Home Fire(60)

The candles threw their reflections onto the ice coffin. Flames trembled along its length, creating the impression of something stirring inside. Karamat walked over to the blinds, opened them to let in the afternoon sunlight, and looked down at the familiar scene of Marsham Street, suddenly so moving in all its quotidian details, cars parked in parking spots, a woman walking by with shopping bags braided around her wrists, trees with thin trunks standing side by side. His London, everyone’s London, everyone except those who wanted to harm it. He touched a vein in his neck, felt the reassuring warmth of his own blood.

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He returned home to Holland Park after Newsnight, a tough interview as expected, but he’d maintained his calm, clarified that he had never made a decision about a corpse—his decision had been about a living “enemy of Britain” (he used the expression three times, which seemed just right, though he might have been able to get away with a fourth). The very word “repatriation,” which is what the girl wanted for her brother’s corpse, rested on a fact of citizenship that had ceased to exist the day he, Karamat Lone, took office and sent an unequivocal message to those who treated the privilege of British citizenship as something that could be betrayed without consequences. No, he didn’t think it was harsh to send that message even to the girls who went as so-called jihadi brides. It was well past the point when anyone could pretend they didn’t know exactly what kind of death cult they were joining. The British people supported him, and that included the majority of British Muslims. The news anchor had raised his eyebrows at that.

Are you sure? he’d said. There seems to be a common view, repeated on this program just yesterday by a representative of the Muslim Association of Britain, that you hate Muslims.

I hate the Muslims who make people hate Muslims, he’d replied quietly.

Up the stairs he went to the bedroom he’d been exiled from. Terry would have been watching, and she’d know how much that question wounded him. He was aware she would still be angry about what she saw as his failure to protect Eamonn, but even so, she would have softened toward him. All he asked for was to be allowed to lie down next to her, not quite touching—unforgiven but not unwanted. At some point in the night she’d touch her foot to his—the once involved rituals of making up pared down to this single gesture over their more than three decades together. Our love is almost middle-aged now, she’d said to him a few weeks earlier, at the anniversary of their first meeting, trying to hide how much she minded that he’d returned home very late from Marsham Street having forgotten the date they always celebrated privately, unlike the wedding anniversary, which was generally a family, or more widely social, affair. His memory lapse was particularly blundering given that it came just months after she’d moved herself to a ceremonial role in her business, something she’d often talked about but that he didn’t think she’d ever do. One of us has to be a fixed point in the universe, otherwise we’ll keep missing each other, she’d said when she announced the decision, the only indication that she’d done it because his promotion to home secretary was imminent. The least he could have done in exchange was to remember the damn anniversary. He was generally a man to acknowledge a mistake the moment it was made, correct it (he had brought her breakfast in bed the next morning, and before leaving for work was attentive in other ways that pleased her), and never think of it again—this raking over a past failure was disquieting, adding to the wrongness of every part of the day, from Suarez’s jumpiness to the conversation with his son to the question about hating Muslims to the girl, that fucking girl.

“No,” Terry said when he pushed the door open. “No. Out.”

“I’ll sit there,” he said, pointing to the stool next to her dressing table.

“I spoke to our son. He told me what you said. About the blow job. Are you an expert on the better ones out there?”

“Whatever my failings are you know that isn’t one of them,” he said, loosening his tie, kicking off his shoes.

“Karamat, I mean it. Out.”

There was no arguing with her in this mood. Unbelievable that his son should have repeated that part of the conversation to his mother—did he know nothing about the rules between men? Down the stairs he went again to the consolations of a laughably expensive bottle of red wine, a gift that Terry had been saving for a special occasion. The ground floor was the place for formal entertaining, the basement the space in which he shut himself away from his family—each as alienating as the other, in the circumstances. He took the wine outside to the patio, where the moving shadows made him drop into a squat to offer as small a target as possible before he realized they were there for his protection. He finally ended up in the kitchen, sitting on the counter, swinging his legs as his children used to do when he would prepare breakfast for them while his wife was on a business trip somewhere. The kitchen table had long since been removed and a gleaming chrome island was in its place to allow more space for cheese boards, platters of canapés, glasses—sorry, children, “flutes”—of champagne. He rolled up his sleeves, picked up the wineglass. The first Indian cricketer to be loved by the English, Ranjitsinhji, always wore his sleeves buttoned at the wrist to hide his dark skin—something about holding an expensive glass of wine made Karamat understand how he’d felt. He let the wine sit in his mouth before it slid down with all the languor of the overpriced.