A Matter of Marriage (25 page)

Interruptions like those would formerly have rattled her, had her sliding under the great bed or behind the long curtains every time she heard a noise, but not now. She hadn't the time. Besides, Richard Bourne already knew she was there. Tomorrow she could start experimenting with colors: adding Prussian blue cut with ultramarine for the base color of the
salwar
, flashes of Egyptian violet where the
salwar
met the skin, Courbet green and indigo where the yew shadowed the fabric.

Then, perhaps on Wednesday, she could start blocking in the hair: big free sweeps with the brush while she thought about cold and warm blacks, browns and bronzes. The hair needed to be a different texture to both hedge and
salwar
. Not prickly-detailed and not liquid-smooth. Perhaps Tariq could bring her some of those rough-ground mineral paints for a grainy texture that she could use to heighten the hair's darkness with fine sweeps in warm metallic shades of bronze and copper. Her feelings of irritation and doom, her fear that in coming to the Abbey she had only exchanged one form of confinement for another, had faded. If she could paint again, paint well, something she had believed was no longer possible, then not everything was wrong with the world, with her. Perhaps there was some other path than the dingy passive neediness of her life with Simon, or an arranged marriage and breeding for Britain.

S
HUNDURI HAD SPENT
the whole weekend in bed, and yesterday had called in sick for work again. Amina and Aisha had knocked on her door more than once, but she'd just said she wanted to sleep, had a migraine, a virus, her period. Anything not to have to leave her room and the constant comfort of the television, phone clasped in her hand.

She had not once answered any calls, but read Kareem's increasingly anxious and frequent text messages repeatedly, talking to the screen and telling him everything she wanted to say. That he was a two-timing bastard, a dirty dog, that he had to marry her now and didn't he realize what he had done to her.

And this Tuesday had been awful so far: she'd struggled to get up and dressed and onto the bus to the bank where she had to be brisk, efficient Shunduri, who everyone could rely on and who never had an off day. She'd made two errors on the foreign exchange counter already.

When lunchtime finally arrived, she shut herself in a toilet cubicle to check her text messages, but there were none from Kareem since the night before. She cried then, but silently because there were other people in the ladies', and it took her so long to repair her make-up that she was late back.

The rest of the afternoon crept by, with Shunduri avoiding eye contact with the customers as well as the other girls' curious stares. When at last the day ended, and she had finished closing up her counter, she bolted for the door and was first out the staff entrance.

But almost as soon as she walked onto the pavement, her heel caught in a crack and snapped. The other bank staff, her friends, rushed past her, not one stopping to ask her what happened and if she was alright.

She'd just gotten up and taken a few tentative steps, balancing on the broken heel, when Kareem was in front of her, saying, “Princess, I'm worried about you.”

He looked sharp and sleek next to the tired commuters rushing for the tube or the bus. She turned her head away and tried to move forward, but he would not budge, and she felt even more stupid and awkward. Why did he have to show up here, at her work, with her shoe broken and no messages from him all day?

“Princess, is it your sister? I know you're worried about her, yeah. What's wrong?” He reached for her sleeve, and she tried to dodge his hand, stumbled and almost fell.

“What do you care?”
That I might be pregnant, that people will be beginning to talk. That you can't marry me.
She pushed his hand away as her tears started to spill. “Simon's been giving her the beats, and Tariq took her away, but you don't care. You're just like him.”

“How could you say that, Princess? I'd do anything for you. You know I love you. You know how I feel about you.” He had his arms out, blocking her progress down the pavement, shepherding her into the laneway down the side of a shop. She was hot with embarrassment at his public declarations, her tears, the broken shoe.

“What's going on, Princess? Is your sister really hurt? Do you want me to do something about him? Is that it?”

“Yeah, if you were part of my family, if you weren't . . . you're part of someone else's though, aren't you? Tell me, do you have children already?”

“Eh? What are you talkin' about?”

“You're fuckin'
married
, you
casra
bastard. How could you do this to me?”

His mouth formed a comical O, and she spotted a mini-cab and ran for it, limping, her smart bank uniform bedraggled with mud and rain.

As soon as she was in the cab, he was ringing her. Once Shunduri was back in her little room, she picked up but would not respond to his apologies and excuses.

—

A
T THREE IN
the morning, Shunduri woke to the glare of the television's light and her phone's bleating. She answered the mobile and lay back on her pillows and listened.

“Princess, don't hang up. I'm outside. I love you. I was never going to bring her over. Auntie and Uncle organized it for the money. They were pressuring me bad, yeah? Uncle wanted me to put the dowry into the restaurant. It was all arranged when I first got to England—but I always knew it wasn't for me. I'll never bring her over. I was never going to, I promise. I can give you everything you deserve.”

He paused, and her phone filled with silence and static.

“If you'll marry me. Please marry me. Marry me.”

Shunduri wanted to talk then, but could make no sound apart from a hiccupped sob.

“Princess, Baby, you don't know how much I love you. I'll prove it to you. Simon will never bother your sister again. I'll sort him out this weekend, give him a talking-to and a bit of a slap. Let me drive you to your family so you can see them. Anytime you want, yeah? Anything you want. Please say yes, Princess. Please.”

Her voice was strangled and harsh. “Divorce her, then.”

“Eh?”

“Do it now. Text her. Text her and divorce her. Say it three times. There's a fatwa that says you can do it by text message. And send it to me too or you'll never see me again.” By now she was sitting upright in the bed.

“Jesus Christ, Princess. You don't know what you're asking. I was never going to bring her over, make it legal, but to divorce her just like that—she's just a village girl, never done anyone any harm.”

“Well, fuck off, then.”

“You can't just—”

“I'm
pregnant
, yaah?
I'm
pregnant and
you're
married.” She felt a rush of horror and euphoria at having finally said the words.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

He stopped talking then, but she could hear his heavy exhalations, a shifting of feet, the slapping sound of a hand on metal, perhaps the railing around the halls of residence.

Her phone crackled into life again. “Alright, Princess, alright. I'll do it. As soon as I hang up. Check your messages when I hang up. I'll see you tomorrow, yeah? On your lunch break.”

He ended the call then, as if afraid of her reply, and she sat cradling the phone until it bleeped and she opened the message.
Juri Shah, I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you. Kareem Guri.
The bitch probably couldn't even read English, but there'd be someone in her village who could.

D
R.
C
HOUDHURY WINCED.
What a way to start a pleasant Wednesday morning. The not-so-dulcet sounds of his head of department's voice on his answering machine, insisting not only that he attend the monthly faculty meeting first thing tomorrow but also have an appointment with her afterward for “necessary discussions,” were certainly calculated to ruin the entire day. Even if she hadn't then also hinted at her displeasure at his non-responses to her emails.

He gazed longingly through his study window at the Abbey on the hill, the multicolored brick quoins of its Elizabethan wing glowing in the sunshine. They had only just finished cleaning and repairing the tessellated tiles in the hall, and he had been looking forward to a stroll around the freshly unscaffolded western wall of the main building this afternoon. And then a wander inside to examine the tiles and renew an interesting discussion with the Trust stonemason about whether the carved florets at the top of the library windows were intended to be asymmetrical.

However, other duties called so he turned his back on the sunshine and the Abbey's siren song and braced himself to sift through his college emails. It was rather disturbing to see just how many unread inter- and intra-faculty memos had piled up in his inbox over the past few months, while he had been fingering textiles and pondering stained-glass for the approval of the two Trusts. And, increasingly, he had to admit, also to gratify his own sense of color and line.

But though he conscientiously sat in his chair and scrolled through his inbox, opened and closed memos and allocated them to folders and subfolders, read them he could not. His heart was not in it. After half an hour, he gave up and decided to call Marjorie, the head of faculty's much put-upon secretary, to see if there was anything he really needed to know.

A great deal, apparently. About three months ago, Marjorie told him, the faculty had been approached by a Wahhabi Islamist institute based in Dubai asking, virtually begging, Professor Bertha Beeton to fly to Dubai to do a series of lectures on whatever she wanted.

And, Marjorie whispered, clearly still reeling from the experience herself, they were not only greeted with undivided attention by room after room full of covered women, but had also delivered lectures, seminars and workshops in the most opulent conference-room settings, slept and eaten in the most luxurious hotels that she had ever seen: marble lobbies, Lacroix-decorated suites with 2000-thread-count sheets, daily fresh flowers and unlimited room service. And further first-class flights had followed, all expenses paid, to Riyadh and back to Dubai for more lectures and meetings.

By the time Dr. Choudhury hung up he was filled with annoyance. Surely this was self-promotion and puffery. Such time and attention given to those second-rate theories of hers; that Derrida'd new-feminist perspective of Herstory. And surely she could have seen through them, with their covered women and their stonings?

But, as Marjorie (with a kind of breathless fascination) told it, it did not stop there. Repeated requests from Dubai and Riyadh for return visits. Valuable presents: jewelry, carpets, electronic goods, unexpectedly given to her personally, on each occasion. Hah, thought Dr. Choudhury after he hung up. Unexpected the first time, perhaps.

He called a colleague, one of the few of his generation and values that were left in the faculty, and shook his head in disgust as Marjorie's stories were confirmed: the Arabs' wooing of Bertha; their inviting her to do a ridiculously overpaid series of lectures based on her latest publication, which harshly critiqued the most recent generation of feminists as inadequate and misled, and which his colleague hinted was merely a thinly disguised rehash of her PhD dissertation.

After the fifth visit, Bertha had apparently returned to Oxford the proud bearer of a joint offer by Dubai and Saudi Arabia for a superlatively well-funded statutory Professorship of Islamic Studies at her own college, together with a veritable bouquet of new and most generous research and study grants.

Bertha had apparently already met with Jamat-al-Islami and several other activist groups, and the word around college was that she had recently also approved several doctoral topics, including “The Necessary Role of Jihad in the Diaspora” and “The Fatwa as Qur'anic Exegesis.” She had submitted an article to the
Times Literary Supplement
titled “The Burqa as an Expression of Feminist Solidarity”—and had had her teeth fixed.

Dr. Choudhury thanked his colleague, promised him some of Mrs. Begum's butter chicken the next time he visited, and hung up the phone, feeling as if he were living hundreds of miles from Oxford, rather than a simple one-hour drive on the motorway.

He was well aware of the amount of damage Bertha could do to the faculty, but even that could no longer galvanize him into action. As long as she left him alone, to go on working on Bourne Abbey or some similar project. He loathed the thought of being forced back to sit on funding subcommittees and drafting recommendations, just to watch Bertha play Lady Bountiful and dole out largesse to her favorites regardless.

He would go to Oxford tomorrow morning, would dutifully listen to Bertha drone on
ad nauseam
at the faculty meeting and their private one, and count the hours until he was back in Wiltshire, where he belonged.

In the meantime, he would make his healthy-walk a pre-prandial one, and to the Abbey rather than the village. He would see the tiles and the unscaffolded walls and perhaps even deliver tiffin to the green room, while he was there. An image of his second child came unbidden to his mind, siding with him against Tariq over some issue of color and line, years ago. She must have been just fifteen or sixteen, but already had an artist's judgement, an artist's sensitivity to such things, that others—academics and experts—never would.

—

R
ICHARD WAS WORKING
hard on the Reid brief from home. After Monday's discussions with the Reids, he'd drafted a Counsel's opinion setting out, in appropriately pessimistic terms, what the clients should expect next. Formal notice had been given to the Reid son that all extra payments were conditional upon his entering the Priory in two weeks' time. Then Felicity had called, sounding rather subdued, to say that his predictions had been correct and the Reid son had moved quickly, already instructing solicitors to apply to dissolve the Trust, so there would be cross-applications coming his way soon. But not before the weekend.

It was about ten when the rug arrived, carried in by a man in his twenties who turned out to be Yusuf's son. Ibrahim laid the carpet on the sitting-room floor and together they slowly rolled it out over the floorboards, between couches and fireplace. When this was done, Ibrahim sat down on it cross-legged and gestured for him to do the same. While he explained to Richard how it should be cared for, he showed him the rug's nap, stroking it back and forth with the edge of his hand, the colors deepening, then fading, then deepening again as his hand changed direction. It was the most beautiful thing Richard had ever owned.

At the front door, they shook hands and parted. Richard drifted back into the sitting room and toed off his shoes. Under his socked feet, the pile quivered like a live thing, and he squatted down to look more closely at the design. Roses and poppies. The design even varied between the intertwining stems: some had thorns on them, and some not. The leaves were different from each other too; he recognized the familiar onion-shape of the rose leaves. The other ones, smaller and formed into fern-like clusters, must be poppy leaves. Poppies were from Turkey, weren't they? And roses, such an English flower, were originally from elsewhere, somewhere in the East. Was the design symbolic? Roses for beauty, opium poppies for pleasure. Love and forgetting, maybe. Or, given the rug's modernity, perhaps East and West.

—

T
HE PAINTING HAD
been going so well, all through the previous day, but last night Rohimun had slept badly and was still lying in bed late this Wednesday morning, restless and enervated by the hot spell that had stretched on for six days now.

Finally, close to eleven, she dragged herself out of bed to dress, avoiding any glimpse of herself in the mirror. The euphoria of painting again, and painting well, was no longer enough. Doubts struck at her anew: that the last two days were merely a freakish exception rather than the beginning of something. That she would look in the mirror again and no longer see what she had started to.

Sneaking back from washing her face awake in the nearest bathroom, Rohimun opened her door to see a man standing before her easel. She was conscious of a frisson of fear, then disappointment. Dad. He didn't visit often—it was generally Tariq's job to bring her meals and check on her—and he had never come right into the room before. He was holding her lunchtime tiffin and peering at the rose. As she watched, he walked slowly backward then stopped about five feet away, still staring at the image, seemingly unaware of her presence.

“Abba,” she said, going toward him, her towel and toiletry bag awkwardly tucked under one arm. She wondered if Richard had spoken to him, imagined the scene if he had, what Dad would do to her then. She'd be straight on the plane to Bangladesh for sure. She bent to touch her father's shoes with her free hand, warily.

“You have been painting.”

“Yes, Abba.” He had spoken to her, the first time since she'd come back, although it had not escaped her notice that he was not using her name. She walked to the duffel bag to pack away her stuff. One thing about squatting here in so much secrecy: it'd sure made her tidy.

“This, this is beautiful,” he said, waving two fingers at the painting. “The depth of color, the translucency of this flower, is number-one.”

He stretched an arm out in her direction, his hand beckoned, and she scuffed over in her flip-flops and stood next to him, pretending to look, hardly daring to hope. He picked up one of her brushes and used it like a pointer to follow the dark lines of the hair as it spread over a third of the canvas.

“This is lovely, very lovely indeed,” he said. “Alive, like in Edvard Munch. Better, because he needed to put a river behind the figure: remember
The Scream
? But you have the river in the hair already.”

He pointed at the female figure. “She is a holy figure, like the great Renaissance Madonnas. You have spoken to Rossetti here: his
Proserpine
you have conflated with a Renaissance Mary—when she turns in profile, and looks, to see the Angel of the Immaculate Conception. One might well say, an Adoration of the Rose.”

She nodded; her throat had tightened up.

“There are echoes of Millais here, his drowned
Ophelia
, with her outward-facing palms as well as the floating hair, the room made for her presence by nature. There is the surrender and the gift inherent in such a gesture, you know?”

She nodded again, swallowed tears. This was better than forgiveness. She felt like a favorite student, a star pupil. She had only seen him like this at art gallery exhibitions and, occasionally, when she'd sat in on his university lectures and he'd go off on a riff about Early English and the Perpendicular style. Now it was about her, her painting.

He sighed. “You have truly excelled yourself with these colors: the glaze of such depth, the richness of that fabric.” He turned to look at her. “This painting of yours, not even finished yet, it is the best you have done. Truly number-one.”

She cleared her throat, finally got the words out. “You've seen my portrait work, Abba?”

“Yes, yes, very competent, very good. You always were a good student. But this, this.” He swung the paintbrush in an elegant arc that encompassed the painting as a whole. “You have matured as an artist, I can see that.”

There was a pause between them then, a little space to allow for the great adjustment that had taken place. And then her father hurrumphed, put down the brush, folded his arms and moved further back, still regarding the painting.

Rohimun, following his cue, went to her palette and started to talk, in fits and starts, about the halo she wanted to create around the hands, how it needed to fall onto the ground, like a blessing, but also radiate back toward the giant rose.

Dad stood and watched as she worked, and occasionally he spoke: something about yellow, its universal reputation as a holy or spiritual color. And Kandinsky's singular refutation of this, asserting yellow's essential earthiness.

Her lunchtime tiffin went cold as she painted, sitting unheeded on the floor where her father had left it, and while she painted, he continued to talk, telling her stories about possible alchemical influences upon the old painters' recipes for mosaic gold and lead-tin yellow, the Romans' use of slave labor to mine the poisonous, gold-like orpiment, the ancient Egyptians' preference for yellow lead antimonite.

She had forgotten about his knowledgeable, intellectual side, and had rarely glimpsed his aesthetic sensibilities in a positive light. So much of his behavior at home, with all of them, had been about appearance and prestige: like a fat peacock, all noise and show.

By the time she started to think of a break, half the afternoon had passed, and the two of them sat down on the floor in a patch of sunlight near the window. They opened up the tiffin lids and shared Mum's cold chicken curry and rice.

Then her father left, with some return of his distant manner but promising to send Tariq at eight with her evening meal, and she walked back to the magical painting that sat at the center of the room. She could do no more with the late-afternoon light until the latest layer of glaze had dried out some more, but the figure, she could work on. She washed out her brushes and placed them in the drying jar on the windowsill, then took a close look at the image.

Those important hands were almost complete, with the beginning of the yellow glaze around them. The logical next step was the neck and face. What a pleasure it was to mix in burnt umber for skin color. To place faint shadows under the eyes to show maturity, rather than crow's-feet.