Iris and Ruby (59 page)

‘
Non
,
non!
’ the child cried, kicking her feet in the dirt.

‘That’s enough,’ the woman ordered, in American-accented English. ‘Stop it right now.’ There was amusement as well as resignation in her expression. Her arms were weighted with shopping bags, and she put down one load in order to have a hand free for the child. But the little girl had already noticed Mair watching her. She blinked her eyes, in which there were no signs of tears, only outrage. The yells changed from private fury to operatic display.

Mair glanced round. There was open space behind and in front of her. She lifted one finger and locked eyes with the child. The tantrum abruptly faded as curiosity took over. As soon as she had the little girl’s full attention Mair drew a breath, gathered herself up and executed a standing back-flip.

It was quite a long time since she had attempted one, and she rocked on landing, but otherwise it was fairly satisfactory. The child’s mouth fell open and her eyes made two circles of amazement. Mair clapped hands at her, and did two forwards linked hand-springs. Hattie and she had synchronised this routine as part of their act, and even now she could probably have done it in her sleep. The second somersault brought her up quite close to the mother and child. The little girl grabbed Mair’s leg and gazed up at her. A smile lit her face.

‘Again!
Encore une fois!
’

The mother was laughing. ‘That’s pretty neat. And it’s way better than a candy bribe.’

Mair was slightly embarrassed to realise that her intention had probably been to attract the mother’s attention as much as the child’s. They had also drawn a fair-sized crowd of onlookers because there weren’t many other distractions on offer in town on this end-of-season afternoon. She hoped the spectators would quickly move away.

‘It seems to have done the trick. Can I give you a hand with these?’ Mair brushed dirt off her hands and picked up the shopping, leaving the mother to scoop up her daughter and settle her across her hip with the same easy movement she had used in the bazaar.

‘Jumping lady,’ said the child in wonder, stretching a small hand to pat Mair’s face.

‘That’s right,’ her mother agreed. ‘Pretty amazing, huh?’ Her voice had a touch of the American south in it.

‘As a matter of fact it was rather shaky. I’m not quite sure what came over me. I wanted to stop your daughter crying.’

The other woman sighed. ‘You and me both. She’d set her sights on being with her dad this afternoon and ended up stuck with me instead. He’s gone to sort out guides and ponies – we’re leaving on a trek tomorrow. That’s what all this shopping’s about – what
do
you take in the way of supplies? Where are you heading? I’m Karen Becker, by the way. And this is Lotus.’

Lotus raised her hand and gave a queenly wave.

‘Mair Ellis. Hello, Lotus.’ Mair smiled.

The child was extraordinarily beautiful, with a broad forehead and a mouth like a cherub’s in a Renaissance painting.

‘I was on my way to get a cup of tea,’ she added.

Karen nodded across the road. ‘Great. We’re going to the salon, Lo, aren’t we? We have to get ourselves a pedicure before we trek a single step. Come with us, and we can chat. I’m sure they’ll give you tea.’

Mair was glad to escape from the staring crowd. The two women stepped over the gutter and picked their way between bullocks and auto-rickshaws to a glass-fronted shop with windows heavily draped in lace. ‘Ladies Only Beauty’, said the sign in the window.

Inside they found a cracked floor, not noticeably clean, dusty bare shelves, and a row of barber’s chairs. There was a smell of old-fashioned perming lotion mingled with incense and boiled laundry. A small flock of women in bright saris instantly surrounded Lotus, lifted her out of Karen’s arms and bore her off to the back of the shop. They started combing her white-blonde hair with trills of admiration. Lotus accepted the attention as no more than her due.

A smiling girl with a red-cheeked, perfectly round Tibetan face relieved them of the shopping. A moment later they were installed in adjacent chairs, facing their reflections in a blotchy mirror.

‘Go on. You may as well.’ Karen grinned.

Mair allowed her Tibetan attendant to unlace her Converse for her, then to steer her feet into a pink plastic foot spa. The motor thrummed under her soles and the water seethed. The whole scene was so incongruous that she couldn’t help laughing.

In the mirror Karen’s blue eyes met hers. ‘Tell me. You must be something like a
capoeira
dancer, right? We saw some of those street performers in Rio. Have you been there?
A
-mazing. I’d so love to be able to move like that. Not in a million years, though.’

Mair laughed again. ‘What? No, I’m not any kind of dancer. I worked in a circus years and years ago.’

‘In a
circus
? Do you come from a circus family? Go on, your dad was the lion tamer, wasn’t he, and your mom was the lady in spangles who did pirouettes on the elephant’s back? You were born in a showman’s caravan, and as soon as you could walk you were dressed up in a tiny costume for the parade.
Don’t
tell any of this to Lotus, please – it’ll only give her ideas.’

Karen had plenty of imagination herself, evidently. Mair was fascinated by her spectacular looks and her vivacity, but she wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. ‘Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid. My father was a farm-supplies salesman and my mother was a primary-school teacher in North Wales.’

‘So, how come?’

Mair might have deflected these questions, but she was the one who had been guilty of exhibitionism and she thought the least she could do was give a straight answer. ‘I was a rebellious child, and I’d been threatening for so many years to run away and join a circus that when the time actually came it would have been a loss of face not to do it. Ours was quite a right-on show. No lions. In fact, no animals at all, because that would have been cruel. My friend and I had a trapeze act, and in the kids’ show we were the clowns as well. We did that for about four years, and then it was time to grow up.’

‘I see.’ Karen’s eyes narrowed. ‘Do I believe all this? Or is it one of those versions of oneself that one does for passing encounters with strangers? If it is, I’ll find out, I’m warning you. We’re going to be friends. I’m always right about these things.’

A young girl arrived balancing a tin tray of tea glasses. Mair took one and sipped. The tea was milky and thick with sugar, but it was welcome. Her attendant lifted one of her feet out of the bath and dried it in her lap. Then she set to work slathering on handfuls of some gritty potion.

Karen chatted on: ‘How could I pass up the chance of making friends with someone who turns somersaults in the air before she’s even spoken?’

Across the room, Lotus had a dozen ribbon bows in her hair. Her tiny fingernails were being dabbed with glitter polish.

Mair decided it was time to seize the conversational initiative. ‘What are you doing in Leh?’ she asked.

Karen’s eyes widened. Her face in the mirror became a pale, intent oval. ‘We arrived here from Tibet. I’m a Buddhist, you see. It’s been a pilgrimage for me.’ She began to talk about the monasteries she had visited, and the devotions she had made. She had been blessed by the senior lama after the annual unveiling of a spectacular
thangka
painting, which had been one of the most spiritual experiences of her life. Did Mair practise? Really not? Had she never felt the call to do so? Did she know that one of His Holiness’s summer residences was actually here in Leh? Had she seen the huge golden Maitreya out at Thikse
Gompa
?

‘Yes,’ Mair managed to say to the latter. Brisk massaging of her foot and ankle was showering the floor with dead skin and caked foot cream.

Karen’s leg was undergoing the same treatment. She paused in her monologue and turned her glancing attention to the young girl, who had come back with a small selection of polishes on the tea tray. ‘Pink or red, do you think?’

‘Red,’ Mair replied automatically.

‘Hmm. Yeah, but I’m going to go for the pink. Don’t want to frighten the ponies, do I? Lotus, what colour are your toes?’ she called.

‘Pink, shiny,’ Lotus chirped.

‘How pretty. Daddy will love them.’

‘And now you’re going trekking.’

Karen waved a languid hand. ‘That’s my husband’s partiality. It’s a reasonable trade-off, I guess. My monasteries for his mountains. Although we met in New York, we’re based in Geneva right now because Bruno is Swiss. These days, he gets to go skiing and mountain climbing pretty regularly from home, but we agreed that this holiday shouldn’t be all Buddhist. Lotus would protest about that too, although she’s generally pretty easy-going. Not that she looked that way when you saw her this afternoon, I admit, but she doesn’t often freak out like that.’

‘You’ll take her on the trek with you?’

Karen looked surprised, then shrugged. ‘Sure. Why not? Bruno carries her in a backpack most of the way. Everywhere we go, Lotus comes along. That way you get a balanced, open-minded kid.’

The child wriggled away from her admirers and came to show off her manicure, spreading her small hands on Mair’s knees and beaming up at her. The ribbons fluttered in her ringlets. There was logic in Karen’s theory, Mair thought. She remembered her first glimpse of the little family in the bazaar and the intimacy that had impressed her then. Lotus was certainly the most confident two-year-old she had ever met.

‘You look lovely,’ Mair told her. ‘Just like a picture.’

‘
Oui – comme Maman
,’ Lotus agreed, admiring herself in the mirrors.

The door of the salon opened, setting the lace curtains fluttering. A dark head and shoulders were framed in the doorway. ‘Karen?’

Karen glanced up from her scrutiny of her toenails. ‘Hi. Did you get everything fixed up already?’

‘
Pappy.
’ Lotus dashed across and leapt into her father’s arms. He swung her off her feet. ‘Jumping lady,’ she clamoured, pointing at Mair. ‘Jumping
high.
’

‘Bruno, this is Maya,’ Karen called. ‘My new friend.’

‘Hello,’ the man said, nodding at her. There was a smile buried in him, Mair thought, but it wasn’t close enough to the surface to break through. She started to explain her name, which Karen hadn’t quite caught.

Mair was Welsh for Mary. When she was young she had tried to persuade her friends to adopt this more sophisticated version, but it had never caught on. ‘
Mair, Mair, pants on fire
,’ the local kids used to chant. She didn’t actually utter any of this, though. Something about Bruno Becker’s level, interrogative stare silenced her.

‘Mair,’ she said quietly. ‘Hello.’

The introductions were cut short because the beauty-parlour staff were shooing Bruno out of the door. Ladies Only Beauty clearly meant what it said.

He carried Lotus with him. He indicated to his wife that they would see her back at the hotel when she was ready. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, over his shoulder, to Mair, and was gone. The introduction of a new friend of Karen’s was clearly nothing unusual.

Karen stretched out her toes and smiled. ‘Peace. That means you and I can go and eat cakes once we’re through here. We can have a proper talk.’

Mair felt like a pebble being tumbled along by a tsunami, but Karen Becker was too insistent – and too interesting – for her to make any real attempt at resistance. In any case, what else would she be doing?

Once their toenail polish had dried to Karen’s satisfaction they strolled down a nearby alley to the German bakery. Over apple cake and coffee Karen confided that she had wanted to come to this part of the world for years, really ever since she had gotten interested in the Buddhist way in her early twenties. So far it had totally lived up to her expectations. These places were holy – they touched your soul directly. You hardly ever encountered that depth of spirituality in Europe, did you? And never in the US of A. Not that
she
had ever recognised, anyway, Karen concluded. Did Mair – was she pronouncing it right? – did she know what Karen meant?

Mair thought of the whitewashed hilltop
gompas
she had visited in the last few days. The dark inner rooms with dim wall paintings and statues of the Buddha were thick with the scent of incense and wood ash, their altars heaped with offerings, often touchingly mundane ones like packets of sweet biscuits or posies of plastic flowers. The murmured chanting of monks rose through the old floors, and windows gave startling views of braided rivers and orchards far below. There
was
a divinity here, she reflected, but more than anything it troubled her with its elusiveness.

At one monastery the guide had beckoned her into the kitchen where an old monk was tranquilly preparing the community’s dinner. With a wooden ladle he scooped water from a bucket into a blackened pot set on a wood-fired stove. Cold balls of rice were gathered into cloths ready for distribution. Kneeling beside him at a rough table, a boy monk of about ten chopped vegetables from the monastery garden. The old man nodded to indicate that he was satisfied with the effort as successive handfuls of carrot and onion were dropped into the pot. The two worked in silence, and it had occurred to Mair that, apart from her presence, this scene would have been exactly the same two or three hundred years ago. The monks’ quiet service to the unending routines of cooking and providing for others had touched her more eloquently than any of the religious rituals.

She tried to describe this tiny epiphany to Karen.

‘But I understand
completely
,’ Karen interjected. She reached out and covered Mair’s fingers with her own. ‘There are many paths to recognition, but they are all the same road. You
do
know what I’m talking about. I was sure you would. I felt it in you as soon as I saw you.’

‘Even though I was turning somersaults?’

‘Because of that, as much as anything else. Why suppress what you wanted to emote? You are the complete you. I endorse that.’