A Matter of Marriage (22 page)

T
HEA SURVEYED THE
Lodge's front drawing room. Everything was ready: fruit juice for the Choudhurys, martinis for the others, and Andrew and Jonathon in their room upstairs with a Disney classic on the DVD player. She was pleased that she'd managed the double feat of fulfilling their obligations to the Choudhurys and of not scaring Richard off to London early. Perhaps because she had been careful not to tell him too much too soon. Even he wouldn't dare to change his plans this late.

She drifted closer to the fire and tweaked into artful disarray the pile of
Paris Vogue
,
Wallpaper*
and
Architectural Digest
. Richard's allergy to social obligations was second nature to her by now, as were the endless cigarette breaks outside that he would resort to if trapped with company not to his liking, or if things went on too long.

Choudhury was always an attentive guest, even though his wife tried to reverse-engineer the recipes and was prone to suddenly developing passions for strange items like the pen-holding coronation mug by the telephone. Perhaps she was a collector. No, Thea couldn't see it. The son was coming tonight as well: an art curator from Johannesburg. He and Henry could discuss the Abbey collection, and Richard had an eye for paintings. Richard shouldn't be too burdened, not being the official host, and Henry, with the Abbey to talk about with Dr. Choudhury, would be in his element.

She drifted over to the gate-leg table where the Abbey decorator's latest proposals had been left as a talking point, but also because, although she would never admit it, Richard's interest and approval still counted. What little difference Richard's breaking of the family Trust all those years ago had made to this family. Henry had been the heir for longer than she'd known either of them, but he still deferred to Richard, and even the National Trust people wrote to him first. She tapped the papers with one perfectly polished scarlet nail. Once they were installed in the Abbey, everything would be different. She glanced at her watch: a favorite Tiffany in honor of the occasion. Seven-forty-five. The men should be down any minute now.

Perhaps she would sit Richard with Mrs. Begum, and if she became too much he could give her one of his put-downs. And tonight could act as thanks for all Mrs. Choudhury's babysitting. Andrew and Jonathon loved everything about her: her food, her rabbits and her garden. It was too easy sometimes, having her just across the way, and always happy to take them.

The gender balance was wrong—too many men—but county was difficult to combine with the Choudhurys and impossible to inflict upon Richard. Henry, on the other hand, usually seemed to find the Choudhurys quite amusing. She smiled at the thought of Richard's face and of the knowing looks he would give her once Dr. Choudhury got going.

The scullery door banged, and Thea scooped up Richard's martini to present to him, a quip about Dutch courage ready on her lips. But instead there were his footsteps on the stairs and a shout to Henry to hurry up in the shower. A pity: she'd been looking forward to a bit of their old acerbic pre-party banter, perhaps one of his perceptive comments on how she was looking, while Henry faffed about upstairs with his tie. Eight o'clock. Her watch gave a silvery chime, and she replaced the cocktail and started to light the reflectors on the mantelpiece. Such a flattering light, and somehow festive as well: perfect for one of their last cosy little evenings before the transition to the Abbey.

She turned her back on the mirror and took in the rest of the room. She had done her best with the Lodge but cute and cottagey it remained. She couldn't wait until people were visiting, seeing her, in the Abbey itself. Much more her style. Perhaps they could have a late-summer ball to celebrate the completion of restoration. Perhaps
Country Life
could send someone. Or even
Tatler
. How wonderful that would be. She sighed, feeling the soft roll of double-stranded pearls over her collarbones as she did so. No gold tonight: Mrs. Choudhury always had enough on for both of them, and she wasn't going to compete.

The doorbell rang, and Thea moved to the stairs to call Henry but was met by Richard, running down the stairs while adjusting his tie, his hair still wet. She stepped in front of him, holding out the martini glass, but he ignored it. His expression was alert, even predatory, but entirely focused on what was to come. Not on her. This is how he looks when he's about to go into court, part of her thought, while another part felt as if she'd been slapped. She searched his face and found an absence of their shared history in his eyes.

“It's the Choudhurys, isn't it?” There was a grim undertone to his voice, as if his worst fears about tonight had just been realized.

“Yes.” Damned if she was going to justify her choice of guests to him. “Richard, darling, the door.
Could
you?”

There was no reply, but he strode down the hall, and she suddenly felt unaccountably weary, as if she'd just come home from standing at some all-day dressy event, like a polo match, or a society funeral. She turned away from the sight of Richard's back and entered the drawing room. Even though it was only the Choudhurys, she couldn't face them just then. She needed a moment.

Everything was in order, impressive to those in the know, but welcoming too. No one could say that she was a bad hostess, whoever the guests were. She stopped next to the Le Corbusier mirrored tray, one of her treasures, now holding the juices and cocktails. When she looked down onto its surface, her pearls, refracted through the various liquids, appeared impossibly lustrous and twice their size. Wasn't it Cleopatra who dropped pearls into her drink, to impress that successful young general Antony with her wealth, and her nerve? It worked too, for a while.

She leaned forward to see more clearly, the drinks sparkling and winking, lit from above and below. The vinegary scent of gin and dry vermouth was bracing, and on impulse she picked up one of the martinis, plucked out the olive and swallowed it whole. Imagine doing that with a pearl. For once she would break her rule of drinking last and least. Stuff the guests. She lifted the glass to her lips and sculled the lot. Hell, she hadn't done that since Oxford.

—

M
RS.
B
EGUM, SLIGHTLY
out of breath, was at the Lodge front door in her second-best non-wedding sari and minimal jewelry: only her usual gold bracelets that never came off, four extra colored glass ones on each wrist that Dr. Choudhury had forced on her at the last minute because they matched the sari, and her smallest gold set, earrings no bigger than her thumbnail and one little necklace almost entirely hidden by her blouse. They had headed off from Windsor Cottage the second the rain had stopped.

All the way, Tariq, stupid boy, was fiddling with his phone and wandering all over the place like a goat looking for the greenest grass, so she'd had to dodge around him, while her scuttling cockroach of a husband was trying to tell her that she was disrespecting these so-great-and-mighty Bournes by dressing as if she was off to the shops, showing him up as a lower-class man, a man who could not afford to buy his wife enough gold, or good saris. What number-one fools, both of them.

She had been to enough Oxford parties to know that the bigger the gold sets she wore, the more fancy-fancy her saris, the less people would expect her to speak English. But if her sari was plain, and she wore her sewing glasses and a friendly smile, talk-talking about weather or motorways or gardening was all that was needed. Sometimes they even asked her what college she was from.

When they were close to the Lodge's front gate, she'd picked up her sari pleats and put on a last burst of speed to beat Dr. Choudhury there: a maneuver that turned out to be unnecessary as at the same time her husband stopped completely. He seemed to have been distracted by the sight of wet grass cuttings sticking to his shoes and was lifting first one foot then the other into the air and waggling it, then tapping his soles on the gravel, muttering something about the virtues of pavements.

She'd slipped through the gate Tariq had just opened, bustled up the broad path, now clearly leading, and leaned on the doorbell, victorious. No long-winded greetings and introductions with them standing on the doorstep like beggars for minutes and minutes while Dr. Choudhury pretended he was Rabindranath Tagore getting the Nobel Prize. It would be just quick
salaams
, kisses between the women like Mrs. Darby did, then inside, as it should be.

—

T
HEA COULD HEAR
everything from where she sat on the sofa, her eyes watering. The front door opening, then complete silence. What was Richard doing? She stood too fast and had to sit back down as the room shifted with her. There was a burst of talking: Mrs. Choudhury, then Dr. Choudhury's lower tones and, at last, the sounds of movement down the hall.

If, on top of everything else, Richard was going to be difficult . . . Thea got to her feet, more cautiously this time, grabbed Richard's cigarettes and lighter from the occasional table and stuffed them under a sofa cushion. And the scullery door was going to be bloody well locked.

Henry, fair hair sticking up and tie askew, shot into the drawing room a split second before their guests and propped when he saw her. Thea, concentrating on standing steadily, affected to ignore his anxious glance, and before he could speak, their visitors came clustering through the doorway.

Henry spun around to greet them. “Mrs. Choudhury, lovely to see you again.”

“Begum, Begum.”

“Oh, ah, you're welcome . . . Some juice, Mrs. Choudhury? Thee managed to source some mango nectar for you, I think. Dr. Choudhury, good, good. And this must be Tariq, weather's a bit wetter than South Africa today, hey? Juice as well? How was your flight?”

Thea did a slow circuit of the room, smiling and nodding in the swirl of movement and chatter, then returned to where she had started, to pretend to listen and hand out drinks through Henry. The dizziness had eased and, conscious of a certain redundancy, she took another cocktail. She'd touched Richard's arm in passing and made some comment about Henry's recalcitrant cowlick, but his brief mechanical assent left her feeling marooned.

Richard stood on the far side of the guests from her, his dark stillness rising above Henry's bustling geniality like a yew hedge behind a flowerbed. No glances of shared amusement, no watchful eye on those she spoke to.

Why did she feel so diminished this evening, so pointless? It was she who'd jilted him, then moved on, married happily, two boys, the Abbey. He was the one who hadn't progressed, living in a flat and still single . . .

She picked up another drink with her free hand and started to move around the edge of the group, back toward Richard. When she was almost there, she caught his eye and lifted the drink, forcing a wry smile and raising her eyebrows. Pax. Truce. Besties. Former Lovers. You Must Need A Drink With This Lot. He stared, as if puzzled by her presence, then waved away the proffered drink, her peace offering, while that fat nobody Mrs. Choudhury burbled on into his inclined ear.

Thea felt the heat in her face, the weight of the drinks in her hands. Her smile, her eyebrows, were as tight and numb as if she'd just been botoxed. No one noticed her. Henry was by the window, chatting with Tariq. The Choudhurys were nodding eagerly at Richard, deferring to his comments, watching his expression.

Look how everyone always revolved around him. Richard said little, seemed to want none of it, but everyone focused on him, deferred to him as a matter of course. She was just a burden to him, as was Henry and the Abbey and everything else that she held precious. He wanted none of it, none of them, but they couldn't do without him.

Including her. How she wanted him still. Nothing had changed: the disinheritance was a paper sham, for Henry would never be firstborn or stronger because of it. He would never be Richard. She had lost something so precious, so . . . what was it? She finished her cocktail and started the martini meant for Richard. Was that her second drink, or her third? Her stomach burned, as did her heart.

Choudhury was talking now, and she saw Richard's expression change, his long fingers play with his cufflinks, his eyes glittering and sharp. He was angry. Like when she'd told him of Henry's proposal, of how they both wanted him to be at the engagement party. Richard's anger had been thrilling then, proof of her power, and somehow enabled her to make everything—the Abbey, the Kiriakis Trust, family relations—move forward and work out. This was different: she had no inkling at all of what had upset him, and all she knew was that it did not involve her.

Mrs. Choudhury touched his arm, and he shepherded her to the other couch and sat down with her. God, even this silly old woman could hold his interest more than she could.

Their heads were together now, and Mrs. Choudhury was ticking something off on her fingers. One, two, three. Thea could hear some of the words. Children. Mrs. Choudhury was talking about her children. One son, two daughters. How fascinating for him.

But he was watching Mrs. Choudhury intently, listening to every word. Thea sat down on the nearest chair to them, tried to formulate some light comment about how she'd met Shunduri just the other day, delightful girl, but the words stuck in her throat. How could she be in this position, trying to find an opening to talk to Richard of all people? She got up awkwardly, sat further away on the other sofa, on some uncomfortable lump . . . Richard's cigarettes. He hadn't even looked for them, hadn't left the room for a smoke once. What was it now? Eight-thirty?

She glanced at her watch, but its small face was blurred, unreadable. Audrey had not appeared, her watch had not chimed for nine, so dinner could not be ready yet. She got up, at a loss as to where to go, what to do, then realized that someone, Tariq, had silently joined her.

He smiled at her and said one for the hostess and pressed her fingers around a glass. His irises were so dark she couldn't distinguish his pupils; his skin, a darker gold than his father's, had the taut smoothness of youth. The mantel reflectors glittered behind him, as if wings of fire were sitting on his shoulders. She took the drink from his hand (her third? fourth?) and held it like a talisman as she tasted tears in the back of her throat.