Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

The conversation that day in the drawing room in the home of Penelope Hampton-Wyvern went on and on. Which is not to say that it dragged on; quite the contrary, when I consider how much felt communicated, I marvel at how scarcely two hours could have contained it. Perhaps the elites run to a different beat of time.

When Emily came back into the room after her phone call, she said, Mother dear, Zafar won the Patrick Hastings scholarship.

I was surprised by Emily’s apparent pleasure. When I informed her the week before that I’d been awarded the scholarship, a scholarship for which she, too, had applied, her face had turned white. Emily had offered no congratulations, and without a word she had walked away, and the following week she winced when she saw my name in the announcements at the back of The Times , near the crossword. I had thought then: What could she possibly envy? This was a woman who had had all the blessings of life, who had been born to wealth and privilege, had gone to the finest schools in the world, a tall and slender lady possessed of a sufficient beauty and the quietly confident charm of upper-class women. Beside her, others seemed shrill.

But my understanding changed. I think that in Emily’s eyes, her proudest achievements had been tainted by the same social favoritism that cleared her path to those achievements, nepotism and favoritism, which give with one hand and take with the other. The esteem to which she felt she was entitled, by virtue of her talents, was always sullied, either because others saw only the privilege and access that aided her successes or because, even when they didn’t see those links, she did.

Emily sought absolution and found in me a confessor, an outsider to whom to depose the truth of her tainted advantage, renouncing the lie without giving up its gains. She told me, for instance, that the panel that awarded her a scholarship to Harvard had included a family friend. I heard from her about the barrister tasked with deciding on her admission to chambers, a man who was at the time seeking promotion to the rank of Queen’s Counsel, a status that commands huge fees and on whose behalf Emily’s father was writing a testimonial. Did she think her confession necessary? Did conscience compel her to disclose the professional conflict (even at the cost of disclosing her father’s own indiscretion in telling her that he was writing a letter on behalf of her boss)? Was she driven to present the Emily she despised so that the better Emily could be loved? Loved by me?

Sitting in the gaze of the three-way mirror on her dresser, Emily Hampton-Wyvern, I imagine now, saw herself as three Emilys, one who longed to be loved, respected, and admired for her notional self; another, a less-reflective Emily, who seized every advantage given to her and took others that weren’t; and a third Emily, one I shudder to think of, one whose existence I think even she could acknowledge only glancingly, one capable of cruelty darker than you or I can imagine.

Righteous indignation might have been enough motivation on that particular afternoon for Emily to advertise her new beau’s successes, independent and hard earned. Perhaps mine might have sanctified hers, by association. Nevertheless, something else was at play. Emily had a visceral drive to attack her mother. I know how we indict our parents for heinous crimes long before we see them as flawed human beings. And of course it’s easier to bring wisdom, the best of it borrowed, to account for the lives of others than to apply the same in the measure of one’s own. But I think Emily held her mother at fault for everything because she blamed her for her parents’ divorce, so that in all things her mother drew Emily’s ire. The privilege that robbed Emily of quiet enjoyment in her successes, while clearing her way to them, did after all come from birth, and the woman she called “Mother” was certainly responsible for that.

So I’ve heard, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. Did you know that Emily’s father won the award? Some years ago, of course.

No, I did not, I said, glancing at Emily.

Congratulations, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. Shouldn’t we crack open some bubbly?

Not at all — these things are random, I replied.

Do you think five Court of Appeal judges would make random decisions?

Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, I thought, knew quite a bit about it already, more, in fact, than I’d told Emily. On the other hand, perhaps the award was judged in her husband’s day as it was in mine. The English bar is hardly famous for changing fast.

Maybe their lordships felt pressured to spread these awards around a little, I replied.

She meant to flatter me and I think, in retrospect, I might have been more gracious.

What the dickens can you mean by that? she asked.

Mother, you of all people can’t deny these awards always go to the same people, said Emily.

I don’t. They go to those who deserve them.

They go to the well connected, said Emily.

That’s plainly not true, since Zafar was awarded one, answered her mother.

Isn’t that the point? said Emily. Things are changing. How many deserving students can there be in Kensington?

Here were the makings of the dainty champion of the downtrodden, the oppressed. Not just deserving students from outside Kensington but also the black races, I thought, or the poor or even the third world might get a shout.

Britain can’t carry on protecting the privileged, continued Emily.

I began then to perceive the complexity of Emily’s relationship with privilege, her hostility toward it not merely at an intellectual level, hostility that was not even a purely emotional blow against injustice but a force that gathered in the depths of rebellion.

* * *

It took six months before she invited me to go with her to a party. Six months of excuses while she went on her own. What? She thought I didn’t know? She never told me but she needn’t have: A day later I might see a party dress hanging on a chair, a pair of high heels outside the wardrobe, lying askew, waiting for the weekly housekeeper, and, on the dresser, lipstick uncapped. Is it prying if I don’t actually look for signs but can’t help noticing them? I’m a pattern seeker, and breaks in patterns scream for attention.

So what did we do? We might have seen a movie or a play or gone out for dinner. Most of all we stayed in the bedroom. Or sat in the lounge, she working and I reading something. We went to her mother’s for supper every week. I arranged dinners with some of my acquaintances, but after she made her last-minute excuses twice and then failed to show on the third, I stopped doing so. We did things together but never with others.

Maybe she feared what lay in wait for us. When the day arrived, the words came as a casual suggestion, muttered while her face was hidden behind the open door of the refrigerator, as if something sitting in the fridge had caused her to remember: Fiona’s having a party. Would you like to come?

What I should have said was, Who the hell is Fiona? And how can you be so casual about it, just drop an invitation like that after six months of avoiding taking me to a single thing?

And yet what do I do but agree meekly? I used to think that I was giving her the benefit of the doubt, when in fact there was nothing to give. My insecurity had destroyed the certainty I should have had in what was plain to see.

Let’s go , I said.

Before the party, I imagined that word must have got around that Emily was seeing someone, but no, not at all. None of her peers seemed to know. Or did they know something? Had they caught the waft of rumors? And did they think, because there was only gossip and never confirmation, that the relationship wasn’t serious? Maybe it’s just a passing fancy, a little exotica, a bit of rough (no surprise there — like mother, like daughter). After all, she hasn’t brought him out until now, has she?