The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas
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can’t sit here in the mission all that time. In summer when I go out to villages and the nomad camps, the people are almost all out with the herds. But if I went in the winter, do you see, they would be in the settlements. They will have less work to do and I would have their attention.’
Nerys considered this. There were tracks out to villages in the valley, and hazardous routes over the mountains to outlying gompas and clusters of huts surrounding them, but she could only just imagine what it would be like to travel through snow and wind when the temperature fell to nought degrees Fahrenheit.
‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.
Evan was silent.
Look at me, she willed him. At last their eyes met.
He wasn’t hostile towards her, neither did he blame her in the least, but the loss of the baby had tipped them over the lip of a divide. As much as he had wanted the child, Evan also needed her to be strong and dependable in the joint enterprise that preoccupied him. Her physical frailty since the miscarriage and the unspoken weighty mass of her sadness suggested that her strength was no longer available for him to draw on. In some recess of his consciousness he resented the withdrawal, and that resentment must loom in his mind as yet another of the personal failings he was obliged to atone for.
They were at an impasse, Nerys wearily concluded. They couldn’t talk to each other: it had been his child as well as hers and, of course, Evan grieved for it, but he put up too many defences against her and she had lost the will to try to break through them. She felt the beginnings of anger, too, at his weakness, which was so determinedly masked with stubbornness.
‘I couldn’t agree to that,’ he said, in his most wintry voice. ‘You must take better care of yourself than I could undertake to do if we were both out in the field.’
Nerys looked away from him. She closed her mouth, knowing that it made a tight line in her white face. ‘You would prefer it if I stayed here alone?’
Evan was surprised. ‘You won’t be alone. You will have the schoolchildren, the congregation, the Gomperts, Henry Buller and our other neighbours. And the servants will look after you.’
Very slowly Nerys folded up her napkin and replaced it in the wooden ring. She stood up, supporting herself briefly with her hand on the back of her chair. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
She went across the passage to the kitchen door. Diskit was sluicing plates and cutlery in a tin basin, her pomaded hair wound up in a cloth because Nerys had told her it must always be covered when she was working. The red of the material matched her cheeks. Two men were sitting on a bench against the wall, their yak-skin boots discarded beside the door leading to the yard. Diskit dropped a fistful of forks on to a metal tray and Nerys inwardly winced at the noise. ‘Diskit, what’s this?’
‘Mem, Leh very busy. My cousin brother,’ she nodded to one of the two men, ‘come from Alchi.’
‘Julley,’ the men murmured.
The girl had learnt a smattering of English from Evan’s predecessor, and Nerys had picked up a basic level of Ladakhi. They communicated well, these days, only rarely having to resort to sign language.
Leh was busy. It was trading season and the caravans were in town, from Lhasa, Yarkand and Kashgar in the east and from Punjab in the west. The merchants from Tibet and Turkestan brought carpets, gold and silver to trade with their Indian counterparts for cotton and tea. The local people had wool and woollen goods for sale, every quality from coarse yak fibre to finest pashm, and the bazaar seethed all day with different faces and national dresses, and a clamour of languages. The British joint commissioner was also in residence. He was responsible for traffic and trade, and every trader had to apply to him for a passport to enable him to retreat in whichever direction he had come before the winter snows cut off the ancient routes.
The next day the commissioner was holding his annual tea party and entertainment at the Residency, to which Evan and Nerys had been invited along with everyone else of any standing in Leh. They had arrived just too late last year, and Nerys was looking forward to this great event as a rare break from their dutiful and monotonous routine. She had few decent clothes to choose from, but the dhobi man had laundered her best blouse and she had ironed it herself, to avoid the creases he invariably pressed into the collar along with a liberal sprinkling of ashes from the iron. She had just finished knitting herself a cardigan. It was soft cream wool, locally spun and the best available, and her job this evening was to add the finishing touch of a dozen pearl buttons.
‘Mem, I tell you,’ Diskit’s cheeks turned even redder, ‘my cousin, on road. Sahib and memsahib, English people. Leh tomorrow. Next week Srinagar.’
The two men nodded vigorously. The cousin did some voluble explaining, from which Nerys was able to decipher that a shooting party was returning from the Nubra valley. There were bearers and cooks, a shikari, or huntsman, camp-boys, a great bag of game heads, ponies, guns, tents and mounds of luggage, all the trappings of a serious expedition. The shooting party consisted of an English gentleman and lady.
This was real news.
English travellers passing through Leh were a focus of attention whoever they might be, but it was most unusual to hear of any Western woman undertaking the journey out to the remote east. Nerys wondered what she could be like. Curiosity, the prospect of the party, and the hope of some fresh conversation and unusual entertainment revived her to the point that she felt almost herself again. She forgot all about Evan, sitting over his book at the dining-table.
‘Mem, I tell you,’ Diskit was insisting. There was still more news to impart.
Nerys gathered that the travellers on the way out had stayed in the dak bungalow between Leh and Thikse, which was why she had not met them before. This was a small house provided for British government or other officials who were in the area and needed temporary accommodation. She knew that it was a comfortless place with mildewed walls, and drifts of dead flies on the windowsills, and she was not at all surprised to hear that the visitors were looking for alternative accommodation this time. Because of the party tomorrow, the Residency was unfortunately already overcrowded.
She said at once, ‘They must stay here.’
The Watkinses had welcomed very few visitors to the mission, because most of the Europeans passing directly through Leh either went to the Residency or stayed with the Gomperts. Henry Buller’s house was generally better avoided. She was already running through in her head what needed to be done. Air the sheets, light the fire under the boiler so there would be enough hot water. Jugs and basins. Towels, a posy of flowers for the bedroom table. How to add some elegant touch to their sparse menus for the next few days?
‘Diskit, first thing tomorrow you will clean bedroom. Wash floor, all dusting, inside cupboard, everywhere.’
Diskit nodded, serious at the importance of this charge. ‘My cousin, tell sahib on road?’
‘Yes, yes.’ Nerys turned to one of the men on the bench. ‘Go back to the camp, say they are welcome here. Can you remember that? Welcome.’
When she had finally gone to tell him the latest, Evan had still been sitting at the table with the remains of dinner at his elbow. ‘Where is Diskit? What do we pay her for? Am I to do the washing up, or might she find the time?’
‘Evan, we’re going to have guests tomorrow.’
He had listened with a frown. Nerys’s reaction had been curiosity followed by anticipation, but his was defensive. The arrival of strangers in their home meant disruption and threatened worse: exposure, or some unnamed humiliation. His expression had made Nerys want to draw his head against her breasts and stroke his greying hair, telling him that he shouldn’t worry or fear so much, but there was no longer any protocol between them for such a move. The weariness that she had felt earlier had descended on her again.
‘Diskit will come in a moment. Her cousin brought a message from the road, and I gave her a list of things to do before the morning. I’m going to bed now, Evan. Tomorrow will be a busy day.’
‘I