Home Fire(28)
It was what she’d say if she were still only trying to manipulate him. It was what she’d say if she’d really fallen in love with him.
You think marriage is in the large things, Mrs. Rahimi had once said. It’s in the small things. Can you survive the arguments about housework, can you learn to live with each other’s different TV viewing habits. He thought of Aneeka opening his kitchen drawers, mocking the cherry pitter that pits cherries, the apple corer that cores apples. A life of small things forming between them.
“I’ve broken us, haven’t I?” she said.
He put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. “No,” he said, and felt the relief go through her body, and his own. “Tell me everything about your brother.”
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His mother had warned him about increased security following the attention brought on by the Bradford speech, but that didn’t make it any less strange to see SO1 officers where previously there’d been trees at the bottom of the garden. Makes it less likely for a terrorist to get in undetected, his mother had said on the phone when he asked if he could stop by for breakfast, and she told him the noise he was hearing in the background was his beloved childhood tree house and its support structure being sacrificed. She had sounded unbothered, but there were dark smudges around her hazel eyes, and she was crossing her arms with hands tucked beneath her armpits as she did when she wanted to hide her usually immaculate nails bitten down to stubs. She was the portrait to his father’s Dorian Gray—all the anxiety you’d expect him to feel was manifest in her.
Terry Lone, mistaking the uneasy looks her son was directing at the officers, turned her back on them and slipped a check into his pocket. When he shook his head and returned it to her, she raised her eyebrows. “You mean that’s not why you’ve stopped by at this ungodly hour? That shouldn’t have come out as an accusation—you know I’m happy to help.”
He draped his jacket over his mother’s shoulder, as a show of affection rather than a response to any sign of her feeling the early-morning cold. “You’re magic. But some of the bonds you bought for me years ago just matured. And anyway, I’m going to get back to work soon. Alice thinks PR and I will be a good fit—she has a job waiting for me.” He wasn’t at all sure that was what he wanted to be doing, but he knew he couldn’t turn up at Aunty Naseem’s door as Aneeka’s intended if he didn’t have a job.
“Well, you know my thoughts on the matter of employment for the sake of employment. But your father will be pleased,” his mother said, allowing him to ask where the man in question was.
“In his study, of course. See if you can drag him out, while I consider the roses.” He watched for a moment while she walked toward the rose bushes: Terry Lone, née O’Flynn, of Amherst, Massachusetts, one of Europe’s most successful interior designers, with a chain of stores from Helsinki to Dubai bearing her name. When she was sixteen, her parents pulled her out of school a few weeks before the end of the semester to travel to London with them, hoping the visit to a city of “real culture” would cure her growing interest in the worrisome feminist movement that was so active on the nearby Smith College campus. They arrived to stay at the Savoy on April 29, 1978, and the next morning, while her parents slept off jet lag, she dutifully walked down to Trafalgar Square to see the National Gallery, and ran into the thousands gathered for a Rock Against Racism march, which was just setting off for Victoria Park to hear the Clash and other musicians raise their voices louder than the racist chants of the National Front. “You coming?” said a Spanish boy with dark hair falling around the shoulders of his black leather jacket covered in badges letting onlookers know NAZIS ARE NO FUN and RACISTS ARE BAD IN BED. They’d been marching awhile by the time she discovered his parents were from Pakistan, a country she’d never heard of. Considerably later that day, when the compliant side of her personality asserted itself and she said she had to return to her parents, he insisted on accompanying her all the way to the Savoy, even at the risk of missing the Clash, and when she burst into tears at the thought of saying good-bye to someone so thrilling, he vowed to marry her one day. For the next two years they communicated by letter, until she enrolled at Chelsea School of Art, by which point he’d left university and swapped his leather jacket for a banker’s suit, which she found both a disappointment and a relief.
Terry Lone picked up a yellow petal, brushed the smoothness of it against the tip of her nose. It was only now that Eamonn understood how you could decide you wanted to marry someone in the course of an afternoon, and without drugs being the primary factor, as he and his sister had concluded many years ago. Did she ever wish she’d continued on to the National Gallery, he wondered. His parents weren’t unhappy together, but there was a separateness to their lives. His mother winding down her daily involvement in her business just as his father became too busy for holidays or even breakfast—that seemed somehow apt for the state their marriage had reached. Today particularly, he wished they were more like the Rahimis.
Glancing around the terrace, he tried to imagine an occasion later this summer when two families might be sitting out for dinner on a balmy evening. Karamat and Terry and Emily and Eamonn, Aneeka and Isma and Aunty Naseem, and maybe even Parvaiz. He acknowledged to himself he had no idea how the world might take him from this moment to that imagined one—he knew only that they all would have to find a way to make it happen.