The Pulse of Danger

Marquis cocked an eyebrow at her, wondering at her amusement, then he turned back to Wilkins. ‘We’re safe enough, Nick. We’re a long way from where the fighting is, and in any case we’ll be out of here in a fortnight.’

‘So you can start preparing, Nick, for the shock of civilisation,’ said Eve, wiping honey from her chin with a finger; and Marquis grinned at her.

Wilkins was aware of the undercurrent between the Marquises. He and the Brecks had discussed it once or twice when they had come back here to the main camp for their periodic reports to Marquis. Each scientist took two porters and moved out into an area of his own choosing, staying there for periods varying from two weeks to a month. The Brecks, both botanists, went together and since this was virtually a honeymoon trip did not seem to mind the isolation from the others. But Wilkins, though shy in speech, was naturally gregarious and always looked forward to his return to the main camp. On the last couple of visits he had noticed that the Marquises had become uncertain in their attitudes towards each other; they were like climbers negotiating the slopes in the mountains beyond the camp where new snow lay across old snow and an avalanche could start with one false step. He had an Englishman’s distaste for viewing other people’s private feelings and he was now wishing urgently for an end to the expedition. He had begun by liking the cheerful, argumentative Marquis, but he had made up his mind now he would not come on another trip with him. For one thing he envied and resented Marquis’s ability to deal with almost anything that came up, his gift for leadership. And for another thing, there was Eve.

Then the Brecks came up from the garden, smiling at each other in the open, yet somehow secret way that, Eve had noticed, was international among young lovers. Perhaps she and Jack had once smiled like that at each other; she couldn’t remember. Memory, if it hadn’t yet turned sour, had begun to fail her when she needed it most. She turned to greet them, looking for herself and Jack in their faces.

‘Boy, what a morning!’ Tom Breck flung his arms wide, as if trying to split himself apart. All his actions and gestures were exaggerated, like those of a clockwork toy whose engine was too powerful. ‘And we’re packing up to go home!’

‘Another month up here and you’d have your behind frozen off,’ Marquis said. ‘Ask the porters what it’s like up here once the winds turn.’

‘I’d like to take a couple of those guys back home with us.’ Breck nodded down towards the porters laughing among themselves as they worked in the garden. ‘Boy, they’re happy!’

‘They wouldn’t be in Bucks County,’ said Nancy Breck, practical as ever. She sat down at the table beside Eve, dipped a tsampa cake in the jar of honey and ate it. ‘That’s where we’re going to live. Lots of tweedy types live there. Bucks County, P.A., is no place for a Bhutanese.’

Tom Breck grinned and sat down opposite his wife, looking at her with undisguised love. He was a tall thin boy who, with his crew-cut and his wispy blond beard, looked even younger than twenty-four. A Quaker from Colorado, he had spent six months in New York where he had met and married Nancy, and in his seven months here on the Indian sub-continent had lost none of his enthusiasm for the world at large. He was a bumbler, forgetful and unmethodical and a poor botanist; and several times Marquis had had to speak bluntly and harshly to him. Always Breck, unresentful of the dressing-down, genuinely apologetic, had gone back to work with the same cheerful enthusiasm. But already in nine months of marriage it had become evident to him that Nancy had come along just in time to save him from disaster. She was and would be his only means of survival; and unlike so many men in the same predicament, he was grateful for and not resentful of the fact. Tom Breck was a pacifist in the battle of the sexes.

‘Bucks County sounds just like Bucks, England,’ said Marquis. ‘Eve’s old man was always in tweeds. Even at our wedding. She had me all dolled up in striped pants from Moss Bros. I looked like a good argument for living in sin, and her old man turned up looking like a second-hand sofa. Twice at the reception I nearly sat down on him.’

Eve smiled sweetly at him, not taking the bait. She had seen the glance pass between Wilkins and the Brecks. She wrapped herself in silence and a smile, aware for the first time that the coolness 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 Tashi back down the valley to buy some at Sham Dzong.’

That was two days’ walk: four days there and back. Jack would consider it a waste of time and two men. If she played her stores carefully, she might have them all out of here within a week.

She smiled to herself, like a schoolgirl who was about to bring the holidays forward by burning down the school.

2

Marquis was secretly pleased when Eve told him they needed more meat and would he try for the gooral. There were still some botanical specimens that had to be gathered to make the collection complete, and time was running out; snow was already beginning to fall heavily on the high peaks, and any day now the winds would swing to the north to bring blizzards. On top of that he had been more disturbed than he had shown by this morning’s news on the radio. He was not a fool, and he knew that the Chinese Reds had long regarded Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and the North-East Frontier Agency as only extensions of Tibet. But he wanted at least another week; he wanted to complete the collection, his best ever. He had fought against the idea, was still fighting it, but this might be his last expedition. He wanted it to be one that botanists at least would remember.

But now only the gooral was on his mind; or so he told himself. He always welcomed the opportunity to hunt game, and it eased his conscience when the hunt was for food and not just for sport. He would go out again this afternoon and collect the swertia racemosa he had seen yesterday in the ravine farther up the valley.

He was now a mile above the camp, moving up a narrow track through a stand of evergreen oak. The valley here was almost narrow enough to be called a gorge, a cleft between two steep wooded ridges; the river raced down the floor of the valley, twisting and turning like a rusted knife cutting its way out of the mountains. He knew that the river sped on to join other mountain streams, became a slower-moving river that merged into the Brahmaputra, a procession of waters that wended their majestic way, carrying the prayers, dreams and excreta of men, down to the Bay of Bengal over a thousand miles away. Rivers, as well as mountains, had always fascinated him; he had a voice like a bookmaker’s lament, but his heart always rang with a Caruso-note when he came for the first time on a river. Heaven was a high mountain peak somewhere and he would reach it by way of a river that flowed uphill. It thrilled him to walk beside such a stream as this one, to look at the water tearing its way over the rocks and to see it as the birth pangs of a giant river that, a thousand miles away, carried ships to the sea. He was passionately interested in everything that grew in nature: plants, trees, rivers. And once, in South America, he had seen the birth of a mountain as a volcano had exploded out of the belly of a plain.

The opposite ridge was bathed in sunlight, the trees glittering like the plumage of some giant green bird, but this side of the valley had never seen the sun and was dank and cold. Strangers to the Himalayas were always surprised at the difference in temperature between a sunny slope and one where the sun never reached; he remembered Nancy Breck’s shock when she had taken a sun and shade reading and found a difference of 30 degrees centigrade. He shivered now as he trudged up beneath the trees. But this was where he would find the gooral; it did not like the sun. A Monal pheasant broke from a clump of rhododendron ahead of him and flashed like a huge jewel as it crossed to the opposite ridge, but he resisted the quick impulse to shoot at it. The .30 Double would just blow the bird to pieces, and he had never been able to bring himself to kill just for killing’s sake.

He breathed deeply as he walked, enjoying the thin sharp air in his nose and throat. Unlike other expedition leaders to remote places, he had never written a book on his experiences, had never tried to explain the mystique that brought him to these high mountains, took him to tropical jungles or, once, had taken him to the loneliness of the Australian Centre. He was a botanist by profession and it was his job to collect plant specimens; it was a job he enjoyed and one in which he knew he had a high reputation. But deep in his heart, and he was a man of more secrets than even Eve suspected, he knew that the botanical searches were now more of an excuse for an escape from civilisation. Not civilisation, in itself, although he had no deep love of it; no city could ever bring on the euphoria that the isolation of those mountains could give him. He wanted to escape from what civilisation meant: surrender to Eve and her money, a scarecrow man papered over with his wife’s cheques. During their brief engagement he had referred to her as his financée; it was a joke that had soon gone sour, like a penny on the tongue. She always contributed a major part of the finance of these expeditions, but he had now convinced himself that this was her money being spent in a good cause, not just in keeping a husband. Which was what would happen to him if he gave in to her and retired to pottering about on the family estate in Buckinghamshire. Civilisation had once meant something else again, a semidetached morgue in a drab suburb of Sydney where his mother and his two sisters had done their best to lay him out with cold looks of disapproval. Only his father, a rebel who couldn’t afford a flag, drunk every Saturday on republicanism and three bottles of Resch’s Pilsener, had never complained; but he had never really understood why any man should choose to leave the greatest bloody country in the world, Australia. His parents had worked their fingers bare of prints to put him through university; they had neither understood nor forgiven him when he had changed from law to botany at the end of his first year. In the end he had run away because he knew he was in their debt and he would never be able to repay them. They were dead now, but his conscience would give a free ride to their ghosts for the rest of his life.

Now Eve, not yet a ghost, had swung a leg over his conscience. And he felt the weight of her more than that of his parents. The time had come when he owed her a decision. He could not expect her to go on accompanying him forever to the ends of the earth and comfort; she was a woman who had been brought up in comfort and it had surprised him that she had borne so long the hardships of their trips without complaint. But maybe that was her heritage: English boarding schools, English plumbing, English cooking, bred pioneers. The Stoics of ancient Greece would have tossed in the towel, taken out life subscriptions to hedonism, if they had ever been exposed to life in some of the more benighted ancestral halls of England.

There was also the matter of children.

She had talked about having a family almost from the moment they had decided to marry. She had then been a girl of impulsive ideas and quick decisions; it had shocked him, a slow starter at romance, to learn how eager she had been, first, to have him make love to her, then, to have him marry her. He had never met anyone like her: she exploded love like a boxful of fireworks. They had met, become lovers, married and she had started talking about a family all within six weeks.

That had been in the autumn of 1954. He had taken a rare holiday and gone to Switzerland for some climbing. He had climbed the Mönch and in the late evening come back to the small hotel where he was staying. In those days English tourists were still limited in their travel allowance and at even the cheapest hotel one met a very mixed bag of visitors. When he had gone into the hotel’s small bar the only vacant seat had been beside hers. He had not been then, and still was not, a ladies’ man; but his easy-going, casual approach attracted a lot of women. It had attracted Eve and she had attracted him. Within forty-eight hours they had been lovers and were in love: it had been that sort of romance.

It had taken him the same time to discover whose daughter she was and how much money she had. ‘Sir Humphrey Aidan – you’re his daughter? You mean I’ve been to bed with the Bank of England?’

‘Da-ahling, he has nothing to do with the Bank of England.’ She sat up in bed and ran a hand through her tousled hair. In those days she wore it long, down to her shoulders. It was the way he still liked it, and he hated it when he had to chop it short for her when they were out on these field trips. ‘Da-ahling, we’re not going to waste our time talking about money, are we? I hate people who have a thing about money.’

‘A thing? What d’you mean? Oh, if only my dad was here—’

‘Thank God he’s not. Can I help the bed I was born in? Look at me, stark. Am I any different from the daughter of some man on the dole?’

‘Look, love—’

‘I absolutely adore it when you call me love. It’s such a divine change after da-ahling. In my set everyone—’