soon discovered that travelling with the McMinns was a completely different experience from her journey with Evan. At night they stayed in the rest houses set along the route, commandeering the places regardless of who might have arrived ahead of them. As a British sahib and a proper daughter of the Raj, Archie and Myrtle automatically took the precedence they saw as their due. They felt no compunction in ousting Ladakhi or Kashmiri travellers from the shelters, even on one evening a Muslim man, with a hennaed beard, who was accompanied by several veiled wives and half a dozen small children and babies. Evan and Nerys had always been confused and unwilling to impose themselves over other people, even the humblest. Whenever they came to a guesthouse, to sleep beside the road in their draughty tent had often seemed the easier solution.
The rest houses were often no more than two-roomed shacks, a living and sleeping room and an attached kitchen, and they were generally dirty and lacking any but the most basic amenities, but Sahib McMinn and his party were always greeted by the owners with extra civility and efforts to please. It wasn’t hard to deduce why, because although Archie demanded a full account of what was owing and didn’t overpay by a single anna, he invariably understood what the fair rate should be and handed over the money promptly and cheerfully.
Their camp servants always first arrived at the rest house, and by the time the McMinns rode up, their yakdan bags had been untied from the ponies and set in the room for them. Camp beds were erected because Myrtle refused to use the charpoys provided, saying they were alive with bugs. Archie always pretended to be dismayed by his wife’s fussy behaviour, but affectionate amusement twinkled out of him. There were plenty of warm blankets, and even linen sheets, which were unpacked and repacked each day. The McMinns’ servants bought food locally to supplement the supplies the pack ponies carried, and their cook made the dinners, which were served with plates and cutlery rinsed daily in a solution of potassium permanganate. Sometimes there was even the opportunity to take a bath. A collapsible canvas structure was erected and part-filled, and Nerys was able to sit in it and luxuriously scoop warm water from an enamel jug over her skin and hair.
At the end of each day’s journey, sitting in their camp chairs under the cobwebby guesthouse rafters, there was plenty for the three to talk and laugh about. Myrtle gossiped and joked about people they had encountered, or the various foibles of the pony men.
‘Do you think they have a rota?’ she speculated, about the Muhammadan and his wives.
‘No, I should think he favours the prettiest one,’ Archie replied. ‘I would.’
‘How can he tell?’ Myrtle wondered.
‘They don’t go to bed in their veils, darling.’
Myrtle hooted with laughter. She smoked thin black cigarettes with opulent gold tips. The first time she lit one, Nerys glanced at her in surprise and Myrtle blew out a long plume of smoke. ‘I was on my very best behaviour, you know, when we met. We were staying in the mission house. Will you disapprove hugely when you really get to know me?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Nerys laughed.
Last thing at night, the bearer brought in mugs of hot cocoa. Archie tipped a slug of brandy into his own and Myrtle’s, and raised an eyebrow at Nerys.
‘Yes, please,’ she said. This was a custom to which she had quickly adapted.
There was only ever the one room at the rest houses, but she soon also got used to sharing with Myrtle and Archie. In bed Myrtle wore pearl-grey silk pyjamas with a Parisian label. ‘Much better for travelling, you know. The coolies drop lice in the beds when they make them up, but they slither off the silk.’
She was right. Lice had been a feature of the Watkinses’ journey up to Leh, clinging snugly in the seams of Nerys’s flannel nightgowns.
With Archie’s rhythmic snoring and Myrtle’s breathing as its accompaniment, Nerys found that she slept better on the Srinagar road than she had done lately in the mission house. Every morning, as soon as it was light, the bearer brought in their bed tea. After they had drunk it Archie went outside in his dressing-gown to shave in daylight while the women got dressed, and then it was time for hot porridge, scrambled eggs and the cook’s delicious fresh bread.
They walked or rode all day, through tiny villages with narrow fields of ripe grain winding beside the rutted track, where bedraggled hens pecked at the verges and stray sheep went scudding ahead of the ponies. Banks of tattered rose bushes spread on either side, now hung with orange hips, like jewels sewn on devoré velvet. When the track rose out of the sparse villages, the immense land was rocky and barren. The mountains loomed over them again, shadowed in sepia and purple, the most commanding ridge sometimes crowned with the massive white walls of a gompa.
At Lamayuru, a few miles before the Fotu Pass, which was the highest point they would have to cross on the route, they stopped for the night in the shadow of the biggest monastery. It was a lowering, piled-up mass of white walls and red-painted wooden slabs, small-windowed, topped off with the squat domes of a dozen chortens with black and gold twisted spires that glittered like spun sugar. The ponies toiled up hundreds of irregular steps to reach the cluster of buildings clinging to the skirts of the monastery. Prayer flags danced against the blue sky overhead and Nerys was reminded of Spitok gompa, past which they had climbed on the road out of Leh. With a prickle of guilt, she realised she had been so busy with the small adventures of the road, and laughing about them with Myrtle and Archie, that Evan had hardly been in her mind. At this distance he seemed a dark, disapproving figure, in contrast to the light-filled days she had been enjoying.
At Lamayuru they were staying in the inevitable rest house, but this one was much bigger than the roadside versions because of the stream of visitors to the monastery. Nerys was shown to a room of her own, no more than a tiny stone slot with a single narrow window. It looked out over a huge drop, with black choughs gliding below the sill.
Their dinner that night was unusually subdued, as if the proximity of the monastery and the columns of red-robed monks quietened even Myrtle.
Afterwards, instead of going back to her cell Nerys went outside and, on an impulse, climbed more steps to the walls of the monastery itself. She tipped back her head to look at the great edifice towering above her, black against the curtain of stars. Patches of faint yellow light glowed like veiled eyes in a few of the windows and she shivered in the wind. She thought she could hear the rise and fall of voices, chanting a prayer. Archie had murmured over dinner that Lamayuru village was a bleak place to live because the tributes and food demanded by the lama to sustain the monks left too little for the villagers themselves. It certainly seemed a desolate place tonight, as she pressed deeper into the angle made by a stone wall to find a scrap of shelter. From somewhere among the tiers of ramshackle houses beneath her rose the sound of a dog howling. She tried to imagine what Evan could achieve in a place like this, offering the promises and threats of a different religion to people who would be better off providing for their families and keeping their rice and mutton for themselves.
All she felt towards her husband was an exasperated tenderness, and she wondered whether this diminished affection, against her own belief that what he did was futile, would be anything like enough to carry her through the years ahead. I could do it, she thought, and anything else he wanted of me, if we had our own children.
She was thoroughly cold now. The monastery loomed so high and dark it was as if it was going to topple over and crush her. She pulled her coat closer around her shoulders and made her way back down the steps. Archie’s bearer was waiting at the door of the dingy rest house.
‘Come now, ma’am,’ he called, and she felt guilty that she had kept him in the draught when he could have been reclining on his blanket with a pipe.
‘I’m
