you mean? Yeah, I guess. He does seem awfully nice, but then I’ve only known him a couple of weeks. Sounds awful, but I keep waiting for him to put a foot wrong. So far he hasn’t, I must say, but I do worry that it might just be by careful intent!’
Sam considered this for a moment before replying, ‘Well, even if it is by careful intent, isn’t it rather nice that he cares enough to do that?’
Anita’s grunt only sounded half-convinced so Sam continued her counsel. ‘Listen, don’t keep watching and waiting for something to go wrong. Just relax and enjoy getting to know him.’ Sam stopped, vaguely aware that it was a bit rich for her to advise anyone on matters of the heart.
Anita nodded. ‘You’re right, Sam. I’m too much of a cynical old cow for my own good sometimes. Listen, call if you need to talk, okay? Any time. You know that.’
Sam reached out over the gear-stick to kiss her friend’s cheek before she got out of the car. ‘You too. Call me whenever you can.’
She started up the engine again but waited until Anita was through her door before reversing and heading back for Borough High Street. She jumped as a motorbike courier flashed by, inches away from the side mirror, and cursed under her breath. That second glass of wine had been a bad idea, taken only because Bubbles had insisted that the police would never be prowling on a night as wet as this. How stupid of her to have taken advice from someone who never drove! The last thing she needed after such an emotional meeting with her two friends was a brush with a policeman waving a large breathalyser. If that did happen, she was sure she would collapse right into his arms in a flood of tears.
Sam nervously edged her Audi into the stream of traffic heading for Waterloo Bridge, earning an angry toot. Well, she hoped this was the way to Waterloo Bridge; even the road signs were virtually invisible in the rain. Sam cursed again. Akbar had told her weeks ago to get a sat-nav device fitted in her car, but, as usual, she’d forgotten. She didn’t usually travel south of the river as Anita was the only person she knew who lived there and she was generally happy to meet in town. Sam had made every attempt to refrain from postcode snobbery, but no matter how hard she tried to be comfortable south of the river, she invariably felt a little lost and threatened the minute she got past the South Bank Centre. Even at the start of the twenty-first century, these grubby narrow streets managed to look faintly Dickensian to her.
As she neared a large green sign, Sam peered upwards trying to read it—ah, Westminster Bridge, that would do nicely. She started to breathe easier as she drove under the blue railway bridge that she recognised as being the old Eurostar line. Now she knew where she was and pressed her foot on the accelerator with more confidence, heading for the bridge. Glancing out of the window, she saw that the river was a sludgy brown, the rain having chased all tourist traffic away from the choppy dark water. The Houses of Parliament looked as secretive and mysterious as ever, their narrow Gothic windows sending thin golden slits of light piercing through curtains of rain.
Perhaps it had not been a great idea, Sam thought, meeting the two people who shared those dark memories that had been triggered by the arrival of Lamboo’s letter. Instead, she ought to have gone somewhere bright and busy like Harvey Nicks, distracting herself as she so often did with a platter of moules frites at the rooftop café, and enjoying the anonymity of the summer crowds. Even if she had stayed at home and played Heer’s favourite tennis game on the Wii console, she might have ended the evening feeling less wretched. Luckily, Akbar had left this morning on a business trip, accompanying his boss to Frankfurt and Berlin for three days. She had come to rely on little breaks like this ever since Akbar’s firm had merged with the German practice, and she was grateful that she wouldn’t have to endure his sarcasm tonight: ‘What’s agitating the acidic Anita these days then?’ or ‘Ah, the bimboesque Bubbles Raheja—now if she had one more brain cell she’d be plant life.’ Sometimes the sarcasm was preferable to the more direct hits, though: ‘What’s with the glum face? Some of us have been hard at work and have earned the right to be morose, you know.’
Sam would never in a hundred years be able to explain to Akbar about Miss Lamb’s letter and the despair it had brought upon her. She’d mentioned Lily’s death to him once in the early days but he hadn’t seemed to take it seriously, and she had assumed that things like that were probably commonplace for someone in the legal profession. She hadn’t wanted to dwell on it anyway—not at a time when she had just got married and her life suddenly seemed to be blooming again. Later she had told herself it was just as well she’d never revealed any of the details to Akbar. Without a doubt, he’d have subsequently used the knowledge to make her feel even more remorseful than before. She could almost hear his sneers, especially seeing that he’d always harboured a special resentment towards her school friendships: ‘What sort of a Social ends with a kid being found dead?’ ‘So that’s what your gang was like at school, sure explains a lot!’ He never noticed that he was usually the only person enjoying his remarks, so busy sniggering at his own wit that he invariably failed to look around and see the stricken expression on her face or, worse, the embarrassment of whoever was in their company observing Sam’s mortification.
Sam slowly relaxed her fingers on the steering wheel as she passed the bright chaos of Knightsbridge and the traffic eased a bit. Hyde Park was covered in wet darkness, its black and gold wrought-iron gates closed for the night. She drove along with Classic FM playing softly on the car radio, trying to remember when Akbar had changed from being the charming, suave man she had fallen in love with to the remote stranger she was now married to. She couldn’t understand why his main source of entertainment seemed to lie in belittling other people, especially her.
Sam recognised Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ as it swelled through the speakers and felt a familiar prickle behind her eyelids as it slowed and turned soft and poignant towards the end. Elgar invariably caused sad memories to unspool and undulate through her head, but today even the soothing tones of the radio presenter was making her want to weep. It came to her as it always did in her lowest moments: it wasn’t Akbar, it was her. It was she who had changed her husband, embittered him in some way by letting her own misery seep into their life together. She had never quite measured up to Akbar’s brilliance anyway, even in the early years of their marriage, doing a part-time job in a library briefly before giving it up, embarrassed by the growing disparity in their salaries and the sheer inanity of carrying on working when he was earning such mega-bucks and needed her to be a support to him. Then, sitting around at home all day or meeting other non-working wives for lunches at Nobu and Zuma and attending the weekend parties thrown by the Kensington banker-lawyer set, she had slowly started to put back on all the weight she had lost at college, almost without noticing it.
It was almost certainly her growing size that had first put Akbar off her, and perhaps it was that which had started off the sarcasm too. Maybe Akbar had thought that jokes were a less hurtful way of letting her know that he did not like being married to a fat woman. But early on she hadn’t taken the hint when he disparaged other overweight people, even those he didn’t know, declaring in that superior way of his that they were all indubitably either ‘weak’ or ‘lazy’. But their sex life had started to dwindle at some indefinable point and then there had been his gift of an exercise bicycle on her thirtieth birthday.
Sam turned down her road and drove past her neighbours’ familiar handsome town-houses, some advertising plush interiors through uncurtained windows. She wondered at that sometimes; she herself always drew the curtains before the lights were turned on—not that she didn’t have expensive contemporary art on her walls or designer custom-made sofas to show off, but there was something comforting in silently declaring that not everything had to be publicised and made known.
Fishing out the electronic buzzer from the glove compartment, she watched the tall metal gates to her house swing slowly open. The maid had drawn the curtains of all the upper windows and only the kitchen was visible from the garden as she pulled into the drive. She could see Heer’s small black head bobbing around inside and felt her heart melt as she turned the ignition off. At least she had her daughter’s love—although who knew for how long. Heer was growing up to be the spitting image of Akbar, and might inherit—dear God—his sense of humour too one day.
Sam gathered her things from the back