A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (37 page)

Chuguchak is an important border city being the main outlet from Turkestan to Siberia and so endlessly there is the business of providing the temporary passports and visas. The consulates are hustled together in the centre of the city, the most obvious and dominant being the Russian. The whole city is much more Russian than Chinese. Like Urumtsi, there is a large postal centre and telegraph offices and I have telegrammed home to Mother, telling her of Lizzie’s death, and my return. Poor Mother.

Ai-Lien – I try out her new name, Irene – and I watch seagulls squawk and squabble with each other. We must wait for the visas and the paperwork to be finished, and this waiting I do not want. It is recognisable, now, the tension between movement and stillness; the feeling that I want to go, but paradoxically, I want to remain. A pause does not help me, it provides time for reflection and reflection leads to sadness. I think of myself, arriving at Kashgar, terrified of the desert, and now – would I go back, if I could, into the vast space of it? I do believe I would. I can see how one wanders, eternally.

Ai-Lien smiles each time she looks at me, bright, sweet black eyes and I think of what I will say to Mother, to explain this baby. It could be that it is a terrible wrong to take Ai-Lien from the desert, but as we watch the seagulls it occurs to me that perhaps I should like to live by the sea, after all.

November 9th

The seagulls drop and dance, finally the paperwork is arranged and tickets are acquired. Trunks packed and I am as ready as it is possible to be for the next part of my journey: a six-day drive to Lake Zaisan, river steamer up the Irtish. The Trans-Siberian railway to Omsk. A week in Moscow and then on, to Berlin and London.

Last night, an attempt – as such – at a goodbye with Mr Steyning, to whom I owe so much, as we ate fine Russian steak and drank thick, coal-black coffee in the dining corner of an inn.

‘As I’ve already said, I simply do not know how to thank you.’

He took my hand, his face thick-spread and sincere.

‘My dear. Go home to England, make yourself comfortable and read through your diary and write it into your book.’

‘Do you really think I am capable of writing it?’

‘Of course.’

I wished that I had a gift to give him, something precious. I said so. ‘I will send you a copy, if it ever becomes a real, actual thing. And of being a mother, do you think it will be . . . possible?’

Again he smiled. ‘I have arranged for someone to meet you at Victoria Station as long as all goes according to plan and you arrive on the fifteenth January.’ Then, taking hold of my hand, he said, ‘I shan’t tell you who. When you arrive, stand under the great clock in the concourse at Victoria Station at six o’clock on the fifteenth, and you will be found.’

Tomorrow I will be gone, across the border.

The horses will be difficult to restrain, the Qazak driver will jump on the seat. There will be a flurry of movement and horse-breath and then a spring forward and I will wave and Mr Steyning will wave. Lizzie will stand behind him, in her long smock, holding a blue convolvulus from the Pavilion House garden, not waving, just watching. Millicent will be there too, though she will be looking away at something on the other side of the hills.

36.
Eastbourne, Present Day

Quality Cod! Fish Restaurant

She’d had the dream again: in the hotel and the phone not working. Authorities outside, the Sheikh, talking to her – instructing her – regarding the appropriate method for the cutting of tongues. . . Sitting up, she looked around. Nikolai and Tayeb were sitting on a Persian rug, Nikolai was on his phone. Bowls of crisps and nuts were lined between them. Arrangements were clearly being made. They smiled at her. She was on a sofa above a restaurant, and somehow she had nodded off for a second.

Nikolai put his phone on the table, lit a cigarette and explained the decisions: they had one day in Eastbourne – today – and then that evening, Tayeb would be driven to Harwich in Essex by Nikolai’s brother, who had a truck with a false floor for bringing counterfeit goods over on ferries.

Frieda looked at Tayeb; he was scratching his wrist and staring down at the rug. In the B&B she had woken up with her legs in a knot around his, ankle against a calf, and her hand resting on a back. The morning bright light illuminated his skin and she saw that it was covered in scars and sores, as if the skin itself was speaking of troubles. She moved her hand, slowly, over his back. It was not unpleasant, it was just his skin speaking out, sending out its message, just as he had written his message out on her in the night.

‘Tayeb,’ Frieda said, ‘what do you think? Will this plan work for you?’

‘My own private compartment,’ he said quietly and she couldn’t tell whether there was bitterness; she thought perhaps there was.

As these plans were discussed and pistachio nuts eaten, Frieda took the missionary notebook from her bag and gently flipped through the pages, thinking of her mother and of Irene, a woman she never knew. Nikolai sat close to Tayeb and they were murmuring to each other.

She remembered the other items from Irene Guy’s flat and stood up, stretching, and went downstairs to the car. In the boot was the holdall with the things she had thrown in from the flat, assuming that she would never be able to visit there again as the week was nearly up. There was the pile of books tied together by the woven fabric, the transcripts, the camera, the Chinese ornament with the peculiar torture scene and the small black Bible. This must have been Millicent’s, she realised, examining it. It was well thumbed. She peered at a page that had come loose, A TABLE OF THE MOVEABLE FEASTS FOR FORTY-SIX YEARS 1913–1958. She untied the strip of fabric to look at the books. The first one had a faded blue cover and the lettering was a worn-down gold. Once, presumably, it had a dust jacket. On the inside cover was a frontispiece illustration of a lake in a desert bearing the title ‘The Heavenly Lake’. Frieda opened to the front page. The book began:

Travel is, in many ways, an untranslatable experience. For the purposes of writing this book I have drawn heavily upon my diaries and notes, but in essence, they have become as dreamlike and as distant as my memories of the desert which once was so very real to me. This is the problem with the communication of another sphere; in all honesty, adventures – for want of a better word – are inherently personal, and intimate. Even the materiality of the buying of tickets, the alighting of trains, the catching of ferries and all the consequential trifles that go into the organisation of such an endeavour amount, ultimately, to a series of personal moments. Still, this is my attempt to capture something of these travels. Let us hope it is a valiant one.

She looked again at the cover and saw the imprint of the long-faded title:
A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar
, by Evangeline English. This, she realised, was a published version of the journal she had been reading, and on the inside cover, written in ink, it said
Francis Hatchett
. It was presumably his copy of her book. Frieda returned to the room of chatting, smoking men, holding the blue book and the Bible.

‘Right: this is the plan,’ Nikolai said, ‘we get Tay’ into Holland, then he goes straight to Amsterdam.’

‘What will you do in Amsterdam?’ Frieda asked

‘I have an old family friend. He can stay there for a while,’ Nikolai answered.

Nikolai offered to pay all of the costs required and give Tayeb enough money to live on for some time. There was much hand shaking and clapping of backs and nodding and smoking throughout these negotiations. Nikolai was gruff, addled, and, Frieda could see, a bit of a bastard, but he obviously cared about Tayeb.

Nikolai arranged whisky glasses on a low table and despite it being not yet eleven in the morning, Frieda sipped the thick, sweet brown liquid and enjoyed its burn-rush in the mouth. She opened the faded book, and flicked through its pages; there were more illustration plates, a photograph of dusty-faced and pigtailed children in exotic clothes, standing in front of a panorama of mountains trailing off to infinity. At the back of the book, sandwiched in the index, was a brown envelope. She pulled it out and opened it. Inside were several letters. The mark at the top of the paper said
Eaton Highlands’ Quality Linen Notepaper
.

It was a thrill to rub the thin blue sheets and see the swirl of the ink; she could see straight away that it was Evangeline’s handwriting. There were several letters, or parts of letters, and a few telegrams clipped together. Francis Hatchett must have kept them in the book; they were barely creased. She began to read
January 30th, 1924, Acacia House
, but Tayeb was speaking to her.

‘What shall we do, then?’ Tayeb said, smiling. ‘It looks like we have one more day together.’

Frieda moved over to the window and looked out at the seaside street. A sizeable gang of seagulls were clamouring and fighting around the contents of an industrial-sized bin. They were charging each other, wings crooked and beaks orange, racketing and squawking a holy terror of a noise. She folded the letters back into the delicate, thin envelope and replaced them in the index section of the book.

‘Let’s go out,’ she said, ‘have a look around.’

Breathlessness; Limit Mechanical:
There is a certain amount you can do, or think you can do; this is one measure of your capacity.

37.
A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes

January 15th, 1924

The sweetness of the ferry crossing and the shock of English voices; a Kentish voice shouting, ‘Move along madam, move along.’

Eyes everywhere peered at my queer outfit. Mr Steyning’s friend, Herr Schomaker, assisted me in buying a European outfit in Berlin but it was German in flavour, a fur scarf and cloche that looked strange in contrast with the dowdy-coloured wrapover coats that I saw on the women on the train from Dover to London.

At Victoria Station I stepped into the thick tide of London’s workers dancing and fighting around me, making their way to wherever they were going. Overwhelmed, I swayed on my feet, fearing that I might faint. I held Ai-Lien to me like a talisman, though it was I who was her guardian. She was asleep in my arms, her face relaxed and her mouth slightly open.

I put my feet as flat as possible to steady us against the pushing and the rushes, standing on the concourse built out of the great gains of Empire. Ai-Lien was a dead weight in my arms and my trunks and bags were behind me. The young porter was waiting expectantly. I looked round for the clock, and was surprised at the change in appearance of the station. The Brighton and South Coast side had been connected to the Chatham side. Southern Railway Company appeared to have even removed the screen wall and the platforms had been re-numbered since my last visit. The clock, however, was still mounted high on the wall in its usual place and I gestured to the porter to follow me as I walked towards it.

There was no one there that I knew, indeed, I thought, well, how could it be that someone were to meet me? Nothing but a pigeon, scuffing on the floor, but I needed a moment to gather myself. My journey was not quite over. There was yet another train to Southsea to be boarded, if I could identify the correct platform and I was not quite ready for that. I paid the porter and watched him scurry into the crowds. I stood, stroking the soft hair on Ai-Lien’s head, thinking of Millicent sitting on the divan and Lizzie clicking her Leica camera, and heard the great ticking clock chime out loud as it struck six o’clock.

A voice came up behind me, ‘Miss English?’

I turned round. It was Mr Hatchett.

‘Oh,’ I said, before I could stop myself, and then he stood, a little shyly, in front of me, glancing at Ai-Lien with surprise, but saying nothing. I looked down at Ai-Lien.

‘This is Irene,’ I said. And then, ‘It is really wonderful to see you, Mr Hatchett.’

‘Call me Francis.’

His face transformed as he smiled, as if cracking a mask, cheerful underneath, and he stood up straight. There it was, that reddish beard that I remembered and eyes alive and friendly.

‘Come,’ he said, ‘I’ve got you a room at the Grosvenor, where you can have a hot bath, something to eat.’

I held out my hand towards him and as he took it my bones sang back their own response.

‘I imagine that, more than anything, you would like a cup of tea?’