The Art of Inheriting Secrets(43)

“Huh,” I said and sipped my tea. The cat leapt down, and I settled a little more. “I don’t actually believe that.”

“Believe what?”

“That you learned your lesson, by which I guess you probably mean you gave up. Books fail for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with the writer, but you know that too.” I paused. “Did you write the wrong books?”

He raised one thick brow, so like his father’s. “I don’t know. When I look back, it’s all this crazy blur—dinner parties and literary gigs and the students and the writing. That’s when I met Tapasi, at a party for the first book.” He shook his head and repeated, “A blur.”

“Believe me: I know the feeling.” I let go of a humorless laugh and swung my body forward, elbows on the table. “I broke up with my boyfriend today.”

“Today,” he repeated, pointing at the ground, at this moment in time.

“Yeah. That’s why I was out walking. We were together for eight years. Eight.”

“Are you all right?”

“It was way past time.” I shook my head. “When I needed to take Arrow, my dog, to the vet because he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t go because he was fucking painting.” I glanced at him. “Sorry.”

He smiled a little. “I’ve heard it before.”

My anger, as hot and liquid as magma, pushed deep into the center of my body for months and months and months, geysered upward. “When I was in intensive care, he came to see me once a day, for like five minutes, and then he couldn’t be bothered to get the apartment ready for me to come home with my crutches and cast, and I had to go stay with my mother. Which ended up being a good thing, because she died, but still”—I looked at Samir, and I hadn’t lost him; he was listening intently—“why didn’t I break up with him months ago? How could I not have seen him more clearly? He’s a jerk. A big fat jerk.”

“You’ve done it now, though.” He held up a fist. We bumped.

I picked up my cup to toast. “To the end of bad relationships.”

“The end.” He drank and picked up the pot to pour more in both of our cups. “Did you enjoy your visit with the earl?”

“You know what? I actually did. The party itself was kind of weird, all those people and I didn’t really know what to say to them. But the earl is wonderful. He’s a great old man, and he knew my mom and grandmother.”

“I’m glad. You seemed nervous about it.”

“And you seemed a little hostile.” It popped out before I could stop it.

For a moment, he regarded me. Took a sip of his tea, then leaned back. “I suppose I was. This is a very classist country, and no one ever forgets it for a moment.” He steepled his fingers, and in the gesture, I could see the professor he’d been. “It’s just always there, judging everything.”

“Right, the class thing here is strange. I mean, I’m American. We don’t do class.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

Startled, I looked at him. He only looked back with his liquid black eyes. I said, “It’s not like here.”

“Perhaps not. But you can’t possibly think it doesn’t exist.”

“I guess.” I thought of those dinners I’d eaten, the very privilege of living in San Francisco at all, the homeless people down on Treat Avenue, the neighborhood where my mother’s house had sold for millions, the stories of people riding the train for two hours to get to work from places as distant as Stockton, people being taxed out of the homes they’d lived in for decades. “I mean, yeah, of course it does.” Thinking more, I felt a little ashamed—the country had been under siege over class for several years now. “But it’s different, don’t you think? America is essentially a meritocracy, in that you can earn your way up the ranks via education and money.”

“But can you, really? University is wildly expensive, is it not? Not everyone can afford the cost.”

I nodded. “That’s true. But we don’t really judge people on accents.”

His mouth lifted on one side. “Don’t you?”

And again, I realized I was wrong. Dialect and regionalities did influence the perception of class. “Huh. Right again.”

He smiled. “Class does exist in America. You’re just more subtle.”

“And we don’t have the nobility.”

“Exactly.”

“It does appear that the British Indian population is very upwardly mobile, or at least some segments are.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, that’s true. But it’s also true that there are no great British Indian estates that are centuries old. Like yours.”

I searched his face. Was that bitterness I heard or only observation? “I hardly know what to think of it.”

“You will.”

“Yes. And anyway, I’m told you can buy titles these days. That’s what I think a lot of the people at that party want. To buy Rosemere to get themselves a title.”

“Almost certainly. And they want to make a fortune creating housing estates.” He gestured toward the uniform, ugly red roofs. “What a shame that would be, to see your land turned into that.”