A Matter of Marriage (14 page)

Dr. Choudhury's palm rose again, belatedly. “My intention, Mrs. Begum,” he said with dignity, “as I was trying to say, was to give this tiffin to Tariq and . . . and . . . to tell him to fetch the girl here for Saturday evening. She can stay here until the danger has passed. Tariq will then return her to the Abbey.”

She felt her face soften.

“But know this, wife: I do not say that she deserves it, or that she is forgiven. That has not changed. It is, however, time that she benefited from traditional family values again. For one evening only.”

—

“
Y
OU REALLY MEAN
that?” Richard's tone was mild, even quizzical: guaranteed to wind Henry up even more.

“Yes, I
do
mean a ghost!” The line was so clear Henry could have been in the room, instead of eighty-odd miles from London, in the depths of Wiltshire. “I tell you, I saw it myself yesterday afternoon! All duskily Celtic, with long wavy hair, wearing some kind of smock. Quite medieval, which obviously supports my theory about the main house predating the outbuildings.”

Richard reclined in his chair, uncharacteristically glad of the distraction, buoyed by Henry's enthusiasm. “So, now you're relying on the paranormal to date the main house?”

Henry rose to the bait, as Richard knew he would. “You're not in the courtroom now, Richard. I'm telling you, I
saw
it, no mistake.”

“Alright, I'm listening.”

“I saw her, clear as day. I was, ah, walking the dogs after lunch, bit of a constitutional, you know, thought I'd do a circuit of the Abbey. Anyway, there I was, stopped for a breather, looked up, and there she was, sort of drifting across one of the second-storey windows.”

“Thea?”

“The ghost. The ghost, Richard. What a drawcard for tourists. We could have open evenings and take punters through the cellars.”

Richard propped the receiver under his ear, unscrewed his fountain pen and started to doodle bedsheet ghosts on the blotter. “You said it was on the second storey.”

“Cellars are spookier than bedrooms. And they'll be touring the whole upper storey already anyway, once we open the Abbey up again. It could be a whole separate tour, a twilight, ghost-hunting, sort of atmospheric thing . . .”

Richard grimaced. Another gimmick to market the Abbey to the weekend daytrippers, along with cream teas on Temple Lawn and Audrey Upwey's nieces in authentic medieval smocks selling authentic bloody medieval ale. So did Henry really believe that there was a ghost, or was it a wind-up?

“I've spoken to Dr. Choudhury, but he, ah, wasn't free to investigate.”

“How about Thea? What does she think of all this?”

“She wasn't really interested in looking, but, you know, she's been researching the antecedents of the green room, where I saw it, to try to identify her—historically, that is, so we could put something in the new leaflets. And of course, the boys are over the moon! Talking of which, I thought I'd have a good look on Saturday night: there's a full moon then, you know.”

“What difference does that make? The wiring's been fixed.”

“Oh, you know, that's sort of supernatural prime time, isn't it? Midnight on a full moon. You remember that BBC series where they . . . or perhaps that's werewolves . . .”

Richard halted his doodling and glanced at the faded Persian opposite. Its central design was of an archway with an onion-shaped top, like a doorway into another world. He could not quite believe that Thea was taking Henry's ghost seriously enough to spend time on it. But then he well knew her weakness for that bloody Abbey.

“Look, how about I visit this weekend, have a read of those grant papers. I'll come down Friday after work, take the terrible two ghost-hunting on Saturday night, and you can take Thea to that new restaurant that's opened up in Swindon. Florian's.” God knows what Henry had done with this latest round of Trust papers anyway.

“That's terrific, Richard. Terrific! And a child-free evening in the school holidays—Thee will love you forever!”

He smiled despite himself.

“How about, ah, Deirdre?” Henry added.

“No, just me.”

“So, she's gone the way of all the others then, eh? Cast aside like so much . . .” Henry didn't finish his sentence, obviously at a loss as to how you cast aside anybody.

Richard took his opportunity. “See you Friday then.”

“London must be quiet! See you then.” The line clicked off.

Richard still held the receiver. It wasn't like Henry to be facetious. Or so quick with his comments about girlfriends. Time his big brother went down there to sort him out.

He was surprised at how much he was looking forward to it. He'd never have believed he'd feel like that about hitting the motorway at Friday rush hour to drive down to Bourne Abbey and sleep in the Lodge's study. Shit, he'd forgotten about that sofa bed. Richard walked over to the Persian rug hanging on his wall and ran his hand across its soft, undulating surface, warm in the sun. What did it remind him of? He used to like to pull his fingers through its pile as a boy when it had lain on the floor of his bedroom in the Abbey, but that wasn't it. He was getting soft in his old age: stroking carpets, chasing ghosts.

M
RS.
B
EGUM STOOD
on the sitting-room Axminster, arms folded, and eyed the peacock on her mantelpiece. He was not what he had been when he'd arrived, just two days ago. The proud curve of his feathered chest had drooped and widened into what was almost a paunch, and his head had tilted, giving his features a leery, calculating expression. His stance, once aristocratic, had become something crooked and degenerate. An omen, perhaps.

His beak had begun to open, and she remembered something that Mrs. Darby had told her, about the danger of looking gifts in the mouth. Or was it to be recommended? She couldn't recall, but the thought would not leave her, so she pulled Dr. Choudhury's ottoman over to the hearth and climbed up. But the ottoman, old and soft like her husband, gave a dusty puff and sank in the middle with her weight. Left at eye-level with the peacock's neck, she reached forward and grasped the bird around his spreading tummy to lift him down.

Two things happened. Once she touched the bird, instead of the stiff dryness of old feathers, her hands encountered a damp, yielding stickiness, as if it had been incompletely preserved and was rotting from the inside out. And when she tried to lift the peacock, it refused to budge. Mrs. Begum grunted in disgust: this dirty-dirty thing in her sitting room had to go. She tightened her grip, her fingers sinking, and pulled upward fiercely.

It was then that one leg, apparently glued to the mantel by that same sticky substance, suddenly broke clean off. The peacock sprang into the air, Mrs. Begum's arms still attached, its tail feathers going every which way, and after a moment, in which Mrs. Begum saw herself in the mantel mirror, arms at full stretch with the peacock directly overhead, like Tariq's old picture of Magical Johnson catching the orange ball, she and the now one-legged peacock sailed backward onto the carpet.

She was unhurt and soon recovered herself sufficiently to look around. Peacock tail feathers were scattered over armchairs and occasional tables. One had landed across the top of a picture frame, looking like one of Mrs. Darby's Christmas decorations. The bird lay in the hearth, its remaining leg pointing up the chimney. Mrs. Begum grunted in disgust: cheap-and-nasty gifts shame the giver. Dr. Choudhury's so-shiny new watch had probably stopped by now as well.

When she returned from the kitchen with dustpan and brush and squatted to sweep up the remains, she saw that the peacock's body had pulled apart in a spill of old straw to reveal a dark object about the size of two fists pushed together. She poked it with the brush, and it rolled free of the straw, gleaming with cling wrap. She leaned closer to look and cautiously picked it up. This was not peacock.

It was as heavy as a stone from her rockery. It felt like the Plasticine that little Tariq would bring home from kindergarten, but a rich brown instead of the blues and yellows that had made her son's wobbly soldiers and serpents. Its substance came off on her hands in streaks with a distinctive, delicate perfume. She sat back on her haunches and lifted the object to her nose, sitting-room mess forgotten. Her head hurt.

She was little Syeda again, perched on her grandmother's lap in the dull heat of the late-afternoon harvest. Watching the silhouettes of the men and women from her village walking slowly backward through rows of nodding, bobbing poppy heads, armed with their
nushturs
, selecting and scoring the seed pods.

Then other memories, of herself older now, headachey and nauseated and following her father with the small earthenware pot into which the poppy milk, now dried to a dark resinous gum, was placed after being scraped off the poppy heads by his curved iron
sittooha
. Between each pod he would lick the blade, and when she once complained of headache, he had taken a little of the gum off the blade with his thumb and wiped it on her bottom lip.

Opium, scourge of Bangladesh and its five neighbors and forbidden by the Prophet (peace be upon him) as the most soul-destroying of the addictions. That number-one-dirty-bastard Kareem had brought opium, a cake of cooked opium paste, into her house. In a peacock, a creature so pure that its feather was permitted to touch the Qur'an. The essence of evil and death was here, in her home, her sitting room.

She stood up quickly, spilling the dustpan to the floor, her breathing tight, her headache growing, and looked for the solitary crooked shelf (put up with much difficulty by Dr. Choudhury) that held the holy book. It was still there: she could see its green and gold spine, high in the corner. She ducked her head, pulling a corner of sari over her hair, and looked up at the Qur'an then back at the hearth and at her stained hands. Too polluted to touch and take protection from the sacred words of Allah.

She remembered Uncle's son, his only living child, seen by her just once soon after she had arrived in Dhaka. Uncle had never spoken of him, but one of the market stallholders had pointed him out from a distance as her uncle's curse, a
casra charsi
, a dirty addict. He was filthy, painfully thin and swaying against a wall in one of the refuse alleys that led off the market. She had been standing perhaps twenty paces away, but could still smell the animal dung in which he must have been walking, lying. His
sherwani
was torn at the front and, between the flaps of fabric, his abdomen looked like knotted rope. One of his hands was curled like a claw under his chin, dark, almost black lips were drawn back from his teeth; and his cheeks and chin were glazed with saliva. His eyes were half closed, and even though he was upright, she had wondered if he was dead.

The words of the village mullah at Friday prayers, echoed at every
Jumma
she had been to in this country, came back to her then.

Remember death . . . remember that you will stand before Allah to be accountable for your deeds on a day that no wealth or children will benefit you. Beware the seeking of mufattir, intoxication, for it is addiction and damnation. Die and meet Allah in this state and you will drink eternally, eternally, from the impure rivers of Hell.

She'd had nightmares for days after seeing her cousin.

Dreams about her little sister, dead from the typhoid, and her parents as she had last seen them after the river, in the wet-season floods, had swept most of their village away. Drowned by Allah for harvesting the poppy. Dreams of herself rotting in that alley, a
casra charsi
for carrying the earthenware pot for her father, licking the gum from her lip.

A few months later, by which time she was over her big-city shock and navigating the laneways around her uncle's shop with impunity, she heard from the same stallholder that her cousin had been found dead in one of the ancient water cisterns that still existed beneath the city, and into which waste water now flowed. She never spoke to her uncle about what she had seen, or dreamt, but from then on had seen his quietness and removed life with different eyes.

—

M
RS.
B
EGUM SHUDDERED.
Averting her eyes from the hearth she retreated to the kitchen. The clock said three. Dr. Choudhury would be home in an hour from his healthy-walk, and she had a strong urge to make
salat
. And she could not pray if she was impure, unclean. That thing in her house, on her hands. She slipped the fingers of her right hand into her mouth and, biting their tips, muttered “
Il Allah, wah il Allahu
,” the old formula for passing graveyards, speaking or thinking of the dead. What could she do?

Fingers still in mouth, Mrs. Begum looked out the kitchen window to the back garden—vegetables in rows, tall and strong, her washing flapping behind them, the rabbit hutch flanked by the neat hessian-topped curve of the compost—and thought.

With sudden decision, and tucking her sari's
pallu
, peasant-style, into her waistband, she ran to open the front door, grabbed hold of the cast-iron shoe-scraper, a strange but practical present from Mrs. Darby, and dragged it into the hallway. She shut the door and pushed the shoe-scraper hard up against it. If Dr. Choudhury was to return early, he must not catch her unawares and perhaps stop her from taking the necessary steps.

This house, her sanctuary and her pride, had been polluted. Police would come, perhaps those reporters. The Women's Institute would hear about it, perhaps exclude her. And Mrs. Darby, her great friend, what would she say? Mrs. Begum knew what was necessary, what only she could do. She hurried out to the back garden.

With a trowel and fork from the miniature shed, she attacked the far side of her perfect, symmetrical compost mound, digging steadily until she had excavated a narrow cavity that ran into the steaming heart of the heap. She dropped her tools and hastened back to the sitting room, where she levered the opium cake off the floor and, holding it before her like a hot pan so as not to stain her sari, proceeded back outside.

Once she reached the heap, she peeled off the remnants of cling wrap, then squatted opposite the hole and carefully fed the opium in, only releasing it when her arms were at full stretch. The cake, hitting the warm interior of the mound, flooded the air with its perfume, and she felt her stomach contract. Swallowing a retch, she grabbed the trowel, rapidly filled the hole and patted it down. Done.

Mrs. Begum sat back on her heels and took a few deep breaths of the rich familiar smell of leaf-mould, mango skins and tea leaves. The tightness in her chest started to ease, though the headache, the old harvest headache she remembered, still pounded. In one month, maybe two, the evil thing would rot away into the soil from where it had come, and no one would be the wiser. Then she would spread it around the perimeter of the garden, under the privet hedge. Nothing could kill that.

She got to her feet, then hesitated. It had been a hot day and a hot night was coming. Normally she would have forked over the tightly compacted heap and taken away a little for her radishes, but there was no time left. What would they taste like after this anyway? She had to clear away the rest of that dirty bird, then do
wudu
, washing herself three times in the proper way so she could make
salat
and finish before her husband came home and wondered what had been broken, who had died, that she needed to pray. She threw the tools into the shed, lifted the skirt of her sari and ran inside the house.

By the time Dr. Choudhury's signature fumble at the front door was due, the peacock's tail feathers had been gathered, plopped into an ugly vase from Bora Khalo, her dirty father-in-law, and positioned on the mantel, not that her husband would ever notice. The hearth was swept and polished, and an elaborate and heartfelt
salat
had been performed. Dinner was not yet started. She flew into the kitchen, banged a saucepan into the sink and started to wash the rice.

—

D
R.
C
HOUDHURY'S HEALTHY-WALK
had not gone well. Halfway around the village he had become uncomfortably hot and sweaty, but had not been willing, in the muggy June heat, to remove his tweed jacket and be seen walking like some laborer in shirtsleeves. People expected more of him than that.

He'd developed a disagreeable dampness under his arms and across his upper back, and he suspected that his upper lip and forehead were shiny. This was confirmed by a glimpse of himself in the latticed display window of the new Ye Lydiard Style dress shop: a most unflattering representation in more ways than one, due to the convex nature of the glass.

Now, with two-thirds of the steady incline of High Street still to traverse, a small, sharp stone somehow crept into his shoe and under his right foot: the one with a particularly tender bunion and several significant corns that Mrs. Begum had neglected to completely remove. He arched his sole and wriggled his toes as he walked, but to no avail. With every step it embedded itself further into his sole.

There was no way he could stop, stand on one foot and be shoeless in the high street to remove a stone. He would look ridiculous. He was an academic, not an athlete. He would just have to soldier on until he found his home.

Finally his front gate came into view. Stoic, he struggled with the gatepost, which seemed to have developed an aggravating lean, catching his right thumb painfully in its latch before managing to swing it open. Mrs. Begum was often in the garden at this time of day, but now it was silent and empty. He struggled up the gravel path, the uneven surface a further refinement in pedal pain. Stones on the outside and the inside. He would far rather just have had one big one to deal with, like Sisyphus.

A dog barked, and he stopped abruptly to look around, nursing his sore thumb, but no one, animal or human, was to be seen. Odysseus returns, full of tales of heroic achievement, but no one recognizes him, no one cares. Nursing his digit, he limped up the path and slowly climbed the three steps to the front door. Why had Mrs. Begum never expressed concern about his pounding heart, his labored breathing? She should have made him see a doctor, have some tests.

He tried to turn the door handle without using his sore thumb, but could not get a sufficient grip. Other men, more traditional, less modest, would just have banged on the door, expected their wife to fly to greet them after such a trial. He leaned his left shoulder against the door and fumbled with his uninjured hand to twist the knob.

The catch gave suddenly, and he stumbled into the house, just missing the edge of the hall table, but temporarily tangling with some minor domestic item that Mrs. Begum had left lying about. He gave the item an impulsive shove with his foot, merely to move it out of the way for others, only then recalling that it was his sore foot, and discovering that the object was both hard and heavy. Pain shot up his leg. He rested against the wall and tears welled, mixing with droplets of sweat and stinging his eyes.

Still no one even knew he was there, what he had been through. He sniffed, straightened and for the first time ever avoided the hall mirror as he hobbled into the sitting room to divest himself of the instruments of his suffering and collapse into his wing-back armchair. Oh, the bliss of being finally shoe- and jacket-less, the comforts of home all around him, the pressures of his public persona left behind.