The Pulse of Danger. Jon Cleary
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on the north-eastern border of Bhutan.
Nick Wilkins, crouched by the radio outside his tent, looked up as she passed him on the way to the kitchen tent. ‘How do you manage to look so fresh and beautiful first thing in the morning?’
She stopped, pleased at the compliment; it was almost as if Nick knew she needed some reassurance this morning. One did not expect such gratuitous compliments from Englishmen, especially an entomologist from Leeds. ‘Nick, you’re a continual surprise! Used you to say nice things to the girls back in Leeds first thing in the morning?’
The compliment had slipped out, an exclamation he now regretted. He turned his attention back to the radio, covering his retreat with the blunt awkward remarks that always made him sound surlier than he actually was.
‘Never met any girls first thing in the morning back in Leeds. Except my sister and she always looked like the Bride of Frankenstein.’ As always when he was embarrassed, the trace of northern accent reappeared in his voice; despite the careful cultivation of the last six years, ever since he had fled Leeds, it was still there wrapped round the root of his tongue. He envied Marquis, the Australian, whose flat vowels would never raise an eyebrow in Knightsbridge. In England, if you were going to be an outsider, it was always better to be a Commonwealth one.
Eve recognised the rebuff, but she tried again: ‘Is your sister married?’
‘Four kids.’
‘That explains it.’ But I shouldn’t mind looking like the Bride of Frankenstein if I could have four kids. Or even one. She nodded at the radio. ‘Any news?’
‘The Chinese have crossed the border east of here, over into the North-East Frontier, and in the west, too, in Ladakh. Things look grim.’
He looked up at her, his squarely handsome face sober and worried. He was an entomologist, accustomed to the savagery of the insect world, but he knew little or nothing of what humans could do to each other. Even in Leeds it had been possible to remain innocent; the gangs and the prostitutes had never come to the quiet street on the edge of the city; the chapel singing had been the loudest noise heard at the weekend. He was twenty-eight years old and this was his first field trip to a territory where the amenities and veneer of civilisation were left behind at the border like so much excess baggage.
Eve sat down at the small table outside the kitchen tent. She was protected from the breeze that came down the valley, and the morning sun warmed her and took some of the edge off her mood. Tsering, cheerful as a lottery winner, a prizewinner every day no matter what his health or the weather was like, brought her the tsampa cakes and wild honey.
‘Very good breakfast this morning, memsahib.’ He said the same thing every morning, never realising the monotony of it; that was one of the advantages of not having a good command of English. ‘Cooked special for you.’
Everyone else had had the same breakfast, but Eve kept up the pretence. ‘Tsering, you are too good to me. Your wives will become jealous of me.’
‘Wives don’t know, memsahib.’ He grinned and ducked back into the kitchen tent.
Eve looked at Wilkins. ‘Jack heard the news?’
‘He got the early bulletin. They’re broadcasting every hour. Shows how serious it is.’ Wilkins switched off the radio and came and sat beside her. He poured some tea into a mug and sat thoughtfully watching the spinning liquid as he stirred it. Eve had the feeling that he looked at everything through a microscope before he offered an opinion on it; he dissected even the most inconsequential happening as if it were some rare entomological discovery. But she knew that the Chinese crossing of the Indian border was more than an inconsequential happening. She had been on enough expeditions with entomologists to think of an analogy: it could be an invasion of Driver ants enlarged to the human level and just as implacably destructive. She said as much, and Wilkins nodded.
‘I’ve never seen Driver ants at work, but I’ve seen pictures of what they’ve done. Given time, they can eat their way right through a farm. Crops, livestock and all. These Chinese could do the same to India.’
‘What did Jack say?’
‘Nothing much. That husband of yours isn’t all Irish blarney. He can be as uncommunicative as one of these Himalayan lamas when he wants to be.’
She looked down towards where Marquis squatted on his heels beside Tom and Nancy Breck and the porters. The camp was pitched in a grass plot beneath a tall cliff; a stand of pine trees made an effective wind-break at one end of the camp. A torrent, fifty feet at its widest, split the narrow floor of the valley, tearing its way through a tumble of huge grey-green rocks in flying scarves of white water; a footbridge, which swayed like a banner when the wind was strong, was slung on thin poles across the raging waters just below the camp. Prayer-wheels, long copper cylinders that spun the morning sun into themselves like silken thread, stood at either end of the bridge; each time Eve crossed the precarious gangway she felt she was supported only by prayer, not the most comforting aid to her sceptical mind. Two gardens had been planted on a flat patch above the river, one for growing their own vegetables, the other for keeping alive the plants that had been collected. The porters were now digging up the plants and packing them in polythene bags. The bags were stacked to one side like so many plastic cabbages, and Marquis was checking the labels the Brecks had fixed to each of them.
Eve said, ‘I think he’d move us out of here at once if he thought there was any real danger.’ But she wondered if what she had said was only a wish and not a conviction.
‘I doubt it,’ said Wilkins, and looked aggressively at Marquis as the latter stood up, said something to the Brecks that made them laugh, then came up towards the kitchen tent. ‘All you’re interested in is your bloody rhododendrons. Right?’
Marquis looked at him quizzically, smiling with a good humour that only made Wilkins more annoyed. ‘Something worrying you, Nick? Your hair shirt shrunk in the wash? Buck up, sport. You’ll be home soon, back there in the Natural History Museum, swapping philosophy and dead flies with the girl students.’
‘I’m worried about the Chinese. I think we should pack up and get out while the going’s good.’
There was a basin of water on a rough wooden stand outside the kitchen tent; Marquis moved across to it and unhurriedly began to wash his hands. He had large hands, cracked and calloused from working among rocks, and his nails were broken and dirty. Eve had grown accustomed to them, but it had taken her some time to appreciate that the hands of a field botanist had much rougher usage than the gloved hands of her father when the latter had pottered among his roses in his Buckinghamshire garden. It still amazed her, after eight years, that those same coarse hands could be so gentle in their love-making.
‘Relax, Nick. We’ll be okay.’ Marquis began to dry his hands. ‘Bhutan is one of the few independent kingdoms left in this part of the world. Any part of the world, for that matter. It took a long distance look at democracy, through a cracked telescope, I reckon, and it turned thumbs down on the idea. I’m a republican up to my dandruff, but if I have to be caught in a kingdom, this is the one I’ll vote for.’
‘Hates England,’ Eve said to Wilkins round a mouthful of cake and honey. ‘Always sticks stamps on upside down on his letters. Hopes the Queen will have a rush of blood to the head and abdicate.’
Marquis grinned at her and went on: ‘Bhutan is tied up with India for the rather back-handed relations it has with the rest of the world. And the Indians hang out bloody great signs to let everyone know they don’t interfere here. For one thing you never see an Indian army man here in Bhutan, not even as an instructor. The Bhutanese were not being just bloody-minded when they took so long to make up their minds whether to give us visas or not. They reckon the less foreigners they allow in here, the more neutral they can claim to be. Neutrality is like chastity, Nick. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Right, love?’
‘I’ve never been neutral,’ said Eve.
Marquis grinned and winked. Neutrality had once been a private privilege, taken for granted; now one had to produce proof, as if it were