The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(5)

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THE FAMILY APARTMENT down by the port was filled with cooking smells and crammed with furniture. There were photographs on every surface, carpets laid on carpets. It was a hot night, and the air conditioners labored and hacked, spitting out water, coughing up lungfuls of mold spores, blights. The table linen was limp and heavily fringed, and I kept fingering these fringes, which felt like nylon fur, like the ears of a teddy bear; they comforted me, though I felt electric with tension. At the table a vast lumpen elder presided, a woman with a long chomping jaw; she was like Quentin Matsys’s Ugly Duchess, except in a spangled sari. The sister-in-law was a bright, brittle woman, who gave a sarcastic lilt to all her phrases. I could see why; it was evident, from her knowing looks, that Ijaz had talked about me, and set me up in some way; if he was proposing me as his next wife, I offered little improvement on the original. Her scorn became complete when she saw I barely touched the food at my elbow; I kept smiling and nodding, demurring and deferring, nibbling a parsley leaf and sipping my Fanta. I wanted to eat, but she might as well have offered me stones on a doily. Did Ijaz think, as the Saudis did, that Western marriages meant nothing? That they were entered impulsively and on impulse broken? Did he assume my husband was as keen to offload me as he was to lose Mary-Beth? From his point of view the evening was not going well. He had expected two supermarket managers, he told us, important men with spending power; now night prayers were over, the traffic was on the move again, all down Palestine Road and along the Corniche the traffic lights were turning green, from Thumb Street to the Pepsi flyover the city was humming, but where were they? Sweat dripped from his face. Fingers jabbed the buttons of the telephone. “Okay, he is delayed? He has left? He is coming now?” He rapped down the receiver, then gazed at the phone as if willing it to chirp back at him, like some pet fowl. “Time means nothing here,” he joked, pulling at his collar. The sister-in-law shrugged and turned down her mouth. She never rested, but passed airily through the room in peach chiffon, each time returning from the kitchen with another laden tray; out of sight, presumably, some oily skivvy was weeping into the dishes. The silent elder put away a large part of the food, pulling the plates toward her and working through them systematically till the pattern showed beneath her questing fingers; you looked away, and when you looked back the plate was clean. Sometimes, the phone rang: “Okay, they’re nearly here,” Ijaz called. Ten minutes, and his brow furrowed again. “Maybe they’re lost.”

“Sure they’re lost,” sister-in-law sang. She sniggered; she was enjoying herself. Nineteenth Lesson, translate these sentences: So long as he holds the map the wrong way up, he will never find the house. They started traveling this morning, but have still not arrived. It seemed a hopeless business, trying to get anywhere, and the textbook confessed it. I was not really learning Arabic, of course, I was too impatient; I was leafing through the lessons, looking for phrases that might be useful if I could say them. We stayed long, long into the evening, waiting for the men who had never intended to come; in the end, wounded and surly, Ijaz escorted us to the door. I heard my husband take in a breath of wet air. “We’ll never have to do it again,” I consoled him. In the car, “You have to feel for him,” I said. No answer.

December 13th: My diary records that I am oppressed by “the darkness, the ironing and the smell of drains.” I could no longer play my Eroica tape as it had twisted itself up in the innards of the machine. In my idle moments I had summarized forty chapters of Oliver Twist for the use of my upstairs neighbor. Three days later I was “horribly unstable and restless,” and reading the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters. Later that week I was cooking with my neighbor Yasmin. I recorded “an afternoon of graying pain.” All the same, Ijaz was out of the country and I realized I breathed easier when I was not anticipating the ring of the doorbell. December 16th, I was reading The Philosopher’s Pupil and visiting my own student upstairs. Munira took my forty chapter summaries, flicked through them, yawned, and switched on the TV. “What is a workhouse?” I tried to explain about the English poor law, but her expression glazed; she had never heard of poverty. She yelled out for her servant, an ear-splitting yell, and the girl—a beaten-down Indonesian—brought in Munira’s daughter for my diversion. A heavy, solemn child, she was beginning to walk, or stamp, under her own power, her hands flailing for a hold on the furniture. She would fall on her bottom with a grunt, haul herself up again by clutching the sofa; the cushions slid away from her, she tumbled backward, banged on the floor her large head with its corkscrew curls, and lay there wailing. Munira laughed at her: “White nigger, isn’t it?” She didn’t get her flat nose from my side, she explained. Or those fat lips either. It’s my husband’s people, but of course, they’re blaming me.

January 2nd 1984: We went to a dark little restaurant off Khalid bin Wahlid Street, where we were seated behind a lattice screen in the “family area.” In the main part of the room men were dining with each other. The business of eating out was more a gesture than a pleasure; you would gallop through the meal, because without wine and its rituals there was nothing to slow it, and the waiters, who had no concept that a man and woman might eat together for more than sustenance, prided themselves on picking up your plate as soon as you had finished and slapping down another, and rushing you back onto the dusty street. That dusty orange glare, perpetual, like the lighting of a bad sci-fi film; the constant snarl and rumble of traffic; I had become afraid of traffic accidents, which were frequent, and every time we drove out at night I saw the gaping spaces beneath bridges and flyovers; they seemed to me like amphitheaters in which the traffic’s casualties enacted, flickering, their final moments. Sometimes, when I set foot outside the apartment, I started to shake. I blamed it on the drugs I was taking; the dose had been increased again. When I saw the other wives they didn’t seem to be having these difficulties. They talked about paddling pools and former lives they had led in Hong Kong. They got up little souk trips to buy jewelry, so that sliding on their scrawny tanned arms their bracelets clinked and chimed, like ice cubes knocking together. On Valentine’s Day we went to a cheese party; you had to imagine the wine. I was bubbling with happiness; a letter had come from William IV Street, to tell me my novel had been sold. Spearing his Edam with a cocktail stick, my husband’s boss loomed over me: “Hubby tells me you’re having a book published. That must be costing him a pretty penny.”