The Pulse of Danger. Jon Cleary
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Eve, was so tangible that she felt she could see it; the wrong remark, even the wrong look, could have punctured it as a balloon might have been. She sat waiting for someone to say the wrong thing; but no one did. Marquis and Wilkins turned away from the table as naturally as if they had decided some moments ago to do so, and went down to join Breck and the porters.
Nancy Breck looked after them. ‘Tom forgets sometimes. I mean, what happened to his parents. Then when he does remember—’She looked back to the north, to the mountains, with the skeins of wind-blown snow now turning to scimitars, riding like demons out of China. ‘I mean, it’s almost as if he wanted to forget—’
‘Wouldn’t that be best?’
Nancy shook her head. She was a big girl, strong and well-proportioned; she looked a farm girl from Minnesota rather than a doctor’s daughter from Main Line Philadelphia. Later on she would be massive, perhaps even a little frightening; but now she was attractive, if you liked big healthy girls. And Tom Breck obviously did; and what anyone else thought didn’t matter at all. She was not wearing her glasses now, and her big short-sighted brown eyes were dark with concentration.
‘He mustn’t forget! I’m not religious, God knows – there, that makes me sound contradictory, doesn’t it? Are you religious, Eve? No, I shouldn’t ask.’ At times Nancy could lose herself and her audience in a flood of words; conversation became a one-way torrent of questions, opinions and non-sequiturs. ‘Anyhow. Tom’s parents died because they were religious. Marvellously so – I’ve read some of the letters they sent him. Every second line read like a prayer.’
I talked like this once, Eve was thinking, listening with only half an ear. I used all those extravagant adjectives; non-sequiturs were a regular diet with me. But I never had Nancy’s passion, not about the world in general; perhaps that is the American in her, they make an empire of their conscience. I only had (have?) passion for my husband, a most un-English habit.
She came back to the tail-end of Nancy’s monologue: ‘Don’t you feel that way about Jack? Or shouldn’t I ask?’
‘No,’ said Eve, and left Nancy to wonder if it was meant as an answer to either or both the questions. She turned to the kitchen tent, calling to Tsering to bring her more tea.
‘Sorry.’ Nancy stood up, mumbled something, then walked away towards her tent, stumbling a little as if embarrassment had only added to her myopia to make her almost blind.
Eve sat alone at the rough table, warming her hands round the fresh mug of tea Tsering had brought her. She wanted to run after Nancy, apologise for the rudeness of her answer; but that would only lead to explanation, and she would never be able to explain to anyone what had gone wrong between herself and Jack. Because she hated scenes, she had done her best to keep their conflict to themselves; they had had one or two fierce rows, but they had always been in their tent and never while Wilkins and the Brecks had been in camp. She knew that Nimchu and the other main camp porters must have heard the rows and discussed them; but she knew also that the Bhutanese would not have gossiped with the Englishman and the Americans. It shocked and embarrassed her to the point of sickness to discover now that Nancy knew that all was not well between her and Jack. To have Nick and Tom know could somehow be ignored. To have another woman, one so newly and happily married, know was almost unbearable.
Tsering hovered behind her, his round fat face split in the perpetual smile that made life seem one huge joke. His name, Tsering Yeshe, meant Long Lived Wisdom; he had never shown any signs of being wise, unless constant cheerfulness showed a wisdom of acceptance of what life offered. He was proud of his attraction for women, and on the trek out he had almost shouted himself hoarse calling to every woman he had passed, even those who were sometimes half a mile away, standing like dark storks in the flooded rice paddies. Eve had no idea how old he was and he himself could only guess; but he had been accompanying expeditions here in the Himalayas, in Nepal, Sikkim and his native Bhutan, every year since the end of World War Two. He had a wife and four children back at Dzongsa Dzong on the Indian border, but he hardly ever saw them; he claimed three other wives in various parts of the country, but Eve suspected these were inventions to bolster his reputation. Eve, a wife driven by her own needs to accompany her husband wherever he went, wondered what Tsering’s wife felt about his long absences.
‘More cake, memsahib? More tea?’ Tsering liked his women fat, and he thought the memsahib much too thin for a really beautiful woman. She had good breasts, but the rest of her was much too flat for a woman who would be really good to make love to. He wondered if that was why the sahib sometimes shouted at the memsahib when they were alone in their tent. ‘You do not eat enough, memsahib.’
‘You’ve told me that, Tsering. If I ate as much as you try to push into me, we’d soon run out of food. How are the stores, anyway?’ It was her job to supervise the stores. Even on their first expedition she had insisted that she be given a job and as time had gone by she had become an efficient and reliable supply officer.
Tsering made a face and ran a greasy hand over his close-cropped black hair. Men and women here in Bhutan all wore the same close-cropped style, and when Eve had first arrived in the country she had several times been confused as to what sex she was talking to. ‘Meat is almost gone, memsahib. Rice, too. Maybe the sahib better shoot something. Yesterday I saw gooral up on hill.’ He nodded back at the tangled hills that, like a green waterfall, tumbled down into the pit of the valley.
Eve did not particularly like the meat of the gooral, the Himalayan chamois, but she had tasted worse goats’ meat and it was at least better than some of the village sheep they had bought on their way out. ‘I’ll speak to the sahib. And you’d better check again on the rice. If it’s really low, we may have to send Chungma and Tashi back down the valley to buy some at Sham Dzong.’
That was two days’ walk: four days there and back. Jack would consider it a waste of time and two men. If she played her stores carefully, she might have them all out of here within a week.
She smiled to herself, like a schoolgirl who was about to bring the holidays forward by burning down the school.
2
Marquis was secretly pleased when Eve told him they needed more meat and would he try for the gooral. There were still some botanical specimens that had to be gathered to make the collection complete, and time was running out; snow was already beginning to fall heavily on the high peaks, and any day now the winds would swing to the north to bring blizzards. On top of that he had been more disturbed than he had shown by this morning’s news on the radio. He was not a fool, and he knew that the Chinese Reds had long regarded Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and the North-East Frontier Agency as only extensions of Tibet. But he wanted at least another week; he wanted to complete the collection, his best ever. He had fought against the idea, was still fighting it, but this might be his last expedition. He wanted it to be one that botanists at least would remember.
But now only the gooral was on his mind; or so he told himself. He always welcomed the opportunity to hunt game, and it eased his conscience when the hunt was for food and not just for sport. He would go out again this afternoon and collect the swertia racemosa he had seen yesterday in the ravine farther up the valley.
He was now a mile above the camp, moving up a narrow track through a stand of evergreen oak. The valley here was almost narrow enough to be called a gorge, a cleft between two steep wooded ridges; the river raced down the floor of the valley, twisting and turning like a rusted knife cutting its way out of the mountains. He knew that the river sped on to join other mountain streams, became a slower-moving river that merged into the Brahmaputra, a procession of waters that wended their majestic way, carrying the prayers, dreams and excreta of men, down to the Bay of Bengal over a thousand miles away. Rivers, as well as mountains, had always fascinated him; he had a voice like a bookmaker’s lament, but his heart always rang with a Caruso-note when he came for the first time on a river. Heaven was a high mountain peak somewhere and he would reach it by way of a river that flowed uphill. It thrilled him to walk beside such a stream as this one, to look at the water tearing its way over the rocks and to see it as the birth pangs of a giant river that, a thousand miles away, carried ships to the sea. He was passionately