‘I shall be surprised if, in another week, he is still alive.’

  ‘What is his trouble?’ asked one of the brothers, Abdul, a big, dyspeptic-looking man, chronically aware that he too had organs susceptible to disease and pain.

  ‘It is in his stomach.’

  ‘She is like a doctor herself. Can she do nothing?’

  McLeod shook his head.

  ‘If he was in hospital, in the city, could the doctors save him?’

  Yes, that was the question. ‘I don’t think so. It’s too late. Two months ago perhaps.’

  ‘Why did he travel then, if he was so sick?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  Abdul shook his head anxiously. He had eaten too much that afternoon, and his belly was sore. If Kemp was too far from hospital, so was he.

  Azim turned to McLeod. ‘I have told them, my friend, that the woman wishes to remain with us in the valley if the man dies. Like myself, they do not understand.’

  ‘Perhaps I do not understand very clearly myself

  ‘Why does she not go with you?’ asked the other brother, as amiable and eupeptic as Abdul was gloomy.

  ‘She is with child, and it is a difficult journey. Besides, she would not leave while her husband is still alive.’

  ‘It may be winter when he dies,’ muttered Abdul. ‘It is the time for dying.’

  ‘I have asked her to send me a message in the spring,’ said McLeod. ‘Could such a message be delivered, to the British Embassy, in the capital?’

  Rafiq nodded. ‘I shall deliver it myself

  ‘It is a long journey.’

  ‘If it was ten times as long, I would deliver it.’

  ‘What would this message say?’ asked Azim.

  ‘It would tell me what she intended to do: either to come back home or remain here. If she wanted to return, I would make the arrangements.’

  ‘It would be better,’ murmured Azim. ‘We could take her and the child to the Embassy, but perhaps they would not understand there.’

  ‘Yes. But, of course, if she chose to remain, it would be up to you to decide.’

  ‘There are difficulties,’ said Azim, after a long pause, during which he puffed at the pipe. ‘In the first place, she is not of our faith, and already there have been complaints that she talks too much about her own faith, which she says is superior. In the second place, it is not usual for a woman to live amongst us without some man being responsible for her. In the third place, there would be the question of the child; surely it would become one of us, it would play with our children, it would speak our tongue, and I think it would want to have our faith. There are other difficulties, my friend, but those are the greatest. You must speak to her about them.’

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘There is a difficulty of another kind. You will leave in a few days. Surely you will tell the people outside that you have found these two, whom everyone thinks are dead.’

  ‘Certainly soldiers will come,’ said Abdul.

  ‘If they do,’ said Azim, ‘we will tell them the truth. We think now that it is possible they will believe us, and will do us no harm. But it is certain they will not allow her to remain. They will take her back with them. Tell her that also.’

  ‘Yes, I shall tell her. But she has already asked me not to say that I have found her. She does not wish anyone to come looking for her.’

  Again there was a pause. It was Abdul, the pessimist, who broke it. ‘Some people here say – I do not admit I say it myself -that she and the man must have done something wrong among their own people. I know it is true that often they quarrel, as if their minds were not at peace.’

  ‘Do you not quarrel with your own wife?’ asked Azim.

  ‘I carefully pointed out I was not expressing my own opinion, Azim. You know yourself, Fakir and his friends say they must have committed some terrible crime.’

  ‘It is not true,’ said McLeod.

  ‘Did the woman not nurse your son when he was sick?’ asked Rafiq.

  ‘And your wife, too, Rafiq.’

  ‘They are thought to be dead,’ said Azim. ‘You know that a village was punished for killing them. I have heard that two men were taken away to be hanged.’

  McLeod nodded.

  ‘Should it not now be proved to everyone that these unhappy people were innocent?’

  ‘Perhaps it should.’

  Azim smiled. ‘Who can tell? You will speak to her about all these difficulties?’

  McLeod promised he would.

  Twenty

  Margaret stood in the doorway, trying to appear as relaxed as any English housewife seeing a friend off whom she would see again in a week or two’s time. But through the open door she could hear Donald’s moans and grumbles of delirium, and see him almost unconscious, with his beard curiously faded and his thin fists stiffened into claws of pain on the blue coverlet.

  Smiling, she watched McLeod mount his horse. By the spring his escort, Rafiq and two others, waited for him, muffled in their leather jackets and striped blankets. Their horses snorted and stamped in the keen air. The dawn was still pink on the high snows.

  McLeod took a long time making himself comfortable in the saddle. She knew he was putting off looking at her to say farewell. This awkwardness in her presence had increased during his five days’ stay in the valley.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I suppose I’ll have to be going.’

  ‘Yes. Goodbye, John. And thank you again.’

  He frowned and shook his head. ‘I’ve done nothing. I feel I’m going away leaving everything to be done, though God knows I don’t know what it is I should do.’

  ‘Yes, John, you are right: God does know. He knows what has already happened, and what is still to happen. It is a great comfort to me, because it means I cannot be forgotten.’

  Again he was confronted by his inability to fathom the religious mind.

  ‘I still am not sure I’m doing the right thing about Donald,’ he said, unable to hide his irritation.

  ‘You must be guided by your own conscience.’

  That piety so like humbug: put your hand in God’s and He will lead you into the enclosure marked: For the Saved Only.

  He must be more tolerant and sympathetic; after all, this was probably the last time he would ever see her.

  ‘I can’t help thinking I ought at least to try and get help to him.’

  ‘If you think that. . .’she whispered. ‘But it would be too late.’

  That was very likely. Every day Donald was weaker. Just half an hour ago McLeod, come to say goodbye, had thought him dead; then watching him begin again the painful struggle to remain alive, or at least to keep on breathing, he had almost wished him dead. Donald could not be made to understand that McLeod was going. Whimpering, and clutching Margaret’s finger with the grip of a baby, he had concentrated on accommodating the agony feasting on him. Watching, McLeod had remembered Minn’s contemptuous description at the cocktail party: leper-lover. And Mrs. Bryson in her bikini had called him indestructible.

  ‘A doctor could be got here in a couple of weeks,’ said McLeod. ‘Don’t you think it’s worth trying?’

  ‘You must do what you think is right.’

  ‘But surely you agree with me?’

  She stood smiling. He could not bear to look at that smile. It was a prophetess’s, surely; by it she was mocking him for having journeyed hundreds of hard desperate miles to bring a doctor to visit a grave. Then he knew it could not be that kind of smile at all. That part of the future she was most interested in, the time of the birth of her child, was darker to her than it was to him.

  ‘I’m afraid my mind isn’t made up yet,’ he said. ‘I know I promised, but I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘If you were to wait for a few days longer.’

  ‘No. I must get back.’ The reason was that for him the situation in the valley had grown intolerable, because of her. ‘You should be all right. Azim has given me his word.’

  ‘I am not afraid. Please believe that. Whatever happens, I shall not be alone.’

  She meant God would be with her. During those few days she had talked too much about God. It was a companionship McLeod stubbornly preferred not to take into consideration.

  ‘In any case, you’ll let me know what has happened, and what you intend to do?’

  ‘If it is at all possible, I promise.’

  ‘It should be possible. Rafiq has promised to deliver the message himself. He’ll keep his word, too.’

  ‘Yes. They are all very kind.’

  ‘Well—’ He stared helplessly at her. His very feelings seemed incomplete.

  ‘May God take care of you, John, wherever you are.’

  He should have returned that compliment, but he could not.

  Beside the spring Rafiq waited patiently. But one of the others, a big, burly jocular man called Salamodin, had dismounted and was on his knees, busy at his morning prayers. He was in a hurry, like a man remedying an oversight. There, too, was God the companion: a different God though, in a different headquarters. Did the one cancel the other out? Again McLeod felt irritable at being left out, unable to sympathise or understand.

  ‘I must say this, too, before I go. I promised your parents to go and see them when I got back. If I were to keep that promise, or if they were to write to me, I think I’d be forced to tell them the truth, that you were here, alive.’

  She stared at him with a curious closeness, reminding him, he thought, that he had already given her his promise.

  ‘Though what reason I should give them for your choosing to stay here—’ He shook his head.

  Still she stared.

  ‘Suppose the worst does happen, suppose the child isn’t what you hope it will be, you could leave it here, that could be easily arranged. Some family would adopt it, for a little recompense.’ He had left some money with Azim for that purpose; all he had told Azim was that she might need it. ‘You’d be able to get away and forget the whole horrible business, as you’ve a right to.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Maybe you won’t be able to accept Azim’s conditions. Remember this is a society dominated by men.’

  Then, taking him by surprise, she came running over, seized his hand and held on to it. He thought she looked suddenly old, ill, and uncertain. If ever God vanished from a human face it was then, from hers. She could not speak, and her dumbness was like some penalty, inexorably exacted; she was afraid, too, and clutched at his hand so fiercely she seemed minded to pull him headlong from the horse.

  Just as abruptly she let go and hurried back to the house. She did not once look round. Inside, she closed the door.

  Trembling, he sat and gazed at the house. His hand still hung down, as if maimed. Out of some green vines that covered part of the wall a bird flew, with a crest and a soft, cooing call. He watched it alight on a tree. For a moment he seemed to escape into its life, where morality did not exist.

  Next moment he jerked the reins, and his horse, glad to go, went snorting to join the others.

  Rafiq looked at him with sympathy. ‘She will not come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I do not think she will ever leave.’

  ‘You think not?’

  ‘It is what my wife says. He is still very sick?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yet he isn’t old.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was sick when he arrived here.’

  The big man who had said his prayers by the spring came up to them, wiping his mouth; he had been taking a drink. He spoke in a jovial voice. ‘What is pain? Or death itself, for that matter? We who are still alive and well should not forget to laugh.’

  ‘Salamodin is always laughing,’ said Rafiq.

  The third man, Sofi, said drolly: ‘They say he laughs when praying.’

  ‘No, but sometimes when other men are praying. I think God must laugh in his beard, too, seeing so many rogues so busy on their knees.’

  As they rode away, McLeod thought that in the house behind him Margaret was probably praying.

  Two hours later, on a hillock in the forest, they stopped to rest their horses and take the last look back down at the valley. Amongst the green trees the houses shone in the sun. Through binoculars McLeod picked out Donald’s and Margaret’s. He saw her, or what at first he took to be her, in the garden. She was motionless, and he thought she must be gazing up at the forest, perhaps regretting in the depths of her heart that she had not gone with him. Then he began to doubt it was she he was looking at. It might have been a rock with a blue cloth spread upon it to dry. That would be like her. However despairing deep within, outwardly she would continue to show a housewife’s calm, and wash, and cook, and tend her husband, and prepare for the child kicking within her. He imagined her hands, ringless, work-worn, and calm; and he wondered at the unimaginable sources of that calmness.

  As they rode on again he felt that he had seen her for the last time. Indeed, he began to have a feeling that he had not seen her at all, but rather had dreamt it; and it was a dream he should start learning to forget. The people he should want to remember were those at Haimir, for instance. Had soldiers or policemen descended upon them again, to bully out of them every detail of his own visit? He thought of the old woman there, and of Rafiq’s mother, and found their remembered indomitability sustaining him, as the memory of Margaret’s incomprehensible devotion could never do.

  So it was those old women, and the young girl with the dead baby, and the old chief with the one hand, and the teacher of English at Kalak, that he kept recalling during the long, furtive journey through dark defiles and along precipitous windy ledges, to the blue lake, and thence to the lower slopes of the mountain where his car was waiting.

  Twenty-one

  Through his binoculars McLeod saw that Salamodin was right: about a mile ahead, amidst the great red rocks like cinders out of hell, was his Land-Rover; and beside it stood a truck. Smoke swirled from a fire, about which men moved. Their clothes did not billow in the strong wind. Near them were two tents, about fifty yards apart.

  Soldiers or police, he was sure; but had they tracked down the Land-Rover deliberately and now waited beside it for his return, or had they come upon it by accident? The former was much more likely. Even in a time of frontier uneasiness this part of the country was seldom patrolled, especially at this late season when winds thick with dust blew during the day, and at night frost was keen. Yes, they must have pursued him from Mazarat, through Haimir to the lakes, and thence to this barren wilderness under the great mountains.

  ‘I think it would be better if you were to go no further,’ he said. ‘They would ask too many questions.’

  Rafiq nodded. He looked sour, and kept touching the butt of the rifle across his saddle. That was a habit picked up coming through the upper pass, with soldiers not so far below.

  ‘I can walk from here,’ said McLeod.

  They did not argue, though they would have thought it unmanly to walk such a distance themselves. But then the heels of their riding-boots were two inches high.

  They all dismounted. Rafiq helped McLeod to strap on his rucksack.

  ‘Will they do you harm?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You have a gun?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think I’ll need it.’

  ‘If we hear shooting, we will come galloping.’

  It was turning dark, and the wind, still blowing down from the hills, was icy. A star or two glittered.

  McLeod shook hands with each of them.

  ‘Sahib,’ said Salamodin, laughing though his mouth was muffled with part of his turban cloth, ‘what you say to them yonder is your business. I agree. But it could be our business, depending upon what you say. You understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean no disrespect, sahib. But Azim told us what he saw at Haimir. You saw it yourself

  ‘Yes, I saw it.’

  ‘It is not right to count heads in such a matter, I agree, but it is still true that your friends are two, whereas there are two hundred and more in the valley.’

  ‘What happened at Haimir would not happen to us,’ said Rafiq. ‘We would fight.’

  ‘The difference would be,’ said Salamodin, laughing, ‘that we would all be dead, whereas at Haimir some are still alive.’

  ‘I shall say nothing to them that will cause you any trouble,’ said McLeod. ‘I shall not tell them I have been to your valley.’

  They were silent for almost a minute.

  ‘Sahib,’ murmured Sofi, who seldom spoke, ‘will you come and visit us again in the spring?’

  ‘I don’t know. It may not be possible. In the spring I expect to be thousands of miles away.’

  ‘There is the woman, sahib. What is to become of her?’

  ‘I don’t know that, either.’

  ‘Does anyone know what will happen to him in the spring?’ asked Rafiq harshly. ‘We are all in God’s hands.’

  ‘No one can deny that,’ agreed Sofi, and said no more; but it was clear that, imagining himself and his friends on a Brobdingnagian palm, he by no means felt confident.

  ‘I shall walk a few steps with you,’ said Rafiq to McLeod.

  He did so, slowly, with awkward, stilted gait. Soon he halted, and gripped McLeod by the arm.

  ‘I struck you,’ he said. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘I wish to explain. At that time we had made up our minds that we would be safe only when your friends were dead. That was the decision of the council. I agreed with it. I spoke for it. The man would soon die, in any case. Perhaps he is dead now, as we speak. So there would be only the woman.’

  ‘I know all this.’

  ‘Not all.’ Rafiq could not keep his voice low. ‘If someone has to be killed, there must be someone to do it. No one was willing.’

  ‘I would have thought Fakir or one of his sons would have offered.’

  ‘They could not. They are holy men. It would not be proper for them to shed blood.’

  ‘But proper enough for them to urge that it be shed?’

  ‘I think it will be the same with your holy men, sahib.’

  ‘It is.’

 

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