A Matter of Marriage (20 page)

Three months and ten saris he had taken before he was able to look her in the eye with his
salaamalaikums
and stumbling enquiries about her health. He would spend whole half-hours wandering around the shelves, or standing still in a corner like a dressmaker's mannequin, watching her. Her uncle would smile and roll his eyes when he spotted Babru gazing into the shop window, but rebuked Syeda when once she made fun of him.

“He has no one, that boy. His mother is dead a long time now, and his father has quarrelled with everyone, thinks they all want his money.” Uncle tapped the back of her hand gravely.

“He and that boy are poorer than any of us.”

She still ached for her own parents, killed by the typhoid that had come in with the monsoonal floods in the last wet season before Uncle had come to take her away. When the shop was quiet, she began to make a second cup of chai, so that Babru could sit with her uncle out the front. His gratitude for such a small thing both irritated and moved her. He desired so much, yet expected so little.

Then had come the crashing arrival of the monsoon rains, a full three weeks early. Uncle was at mosque, and the street flooded with rubbish. She closed the shop, barricading the entrance with rags stuffed under the door, before leading Babru upstairs into the sewing room to wait out the downpour.

The tin roof's drumming reverberations made it impossible to talk, so she waved him to sit while she made some chai. The room, as large as her own so-pretty wallpapered bedroom now, seemed small, being filled with hundreds of rolls and bolts of fabric for blouses, leggings and pants to coordinate with the multitude of saris,
salwars
and
sherwanis
downstairs. The little sewing machine was tucked into a corner, and the floor was covered in scraps of fabric too small to save, which she would periodically sweep up into a bag and sell as stuffing to an upholsterer in the next street. Her bedding roll was spread out in the opposite corner.

She remembered it all as if it had been yesterday.

Holding the chai, she had turned to find that he had sat himself down on her bed. Her bed. The little cup dropped from her hand. He stood at her expression, his arms reaching out, then she was against his chest and he held her. He dipped his head down past hers and rested his cheek against her neck. “Coconut oil,” he murmured into her ear, too close now to be drowned out by the thunderous rain. “You smell so beautiful.”

—

M
RS.
B
EGUM CLOSED
the magazine, trying to recall if she had anything sweet downstairs. The sherbet milk. Why not. After all these years, never having had her proper bride's welcome, she was entitled to it. When her children married, she would make sure that everything was done the proper way.

She walked quietly downstairs. The study door was closed, and light shone from under the door. Dr. Choudhury would be there for hours. She hoped that hunger was cramping his fat stomach. She took the jug of sherbet out of the fridge, poured some into a small cut-glass vase that Mrs. Darby had given her in exchange for the secret to number-one butter chicken, and carried it upstairs. She would have her bridal drink with the Windsors.

When she returned to the windowseat, her children could no longer be seen, and the samosa basket was empty. Well and good. Her fool of a husband needed time to reflect on his errors, and she needed to plan. Like all great strategists, she knew that victory would only be hers if she could keep one step ahead.

She raised her sherbet drink and spoke softly to her reflection in the darkened glass. “For you, daughter Syeda, beautiful bride who blesses our house.”

A
SLEEP-IN O
N
that sofa bed had probably been a little optimistic, Richard reflected, taking the chair at the head of the breakfast table, shaking the Sunday paper straight, and wishing he could do the same with his back. A bleary-eyed Henry came in, resplendent in a pale blue dressing-gown that looked as if it belonged to Thea.

“Marvellous restaurant, Richard. Don't know how you hear about all these fantastic local places in London. Thee's sleeping in, but only because I made the ultimate sacrifice and got up to hear the boys' gory details of sinister shadows and strange eerie sounds. They've gone up to the stables to make a ghost trap, bloodthirsty little buggers. I take it you didn't see anything out of the ordinary?”

“That's right. And also no signs of any break-in, I'm glad to report.”

Henry stopped, coffeepot in hand. “Good Lord. Hadn't even thought of that, so caught up in the, ah, historical aspect. Perhaps I'll have a word with our Dr. Choudhury and the builders about keeping a bit of a lookout. Awful Audrey hasn't started proper cleaning duties in the Abbey yet.”

“Must say that dressing-gown's pretty fetching. Goes with your eyes.”

Henry stretched out a sleeve and scrutinized it critically. “Suits me, does it? They're from the in-laws, a sort of cashmerey thing. I'll let Thea keep the red one. Much more her sort of color.”

Richard raised his eyebrows but decided to forbear. Thea would hear and would not see the funny side. He put out his hand for the coffeepot. “I thought I saw Dr. Choudhury in the Park this morning, near the Abbey. I thought his role was over by now?”

“Well, actually, Dr. Choudhury's more likely than the builders to be around on the weekends: he's told me he's still got a few bits and pieces to finish off upstairs. His easel's up there, I believe.” Henry waved the coffeepot around to emphasize his point, just out of reach. “So we often see him pottering around the Abbey when it suits him. Did you know, when he writes his papers on Bourne Abbey, he's going to give me a shared byline as well.”

Richard grabbed the coffeepot from Henry and went over to the cups on the sideboard. “Not so surprising, really. You have turned yourself into a bit of an expert on the Abbey: wainscoting, priest's holes, that sort of thing.” He turned just in time to see Henry squeeze past and slip himself into the vacated chair, ducking to avoid an anticipated but non-existent block.

Henry pulled the sports section out of the paper, messily refolded the rest, leaned back, and stretched his legs out luxuriously. “Well, then, Richard, perhaps you getting us stuck in one as children wasn't entirely wasted.”

Richard snorted and kept pouring his coffee. “You're such a romantic, pretty-boy. I'd always thought that was more of a linen cupboard myself. Whoever heard of shelves in a priest's hidey-hole?”

Henry half rose, then remembered that ownership was nine-tenths possession and sat down again. “The shelves were a later addition, as you damn well should know if you'd read my last letter to the Trust!”

—

L
EFT TO HIMSELF
in the sitting room that afternoon, Richard found he was not quite as sanguine as he had led his brother to believe. His Saturday evening torchlight tour of the Abbey with the children had elicited the expected shrieks and giggles and, as anticipated, nothing of substance.

Yet, when touring the upper levels, one of the rooms, the green room, had had a different atmosphere. Over and above the smell of fresh paint and linseed oil from the sheeted painting equipment stored there, was something less tangible but, to him, distinct. He had felt a prickling awareness of a presence, a feminine one. And there'd been a single hair, dark and wavy and very long, lying across one of the windowsills. This was a room inhabited by a woman. And not a hundred years ago, either.

To mention it to Henry or Thea would merely add fuel to the fire without being helpful, and anyway, Richard felt more than a little silly coming up with something so airy-fairy. A smell. A hair. Then this morning a glimpse through the bathroom window: Dr. Choudhury hurrying to the Abbey, carrying something. Had he looked furtive, or was that just Richard's own, overactive imagination? He wanted to dismiss it, turn it into a joke about his susceptibility to Henry's imaginings. Yet when the opportunity had come up today, with all the references to the subject, he had not. And his conviction that there was something would not go away.

A little discreet questioning had established that Thea had had no involvement with the upstairs work and, besides, her hair had never been that long. And from Audrey Upwey's purplish perm, it was certainly not. The building crew downstairs were all men. A long-haired tradesman? It was a woman's hair, a woman's smell, he was sure of it. Ridiculous.

He only had this evening, before an early start tomorrow morning to get back to London and his Chambers. Perhaps he should revisit the green room to test his first impressions.

Richard moved irritably out of Thea's too-soft armchair. Everywhere he looked, photographs: the parents, Thea's multitude of Greek relatives, lots of the boys of course, and a few of Henry and Thea's various friends. Some of those faces he recognized from university years ago. Typical of Henry to have made the necessary effort to keep in touch, though Thea probably did her fair share in that regard as well.

From the window, he could just see Bourne Abbey on the upper slope of the hillside to his left. Henry had always been the one dazzled by the romance of the place, and from an early age had been determined, like their father, to dedicate himself to Bourne Abbey's restoration and a proper understanding of its history.

A proper understanding. On second thought, maybe some of the romance was flowing in his veins as well. He would head out later for a look around and be back in time for Thea's drinks do tonight. No one would be the wiser.

—

R
OHIMUN SWORE AS
half a tube's worth of cadmium yellow plopped onto her breast. She unzipped her tracksuit top, folding it in on the oily blob and using the top's fleecy lining to scrub the floor in case any paint had made it that far. The metal tube must have split along the seam. She would have to paint in one of Mum's old
salwarkameezes
: more comfortable anyway, since she had gotten so fat.

She grabbed the first one that came out of the kitbag and pulled it over her head, enjoying the susurration of the microfiber as it slid down her body. It was a dark cobalt blue, only relegated to the too-old pile by the turmeric stains on the cuffs and front. She took off her tracksuit pants as well and slipped on the soft
salwar
pants, tying them loosely at the waist.

Back at her easel the rose floated before her, taking up the entire top left-hand quarter of the canvas, luminous against the dark greens and lamp blacks of the yew hedge that she had started to block in. She was not painting this
alla prima
,
impasto
, like her Freud- and Bacon-inspired commission portraits, all speed and dash and texture. It was time for a different method, and for once, she was going to take as long as she wanted.

Discarding the palette knife in favor of soft brushes, she had taken days to build up layer after layer of pure unmixed colors, heavily diluted and the most transparent she could make them, to form a glaze that mimicked the translucent depths of the colors within the rose. That part of the canvas was virtually complete; the rest was primed and lightly blocked-in with sepia. Breaking the rules, but it had been too difficult to think about the figure on the canvas until now.

She turned to the cheval, using her forearm to push hair back from her face and squinting at the shapes that her figure formed. She really needed an SLR to take a few shots to help her out, for when the light was different or she was focusing on detail. And it was going to be tricky working on her own profile. If only there was a second cheval, or even a hand mirror . . . Perhaps Tariq could pick one up cheap in a local pawnshop. In the meantime, she needed a general idea of the shapes and proportions her body would create.

She rotated slowly before the looking glass, letting her eyes come back into focus. It had been so long since she had really looked at herself. For once, the dark bulk of hair didn't swamp the rest of her. She smoothed her hands up over rounded hips, inwards over the indentation of her waist and out over full breasts. The
salwar
fell as it should: the curves suggested but not outlined.

She'd felt fat before, wearing the tight jeans and sheaths Simon liked, then trying to squeeze into old school clothes when she first came here, but now she wasn't so sure. She looked . . . grown up. Not some skinny student anymore. And not a Bounty bar either. The
salwar
looked alright.

And her hair . . . She thought of what Munch had done with hair, how it would swirl around his paintings like a live thing, creeping into cloud formations, flowing water, transforming into spermatozoa and embryos. Hair was power, life, wild nature. She stared at the canvas, dipped her finger into the sepia mess on her palette and started to change the faintly outlined figure into something larger, bolder and fuller. And then the suggestion of a mass of hair flying upward against the hedge, to balance the rose, high in the opposite corner.

—

R
ICHARD STOO
D IN
the middle of Bourne Abbey's library. There were no books to be seen, having been packed away with all the moveable furniture. The massive outline of the stone fireplace, still under its protective coating of bubble wrap, was about the only thing he recognized. That and the dusty, thirty-foot-high mullioned windows that formed the room's southern wall. Light streamed through them in angled shafts that turned the drop sheets the same creamy gold as the walls, and gave mystery to the barren bookcases.

When he was little, family Christmases were held in here, with the pine tree's smell competing against his mother's cigarettes and the aroma of Bristol cream sherry that clung to her clothes and skin. He and Henry would compete to bring a smile to their parents' faces, try to stretch out the anticipation and the unwrapping, the brief moments of cuddles and jokes, and to delay sitting down to the family lunch and the inevitable bickering or worse.

Mother was long gone, some twenty years ago, and Father, nine years now. His father had spent his life struggling to make-and-mend, with mortgages on mortgages to line the roof, repair the plumbing, hold back the ever-present damp rot. While his wife and his marriage were falling apart in front of him. Maybe he'd thought that fixing one would fix the other. Or perhaps he had just decided to concentrate on the things that could be mended.

How many Christmases had there really been in this room, so long ago? Shortly after Mother died, chunks of masonry started crashing down from the front parapets, and they had moved to the Lodge. By then Richard was consumed with hatred for the monstrous building that just seemed to carry on what his mother's drinking had started: a perpetual problem with no solution, a cancer in their finances, a hole in his father's heart.

Oxford had been a fading hope until Richard had scraped into a scholarship for the fees, and a part-time-rounds clerk position in a local solicitor's offices had been enough for the rest. Anything to escape his decomposing family. Henry was bloody lucky to have ridden in on his coat-tails three years later, just when Father was ready to give up and sell out to developers and was finally willing to listen to Richard, freshly acquainted with the law of trusts and his idea of breaking the deed and ceding the Abbey to Henry. The back-breaking loan Richard had taken out, on the strength of certain objects now on perpetual loan to the Victoria & Albert and the Bodleian, to cover Henry's university fees, buy out Father and get both of them free of the Abbey, had been a small price to pay.

And now the monster was tamed: shiny new in places, not a hint of mustiness, woodworm conquered and parapets safe again. For a few years anyway.

Perhaps Thea was the best person for the place. Her family were loaded enough to withstand the money-sink that the Abbey would always be. And she had no history with this house and was thus free of the gigantic burden of ancestral obligation that had distorted his parents' marriage and eventually destroyed them both. Nouveau riche gave her a protective coating of utilitarianism that had always been lacking in the Bournes.

How calm and quiet it was, in this late-afternoon light. He had seen Thea's decorating plans for this room: cream and gold with touches of mid-blue. He'd withstood her hints about returning the blue and gold Persian in his Chambers, but had been relieved at the projected color scheme, despite his pose of unconcern. It bore no relation to the dark red flock and black japanned side tables that he remembered from his childhood. And the bookshelves, cleaned of centuries of smoke stains much to the horror of the National Trust, were now closer to the honey shade of new oak than the blackish brown that he remembered. He smiled—he was fairly sure that Thea had hidden that particular series of indignant Trust letters from Henry, who was always such a slave to authenticity.

Richard strode out to the great hall. He and the boys had taken the main stairs last night, clomping up with flashing torches, plenty of ghost sounds and shrieks of anticipatory fear. This time he would take the servants' stairs and walk up quietly on green baize. He pushed open the swing door and paused to let his eyes adjust to the semi-dark. There was that smell again. No, it was a different one. Damned if it wasn't curry: the builders must have gotten in takeaway.

—

T
HE DEEP BLUE
of the
salwar
Rohimun was wearing would do nicely against the equally deep green of the hedge. Harmonious colors. It would also ensure that the golden rose was the true center of the painting. Light shining out of darkness. Pagan nature worship. The hand of God in all things. Whatever. That stuff was for the dealers and, God forbid, the critics. What really mattered was the physical response, which bypassed the brain and went straight to the gut and the heart and the hairs on the skin. Like music. Critical analysis was just an attempt to understand those reactions. Or rationalize them.