The Pulse of Danger

JON CLEARY

The Pulse of Danger

Dedication

To Innes and George

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

Chapter One

The leopard coughed somewhere on the steep slope behind the camp; and Eve Marquis awoke at once. Despite the number of trips she and Jack had made into the wildernesses of the world, she had never been able to take for granted the beasts that might prowl the outskirts of their camps. Each night she went to sleep with one ear still wide awake for any hint of danger; other people’s nightmares were supposed to be soundless, but hers were full of lions roaring, elephants trumpeting and gorillas grunting. Lately they had been echoing with the coughing of leopards. English and therefore a supposed animal-lover, a worshipper of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals as much as of the Church of England, she had all her life been guilty of what she felt was treason: she hated animals, couldn’t bring herself to trust even a day-old puppy. Cruft’s dog show was something left over from Dante’s Inferno; and people who kept more esoteric pets, baby alligators and Siamese fighting fish, were devils she did her best to avoid. Yet year after year she left the comparative safety of Kensington, a region where the wilder poodles were at least kept on a leash, and ventured into these areas where the animals made the beasts of Kensington Gardens look like people-lovers.

Why? she asked herself. And the answer pulled back the flap of the tent and came in, dropping some letters on her as she rolled over on the camp-bed.

‘Mail,’ Jack said, sitting down on his own bed. ‘Chungma just got back from Thimbu. The trucks will be there waiting for us three weeks from to-day. Sleep well?’

She had indeed slept soundly, and that annoyed her. When one was afraid of being torn to pieces, one should not sleep like a new-born baby. But she had always been like that when they were camped at some height. Other people complained of headache, difficulty in getting their breath, even of heart flutters; but it was as if the higher she went, the more relaxed and at home she felt.

She remembered how pleased Jack had been when he had first discovered this fact about her. That had been on her first trip with him, their honeymoon trip, to the slopes of Ruwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon, in Uganda.

‘I was worried,’ he had grinned. ‘Someone told me honeymoons should always be taken at sea-level. Shortness of breath in the groom or bride is no foundation for a happy marriage.’

‘Ours is going to be a happy one. I don’t think either of us is going to suffer from shortness of breath. Not for years, anyway.’

That had been only eight years ago. Their lungs were still good, but she had begun to feel their marriage needed a check-up. She had decided it was suffering from a shortness of compatibility, from a congestion of selfishness; she had had plenty of time in these past seven months to diagnose the reasons. That, of course, was part of the trouble: on these trips she too often had too much time to think. And to feel sorry for herself, something of which she was secretly ashamed. Self-pity was as wasteful as lavishing love on a dog or a cat.

Jack had begun to slit open the letters with the small curved knife he used for prising plants from rock crevices. ‘I’m going up to Bayswater Road this morning. There’s a patch of swertia over there. I want to get some seeds of it.’

All the tracks, streams and ridges in their working area were given familiar names for easier identification; it was an invention that had become a habit with them as they had made these expeditions into regions that were often unmapped. It was better than referring to the ‘fourth ridge from the skyline’ or the ‘track that branches off at the Kharsu oak’; and at first she had taken it on herself to dream up the names. As it had with soldiers during the war, it evoked a certain nostalgia for home and took away some of the foreignness of an alien land: Piccadilly Circus as a jungle clearing was just as much home as the original. Or almost. But lately, abraded by the moods that had taken hold of her like a girdle that didn’t fit, she had begun to look upon the names as an irritating whimsy. But she could say nothing: after all, they had been her idea in the first place. The first Bayswater Road had been a track on Ruwenzori: it was a honeymoon memory.

‘Better take your rifle,’ she said. ‘I heard the leopard again.’

‘I’ll be loaded down enough, without taking a bloody rifle with me.’ He was the animal-lover; he would trust even a starving python. ‘I’ll be all right, love. Here.’

He handed her the bulk of the letters. She took her arms from under the blankets, felt the chill of the morning air through her pyjama-sleeves, and quickly grabbed at the sweater he tossed her. On their first trip to Ruwenzori she had insisted on taking sheets with them, but it had not taken her long to appreciate that the comfort of them did not compensate for the extra weight and the difficulty of washing them. She had grown accustomed to the roughness of blankets or the constriction of a sleeping-bag, but that did not mean she liked them. Sheets had become a symbol of civilisation for her. Small things assumed a disproportionate importance when one had time, too much time, to think about them. The linen department at Harrods had begun to look like one of the annexes of the Promised Land. She sat up, pulling on the sweater, and began to glance through her letters, the first links for weeks with that Promised Land.

She looked up. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Sort of.’ He re-read the letter he was holding, then carefully refolded it. She recognised all the signs: he was going to tell her something he guessed she did not want to hear. ‘The Bayard Institute wants me to take a party out to New Guinea.’

She put down her own letters: whatever news was in them was unimportant beside what he had just told her. ‘What are you going to tell them?’

‘Well—’

‘Jack, if you go, I’m not going with you. You promised this was our last trip.’

He grinned, as if he did not think she was serious. ‘You’d like New Guinea. And we could go down to Sydney for a few weeks. You’re always complaining I’ve never taken you back to my home—’

‘We’ll go to Sydney. But not to New Guinea. I’ve had enough—’ Suddenly she felt on the verge of tears, but she held them back. She had learned long ago that winning a man over by tears provided only a temporary victory: she was not going to spend her life in a drizzle of weeping.

‘We’ll talk about it later, on the way back to Thimbu.’ He stood up, put a huge rough hand on the back of her head and gently ran it down to stroke her neck.

‘Don’t start smoodging to me,’ she said tartly, her mind made up not to give in to him this time. Then the leopard coughed again, the ough-ough sound that told he was angry; and she looked up at her husband with true concern, all her anger at him suddenly gone. ‘Darling, please take the rifle.’

He went to say something, then he shrugged, sat down on his bed again and drew out the gun-case from beneath it. She had given him the guns as a wedding present, both from Holland and Holland, a Super .30 Double and a 12-bore Royal ejector self-opener; the type of gun had meant nothing to her, but the salesman had assured her that no sportsman could wish for more. But he hadn’t known her Jack. They had cost her nine hundred pounds each and they had almost caused a fierce row between her and Jack; he had rebelled against such extravagance, insisting she was not to buy him gifts he himself could not afford, but she had been just as stubborn as he that she would not take them back. In the end he had accepted them, but they were the last expensive gift she had given him, except for the contributions she always made towards the cost of their expeditions. Being the rich wife of a poor botanist was not an easy occupation.

He took out the Super .30 and wiped the oil from it. ‘I haven’t had much chance to use it this trip.’ His big hands moved caressingly down the barrels and over the stock, the hands of a lover.

‘That’s your baby, isn’t it?’

He looked at her from under his heavy black brows, his dark blue eyes seeming to glaze over as they always did when he wanted to retreat from an argument. It had not escaped her that he only retreated from arguments with her; with everyone else the eyes blazed almost with enjoyment when there was a conflict of opinion. That was the Irish in him: a generation removed from Ireland, the bog-water dried out of him by the Australian sun, he still had the Irishman’s belief that an argument was better than a benediction.

‘Don’t start that again, love.’

‘Wouldn’t you like a son you could teach to use a gun?’

‘With my luck I’d land a daughter.’

‘We could keep trying. I’m willing.’

He looked at her for a moment, then again his eyes glazed over. He turned away and began to fill a pouch with cartridges. She looked at his broad back, wanting to apologise, but the words were like stones stuck behind her teeth. It had become like this over the past few months; the old ability to communicate with him with just a look had gone and now there was even difficulty in finding words. She continued to stare at his back, loving him and hating him: once you gave your heart to someone, you could never take it all back. She loved him because physically he had not changed; he was still the man whose touch, sometimes even just the sight of him, could make her tremble with longing. He was big, well over six feet, with the chest and shoulders of a wrestler; she still continued to be amazed at some of the feats of strength she saw him perform on these trips. He was not handsome, with the nose that had been broken in a Rugby scrum and the cheekbones that were too high and too broad: if any Tartar had made it as far west as Connemara and not been talked impotent by the Irish, then Jack could claim him as an ancestor. It was a face which appealed to men as well as to women, one in which strength of character was marked as plainly as the irregular features. She loved the physical side of him, and she loved his warmth, his humour and his tenderness. Lately she had begun to hate him for what she thought of as his selfishness and his total disregard of any of her own ambitions. His strength of character was only a stubbornness to deny his own failings.

‘You’d better get up,’ he said without turning round. ‘Tsering has your breakfast ready.’

‘Tsampa cakes and honey?’ Their food supplies had begun to run low and for the past month she had been breakfasting on the small unappetising cakes made from roasted ground barley, the tsampa flour that was the staple diet of their Bhutanese porters. ‘I can hardly wait!’

But he had already gone out of the tent, leaving her with her sarcasm like alum on her lips. I’m becoming a real shrew, she told herself; and felt disgusted. Naturally good-tempered, she despised bitchery in herself as much as in others.

From outside she heard a few bars of music: Indian music made even more discordant to her ear by static. Nick Wilkins was fiddling with the radio, trying to get the morning news: Delhi spoke in a cracked voice across the mountains. There was a note of excitement in the voice, but she took little notice of it.

She dressed quickly in slacks, woollen shirt and sweater, washed in the basin of now tepid water that Tsering had brought in just before she had wakened, ran a comb through her short dark hair and put on some lipstick. She looked at herself in the cracked mirror that hung from the tent pole; even scarred by that mirror, she thought, I don’t look too bad. Her hair had been cut by Jack with blunt scissors a month ago; the effect was only a little worse than the deliberate casualness of some professional hair styles. Her skin was still good, but if she looked closely she could see the faint lines round the corners of her eyes, the result of too many years’ exposure to sun and wind. Nick Wilkins had told her that butterflies, at Himalayan heights, underwent a change of melanism, the dark brown pigment in their make-up asserting itself. If she stayed around here long enough she could finish up looking brown and wrinkled like the old women of the Himalayas. In the year of her début, when she had been one of the more energetic of London’s butterflies, Tatler and Queen had described her as beautiful; but in those days in those magazines any daughter of the well-to-do whose eyes were straight and whose teeth had no gaps was described as beautiful. But Life, whose standards of beauty were higher and which did not have to depend on the British middle and upper classes for its circulation, had also said she was beautiful. They had done a colour story on Alpine plants and one of the illustrations had featured Jack as a collector. The caption had read: ‘In the background is Marquis’s beautiful wife, Eve.’ She had been half-obscured by a clump of Megacarpaea polyandra, but one couldn’t have everything; she had accepted the compliment and since then had been a regular subscriber to Life.

She guessed she was still beautiful, but the thought did not exercise her; her vanity, as well as her patience, had worn itself out in these remote corners of the world. The good bonework still showed in her face; her lips were still full and had not begun to dry out; her dark eyes still held their promise of passion. Oh, there’s plenty of passion there, she told herself; only what the hell do I do with it? Her Cypriot grandmother had died early from too much exposure to the English climate and not enough attention from her phlegmatic English husband. She herself had suffered from a variety of climates and an Australian husband who had lately begun to turn into a stranger.

She turned from the distorted image of herself in the cracked mirror and went out of the tent into the cold sharp air, like a blade laid softly against the cheek, of this narrow valley on the north-eastern border of Bhutan.

Nick Wilkins, crouched by the radio outside his tent, looked up as she passed him on the way to the kitchen tent. ‘How do you manage to look so fresh and beautiful first thing in the morning?’

She stopped, pleased at the compliment; it was almost as if Nick knew she needed some reassurance this morning. One did not expect such gratuitous compliments from Englishmen, especially an entomologist from Leeds. ‘Nick, you’re a continual surprise! Used you to say nice things to the girls back in Leeds first thing in the morning?’

The compliment had slipped out, an exclamation he now regretted. He turned his attention back to the radio, covering his retreat with the blunt awkward remarks that always made him sound surlier than he actually was.

‘Never met any girls first thing in the morning back in Leeds. Except my sister and she always looked like the Bride of Frankenstein.’ As always when he was embarrassed, the trace of northern accent reappeared in his voice; despite the careful cultivation of the last six years, ever since he had fled Leeds, it was still there wrapped round the root of his tongue. He envied Marquis, the Australian, whose flat vowels would never raise an eyebrow in Knightsbridge. In England, if you were going to be an outsider, it was always better to be a Commonwealth one.

Eve recognised the rebuff, but she tried again: ‘Is your sister married?’

‘Four kids.’

‘That explains it.’ But I shouldn’t mind looking like the Bride of Frankenstein if I could have four kids. Or even one. She nodded at the radio. ‘Any news?’

‘The Chinese have crossed the border east of here, over into the North-East Frontier, and in the west, too, in Ladakh. Things look grim.’

He looked up at her, his squarely handsome face sober and worried. He was an entomologist, accustomed to the savagery of the insect world, but he knew little or nothing of what humans could do to each other. Even in Leeds it had been possible to remain innocent; the gangs and the prostitutes had never come to the quiet street on the edge of the city; the chapel singing had been the loudest noise heard at the weekend. He was twenty-eight years old and this was his first field trip to a territory where the amenities and veneer of civilisation were left behind at the border like so much excess baggage.

Eve sat down at the small table outside the kitchen tent. She was protected from the breeze that came down the valley, and the morning sun warmed her and took some of the edge off her mood. Tsering, cheerful as a lottery winner, a prizewinner every day no matter what his health or the weather was like, brought her the tsampa cakes and wild honey.

‘Very good breakfast this morning, memsahib.’ He said the same thing every morning, never realising the monotony of it; that was one of the advantages of not having a good command of English. ‘Cooked special for you.’

Everyone else had had the same breakfast, but Eve kept up the pretence. ‘Tsering, you are too good to me. Your wives will become jealous of me.’

‘Wives don’t know, memsahib.’ He grinned and ducked back into the kitchen tent.

Eve looked at Wilkins. ‘Jack heard the news?’

‘He got the early bulletin. They’re broadcasting every hour. Shows how serious it is.’ Wilkins switched off the radio and came and sat beside her. He poured some tea into a mug and sat thoughtfully watching the spinning liquid as he stirred it. Eve had the feeling that he looked at everything through a microscope before he offered an opinion on it; he dissected even the most inconsequential happening as if it were some rare entomological discovery. But she knew that the Chinese crossing of the Indian border was more than an inconsequential happening. She had been on enough expeditions with entomologists to think of an analogy: it could be an invasion of Driver ants enlarged to the human level and just as implacably destructive. She said as much, and Wilkins nodded.

‘I’ve never seen Driver ants at work, but I’ve seen pictures of what they’ve done. Given time, they can eat their way right through a farm. Crops, livestock and all. These Chinese could do the same to India.’

‘What did Jack say?’

‘Nothing much. That husband of yours isn’t all Irish blarney. He can be as uncommunicative as one of these Himalayan lamas when he wants to be.’

She looked down towards where Marquis squatted on his heels beside Tom and Nancy Breck and the porters. The camp was pitched in a grass plot beneath a tall cliff; a stand of pine trees made an effective wind-break at one end of the camp. A torrent, fifty feet at its widest, split the narrow floor of the valley, tearing its way through a tumble of huge grey-green rocks in flying scarves of white water; a footbridge, which swayed like a banner when the wind was strong, was slung on thin poles across the raging waters just below the camp. Prayer-wheels, long copper cylinders that spun the morning sun into themselves like silken thread, stood at either end of the bridge; each time Eve crossed the precarious gangway she felt she was supported only by prayer, not the most comforting aid to her sceptical mind. Two gardens had been planted on a flat patch above the river, one for growing their own vegetables, the other for keeping alive the plants that had been collected. The porters were now digging up the plants and packing them in polythene bags. The bags were stacked to one side like so many plastic cabbages, and Marquis was checking the labels the Brecks had fixed to each of them.

Eve said, ‘I think he’d move us out of here at once if he thought there was any real danger.’ But she wondered if what she had said was only a wish and not a conviction.

‘I doubt it,’ said Wilkins, and looked aggressively at Marquis as the latter stood up, said something to the Brecks that made them laugh, then came up towards the kitchen tent. ‘All you’re interested in is your bloody rhododendrons. Right?’

Marquis looked at him quizzically, smiling with a good humour that only made Wilkins more annoyed. ‘Something worrying you, Nick? Your hair shirt shrunk in the wash? Buck up, sport. You’ll be home soon, back there in the Natural History Museum, swapping philosophy and dead flies with the girl students.’

‘I’m worried about the Chinese. I think we should pack up and get out while the going’s good.’

There was a basin of water on a rough wooden stand outside the kitchen tent; Marquis moved across to it and unhurriedly began to wash his hands. He had large hands, cracked and calloused from working among rocks, and his nails were broken and dirty. Eve had grown accustomed to them, but it had taken her some time to appreciate that the hands of a field botanist had much rougher usage than the gloved hands of her father when the latter had pottered among his roses in his Buckinghamshire garden. It still amazed her, after eight years, that those same coarse hands could be so gentle in their love-making.

‘Relax, Nick. We’ll be okay.’ Marquis began to dry his hands. ‘Bhutan is one of the few independent kingdoms left in this part of the world. Any part of the world, for that matter. It took a long distance look at democracy, through a cracked telescope, I reckon, and it turned thumbs down on the idea. I’m a republican up to my dandruff, but if I have to be caught in a kingdom, this is the one I’ll vote for.’

‘Hates England,’ Eve said to Wilkins round a mouthful of cake and honey. ‘Always sticks stamps on upside down on his letters. Hopes the Queen will have a rush of blood to the head and abdicate.’

Marquis grinned at her and went on: ‘Bhutan is tied up with India for the rather back-handed relations it has with the rest of the world. And the Indians hang out bloody great signs to let everyone know they don’t interfere here. For one thing you never see an Indian army man here in Bhutan, not even as an instructor. The Bhutanese were not being just bloody-minded when they took so long to make up their minds whether to give us visas or not. They reckon the less foreigners they allow in here, the more neutral they can claim to be. Neutrality is like chastity, Nick. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Right, love?’

‘I’ve never been neutral,’ said Eve.

Marquis grinned and winked. Neutrality had once been a private privilege, taken for granted; now one had to produce proof, as if it were a concession given by belligerent outsiders. Civilisation had begun to learn the lesson of barbarism: never trust the silent bystander, give him a clout just for luck.

‘I don’t blame them,’ he went on. ‘There are only three-quarters of a million Bhutanese, most of them still living in the sixteenth century, still eating the lotus, unfrozen and not bought at bargain prices in any supermarket. On one side of them they’ve got seven hundred million Chows, itchy with all the propaganda that’s sprinkled on them like lice powder, seven hundred million pairs of legs poised for the Great Leap Forward – and it could be in this direction. On the other side of them they have nearly five hundred million Indians – and if any man can tell what one Indian is going to do from one day to the next, let alone five hundred million of them, he’s a better man than me, Gunga Din or Malcolm Muggeridge. The Bhutanese have been sitting on the fence so long they’ve got crotch-sore. But a sore crotch is preferable to a severed head. Once they start leaning one way, the other side is going to jump in here like a gate-crasher at a party. Only it will be no party for these poor bastards.’ He gestured down at the porters. ‘In no time at all they’ll be like the Tibetans, also-rans in their own country. We had it in Ireland once, till we kicked out the English.’