Free I Think of You: Stories by Ahdaf Soueif

speak to you. To you alone. Is this how horoscopes work? If she were to askhim … Asya has to smile; it’s exactly the type of question he hates. And yet he sends her this—this portfolio.
    She turns back to the table. Gerald would like it. Gerald would love it. It’s just his kind of thing. Multimedia too. She flicks through the pages and comes again to the longest of the poems and stops, as before, at the last verse. “So,” she says out loud, “she can say ass. Well, big deal. Anyone can say ass. I can say it. Ass. Jaunty ass. Big deal.” She turns back to her typewriter.
—and they’re vaguely okay, I suppose. Not my kind of thing. Anyway, Mummy darling, you’re going to have to come over next summer—

Satan

    I don’t understand anything. Are you both joking or what? Do you think I’ve gone senile that I can’t get a straight answer from either of you? So my son is crazy; he’s got an armored head. I know that, but I know also that he treasures you like the light of his eyes and he could never do without you. Yes, I know there’s a woman: some low creature has pulled him for two or three weeks; absence does terrible things, child, and it was you who chose to put countries between you. I’m not making excuses for him. Don’t ever think that. I am furious with him. I’ve told him and I’ve sworn : after this time I’ll not enter a home of his until things are all right between you. I’ll not enter any home of his unless you are its mistress.”
    “Tante,” Asya says when she can edge a word in. “Tante, It’s not like that. What’s happened between Saif and me is nothing at all to do with Clara.”
    “Clara! And you can put her name on your tongue? Your nerves, my dear, your nerves!” Adila Hanim’s voice pitches a couple of notes higher. “I tell you, I didn’t even believe him when he told me you knew.” She reaches for a casserole dish on a high shelf, and before her daughter-in-law can move to help her, she has banged it down on the cooker. “She actually has the boldness to come here with him. What does she think? She imagines I’m going to welcome her? That we’re all going to sit down together and talk about this and that? I wouldn’t even shake her hand!”
    Asya stands in the doorway of the kitchen, her arms folded behind her. “Well, you must have annoyed him then,” she says gently.
    “Let him be annoyed. It’s time someone annoyed him. Staying with her in a hotel, openly, when he knows I’m coming.”
    Beyond her mother-in-law’s solid figure, a tall narrow window stands ajar. Visible beyond it are daylight and a brick wall. But Asya knows that it opens onto the narrow passage between the two Victorian houses. To the right is the fence enclosing the gardens; to the left is the street.
    “But, Tante, she was living with him here. He went to a hotel because he left the flat for you. It was natural that he should take her with him.”
    “Asya! Are you trying to give me a stroke?” Adila Hanim pauses with her hands on the rim of the pot into which shehas just thrown a knob of butter. She stares reproachfully at her daughter-in-law. Why is Asya defending him? Like this, she, Adila, finds herself attacking Saif more and more; as though the matter gnawed at his mother’s heart more than at his wife’s. She looks at Asya, who tries to manage a small smile. Asya has changed. In the five years since they last met, she has changed. When she first came in and they hugged each other, then drew away with moist eyes, Adila had thought her daughter-in-law was still the same. But now she sees the changes. The black hair keeping more of its wave than it had ever been allowed in Cairo; the skin paler; the face newly defined, as though it had been sculpted out of its old childish roundness. But above all, the detachment, the holding back, to be seen in the eyes and in every stance of that slim body. Oh, child, child, whatever has happened to you? Adila Hanim turns away. “He could