The Kashmir Shawl

FIFTEEN


March 1945

He was as handsome as always, and as secretive. She could hardly believe that he was really here in Srinagar. He had materialised in the flesh, just like Miss Soo Ling in the sliding box or the doves in one of his stage tricks.

Nerys let Rainer lead her through the streets near Lal Chowk until they reached an ordinary little dhaba, a place where tradesmen from the nearby workshops came to swallow a plateful of cheap food. He pulled out a metal chair for her at a plywood table.

‘What would you like?’ he asked. ‘Champagne? Pâté de foie gras?’

She laughed. ‘Yes, please. And then strawberries and cream. Rainer, I can hardly believe it. Are you really here?’

He extended his hand so she could check its solid warmth. She clasped it between both of hers, just for one second, which was as much as she could allow herself.

He looked fit, windburnt and as tightly coiled as a spring. ‘Thank you for coming so quickly,’ he said.

She had received a scribbled note, delivered by one of the urchins from the bazaar. Without stopping even to look in the mirror she had set out to Lal Chowk. He was waiting for her in the middle of the teeming square at the centre of the city, as if to underline physically what she already knew – that their weeks together had been the very heart of her time in Kashmir.

‘As if I was going to choose not to, perhaps.’

He looked into her eyes. ‘It might have been difficult for you. Is your husband in Srinagar?’

‘Yes. He’s very busy.’

There had been no need to lie to Evan about where she was going because he hadn’t asked. She hesitated and then added, ‘Rainer … nothing has changed. I’m doing what I always intended to do. I am the missionary’s wife and helper. Now and always.’

‘I know. I know, I know, I know. But I can still love you, can’t I? I went away because it would have been impossible to stay and watch you being Evan’s wife, and all I learnt was that wherever I am I feel the same. I do try to look upon loving you as a blessing, you know. It makes me a better person, probably.’

They laughed at the probably.

Rainer wasn’t unhappy, she could see that. It wasn’t his way.

The simple joy of seeing and being with him swelled inside her, making her feel light and easy as she hadn’t done for months.

A dish of onions and limes was placed in front of them, followed by a bowl of dhal makhani and a basket of hot naan bread. Rainer demolished the food without looking at it, as if finishing it off were a task that must be completed. Nerys sipped cardamom tea.

‘Tell me about everything,’ he demanded. ‘How are you? I want the truth, too.’

Nerys’s smile faded a little. It had been a hard winter.

‘No, wait a minute. I’ve got something for you,’ he said. He opened the inside pocket of his coat and slipped a small brown-paper folder across the table.

The three women on the houseboat veranda were laughing at a forgotten joke, with lotus leaves and a stretch of lake water spread behind them. It was a charming photograph, capturing the happy glamour of the old days on the Garden of Eden. Nerys looked across the table. ‘Is it mine? To keep?’ she asked.

‘Of course. I’m only sorry that it has taken me so long to come and give it to you in person.’

‘Thank you.’ She put the photograph away in her handbag. ‘I am all right,’ she told him. But I miss you. Every day.

He heard the unspoken words. ‘And Myrtle and Caroline?’

Myrtle and Archie were down in Delhi, and Mr and Mrs Flanner had finally bought the old houseboat. Nerys had bumped into Laura Flanner at a WVS fund-raising housie-housie party, where the new owner complained that the McMinns hadn’t told them the half of what was decrepit about the boat. Nerys protested that to her it had always seemed the lap of luxury.

Laura Flanner had raised one Bostonian eyebrow. ‘Is that so?’

‘But, then, I’m from Wales.’

Myrtle had written to say that it was terribly sad and a bore but she didn’t think they would be coming up to Srinagar for this summer. After the war – suddenly everyone had started to talk about after the war as a real time, rather than just a prayer for the remote future – Archie was hoping to find a peacetime job with the railways again. Office-based, of course. He stood a better chance of that by staying in Delhi, Myrtle said, and wheeling himself off to see everyone he could think of. ‘You know Archie,’ she had written. ‘He never gets despondent, and he’ll never give up.’

Nerys found Srinagar a much duller place without the McMinns.

Caroline and Ralph Bowen appeared together at the Residency cocktail parties that the Fanshawes still occasionally hosted, or Nerys would sometimes catch sight of them at a regimental concert or among the spectators at a tennis match. Everyone said how encouraging it was that poor Captain Bowen was recovering so well and how fortunate it was that he had his wife to look after him. Nerys wondered if she was the only one to notice that as Ralph got physically stronger Caroline seemed to grow paler and more silent. Sometimes she came alone to tea with Nerys at the mission. She had developed a nervous habit of twisting the rings that were now loose on her third finger.

‘I’m quite all right,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t sleep very well these days, that’s all. Ralph has terrible nightmares. He won’t ever tell me what he’s dreaming about, but I think it helps him to wake up and find that I’m there. That’s something, isn’t it?’

Nerys told Rainer the outline of this.

‘And Zahra?’ he asked.

The two girls had been in Kanihama all winter, and Nerys had visited them as often as the road was open. Zahra was well looked after, and the precious shawl was safely folded away with Nerys’s best clothes in a chest at the mission.

‘There’s not much news in Srinagar.’ She smiled at Rainer. ‘Tell me yours. Where have you been, all these months? I know I probably shouldn’t ask. But I thought of you very often.’

How odd it is, she thought, that two people can have one spoken conversation while conducting another in their hearts.

‘Did you? I like that. I’ve been devising a new trick. It’s a good one, you’ll enjoy it. I put on a few little magic shows for the troops – it was a cover for some camouflage advisory work. Covering troop movements, supply depots.’ He added, ‘Nothing at all heroic. I’m only a Swiss civilian. I’m not a friend because your people can’t be completely certain I’m not an enemy. It doesn’t matter now. The war will be over in a few weeks.’

Evan was saying the same thing, and he had begun to talk about the mission recalling him to Shillong or even their eventual return to Wales. Nerys had more than once tried to bring up the subject of adoption, but he had been adamant that God’s will was either to give them a child of their own or that they should remain childless. She tried to devise plans for Zahra, but she knew that realistically all she could do was wait and hope.

‘And so, now what?’ she asked Rainer.



He hooked one shoulder. ‘I have something important to do.’

There was no point in asking what that might be.

By now he had polished off all the food. He pushed the dishes aside and said abruptly, ‘I asked you to meet me here because I want to introduce you to someone. Will you come with me now?’

Nerys looked at him in surprise. ‘Of course.’

They left the dhaba and walked through the crowds. There were more people about, drawn out of their houses by the thin March sunshine, but the wind was still cold and Nerys wrapped her faithful pheran tightly around her.

The house was built of soft red brick framed by thick wooden beams, an old Srinagar home in a quiet street. The door was opened by an elderly woman in a sari. Rainer was obviously a regular visitor. He spoke quietly to her and the door inched wider. They slipped inside and were led up the shallow wooden stairs.

In the upstairs room another woman, much younger, was sitting on a window-seat staring down through slatted shutters into the street. As soon as she saw Rainer she jumped up and hurried to him. Glancing away as they greeted each other, Nerys noticed a crucifix on the wall. On a shelf below, with a candle burning in front of it, stood a framed photograph of a child. A rosary hung over the frame.

The servant closed the door.

‘Nerys, this is my friend Prita.’

Nerys took her hand. Prita’s face was drawn and her eyes were full of shadows. She was dressed all in white, the colour of mourning.

‘I am glad to meet you,’ the woman said, in a low voice. ‘Rainer has told me about you, that you are a good woman and a good friend.’

Nerys knew that the link between these two was something more than simple friendship. The air in the room seemed to shiver.



‘He has been very kind to me in my sad times,’ Prita continued. ‘See, over here? This is a picture of my son. God rest his innocent soul.’

The boy was perhaps three, a solemn-faced infant in a white shirt.

‘Arjun’s father was killed in 1942. My husband was for Free Kashmir, this is what he and his fellows dreamt of, and his idea was not welcome to the British or to the maharajah. Many men died in the uprising at that time, but there was no end to it then and there will be much more killing to come. I sadly believe that the time of death in Kashmir is only now beginning.’

Nerys still held the woman’s hand. It was light and dry, the sinews prominent under the thin skin.

‘I am staying here after that for the sake of our son, even though the enemies of my husband are mine too. Our child was Kashmiri first, before any religion, and if he did not grow up in Srinagar, what life would he know? But now …’

Rainer came to Prita’s other side. He took her in his arms and kissed the top of her head where the smooth black hair parted. His solid bulk made Prita seem tiny. For a moment the three of them were drawn together as tightly by her grief as by any history.

‘Arjun was quite well, you know, a baby like any other. Then he was ill, one month, two, worse, and then he died. Rainer told me, you are a nurse. You will understand what I cannot.’

‘Not a proper nurse. Only a missionary’s wife,’ Nerys whispered. She was thinking: rheumatic fever, diphtheria, tetanus, measles, infant diarrhoea – there were so many diseases that carried off the children.

Her arms ached with longing to hold Zahra.

‘It’s only two weeks since Arjun died,’ Rainer said.

‘I am so sorry.’ There was nothing else Nerys could say.

Prita’s ravaged face turned. ‘I am not behaving well to my guest, to Rainer’s good friend,’ she managed to whisper. ‘Perhaps you would like some tea.’



Nerys hugged her and then stepped back. ‘Thank you, not now. But I will see you again,’ she promised.

‘Thank you,’ Prita said, and Rainer’s face flashed his gratitude.

‘I’ll see you home, Nerys.’

He told Prita that he would be back soon.

Nerys and Rainer walked towards the mission. After the shadows of the widow’s house the day seemed bright and noisy.

He said, ‘I wanted very much to introduce her to you. I am going to marry her, you see.’

The street clamour rang in Nerys’s ears.

You asked me to marry you. And my answer was that I am already married.

A group of American soldiers on leave flooded out of a bar and blocked their way. Nerys threaded her way past. One of them saw her face and apologised. ‘Excuse me, ma’am.’

She found her voice. ‘Do you … love her?’

Rainer stopped walking. He didn’t touch her, but it was as if he did. ‘I think you know the answer to that.’

‘Then …’

‘I am going to take her back to Europe. Her husband was one of the leaders of the Kashmiri independence movement, and even before 1942 he made many enemies. He paid for that, but his death also left his family in an impossible position. Prita has a few friends, but they will be as vulnerable as she is once the war ends and you British leave India. This state will be cruelly divided and it won’t be safe for her to stay here, a widow without anyone to defend her. Prita’s husband was a Sikh but she is a Christian convert. A Catholic, like me.’

They were close to the Jhelum river and Nerys stood gazing at the shikaras loaded with local goods on their way downriver to be traded or sold in Baramulla and as far away as Rawalpindi. She thought of the floating vegetable gardens out on the lakes, the apple orchards and rice paddies, the shops along the Bund, and the shawl-makers up in Kanihama. Srinagar and the whole of Kashmir were outwardly calm in the lemon-yellow spring sunshine, but she knew how deep were the rifts that lay beneath the surface. Evan and Ianto still went out every day to try to convert lower-caste Muslims and Hindus, and they reported that the two sides hated each other even more than they hated the British. Nerys heard that a radical Sikh leader had threatened, ‘If the Muslim League wants to establish Pakistan they will have to pass through an ocean of Sikh blood.’

The fragile, exquisite Kashmiri summer was coming, and she shivered at the prospect of what darkness might lie ahead.

Of course Rainer would do whatever he could to help one woman, who had lost her child as well as her husband. She imagined how he would take his wife back to Switzerland, where they would perhaps live in another lush valley with the white mountain-tops looking down on them. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘It’s a good thing you’re doing.’

She had also been in India long enough to know that many marriages were arranged between near-strangers and became strong, successful and affectionate unions. ‘I hope you will be happy,’ she added, with most of her heart.

They reached the bank of the river and looked along the steps at the familiar scenes of people washing their clothes, cooking, rinsing pans and soaping children.

‘Will you come to my wedding?’ Rainer asked.

‘Of course I will.’

‘Thank you.’ He touched her hand.

She had once thought he was inscrutable, but now she suddenly saw him in all his strength. She also knew that she loved him. ‘You’ll be going to Switzerland?’

There was a pause. ‘Eventually. My father is there, and I have friends in the mountains. But I shall miss Kashmir.’

He didn’t add and you, and she was in a way relieved. They had said enough to each other.

They reached the door of the mission. Two bazaar children were sitting on the step even though Nerys’s schoolroom had closed hours ago. One tapped her mouth and reached out her cupped hand. Rainer took a coin from his pocket, the other child snatched it and they ran away.

‘I’ll let you know the day and time of the wedding,’ he told Nerys. ‘It’ll be very soon.’

‘I will be there,’ she promised. She stood with her hand on the door’s iron latch and watched him go, walking back to Prita through the oblivious crowds.



She was already awake, knowing that he was in the grip of the dream again. Ralph writhed, his arms cradled over his head and his legs kicking as he tried to fend off whatever it was that stalked and terrorised him. Sweat had soaked his pyjamas and the bed-sheet. Caroline tried to hold him but he tore himself away from her. He muttered and thrashed and then screamed, just once, but loudly enough for her to imagine Julia Dunkeley waking up next door.

‘Ralph, please, hush. It’s all right. I’m here, you’re safe. It was a nightmare, just a bad dream again.’

He struggled blindly upright, twisting as he tried to escape the horror in his head. She caught his arm and fought to steady him, but panic lent him strength. He brushed her off and pounced. His hands closed round her neck and squeezed, thumbs like steel digging into her windpipe, heavy limbs pinning her down. Caroline’s breath gargled and then stopped. She never knew how close she came to losing consciousness, only that the pressure of his fingers suddenly slackened and air rushed into her lungs. She gasped and shuddered, too shocked to move. In the darkness she sensed that Ralph drew back, his hands in the air, confusion gathering in him as he jolted into consciousness.

‘Caroline?’

She managed a sound, no more than a rasp in her throat.

Ralph fell back against the bolster. He groaned and panted as she eased herself upright and slid to the edge of the bed. She groped for the box and struck a match, then lit the candle. The electricity was on, she could hear the distant hum of the barracks generator, but she knew from experience that a bright light could frighten him before he was fully awake. The candle flame wavered and steadied behind her cupped palm.

‘Caroline?’

She found that she could speak, although her neck and throat throbbed agonisingly. ‘I’m here. You were having a nightmare.’

His face and skull glistened with sweat. He nodded, eyes searching the long shadows in the room as the night terrors receded.

‘Shall I make you some tea?’ she asked.

‘No. Not tea.’

He sat up, pyjamas pasted to his body, and swung his legs out of bed. He put on his dressing-gown and shuffled to the door.

‘Ralph, please, won’t you tell me about the dream? Maybe if you talked about it, it would help to make it stop.’

He shook his head. His fingers twisted the doorknob and she knew that he was longing for the whisky bottle.

‘All right, not to me, perhaps, but what about one of the other men? Men who will have seen … some of the same things?’

‘No. It’s a bloody dream, that’s all.’

She followed him into the sitting room. He snatched the bottle of cheap Indian whisky off the engraved silver tray that had been their wedding present from the Fanshawes and poured three inches into a tumbler. His hands were shaking and the rim rattled against his teeth as he drank. He didn’t even put the glass down as he refilled it, but his hands were already steadier.

‘Ralph, don’t drink so much. It doesn’t help.’

‘Yes, it does,’ he said flatly. ‘Believe me.’

After the nightmares he would drink until he anaesthetised himself and then fall into snoring oblivion. When he woke up the next day he would be as pale as death, angry as a trapped bear, and she would have to tread around him as if in a minefield.



Caroline was afraid of her husband and of his barely contained violence, and however much she sympathised with him, it seemed that she was helpless in the aftermath of what he had seen and suffered. Ralph could go out to the club, or to the regimental mess with the other officers he counted as friends, and outwardly appear almost his old self. Only she knew how haunted he was, and how fragile the shell that contained him.

Involuntarily her fingers crept up to explore her bruised throat. She saw that he was looking oddly at her and drew them away again.

‘Was I trying to throttle you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Christ. It wasn’t you in my sleep, you must know that. There was a Jap, one of the jailers. Sadistic bastard. He …’ Ralph’s eyes closed, then snapped open as if he couldn’t bear to contemplate what lay behind his eyelids.

Caroline waited, holding her breath. She was imagining how another man (the same sort of man, perhaps) might have recognised his prisoner’s weakness – Ralph’s particular vulnerability, which he kept concealed at such cost and had hoped to hide even from his wife – and worked on it in ways that were quite possibly cruel beyond her understanding.

‘Go on,’ she said softly, hoping to encourage him.

She shouldn’t have spoken. Ralph gulped back the second whisky and the glass clattered on the tray. ‘For Christ’s sake, no. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was dreaming.’ He came towards her and she had to resist the impulse to shield herself. But he only touched his hand to her shoulder before withdrawing it. ‘It’s a bloody rotten life for you too, isn’t it?’ he muttered.

A slow flush crept up her face, and the blood hammered painfully through the bruises. Ralph stared down at her until his mouth puckered, the way it did when he was forced into anything more than a routine exchange with her. He turned sharply away, muttering, ‘Almighty God, what is the matter with you?’



He didn’t expect or wait for an answer. He picked up the bottle, saying in a harsh voice, ‘Go to bed. I’m going to sit up and read.’

In the morning, she would find him sprawled and unconscious in the armchair.



The Catholic church was a little red-brick structure with a miniature steeple and a roof of corrugated iron painted pea-green. Nerys and Caroline sat in the front pew beside Professor Pran’s daughter. They were the only guests. Prita came down the aisle on the professor’s arm, wearing her white sari and a white dupatta woven with a tiny thread of gold covering her hair. Rainer waited for her at the altar rail, his coat brushed and a dark red rose in his buttonhole.

The priest who conducted the service was Father Kennedy of the Catholic Mission. Nerys knew him slightly, and Evan had once told her that he was a fine missionary. As Rainer and Prita exchanged their vows, she looked up at the plain glass in the church’s tiny trefoil windows and thought about the various contracts that a marriage entailed. It was more complicated, much more, than honouring and obeying suggested.

And as for love – how many versions of that were there?

Beside her, Caroline sat with her head bent, turning the rings on her wedding finger. The chafed skin beneath was raw and flaking. She wore a gauzy scarf round her neck to hide blue-purple thumbprint bruises.

After the bride and groom had signed the register in the miniature vestry, with the professor and Nerys as their witnesses, Rainer took them all to his favourite dhaba for the wedding breakfast. Father Kennedy came too, and told some good stories about the early days of the mission in Kashmir. It was a happy party. Prita said very little, but she smiled sometimes and rested her hand with the new gold band on her husband’s arm.



The next day Nerys went up to Kanihama to see Zahra and the loyal Farida. She stayed in the village for a few nights, singing songs and playing games with Faisal, his little brother and the other children from her old schoolroom. She had taken with her some simple medicines and dressings, and treated the villagers’ numerous winter ailments as best she could. She assured Zafir that Zahra’s precious shawl was in her safe keeping, and at the same time discreetly made sure that the other side of the bargain was being honoured. She was in no real doubt that the little girl was well looked after, particularly by Farida – life up in the village was hard, but she could see that Zahra was healthy and full of laughter.

When she returned to Srinagar she brought the two girls with her for a spring visit to the city, the first of that new year. When they arrived the pair scampered ahead, down the lane to the mission door, past a beggar who sometimes crouched in a niche in the wall. Inside the house Evan absently stroked the girls’ heads and Ianto beamed through his spectacles. The children who regularly came to the schoolroom took them back into their games.

Nerys was disconcerted by Caroline’s response when she told her about the girls’ arrival. Her hands flew to her mouth and her face drained of colour. ‘I can’t see her. I really cannot, not now that Ralph’s here.’

Nerys’s heart sank. ‘But as far as Ralph and everyone else is concerned she’s a mission orphan.’

‘I can’t. You don’t understand.’

Ralph saw everything, Caroline believed. Guilty, she flushed under his scrutiny and heard in her head, What is the matter with you?

‘All right.’ Nerys sighed. ‘If you feel you really can’t. But it seems a shame.’



April came. Rainer was packing boxes, preparing to leave his apartment overlooking the Jhelum river. The coils of rope, mountaineer’s hardware and the paraphernalia of magic tricks were all gathered up, heavy drums sealed and labelled for collection by various freight agents.



In Europe, the US Army Air Force and RAF Mosquitos had taken it in turns to bomb Berlin as the Red Army closed in on the city overland.

‘It’s almost over,’ Ralph said, listening to the news. Caroline turned aside.

After the war. After the war. What would that mean? She felt increasingly as if she were in one of Rainer Stamm’s magical boxes, where the roof and walls squeezed closer and closer together. She was trapped. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the flash of metal and even felt the kiss of steel on her skin as a blade sliced through the wall. She flinched, and realised that Ralph was glaring at her.



Evan opened a letter from the Welsh Presbyterian Mission, postmarked Shillong. He put it aside until Nerys had seen that Zahra and Farida were asleep in their shared bed and Ianto had eaten his supper with them and gone off to his rented room beyond the bazaar. Then he said, ‘My dear, I have something to tell you. We are recalled to Shillong.’

‘What? When?’

‘In a month or so, probably. Of course, much depends on the war news. But I’d say it would be something of that order. You’ll be pleased to hear that Ianto is to stay on to continue our work here. I hope very much that we shall be able to travel back through Kargil and Leh, to revisit my earlier converts. I am going to write and ask if that might be possible.’

‘It’s very soon,’ Nerys managed to say.

Evan had taken a sheet of writing paper to begin his letter. ‘We have been in the field for quite a respectable amount of time,’ he said.

I shall have to take Zahra with us, Nerys decided. Somehow, it will have to be done. Perhaps Farida belongs in Kanihama with Faisal and the others, but I cannot leave Zahra behind.



Ralph went to a dinner at the mess. The few of his brother officers who remained in Srinagar HQ were invariably polite to him, even deferential, but the cordiality they showed him had not increased since his return. If anything, he was more of an outcast. They were aware of what he had been through, but the effects were not discussed. They were not articulate men.

Tonight, however, the atmosphere was different.

They had listened to the latest news bulletin. Yesterday the Russians had reached Vienna. Major Dunkeley thumped his clenched fist on the table. The bloody Boche were finally done for, he declared. It wouldn’t be long before Berlin and Hitler himself fell into Allied hands. It was a damned shame that it was the Reds and not the British who were to have that honour, but even so – it was not too premature to have a small celebration, between friends, was it?

There was a ragged cheer, and the port decanter was called for.

As it circulated and the cigar smoke thickened, Ralph briefly became just another officer among soldiers who at last had victory in their sights. He drank and joked and sang the regimental ditties, and his glass was filled and refilled.

Since Changi and Burma, Ralph Bowen’s liver had never functioned properly. There were several other parts of his body that let him down too, so he didn’t take particular notice even when the MO ordered him to go easy on the old bottle. He drank to get drunk in any case, and that point came more and more quickly.

Too soon, he slipped beyond the self-imposed barriers. In the press of warmth and brotherhood, he let his arm fall from the back of the chair where it had been resting on to the broad shoulders of Lieutenant Ormsby. Under the revolving fans the room was swimming but this was a safe place, even a beloved one.

Ormsby shook himself free and leapt to his feet. ‘For Christ’s sake, Bowen.’

A glass of port skidded off the polished table and smashed to the floor.



‘That’s enough,’ growled Dunkeley. ‘Captain Bowen, please return to your quarters.’

In a capsule of silence, Ralph reeled out of the room.

A voice called after him, ‘Off you go to that pretty little wife of yours,’ and someone else tittered.

The cool air outside made him stagger. He leant against the door frame and a passing servant said respectfully, ‘May I help you, sir?’

‘No. Leave me alone,’ he muttered.

He tried to take one more step but his legs gave way. He collapsed into the gaudy bushes that bloomed under the windows of the mess. He instantly fell into a doze, but he thought he could only have been asleep for a second or two. When he surfaced again he could hear voices, and the sound of two men relieving themselves on the lawn a few yards away.

‘Julia’s sister ran into her in Delhi a couple of years back. She was coming out of a doctor’s office with McMinn’s wife.’

‘I wish I’d been in Delhi with Myrtle McMinn.’ The other one laughed.

‘They were both mightily uncomfortable to be spotted. Alice said she was certain she was pregnant.’

‘Who – Caroline Bowen?’

‘The same.’

Ralph felt the grit and dirt under his cheek. He lay as still as he could.

There was a loud guffaw. ‘Not by her husband?’

‘This is the interesting part. Bowen was in Burma, wasn’t he? No – it was that unspeakable Ravi Singh fellow, apparently. That’s how the story goes. Of course, it could be just Srinagar gossip, but they were pretty thick at one time, the two of them.’

Somebody belched and excused himself, and then footsteps swished across the grass towards the bungalows. The voices were swallowed by the darkness.

When he was sure that he was alone Ralph hauled himself painfully to a sitting position. He rested his head in his hands and tried to think.



Caroline? His wife – who seemed more like a white mouse than a woman – his wife and Ravi Singh?

It seemed utterly unlikely, and as he tried to pursue the notion he realised that it didn’t hold much significance anyway. A woman in bed with the wrong man? A miserable little by-blow, done away with by a doctor in Delhi or even delivered and then hidden away? What did it matter?

Worse things had happened – far, far worse.

Ralph manoeuvred himself on to hands and knees and, by hauling on the bushes, achieved a standing position. Frowning hard and repeating the words one, two, one, two, he found that he could march very acceptably. He swung his arms smartly, and even though the ground shifted and tilted he made it all the way to the lane that ran past the married-quarters bungalows. Here was the gate. No, not that one. Further. Wouldn’t do to step into the wrong house.

Next but one. Almost there. Sleep, that was the thing.

A patch of deeper shadow lay in the long grass beside the fence. His blurred eyes settled on it and in the same instant the shadow stirred. It became a man, hunkered on the ground, lying in wait for him.

Ralph staggered, but the enemy’s threat almost sobered him. Bayonet or pistol, which would it be? He wouldn’t stop to find out. Kill him first.

He kicked out hard, into the man’s legs. The figure recoiled and scrambled to his feet. Ralph caught him by the arm and punched at his head. The pain from his knuckles shot up his arm and he cursed and almost overbalanced. It wasn’t a Japanese soldier at all, just a beggar. He had seen the wretch here before. He landed another more satisfactory punch. ‘Get out, damn you. Don’t let me catch you near my house again.’

The beggar broke free. To Ralph’s amazement the man seized his arm and twisted it up behind his back. Pressing his mouth close to Ralph’s ear he hissed two or three words that Ralph didn’t understand. Then he flung him aside and loped away up the alley, barefoot, silent as a cat.



Drink swirled in Ralph’s head again as he hung against the fence.

Had there really been a man or was he in a dream?

He was gone, anyway.

He opened the door of the bungalow and the familiar smell of brass polish and insect powder and curry spice enveloped him. He wanted a nightcap, but what he had heard on the mess lawn nagged in his mind. Ask Caroline, ask his little wife for the truth, that was the thing to do …

Their bedroom was pitch dark, but he sensed that she was awake.

‘I heard a funny story at the mess tonight,’ he shouted.

The lamp clicked on. Caroline sat up and stared at him, her eyes wide. ‘Did you have a nice dinner?’

‘I heard a funny story,’ he repeated. ‘I heard you had a baby. My dear wife. What do you think of that?’

Her hand shot up to her mouth. ‘What do you mean? Who said …?’

So it was true.

She looked shocked and utterly terrified, but not surprised.

Ralph was breathing hard. At first it hadn’t struck him as particularly important, whatever Caroline had done while he was fighting to stay alive in Changi and Burma. Their marriage was a sham in any case, and what did any of it matter? But now the humiliation of the night in the mess, the treatment he had just received from a bloody beggar in the street, the fog of drink and the incessant pain in his body all rolled together. He wanted to howl like a dog. He wanted to lay his head down and for everything to stop hurting. He wanted his wife to stop whispering, and being afraid whenever he glanced at her, and act like a man.

‘Ra-vi Singh,’ he said, drawing out each syllable.

Fear leapt in her eyes.

Ralph had met him only a handful of times, years ago, but he had a sudden vision of the man’s dark, sneering, dismissive face. Ravi Singh was a native, even if he was the maharajah’s relative. Anger ballooned in him. He clenched his fists and swayed towards the bed. Caroline whimpered and threw up her arms to fend him off, and as she did so, he understood that what he hated most of all in her was her lack of spirit.

He wasn’t going to hit her. He wasn’t ever going to strike a woman.

‘Don’t be so bloody feeble. You can tell your lover I’m going to kill him.’

‘Ralph, he’s not … he’s not my lover. I was stupid and lonely. He’s a wicked man. Don’t go near him. Please, I beg you not to.’

‘I am going to kill him,’ Ralph repeated. The idea made him feel much better. He remembered the way the butt of his service revolver fitted his hand.

And so, a nightcap. That was what he needed now – now the decision was made.

He swung away from the bed and made an unsteady diagonal to the door. In the sitting room the bottle stood ready on the tray. He hoisted it in a fist and collapsed into the armchair. No bed. Sleep here.



Caroline lay rigid under the sheet.

She had pledged secrecy, hoped and believed that she had kept it. Yet it seemed that her infidelity was the subject of mess gossip and, far, far worse than that, somehow the whole world knew all about her child.

After a while her heart slowed a little. Disconnected thoughts ricocheted through her head. Trying to hide her pregnancy had been utterly foolish. It was what Myrtle would have done, if she had ever been stupid enough to make such a mistake in the first place, but Myrtle would have carried it off with élan.

Her friendship with Nerys and Myrtle, the days on the Garden of Eden, the cricket match on the frozen lake, even Kanihama, all seemed to belong to another age. Caroline felt frozen, but blades of self-hatred stabbed through the ice.



The only thing she could do was go to Ravi, tell him the whole truth and ask for his understanding.

If he were to kill her, that wouldn’t matter. She thought she would even be glad of it. She couldn’t let Ralph go anywhere near him, though, because it was Ralph who would be hurt, or slaughtered.

From that, at the very least, she would try to protect him.

And then there was Zahra.

She rolled on to her side, drawing up her knees. Cold. Good, keep the coldness, that was protective.

She must ask Nerys to take care of Zahra. Nerys would do it much better than she ever could.

Tomorrow: Ravi, and then Nerys.

She lay and waited for the hours to crawl by.