Free A Matter of Marriage by Lesley Jorgensen

her own. But then she remembered that he was holding the invitation so she was stuck with trailing behind Simon as he caught up with his mates. She exchanged fake smiles with a lot of tall skinny blonde
gora
totty girlfriends—well, what other kind of totty was there—she being the ethnic mascot for the night.
    She hung back on the edge of the group as they chatted and laughed, looked longingly toward the main entrance. The doors weren’t open yet, but the red carpet, already dark from the rain, had been laid in one wide strip from the road and up the middle of the steps to the main doors. It was partially covered by a yellow plastic awning, bright under the streetlights. More people of Simon’s type, men in suits and dinner jackets, and long-legged women in silver and black and grey, wandered under the awning in apparent disregard of a small group of dishevelled men sitting on deckchairs taking photographs.
    Something was digging in under her blouse: it felt like one of Mum’s spare safety pins. She turned away from Simon and his lot, trying to run a finger under the shoulder of her blouse without being too obvious, and caught the eye of one of the security guards, a Sikh, looking at her like she was from another planet. Thanks, she already knew that.
    Flashbulbs were going off: someone must have arrived, and now Simon and his posse had disappeared. Rohimun scanned the gathering. There they were, almost inside, all heading up the steps together. Despising herself, she scuttled after them to catch up, her bag banging unrhythmically against her bottom, but as she ran, another group of people moved in front of her, blocking her way. The crowd on the red carpet had become a queue for the doors, opened now, and she stopped and rose awkwardly amongst them on tiptoes, just in time to see Simon present her invitation to security and disappear inside. Blank backs hemmed her in, and she whispered
you bastard
as she stood her ground, angry and at a loss.
    But then the group just in front of her exploded into noisy meet-and-greets with another group and she, blessing her shortness for once, edged forward with them, past the security guard and inside. The crowd had seemed large before, but within the first exhibition room, it was diminished by the room’s enormous proportions: oompa-loompas in a room for giants. People spread out and started to cluster into small bands, kissing and laughing.
    The roiling anger in her gut that had seen her through the taxi ride and onto the red carpet seemed to have subsided and she felt oddly lighthearted.
Seize the day
, as Tariq used to say. Rohimun lifted her eyes to the room’s vaulted Victorian wedding-cake ceiling, eighteen feet high, scrolled and curlicued and coved and acanthused in a multitude of whites: zinc white, antique, palest violet, ivory and cream; a tumbling shadowed richness of tones and shades that leapt up from the deep red walls like seafoam on blood.
    And then there were the paintings. Rohimun started to walk around the edges of the room, avoiding the cocktailed people trying to compete by volume alone with Crivelli, Raphael, Michelangelo. Monumental figures lifting, straining, stretching, bulging eyes focused on the utterly immediate or the unutterable vision. This was where she belonged. Flesh was everywhere: huge muscled arms, backs and thighs. The women were no less monumental: gigantic pearly or tawny stomachs, breasts and buttocks, their hair curling and cascading. Nakedness was the obvious and inevitable state. Clothes were an unrestricting, almost ephemeral afterthought: ready to tear apart, fall off, drift away at the slightest movement or, indeed, even an excess of emotion.
    Rohimun sighed. Not one thin, hair-straightened blonde amongst them. Or a single skinny-bottomed stockbroker. She wandered further, into the next room, her sandals making pleasant shushing slaps on the marble floor.
    The portrait exhibition was not yet open, but she was more