Tulku

5

IN THE REST of that day, though the track became steadily narrower and steeper, they travelled further than they had done in any two previous days. They heard and saw no sign of pursuit, but Mrs Jones would rest no more than the horses needed. She was unusually silent, riding close behind Albert so that at the slightest sign of jibbing she could flick him across the haunches with a long withy she had cut – but indeed she seemed to drive them all on, horses and humans, as though she had funnelled her swirling energies into a single blast before which they were nothing but wind-borne seed, blown steadily up the track. It wasn’t that she was scared, Theodore guessed. It was something else.

The map which P’iu-Chun had given them looked like an illustration to a fairy-tale, with a curly dragon blowing the prevailing wind from the south-east corner and delicate drawings crowding the blank spaces; but it was surprisingly accurate, marking every fork in the track, and at last the endless series of zigzags which brought them up into the Plain of Shrines. For more than an hour they had climbed this last section, with the tree-tops below the path not reaching high enough to obscure the view across to the opposite side of the valley, just as steep and now astonishingly near. And then they were in the open.

The trees ended as though a line had been shaved along the rim of the valley and they came out wearily on to a vast, undulating, grassy plateau which seemed to reach right to where the wall of the true mountains shot towards the sky. Scattered all across this plain were strange rock outcrops, carved by wind and water into pinnacles and pillars and shapes like fortresses, and pocked with caves. Sometimes a fuzz of twisted trees crowned these outcrops, and nearly always there was a shrine or tomb, mostly in ruins but once or twice looking almost new.

To Theodore’s eye the path vanished – you could roam where you wished over the measureless grassland – but Mrs Jones seemed to see where it lay. The grass itself was deceptive, shimmering green in the distance but underfoot only tufts and sparse blades protruding through shaly soil. The air was almost painfully sharp and clear after the muggy heat of the valley. At first their path took them back to the line of the river, which now ran a thousand feet below them, cutting its way through a gorge which made the ravine at the Settlement seem no more than a trivial crack. Even from this height, though, they could hear the mutter of rock-torn water. Then the river curled away south and for three hours they rode through the weird plateau, with no landmarks except the rock formations, which often looked completely different from different angles. It became steadily colder, and Theodore was grateful for another of P’iu-Chun’s ‘gifts’, a hip-length jacket of coarse-woven wool, with a breast-pocket he could fill with bread to munch as he rode.

Towards dusk they came to a pillar crowned by a shrine and a single, leaning birch-tree. A flight of steps had been cut in the sheer side. Mrs Jones reined and looked at it.

‘This’ll do,’ she said. ‘You two give the horses a feed, and I’ll nip up with the glasses and see if I can spot if we’re being followed. If we ain’t, then we’ll camp here – if we are, then we’ll have to plug on.’

She dismounted, took a pair of binoculars from her saddle-bag and started to climb the steps. Lung seemed even more absent-minded than usual, so Theodore saw to the horses single-handed. When he had finished he found Lung staring up at the rock-pillar and followed his gaze. Mrs Jones was there, standing on a slant of rock stair forty feet up, her back braced against the cliff and the binoculars to her eyes.

‘She has a great head for heights,’ said Theodore.

‘She is the osprey on the crag,’ said Lung. ‘She is the song men sing when they march under banners. Her heart beats with the blood of dragons.’

‘Yes, she doesn’t seemed scared of anything.’

‘But she is the duck on the nest. She is flute music heard under willows in the evening. Her eyes shine with lamplight from old gardens.’

‘Is that your own poem?’

‘A beginning. You have fed the horses?’

‘Yes. Do you . . .’

‘Look, she has seen us.’

Mrs Jones’s voice floated down through the evening stillness. ‘Cooee! I can’t see nothing, and that’s right to the forest. We’ll camp here. And I’ve found a nice cave a little up the cliff.’

* * *

The cave was dry and surprisingly clean. Lung said it had probably been used by a hermit. They made no fire, but cooked hot stew from a can using Mrs Jones’s patent stove, whose white tablets of solid fuel reeked vilely in the clean air. They ate their food in the dark, by feel and smell, and watched a storm build itself against the mountain wall far to the north. Lightning whipped and blinked, too distant for them to hear the thunder, but overhead the sky was full of stars.

‘Going to be a moon,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘We better keep watch, I suppose. Don’t feel like sleeping, myself, so you go and kip down, Lung, and I’ll wake you when it’s your turn . . . No, you stay along of me, young Theo, and I’ll tell you my life history. I need a bit of company, stop me thinking. You’re not too fagged?’

‘No, not at all,’ said Theodore with automatic politeness, though his eyes were sticky with needed sleep and his whole body chilled through.

‘That’s the ticket. Here, wrap yourself in a couple of blankets. Off you go. Lung, and don’t lie awake half the night making up poetry – I can see you’re in the mood. You’ll have the other half for that, when you’re doing sentry.’

Lung mumbled his goodnights absent-mindedly and felt his way down the stair to the single tent they had pitched for him and Theodore. Mrs Jones had decided to sleep in the cave.

‘He’s all right,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Matter of fact he’s a sight better-mannered than some of the poets I’ve known – he can hold his liquor, for a start. You think I’m a wicked old woman, don’t you, young man?’

Theodore was too surprised to answer.

‘I’ll lay you do, though, don’t you?’ insisted Mrs Jones.

‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.’

‘Jesus said that, didn’t he? ‘Bout a harlot, what’s more. I was never that, not really. Wouldn’t do me much good in any case, would it, young man? You’ve not had the time to do much by way of sinning, nor the opportunity neither. Do you want to chuck any stones?’

Behind the flippant words there was an urgency which cut through exhaustion, cut through the carelessness of the past few days, and woke the numb centre.

‘I am worse than anyone,’ muttered Theodore. ‘I have betrayed my faith.’

‘Ah, come off it! You couldn’t help that – you did what you had to! Now see here . . . it ain’t no good, though, just having to. I suppose I had to shoot those blokes this morning – ‘nother second and Lung would of been a goner if I hadn’t got that feller what was swiping at him with his sword . . . but it’s shook me up a lot worse than a lot of other things I done what you’d call wickedness I dare say . . . Do you like me, young man? Spite of it all, do you like me?’

Her voice had dropped to a throaty mutter, but all her energies lay behind the question, compelling an answer.

‘Yes,’ said Theodore, ‘I like you all right. And my father says . . . used to say . . . it’s no odds what a man’s done in his past life. It’s what you’re going to do in your future life – that’s what counts.’

‘Good for him, then – not that I’d stake much on me becoming a holy body for the rest of my born days.’

She was silent for a while, as if brooding on the possibility. Theodore became aware that he could see her now, sitting at the mouth of the cave, surrounded by an irregular glow, a mere paling of the blackness. For a while he thought that he was imagining the effect in his weariness, that his mind was playing tricks, making him see the invisible forces that beamed out from her. Then, rather to his relief, he realized that the moon must be rising.

‘Do you want to know why I’m here?’ said Mrs Jones suddenly.

‘So you can watch and see if we’re being attacked.’

‘That ain’t what I meant. Here I am, bundling round these heathen parts, looking for odds and bobs of plants, running for my life now, ’cause of a young man whose family paid me to stay out of England for ten years.’

‘Was that Mr Jones?’

‘Lord no. I give him the push years before. He was a wrong g’un, if ever. Like to hear about this other bloke?’

‘If you want to tell me,’ said Theodore.

‘He’s a nice young man,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Least, he was when I met him. I suppose he must be around thirty-five now. That’s right, he’s four years younger than what I am . . . rich as crazes . . . you see, he’s the one and only white-headed boy of one of them old Jewish banking families. He never took me home, of course, but he told me about it. There’s his Dad, what ran the bank and could of bought up the Prince of Wales twice over, and his Mum, come from just the same kind of family only in Paris, dripping with diamonds, handsome, full of brains, sharp as a green lemon, and all his sisters and his aunts, them as nobody’s managed to marry off into other banks, all sitting around of an evening in this great big house north of the Park; and in the middle of them, all in black, deaf as a post but still missing nothing, is his Gran – his Dad’s Mum, and what she says goes. Even my Monty’s Dad, with his hunting-lodge in Scotland and his yacht at Cowes and his pack of hounds in the Midlands – even he’s scared stiff of her. Now, I don’t think any of them minded a straw when Monty hit it off with me – only an actress, my dear, keep him out of trouble till we choose a wife for him. What they didn’t realize was it was going to get serious between Monty and me . . .

‘I suppose I better explain about that. I told you I wasn’t a harlot, ’cause I’ve never been with a gentleman what I didn’t fancy a bit, and I let them give me jewels and things, but it wasn’t serious, not more than once or twice . . . anyway, I was too young then to know what I was doing, almost. But Monty and me . . .

‘When his family saw what was going on, they done their best to break it up, but it didn’t work ’cause Monty upped sticks and took me to Africa. Funny, ain’t it, how a rich Jew-boy, brought up in the middle of London, should want more than anything else in the world to have a great big garden full of foreign plants . . . two years we spent at it, fossicking round after roots and bulbs and things. We done Africa. We done Inja. We done South America. I used to tell Monty, teasing him like, as I was only his excuse for getting away from his bank and going plant-hunting. Course, it wasn’t true . . . he was gone on me and I was gone on him . . . mercy, yes! Not that he’s much to look at, a little bloke, trim, going a bit bald even when I first met him, something about him made him look like he’s just been polished, even in the middle of a jungle, know what I mean? Oh, they was good times . . .

‘Funny how things work out. We was in Mexico, and I started having a baby. I’d always managed to miss that before, but now it seemed like the best thing of all, and Monty took it into his head that he was going to bring me back to London, where I could have good doctors – and spite of his family he was going to marry me. Me, I didn’t care what happened, I was that happy for him. So we come home.

‘We found a nice little house, up in Swiss Cottage, and Monty set about arranging everything. He would of married me if they’d cut him off with a shilling, but he was used to being rich, and there ain’t no point in being poor if you can help it, is there? So he had a bit of argy-bargy to do, took him out a lot. And we hadn’t been settled even a week when I was sitting alone one morning and a lady come calling, and it was Monty’s Mum.

‘Surprising how we hit it off, despite we was on opposite sides. She didn’t say so right out, but I got it into my head something must of happened to her, back in Paris, like what was happening to Monty now, and she’d come and married Monty’s Dad when she was stuck on someone else. She didn’t come the grand lady with me, nor lay down the law, neither. But she told me straight out that if I married Monty he wasn’t getting a penny. They’d chosen a wife for him, and what’s more she wasn’t one of themselves – she was the daughter of an English Marquess. I can’t hope to explain to you what that meant to them – all these years the Jews being shovelled aside by the English nobs, not being let into their clubs, not being allowed to meet their wives, being treated like dirt, really, despite lending them all the money they needed . . . Monty’d told me how it hurt. And then Monty’s Mum explained how they’d set him up if he married this girl, with everything he wanted. I remember I asked if the girl was interested in gardening, and Monty’s Mum just smiled and nodded. She’d taken care of that! She even knew the bit of ground we’d chosen for Monty’s garden – Monty’d come home the day before a bit down in the mouth, because he thought it was all settled and then he’d found it had been sold all of a sudden to someone else. Guess who had the title deeds in her handbag!

‘I didn’t tell Monty she’d been. I got him to take me down a couple of days later, pretending I wanted to look for another bit of ground in the same part of the world, but while we was there I said we might as well have a wander round this bit what we’d missed, as I’d never even seen it. Raining stair-rods it was when we get out of the carriage, but we walked all round under Monty’s big black brolly, arms round each other’s waists so as to keep out of the rain, and even so my shoes was falling apart and my skirt was sopping up to my knees by the time we’d been round – and my heart was breaking, too, ’cause I knew he had to have it. Seventy-three acres, running slant along a ridge looking out south-east. You couldn’t see fifty yards that day, but Monty said in decent weather you could see clear across to the Downs, twenty-five mile away – nothing much of a view round these parts, I suppose, but it’s a long way in England. I couldn’t see what made it so different from any other bit of farm on a hill-side, ’cept there was a huge old grove of sweet chestnut near the top and a long wood sweeping down half sideways, not too thick, just right for his lilies . . . Ah, he’s such a one for lilies. Me too . . . And as we went round he told me where he was going to put all his plants what we’d been collecting those two years, and what his gardening friends had been looking after for him, his clematis and his peonies and his eucryphias – you never seen a eucryphia in flower, I dare say, young man . . .’

‘I don’t know,’ said Theodore. The urgency with which she told her story, though she seemed to be talking as much to herself as to him, had somehow buoyed him out of sleep; but even so it was difficult to bring his wits together to answer the sudden question.

‘I suppose there were quite a lot of flowers round the Settlement, but I only got to know a few of their Chinese names,’ he explained.

‘No, there wouldn’t be a eucryphia round there,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I wonder how he’s been getting his through the winter – they’re not that hardy . . .’

She sat brooding again, framed in the silver moonlight.

‘What did you say to Mr Monty?’ asked Theodore.

‘Nothing. Not straight off. I had to see his Mum again. Fix up about my income, fix up about the baby. You know, till she died last winter she wrote me a huge long letter, twice a year, telling me how the kid was doing; and when the doctors told her she hadn’t much time left she wrote again, saying she’d sent him down to live with Monty, giving out he belonged to one of Monty’s sisters what had died in France. I never seen him since he was two weeks old, and I was that sick having him, what with all the heart-break and the rows with Monty, that honest I hardly remember him. Monty guessed, you see. First off I told him I wasn’t going to marry him ’cause I wanted to go on fossicking round the world and I could see he wanted to settle down, but soon as that bit of land come back on the market he guessed we’d been going behind his back. He was that angry! Honest, I didn’t know he had it in him to get so stirred, him such a gentle bloke. It was me getting together with his Mum as done it . . . Whole evenings I was down on my knees beside his chair, begging him to see he’d be happier in the end . . . I wore him down, poor man, and in the end he went off and proposed to this girl and she said yes, and then he took her down to Sussex and showed her his piece of ground – I remember lying on my sofa, huge as a beer-barrel, I was that near my time, and looking out of the window and thinking they had a lovely sunny day for it.

‘Next time Monty come to see me – he wasn’t living in my house no longer, of course – I asked him what the girl had made of it and he smiled like a pawn-broker and said she had the right ideas. And then I knew they’d make a go of it, and there was nothing more for me to do except have my baby and clear out. I only seen him twice more, once when the doctors thought I was dying, after the baby, and once very formal when his Mum took me along, pretending I was just a pal of hers, to meet his new wife, what I never seen. Funny how stuffy he was about that – didn’t like it at all. I could tell, of course. Never seen him again.’

‘But you still send him the plants you find?’ asked Theodore, after a pause.

‘No. Course not. Couple of times, when I’ve got something special, I thought of asking Mr Hillier – he’s the bloke I send things to, big commercial gardener near Winchester, I know he’ll do right by my plants if anyone will – I’ve thought of asking him to send a rooted cutting or some seed on to Monty, not telling who it really come from, but it wouldn’t be right, would it? What do you think? What do you think about the whole thing? I’ve never told anyone all this before, but I’d like your opinion, young man.’

Her tone was odd, suddenly mocking but still somehow earnest. Theodore hesitated. There was an easy way out. Matthew 7. 1 – ‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’ But he guessed that if he simply quoted that it would bring out her full mockery. She needed something from him, but he wasn’t sure what. He had understood most of her story, in the sense that he had followed the events in it; but why these things had happened, what force had driven her and this man together, and what other force, or set of forces, had then prised them apart, he could not comprehend.

‘Spit it out!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I’m past praying for, ain’t I?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Theodore. ‘Honest, I don’t know enough.’

Perhaps she chose to misunderstand him.

‘You want the story of my life, eh?’ she said. ‘So you can see how I come to set up with Monty in the first place? Fair enough, though I warn you it’s a lot different from anything you’ve known. Eight children, we were, the ones what lived past weaning, all in a couple of rooms in Battersea. Dad, he wasn’t a drunk, and he never hit my Mum, far as I know. No, they were decent people, but dead poor. Dad was a docker, but he’d gone and ruptured himself lifting weights too heavy, so all he could do was sweeping kinds of jobs and there ain’t much of a living in that, even when the work’s there. And all those kids. Mum must have starved herself, often as not, see we got a bite, and even so three of us popped off afore they was eight, and that left me third eldest, what had been fifth . . .’

She was talking in a low, even voice, almost a whisper. The memories seemed to drag her back to those sooty, slime-paved alleys and dank, tiny rooms so that her accent became more marked and harder to follow than Theodore had ever heard it. Pay became pie, with became wiv, getting became ge’in’ as she relived that tatterdemalion strange childhood, as full of dangers as the wildest forest, with Saturday night stabbings as common as church-going, and the wheels of the always-drunk carters grinding along the cobbles – a life for the quick and the lucky to escape from and the rest to be submerged like rubbish tossed into the greasy Thames. Theodore was not aware of falling asleep.

He woke alone in the tent at dawn. Goodness knows how she had got him down there – woken Lung, perhaps, and between them carried him down the narrow steep steps in the moonlight. It was strange that she had not simply rolled him up in his blankets and left him to sleep in the cave. Her voice was still vivid in his mind, as if it had become part of his dreams. I’m past praying for, ain’t I?

He crawled out of his blankets, stiff with travel, and stood up outside the tent. Far up the rock pinnacle a dove was calling; the rock spired into an almost white sky, but the air was so clear he felt he could see the individual grass-blades all the way to the mountains. Mrs Jones was presumably asleep in the cave, and Lung was nowhere to be seen. The hobbled horses grazed near by.

Theodore stood for a while, feeling very strange. The cleanness of the upland air, the whiteness of the sky, the ache of muscles and nerves remade in sleep, the dew and the one dawn bird – these combined to make the world seem not merely clean but new. They had come out of the ancient, stifling, ever-decaying forest into this austere arena and here they had found a new beginning. He started to climb the stairs, moving with extra caution so as not to break the spell of newness by speaking to anyone before he had first tried to speak to God. It was colder than he had realized. His breath hung in white puffs before him and the air rasped in his throat, but at last he reached the top.

The shrine was in good repair, a little, square wooden hut, with a pointy, tiled roof which ended in up-turned eaves, all painted gaudy red and green and streaked with bird-droppings. To the south-east lay the tumble of infolded forested hills through which they had journeyed; to the north-east, more hills, ringing a vast shadowy basin; and to the west the enormous wall of the Himalaya. For days these mountains had been retreating as the travellers had trudged towards them. Now, seen from this height, they had rushed in.

Theodore had forgotten about the little heathen shrine when he had decided to climb up here to pray; he chose a smooth patch of rock the other side of the single birch tree and knelt, closing his eyes and waiting for the last beating of his heart to quieten. Then, as always, he started with the Lord’s Prayer.

‘Our Father . . .’

He moved his lips through the familiar words and held his mind to their meaning, but they were still no more than words. He was talking to a white sky and a huge, clean, empty plateau, neither of which could hear him. Nothing had changed. Nothing had been born anew. The world was the same stale, mindless place in which Father had been murdered by the Boxers and the Settlement wiped out, and the old man in the forest had wailed over the body of his bandit son, shot by Mrs Jones . . .

I’m past praying for, ain’t I?

No words formed in Theodore’s mind, but for a moment while he was considering how to begin he sensed that somewhere in the unlistening emptiness around him a crack had opened and that his thought, his image of Mrs Jones, was being perceived and received. The feeling lasted only an instant, and then the blankness walled him round. For some time he tried to recapture the feeling, but it didn’t come again. He was about to return to the routine of familiar prayer when the silence was broken by a suppressed cough.

He opened his eyes and looked round. Mrs Jones was standing in front of the shrine with her binoculars in her hand.

‘Sorry to interrupt, young man,’ she said. ‘I hope you popped one in for me.’

‘Yes.’

‘So you don’t think I’m past praying for, then? Though I’m a wicked old woman in all conscience.’

She smiled at him teasingly, as though she pitied him and was thoroughly pleased with herself. A cooing note in her voice echoed the call of the dove that had woken him at dawn. Theodore felt he wanted to shake her, to shock her, to take water and soap and harsh flannel and scrub away the make-up that plastered her wrinkled skin; and at the same time he wanted her to smile at him without mockery, to speak as she had last night when she had seemed to need him for more than his ability to speak Miao and Mandarin and to manage a pack-horse. He looked away, but was still aware enough of the tension between them to know the moment when her stance changed and her plump and pliant body stiffened into concentration.

‘Come and look here,’ she said. ‘See if you can spot what I think I just seen.’

He moved across and took the heavy binoculars.

‘See that tall lump with the pines atop?’ she said. ‘Line up on that, so you can find it in the glasses. Right? Now go up from there . . .’

The binoculars seemed to make mist, faint layers of quivering grey which were not there to the naked eye. The image jumped at the slightest tremor in his hands . . . now, there, a little blurred in the mottled grey and fawn, spots of darker matter, clumped at the centre but with a few outliers on either side. Deer? The clump changed shape. An outlier moved inwards, and for a second the blur of distance sharpened and the spot was a man.

‘People,’ he said.

‘That’s what I make ’em. What are they carrying?’

‘Not much. Not coolie-poles.’

‘Then they ain’t traders. And you see how they ain’t all sticking to the one path? Only time I seen men moving like that – in Africa, mostly – was when they was following a trail. Tracker in the middle, main party following him, couple of blokes out each side case he misses where the trail jinks.’

‘Boxers? The men from the forest?’

‘Well, they might be hunting some kind of animal, but my guess is it’s us.’

‘You mean they still want to rob us?’

‘Well, they’ll take what we got, supposing they catch us. But it ain’t just that. There’s more blokes there than what we met in the forest – Uncle Sam’s gone back and got his tribe. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’

‘Burning for burning, stripe for stripe, wounding for wounding,’ quoted Theodore. ‘But it says that if you don’t lie in wait for your enemy and God delivers him into your hand, then you are allowed to flee.’

‘Doubt if they’ve read that bit,’ said Mrs Jones drily as she took the binoculars back. ‘They’ll be here by dinner time. We better get started. You nip down and explain to old Lung, though you’ll have a job getting anything into his head this morning. He’s full of his poems!’

She laughed, apparently more amused by Lung’s behaviour than alarmed by the murderers on their trail. Even in the panic of the moment Theodore found this odd.