Deception on His Mind (6 page)

“We are.”

“Then—”

“I can't reciprocate. I haven't the money, and even if I had …” Sahlah went back to folding the garment, letting her sentence hang.

Rachel finished it for her. She'd known her friend long enough to realise what she was thinking. “You'd give it to your parents. You wouldn't spend it on me.”

“The money. Yes.”
It's what we generally do
was what she didn't add. She'd said it so often over the eleven years of their friendship—and she'd repeated it endlessly since first making Rachel aware of her intentions to marry a Pakistani stranger chosen by her parents—that there was no need for her to tack the sentence on to the declarations she'd already made.

Before coming to the house, Rachel hadn't considered the possibility that her visit to Sahlah might actually make her feel worse than she'd been feeling for the last few weeks. She'd seen her future as a form of syllogism: Sahlah's fiancé was dead; Sahlah was alive; ergo, Sahlah was free to resume her position as Rachel's best friend and the dearest companion of her future life. Apparently, however, this wasn't to be.

Rachel's stomach churned. She felt light in the head. After everything she'd done, after everything she'd known, after everything she'd been told and had loyally kept to herself because that's what friends did when they were best friends, right …?

“I want you to have it.” Rachel strove for the sort of tone one used when paying a visit to a house where death had paid a visit first. “I just came to say that I'm most awfully sorry about … well, about your … loss.”

“Rachel,” Sahlah said quietly. “Please don't.”

“I understand how bereft you must be. Despite your having known him for so short a time, I'm sure you must have come to love him. Because—” She could hear her voice tightening. It soon would be shrill. “Because I know you wouldn't marry anyone you didn't love, Sahlah. You always said you'd never do that. So it only stands to reason that when you first saw Haytham, your heart just flew to him. And when he put his hand on your arm—his damp, clammy hand—you knew he was the one. That's what happened, isn't it? And that's why you're so cut up now.”

“I know it's hard for you to understand.”

“Except you don't look cut up. At least not about Haytham. I wonder why. Does your dad wonder why?”

She was saying things she didn't mean to say. It was as if her voice had a life all its own, and there was nothing she could do to bring it under control.

“You don't know what's going on inside me,” Sahlah declared quietly, almost fiercely. “You want to judge me by your own standards, and you can't because they're different to mine.”

“Like I'm different to you,” Rachel added, and the words were bitter. “Isn't that right?”

Sahlah's voice softened. “We're friends, Rachel. We've always been and we'll always be friends.”

The assertion wounded Rachel more than any repudiation could have done. Because she knew the statement was just a statement. True though it may have been, it wasn't a promise.

Rachel fished in the breast pocket of her blouse and brought out the crumpled brochure she'd been carrying with her for more than two months. She'd looked at it so often that she'd memorised its pictures and their accompanying pitch for the Clifftop Snuggeries, two-bedroom flats in three oblong brick buildings. As their name suggested, they sat above the sea on the South Promenade. Depending upon which model one chose, the flats had either balconies or terraces, but in either case they each had a view: the Balford pleasure pier to the north or the endless grey-green stretch of sea to the east.

“These are the flats.” Rachel unfolded the brochure. She didn't hand it over because somehow she knew that Sahlah would refuse to take it from her. “I got enough money saved to make the down payment. I could do that.”

“Rachel, won't you try to see how things are in my world?”

“I mean, I
want
to do that. I'd see to it that your name—as well as my own—went on the deed. Each month, you'd only have to pay—”

”I can't.”

“You
can,”
Rachel insisted. “You only think you can't because of how you've been brought up. But you don't need to live like this for the rest of your life. No one else does.”

The older boy stirred in the cot and whimpered in his sleep. Sahlah went back to him. Neither child was covered—it was far too warm in the room for that—so there was no adjustment to make in any bedclothes. Sahlah brushed her hand lightly against the boy's forehead. Asleep, he changed positions, his rump in the air.

“Rachel,” Sahlah said, keeping her eyes on her nephew, “Haytham is dead, but that doesn't end my obligation to my family. If my father chooses another man for me tomorrow, I'll marry him. I must.”

“Must?
That's mad. You didn't even know him. You won't know the next one. What about—”

“No.
It's what I want to do.”

Her voice was quiet, but there was no mistaking what the firmness of her tone implied. She was saying,
The past is dead
without saying it. But she'd forgotten one thing. Haytham Querashi was dead as well.

Rachel went to the ironing board and finished folding the coat. She was as careful about the task as Sahlah had been about folding the nappies. She brought the hem up to meet the shoulders. She formed the sides into thin wedges which she tucked into the waist. From the cot, Sahlah watched her.

When she had returned the coat to its box and tapped the lid on it, Rachel spoke again. “We always talked about how it would be.”

“We were little then. It's easy to have dreams when you're just a child.”

“You thought I wouldn't remember them.”

“I thought you'd outgrow them.”

The remark smarted, probably much more than Sahlah intended. It indicated the extent to which she had changed, the extent to which the circumstances of her life had changed her. It also indicated the degree to which Rachel had not changed at all. “Like you've outgrown them?” she asked.

Sahlah's gaze faltered under Rachel's. Her hand went to one of the bars on the children's cot, and her fingers grasped it. “Believe me, Rachel. This is what I must do.”

She looked as if she was trying to say more, but Rachel had no ability to draw inferences. She tried to read Sahlah's face to understand what emotion and meaning underlay her statement. But she couldn't grasp it. So she said, “Why? Because it's your way? Because your father insists? Because you'll be thrown out of your family if you don't do like you're told?”

“All of that's true.”

“But there's more, isn't there? Isn't there more?” Rachel hurried on. “It doesn't matter if your family throw you out. I'll take care of you, Sahlah. We'll be together. I won't let anything bad happen to you.”

Sahlah let out a soft, ironic laugh. She turned to the window and looked at the afternoon sunshine that beat relentlessly down on the garden, drying the soil, desiccating the lawn, robbing the flowers of life. “The bad's already happened,” she said. “Where were you to stop it?”

The question chilled Rachel as no breath of cool wind could have done. They suggested that Sahlah had come to know the lengths to which Rachel had been willing to go in order to preserve their friendship. Her courage faltered. But she couldn't leave the house without knowing the truth. She didn't want to be faced with it, because if the truth was what she thought it might be, she would also be faced with the knowledge that she herself had been the cause of their friendship's demise. But there was no way round it that Rachel could see. She had barged her way in where she wasn't wanted. Now she would have to learn the cost.

“Sahlah,” she said, “did Haytham—” She hesitated. How to ask it without admitting the ugly extent to which she'd been willing to betray her friend?

“What?” Sahlah asked. “Did Haytham what?”

“Did he mention me at all to you? Ever?”

Sahlah looked so bewildered at the question that Rachel had her answer. It was accompanied by a swelling of relief so sweet that she tasted its sugar on the back of her tongue. Haytham Querashi had died saying nothing, she realised. For the moment, at least, Rachel Winfield was safe.

• • •

F
ROM THE WINDOW,
Sahlah watched her friend pedal off on her bicycle. She was riding toward the Greensward. She meant to return home by way of the seafront. Her route would take her directly past the Clifftop Snuggeries, where she'd harboured her dreams despite everything Sahlah had said and done to illustrate that they'd taken different paths.

At heart, Rachel was no different to the little girl she'd been at the junior school where she and Sahlah had first stumbled across each other. She'd had plastic surgery to build relatively reasonable features out of the disastrous face she'd been born with, but beneath those features she was still the same child: always hopeful, eager, and filled with plans no matter how impractical.

Sahlah had done her best to explain that Rachel's master plan—the plan that they should purchase a flat and live together into old age like the two social misfits they were—could not be realised. Her father would not allow her to set up house in such a fashion, with another woman and away from the family. And even if in a fit of madness he decided to allow his only daughter to adopt such an aberrant lifestyle, Sahlah herself could not do it. She might have done, once. But now it was too late.

Each ticking moment made it later still. Haytham's death was in so many ways her own. If he had lived, nothing would have mattered. Now he was dead, everything did.

She clasped her hands beneath her chin and closed her eyes, wishing for a breath of sea air to cool her body and still her feverish mind. Once in a novel—kept carefully hidden from her father, who wouldn't have approved—she had read the term “her mind raced wildly” about a desperate heroine and had not understood how a mind could possibly accomplish such an unusual feat. But now she knew. For her mind had been racing like a herd of gazelles ever since she knew that Haytham was dead. She'd considered every permutation of what to do, where to go, whom to see, how to act, and what to say from that moment forward. She'd come up with no answers. As a result, she'd become completely immobilised. Now she was the incarnation of waiting. But what she waited for she could not have said. Rescue, perhaps. Or a renewal of the ability to pray, something she'd once done five times a day with perfect devotion. It was lost to her now.

“Has the troll gone, then?”

Sahlah turned from the window to see Yumn lounging in the doorway, one shoulder against the jamb. “Are you speaking about Rachel?” Sahlah asked her.

Her sister-in-law advanced into the room, arms raised languidly as she plaited her hair. The braid that resulted was insubstantial, barely the thickness of a woman's little finger. Yumn's scalp showed through it unappealingly in places. “‘Are you speaking about Rachel?’ “Yumn mimicked. “Why do you always talk like a woman with a poker up her bum?” She laughed. She'd removed the
dupattā
she always wore, and without the scarf and with her hair pulled back and away from her face, her wandering eye looked more pronounced than usual. When she laughed, the eye seemed to skitter from side to side like the yolk of an uncooked egg. “Rub my back,” she ordered. “I want to be relaxed for your brother tonight.”

She went to the bed where her older child would soon start sleeping, and she kicked off her sandals and sank onto the azure counterpane. She swung her legs up and lay on her side. She said, “Sahlah, did you hear what I said? Rub my back.”

“Don't call Rachel a troll. She can't help what she looks like any more than—” Sahlah stopped herself short of the final two words.
Any more than you can
would be carried straight back to Muhannad, with a suitable amount of hysteria accompanying it. And Sahlah's brother would see that she paid for the insult to the mother of his sons.

Yumn observed her, smiling slyly. She so wanted Sahlah to complete the sentence. She'd enjoy nothing more than to hear the crack of Muhannad's palm on his younger sister's cheek. But Sahlah wouldn't give her the pleasure. Instead, she joined her at the bed and watched as Yumn removed her upper garments.

“I want the oil,” she instructed. “The one that smells of eucalyptus. And warm it in your hands first. I can't bear it cold.”

Sahlah fetched it obediently as Yumn stretched out on her side. Her body was showing the strain of two pregnancies that had followed so quickly one after the other. She was only twenty-four, but already her breasts were sagging and the second pregnancy had stretched her skin and added more weight to her sturdy frame. In another five years, if she adhered to her intention of producing annual offspring for Sahlah's brother, it was likely that she'd be nearly as wide as she was tall.

She coiled her braid to the top of her head and fastened it there with a hair pin she took from the bedside table. She said, “Begin.”

Sahlah did so, pouring the oil first into her palms and smoothing them together to warm it. She hated the thought of having to touch the other woman's flesh, but as the wife of her older brother, Yumn could make demands of Sahlah and could expect them to be carried out without protest.

Sahlah's marriage would have ended Yumn's suzerainty over her, not because of the mere fact of the marriage but because the marriage would have taken Sahlah out of her father's house and out from under Yumn's spatulate thumb. And unlike Yumn, who, despite her domineering ways, was forced to put up with a mother-in-law to whom she had to subjugate herself, Sahlah would have lived with Haytham alone, or at least until such a time as he began to send to Pakistan for his family. None of that would happen now. She was a prisoner, and everyone in the household on Second Avenue—save her two small nephews—was one of her gaolers.

“That's very nice,” Yumn sighed. “I want my skin to gleam. He likes it that way, your brother, Sahlah. It arouses him. And when he's aroused. …” She chuckled. “Men. What children they are. The demands they make. The desires they have. How miserable they can make us, eh? They fill us with babies at the wink of an eye. We have one son and before he's six weeks old, his father is upon us, wanting another. How lucky you are to have escaped this miserable fate,
bahin.”
Her lips curved, as if she had a source of amusement to which only she was privy.