A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (5 page)

‘A bicycling guide for the desert,’ he smiled. ‘How curious.’

Two years ago my little sister Lizzie, incandescent-eyed, with a touch of otherworldliness, declared at the dinner table in Southsea, in front of Mother and Aunt Cicely and the dust lying in heaps upon the walnut-cased clock, that she had succumbed to what she termed a calling. Her new friend from St Paul’s in Portsmouth, Miss Millicent Frost, had guided her towards this calling and helped her to arrive at certain understandings. I truly could have died with shock.

I remember it was raining outside but uncomfortably warm in Aunt Cicely’s parlour as Lizzie elaborated upon her plan to train as a missionary with a view to travelling East. It was imperative, she insisted, that she save the wretched souls of the lost, diseased and the destitute. It was her duty to help the unfortunates, cruelly condemned by geography and ignorance and I recall thinking how dismal that the rain kept coming and sensing the certainty that Father would now die soon.

We had returned to England for him. He had a need to return, he explained, before he grew faint, white and dry as paper. He wanted to see his sister and to sit beside an English fireside and eat Dorset-grown potatoes. So we returned from Geneva to Southsea. Only, for Lizzie and me, it wasn’t a return. Despite our being English, despite our names – Misses Evangeline and Elizabeth English – despite learning our Bible from King James, and singing
ring-a-ring-of-roses-a-pocket-f-of-posies
in the nursery, we had never, in fact, lived in England, nor even visited it. As children we followed Father to Alger, Saint Omer, Calais, Geneva, but never dull, ghastly England.

Mother, quite a name in Geneva, with her red hair and committees and pamphlets, was as unprepared as Lizzie and I for our first sight of the desolate Southsea tea-houses closed for the winter, and the pier asserting its futile defiance against the interminable unfriendliness of the grey, spitting sea. How that clock ticked on like a metronome. Mother said nothing as Lizzie, slight and beautiful, sat with her face obfuscated as if she were covered in gauze. My sister is, and has always been, like the feeling in a room from which someone has recently left. I watched her twist her handkerchief into a rag, stretch it with anxiety, and I wondered, who is she, this Miss Millicent Frost? I could see that Lizzie was serious and my immediate thought was this: there is not a chance I will stay behind in the damp, phlegmatic dreariness of an English winter whilst unadventurous Elizabeth travels to Babylon! Mecca! Peking!

Just three or four weeks before leaving, by chance, our cousin Alfred had invited us to a luncheon in Hampstead. We were curiosities, to be shown off, so that he would look somewhat interesting to a publisher whom he was in the process of flattering. He had hopes for his own book of verse.

The publisher, Mr Hatchett, we had been warned, was a stiff old fish. We were to tell him of our forthcoming travels and give off the air of frightful intriguing adventuresses, or similar. It was a surprise, then, when Mr Hatchett sat next to me, not at all a stiff fish, rather courteous, with an encouraging smile. It was even more of a surprise when I found myself telling him my plans to write a guide of the area.

‘I have this idea, you see,’ I said.

‘Go on,’ he responded, clapping his hands together lightly.

So, I talked, and was impressed that off-the-bat he knew my reference, Egeria – the astonishing woman who travelled in the fourth century from Gaul to Jerusalem – indeed, he told me the story of her book being discovered (possibly 1884 or 5?) and I admitted that it was reading her descriptions of the candles and lights and the mysterious glittering interiors, the tapirs, silks, the jewels and hangings that had inspired my desire to travel.

‘I understand,’ he said and again, that generous smile. He looked as though whilst he dreamed of travel for himself, he did not a bit resent my imminent adventures, rather, he admired me for them.

‘You really must tell me more about this Guide. I should be very interested to publish it.’

I did not tell him that I was hunting for something distant, something terribly unEnglish; something that would obliterate Southsea.

Oh – now Millicent calls me.

May 4th

‘I’m scared of Mohammed,’ Lizzie said, watching me hold the baby up on to my chest and rub her calm as I’ve learned to do.

‘Why?’

‘He hates us.’ Before I could reply, she had gone.

The sandstorms are oppressive. They consume the air like an agonised howl from the earth’s heart. Every afternoon they whirl and blow up, flinging huge volumes of sand around the city, accompanied by a mourning sound.

Steadily, I am beginning to understand the rhythm of this inn. We are all three of us, Millicent, Lizzie and I – well four, if I count the baby – sleeping together in one room with the kangs lined in a row like coffins. The kangs are strange beds made of hard mattresses resting above a small brick stove area built underneath. The fires keep our bodies warm at night but strangle the night air of oxygen. I have created a crib from one of Millicent’s Bible trunks which I half-emptied and padded with paper and blankets.

In Millicent’s trunk I found the presents we have collected to use as gifts or bribes. Six packets of Russian lump sugar. Five jars of caviar and at the bottom of the trunk several packets of candied jujube fruits, like dates, but redder, to hand out to children. Underneath were Millicent’s two maps. I unrolled them and laid them out across the numerous turquoise and golden satin-covered pillows. The first is a Map of the Great North West. There is a vast area, coloured black, and at the bottom left of it I find it: Kashgar. The black area below it is the Takla Makan desert, famous for blizzards that freeze men on their feet, leaving only the bones to be picked by the insects. Indeed, the words Takla Makan in Turki mean, ‘If you go in you shall not come out’.

This map is a none-map; rather, it is a hole in a map, an ink stain against the bright turquoise of the wadded quilt below it. I am reminded of the great explorer Burton’s opening words from his
Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage
:

In the autumn of 1852, through the medium of my excellent friend, the late General Monteith, I offered my services to the Royal Geographical Society of London, for the purpose of removing that opprobrium to modern adventure, the huge white blot which in our maps still notes the Eastern and Central regions . . .

Our current location is the sin-filled other side to Richard Burton’s white emptiness. It is Millicent’s destination, her pilgrimage. From Baku, then Osh, she pushed us further on, further East even though we were warned of bandits and Moslem brigands, and of thieves and soldiers hungry for loot and violence. Millicent’s determination to reach the great strip of blackness untouched by Christian mission, where no Churchmen (nor even many white men) have visited overrode her fear. As far as she is concerned, where the Mission has not been, a wild, unfettered and heathen hole resides, a hole Millicent intends to fill with her own limitless goodness.

The second map is not geological. It is a Missionary Map, rolled up in the same scroll. A river of sin runs like a course of blood through the desert of Eternal Despair. At the bottom is a quote from Bunyan: ‘Know, prudent cautious self-control is wisdom’s root.’

In my mind’s eye I conjure up Sir Richard Burton’s crackling eyes (I once saw a photograph of him in
The Times
dressed as an Arab, with a machete in his hand and a long-nosed saluki at his side). Give me courage, Sir Richard! I have convinced Millicent of my missionary calling. I have convinced a publisher of the worth of my proposed book. I have even tricked my dear sister who believes that I am here in His name, to do His Good Works. I should be feeling clever. I have escaped England, but why, then, always this apprehension? To my surprise, despite a childhood of examining maps and reading adventure stories, I realise that I am quite terrified of the desert; of its insects that grow louder with the dusk; of its relentlessness; of becoming simply bones, left in a desert to petrify.

6.
London, Present Day

Pimlico

‘Now that’s what I like to see,’ a voice from behind an enormous bunch of lilies, looking like a stage prop in their opulence. ‘A half-dressed girl waiting for me at the top of the stairs.’

Frieda pushed her glasses up her nose and watched the flowers as they consumed the corner of the stairwell.

‘Before you say anything,’ the voice continued, ‘I do know that wild moor grass and rare Alpine tulips are much more your thing than these hideous lilies, but it was the best I could do and I know I will remain unforgiven, but . . .’ Nathaniel’s head twisted from behind the bouquet, his hair pushed up from his face as if betraying the after-effects of a recent argument with himself. He reached the top of the stairs.

‘But,’ he went on, ‘I have got some poppies on order from the Kirghiz Pass. Until then . . .’ he held the flowers towards her, arranging his face into a carefully raffish mode. Frieda looked at the creamy, preposterous petals without smiling.

‘I won’t even explain,’ he said. ‘Just make me coffee and I will try my hardest to thaw that chilly, frozen expression on your forehead.’

Frieda turned away. ‘Oh come in,’ she said, finally, leaving him to squeeze the foliage that accompanied the lilies through the doorway.

As always, when he visited, Nathaniel made Frieda’s flat seem reduced and cramped and in all senses inadequate. His six-foot frame and general expansiveness monopolised the limited space in seconds as he nearly knocked over the coatstand, shifting himself about with soft grunts, giving it all the smile of an adult surveying a Wendy house: marvellous. Terribly sweet.

‘Would you like some tea?’

‘Coffee.’ He grabbed her hand, tugging her towards him. ‘Come here, you sulky thing.’

Frieda allowed him to pull her. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, making eye contact.

‘Full marks for earnestness.’

‘Oh, come on, that’s not fair.’ His hand pressed on the small of her back, and then he pulled it away and rubbed it through his hair, sighing. ‘There was no way. I just couldn’t get out. Kids crying all over the place. Margaret crying. It was a disaster area, last night. A war zone.’

Frieda almost asked why Margaret was crying but stopped herself. She had long since forbidden herself to think about Margaret, forcing herself not to analyse her, nor think about their marriage. If uncontrollable thoughts did occur they would be in terms of an empty house, or, more often, a disused church: mouldy, uncomfortable and full of empty sounds that shift uneasily, making a visitor wish to be invisible but rendering that invisibility impossible. Regardless, despite herself images came, hallucinatory, like blown-up balloons: Margaret in a summer dress in their rose-bedecked garden, smiling at the children. Nathaniel on a sun lounger, quaffing wine. Their four-bedroom house in Streatham with its antique furniture, piles of curios (stuffed waders, mounted antlers) and collections of antique bicycles in the shed. Margaret, dead-heading the roses, no doubt wishing she could dead-head Nathaniel. Frieda tried not to care. It was not her concern. She wasn’t going to be one of those sordid losers who meet up with their lover’s wives in cafés to lament his lovable flaws. She clanged about, pulling out coffee things.

On her kitchen table was a yellow pamphlet. It had been left outside her hotel room whilst she was on her last trip, but whoever left it had scurried away. One of the waiters, perhaps? Or a bell-boy. It was odd to see it here, in London. Written in English, it stipulated amongst other things the rulings concerning the removal of body hair of women, as instructed by the Prophet and interpreted by Sheikh Abdul:

1. Removing the hair from the armpits and private parts is Sunnah (part of the tradition).

2. As for the private parts it is better to shave them.

3. Removing hair from the eyebrows on request from the husband (or without it) is not allowed because the Messenger of Allah said: ‘Cursed is a woman who removes (or cuts) the eyebrows of other women and a woman who has it removed (or trimmed) for her.’

In the hotel room she had wondered about this Sheikh and his specific rules, this intense consideration of women’s personal hair. On her table the pamphlet was surreal, or rather, hyper-real, and incongruous, like looking at a shopping list on a wedding day.