The Kashmir Shawl (43 page)

Mair’s feet tangled with Tal’s so that she tripped and fell into his arms. He caught her by both elbows and swept her upright again. ‘Thanks for coming,’ he shouted in her ear.

‘I wouldn’t have missed it. I hope you’ll both be very happy.’

‘I’m pretty confident,’ he said. ‘We know what we like, don’t we, Annie and me?’

Much later, sated with obscure valley gossip, warm wine and eighties disco, the Ellises made their way back to the holiday cottages.

Jackie slipped away to bed and Eirlys, Dylan and Mair sat down together with the whisky bottle. They were taking pleasure in being together tonight precisely because they knew that modern lives would make this harder to achieve in future.

‘Didn’t we have a good time? I was right to make you both come, wasn’t I?’ Eirlys said.

Dylan snorted over his glass and wiped his chin with the end of his tie. ‘You’re always right, snowdrop. And we love you.’ He tilted what was left in his glass. ‘Here’s to us, my sisters.’

A year went by, and it was at the beginning of another Kashmir spring that Myrtle and Archie finally came back to the
Garden of Eden
. The pieces of Archie’s body had been put back together by the doctors in the military hospital. ‘But, unfortunately, not in exactly the same order,’ he joked.

Artificial limbs might have been fitted eventually, to replace his crushed lower legs, but the spinal injuries that had resulted from being buried under a toppled railway freight car during the bombing raid were too serious ever to mend.

His wheelchair was carried on to the houseboat by Majid and half a dozen other helpers. The passage inside was just wide enough to allow them to roll him out on to the veranda where he could sit all day with a rug draped over his shoulders to watch the changing light on the water and the mountains.

Myrtle confided to Nerys that it was this one objective, getting her husband back to the tonic air and the loveliness of Srinagar, that had kept her going through all the weeks and months in the hospital. Wounded men had arrived in their hundreds and had either died or recovered sufficiently to be moved to recuperation centres, only to be replaced by new casualties in the seemingly endless tide of bloodied bodies, but Archie had stayed. His injuries were so serious that for weeks he was not expected to survive, yet he clung on and, in the end, almost imperceptibly, he began to improve.

Myrtle lived by his bed. She talked to him, read to him from his favourite books, or simply held his hand. ‘He never gave up. He was braver than any human being should ever have to be,’ she told Nerys.

Archie said, in one of the few moments when Myrtle was not within earshot, ‘Without her I would have closed my eyes and given up. It would have been much easier. But somehow she convinced me that we’d come back here one day.’

He lifted a hand and pointed at the glimmering water and the reflections of passing boats. The flower-seller’s
shikara
glided towards them, loaded with buckets of spring blooms; Nerys leant down and bought an armful of splashy peonies. Archie buried his gaunt face in their damp furled petals. ‘I would never have come home without Myrtle. I’d never have left that hospital. I owe her this view, these flowers, every day that we have together now. I can’t feel sorry for myself, can I, when
so many poor fellows died? And while so many more, like Ralph Bowen, are in the Jap camps?’

She smiled at him. Mounted on the wall behind his head were the magnificent antlers that he had brought back from his shoot in Ladakh. Archie would never walk again, let alone ride or shoot or play cricket or any of the sports he loved. Within her smile, Nerys was biting the insides of her cheeks to suppress her tears.

Myrtle came back with Majid and the samovar. She put a cup of tea into Archie’s hand and spread a napkin over his chest in case he spilt it.

She was thin, with bony pockets showing at the base of her throat and deep, dark circles under her eyes. She didn’t drink cocktails any more. ‘What if he needed me in the night and I was pie-eyed?’ She had shrugged. She smoked instead, snapping her gold lighter to a new cigarette as soon as she had stubbed out the old one. Now that she had achieved her objective of getting Archie home, their problems were multiplying.

He was almost completely confined to the
Garden of Eden
because it took so many pairs of hands to lift him on and off the boat. They had tried once to carry him into a
shikara
, but the craft had rocked so much that he had almost fallen into the lake. The path along the bank was narrow and bumpy and when it rained it became clogged with heavy mud. In their old life, as the McMinns hopped to and fro, the mud had been no more than an inconvenience. Even on the houseboat the floors were uneven and the panelled bathroom was unsuitable for a man who couldn’t walk. Once the summer was over it would be far too cold for him. The English doctor came regularly to visit Archie, but he had explained to Myrtle that if her husband were to develop any serious lung or circulatory complication Srinagar’s little military hospital would not be the best place to treat him.

‘I don’t know what to do for the best,’ Myrtle finally confessed to Nerys. All her energy, the formidable power that
Nerys had once worried about because it had no direction, was taken up with looking after her husband. But not even Myrtle could solve everything.

‘I think maybe you’ll have to move,’ Nerys said gently. ‘Perhaps you could rent a bungalow in the new town. You can have a garden, grow flowers, even some vegetables.’

‘The doctor thinks I should take him to Delhi. But the
heat.’

‘Couldn’t you go just for the winter?’

The lighter snapped and its little flame doubled in Myrtle’s eyes. She blew out a column of smoke. ‘This winter, yes. After that, I don’t know. Money is the problem. Our Delhi house belongs to the company so we can’t keep it for ever. We’ll have Archie’s disability pension, but that won’t run to keeping two places. I don’t know what the old
Garden
might fetch nowadays. Who would buy her?’

They didn’t talk about it because they didn’t need to, but Srinagar was changing. The evidence of it was everywhere, visible in the way that Hindus and Muslims moved past each other in the narrow alleys of the bazaar without exchanging a greeting, audible in the outbreaks of violence under the cover of darkness, embodied in a mysterious fire that consumed an ancient Hindu temple on the Jhelum bank. Conflict flared in the gardens and under the chinar trees. Some of the Pandits, Hindus who had been teachers and government officials, were quietly leaving Kashmir. Professor Pran, the cricketer whose batting had won the Christmas match on the ice, mentioned that he might move south because it would be better for his wife and daughters even though it would break all their hearts to leave Kashmir. The old British echelons were disintegrating too. The Quit India movement gathered force on all sides against the Raj, and as the conflict intensified Nerys remembered what Rainer used to say. ‘Hindu against Muslim. Divide and rule, that’s the motto of you British.’

As much as she could, Nerys helped Myrtle to nurse Archie. It was hard work for Myrtle and it left her little time for anything else. But they agreed together that the McMinns would
stay on the
Garden of Eden
until Myrtle could find a buyer for the old houseboat. Archie spent these days out on the veranda with his pipe and the newspapers. He claimed to be the happiest man in Srinagar.

‘What about Zahra?’ Myrtle privately fretted to Nerys.

‘Do you think you could look after her now, as well as Archie?’ she asked.

Myrtle sighed.

Nerys said firmly, ‘Don’t worry about Zahra. She’s well and happy.’

Up in the village Faisal and his little brother had been fully absorbed into the tribe who played under the big tree or went out into the fields with the sheep. They were wiry, dirty, exuberant children, and therefore indistinguishable from most of the others, but Farida still held herself apart. That same spring, Evan had decided he must move back to Srinagar. A new missionary had arrived to help him, and the young man needed a home, as well as training in a setting less stark and – although Evan would never have said so – more rewarding than Kanihama. Nerys divided her time between the village and helping Myrtle to look after Archie. Whenever she left Kanihama, she paid the village women as much as she could afford to take care of Zahra in her absence. She would have been anxious even about this had she not known that Farida would be the baby’s faithful guardian.

Just once, after Archie had come back to Srinagar and it was becoming clear that caring for his physical needs was going to be all that Myrtle could cope with, Nerys tried to talk to Evan about adopting a child themselves. She thought she managed to keep the edge of longing out of her voice, but her husband looked curiously at her. ‘What child?’

‘Zahra, perhaps.’

‘Which one is that? There are so many infants, Nerys, and the Lord has called us to care for all, not to single one out. As for a child of our own, we must accept His will.’

He spoke in his most aloof and implacable tone, and Nerys turned away in silence.

Zahra was still carried everywhere in the sling on Farida’s back, and at night the two children shared the same mattress and blanket. Farida never ate a mouthful herself until Zahra had been fed, and she preferred sitting with her in her lap to running about with the children of her own age. The headscarf she wore covered her mouth as well as her hair, but her black eyes were always solemn and watchful. The only time a smile seemed to glimmer in them was when Zahra did something new and clever.

Farida was old beyond her years, but Nerys had to accept that there was nothing she could do to change this. She watched the two children together with a sharp mixture of pleasure and sorrow.

In Srinagar Nerys had acquired a sort of schoolroom on a street that led down to a reedy canal because she and Evan were living in the rooms above it. Evan’s recently arrived assistant missionary was called Ianto Jones, a myopic young man with an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down whenever he spoke. Together they rode their bicycles into the city or took a bus up to the villages on the Kanihama road.

In the schoolroom, once she had cleared out the lumber and put down rat poison, Nerys gathered some of the bazaar children. Just as she had done in Leh and Kanihama, she played games and sang songs with them, and afterwards fed them a simple meal. The numbers grew. And as soon as their living rooms were habitable, she asked Evan if he would mind if the two little orphan girls from Kanihama came down to stay with them.

‘Those village orphans again? Why?’ He frowned. ‘Haven’t you got enough to do?’

‘I miss them,’ she said.

It was more than a year, but Nerys was still not pregnant. Evan was more considerate of her feelings than he had been at the beginning of their life together, and he squeezed her hand now with an air of resigned indulgence.

‘All right, my dear. If that’s what you want, by all means bring them down here for a visit.’

Farida enjoyed a truck ride and then a bus journey to the city. She sat upright at the back of the bus with the handful of shawled women and their babies, just as if she were the same age as them.

Zahra was walking now, even though Farida still preferred to carry her. When she was put down she tottered through the unfamiliar spaces, starfish hands outstretched, on plump bare legs that were as smooth as pale brown hens’ eggs. Her eyes were the colour of dark jade, and there were threads of gilt in her toffee-brown hair.

‘She is an unusual-looking baby,’ Evan said, before he stuffed a pile of pamphlets into his knapsack and bicycled off with Ianto. He was too busy and too preoccupied to be curious about anything beyond what directly concerned him.

Archie was different. He was much more broadminded, and by the first time the three women gathered on the
Garden of Eden
with the two little girls he already knew the full story. He had hooted with laughter at the account of the
kangri
winter, and listened in amazement as Caroline shyly mentioned the winter birth up in Kanihama.

‘My good girl, how very brave you were,’ he said.

‘I had the two best friends in the world – you can do a lot with friends to help you. Nerys took good care of me when the baby was born.’

‘And you had a cup or two of herbal potion,’ Nerys put in. ‘We never found out what was in it.’

Archie gestured with the stem of his pipe. ‘We were both lucky. And just think, I’ve got the two of them to nurse me now.’ He caught his wife’s arm as she passed, and she kissed the top of his head where a bald patch had appeared in his sandy hair.

Shadowed by Farida, Zahra toddled from the
Garden of Eden
’s veranda to the saloon and back again. She pulled silver-framed pictures off low shelves, smeared glass doors and
polished tables with her tiny hands, and everyone beamed as they watched her.

‘She’s certainly going to be a beauty,’ Archie said. No one spoke of it, but there was still a pronounced look of Ravi Singh about her.

Caroline’s eyes followed every move she made. Tentatively, as if she hardly trusted herself, she had begun to hold her daughter, curling her hair around her fingers and stroking her cheek with a fingertip. Zahra impartially beamed at her, showing a row of tiny white teeth as Farida looked on, waiting until Zahra would be hers again.

Nerys and Myrtle observed this growing tenderness.

‘Maybe, some day, there’ll be a way after all,’ Myrtle whispered.

Neither of them tried to speculate further. Nerys kept her own longings to herself. For now, the baby belonged to all of them and it was enough to see her growing and flourishing. Zahra represented hope in a dark time.

Evan regularly came to smoke a pipe with Archie and discuss the war news. One midsummer afternoon, leaving the two men in the veranda’s shade, the three women took a
shikara
ride across to the Shalimar Garden. Zahra was firmly held by Farida but she wriggled and laughed, stretching her hands out to birds overhead and the droplets of water scattered by the boatman’s paddle.