Free I Think of You: Stories by Ahdaf Soueif Page B

kill me first. Marry a daughter of a … a woman who’d take a respectable man off his wife? Living abroad has addled your brains, child. That’s what’s happened.”
    Adila Hanim peels potatoes in silence. The kitten flicks its tail, pounces at it, and loses it. Asya watches. She had offered to help but had been waved away. Should she insist? Should she be here at all? She knows the conversation isn’t going the way Tante Adila wants it to, but then it never could have. Can she stand here and say she’d been unhappy for years? Say she’s “known” another man but has left him? Say she loves Saif but has to be free?
    When he’d phoned her to say that his mother was in London and wanted to see her, they had both known that Adila Hanim was here to try and put an end to the separation between them.
    “If you don’t want to go, that’s fine. I’ll tell her,” Saif offered.
    “No, I’ll go. I ought to, and I’d like to see Tante.”
    “I’m not going,” he said. “She’ll have dinner laid out and it’ll be hellish.”
    So here she is. She had known she’d have to stall on any intimate conversation. Yet she really loves Tante Adila and has missed her—misses her even more now that she’s here. Maybe she had hoped somehow to make her feel not too bad about the whole thing. Well, this was a far cry from the days shared in the Madis’ kitchen at home. The French windows open onto the garden where the three cats snoozed under thepear tree. Dada Nour preparing the vegetables, her daughter at the sink washing chopping boards, mixing bowls, graters as they were finished with. Tante and her at the table. Tante cooking, showing her how to rub the boiled pasta with raw egg before covering it with the sauce bolognese, how to recognize the exact moment when the pepper sizzling in the butter was ready for the rice. Tante hadn’t thought she was a tart for visiting her son, for spending days in their home without her own parents knowing, for vanishing into his room for the afternoon.
    “If you love my son,” she once said to her, “you are loved by me.” What would she say now if she knew the truth? Should she tell her the truth? She looks at her mother-in-law’s grieving, betrayed face. What is the truth but every detail of the last nine years? How can it be told? And would it really make this easier? And anyway, shouldn’t it be up to him? This is his family. Let them believe what he chooses for them to believe. Maybe he prefers the cad’s role to that of the injured husband. She looks down at the kitten, busy now with a stray pistachio nut. Poor Clara. Bad luck to be the one around when this family disciplinary expedition showed up.
    A little while ago it would have been Mandy. And before that, Lady Caroline. But it was just this gentle, tragic-faced girl’s luck. Clara’s medieval features made Asya think of the Lady of Shallott. True, she had only seen her photo—but she felt as if she knew her. She knows, for instance, that Clara is dreaming of a home in the shadow of the pyramids, of “bonny wee bairns” with brown skin and green eyes. She alsoknows for a certainty that within two months she’ll be back in St. Andrews—possibly with a black cat.
    Adila Hanim turns and catches Asya staring at the kitten. “Imagine. She’s got a special comb for that cat. A special comb!” She snorts, then shakes her head and goes back to chopping the potatoes into the almost-ready chicken casserole.
    When Asya arrived, Adila Hanim had been sharing the kitchen with her second son’s mother-in-law, Souma Hanim. Each woman was determined that she would be the one to do all the cooking, the cleaning, and the washing-up. Adila Hanim—whose mother had died when she was five, leaving her a father and an older brother to look after—because she had never been and never could be in a house run by another woman. Souma Hanim, because she was well bred to an extreme and would never allow it to be said of her that she had