The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas
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the snow comes?’
‘It is only the beginning of September, but if the weather happens to be against us the Lord will direct our actions.’
‘Do you really want me to go?’
The mattress rustled as he minutely shifted his weight. ‘I think it would be a good idea.’
‘Very well,’ Nerys said, in a cold voice that she didn’t want to acknowledge as her own.
Three days later, her bag stood in the mission courtyard beside the McMinns’ luggage, waiting to be loaded on to the first relay of ponies. Nerys handed out apples and dried apricots to the scrum of Leh children, not just her pupils, who were staring through the gate at all the activity. Diskit’s three grimy offspring were among them, and Diskit herself stood on the house steps in tears. She wasn’t wearing her headcloth. Nerys put down the fruit basket and went to her. ‘Don’t cry. I’ll be back in two months’ time. Sahib will bring me home.’
Diskit only sobbed more loudly. Nerys put her arm round her shoulders, inhaling the ripe smell of her hair. ‘Don’t forget your scarf. Always when you are working. Look after Sahib for me.’
Diskit wiped her nose on her sleeve and sniffed. ‘Yes, Mem.’
‘The ponies are ready,’ Archie announced, from beyond the gate, as hoofs rattled on the dried earth. Myrtle had put on her sola topi, with the muslin veil tied around her face, and Nerys had a wide straw hat.
Evan stood to one side, looking unhappy now the moment of parting had finally come. Nerys went to his side and reached up for a kiss. Awkwardly he knocked her hat askew as their dry lips touched. He stood back at once and patted her shoulder. ‘It won’t be so long. God bless you, my dear.’
She mumbled a goodbye, conscious that Diskit, the house-boys and the schoolchildren were watching, although the McMinns had tactfully busied themselves out in the street. The bolder children flung themselves at her, clasping her knees, and she bent down to hug and kiss each of them, instead of her husband.
Archie and Myrtle were mounted and Nerys’s pony was waiting. Archie’s bearer helped her to clamber into the padded saddle, then took the reins and turned the pony’s head to the road for her. She twisted round to wave goodbye. The procession moved off down the lane, past the chapel and into the street leading to the bazaar, leaving Evan’s solitary black silhouette outlined against the stone wall of the mission compound.
It was a cloudless day. As they wound the first miles along the Indus valley, Nerys felt heat strike through her straw hat, and wished she had brought cotton gloves to protect her hands from the blazing sun. After a time, on a high spur of land, she saw the prayer flags and brass spires of Spitok rising above the towering walls. This was the first of the great gompas on the route, and it was the furthest point she had travelled from Leh in more than a year.
Myrtle had gone ahead, but now she reined in her pony and waited for Nerys to catch up. Archie and the string of pack ponies were already far in the distance, enveloped in a puff of swirling dust.
‘Would you like company?’ Myrtle asked. Only her dark eyes were visible between the swathes of veil. ‘Or would you rather be left to yourself?’
Nerys looked up at the mountains ahead. The surprising strength that she had discovered on the long ride up from Manali seemed within her grasp again. ‘Company, please,’ she said.
Myrtle reached out of the saddle to pat her knee. ‘Good.’
They faced west, and rode on.
Nerys soon discovered that travelling with the McMinns was a completely different experience from her journey with Evan. At night they stayed in the rest houses set along the route, commandeering the places regardless of who might have arrived ahead of them. As a British sahib and a proper daughter of the Raj, Archie and Myrtle automatically took the precedence they saw as their due. They felt no compunction in ousting Ladakhi or Kashmiri travellers from the shelters, even on one evening a Muslim man, with a hennaed beard, who was accompanied by several veiled wives and half a dozen small children and babies. Evan and Nerys had always been confused and unwilling to impose themselves over other people, even the humblest. Whenever they came to a guesthouse, to sleep beside the road in their draughty tent had often seemed the easier solution.
The rest houses were often no more than two-roomed shacks, a living and sleeping room and an attached kitchen, and they were generally dirty and lacking any but the most basic amenities, but Sahib McMinn and his party were always greeted by the owners with extra civility and efforts to please. It wasn’t hard to deduce why, because although Archie demanded a full account of what was owing and didn’t overpay by a single anna, he invariably understood what the fair rate should be and handed over the money promptly and cheerfully.
Their camp servants always first arrived at the rest house, and by the time the McMinns rode up, their yakdan bags had been untied from the ponies and set in the room for them. Camp beds were erected because Myrtle refused to use the charpoys provided, saying they were alive with bugs. Archie always pretended to be dismayed by his wife’s fussy behaviour, but affectionate amusement twinkled out of him. There were plenty of warm blankets, and even linen sheets, which were unpacked and repacked each day. The McMinns’ servants bought food locally to supplement the supplies the pack ponies carried, and their cook made the dinners, which were served with plates and cutlery rinsed daily in a solution of potassium permanganate. Sometimes there was even the opportunity to take a bath. A collapsible canvas structure was erected and part-filled, and Nerys was able to sit in it and luxuriously scoop warm water from an enamel jug over her skin and hair.
At the end of each day’s journey, sitting in their camp chairs under the cobwebby guesthouse rafters, there was plenty for the three to talk and laugh about. Myrtle gossiped and joked about people they had encountered, or the various foibles of the pony men.
‘Do you think they have a rota?’ she speculated, about the Muhammadan and his wives.
‘No, I should think he favours the prettiest one,’ Archie replied. ‘I would.’
‘How can he tell?’ Myrtle wondered.
‘They don’t go to bed in their veils, darling.’
Myrtle hooted with laughter. She smoked thin black cigarettes with opulent gold tips. The first time she lit one, Nerys glanced at her in surprise and Myrtle blew out a long plume of smoke. ‘I was on my very best behaviour, you know, when we met. We were staying in the mission house. Will you disapprove hugely when you really get to know me?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Nerys laughed.
Last thing at night, the bearer brought in mugs of hot cocoa. Archie tipped a slug of brandy into his own and Myrtle’s, and raised an eyebrow at Nerys.
‘Yes, please,’ she said. This was a custom to which she had quickly adapted.
There was only ever the one room at the rest houses, but she soon also got used to sharing with Myrtle and Archie. In bed Myrtle wore pearl-grey silk pyjamas with a Parisian label. ‘Much better for travelling, you know. The coolies drop lice in the beds when they make them up, but they slither off the silk.’
She was right. Lice had been a feature of the Watkinses’ journey up to Leh, clinging snugly in the seams of Nerys’s flannel nightgowns.
With Archie’s rhythmic snoring and Myrtle’s breathing as its accompaniment, Nerys found that she slept better on the Srinagar road than she had done lately in the mission house. Every morning, as soon as it was light, the bearer brought in their bed tea. After they had drunk it Archie went outside in his dressing-gown to shave in daylight while the women got dressed, and then it was time for hot porridge, scrambled eggs and the cook’s delicious fresh bread.
They walked or rode all day, through tiny villages with narrow fields of ripe grain winding beside the rutted track, where bedraggled hens pecked at the verges and stray sheep went scudding ahead of the ponies. Banks of tattered rose bushes spread on either side, now hung with orange hips, like jewels sewn on devoré velvet. When