‘What do you mean?’
‘Just it comes in a lot. Don’t you remember, him telling me to form the shape of it in my mind, and then dream up a lotus growing out of the top of my skull? That’s not the botanical flower what you and I know, Nymphaea lotus, what I always have a bit of trouble getting out of my mind – it’s his holy lotus, of course. You remember that?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, I won’t bother you with it . . . only I keep thinking, some of what he tells me, I ought to of worked out for myself long ago. Spines, for instance – I’ve always had a fancy for backbones.’
She gave a silent chuckle, reached out and ran her hand from the small of Theodore’s back up to his collar; it was the sort of half-thinking caress one might give to a dog that settles alongside one’s chair, but it made him shiver as though energies were flowing from her finger-tips into his marrow. They walked on, four monks before and two behind, but he had to restrain himself from shaking himself as a dog does after such a touch.
That must have happened quite early in the course of her teaching, because she was still wearing her hat and veil, and all her make-up, and was carrying a frilly parasol over her shoulder. But as week added itself to week and then month to month, she changed. There was no particular day on which she discarded her hat – instead she spent a couple of evenings remodeling one, twisting and steaming and punching and stitching the tolerant felt until, though it was the same hat in all essentials, it now had a curious upward-pointing peak vaguely like the caps worn by Tibetan nuns when they came from the nunnery, two miles along the mountain, to attend one of the ceremonies.
A few days later the veil vanished. Mrs Jones also took to wearing her dark russet riding-cloak, experimenting with its clasp, taking up its hem, devising a loose belt, until she had a garment that fell in much the same folds as a monk’s robe. She gave the parasol to a peasant woman who admired it. And by unnoticed stages she abandoned her make-up. This change was so slow that there was no certain morning on which Theodore realized that her skin was rather coarse – not pocked, but large-pored – with a delta of wrinkles at the corner of each eye, and that a line of dark down ran along her upper lip. The blue-black shadows faded from round her eyes, making them seem less enormous, but they were still the same eyes, large, sparkling with life and full of secrets. She might spend half an evening in her screened nook in the guest-house, quietly humming her mantras or sitting in total silence, cross-legged on her cot, staring at one of the patterns of Tibetan letters which she had hung there; but then she would emerge and begin to tease Lung and Theodore, or touch up her plant-drawings or look at Theodore’s latest work and show him how the emphasis of a line or the deepening of a shadow might give a picture body. They would eat supper, and then she would sit beside Lung on his cot with her head on his shoulder and his hand clasped in her lap and sing his favourite song . . .
The boy I love sits up in the gallery,
The boy I love is looking down at me . . .
and Lung would smile and fondle a tress of hair with his free hand and pretend to be happy, but often the tears would stream down his cheeks as she sang. Theodore was neither shocked nor embarrassed by these scenes. It was like watching an old couple, grandparents of many children, sitting by the hearth and remembering their courting days.
Lung, of course, noticed and resented each alteration in Mrs Jones. Sometimes he argued, but more often he would try and do things to draw her attention back to earlier days: fuss over her plant collection, or try to get her to organize her sketches; strip down her rifle and clean it; unpack and repack the baggage, on the pretext that everything had to be ready for the escape; and so on. One morning Theodore and Mrs Jones returned from the Lama’s house to find that Lung had hammered nails into the wall and hung there, like a military trophy, the sword he had taken from the dead bandit. The rifle was slung across it.
‘That looks real handsome,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Mind you, you’ll have to keep cleaning it, or it’ll get the rust. It’d be better off in its case, honest.’
‘Will not be there long time,’ said Lung.
‘Oho! What’s up, then? You on to something?’
‘I find friend who help us escape.’
‘Have you now? Sure? Who is he?’
‘You see him long time back, drink tea with me. Lama Sumpa his name.’
‘Ah, that fellow! What’s in it for him?’
‘Not say, but perhaps he think if help Chinese, then Chinese make Sumpa Abbot of Dong Pe.’
‘Now you be careful, my love. He’d help the Chinese just as much by pushing me into the first ravine we come to.’
‘No, no,’ said Lung, smiling confidently. ‘Sumpa say perhaps Lama Amchi find wrong Tulku, but Sumpa not sure. If this maybe true Tulku, Sumpa afraid to kill Missy, see. But take Missy far from Dong Pe, then baby is born. If he is true Tulku, Sumpa says, he find way back to Dong Pe.’
‘Now, that’s amazing!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Just what I been thinking myself. I’ll know, won’t I? He’ll tell me, somehow, if he’s . . . what the oracle said he is, and then I can bring him back.’
‘So you are coming,’ whispered Theodore.
‘What do you mean, ducky?’
‘I’ve been scared to ask, and so’s Lung, I guess. You’ve been taking Buddhism so seriously. I mean, your clothes, even.’
She laughed, and her fingers flicked dismissively at her habit.
‘You’re forgetting I’m an actress,’ she said. ‘I like to get myself into a part and play it proper. Not that I ain’t serious about what old Amchi’s been telling me – fact, it makes more sense to me than anything I’ve heard from all the other holy bodies what have tried to make a decent Christian of me. But look at it another way – I’ve got to take it serious, haven’t I? Old Amchi would spot at once if I didn’t.’
‘But you’re coming, all the same?’ insisted Theodore.
‘Course I am. I told you as I nearly died having my other kid. I’m not risking that again, any more than I can help. I’m getting myself to where there are proper doctors, whatever old Amchi says.’
‘Good,’ said Lung. ‘Now, Sumpa make this plan . . .’
‘No, don’t tell us, love,’ interrupted Mrs Jones, ’or Amchi’ll smell it out. Don’t you think so, Theo?’
Theodore nodded. In the glimmering room at the top of the Lama’s house the odour of conspiracy would have reeked about them like incense.
‘I guess you’re right,’ he said. ‘Only how long have we got to wait?’
‘Five weeks,’ said Lung. ‘Then is big festival. Plenty people come to Dong Pe. Everybody most busy. We go then.’
As those weeks dragged by, Lung and Theodore discussed this conversation many times. Mrs Jones usually managed to turn the subject aside, but when Lung tried to insist on talking about the escape she refused to listen.
‘You know,’ she said once, ‘I’m like an old hank of wool what’s got itself all of a tangle, and now I’m sorting myself out and rolling me up into a proper ball what I can knit with.’
She seemed to find the days of waiting no trouble at all, and Theodore endured them well enough, but they were a trial for Lung. He took to visiting Major Price-Evans with Theodore, helping to clean the temple and arguing, very formally and politely despite his inadequate English, for Confucianism against Buddhism. Theodore paid little attention to these debates, which were not very satisfactory even to Lung, because the Major was such a difficult opponent, tending to agree with everything Lung said and then somehow to incorporate it into his own side of the argument. One morning Lung, exasperated but still needing distraction, offered to mend the little windmill which was supposed to drive the second line of prayer-wheels. The Major was delighted, and Lung set about the job with his usual self-mocking competence, borrowing tools from somewhere and then – as if to spin the project out through the weeks of waiting – cutting every strut and joint as if he were making fine furniture.