The Kashmir Shawl

Nerys had looked into his eyes.

Evan wanted to go just because the posting would be difficult and uncomfortable. Leh would give him the chance to prove his missionary zeal to God and to his superiors, while providing him with even more opportunities for self-denial. She was beginning to realise that poor Evan secretly had a low opinion of himself. Doubting the value of what he achieved within the mission, all his conscientious work and insistence on taking the hardest route was probably his way of dealing with an absence of self-confidence and self-love. He wouldn’t even feed himself properly, however hard she tried to devise meals that would nourish him. He was gaunt, and his face had developed hollows beneath the cheekbones. He was often ill, with fevers or stomach complaints.

I will love you more and better, she silently vowed, to make up for what you can’t do for yourself.

She had cupped his face between her hands and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Of course we must go. I’ll be very disappointed if we don’t. Even the journey sounds like an adventure.’ She had already heard the legends of the road from Manali to Leh.

That night in bed Evan had taken her hand and whispered, ‘My dear?’

That was his signal. She had moved closer, her nightdress rucking round her thighs, and murmured, ‘Yes.’ She made sure that her mouth was almost touching his, so he felt the warmth of her breath.

He probably didn’t think that doing it was actually sinful, she reflected. After all, they had been married, in chapel, by Parchedig Geraint Rhys, his friend and teacher, and in front of their two families. It was just – probably – that he didn’t think he deserved this much pleasure. Certainly he never tried to prolong the act, or to intensify the sensations for either of them. He submitted to the base urge, as he no doubt thought of it, then detached himself as quickly as possible.

For herself, Nerys didn’t care whether she deserved pleasure or not, but she knew from the very first fumbling time her husband came into her that she loved sex. At the beginning she had tried to imagine a marriage where both of you liked it equally and wanted it as much as she did. You’d never get out of bed, she thought. After two years of marriage, she had learnt to keep her imagination under stricter control.

Evan accepted the Leh posting, and the Watkinses made the long journey up into Ladakh. Nerys enjoyed the train journeys to Calcutta and on to Delhi, even though the summer heat of the plains was crushing after the relative airiness of Shillong. At every station food vendors clambered into their carriage with tiffin baskets containing rice and curries, chai men rang their little bells, and women imploringly held up cloth slings filled with ripe fruit to the dust-coated windows. She bargained for these goods along with the other train passengers, and arranged little picnic meals in a white napkin to tempt Evan whenever he glanced up from his book. And for hour after hour she gazed out at India as it rolled past the train. Paddy fields, buffalo carts and mud villages gave way to sweltering towns and cities of blistered slum tenements, and ever more hopeless camps where families lived under a tattered canvas awning on one patch of dirt beside the railway lines, with the smoke of countless fires thickening the already viscous air. Then the train would steam out into the countryside again, edging across a vast brown plain as if the acrid city had never existed.

In Delhi they were staying in a missionary house when Nerys finally heard the news of the Dunkirk evacuation on the BBC Overseas Service. Awaiting her were letters from her parents, containing accounts of air raids and food shortages, and of little boys she had known at school who now appeared on lists of men killed in action. It was hard to hear of the terrible changes that her known and loved world was undergoing when she was in such a strange place herself. Anxiety for the people she had left behind filled her thoughts, and India and their work there seemed even more unrelated to anything she understood. She ached to go home; the depth of her longing was physical, almost frightening. Evan came back one afternoon from a mission meeting and found her struggling to breathe at an open window, although the air outside was dense with soot and heat. A woollen sock she was knitting lay on the floor beside her. She had heard that it would be cold crossing the passes on the way up to Leh, and although the notion of chill seemed to have slipped out of the world altogether she was worried in an abstract way that they did not have enough warm clothing.

‘I think we are ready to leave.’ Evan frowned, choosing either not to see or not to remark on her distress. ‘I shall order the tickets for Chandigarh.’

With the advice and help of the Delhi mission they had accumulated a mountain of supplies, ranging from thick felt boots and blankets to tins of butter from the Delhi Dairy Company. Everything had been packed into travelling baskets fastened with leather straps.

Nerys stooped to pick up her knitting. ‘Are we doing the right thing, Evan? Do you ever worry that … that our efforts might be better expended at home?’

He put down his armful of papers and books. ‘Because of the war?’

‘Yes.’ If they were at home, she supposed, her husband would be a forces’ chaplain and she would be school-teaching in the place of men who were away fighting.

‘I have been called here, Nerys. I know that I am doing God’s will.’

That’s all very well for you, she almost retorted, but what about me? I don’t know anything of the kind. What is God’s will for me?

She had never once actually asked him.

She had always bitten her tongue, knowing that the only safe direction for the conversation to take was for her to agree that she was Evan’s wife, and her duty was to be no more or less than that. In any case, all of this, every step that had brought her here, had been her own choice. If she had not chosen to marry him she would be at home in Wales, and tomorrow she would be a spinster schoolteacher making her way to a classroom full of children whose lives she could comprehend, instead of a married woman on her way to Ladakh.

Through the window came the noise of vendors shouting, street children playing in the gutter, a baby’s wail, the tinny notes of amplified music. Nerys stood very still, her fingers feeling like melted wax on the knitting needles.

‘Are you unwell?’ Evan laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘Would you like me to call Mrs Griffiths?’

Mrs Griffiths was their hostess, a Delhi missionary wife whom Nerys hardly knew. ‘No, thank you, Evan. I’m not ill. I agree with you. We’re ready to go, so you should get the train tickets.’

At Chandigarh they left the train and travelled overland by truck, with their luggage roped under canvas on the flat bed of the vehicle, up to a town called Manali. There was another outpost of the mission here and Evan had to arrange the last details connected with their posting to Leh, so they stayed for three days. Manali lay in the foothills of high mountains and the blissfully cool air was crisp and sweet-smelling. The folded ridges that rose above the valley were covered with dark pine trees. The views made Nerys think of Switzerland, although she had never been there. She went for walks beside a crystal stream and watched eagles gliding over high crags. Her spirits lifted like the birds.

On their last evening, she and Evan ate dinner by candlelight in a little wood-panelled room overlooking a garden. When he put down his knife and fork she jumped up and went to him, resting her arms over his shoulders and putting her cheek against his hair. ‘I am so glad we’re going. I’m sorry I doubted the wisdom of it,’ she whispered.

‘I prayed you might have a change of heart,’ he answered.

Nerys knew that night would be their last in a proper bed until they reached Leh. She had learnt on their honeymoon that she must never make any overtures to her husband, but while he was out of the room she touched a dab of perfume to the nape of her neck and put on her wedding nightdress.

‘My dear?’ Evan asked, as soon as he blew out the lamp.

At first light the next day, a train of fifteen ponies assembled. It took two hours for all of Nerys and Evan’s baggage to be unpacked and redistributed into separate loads that were shared out between the pony men and their animals. A wiry little man called Sethi was in charge of their caravan. It was three hundred miles from here to Leh, over an ancient trading track that crossed the Himalayas. They would ride, and camp each night along the way.

‘Come, Memsahib.’ Sethi helped Nerys into the saddle of her pony, put the woven bridle with its bells and pompoms of bright wool into her hands, and slapped the animal’s rump. It started forwards and their procession wound out of Manali. Thirty miles of steep ascent lay ahead, to the first high pass on their route.

Nerys often thought back with a kind of dizzy disbelief to the rigours of that long journey. The days were a blur of jolting on the back of the pony, or dismounting with aching legs and numb buttocks to trudge in its wake. The track was often no more than a gash leading between tumbled rocks, or a muddy ledge perched over hundreds of feet of empty air with a silver river winding far below. The ponies picked their way along, encouraged by clicks and whistles from the pony men. Their loads rhythmically swayed, sometimes tipping far out over the void. At night Sethi and his men pitched the tent and Nerys and Evan crawled inside and rolled themselves in their blankets. Cold winds battered the canvas and sliced between the tent wall and the groundsheet. The cook-boy lit a fire and in time a tin billycan of mutton stew and another of steaming rice would be passed through the tent flap. Nerys had never felt so hungry in her life. She ate ravenously, devouring everything that was given to her. Evan lay in his blanket cocoon with his eyes closed. He suffered from the high altitude, waking up every morning with a headache and coughing weakly all through the day. Nerys dosed him with aspirin and cough mixture, and coaxed him to eat.

‘Just a spoonful of rice, dear. You must have some food, or you won’t have strength to do your work when we arrive.’

He raised himself on one elbow, and ate a small amount of his dinner.

They slept fitfully at night, propped up on saddles to ease their breathing, waking to the sound of the wind or the men talking and chuckling round their fire. In the morning the whole process started all over again.

But as the days passed Nerys found that she grew steadily stronger, and with the strength came a new happiness. She gazed at the changing scenery, thinking of how its barren grandeur dwarfed the peaks and valleys of Snowdonia yet reminded her of home. She realised that she felt more at ease in this inhospitable landscape than she had done anywhere in boiling lowland India. She joked with the pony men, using sign language because they had hardly a word in common. Sethi became her ally, riding just ahead of her on his shaggy white pony or patiently leading her mount when her aching body protested too much and she had to climb down and walk for two or three miles.

‘Memsahib very strong,’ he said meaningfully. He didn’t even glance at Evan, drooping over his pony’s reins.

Nerys knew that she would never forget the afternoon of the long, gasping climb up to the Baralacha Pass. When at last she staggered up to the highest point, at sixteen thousand feet, it was as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of her brain and her blood, leaving her whole body as limp as string. Evan was grey and gasping, hardly able to sit in his saddle. A man had to walk on either side of his pony to support him.

Then Nerys looked back. Behind her, to the south, stretched the whole of India. She turned in a half-circle. Ahead, to the north, lay the unknown territory of Asia. She straightened up and sucked in a deep breath of the glassy air.

Sethi was watching her. ‘Welcome, Memsahib.’ He smiled.

The days of riding, camping, sleeping and riding again drew on, and then suddenly they were done. Their little caravan wound up a low hill, and at the crown they found themselves looking out over the Indus valley. There were orchards and walnut trees and cultivated fields stretching along the riverbanks. The town of Leh spread over a sunny slope facing a range of high, white-iced mountains.

It was the end of August, and more than a month had gone by since they had left Shillong. As they rode into Leh, passing pony carts loaded with sheaves of dried barley stalks, flocks of goats, and women walking back from the fields, Nerys thought of the cold sliding down the mountains behind them and tightening its grip on the passes they had just crossed. Already there had been snow higher up, melting into slush in the midday sun and refreezing into treacherous ridges as soon as the dark came. Once they had unloaded their ponies the men would set out again for Manali, travelling fast and light against the weather, but the slow journey Evan and Nerys had made couldn’t be reversed. Not until winter had come and gone again.

Here we are, Nerys thought, as they passed to the left of a long mani wall on the outskirts of town. Thousands of carved stones were piled on it, each one engraved with the mantra Om mani padme hum. She bowed her head respectfully towards the wall. Here we are, and here we shall stay.

That had been almost a year ago.

Nerys turned to lie in the same position as Evan, but not quite spooned against his body in case she disturbed him. She inhaled his soap-and-sweat smell. Now that he was deeply asleep, she would complete her review of the day by considering this evening.

They had been eating their early dinner. Diskit, the woman who cooked and served their food, had withdrawn to the kitchen. She had been widowed and left with a young family so she was glad to be attached to the mission, whatever religious allegiance it obliged her to demonstrate. They could hear her opening the door to stir the ashes in the iron cooking stove, then piling in more yak-dung fuel to cook tomorrow’s stew for the school. The smell of boiling mutton drifted in to them. Evan turned a page of his book. Without even glancing at him, Nerys knew that a shadow had crossed his face. The homely kitchen sounds set up a chain of unwelcome associations in his mind.

The early Moravian missionaries had arrived in Leh in 1853, before the Catholics and long before the fledgling Welsh Presbyterians. They had established themselves successfully. They had introduced the sturdy little stove that was now a fixture in every Ladakhi kitchen, set up the first printing press, and the post office, and had translated the Bible into Tibetan.

Evan felt keenly the precarious position of their own much younger mission, and the pitiful size of his congregation compared with the numbers who made their way to worship at the Moravian church. He condemned himself for his lack of achievements, practical as well as spiritual.

‘You don’t have to think of it in that way. They are our Christian brothers, and we are doing the same work,’ Nerys had once said.

Their fellow missionaries were currently an Englishman, who had spent all his ordained life working for the Moravian church in India and was soon to retire, and a middle-aged Belgian couple. For the endless months of the winter they had been almost the only other European residents in Leh, and Nerys had grown to like all three of them. It had been Madame Gompert, with Diskit, who had nursed and comforted her through the blood and grief of the miscarriage.

She hadn’t said anything this evening, and it had been Evan who had put down his knife and fork and closed his book. ‘Nerys, I have something to discuss with you.’

‘What is it?’

‘It will soon be winter again.’

She could hardly be unaware of that. This year, now she knew about the depths of cold and silence, the monotony of eating the same food, the frozen water in their washing jugs, and the isolation of their little world, she thought that she would deal with it better. ‘Yes.’

‘I 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.