The Kashmir Shawl

EIGHTEEN


Mair spent that Christmas with Dylan, Jackie and their smaller daughter, after a run-up to the holiday behind the till in the bookshop where she was now working. She was back in time for New Year, after which Hattie and her latest boyfriend left for two weeks in the Caribbean. When they came back, suntanned and smiling, Mair knew that Hattie had finally found the man she wanted. The two of them were finishing each other’s sentences, and had adopted a series of new pet names.

When Mair mimed sticking two fingers down her throat Hattie only grinned. ‘I know, I know. But I’m buying into it. Coupledom, you know? I never thought I would, but …’ She shrugged, delighted.

‘Does being a couple have to include calling him Edbo instead of just Ed, and other cringey things?’

Her friend raised an eyebrow. ‘I think you’re jealous.’

‘Of course I’m bloody well jealous.’

Hattie was just the same as she always had been, but happier. And busier, it also had to be admitted. She wanted nothing more than to be with Ed, and although the two of them regularly included Mair in their plans, there was simply less time nowadays for Mair and Hattie on their own.

Mair insisted to herself that it was Ed’s monopoly of Hattie’s company that made her jealous, not the quicksand condition of being in love.

The two women embarked on determined jokes about how Mair might compensate by taking up new hobbies and Internet dating sites, or even revisiting old flames to see if there was still a flicker of warmth.

‘No way.’

‘You’re not making any effort.’

‘I’ll take up macramé then, how about that?’

‘Really hot.’

But then Hattie became serious. ‘Do you want to be with someone, Mair? I mean, it’s not the only way, is it?’

‘I do,’ Mair answered, after some thought. ‘But then again I don’t.’

She didn’t want to be any more explicit. There was nothing to be explicit about, in any case, just a vague longing that wasn’t even as defined as a wish. She only knew that she was restless and incapable of fixing her attention on anything in particular because it was already subliminally, troublingly, focused elsewhere.

In February Mair heard that Tal and Annie were expecting a baby, and emailed her congratulations. A laconic message eventually came back from Tal, saying that it would be good to have another pair of hands for next year’s lambing. This made her think of the last evening in the old house, when she had first seen the shawl, and the Williamses’ sheep out on the hill had been crying for their vanished lambs.

The weather was harsh, with snow lying on the ground for almost a month, which meant that footfall in the bookshop diminished to almost zero. She asked her friend, the bookseller, outright whether she could really afford to keep her on.

Her friend said, ‘It may come to that, but let’s hang on and see what happens when the spring comes. If it ever does.’

The lack of job security didn’t worry Mair any more now than it had done in the past, but what was new was a sense of impermanence and a growing detachment, as if she were somehow not quite occupying all the corners of her own life and couldn’t make herself care enough to change anything. She kept busy with the humdrum affairs of the shop, with her wider circle of friends, and even began going to the gym again and practising some of the old routines she and Hattie had developed in their circus days. Being more supple and fit was a partial antidote to her strange and intractable state of mind.

During all this time she read and reread her grandmother’s letters.

There were three dozen in all, written over the fifteen years between 1945 and 1960. Mair unfolded the pages carefully so as not to crack them along the folds, smoothing them out in order to puzzle over dates and the sequence of events before arranging them in chronological order once again. She concluded that quite a few must be missing, because some of the events that Nerys mentioned in passing were never related in full.

In her imagination, the young Nerys Watkins became her daily companion. And at the same time the known Caroline, the very old woman sitting with her leg propped up in the quiet room in a quiet suburb of Srinagar new town, merged with the sad unknown one who – Mair came to understand – was in a long-stay hospital somewhere within sight of the Malvern Hills.

The very first letter that she read, on the flight from Srinagar to Delhi, was an attempt by her grandmother to comfort her friend during her illness. From an address in Shillong, Assam in September 1945, Nerys wrote that it must help Caroline – even if only a tiny little bit – to have such a beautiful and perfectly English view to look out at from her window. And then, in the sad but reconciled voice of a missionary’s wife who hadn’t seen home for six years, she touched on the heat of India’s summer, the latest epidemic that was overwhelming the mission hospital, and her wish to see her own Welsh valleys again before too long. There was some more Indian news, related with determined cheerfulness, partly of Myrtle, the dark-lipped beauty of the photograph that Mair had carried with her for so long. Nerys wrote that Myrtle and ‘Archie’, presumably her husband, had been up into the hills for a little break from the heat, but now Archie was back at his work in Delhi. ‘Myrtle suffers, but puts a good face on it. They both do.’

No matter how many times she read the next lines, her grandmother’s absolute faith in the mysterious pin-up never failed to strike her. The name ‘Rainer’ always jumped out at Mair. Nerys wrote that there was still no word or news from him, not yet. But he always kept his promises, Caroline knew that, didn’t she? Zahra would be safe in Rainer’s care; Caroline was to try not to worry; they would reappear like magic when Rainer was ready and there was no more danger, and between them they would make sure Zahra reached England. Caroline would be well again by that time, and Nerys would bring Zahra to see her: ‘We’ll have a picnic, sitting in the cool grass on the riverbank, you and me and the little girl. Hold your faith in that, if you can, darling. And of course Ralph need never know a thing about it – if that’s worrying you in the least.’

But there was a note of underlying desperation in the passage about Rainer and the little Zahra – whoever she might actually be – and urgency even in her grandmother’s handwriting that had troubled Mair from the very first reading of the letter. It sounded as if Nerys was battling to reassure and convince herself, as much as Caroline, that there would be a happy outcome. ‘Rest, Caroline dear, and let the doctors take care of you. You’ll soon be well, and in the world again. Write to me when you feel up to it. With love always, Nerys.’

One of the first things Mair had done was to look up the address on the envelopes: Mrs Ralph Bowen, Carteret Ward, Calderton Hall, Calderton, Nr Malvern.

The top entry that came up under Calderton Hall was a property developer’s prospectus. It showed a gaunt grey stone mansion set in sweeping grounds, now in the process of being divided up into luxury apartments with startling price tags attached. There was no mention of the history of the place after the Calderton heirs had sold it in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it took some more digging before Mair discovered that for more than a hundred years it had been a secure mental institution.

Further researches drew her into an unexpected underworld of lunatic asylums, the gaunt institutions where families used to deposit their deranged, damaged or occasionally just egregious relatives, then largely and conveniently forget about them. Her laptop and its patient, dispassionate connectivity led her deeper and deeper into the history of such institutions, and into the sad individual stories of mental illness. She began to read widely, ordering books and pamphlets as her interest intensified. Calderton Hall Hospital had been closed down more than a decade ago, after public disclosures relating to inhumane treatment of the long-term residents. Several had been locked up for as much as fifty years and some had originally been no madder than it needed to be odd, or friendless, or the mother of an illegitimate baby.

Mair’s sympathy for the unknown younger Caroline grew to the point where she felt as if she knew her, even though the real sequence of events that had taken her into Calderton, out again eventually and back to Srinagar, was no more than a tissue of guesswork stitched together from research and clues in Nerys’s cheerful letters.

Mair worked out that Caroline must have suffered a breakdown in India, and on her return to England had been immediately committed by her husband to the long-stay Carteret locked ward at Calderton.

That made sense of the tiny amount of information Caroline herself had given Mair, and Aruna’s strange manner, which seemed to combine servant and nurse with just a touch of jailer. And there in Carteret Ward Caroline had presumably stayed, until at least 1960 because that was the date of Nerys’s last letter, or the last letter from her that Caroline had kept.

This one was short and written from the same familiar address in North Wales as all the others, except the first few:

I have some very sad news. Poor Evan died five days ago, finally succumbing to pneumonia. We buried him yesterday. As you know, he had never been strong since our years out east. He was very peaceful at the end, I was with him all the time and Gwen was able to say goodbye while he was still conscious. We will both miss him so much.

If only I had talked to Mum, Mair thought. If only any of the three of us had ever thought to ask her about Grandma in India.

The shawl lay in its usual place, folded over the back of an upright chair where she could see it whenever she looked up from her laptop. The colours rippled in the grudging daylight reflected off grey snow. The shawl, the lock of hair and the letters themselves were Mair’s only physical link to the story that remained full of obstinate knots.

One of Nerys’s letters had described the joyful upheaval of the return to Wales. In 1950, almost shyly, she wrote about the birth of her daughter. After that the letters became domestic recitals, sympathetic but general attempts to keep Caroline in touch with a world that was steadily leaving her behind. Mentions of Rainer and Zahra in the chronology became less and less frequent, and the certainty that they would reappear seemed to fade into puzzlement and, finally, the sad silence of acceptance.

Mair had scanned the pages so often that she knew some of them off by heart, and there were no more obvious clues that she could follow up.

She had plenty of evenings to spare, though, and she devoted many to the Internet. The National Archives eventually led her to Captain Ralph Bowen’s regimental records. He had been decorated for his bravery in Burma, and honourably discharged in 1945. He had died in 1978, without issue. There was no mention of a wife to survive him. Poor Caroline had been erased.

By searching the Scottish Family Records online, after many false starts she eventually uncovered Archibald Fraser McMinn of the Indian Railways. His wife Myrtle, née Brightman, had predeceased him, but Archie himself had lived on into the 1970s and had died in Edinburgh. The McMinns had had no children either.

Piecing everything together in the quiet evenings, the conclusion Mair eventually reached was that Zahra had most probably been Caroline’s child, but that the circumstances surrounding the birth had been kept secret even from her husband. Zahra had in some way been entrusted to Rainer’s care, and then the two of them had disappeared.

If this theory was correct, then Zahra was almost certainly dead. That Aruna had rebuked Mair for upsetting Mrs Bowen because she had lost her daughter long ago seemed to confirm this.

For the right dates, she found nothing under Rainer’s name but brief and confusing mentions in some books on magic tricks (could this be a different man?) and a pre-war collection of mountaineering anecdotes.

There was nothing more.

During the long hours in the quiet bookshop, Mair related instalments of the incomplete history of the shawl to Mandy, her bookseller friend.

‘It’s really interesting,’ Mandy said, over the rim of her coffee mug, before Mair went into the back room to unpack a new delivery of books. ‘You’ve put such a lot of time into investigating it, going to Kashmir and everything. Maybe you should write about it.’

Mair looked about her. The books lay in tiers and slabs, their jackets like so many coloured leaves, bright and imploring. There were plenty of them, more than enough, and the shawl story was private, her own history. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.



Spring came, late but exuberant. Business in the bookshop picked up a little.

Mair took a week’s holiday and went walking in Spain with some friends. A month later she was in Birmingham for Eirlys’s thirty-ninth birthday party. (‘I’m not mentioning next year’s event,’ Eirlys said.) She and Dylan had both been interested to read Nerys’s letters, and they looked at the picture of the three women on the houseboat in this new light. They listened politely to Mair’s account of her subsequent discoveries.

‘Mental institutions were quite barbaric in those days,’ Eirlys agreed. ‘When Caroline’s husband died and psychiatric care improved, they were probably relieved to be able to discharge her as mentally fit. Once the hospital was given notice to close, that would have been the convenient option anyway. How did she seem when you met her in Kashmir?’

‘Frail,’ Mair said, conjuring up the quiet room in Srinagar as she spoke. ‘Forgetful. But not insane.’

Eirlys nodded, sombre with the weight of medical insight.

In June, during a spell of hot weather, Hattie called Mair to say that she would be coming round to Mair’s flat to have a glass of wine with her after work. The door to the fire escape stood open and they took two kitchen stools out on to the metal platform, squeezing them in side by side. There was a faint breeze in the trees. Mair took a sip of her wine and waited.

‘Ed and I are going to get married,’ Hattie said.

Mair exclaimed, and hugged her friend. She said that they were made for each other, she was so happy that Hattie was going to do it, and Ed was lucky to have her. All this was true, and the dazzle of joy in Hattie’s face was the best picture Mair had seen for a long time. ‘Am I to be a bridesmaid?’ she demanded.

‘Just try to get out of it. I’m thinking of a pink theme, by the way.’

‘I’d really prefer to be in turquoise.’

‘Don’t start being difficult. You have to do what I want. It’s my ego trip, remember.’



‘Fine, Bridezilla.’

Mair had a bottle of champagne in her fridge. They drank it, and in the end Hattie had to leave her car behind and ring for a taxi to take her home.

After she had gone Mair sat down in her accustomed place at the computer. The shawl caught her eye. She was just drunk enough for the snag of an idea in her mind to embed itself and become a full-blown intention within seconds.

She went into her email list and found the one message she had received and saved from Bruno Becker, eight months before. She didn’t look at the contents because she didn’t need to.

At Lamayuru he had mentioned the name Rainer.

The click she had first heard when Caroline uttered the same name repeated in her head, just as loudly.

Here was the real link, she was suddenly convinced, not archives or records offices. Several times in the past months she had thought of contacting him, but she had always dismissed the idea. Bruno and Karen were mourning their daughter, and she had felt too diffident to approach them, either with further condolences or superficial questions about family history. There had been no response to her message; neither had she expected one. What was there to say, in threadbare words, in the face of such a loss?

But now, she judged, flushed with champagne certainty, now was the perfect time to write.

She began to type, quickly and nervously, unsure as to what extent she was using the query about Rainer to shield her real wish, which was to have news of the Beckers themselves. Thick-fingered, she made a series of typing errors and urgently corrected them, altering the wording until she was satisfied with the result. The final message was just a few lines long. She wrote that the two of them were often in her thoughts and she wondered how they were now. If they felt able, she would very much like to hear from them. Then she added that Bruno had once mentioned the mountaineer called Rainer, whom she believed from discoveries in Srinagar and recent researches might have a strange connection to her own family. Could he perhaps give her any more information?

She hesitated, then typed simply With love from Mair.

There was no question that Bruno and Karen wouldn’t remember who she was. She didn’t imagine that those days of waiting were ever far from their minds.

She pressed send. Then she sat staring at the screen for several minutes, as if a response might come immediately.



Nothing happened for two weeks.

Hattie and Ed were planning to get married just before Christmas.

‘A winter wedding,’ Hattie said dreamily. ‘Perhaps a little cloud of a cream fur jacket with a stand-up collar. Ivy and mistletoe and sparkling frost.’ From being an average-to-advanced cynic, she was melting into a dewy romantic. Mair humoured her, with equal parts of love and amusement.

Then, after an author reading event in the bookshop followed by a book signing featuring a free iced cupcake with every purchase, she came home late from the shop and found a reply from Bruno in her inbox.

He apologised for the late response, then said it had been good to hear from her and added that he had been away in the mountains. He thanked her for her kind thoughts, and said there had been some black times but he was doing all right, more or less, and so was Karen. About Rainer Stamm he knew little, only that he might have been killed in a motor accident in Kashmir in 1945. But no body or bodies had ever been found.

There were some other things he could tell her, but perhaps it would be simpler if she telephoned him. He gave a Swiss number. Best wishes, Bruno.

Mair looked automatically at the clock. It was an hour later in Switzerland, she was almost certain. Too late to call now, and also too eager-seeming. She smiled to herself about having become a lonely spinster bookseller. Right on cue the cat belonging to the people downstairs appeared in the doorway to offer her his company.

She waited until the following evening, then dialled the Swiss number.

Bruno answered, just one word, but she knew his voice at once. The receiver seemed slippery in her hand.

‘It’s Mair.’

‘Hey,’ he said.

Afterwards she didn’t remember the sequence of their conversation, just that it seemed to continue from where it had broken off in Lamayuru. He spoke more slowly than before, with a suggestion of hesitancy, as if all that had once been certain was no longer to be taken for granted. When she asked about Karen the pause was even longer.

‘She is living in a consciousness-raising collective for the bereaved, in New Mexico.’

Mair groped for a response. ‘A Buddhist one?’

To her relief, Bruno laughed. ‘I’m not sure. Could be a one-size-fits-all-faiths sort of set-up. Karen and I split up, Mair.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Thank you. It happened very quickly after Lotus died. Her death was like – an explosion, I suppose. Silence, then shock waves, falling masonry, shards of glass piercing what hadn’t been crushed.’ She could hear the rise and fall of his breathing. ‘It became obvious almost immediately that Karen and I couldn’t help each other at all. That forced us to acknowledge we’d have to separate. It was sad, but there wasn’t too much animosity. Neither of us had the strength to be angry at that point. I expect Karen’s working through her anger now. It’s not unusual, I’ve heard, for couples to be blown apart by the death of a child.’

‘What have you been doing?’ Mair asked gently.

‘I resigned from my job. I didn’t know how to – to be a clockwork person. I came up here to the mountains. I’m surviving in a sort of cabin. I walk a lot. Sometimes I take a tent and some supplies and go even higher up to camp. That’s where I’ve been for the last couple of weeks. It’s beautiful. You … should see the view I’m looking out at. It would remind you of Ladakh.’

‘You sound as if you’re doing better than surviving,’ Mair told him. She didn’t know whether she was more impressed by his honesty or the route to survival that he had chosen.

‘I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like less than that. She was so perfect. And she is so very conclusively and absolutely gone.’ There was a silence. Then he said, ‘Tell me why and what you want to know about Rainer Stamm.’

Mair collected herself, with difficulty. She explained as succinctly as she could.

Bruno broke in to say he remembered everything she had told him about tracing the history of her grandmother’s Kashmir shawl.

Mair added, ‘There are some letters. It turns out that Rainer knew my grandmother in Srinagar, and two of her friends. The shawl belonged to one of them – her name was Caroline. I met her, she’s living in Srinagar again now. At the end of the war Rainer disappeared, taking a child with him. I think that child might have been Caroline’s.’

There was a silence.

Then Bruno said, ‘Prita died fifteen years ago, you know.’

‘I didn’t know. I haven’t heard about anyone called Prita.’

‘Prita was Rainer’s Indian wife. She brought Zahra up as her own daughter.’

Mair thought she might have misheard. ‘Zahra?’

‘That’s right. Prita Stamm and the little girl were more or less bequeathed to my parents’ care when they reached Switzerland after the end of the war. I knew them all the time I was growing up.’

Mair’s thoughts tumbled over each other. Here was the link at last. Here was the continuous thread … Her eyes widened as she realised the significance. ‘Is Zahra still alive?’

‘Oh, yes. She’s in her late sixties now. Prita and she went back to India after Zahra graduated from university here. We keep in touch, but it’s only a card now and again. We’d planned to visit her on the way home last year.’

Mair listened to the echo of his words. There was still too much to take in, and too much to try to say on the telephone. She said, on a sudden impulse, ‘Bruno, may I come out to see you?’

‘Of course,’ he answered.



The train journey from Zürich airport took almost four hours on four different trains, but every connection worked to the minute. The last leg of it was on a little cog railway that took her up the side of a mountain through pine forests and past lush Alps dotted with brown cows. Through the open window flooded huge draughts of sweet-scented air carrying the jingle of cowbells. Mair craned her neck to look up at snow-covered peaks that brought to mind lake reflections in Srinagar and the circle of mountains enclosing Leh. She felt as if she had travelled back a year in time.

At last the train reached the end station. She stepped off in a shoulder-high tide of Japanese tourists wearing sun visors, and a surprising contingent of Hassidim in long black coats and wide-brimmed hats.

Beyond a little cluster of station buildings and hotels, the earth slipped away into blue air ahead and behind her, but to the right and left it was as if it had been grasped by a giant’s hand and twisted up into vast monuments of rock and ice. A glacier slashed with huge crevasses hung over a dizzy rock-fall of moraine.

Mair stood still and gazed.

‘Hey,’ a voice said. A hand lightly touched her shoulder.

She swung round to see Bruno. His weatherbeaten face was noticeably thinner than the last time she had seen it, but he was familiar in a way she hadn’t expected.

‘You look surprised,’ he said.

‘This scenery? Awestruck would be closer.’

He nodded, his dark eyes on her face. Suddenly she heard the chop of rotor blades and saw him with Lotus in his arms, running towards the helicopter.

‘Welcome to the Oberland,’ he said. He hoisted her bag and swung it over his shoulder. ‘Can you walk up the hill? There’s no other way to get to the cabin, I’m afraid.’

They left the Japanese and the Hassidim milling between café sunshades and souvenir stalls and began to climb. A ribbon of path zigzagged over the hillside towards a scree slope.

Mair put her head down and followed on Bruno’s heels. Leaves and long grasses brushed her ankles – she saw now that the entire hillside was thick with wild flowers: blue campanula bells and starry marguerites, yellow doronicum, tangle-headed wisps of Alpine anemone and baroque spires of giant thistle. Dark blue veronica edged the path. If this was really the way to Bruno’s house it was the loveliest station commute she could imagine.

The path angled vertiginously across the scree.

She was glad when they reached the shoulder and Bruno stopped to hoist her bag to his other side.

‘Thank you for carrying my stuff.’

‘It’s steep. You’re pretty strong.’

She was pleased by this. Turning back to look at the way they had climbed, Mair’s breath was taken away again. Below them lay the station and the little green train, like a child’s toy, winding its way back down to the valley. Across the saddle the giant peaks now seemed close enough to reach out and touch.

Bruno pointed. ‘Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger,’ he said.

The face presented to them by the mountain called the Eiger was a black pyramid of concave rock rising sheer for thousands of feet. The sight of it made Mair shiver.

‘That’s the Nordwand,’ Bruno said. ‘North face.’

‘At Lamayuru you told me about Rainer attempting to climb that.’

‘Yes. His guide was my grandfather. They both came very close to death, and their survival forged a friendship.’



They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring across at the rock wall.

‘Come,’ Bruno said at length. ‘It’s not far from here.’

Downhill now, at an angle, winding deeper into a remote landscape of empty air over rolling turf with a pile as velvety as the finest Kashmir carpet. Far down in the valley Mair could see clusters of chalets and the glint of traffic on threadlike roads.

They scrambled over a ridge and a tiny lake of extreme blue appeared just below them, set like a sapphire in a green ring of ground. At the opposite bank, on a broad wedge of land, a small cabin stood among the flowers. There were four windows, two by two, each with a window box spilling scarlet geraniums.

In the doorway, Bruno bowed. He seemed more Swiss here in his own setting.

‘Welcome,’ he said again.

The cabin was constructed of logs, and there was a low pitched roof of wooden shingles. The eaves projected a long way all round, and in the shade at the front there was a wooden platform with two benches, one on either side of the door. To the left-hand side there was a flat wall of logs, stacked with such intricate attention that it would have been difficult to slide a finger between the cut faces.

Inside there were wide wooden floorboards and a square metal stove. At the windows were red and white gingham curtains and on a solid wooden table stood a blue jug of flowers.

‘It’s quite primitive,’ Bruno said. ‘Lake water, earth closet, candles or oil lamps. I’ve rigged solar panels on the roof, though. They heat a small hot-water tank for washing. I could make it more comfortable, of course, but I rather like it as it is.’

‘Don’t change it too much. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen,’ Mair said.

To her surprise, he smiled with pleasure. It was the first time this afternoon that she had seen him do so.



‘Do you think so? My father used to bring me here every summer. It’s just a shepherd’s hut, really.’

He showed her the way up a ladder through a trapdoor in the corner of the beamed ceiling. Up here two small rooms were separated by a rough plank wall. Mair’s had a single mattress on the floor, made up with white sheets and a patchwork quilt. There was a faded rag rug, and a row of wooden pegs on the wall, nothing more. The window was at knee height. She was touched to see a pale blue towel laid on the quilt, neatly folded with one corner doubled back. Bruno had prepared a welcome for his guest.

He withdrew his head from the trapdoor and she unpacked her few things and hung them on the pegs. As she climbed down again she glimpsed his room. There were piles of books, another single mattress, hardly more clothes on his row of pegs than she had brought with her for a stay of three days. It was clear that he lived simply.

Downstairs Bruno showed her out to the neat kitchen with its stone sink and modern bottled-gas cooker. A row of pots and enamel plates and two glasses stood on a wooden shelf. Outside in a lean-to was the lavatory. A tiny porthole cut in the door gave a circular view of a clenched fist of ice and snow high on the Nordwand.

A kettle whistled on the gas and Bruno made tea. Looking around her, Mair noticed a wind-up radio, a laptop computer. On a shelf of new-looking wood there was a photograph of Lotus in a Perspex frame. Her hair blew off her face like a cloud of white candyfloss. Bruno’s gaze slid across it.

‘Most days I walk down to the station buffet the way we came,’ he said. ‘My friend Christoph’s the boss there. I drink an espresso and read the newspaper and they let me charge my phone and computer.’

They carried their cups outside and took a bench each.

Mair stretched out her legs and rested her head against warm, splintery wood. The snow and ice walls glittered in the crystal air. With so much space around her she had the luxurious sense that there was infinite time to ask all the questions that simmered in her head.

In his new, hesitant way Bruno told her about his life in the cabin.

‘When I first came up here there was still snow on the ground. I’d wake up to find chamois and hare prints passing the door. I’d put on my skis and follow them as far as I could. If I’m in a hurry, I walk as far as the station and get the train on down to the village you came through to buy food and pick up emails, but there is no hurry. I keep a bike at the station so I usually cycle or even walk all the way there and back again. It only takes a couple of hours. At the … beginning, after she died, I’d walk and walk, from dawn until dark. As fast and as far as I could, until I was ready to drop. As if I could ever walk away from what happened. I realised, in the end, that that was what I was trying to do. It’s better now I know that much.’

Mair nodded, full of sorrow and sympathy.

Her impulse was to jump up and hold him in her arms, but she resisted it. Bruno was tough, even though he spoke with such raw frankness. He didn’t need her mothering.

They drank their tea and watched birds gliding over the ridge.

After a while he said, ‘I collected this from my sister, when I knew you were coming. She lives in Bern.’ He brought out a big album with heavy black boards split and frayed at the corners. He turned pages until he found what he was looking for.

‘This is Rainer Stamm, with my grandfather, in 1937.’

It was a deckle-edged black-and-white photograph of two men wearing breeches with braces and flannel shirts. They were standing in front of what appeared to be a station halt somewhere in the mountains. Both of them were smoking, smiling, squinting a little against strong sunlight.

Mair looked for a long time.

The pin-up. Caroline’s words.

‘He was rather handsome, wasn’t he?’ she said.



‘Prita was only married to him for a matter of weeks before he died, but she never took up with another man in Switzerland, or India, as far as I know. She told me once that the European ladies in Srinagar adored him.’

Remembering the picture of Nerys, in a moment of high happiness, Mair thought, maybe.

Quite possibly Grandma had been one of those ladies. It was wartime. There would have been the opportunity, after all – she knew from Hope and the Glory of God that missionaries were often away in the field. She found herself hoping that Nerys had indeed stolen some romantic moments with the pin-up. It would have given her some wicked, glamorous memories to help her through the Welsh years of chapel, village politics, and being the preacher’s wife that must have followed. Mair had never envied her grandmother’s way of life, or her mother’s.

‘Would you like some more tea?’ Bruno’s voice made her jump.

‘Yes, please.’ She smiled.

Later, while Bruno was frying potatoes and schnitzel, she leafed through the other Becker family pictures. In two or three Prita was a small upright figure, at the end of the line or standing a little apart. What must it have been like for her, she wondered, an Indian widow so far from home? But Mrs Stamm had an indomitable look. She was a survivor.

They ate facing each other at the wooden table, yellow-lit by an oil lamp.

‘You’re a good cook,’ she said appreciatively.

‘Karen didn’t like cooking. It’s strange to be making food for someone other than myself up here.’ Mair listened to the silence that seeped around them. ‘Strange but good,’ he added. ‘Thank you for coming all this way.’

Afterwards they took glasses of schnapps out to their benches. The sky faded from royal blue to infinite darkness, with the mountains radiating spectral light.

‘We drank all that cognac at Lamayuru,’ she said deliberately. She didn’t want to remind him but neither did she want there to be topics they had to steer away from. But he seemed relieved to remember the place. He had spent a lot of time alone recently and she guessed that the words came more easily out of doors, looking ahead into the darkness, than face to face in the lamplight.

He said, ‘I remember everything we talked about. And the food they gave us, and the faces of the drivers sitting opposite, and the snow when we went out to the yard.’

Cold snapped suddenly out of the silence and drove them back inside the cabin.

‘I go to bed very early,’ he said awkwardly. She knew that he needed solitude.

Lying on her mattress, listening to the cabin creaking around her ears, Mair thought that this could be one of the most romantic places in the world, including the lake at Srinagar. The creaking wood even echoed the protests of Solomon and Sheba as it sank lower in the water. This sapphire lake was a miniature of the other, reflecting its own shimmering peaks. Even the wild flowers splashed the same colours as her grandmother’s shawl.

She had a strange sense of time tucking inside itself, folding, dovetailing with minute precision.

On the other side of the plank wall Bruno was absolutely silent. He didn’t clear his throat or turn over. She thought he must be lying on his back too, staring up towards the old beams.

Soon she slept.



There was a delicious smell of coffee and frying bacon.

She yawned her way down the ladder.

‘Eggs with your bacon?’ Bruno asked, holding up a wooden spatula. He brushed aside her protests, saying that they were going walking and she would need to fuel up.

‘If you want to go higher into the hills, of course?’ he added. It struck her that he was uncertain of her response, but that he wanted to please her. The realisation made her skin prickle as if it had become electrostatic.

They set off from the hut, uphill along a high mountain path, then negotiating a moraine ridge. Bruno pointed to the chains of peaks and named each one for her. He also began to tell her what else he knew about Rainer Stamm.

The mystery of his disappearance or death had never been solved although the official explanation, that he had skidded off a Kashmir mountain road when Prita and the child were already aboard ship on their way to Europe, had enabled his wife – eventually – to inherit his estate. He had left everything he had to her, including a house in Interlaken.

‘There is another story, though,’ Bruno said.

‘Go on.’ Mair was panting for breath and it was much easier to listen than try to talk.

‘In 1945 there was an attempt by a Swiss-American climbing team to conquer Nanga Parbat.’

‘Nanga Parbat again?’

Tinley and his ancient uncle, smoking bidis in the graveyard at Leh and waiting while she read the inscriptions. She had discovered the memorial to Cambridge mathematician Matthew Forbes, lost in an avalanche on the mountain.

‘Exactly. Again.’

Mair glanced back over her shoulder, towards the wall of the Eiger.

‘There were three Western names on the climbing permit for that ’forty-five expedition. Two Americans and a Swiss by the name of Martin Brunner.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, Brunner was killed. He had gone up with one of the sherpas to recce a higher camp and there was a storm. The sherpa eventually made it back to rejoin the Americans, but Brunner had been injured in a fall and couldn’t down-climb. I tracked down the expedition report in the annals of the American Mountaineering Association, so I know the details.’

Bruno walked at the same sure pace, uphill or down, whatever the ground. Mair had to watch where she placed her feet and it was a moment before she was able to ask, ‘Why were you so interested in this Martin Brunner?’

He glanced at her, enjoying keeping her in suspense. The hesitancy in his voice had disappeared as they talked more. He was a good storyteller.

‘Because he didn’t exist. There are no Swiss records of a climber by that name. His details on the permit are false, too. They don’t relate to anyone.’

‘I see. Do I?’

Bruno raised an eyebrow. ‘Come on. You can guess.’

‘Brunner was really Rainer Stamm?’

‘I can’t prove it, but I believe so. My grandfather was guide to the Forbes family as well as Rainer, and he said that Rainer always promised Matthew’s father that he’d go back and claim Nanga Parbat in the boy’s honour. In the end it wasn’t climbed until 1953, by Hermann Buhl, just a few weeks after you British knocked off Everest.’

‘But why under a false identity?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know. Shall we stop here and have something to eat?’

Mair had begun to think they would walk all day but, to her relief, he led the way to a flat-topped rock. She sank down, resting her chin on her knees to marvel at the view. Bruno handed her a chunk of bread, some mountain cheese and an apple. The simple food tasted wonderful.

‘Rainer would have had his reasons for the assumed identity and for faking his own death. He was a magician as well as a mountaineer. An illusionist.’

‘Ah, I know about that.’ Mair laughed. ‘Because I looked him up too. It was confusing.’

Bruno was staring across to the black rock face where Rainer’s life had been saved by Victor Becker.

Mair thought, That same man was perhaps my grandmother’s lover, certainly her good friend. Her sense of time’s intricate dovetailing grew even stronger. She murmured, ‘It’s sad, isn’t it? Rainer was newly married, he was performing some kind of disappearing trick with his own life, and then he actually disappeared trying to claim Nanga Parbat in memory of a boy who had already died on the mountain. I do know that for years afterwards my grandmother was waiting and hoping for news of him.’

Bruno said, ‘Yes, that’s sad. But perhaps she also understood what made him who he was. Many lives were lost on Nanga Parbat before Buhl climbed it. Sixteen men on a single day in 1937. Rainer would have known all that, but still he went. Perhaps he needed to live and to risk death in that way, because extreme risk was in the end the only reality he could subscribe to. Maybe the gravity of mountains and the weightlessness of magical illusion were always opposing within him. He probably hid the compulsion even from the people he loved. He must have been a fascinating character. Do you think your grandmother loved him?’

‘Yes, I do. And, yes, I think you’re probably right.’

The shawl, the photograph, the lock of hair.

The quirks of history that linked her to Bruno Becker, the vertiginous face of the mountain confronting them – all these things made a pattern that seemed, in that moment, part of a bigger and only partly intelligible design.

This realisation made Mair feel happy in a profound way that seemed entirely new to her.

‘Now it’s time to talk about Zahra,’ she said.

Bruno stood up and shook breadcrumbs off his lap. Two Alpine choughs greedily descended on them.

‘Later,’ he said, the adept storyteller again. ‘Can you remember the mountain names? What’s that one?’ He pointed at a vast tumble of rock and snow.

‘Um, is it the Wetterhorn?’

‘Good,’ he said.



They ate dinner back at the cabin, and afterwards Bruno lit the oil lamps. They were sitting inside with the door closed because clouds had drifted across the sky and a chill wind rolled down off the glacier. He took another book off the shelf and opened it. With her head bent close to his, Mair saw that it was a more modern photograph album with sticky plastic interleaving the pages. Some of the pictures were even in fading colour.

‘This is Zahra.’

A solemn little girl with dark brown hair worn in two looped plaits, lined up with a row of other children in school dresses. Her skin was darker than her companions’, but not distinctly so.

‘And here.’ Bruno pointed.

She was a teenager in this one, short-haired, dressed in jeans and a blue-checked shirt. Her face was more clearly visible and Mair studied it for any resemblance to Caroline Bowen. She could see none at all. Zahra had aquiline features and dark eyebrows that almost met at the bridge of her nose.

‘There’s only one more. Mine wasn’t a family for photographing every rite of passage.’

Zahra stood near the top of a flight of stone steps with Prita on the one above her. Their heads were level. Prita’s hair was greying now, centre-parted and drawn loosely back. Zahra was perhaps twenty, solemn and formal in a dark skirt and jacket. Even in their Western clothes, Mair thought, they looked distinctly Kashmiri. Their features were quite different but they could have been taken for biological mother and daughter because of something poised about the way they looked into the camera, heads up and gaze unwavering. She reflected that the two of them must have been closer than many natural mothers and daughters because of their difference from their Swiss friends and neighbours.

Bruno answered an unspoken question. ‘That must have been taken when Zahra was at university. Prita and she always had an understanding that once Zahra had finished her education they would go back to Kashmir.’

He collected his two glasses from the shelf and poured schnapps, slid one across the table to Mair. ‘My father told me that they often joked about it together. Before the maharajah finally acceded to India, he used to claim that he wanted Kashmir to be a sort of Asian Switzerland. Independent, neutral, on friendly terms with all its neighbours. Prita and Zahra would say that Maharajah Hari Singh originally had the right idea, at least. They knew that much from the real Switzerland.’

‘So they went back?’

‘Yes, not long after that picture. It was in the mid-seventies, before the really bad times of the insurgency, but you more or less know what they found.’

Mair did.

‘Srinagar became a dangerous place. They settled eventually in Delhi. Zahra taught European languages at one of the universities.’

‘Did she marry?’

Bruno gave one of his rare smiles, and drained his schnapps. ‘Yes. She had three boys. I believe one is a pilot, one is a software designer, one is an architect.’

Mair beamed with satisfaction. ‘How wonderful.’

‘It is, rather. I’d like very much to have been able to visit her in Delhi.’

The yellow light of the lamp hollowed darker shadows out of Bruno’s face. In the silence that followed they listened to the rising wind and the old cabin creaking like a ship at sea. Bruno’s eyes were on the photograph of Lotus with her white hair blown into a cloud around her head. ‘In a few more weeks, it will be a whole year since she died.’

As gently as she could, she asked, ‘Will you be here on your own?’

‘I don’t think I shall be fit company for anyone else.’

‘Bruno …’

‘I know. She’s dead and she won’t come back, and those of us who are left behind have to pick up and carry on without her. I’m doing it, Mair. But it takes time and an effort of will.’ His head dropped suddenly into his hands and he clawed his fingers through his hair. With his face hidden he said, in a muffled voice made jagged by pain, ‘It takes so much effort. To wake, to exist for another day, to sleep – or try to. Over and over again, living while all the time Lotus is dead.’

She got up from her seat and went to him. This time she couldn’t stop herself. She put her hands on his bowed shoulders. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you to do anything any differently. I wouldn’t have the cheek, when you’re already braver than it seems possible to be. I was going to say that if you wanted someone to stay with you, even nearby, I’ll be here. I was at Lamayuru. I saw how it happened. There would be nothing to explain.’

She had meant it in the sense that there would be no need to describe the sequence of those events to someone who had not witnessed them, but he flinched under her hands.

‘She was so innocent and trusting and yet we couldn’t keep her safe. I can never explain that away.’

‘There’s no explanation to be made. Not about what happened, or how. It was a terrible accident.’

He was choking now with sobs. Mair’s face was wet too. She cradled his head against her ribs and waited as he wept.

In the end he raised his head and she immediately released her hold. Her hands retained the memory of his skull shape and the thickness of his hair. She went back to her seat and, after a last look at Prita and Zahra, she closed the photograph album.

‘I could hear your heart beating,’ Bruno said. There was an odd, disbelieving glimmer in his face that she read as hope. In a voice so low that she could barely hear the words, he added, ‘Another human heart.’

He reached for the bottle and refilled their glasses. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said. ‘Can we do that? I’m surprised to realise it but I’ve enjoyed today. I’d forgotten what it’s like to talk and have someone listen, taking in what you say and measuring it up and shaping an answer in a voice different from your own, instead of the monologue going on and on in your own head. I’ve been alone too long. I don’t want to talk about Lo any more, though. I will do eventually, if you’ll listen, but I’m not ready yet. Is that all right, Mair?’

His words were falling over each other now, all the hesitancy obliterated.

‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘That’s quite all right. You could tell me some more about Prita and Zahra, maybe. Were they very close?’

He listened to the wind for a few seconds. Then he settled back in his seat, ready for the story. Mair found that she breathed more easily.

‘Yes, they were. There were a few disagreements, I think. Zahra was my father’s generation but she was quite modern in her outlook, and Prita was very traditional. But by the time I was old enough to notice anything, they were devoted to each other. They came back here two or three times while I was growing up to visit my father and their other friends. Prita used to give me Indian sweets in amazing colours, and I thought that was very exotic. Zahra taught me some words of Urdu.’

‘Did she know about her background?’

‘Oh, yes, Prita never concealed anything. Zahra knew that she was an orphan adopted from the mission in Srinagar.’

‘My grandfather’s mission,’ Mair put in.

They looked at each other across the table. The two halves of the story that they held between them fitted together as neatly as two nutshells enclosing a single kernel.

‘Prita was a widow whose own son had died at about the same age as Zahra was when they arrived in Europe. Prita herself was legally married to Rainer so, of course, as a wife and then a presumed widow once more she was able to come to Switzerland and inherit his estate. Zahra arrived with her, somehow or other, probably as the result of one of Rainer’s magical flourishes aimed at concealing an illegitimate birth. That is, if all your theories are correct. Eventually Zahra became a Swiss national too. As far as we were all concerned, all of us who knew them, they were a mother and her daughter.’



Bruno paused. He added, in a lower voice, ‘I’m quite certain that to one another they were mother and daughter too.’

Mair had the same thought. Yet she believed – no, she knew – that Zahra’s natural mother was still alive, and living in a quiet house in a suburb of Srinagar. Should she bring them together, after so long? Was it right to intervene in other people’s lives and play with their histories?

The two halves lay in her hands now, and Bruno’s.

She had no proof: only a theory, a sheaf of letters, a lock of hair and a kani shawl. And a man sitting opposite her who had lost his daughter, just as Caroline Bowen believed she had lost hers. The agony of that loss was plain to see. Sixty-odd years might have diminished it for Caroline, but she had spent perhaps as much as half of that time in a lunatic asylum.

Mair sat upright. There was no doubt in her mind that the secret wasn’t hers to keep, now that she had unravelled it. ‘I’m going to go back to India to see them both,’ she said, ‘if you will give me Zahra’s address.’

Bruno stared at the lamp flame and said nothing.

Mair waited.

Then she added softly, ‘Or perhaps you could come with me and we could visit Zahra together. That was the plan, wasn’t it?’

He did look at her now, remembering.

She saw something else in his face, a contraction of the eye muscles and tightening around his mouth, and she knew that it was fear.

Bruno was afraid to leave his shell, the safety of his cabin in the mountains, and venture out into the world again.

He shook his head. ‘I would hold you back,’ he said oddly.

‘No,’ she contradicted. ‘I don’t think so. The history isn’t all mine, is it? Half of it is yours to tell.’

‘I don’t know.’

But he did: she could see that in his face too. Outside concerns were intruding into the isolation of grief.

In silence he battled with himself as rain drummed on the cabin roof. Mair rinsed the glasses in the sink, put the bottle back on the shelf, and climbed the ladder to her bedroom while he still sat at the table. She was in bed, lying in darkness when his head and shoulders framed themselves in the doorway. ‘All right. I’ll come to India with you.’

He closed the door on her and the latch clicked.