don’t blame them,’ he went on. ‘There are only three-quarters of a million Bhutanese, most of them still living in the sixteenth century, still eating the lotus, unfrozen and not bought at bargain prices in any supermarket. On one side of them they’ve got seven hundred million Chows, itchy with all the propaganda that’s sprinkled on them like lice powder, seven hundred million pairs of legs poised for the Great Leap Forward – and it could be in this direction. On the other side of them they have nearly five hundred million Indians – and if any man can tell what one Indian is going to do from one day to the next, let alone five hundred million of them, he’s a better man than me, Gunga Din or Malcolm Muggeridge. The Bhutanese have been sitting on the fence so long they’ve got crotch-sore. But a sore crotch is preferable to a severed head. Once they start leaning one way, the other side is going to jump in here like a gate-crasher at a party. Only it will be no party for these poor bastards.’ He gestured down at the porters. ‘In no time at all they’ll be like the Tibetans, also-rans in their own country. We had it in Ireland once, till we kicked out the English.’
‘You were never in Ireland,’ said Eve.
‘I inherited the feeling of oppression. It’s in my bones.’
‘It looks to me as if the Chinese have already begun to gate-crash,’ Wilkins said.
Marquis shook his head. ‘Not here, Nick. This country is too small. The Chows don’t want to lose face with all the uncommitted countries in Asia. I can’t understand why they’ve come across the Indian border, it’s not going to win friends and influence anyone for them. But maybe they reckon attacking someone almost as big as themselves won’t lose them any popularity. Little blokes get a certain sadistic delight out of seeing big fellers knocking hell out of each other.’
Eve looked up at him and smiled sweetly and innocently, wondering when he had last had hell knocked out of him. She looked around the camp for some Dempsey or Joe Louis, but the camp was barren of heavyweights, and she went back to spreading honey on another tsampa cake.
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