A Matter of Marriage

by Lesley Jorgensen

  “Not my fault,” she snapped, but after a moment she grabbed the offending tress and pulled impatiently on it.

  “That’s hardly going to help. Let me try.” He slid his hands under hers and felt for the point of connection between his shirt button and the lock of her hair. “It’s quite a tangle.” Surely he could’ve done better than that. He sounded like Colonel Blimp. Changing tack, he said, “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” She averted her head despite the fighting words, and her hands reached out over his fingers and pulled fiercely on the edge of his collar.

  “No point in doing that.”

  She tugged again. “I don’t have time for this.”

  As if it were his fault. Her hair seemed to have twisted right around the button’s axis. They both shuffled closer as they worked on the tangle. He hoped she didn’t have any other makeshift weapons on her person. A staple gun, or a jar of turps. A really sharp pencil.

  “Look, it doesn’t matter, yeah, just rip it. It’s only hair. I . . . you have to go.”

  Was she expecting someone? Choudhury?

  “There must be a way,” he said, bracing against her pulling as he tried to puzzle it out. What right did she have to tell him to get out. Expecting him to apologize. More front than Harrods, as Audrey would say.

  Her hands suddenly tugged at his, and he felt his shirt jump forward. Something fell to the floorboards, and she laughed abruptly, revealing twin dimples in her cheeks. They both bent down to pick up the shirt button, just avoiding cracking heads. In doing so, her hair, freed now, swung against his shoulder, its massy weight as different as it was possible to be from the light brush of a tossed bob.

  As he put the button into his shirt pocket, she moved to the painting, touching it in several places with her fingertips as if to reassure herself, then folded her arms and glared at the mantelpiece to his right, as if waiting for him to leave. Some nerve. In profile, her lashes curled extravagantly, below a dark brow as thick as his finger.

  “What are you doing here? Are you meeting Choudhury later tonight?”

  She swung to face him, her mouth open for a moment as if searching for a riposte. “What do you care? Are you here with some fucking paper? Why am I so interesting anyway?”

  As she spoke, Richard stared at her face. Jesus. Was she the girl from the V&A? “Who are you? And why are you here?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  The question struck home. Who was he to judge how she had arrived at this point in her life? He opened his mouth to rephrase, renew his questioning, but she turned away and swore again, her voice quavering now. Trying to get to the bottom of things at this stage seemed pointless: she was only getting more upset. He noticed the palette knife and kicked it under the bed for safety. It hit something with a metallic ring.

  He pulled up the valance and saw a camp bed and a duffel bag. When he turned back to question her, she was fingering a jumble of brushes and paint tubes on a box, as if checking that they were all there. Facing away from him, her hair fell past her hips. He’d thought that the wild mass of hair in the painting was an exaggeration, artistic licence, but not now. Was this how Choudhury saw her hair, spread out in the wind against greenery? Or tangled across a green velvet bedspread? His stomach knotted.

  He went over to her. “Look, you can’t stay here, you know.” She ignored him and walked to the window.

  He tried again. “If you need somewhere to stay, there are shelters. I could make some enquiries.” He felt like a complete bastard. Compared to him Choudhury must be looking pretty good right now. “Or perhaps a youth hostel. Until you can sort something out. But you can’t stay here. You must know that.”

  She crossed her arms. Her feet were bare and grass-stained, and her fingernails were rimmed with black. How rough had she been living since she’d left the V&A?

  “Is there someone I could call for you?” Don’t say Choudhury.

  “What paper is it then? Which one?” Her tone was calmer but still edgy, hostile. “What’s your name?”

  “Richard Bourne.”

  “Bourne.” She was rattled now, clearly caught by surprise, recrossing her arms, hugging her elbows.

  “This is my family home.” He surprised himself, had not volunteered that information for years, and felt an odd kind of pride in saying those words.

  “So, you live here,” she said, in a couldn’t-care-less tone. “I mean, you’re moving back in when it’s finished.” She glanced at his trainers with contempt, and his feet twitched uneasily, despite himself.

  “I live in London. My brother and his family, they’re in the Lodge. They’ll be living here.”

  The rain was still falling. He couldn’t leave without some kind of agreement or understanding with her.

  “What’s your problem with papers?”

  Perhaps there was a warrant out for her as an illegal alien. A forced marriage in the offing? Or a violent husband? That Asian man in the dinner suit? No ring. But that didn’t mean anything. Didn’t they wear crimson on their hairline, if they were married? Perhaps he could do something, if there were legal problems. The silence stretched on, and the room grew colder and darker. A change of subject perhaps.

  “Is the painting of you?”

  She looked at him oddly. “It’s a rose.”

  “No, the figure beside it.”

  “Oh. Sort of.” Her voice was flat and dismissive.

  The silence returned, and he found himself casting around for something to say, as if he were at a cocktail party and she a difficult date. His watch alarm sounded tinnily. Shit. Thea must have set his watch alarm for her faux-casual pre-dinner drinks, and there were guests tonight, he’d completely forgotten. He couldn’t tell them about this unwanted visitor when there was company: far too disruptive.

  “Look, do you need to stay here for now?”

  She appeared to hesitate, then nodded.

  “Are you safe here? No one’s bothering you or . . .”

  She stared at him pointedly, but eventually shook her head.

  “Alright. I have to be in London tomorrow but I’ll be back at the end of the week to work out what’s to be done. You can stay till then.” She continued to stare, her expression disdainful, and he quashed a strange urge to apologize.

  “Okay,” she said, turning back toward the windows as if those black rectangles held more interest.

  He left the room, stood in the darkened hallway, trying to collect his thoughts. What the hell was all that about? He remembered Thea’s dinner party again. Maybe he’d just stay for drinks, skip the dinner and leave for London tonight, pleading pressure of work. No. Thea would have a fit and that would make coming back next weekend tricky. Thirty-five years old and still on Thea’s social fucking leash.

  Nineteen

  THEA SURVEYED THE Lodge’s front drawing room. Everything was ready: fruit juice for the Choudhurys, martinis for the others, and Andrew and Jonathon in their room upstairs with a Disney classic on the DVD player. She was pleased that she’d managed the double feat of fulfilling their obligations to the Choudhurys and of not scaring Richard off to London early. Perhaps because she had been careful not to tell him too much too soon. Even he wouldn’t dare to change his plans this late.

  She drifted closer to the fire and tweaked into artful disarray the pile of Paris Vogue, Wallpaper* and Architectural Digest. Richard’s allergy to social obligations was second nature to her by now, as were the endless cigarette breaks outside that he would resort to if trapped with company not to his liking, or if things went on too long.

  Choudhury was always an attentive guest, even though his wife tried to reverse-engineer the recipes and was prone to suddenly developing passions for strange items like the pen-holding coronation mug by the telephone. Perhaps she was a collector. No, Thea couldn’t see it. The son was coming tonight as wel
l: an art curator from Johannesburg. He and Henry could discuss the Abbey collection, and Richard had an eye for paintings. Richard shouldn’t be too burdened, not being the official host, and Henry, with the Abbey to talk about with Dr. Choudhury, would be in his element.

  She drifted over to the gate-leg table where the Abbey decorator’s latest proposals had been left as a talking point, but also because, although she would never admit it, Richard’s interest and approval still counted. What little difference Richard’s breaking of the family Trust all those years ago had made to this family. Henry had been the heir for longer than she’d known either of them, but he still deferred to Richard, and even the National Trust people wrote to him first. She tapped the papers with one perfectly polished scarlet nail. Once they were installed in the Abbey, everything would be different. She glanced at her watch: a favorite Tiffany in honor of the occasion. Seven-forty-five. The men should be down any minute now.

  Perhaps she would sit Richard with Mrs. Begum, and if she became too much he could give her one of his put-downs. And tonight could act as thanks for all Mrs. Choudhury’s babysitting. Andrew and Jonathon loved everything about her: her food, her rabbits and her garden. It was too easy sometimes, having her just across the way, and always happy to take them.

  The gender balance was wrong—too many men—but county was difficult to combine with the Choudhurys and impossible to inflict upon Richard. Henry, on the other hand, usually seemed to find the Choudhurys quite amusing. She smiled at the thought of Richard’s face and of the knowing looks he would give her once Dr. Choudhury got going.

  The scullery door banged, and Thea scooped up Richard’s martini to present to him, a quip about Dutch courage ready on her lips. But instead there were his footsteps on the stairs and a shout to Henry to hurry up in the shower. A pity: she’d been looking forward to a bit of their old acerbic pre-party banter, perhaps one of his perceptive comments on how she was looking, while Henry faffed about upstairs with his tie. Eight o’clock. Her watch gave a silvery chime, and she replaced the cocktail and started to light the reflectors on the mantelpiece. Such a flattering light, and somehow festive as well: perfect for one of their last cosy little evenings before the transition to the Abbey.

  She turned her back on the mirror and took in the rest of the room. She had done her best with the Lodge but cute and cottagey it remained. She couldn’t wait until people were visiting, seeing her, in the Abbey itself. Much more her style. Perhaps they could have a late-summer ball to celebrate the completion of restoration. Perhaps Country Life could send someone. Or even Tatler. How wonderful that would be. She sighed, feeling the soft roll of double-stranded pearls over her collarbones as she did so. No gold tonight: Mrs. Choudhury always had enough on for both of them, and she wasn’t going to compete.

  The doorbell rang, and Thea moved to the stairs to call Henry but was met by Richard, running down the stairs while adjusting his tie, his hair still wet. She stepped in front of him, holding out the martini glass, but he ignored it. His expression was alert, even predatory, but entirely focused on what was to come. Not on her. This is how he looks when he’s about to go into court, part of her thought, while another part felt as if she’d been slapped. She searched his face and found an absence of their shared history in his eyes.

  “It’s the Choudhurys, isn’t it?” There was a grim undertone to his voice, as if his worst fears about tonight had just been realized.

  “Yes.” Damned if she was going to justify her choice of guests to him. “Richard, darling, the door. Could you?”

  There was no reply, but he strode down the hall, and she suddenly felt unaccountably weary, as if she’d just come home from standing at some all-day dressy event, like a polo match, or a society funeral. She turned away from the sight of Richard’s back and entered the drawing room. Even though it was only the Choudhurys, she couldn’t face them just then. She needed a moment.

  Everything was in order, impressive to those in the know, but welcoming too. No one could say that she was a bad hostess, whoever the guests were. She stopped next to the Le Corbusier mirrored tray, one of her treasures, now holding the juices and cocktails. When she looked down onto its surface, her pearls, refracted through the various liquids, appeared impossibly lustrous and twice their size. Wasn’t it Cleopatra who dropped pearls into her drink, to impress that successful young general Antony with her wealth, and her nerve? It worked too, for a while.

  She leaned forward to see more clearly, the drinks sparkling and winking, lit from above and below. The vinegary scent of gin and dry vermouth was bracing, and on impulse she picked up one of the martinis, plucked out the olive and swallowed it whole. Imagine doing that with a pearl. For once she would break her rule of drinking last and least. Stuff the guests. She lifted the glass to her lips and sculled the lot. Hell, she hadn’t done that since Oxford.

  —

  MRS. BEGUM, SLIGHTLY out of breath, was at the Lodge front door in her second-best non-wedding sari and minimal jewelry: only her usual gold bracelets that never came off, four extra colored glass ones on each wrist that Dr. Choudhury had forced on her at the last minute because they matched the sari, and her smallest gold set, earrings no bigger than her thumbnail and one little necklace almost entirely hidden by her blouse. They had headed off from Windsor Cottage the second the rain had stopped.

  All the way, Tariq, stupid boy, was fiddling with his phone and wandering all over the place like a goat looking for the greenest grass, so she’d had to dodge around him, while her scuttling cockroach of a husband was trying to tell her that she was disrespecting these so-great-and-mighty Bournes by dressing as if she was off to the shops, showing him up as a lower-class man, a man who could not afford to buy his wife enough gold, or good saris. What number-one fools, both of them.

  She had been to enough Oxford parties to know that the bigger the gold sets she wore, the more fancy-fancy her saris, the less people would expect her to speak English. But if her sari was plain, and she wore her sewing glasses and a friendly smile, talk-talking about weather or motorways or gardening was all that was needed. Sometimes they even asked her what college she was from.

  When they were close to the Lodge’s front gate, she’d picked up her sari pleats and put on a last burst of speed to beat Dr. Choudhury there: a maneuver that turned out to be unnecessary as at the same time her husband stopped completely. He seemed to have been distracted by the sight of wet grass cuttings sticking to his shoes and was lifting first one foot then the other into the air and waggling it, then tapping his soles on the gravel, muttering something about the virtues of pavements.

  She’d slipped through the gate Tariq had just opened, bustled up the broad path, now clearly leading, and leaned on the doorbell, victorious. No long-winded greetings and introductions with them standing on the doorstep like beggars for minutes and minutes while Dr. Choudhury pretended he was Rabindranath Tagore getting the Nobel Prize. It would be just quick salaams, kisses between the women like Mrs. Darby did, then inside, as it should be.

  —

  THEA COULD HEAR everything from where she sat on the sofa, her eyes watering. The front door opening, then complete silence. What was Richard doing? She stood too fast and had to sit back down as the room shifted with her. There was a burst of talking: Mrs. Choudhury, then Dr. Choudhury’s lower tones and, at last, the sounds of movement down the hall.

  If, on top of everything else, Richard was going to be difficult . . . Thea got to her feet, more cautiously this time, grabbed Richard’s cigarettes and lighter from the occasional table and stuffed them under a sofa cushion. And the scullery door was going to be bloody well locked.

  Henry, fair hair sticking up and tie askew, shot into the drawing room a split second before their guests and propped when he saw her. Thea, concentrating on standing steadily, affected to ignore his anxious glance, and before he could speak, their visitors came clustering through the doorway.


  Henry spun around to greet them. “Mrs. Choudhury, lovely to see you again.”

  “Begum, Begum.”

  “Oh, ah, you’re welcome . . . Some juice, Mrs. Choudhury? Thee managed to source some mango nectar for you, I think. Dr. Choudhury, good, good. And this must be Tariq, weather’s a bit wetter than South Africa today, hey? Juice as well? How was your flight?”

  Thea did a slow circuit of the room, smiling and nodding in the swirl of movement and chatter, then returned to where she had started, to pretend to listen and hand out drinks through Henry. The dizziness had eased and, conscious of a certain redundancy, she took another cocktail. She’d touched Richard’s arm in passing and made some comment about Henry’s recalcitrant cowlick, but his brief mechanical assent left her feeling marooned.

  Richard stood on the far side of the guests from her, his dark stillness rising above Henry’s bustling geniality like a yew hedge behind a flowerbed. No glances of shared amusement, no watchful eye on those she spoke to.

  Why did she feel so diminished this evening, so pointless? It was she who’d jilted him, then moved on, married happily, two boys, the Abbey. He was the one who hadn’t progressed, living in a flat and still single . . .

  She picked up another drink with her free hand and started to move around the edge of the group, back toward Richard. When she was almost there, she caught his eye and lifted the drink, forcing a wry smile and raising her eyebrows. Pax. Truce. Besties. Former Lovers. You Must Need A Drink With This Lot. He stared, as if puzzled by her presence, then waved away the proffered drink, her peace offering, while that fat nobody Mrs. Choudhury burbled on into his inclined ear.

  Thea felt the heat in her face, the weight of the drinks in her hands. Her smile, her eyebrows, were as tight and numb as if she’d just been botoxed. No one noticed her. Henry was by the window, chatting with Tariq. The Choudhurys were nodding eagerly at Richard, deferring to his comments, watching his expression.