The Pulse of Danger. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ between Jack and herself was now apparent to the others. Oh, to be back in London, where you had the privacy of congestion! One was too naked here in the mountains. She wondered how the monks in the mountain monasteries, who valued introspection so much, managed to survive the exposure to each other.

      Wilkins broke the moment, bluntly, like a man treading too heavily on thin ice. ‘I wouldn’t mind being tweedy and all in Bucks, England, or Bucks County, P.A., wherever that is. Anywhere, just so long as we’re out of here.’

      Tom Breck, the morning sun making newly-minted pennies of his dark glasses, looked up towards the mountains north and east of them. The valley ran north-east between tree-cloaked slopes that rose steeply towards the peaks of the Great Himalaya Range. Oak, birch and pine made a varied green pattern against the hillsides; clumps of rhododendrons were turning brown under the autumn chill; gentians that had miraculously survived the frosts lay like fragments of mirror among the rocks, reflecting the blue above. The morning wind, still blowing from the south although it was late October, snatched snow from the high peaks and drew it in skeins, miles long, across the shining sky. He had loved the Rockies in his home state, but they had never prepared him for the grandeur and breath-taking excitement of these mountains on the roof of the world.

      ‘I’d be quite happy to stay here forever.’ He looked across at Nancy, grinning boyishly, twisting his beard as if wringing water from it. ‘What d’you say, honey?’

      Nancy nodded. ‘Maybe for a while. Not forever, though. It’s too close to China. Sooner or later you’d be wanting to climb the mountains—’She nodded towards the north.

      ‘This is as close as I want us ever to get.’

      Breck’s face had sobered. The light went out of his dark glasses as he lowered his head, and a deep frown cut his brows above them. ‘You’re right, honey. I’d find nothing. Nothing that would help.’

      Then he got up, awkwardly, quickly, and went back down to the porters in the garden. There was a moment which, to Eve, was so tangible that she felt she could see it; the wrong remark, even the wrong look, could have punctured it as a balloon might have been. She sat waiting for someone to say the wrong thing; but no one did. Marquis and Wilkins turned away from the table as naturally as if they had decided some moments ago to do so, and went down to join Breck and the porters.

      Nancy Breck looked after them. ‘Tom forgets sometimes. I mean, what happened to his parents. Then when he does remember—’She looked back to the north, to the mountains, with the skeins of wind-blown snow now turning to scimitars, riding like demons out of China. ‘I mean, it’s almost as if he wanted to forget—’

      ‘Wouldn’t that be best?’

      Nancy shook her head. She was a big girl, strong and well-proportioned; she looked a farm girl from Minnesota rather than a doctor’s daughter from Main Line Philadelphia. Later on she would be massive, perhaps even a little frightening; but now she was attractive, if you liked big healthy girls. And Tom Breck obviously did; and what anyone else thought didn’t matter at all. She was not wearing her glasses now, and her big short-sighted brown eyes were dark with concentration.

      ‘He mustn’t forget! I’m not religious, God knows – there, that makes me sound contradictory, doesn’t it? Are you religious, Eve? No, I shouldn’t ask.’ At times Nancy could lose herself and her audience in a flood of words; conversation became a one-way torrent of questions, opinions and non-sequiturs. ‘Anyhow. Tom’s parents died because they were religious. Marvellously so – I’ve read some of the letters they sent him. Every second line read like a prayer.’

      I talked like this once, Eve was thinking, listening with only half an ear. I used all those extravagant adjectives; non-sequiturs were a regular diet with me. But I never had Nancy’s passion, not about the world in general; perhaps that is the American in her, they make an empire of their conscience. I only had (have?) passion for my husband, a most un-English habit.

      She came back to the tail-end of Nancy’s monologue: ‘Don’t you feel that way about Jack? Or shouldn’t I ask?’

      ‘No,’ said Eve, and left Nancy to wonder if it was meant as an answer to either or both the questions. She turned to the kitchen tent, calling to Tsering to bring her more tea.

      ‘Sorry.’ Nancy stood up, mumbled something, then walked away towards her tent, stumbling a little as if embarrassment had only added to her myopia to make her almost blind.

      Eve sat alone at the rough table, warming her hands round the fresh mug of tea Tsering had brought her. She wanted to run after Nancy, apologise for the rudeness of her answer; but that would only lead to explanation, and she would never be able to explain to anyone what had gone wrong between herself and Jack. Because she hated scenes, she had done her best to keep their conflict to themselves; they had had one or two fierce rows, but they had always been in their tent and never while Wilkins and the Brecks had been in camp. She knew that Nimchu and the other main camp porters must have heard the rows and discussed them; but she knew also that the Bhutanese would not have gossiped with the Englishman and the Americans. It shocked and embarrassed her to the point of sickness to discover now that Nancy knew that all was not well between her and Jack. To have Nick and Tom know could somehow be ignored. To have another woman, one so newly and happily married, know was almost unbearable.

      Tsering hovered behind her, his round fat face split in the perpetual smile that made life seem one huge joke. His name, Tsering Yeshe, meant Long Lived Wisdom; he had never shown any signs of being wise, unless constant cheerfulness showed a wisdom of acceptance of what life offered. He was proud of his attraction for women, and on the trek out he had almost shouted himself hoarse calling to every woman he had passed, even those who were sometimes half a mile away, standing like dark storks in the flooded rice paddies. Eve had no idea how old he was and he himself could only guess; but he had been accompanying expeditions here in the Himalayas, in Nepal, Sikkim and his native Bhutan, every year since the end of World War Two. He had a wife and four children back at Dzongsa Dzong on the Indian border, but he hardly ever saw them; he claimed three other wives in various parts of the country, but Eve suspected these were inventions to bolster his reputation. Eve, a wife driven by her own needs to accompany her husband wherever he went, wondered what Tsering’s wife felt about his long absences.

      ‘More cake, memsahib? More tea?’ Tsering liked his women fat, and he thought the memsahib much too thin for a really beautiful woman. She had good breasts, but the rest of her was much too flat for a woman who would be really good to make love to. He wondered if that was why the sahib sometimes shouted at the memsahib when they were alone in their tent. ‘You do not eat enough, memsahib.’

      ‘You’ve told me that, Tsering. If I ate as much as you try to push into me, we’d soon run out of food. How are the stores, anyway?’ It was her job to supervise the stores. Even on their first expedition she had insisted that she be given a job and as time had gone by she had become an efficient and reliable supply officer.

      Tsering made a face and ran a greasy hand over his close-cropped black hair. Men and women here in Bhutan all wore the same close-cropped style, and when Eve had first arrived in the country she had several times been confused as to what sex she was talking to. ‘Meat is almost gone, memsahib. Rice, too. Maybe the sahib better shoot something. Yesterday I saw gooral up on hill.’ He nodded back at the tangled hills that, like a green waterfall, tumbled down into the pit of the valley.

      Eve did not particularly like the meat of the gooral, the Himalayan chamois, but she had tasted worse goats’ meat and it was at least better than some of the village sheep they had bought on their way out. ‘I’ll speak to the sahib. And you’d better check again on the rice. If it’s really low, we may have to send Chungma and СКАЧАТЬ