Deception on His Mind (79 page)

Just for a moment with Rachel, she'd felt relief. When her friend had said, “I've gone and done it,” such a weight had lifted from Sahlah's shoulders that she'd actually thought she might become airborne. But when it had become apparent that going and doing it had meant acquiring a flat into which Sahlah knew she would never move, despair had descended upon her forcefully. Rachel had been her only hope to rid herself of the overt mark of her sin against her religion and her family, doing it in perfect secrecy and with minimum risk. Now, she knew, she was going to have to strike out on her own. And she couldn't even begin to determine the first move she had to make.

“Sahlah?
Sahlah?”

She started at the sound of her name, said in the same hushed tone that he'd used in the pear orchard on those nights that they'd met. Theo stood to her right, stopped dead in his progress to his grandmother's room, one hand holding a can of Coke that was beaded with moisture.

She reached without thinking for the pendant she wore, as much to cover it up from him as to hold it in a form of taking sanctuary. But he'd seen the fossil, and he obviously made an interpretation from the fact that she was wearing it, because he came to the bench on which she was sitting and he sat down next to her. He set his Coke on the floor. She watched him do it. Then she kept her eyes on the can's aluminium top.

“Rachel told me, Sahlah,” he said. “She thinks—”

“I know what she thinks,” Sahlah whispered. She wanted to tell Theo to leave or at least to stand across the corridor and pretend their conversation was nothing save an expression of concern over his grandmother's condition on her part and a polite offering of gratitude for that concern on his. But the very nearness of him after the long weeks of not seeing him was like an intoxicant to her. Her heart wanted more and more of it even as her mind told her that the only way she could serve herself and ultimately survive was to accept less.

“How could you
do
it?” he asked. “I've been asking myself that question over and over since I talked to her.”

“Please, Theo. It doesn't help to talk about it.”

“Doesn't help?” He asked the question bitterly. “That's fine with me, because I don't much care if it doesn't help. I loved you, Sahlah. You said you loved me.”

The top of the Coke can shimmered in her vision. She blinked quickly and kept her head lowered. Around them, the work of the hospital went on. Orderlies hurried by with trolleys in front of them, doctors made their rounds, nurses carried small trays of medication into their patients. But she and Theo were divided from them as effectively as if they'd been encased in glass.

“What I've been wondering,” Theo said, “is how long it took you to decide you loved Querashi instead of me. What was it, a day? A week? Two? Or maybe it didn't happen at all because, like you kept telling me, your people's ways don't make love necessary when it comes to marriage. Isn't that how you put it?”

Sahlah could feel the blood beating fiercely behind the birthmark on her cheek. There was no way that she could make him understand when his understanding demanded a truth from her that she would not part with.

“I've also been wondering how it happened and where. You'll forgive me for that, I hope, because you'll understand that for the last six weeks I've thought of practically nothing else but how and where it
didn't
happen between the two of us. It could have, but it didn't. Oh, we came close enough, didn't we? On Horsey Island. Even that time in the orchard, when your brother—”

“Theo,” Sahlah said. “Please don't do this to us.”

“There isn't an us. I thought there was. Even when Querashi showed up—just like you said he was going to show up—I thought there still was. I wore that fucking bracelet—”

She flinched from the term. He wasn't, she saw, wearing the bracelet now.

“—and I kept thinking, She knows she doesn't have to marry him. She knows she can refuse to do it because there's no way in hell that her dad will make her marry anyone against her will. Her dad's Asian, yes. But he's English as well. Maybe more English than she is, really. But the days went by and turned into weeks and Querashi stayed. He
stayed
and your father brought him round to the Cooperative and introduced him as his son. ‘In a few weeks, he joins our family,’ he told me. ‘He takes our Sahlah as his bride.’ And I had to listen and offer best wishes and all the time I wanted to—”

“No!” She couldn't bear to hear the admission. And if he thought her refusal to listen meant her love for him was dead, that was just as well.

“Here's how it was at night,” Theo said. His words were terse. Their sound limned his bitterness. “During the day I could forget about everything and just work myself into a stupor. But at night I had nothing but the thought of you. And while I couldn't sleep and I couldn't much eat, I could deal with that because all along I thought you would be thinking of me as well. She'll tell her dad tonight, I kept thinking. Querashi will leave. And then we'll have time, Sahlah and I, time and a chance.”

“We never had either. I tried to tell you that. You didn't want to believe me.”

“And you? What did you want, Sahlah? Why did you come to me those nights in the orchard?”

“I can't explain it,” she whispered hopelessly.

“That's the thing about games. No one can ever bloody explain them.”

“I wasn't playing a game with you. What I felt was real. Who I was was real.”

“Right. Fine. And I'm sure that was true for you and Haytham Querashi as well.” He started to rise.

She stopped him, her hand reaching out and closing on the bare flesh of his arm. “Help me,” she said, looking at him finally. She'd forgotten the exact blue-green of his eyes, the mole next to his mouth, the fall of his soft blond hair. She was startled by his sudden proximity and frightened by her body's response to the simple sensation of her hand's touching him. She knew she had to release him, but she couldn't. Not until he'd committed would she let him go. He was her only chance. “Rachel won't, Theo. Please. Help me.”

“Get rid of Querashi's kid, you mean? Why?”

“Because my parents …” How could she possibly explain?

“What about them? Oh, your dad'll probably be bloody well cheesed off when he hears you're pregnant. But if the kid's a boy, he'll adjust quick enough. Just tell him you and Querashi were so hot for each other that you couldn't wait until after the ceremony.”

Beyond the rank injustice of his words—born however they were from his own suffering—their sheer brutality forced the truth from her. “This isn't Haytham's baby,” she said. And then she dropped her hand from his arm. “I was already two months pregnant when Haytham came to Balford.”

Theo stared at her, disbelieving. Then she could see him trying to bleed the full extent of the truth from an agonised study of her face. He said, “What the hell …?” But the question died before he finished it. He merely repeated the opening part, saying, “Sahlah, what the
bloody
hell …?”

“I need your help,” she said. “I'm begging for your help.”

“Whose is it?” he asked. “If it isn't Haytham's …Sahlah, whose is it?”

“Please help me do what I need to do. Who can I phone? Is there a clinic? It can't be in Balford. I can't take that chance. But in Clacton …? There must be something in Clacton. Someone there who can help me, Theo. Quietly and quickly so my parents don't know. Because if they find out, it will kill them. Believe me. It will kill them, Theo. And not only them.”

“Who else?”

“Please.”

“Sahlah.” His hand closed fiercely on her upper arm. It was as if he sensed in her tone everything that she could not bring herself to say. “What happened? That night. Tell me. What happened?”

You're going to pay, he'd said, the way all whores pay.

“I brought it on myself,” she said brokenly, “because I didn't care what he thought. Because I told him I loved you.”

“Oh
God,”
he whispered and his hand fell from her arm.

T
HE DOOR TO
Agatha Shaw's hospital room opened, and Sahlah's father stepped out. He closed it carefully behind him. He looked bewildered to see his daughter and Theo Shaw in earnest conversation. But his face warmed in an instant, perhaps with the certainty that Sahlah was doing her part to bring herself into the garden underneath which the rivers flowed.

He said, “Ah. Theo. I'm so very happy that we won't have left the hospital without seeing you. I've just spoken to your grandmother, and I've given her my assurance—as a friend and town councillor—that her plans for Balford's renaissance will go forward unchanged and unimpeded in any way.”

Next to her, Theo rose. Sahlah did likewise. She ducked her head modestly, and in doing so, she hid from her father's vision the telltale sign of her birthmark's painful throbbing.

“Thank you, Mr. Malik,” Theo said. “That's good of you. Gran will more than appreciate your kindness.”

“Very good,” Akram said. “And now, Sahlah my dear, shall we be on our way?”

Sahlah nodded. She cast Theo a fleeting look. The young man had gone pale beneath his light tan, and he was gazing from Akram to her and back to Akram as if he sought but failed to find something to say. He was her only hope, and like every other hope she'd once harboured about love and life, he was fading from her.

She said, “It was lovely talking to you again, Theo. I hope your grandmother recovers quickly.”

He said, “Thank you,” stiffly.

Sahlah felt her father take her arm, and she allowed herself to be led towards the lift at the end of the corridor. Each step seemed to take her away from safety. And then Theo spoke.

“Mr. Malik,” he said.

Akram stopped, turned. He looked pleasantly attentive. Theo rejoined them.

“I was wondering,” Theo said. “I mean, forgive me if I'm out of place, because I don't pretend to know exactly what's right in this situation. But would you very much mind if I took Sahlah to lunch one day next week? There's a …well, there's a jewellery exhibit—it's at Green Lodge, where they do the summer courses—and as Sahlah makes jewellery, I thought she might like to see it.”

Akram cocked his head and considered the request. He looked at his daughter as if gauging her readiness for such an adventure. He said, “You are a good friend of the family, Theo. I can see no objection, if Sahlah wishes to go. Do you, Sahlah?”

She raised her head. “Green Lodge,” she said. “Where is that, Theo?”

His reply was as even as was his expression. “It's in Clacton,” he told her.

UMN KNEADED THE SMALL OF HER BACK AND USED
her foot to kick the trug ahead of her in her assigned rows of her mother-in-law's loathsome vegetable garden. Sullenly, she watched Wardah cultivating two rows over—hovering over a vine of chillis with the devotion of a newlywed wife to her husband—and she wished upon the older woman everything foul that was humanly possible, from sun stroke to leprosy. It was approximately two million bloody degrees, working there among the plants. And to accompany the unbearable, deadly temperature, which that morning had been declared a record high by the BBC Breakfast News, the insect life in Wardah's garden was making a feast of more than the tomatoes, peppers, onions, and beans upon which they normally sated themselves. Gnats and flies buzzed round Yumn's head like malicious satellites. They landed on her perspiring face, while spiders worked their way beneath her
dupattā
and tiny green caterpillars dropped from vine leaves onto her shoulders. She flailed her hands and raged, attempting to drive the flies in her mother-in-law's direction.

This torment was yet another offence committed by Wardah against her. Any other mother-in-law, filled with what ought to have been gratitude at having been presented with two grandchildren in such rapid succession and so soon after her son's marriage—would have insisted that Yumn rest herself beneath the walnut tree at the edge of the garden, where even at this moment her children—two
male
children—rolled their toy lorries along the miniature thoroughfare created by a space between the old tree's roots. Any other mother-in-law would have recognised that a woman on the verge of another pregnancy should not even be
relaxing
in the blazing sunlight, let alone be toiling in it. Hard manual labour wasn't good for a woman in her childbearing years, Yumn told herself. But try sharing that bit of information with Wardah, Wardah the Wonder, who'd spent the entire day of her son Muhannad's birth washing every window of the house, cooking dinner for her husband, and scrubbing the dishes, the pots, and the kitchen floor before she squatted in the larder to deliver the baby. No. Wardah Malik was unlikely to see temperatures rising to thirty-five degrees as anything other than a minor inconvenience, just as she'd seen the hose pipe ban.