‘No,’ Nerys said. It was a stony monosyllable.
No bodies had ever been discovered, but the police – so the gossip went, although no one knew anything for certain, even Mr Fanshawe, since no British subject was involved – were prepared to accept that in a wild and lawless area, any one of a number of things could have happened to them. In the face
of all the blood, the ransacked luggage and the absence of any other evidence, the authorities were ready to reach the convenient conclusion that there had been three fatalities.
‘
No,
’ Nerys reiterated.
Somewhere, Zahra and Prita and Rainer were alive and safe. She was used to Rainer’s prolonged absences. He came and went according to his own devices. He had done ever since she had known him, and he would never change. She had never wanted to change him and – even if she had been free – to marry or even live with him would have been to do just that. Their beginning would have contained the end, and although she missed him in every waking moment, she understood that much.
The reason why there was no news would become clear. He
would
come. He had struggled back up to Kanihama, hadn’t he, as soon as he could travel, even with serious burns, because he had made a promise?
The last time she had seen him Rainer had touched her forehead with his lips.
Don’t worry if you don’t hear anything. She will be safe, I promise you. And I will come back.
They reached the little hotel, and rather than retreat to their room, where a sluggish fan did nothing but stir up the heat, they went into a cavernous bar off the lobby. Palms drooped in brass pots and there was a grey smell of stale smoke. As soon as he saw them a solitary young waiter sprang up from his post, switching on a wide smile of welcome.
Nerys would very much have liked a stiff gin but nowadays Myrtle would only ever touch lemonade, so she ordered the same for herself.
The waiter’s vigil obliquely reminded her of Farida, who would be sitting as she did every day on her accustomed step outside a village house in Kanihama. She kept watch on the sparse traffic up and down the mountain tracks, and she raced to meet every new arrival, in case Zahra was coming.
This thought made Nerys so sad that she was ashamed of her own selfish, mute yearning for the missing child.
Myrtle lit a cigarette and clinked her tall glass against Nerys’s as if they were drinking cocktails at the Lake Bar of the Srinagar Club. She blew out a plume of smoke and leant back with a sigh. ‘That was a fairly dismal farewell,’ she said. ‘But we had to come, didn’t we?’
Nerys could only agree. ‘We did. I’ll go and see her as soon as Evan and I get home. She’ll be better, I’m sure. And, of course, there’ll be news of Zahra to tell her by then.’
Myrtle turned her speculative gaze on her friend. She was much thinner now and her cheeks were almost hollow, but she still laughed all the time. Men still turned to look at her as she passed.
‘Maybe. What have you heard from Shillong?’
Nerys told her that she and Evan would be leaving Srinagar for Shillong in the next month. With the agreement of the central mission they would travel, as Evan had wished, over the mountains to Kargil and Leh to revisit his handful of converts, and then, by the mountain passes that they had first traversed, back to Manali. The privations of the journey that had seemed so notable then would be much less striking now, Nerys thought. They were all used to the absence of comforts.
‘Do you remember our great journey across to Srinagar?’ Myrtle smiled.
‘I’ll always remember it. I don’t think I knew how to be me until I met you,’ Nerys told her. She knew how much she owed to the McMinns.
Archie now held a part-time administrative post with the Indian Railways, and had used his engineering skills to adapt a car in which he could drive himself. It made a big difference, he cheerfully reported. His tops, the fine sets of antlers that he had bagged on his Ladakh shooting holiday, had found a permanent place on the wall in their Delhi house. Neither shooting excursions nor lakeside seasons in Srinagar were a possibility any longer.
‘Everything changes,’ Myrtle said, looking away again. ‘I wish you weren’t leaving India.’
‘Will you and Archie stay on?’
‘We don’t know anything or anywhere else,’ she said.
From her chair Nerys could see across the lobby to the main door, guarded by a man in a dark red turban and long coat, and a slice of the open street that lay beyond. Dust-heavy air shimmered in the heat, and throngs of Indians crowded the road, all classes and religions, mixed up with servicemen of a dozen nationalities, who had poured in as demobilisation began, the pedestrians diving between packed buses and shiny cars and carts pulled by coolies. All of this busy humanity streamed every hour of the day past the
chai-wallah
, who sat on the kerb with his spirit lamp and tin cups, staring into infinity with an unfathomable smile.
Only a few hundred yards from here was Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, with its soaring arches as grand as any cathedral. Tomorrow Nerys would take a train north and Myrtle would return to Delhi.
Nerys understood that she loved India, and she would miss every brutal and beautiful fragment of it.
She shook herself, and dug into her bag for a linen-wrapped package. She turned back a corner of the wrapping to show Myrtle the shawl. ‘I was going to give it back to Caroline before they sailed. But the moment never seemed right.’
‘No,’ Myrtle agreed.
Caroline believed that her daughter was dead, and the Kashmir shawl was woven with guilt as well as loss.
‘I’ll keep it safe for Zahra myself,’ Nerys decided.
‘All right.’
Myrtle had been trying gently to persuade her friend that all three of them were dead – why else had there been no word from Rainer? – but she had had no success, and had lately decided that it was kindest to let Nerys come to terms with that truth in her own time. She said, ‘Shall we go crazy and order ourselves another lemonade, perhaps?’
Nerys smiled. ‘Let’s do that.’
In a brown envelope in her bag was the gilt-threaded lock
of Zahra’s hair. She didn’t tell even Myrtle about that. It was her talisman, her remaining link to the laughing little girl who had run at her and shouted, ‘Ness, Ness.’
The lake lay as flat as a mirror. Evan and Nerys had taken a
shikara
ride across to the Shalimar Garden, because this was their last evening in the Vale of Kashmir.
At the mission Evan’s books and their few significant pieces of furniture and kitchenware stood packed and prepared eventually to be freighted home to Wales. Their travelling bags and baskets of supplies were ready for the bus that would take them to the end of the Srinagar road, and from there they would pick up the pony men and their animals and begin the long ascent out of the Vale, up to the heights of the Zoji La and beyond that across into Ladakh.
Early August was already frilling the chinar leaves with ochre, and over the old town lay the familiar autumnal veils of lavender-coloured smoke. When the two of them reached the uppermost terrace, they turned to look at the spreading view. The water was criss-crossed with tiny boats that from this distance looked no bigger than water beetles, the floating gardens were ripe with vegetables and fruit, and over everything the mountains rose in pleats of purple and grey.
Evan was coughing almost absent-mindedly, like a tired sheep in a pen. This year he had fallen victim to a series of chest infections and Nerys was worried that his health and strength might not be up to the long journey ahead.
‘Don’t fuss about me, Nerys, please,’ was all he said, when she tried to talk to him about it. She glanced sideways at his profile now, familiar as always in his abstracted contemplation of his work, the mission, and the ways of the Almighty. He was gaunt, suntanned from bicycling in and above Srinagar, shy and awkward as he always had been, and dear to her.
He felt her gaze on him and turned abruptly. He said that he would have to get back soon, because there were two or three final matters that he needed to discuss with Ianto Jones.
Nerys nodded her acceptance and they fell into step as they began the descent. She took his arm and slid her hand beneath it and he held it there, gently pressed against his body.
For the sake of economy they had paid off their first
shikara
man, but there was a small flotilla of them waiting near the jetty and one soon came gliding towards them in the hope of a fare. Within the little sanctuary of flower-printed curtains looped back with raffia strings, they sat back against the cushions as the lake scent rose and caught in their throats. The boatman pushed away from the mooring and, glancing back at him, Nerys saw that he was holding his paddle close to his chest. The inverted leaf made a heart shape, and the memory pierced her like a blade.
Almost three months.
Rainer, with Prita and Zahra.
Vanished, as if into thin air.
Her grief was like a stone, but she contained it within herself. It was only for tonight, her last in this lovely place, that it seemed too much to bear.
She turned her head so that Evan might not see her face, and kept her eyes fixed on the fringe of houseboats that clung to the lake shore.
The tiny coronet of blue flame seemed too fragile to survive in this place of howling wind. One of the men grimly hung over it, steadying the rim of the pan on the burner as the rough scoops of snow refused to melt. His companion lay huddled in his bag, his eyes closed as the storm hammered and roared at the canvas walls. The tent swelled like a pair of lungs labouring to suck in a breath of thin air, and then, with a bang and a shriek, collapsed inwards again. Trying to shout above the din took more energy than either of them had to spare.
After an hour, just enough snow had melted to allow them to mix a cup of powdered soup apiece. One man held the two precious warm drinks because the other insisted on laboriously unzipping the tent opening before he drank. Snow drove in at them and the tent pegs only just kept the flimsy capsule anchored. It was absurd, the watcher belatedly realised, to have imagined that he might see anyone coming – or, indeed, that any living thing could move in the thick of this storm. Altitude and exhaustion were eroding his judgement. He struggled to close the flap again.
They hunched over their soup.
‘What time is it?’
‘Quarter after six.’
It was thirty-two hours since the man they referred to as
Martin Brunner and his companion had set off from their tiny camp. At 20,000 feet, they were more than five thousand feet above the base camp established at the foot of the Rakhiot icefall. Since they had left their base the three mountaineers and Pasang Pemba, the strongest and most experienced of their sherpas, had been carrying loads and leapfrogging their slow and painful way up the mountain to this point. It was now mid-July and the weather had been atrocious. Snow had fallen every day and filled in their laboriously cut steps, and in places it had swept away their fixed ropes.
On the morning of the previous day, Martin and Pasang Pemba had left camp to reconnoitre the rock formation they called the Moor’s Head. This ugly and threatening rock wall blocked their access to the high saddle of the mountain and the summit beyond, although the summit itself had been almost constantly veiled in cloud.
At first light yesterday, however, they had woken to a clear sky and a view of the mountain rearing to its full height above them, cold and crystalline.
‘Let’s go,’ Martin had said to Pasang. They were the stronger pair. Taking minimal food and protection with them, they had planned to climb to the rock head and assess how serious an obstacle it really was, then return to camp to rest and prepare a load to carry for the assault. The next camp would have to be established above the Moor’s Head.
They would be back that evening, Martin assured their American companions.
The two men set off up the slope, chipping their way upwards until they were no more than black specks moving amid the rock and snow. Finally they were swallowed up in the immense distance.
By mid-afternoon of the same day, an ominous nimbus encircled the sun. The wind began to blow and clouds whipped across the upper heights. The two men left behind watched and waited, but as darkness fell the snow and rising wind drove them into the inadequate shelter of their tent. They
waited all that night, and through the following day, but the storm only gathered force. They couldn’t retreat, any more than they could go upwards, and the younger one was now suffering from chest pains and disturbing intervals of dizziness and confusion.
The elder lay as quietly as he could, assessing the situation.
Brunner and the sherpa had with them only basic supplies. They would have had to bivouac in the open overnight, and now the second night was upon them. It was inconceivable that they could survive two successive nights outside in conditions such as these.
Once the storm had blown itself out he himself would have to help his companion down to where their support team waited for them above the icefall at Camp I, and he thought they would be quite lucky to make it. There was no question of launching a rescue attempt.
Martin Brunner and Pasang Pemba would certainly be Nanga Parbat’s latest victims.
He remembered the advice of the American consul back in Calcutta, who had warned him to take no risks that might have potentially disastrous consequences. Of course the consul was thinking in political as well as human terms, because the bestowal of permits for future American expeditions depended to some extent on the absence of a tragic outcome to this one. And as expedition leader, at least in name, he didn’t think they had been reckless – just unlucky.
But, considered separately, Martin Brunner was a different matter. He climbed with implacable strength and determination, almost like a machine, and this brutal focus meant that he was careless of the weather and of himself.