The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas

she folded it back her first impression was of wonderful colours. Silvery blues and greens sprang at her, like a distillation of lake water and spring skies, with starbursts of lavender and vermilion flowers caught in the depths. She looked more closely and saw the intricacy of the woven pattern; the sumptuous curved teardrop shapes with curled tips, the ferny fronds and branched stems and tiny five-petalled flowers. The only sound in the room was the distress of the sheep as Mair shook out the layers of soft wool. It was so light that it seemed to float on the air.

      The shawl was a lovely thing, and she had never seen it before.

      An envelope had fallen out of the folds. It was an old brown one, ordinary, creased in half, with the glue long ago dried from the flap. Gently Mair eased it open. Inside there was a single lock of hair. The curl was very fine and silky, dark brown, with a few coppery threads shining in it. She pinched it between her fingers.

      ‘That’s Grandma Watkins’s shawl,’ Eirlys said, in her authoritative way.

      ‘It’s so beautiful,’ Mair whispered.

      Eirlys was the only one of the three who had known their mother’s mother, and even she had no recollection of her because she had died when Eirlys was still a baby. All any of them knew was that she had been out in India with her much older missionary husband. The couple finally came back to Wales and had had their only child when Nerys was already in her forties. That daughter, Gwen, had married a neighbour from the same valley, handsome Huw Ellis, when she was only nineteen. She had always said to her own three children that she didn’t want them to grow up with elderly parents, the way she had done.

      ‘Whose hair can this be, do you think?’ Mair wondered.

      ‘I’ve no idea,’ Eirlys said.

      Mair thought about it. Grandma Watkins wouldn’t have kept her own hair, would she? Was it her husband’s, then, or more probably her child’s?

      No. This wasn’t the hair of an elderly missionary, and it wasn’t Gwen’s either, she was fairly sure of that – hers had naturally been a quite different, much lighter colour.

      Whose, then?

      The question intrigued her, but it seemed to have no answer.

      She pressed the shawl to her cheek. The fabric was so fine that she could enclose it in her two fists. For the first time, she breathed in its faint scent of spice.

      ‘We’ve still got a lot to do,’ Eirlys said, as she finished her tea.

      Thoughtfully Mair slipped the lock of hair back into its envelope.

      Later, when most of the packing and boxing were done, the three of them gathered in the kitchen. The back door stood open and midges floated in on the breeze. The noise of the sheep grew louder and more plaintive as twilight crept up. Dylan had opened a bottle of wine, and Mair was putting together a picnic supper of cold ham, with baked potatoes from the microwave. Dylan had bought it for their father a couple of years back and Huw had used it regularly to heat up supermarket ready-meals for one, declaring that they were very tasty. Eirlys had disapproved, pointing out that ready-meals were high in fat and salt.

      The machine pinged and Mair took out the potatoes. She could just see their father winking and silently going heh-heh-heh-heh.

      Without warning, tears threatened to spill out of her eyes.

      They all knew that this was the last evening they would ever spend together in the old kitchen. Mair was determined not to make it more sorrowful by indulging in any fit of weeping. She smiled instead, at Dylan who was sitting with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and then at Eirlys, with her hair hooked behind her ears and her eyes looking very shiny behind her glasses.

      ‘Should we eat in the other room?’ Mair asked.

      The table in there was a better size for three than the drop-flap one wedged in the kitchen corner, where the memory of their father sitting alone with his cup of tea and the newspaper was very clear.

      The business of taking the food through and finding the last pieces of unpacked cutlery carried them through the moment. Dylan found some candle stubs and Eirlys put them in a saucer. The glow made the stripped-out room look inviting again, blotting out the dust squares on the walls where pictures used to hang.

      ‘We should talk about the good things,’ Eirlys said, when they were all sitting down.

      For a second Mair thought she meant the happy times they had spent as a family, and the uncharacteristic sentiment startled her. Then she realised that her sister was talking about the two or three pieces of furniture and old silver that were all there had been of real value in the house. Since the reading of the will they had known that the proceeds from selling the house were to be divided equally between them. The smaller items they hadn’t really talked about.

      There was the grandfather clock, with a painted face showing the sun and moon, whose sonorous tick had measured out the long afternoons of her childhood. Huw had mentioned it once, in the last weeks, referring to it as ‘Dylan’s clock’. Mair had deliberately ignored him because she didn’t want to acknowledge what he meant.

      ‘You’ll take the clock, Dylan,’ Eirlys said. ‘Mair?’

      The other two were married, and they owned houses with hallways and alcoves and shelves. Mair was not, and she lived happily in a rented one-and-a-half-room flat. She didn’t need, or even want, her mother’s bow-fronted chest or silver teapot. They would find a better home with Eirlys. She laid down her knife and fork and cleared her throat.

      ‘I would like to have Grandma’s shawl,’ she said. ‘If that’s all right?’

      ‘Of course it is.’ Eirlys nodded. ‘If you agree, Dylan?’

      He looked at Mair. There were quite deep lines at the corners of his eyes, these days. He and Eirlys were both shortsighted, and Dylan tended to screw up his eyes when he was concentrating.

      Awareness of how much she loved her brother wrapped round her like a blanket. All her life he had been her ally, whereas as children she and Eirlys had constantly squabbled, mostly because they were each other’s embodied opposites. Not that they had quarrelled recently, of course. The loss of their adored father had made them considerate of each other, even wary.

      ‘Do you know where it might have come from?’ Dylan asked her.

      She said, ‘No. But maybe I could try to find out.’

      This idea only came to her as she gave voice to it. She was surprised by the curiosity that the mysterious shawl aroused in her.

      That night Mair and Eirlys went to bed for the last time in the room they had shared as children. Mair could tell that her sister wasn’t asleep, although she didn’t twist and turn between the damp sheets like Mair was doing. In the end she whispered, ‘Eirlys, can’t you sleep?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘What are you thinking about?’

      ‘The same as you, probably. Once your parents are both dead, you really are it, aren’t you? You’re responsible, because there’s no one standing in front of you. Do you know what I mean?’

      Sympathy flooded through Mair. Her sister had been behaving responsibly for her entire life. She had been a prizewinning medical student and had just been appointed to a consultant’s post at her Birmingham hospital, yet she had still found time to marry and have two boys. All her life she had been studying and looking after other people, and now her vision of this latest phase of their lives was of yet more weight falling on her shoulders.

      Mair thought, Ever since I could walk and talk, I’ve been skipping away from the path my sister and brother trod ahead of me. Instead of following them to a good university she had left home and Wales at seventeen, fulfilling a long-standing promise, halfway between a family joke and a rebellious threat, to run away and join a circus. And at Floyd’s Family Circus she had met Harriet Hayes, or Hattie the Clown. Together they had worked up a simple trapeze act. Their nights at the circus were a long way behind