At the junction where she turned off towards her hotel, she said goodbye to the two men. The money she gave Sonam
disappeared in a flash into a slit in his tunic. He grasped her by the wrist and angled his head to peer at her in the gloom. Tsering translated for the last time.
‘In those days, the old times, it was very hard to live here. There was not much, for any people. But it was good, just the same.’
The old man was telling her that Evan Watkins and his wife had not experienced undiluted hardship here in Leh. There had been happiness too.
Mair could understand that.
She shook hands with them.
Tsering grinned, his teeth white in the darkness. ‘You are looking for history from your shawl. Now you will be going to Kashmir.’
‘I will, yes.’
‘Safe journey,’ he said.
They wished her goodnight. As she watched them making slow progress down the deserted street, the power came on again. Their moving shadows slid over the old stone walls.
India, 1941
He had taken their candle behind the screen with him. It was only a hinged wooden frame with brown paper pasted across it, and the light, placed on the hidden washstand, threw his enlarged and distorted shadow on to the paper. Nerys turned to face the other way, in order not to see her husband washing himself. She studied instead the plain wooden crucifix that hung on the wall beside the bed.
The yellow glow of the candle flickered as he carried it from the washstand and placed it on the night table, so she knew it was all right to turn on to her back again. The mattress, stuffed with yak’s hair, gave out its familiar rustle as she moved. There was a whiff of carbolic soap with a lingering trace of male sweat as Evan picked up the Bible that always lay next to his pillow. He sank to his knees beside the bed. Nerys at once made a move to push back the blanket and join him in his prayers, but he told her that she should stay where she was.
‘The Lord sees everything. He won’t frown if you take a few more days’ rest, Nerys.’
‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she murmured, but she lay still because she felt so tired. She listened as he read in Welsh from the Book of Job, one of his favourite resorts. ‘Amen,’ she said,
when she thought he had finished. There was an interval as he prayed in silence, and she attempted the same herself. Among other things, she asked God if He could somehow make a better wife of her.
At last Evan sighed and got to his feet. He took off his thick dressing-gown and hung it on the hook, peeled back the blanket, letting a blade of cold air into the bed, and hovered for a moment in his striped flannel pyjamas, as if to lie down beside her took a positive effort of will.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
He blew out the candle and got in. The mattress sank under his weight and she tensed her hip and leg muscles in order not to roll against him. Not that she didn’t long for the comfort of his arms and the warmth of his skin, because she felt so sad and empty that she craved physical reassurance without any of the pitfalls that words could lead to, but it had been a long day and she didn’t want to place even this much of a demand on him.
‘Goodnight, my dear,’ he said, after a moment.
‘Goodnight, Evan,’ she said quietly.
It would not be long before he fell asleep. She lay with her fingers interlaced across her breastbone and reviewed the day.
The smaller children gave her the greatest pleasure. She loved the sight of them in class, with school pinafores tied over their ragged clothes, sitting in a neat line with their shining eyes fixed on her as she wrote words and numbers on a blackboard balanced on an easel. One, two, three. Boot, hat, apple, hand. They bore this part of the day patiently, just as they did when she read them stories from the Bible, but what they really enjoyed was singing and dancing and clapping games. They chanted their own words to ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘The Farmer’s in His Den’, and she tried to copy what they sang because her efforts made them laugh so uproariously. Or with her harmonium and their drums, whistles and tambourines they
pounded out made-up songs that filled the room with rhythm and needed no language at all.
The older children were less rewarding. Nerys knew they only came to school because of the mission’s free midday meal, soup and rice with a thick stew of lentils. They fidgeted and murmured among themselves as she talked, and as soon as the class finished at three o’clock they raced each other across the yard, happy to be free from her lessons even though the rest of the day would be spent working in the fields, or bent over a weaving loom. She could only hope that the food they ate and the minimal medical attention she could offer, for their racking coughs, gummy eyes and running sores, was a compensation for the two hours of mutual incomprehension they shared with her. By the age of eight or nine, most of them stopped coming altogether. They were too valuable to their parents as extra pairs of hands.
Nerys listened as Evan’s breathing slowed and deepened.
However positive she tried to be, it was hard not to feel that they were wasting their time in this place, two ignorant outsiders battling against the primitive conditions, an obscure language and centuries of history.
Of course, Evan wouldn’t have agreed that they were ignorant. But Nerys didn’t share her husband’s absolute conviction that the Word was the only truth, and bringing it to the heathen the only thing that really mattered. She was even afraid that she might be losing her faith altogether, although the mere acknowledgement of this, in silence and under the safe cover of darkness, made her wince with anxiety. How could there be a missionary’s wife who didn’t believe in the Lord?
Ironically, it was India that had brought her to this precipice of doubt.
Back in Wales, she had first met the Reverend Evan Watkins when he was on home leave from his Indian mission and she was in teacher training, and it had all seemed perfectly straightforward. Their God, the one she and Evan shared, was a daily
matter, of course. He was Grace said before meals, prayers at bedtime for family and the sick, the King and Queen and the unfortunate heathen. He was chapel on Sundays, the thick black Bible, Nonconformist hymns, and a whole way of life that she was accustomed to and took comfortably for granted. Even after Evan had proposed (and she had hoped – even
prayed
– that he would ask her), and during their short engagement, the wedding, their honeymoon in Anglesey (she wouldn’t dwell on that now) and all the preparations for India that had followed, she had never questioned the basic premise. Evan had heard the call to do missionary work, and she was proud to be accompanying him. She would help him and support him in every way she could, and they would succeed together.
At Shillong, the centre of the Presbyterian outreach mission to India, where they had lived for their first months of married life, it had not been so very difficult. Within the compound there was a large school run by the mission, where the teaching was excellent and the local families seemed prepared to accept the Christian message that accompanied it. As well as the big chapel, with its regular services for mission families and respectable numbers of converts, there was a medical clinic for first aid and minor ailments, classes for local women in domestic skills, hygiene and vegetable-growing that Nerys had enjoyed helping with, and all the support of a small but determined religious community. There was even, at a little distance, a mission hospital, with a resident qualified doctor and three nurses, where women could come to give birth in safer and more sanitary conditions than were available anywhere else in the area. Lepers were treated there too, and TB patients, and sufferers from septicaemia and rabies and all the other shocking ailments of India. Nerys could see that they were doing some good through their work, she and her husband, even though it was in a small, oblique way.
India itself had shocked her. She had only been able to conjure up the most pallid images in advance so the actual vastness,
the brutal heat of the plains, so fierce that it flayed her skin and bleached the skies, the swarming people, the solid torrents of monsoon rain, the harsh colours and stink of it all, the flies, the crippled bodies and the raw poverty she saw every day had almost unpinned her. When she tried to confess her dismay to Evan, he had looked annoyed.
‘The work is what we are here to do, my dear, with God’s help. There is no time for considering ourselves or our misgivings.’
She had begun to retort that she wasn’t afraid of work, and she wasn’t being self-absorbed, she had only wanted to talk about what they both saw all the time. But she had stopped herself. Evan didn’t want to talk about anything except the routine of their days. He had a focus on his work that was so tight, so unwavering, that she began to suspect he was afraid of where speculation might lead him.
In any case, her confusion didn’t last. In time she began to see a vitality in this seething country, a kind of dogged appetite that brought babies bawling into the world amid all the desperation, reflected in the eyes of a beggar as he reached up with cupped hands to receive a half-
pice
coin, in the backs of women bent double in the fields, and in the man who sat all day beside the churning traffic with his spirit stove, brewing delicious
chai
to sell to passers-by. Nerys used to stop on her daily walk and drink a cup with this man, sitting on his little three-legged stool while he squatted in the dust. Unfortunately she couldn’t see how any of these people might be affected, for either better or worse, by the Christian message that she was supposed to be bringing them. Their situations were nearly all desperate and they had their various religions already. What difference could a merely different one make?
It was a dry, unwelcome seed that took root in her, but its growth was rapid.
Evan worked all the time, preaching, writing, reading and travelling to outlying villages. Even with teaching at the school and trying nervously to deal with the house servants, whose
grinning expectation of her orders she found embarrassing, Nerys had plenty of hours to spare. She began helping out at the hospital where the nurses offered much livelier company than the other mission wives.
Her favourite duty was in the labour and delivery room. Her memory of the first baby she saw being born was as vivid as if it had happened that morning. The mother was younger than she was, had borne two children already and had been screaming for two long hours while Nerys sponged her face and struggled to soothe her. But as soon as he was born she reached her arms out for this new infant with a smile that filled the room. Nerys had had to turn aside and wipe her own eyes with a towel.
Her hands slid lower now, an involuntary movement that she tried and failed to suppress, over the corrugated twin arches of her lower ribs, to rest in the slack bowl beneath them. Since her own first pregnancy had miscarried, less than a month ago, she had tried to tell herself that there would soon be another baby on the way. She felt sick and exhausted, and it had taken more than long enough to conceive this one, but still, they would manage, wouldn’t they?
Unless this was God’s way of punishing her for not believing in Him.
Nerys smiled grimly into the darkness. If she didn’t believe, how could miscarriage now or failure to conceive again at some time in the future be a divine punishment for anything?
Think about something else, she advised herself. Her husband sighed in his sleep and curled on his side, facing away from her.
When Evan had been offered the chance to go all the way up to Leh, where the resident Welsh missionary had died of dysentery, he had explained to Nerys that they did not have to go. They should see it as an offer, an opportunity for greater good, not an order. The posting would be a hard one, he warned. Leh was at a considerable altitude; it could be reached by only two possible roads, and those were closed by snow for
at least half of each year. They would probably be among only a tiny handful of other Western people, there was no proper hospital, and the local population were likely to be even less receptive to the word of Our Lord than they were down here in Shillong.
Nerys had looked into his eyes.
Evan wanted to go just because the posting would be difficult and uncomfortable. Leh would give him the chance to prove his missionary zeal to God and to his superiors, while providing him with even more opportunities for self-denial. She was beginning to realise that poor Evan secretly had a low opinion of himself. Doubting the value of what he achieved within the mission, all his conscientious work and insistence on taking the hardest route was probably his way of dealing with an absence of self-confidence and self-love. He wouldn’t even feed himself properly, however hard she tried to devise meals that would nourish him. He was gaunt, and his face had developed hollows beneath the cheekbones. He was often ill, with fevers or stomach complaints.
I will love you more and better
, she silently vowed,
to make up for what you can’t do for yourself.
She had cupped his face between her hands and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Of course we must go. I’ll be very disappointed if we don’t. Even the journey sounds like an adventure.’ She had already heard the legends of the road from Manali to Leh.
That night in bed Evan had taken her hand and whispered, ‘My dear?’
That was his signal. She had moved closer, her nightdress rucking round her thighs, and murmured, ‘Yes.’ She made sure that her mouth was almost touching his, so he felt the warmth of her breath.
He probably didn’t think that doing it was actually sinful, she reflected. After all, they had been married, in chapel, by Parchedig Geraint Rhys, his friend and teacher, and in front of their two families. It was just – probably – that he didn’t think
he deserved this much pleasure. Certainly he never tried to prolong the act, or to intensify the sensations for either of them. He submitted to the base urge, as he no doubt thought of it, then detached himself as quickly as possible.