A Matter of Marriage (16 page)

And Kareem seeing her with new eyes, the eyes of a suitor and a husband. Aaah. Her eyes stung, and she turned her back on her friends, tugging fiercely at the
hijab
's knot at the side of her neck. But she only seemed to be able to make it tighter, and as she tugged harder, the tears started to spill down her cheeks.

“Baby, are you all right? Baby!” First Aisha, then Amina were staring at her expression, her tears.

She tried to say of course she was fine, she was just trying to get this knot undone, but the words didn't come out properly, and she started to cough on choked tears, had to sit down on the bed while her coughing turned to a kind of gasping crying, and Shilpi ran to the bathroom for a glass of water and Amina tried to give her tissues and Aisha squeezed her shoulders.

Still no words would come out, and eventually her friends seemed to decide that she was sick, there was some sort of bug going around, and they should head back to the college dorm and put her to bed. They phoned for a taxi.

Shilpi walked her downstairs to the cab, the knot in the
niqab
undone, but Shunduri was holding it over her head with one hand as if her life depended on it, her left forearm hard across her midriff as if she had stomach ache. There was little conversation in the taxi on the way home, and once they were back in the dorm, she told them no, she didn't want any company, she didn't need a doctor, just wanted to sleep. She shut her bedroom door on their faces, locked it and climbed into bed still fully dressed, averting her eyes from her bedroom clock, which kept flashing the time, as insistent as her calendar with its missed due date. The tears started again as she pulled off the
niqab
, clutched it to her chest and curled up under her duvet. On Friday morning Shunduri woke late with the alarm already on snooze, her mouth foul-tasting and a headache well entrenched at the base of her skull. Squinting at her phone screen, she checked for texts from Kareem sent last night. Nothing.

It was past nine so she telephoned the bank to call in sick, dragged on her dressing-gown over her clothes and wandered down the corridor to Neena Varios's room to beg a couple of migraine tablets. Once in her own room, she washed them down with a cup of cold tea and climbed back into bed.

Only then did she text Kareem's number:
Don't bother 2nite. Or anytime u casra bastard
, turning off her phone straight after. The
niqab
was still there, crumpled up like a used handkerchief on her pillow, and she tucked it into her fist, lay down and waited for sleep.

“
U
NCLE
R
ICHARD!”
T
WO
small boys in superhero pajamas cannoned into him at what was becoming a dangerous height, and were immediately campaigning for a wrestling match on the back lawn.

“Absolutely not, monsters. That's your father's job.”

“Oh, but Daddy won't—he gets all puffy,” said Jonathon, struggling to dislodge brother Andrew, who, hanging grimly on to Richard's belt, and not to be outdone, cried, “Yeah! And red!”

A smiling Thea was not far behind. “It's so good to see you, dearest Richard. Henry is, of course, just as pleased, simply a
little
caught up in some new primary sources we've just unearthed. He's on his way back from the Abbey now. It's all very exciting, but let's get your things out of that townie car and you into a dry martini.”

“Nothing better, Thea. It's good to be off that motorway. Sorry I couldn't get here sooner.”

Richard kissed his sister-in-law on both cheeks, remembering her preferred continental style, before maneuvering gingerly, boys still attached, through the door of the Lodge and dumping them unceremoniously on the sitting-room carpet. “Remember the mixer, please: I'm not a QC yet.”

Thea, tilting her head, flicked at the tangle of gold at her neck. “Well, come and help me then. We can put your bag away later. Boys!
Boys!
This may be your last chance to play on the trampoline before bedtime.”

She turned, ignoring the stampede to the back door that passed her by inches, and Richard found himself following her sauntering walk down the passage with interest. Thea Kiriakis, former Chelsea fashionista, had lost her old angularity and was now affecting lady-of-the-manor cashmere and tweeds. Which actually suited her very well, perhaps because of the unexpected contrast with her dark coloring. The only jarring note in this new image was the familiar quantity of gold at neck and wrists.

And, of course, everything was a little too well cut for county. Images from their past assailed him suddenly, and he brought his train of thought up short. What else had he expected? Of course, they would be moving back into the Abbey any day now. She
was
the lady of the manor.

And he was a little too preoccupied with old times, perhaps? Those particular times in London nine or ten years ago, when he and Thea had played host and hostess, and Henry was the occasional visitor? Richard decided to take a kitchen stool this side of the breakfast bar, rather than go round and lean against the countertop and share the space with her. You could never be too careful. But of what? Surely not himself: he'd seen their break-up coming a mile off, in a sense had engineered it, and besides, it was ancient history, and he'd never been into that.

“I suppose Henry told you all about our ghost?” said Thea, as she moved toward the fridge. She took two martinis out, already garnished, and slid one across the counter, smiling. “And I suppose that's why you made this lightning decision to visit? Not that I'm not glad to see you.”

Henry appeared through the scullery door, carrying a Tupperware container behind his back and making a beeline for the fridge. “Hey, Richard,” he said indistinctly, one hand over his mouth. “Thee, I just need to . . .”

“What are you eating? Is that cake?”

Henry shook his head. “No, no, Thee. It's just one of Mrs. Choudhury's pakhoras. You know how she never lets me leave without food.”

“How many have you eaten?”

“Well, ah . . .”

“I thought you were trying to lose weight.”

“Oh, ah, just one while I was there, then one on the way back, and then, ah . . .”

“She thinks I never feed you.”

“Richard, would you like one? They're delicious.”

“Very fattening,” said Thea. “You should see how much she feeds the children: no wonder they're over there all the time.”

“Oh, I see you're onto the hard stuff already.” Henry tried to steer the conversation elsewhere, as Thea pulled the Tupperware out of his hands. “It's great to see you here at last, by the way.”

Richard sipped his drink cautiously: Thea's martinis were pretty near to pure gin, with olive. “It was good timing as far as work went. And of course I had real reason to be concerned about my brother's and sister-in-law's mental health. Seeing ghosts. Researching ghosts. Help was clearly needed . . .”

“Rubbish!” Thea reached out to snatch his martini back, and he swiftly lifted it into the air. Even sitting down, this was well out of Thea's reach, and Henry was happy just to laugh.

“Now, Thee, you must watch that excitable Greek temperament—superstitious too, by the looks of things. Oh, now, that was pure temper. Pass the tea towel, Henry. You two owe me another martini.”

—

T
HA
T EVENING, AFTER
dinner, Richard, feeling uncharacteristically flat, stretched his legs out on the sofa in the sitting room. Ready for bed, and it was only nine-thirty. Must be his London hours catching up with him. Or more likely Thea's martinis. Henry, a sheaf of papers in his hand, was murmuring with Thea: something about the ghost, no doubt.

Backlit by a silk-shaded lamp, with Thea, immaculately groomed, sitting on the floor and leaning on Henry's knee to emphasize a point, and the boys for once not squabbling over their card game, they looked like a movie-screen family, too good to be true. He rested his head back against the cushions and watched them through half-closed eyes.

The image needed a title.
Country Life at Bourne Abbey Lodge
. Or maybe,
This Could Have Been You
. Well, there's a thought. The room felt too warm now, to the point of oppressiveness, and he had a sudden craving for the cool blue space of his Chambers. Or maybe he just needed a cigarette. He got to his feet, signalling a watchful Thea and an oblivious Henry with two fingers to his mouth, and found his way outside via the scullery door.

The grind and snap of his lighter in the quiet of the garden was obscurely comforting, although it was certainly no cooler out here. The lawn stretched before him. He breathed in slowly and deeply, savoring fresh air and acrid smoke in equal measure.

In the still, moonlit air, smoke from his neglected cigarette curled into a luminous, almost vertical, stranded spiral, a DNA helix. Inheritance. You could run, but never escape. Well, hadn't he proved that wrong? Henry was inheriting, and he, Richard Bourne, eldest son, was free of it forever, free to live his own life in London and pursue his chosen career. No crumbling wreck of an Abbey to blight his existence and tie him to the regions, none of the county social round to put up with come hell or high water.

He flicked the cigarette's long ash tail and frowned. But he was here, wasn't he? Back in, not quite the Abbey, but its Lodge. And in a month or two, he would be invited, knowing Thea, to a grand unveiling of the fully restored Abbey, now on the National Trust A-list, no less. He'd needed a break, but why hadn't he gone down to Cowes, or flown to Paris for the weekend? The paperwork for Bourne Abbey was not so pressing that he couldn't have dealt with it the next time Thea came down to London. So, why was he here, back on the family land, sorting out family problems again?

His sense of oppression was lifting with a little fresh air, and the unease that remained was probably just work-related. Yet he could think of nothing outstanding, nothing out of control. He prided himself, always had, on knowing exactly where he stood on all his current matters: no sprinting down from Chambers, gown flapping, for unprepared applications, or scrambling to hide sloppy preparation from his instructing solicitor and the Bench. No, it wasn't work. And it wasn't Thea, startling though her transformation was.

So why this discomfiting sense of something missing, or impending, that had been growing on him for the last few months? Something that he would have to rise to meet, or understand, that was outside of his experience. He squared his shoulders and glanced further, beyond the Lodge garden, toward the Abbey itself, invisible in the dark. But there was nothing untoward there: Henry's ridiculous money-making plans, his avoidance of paperwork, were an irritation, no more.

Perhaps his work was a problem in a different sense: was he entering into that no-man's-land of restless anxiety that so many senior juniors, waiting for the magical appointment to Queen's Counsel, were said to suffer? He blinked slowly, reluctant to close his eyes to the sting of the smoke. No, not yet anyway: two more years at the earliest at his own estimate, though Sternbridge, his Chambers' senior bencher, had hinted that a few more high-profile briefs from Her Majesty's Inland Revenue could accelerate things somewhat. And certainly, until recently, he'd been happy to do just that. The Reid brief, where he was instructed to preserve and protect a family Trust, make it work as it should, was not his usual style: he was more an anti-Trust man, as the Americans would say.

The scullery door creaked open, and Thea emerged, her pearls shining in the moonlight. She had discarded her tailored jacket and the shirt underneath was sleeveless.

“Company?”

“Always a pleasure, Thea. Light?”

“No, trying
very
hard to give it away. Just let me smell the air. Aren't ex-smokers pathetic? Never thought I'd join their ranks till I caught Jonathon playing with my pack. No moral high ground to tell him off, you see. And he knew it.”

“You'll have plenty of distraction soon enough.”

Thea swung her arms out, then spun lazily, her heels scraping on the flagstones.

“I don't know what we're going to do with ourselves when we have all that space at the Abbey. It seems almost unbelievable that it's only a few months away now after—what? Five years of renovation and restoration. And no small thanks to your legal nous.”

“Nothing could have replaced your hard work, Thea.” Not to mention her family's money. He hesitated. “I'm just glad that Henry—both of you—were willing to take on what I was not.”

“I've always wondered about that eldest-son thing, you know. If Henry hadn't been so passionate about the Abbey, or if you hadn't been able to break the Trust, would it
really
have been so awful for you to take it on?” She paused and, in the face of his silence, gave a husky little laugh.

Giving up hadn't changed that. How strange that now, after eleven years, or was it twelve, she was so direct on the subject. Or was this sudden need for forgiveness, or closure, some kind of recognition, actually very timely, with all the hard work done and all she had wanted for so long, now close enough to touch?

His coming down at this juncture had had repercussions, caused anxieties, that he hadn't fully appreciated. He squinted at the glowing end of his cigarette, taking in Thea's guarded gaze and stopped breath, and made a conscious effort to throw sufficient emphasis into his voice. “Not in a million years.”

She gave a little jump, whether of unrelieved tension, or joy, or something else, he could not tell. But then her feet resumed their dance, and her voice thrummed lower and softer than before. “I'm not so sure I believe you. Oh, give me just one puff.”

He smiled, shaking his head, and stepped out of her charmed circle to flick the remains of the cigarette into the garden before heading inside. “Absolutely not, Thea. Think of your moral ground.”

—

A
FTER
T
HEA MADE
noises about turning in, Richard went upstairs with Henry to do a dutiful look-in on Andrew and Jonathon, to find them fast asleep on the bedroom carpet under a tangled mess of duvets, sheets, and Twix and Mars Bar wrappers. The boys' arms and legs were sticking out at odd enough angles to suggest a massacre. The video they'd been watching was long finished, and the battle scene from a re-colored
El Cid
was playing on the television.

While Henry pulled on duvets and unwound sheets, Richard scooped up the nearest body and tipped it into the top bunk, then stopped to watch the confrontation between a red-faced, red-crossed knight and a glamorous, dastardly infidel, speechifying with swords drawn under the green flag of Islam and Saladin.

“Great words. Henry, wasn't this one of your favorite movies?”

Henry straightened to look. “Oh yes, wonderful stuff.”

“
Yonder lies the castle of my father
. Remember that line? Brought the house down.”

Henry tugged on a sheet that seemed to have wrapped itself completely around both a boy leg and a bunk leg, and had formed a granny knot. “Tony Curtis. But that wasn't
El Cid
. It was
Son of Ali Baba . . .”

“Who could have cast that pretty-boy Tony Curtis as a serious hero? Should have been Gregory Peck or this fellow with the beard.”

“Charlton Heston. No one laughed at
him
,” said Henry, sounding almost bitter.

“Here, I'll pick him up and see if you can slide his leg out of the sheet. Looks like his brother tied him to the furniture.”

“Wouldn't be surprised,” said Henry. “Big brothers for you.”

—

O
UTSIDE, A FITFUL
moonlight shone down on the Abbey and its great estate, in darkness no longer shrunk by death duties and new roads to merely Park and Lodge. Night restored the ancient boundaries, when the Abbey lands encompassed Windsor Cottage, Lydiard village, Tregoze Church and the farmlands beyond, stretching to the gleaming line of the Stowe River on three sides and the first gigantic upward sweep of the Wiltshire Downs on the fourth.

In the back garden of Windsor Cottage, hutched rabbits slept, and snake bean and okra leaves drooped from the long summer's day. In the center sat the compost heap, its smooth, even darkness at odds with the soft-edged asymmetries of bush and plant. It had been steaming all afternoon and the nearby cucumber frames dripped with condensation.