Home Fire(17)

He took Isma’s envelope out of his satchel and handed it to the old lady, who laughed in delight when she shook it, guessing the contents. “Such a thoughtful girl, that girl. Tea—with sugar?” At his response she said, “You British, never any sugar in your tea. My grandchildren are all the same. My daughters, half-and-half—one yes, one no. How did you meet Isma? What do you do for a living?”

She was amused by the story of the man who needed rescuing from an unmanned coffee counter but made a disapproving face at “taking a year off,” which made him say “probably return to consultancy but perhaps a more boutique firm.” “One of those personal shoppers?” she asked, and it took him a moment of placing together “consultancy” and “boutique” to understand how she’d reached that conclusion. When he explained, she laughed, slapping his hand in a show of mirth, and he laughed too, wishing he’d known a paternal grandmother—a dadi. His had died the year before he was born, and her husband—a newspaper-kiosk vendor—had followed soon after, “dead of helplessness,” as Eamonn’s father explained.

Soon she was frying samosas for him, as though determined to inhabit a stereotype, while, as instructed, he licked the end of a thread and guided it through the eye of a needle. She had moved to London from Gujranwala in the fifties, she said; his grandparents had come then from Sialkot, he said. No, he didn’t speak Punjabi. No, not Urdu either. “Only English?” Some French. She said, “My father fought in the British Indian army during World War One. He was in France for a while, billeted with a family there—the sons and husband were soldiers, so it was just the women he lived with. Je t’adore, he used to say to his children years later. After he died, I wondered who had taught him those words. Here, hold out your arm.”

The threaded needle was for him, it turned out. She had noticed the loose button on his sleeve, and he found himself looking at the parting of her dyed black hair as she bent down to set it right, still talking away. “Shukriya,” he said, the Urdu word clumsy on his tongue, and after a moment’s pause in which something else seemed necessary he added “Aunty,” and was rewarded by another pat on his cheek. He assumed all this affection and the generosity of her welcome was just the famed Pakistani hospitality his father sometimes sighingly spoke of when regretting how “English” his children’s lives had turned out (to which Eamonn’s mother would reply, “It’s wonderful in the abstract but when you actually encounter it you call it intrusive and overbearing”); but then she said, “So, Isma sent you to meet us.”

He set down the samosa, which, it was suddenly clear, had been given to him under a false assumption. “Not exactly. In fact, no. I told her I would post the package, but it was such a nice day I thought I would take a long walk and drop it off.”

“You walked here? All the way from Notting Hill, to see us.”

“It’s a nice walk. I like discovering new bits of London—in this case, the canal,” he said, which seemed an effective way of dispelling her misconception without either of them actually mentioning it.

“Oh, she told you how much she loves walking along the canal.” He picked up the samosa and bit into it. Isma could set her straight when they spoke—he didn’t doubt Aunty Naseem would be on the phone to her as soon as he left. “You know, I’ve known her since the day she was born. Her grandmother was my first friend—we were living off the High Road, nothing like today. There were no other Asians at all. And then one day, across the street I saw a woman in a shalwar kameez. I ran across, in the middle of traffic, and caught her by the arm, and we stayed there talking for so long my husband came out looking for me. When we moved to this street, we said to them, Come on, we can’t separate. So they came. And here Isma was born, and grew up. So much sadness in her life, looking after the twins from such a young age. It’s time someone looked after her.”

He was spared the further embarrassment of this conversation by the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs.

“We have a guest. A very nice young man. Isma sent him.” The footsteps retreated up the stairs and the old woman’s voice dropped. “Aneeka. She’ll come down again once she’s fixed herself up. In my days either you were the kind of girl who covered your head or you were the kind who wore makeup. Now everyone is everything at the same time.”

He had been about to leave, but instead he reached for another samosa. A few minutes later, the footsteps approached again. The woman who walked in was smaller than he’d expected from the picture—petite, really, and without any of the sense of mischief he’d seen in the photograph—but just as beautiful. Eamonn stood up, conscious of his greasy fingers and of the question of how he might use them to unpin the white hijab that framed her face. She greeted him with a puzzled look, which confirmed how unlikely it was for Isma to have sent someone like him to meet her family. The old lady introduced him by his first name—which was all he had given her—and Aneeka’s expression didn’t so much change as ossify.

“That’s spelled with an e, not an a, Aunty. Eamonn Lone, isn’t it?”

“Isma told you about me?”

“What do you want here? Why do you know my sister?”

“He met Isma in Northampton. At a café,” the old woman said, coming to stand next to Eamonn and place a hand on his arm, looking at him apologetically, not only for the girl’s behavior but for her own “oh” of disappointment when the girl mentioned his surname. “He walked all the way from Notting Hill to bring me M&M’s from Isma. Along the canal.”