A Matter of Marriage (31 page)

She closed her eyes and bobbed under the water for a couple of strokes, enjoying the sensation of holding her breath, moving her face against the water's soft resistance. Then she came up, reached with her feet for the bottom, couldn't feel it and, after a moment of panic, slipped into an awkward sidestroke that by degrees became elongated, leisurely. She hadn't swum like this since she was at school.

When she started to feel cold, she let herself drift back to the bank, to a shell-shaped outcrop a little further down, and climbed out. She pulled the remaining pins out of her bun, and stood enjoying the sensation of looseness and movement on her scalp.

Her dress clung to her, dripping down her legs. When she looked down, it was sheer and she could see, over her heart, Jackie's outward stare. Thea's underwear, a flesh-colored set from La Perla, was not only outlined by the dress but was see-through as well. For a second her hands went to pubis and breasts, then she dropped her arms. Who was she covering for? She strode up the bank and started to walk home.

The sun warmed her back, and she swung her arms, letting their momentum carry her up the hill. When she reached the back garden, she could hear the dogs barking inside, and a man's voice, happily chastising their noise. Feeling as if it were someone else's house, she walked softly to the sitting room's back window and peered in.

Henry was on the floor wrestling with the two Retrievers, brandishing a slipper and yelling over their barks. One of the dogs had hold of his shirttail and was growling and shaking its head, and Henry, in twisting away, had his shirt pulled up to his shoulderblades. How like his sons he was right then, writhing and quick, white skin gleaming against the dim carpet. The two dogs were tumbling on top of him and each other in an effort to take the slipper, and while she watched, they knocked into the Pembroke table and her carefully
dérangé
Abbey drawings fell onto the floor.

From the outside the sitting room looked dark and static, as oppressively full of meaningless objects as a Victorian parlor. Her precious cluster of silver-framed photos, her row of Meissen figurines on the mantelpiece, the stack of fashionable magazines looked like nothing more than pointless obstacles to be negotiated by eager dogs and men. Was it just a trick of the sun blazing on the glass, or was what she was now seeing more real, closer to the true nature of things, than she had seen before? She gripped the windowsill, staring at the puzzle of her own life before her.

The slipper went flying, followed by the yelping dogs, and an occasional table tilted under the onslaught. The china bowl on top slid and fell onto the stone hearth with an audible crack and a waterfall of potpourri. Dogs and man parted, temporarily silenced. With a sudden sadness, Thea realized that the real tragedy of the shattered bowl, her prized Moorcroft ware, was that the rhythm of the joyous game had been broken.

“Shit!
Scheisse!
”

Henry looked worriedly to the far end of the room, where the double doors opened onto the hallway, as if anticipating a judgemental visitor, who, she then realized, was herself.

He had the dogs by the collars now. “Out, maties, out you go before we get caught!” He was running them forward out of the room, almost catching their tails in the slamming door.

Henry came back into the center of the sitting room, but he was different now. He was her familiar Henry, slightly stooped and staring a little absently at nothing in particular, before squatting to replace spilt papers and fallen cushions with much unnecessary patting and shuffling. She felt bereft. Where was that quick, laughing man?

Henry left again and returned carrying a cloth, which he laid on the hearth next to the shattered bowl. He knelt down with his back to her. She guessed that he was picking up the china pieces, but still resented being shut out by the gentle curve of his back. She wanted to see everything. She wanted to see the dogs again, the wrestling, how they brought the room alive and sparked off her husband's bright vitality, unfettered by domestic constraints.

But that was all gone now. She was expected home. The breeze had cooled, and her dress and underwear felt gritty against her skin. She walked around the side of the house, avoiding the gravel of the center path. The water pipes that ran down this side and into the scullery started to vibrate: Henry must be washing his hands downstairs. The television blared faintly from the boys' bedroom, and she thought she could hear Richard's voice in there too. Henry still had the potpourri to sweep up: if she moved now she could avoid explanations and get upstairs. She trotted quickly around the corner to the front of the house, and straight into the dogs.

For once they did not stand off and bark, instead surrounding her and nosing her with quiet intent, as if she were some large but not unfriendly creature that had wandered into their garden from the woodland. Perhaps she smelled different now. Feeling strangely tender, even regretful, she ruffled their ears, getting a lick on the hand in return, then slipped through the front door.

As she tiptoed past the sitting-room doors, she caught a glimpse of her husband, kneeling by the hearth. There was the scrape of a brush and pan. She crept by and sped upstairs.

T
AR
IQ RETURNED HOME
before eleven, hair wet and his appetite sharp, in time to placate—and distract—Mum with an offer to drive her to the shops. But he had barely sat down at the kitchen table when his mother's hand smacked him hard across the back of the head.

“Amma! What?”

She slapped him again, so hard that it echoed around the kitchen. “You think your mother is so, so stupid? That I can carry you in my womb for ten months, ten months, and not know what you are thinking, what you are doing, every minute of your life?”

“But what did I—”

His head jarred with the force of another slap, this time on the right side. He felt his eyes begin to water. Her nail-tips had caught on the edge of his ear: Jesus Christ that hurt. He should have known not to interrupt.

“You think, after I gave birth to you, almost dying with the agony, you can stab me in the heart like this?”

He kept his eyes on the scrubbed pine of the kitchen table, resisting the urge to put a protective hand over his ear. Mum sure hadn't lost her touch. And she'd been wearing her rings too. His right ear and the back of his head burnt and prickled. He had a vivid mental picture of a few strips of his skin sitting curled around the raised stones of the eternity ring Dad had bought her when he'd seen Mrs. Darby's.

“You think you are so modern, with your dirty habits? You think I know nothing of what used to happen between the men, out in the fields in my village? You, you
Anglo-Desi
to think that all such things are only invented by you!”

Jesus Christ. Had she seen him with Denny? His stomach dropped.

She started to cry, big gulping sobs, but when he turned his head toward her, she screamed something unintelligible and reached out to slap him again. He fell onto his knees and tried to touch her feet, but she backed away.

“I'm sorry, Amma. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

She bent to push his shoulder, hard, as if he repulsed her. He felt his face twisting into a grimace, like a child with a skinned knee, his eyes welling up. Anything but this. Not Mum. She walked to the kitchen window, then turned back. He sat on the linoleum, his tears falling now, and stared at the red hem of her sari, at her feet in worn leather sandals, too far away to reach.

“Please forgive me, Amma. Please. I can't bear this.” His throat felt like it was closing up, and he choked out the last words. “You know I'm nothing without family.”

“Your father, your poor father . . .” Mum took a deep gulping breath, blew it all out and spoke in a tone that was lower but still dripped with anger. “You know nothing of married life, what it is to see all sides of a person. That person is you, their faults are your faults. His sorrows, his pain, are mine also. I know him like I know myself. I know him in all his ways.”

She lifted her sari hem to her eyes and wiped them hard. “Your father, you have broken his heart.”

It was so quiet in the kitchen now. Tariq could hear the kitchen clock's regular tick, and beneath that the dull accelerating beat of his own heart.

“Your father, you do not understand . . . He came home from the university yesterday. They took his job, you know.”

“What?”

“They will pay him still, but that is not . . .” She picked up a large saucepan from the draining board, and Tariq flinched. “He did not even eat his lunch, all his food that I had ready. All this time, when you are out so much, always with your
friend
, he is needing to be with his son, to talk with him. But, no, you have more important things to do. So now, this morning, he goes through the Park to give Munni her tiffin, as his son is out,
again
.” She walked to the counter, banged the saucepan into the sink as if she were hammering a nail, and turned on the tap. “He
sees
you.” The water roared in, splashing the floor. “He
finds
you . . . with that boy.”

Tariq rocked forward and bowed his head to the linoleum. “Oh god.”

“He came back, he could not talk, not at first. He could not even eat his food. He said, ‘I have nothing now, nothing.'” She gave a series of hiccupping sobs and started to swirl the rice in the saucepan, around and around.

He slowly got to his feet and backed away from her toward the table, feeling old and tired. “Where's Abba now?”

“And Richard Bourne came to dinner last night, while you were in visiting Oxford. For Munni. I am the only one trying to fix this family—I am the only one. You, bloody idiot, you just break it more.”

He reached for a chair and sat down at the kitchen table, put his head in his hands. He had ruined everything. He should have just stayed on in South Africa, accepted his exile.

Dad's cup of tea was sitting on the table in front of him. Mum must have made it just before Tariq came back, not put the milk in yet. He pulled it closer and wrapped his hands around its warmth, the way his father would have done. Mum was still at the counter, half turned away, peeling a clove of garlic with her thumbnails. All the comfortable kitchen sounds were there: the hiss of the gas flame under the rice, the fizz and plop of boiling water, the rustle of Mum's sari as she shuffled between sink and stove. Only he was different. Everything had fallen apart, not because he was absent, but because he was here. Here and being himself.

He wished that he was seven again and his biggest worries were the kids at school, or homework neglected. That he could bury his face in Mum's sari, or cuddle up next to Dad on the couch. How had things gotten to this, despite all his efforts to plan and control things? What did that say about his fate, the trajectory of his own life?

He looked down into the cup. Some fine golden specks rested on top of the tea: pollen from the jar of flowers in the middle of the table. He brought his head closer. Although the tea had settled, the fine golden specks continued to move: a quivering, seemingly random dance across the liquid's surface. Brownian motion, he remembered it from school. The pollen's movement was the result of the accumulation of multiple blows from forces too minute to detect, from objects too microscopic to see.

He'd been so careful, until today, only seeing Denny at night or when his parents were busy. Tariq considered the accumulated effect of all the different forces that had led him to the Park, then the river, then Denny. Of being seen at that particular moment, and by his father. Yet that dirty episode last Sunday with a drunken
gora
wife, only meters away from her husband, his parents and a whole roomful of people, had been suspected by no one, spawned no consequences for anyone concerned.

“Amma . . .”

Her wooden spoon smacked down on the table next to his hand, sprinkling rice water onto the tabletop. He jumped and almost spilt the tea.

“
Don't
you think that this stops you from being part of this family, of being a man for this family, for your sisters!” She hissed into his sore ear, her betel-breath hot on his skin. “You
will
marry. You will marry a good girl, if it kills me. If it kills
you
. If you do not, you are no son of mine.”

He clutched his cup and stared into its depths. What she wanted was action, not remorse. Mum moved away, and he could hear the rice being stirred vigorously. Even now that they all knew, there was no escape.

“Where's Abba?” He had spoken more loudly than he intended, the sudden clarity of his next step lending strength to his voice.

She stopped stirring, and he realized that she had been expecting him to beg her for more time, or to intercede for him. The realization made him repeat his question.

“Sitting room,” she said eventually, then held up her hand, her voice almost soft. “Wait. I will make more tea.”

She whisked about and presented him with a small silver tray holding a cup of fresh tea and a roll of paan. He took the tray, and she held the kitchen door open for him to walk through, but he did not hear it close behind him. Of course: Mum would be down the corridor to listen as soon as he was in the sitting room.

When he entered, he could see the top of Dad's head in the wing-back chair that had been swivelled to face the view of the Abbey. He advanced cautiously, put the tray down on the ottoman and went to shut the door. He thought he heard a small, stifled gasp of annoyance from the hallway as he closed it, but could not be sure.

“Abba.” He walked to his father's chair, knelt and embraced his ankles, putting his head on his father's feet
.

His father said, did, nothing.

“Please forgive me.” He kept his head down, felt his father try to pull his feet away, and held on more firmly. “Please, Abba. Please.”

There was a silence that stretched on for some time. His father hurrumphed.

“Please, Abba, I know I was wrong. I'm sorry. Please forgive me.”

Dad cleared his throat again, blew his nose. He spoke quickly, as if rushing through a prepared speech. “You have cast great shame on this family, great shame: you, the eldest son, the protector of your sisters. And caused great shock and sorrow to your mother. Your devoted mother.”

“Please, Abba. Forgive me. I know I am not worthy, as your son, but please . . .” He held on desperately to his father's feet. Tears rose, his voice cracked, but no more words came out.

After some minutes his father spoke. “We are men, made in Allah's image, made to . . . to procreate, to take a wife . . . We have duties . . . so that we are cared for in our turn . . .” His voice faded to nothing, and he stared out the window again.

Tariq felt adrift. Where was the shouting and beating? Had what Dad saw earlier broken him, on top of what had happened at Oxford? Had he done that to his own father? He sounded so distressed and confused, so lacking in anger. Or direction. Tariq couldn't bear the silence, the sense of multiple sorrows. He opened his mouth to beg for forgiveness again, say something to bring on the necessary beating.

But his father forestalled him with a hand raised, palm upward. “To be a man . . .” he began, but stopped on a slight quaver. “When I was younger than you, I came here, to this country. I was on my own. I knew no one. There was no community in those days. You know the Rhodes then: no one could be married. I had to live in single-men's digs. No one visited me.”

His father tucked in his outstretched feet and picked up a silver-framed photo from the side table. Tariq recognized it. It held an old black-and-white photograph of Dad in his then brand-new doctoral robes, arm-in-arm with Clyde Royston, his doctoral supervisor, taken outside the Sheldonian Theatre. It usually sat in pride of place in Dad's study. In the photo, the two men were laughing, heads tilted back, eyes half shut against the sunshine. Clyde had a bottle of champagne tucked under one arm.

“I had no friends. For days I would speak to no one. Your mother did not join me for almost six months. Clyde was like a brother to me, when I had no one else.” He rested the photo face-down on his chest and sighed deeply. Then he seemed to recollect himself and jabbed his finger at Tariq.

“
You
were never so alone, never so lonely.
You
have no such excuse.”

Tariq stared at his father, wondering when the world had been turned on its head.

“Marriage is a duty, my son. The Qur'an makes that clear. I, er . . . When you are away from home, many things are different. Islam is a compassionate faith, hence the doctrine of necessity. Now, but now, you must do as we all must do.”

Tariq swallowed, tried in his surprise to halt himself, but the words and the tears came out in a flood, a rush of feeling and truth as he bent to touch his right cheek to his father's slipper. “I can't, Abba, I just can't. I thought for a long time that I could—it's why I came home—but please forgive me, I can't. I'll never leave you again, I'll be a good son to you, I'll do anything you ask, but please don't ask that of me. Please, I beg you, I can't.”

He looked up to see his father staring at him, right hand splayed over the picture's back as it lay across his heart, and there was nothing but truth in both their gazes.

With a rattle of the door handle, Mum swept into the room and fetched up against the ottoman. She stretched her right arm toward her husband and spoke in a strangled voice, part rage, part desperation. “Make him, make him. You
must
make him.”

She stepped backward then, as if suddenly horrified by her own temerity.

Keeping a protective hand over the photo, Dad cleared his throat again, in an extended kind of way. “This catarrh, so troublesome. Always when I least expect it.”

“As I am the mother of your children, he must, he
must
be made to.”

His father gave an excellent imitation of puzzlement, with a slightly defensive edge. “What, what?”

“Your son. He must marry. I have the ceevees. If he does not, he is no longer my son, I am no longer his . . .”

Dad's hand rose up, and Mum stopped with a kind of gasp. Tariq realized that he had been holding his breath and tried to exhale in complete silence. Dad, very deliberately, brought the photo frame to arm's length, looked at it, and placed it onto the occasional table so that it faced out to them all.

The silence continued. Mum did not move a muscle.

“So, you say he must marry?” his father said musingly, as if this was an interesting academic point raised by an undergraduate. “Or, if not, he must leave your home?”

Tariq had a sudden sense of how his father's tutorials must have been conducted, with the leisurely teasing out of arguments and drawing together of threads of reasoning. Plenty of pauses for thinking time. How pleasant to have been in one of his classes. Not that he'd ever wanted to back then.

Dad steepled his fingers and looked pensively at them. No one spoke. Tariq considered breathing, but it seemed like bad luck. Not that there could be anything but one outcome to such a conversation. Asian men married, or they were not men. Asian men married, otherwise their families could not advance in the community, their future was not secure. Everyone had to marry.