colour in her
face was darkened by outrage. ‘That would be impossible. My husband is a prisoner of the Japanese in Burma. Like many other army wives, I am waiting, praying, for him to come home.’

‘Your husband’s absence was never an obstacle in the past.’ He smiled.

‘That was my mistake.’

Ravi was displeased. His mouth set in a line and he lifted one black eyebrow. ‘Then I am sorry to have reminded you. I hope the memories of that other time don’t trouble you too much.’ A cold glance flicked over Zahra, now happily stumbling towards the flowers.

‘Goodbye,’ Caroline said. Ravi was already striding back to his friends.

Myrtle and Nerys swept up the girls and all three women hurried back down the steps towards the lake.

‘He – he asked to see me,’ Caroline managed to stammer, once they were out of sight.

‘That man certainly has sexual confidence,’ Myrtle said.

‘I’m afraid of him.’ Caroline’s heart was thudding in her chest, and she was horrified to realise that half of her discomfort was caused by a physical longing to see Ravi again. Wanting to glide through the marble corridors to his private rooms, where the pale silk hangings fluttered in the breeze and rose petals floated in silver water basins.

‘Don’t be afraid.’ Nerys was beside her, and Farida, with Zahra’s tired head lolling on her small shoulder. ‘You’re safe with us.’

‘What if he guessed?’ Caroline breathed.

‘He didn’t. And he won’t,’ Myrtle insisted.

Nerys was not so sure, but she didn’t say anything. She thought of Rainer and how all her instincts, whenever there was a threat, were to turn to him for help. But Rainer had disappeared from Srinagar and there was no word of him. She had heard one rumour that he had gone back to Switzerland for good, another that he was involved in a secret mission
somewhere in the south Pacific, and yet another that he was with a magic show, touring the Allied troops’ rearguard posts. But she had no way of knowing if any of these had a grain of truth in them.

Myrtle led the way. ‘Let’s go back home, to the
Garden
.’

Their
shikara
was waiting for them at the landing stage.

FOURTEEN

August 1944

‘Do you know for certain?’ Myrtle asked. A plume of cigarette smoke drifted over her head, offering her a small degree of protection from the flies that troubled Nerys and Caroline. There was a dung-heap on the other side of the garden wall. The afternoon was stiflingly hot, and a thick haze blotted out the sky.

Caroline’s eyes were so wide that the whites were visible all the way round the blue irises. Her fingers knotted in her lap as she twisted her wedding and engagement rings. ‘Oh, yes, I think so. I mean, it’s not official yet. Mrs Dunkeley says that as soon as there is definite confirmation of names and ranks, Division HQ will formally notify wives and families. But I think it must be true.’

Nerys leant back on a wobbly bench seat, her ankle brushing a bed of coriander that loaded the air with its scent. She had been watching Caroline with deepening concern.

Archie took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘Good show. Brave fellows,’ he said. His wheelchair was drawn up in its usual spot under the shade of an almond tree.

The bungalow in the outer sprawl of Srinagar’s new town had a small fenced garden. With the help of a bent old man, who
laboured in the sun with a battered straw hat perched on top of his red skullcap, Myrtle had been growing squash and spinach and a bed of fist-sized kohlrabi. ‘Look at this one, I’d win first prize with it in any village show in England,’ she had claimed, as she brandished the dirt-coated object. ‘The question is, why would anyone want to eat such a thing?’

The McMinns had retreated to Delhi for the previous winter, leaving the
Garden of Eden
locked and empty because Myrtle had been unable to find anyone who wanted to buy it. But just as the heat of the summer had begun to build yet again, an American civilian couple had taken it for the season, with a vague promise that they might consider a purchase if all went well. Bob Flanner was in import-export, Myrtle reported, and seemed to have plenty of dollars to throw around. Mrs Flanner had employed Majid and the rest of the staff, which Myrtle said was a great relief because even paying them a much-reduced retainer wage was more than she and Archie could afford. As a short-term solution, the McMinns had made the difficult journey back up from Delhi and had had their furniture moved into the little rented place. It was a long way from the lake and there was no view of water or mountains, or of anything much, except a brick wall and the tops of trees in the nearby gardens, but Archie had insisted that it was ideal. ‘So quiet. Our neighbours are all charming people. And I love to sit in a garden in the cool breeze.’

‘After this summer, I just don’t know,’ Myrtle confided to Nerys.

There was nothing Nerys could suggest, no prediction she might make that would carry any more weight than a hundred others, let alone offer Myrtle grounds for optimism. Uncertainty was still the daily reality, not just for themselves but for the war and what the end of it might bring.

At the end of March the Japanese had marched from occupied Burma into India via the remote Naga hills. Their commanding general’s intention was to cut the road between Imphal, the
capital of the Indian state of Manipur, which lay just seventy miles from the Burmese border, and the sleepy garrison town of Kohima. They failed to take Imphal but Kohima was besieged. The fighting in and around the town continued into April as a scratch force of mixed British and Indian regiments struggled to defend it.

The Allied forces grimly battled on as casualties mounted. Reinforcements slowly trickled up the road from the Allied supply base at Dimapur and the siege was finally lifted. On 22 June, twenty miles outside Imphal, British troops from Kohima met men from the 5th Indian Division who were moving up to meet them. The Japanese advance into India was halted. Their troops were increasingly short of ammunition, air cover and food supplies, and the Allied forces began slowly to clear them from the hills, driving them back the way they had come into Burma.

Through all this time only Evan and Ianto Jones had carried on as normal. Against all the odds, a big shipment of Bibles had arrived from Wales, and the two men cycled every day to hand them out to their tiny congregation and whoever else seemed inclined to accept the Word. But to Nerys it seemed that they had all been holding their breath for weeks and were now able to let out a gasp of relief. One evening she came back unexpectedly to the little whitewashed room that served for a chapel at the mission to find Evan on his knees in prayer. She whispered an apology for disturbing him and prepared to tiptoe away but Evan caught her hand. ‘Stay here with me, Nerys.’

She fumbled into a kneeling position beside him.

‘I am praying for our men in battle, of course, in Burma and wherever they are,’ he said, ‘but I am praying also for you and me and our future family, my dear. If the Almighty will just be good enough not to take that as a selfish supplication.’

Her heart squeezed with sympathy for him. Evan longed for a child as much as she did. He regularly reached out for her under the cover of darkness, embracing her without saying a
word – as if to speak would be to open floodgates of embarrassment – but in spite of his inarticulacy she thought they understood each other a little better nowadays. She tried to reassure him. ‘I’m sure He won’t.’

In the silence that followed she even tried out a halting, unpractised version of a prayer herself. It was a very long time since she had tried to pray. Children’s voices rose from the enclosed yard under the windows where her mission pupils played and chased each other. She humbly prayed that Evan might relent and consent to their adopting Zahra. Once she had done that she ventured to say, ‘We could still have a family. There’s more than one way …’

There wasn’t even a beat of hesitation. ‘I don’t believe I could do it,’ he said. ‘Not take on someone else’s child and raise it as our own.’ There was a note of pure desolation in his voice.

Nerys knelt for a moment longer, then stiffly got to her feet. She patted Evan on the shoulder and he bent his head without speaking. His hair was now almost entirely grey.

Down in the schoolroom yard Zahra, aged two years and three months, came running to greet Nerys. Not one of the children there was plump but Zahra still had soft dimples in her pale-brown knees and elbows. She had two rows of perfect white teeth and her brown-gilt hair had grown long. ‘Ness, Ness,’ she called in delight.

By the end of July the 15,000 Japanese soldiers who had marched into India were struggling back towards Rangoon. Half of them were to die along the way, starved and exhausted and crippled by dysentery.

Then at the beginning of August, extraordinary news had filtered through to Srinagar.

A detachment of British prisoners of war had been found in the remote hills inside Burma. Following the fall of Singapore the men had originally been held at Changi prison, but then they had been moved northwards to labour on the roads that were being hastily constructed in the attempt to supply infantry
advances over the border into India. These men, fortunate not to have been butchered by their retreating Japanese captors, had been discovered by an advancing unit of the Indian Infantry. When the soldiers stumbled upon them they were hiding in a makeshift camp on the outskirts of a hill village, uncertain of the progress of the Allied advance and starved almost to death. Captain Ralph Bowen was one of those men.