“So, ah, whereabouts are you from, exactly?” He held his breath.
Kareem stared at him, all geniality gone as if it had never been. He extended his right arm, and shook his hand from the wrist in such a way that Henry could hear the knuckles crack. “I’m an East Ender, meself.”
Henry felt a prickle on his neck, and became very aware of the ropes of muscle that rose out of Kareem’s shirt collar. All those tabloid stories of drug gangs, ruthless criminals . . . He felt his chin drop and recede, as it always did in a crisis, and he blinked rapidly behind his glasses. “I’m sorry, I d-didn’t mean . . . I thought you might be related to my wife . . . She’s Greek, you know.”
“Greek?” Kareem’s eyebrows shot up. “Ei hala kwai toni aliue!” He laughed and shook his head, then pulled on an earlobe in which sat a fat diamond or diamanté or something. Thea was always trying to explain the difference to him. “Man, what are you thinkin’? I’m a Desi boy.” He grinned at Henry’s blank face. “Bang-la-desh.”
“Ohh, so . . .”
“So I’m no Mirpuri Paki either.”
“It d-doesn’t matter.” Henry always stuttered when he was nervous. “I’m just glad you’re not Greek.”
Kareem gave him a look that Henry remembered from school. A fifth-form, what-am-I-going-to-do-with-the-new-boy look. Kareem’s fingers circled Henry’s upper arm, and he was back in the Becksley Grammar School first-floor toilets, hands gripping him, his forced, skidding walk to the end cubicle and the brief sight of a toilet bowl before the backs of his knees were kicked in and his head was forced down and into the bowl, cracking his chin on the porcelain edge. The agonizing fight for breath amidst the emptying cistern, then shouts, running feet and the bang of the cubicle door before being left alone with ruined glasses and pissed pants.
“Hey, man, you alright?” Kareem was standing close, closer than before, and staring at him. Wanting to know if he was okay. Like an ideal big brother, always there when you need him.
He touched his glasses for reassurance. “Sorry, miles away.”
Kareem spoke again, and his tone was almost kindly. “Come and see my new car, man. I only picked it up last week.” He turned toward the two women. “You’re not goin’ anywhere else, are you, Princess? You’re stayin’ here?”
“Yaah. What do you think?” Shunduri spoke without looking at him.
Kareem, seeming satisfied, reached out again to Henry, this time putting his arm around his shoulders, and started to guide him out into the main hall.
Henry complied: how could he not? In fact, one part of him was surprised at how safe he felt in this stranger’s presence. He ventured further. “So, ah, what’s Mirpuri?”
“They’re the poor Pakis, man. Not the rich ones from Islamabad and Karachi. The dirty peasants from Mirpuri province that come over here and clean your toilets and run the railways and set up restaurants and try to cook as well as us Bengali boys. Crap food. Tastes like shit. And do they love their bread, man. Always bread. Like you goras, you Christians, with your potatoes. I can’t take it. It’s no meal without rice, yeah.”
As they walked outside, Kareem glanced back at the Abbey and spoke more quietly. “Does this place have dungeons?”
“Sort of, I suppose. Quite big ones, actually.”
“Jesus.”
“Well, cellars, really.”
The car, beaded with raindrops, loomed over them, its windows impenetrable even from this close.
“Now this is my pride an’ joy, yeah? The latest Rover SUV. Tata just bought them out, you know. It’s not even in the showrooms yet. See that paint job? I had it T-cut last night, ready for me this morning. And now GPS problems. Man, I didn’t expect that. Too many trees, or hills, or somefin’, messing with the signal. But check out those aerials.”
Henry looked in vain. Not an aerial to be seen.
Kareem steered him to the rear of the car, where he pointed to an LED cylinder just visible inside the back window. “They’re embedded in the LED. One for family, one for my Princess, you know? And two for business. For clients. Got to be in touch all the time, otherwise, that’s the thin end of the wedge. They’d be callin’ someone else before you know it. No loyalty these days, man. Just the quick or the dead, you know?”
“So . . . but that would mean, you’d need . . .” His voice failed him.
“Yeah, four mobs.” Kareem squeezed his shoulder again. “Never leave home without ’em, yeah.”
“Where do you put them all? The, ah, mobiles?”
Kareem grinned and pulled up a trouser leg to show a strangely underdeveloped calf that narrowed to an ankle smaller than Henry’s wrist. His sock bulged. “That’s for family.” Then he carefully unbuttoned his skin-tight suit jacket to show his shirtfront, which was crossed by a diagonal of shiny black fabric. “That’s for my new clients, and my old ones.”
Henry goggled. “Th-that’s, some kind of holster?”
“Yeah, they’re big now. It started with the Sikh boys, the religious ones, wanting to carry their daggers, but still look good in a suit, yeah? Started to get ’em custom-made, then the Pakis found out how good they were for mobs. If you’re a businessman, you need more than one, yeah?”
It had never occurred to him. His telephone sat on the hall table, where it had always been. “I don’t know whether I want to know where the fourth . . .”
“Relax, man! My trouser pocket.” Kareem laughed, glanced at his watch, a heavy silver Omega that Henry instantly coveted, threw a careless arm over Henry’s shoulder, and started to move back toward the house.
Henry laughed as well, with a weird surge of confidence. Nothing could touch him now. He felt like the newest, weediest boy at school who suddenly finds himself best friends with the rugby captain. A rugby captain from Mars. He and Kareem were about the same age, both apparently born and bred in England, yet they may as well have come from different planets.
“Look, I’ll show you something. The, ah, rose garden. It’s just been excavated, you know. It’s just around here, by that hedge.”
“It’s not too far, den? I don’t want to leave Princess on her own . . .”
“No, no, not far at all. See, there. When it was dug out, look, they found these channels in a cross-shape, and this in the middle. We think it’s the remains of a well.”
Kareem stopped on the gravel and looked dubiously at the muddy garden beds.
“You can see more if you—”
“Nah, nah, I can see it all from here, man. That’s a fountain in the middle, innit?”
“Well, I suppose it could have been,” Henry replied doubtfully. “But that wouldn’t be very medieval, and I don’t . . .”
“It’s a Paradise garden,” said Kareem, warming to this theme. “I’ve seen ’em on BBC2, like out the front of the Taj Mahal. And in Spain. They always have a fountain in the middle. And four quarters for the four corners of Paradise.”
“Oh, right. That would be the Muslim Paradise then. I don’t think . . .” He spotted one of the dogs, Colin’s black Labrador, bounding toward them.
“Jesus Christ,” said Kareem, stepping rapidly backward, his hands over his crotch.
Henry slapped the dog’s sides and fondled its ears. “Hey, Devil. Where’s Colin then? He must have let you off. Hey, boy.” The dog moaned ecstatically, then glanced back, its ears pricked, before loping off toward the river. Colin must have whistled for him.
Kareem was nowhere to be seen. Henry gave a token shake to his muddied cords, then wandered around to the Abbey’s front.
“Oh, there you are, Kareem. Thought I’d lost you.”
Kareem must have moved very fast because he was already up the steps to the portico’d front entrance, and reaching for the door handle.
“So, ah, you’ve seen enough then?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Their footste
ps echoed in the main hall, the smell of fresh wood and new paint easily detectable here, and Henry wondered for a magical moment if this was how the first abbot must have felt as he walked into his brand-new abbey with his cohort: fellow travellers from the Holy Land, perhaps.
Kareem was still walking away from him, and Henry wondered if he’d done something wrong. “Did . . . ah, did the dog worry you? You don’t like dogs?”
Kareem turned to face him and grinned, shrugging his shoulders. He almost looked embarrassed. “I’m from Tower Hamlets Estate, innit?”
“I don’t . . .”
“National Front’s very active round there, man. They used to set their dogs on us kids. The Asian an’ black kids on the estate.” Kareem gave a mock shudder. “German Shepherds, man, barkin’ like crazy two inches from your face when you’re pissing your pants on the monkey bars, with nowhere to go.” He shook his head. “Dogs ain’t my thing, man.”
“Good Lord,” said Henry, horrified. “Children? Why didn’t someone call the police?”
“Ha ha, right.” Kareem slapped Henry’s back and squeezed his shoulder again. “You crack me up. I like you, man, I really like you.”
As they walked through the hall, the Henri Regnault portrait came into view, and Kareem froze. “Jesus Christ,” he said, and his arm dropped from Henry’s shoulder.
Not surprising, really: the more than life-size African executioner, standing over a headless body and wiping his scimitar on his robes, took a lot of visitors aback.
Feeling oddly bereft without the warm weight of Kareem’s arm, Henry hastened to explain. “It’s pretty gory, isn’t it? It’s called Execution without Trial or sometimes just The Executioner. It was bought by an ancestor of mine: the Reverend Bourne. Used to give me nightmares as a child. Mind you, I still prefer it to these others.” He gestured at the hated Victoriana decorating the walls of the hall. “Must say, not my favorites.”
“Why have ’em, then?”
“They’ve been purchased by the Kiriakis Trust. I’ve got no say there. Old Theo Kiriakis’s taste. That’s Thee’s grandfather.”
“Yeah. You can’t mess wiv elders.” Kareem eyed the various paintings of kittens, puppies and family scenes, his expression neutral. “Are they valuable?”
“Oh, not really. Some of them were used, well, painted for the Pears’ Soap advertising campaign of the time . . .” He stopped himself, unable to say anything more about them that was remotely positive. If you can’t say anything nice, as Audrey used to say when he and Richard were little.
“They don’t really go with the pieces, innit?”
“Pieces of what?”
“Weapons.” Kareem gestured at the swords, daggers and early muzzle-loaders scattered between the pictures. “The weaponry you got up dere.”
“Oh. Oh quite. You’re perfectly right there. Well put.” Thee had never agreed with him on this, and Richard seemed to think he was spineless for allowing old Kiriakis’s kitsch to be displayed next to the armory.
Kareem appeared to have regained some of his confidence, now that they were inside. He folded his arms over his chest and approached the executioner. “That goes with the weaponry.”
“Yes, yes, indeed. In fact that, ah, bloodstained scimitar in the executioner’s hand, we’ve got two of those on the wall. The ones with the curved blades, next to the kittens in a basket.”
“Oh yeah. Like in Aladdin. So, ah, why do you have all the swords up there?”
“Oh, ah, just tradition, I suppose. Most of them are still in beautiful order: perfectly useable if I ever felt the urge, you know. Hah hah.”
Kareem didn’t laugh. A buzzing sound started up, as if a bumblebee had sought refuge inside from the wet weather. Kareem bent and fished an angry mite of a mobile phone out of his sock. Putting it to his ear and launching into what Henry assumed was Hindi or something, Kareem strode toward the back door, giving the armory display a wide berth on the way out.
Henry wandered tentatively into the sitting room, caught a glimpse of himself in the mantel mirror, round-shouldered and soft-bellied, and drew in his tummy for a second before giving up. He had always been more duvet than washboard; Richard had scored all the tall-and-lean genes.
Some of the curtains had been drawn against the cool day, and the women were sitting opposite each other, on the new cabbage-rose chintz sofas. The two dark heads were together, almost touching, and little wisps of steam were rising like smoke signals from the tiny, transparent, gold-rimmed coffee cups in their hands. They looked up at him simultaneously, startlingly similar, as if they were cousins or even sisters. He felt like an intruder.
“Well, well.” He briefly stretched out his hands to the fire, then unstuck a piece of baklava from a doily, and sat down next to his wife. Shunduri stared back at him, casually hostile.
“Isn’t this nice,” he said. She must be Greek, even if Kareem wasn’t.
Thea put a hand on his knee, and spoke to Shunduri. “We were both at Oxford together, Henry and I. That’s how we met.”
He suddenly relaxed into the squashy back of the sofa, and could have kissed his wife. If she didn’t even know how they met, she couldn’t possibly be a relative. They really must just be lost, like Shunduri had said. He took an unwary bite of the baklava then realized that Shunduri was still looking at him.
“You know my dad then? Dr. Choudhury?”
“Your . . . Oh, good Lord,” he said with sudden comprehension, speaking with his mouth full. “I didn’t realize. Shunduri Choudhury. Yes, yes, of course, lovely fellow. We couldn’t have done without him at the Abbey, you know.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, smiling with relief. “You’re down here to visit your parents, are you? And your brother. Good lord, of course! And you probably haven’t seen that new bypass they’ve opened this last month . . . Ah, that’s why you were lost . . .” He realized that he had just sprayed a bit of baklava, and subsided. Last thing he wanted was an interview with Audrey about who’d put honey on the new sofa cushions.
Shunduri nodded at him in a dignified sort of way and fiddled with the knot on her headscarf. “I’ve been very busy with college in London, yaah. Studyin’.” She paused, before saying with a careless air, “Have you seen my sister, then? Is she, like, stayin’ around here or somefink?”
Henry, trying to discreetly remove the remains of the baklava from the roof of his mouth, turned to Thea, who shook her head and spoke. “I don’t think so, Shunduri. We were introduced to your brother—Tariq, is it?—just the other day.”
“Oh,” Shunduri said, as if Henry and Thea had failed some sort of test. “I thought she’d be . . . We came all this way . . .” Her voice trembled. “My own sister. It’s not my fault.” Then she burst into tears.
“Good Lord,” said Henry again, standing up and taking an instinctive step backward.
“For heaven’s sake, Henry,” said his wife, moving to the other sofa to sit next to Shunduri. “Find something else to say.”
But even if he could have, the bloody endless baklava seemed to have glued itself to the roof of his mouth. He retreated further, grabbed the tissue box on the writing table and scooted it across to Thea.
With masterly timing, Kareem appeared at the doorway and, understandably, paused. Henry felt a surge of sympathy for him, although he didn’t seem that surprised by the turn of events and simply said, “Princess.”
Shunduri hiccupped and wiped her nose on the proffered tissues. Then she broke into a rapid, high-pitched flow of their native language, periodically interrupted by little outcroppings of English.
“. . . just not fair . . . always the last to know . . . no one will tell me anyfing . . . dropped everything to come here . . . always the favorite . . . what about me . . .”
Kareem said something to her, and she shook her head violently, then looked round at them all, her eyes swimming.
“I c
alled her you know. I called her just last weekend, to say I was coming down and that gora Simon picked up. He said, “Your bruvver’s took her and good riddance.” But Mum and Dad won’t say nuffink to me.”
Kareem looked as if he was about to say something, but she plowed on, the pitch of her voice rising steadily.
“And when I called home last night to say what time I was coming, Baiyya wouldn’t say nuffink either. I didn’t do anyfing wrong. She’s my sister.”
Henry started to say Good Lord, but Thea caught his eye, and he stopped himself so abruptly that he had a coughing fit and had to retreat with his free hand over his mouth to prevent any more baklava escaping. Kareem, ignoring his host’s struggles and seemingly unbothered by Shunduri’s tears, took over tissue-box duties from Thea and stood watching Shunduri, his plan apparently being to just wait for her to wind down to silence, like some kind of clockwork doll.
Perhaps Kareem was used to this kind of thing happening all the time. Henry felt a wave of gratitude for Thea’s cool pragmatism, which, while not exactly serene, was certainly never out of control. He couldn’t imagine Thea losing it in public like this.
Shunduri let up for a moment, then launched into another wail. Henry eyed Kareem’s unmoved expression with admiration. Imagine living with this every day.
The sound of thunder outside, then heavy rain, interrupted proceedings. Kareem flinched, took a hasty glance at his Omega, and turned to his hosts. “Time we was goin’. Shunduri’s family . . .”
“It’s pouring,” said Thea. “Why don’t you wait until it stops?”
Kareem shook his head. “Really must get goin’. She’ll settle down once she’s with her mum. Very nice to meet you both. Come on, Princess. Let’s go see your mum and dad.”
“Oh yes, of course,” said Henry. “Look, I’ll see you out. You can’t miss it from here.” He followed Kareem, who towed a sniffing and complaining Shunduri through to the main hall and toward the rear entrance.
As the rain increased in force, the lights flickered, glinting off the armory. Kareem sped up, and Henry had to break into a trot to keep up, saying to their retreating backs, “Just, ah, continue round to the front, then to the gates, then hard left.”
A Matter of Marriage Page 11