The Kashmir Shawl

TEN


Winter came. In early December 1941 Japanese troops invaded Malaya. The Indian Army units defending the Malay coast were forced into surrender, and even though they were heavily outnumbered, the Japanese continued their advance down the peninsula towards the Allied stronghold of Singapore. At the same time, almost to the day, Japanese bombs fell on the US Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor.

The war in Europe had spread to Asia, and in response the Americans began the biggest mobilisation in history.

Far from Srinagar, Captain Ralph Bowen and his company of the Indian 11th Infantry were drawn back to defend the naval base at Sembawang, in the north-east of the island of Singapore. At the same time Archie McMinn, the Indian Railways engineer, at last succeeded in his attempts to get into uniform. Almost at once he found himself co-ordinating rolling stock and personnel to supply the troops in Malaya, and preparing to evacuate thousands of wounded men in the opposite direction.

Across the Himalayas in Kargil, the conscientious objector Parchedig Evan Watkins preached in an almost empty Presbyterian mission hall, and spent his lonely evenings in the mission’s tiny, bleak residential quarters tuned in to the war news via the Overseas Service of the BBC. His main consolation, as the cold tightened its grip and the futility of his efforts became harder to deny, was to think of Nerys in the relative comfort and luxury of the Vale of Kashmir. He missed the home she had made for them both in Leh, the noise of small children clapping and singing in her schoolroom, even Diskit’s cooking. He prayed humbly for the gift of fortitude, trudged miles through the icy days to small settlements – whose inhabitants received him with frank bewilderment – and realised how intensely he was looking forward to the coming of spring and the reunion with his wife.



For Nerys, Srinagar had a wintry loveliness that the society migrants of the summer season could hardly have imagined.

Smoke from countless wood and charcoal fires curled into the white skies; bare trees were policed by brooding birds; the clopping of tonga horses’ hoofs was amplified by the frozen silence. When she woke up one morning the lake water was filmy, as if covered by a layer of oil. The next day it had developed a skin of thin, glittering plates, like the markings of some huge reptile, and the one after that it was frozen solid. Moorhens and wagtails left necklaces of spiky prints in the powdery rime, and garlands of icicles festooned the houseboats’ carved eaves.

In delight at the beauty of it, she asked Myrtle, ‘Does this happen every year?’

‘Only about every fourth winter. Before the war, in the years when the lake did freeze, there would be skating parties and sleigh rides. One year the Resident – not this one, his predecessor – held a Jacobean ice fair. It was before I was married, and it was sheer heaven. Everyone wore fancy dress and there was a band playing for the skating and dancing, the Residency cooks roasted kids and a lamb on huge spits on the bank and there were chestnuts on braziers out on the ice. It was the best party of the whole year – people came up from Delhi and Jammu especially for it.’

She sighed for bygone days of glamour. ‘There won’t be anything of the kind this time. There isn’t a soul here and every damned thing is scarce or rationed or unobtainable.’

‘I’m here, and Caroline. We’ll just have to devise an ice celebration of our own. Rainer will help.’

‘I hope so. We need something to look forward to,’ Myrtle agreed. She poured herself some more gin and added a small splash of lime juice.

Rainer had become a regular visitor to the houseboat, appearing at the veranda steps almost as regularly as Caroline did. Myrtle was intrigued by his introductions to Srinagar people on whom she had never set eyes before and who were never going to cross the threshold of the club or pop up at Residency parties.

On the day after Pearl Harbor Rainer took both women to call on his friend the professor. Nerys and Myrtle drank tea with his wife, the musician daughter and other female relatives, while the men sat in another room sharing a pipe and discussing politics and war. Myrtle didn’t protest at this automatic segregation, although Nerys had expected her to do so. The professor’s women were sharp and surprisingly talkative, as well as slyly funny, and when they got back to the Garden of Eden that evening Myrtle declared it was the most interesting time she’d spent in ages.

She had decreed that Caroline should also go out and about as much as possible before her shape became too pronounced. As December passed they took tea or coffee in the echoing confines of the club almost every other day, and were becoming such a familiar sight in their usual corner that the handful of regulars did no more than raise a hand as they shuffled past on their way to the bar or the bridge table. Whenever they left the houseboat the women were slow-moving, shapeless mounds of wool, sheepskin, pashmina and thick tweed. Quite quickly, Nerys recognised that Myrtle’s absurd plan was in fact rather a clever one.

However, Rainer had only seen the women together twice before he asked Nerys, the next time they were alone, if she would please tell him what was going on with Mrs Bowen and the pherans.

‘Pherans?’ she asked, with what she hoped was wide-eyed innocence.

‘That’s right. The three of you looked like a row of galleons under sail at the club yesterday afternoon, and I’m sure there will be questions in the book about the heating because lady members seem obliged to wear their outdoor garments in the drawing room. Hmm?’

‘I feel the cold,’ Nerys offered.

She had acquired a kangri and was genuinely glad of it. The fire-pot was a bulbous earthenware container, about the size – well, she admitted to herself, with a flicker of laughter, about the size of a full-term pregnancy – encased in a wicker basket. Every morning Majid filled it with a scoop of glowing embers from the stove in the kitchen boat and brought it to her bedroom. She hugged it against her belly while she summoned up the resolve to slide from under the blankets and dive into her clothes, and once she was dressed she settled it within her various layers before scuttling down the chill planks to the saloon, where the stove was already glowing and Myrtle was huddled beside the coffee pot. Myrtle wore a lambskin hat with flaps that covered her ears, and a pair of fleece-lined gloves with the fingertips cut off so she never had to remove them. Within a radius of three or four feet of the stove it was warm enough to sit and talk, but beyond that lay the realm of ice.

Rainer merely shook his head. He curled a long arm and rubbed his hair so that it stood out like a mane. ‘Have I ever listed the four principles of stage magic for you? Please stop me if I have.’

‘No, I don’t believe so.’ Nerys was already laughing. They were always having conversations like this, mock-solemn and formal, yet bubbling under the surface with amusement and flirtation.

‘The four principles,’ he counted them off on his fingers, ‘are misdirection, distraction, disguise and simulation. If, for example, you tell an audience that a jug seemingly full of white liquid is in fact full of milk, that audience will automatically believe you because their collective mind looks no further. I think you three ladies are cleverly employing all four principles to your own ends. As a professional I admire the technique, but as a friend I cannot help feeling somewhat excluded.’

The plaintive note he managed to project made Nerys laugh harder. ‘It’s not my secret to share,’ she protested.

‘Ah, well, then. But if I were to offer a fellow illusionist’s advice, it would be, ah, that too much of a distraction only attracts attention.’

‘I see. Thank you,’ she said.

That evening she warned Myrtle and Caroline that Rainer had been asking questions. She thought it would be a good idea to tell him what was happening because he might be useful to them in the future.

Caroline was uncertain. ‘Is he discreet?’ she asked.

Nerys said that she was absolutely sure he was, and Myrtle had something else to add. ‘Rainer Stamm is one big secret himself. You remember those two Americans we met at his house, Nerys?’

She did, and Myrtle smiled. ‘One of them had had a couple of Scotches, and took rather a shine to me.’

Nerys remembered that, too.

‘Well. I thought he might be a spy, but he believes that Rainer really is one.’

Nerys was amused. ‘Our side or theirs, do you think?’

Caroline looked from one to the other. ‘Surely he’d be on our side. He couldn’t be a Nazi, could he? Even though he’s Swiss?’

Myrtle patted her hand. ‘I should think all the best spies have that couldn’t-possibly-be quality, darling. But don’t worry. I’m inclined to trust Mr Stamm, and Nerys is right – he could be helpful to us.’

It was agreed that Nerys should take him into their confidence.



She was at Rainer’s house the next evening, while Myrtle and Caroline were putting in an appearance at a sale of handicrafts and gifts to raise funds to send sweets and cigarettes to the men in Malaya. Myrtle had said that she for one didn’t care if she never saw another item of local papier-mâché, and certainly didn’t intend to present anyone she knew with a pen tray or a card holder. If she received any such Christmas gift herself, they should take note, she would wait for the lake to thaw and then pitch it in.

Caroline nodded. ‘I shall remember that,’ she said.

Myrtle and Nerys were sometimes unsure whether she was joking or merely being solemn.

It was very cold in Rainer’s room. The sky beyond the uncurtained window was a shower of stars, hollow with frost. They were sitting looking out at the black river water and the yellow points of lamplight showing from houses on the opposite bank. In their wire cage, the pair of white doves he used for some of his tricks were asleep with their heads beneath their wings.

‘Who is the father?’ Rainer asked, once Nerys had outlined the facts.

‘I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you that.’

‘I can probably guess.’

‘You probably can. You don’t miss much.’

There was a small silence. Rainer’s mood could dip into sudden melancholy. ‘I do miss things,’ he said, in a low voice.

‘I didn’t mean that sort of missing …’

‘I know what you meant.’ He leant forward. Nerys was swathed in blankets as well as all her clothes, and his hand slipped between the outer layers to find hers and then clasp it. ‘You are warm.’

‘I am. Mine is an exceptionally good pheran. I don’t even need my kangri in here.’

‘This plan is Myrtle’s, I take it?’

‘Yes. But we are all agreed. Any one of us could be pregnant, or all three, or none.’



‘Aren’t you worried about your reputation, Nerys?’

‘No,’ she said, after reflection. She didn’t care what Srinagar might think.

He came a little closer, his head blotting out the window and the stars. ‘Mrs Watkins,’ he whispered. Briefly, he lifted her hand to his lips.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Rainer was looking at her with minute attention. She didn’t believe that anyone else had ever looked at her with this degree of precise and steady scrutiny. ‘Nerys, you do understand what is happening between the two of us, don’t you?’

‘Of course. I’m not Caroline Bowen,’ she said, with a touch of heat. He couldn’t think she was so innocent or so obtuse as not to know.

Not rebuffed in the least, he smiled. ‘You are a thousand times more desirable than Mrs Bowen, pretty and English and adorably pliant though she is.’

They sat quietly for a moment. Nerys’s pulse steadied until she could hear the creak of old wood and the gentle hiss of the fire, not just the pounding of her heart.

Understanding what was happening meant acknowledging the moral dilemma that faced her, but it was also to do with anticipation; the fine control of a serious decision weighed in the balance. To become Rainer’s lover – or not – was her choice as much as his, that was what he was indicating, and she was intoxicated by the oxygen of independence that it gave her. She had a sense of the meek selves, the effacing and mildly baffled versions of herself, that had advanced to this point. As if she had been a caterpillar, then a frozen chrysalis, and now was on the brink of becoming a surprising butterfly.

She sat upright. ‘I think we both understand quite well,’ she said. She held out the small, thick green glass that he had given her and indicated that she would take another half-inch of Rainer’s French cognac. Decent drink of any kind was becoming hard to find in Srinagar. Then she settled herself in her cocoon of blankets, her back comfortably against the wormy old panelling. Brandy fumed pleasantly in her head as she sipped it. ‘Do you know,’ she said, in amusement, ‘that various people suspect you of being a spy?’

‘Do they, indeed?’

‘And are you?’

He enjoyed his reputation, she could see that. He almost tossed his mane.

‘No, my darling. I’m a mountaineer, and a magician.’

‘In that order?’

‘Always in that order. I make my living as a stage illusionist and I have given shows all over Europe. I could mention crowned heads, if I were trying to impress you. But, in my heart, the mountains are always first. I will get to Nanga Parbat whatever the British have to say, and I will claim the peak for my friend Matthew Forbes.’

Images of cruel white peaks as jagged as sharks’ teeth glimmered in Nerys’s head, and anxiety stirred. She didn’t want even to imagine Rainer meeting the same fate as Matthew. ‘When?’

He laughed at her, widening his red mouth, pleased to note her concern. ‘When I can. But now, with the war so close,’ he shrugged, ‘I have other concerns. I wish to help the Allies, naturally. The alternative is not to be thought about. I am an expert in camouflage, and in other forms of deception that may have a military value, and I have offered my services to the British. But, as you can see, they have not yet taken me quite seriously.’ He waved his hand at the room, and its strange clutter of painted props.

‘They ought to,’ Nerys said. She wasn’t quite sure whether or not she believed Rainer’s innocent account of himself.

He lowered his voice. ‘Thank you. We shall see. In the meantime … I find that Srinagar draws me, and holds my heart in a way that I never expected.’

A small silence fell as they turned their heads in the same arc to gaze over the lights in the labyrinth of the old town.

‘I need your help,’ Rainer said, after a while.

‘Of course I’ll help you. Tell me how.’



‘Wait until you hear. You may change your mind. Because of my various projects I am eager to maintain cordial relations with the Resident, your friend Mr Fanshawe.’

‘He’s hardly my friend. I’m not even on the social scale,’ Nerys protested.

‘Mr Fanshawe has asked me to put on a morale-raising magic performance on Christmas night at the Residency. It will be for the entertainment of the staff and their families, what’s left of the regimental headquarters, Srinagar society of a certain sort. You will easily imagine.’

Nerys could.

‘To manage a show properly, however, I will need a stage assistant. It’s usual for the assistant to be female, and preferably of exotic extraction. Mysterious Madame Moth, Miss Soo Ling straight from Shanghai, that sort of thing.’

‘I see. Rainer, I’ve never been on a stage in my life. And Welsh is not exotic.’

‘You are not following me. The four principles, remember? Disguise. You will have to remove your pheran, I’m afraid, but it can be replaced by flowing robes. Chinese, I think definitely. A little round black hat, a mask. Charming.’

‘Will I be sawn in half?’

Their eyes met.

‘I haven’t devised the programme yet. That may only be the beginning. And I am not an amateur, Mrs Watkins. We shall rehearse, and rehearse, and then rehearse some more. Are you willing?’

‘Ready, and more than willing,’ she managed to answer.

And later, when she mentioned that Myrtle was nostalgic for the glamorous pre-war ice parties, Rainer said that in return for Nerys’s services as stage assistant he would come up with an idea for a Christmas celebration.

Nerys reported all this back to Myrtle and Caroline before they set off for Delhi, avowedly to retreat from the punishing cold and to shop for Christmas, but in fact discreetly to consult a doctor about the progress of Caroline’s pregnancy.



‘You seem very happy,’ Myrtle said, looking at her face.

‘Yes,’ Nerys agreed simply.

‘Are you in love with him?’

Nerys glanced round to make sure that Caroline was out of earshot. ‘I don’t think that would be entirely welcome.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question. Have fun, remember. Caroline and I will be back in Srinagar on the twenty-third.’



The excursion to Delhi was not enjoyable. The journey, by road and then train, was excruciatingly slow and uncomfortable, and Caroline was anxious and tearful. The Hindu doctor they had found examined her and brusquely informed her that she was quite healthy and could expect to deliver in approximately fourteen weeks’ time. He was more interested in where she planned her confinement, and wanted to know why, if her husband was in the army, she was not under the care of the military hospital.

They hurried away, and Caroline declared that whatever else happened she wasn’t going anywhere near that doctor ever again. Even worse, on their way back through Connaught Place from his office to Myrtle’s bungalow, Caroline stopped to lean against a pillar and catch her breath. Delhi was warm after Srinagar and they had had to put aside their pherans, swathing themselves instead in loose silk duster coats and trailing scarves. At that very moment there was a cry of recognition. A woman stepping out of her car at the kerb turned out to be the sister of the major’s wife, Caroline’s next-door neighbour.

‘How divine to see you both. Are you going out to tea? Would you like a lift?’

Caroline told Nerys that she jumped six inches in the air, absolutely certain that she had been resting with her hand on the top of her bulge. The woman was staring at their unconventional turn-out. It was only through Myrtle pretending to be ill, claiming that she was going to be sick or perhaps faint, that they managed to make their escape into the crowds.

‘Our driver is waiting. Do give my best wishes to Mrs Dunkeley,’ Caroline called over her shoulder, adding, ‘That poisonous witch,’ for only Myrtle to hear.

Myrtle told Nerys, ‘Delhi’s too dangerous. There are too many people with nothing to occupy them but gossip. Unless Caroline spends the next three months in purdah inside the Garden of Eden, sooner or later someone we know will catch a glimpse of her and within minutes the entire Empire will hear of it.’

Nerys agreed. ‘We’ll think of something,’ she said.



At eleven o’clock sharp on Christmas Eve, in crackling cold under a colourless sky, two teams assembled on a swept-clean expanse of lake ice directly in front of the Garden of Eden. Rainer’s idea was a cricket match.

The Residency staff seized on his scheme with enthusiasm, and had in the end taken it over from him.

‘After all, I am only Swiss. What do I know of team sports?’ Rainer murmured.

The British team was made up of the handful of young men who represented the wartime skeleton of diplomatic staff in the city, some Residency bearers, and the very few army officers who had managed a few hours’ Christmas leave. The team captain was Mr Fanshawe. The Srinagar side was captained by Rainer’s Pandit friend, the university professor, who was a passionate cricketer. He had assembled an impressive-looking team of colleagues and students, Muslim as well as Hindu. The wicket-keeper was a majestic Sikh.

Stumps and balls had been extracted from the Residency stores and the players warmed up with sprints on the pitch. Most of them wore cricket whites over many layers of woolly insulation, and the effect was of twenty-two very fat men squeezed into small boys’ clothes. There had been some difficulty over how to embed the stumps in the ice, but Rainer produced a tool designed for fixing ropes into glaciers and bored six neat holes of the precise depth and diameter required. He filled in the waiting time by juggling with the ball and some apples borrowed from one of the vendors who had eagerly crowded down to the boundary. The Srinagar side won the toss and elected to bowl, and Mr Fanshawe called out to him, ‘Now then, none of your magic tricks with that ball, Mr Stamm.’

‘For that you will have to wait until tomorrow, sir.’

The veranda of the Garden of Eden served as the pavilion, and it was packed with batsmen and spectators. Inside the crowded houseboat Majid and his helpers served hot toddies, fried pakoras and plates of mince pies. Under Majid’s sceptical eye Nerys had managed to bake the pies in the oven of the kitchen boat, in between the long hours of rehearsal that Rainer insisted upon.

‘How is the magic going?’ Myrtle enquired.

‘Actually, it’s hell. Really hard work, mental and physical, and I’m not allowed even a flicker of a mistake.’

‘We’re all anticipating quite a spectacle.’

Nerys pulled a face of extreme apprehension.

Rainer put on a white coat, oddly matched with a pair of crampons, and crunched out to the umpire’s position midwicket. He produced a tin whistle out of the air and blew it to signal the start of the game.

The cricket match had drawn a large crowd. The boundary was ringed with food-and chai-sellers, their glowing braziers supported on bricks. There was a strong smell of spiced mutton and delicious bread. Men jostled each other to get the best view and a few veiled women strolled in inquisitive groups over the ice from the bank. Children screamed and raced each other until the first ball sailed overhead for a six and everyone scattered. The biggest boys chased the fielder as he skidded after the flying ball.

Some of Mrs Fanshawe’s friends and the club wives had persuaded tonga drivers to edge their vehicles on to the ice and now they sat under fur wraps beneath the tonga canopies, applauding the batsmen as they slithered between the wickets. Mrs Fanshawe herself sat in a large wicker chair like a throne.

In the background the horses blew into their nose-bags, clouded breath rising as their harnesses jingled. The drivers cheered wildly with everyone else when the Residency third secretary, the star batsman, was clean bowled.

Every single person present was so heavily wrapped and scarved against the cold that they looked like dumplings on legs, taking careful steps over the slippery surface. Caroline’s cheeks glowed. The end of her nose and the tips of her earlobes were bright pink. ‘What fun,’ she called to Nerys.

There was a howl as Mr Fanshawe was spectacularly caught in the slips. The fielder skidded over the ice on his belly, the ball triumphantly held aloft. The Residency team was crumbling under fierce pressure from the professor’s eleven. It had been agreed that the match was to consist of just twelve overs each side, and faced with the need to score quickly, the batsmen were risking everything. In rapid succession they pulled on their gloves and descended the steps of the houseboat, striding out to the wicket with bat tucked manfully under one arm. Three minutes later they would make the return journey, raising their caps to the Resident’s wife. More familiar than Nerys with the rules of village cricket, Myrtle, Caroline and all the other wives laughed and clapped at this absurd version of the game. More hot toddies and the sherry decanter circulated freely.

Every time another man was out, the players and spectators on the ice leapt and yelled, punching the air and hugging one another with glee.

‘Most unsporting,’ tutted Mrs Fanshawe.

Small boys glissaded across the wicket and Rainer chased them off. At the end of the twelfth over, the scorer chalked on the blackboard propped against the houseboat steps, British Resident’s XI, 32 for 8.

By the interval, in which Majid and his helpers served Christmas cake, with the option of tea or more alcohol, the party had become thoroughly festive.

‘Such a clever idea. You are a genius,’ Myrtle said to Rainer, and Nerys felt the glow of reflected glory. Rainer accepted the praise as his due and went crunching out again to resume his umpiring duties.

The Srinagar opening batsman was out first ball. There was a roar of dismay. Mr Fanshawe, in the deep field, permitted himself a tiny smile. The new batsman, magnificent in an enormous pair of blindingly white pads, was the professor. He made his slow way to the wicket, took his position and hit a six. Three balls later, he did the same again.

Even Nerys found herself edging to the front of the crowd. The sun now emerged as a flat disc of silver, striking rainbow glimmers off the tips of icicles. Myrtle and Caroline excitedly nudged beside her and, shoulder to shoulder, they made an insulated wall of scarves and pherans.

The game didn’t last much longer. The professor hit his sixth six and a forest of arms shot into the air, with a cheer and a drumming of feet ecstatic enough to be welcoming independence for Kashmir. The players streamed back across the ice, the fielders’ cold-nipped faces beaming with pleasure. The vendors immediately closed up their tiny stalls and pushed the braziers to the bank.

‘Bad luck,’ called the professor, from amid a crowd of supporters.

‘Jolly well done,’ Mr Fanshawe replied, as the scorer chalked up Professor Pran’s XI, 36 for 1. ‘We must make this a regular event whenever we have ice. Good show, Mr Stamm.’

Rainer bowed, and Nerys wondered how much longer it would be before the Nanga Parbat permit was granted.

Majid was making another circuit with the drinks, but most of the players and guests were beginning to take their leave. Everyone wished each other a very merry Christmas.

‘So pleasing to see the men enjoying a game, Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Sikhs all together, don’t you think?’ Mrs Fanshawe said, as she stepped into the Resident’s flagged car.

‘If only religious understanding and mutual tolerance were quite as simple as she is,’ Rainer murmured, in Nerys’s ear.



For the last few minutes he had been in an animated conversation with the Sikh wicket-keeper. His eyes glittered. ‘Come with me,’ he said. He took her arm and steered her towards the bank.

Two of the waiting tonga drivers had harnessed up again and drawn their vehicles behind a line gouged in the ice. The wicket-keeper leapt into one as Rainer handed Nerys into the other. The drivers brandished their whips and the horses’ breath rose in clouds. The tongas creaked and strained and impatient hoofs clattered on the ice. A scowling man in a flat Pathan cap took his place with one foot on either side of the line and raised his arm.

‘What’s going on?’ Nerys demanded. Her voice was sharp with alarm.

Rainer settled back in the creased leather seat. ‘A small wager. Look at our horse – he’s a fine specimen.’

‘What?’

The man’s arm dropped. The drivers whipped up and the horses started off at such a speed that Nerys was flung backwards. Rainer circled her with one arm.

‘You have a ringside seat. It’s a race to the other side and back.’

The two horses reached a gallop, their nailed shoes sending up showers of chipped ice. It was incredible that neither of them skidded. The old tongas swayed and groaned in protest at the flying speed. Nerys’s hands covered her mouth as the wind flayed her cheeks. She didn’t know whether to scream or weep with terror. Rainer only slid to the edge of the seat, urging their driver to go even faster. As they reached the far bank the man reined in, and as soon as the pace slackened Rainer jumped out. The instant his feet smashed on to the ice he was running. Reaching the bank, he seized a branch from the old mulberry tree that grew there and raced back again. Waving his own branch, their opponent was only three seconds behind them as they wheeled for the opposite shore.

They were heading back towards the houseboats, following the arrow of their outbound tracks. The thrill of the race surged through her but at that moment Nerys heard a crack like a pistol shot. She felt their horse check itself and almost stumble. Her eyes were stinging with cold but she saw huge webs of fissures radiating ahead of them as the ice started to give way under the tonga wheels.

‘Faster,’ Rainer howled. He bounded forwards to thump the driver between his shoulder-blades. ‘Go faster, man. It’s the only way.’

The whip flailed and somehow the horse recovered itself and galloped on. In their wake, icy water welled up and flooded like pools of quicksilver to cover the cracks. Off to one side the other driver had seen their difficulty and veered aside to the safety of thicker ice. Rainer knew that the race was theirs if they could outpace the ice breaking up, and the horse instinctively sensed it too. It was tiring, its head plunging from side to side, but it kept going as the driver’s whip stung its lathered flanks. Long seconds later, they floundered to the margin of safer ice and the mirrors of water lay behind them.

The small crowd of remaining guests had been watching, transfixed by horror. Rainer’s winning tonga drew up and the horse shuddered to a standstill, its hoofs splayed and head hanging piteously. Rainer triumphantly brandished the winner’s mulberry branch but everyone was too shocked to applaud. Myrtle came forward and took Nerys’s arms as her trembling legs almost gave way on the tonga step. ‘You’re all right now. There was a moment when I was afraid you weren’t going to be,’ she murmured to her.

‘Me too,’ Nerys gasped.

‘Nothing venture. We won, didn’t we?’ Rainer returned. He took out a roll of banknotes and began to count money into their driver’s outstretched hand. Nerys patted the horse’s sweat-blackened side and made her unsteady way back to the Garden of Eden.

The other horse trotted up and Rainer beamingly shook hands with his vanquished opponent.



Myrtle was still outside, saying goodbye to the shocked stragglers, when Rainer shouldered his way into the saloon, seeming too large and too elated for the confined space.

Nerys rounded on him, anger making her cheeks blaze. ‘What did you think you were doing? We could all have drowned.’

‘I know,’ he whispered to her, coming so close that his breath was hot on her face. ‘But we didn’t, and you were excited, weren’t you? Don’t pretend you’re not a hundred times more alive at this moment than you felt an hour ago.’

It was true. She was aware of every square inch of her own skin, and every detail of her surroundings. She was minutely aware of the vivid colours of Myrtle’s silk cushions, of the breath flooding her lungs, the sweat of fear that was cooling the nape of her neck.

Life was precious, every gleam in the wood panelling, each tiny pucker of fabric, was exquisitely beautiful, and when she looked up at Rainer he caught her shoulders and drew her even closer. ‘You see? You do feel it. You didn’t faint or scream or make any female display. You don’t need cushions, or allowances made, or a man who will protect and diminish you. I knew it. We have the same spirit, and I recognised you the first time I saw you.’

Their mouths touched for an instant. Longing for him raced through Nerys’s veins, flooding after the surges of fear and the sweet thrill of finding herself alive.

It was only Myrtle coming up the steps and the sound of her footsteps kicking the ice off the veranda that forced them apart. Nerys was struggling to breathe as Rainer stepped away.

‘I think the match was enjoyable, don’t you?’ he said smoothly to Myrtle.

‘It wouldn’t have been an enjoyable day if my best friend had drowned in front of my eyes,’ she snapped.

‘But I didn’t drown. I didn’t even get my feet wet,’ Nerys said.

Rainer inclined his head to Myrtle. ‘I’ll leave you both now. I must go and rehearse for tomorrow evening. I wish you a very happy Christmas.’

Nerys followed him out into the crystalline whiteness.

‘Don’t forget to run through the routine in your head,’ he ordered. ‘I don’t want a single thing to go wrong with one single trick.’

‘Nothing will go wrong,’ she answered.

His eyes moved over her face, as explicit as a touch. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. He didn’t mean the Residency magic show.

She raised her hand to shield her eyes against the light and watched him walk away.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, she repeated. The word and the anticipation expanded to fill her head with wicked gold.

Myrtle had shed her pheran and was reclining in her chair next to the stove.

‘Don’t be disapproving,’ Nerys begged.

Myrtle waved her cigarette. ‘When have I ever gone in for disapproval? What I am experiencing is jealousy, my girl.’

‘You know you said about not wanting to see your best friend drown?’

‘Yes.’

‘Am I really your best friend?’

Myrtle blew out a calculated smoke-ring. ‘Yes, Nerys, you are.’

Nerys had never had a best friend before. There had been the girls at teacher training college and from her grammar school, but none of them was anything like Myrtle McMinn. Even with the glimmer of tomorrow meshing her consciousness, Nerys thought that this simple statement was the best Christmas present she would ever receive.



The next morning, Caroline joined them and they walked the short way through thin spirals of blowing snow to the English church. The wooden pews were packed with the hardy remnants of Srinagar Club society. Mr Fanshawe read the lesson, and the congregation sang the familiar carols. The stoves on either side of the nave had been lit in good time, but still they could see their breath clouding the air as they listened to the Christmas sermon. The three women would only have been conspicuous if they had not been wrapped from head to foot in their thickest clothes.

Back at the Garden of Eden, as they exchanged non-papier-mâché gifts and laughed over Majid’s loyal but approximate interpretation of a traditional Christmas dinner, Myrtle warned that they would have to make a new, more ambitious plan for the next three months.

Caroline nodded her agreement. She was biting her lip as she said, ‘It’s getting harder to hide my shape from the servants.’

Nerys put in, ‘At the very least you must move in here with Myrtle in the new year.’

‘But where will you go?’

‘Don’t worry about that. I need to find a little place of my own to live. As soon as the passes open, Evan will be here.’ She gave the statement deliberate emphasis.

Tomorrow had turned into today.

Caroline said, ‘The snow always melts in the end. I wonder, will it ever be the end of the war?’

‘That must come too,’ Nerys said.

A small silence fell as they looked at one another. The world beyond the fragile, lamplit capsule of the houseboat was rocked by dangers known and unknown, and to imagine what might happen drew the bond between the three women even more tightly. Caroline placed her hand over her stomach, where the baby had begun to kick. Their own future seemed just as uncertain as whatever lay ahead for her unborn child.

Myrtle broke the silence by producing a bottle of champagne that had been immersed in a bucket of lake ice. ‘This, my dears, is one of the last bottles of decent bubbly remaining in the entire twenty-one-gun state of Kashmir.’ She filled their glasses. ‘Happy Christmas, and here’s to us and all those we care for.’



Nerys and Caroline echoed her words, but it was a sombre toast.

‘This evening, we have Nerys’s grand stage début to look forward to,’ Myrtle recalled, once she had drained her glass. Nerys covered her face with her hands, because she didn’t need reminding, and they were cheerful again.



The ballroom at the Residency was decorated with a huge Christmas tree. Wives of the regiment, with their children who were too young yet to be at school in England, their ayahs, Residency staff and most of the congregation from this morning were sitting in rows of small gilded chairs. There was an atmosphere of festive anticipation.

Nerys peered through a chink in the makeshift curtains rigged up at the back of Rainer’s plinth stage, which had been transferred from his house and erected by a team of bearers. Her stomach was a mass of butterflies. In the sea of faces she could see Caroline, wearing a black velvet evening cape with a hood trimmed in ermine, borrowed from Myrtle, and Myrtle in a voluminous empire-line swirl of midnight-blue satin.

Mr Fanshawe made a speech of welcome and Nerys took her place in the wings. She looked across at Rainer, poised on the spot where the curtains would part to reveal him. Unlike his regular evening clothes, his stage costume was spruce and his white tie starched and pristine. She had been intending perhaps to blow him a good-luck kiss, acknowledging their intimacy as well as her stage fright, but then she saw that his eyes were closed and he was completely absorbed in himself.

A mountaineer first, then a magician, she remembered. After that, a man.

The Resident boomed, as if he were a music-hall master of ceremonies, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Rainer Stamm’s mysterious medley of magic!’

With two bearers out of sight in the wings hauling on the ropes, the curtains swept aside and the show was on.

For the first segment Rainer ran through a series of tricks with the linked rings, playing cards, billiard balls and scarves. The audience was pleased, and applauded vigorously. Then came the moment. He announced that he would be joined by Miss Soo Ling, just arrived in Srinagar all the way from distant Shanghai.

Wondering if she was actually going to faint from nerves, Nerys pulled down her black carnival mask, patted the black straw hat that hid her hair and swept on stage. She folded her hands inside the sleeves of her flowing Chinese robes and gave a deep bow to acknowledge the storm of clapping.

As she did so, something strange happened. Her fear completely evaporated. She felt calm, clear in the head, and utterly exhilarated.

To start with, the part she had to play in the magic was merely supportive. There was the water trick, in which she passed Rainer the crystal jugs, the trick with the doves that he plucked out of the air, in which she had to make sure their basket was placed in exactly the right spot where it was not visible to any section of the audience, and then the mango tree, where she planted the seed from which – with the aid of mirrors – a mango tree magically grew and fruited. Miss Soo Ling picked the ripe fruit, and ceremoniously presented it to Mrs Fanshawe who was sitting in the middle of the front row. All through this, Nerys played the silent role that she and Rainer had devised. She was pert, sometimes refusing to do what he told her. The children loved the show of disobedience.

By the time it came to the last trick, the show’s finale, Nerys knew that nothing could go wrong.

The trick was the magic box. The real responsibility for pulling it off was hers, not Rainer’s, but they had rehearsed it so meticulously that she was looking forward to performing it to perfection. Laughter and applause rang in her ears and she soaked it all up; it was as if another of Rainer’s tricks had finally hatched this glamorous performer from the chrysalis of a quiet schoolteacher and wife to a Presbyterian minister.

The box, a red-painted structure made in three sections with a series of shuttered portholes painted with silver moons and stars, was carried on by two bearers and positioned on the plinth. As soon as she saw it, Nerys was to drop all her cheeky airs and try to run offstage. Rainer made a show of barring the way and marching her to the box. The audience took sides, cheering either for him or for Soo Ling.

The box was just big enough for her to stand up inside it. He opened the door, demonstrated that it was empty, bundled Nerys in and turned the key in the lock.

Once she was incarcerated, Rainer gave the audience a wink. He lit a cigarette, strolled away to a gramophone placed on a side table and selected a record. The music was Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. They had rehearsed the precise progress of each phase of the trick to the rising beat of the music.

Rainer cast his cigarette aside. From the wings, he brought out a huge silver sword and polished the blade with a silk handkerchief. With a horizontal sweep of the blade he sliced cleanly between the top and middle sections of the box. The audience gasped. He did the same with the second and third sections. Then he lifted the top third away, and put it down on the plinth. The second box followed.

Flat on her back, sliding on a wheeled trolley in the confined space within the plinth, Nerys heard a child’s clear voice call out, ‘Chinese lady cut in bits, Mummy.’

There was a muffled gale of laughter, and Ravel was getting louder and faster.

All she had to do was slide very fast between the three trapdoors in the floor of the plinth, get into a crouch and pop her head into one box for Rainer to open the porthole, slide back as he juggled with the boxes, slip her arms into place to wave through the portholes in the second and, as the trick gathered momentum, to stand on her head beneath the third so that her black-stockinged legs and feet in Chinese slippers stuck out upside-down.

She was sliding in the airless space when she felt a sudden jolt and a sideways tilt. Instead of making a smooth glide the trolley jammed at a standstill. At first she couldn’t work out what had gone wrong but, gasping for breath, she squeezed her body into place just as Rainer snapped open the next porthole to reveal her serene masked face. She could hear the laughter and clapping and the relentless crescendo of ‘Bolero’. Below, the trolley was now a barrier to her next desperate moves. She scrambled from box to box, losing the sequence in her panic. The inevitable moment came when the shuffle of boxes got ahead of her and a porthole was opened to reveal thin air.

‘My God,’ Rainer yelled, and there was a burst of laughter. He slammed it shut again.

Recovering herself, Nerys managed to fold her bruised limbs into place. He slammed the door, rapped twice on the box, and when he opened it the second time, there she was.

She made the next position, choking with dust, wildly kicking her slippers in the air to gales of laughter, but as she wrestled for the final place a nail in the floorboards tore a long rent in her sleeve and in the soft flesh of her arm beneath. Biting back a scream of agony she swarmed over the ruined trolley and forced herself upright again in the three boxes that Rainer had now restacked in their original position. Over the last bars of music she heard the tap with the key that indicated he was about to open the door. She pasted a smile on her face.

The door swung open, exactly on the beat.

‘She is mended!’ shouted the same child.

Rainer took her hand and led her out to take a bow. She smiled harder beneath the mask and held his fingers tight, keeping her arm clamped to her side because she could feel that her sleeve was soaked with blood.

The curtains finally fell to a storm of clapping and stamping.

He spun on her, hot with anger. ‘What the hell were you doing? You nearly ruined it.’

‘I nearly ruined it? How dare you? The wheel must have come off the blasted trolley. I damn nearly killed myself for your bloody stupid trick.’



Flooded with pain and rage, Nerys swung her good arm at him but he caught her by the wrist before she could slap his face. ‘You’re a wildcat. I’ve never heard you swear before.’ He was grinning, relishing this unexpected aspect of her.

‘I couldn’t slide the trolley. It blocked the way. I had to crawl on my stomach, and I’ve ripped my arm and—’

His smile vanished. ‘Let me see.’

There were drops of blood on the stage and her hand was smeared with it. Rainer rolled back the soaked sleeve and saw the wound. He took in a breath. ‘I’m so sorry. Forgive me. Here …’ He whisked a string of knotted handkerchiefs from inside his spotless waistcoat and roughly bound up her arm. Over his shoulder he told the nearest Residency bearer that he was taking Mrs Watkins away to have a cut urgently dressed. Then he lifted her off her feet and ran to the makeshift dressing room, bundled her into her pheran, which had been hanging there on a hook, and raced past startled faces to the back of the big house.

‘I can walk,’ Nerys protested, as they burst out into the navy-blue night. Rainer was staggering a little under her weight, and his heavy footprints wavered in the carpet of silver frost.

‘Don’t you want to be abducted?’ He groaned.

‘You can’t abduct me. I’m the free spirit, the woman who doesn’t need cushions, remember?’ She squirmed out of his arms, linking her good hand in his as they raced across the yard past Mr Fanshawe’s staring grooms and guards, and through a gate into a lane. By a stroke of luck they came upon a tonga making its way to the front driveway in the hope of picking up a fare at the end of the party. A moment later, for the second time in two days, they were under a swaying canopy as the driver whipped his horse into a flying gallop.



As ever, it was cold in the raftered room overlooking the Jhelum river.

‘Take this off,’ he ordered her. She unbuttoned the Chinese robe and let it drop at her feet. Rainer kissed her naked shoulders before wrapping her up in a pashmina shawl. Then he lifted her chin and kissed her mouth, holding her against him as if she weighed nothing.

‘You are magical,’ he murmured, after a long time. With difficulty he stepped back. ‘Wait. Sit here. Let me dress your arm.’

He brought a bowl of water and bathed the ragged cut, announcing that it was just a flesh wound and she must be healthy to bleed so freely. Then he flooded it with iodine and she yelped and swore again.

When he had finished bandaging her he gave her a glass of his good cognac.

‘I should thank you for rescuing the box trick from disaster,’ he said, in a solemn voice.

‘I did, didn’t I?’

‘The trolley wheel must have been damaged when the porters carried it over there.’

‘You did your own rescue, when my arms didn’t wave out of that box. They loved it, I could hear.’

Rainer clinked his glass against hers. She could see the weatherbeaten furrows of his lion’s face. ‘We make a good team,’ he said. His praise was precious to her.

Then, very gently, he took her hands and helped her to her feet. They looked into one another’s eyes.

Rainer said, ‘I think now it is the right time. If you agree?’

Nerys inclined her head. She felt like his friend and coeval now, and this touch of intimacy reignited her desire. For all the moral questions and the guilt in anticipation that had plagued her, and despite her emergence as a woman who could make her own choices, now that the moment had come it didn’t seem to be a question or even a choice. It was simple, and inevitable.

He lifted her up and carried her to his bed. Then he untied the hangings, so they fell and curtained off the glimmering room.



‘This is all the world,’ he told her. ‘For tonight.’

He knelt over her, and took off her remaining clothing piece by piece. She let him do it, and was surprised at her pleasure in his admiration.

At last he whispered, with a quaint formality that touched her heart, ‘If you will permit me?’

She did. She permitted him everything, and she took all the freedom he offered her in return.

She might never have known this, she thought.

She might easily never have learnt this language that in the end came naturally, and the delight would have been locked away for ever, like a wonderful unperformed trick hidden in one of the magician’s boxes.

But a long time later, as she drifted into sleep, it was Evan who hovered in her thoughts. She saw him with the eerie clarity of a dream, her husband with his awkward innocence and the anxiety that constantly stalked him. She felt a surge of tenderness towards him, and a prickle of shame at what she had just done. But even so she couldn’t regret it. She suspected that she might never do so.

With his arms tightly wound round her, Rainer was already asleep. She listened to his breathing, and in the end she surrendered her drowsy inquisition and slept too.



There was a distant banging, and a voice calling. As Nerys surfaced she had the sense that the noise had persisted for quite a long time. Rainer’s arm lay heavy across her chest and she twisted to disengage herself. Opening a chink in the bed’s curtains – This is all the world, for tonight – she let in a shaft of dim grey light. It was very early, but the day had come.

Someone was hammering on the door downstairs. The voice sounded like a child’s. Nerys’s clothes were scattered, tangled up in the bedcovers, and she remembered that the bloodstained Chinese robe lay somewhere across the room.

‘Rainer, wake up.’ She shook his muscled shoulder and he opened his eyes. ‘Listen.’



He uncoiled himself, already reaching for his clothes and dragging them on.

‘Wait here,’ he ordered, but she ignored him. Wrapped in a blanket she was at his heels as he reached the door. Her arm felt stiff and sore, but she forgot it instantly.

On the step was the little girl, the yarn-spinner’s daughter. Her dirt-covered face was seamed with the tracks of fresh tears. Her fists pulled at Rainer’s legs as she gabbled at him.

‘What’s she saying?’

‘The mother’s ill. She wants help, food.’

Nerys stooped and hoisted the child in her arms. Her response was to twist and spit, beating her hands on Nerys’s shoulder and howling into her face.

She called to Rainer, ‘Tell her we’ll come. We’ve got to get dressed.’

While they scrambled into their clothes the girl darted through the room, snatching fruit off a plate and tying it in the cloth from her head. The desperation of her feral rummaging struck dread as well as pity into Nerys. With the child haring ahead of them, they raced through the icy mud and refuse heaps of the alleyways until they came to the doorway with its shred of protective sacking.

The little boy was sitting in the corner of the bare room with the silent baby in his lap. The whites of their eyes showed in the dim light. The mother was lying stretched out beside her spinning wheel.

It was immediately obvious that she was dead.

The girl crouched beside her and pulled at her arm. Then she gave a low wail like an animal’s cry and flung herself across her mother’s body.

‘Take the children out of here,’ Rainer murmured.

Nerys looked round. There was nothing in the bare room except the wheel and the bed of rags. Even the shawl, in its cloth wrapping, had gone. With dry eyes and stiff hands she lifted the baby from its brother’s arms and folded it inside her pheran. She took the younger child’s cold hand, and with Rainer’s help, she detached the now silent girl from the mother’s cooling body. There were no more tears and, after that one terrible wail, not a sound.

‘Take them to my house. I’m going to find the head man of this quarter and report the death. Then I’ll be back,’ he said. His face was like a stone.

Nerys led the children back the way they had come. She wasn’t sure of the route through the labyrinth of alleys, and she was too angry to try to ask any of the silent men who stood in the shadows to watch them pass. The girl refused to take her hand. She walked in silence, stiff as a small robot.

At last they reached the river and the tall old house. Nerys sat the boy on Rainer’s bed and drew the covers across his thin shoulders. The baby was stirring and whimpering and she rocked it as she moved round the room. The girl went to the window and stood with her back to them, staring out at the snow that had begun to fall.

In Rainer’s kitchen Nerys unearthed some roghani bread and a dish of apple sauce. Unlike everyone else in Srinagar, Rainer employed no servants. She boiled a cup of milk on the bottled-gas ring, and placed it on the windowsill to cool while she fed spoonfuls of bread and apple to the boy. When he had eaten something she was able to persuade the girl to turn away from her sentry position. She snatched some bread and, holding it in two hands, gnawed at it as she returned to her place.

Nerys was holding the mute baby in her arms and feeding it warm milk from a teaspoon when Rainer came back. He brought fresh warm bread and a pot of lentil stew. He set out the food and the girl seized her plate and took it back to the window.

‘She had fever,’ he said. ‘She had been ill for a few days.’

‘Why didn’t anyone help her?’

‘She was an outcast. That’s the way it is with them. Maybe it’s true – maybe she had been with another man – I don’t know. No one will know, now.’



Nerys looked from one child to another. They hardly seemed children at all, more like small, carved effigies.

She was aware that a great deal had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and that there was much more to come. Her own concerns, so gripping an hour ago, had become entirely unimportant. ‘What can we do for them?’ she whispered.

Sombrely he considered the question. ‘We’ll take them back to the village. To her family, in Kanihama.’