“It seems to me that if they desire to be treated equally—which I can only assume means that they wish to be treated like their English counterparts—then they might consider acting for once like their English counterparts.”
“There've been plenty of demonstrations that the whites have organised over the years,” Theo said. “The poll tax riots, the blood sports protests, the movement against—”
“I'm not speaking about demonstrations,” she cut in. “I'm speaking about being treated English when they decide to start acting English. And dressing English. And worshipping English. And bringing up their children English. If an individual decides to immigrate to another country, he should not expect the country to cater to his whimsies, Theodore. And if I'd been in your place at the council meeting, you may depend upon it: I'd have said just that.”
Her grandson folded his napkin precisely and laid it perpendicular to the table edge as Agatha had taught him. “I've little doubt of that, Gran,” he said wryly. “And you would've waded right into the riot afterwards and beaten in a few heads with your stick.” He pushed back his chair and came to hers. He laid his hand on her shoulder and kissed her forehead.
Agatha gruffly pushed him away. “Stop your nonsense. And Mary Ellis has yet to bring in the cheese.”
“None for me tonight.” Theo headed towards the doorway. “I'll fetch the display from the car.”
Which he had done, and she stood before it now. Balford-le-Nez of the present was depicted in all its decrepitude on the centre easel: the abandoned buildings along the seafront with boarded windows and wooden architraves shedding their paint like sunburned skin; the moribund High Street where every year another shop closed its doors a final time; the grubby indoor swimming pool whose stink of mildew and woodrot couldn't possibly be captured by a camera's lens. And like the easel displaying Balford of the past, among these pictures of Balford now was a photo of the pier, which Agatha had purchased, which Agatha had renovated, which Agatha Shaw had restored and rejuvenated, breathing life like a god into her personal Adam, making the pleasure pier an unspoken promise to the sea town where Agatha had spent her life.
That life and its impending close would have been given some meaning by Balford of the future: hotels refurbished, businesses lured to the sea by the guarantee of low ground rents and landlords committed to redevelopment and restoration, buildings gentrified, parks replanted—and big parks, not plots of grass the size of an envelope which some people dedicated to Asian mothers with utterly unpronounceable names—and attractions added along the seafront. There were plans for a leisure centre, for a renovated indoor swimming pool, for tennis and squash courts, for a new cricket pitch. This was what Balford-le-Nez could be, and it was to this end that Agatha Shaw was striving, seeking a slip of immortality.
She'd lost her parents during the Blitz. She'd lost her husband at thirty-eight. She'd lost three of her children to careers round the globe and the fourth in a car crash at the hands of his limp-willed Scandinavian wife. Early on she'd come to know that the wise woman kept her expectations humble and her dreams to herself, but in these final years of her life she'd found herself growing as weary of submission to the will of the Almighty as she would have grown weary of fighting that will. So she'd taken up her final cause like a warrior, and she was fully determined to see this battle through to the end.
Nothing was going to stop this project, least of all the death of some foreigner she didn't know. But she needed Theo to be her right hand. She needed Theo quick-witted and strong. She wanted him impenetrable and invincible, and the last thing her plans for Balford had required of him was his tacit agreement to their derailment.
She clutched her three-pronged stick in a grip so tight that it made her arm tremble. She concentrated the way her physical therapist had told her that she would now have to concentrate in order to walk. It was an unspeakable cruelty to have to tell each leg what to do before it would do it. She who once had ridden, played tennis, golfed, fished, and boated was reduced to saying, “First left, then right. Now left, then right,” just to get to the library door. Her teeth ground on the words. If she'd had the temperament to be a dog owner, had possessed a faithful and affectionate Corgi, and had been equal to the effort required, she would have kicked the animal in sheer frustration.
She found Theo in the old morning room. He'd long ago converted it to his lair, equipping it with television, stereo, books, comfortable old furniture, and a personal computer on which he communicated with the world's social misfits who happened to share his particular passion: amateur palaeontology. Agatha thought of it as an adult's excuse to grub round in the mud. But to Theo it was an avocation that he pursued with a dedication that most men used when pursuing pudenda. Day or night mattered little to Theo: When he had a free hour, off he would stride in the direction of the Nez, where the eroding cliffs had been disgorging dubious treasures for as long as the sea had been gnawing at the land.
He wasn't at the computer that night. Nor was he using his magnifying glass to study a misshapen bit of stone—”This is actually a rhino tooth, Gran,” he'd say patiently—culled from the cliffs. Rather, he was speaking into the telephone in a low hushed voice, rushing sentences that Agatha couldn't distinguish into the ear of someone who clearly didn't want to hear.
She caught the words, “Please. Please. Listen to me,” before he looked towards the door and, seeing her, replaced the receiver in its cradle as if no one were on the other end of the line.
She studied him. The night was nearly as torrid as the day had been, and since this room was on the west side of the house, it had taken the worst of the day's heat the longest. So there was at least one reason why Theo's face was flushed and why his fair skin was damp and oily looking. But the other reason, she supposed, was sitting somewhere holding a dead telephone receiver in a damp palm, doubtlessly wondering why “Listen to me” had ended rather than extended a conversation.
The windows were open, but the room was insufferable. Even the walls looked as if they wanted to sweat right through their old William Morris paper. The clutter of magazines, newspapers, books, and most of all the clutter of stones—”No, Gran, they only look like stones. They're actually bones and teeth, and here, look for yourself, this's part of a mammoth tusk,” Theo would say—made the room even more unbearable, as if they raised its temperature another ten degrees. And, despite her grandson's care to clean them, they imbued the air with a disturbingly fecund smell of earth.
Theo moved from the telephone to the broad oak table. This was finely sheened with dust because he wouldn't allow Mary Ellis to apply a rag to its surface and disarrange the fossils he'd assembled there in cubicled wooden trays. There was an old balloon-backed chair in front of the table, and he took this and swung it round to face her.
She understood that he was making a place for her, well within her reach. This realisation made her feel like pinching the lobes of his ears until he wailed. She wasn't ready for the grave despite its having been dug, and she could do without the tender gestures revealing that others anticipated her imminent demise. She chose to stand.
“And the end result?” she demanded as if there had been no break in their conversation.
His eyebrows drew together. He used the back of his curled index finger to wipe the perspiration from his forehead. His glance went to the telephone, then back to her.
“I'm not the least interested in your love life, Theodore. You'll learn soon enough that it's an oxymoron. I pray nightly that you develop the presence of mind not to be led by either your nose or your penis. Otherwise, what you do on your free time is between you and whoever shares the momentary joy of experiencing the mingling of your bodily fluids. Although in this heat, why anyone would even think of intercourse—”
“Gran.” Theo's face was flaming.
My God, Agatha thought. He's twenty-six years old with the sexual maturity of a teenager. She could only imagine with a shudder what it was like to be on the receiving end of
his earnest grappling. At least his grandfather—for all his faults, one of which happened to be dropping dead at the age of forty-two—had known how to take a woman and be done with it. A quarter of an hour was all Lewis had ever needed, and on the nights when she was extremely lucky, he managed the act in less than ten minutes. She considered sexual intercourse a medicinal requirement of marriage: One kept the juices flowing in every part of the body if one wished for health.
“What did they promise us, Theo?” she asked. “You pressed for another special council meeting, of course.”
“Actually, I …” He remained standing as she did. But he reached for one of his precious fossils and turned it over in his hand.
“You did have the presence of mind to demand another meeting, didn't you, Theo? You didn't let those coloureds take command and do nothing about it, did you?”
His look of discomfort was the answer.
She said, “My God.” He was so like his brainless mother.
Despite herself, Agatha needed to sit. She lowered her body onto the seat of the balloon-backed chair and sat as she had been taught to sit in girlhood, ramrod straight. She said, “What on earth is the matter with you, Theodore Michael? And sit down, please. I don't want a stiff neck to mark this encounter.”
He pulled an old armchair round to face her. It was covered in faded corduroy, upon its seat a frog-shaped stain the origin of which Agatha didn't care to speculate upon. “It wasn't the time,” he said.
“It wasn't … what?” She'd heard him perfectly, but she'd found long ago that the key to bending others to her will was to force them to examine their own with such diligence that they ended up rejecting whatever idea they'd begun with, in favour of hers.
“It wasn't the time, Gran.” Theo sat. He leaned towards her, bare arms resting on his fawn, linen-draped legs. He had a way of making wrinkles look like haute couture. She didn't think such a sense of fashion was seemly in a man. “The council had their hands full with keeping a lid on Muhannad Malik. Which they failed to do, as things turned out.”
“It wasn't his meeting.”
“And with the issue being a man's death and the Asians’ concerns about how it was being handled by the police—”
“Their concerns. Their concerns/’ Agatha mocked.
“Gran, it wasn't the time. I couldn't make demands in the middle of chaos. Especially demands about redevelopment.”
She thumped her stick on the carpet. “Why not?”
“Because it seemed to me that getting to the bottom of the Nez killing was more pressing an issue than the funding of the renovation of the Pier End Hotel.” He help up his hand. “No, wait a moment, Gran. Don't interrupt. I know this project is important to you. It's important to me as well. And it's important to the community. But you've got to see that there's hardly a point in infusing money into Balford if there isn't going to be a community left.”
“You certainly can't be suggesting that the Asians have the power or even the temerity to destroy this town. They'd be cutting their own throats.”
“I'm suggesting that unless the community is a place where future visitors don't have to be afraid of being accosted by someone with a grudge against the colour of their skin, any money we pour into redevelopment is money we might as well send up in flames.”
He was surprising her. For a moment Agatha saw the shadow of his grandfather in him. Lewis would have thought exactly the same way.
“Hmph,” she sniffed.
“You see I'm right, don't you.” He phrased it not as a question, she noted, but as a statement, which was like Lewis as well. “I'll give it a few days, let the tension pass, and organise another meeting then. It's for the best. You'll see.” He glanced at a carriage clock on the mantelpiece and got to his feet. “And now it's time you were in bed. I'll fetch Mary Ellis.”
“I shall ask for Mary Ellis when I'm ready, Theodore. Stop treating me like—”
“No arguments.” He went to the door.
She spoke before he could open it. “You're going out, then?”
“I said I'd fetch—”
“I don't mean out of the room. I mean out. Out. Out of the house. Are you going out again tonight, Theo?” His expression told her she'd pushed too far. Even Theo—malleable as he was—had his limits. Too much delving into his personal life was one of them. “I ask because I wonder about the wisdom of these nocturnal wanderings of yours. If the situation in the town is as you suggest—tense—I dare say no one should be out and about after dark. And you've not been taking the boat out again, have you? You know how I feel about sailing at night.”
Theo regarded her from the doorway. There it was once again, that look of Lewis's: the features settling into a pleasant mask beneath which she could read absolutely nothing. When had he learned to dissemble so? she wondered. And why had he learned it?
“I'll fetch Mary Ellis,” he said. And he left her with her questions unanswered.
SAHLAH WAS ALLOWED to be part of the discussion because, after all, it was her fiancé whose life had been taken. Otherwise, she'd not have been included, and she knew it. It wasn't the way of the Muslim men of her acquaintance to give merit to what a woman had to say, and although her father was a gentle man whose tenderness often showed itself only in the soft pressure of his knuckles against her cheek as he was passing by, when it came to convention, he was Muslim to the core. He devoutly prayed five times each day; he was on his third reading of the Holy Qur'aan; he made certain that a portion of the profits from his business went to the poor; and twice already he'd paced in the footsteps of millions of Muslims who had walked the perimeter of the Ka'bā.
Thus on this night, while Sahlah herself was permitted to listen to the men's discussion, her mother merely served the purpose of bringing food and drink from the kitchen to the front room, while Sahlah's sister-in-law made herself scarce. Yumn did this for two reasons, naturally. One was a bow to haya: Muhannad insisted upon the traditional interpretation of feminine modesty, so he would allow no man save his father ever to look upon his wife. And one was her nature: Had she remained downstairs, her mother-in-law might have ordered her to help with the cooking, and Yumn was the laziest cow on earth. So she'd greeted Muhannad in her usual fashion, fawning over him as if her dearest desire were that he might wipe his boots on the seat of her drawstring trousers, and then she'd disappeared upstairs. Her excuse was the need to be vigilant should Anas have another one of his terrible nightmares. The truth was that she'd be entertaining herself by flipping through magazines which displayed the Western fashions that Muhannad never allowed her to wear.
Sahlah sat well away from the men, and in deference to their sex, she neither ate nor drank. She wasn't the least bit hungry anyway, although she felt a craving for the lassi that her mother served to the others. In the heat, the yoghurt drink would be a source of blessed refreshment.
As was his custom, Akram Malik thanked his wife courteously as she set plates and glasses before their guest and their son. She touched his shoulder briefly, saying, “Be well, Akram,” and left the room. Sahlah often wondered how her mother could defer to her father in all things, as if she had no will of her own. But when asked, Wardah always explained simply, saying, “I don't defer, Sahlah. There's no necessity. Your father is my life as I am his.”
There was a bond between her parents that Sahlah had always admired although she'd never completely understood it. It seemed to rise from an ineffable mutual sadness that neither of them spoke of, and it manifested itself in the sensitivity with which they treated and spoke to each other. Akram Malik never raised his voice. But then, he never had to. His word was law to his wife, and it was supposed to be law to his children as well.
But Muhannad, as a teenager, had sneeringly called Akram “old fart” behind his back. And in the pear orchard beyond their house, he would hurl stones at the wall and viciously kick the mosaic-barked trunks of the trees to rid himself of the fury he felt whenever his father thwarted his wishes. He was carefu
l never to let Akram see his rage, however. To him, Muhannad was silent and obedient. Sahlah's brother had spent his adolescence biding his time, doing his father's bidding, and knowing that as long as he put his obligations to the family first, the family business and fortune would be his in the end. It was his word that would then be law. Sahlah knew that Muhannad longed for that day.
But at the moment he was faced with his father's unspoken outrage. In addition to the turmoil he'd roused in town that day, he had brought Taymullah Azhar not only into Balford but into their home. This constituted the gravest act of defiance against their family. For although he was the oldest son of Akram's brother, Sahlah knew that Taymullah Azhar had been cast out of his family, and to be cast out meant that he was dead to everyone. Including to his uncle's family.
Akram had not been at home when Muhannad arrived with Taymullah Azhar, disregarding Wardah's quiet but urgent “You must not, my son,” spoken with a warning hand on his arm. Muhannad had said, “We need him. We need someone with his experience. If we don't start getting the message out that we won't let Haytham's murder be swept under the rug, we can expect business as usual from this town.”
Wardah had looked worried but said nothing more. After the first moment of startled recognition, she didn't even look at Taymullah Azhar. She merely nodded—the deference towards her husband translating automatically into deference towards her only son—and she retreated to the kitchen with Sahlah, awaiting the moment when Akram returned home from arranging for Haytham's replacement at the mustard factory.
“Ammī,” Sahlah had asked in a low voice as her mother began assembling a meal, “who is that man?”
“He is no one,” Wardah had replied firmly. “He does not exist.”
But clearly, Taymullah Azhar did exist, and Sahlah first heard his name—and immediately realised who he was from the past ten years of family gossip among the younger cousins—when her father came into the kitchen upon his return home and Wardah intercepted him, telling him about the visitor who had arrived with their son. They exchanged hushed words. Akram's eyes displayed his only reaction to the visitor's identity. Behind his glasses, they narrowed quickly.