Deception on His Mind (41 page)

The fact that Akram had perceived Theo as decent was what made his interaction with Sahlah acceptable. Despite his own affection for them, Akram would have preferred that his daughter had no contact with Western men. Everything about a daughter of Asia was to be safeguarded and kept in trust for a future husband: from the moulding of her mind to the protection of her chastity. Indeed, her chastity was nearly as important as her dowry, and no step was too great to take if it could ensure that a woman went to her husband a virgin. Since Western men did not hold these same values, it was from them that Akram had to guard his daughter from the onset of puberty. But he put aside any and all worries when it had come to Theo Shaw.

“He's from a good family, an old town family,” Akram had explained, as if this fact made a difference in his level of acceptability. “He'll work with us to set up a system that will modernise every aspect of the company. We'll have computerised word processing for correspondence, spread sheets for accounting, programs for marketing, and desktop design for advertising and labelling. He's done this already for the pier, he tells me, and he says that within six months we'll see the results in accumulated man hours as well as in increased sales.”

No one had argued against the wisdom of accepting Theo Shaw's help, not even Muhannad, who was least likely to welcome an Englishman into their midst if that Englishman were to be in any position of superiority, even one as arcane as computer expertise. So Theo Shaw had come to Malik's Mustards, setting up the computer programs that would revolutionise the manner in which the factory did business. He'd trained the staff to operate these same programs. And among the staff had been Sahlah herself.

She hadn't intended to love him. She knew what was expected of her as an Asian daughter, despite her English birth. She would marry a man carefully chosen by her parents because, having her interests at heart and knowing her better than she knew herself, her parents would be able to identify the qualities in a prospective husband most complementary to her own.

“Marriage,” Wardah Malik had often told her, “is like the joining of two hands. Palms meet”—she demonstrated by holding her own hands up in an attitude of prayer—”and fingers intertwine. Similarity of size, shape, and texture make this joining both smooth and lasting.”

Sahlah couldn't have this joining with Theo Shaw. Asian parents did not choose Western men for their daughters to marry. Such a choice would only serve to adulterate the mother culture from which the daughter sprang. And that was unthinkable.

So she hadn't considered Theo anything other than the young man—affable, attractive, and casual in a way that only Western men were casual with a woman—who was doing a friendly service for Malik's Mustards. She hadn't really thought of him at all until he placed the stone on her desk.

He'd earlier admired her jewellery, the necklaces and earrings fabricated from antique coins and Victorian buttons, from African and Tibetan beads intricately carved by hand, even from feathers and copperas that she and Rachel collected on the Nez. He'd said, “That's nice, that necklace you're wearing. It's quite different, isn't it?” And when she'd told him she made it, he'd been openly impressed.

Had she been trained in jewellery making? he'd wanted to know.

Hardly, she'd thought. She'd have had to go off somewhere to school to be educated in her craft, perhaps to Colchester or regions beyond. That would have taken her away from her family, away from the business where she was needed.
It's not allowed
was what she wanted to say. But she'd told him instead a version of the truth. I like to teach myself things, she'd informed him. It's more fun that way.

The next day when she'd come into work, the stone had been on her desk. But it wasn't a stone, Theo explained to her. It was a fossil, the fin of a holostean fish from the Upper Triassic period. “I like its shape, the way the edges look feathered.” He coloured slightly. “I thought you might be able to use it for a necklace. As a centerpiece or something …? I mean, whatever you call it.”

“It would make a fine pendant.” Sahlah turned the stone in her hand. “But I'd have to drill a hole through it. You wouldn't mind that?”

Oh, the jewellery wasn't for him, he told her hastily. He meant her to use the fossil in a necklace for herself. He collected fossils out on the Nez, where the cliffs were collapsing, you see. He'd been looking through his display trays last night. He'd realised this particular fossil had a look and a shape that might lend it to being used artistically. So if she thought she could make something of it and with it, well … she was quite welcome to keep it.

Sahlah had known that to accept the stone—no matter how innocently it had been offered—would be to cross an invisible line with Theo Shaw. And she saw the part of herself that was Asian lowering her head and quietly sliding the serrated bit of prehistoric fish across the desk in polite refusal of the gift. But the part of herself that was English took action first, fingers closing round the fossil and voice saying, “Thank you. I know I can use it. I'll show you the necklace when I've finished it, if you'd like.”

“I'd like that very much indeed,” he said. Then he'd smiled and an unspoken bargain had been struck between them. Her jewellery making would be their excuse for conversation. His fossil collecting would justify their continuing to meet.

But one did not fall in love because a single stone or a thousand stones passed from a man's hand into a woman's. And Sahlah Malik hadn't fallen in love with Theo Shaw because of a stone. Indeed, until she was in the midst of loving him, she hadn't even realised that there was a simple word of four letters that explained the softness she felt round her heart, the yearning she experienced in the palms of her hands, the warmth that rose from her throat, and the lightness of body as if she had no real body when Theo was present or when she heard his voice.

“White man's slag,” Muhannad had cursed her, and she'd heard the hiss—like a snake's—in his words. “You're going to pay. The way all whores pay.”

But she wouldn't think of it, she wouldn't, she
wouldn't.

Sahlah raised her head from her arms and looked down at the paper, the pencil, the beads, the beginning of a sketch that was no sketch because nothing within her could create a design or put objects together in a pattern that was balanced and pleasing to the eye. She was lost, now. She was paying the price. She'd been awakened to a longing that couldn't be met within the narrow definition of the life she was expected to lead, and she'd begun to pay the price for this longing months before Haytham's advent among them.

Haytham would have saved her. He possessed an earnest concern for others that set the self aside, and because he was capable of acts of generosity beyond her ken, he greeted the news of her pregnancy with a question that swept aside both her guilt and her fear. “And have you carried this dreadful burden these two months all alone, my Sahlah?”

She hadn't wept until that moment. They'd been sitting in the orchard, side by side on the wooden bench whose back legs slid too far into the soil. Their shoulders had been touching but nothing else touching, until she confided in him. She hadn't been able to look at him as she spoke, knowing how much depended upon the next few minutes of conversation. She couldn't believe he would take her as his wife once he knew that she carried another man's child. But by the same token, she couldn't bring herself to marry him and then to attempt to pass off the birth of a healthy baby as the birth of an infant that would have to be taken as at least two months premature. Besides, he'd been in no immediate hurry to marry, and her parents had seen in his suggestion that they wait not a reluctance to fulfill his part of the marital agreement but a wise man's decision to learn to know the woman who would be his wife. … before she became his wife. But Sahlah had no leisure to pursue an acquaintance with Haytham Querashi.

So she'd had to speak. And then she'd had to wait, her future and her family's honour held in the palm of a man she'd known less than one week. “And have you carried this dreadful burden these two months all alone, my Sahlah?” And when his arm went round her shoulders, Sahlah realised that she'd been saved.

She'd wanted to ask him how he could take her as she was: defiled by another, pregnant with that other's child, tainted by the touch of a man who could never be her husband. I've sinned and I've paid the price of sinning, she wanted to say. But she said nothing, merely weeping in near silence and waiting for him to decide her fate.

“So we'll marry sooner than I had expected,” he'd said meditatively. “Unless … Sahlah, you don't wish to marry your child's father?”

She'd clenched her hands together between her thighs. Her words were fierce. “I don't. I can't.”

“Because your parents …?”

“I can't. If they knew, it would destroy them. I'd be cast out. …” She could say nothing else as the grief and fear within her—so long held in check—were finally given release.

And Haytham required no other explanation from her. He'd repeated his initial question: Had she carried the burden alone? Once he understood that she had, he sought only to share it and to comfort her.

Or so she had concluded, Sahlah thought now. But Haytham was a Muslim. Traditional and religious at heart, he would have been deeply offended at the notion that some other man had touched the woman meant to be his wife. He would have sought a confrontation with that man, and once Rachel had alerted him to the existence of a gold bracelet, a very special gold bracelet, a gift of love …

All too clearly, Sahlah could picture the meeting between them: Haytham asking for it and Theo eager to comply. “Give me time,” he'd begged her when she'd told him she would marry a man from Pakistan chosen by her parents. “For God's sake, Sahlah. Give me more time.” And he would have struck out to buy himself that time, eliminating the man who stood between them in order to prevent what he saw he couldn't stop: her marriage.

Now she had a surfeit of time and no time at all. A surfeit of time because there was no man waiting in the wings to rescue her from disgrace in such a way that she would not lose her family as a result. No time at all because a new life grew in her body and promised the destruction of all that she knew, held dear, and depended upon. If she did not act decisively and as soon as possible.

Behind her, the bedroom door opened. Sahlah turned as her mother entered the room. Wardah's head was covered modestly. Despite the unabating heat of the day, her entire body was clothed so that only her hands and her face were bare. Her choice of dress was dark, as was her custom, as if she were permanently in mourning over a death that she never acknowledged in words.

She came across the room and touched her daughter's shoulder. Silently, she removed Sahlah's
dupattā,
and loosened her hair from its single plait. She took a hairbrush from the chest of drawers. She began to brush her daughter's hair. Sahlah couldn't see her mother's face, but she could feel the love in her fingers, and she could sense the tenderness in every stroke of the brush.

“You didn't come into the kitchen,” Wardah said. “I missed you. I thought at first that you weren't home yet. But Yumn heard you come in.”

And Yumn would have reported, Sahlah thought. She'd be maliciously eager for her mother-in-law to know Sahlah's every lapse in duty. “I wanted a few minutes,” Sahlah said. “I'm sorry,
Ammī
Have you started dinner?”

“The lentils only.”

“Then shall I—”

Wardah pressed her daughter's shoulders gently when Sahlah would have risen. “I can cook the dinner with my eyes closed, Sahlah. I missed your company. That's all.” She curled a long lock of Sahlah's hair round her hand as she brushed it. She laid the lock against Sahlah's back and chose another, saying, “Shall we speak to each other?”

Sahlah felt the pain of her mother's question like a fist that was gripping her heart. How many times since her childhood had Wardah said those same six words to her daughter? A thousand times? A hundred thousand? They were an invitation to share confidences: secrets, dreams, puzzling questions, ruffled feelings, private hopes. And the invitation was always extended with the implicit promise that what was said between mother and daughter was to be held in trust.

Tell me what happens with a man and a woman.
And Sahlah had listened—both frightened and awestruck—as Wardah explained what occurred when a man and a woman bound themselves to each other in marriage.

But how do parents know what person is good for a marriage to one of their children?
And Wardah quietly delineated all the ways in which fathers and mothers are fully capable of knowing their children's hearts and minds.

And you,
Ammī?
Were you ever frightened to marry someone you didn't know?
More frightened to come to England, Wardah told her. But she'd trusted Akram to do what was best for her, just as she'd trusted her father to choose a man who would care for her throughout life.

But weren't you ever afraid in your life? Even to meet
Abhy-jahn? Naturally, her mother said. But she'd known her duty, and when Akram Malik had been presented to her, she'd thought him a good man, a man with whom she could make a life.

This is what we aspire to as women, Wardah told her in those quiet moments when she and her daughter lay side by side on Sahlah's bed in the darkness before Sahlah fell asleep. We achieve fulfillment as women by meeting the needs of our husbands and our children, and by sending our children into marriages of their own with suitable mates.

True contentment grows from tradition, Sahlah. And tradition binds us together as a people.

In these nighttime conversations with her mother, the room's shadows hid their faces from each other and freed them to speak their hearts. But now … Sahlah wondered how she could possibly speak to her mother. She wanted to do so. She yearned to open her heart to Wardah, to receive the comfort and to feel the safety that her mother's quiet presence had always provided her. Yet to seek that comfort and safety now meant to speak a truth that would destroy the very possibility of comfort and safety forever.