A Matter of Marriage

by Lesley Jorgensen

A disconnected whistling sound caught his ear, and he turned his head nervously from side to side, conscious of a most unpleasant occasion recently when he had been attacked by a nesting bird of some kind and had had to resort to an undignified jog back to the safety of Windsor Cottage, while waving his arms above his head in order to protect himself.

  But no birds could be seen. After pausing to examine the summer sky for signs of enemy action, he had just adopted a brisker pace and a slightly more aggressive swinging action of the tiffin when there was a rustling of bushes and one of Henry’s large yellow dogs bounded out of the undergrowth.

  “Eh, eh!” cried Dr. Choudhury, advancing while holding the tiffin container protectively over his crotch. “Eh! Get out!”

  But the dog seemed unperturbed by this show of courage, and Dr. Choudhury, despairing, increased his speed to a quick march and tried to ignore the dog’s excited barks and intermittent forays into his private parts.

  None too soon, he arrived at the open, lawned area that surrounded the Abbey itself, and the dog ran off ahead. Between him and the Abbey was a fair-haired figure in a hacking jacket and corduroys, performing a sort of slow extended spin with its arms stretched out, like a very tired dervish. Surely that was not Henry Bourne. But as he neared, he could hear Henry’s voice, pitched to seriousness.

  “One, two, three, one, two, three. Ah no, wrong foot.”

  He hurrumphed loudly to interrupt this private ritual. Everyone had them, after all. Henry stopped and, to Dr. Choudhury’s horror, both dogs tore back down the slope toward him.

  “Dr. Choudhury! Capital, excellent—I was hoping to catch up with you!”

  “Eh, eh! Henry!” he said with a mixture of relief and irritation as he tried to fend off the dogs who were both evincing a single-minded fascination with his crotch and bottom. Really, there was no such thing as a truly domesticated animal.

  “Darcy! Knightley! Come on now. Don’t worry, Dr. Choudhury. I’ll throw my stick. There they go. Look, I’m glad I saw you—you’ll never guess.”

  “What, what is it that you think I will never guess?” He smiled broadly to ensure that Henry would recognize his question as rhetorical, and not an attempt to interrupt. “I guess that you were, er, dancing!”

  “Oh, ah, that.” Henry went a little pink. “Well, yes, you’ve sprung me there. I was having a bit of a practice, you know.”

  “Practice of what?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “No,” said Dr. Choudhury, with all the geniality of a don trapping an unwary undergraduate into a sophistry. “I do not know.”

  “It’s . . . the Hunt Ball’s only five months away. Gay Gordons, Dr. Choudhury. It’s fiendish. And waltzing. You don’t know what it’s like, having two left feet.”

  Having never danced a step in his life, Dr. Choudhury nodded sympathetically. “You will improve with practice. Though of course, we cannot all be Margot Fonteyn.”

  “Yes, practice, practice. That’s the key. And this year’s ball is at the Abbey. Thea’s triumphed again, eh? Anyway, I wanted to tell you: here I was yesterday, just here, counting feet, stopped for a breather, glanced up, and there she was, sort of drifting across one of the second-storey windows.”

  “Mrs. Kiriakis?”

  “No, the ghost. We’ve got a ghost.”

  “What?” Dr. Choudhury, still brushing himself down in order to remove an undesirable stickiness from the lickings and sniffings of the dogs, did not follow.

  Henry went a little pinker, took a stick that one of the dogs had retrieved and began to bash the vegetation beside the path. “Well, ah, I was thinking, it could be someone that we could link to the history of that room.”

  “What room?”

  “The green bedroom: that’s where I saw her, you know. Yesterday.”

  Dr. Choudhury froze, and the returning dogs, sensing easy prey perhaps, moved in on him again.

  “Come on, boys! Here!” Henry lofted the stick again. “So, what do you think?”

  “The green bedroom,” he managed to say.

  “Yes. Not that I was actually there, you understand. I was down here with the dogs of course, and, ah, just happened to look up and there she was. At the window.”

  “The window.” Dr. Choudhury was beginning to discern an unfortunate pattern in his own responses, but still felt that he was doing quite well in the circumstances.

  Henry laughed and went even pinker. “Looking completely, ah, gorgeous and mysterious, you know, as all the best ghosts are. Hah, hah . . . It seemed to look at me, then just sort of wafted away.”

  “Wafted.”

  “Yes. Sort of. Exciting, really, don’t you think?” said Henry.

  “Indeed, most, er, exciting. Could you throw that stick again?”

  “Oh, sorry, yes. There they go. Looks like you must have some food on you.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Dr. Choudhury. “I was about to have a picnic you understand, but now I have to go. I have just remembered an urgent appointment and I must . . .”

  “Not at all. Lovely day for it. I was just wondering, you know, whether you’d like to . . . perhaps we could have a look over the green bedroom together sometime. I asked Thea yesterday, but she wasn’t—”

  “Is that a breeze? Most terrible for my neuralgia. Henry, perhaps a shadow, yes, most likely a shadow brought on by the sunlight and, er, waving tree branches. And my easel is up there at the moment: perhaps you saw the top of that. But I must be off. Throw that stick again, please.”

  And with that request, Dr. Choudhury turned and hurried away from Henry in the direction of Windsor Cottage, shoulders hunched against discovery or challenge.

  Henry’s voice floated after him, growing progressively fainter. “I’m tied up with the Trust and, ah, church committee stuff, the next few days, but I thought I’d have a proper look around this Saturday night? You know, tap the paneling and all that. If you’re free then? You’ll let me know?”

  “Perhaps. But it will be nothing. Nothing.” Dr. Choudhury flapped a wrist in discouragement as he continued to walk away. Mrs. Begum would know what to do.

  —

  MRS. BEGUM, TROWEL in hand, scrambled from her knees in the front garden and rose on tiptoe to confirm her suspicions. There was no mistaking it. The white head of her number-one-fool husband could be clearly seen above the neatly trimmed privet proceeding toward the garden gate, far too soon to have delivered her carefully packed tiffin of fluffiest white rice, tender fish biryani, and some beautifully smooth and soothing dahl.

  No one could make dahl like she could, and yet here it was, coming back again, having done no good at all. What had he done now? Dropped it in a cowpat?

  All this upset today with its turvy-topsy visitings and leavings, and Baby stabbing her in the heart like that, and Rohimun’s father could not even get her fed now. Mrs. Begum pressed down the last transplanted dahlia and spared a hostile look for the tumbled foxgloves in the far corner of the front garden, innocent victims of a windy night, and they trembled for their fate with the breeze. Well that they should. As soon as she found out the name of those tidy little bushes in Mrs. Darby’s front garden, the foxgloves would be dug out and chopped up, ready for the compost.

  No one had compost like hers: she’d seen the smelly mess that passed for compost up at the Abbey, all those clippings on top, drying out instead of rotting in, and not enough kitchen waste in between. That man, Colin, called himself a gardener? More like a rubbish collector. She trotted along the wooden boards that crisscrossed her garden beds and, trowel held high, sped to welcome her husband at the gate.

  Dr. Choudhury, only now appearing to notice his wife, hastily stepped back from the gate before it was flung open, and forestalled her challenge with a raised hand. “In the house, in the house,” he whispered in Bangla, holding the tiffin before him like a shield.

  She co
rrected him mechanically, “Cottage, cottage, not house,” while she looked past her husband to the road. No cars parked and, more importantly, no dirty bastard reporters like Tariq had warned her of, standing around and spying, to their mothers’ shame. She hesitated. Maybe a sneaky-sneaky one had followed her husband to the Abbey.

  With that thought, she hustled Dr. Choudhury into the cottage, stood while he arranged himself in his wing-back chair in the sitting room, and waited for his explanation. A heavy sigh followed, so she flew into the kitchen and loaded up the pandan tray, and hauled it from kitchen to parlor, placing it close to him. She looked at him expectantly.

  He still did not speak but rolled mournful brown eyes up at her, and with a huff of frustration, she squatted down by the tray. Pulling out the largest betel leaf, she lay a tobacco leaf inside it, then, one-handed, sprinkled it with betel nuts (finely chopped), one clove, cardamon, a hint of lime and a scattering of sugar balls. The entire package was quickly folded into an inch-long green envelope, which, succumbing to impatience, she turned and popped it into her husband’s mouth.

  She tossed a fragment of betel nut onto her own tongue, sat down on the edge of the chair opposite and glared at her husband. Either because of this special marital communication, or perhaps because now sufficiently fortified by the paan tucked into his cheek, Dr. Choudhury delayed no further.

  “Ah, wife, it is good to be home.”

  “Yes, yes?”

  “Something of, er, concern has . . . While walking, you understand, through the woodland that forms the most direct route between cottage and Abbey, I was hailed by Henry Bourne.”

  She leaned even further forward in her chair in consternation, dangerously close to the occasional table and, in her eagerness to speak, almost swallowing her paan before time. “It is a great thing that Henry does not suspect, unless in fact . . .”

  But her husband raised his hand, and she stopped.

  “As it was in fact I that spoke with Henry, others should desist from unnecessary interruptions and speculations, which would only impede them from being informed of the very things that they seek. And,” he continued, “Henry of course wanted my opinion, my, well, views, about the historical provenance of certain, er, unearthly events that he believed he witnessed yesterday, in one of the upper windows of the Abbey, on the western side.”

  “Eh?”

  “In short, wife”—and here Dr. Choudhury paused with a fine sense of drama—“Henry thought he saw someone, a woman, a ghost, in the green bedroom.”

  Mrs. Begum gasped and bit her fingertips, then tried to speak, but her husband’s flow was unstoppable.

  “Of course I informed him regretfully of my unavailability to explore the Abbey together today, due to my having just recalled a prior and pressing engagement. Several of them.”

  Dr. Choudhury’s palm was slowly descending, but his voice rolled on. “Henry seemed to accept this blow with good grace, and even wished me a pleasant walk. However, he did mention he might investigate the matter further, on this Saturday evening.”

  Once Dr. Choudhury’s palm came to rest upon his flannelled knee, Mrs. Begum erupted. “Has my husband forgotten that we have a child who needs to be fed, that he has just deprived her, yes, a bad girl, but still his daughter, of the food that is hers?” She jumped to her feet, almost upsetting the entire pandan tray. “And Henry will still go there on Saturday, I know it! Where does my daughter’s father think she is going to sleep on Saturday night, and what does he think she is going to eat today? And tonight? Leaves from the trees perhaps? Or some of those builder-men’s dirty pork pies? Perhaps he thinks that her so-skinny Londoni body is not skinny enough, or she is too comfortable in that big cold Abbey?”

  She thumped her right hand, fingers curled into a fist, to her left breast. “Why doesn’t my husband just go and stab the mother of his children in the heart, instead of making me watch them starve to death and be caught trespassing, all for nice-nice chats with Mr. Henry?”

  Dr. Choudhury’s palm rose again, belatedly. “My intention, Mrs. Begum,” he said with dignity, “as I was trying to say, was to give this tiffin to Tariq and . . . and . . . to tell him to fetch the girl here for Saturday evening. She can stay here until the danger has passed. Tariq will then return her to the Abbey.”

  She felt her face soften.

  “But know this, wife: I do not say that she deserves it, or that she is forgiven. That has not changed. It is, however, time that she benefited from traditional family values again. For one evening only.”

  —

  “YOU REALLY MEAN that?” Richard’s tone was mild, even quizzical: guaranteed to wind Henry up even more.

  “Yes, I do mean a ghost!” The line was so clear Henry could have been in the room, instead of eighty-odd miles from London, in the depths of Wiltshire. “I tell you, I saw it myself yesterday afternoon! All duskily Celtic, with long wavy hair, wearing some kind of smock. Quite medieval, which obviously supports my theory about the main house predating the outbuildings.”

  Richard reclined in his chair, uncharacteristically glad of the distraction, buoyed by Henry’s enthusiasm. “So, now you’re relying on the paranormal to date the main house?”

  Henry rose to the bait, as Richard knew he would. “You’re not in the courtroom now, Richard. I’m telling you, I saw it, no mistake.”

  “Alright, I’m listening.”

  “I saw her, clear as day. I was, ah, walking the dogs after lunch, bit of a constitutional, you know, thought I’d do a circuit of the Abbey. Anyway, there I was, stopped for a breather, looked up, and there she was, sort of drifting across one of the second-storey windows.”

  “Thea?”

  “The ghost. The ghost, Richard. What a drawcard for tourists. We could have open evenings and take punters through the cellars.”

  Richard propped the receiver under his ear, unscrewed his fountain pen and started to doodle bedsheet ghosts on the blotter. “You said it was on the second storey.”

  “Cellars are spookier than bedrooms. And they’ll be touring the whole upper storey already anyway, once we open the Abbey up again. It could be a whole separate tour, a twilight, ghost-hunting, sort of atmospheric thing . . .”

  Richard grimaced. Another gimmick to market the Abbey to the weekend daytrippers, along with cream teas on Temple Lawn and Audrey Upwey’s nieces in authentic medieval smocks selling authentic bloody medieval ale. So did Henry really believe that there was a ghost, or was it a wind-up?

  “I’ve spoken to Dr. Choudhury, but he, ah, wasn’t free to investigate.”

  “How about Thea? What does she think of all this?”

  “She wasn’t really interested in looking, but, you know, she’s been researching the antecedents of the green room, where I saw it, to try to identify her—historically, that is, so we could put something in the new leaflets. And of course, the boys are over the moon! Talking of which, I thought I’d have a good look on Saturday night: there’s a full moon then, you know.”

  “What difference does that make? The wiring’s been fixed.”

  “Oh, you know, that’s sort of supernatural prime time, isn’t it? Midnight on a full moon. You remember that BBC series where they . . . or perhaps that’s werewolves . . .”

  Richard halted his doodling and glanced at the faded Persian opposite. Its central design was of an archway with an onion-shaped top, like a doorway into another world. He could not quite believe that Thea was taking Henry’s ghost seriously enough to spend time on it. But then he well knew her weakness for that bloody Abbey.

  “Look, how about I visit this weekend, have a read of those grant papers. I’ll come down Friday after work, take the terrible two ghost-hunting on Saturday night, and you can take Thea to that new restaurant that’s opened up in Swindon. Florian’s.” God knows what Henry had done with this latest round of Trust papers anyway.

 
“That’s terrific, Richard. Terrific! And a child-free evening in the school holidays—Thee will love you forever!”

  He smiled despite himself.

  “How about, ah, Deirdre?” Henry added.

  “No, just me.”

  “So, she’s gone the way of all the others then, eh? Cast aside like so much . . .” Henry didn’t finish his sentence, obviously at a loss as to how you cast aside anybody.

  Richard took his opportunity. “See you Friday then.”

  “London must be quiet! See you then.” The line clicked off.

  Richard still held the receiver. It wasn’t like Henry to be facetious. Or so quick with his comments about girlfriends. Time his big brother went down there to sort him out.

  He was surprised at how much he was looking forward to it. He’d never have believed he’d feel like that about hitting the motorway at Friday rush hour to drive down to Bourne Abbey and sleep in the Lodge’s study. Shit, he’d forgotten about that sofa bed. Richard walked over to the Persian rug hanging on his wall and ran his hand across its soft, undulating surface, warm in the sun. What did it remind him of? He used to like to pull his fingers through its pile as a boy when it had lain on the floor of his bedroom in the Abbey, but that wasn’t it. He was getting soft in his old age: stroking carpets, chasing ghosts.

  Twelve

  MRS. BEGUM STOOD on the sitting-room Axminster, arms folded, and eyed the peacock on her mantelpiece. He was not what he had been when he’d arrived, just two days ago. The proud curve of his feathered chest had drooped and widened into what was almost a paunch, and his head had tilted, giving his features a leery, calculating expression. His stance, once aristocratic, had become something crooked and degenerate. An omen, perhaps.

  His beak had begun to open, and she remembered something that Mrs. Darby had told her, about the danger of looking gifts in the mouth. Or was it to be recommended? She couldn’t recall, but the thought would not leave her, so she pulled Dr. Choudhury’s ottoman over to the hearth and climbed up. But the ottoman, old and soft like her husband, gave a dusty puff and sank in the middle with her weight. Left at eye-level with the peacock’s neck, she reached forward and grasped the bird around his spreading tummy to lift him down.