A Matter of Marriage

by Lesley Jorgensen

  Keeping his eyes on the mirror, he drew the fabric up to his neckline. He was so right about the color. He started to rotate as he wrapped the fabric around his waist, his head swivelling back toward the mirror with each turn. Beautiful. He jiggled the folds of the pallu until it fell in one symmetrical sweep over his forearm, then stared at the cheval, ladhu ball forgotten.

  —

  MRS. SYEDA BEGUM sat in the dark watching her children from her bedroom window. She smiled and nodded to see them embrace, and resumed her own plotting for family unity, grandchildren and general advancement of the Choudhurys. The sooner her troubled son unburdened his heart to his favorite sister the better for everyone.

  She reached out to the pile of old Royalty magazines tucked into her window recess and selected one, turning the pages reverently. Tariq still had time: Mrs. Darby had told her that Prince Charles had not married till he was thirty-two. Inside the magazine was a newspaper cutting: a double-page spread of photographs showing that good Muslim boy Dodi with poor Princess Diana before they died.

  Mrs. Begum examined the photographs in the article. Laughing and smiling and enjoying themselves, like young people in love should. And why not. She was beautiful, and he was rich, and his family did not object. She would have converted, like Imran Khan’s wife, and they would have lived happily ever after, with more sons, and everything she wanted from Harrods. A great pity that the Windsors were unable to accept love-matches or mixed marriages. Then again, honor killings were not unknown amongst Muslims either.

  A wife for Tariq . . . She had a feeling in her stomach that she needed to look again at the ceevees of prospective brides that had been arriving since he graduated. First choice must now go to those girls who did not look too passionate: more study-types, or motherly, perhaps. Thin lips and big hips. And they could not have the parents and all the aunties living just around the corner, either. The parents, especially the mother, must be dead, invalid or distant, too distant to be always visiting and calling. She herself could give her daughter-in-law all the mothering she needed, and make sure that her attention was properly directed.

  After all, that was where the Queen had gone wrong. If she had mothered that poor motherless Diana a bit more, kept her busy in the bosom of the family, then she would never have left. A strong, loving mother-in-law will always be more important to a marriage than a weak husband.

  She thought back to the circumstances of her own marriage: she, a nobody, an uneducated village girl who had married up, up, into the dizzy heights of a Choudhury family in Dhaka. Their furious grudging acceptance, forced by a combination of her rounded belly and Babru Choudhury’s passionate protestations. It had been the first and only time he had stood up against that dirty-bastard father of his.

  Then after the marriage, no welcome, no celebration. She was hidden away in her father-in-law’s house while her new husband left for UK to take up his Rhodes scholarship. But she hadn’t cared. Even while she hauled her heavy body around working like a slave for that man, she had known it was only a matter of time.

  And sure enough, within a few months, Babru’s cousin had arrived one day while Bora Khalo, father-in-law (he had never asked her to call him Abba), was sleeping. He gave her the aeroplane ticket and one hundred British pounds. Twenty pounds plus two Benares saris from her uncle the tailor got her the Bangla passport. The remaining eighty pounds, hidden inside a cigarette packet that dropped discreetly onto a file-filled desk at the British High Commission, procured the precious spousal visa.

  She had packed in secret, constructing a parcel of newspaper and string—just as she had done for her journey two years earlier, from the drowned paddies of Syhlet province to Uncle’s shop in the great dusty capital of Dhaka. The parcel held all her clothes, along with a new shirt and perfume for Babru.

  Mrs. Begum marvelled. She was so young then, and alone, yet she had been far more fearful of the train journey with Uncle to Dhaka at fourteen, than the prospect of flying, alone and pregnant and only sixteen, across the world in an aeroplane to a foreign country and her new husband. How much she had grown up in those two years.

  Bora Khalo would never have consented to her going. Never. It was the first thing he had said to her after the nikkah: that Babru could only go to UK on his own, as a single man, otherwise the Rhodes would be lost, her dirty ways having almost ruined his career before it began.

  She shivered and turned another page. Princes and princesses. Kings and queens. No different to anyone else: family troubles, wayward children, the difficult, bitter father-in-law. Look at Prince Charles, so lonely and awkward, just like Babru when she first met him. Long and skinny and shyer in the tailor’s shop than a child on his first day of school, wordlessly handing Uncle a bundle of sherwanis and kurtas for alteration.

  Standing at the other counter, shaking out a wedding sari for three anxious aunties, she had seen how his eyes were drawn to the flash and glitter of the embroidery as they fingered it. He had drifted toward her counter, coming to a standstill just behind the aunties with such an air of concentrated desire that the three women, until then arguing amongst themselves about the sari’s merits, had moved as one to claim it as theirs.

  She had pulled down a selection of the brighter saris from the high shelves behind her, putting them on the far edge of her counter for him to inspect. Then she was back in the whirlwind of bargaining with three determined aunties, and when she next looked up, he was gone.

  But a week later he was there again, with his long fingers leaving damp marks on a shiny leather wallet. More saris were shaken out and stroked, and one was bought, for the first price Uncle named. Forced to reply to the tailor’s cheery questions about the wellness of “your honored father, the judge,” he dropped his parcel twice as he was bowed out of the shop.

  Three months and ten saris he had taken before he was able to look her in the eye with his salaamalaikums and stumbling enquiries about her health. He would spend whole half-hours wandering around the shelves, or standing still in a corner like a dressmaker’s mannequin, watching her. Her uncle would smile and roll his eyes when he spotted Babru gazing into the shop window, but rebuked Syeda when once she made fun of him.

  “He has no one, that boy. His mother is dead a long time now, and his father has quarrelled with everyone, thinks they all want his money.” Uncle tapped the back of her hand gravely.

  “He and that boy are poorer than any of us.”

  She still ached for her own parents, killed by the typhoid that had come in with the monsoonal floods in the last wet season before Uncle had come to take her away. When the shop was quiet, she began to make a second cup of chai, so that Babru could sit with her uncle out the front. His gratitude for such a small thing both irritated and moved her. He desired so much, yet expected so little.

  Then had come the crashing arrival of the monsoon rains, a full three weeks early. Uncle was at mosque, and the street flooded with rubbish. She closed the shop, barricading the entrance with rags stuffed under the door, before leading Babru upstairs into the sewing room to wait out the downpour.

  The tin roof’s drumming reverberations made it impossible to talk, so she waved him to sit while she made some chai. The room, as large as her own so-pretty wallpapered bedroom now, seemed small, being filled with hundreds of rolls and bolts of fabric for blouses, leggings and pants to coordinate with the multitude of saris, salwars and sherwanis downstairs. The little sewing machine was tucked into a corner, and the floor was covered in scraps of fabric too small to save, which she would periodically sweep up into a bag and sell as stuffing to an upholsterer in the next street. Her bedding roll was spread out in the opposite corner.

  She remembered it all as if it had been yesterday.

  Holding the chai, she had turned to find that he had sat himself down on her bed. Her bed. The little cup dropped from her hand. He stood at her expression, his arms reaching out, then she was against
his chest and he held her. He dipped his head down past hers and rested his cheek against her neck. “Coconut oil,” he murmured into her ear, too close now to be drowned out by the thunderous rain. “You smell so beautiful.”

  —

  MRS. BEGUM CLOSED the magazine, trying to recall if she had anything sweet downstairs. The sherbet milk. Why not. After all these years, never having had her proper bride’s welcome, she was entitled to it. When her children married, she would make sure that everything was done the proper way.

  She walked quietly downstairs. The study door was closed, and light shone from under the door. Dr. Choudhury would be there for hours. She hoped that hunger was cramping his fat stomach. She took the jug of sherbet out of the fridge, poured some into a small cut-glass vase that Mrs. Darby had given her in exchange for the secret to number-one butter chicken, and carried it upstairs. She would have her bridal drink with the Windsors.

  When she returned to the windowseat, her children could no longer be seen, and the samosa basket was empty. Well and good. Her fool of a husband needed time to reflect on his errors, and she needed to plan. Like all great strategists, she knew that victory would only be hers if she could keep one step ahead.

  She raised her sherbet drink and spoke softly to her reflection in the darkened glass. “For you, daughter Syeda, beautiful bride who blesses our house.”

  Seventeen

  A SLEEP-IN ON that sofa bed had probably been a little optimistic, Richard reflected, taking the chair at the head of the breakfast table, shaking the Sunday paper straight, and wishing he could do the same with his back. A bleary-eyed Henry came in, resplendent in a pale blue dressing-gown that looked as if it belonged to Thea.

  “Marvellous restaurant, Richard. Don’t know how you hear about all these fantastic local places in London. Thee’s sleeping in, but only because I made the ultimate sacrifice and got up to hear the boys’ gory details of sinister shadows and strange eerie sounds. They’ve gone up to the stables to make a ghost trap, bloodthirsty little buggers. I take it you didn’t see anything out of the ordinary?”

  “That’s right. And also no signs of any break-in, I’m glad to report.”

  Henry stopped, coffeepot in hand. “Good Lord. Hadn’t even thought of that, so caught up in the, ah, historical aspect. Perhaps I’ll have a word with our Dr. Choudhury and the builders about keeping a bit of a lookout. Awful Audrey hasn’t started proper cleaning duties in the Abbey yet.”

  “Must say that dressing-gown’s pretty fetching. Goes with your eyes.”

  Henry stretched out a sleeve and scrutinized it critically. “Suits me, does it? They’re from the in-laws, a sort of cashmerey thing. I’ll let Thea keep the red one. Much more her sort of color.”

  Richard raised his eyebrows but decided to forbear. Thea would hear and would not see the funny side. He put out his hand for the coffeepot. “I thought I saw Dr. Choudhury in the Park this morning, near the Abbey. I thought his role was over by now?”

  “Well, actually, Dr. Choudhury’s more likely than the builders to be around on the weekends: he’s told me he’s still got a few bits and pieces to finish off upstairs. His easel’s up there, I believe.” Henry waved the coffeepot around to emphasize his point, just out of reach. “So we often see him pottering around the Abbey when it suits him. Did you know, when he writes his papers on Bourne Abbey, he’s going to give me a shared byline as well.”

  Richard grabbed the coffeepot from Henry and went over to the cups on the sideboard. “Not so surprising, really. You have turned yourself into a bit of an expert on the Abbey: wainscoting, priest’s holes, that sort of thing.” He turned just in time to see Henry squeeze past and slip himself into the vacated chair, ducking to avoid an anticipated but non-existent block.

  Henry pulled the sports section out of the paper, messily refolded the rest, leaned back, and stretched his legs out luxuriously. “Well, then, Richard, perhaps you getting us stuck in one as children wasn’t entirely wasted.”

  Richard snorted and kept pouring his coffee. “You’re such a romantic, pretty-boy. I’d always thought that was more of a linen cupboard myself. Whoever heard of shelves in a priest’s hidey-hole?”

  Henry half rose, then remembered that ownership was nine-tenths possession and sat down again. “The shelves were a later addition, as you damn well should know if you’d read my last letter to the Trust!”

  —

  LEFT TO HIMSELF in the sitting room that afternoon, Richard found he was not quite as sanguine as he had led his brother to believe. His Saturday evening torchlight tour of the Abbey with the children had elicited the expected shrieks and giggles and, as anticipated, nothing of substance.

  Yet, when touring the upper levels, one of the rooms, the green room, had had a different atmosphere. Over and above the smell of fresh paint and linseed oil from the sheeted painting equipment stored there, was something less tangible but, to him, distinct. He had felt a prickling awareness of a presence, a feminine one. And there’d been a single hair, dark and wavy and very long, lying across one of the windowsills. This was a room inhabited by a woman. And not a hundred years ago, either.

  To mention it to Henry or Thea would merely add fuel to the fire without being helpful, and anyway, Richard felt more than a little silly coming up with something so airy-fairy. A smell. A hair. Then this morning a glimpse through the bathroom window: Dr. Choudhury hurrying to the Abbey, carrying something. Had he looked furtive, or was that just Richard’s own, overactive imagination? He wanted to dismiss it, turn it into a joke about his susceptibility to Henry’s imaginings. Yet when the opportunity had come up today, with all the references to the subject, he had not. And his conviction that there was something would not go away.

  A little discreet questioning had established that Thea had had no involvement with the upstairs work and, besides, her hair had never been that long. And from Audrey Upwey’s purplish perm, it was certainly not. The building crew downstairs were all men. A long-haired tradesman? It was a woman’s hair, a woman’s smell, he was sure of it. Ridiculous.

  He only had this evening, before an early start tomorrow morning to get back to London and his Chambers. Perhaps he should revisit the green room to test his first impressions.

  Richard moved irritably out of Thea’s too-soft armchair. Everywhere he looked, photographs: the parents, Thea’s multitude of Greek relatives, lots of the boys of course, and a few of Henry and Thea’s various friends. Some of those faces he recognized from university years ago. Typical of Henry to have made the necessary effort to keep in touch, though Thea probably did her fair share in that regard as well.

  From the window, he could just see Bourne Abbey on the upper slope of the hillside to his left. Henry had always been the one dazzled by the romance of the place, and from an early age had been determined, like their father, to dedicate himself to Bourne Abbey’s restoration and a proper understanding of its history.

  A proper understanding. On second thought, maybe some of the romance was flowing in his veins as well. He would head out later for a look around and be back in time for Thea’s drinks do tonight. No one would be the wiser.

  —

  ROHIMUN SWORE AS half a tube’s worth of cadmium yellow plopped onto her breast. She unzipped her tracksuit top, folding it in on the oily blob and using the top’s fleecy lining to scrub the floor in case any paint had made it that far. The metal tube must have split along the seam. She would have to paint in one of Mum’s old salwarkameezes: more comfortable anyway, since she had gotten so fat.

  She grabbed the first one that came out of the kitbag and pulled it over her head, enjoying the susurration of the microfiber as it slid down her body. It was a dark cobalt blue, only relegated to the too-old pile by the turmeric stains on the cuffs and front. She took off her tracksuit pants as well and slipped on the soft salwar pants, tying them loosely at the waist.

  Back at her easel t
he rose floated before her, taking up the entire top left-hand quarter of the canvas, luminous against the dark greens and lamp blacks of the yew hedge that she had started to block in. She was not painting this alla prima, impasto, like her Freud- and Bacon-inspired commission portraits, all speed and dash and texture. It was time for a different method, and for once, she was going to take as long as she wanted.

  Discarding the palette knife in favor of soft brushes, she had taken days to build up layer after layer of pure unmixed colors, heavily diluted and the most transparent she could make them, to form a glaze that mimicked the translucent depths of the colors within the rose. That part of the canvas was virtually complete; the rest was primed and lightly blocked-in with sepia. Breaking the rules, but it had been too difficult to think about the figure on the canvas until now.

  She turned to the cheval, using her forearm to push hair back from her face and squinting at the shapes that her figure formed. She really needed an SLR to take a few shots to help her out, for when the light was different or she was focusing on detail. And it was going to be tricky working on her own profile. If only there was a second cheval, or even a hand mirror . . . Perhaps Tariq could pick one up cheap in a local pawnshop. In the meantime, she needed a general idea of the shapes and proportions her body would create.

  She rotated slowly before the looking glass, letting her eyes come back into focus. It had been so long since she had really looked at herself. For once, the dark bulk of hair didn’t swamp the rest of her. She smoothed her hands up over rounded hips, inwards over the indentation of her waist and out over full breasts. The salwar fell as it should: the curves suggested but not outlined.