“For Tariq, Abba,” she muttered, embarrassed when she realized that he had expected something else: an apology, perhaps, for everything. Not likely. She was beyond that now. Not sure where exactly, but not there.
Eight
KAREEM’S GPS HAD been silent for the last half-hour except for the occasional plaintive No signal connection and Unable to calculate. Dark clouds covered what sky could be seen between the trees, and the weep weep of the wipers were an unwelcome reminder of the sunny weather that Kareem and Shunduri had left behind in London. Even the stuffed peacock in the back seat, a gift from a new supplier that Kareem had decided at the last minute would do as a family present, seemed uneasy as it gazed out the left side-window with tightly closed beak and beady eyes.
For the past few minutes, ever since the rain had begun, Kareem had been driving steeply downhill on a winding single-lane road with no visible signposts, so crowded by trees and bushes on both sides that there was nowhere to turn around. But his princess, put into the back seat with the peacock fifteen minutes ago for reasons of respectability, did not appreciate this point.
“It’s an all-wheel drive, yaah?”
“I’m not getting dis car dirty for anyone, Princess. Know how long it took to shine up?” And all done earlier this morning than any Asian man should ever be getting up, due to Shunduri’s multiple texts telling him to get up.
“What are you going to do, then?”
He shrugged irritably, concentrating on keeping all four wheels of the large vehicle on the narrow strip of tarmac and away from the reaching arms of the undergrowth. He’d have to go over everything with a chamois once they were out of this wilderness. “We just keep going, innit?”
“What, so we just keep going on down like this for evah, yaah? Me and this stupid bird?” Shunduri sniffed, and he could see in the rear-view that she had folded her arms and was staring at the peacock with a kind of competitive hostility. “I don’t think so.”
As she spoke, the dark road started to twist and rise, then they passed between two stone statues: a wolf and a lion. It looked like private property to Kareem, and he adjusted his shoulders uncomfortably, tense from holding the car positioned in the middle of the road and from looking for a way out. He must have been dreaming to have gotten himself this lost.
But just as they encountered another statue on their right, a leopard or cheetah, and he was readying himself to ask whether there was some kind of safari park near her parents’ place, the tarmac gave way to a broad sweep of creamy gravel with a gigantic grey stone building at its end. He leaned forward and stared up through the windscreen. Jesus Christ, it was as big as Buckingham Palace. Some kind of hospital, or country club, maybe. He turned off the engine and started to fiddle with the GPS.
“Somefin’s wrong wiv dis, for sure.”
Shunduri bounced in her seat. “It’s the Abbey. Bourne Abbey. Look. We must’ve come up the back way.” She pointed at a small white sign stuck into the lawn right in front of the building, and he twisted around to read it.
Bourne Abbey Tea Rooms, National Trust, This Waye, and a gothic arrow that pointed away from them. No one was to be seen, and it was very quiet. Even the rain had stopped.
“Dad knows these people,” she said.
“Your dad?”
“Yaah. He’s been advising them. On the building, fixin’ it up an’ that, for years now. That’s why they moved here from Oxford.”
What appeared to be the main entrance was deep in shadow and, with its iron-studded door, it looked straight out of a Dracula movie. All it needed was a creepy butler squeaking it open. He leaned back in his seat, feeling observed, despite the car’s tinted windows.
“They live here?”
“Mum and Dad? Nah, they moved close to here, in Lydiard. The village. That’s where we’re supposed to be.”
Kareem started up the engine again.
“What are you doing?”
“Turning round, innit? Plenty of room to turn round here.”
“Forget that. I’m gettin’ out and asking for directions. Seein’ as your GPS is so fine.”
“Eh, Princess, no need for that,” he said faintly. Hadn’t she seen any horror movies? They had half a tank of petrol and no need at all to hang round here. Next thing, she’d go missing and he’d have to go looking for her. Straight out of Hammer House of Horror. Never go exploring, never split up. Didn’t she know anything?
But she was already unclipping her seatbelt, and Kareem, doomed, gave one last despairing rev before switching off the engine.
“We’re not splitting up, yeah? I’m comin’ wiv you.”
Shunduri stared at him, clearly irritated. “What are you talkin’ about?”
Lightning flickered, putting the Abbey into silhouette behind her, and he bit his fingertips to ward off the evil around him.
—
“OH,” SAID THEA. “Very Mission Impossible. But who would turn up at the Abbey now? No one knows we’re here except the decorator.”
She and Henry had risen from the National Trust guidelines, fabric swatches and paint chips spread out on the sitting-room table, and were spying through one of the rear-facing windows, drawn by the sound of a car turning onto the gravel outside. She’d wanted to get to the Abbey early before the decorator came, but who could this be?
The shiny black SUV had stopped, facing the house, but no one got out. Thea had to resist an urge to press her nose against the glass. The car windows were so dark that she was unable to see inside, and the effect was such that the car seemed to be looking at them. She could hear Henry just behind her, fidgeting restlessly.
“It must be the decorator. Why doesn’t she get out?” he said.
“The decorator’s not coming till later.”
“I thought we were meeting her this morning. That’s why we’re here . . .”
She didn’t recognize the car. Were they trying to force her and Henry to come out to greet them? Was this some kind of power play?
“I wanted to get here early so we could look at the fabrics and paint samples in this room and make some decisions. Then the decorator for lunch at one, then we work, then afternoon tea before she leaves. That’s why Audrey’s here. I can’t do everything myself, you know.”
Henry made his nervous, throat-clearing sound. “Do we know them? Are they, ah, family?”
“You mean my family when you say that, don’t you?”
“I’m just caught a bit by surprise, Thee. You know me.”
She did not deign to reply. The SUV’s side passenger door swung open and, in one twisting, sinuous motion, a figure emerged and slid to the ground. She wore a long-sleeved, boat-necked black dress with ruched sides, sheer black stockings, black three-inch heels, black gloves, a black headscarf tightly bound and knotted around her head and neck, and sunglasses that obscured most of her face. She looked like a negative print of Grace Kelly. The woman paused, facing the house, then slammed the car door shut and started, with some apparent difficulty, to traverse the remaining loose gravel between herself and the back door.
At the first of the three steps up to the entrance, she stopped, one hand on hip and one outstretched diagonally behind her, as if reaching for something that should be there.
Thea stared. “Alaïa, I can just tell. Blahnik heels. I don’t know about the glasses though. If they’re not copies, that’s that new Dior shape that even Pip can’t get her hands on yet.” She clicked her tongue. “Christos. If tight from neck to ankle is the new silhouette, I’ll have to lose twenty pounds.”
“Ah, Thee.” Henry took a step away from the window. “Is this some relative you haven’t told me about? Because she looks cross and you know I’m not . . .”
Thea, still entranced, flapped her hand in negation. “Who is she?”
“She looks Greek. She’s got that look.” Henry’s voice was lugubriou
s. “Remember your Auntie Alex? She wore black too. And no one told me she’d put a curse on me for taking you away from the true church. Remember? She said that if she’d had anything to do with the Kiriakis Trust, I’d have to pay back every drachma . . .”
Thea pressed her lips together. A pillar of strength he was. Without taking her eyes from the window, she reached behind her, caught Henry’s sleeve and pulled him forward. “Look.” She pointed with her free hand. “There’s another one!”
And indeed, another figure, also in black, had descended from the driver’s side of the car. This second figure was as clearly male as his companion was not. Dressed in a skin-tight, black Savile Row suit with a charcoal stripe, black shirt and tie, driving gloves and wrap sunglasses, his head was shaven, his ears glittered, and he had a boxer’s broad shoulders, wasp waist and chicken legs. With no discernible hurry, he swaggered around the front of the car to his companion, who grabbed his sleeve and used it as leverage to pull herself, hobbled by the long tight dress, up the steps.
Henry gave a sigh partway between resignation and martyrdom. “I’ll go to the door.”
“No, wait. I’m not ready.” Thea glanced at the mantel mirror, bent over and shook out her bob, and stood back up to comb it through with her fingers so that it flowed back from her face in a glossy black helmet. On tiptoe, she could just see reflected her favorite brooch, a cream-on-rose Helen of Troy cameo, circled with gold. Her fingers flicked it as she briefly surveyed the room. This is my territory now.
“Quick! Help me get the dust covers off the sofas.”
As Henry folded the covers and dropped them, at her direction, through the doorway that led to the servants’ passage, she took a quick look around. This room was presentable enough, impressive enough, for unexpected visitors, with its view over the Park and a fire burning in the hearth, and Colin’s wife Audrey in the Abbey kitchen to look after them. Good thing she’d put on the McQueen cashmere this morning, with its breastplate design woven into the pattern. Very cutting-edge.
In the mirror she met her husband’s eyes, and was startled into a smile when he grimaced at her seriousness. He came closer, and his hand brushed her shoulder. “Girding our loins?”
She shook her head at him wryly. Easy for you to say, she thought. No one questions your right to be here.
The doorbell pealed just as he opened his mouth to speak.
“They’re not family.” Thea knew what he had been about to ask. Again. “I’ve never seen them before.” She took a seat at the table so as to face the double doors that led off the main hall, threw the Biro in the wastepaper basket and found the Mont Blanc fountain pen in her handbag.
“Oh.” Henry walked to the table and shuffled the loose papers into disorder for her. “So, ah, we wait then?”
She could sense him hovering but refused to look up. “Yes.” The doorbell pealed again.
Eventually Audrey could be heard on her way, muttering under her breath, to answer the back door. Thea waited, head down and fountain pen raised, as if confronted by a particularly tricky National Trust issue. Audrey’s knock at the sitting-room doors was soon heard, followed straight after by Audrey herself, flowered pinny on and tea towel in her hand. Opening doors was not her job.
“Oh, that’s where you be, Mrs. Kreekis,” she said in a carrying tone, making her position on having to leave the kitchen clear. “There’s a man an’ lady.”
Thea hesitated, torn between going too far with Audrey and a real need for information. “Did you get their names, Audrey?”
Audrey sniffed. “Summat furrin’.” She looked pointedly at Thea. “Couldna’ make head nor tail ovvit.”
Thea drew breath to speak, but Audrey slapped the tea towel against her flank and turned away to show that she had no intention of taking this front-of-house rubbish any further. “I’m showin’ them in then,” she threw over her shoulder.
Audrey returned almost immediately and proceeded to open only one half of the double doors that led into the sitting room from the hall. She flattened her bulk against the door with exaggerated care, waving the mysterious visitors past her with a flip of her tea towel. The woman in black stalked in first, brushing past Audrey without a second glance.
The man followed her, but he had to turn sideways to pass. Broad-shouldered but short, he was no match for Audrey’s big-boned, farmer’s-wife build, which gave her the necessary height to talk eye to eye with a reluctant Henry when his breakfasting habits got too messy. The man had made the mistake of facing Audrey to slip past, which put him at eye level with her massive floral bosom. Acres of cornflowers. For a second he froze, transfixed. She stared back at him unsmiling and, somehow diminished, he turned his head to the side and made his escape into the room.
“Here they be then. From Lunnon,” Audrey said flatly, turning to exit, but not quite fast enough.
Thea, having learned her lesson, spoke at once. “Thank you, Audrey. Can we have coffee and cake, please. Proper coffee.” She turned to her guests, rising from her chair and smiling, her voice slowing and smoothing to pure transatlantic caramel. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t catch your names.”
In the hurly-burly of first-name introductions, and talk of GPSes and roadworks detours, the obscuring sunglasses were finally removed, and Thea found herself staring at a young woman whose swarthy coloring, slim build and designer clothes were close enough to her own old London appearance to feel familiar, and whose head-high, nervy aggression also gave Thea the sharpest stab of self-recognition.
Here was fifteen-years-ago Thea, new to school in England, escaping a fractured, feuding family back in Athens. Trying to break into the little cliques that mattered, but always the shortest and darkest, always the accent that singled her out. And then, after the hiatus of her undergraduate years in Stanford, it was also ten-years-ago Thea doing the whole thing again at Oxford for her master’s, always on the outside, always pretending not to care but, underneath, paddling frantically to catch up, to break into the magic circle of belonging.
Until she met Richard, born to everything she had ever wanted but wanting none of it. Their relationship had provided an entree to the very people, the very groups she had craved, first at Oxford, then when living together in London. He had teased her about it: how she hung on every word he spoke about friends and relatives, the efforts she made to meet and greet and eat with those very people whose phone calls he could not be bothered to return, whose social demands he told her he loathed. By the end of that time, she knew everyone, had been everywhere. She had cultivated all of the connections and contacts that he was so blasé about, even had her own inner circle. What efforts she had gone to, been happy to go to, to create a community of belonging: her contribution to their joint future.
After two years together, he had finally taken her home for a weekend, and she had fallen in love at first sight with a crumbling stately home and, especially, its last one hundred years of continuity and family. She had glimpsed a dream of an existence, and then he had told her he wanted none of it, not Bourne Abbey, not marriage, not children.
Audrey, with a swiftness that was commendable until Thea remembered that The Archers would be on in half an hour, wheeled in the tea trolley with Thea’s favorite demitasse cups and Henry’s mother’s cake-stand, piled high with slices of halva and miniature baklava triangles. Audrey had used those tacky paper doilies again, as if she’d never been told not to. Clearly the only way Thea was going to stop that was to find Audrey’s secret stash and throw it in the bin. But, Audrey being Audrey, she’d probably just put them back on the shopping list and plead ignorance.
And here was Thea’s younger self still standing before her, insecurity coming off her like sweat off a racehorse, and so ready for the rejection that was bound to ensue, because it always did. For a moment Thea fancied she could see herself through this girl’s eyes: older, frighteningly well-groomed and, most importantly, belonging in
the setting of the Abbey. It didn’t matter what the girl had to say: Thea knew what was really at stake. She felt all her initial competitive hostility melt away, and grasped the other woman’s gloved hand.
“Do come and sit by the fire, Shunduri. Did you take the motorway?”
—
HENRY, STANDING WATCHING the exchange between his wife and the woman in black, had the distinct feeling that he’d missed plenty, but not the shiver of seeming recognition that had passed between them. Bloody Greeks. His fate was sealed. The main hall renovations, largely funded by in-law drachmas and never achievable on the National Trust grant scheme alone, were complete. And now they were coming to claim their piece of the action.
How often had Richard told him that, with money, there were always strings attached? What would it be? Installation of one of Thee’s evil aunties or grandmothers upstairs, for life. She’d probably outlive them all, having made a compact with the devil already. Or maybe Thee’s brother would arrive next, wanting the takings from open days to fund business expansion into England.
These two, maybe the family’s Turkish branch, were just the outriders, the advance scouts for the full-scale invasion to come. Henry felt a little doom-laden frisson run down his spine, and smiled weakly at Kareem.
“So, ah, are you planning to stay long?”
“As long as my princess needs.”
“Oh, ah, that’s Shunduri then?” Henry had never, since school, felt more like a fool. Maybe she was Greek royalty. She certainly had Prince Philip’s resting expression down pat.
“Yeah.”
Henry squirmed on the inside. It was a horribly awkward situation, but he had to know. He drew Kareem away from the two women, toward Audrey’s double doors.
A Matter of Marriage Page 10