A Matter of Marriage

by Lesley Jorgensen

  “Ah, the rice.”

  “Allow me.” He turned off the gas, found a handtowel, picked up the biggest saucepan and shook its contents into a colander standing in the sink. The scent and sight of the steaming rice started his stomach growling again.

  Mrs. Begum bustled over, seemingly recovered, and took the empty saucepan out of his hands.

  Perhaps now he could duck out, check the glovebox. He was really beginning to feel it. His skin crawling and clammy, his vision starting to blur, the beginnings of a headache. Day four: the doctor had warned him. His symptoms would peak, then subside. He just had to soldier on. Why hadn’t he filled the script for nicotine patches? He felt like eating one. Why hadn’t he considered the gum at least, kept some as backup?

  Footsteps sounded in the hall, along with Dr. Choudhury’s voice, raised and plaintive. “Tea, tea now.”

  Mrs. Begum took hold of Richard’s upper arm and pushed him out the kitchen door into the hallway. “All done, all ready now,” she said. “Go to Dr. Choudhury. I will bring the tray.”

  He hesitated, looking at the front door. Perhaps he could quickly duck out to the car, just on the off chance. But halfway down the hall, Dr. Choudhury’s head had poked out of the sitting-room doorway in an odd echo of his wife’s earlier.

  “Ah, Richard Bourne. Hail fellow, well met. Come in, come in, sit down. Yes, there. No, I won’t hear of it, sit down. I will pour you a drink. As you know, I do not, but I can manage a whiskey for my friend Richard.”

  After giving him his drink, Dr. Choudhury started to waffle on about some university politics, which Richard, headachey and distracted, could only partially follow, but felt obliged to try, given what he’d been assuming about the man until only minutes before. There was a certain subdued quality in his manner tonight, but what the Saudis had to do with Oxford, Richard could not say, so larded had the story been with complicated self-justifications and assertions of some kind of conspiracy to remove him. Apparently because he was a symbol of all that was civilized and moderate within the department’s staff. And why would they bother with him anyway? Historical Architecture was hardly their beef. So to speak.

  At least Tariq was nowhere to be seen, Richard thought, which took some of the pressure off having to socialize.

  When they sat down to eat, it was a no-nonsense meal in the kitchen, as if he were family. He watched Mrs. Begum’s quick but gentle placement of the various saucepans straight onto cork mats on the scrubbed pine. He could recall Audrey with the silver chafing dishes his mother insisted on, banging them down on the table so hard that their contents sometimes erupted onto the tablecloth.

  Mrs. Begum served her husband first, then him, with a generous mound of rice and curry, just as he’d hoped. Once he began to eat he discovered that it helped with the cravings, and the headache. So he kept on eating, and Mrs. Begum, pleased, kept on serving him, until, looking at his plate which was as full as when he’d started, he felt as if he were going to slip into a coma.

  When she saw that he had stopped, finally defeated by the never-ending food mountain before him, she sent him back to the sitting room along with her husband, flapping a dismissive hand at his token attempts to help clear the table.

  Richard’s head was pounding, and his stomach was uncomfortably full. Dr. Choudhury, who did in fact look older than he’d ever seen him, was now expanding upon his poor health and the stresses of fatherhood.

  Mrs. Begum joined them, and though her hands were constantly occupied with the contents of her large silver tray and its leaves and powders, she chatted away, persuading him to try some paan. He refused the sweetened packages that she was making for her husband but did accept a few fragments of betel nut and chewed them diligently. They were almost tasteless, and hard work initially, but less than a minute later, he felt a pleasant buzz in his limbs and, for a blessed half-hour after, a measure of relief from his headache. Good stuff, although having seen Mrs. Begum’s reddish teeth and maroon gums, he had refused a second helping. About the only thing he had refused, though.

  It was late enough for him to make his excuses, but he kept sitting there, accepting cups of tea and mangoes—hoping for some word, some sign from Dr. Choudhury or his wife, that one or the other was going to resume the conversation about Rohimun. Or some kind of hint, at least, of current troubles, future plans.

  He even followed Mrs. Begum out to the kitchen at one point, on the pretext of helping her to carry out the heavy tray, in the hope that something more would be said, even a passing comment. But nothing. The photos had been cleared away from the kitchen table as if they had never been.

  Twenty-five

  ONLY AN HOUR after going to bed early, Rohimun awoke, a pulse beating heavily between her legs. The sixth hot night in a row. She slid out of her sleeping bag and off the great bed, pushing her hair back from her face, but it still lay along her back like a wool blanket; she wanted a glass of refrigerated water, a cool shower. But the builders had turned off the water and power yesterday for some reason. She couldn’t wash, couldn’t have a cold drink, was too hot and wakeful to go back to sleep.

  A breeze stirred through the open window, balmy and warm. The river. She’d been in the gardens at night: surely walking down the front lawn to the river was not that different.

  She pulled her duffel bag out from under the bed and found a towel, her flip-flops, the toiletry bag, and the thinnest salwar Mum had packed—a double layer of creamy muslin. Why shouldn’t she get out? Four days solid she’d been cooped up inside. At first, because she’d been so rattled by Richard Bourne’s visit, she’d really tried to keep a low profile. But then, because of the increase in her productivity, she’d been painting from dawn to dusk and hadn’t cared where she was.

  But now she’d started to recall being back in Simon’s flat: the endless weekends where they never went outside, their dirty clothes piled in a corner of the bedroom, the depression in the plasterboard near the front door where he’d punched the wall. What would Richard Bourne think of someone like Simon? Probably be great mates, with their posh accents. Probably went to school together or something, maybe with Richard a few years ahead.

  He had looked so peaceful sleeping, and when he’d first woken, his eyes had opened wide, staring into hers as if in surprised recognition. His pupils, clearly visible in the dim light against light-colored irises (blue? green?) had expanded rapidly, as if he’d been dreaming of some bright sunlit place, and woken into darkness.

  Oh, for Chrissake. She bundled up her things and shuffled into the hallway. All was quiet: the hot spell seemed to have reduced the usual creaks and sighs of the Abbey’s night-time cooling. She walked down the front stairs, the flip-flops clapping at her heels and her fingertips skimming the smooth banister rail—more like satin than wood.

  Outside it was warm but without the stuffiness of the Abbey. Rohimun started over the clipped lawn for the river, stopping at irregular intervals to hop about in search of an errant flip-flop. She would feel better after a dip, and she could wash her hair.

  —

  AFTER ANOTHER HOUR of desultory post-dinner conversation and even more tea and some snacks, Richard was a man in pain. The betel nut had worn off, and the headache had returned worse than before and was making his vision shimmer so that Dodi and Diana above the mantel seemed to be following him with their mournful dead eyes: watching, waiting, for him to do something.

  It was almost midnight when he left Windsor Cottage, feeling as if he had been run over by a steamroller and then somehow overinflated, with lamb ghosh and rice and dahl and rice and chicken korma and rice and green onion salad and pakhoras and onion bahjees. And mango. And more sweet milky tea. God, he couldn’t bear to think about it.

  His skin crawled with nicotine cravings, and he had to stop himself from breaking into a jog as he walked down the front path and closed the garden gate. At the car, he wrenched open the glovebox and pulled
out its contents looking for cigarettes, hoping without hope that some long-forgotten second pack was hiding in there.

  —

  ROHIMUN ONLY RELUCTANTLY decided to get out when her shivering had become continuous: she must have been in the water half an hour at least. She scrambled onto the stone steps and stood awkwardly to towel and dress, her body leaden and cold, missing the river’s buoyancy. But she felt fresh and clean, and not at all tired.

  Without the restriction of underwear, the muslin top and pants were cool and airy against her skin. She wrapped the towel around her head, and her hair hung heavily down her back, its dripping ends brushing against her bottom as she walked up the slope to the Abbey. Her restlessness and claustrophobia were gone, and her fingers itched for dawn, to hold the paintbrush, to start mixing white spirit into the yellows so they would go on as a thin, watery wash, like a beam of morning sunlight.

  By the time Rohimun had paced up to the Abbey’s great main door, she was warm again. She stopped there, reluctant to go straight into the black, airless interior, but also wanting to clarify her thoughts about the painting before she headed upstairs.

  She unwound the towel from her hair. In the toiletry bag somewhere was an elastic. She wove her hair into a loose plait, swinging her hair to her side to continue plaiting when she could no longer reach behind. She hadn’t done this in months, except for that last night in London: Simon had hated her plait, called it low-rent ethnic, to go with a sari and cardigan in the high street.

  In the painting, the figure and its landscape were static and the rose hovered stilly. It was only the hair that was active, powerful, dynamic. A force of nature? Of womanhood or sexuality? Or maybe it was freedom. Her scalp crawled at the memory of the weighty chignon that was Simon’s preferred dress-up style for her, so tight it was an effort to blink. And then there’d been the patronizing advice of the women in his clubby London crowd, to get her hair straightened or to crop it, telling her she was too short to carry that much hair, that it made her look like Cousin Itt.

  She remembered Mum plaiting her hair, could almost feel her fingers, her voice telling her to stop wriggling, that it was her one beauty. And Bai pulling on it at school, saying she didn’t need to get a paintbrush, she had one already. When she reached the ends, she slipped the elastic over the plait then squeezed it out so that it left a pattern of drops on the moonlit flagstones. Plaiting it wet like this, it would take two days to dry, but it would be a cool line down the middle of her back while she painted, and a connection to the past that, for once, she was happy to have.

  She would paint the hair wilder, she thought, as she ran up the stairs: each flying lock thick and solid, but also more snaky and sinuous. Hair with muscle and movement, rather than shine: Medusa, rather than a shampoo commercial.

  —

  BY THE TIME Richard pulled up in front of the Lodge, the clock read a quarter past midnight. The options, of a half-hour drive to the nearest motorway service station to buy some smokes, or letting himself into the Lodge and trying to sleep in that bloody Batman sofa bed, were equally unattractive. There was no way he could sleep feeling like this. He couldn’t even sit comfortably in the car. A small, painful burp escaped. He was Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote after that last fatal wafer. He had to get out, get some fresh air.

  Outside the car, the air was pleasantly warm, and there was a soft homogeneity about the country darkness, entirely different from London’s busy evenings, where the night was continually displaced by streetlights, car lights, shop windows.

  He put his keys in his pocket and started to walk, moving off the gravel and away from the house as soon as he could so he wouldn’t disturb anyone, breathing deeply in an effort to clear his head. After the low-ceilinged clutter of the Choudhurys’ cottage, the flat silent fields, punctuated by mature oaks, seemed gigantic and simple and dignified, like Norman churches or concrete sports stadiums. His eyes adjusted to the dark, and even the headache seemed to lift a little. Jesus, he hoped that was the worst of it. He had given up before, but never cold turkey from the pack a day that he had crept up to over the last twelve months. The thought of another day like this gave him the horrors.

  Going this way, there was only one field between him and the Park proper, and he began to walk diagonally across it, long grass swishing noisily against his legs, punctuated by the intermittent scutter of a rabbit or rat in the hedgerows, disturbed by his regular strides. He should be heading directly for the Abbey. What was to be done about the girl, Rohimun Choudhury? Or was it Begum? He’d assumed too much already. She couldn’t stay at the Abbey indefinitely: that much was clear. Dr. Choudhury of all people must be aware that it was only a matter of weeks now before Henry and Thea moved back in. And the disappearance of the photos once Choudhury came home, the absence of discussion of their middle child, did not bode well for her father allowing her home anytime soon. Surely there was some way he could help, a reason for her to need him.

  The idea of pilgrimage came back to him: how it was seen as more pious to journey by foot, and to travel lightly as a sign of one’s detachment from material things; how the most zealous, or perhaps those most in need of redemption, would go great distances barefoot, or even on their knees. Giving up smoking was certainly a penance. But where was he travelling to?

  A dark presence loomed ahead: the Abbey. He paused, trying to orient himself. It must be the western wall. The rose garden should be close by. When he thought of her, he had several images now. There were the photos taken before he knew her: a cheeky, happy schoolgirl with her brother, a resentful overdressed teenager. And then his own memories: her flying run as she left the exhibition with her brother, the fierceness of her expression as she half lay on him with the palette knife, her hair falling over his face and chest. And the woman in the painting, communing with the gigantic rose as it shed golden light over her visage.

  He followed the yew hedge that marked one side of the sunken rose garden, one of his favorite places. He stepped through the Romanesque archway and stood amongst the bushes. He could just make out the garden’s four quarters, separated by little clay channels and a central, circular depression, recently excavated: a Celtic cross design, he recalled Henry saying. Henry and his ghosts. Was Henry’s ghost sleeping? He thought of the ghost stories they used to scare each other with as children, while their mother wandered, alone and lonely, through the galleries and halls.

  Had Mother left an impression here, her misery a vibration that had sunk into stone and wood, flags and threadbare carpets? Or had all trace of her disappeared when she’d been taken to London for treatment, a wraith even before she’d departed. He’d tried to hold on to her the morning she’d left in the car. Her sickly nicotinic sherry-sweetness had been almost tangible in the air, but her thin, narrow palms, the soft pebbled tweed of her skirt, had slipped through his fingers, impossible to grasp. Even now he could see the flash of her pale nape, between coiffed hair and collar, as she turned into the interior of the taxi. His father’s hearty falseness. “Mummy’ll be back soon. When she’s well. Who’s for a game of checkers?”

  He’d run up to her room then and seen her hairbrushes and scent bottles gone from the dressing table, with only circles of dust to mark their passing. The wardrobe half empty, her best coat gone from its special hanger, and the empty sherry bottles cleared away. That afternoon he and Henry had fought hard and bloodily in the stable yard. Henry still had the scar from that fight: a small chunk taken out from between his eyebrows, courtesy of one of the garden stakes they had been lunging with. But Richard carried no mark from that day. Nothing at all.

  As he left the rose garden, the wall of the Abbey was before him, and he rested his hand on the stonework. He was near enough to see the green room’s windows now, glassily blank, dark as any of the others. Was Rohimun asleep? Here he was, under her window like some minstrel lover. All he needed was some particolored tights and a lute. He felt no closer to kno
wing what to say to her, despite so much having changed since last week, at least from his perspective. And this business of the media.

  He froze as a window squeaked open above him. There was a clatter, then something hit his shoulder, fell to his feet, and he heard her voice, low and clear, “Shit.”

  He touched his shirt and his fingers came away wet; crouched down and found a paintbrush. He shook it a couple of times over the grass and set off for the main entrance, making no effort to tread softly on the gravel. He wasn’t sneaking up back stairs anymore.

  He was halfway up the main stairs when he heard her coming, saw her flying down the treads in loose white pants and a tunic of some fabric so light that it caught the air and floated around her as she moved. She hadn’t seen him though, so he cleared his throat in warning, and she gave a small cry and stopped, gripping the balustrade.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me, Richard Bourne,” he said, some of the old Blimp awkwardness creeping back. “You dropped your brush.” He held it out to her.

  “Oh.” After a small hesitation, she came forward and snatched it out of his fingers. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He leaned toward her a little, although he didn’t intend to. “Rohimun Choudhury. Ah, Begum.”

  She stared back at him levelly, beginning to catch her breath. “Choudhury.”

  He fought down the urge to apologize again. “I just wanted you to know I didn’t realize you were Dr. Choudhury’s daughter. I’ve just been at your parents’ for dinner.”