The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas
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for a moment in his striped flannel pyjamas, as if to lie down beside her took a positive effort of will.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
He blew out the candle and got in. The mattress sank under his weight and she tensed her hip and leg muscles in order not to roll against him. Not that she didn’t long for the comfort of his arms and the warmth of his skin, because she felt so sad and empty that she craved physical reassurance without any of the pitfalls that words could lead to, but it had been a long day and she didn’t want to place even this much of a demand on him.
‘Goodnight, my dear,’ he said, after a moment.
‘Goodnight, Evan,’ she said quietly.
It would not be long before he fell asleep. She lay with her fingers interlaced across her breastbone and reviewed the day.
The smaller children gave her the greatest pleasure. She loved the sight of them in class, with school pinafores tied over their ragged clothes, sitting in a neat line with their shining eyes fixed on her as she wrote words and numbers on a blackboard balanced on an easel. One, two, three. Boot, hat, apple, hand. They bore this part of the day patiently, just as they did when she read them stories from the Bible, but what they really enjoyed was singing and dancing and clapping games. They chanted their own words to ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘The Farmer’s in His Den’, and she tried to copy what they sang because her efforts made them laugh so uproariously. Or with her harmonium and their drums, whistles and tambourines they pounded out made-up songs that filled the room with rhythm and needed no language at all.
The older children were less rewarding. Nerys knew they only came to school because of the mission’s free midday meal, soup and rice with a thick stew of lentils. They fidgeted and murmured among themselves as she talked, and as soon as the class finished at three o’clock they raced each other across the yard, happy to be free from her lessons even though the rest of the day would be spent working in the fields, or bent over a weaving loom. She could only hope that the food they ate and the minimal medical attention she could offer, for their racking coughs, gummy eyes and running sores, was a compensation for the two hours of mutual incomprehension they shared with her. By the age of eight or nine, most of them stopped coming altogether. They were too valuable to their parents as extra pairs of hands.
Nerys listened as Evan’s breathing slowed and deepened.
However positive she tried to be, it was hard not to feel that they were wasting their time in this place, two ignorant outsiders battling against the primitive conditions, an obscure language and centuries of history.
Of course, Evan wouldn’t have agreed that they were ignorant. But Nerys didn’t share her husband’s absolute conviction that the Word was the only truth, and bringing it to the heathen the only thing that really mattered. She was even afraid that she might be losing her faith altogether, although the mere acknowledgement of this, in silence and under the safe cover of darkness, made her wince with anxiety. How could there be a missionary’s wife who didn’t believe in the Lord?
Ironically, it was India that had brought her to this precipice of doubt.
Back in Wales, she had first met the Reverend Evan Watkins when he was on home leave from his Indian mission and she was in teacher training, and it had all seemed perfectly straightforward. Their God, the one she and Evan shared, was a daily matter, of course. He was Grace said before meals, prayers at bedtime for family and the sick, the King and Queen and the unfortunate heathen. He was chapel on Sundays, the thick black Bible, Nonconformist hymns, and a whole way of life that she was accustomed to and took comfortably for granted. Even after Evan had proposed (and she had hoped – even prayed – that he would ask her), and during their short engagement, the wedding, their honeymoon in Anglesey (she wouldn’t dwell on that now) and all the preparations for India that had followed, she had never questioned the basic premise. Evan had heard the call to do missionary work, and she was proud to be accompanying him. She would help him and support him in every way she could, and they would succeed together.
At Shillong, the centre of the Presbyterian outreach mission to India, where they had lived for their first months of married life, it had not been so very difficult. Within the compound there was a large school run by the mission, where the teaching was excellent and the local families seemed prepared to accept the Christian message that accompanied it. As well as the big chapel, with its regular services for mission families and respectable numbers of converts, there was a medical clinic for first aid and minor ailments, classes for local women in domestic skills, hygiene and vegetable-growing that Nerys had enjoyed helping with, and all the support of a small but determined religious community. There was even, at a little distance, a mission hospital, with a resident qualified doctor and three nurses, where women could come to give birth in safer and more sanitary conditions than were available anywhere else in the area. Lepers were treated there too, and TB patients, and sufferers from septicaemia and rabies and all the other shocking ailments of India. Nerys could see that they were doing some good through their work, she and her husband, even though it was in a small, oblique way.
India itself had shocked her. She had only been able to conjure up the most pallid images in advance so the actual vastness, the brutal heat of the plains, so fierce that it flayed her skin and bleached the skies, the swarming people, the solid torrents of monsoon rain, the harsh colours and stink of it all, the flies, the crippled bodies and the raw poverty she saw every day had almost unpinned her. When she tried to confess her dismay to Evan, he had looked annoyed.
‘The work is what we are here to do, my dear, with God’s help. There is no time for considering ourselves or our misgivings.’
She had begun to retort that she wasn’t afraid of work, and she wasn’t being self-absorbed, she had only wanted to talk about what they both saw all the time. But she had stopped herself. Evan didn’t want to talk about anything except the routine of their days. He had a focus on his work that was so tight, so unwavering, that she began to suspect he was afraid of where speculation might lead him.
In any case, her confusion didn’t last. In time she began to see a vitality in this seething country, a kind of dogged appetite that brought babies bawling into the world amid all the desperation, reflected in the eyes of a beggar as he reached up with cupped hands to receive a half-pice coin, in the backs of women bent double in the fields, and in the man who sat all day beside the churning traffic with his spirit stove, brewing delicious chai to sell to passers-by. Nerys used to stop on her daily walk and drink a cup with this man, sitting on his little three-legged stool while he squatted in the dust. Unfortunately she couldn’t see how any of these people might be affected, for either better or worse, by the Christian message that she was supposed to be bringing them. Their situations were nearly all desperate and they had their various religions already. What difference could a merely different one make?
It was a dry, unwelcome seed that took root in her, but its growth was rapid.
Evan worked all the time, preaching, writing, reading and travelling to outlying villages. Even with teaching at the school and trying nervously to deal with the house servants, whose grinning expectation of her orders she found embarrassing, Nerys had plenty of hours to spare. She began helping out at the hospital where the nurses offered much livelier company than the other mission wives.
Her favourite duty was in the labour and delivery room. Her memory of the first baby she saw being born was as vivid as if it had happened that morning. The mother was younger than she was, had borne two children already and had been screaming for two long hours while Nerys sponged her face and struggled to soothe her. But as soon as he was born she reached her arms out for this new infant with a smile that filled the room. Nerys had had to turn aside and wipe her own eyes with a towel.
Her hands slid lower now, an involuntary movement that she tried and failed to suppress, over the corrugated twin arches of her lower ribs, to rest in the slack bowl beneath them. Since her own first pregnancy had miscarried, less than a month ago, she had tried to tell herself that there would soon be another baby on the way. She felt sick and exhausted, and it had taken more than long enough to conceive this one, but still, they would manage, wouldn’t