Chapter Six

Lamia arrived in Oxford for the lecture meetings armed with her father’s credit card and her mother’s detailed instruc-tions regarding Tala’s trousseau. Though what she was expected to buy in Oxford, she wasn’t sure. The place was pretty enough, but it was also all museums and culture. As far as she knew, there wasn’t even a Gucci. Still, it was the first time since her marriage that Lamia had travelled without her husband, who had remained in Amman, working, since the dual purpose of her trip (charitable lectures, shopping for a wedding) were not events he could justify leaving his work for. She had enjoyed her solo flight tremendously and felt a certain guilty freedom in travelling alone. All of her journeys with Kareem were meticulously planned, and there was undoubtedly a positive side to this, since her husband’s conscientiousness allowed her to slip into a kind of auto-pilot mode where she did not have to worry about anything like passports, timings or packing; but in the end she also found their trips emotionally draining. For Kareem had a tendency to be compulsive. His clothes, for example, had to be folded in a certain way and he would allow neither the staff nor Lamia herself to actually place them into the suitcase. He had a system for packing, as he had systems for almost everything, and the proper adherence to the packing system ensured that he could fit a maximum number of garments (plus one hardback book, business-related, and a washbag) into his suitcase, without causing anything to crease unnecessarily. This aspect of his personality had been one of his attractions for Lamia during the brief period when they had been dating. Within Lamia burned a hollow of insecurity, which Tala and Zina had together traced back to her unfulfilled need for their mother’s attention (as the middle child she had been even more overlooked than the other two), compounded by the lack of a strong character of her own. Lamia herself was not convinced by such Americanised psycho-babble. All she knew was that Kareem’s carefully arranged routines, his meticulous attention to every detail, the comfort he derived from knowing that everything was in its proper place – from knowing that everything (and everyone) had a proper place – all of this, even down to the standardised perfection of his features; these were all soothing to her and infinitely reassuring.

But she had found, during these two honeymoon years of her marriage, that they could also be tiring, not to say exhausting. There were days when she longed to stay in bed and perhaps eat breakfast there – something Kareem would never countenance, because breakfast always created crumbs, and the mere idea of crumbs on the sheets, of stray food particles insinuating themselves, unseen, into folds and creases and lying there, potentially for hours, pollut-ing their sleep space, was too terrible to contemplate. Then there were afternoons when she would put down a book she had been reading and toy with the idea of just leaving it there. Once or twice she had done so, but within moments of Kareem returning home from the office, she found the book had disappeared, back to the shelf where, admittedly, she was easily able to find it again thanks to his logical, alphabetised system.

She shook off these recollections as the car that had collected her from the airport drew nearer to the spires of Oxford’s centre. The main points to remember – and she was assiduous about remembering them – were that Kareem was a decent man, with good values and solid ethics. He had a charm, a sense of humour that she had not found to be widespread in other Arab men she knew, and she enjoyed the way that he could make their friends – even her parents – laugh over dinner or tea parties. This way he had with her parents and the approval and attention that Lamia had felt emanating from Reema since her marriage had also been gratifying. And Kareem was liberal. She still kept an office in Amman, at her father’s head-quarters and, if anything, he was always overly concerned to ask her about what exactly was happening with her family’s businesses. He had many such flashes of consideration, she realised, and so many of her friends’ husbands did not. She liked having the office there, it gave her a focus. She did not want to become one of those women with nothing better to do after seeing their husbands off to work than to frequent the gym and have coffee afterwards. She would maintain her desk until she had children, at least, and then her life would be devoted to them. She sensed, sometimes, that life was made of something more, that there was a spark which could elevate it to another plane; she had, in fact, felt something of this during those early days of Kareem’s attentions. That feeling had left her some time ago, eroded by routines and habits and familiarity, but she could still summon it up sometimes, when she focused hard, but she remembered to do so less and less often.

Outside, the late morning sunlight was soft and unobtrusive, very unlike the glare of Amman. Lamia ventured to remove her sunglasses as the car pulled to a stop outside the hotel. Even without proper shops, parts of this city were quite beautiful and she was further pleased to remember that she would not have to share a room with Tala this time, because Tala was bringing a friend and the friend would share with her, leaving Lamia to luxuriate alone in her crisply-sheeted bed.

In the café where they had just finished breakfast, Tala slipped her phone back into her pocket. ‘A text from Lamia,’ she explained. ‘She arrived at the hotel.’

‘Should we go and meet her?’

Tala shook her head. ‘Count on an hour for her to shower and change. Plenty of time for you to go to the bookstore. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you here.’

Leyla stood up. ‘What will you do? Have a coffee?’

Tala nodded, drew two magazines from her bag and smiled.

‘I want to read your stories again.’

‘Then I’m definitely going,’ Leyla smiled and left. Tala watched her weaving through the tables, her gait a little awkward and shy, as though she sensed she was being watched. Leyla stepped outside and glanced back to wave. The sun fell on her now, burnishing her skin, gleaming on her hair. Tala raised a hand in acknowledgment and then quickly looked down.

She had been trying hourly to ensure that this new friendship with Leyla remained such, to be certain that it would not slip out of the careful grasp of her fingers and into the darker chambers of her heart. That had happened to her once or twice before, with women she had felt an instant connection with, and somehow the friendship had tipped over into something more, something wrong and Tala felt it was just a flaw or a need she had to correct in herself. Certainly she had no wish to negotiate the viscous swamps of despair and self-disgust that had accompanied those times in her life. Yet now Leyla had begun to fill a space in Tala’s heart, a desire for intimacy, for friendship. She had felt Hani fill that space once, not so long ago. For he too was a good friend to her, someone with whom she laughed and from whom she learned. But they had been mostly apart for the past few months – he working in Amman, she in London – and when she had found Leyla insinuating herself into her daily thoughts, Tala had told herself that it was not wrong for her to want a close friend. But she also knew that it was essential that she stopped noticing the sunlight on her hair and the nuances of her eye colour; that she cease communicating with her constantly and silently with the heightened intimacy of exchanged glances.

She looked at the stories lying on her lap. It was these stories, which Leyla had given to her so tentatively after the theatre, which had begun, too easily, to weaken the taut pull of her resolve. The stories were exceptionally good, which was not a surprise as much as a pleasure. They had vastly diverse settings and tones, but both were tales of love almost found but ultimately lost – a classic theme which was handled lightly and delicately, yet which evoked in Tala a mood of such profoundly delicious regret that it had permeated all her responses for hours afterwards. And here, in the vibrant restaurant, as she began to read the words again, Tala tasted again the light, delicious mist of melancholy upon her tongue.

She considered Leyla, concentrated on how she could evoke emotions and sensations simply by placing words on a page. Why did she do it? It seemed entirely natural that Leyla should possess such ability, and yet so unlikely. She was so quiet most of the time, so self-effacing. And yet on these pages were intelligence, expressiveness, passion.

When her telephone rang again, she could only, in her cloud of wishful imaginings, comprehend that it might be Leyla, and she snatched it up eagerly.

‘My darling,’ the voice said. She blinked.

‘Hani!’

‘Is this a bad time?’

She reassured him that she had only been reading.

‘Not contracts I hope?’

She glanced guiltily at the pages that lay open before her. ‘No.

Not contracts. How are you, Hani?’

‘Missing you.’

‘Me too,’ she replied.

‘Really?’

She wished that he would not push the question like that.

‘Of course. How’s my favourite city?’ she asked, falling back on irony to cover her embarrassment.

Amman was the same, he told her, nothing ever changed. She listened to his account of the internal battles he was waging in his government department, and the dispiriting baseness of the politics dampened even the relaxed cadences of Hani’s voice. He changed the subject deftly, trying to fire her enthusiasm, to the camping weekend he had taken in Wadi Rum.

‘It was stunning, Tala,’ he said. ‘Just the desert, the stars, the amazing rock formations. Really, we have to do this together some time.’

‘I’d like to,’ she said. Perhaps that was what she needed. To stop focusing her attention on the parts of her home country that she abhorred – the navel-gazing society, the tradition-obsessed mindset – and to simply enjoy the natural beauty. She pictured the wild desert landscape of Wadi Rum at night, imagined how the overarching beauty could inspire and impress. It had been fifteen years since she had been there.

‘Let’s do it when I come back for the wedding,’ she said decisively. ‘It’ll be a crazy few weeks. We can get away for a couple of days.’

‘That’d be great,’ he replied, and she could hear the pleasure in his voice. She was able to lift emotion from him so easily. She frowned.

‘I miss you, Hani,’ she said.

‘Want me to come see you?’

‘No, don’t,’ she said. ‘You can’t leave work anyway. And I’m busy here. We’ll see each other soon.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I love you.’

‘Me too,’ she replied quickly and turned off the phone.

Putting the stories firmly back into her bag, she ordered another coffee, picked up a newspaper that had been left behind at a neighbouring table and sat back, with some determination, to read about what was happening in the Middle East.

Lamia was still in her robe after a long soak in the bathtub when she heard Tala knocking insistently on her door. Her sister held her in a long hug before planting a kiss on her cheek. Lamia smiled self-conciously and pulled back. As usual, she was slightly unnerved by Tala’s openness, by the hearty enthusiasm of her self-expression.

Such excited physicality, such verve, did not come as easily or naturally to Lamia – she was quieter, a silent observer, who eschewed extremes of emotion or activity.

‘You look amazing,’ Tala said. It was true. Lamia had always been beautiful, but there was an aura about her today that made her even more striking. She had lost some weight too, and that had sharpened the high planes of her cheekbones and made her soulful eyes seem even larger. Tala turned and led the way into the bedroom, where she turned down the widescreen television which was beaming out pictures of the latest strife in the Middle East.

‘Did you see that?’ Tala asked. ‘More trouble in the West Bank.’

Lamia knew that she should be interested, but could not overcome the fact that she was faint with hunger. She had missed breakfast, having left at an ungodly hour from Amman that morning, and though she would have liked to have skipped lunch, she felt compelled to have a salad at least.

‘Are we going out to eat?’ she asked.

‘Leyla and I thought Italian. She felt like pasta.’

‘I don’t do carbs,’ Lamia said, alarmed.

‘Why?’

‘I feel better without them,’ she said.

‘What do you eat? Too much protein isn’t good for you,’ Tala said.

Lamia resisted the urge to bite her thumbnail. She was inordi-nately conscious that Tala had only been in her space for two minutes and was already making her feel defensive.

‘I don’t eat red meat, remember?’ she said.

In the brief silence that ensued, Tala reminded herself that Lamia was old enough to decide for herself what kind of diet she wanted to follow. She had forgotten about the meat, though. When she was perhaps fourteen, Lamia had been at her friend’s house on the out-skirts of Amman, and had watched as the new neighbours moved in, bringing with them an old tradition of slaughtering a lamb to bestow luck on a new house. Lamia had watched, horrified, as the clueless animal was led out of a pick-up truck and onto the front patio. She had meant to look away before the killing took place, but with indecent haste, a knife had been produced and the throat slit open. She had stared, open-mouthed, the bile rising in her stomach as several pairs of hands were dipped into the warm, dripping blood, and signs were painted on the door to ward off the evil eye.

She had wept, and her friend’s mother had laughed and explained to her the tradition and its long practice, but Lamia had not eaten meat since.

Over lunch, Tala watched Lamia as she precisely, methodically, picked out a few stray tubes of pasta that had escaped onto her plate, amid slices of roasted vegetables.

‘I thought we could go to the Ashmolean Museum this afternoon,’ Tala said, to prevent herself from commenting on her sister’s picky eating habits. ‘Before our meeting.’

‘We need to shop,’ was Lamia’s sharp reply. ‘For your wedding.’

‘The museum has a shop,’ Tala said, instantly regretting the sarcasm. It was too easy to make fun of her sister and she wished she could control the impulse to rile her all the time.

Lamia pushed back her plate and sighed.

‘Lamia, you used to study here, didn’t you?’ Leyla asked quickly Lamia nodded but offered no further details, because she was watching Tala lift a forkful of her own food and place it in Leyla’s mouth. It struck her as unnecessarily intimate, as well as unhygienic. She had tried to do that once with Kareem, to offer him a taste of something she had truly enjoyed, but he had declined and spent the ensuing minutes explaining the armies of germs that would have swarmed onto the fork from her mouth and that she now, in a supposedly caring gesture, wanted to transfer to him. His earnest explanation certainly had removed any hint of romanticism from the idea and Lamia had never tried it again. She looked away from the girls opposite her, for Tala’s head was bent too close to Leyla’s and they were giggling about something that she had missed. Tala looked up, and shifted her position away from Leyla slightly, casually.

‘You know, Leyla’s going to be a great writer one day. One day we’ll walk into any Oxford bookstore or library and be able to see her books.’

Tala was looking at the girl with such pride, in a way she had never looked at Lamia herself.

‘That’s nice,’ Lamia said, trying to make an effort, but Tala just rolled her eyes.

‘Hey, Leyla,’ Tala said with a grin. ‘Maybe you can publish an edition with pictures in it. For my sister.’

Lamia began to gather her bag and coat in preparation for leaving. With Tala in such a flippant mood, and after all the insults she had endured over lunch, there was no chance that Lamia would ac-company those two to dredge through another museum. There was a spa in the hotel where she could while away the time before their meeting with the college Dean, and anyway, Kareem would be placing his usual call after lunch to check on her and see how she was.

Walking together through the streets that separated the old colleges of the town, Leyla looked around, taking in the elegant, stone buildings upon which smudges of afternoon sunlight were smeared like streaks of amber pollen.

‘That sweet city with her dreaming spires’ said Tala. Leyla looked at her, surprised.

‘That’s a Matthew Arnold quote,’ she said. ‘How did you know it?’Tala raised an eyebrow. ‘Do writers have a monopoly on reading poetry?’

Leyla smiled in acknowledgement.

‘Look, I’m sorry if Lamia is a bit hard to take,’ said Tala, changing the subject. ‘I don’t understand anything about her any more.

The way she spends her time, her views on things. Her marriage. It’s exactly that kind of conservative, controlling relationship that I’ve always wanted to avoid at all costs.’

‘So your fiancé’s not like that?’ Leyla asked. Tala had spoken very little about Hani when they were together, and Leyla had found herself having to remember to ask about him.

‘Hani? No. He’s an Arab, born and brought up in Jordan, but he’s not like the rest. He’s very gentle. Very kind. I know exactly who he is. There’s no game playing.’

‘He sounds wonderful,’ Leyla smiled, and she tried to dispel the touch of disappointment that she felt at Tala’s glowing appraisal of her fiancé. It was wrong and as Tala’s friend she should be thrilled.

But then Tala’s own eyes were dark and reflective as she looked off towards the church, from which a delicate chime floated across to them, naming the hour.

‘He is. He really is,’ said Tala, uncomfortable suddenly. ‘At least, I can’t find anything wrong with him,’ she joked. But her brows were drawn in, and her smile melted away too quickly.

‘Why are you trying?’ Leyla asked. It was a bold step, and Leyla was still a little surprised she had taken it, but it clearly touched a raw spot of some kind, for Tala turned away a little, folding her arms about her.

‘It’s four,’ Leyla said. ‘You should go to your meeting with Lamia. I’ll meet you back at the hotel later.’

Tala nodded and they walked together to the main road, where Tala hailed a cab and hurried into it, pausing only briefly to wish Leyla a pleasant afternoon. Leyla watched the cab drive off until it turned out of sight, but Tala did not glance back to wave.

The fork-sharing and general cosiness over lunch had left Lamia quite nauseated. During the meeting about the charity event (which seemed to drag on forever) she kept her sunglasses on, using the dark lenses as a cover through which she watched Tala as she spoke with the Dean. Her sister looked better than she had in a while, Lamia thought, sort of healthy and glowing, although it wouldn’t kill her to do something with her hair occasionally. But she didn’t have Lamia’s sense of style or fashion, nor was she quite skinny enough, and as far as Lamia could ascertain, her fledgling business hadn’t made money yet. And yet she seemed to appear permanently pleased with herself. Frankly, why she was cavorting around Oxford for a weekend with some girl when she had wedding preparations and a fiancé to attend to, was beyond her. Lamia was not sure whether she liked Leyla. She was too quiet, too knowing, her eyes were always probing, she felt, and she was clearly a bad influence on Tala, enticing her to museums and libraries when she should be shopping.

It was only a further annoyance to Lamia, then, that in the taxi home, Tala’s conversation consisted of nothing but Leyla and how wonderful and talented she was. Lamia opened the window to conquer her light-headedness.

‘What’s the matter?’ Tala asked.

‘Nothing. Just a bit dizzy.’

‘Because you ate a lettuce leaf at lunch. You must be starving. We’ll have dinner…’

‘No. I don’t want dinner. I want an early night.’

‘Maybe I’ll do the same,’ Tala said, and Lamia noted that her eyes flickered to the window from which she stared out with a slight smile on her face. What was so exciting about an early night? And with a girlfriend? Lamia knew, of course, she was not stupid. She had noticed this happen to Tala once before, with a girl whose name Lamia could not even recall, back when they were at university together and had shared a house. It must have been eight years ago, but Lamia remembered the signs – the glow in Tala’s face, her wistful looks from windows, her secret smiles, and most obviously, her inability to stop talking about the girl in question.

‘How did Leyla become a writer?’ Lamia asked conversationally and she closed the window and sat back to listen. The more Lamia nodded and encouraged, the more emboldened Tala felt to speak.

It was the downfall of love, Lamia thought wistfully, that it inspired the lover to toss away any shred of caution just to obtain the pure, desperate pleasure of talking about the beloved. And Lamia was better versed in this weakness than many. When she was twenty years old she had fallen insanely in love with a young man who worked as a manager for the manufacturing section of her father’s business.

This love created a new universe for Lamia, a previously untasted world, in which she existed far above the general thrust and push of daily life. She ate when directed to, and every night lay down in the cool solitude of her bed to enjoy only the idea of him. She passed whole days at work with the smiling docility of an idiot, without knowing what she was doing or why. She delighted in the ice-hard, pale blue dawn that broke each morning across the ramshackle, dis-organised buildings of Amman, knowing that, across the tiny city, he was watching the sunrise with her. He was intelligent and kind, with a rare integrity that made him feel no shame that he worked for a living and could not yet own a business. This disadvantage, the disparity in their financial situations, could perhaps have been overcome with time and patience and insistence on her part. But he was also Muslim, and that, Lamia knew, was nothing less than impossible. He told her that his family would not accept her if she remained a Christian, and she knew that hers would never countenance a conversion to Islam. They had continued their affair in secret for three months, and by the end of that time, Lamia had felt herself so inflated with passion that she knew she would implode if she could not speak of it to anyone. Tala was in the States, Zina was in a Swiss boarding school, and only Reema was there, in Amman, at the end of every day, waiting, prodding, gently opening out the reticence that she could sniff inside her daughter, like the scent of a lily dying in the darkness. At last, Lamia had confided in her mother, and Reema had listened with a consoling hand on her child’s back, and understanding in her eyes. And the next morning, when Lamia went to the office, she found that the young man was gone. He had been fired, and she realised later, so strongly advised that he should not see her that he never tried to contact her again, even in secret.

By the time they arrived back at the hotel, the final scrap of evidence was offered up to Lamia’s scrutiny when Tala confessed that she was nervous about the wedding. Not about the menu or her dress, but about whether it was the right move.

‘All brides have jitters,’ Lamia told her, walking up the steps to the lobby. She paused and looked directly into Tala’s eyes. They looked tired and flickered away from Lamia’s gaze. Lamia felt a momentary pang of pity for her sister.

‘You won’t find anyone like Hani ever again,’ Lamia told her.

‘And he adores you.’

‘Yes,’ said Tala.

‘You just need a good night’s sleep,’ Lamia said kindly. ‘Everything will look different in the morning.’

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 656