foot on a road as isolated as the one they had just travelled would have been dangerous, maybe impossible.
Mair shivered. Despite her show of optimism, she didn’t like this place, not for its lack of home comforts but because of the bleakness and the air of indefinable gloom that hung about it. But it was still a safe haven tonight. She glanced at Lotus’s pink cheeks. The little girl’s thumb was in her mouth. ‘We’ll be snug as bugs, won’t we, Lo?’ She smiled.
A square of sacking that masked an inner door was pulled aside and another woman emerged. She was carrying a saucepan with a feeble wisp of steam rising from the contents.
Bruno took the pan and thanked her. He sat upright and said gently, ‘Lotus, look, here’s your supper.’
He began to feed her spoonfuls of warmed-up baked beans alternating with chunks of flatbread. She wriggled half out of her blanket cocoon and ate with relish, smearing her chin with orangey sauce.
Over her head Bruno said, ‘We always carry a couple of cans of beans with us. Lotus will eat them day or night, whatever else goes awry.’ He dropped his voice. ‘We may find ourselves envying her later.’
A blackened cauldron had been lowered on to the stove. The two women squatted on the earth floor and began to slice onions, tossing them into the pot and exchanging remarks with the group of truck drivers.
‘It’s only one night.’ Mair laughed.
But Bruno didn’t laugh with her. ‘I hope you’re right.’
She thought how forbidding he could look, with his dark face and the black eyebrows drawn together in a thick line. He and Karen seemed so markedly different that she could only conclude theirs was one of those partnerships of opposites.
Lotus finished all the baked beans and caught at the pan to make sure that there wasn’t another spoonful in the bottom. Soot coated her hands and Bruno patiently cleaned them with his handkerchief, telling her that she couldn’t get into bed with Mummy and leave black handprints all over her, could she? He took an apple from his pocket, peeled and quartered it and fed that to Lotus as well. By the time she was on the fourth slow chunk, her eyelids were drooping.
‘Time for bed,’ Bruno whispered. He rearranged the child’s coverings so that only her eyes and nose were visible, before hoisting her in his arms. Then he slid a glance at the food preparations. ‘May I join you later for dinner?’ he asked Mair formally, but at the same time his black eyebrows rose in amusement.
‘Of course. I’d like some company,’ Mair answered.
While he was gone she sat propped against the wall and watched the cooks at work. The stove was heating up and the smell of boiling vegetables hung in the air. Condensation dribbled down the tiny window panes, but the kitchen didn’t seem to have got any warmer. She was thinking that she could easily have ended up here with the Israeli boys for company rather than the Beckers, and offered a quick thanks to the gods of Lamayuru for the lucky escape.
Fifteen minutes passed before Bruno returned. After brushing off the snow he took his place beside her on the mattress, watched by the drivers. He waited until they lost interest, then, from his well-stocked pocket, produced a flask. He rummaged again and brought out a pair of collapsible metal beakers, and waved a finger over them. ‘Cognac?’ he murmured, and poured.
They clinked their beakers. Bruno took a long gulp from his. Mair followed suit and the alcohol instantly glowed through her chilled bones.
‘Aaah. How’s Karen?’
‘She’s lying in bed reading one of her Buddhist texts. I put Lotus in beside her – she instantly fell asleep.’ He added, after a moment, ‘She has great reserves of power and determination, my wife, so she suffers when we have a situation like tonight, when there is nothing even she can do to alter the circumstances. In fact, Karen’s brand of Buddhism seems to involve a great deal of determination overall. You might even call it a need for control. I’m not quite sure how that aligns with the teachings. Technically speaking.’
Their eyes met. Bruno’s manner was extremely dry but there was a strong reverberation of humour in him. He was Swiss but also quite un-Swiss. That made him interesting as well as attractive, Mair thought. ‘Are you religious?’ she asked.
He shook his head decisively. ‘No. You?’
‘Not at all. But my grandfather was a missionary. He and my grandmother were out here in the 1940s, with the Welsh Presbyterian mission outreach to Leh.’
‘That’s why you’re here now?’
‘My father died recently. His parents were part of our lives because they lived nearby, but we never knew my maternal grandpa and grandma. My mother died when I was in my early teens so that part of the story was lost. I want to try to uncover some of it.’
Mair rarely talked about her mother, even to Hattie. Her instinct was to protect the bruise that had been left by her death. So it was startling to find herself confiding to Bruno Becker this intimate detail, and to realise that since their first encounter and her explanation of the somersaults she hadn’t told Karen one thing about herself.
She had begun to, she remembered, but something else had always intervened.
But Karen was a bright flame, and everyone was drawn to her. It was only the strange circumstances, the snowstorm and their temporary captivity under the shadow of the monastery, that were making Mair talk so unguardedly to Karen’s husband.
She took another hasty mouthful of cognac. Her hand was unsteady and the metal rim of the beaker rattled faintly against her teeth.
‘Go on,’ Bruno murmured.
She told him about the shawl, and her discoveries in Changthang and Leh. He listened attentively, his black head tipped against the stone wall and his eyes on her face. The cook measured some scant handfuls of rice into another pan of water as the scent of mutton swirled through the kitchen.
Bruno enjoyed the story of Tsering’s great-uncle, and the old man’s early memory of listening in amazement to the mission’s wireless set. ‘And now you’re following the shawl thread onwards to Srinagar,’ he said at length.
‘Yes. Who knows what I’ll find there?’ I will find out about the photograph, she thought.
He unscrewed the cap of the flask and poured them both another drink. She sipped hers, stretching out her legs and letting her shoulders drop. The long day of bouncing over potholes had left her muscles aching.
Bruno rotated his beaker, thoughtfully examining the reflections in the polished surface. ‘I am lucky in that both my parents are still alive. They divorced long ago and my mother remarried. She lives near us in Geneva now – she adores Lotus. My father is still physically strong but his memory has almost gone. My sister and I agreed that he would be safer and happier in a special hospital, which is not nearly as bad as it sounds, by the way.
‘When I went to see him just before we came out here, we were sitting on his balcony looking at the mountains and I was talking – I have to talk a lot on these visits. He likes to hear about the rest of the world and everyone’s lives, although I’m not sure how much of it he remembers. I was telling him about all the places we’d be visiting, and he seemed to be listening, nodding, the way he does.
‘Then he reminded me that an Indian friend of our family
