The Kashmir Shawl

ELEVEN


Two days after Christmas, Nerys and Rainer drove the little trio through the snow from Srinagar to Kanihama. The boy and girl huddled behind the seats of the truck and the baby wailed in Nerys’s arms.

The children’s grandfather and great-grandfather came out of the village house to meet them.

‘We have very little,’ the man with the crescent face complained. ‘Not enough to feed the mouths already.’

‘These are your daughter’s children. She is dead, and if you and her family do not care for them they will die too,’ Rainer said.

‘May the woman rest in peace,’ the older man murmured piously. His son’s mouth set in a hard line.

The children’s teeth were chattering from the cold. In the end a woman came out of the houses and led them away. Nerys would never forget the glance of smouldering accusation, quickly blanked out, that the girl, Farida, shot back over her shoulder. She hadn’t uttered a word since her mother had died, and this was the first sign of emotion she had shown. She had grabbed all the food she could lay her hands on, not even waiting to see if her brothers had a share, and the rest of the time she had stood or sat with her face turned away.



‘His own child, their flesh and blood,’ Nerys whispered to Rainer in disgust.

‘Their rules are not the same as yours,’ he answered. ‘There has been dishonour. The daughter was disowned.’

‘We can’t leave those children here. Let me take them back to Srinagar. I’ll look after them somehow.’

‘This is where they belong, Nerys. These are their people, not you and Myrtle and the Srinagar Club ladies with their ideas of charity. Don’t let sentiment cloud your judgement.’

‘You’re so callous. I’m surprised at you.’ She was angry with him because she was confused.

In the end money changed hands, and Rainer gave stern instructions to the villagers about how the children were to be cared for.

As they drove away, Nerys wept.

Three days later she insisted that Rainer drive her back to the village to see how they were getting on. What they saw was not reassuring. The baby was silent and limp, even though he was being nursed by an aunt, or perhaps it was a cousin, who had recently given birth herself. The boy, Faisal, cried or rocked himself in a corner and Farida stood in bitter silence.

They had brought more food with them, as well as extra clothing, warm blankets, and a crib for the baby. The villagers stood looking on as Rainer unpacked the supplies, just as fascinated as they had been by his magic tricks. Nerys thought they probably made no distinction between that conjuring and this materialising of desirable food and clothing. The goods were quickly whisked away.

‘They’re going to take everything for themselves,’ she whispered, looking at the ring of dark, unsmiling faces. In the grip of winter Kanihama was a far harsher place than it had seemed on that sunny afternoon back in the autumn.

‘Of course they will. Wouldn’t you in their place? The idea is to show them that keeping the children in the village brings benefits that wouldn’t come their way otherwise. Whoever actually eats this food and sleeps in these blankets, the children will be better off in the end.’

Nerys wasn’t convinced, but for the time being she didn’t have any other ideas.

Rainer went off to smoke a pipe with the men and she was left among the women. Apart from the kani weavers, always bent over their looms, it was the women who seemed to do most of the work. She nodded and smiled at them as they passed and tried not to draw too much attention to herself. Faisal stopped crying, apparently from exhaustion, and she took the opportunity to lift him into her arms. After a moment he fell asleep, and as she rocked him she studied the wet black eyelashes curling against his brown cheek. To her surprise, one of the women brought a wooden stool and pushed it in front of her. Nerys thanked her in Kashmiri and sat down.

Farida didn’t even glance in their direction.

From where she sat, Nerys could look out into the square. She noticed that three or four of the little mud-brick structures were empty because the shawl workers had begun to migrate down to the city in search of work. The old, traditional ways of village life were breaking down, the shawl trade was in decline, but the craftsmen’s families still had to be fed. Rainer had told her that some of the skilled workers had gone to little factories in the city, set up by Kashmiri middle men to mass-produce cheap approximations of the precious hand-made pieces that took countless hours to weave and gave their makers far too little return for their labour.

Faisal moaned and kicked in his sleep. She wondered how bad his dreams could be. She didn’t want to leave him again and go back to lotus-eating down in Srinagar. Thoughtfully she gazed out at the empty houses, and by the time Rainer came back she had made up her mind. He drew up another stool and sat down beside her, and the women glanced covertly at them as they went about their work.

She said, ‘If the children are going to live here, I will stay with them. They’ll be with their own people but I can make sure they’re well and getting what they need. Perhaps I can teach them some games and English words, just like I did over in Leh.’

He looked into her face, grasping her idea but doubting that it was practical. ‘It’s a harsh life. Can you survive up here, do you think, on your own?’

She lifted her chin, thinking back to her life in Ladakh, to the physical demands of the climb from Manali and after that the relative ease of the journey over the Himalayas with Myrtle and Archie.

‘Yes, I can. The Garden of Eden and cricket matches aren’t exactly what I’m used to. It was fun, but I don’t want to live like that all winter. I’m going to have to move out of the houseboat soon anyway, because Caroline needs somewhere more secluded than the married quarters. I’d thought of looking for a room in the old town, maybe near your house, but coming up here and doing something similar to my work in Leh would be much more useful. l won’t be alone, either. Look around you. Kanihama is full of people.’

‘You don’t know their language.’ He didn’t have to add, ‘There are no Europeans here and British ladies, even missionaries’ wives, don’t live alone in Indian hill villages,’ because it was implicit.

‘Rainer, I can learn.’ Her voice carried an edge of rebuke.

He looked at her for a long moment, and then he touched her cheek. ‘You are formidable. All right, Nerys. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.’

‘Let’s start by asking the head man what and who I have to pay to rent one of these houses.’

The negotiations were complex and protracted, but in the end a house – more of a hovel, really, but Nerys was confident that she and Rainer between them could make it habitable – and a steep price were agreed. She handed over a wad of rupees to the village elders, on the understanding that Rainer and she would be coming back very soon, and that this time Nerys would be staying.



‘Just a day or so, I promise,’ she whispered, to the uncomprehending Faisal. The little boy held on to her leg, then turned away. Farida stared into the distance and didn’t acknowledge their departure.

A tight knot of villagers gathered to watch them leave. It was one thing, Nerys thought, to visit Kanihama on an autumn afternoon and to be welcomed as a rich tourist maybe with the money to buy a shawl or two, but quite another to propose a life among the shawl-makers. Apart from what they hoped to get out of her, her intrusion would be entirely unwelcome.

As the Ford bumped over the ruts past the ravine where she and Rainer had picnicked, her resolve temporarily failed. It would be so much easier to stay comfortably in Srinagar until Evan arrived. She reminded herself that she had felt the same anxiety at Shillong, and even more so at Leh, where she had been merely her husband’s adjunct, and yet she had been able to make herself useful in both places. And Evan would understand why she wanted to be in Kanihama. The thought brought him oddly close, at the very moment when they had never seemed further apart.

‘You are quiet,’ Rainer said, over the truck’s rattling din.

‘I’m making plans,’ Nerys told him.

They returned to the house by the river, and the curtained bed.

With Rainer, the physical intricacies and elaborations were turning out to be much as she had imagined them when she had lain awake for the long nights beside Evan, but what did surprise her was the way that two bodies could be ordinary together, and also comical and available without ceremony.

There was no diffident my dear? about Rainer, and not a flicker of embarrassment. He could be ardent at one moment and at the next he might break off to talk about the significance of America’s entry into the war, or to enquire casually if Nerys was hungry. He could get up from the bed and wander away naked to find a plate of food. If she was eating, or had just dressed herself, he would slide urgent hands inside her clothes or lick the nape of her neck. She realised that, for Rainer, sex was on the same spectrum as eating or arguing, and after Evan’s guilt and inhibitions such freedom was a revelation. And it was highly endearing. Yet, oddly, all their physical intimacy didn’t seem to bring Rainer closer.

He was massively there, a dense slab of muscle under warm skin, but no deeper knowledge of him emerged from their long kisses, or from the way that their limbs twined in an attempt to get closer and deeper. It was like the reverse of a honeymoon, Nerys decided, with amusement. While he had courted her, there had been the promise of a perfect fusion of minds as well as bodies. That had been her romantic dream. Now that they were greedily exploring each other, and she discovered what pleased her as well as him, it was as if the erosion of mystery nudged him further away from her.

She remembered his words, ‘I can’t stay in one place,’ and that warning seemed more intelligible now. She felt it was quite likely that, any minute now, Rainer would step into one of his own painted boxes and disappear.

Nerys tried to explain to Myrtle and Caroline what was happening.

Myrtle caught Nerys’s face between two hands and looked hard at her.

‘Are you running away from him? Is that what this mad Kanihama scheme is really about?’

‘No, I’m not. It’s nothing to do with Rainer. I want to be useful, you know that, and I can’t do it here, not by going with the wives to charity sales and first-aid demonstrations and committees.’

This came out sounding like a criticism of Myrtle, not just her friends, and Nerys regretted it immediately. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. You’re a missionary’s wife.’

And now the mistress of a magician, neither of them added.

‘I am,’ Nerys acknowledged.

It was a time of general uncertainty, so one more area of confusion seemed hardly remarkable.



Myrtle had had no recent news of Archie. ‘He’ll write when he can,’ she said, and always changed the subject.

‘You’re so brave,’ Caroline declared, when she heard about Nerys going to Kanihama. Her round face had grown rounder and was permanently pink these days as the flush of pregnancy deepened. She was worried that her house-boy spied on her and that the dhobi-wallah or the woman who did her sewing must have guessed her secret. ‘What am I going to do?’ she cried.

Myrtle was helping Nerys to pack, and Caroline was sitting in an armchair. Her eyes were shiny with tears and her voice shook with anxiety.

Myrtle told her firmly, ‘You are quietly moving in here with me. Majid is discreet, Rainer and I will look after you, and Nerys is only a few miles away.’

There was no definite news of Ralph Bowen, either. With the rest of his Indian Army regiment, he was in the thick of the battle for Singapore.

Nerys was ashamed to catch herself wondering whether it would be for the best if he were killed in action, but then Myrtle confessed to the same dark thought.

‘God help us all.’ She sighed. ‘Nerys, you won’t make the same mistake as Caroline did, will you?’

‘I will not,’ Nerys assured her. She had her own talcum-powdered device in its box, and used it.

‘All right. Let’s go out and buy what you’ll need to set up your home in the hills,’ Myrtle said. She brightened up at the prospect of shopping.



On 1 January 1942, a day of heavy frost, Nerys moved into the village house. It consisted of one room with a door that opened straight off the square and a single window, and another room that was hardly more than an alcove leading out of the first. The familiar audience of villagers gathered to watch as she and Rainer staggered from the truck with a charpoy, sheets and blankets, food and clothes, pans and floor coverings and armfuls of rough woven tent fabric to hang against the crumbling walls and keep out the wind.

Rainer hammered the drapes into the old wooden beams, spread out the rugs and got the squat iron stove going for her. It was identical to the one Diskit had tended in the kitchen at Leh, as introduced by the Moravian missionaries. He carried water from the well while Nerys made up her bed and slipped her kangri between the blankets. She was so used to carrying it within her pheran that she felt light and girlish without its bulk swaying in front of her. She lit the paraffin lamp and a series of candles, and the rough little place looked suddenly homely. Rainer’s tin kettle began to whistle on the stove, and she laughed again at the familiar sound. There was only one chair, so he sat on the floor resting his back against her knees while they drank their tea. She knotted her fingers in his tawny hair.

Making a home together that they were not going to share seemed of a piece with the honeymoon that hadn’t revealed the man. She watched the candles flicker and wondered, if she were actually married to him, whether the entire marriage would have the same quality. She concluded that it would, but the thought didn’t in any way diminish her feeling for him.

Rainer reached up and clasped her hand. ‘Shall I stay?’ he murmured. The charpoy was inviting and the room hadn’t warmed up yet. But this wasn’t busy Srinagar. Nothing that she did in Kanihama was going to pass unnoticed. She remembered what had been dealt out to the yarn-spinner. ‘Better not.’ She smiled, with regret.

‘And will you come to Srinagar?’

‘When I can.’ Even in the depths of winter, farm vehicles and traders made their way up and down the Vale, and she thought it wouldn’t be too difficult to pay for a ride.

‘I’ll bring you food and supplies and news as often as I can.’

‘Will you be able to get enough petrol?’

‘I have useful contacts,’ he answered, tapping the side of his nose with a knowing air.



Nerys assumed that he meant his tough-looking American friends. Since Christmas he had met them several times, and she hadn’t asked any questions.

‘Are you sure I can leave you here, my sweet girl?’

His words and his concern touched her. She kissed the top of his head and he twisted to scoop her into his arms.

After he had gone, she blew out all the candles except one. She lay down in bed and looked at the shadows. There was no sound except the wind scraping in the branches of the trees, and she realised that she was happy. She wouldn’t have gone back to the houseboat on the lake, even if she could.



The days and then the weeks slowly passed.

There were plenty of times during that cold January when she would gladly have run away, but she stayed put. At first it was enough of a battle to eat, keep warm and sleep, and to see Faisal and Farida. The baby turned a corner, began to thrive, and soon became part of the small tribe of infants who were carried or propped up or left to sleep as the village work went on around them. In time Faisal also became less sad. He learnt that Nerys’s door led to food and warmth and unfamiliar games, even music and singing, and he came so regularly that he almost lived under her roof. Tentatively at first, and then with more confidence, some other children followed him. They sat in a row on her floor and she told them stories, taught them a clapping song, or drew pictures. Up from Srinagar came Rainer with crayons and paper, sometimes a bag or two of sweets, and once a dozen brightly coloured balloons. That was a day to remember.

Nerys looked up one afternoon and saw one of the mothers peering in at her. They had sold her milk and vegetables and yoghurt, and let her collect wood for her fire, but this was the first time anyone had come to visit. The woman pulled her shawl across her face and drew back as soon as Nerys noticed her, but Nerys insisted she come inside and drink tea. They managed a stilted conversation, with more gestures and smiles than words. After that, some others came with their children. By the beginning of February, Nerys had the beginnings of a classroom set up in a room in one of the bigger houses. She had nothing at all, far less even than in her primitive schoolroom at the Leh mission, but for a couple of hours each day she did her best to entertain a dozen infants. They sat there, round-eyed, staring or laughing at her, but the next day they remembered what she had done, and if she changed a tune or a story mime there would be an outcry.

There was a school in a village further down the valley, but it was a long walk in midwinter snow and most of the parents preferred to keep their children at hand to watch the animals, or to mind the even tinier ones. Some of the bigger boys went further away to the madrasah, but not all the families were able to manage the fee.

Nerys’s sketch of a school was regarded with suspicion at first but then, seemingly almost overnight, it was accepted and she was part of the village.

‘English,’ said Faisal’s grandfather, Zafir. ‘Please teach some English.’

The British were no longer particularly welcome in Kashmir and it was accepted that soon they would leave the Vale and India itself, but everyone still coveted the passport to prosperity represented by their language. She did what she could, returning to the choruses of hat, shoe, finger, nose that reminded her of Leh, and therefore – constantly – of Evan.

He would approve of what she was doing. That, at least.

Only Farida remained aloof and silent. Sometimes she hovered in the doorway, but then she would whirl away and not reappear for a day.

Rainer brought news of the Japanese bombings of Singapore and the fighting in the Libyan desert, messages from Myrtle and Caroline, and a warning that he too might soon be leaving Srinagar.

‘Where are you going?’ Nerys asked.

‘I have some skills that the military can use. Like you, I want to make myself useful,’ was all he would say.



When she wasn’t with the children, she loved to watch the shawl-makers at work. She discovered the dye workshop at the edge of the village where a stream ran between jaws of ice and rock. She saw the spun yarn immersed in copper vats that simmered on wood fires, sending great clouds of mingled steam and smoke into the colourless sky. The dye workers prodded their cauldrons with long sticks, fishing out the hanks of yarn to examine the depth of colour. The pure water and natural dyes gave the rose-pinks, blues and ochres the clarity she had admired in the weaving room back in the village. The dyers were more gregarious than the kani craftsmen, who were too intent on their bobbins to take any notice of her coming and going, and she was soon an accepted presence in the steam-filled shed.

It took a little more time before the women tried to show her how to spin, and then there was much hilarity because her efforts were so clumsy.

In all this time the peacock’s feather shawl grew by a narrow hand’s breadth.

The weaver was a thin young man who always wore a red skullcap. He rubbed his eyes, and looked up at the white mountains to rest them for a precious minute.



One morning in the middle of February Nerys woke up to daylight instead of greyish dawn.

It wasn’t late. The boy who drove the goats from their barn to the grazing every morning had just passed – she could hear their bells and his low whistles as the flock streamed uphill. She never needed to look at her clock up here because the time of day was evident from what was going on in the neighbouring houses or out in the fields. The days were lengthening and although the cold seemed just as implacable there was a difference in the light that suggested winter might some day turn to spring. The thought of this gave her a quiet beat of happiness as she got dressed. Through her window she could see the wide-branched chinar tree planted at the centre of the rough square, and it became easier to recall its welcome summer shade.

She stoked the fire in the iron stove, dipped a jug into her water bucket, filled a tin kettle and placed it on the heat. When the water finally boiled she made tea and sat in her chair, wrapped and hooded in her pheran, warming her hands on the cup.

Faisal would be here at any moment.

She had no sooner thought of him than she heard the scuffling of small feet and an urgent rattle at the door. The little boy bounded in to crouch next to her and close to the stove’s warmth. She solemnly wished him good morning.

‘Good morning,’ he repeated proudly, in his singsong voice. His English words were accumulating fast.

In just two months, he had grown taller and straighter. He didn’t rock himself or linger in the shadows at the corner of the room. This morning he was happily rolling a ball, humming to himself and keeping only half an eye on Nerys and the preparation of porridge and eggs.

‘Hungry?’ she asked him, tapping her hands to her mouth to reinforce the question.

‘Yes, please,’ he answered, as she had taught him to do, but his attention was still on his game.

Faisal was good company. He was alert, he loved playing and imitating, and he learnt everything she taught him with incredible speed. She missed Myrtle and Caroline, and Rainer’s visits were limited by the availability of fuel for the Ford, but it was Faisal’s rapid progress that convinced her she had done the right thing in leaving Srinagar.

The rice porridge steamed in what had become a lemon-rind slice of sunlight. She gave Faisal his spoon and they sat down at her plank table to eat.

‘Good?’

‘Good.’ He beamed.

She took a mouthful, and above the voices of two women carrying water and a cock crowing, she heard the approach of a vehicle. Before it turned into the square and rattled to a halt, she already knew that it was the Ford.

‘Car,’ Faisal said.

Nerys got up and hurried outside. With Rainer in the cab of the truck were Myrtle and Caroline. She ran across to them. Myrtle flashed a warning glance at her and she saw that Caroline’s face was as white as chalk. Rainer didn’t smile a greeting.

‘Come inside,’ Nerys murmured, conscious of the eyes that followed every event in the village. They made a protective guard round Caroline as they crossed the few steps to the house. Nerys told Faisal to go and play with the other boys.

‘What has happened?’ she demanded, as soon as she shut the door.

‘Ravi Singh,’ Caroline managed to say. It was Myrtle who had to take up the story.



Yesterday afternoon, they had been sitting beside the stove in the Garden of Eden. Myrtle was reading and Caroline knitting a matinée jacket. She was sure that the baby would be a boy, and she had chosen pale blue wool from a shop on the Bund.

Majid came from the kitchen boat. He never hurried, so Myrtle knew from the way he bumped into the door that something was wrong.

‘What is it, Majid?’

He pointed. ‘A boat is coming.’

The lake ice had thawed and now flat grey water stretched from shore to shore. Heading straight for them was a private motor-boat with a uniformed boatman at the helm. The small cabin was curtained but the two women recognised the servants’ livery.

Caroline’s hands flew to her mouth. ‘Oh, God. What does he want?’

Out of consideration to Majid she was wearing a loose embroidered wool coat and Myrtle was similarly dressed, even though the house-boy must have worked out long ago what the situation was. There was no time to run away, or try to disguise matters. All Caroline could think of doing was to hide her knitting in her work bag.

‘Perhaps, Memsahib …’ Majid pointed down the length of the boat to Caroline’s bedroom.

‘Yes, go,’ Myrtle said to her. ‘Stay there and don’t make a sound.’

The motor-boat’s engine cut out and the boatman brought it in a smooth glide to the steps. As soon as he had made fast, the cabin door opened and Ravi Singh’s sleek figure emerged. He was wearing riding clothes, impeccably cut in British style, which had the effect of making him look even more haughtily Kashmiri.

Myrtle greeted him at the veranda door.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs McMinn,’ he said curtly.

‘Ravi, I am Myrtle, you know that perfectly well. How lovely of you to drop in, though. What a surprise treat on this grey afternoon. What shall it be? A cup of tea or a cocktail? I rather think a cocktail, don’t you? Majid, please.’ She clapped her hands and the house-boy bowed his retreat. ‘Please sit down, Ravi. You do rather tower over one.’

‘I have come to see Mrs Bowen.’

Myrtle widened her eyes. ‘You should go to her bungalow, then. Unless she’s at the club this afternoon? We sometimes meet there for tea, but I’m a little tired today.’

Ravi slapped his pale kidskin gloves against the palm of his other hand. ‘She is not at her house. I think she is here,’ he said flatly. He looked at Myrtle’s ambiguous silhouette. ‘I have heard something.’

Myrtle’s voice was sweet and silky. ‘What have you heard?’

‘That is not for discussion.’

‘I see,’ she breathed. ‘I’m so sorry to disappoint you, Ravi, but Caroline is not here. Maybe she is away. I did hear her mention that she might go down to Delhi, now that the ice is gone. You know, to do some shopping, to see a few people. She is lonely with her husband away, as we all are, and Srinagar is so dismally quiet, these days, what with winter and the war. Don’t you agree?’

Majid padded into the room again, carrying the clinking tray and ice-bucket.

‘Gin fizz?’ Myrtle smiled. She clicked her lighter to one of her gold-tipped cigarettes.

‘No, thank you. Please tell Mrs Bowen that she can’t conceal anything from me, and it is folly to imagine that a Kashmiri noble family can be held in contempt.’

‘If I see her, Ravi, I shall give her your message. I am afraid, though, it will be as baffling to her as it is to me. Unless it’s a game. Is it a clue?’

‘No, Mrs McMinn, it is not.’ His manner was frosty enough to ice the lake all over again. ‘Good afternoon.’

Majid bowed and opened the veranda door but Ravi swung back. He had caught sight of Caroline’s work bag with a loop of pale blue wool trailing from it, and his eyes flicked from it to Myrtle again. ‘May I congratulate you, by the way, on an impending happy event?’

Myrtle could do an imperious face too. Her eyebrows rose a fraction but she gave no other sign of having heard his question.

‘Good afternoon,’ Ravi finally repeated. A moment later his launch was carrying him back across the lake, trailing a furrow of mint-green water.



Caroline shrank in Nerys’s chair, her arms crossing over her belly. ‘The dhobi-wallah, someone, maybe the yard-boy, has told a story to another servant, and the news has passed all the way up to Ravi Singh. Now he’s looking for me and the bastard baby that will bring dishonour to his family name.’

Myrtle looked over her head and met Nerys’s eyes. ‘Don’t be afraid of Ravi Singh,’ she ordered. ‘He can’t know anything for certain, and Srinagar servants’ talk is no more than that. What we did, Nerys, was to send a message to Rainer and he came straight away.’



‘We left this morning at first light,’ Rainer said.

‘Can I stay here with you?’ Caroline implored her. ‘No one will guess I’ve come all the way up here, not even Ravi.’

‘Of course you can,’ she soothed.

Rainer knelt in front of the stove and deftly blew the embers into a blaze.

Myrtle said, ‘Rainer’s got another idea, too.’

By Nerys’s reckoning it was less than a month to Caroline’s due date. Whatever it might be, the idea had better be a good one.

Rainer took his time. When he was satisfied with the fire he sat back on his heels and gave Nerys the warm, half-sleepy smile that immediately made her aware of her skin under the layers of clothes. ‘South-west of here, on the road out of the Vale in the direction of Rawalpindi,’ he said, ‘at a place called Baramulla, there is a Catholic convent. The sisters run a small hospital with the help of a French doctor and his wife. If you agree, Nerys, Caroline will stay here with you out of Ravi Singh’s reach – he will naturally assume that if she is not in Srinagar she must be in Delhi.’

Nerys quoted one of the four rules: ‘Misdirection.’

‘Exactly. Why would she head up into the hills, if she is in the condition that he suspects? I have to go away now to do a small job of work, but when I am back again I will come up to Kanihama and we will take Caroline to the doctor and the nuns at Baramulla. She will be quite safe to deliver there.’

Caroline’s head was bent and her fingers constantly pleated the edge of her pheran.

‘It’s a good idea. But couldn’t we take her there now?’ Nerys asked.

‘Baramulla is on the road. There are routes north and west, and therefore all sorts of people passing through. Who knows where Ravi Singh’s spies might be? To stay out of sight here is safer, for as long as possible.’

Caroline did look up now. Her blue eyes were full of fear. ‘I don’t want Ravi to find me. I’m afraid of him,’ she whispered.

Outside the window there was only the handful of houses and patchy fields and then the mountains. Almost no one came to Kanihama unless it was pedlars bringing essentials to the villagers, and few of the people ever left it, except Zafir and the other head men who took the village products to market further down the valley road or in the city.

‘We’ll stay here,’ Nerys agreed.

Rainer nodded. ‘Good. I am leaving this morning, and I will stop at Baramulla convent on my way and tell them to expect us.’

‘You have to go so soon?’ Nerys gasped.

Myrtle had fallen silent once she had described Ravi Singh’s visit, but she jumped up now and said that she would bring Caroline’s belongings in from the truck. Rainer took Nerys’s arm and led her outside to stand under the chinar tree.

He said, in a low voice, looking round first as though enemy agents might be perched in the branches overhead, ‘It is a job I must do. There is an airfield, strategically important. The British and the Americans want me to move it.’

‘To move it? An airfield? Would that be single-handed?’ Nerys asked.

‘Not quite. I shall have a small team, carpenters, painters and so on. It will be a trick, of course, an illusion performed with camouflage, dummies, lights – I don’t know what else until I see the place from the air. But through my skills the Japanese will bomb an empty patch of jungle instead of an airstrip with thirty fighter planes. There is no one in India or the whole of Asia who can succeed in this job other than me. I am the magician.’

She smiled through the chafe of her anxiety. Rainer would never be short of confidence, whatever feat was expected of him. ‘Good luck,’ was all she said.

He lifted her hand and kissed it. ‘I will be back in two weeks.’



She didn’t say, ‘Promise me,’ although she longed to.

She waited under the tree, watching, until the red Ford had jolted out of sight.

In the house, Myrtle and Caroline had unpacked a second charpoy and erected it in the confined space. Caroline stood with her hands to her back, easing the ache. The folds of her pheran hardly disguised her bulk.

‘It’s hard, I know,’ Myrtle said softly to Nerys, ‘but Rainer will be all right.’

Nerys lifted her chin. ‘Of course. Now, let me find us all some breakfast. You can’t have had time to eat before you left. There’s rice porridge and eggs, and I should think my neighbour will have baked our bread by now. I’ll send Faisal for some. It’s so good.’ She could just see the top of the little boy’s head bobbing outside the window.

Myrtle said, ‘I’ve brought my bedroll. Can I stay, too, for a couple of nights? After that I’d better go back and show myself at a Women’s Aid meeting or in the club. The story, by the way, is that after a touch of fever Caroline has gone south to recuperate with a nurse cousin of mine.’

‘Of course you can stay. What fun,’ Nerys smiled.

To have Myrtle and Caroline for company made Kanihama seem a sunny, benign place, and her dusty mud-brick house almost as luxurious as the Garden of Eden.

If they sat knee to knee on their stools, there was just room for the three of them at the plank table. After his errand Faisal played with his ball at their feet.

Myrtle took a crust of bread and some spiced apple, but she didn’t eat. ‘Have you heard the grimmest war news?’ she asked.

Nerys gestured briefly at the bare room. There was no news here, except what they could bring her.

‘Yesterday Singapore surrendered. The city’s occupied by the Japanese.’

Caroline pecked at her food with small, precise movements.

Myrtle added, ‘It seems likely that a lot of our men who survived the battle and the bombing will have been taken prisoner by the Japs. The reports are very confused.’

‘Ralph is alive. I know he is,’ Caroline said. She seemed unnaturally calm now, almost remote, as if too much was happening for her to be able to deal with it all.

‘Have you heard from Archie?’ Nerys asked Myrtle quietly.

‘One letter. I don’t know for sure but he and his men are probably involved with the evacuation of wounded from Malaya. It is … Well, we can imagine how it is.’

Caroline put her hand to her belly. She said dreamily, ‘This baby kicks all the time. He’s like a bull elephant.’

Thin sunlight filtered into the room. The three sat thinking of the child that would soon be born, and the world of uncertainty that would greet him.



For two days they sat by the stove, keeping warm. Caroline knitted blue baby clothes, and they played with Faisal and his brother, the yarn-spinner’s baby, now grown almost plump. Farida watched from the margins but if any of them beckoned to her she turned and ran away. Myrtle and Nerys visited two or three of the other houses to drink tea with the women, and as they walked out in their kangri-distended pherans they told each other that they must look like a pair of little round teapots on legs.

In the weaving house, Myrtle leant over to examine the peacock’s feather shawl that the thin weaver hopefully uncovered to show her. The lake blues and shimmering silvers made an iridescent pool in the drab chill of winter’s end. ‘It is exquisite,’ Myrtle agreed, but she shook her head at the man’s imploring gesture. ‘I haven’t got anything like enough money. If I did have, honestly, I would buy it.’

On the third morning, Myrtle said she must go back to Srinagar to listen out for the latest rumours. An old man taking tree trunks down to a wood-carving workshop said that she could ride with him on his bullock cart, as far as a place where it was possible to pick up the public bus onwards to Srinagar.



Myrtle climbed on to the seat of the cart, spreading folds of tweed to cover her knees and enclose her kangri. ‘I shall be heartily glad when this pregnancy finally reaches its natural conclusion,’ she murmured to Nerys.

‘Try to enjoy the ride,’ Nerys advised.

‘Life is quite a strange adventure at present, isn’t it? Before Rainer whirled us up here, I was looking at those tops of Archie’s – you know, the stags and mountain sheep that he shot in Ladakh. Back then, I thought a hunting trip with my husband was very daring. That was before I met you, Nerys Watkins.’

They both laughed, even though there seemed to be little enough that was genuinely funny.

‘I’ll be back with Rainer,’ Myrtle promised. ‘Then we’ll go to Baramulla and our baby will be born, eh?’

‘Two weeks,’ Nerys said, and stood back to let the cart pull away.



The days passed very slowly. The villagers were curious about the new arrival, but not overbearingly so. With her usual mixture of sign language and the simple words of Kashmiri she had picked up, Nerys indicated to the friendlier women that Caroline’s husband was away at the war, and soon she would be going to the hospital to have her baby. They accepted this with a shrug. In Kanihama babies were born behind a curtain in one of the mud-brick rooms.

Caroline watched the children when they came to play with Nerys. She would join in the singing, or draw pictures for Faisal – tree, sheep, flower – but more often she sat with her hand on her stomach, where the protrusion of a tiny heel could often be seen through the stretched muscle wall. Her abstracted air intensified and Nerys put it down to the inner absorption of late pregnancy, remembering how the mothers at Shillong had retreated into themselves in just the same way.

At night they lay side by side on their charpoys. Caroline slept badly, sighing and shifting under the weight of her belly, and Nerys listened anxiously to her movements. She left a candle burning in a niche, and the draughts sent shadows wavering over the roof beams.

Thoughts of her own lost baby came less oppressively now.

She had chilblains and a cough, but apart from these minor ailments her body felt taut and surprisingly strong from the straitened life at Kanihama, and she took a new, less shy satisfaction in it because of what Rainer had shown her. Putting her own concerns aside, she concentrated her thoughts on what Caroline was likely to need.

The two weeks crept by, but Rainer did not reappear.

Which jungle had taken him? Where was he, who was not even a soldier? It seemed that he had done the disappearing act she had often imagined. Nerys stifled her anxiety, compressing it until it weighed like lead beneath her diaphragm.

‘When will they be here?’ Caroline asked constantly.

‘Don’t worry,’ Nerys soothed.

The post was delivered only once a week in Kanihama. The postman brought a letter from Myrtle and waited at Nerys’s door to see her open it, as eager to hear the contents as they were. She gave him money and he retreated.

Myrtle had scrawled, ‘No one knows where Rainer is. Not a word, or even a breath of a rumour. He has simply vanished. Do you want me to come up to Kanihama without him? What can I do to help you?’

Nerys sent a note back: ‘He’ll come. Stay there, be our ears and eyes. Caroline and I will be all right.’

That night, under the flickering shadows, she reviewed her options. They were limited. It might be possible to borrow a car in Srinagar, with a driver who didn’t know either Ravi Singh or the European wives, to take Caroline and herself to the convent hospital in Baramulla. But a journey for a pregnant woman that had seemed a feasible undertaking with Rainer in the Ford became a daunting prospect with a stranger. Alternatively she could convey Caroline back to Srinagar where she could present herself at the military clinic, but that would be to undo all the concealments of the last months.

Or they could stay put.

After sleepless hours, she went out first thing in the morning and asked a series of questions of the Kanihama women. Eventually they led her to a crone with a seamed face and a white headcloth, who was puffing on a pipe beside a smoky fire. This, she learnt, was the village midwife. The old woman listened and nodded, then put out a hand for Nerys’s money. In reply, Nerys rocked her empty arms and mimed passing over money. Baby first, then the fee. The old woman laughed, showing a row of blackened teeth, and the laughter spread to the other women. Nerys decided that she liked the midwife, and they shook hands.

Back at the little house, she persuaded Caroline to undress so that she could examine her. As Nerys felt her stomach Caroline’s eyes opened so wide that the whites showed all round the blue irises. ‘How many babies have you delivered?’ she asked, in a tight voice.

‘Several,’ Nerys answered. The baby’s head seemed neatly engaged. If it was a straightforward labour and delivery, all would be well. If not … Please, Rainer, she implored within her head. For God’s sake, get here before it’s too late.

It was a sunny day, and there was even a whisper of warmth in the breeze. Nerys gathered up sheets and cloths and towels and took them in a bundle down to the dyers’ shed on the banks of the stream. There she persuaded the men to fill one of their copper vats with crystal stream water, and to boil it. She laundered all the bedclothes and the other pieces, then hung them on the lines that crisscrossed the bank. They dried in the sun and wind, billowing among the brilliantly coloured hanks of pashmina yarn.

Caroline complained of the pain in her back. Nerys filled her kangri with embers and gave it to her to rest against. Evening crept up and she lit the candles yet again.

Rainer, where are you?



She refused to let her head fill with images of him taken prisoner, or lying wounded in the thick jungle, or worse.

At midnight, Caroline suddenly got up from her charpoy. She went to the window and rested her head against one folded arm, exhaling with a low grunt of pain.

‘What do you feel?’ Nerys asked.

‘It’s started.’

‘All right. It’s going to be all right.’ She lit the lamp and stoked the stove.

Caroline lay on the mattress and drew up her knees. She looked terrified, and there were beads of sweat breaking under her hairline. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she almost screamed, as Nerys put on her pheran.

‘I’ll be five minutes. I’m going for the midwife. Try to rest.’

The old woman was fast asleep in her crumbling little house. Nerys shook her awake as gently as she could. ‘Come,’ she begged.

Grumbling under her breath, she got up and slowly put on her threadbare pheran. She picked a battered pail off a shelf, half filled it with a dark brew that was sitting in a pan on the stove top and followed Nerys into the night.

Caroline was gasping with fear and pain as the midwife examined her. There was a dismissive twist to the woman’s shoulder as she straightened up again. She pillowed her cheek on her folded hands and pointed to the drink she had brought. Then she marched off again. The message was clear. Caroline should drink some of her herbal brew, and there was still plenty of time for everyone to sleep.

By the time it was light, Caroline was writhing in a twist of laundered sheets. With every contraction she gave a snarl of pain that rose to a scream. In each brief respite Nerys sponged her face with cool water and made her drink a mouthful of the midwife’s potion. ‘You’re doing well,’ she kept whispering. As far as she could tell, Caroline was. ‘Try to save your strength. Breathe.’

In the middle of the morning the midwife came strolling back, chewing on a handful of pickled walnuts and spitting out the coarse skins into her cupped palm. Nerys made her wash her hands before she examined Caroline.

‘Make it stop,’ Caroline screamed. ‘Please, God, help me.’

The woman straightened up again, adjusting her headcloth.

‘Good,’ she said surprisingly, in English, and her face cracked into a rare smile. She took a strip of linen cloth from Nerys’s basket and doubled it into a band. Then she put it between Caroline’s teeth before the girl’s tear-stained face screwed up with the arrival of another contraction. Caroline bit into the cloth as the midwife laid her ear against her belly. There was another scream, choked by the band of linen. With a sudden gush the waters broke.

When Nerys looked between Caroline’s legs she could see the wet black oval of the baby’s head. ‘Can you push?’ she asked.

The elemental noises and smells of imminent birth brought the procedures of the delivery room at Shillong flooding back. She felt calm now. She told Caroline how to pant between contractions, and how to push into her pelvis instead of her throat. The midwife perched on a stool between Caroline’s knees, and when the baby’s head appeared she cupped it in one brown hand and expertly guided the tiny, slippery shoulders with the other.

‘One more big push and you’ll see him,’ Nerys promised. Caroline’s crimson face poured with tears, she tore the soaking rag out of her mouth and howled, and the baby was born. It had long, scrawny arms and legs, a thatch of black hair, and it was a healthy girl.

Working together, Nerys and the midwife cleaned the baby’s airway, smiled at each other as the first mewing cry erupted, then wrapped her in a pashmina and laid her on Caroline’s chest. Caroline was lying back against pillows and blankets. Her eyes were closed and she was shuddering with exhaustion. ‘It’s not a girl,’ she breathed.



‘Yes, it is, and she’s beautiful.’

It was the same old miracle, Nerys thought, the same and different every time. She tucked a fold of shawl over one minute crimson foot and offered up a jumbled, wordless prayer of thanks. If Evan were here he would have knelt to bless this new life, but as it was, the tiny girl would have to make do with the approximation that was all Nerys could offer, and the mumbled imprecations of the Muslim midwife as she tied off the cord and cut it with a flash of bright blade.

‘Let me take her,’ Nerys said.

Caroline gave up the baby without protest as the old woman turned her attention to delivering the afterbirth. Nerys remembered how carefully the nurses at Shillong had checked to see that none remained inside the mother, and was relieved that this midwife was equally attentive. With the baby held against her shoulder she stroked Caroline’s sweat-soaked hair off her face. ‘You’re doing so well. You were very brave,’ she told her.

‘I wasn’t,’ Caroline sobbed.

There was a scratch at the door, then it creaked open. Farida’s small figure stood outlined against the bright light.

‘Hello,’ Nerys said in surprise.

The little girl sidled into the room, crept closer and tugged at the shawl that swaddled the baby. Nerys glanced at Caroline but her head had fallen to one side and her eyes were closed in exhaustion. She crouched so that Farida could look at the newborn, but the child went further. She deftly scooped the baby into her own arms and sat down cross-legged next to the stove, cradling her in her lap. She began to croon a little song. The midwife nodded in casual approval. As Farida laid a finger against the baby’s cheek, Nerys realised it was the first time she had ever seen her smile.

She was relegated to the margins of this ancient tableau, so she made herself busy, putting the kettle on and tidying the bloodstained cloths into a basket.

The midwife finished her work, then she and Farida bathed the baby in a tin basin. The little scrap of flesh kicked and cried, but Caroline was still sunk against her pillows, eyes closed. They dressed her in some of the blue knitted garments and Farida fiercely took possession of her again.

Finally the midwife held out her hand for the money. Nerys counted it into her palm, note by note, and only then would the woman accept some tea with bread and honey. Even Farida took a cup of tea. Caroline’s lips were swollen and cracked, so Nerys smoothed Vaseline into them, then made her drink and eat a little.

‘Do you want to try to feed her?’ she asked, but Caroline only shook her head.

‘Zahra,’ Farida announced.

She and the midwife debated something, then Farida repeated, ‘Zahra,’ and adjusted the baby’s bonnet.

‘Have you thought of a name?’ Nerys asked.

Caroline had mentioned that her father’s name was Charles, and she had joked once that maybe she should choose Linlithgow, in honour of the viceroy, or even George for the king. That seemed a long time ago, and there had never been any mention of girls’ names.

‘Zahra sounds pretty,’ Nerys added.

‘All right,’ Caroline answered. Then she added, ‘I’m sorry, Nerys. I am so tired.’

‘Of course you are. Rest now.’

Somehow, Nerys thought, she must get news to Myrtle.

At the end of the afternoon, when Zahra was asleep in a little box crib with Farida crouched like a shadow beside her, a deputation of women came to the door. Farida’s grandmother was among them, and she was carrying an earthenware dish swathed in a cloth. There was a delicious smell.

With stately formality, the women laid out bowls and carved wooden spoons, then ladled out portions of steaming tahar rice cooked with turmeric, a dish traditionally made everywhere in Kashmir by Hindus and Muslims alike, to give thanks to God for a lucky escape or a safe delivery from danger.

Nerys and Caroline shared the fragrant food.



‘Thank you,’ Caroline said humbly. ‘Thank you. I have been lucky, I know that. I was afraid that I was going to die.’

Someone knew of a boy who was going down to Srinagar to work with his uncle at the shawl factory. Nerys wrote the note for Myrtle and entrusted it to him.

When everyone had gone, even Farida, she tried again; ‘Do you want to hold her?’ she murmured. ‘She’s got such black hair, and big dark eyes.’

‘Then she looks like her father. I can’t keep her, I can’t be her mother, so perhaps I shouldn’t even think about her as my baby.’

Nerys stroked her hand. In Caroline’s position she wouldn’t have been able to stop herself holding Zahra to her heart. Nobody would have been able to tear her away – not without killing Nerys first.

Perhaps in the circumstances Caroline’s instinct was wiser than hers.

There was a wet nurse in the village, the same woman who had looked after the yarn-spinner’s baby. Zahra could go to her, for now, until Myrtle came and they could discuss what was to be done.



The next afternoon, a car arrived in the square. It was a trader’s truck from Srinagar, with a sullen driver who jumped out and flung up the bonnet to examine the engine as if the journey had taken a final toll. Myrtle stepped out from the passenger side. She wore her pheran loose over her shoulders, the folds pushed back to reveal her neat waistline.

‘I have never been more pleased to see you,’ Nerys told her.

Myrtle had brought milk powder and glass feeding bottles, flowers and chocolates, the Srinagar newspaper, but no news of any of the men. ‘The talk’s all about Japanese atrocities in Singapore, prisoners of war, a hospital massacre. The damned Japs shot the patients and all the doctors. No one has the remotest interest in our little affairs, darling. I saw that woman who lives next to Caroline and told her that Caroline is much better from being in the sun with my dear cousin, and she hardly heard me. How is she?’

‘Physically she’s tired but recovering well. Emotionally, I’m not so sure.’

‘And the baby?’

‘She’s beautiful.’

Myrtle carried her armful of gifts into the house.

‘Golly. Look at all this. I feel as if I’m in a smart nursing home,’ Caroline called from her bed, and the ghost of her old smile accompanied the words.

Myrtle and Nerys went later to visit Zahra, who was ensconced with Farida and the wet nurse. Faisal was delighted to welcome Myrtle, and danced along with his hand in hers.

Myrtle peered into the box crib, turning back a few layers of blue woollens. ‘My God,’ she breathed in Nerys’s ear. ‘It’s Ravi Singh.’ They both hovered over the tiny baby, gazing at her as if she were a miracle.



After resting for a week, Caroline made the journey with Myrtle back to the Garden of Eden where, as far as Srinagar knew or cared, she was still recovering from her bout of fever. She left her daughter in Nerys’s care, and both her friends could see that there was more exhausted relief than anguish in the separation. She was unnaturally quiet, except for sudden bouts of weeping that she seemed unable to control, but in Srinagar her distress could be put down to anxiety for Ralph Bowen, whose name had been listed among hundreds of others as a prisoner of war.

Nerys resumed her small routines of songs and word games with the village children, broken up by afternoons of playing with Zahra and her ever-faithful attendant, Farida. It was a lucky accident that the baby’s arrival had broken through the girl’s shell of isolation, she thought. Farida even began to play with the other children, although she darted away every two or three minutes to make sure that the baby was sleeping or happily watching the patterns woven by the chinar branches over her head. She came every morning now, as reliably as Faisal, to take her breakfast with Nerys.

Nerys began to see how Zahra might even be absorbed into the village. Babies and children didn’t seem to require the individual attention of their mothers – they were passed around between grandmothers, aunts and siblings, whoever happened to be at hand. Perhaps, she thought, with Myrtle, Caroline and herself to provide the money, there could be a life for Zahra in Kanihama. At least for her early years. And after that, when the end of the war came, there would be orphans, and displaced families, and children who would need protection in countless different ways. Who could predict what might happen to this particular orphan?

That was how Nerys reasoned, with even more secret hope and longing now that Zahra was born.



At the beginning of April, when buds had begun to swell on the thorn bushes and chinar twigs, and the fields and vegetable patches were green with new shoots, Nerys heard the sound of another car approaching. In her anxiety for Rainer she had conjured the same sound a hundred times, only to be as regularly disappointed, but now, once she let herself listen properly, it was unmistakable. She dropped the saucepan she was holding and ran outside.

It was the truck, driven by Rainer. The door swung open but he seemed unable to climb out.

She cried, ‘What’s happened? You’re hurt. Let me help you.’

His face contorted. ‘Not that side. Come round here. If I could lean on you …’

With his weight supported on her shoulder they shuffled to the house and she helped him to the chair by the stove. His face was haggard and his torso seemed twisted, like a tree struck by lightning.

‘Where’s Caroline?’

So wherever Rainer had come from, it was not the city.

She said quickly, ‘In Srinagar, with Myrtle. She’s recovering, and the baby is here. It’s a girl.’



Rainer passed his tongue over parched lips. ‘I am so sorry,’ he murmured, ‘to have let you down.’

She put her cheek to his. ‘You didn’t. Drink some of this.’

She had heated up a cupful of the midwife’s latest brew. She still didn’t know what the mixture contained, but she was impressed by its restorative effects. Rainer tasted and spat. ‘Dear God. What’s this poison?’

She relaxed a little. ‘Rainer, what’s happened to you?’

He took her hand and held it against him. After a moment he said, ‘I was lucky. I didn’t quite walk away, but I survived. Some others didn’t.’

Nerys sat down beside him on the stool usually occupied by Faisal or Farida. His hand was badly scabbed and at the edges the renewed skin was puckered as if it had been burnt. To be bombarded with questions wasn’t what he needed, she thought. He would tell her when he was ready.

He wasn’t ready until he had slept for two hours. Nerys helped him to undress before he lay down. Under the tunic that he was wearing over loose trousers, his arm and shoulder and the upper part of his chest were covered with stained, yellow-soaked burn dressings.

‘Would you like me to change these for you?’ she asked matter-of-factly.

‘Later,’ he said. As soon as his eyes closed he fell asleep.

Nerys left him in her bed and went outside to play catch and hide-and-seek with the children. The piercing mountain air was scented with woodsmoke and animal dung, just as it had been on the afternoon when Rainer had first brought her here, and now in the sheltered places the sun felt hot on her shoulders.

Later she tiptoed inside and began to prepare some food, but when she turned to look at him she realised that his eyes were open and resting on her.

‘Tell me I’m not dreaming,’ he said.

‘You’re not, unless I’m dreaming the same thing.’

He reached out his good arm. ‘Come here.’



Carefully, so as not to jostle him, she lay down in the narrow space. He put his lips against her forehead. ‘That’s better.’

Her heart was thumping so hard, she wondered if he could feel it against his scarred ribs.

At last, he began. ‘I got myself out of a military clearing hospital. I’m only a civilian, and one with dubious national status at that, so they didn’t try too hard to hang on to me. I managed to get on a flight to Delhi, and I’d left the truck with a friend of mine there so I was able to pick it up and drive straight here.’

She could see what this effort had cost him.

‘All the time I was lying there I was thinking that I’d promised to take Caroline and you to Baramulla. If I could have got word to you, I would have done.’

She smiled at him. ‘I knew that. I admit that I was worried when you didn’t come, but the anticipation was much worse than the reality. Babies are born all the time in Kanihama, you know.’

‘I am sure you were magnificent. As always.’

‘Not at all.’ Nerys laughed. ‘The village midwife was the heroine. That was her special healing potion you were drinking.’

‘I hope it will work,’ he said, with a touch of grimness.

She waited.

‘So, I did my conjuring trick. That’s all it was, just an illusion on a grand scale. The British were reluctant to give me what I needed at first, because it was a top-secret mission and I had no security clearance. As far as the brass are concerned, I’m German-sounding enough to be an enemy agent. But they had to let me work it in the end, because there was no one else with the skill to do what they needed.’

It was good, Nerys thought, to hear the old Rainer talking.

‘As you know, I had to move the airstrip so the Japs would bomb the wrong place. Against a dense jungle backdrop it’s very difficult to judge scale from the air, especially at night, so on a similar site two miles up the coast we cleared an area one third the size of the actual landing area and constructed a scaled-down version of the real thing. I was given a team of British sappers. We built and painted balsa-wood planes, huts, storage dumps, dummy fuel stores, everything. I flew over it in a reconnaissance plane, just a few hundred feet up, and it was superb. The real site was invisible under camouflage netting, the other looked identical. Of course, part of the mission was to convince the Japs that they’d taken out the fuel dumps as well as the planes. Fuel’s crucial in any battle. If the enemy thinks you’ve got none when you have plenty, that’s a tactical advantage.’

There was a small silence while Nerys considered this. The trick would have involved staging a huge blaze, she thought.

‘We had explosives, enough to create a big bang. We constructed a pyre that would burn well and doused it with fuel. There was a system of detonators that I was controlling, so as soon as there was a direct hit on the dump I could make the whole works explode in flame, just like a cache of aviation fuel going up.’

Rainer paused, searching for words.

‘This took a certain amount of trial and error. Difficult to do, without smoke plumes giving our position away to enemy spotter planes. So we built a kind of tunnel within a tunnel, in which to test the detonator systems. I had two of the sappers inside, setting up the lines.’

He put a hand over his eyes. Then he said in a level voice, ‘Something went wrong. A dropped light, a stray spark. I don’t know. The tunnels caught fire. Within a second, they were ablaze. I went in, but I couldn’t reach the men.’

Nerys imagined the thick, smothering humidity of the remote jungle, the black smoke in an enclosed place, the stench of burning.

‘That happened the day before the operation. I wasn’t there to see it, but when the time came the fake airstrip was lit up in place of the real one and sure enough the Japs came over. I understand that the explosion and burning of the false fuel dumps was most effective.’



He paused, shifting to ease the pain from his burns. ‘I’m glad of that, for the sake of those two men.’

‘Yes,’ was all she could say.

Rainer wiped his mouth with the back of his good hand. ‘You were kind enough to offer to change these dressings? There is a box in the truck.’

She went out again into the sunshine, and saw Farida patiently standing near the door with Zahra swathed in a shawl on her back. Nerys held out a hand and led her into the house.

‘Look, here’s Farida,’ she told Rainer. ‘And this is Zahra.’

He propped himself up. Nerys and Farida turned back the shawl to reveal the baby’s wide dark eyes, olive skin and crest of jet-black hair. Hesitantly, he put a scarred finger to the tiny cheek. ‘Hello,’ he said. Then he looked up and met Nerys’s eyes. ‘I’m glad to see that there are beginnings as well as endings,’ he said.

As she walked to the Ford, Nerys looked up at the mountain-tops. The snow was melting fast, filling the stream that dashed past the dyers’ sheds in an icy flood. Very soon, the high passes would open and the road from Kargil would be clear again.