The Kashmir Shawl

SEVEN


The band struck up and the maharajah himself led out Mrs Fanshawe for the first waltz of the Resident’s Autumn Ball.

Nerys watched from the thicket of gold chairs at the side of the ballroom. Mrs Fanshawe in silvery lamé, with feathers nodding in her hair, was entirely outshone by her partner, who wore a jade-green brocade frock coat with a massive emerald fastened among a cluster of lesser gems in his turban. After a respectful interval the floor slowly filled with other couples, European wives and daughters wearing elbow-length white gloves with their ballgowns, as Residency protocol demanded, partnered by a sprinkling of uniformed British and Indian officers, portly dinner-jacketed civilians, handsome men of the maharajah’s retinue, and representatives of the various upper echelons of Residency staff. There was a scent of dried lavender, camphor and face powder.

The wives of the Hindu guests didn’t dance in public but they had been present at the dinner beforehand, splendid in silk saris that made them look like a flock of exotic birds. Nerys wondered if they had withdrawn to one of the Residency’s salons to admire one another’s cascades of gold jewellery and privately indulge in unrestricted gossip. Over the silver plate and crystal glasses at dinner the general talk had been of the unseasonably cold weather, the looming probability of war in Asia, the inconvenience of forthcoming rationing and – in whispers – of the latest Srinagar social scandal. Nerys had been in the city for only three weeks but she had already met Angela Gibson, the wife at the centre of the latest murmurings, and her husband had been pointed out to her at several gatherings.

It was odd to realise how quickly you could be drawn into this vortex, even someone as socially marginal as herself.

The thought of the whispers and gossip made her sit up and smooth the skirt of her dance dress, the first she had ever owned. It was rose-pink silk, made up for her by Myrtle’s tailor from a pattern in The Colonial Lady’s Fashion Companion, and she was wearing it tonight with a corsage and a pair of long white gloves borrowed from Myrtle. Myrtle had also rolled up her hair for her, dabbed French perfume behind her ears, and even applied some makeup.

When she had finished, Myrtle had stood back to admire her handiwork. ‘Nerys Watkins, you have a mouth like a film star,’ she proclaimed. ‘If I were a man, I’d want to join the queue to kiss it.’

‘What?’ Nerys examined her own barely recognisable reflection.

Myrtle snapped open her beaded evening bag and stowed away her gold cigarette case and lighter. ‘I said if, darling. I’m not that way, not even at my hideous boarding school, where such behaviour was not unknown, believe me. But if we all have to do without our men for much longer, who knows?’

Smiling at the memory of this exchange, which until recently would have seemed deeply shocking, Nerys glanced round for her friend. Myrtle was in dull-gold satin, exotic among her powdery British compatriots because of her short black hair and scarlet lips. Naturally enough she was at the animated centre of a circle of interested men, but Nerys would have wagered her grandparents’ legacy – or what was left of it, after she had made the substantial payment to the tailor – that Archie McMinn had nothing to worry about.



Rubicund Mr Fanshawe now foxtrotted past, steering a plump woman decked in dowager’s purple. Nerys wasn’t nearly high up enough in the pecking order to be honoured with a dance herself, but the Resident had greeted her cordially at the reception before dinner. ‘Mrs Watkins, welcome to Srinagar. Is Mrs McMinn looking after you? Will your husband be joining us soon?’

She had explained that Evan was still very busy with outreach work in Kargil, but that he hoped to reach Kashmir in good time before the winter closed in. As she said this, she heard the warning of the cold wind, sharp with ice, that rattled the branches of the chinar trees in the Mogul gardens.

‘I’ll look forward to meeting him,’ the Resident said, in his polished way, and the line of guests shuffled forward.

Nerys studied the pearl buttons at the wrist of her glove. What would Evan think if he could see her now, dressed up and lipsticked, slightly dizzy and fond with the Residency’s fruit punch?

She told herself that, as he wasn’t here, it really didn’t matter what he might or might not think.

The gold chair directly in front of her was twirled aside. ‘Good evening, Mrs Watkins,’ a voice said. ‘Our acquaintance did begin in an unorthodox manner, but maybe you will overlook that.’

She looked up to see tawny hair and a wide smile. ‘Good evening, Mr Stamm,’ she rejoined.

He didn’t wear patent-leather dancing pumps, like the other male guests, but a pair of serviceable black oxfords lightly rimmed with riverbank mud. The rest of his evening clothes were unremarkable, except that they were unbrushed, but still he seemed more notable than any other man in the room, including the maharajah.

The band played a little louder, in a faster tempo, and the chandeliers sparkled even more brightly.

‘Shall we dance?’

It wasn’t like any other dance, in her extremely limited experience of such things. His right hand grasped hers at the proper angle and with the required firmness, and she felt the warmth of his fingers through her white kid glove. His left hand rested precisely in the small of her back and its caress made her sharply conscious of the three discrete layers – in her mind she counted them – of slippery fabric that separated her naked flesh from his.

They skimmed over the floor. When she finally met her partner’s eyes, she saw they were bright with pleasure and amusement. He was humming the waltz tune under his breath and he was so close to her that she felt these vibrations pass from his ribcage into her own body, connecting the rhythm of their steps so that they turned as one person, perfectly attuned and with their eyes still locked together. He was a good enough dancer to convince her that she was just as good.

Nerys thought she had better say something. ‘Your rope trick was very clever.’

‘Thank you. You must let me show you some of my other effects.’

‘Are you a magician, then?’

‘There’s nothing magical about magic, that’s the sad secret. It’s all practice and presentation.’

‘Oh dear. And I believed that my blowing on the knot was what did it.’

‘Perhaps it was,’ he murmured.

When the waltz ended they stood in a bubble of quiet, hands clasped, until the next began. They chatted now as they danced, like friends.

It was a little while – or perhaps a long time – later that Nerys noticed Myrtle watching them from the edge of the floor, her head cocked to one side and the light catching her diamond dress clips.

‘We have attracted the attention of your chaperone,’ Rainer Stamm said.

Nerys drew back from him, pretending to be offended. ‘Mr Stamm, I’m a married woman. I have no need of a chaperone.’

His laugh rose from the same place as the humming. ‘Won’t you please call me Rainer?’

‘Yes, Rainer.’

‘Nerys,’ he repeated softly, fitting the syllables to the music. ‘So, Nerys …’

With a catch on the r and a sibilant finish, she thought his pronunciation made her prosaic name sound beautiful. ‘May I ask you something?’ she began, and he inclined his head even closer. ‘The children I was with when you rescued me the other evening, the smallest ones, did you see them?’

‘I didn’t rescue you. But, yes, I saw them.’

‘I’d been at their house because they were trying to sell me a shawl. They’re very poor.’

‘Many people in Srinagar are very poor.’

‘I know that. It just happened that this family found me, and I feel that I let them down.’

In the intervening days, she had thought a good deal about the little family and their one bare room, the girl’s sharp-faced persistence and her mother’s exhausted smile.

‘What is it you want to do for them, Nerys?’

‘I’m a missionary’s wife,’ she began.

Rainer spun her into a turn a little faster than necessary and his hand weighted her spine. ‘Are you? So you want to convert them, is that it?’

‘No. It’s not that I don’t support my husband’s mission, of course, but I don’t have quite the same … the same desire to save souls.’

‘Assuming that they are not already saved by a different route?’

‘Yes, if you like. Last year we lived in Leh.’

He looked at her and she noticed now that his eyes were the colour of barley sugar. ‘I know Leh.’

‘I taught the school there. I don’t have any illusions about the value of what I was doing, but it was better for the children than nothing at all. They were fed a decent meal, and we played games and sang.’

‘There are schools in Srinagar.’

She sighed. ‘Yes. Of course there are.’

Another dance was ending and there was a drift of people towards the supper room. Nerys caught sight of the girl Myrtle and she had met at the club – Caroline Bowen, that was her name – standing in the centre of the room. There were two bright red patches on her cheekbones. Her partner was a tall, conspicuously handsome and autocratic-looking young Kashmiri man, who now gave her an exaggerated bow and stepped backwards.

Nerys felt the minute disturbance of the air as Rainer’s fingers traced her spine without actually touching it. She had to make herself concentrate on his words as his other hand gently released hers.

‘It sounds as if these people are pashmina-fibre spinners. The sad truth is that the traditional work they contribute to, kani shawl production, is beautiful and slow and no longer much sought after. The mills in England and Scotland can reproduce the old designs much more cheaply, and they turn out Kashmir-look shawls for a fraction of the price. The goods are exported back east, and the local people are squeezed out of the market.’

Kani: that was what the child had kept saying.

Nerys glanced round the room, at the wives, the bold, flirtatious girls and all their conscious displays of fashion, probably not quite the latest thing – even she was aware of that – because of the distance from Europe and the demands of the war but, still, there was so much money here.

‘Are you rich, Nerys?’ Rainer was asking.

She shook her head. ‘The opposite.’

His face softened and she noticed the pale creases around his lips and eyes where the sun hadn’t quite reached. ‘Maybe there is something you could do for this family. I am too distracted to talk about it now, watching out for the cavalry officer who’s going to pounce at any second and claim you for his partner.’

‘I don’t know any cavalry officers.’

‘I am relieved to hear it. May I escort you to supper, madam?’

Nerys took the arm he held out. She felt giddy from the way their connection was racing ahead of her, hurdling the fences of convention and galloping towards – she didn’t know where or what. She must tell Rainer that Evan would soon be arriving in Srinagar and make it clear that they planned to return to Leh, most probably now in the spring, to continue the work of the Nonconformist outreach there. That would be quite proper.

There was a sudden disturbance in the centre of the room.

A girl’s voice had been raised briefly and now there was a whisper as the crowd parted.

Nerys first saw the aquiline man with the imperious bearing, smiling in his formal long silk coat. Then came Caroline Bowen, her head down to hide her flushed face. She was walking away from him so fast that the heel of her shoe snagged the train of her dress and she almost stumbled. Nerys caught her arm and held her as she passed, and they swayed awkwardly before the girl regained her balance. ‘So sorry,’ she cried. She looked as if she might burst into tears or into a hoot of laughter, as if she didn’t know which way her emotions might swing.

‘Are you all right?’ Nerys asked.

‘Perfectly,’ she insisted, with an air of wild gaiety. ‘Perfectly. Hot, you know. Fresh air.’ She fanned her fingers in front of her face and broke away from them both.

‘Let me come with you,’ Nerys said. Making her way out of a knot of watching faces, some smirking, some concerned, others flatly curious, came Myrtle. They fell in on either side of Caroline and the three women swept out of the room. Nerys just had time to glance back over her shoulder at Rainer, who calmly nodded.

In the Residency’s wide entrance hallway there were fewer inquisitive onlookers. Myrtle steered Caroline’s gloved elbow. ‘You know the house. Where can we go that’s private?’

The girl hesitated. She looked much closer to tears than hysterical laughter now. ‘I can’t think. Wait a minute – there’s the salon.’

She led the way. A closed door was guarded by a Residency servant in scarlet livery, but he bowed respectfully and opened it for them as soon as he recognised Caroline.

The Residency salon was a replica of an English country-house drawing room. There were sofas with chintz covers, backed by tables piled with books and magazines. A grand piano stood in the curtained window bay and only the flowers, scarlet cannas, puckered cockscombs and vivid gladioli, instead of sweet peas and delphiniums, gave a clue that this was not the home counties. Myrtle steered their charge to one of the sofas and sat her down. At once Caroline’s whole body began to shiver. She put her hands up to her face and smothered a sob as tears ran down her cheeks and soaked into her gloves.

Myrtle took hold of her shoulders and briskly shook her. ‘Listen to me. You cannot, you must not, make a spectacle of yourself like this. Never again. Do you understand me? However bad it is – and you’d better tell us right now just how bad – you have to keep up public appearances. That is your job. Your husband is an Indian Army officer, you are a family friend of the Fanshawes. At the very least you owe them all dignified behaviour. You owe yourself much more than that, incidentally.’

The girl’s sobs grew louder. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she choked. ‘I love him.’

Myrtle sighed. She patted Caroline’s silky pale shoulder and waited while the storm of sobbing reached its peak and then showed signs of blowing itself out. She shook a starched handkerchief out of her evening bag and handed it to her.

‘Should I go?’ Nerys murmured.

‘Yes,’ Caroline gulped.



Myrtle said, ‘No. Nerys is a friend and you need more than one, my girl. Are you ready for a glass of water?’

‘I’d rather a whisky.’

‘I think you’ve had enough to drink.’

A jug and a pair of cut-crystal glasses stood on a tray. Nerys poured water and put the glass into Caroline’s hand. The girl sniffed dolefully and sipped at it with her head down.

‘Now then.’ Myrtle lit a cigarette. Nerys could hear the music from the ballroom. In the supper interlude, the band was attempting a piece of Debussy, which was less kind to the players’ shortcomings than the dance tunes.

‘I love him,’ Caroline repeated. This time there was a chip of defiance in her voice.

‘All right. If you insist. These things happen.’

Over the girl’s head, Myrtle caught Nerys’s eye. She pulled down the corners of her mouth to underline the seriousness of the situation, but then she countered the effect by winking. ‘But you are British, and married. There are ways to deal with affairs like this, and making a public scene is most emphatically not one of them. What were you thinking of? Do you think Ravi Singh is pleased by your discretion and decorum?’

‘I didn’t mean to make a scene.’

‘You succeeded, though.’ Myrtle’s tone remained frosty, but she took Caroline’s hand between hers and squeezed it. ‘Tell us what’s up, eh? We can work it out between the three of us, you know.’

‘I had a letter from … from my husband. The regiment has been granted a last-minute forty-eight-hour deployment leave, and he will be here tomorrow. I waited until Ravi asked me to dance, and he did that very properly after dancing first with Rosalind Dunphy and Jean Whittaker, so there was no reason for any of those old witches from the club to notice anything. Then I told him. I thought he would … he would …’

Two more tears dropped into the lap of Caroline’s gown.



‘You thought that at the very least he would be jealous, was that it? You dreamt that he might even insist you didn’t see your husband. Your gallant knight was going to sweep you over the pommel of his saddle and gallop off with you. But instead he bowed and changed the subject. Did he comment on the band, or the cold weather, or the war news? And so you screeched out your disappointment and desperation in front of everyone?’

‘It wasn’t like that. You don’t understand.’ Caroline had gone so pale that Nerys thought she was going to be sick.

Myrtle circled her with her arm now and drew the girl’s head down on to her shoulder. ‘I’m trying to understand,’ she said gently. ‘You think this is your only hope of love, your first and last and only hope, and you can’t let it go, even though you know somewhere inside you that Ravi Singh isn’t really what you want. But he’s handsome and virile, and he’s whispered to you all kinds of sweet and private things that no one’s ever said to you before, hasn’t he?’

Mute, Caroline nodded.

‘Of course he has. You’re very pretty, and you flatter him. But that’s all it is. Ravi will marry whoever his mother picks out for him. He’s the maharajah’s cousin. He has his place here in Kashmir, even though Srinagar is a troubled city. Whatever dream you may have, however much you may be prepared to give up for him, a divorced English woman doesn’t fit any part of that picture, darling. He’ll take a bride from a Dogra family just like his own, and you two will forget each other.’

‘No.’ Caroline’s head whipped up now. ‘Never.’

Myrtle squeezed her hand again. ‘I think there are two problems here, and you may be tangling them up.’

‘Are there? Am I?’ Now it was Caroline’s turn to be chilly. From her wide blue eyes and curled blonde hair, right down to the single strand of pearls around her pink neck, she seemed to Nerys to be the perfect English rose in India.

‘Yes. One is Ravi, and the crush you have on him. No, wait a minute, just hear what I’m going to say. The other is Ralph. If you can’t love your husband, you know, darling, if you can’t make it work between the two of you, perhaps you shouldn’t waste your young life in trying. Nothing’s going to be the same after this war as it was before, not even marriage and thinking of England. If you want to leave him, we’ll help you to do it. Won’t we, Nerys? But it’ll be to achieve your independence, not to look to Ravi Singh to prop you up.’

‘I can’t leave Ralph.’ Caroline snatched back her hand. ‘That can’t happen.’

‘I see.’ Myrtle chose to overlook the contradiction. ‘Well. I’m glad you’re so clear on that. But if your intention is to be a good wife in the official way, and to hold up your head in Srinagar or wherever Captain Bowen is posted, then you must be discreet. I won’t advise you not to have affairs – you’ve only got to look about you in this place to recognise that I would be wasting my breath with that – but please be careful who you choose. The unromantic truth about romance is that it’s flimsy. Don’t make it your sole support because it won’t bear your weight. As you are already discovering.’

What a wise woman you are, Myrtle McMinn, Nerys thought.

Myrtle’s strong face was filled with compassion now, but there was nothing sentimental about her. She was practical, and if Evan would consider her immoral then she was of the breed that had its own morality.

Caroline gnawed her lip. Then she forced a smile, without a glimmer of it reaching her sad eyes. ‘You’re kind. Both of you are. I appreciate it, honestly. I think I’ll go home now. When you say goodnight to Mrs Fanshawe, would you say that I felt unwell and slipped away so as not to distract her?’

Outside, a long line of guests’ cars stretched into the darkness. The Residency’s driveway was lined with flaming torches that sent smoke plumes coiling into the wind. Myrtle and Nerys put the now silent girl into a tonga, then went back into the house to say their formal goodbyes and to deliver Caroline’s message to Mrs Fanshawe.

The Resident’s wife graciously accepted their thanks for the evening. ‘How very good of you to look after Mrs Bowen. She’s such an interesting young woman, but I think she doesn’t find life easy.’

Nerys and Myrtle were helped into their evening coats by another liveried servant. There was a primrose-yellow Rolls-Royce purring at the steps; flanked by attendants and lesser members of his entourage, and lit by the lurid light of burning torches, the maharajah swept into his car and was driven away.

The two women sat back under the canopy of their tonga as the horse clopped away in the line of cars and other vehicles. They passed under an arch of trees, through the gates and out into the wide streets of the new town. The modern villas of prosperous Pandit and Muslim Kashmiris lay in their secluded gardens, the glow of yellow lanterns showing through autumnal branches. A watchman crouched beside each gate, and as they passed one, the slow beat of a terracotta drum held in the folds of a blanket briefly echoed the horse’s hoofs.

Myrtle spoke after a long silence. ‘You know, if I were married to Ralph Bowen I wouldn’t find life easy either.’

‘What exactly is so bad about him?’

‘He’s what Archie calls a three-letter man.’

Nerys had no idea what this meant. She thought that maybe Rainer Stamm could explain it to her.



The following night, the young wife of Captain Ralph Bowen quietly undressed in the bathroom of the small married-quarters bungalow on the rim of the barracks compound. It was separated from its two neighbours by a fence and a pair of identical dusty channels dignified by the name of flowerbeds. The bungalow walls were thin, and Caroline always felt that she had to move carefully so that her neighbours didn’t know exactly what she was doing every moment of the day and night.

She brushed her hair so that it lay prettily over her shoulders, and settled the silky ruffle of her honeymoon peignoir. It left exposed a swathe of her throat and chest, and the swell of flesh below. She knew now that she looked beautiful like this. Experience had taught her that much, at least. Her immediate resolve wavered for a moment, but she shut off every thought except those about Ralph, who was lying in their bed on the other side of the door.

Caroline practised a smile at herself, and the mirror reflected a sickly smirk. Not nearly good enough. She pulled at the peignoir so it fell further open, shook back her hair and widened the smile. Then she walked through to her husband.

Ralph Bowen was reading a magazine, in which she caught a glimpse of a hunting picture with couples of hounds in front and a shires backdrop of fields and copses. It was a very old issue – it had been in their house for months. Ralph was wearing his stiff blue pyjamas with piped cuffs. She went slowly round to his side of the bed and stood where he couldn’t avoid seeing her.

The silence felt sticky, making her long to shake herself free of it. ‘I’m glad you’re not asleep,’ she said, in a low, teasing voice.

To her relief the words came out of her mouth quite easily. Ralph turned a page. He had drunk two whiskies with soda after their dry little dinner, but he wasn’t intoxicated. That might be in her favour, Caroline reckoned, or it could equally go against her.

She had planned all this in advance, but it was harder to put everything into practice when he wouldn’t even glance at her. Even so, she slowly untied the belt of her robe, and eased her bare shoulders free. She held the fold of fabric close over her breasts, then gradually allowed it to fall. The air was cool on her back and buttocks. Soon the nights would be icy and everyone would need to carry their fire-pots.



The peignoir now lay in ripples at her feet. Caroline took a shallow breath and stood up straight and naked.

You are exquisite, the other one had breathed.

‘Ralph, look at me,’ she said.

He let the magazine fall and raised his eyes. He had long, colourless eyelashes, a red face and neck that shaded abruptly into pale skin just revealed by his pyjama coat. ‘What are you doing?’

Caroline turned full circle, she hoped voluptuously, letting him see the swell of her bottom, the jut of her hips and the smooth roundness of her belly. ‘You’re going off to war,’ she breathed, ‘and I am so proud of you. I want to be yours before you go.’

She swayed towards him, standing now at the mattress edge and looking down. Ralph’s eyes travelled over her body. At least he was no longer absorbed in his reading.

‘Won’t you make love to me?’ Caroline implored.

She pulled back the hairy blanket with its scent of mothballs, and a linen sheet from her trousseau that had been imperfectly laundered by their dhobi-wallah. She lay down in the narrow space between Ralph and the bed’s edge, moulding her body against his. At the same time her fingers worked at the buttons and then the sash of his pyjama trousers. Every inch of him was rigid, except for what counted. This lay in her cupped hand, flaccid.

She closed her eyes, concentrating. She brought her breasts up against his ribs and let her flesh radiate warmth into his. He lay still at first, but then very awkwardly and reluctantly, Ralph rotated towards her so they lay face to face. He kissed her on the lips, his moustache scraping against her mouth.

Encouraged by this response Caroline went on stroking, but nothing happened. She had expected as much, so instead of withdrawing she stretched voluptuously, measuring her full length against him. Then she raised herself on one elbow so she could look down at him. His fine, straw-coloured hair fell back, revealing his rounded and touchingly childish forehead. His eyes were wide open, the rims reddened by sun and whisky, concentrated with his familiar glare.

‘I love you,’ Caroline whispered.

Now they were on their way this wasn’t so difficult. Everything was going to be all right.

No man could resist you, the other had moaned in her arms. This is ecstasy itself.

She couldn’t isolate the memories any longer. She gave up the effort and with a shiver let the soft scenes gather in her head, folding like veils between Ralph and herself.



The first time had been the drive out into the country and the picnic. Ravi assured her that other people would be coming with them, but when he picked her up there had been only him in one of his polished cars, with a series of covered baskets stacked in the jump seat and himself full of dangerous teasing as he lifted her hand to his lips.

‘So, after all, there will just be the two of us, beautiful Caroline. Will you be safe with me, do you think?’

She was so happy that she hadn’t given a thought to her safety. Anyway, what did safe matter?

They had driven out into the countryside, along the dusty road towards the village of Pahalgam, through the slow-moving flocks of sheep and goats. It was a silvery afternoon in midsummer, and once out of the city they flew under the shade of willow and poplar trees, passing terraces of rice paddies where villagers worked doubled up under the shade of conical hats. It was lush and green out here, and when they stopped driving it was silent, except for the crickets whirring in the heat. There was a little pavilion enclosed beside an apple orchard, and Ravi had unlocked it and thrown open the doors. Inside there were cedar floors, greyed with disuse, cushioned divans and an old hookah on a low carved table.

‘What is this place?’ she had asked, trailing her finger through the dust.

He shrugged, unpacking baskets. ‘My family’s – just a summer place to come and enjoy the view. No one uses it, these days, as you can see.’

The view was of mountains, stands of dark conifers running up the ridges to meet steep brown slopes and peaks that rose in two-dimensional serrations against the pearly sky. Caroline already knew that, like all Kashmiris, Ravi loved and revered the mountains.

‘Come, sit here,’ he ordered. Open windows gave on to an enclosure of sun-dappled grass. Bright yellow butterflies twisted in the air. They were the only two people in the world once Ravi began kissing her. Because he always behaved as if there was infinite time to bestow attention on whatever he did, as if nothing mattered other than what engaged him at that very moment, there was no sense of urgency, let alone of negotiation. She had seen him behave in this way with his horse, rippling the palm of his hand over its flanks, or with elaborate dishes of food as he closed his eyes the better to concentrate on the nuances of spicing, or with the purchase of a jewel from a trader as a gift for his sister, or even in tasting a simple glass of lemonade on a hot afternoon. Now she was the recipient of this extravagant concentration.

He took fifteen minutes to unbutton the cuff of her blouse and roll up the linen sleeve, fold by fold, to expose the crook of her arm. It wasn’t the first time he had kissed her: there had been laughing embraces at dances and in gardens and behind the curtains of a shikara, but this was the first time he had placed her above everything else. By the time Ravi’s mouth moved from hers to the pulse in her throat, and then by infinitely slow downward progression to her breasts, she was melting. He didn’t have to ask her: she would have allowed him anything.

No. She would have begged.

With meticulous care, Ravi removed all her clothes. He placed her shoes side by side, as gently if they were made of spun sugar. The warm air drifted over her skin and the buzzing of the crickets filled her ears. He examined her limbs, the incurve of her waist, the matching inner concavities of her thighs and the spring of her toes. Then he raised his liquid dark eyes to hers. ‘You intoxicate me,’ he breathed.

Intoxicated also by her own beauty, at last, after a whole year of gathering dismay and loneliness, Caroline arched her back against the divan cushions. She noted dreamily the contrast of their skin, cream against caramel. Ravi removed his starched shirt and exposed his muscled chest. She lightly drew her fingers across it and touched the place over his heart. His teeth were very white as he smiled down at her, and then he knelt between her thighs.

When he came into her, with the first quick movement he had made, she gave an involuntary yelp of pain. He froze above her, and she saw that, for the first time in the six months since their meeting, Ravi Singh was surprised. He withdrew again and they both gazed down at a small smear of blood.

‘This is your first time?’

Caroline nodded. It was a hideous thing for a wife of a year to have to admit, but it wasn’t her fault. She also felt a throb of triumph because it was to Ravi she had given her virginity, not her angry, bewilderingly critical and increasingly absent husband. Love surged through her like a river in flood. Ravi had saved her, and now they belonged to each other. The flower-dotted meadows and green terraces of the Vale had become their private kingdom, now and for ever.

She smiled up at him. ‘I’m happy,’ she whispered. ‘It won’t hurt any more.’

Nor did it.

Once he had collected himself, Ravi was even more tender with her. Afterwards she held him in her arms and kissed his eyelids. His black hair was sweat-damp, the lines of his profile had suddenly become familiar and minutely precious instead of merely beautiful.

He pulled his clothing together and helped her to dress, even down to the laces of her shoes. Then they sat back among the cushions and spread out their picnic of fresh Kashmiri fruits and thick yellow cream. Hungry, Caroline ate one-handed, laughing and spilling the food he placed in front of her because Ravi kept her other fingers laced in his.

‘Now. Won’t you tell me how this state of affairs has come about?’ he whispered, putting the dishes aside and playing with the buttons of her blouse.

Caroline blushed. ‘My husband is not very interested.’

Ravi raised one black eyebrow. ‘I cannot believe it. He is a soldier, a horseman, and also a man of the world. This does not seem quite right to me.’

‘I minded about it very much to begin with. I’d imagined – well, all the things girls do imagine and whisper about. My mother’s dead, I told you that, and my stepmother before the wedding only helped me with … practical matters. Our engagement was quite short. Once we were married, though, Ralph didn’t do what husbands are supposed to. Our honeymoon was only a week. Then he was away with the regiment, and then he had a bout of illness. When he recovered he went away again. A year seems to have gone,’ she added, in a bleak voice.

‘I see,’ Ravi said. ‘You have been very lonely.’

Caroline nestled closer against him. ‘It doesn’t matter to me now. I’ve got you, and it’s beautiful. I’m so glad this has happened.’ She was thinking that the moment – this very second, with the crickets in the grass and the soft swish of the breeze, the sun spreading its fingers across the old floor, with womanhood, Ravi’s love and a life handed back to her – was what every day of her whole existence had been leading up to. It was perfect. She wouldn’t have changed a single detail of it.

‘My dear,’ he said, and she took that to mean that she was his dear.

‘I love you,’ Caroline whispered, with not a calculating thought in her head.

The contours of his face hardened, just perceptibly. ‘Love? Is that what you believe in?’

‘Yes, of course I do.’



‘Even with what you have learnt since your marriage?’

A little beat of dismay drummed in her head, but she ignored it. Caroline looked her lover straight in the eye. ‘Yes,’ she repeated.

Ravi silently lifted her hand to his lips and kissed each knuckle in turn.



In the four months since that day there had been perhaps a dozen more times. As well as their snatched secret hours together, there had been the routines of tennis parties and rides to the gardens and all the gaiety of a Srinagar season. In these long weeks Caroline had learnt a lot about what to do with a man, and she had also learnt not to blurt out I love you. She teased and pouted instead. But Ravi Singh never again favoured her with the full force of his attention the way he had done the first time. Lately, as she had become more dependent on him, he had seemed restless in her company, except for the brief times when they were naked together. Last night at the Resident’s ball, when they were dancing and she had told him that Ralph was coming home, he had scrutinised her from under his dark eyelashes.

‘So now you will put into practice what you have learnt, eh?’ He smiled.

Once she had understood them the shock of his words left her rigid.

Her lover wasn’t jealous; her lover was practically a voyeur. He could happily imagine her performing on Ralph the acts she had learnt from him. And in a single flash of perception she understood the truth she had, up till now, ignored: Ravi wasn’t biding his time before claiming her, not at all. He was just diverting himself with a married Englishwoman. Exactly as Myrtle McMinn had warned her.

Shock was followed by a jet of boiling outrage. Caroline snapped upright, her hands against his chest, her heels clattering on the dance floor. Ravi immediately stood back and suavely bowed.



‘Is that it? Is that all you’re going to say?’ Her voice rose, unintentionally shrill, and the couples dancing nearby slowed to stare at them. Ravi frowned, but her anger and the rising edge of desperation were too powerful.

She drew in a breath. ‘I hate you,’ she hissed, still too audibly. With a snapshot of Ravi’s scowl and the pairs of gaping faces at his back burning into her eyes, she had flung herself away from him, tripped over her train, and almost fallen flat. Myrtle’s friend, and then Myrtle herself, had come to her rescue.

What Myrtle had said to her in the private salon only highlighted the truth. The once-absorbing riddle of loving Ravi Singh and being married to Ralph Bowen had in the last month become just that: a Christmas-cracker fragment of paper with a conceit cheaply printed on it that would shrivel into ash and disintegrate as soon as it touched the fire.

Caroline had an even more urgent concern now and it was this that brought her into their bedroom, with the shameful trophy of her experience, to Ralph.



She lowered her head, inch by inch, her cheek brushing her husband’s chest and then his belly with its sparse thatch of coppery strands. As if he were being stretched on a rack she felt him tensing, drawing apart and away, his joints minutely creaking beneath her ear. She screwed her eyes shut and lifted her head so that her own blonde hair waved over his groin. Ralph had stopped breathing. Her breath was stuck somewhere inside her ribcage. She took him in her mouth. Briefly, his thing twitched.

Then he shouted, ‘In God’s name, what are you doing?’

He shoved her backwards and rolled out of their bed as if it were on fire, hopping and grasping with one hand to secure the pyjama trousers that sagged below his hips.

Caroline gaped at him. Ralph was crimson, cheeks wobbling, turkey-faced with anger and embarrassment and indignation.

‘That’s a whore’s trick,’ her husband bawled at her.

‘Please, don’t shout,’ she whispered, imagining Major and Mrs Dunkeley sitting upright in their bedroom in the bungalow next door. She rolled herself in the sheet and sat up.

Ralph had secured his pyjamas. He stood with the bed like a barricade between them, appalled, bristling with righteousness. ‘Where did you learn a whore’s trick like that? Decent women don’t do that sort of thing.’

One of the other skills that Caroline had learnt in the course of her love affair was how to dissemble. She widened her eyes to make pools of innocence. ‘How do you know it’s what prostitutes do? That’s not what it says in my book.’

‘What damned book? What the hell are you talking about?’

‘The Young Wife’s Guide to Married Love,’ Caroline improvised. ‘I sent home for it. It arrived in a discreet package, don’t worry. I thought I needed some advice about how to encourage my husband. I do, don’t I?’

‘Are you mad? Hand that filth over to me immediately.’ Ralph stuck out his fist, but she was ahead of him.

‘I read it and burnt it. I couldn’t run the risk of letting the servants find it.’

He stared down at her, nose in the air, like a gun dog, trying to sniff out the dimensions of her lie. She met his glare.

‘You are disgusting,’ he said at last, defeated.

Caroline lifted her chin. ‘Why did you marry me, Ralph?’

‘Because it’s what people like us do. We marry.’

‘And then live like this? In sexless, meaningless, endless antipathy?’

He turned abruptly away. ‘Yes, probably. Don’t be melodramatic.’ He gathered up his magazine, took his plaid dressing-gown off the chair beside the bed, collected his cigarette case and lighter from the box on the dressing-table and slipped them into his pocket.

Caroline watched him as he marched to the door. She tried once more, softening her voice: ‘I’m sorry. It’s your last night. Won’t you come back to bed?’

‘Goodnight,’ he snapped, and the door closed behind him.

She lay back again.



Ravi.

You are exquisite …

In a way. But she was not desirable enough or appropriate enough for him to want all of her. Caroline had never felt so lonely, or so afraid, in all her twenty-two years. She lay down and stared up at the ceiling. Tomorrow her husband was going away with his regiment. There was a war on.

Maybe she would be widowed.



Myrtle and Nerys were having breakfast out on the veranda of the Garden of Eden. The starry nights were now hollow with cold, but this morning there was still just enough warmth in the sun for them to enjoy sitting outside. A thin layer of low mist hung over the lake water, and the mooring posts were policed by brooding eagles. Boats in the distance slid soundlessly through what looked like horizontal layers of light. Myrtle was reading her letters, briskly slitting the envelopes with an ivory-handled paper knife, scanning the contents and placing them in one of three tidy piles.

Nerys had received just one letter, from Evan. He had written about the work in Kargil, the difficulty of travel to the distant northern valleys, the privations of his daily life – his monkish enjoyment of which was heightened, Nerys was sure, by the imagined contrast with her own sybaritic existence down in the Vale. In the final sentence he announced that he was planning to stay where he was for another two weeks.

She folded the two sheets of paper and replaced them in the envelope. Then she sat back and thoughtfully sipped her tea. Majid came with a fresh jug of water, removed their empty plates and padded away silently on bare feet. Black and white kingfishers dipped at their own reflections as a shikara paddled towards the houseboat. The ripples from the prow and paddle rocked the lily-pads, leaving a crystal bead in the centre of each to flash briefly in the subdued sunlight.

‘Hello,’ Myrtle said, looking up.



The boatman angled his craft to the foot of the steps. It wasn’t the flower vendor or the man who brought fresh-caught lake fish wrapped in layers of newspaper, or any other of the familiar traders who plied between the houseboats. He stepped forwards from the stern of his boat, splayed feet balanced against the rocking, and held up a package. ‘Delivery, ma’am. Special.’

Myrtle looked at it, then said, ‘It’s for you.’

Nerys didn’t recognise the spiky black script. She gave the boatman a coin and used Myrtle’s paper knife to slit open the wrapping. Inside, secured in a twist of paper, was her stolen brooch.

Myrtle knew about the theft. She clapped her hands delightedly. ‘That is clever of him. Was the whole episode one of your Mr Stamm’s magic tricks, do you think? Performed to impress you?’

‘He’s not my Mr Stamm. No, it happened exactly as I told you. The brooch was snatched by a gang of children in the old town. I don’t see how he could have set it up without recruiting and training the whole lot of them first, and why on earth would he have bothered to do that?’

She scanned the note that came with it. Rainer wondered, following on from their meeting at the Residency, whether Nerys might be free to visit him at home for a drink? Mrs McMinn would also be most welcome. Six o’clock that evening. He gave the address in the old town.

Nerys handed the card to Myrtle to read.

‘Hmm. Rather sure of himself, isn’t he? What did the two of you talk about?’

Nerys told her about the children from the room behind the bazaar, and her unformed desire to do something to help them.

‘So, are you going?’ Languidly, Myrtle waved away the smoke from her first cigarette of the day.

‘Yes, if you will come with me.’

‘It sounds, darling, as if I would be a tiny bit of a gooseberry. I saw the two of you dancing the other night. You were setting the floor on fire.’

Nerys calmly pinned the pearl circlet in its place at the throat of her cardigan. It was the cream one she had worn to the commissioner’s party in Leh, which now had its buttons neatly sewn on. ‘I am very glad to have our brooch back. I felt so bad about having lost it, because you’d given it to me. I’d like to thank Mr Stamm in person, but there’s no more to it than that.’

‘If you say so. All right. We’ll dress up in our finery and toddle over to see your admirer this evening. What is Evan’s news?’

Nerys told her.

‘Two more weeks? He’d better get a move on.’ Myrtle squinted across at the backdrop of mountains.

‘I don’t think he wants to come to Srinagar at all.’ With a wave of the hand Nerys encompassed the fanciful woodwork of the Garden of Eden, the seat cushions with hand-embroidered leaves and flowers, the lake and the Srinagar Club flags in the distance.

Myrtle looked kindly at her. ‘How does that make you feel?’

‘I married a missionary. I understood what is involved.’

‘Yes. Do you want to know what I think?’

‘Of course I do.’

Myrtle picked up Rainer Stamm’s note from the tablecloth and lightly fanned the air with it. ‘I think you should have some fun. You’ve recovered your health and strength, thank God. I think you should be silly, and enjoy yourself just for a few weeks. I don’t believe you’ll regret it in the end. Trust me. I’m a wise woman.’

Nerys understood what her friend might be including under the general heading of fun. In spite of this she found herself laughing, and she reflected at the same time on how Srinagar and Mrs McMinn were changing the missionary’s wife. ‘Yes, I know you are. But that’s not what you advised Caroline Bowen.’



‘Pfff. You are a grown woman. A very sensible and serious one, who might benefit from an instant’s frivolity. Caroline, on the other hand, is hardly more than a schoolgirl.’

‘I see. Are you telling me to look at another man?’

Myrtle’s eyes widened. ‘I’m not advising you to do anything, Mrs Watkins. You have a very good mind of your own.’