The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ who was sitting with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and then at Eirlys, with her hair hooked behind her ears and her eyes looking very shiny behind her glasses.

      ‘Should we eat in the other room?’ Mair asked.

      The table in there was a better size for three than the drop-flap one wedged in the kitchen corner, where the memory of their father sitting alone with his cup of tea and the newspaper was very clear.

      The business of taking the food through and finding the last pieces of unpacked cutlery carried them through the moment. Dylan found some candle stubs and Eirlys put them in a saucer. The glow made the stripped-out room look inviting again, blotting out the dust squares on the walls where pictures used to hang.

      ‘We should talk about the good things,’ Eirlys said, when they were all sitting down.

      For a second Mair thought she meant the happy times they had spent as a family, and the uncharacteristic sentiment startled her. Then she realised that her sister was talking about the two or three pieces of furniture and old silver that were all there had been of real value in the house. Since the reading of the will they had known that the proceeds from selling the house were to be divided equally between them. The smaller items they hadn’t really talked about.

      There was the grandfather clock, with a painted face showing the sun and moon, whose sonorous tick had measured out the long afternoons of her childhood. Huw had mentioned it once, in the last weeks, referring to it as ‘Dylan’s clock’. Mair had deliberately ignored him because she didn’t want to acknowledge what he meant.

      ‘You’ll take the clock, Dylan,’ Eirlys said. ‘Mair?’

      The other two were married, and they owned houses with hallways and alcoves and shelves. Mair was not, and she lived happily in a rented one-and-a-half-room flat. She didn’t need, or even want, her mother’s bow-fronted chest or silver teapot. They would find a better home with Eirlys. She laid down her knife and fork and cleared her throat.

      ‘I would like to have Grandma’s shawl,’ she said. ‘If that’s all right?’

      ‘Of course it is.’ Eirlys nodded. ‘If you agree, Dylan?’

      He looked at Mair. There were quite deep lines at the corners of his eyes, these days. He and Eirlys were both shortsighted, and Dylan tended to screw up his eyes when he was concentrating.

      Awareness of how much she loved her brother wrapped round her like a blanket. All her life he had been her ally, whereas as children she and Eirlys had constantly squabbled, mostly because they were each other’s embodied opposites. Not that they had quarrelled recently, of course. The loss of their adored father had made them considerate of each other, even wary.

      ‘Do you know where it might have come from?’ Dylan asked her.

      She said, ‘No. But maybe I could try to find out.’

      This idea only came to her as she gave voice to it. She was surprised by the curiosity that the mysterious shawl aroused in her.

      That night Mair and Eirlys went to bed for the last time in the room they had shared as children. Mair could tell that her sister wasn’t asleep, although she didn’t twist and turn between the damp sheets like Mair was doing. In the end she whispered, ‘Eirlys, can’t you sleep?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘What are you thinking about?’

      ‘The same as you, probably. Once your parents are both dead, you really are it, aren’t you? You’re responsible, because there’s no one standing in front of you. Do you know what I mean?’

      Sympathy flooded through Mair. Her sister had been behaving responsibly for her entire life. She had been a prizewinning medical student and had just been appointed to a consultant’s post at her Birmingham hospital, yet she had still found time to marry and have two boys. All her life she had been studying and looking after other people, and now her vision of this latest phase of their lives was of yet more weight falling on her shoulders.

      Mair thought, Ever since I could walk and talk, I’ve been skipping away from the path my sister and brother trod ahead of me. Instead of following them to a good university she had left home and Wales at seventeen, fulfilling a long-standing promise, halfway between a family joke and a rebellious threat, to run away and join a circus. And at Floyd’s Family Circus she had met Harriet Hayes, or Hattie the Clown. Together they had worked up a simple trapeze act. Their nights at the circus were a long way behind them now, but they had been close friends ever since. In the intervening years Mair had also been a dress-shop manager, the singer in a band, a receptionist, a PR, a nursery assistant, a bookseller, and several other incarnations in the job market, with varying degrees of success, but usually some satisfaction.

      No, even Hattie wouldn’t call me responsible, she acknowledged. And Hattie was quite a lot more frivolous than Eirlys.

      Mair’s heart began to pound against her ribs and a white light blazed behind her eyes. Her body felt suddenly as light as a feather, and she realised that what she was feeling was free. She wanted to capture this blessing, and at the same time she longed to share some of it with her sister. Her fingers reached out and touched the fringes of the shawl, which lay on the chair beside her bed. ‘Yes, I do know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Eirlys, I’ve been thinking. I might do some travelling. You know, now Dad’s gone and, like you say, there’s just us left behind. I was wondering about going to India – perhaps see what I can find out about Grandma and her shawl. I’d be unravelling some family history. Why don’t you come with me? We could spend some time together. We haven’t done much of that lately.’

      There wasn’t so much as a second’s hesitation before Eirlys replied, ‘I couldn’t possibly. There’s the hospital. It’s difficult for the whole team, with the latest cuts. And who’d look after Graeme and the boys? You should go, though, if that’s what you really want to do. I saw the way you looked at the shawl.’

      Mair knew there was no point in trying to change her sister’s mind. Eirlys was decisive enough for two people. ‘I do think it might be interesting,’ she said.

      She didn’t try to articulate the feeling of rootlessness that had troubled her since their father’s death. Eirlys and Dylan were settled, and she was far from being so herself. Perhaps uncovering some family history might help her to feel her place again.

      ‘You might not find out anything at all. India’s a big country. But you deserve a break and a new horizon. Grief can take all sorts of different forms, you know. And you took on most of the burden of looking after Dad. Dylan and I are really grateful for what you did, giving up that job and everything.’

      Mair blinked hard in the darkness, but hot tears still escaped from the corners of her eyes. After the funeral Eirlys had remarked that the baby of the family was so busy being unconventional that it didn’t leave much time for her to focus on anything else. That had stung Mair, but now she reflected that grief did indeed take many forms. Eirlys’s caused her to be more tart than usual. The realisation made her sister’s kindness now seem even more touching and valuable. She murmured, ‘It was a privilege. I’m glad I was free to do it.’

      ‘Take some time, have a trip to India. If you need a reason and the shawl gives you one, that’s fine,’ Eirlys concluded. ‘Now, can we go to sleep?’

      Outside, the bleating of the sheep had finally subsided. Mair knew why. Once night had fallen, the ewes understood that their lost lambs could never be called back. СКАЧАТЬ