The Kashmir Shawl by Rosie Thomas

nursed and comforted her through the blood and grief of the miscarriage.
    She hadn’t said anything this evening, and it had been Evan who had put down his knife and fork and closed his book. ‘Nerys, I have something to discuss with you.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘It will soon be winter again.’
    She could hardly be unaware of that. This year, now she knew about the depths of cold and silence, the monotony of eating the same food, the frozen water in their washing jugs, and the isolation of their little world, she thought that she would deal with it better. ‘Yes.’
    ‘I can’t sit here in the mission all that time. In summer when I go out to villages and the nomad camps, the people are almost all out with the herds. But if I went in the winter, do you see, they would be in the settlements. They will have less work to do and I would have their attention.’
    Nerys considered this. There were tracks out to villages in the valley, and hazardous routes over the mountains to outlying gompas and clusters of huts surrounding them, but she could only just imagine what it would be like to travel through snow and wind when the temperature fell to nought degrees Fahrenheit.
    ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.
    Evan was silent.
    Look at me, she willed him. At last their eyes met.
    He wasn’t hostile towards her, neither did he blame her in the least, but the loss of the baby had tipped them over the lip of a divide. As much as he had wanted the child, Evan also needed her to be strong and dependable in the joint enterprise that preoccupied him. Her physical frailty since themiscarriage and the unspoken weighty mass of her sadness suggested that her strength was no longer available for him to draw on. In some recess of his consciousness he resented the withdrawal, and that resentment must loom in his mind as yet another of the personal failings he was obliged to atone for.
    They were at an impasse, Nerys wearily concluded. They couldn’t talk to each other: it had been his child as well as hers and, of course, Evan grieved for it, but he put up too many defences against her and she had lost the will to try to break through them. She felt the beginnings of anger, too, at his weakness, which was so determinedly masked with stubbornness.
    ‘I couldn’t agree to that,’ he said, in his most wintry voice. ‘You must take better care of yourself than I could undertake to do if we were both out in the field.’
    Nerys looked away from him. She closed her mouth, knowing that it made a tight line in her white face. ‘You would prefer it if I stayed here alone?’
    Evan was surprised. ‘You won’t be alone. You will have the schoolchildren, the congregation, the Gomperts, Henry Buller and our other neighbours. And the servants will look after you.’
    Very slowly Nerys folded up her napkin and replaced it in the wooden ring. She stood up, supporting herself briefly with her hand on the back of her chair. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
    She went across the passage to the kitchen door. Diskit was sluicing plates and cutlery in a tin basin, her pomaded hair wound up in a cloth because Nerys had told her it must always be covered when she was working. The red of the material matched her cheeks. Two men were sitting on a bench against the wall, their yak-skin boots discarded beside the door leading to the yard. Diskit dropped a fistful of forks on to a metal tray and Nerys inwardly winced at the noise. ‘Diskit, what’s this?’

    ‘Mem, Leh very busy. My cousin brother,’ she nodded to one of the two men, ‘come from Alchi.’
    ‘ Julley ,’ the men murmured.
    The girl had learnt a smattering of English from Evan’s predecessor, and Nerys had picked up a basic level of Ladakhi. They communicated well, these days, only rarely having to resort to sign language.
    Leh was busy. It was trading season and the caravans were in town, from Lhasa, Yarkand and Kashgar in the east and from Punjab in the west. The merchants from Tibet and