The Pulse of Danger. Jon Cleary
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linen department at Harrods had begun to look like one of the annexes of the Promised Land. She sat up, pulling on the sweater, and began to glance through her letters, the first links for weeks with that Promised Land.
She looked up. ‘Anything interesting?’
‘Sort of.’ He re-read the letter he was holding, then carefully refolded it. She recognised all the signs: he was going to tell her something he guessed she did not want to hear. ‘The Bayard Institute wants me to take a party out to New Guinea.’
She put down her own letters: whatever news was in them was unimportant beside what he had just told her. ‘What are you going to tell them?’
‘Well—’
‘Jack, if you go, I’m not going with you. You promised this was our last trip.’
He grinned, as if he did not think she was serious. ‘You’d like New Guinea. And we could go down to Sydney for a few weeks. You’re always complaining I’ve never taken you back to my home—’
‘We’ll go to Sydney. But not to New Guinea. I’ve had enough—’ Suddenly she felt on the verge of tears, but she held them back. She had learned long ago that winning a man over by tears provided only a temporary victory: she was not going to spend her life in a drizzle of weeping.
‘We’ll talk about it later, on the way back to Thimbu.’ He stood up, put a huge rough hand on the back of her head and gently ran it down to stroke her neck.
‘Don’t start smoodging to me,’ she said tartly, her mind made up not to give in to him this time. Then the leopard coughed again, the ough-ough sound that told he was angry; and she looked up at her husband with true concern, all her anger at him suddenly gone. ‘Darling, please take the rifle.’
He went to say something, then he shrugged, sat down on his bed again and drew out the gun-case from beneath it. She had given him the guns as a wedding present, both from Holland and Holland, a Super .30 Double and a 12-bore Royal ejector self-opener; the type of gun had meant nothing to her, but the salesman had assured her that no sportsman could wish for more. But he hadn’t known her Jack. They had cost her nine hundred pounds each and they had almost caused a fierce row between her and Jack; he had rebelled against such extravagance, insisting she was not to buy him gifts he himself could not afford, but she had been just as stubborn as he that she would not take them back. In the end he had accepted them, but they were the last expensive gift she had given him, except for the contributions she always made towards the cost of their expeditions. Being the rich wife of a poor botanist was not an easy occupation.
He took out the Super .30 and wiped the oil from it. ‘I haven’t had much chance to use it this trip.’ His big hands moved caressingly down the barrels and over the stock, the hands of a lover.
‘That’s your baby, isn’t it?’
He looked at her from under his heavy black brows, his dark blue eyes seeming to glaze over as they always did when he wanted to retreat from an argument. It had not escaped her that he only retreated from arguments with her; with everyone else the eyes blazed almost with enjoyment when there was a conflict of opinion. That was the Irish in him: a generation removed from Ireland, the bog-water dried out of him by the Australian sun, he still had the Irishman’s belief that an argument was better than a benediction.
‘Don’t start that again, love.’
‘Wouldn’t you like a son you could teach to use a gun?’
‘With my luck I’d land a daughter.’
‘We could keep trying. I’m willing.’
He looked at her for a moment, then again his eyes glazed over. He turned away and began to fill a pouch with cartridges. She looked at his broad back, wanting to apologise, but the words were like stones stuck behind her teeth. It had become like this over the past few months; the old ability to communicate with him with just a look had gone and now there was even difficulty in finding words. She continued to stare at his back, loving him and hating him: once you gave your heart to someone, you could never take it all back. She loved him because physically he had not changed; he was still the man whose touch, sometimes even just the sight of him, could make her tremble with longing. He was big, well over six feet, with the chest and shoulders of a wrestler; she still continued to be amazed at some of the feats of strength she saw him perform on these trips. He was not handsome, with the nose that had been broken in a Rugby scrum and the cheekbones that were too high and too broad: if any Tartar had made it as far west as Connemara and not been talked impotent by the Irish, then Jack could claim him as an ancestor. It was a face which appealed to men as well as to women, one in which strength of character was marked as plainly as the irregular features. She loved the physical side of him, and she loved his warmth, his humour and his tenderness. Lately she had begun to hate him for what she thought of as his selfishness and his total disregard of any of her own ambitions. His strength of character was only a stubbornness to deny his own failings.
‘You’d better get up,’ he said without turning round. ‘Tsering has your breakfast ready.’
‘Tsampa cakes and honey?’ Their food supplies had begun to run low and for the past month she had been breakfasting on the small unappetising cakes made from roasted ground barley, the tsampa flour that was the staple diet of their Bhutanese porters. ‘I can hardly wait!’
But he had already gone out of the tent, leaving her with her sarcasm like alum on her lips. I’m becoming a real shrew, she told herself; and felt disgusted. Naturally good-tempered, she despised bitchery in herself as much as in others.
From outside she heard a few bars of music: Indian music made even more discordant to her ear by static. Nick Wilkins was fiddling with the radio, trying to get the morning news: Delhi spoke in a cracked voice across the mountains. There was a note of excitement in the voice, but she took little notice of it.
She dressed quickly in slacks, woollen shirt and sweater, washed in the basin of now tepid water that Tsering had brought in just before she had wakened, ran a comb through her short dark hair and put on some lipstick. She looked at herself in the cracked mirror that hung from the tent pole; even scarred by that mirror, she thought, I don’t look too bad. Her hair had been cut by Jack with blunt scissors a month ago; the effect was only a little worse than the deliberate casualness of some professional hair styles. Her skin was still good, but if she looked closely she could see the faint lines round the corners of her eyes, the result of too many years’ exposure to sun and wind. Nick Wilkins had told her that butterflies, at Himalayan heights, underwent a change of melanism, the dark brown pigment in their make-up asserting itself. If she stayed around here long enough she could finish up looking brown and wrinkled like the old women of the Himalayas. In the year of her début, when she had been one of the more energetic of London’s butterflies, Tatler and Queen had described her as beautiful; but in those days in those magazines any daughter of the well-to-do whose eyes were straight and whose teeth had no gaps was described as beautiful. But Life, whose standards of beauty were higher and which did not have to depend on the British middle and upper classes for its circulation, had also said she was beautiful. They had done a colour story on Alpine plants and one of the illustrations had featured Jack as a collector. The caption had read: ‘In the background is Marquis’s beautiful wife, Eve.’ She had been half-obscured by a clump of Megacarpaea polyandra, but one couldn’t have everything; she had accepted the compliment and since then had been a regular subscriber to Life.
She guessed she was still beautiful, but the thought did not exercise her; her vanity, as well as her patience, had worn itself out in these remote corners of the world. The good bonework still showed in her face; her lips were still full and had not begun to dry out; her dark eyes still held their promise of passion. Oh, there’s plenty of passion there, she told herself; only what the hell do I do with it? Her Cypriot grandmother had died early from too much exposure to the English climate and not enough attention from her phlegmatic English husband. She herself had suffered from a variety of climates and an Australian husband who had lately begun to turn into a stranger.
She turned from the distorted image