The Kashmir Shawl (48 page)

‘Thank you.’ She put the photograph away in her handbag. ‘I am all right,’ she told him. But I miss you. Every day.

He heard the unspoken words. ‘And Myrtle and Caroline?’

Myrtle and Archie were down in Delhi, and Mr and Mrs Flanner had finally bought the old houseboat. Nerys had bumped into Laura Flanner at a WVS fund-raising housie-housie party, where the new owner complained that the McMinns hadn’t told them the half of what was decrepit about the boat. Nerys protested that to her it had always seemed the lap of luxury.

Laura Flanner had raised one Bostonian eyebrow. ‘Is that so?’

‘But, then, I’m from Wales.’

Myrtle had written to say that it was terribly sad and a bore but she didn’t think they would be coming up to Srinagar for this summer. After the war – suddenly everyone had started to talk about
after the war
as a real time, rather than just a prayer for the remote future – Archie was hoping to find a peacetime job with the railways again. Office-based, of course. He stood a better chance of that by staying in Delhi, Myrtle said, and wheeling himself off to see everyone he could think of. ‘You know Archie,’ she had written. ‘He never gets despondent, and he’ll never give up.’

Nerys found Srinagar a much duller place without the McMinns.

Caroline and Ralph Bowen appeared together at the Residency cocktail parties that the Fanshawes still occasionally hosted, or Nerys would sometimes catch sight of them at a regimental concert or among the spectators at a tennis match. Everyone said how encouraging it was that poor Captain Bowen was recovering so well and how fortunate it was that he had his wife to look after him. Nerys wondered if she was the only
one to notice that as Ralph got physically stronger Caroline seemed to grow paler and more silent. Sometimes she came alone to tea with Nerys at the mission. She had developed a nervous habit of twisting the rings that were now loose on her third finger.

‘I’m quite all right,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t sleep very well these days, that’s all. Ralph has terrible nightmares. He won’t ever tell me what he’s dreaming about, but I think it helps him to wake up and find that I’m there. That’s something, isn’t it?’

Nerys told Rainer the outline of this.

‘And Zahra?’ he asked.

The two girls had been in Kanihama all winter, and Nerys had visited them as often as the road was open. Zahra was well looked after, and the precious shawl was safely folded away with Nerys’s best clothes in a chest at the mission.

‘There’s not much news in Srinagar.’ She smiled at Rainer. ‘Tell me yours. Where have you been, all these months? I know I probably shouldn’t ask. But I thought of you very often.’

How odd it is, she thought, that two people can have one spoken conversation while conducting another in their hearts.

‘Did you? I like that. I’ve been devising a new trick. It’s a good one, you’ll enjoy it. I put on a few little magic shows for the troops – it was a cover for some camouflage advisory work. Covering troop movements, supply depots.’ He added, ‘Nothing at all heroic. I’m only a Swiss civilian. I’m not a friend because your people can’t be completely certain I’m not an enemy. It doesn’t matter now. The war will be over in a few weeks.’

Evan was saying the same thing, and he had begun to talk about the mission recalling him to Shillong or even their eventual return to Wales. Nerys had more than once tried to bring up the subject of adoption, but he had been adamant that God’s will was either to give them a child of their own or that they should remain childless. She tried to devise plans for Zahra, but she knew that realistically all she could do was wait and hope.

‘And so, now what?’ she asked Rainer.

He hooked one shoulder. ‘I have something important to do.’

There was no point in asking what that might be.

By now he had polished off all the food. He pushed the dishes aside and said abruptly, ‘I asked you to meet me here because I want to introduce you to someone. Will you come with me now?’

Nerys looked at him in surprise. ‘Of course.’

They left the
dhaba
and walked through the crowds. There were more people about, drawn out of their houses by the thin March sunshine, but the wind was still cold and Nerys wrapped her faithful
pheran
tightly around her.

The house was built of soft red brick framed by thick wooden beams, an old Srinagar home in a quiet street. The door was opened by an elderly woman in a sari. Rainer was obviously a regular visitor. He spoke quietly to her and the door inched wider. They slipped inside and were led up the shallow wooden stairs.

In the upstairs room another woman, much younger, was sitting on a window-seat staring down through slatted shutters into the street. As soon as she saw Rainer she jumped up and hurried to him. Glancing away as they greeted each other, Nerys noticed a crucifix on the wall. On a shelf below, with a candle burning in front of it, stood a framed photograph of a child. A rosary hung over the frame.

The servant closed the door.

‘Nerys, this is my friend Prita.’

Nerys took her hand. Prita’s face was drawn and her eyes were full of shadows. She was dressed all in white, the colour of mourning.

‘I am glad to meet you,’ the woman said, in a low voice. ‘Rainer has told me about you, that you are a good woman and a good friend.’

Nerys knew that the link between these two was something more than simple friendship. The air in the room seemed to shiver.

‘He has been very kind to me in my sad times,’ Prita continued. ‘See, over here? This is a picture of my son. God rest his innocent soul.’

The boy was perhaps three, a solemn-faced infant in a white shirt.

‘Arjun’s father was killed in 1942. My husband was for Free Kashmir, this is what he and his fellows dreamt of, and his idea was not welcome to the British or to the maharajah. Many men died in the uprising at that time, but there was no end to it then and there will be much more killing to come. I sadly believe that the time of death in Kashmir is only now beginning.’

Nerys still held the woman’s hand. It was light and dry, the sinews prominent under the thin skin.

‘I am staying here after that for the sake of our son, even though the enemies of my husband are mine too. Our child was Kashmiri first, before any religion, and if he did not grow up in Srinagar, what life would he know? But now …’

Rainer came to Prita’s other side. He took her in his arms and kissed the top of her head where the smooth black hair parted. His solid bulk made Prita seem tiny. For a moment the three of them were drawn together as tightly by her grief as by any history.

‘Arjun was quite well, you know, a baby like any other. Then he was ill, one month, two, worse, and then he died. Rainer told me, you are a nurse. You will understand what I cannot.’

‘Not a proper nurse. Only a missionary’s wife,’ Nerys whispered. She was thinking: rheumatic fever, diphtheria, tetanus, measles, infant diarrhoea – there were so many diseases that carried off the children.

Her arms ached with longing to hold Zahra.

‘It’s only two weeks since Arjun died,’ Rainer said.

‘I am so sorry.’ There was nothing else Nerys could say.

Prita’s ravaged face turned. ‘I am not behaving well to my guest, to Rainer’s good friend,’ she managed to whisper. ‘Perhaps you would like some tea.’

Nerys hugged her and then stepped back. ‘Thank you, not now. But I will see you again,’ she promised.

‘Thank you,’ Prita said, and Rainer’s face flashed his gratitude.

‘I’ll see you home, Nerys.’

He told Prita that he would be back soon.

Nerys and Rainer walked towards the mission. After the shadows of the widow’s house the day seemed bright and noisy.

He said, ‘I wanted very much to introduce her to you. I am going to marry her, you see.’

The street clamour rang in Nerys’s ears.

You asked me to marry you. And my answer was that I am already married.

A group of American soldiers on leave flooded out of a bar and blocked their way. Nerys threaded her way past. One of them saw her face and apologised. ‘Excuse me, ma’am.’

She found her voice. ‘Do you … love her?’

Rainer stopped walking. He didn’t touch her, but it was as if he did. ‘I think you know the answer to that.’

‘Then …’

‘I am going to take her back to Europe. Her husband was one of the leaders of the Kashmiri independence movement, and even before 1942 he made many enemies. He paid for that, but his death also left his family in an impossible position. Prita has a few friends, but they will be as vulnerable as she is once the war ends and you British leave India. This state will be cruelly divided and it won’t be safe for her to stay here, a widow without anyone to defend her. Prita’s husband was a Sikh but she is a Christian convert. A Catholic, like me.’

They were close to the Jhelum river and Nerys stood gazing at the
shikaras
loaded with local goods on their way downriver to be traded or sold in Baramulla and as far away as Rawalpindi. She thought of the floating vegetable gardens out on the lakes, the apple orchards and rice paddies, the shops along the Bund, and the shawl-makers up in Kanihama. Srinagar and the whole
of Kashmir were outwardly calm in the lemon-yellow spring sunshine, but she knew how deep were the rifts that lay beneath the surface. Evan and Ianto still went out every day to try to convert lower-caste Muslims and Hindus, and they reported that the two sides hated each other even more than they hated the British. Nerys heard that a radical Sikh leader had threatened, ‘If the Muslim League wants to establish Pakistan they will have to pass through an ocean of Sikh blood.’

The fragile, exquisite Kashmiri summer was coming, and she shivered at the prospect of what darkness might lie ahead.

Of course Rainer would do whatever he could to help one woman, who had lost her child as well as her husband. She imagined how he would take his wife back to Switzerland, where they would perhaps live in another lush valley with the white mountain-tops looking down on them. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘It’s a good thing you’re doing.’

She had also been in India long enough to know that many marriages were arranged between near-strangers and became strong, successful and affectionate unions. ‘I hope you will be happy,’ she added, with most of her heart.

They reached the bank of the river and looked along the steps at the familiar scenes of people washing their clothes, cooking, rinsing pans and soaping children.

‘Will you come to my wedding?’ Rainer asked.

‘Of course I will.’

‘Thank you.’ He touched her hand.

She had once thought he was inscrutable, but now she suddenly saw him in all his strength. She also knew that she loved him. ‘You’ll be going to Switzerland?’

There was a pause. ‘Eventually. My father is there, and I have friends in the mountains. But I shall miss Kashmir.’

He didn’t add
and you
, and she was in a way relieved. They had said enough to each other.

They reached the door of the mission. Two bazaar children were sitting on the step even though Nerys’s schoolroom had closed hours ago. One tapped her mouth and reached out her
cupped hand. Rainer took a coin from his pocket, the other child snatched it and they ran away.

‘I’ll let you know the day and time of the wedding,’ he told Nerys. ‘It’ll be very soon.’

‘I will be there,’ she promised. She stood with her hand on the door’s iron latch and watched him go, walking back to Prita through the oblivious crowds.

She was already awake, knowing that he was in the grip of the dream again. Ralph writhed, his arms cradled over his head and his legs kicking as he tried to fend off whatever it was that stalked and terrorised him. Sweat had soaked his pyjamas and the bed-sheet. Caroline tried to hold him but he tore himself away from her. He muttered and thrashed and then screamed, just once, but loudly enough for her to imagine Julia Dunkeley waking up next door.

‘Ralph, please, hush. It’s all right. I’m here, you’re safe. It was a nightmare, just a bad dream again.’

He struggled blindly upright, twisting as he tried to escape the horror in his head. She caught his arm and fought to steady him, but panic lent him strength. He brushed her off and pounced. His hands closed round her neck and squeezed, thumbs like steel digging into her windpipe, heavy limbs pinning her down. Caroline’s breath gargled and then stopped. She never knew how close she came to losing consciousness, only that the pressure of his fingers suddenly slackened and air rushed into her lungs. She gasped and shuddered, too shocked to move. In the darkness she sensed that Ralph drew back, his hands in the air, confusion gathering in him as he jolted into consciousness.

‘Caroline?’

She managed a sound, no more than a rasp in her throat.

Ralph fell back against the bolster. He groaned and panted as she eased herself upright and slid to the edge of the bed. She groped for the box and struck a match, then lit the candle. The electricity was on, she could hear the distant hum of the barracks generator, but she knew from experience that a bright
light could frighten him before he was fully awake. The candle flame wavered and steadied behind her cupped palm.

‘Caroline?’

She found that she could speak, although her neck and throat throbbed agonisingly. ‘I’m here. You were having a nightmare.’

His face and skull glistened with sweat. He nodded, eyes searching the long shadows in the room as the night terrors receded.

‘Shall I make you some tea?’ she asked.

‘No. Not tea.’

He sat up, pyjamas pasted to his body, and swung his legs out of bed. He put on his dressing-gown and shuffled to the door.

‘Ralph, please, won’t you tell me about the dream? Maybe if you talked about it, it would help to make it stop.’

He shook his head. His fingers twisted the doorknob and she knew that he was longing for the whisky bottle.

‘All right, not to me, perhaps, but what about one of the other men? Men who will have seen … some of the same things?’

‘No. It’s a bloody dream, that’s all.’