Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

There was, in fact, a great deal about her he didn’t understand. Most days that was part of her allure, but one morning, less than two weeks after they’d first met, he woke up resentful. The previous afternoon he had returned from the bakery around the corner to find a note she’d slipped through the communal letter slot in the front door saying “Was here. Left.” He canceled his evening plans in case she came back, but she hadn’t, and all that secrecy he’d been enjoying suddenly seemed a tiresome game in which she held all the power. Impulsively, he packed his bags for a week away and caught the train to an old school friend’s home in Norfolk. To begin with, he enjoyed the thought of her returning repeatedly to his front door only to find him gone. Let her know what it felt like to be the one who did the waiting around. But on the second night, when his hosts were asleep, he called his father’s personal assistant and asked him to find a cab company nearby that could get him back to London.

He arrived home at nearly three a.m., half asleep as he came up the stairs to his front door, and saw a figure curled up on the landing, his doormat rolled up as a pillow. He crouched down next to her, and when she opened her eyes her relief was both shaming and thrilling.

Once they were inside he walked straight to the living room, withdrew a set of keys from a ceramic bowl on a shelf, and handed it to her, saying it was hers to use anytime, day or night. She butted her head against his shoulder and said, “Don’t be this nice.” He asked her what she meant and she replied by kissing him, slow and intense.

Something shifted between them that night. When he woke up the next morning and walked toward the sound of Aneeka making breakfast in the kitchen, she left off blending a smoothie to show him the chart she’d made of all the blocks of time when he shouldn’t expect to see her — times when she was on campus, or in study groups, or the Wednesday evenings when Aunty Naseem insisted on a family dinner, and any day between three and five p.m. “Why not then?” he said, and she nipped his shoulder and said, “Let a woman hold on to her mystique!”

“Okay, okay. Block out Sunday afternoons too,” he said.

She kissed his shoulder where she had nipped at it. “The weekly Lone family lunch in Holland Park. Is it very civilized? Do you say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ and talk about the weather?”

“Why don’t you come some Sunday and see for yourself.”

She stepped back. She was wearing nothing but his T-shirt, and the tightening of her shoulders transformed the look from sexy to vulnerable. So she did know about her father and his. He caught her hands in his, reassuring them both that they could survive the conversation he knew they had to have. “I know that’ll be difficult for you. Isma told me. About your father. And about what my father said about him.”

“You know about my father?”

“Yes.”

“Why did she tell you? We don’t talk about that to anyone.”

“If you ever speak to her again you could ask.”

She walked away, poured out a smoothie, left it next to the blender, and returned to him. Shoulders still held in, looking at him with some of the mistrust she’d shown at their first meeting.

“Who else did she tell you about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Not who else. I meant what else. What else did she tell you about him?”

“It’s okay,” he said, touching her hand. “It’ll be okay. You never even met him. No one will judge you by him.”

“Not even your father?” She sat down on one of the high stools next to the kitchen counter, looking at him very seriously.

“Especially not him. He says you are what you make of yourself.” He raised and lowered his shoulders. “Unless you’re his son. Then he indulges you even if you don’t make anything of yourself.”

“He indulges you?”

“Yes. My sister’s like him, so she gets all the expectation. I get the pampering and the free passes.”

“Do you mind that?”

“I mind a lot. And you’re the first person to ever guess that might be the case.”

She hooked her feet around the back of his legs and drew him to her. “I never held it against your father that he said what he did about mine. He was right — we were all better off without Adil Pasha. But now I mind. Because when I think about it, he comes across as unforgiving. I don’t like the idea of you having a father who is unforgiving. I want to know he’s different with you.” She kept kissing him as she spoke, light kisses on his mouth, his neck, his jaw, slightly frantic.

He drew back, took her hands in his. “It’s fine to talk about this. It’s true, he can be unforgiving, particularly of people who betray his country.”

“What if you were the one asking him to do the forgiving?”

“You want me to ask him to find out what he can about your father?” But she was shaking her head emphatically. No, she didn’t want to know. Her father was nothing to her — it was her grandmother who had needed to know what had happened to her son; maybe her mother, maybe Isma. But not her, not Aneeka. She wanted to know about him, about Eamonn. She would like to have a picture of what it meant to be Karamat Lone’s son beyond what the photo album revealed.

“He’s one kind of person as a politician. Another kind as a father. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for me.”

“That’s good,” she said, a new note in her voice, one he couldn’t place. “That’s how it should be.” She put her arms around him, and he tried to ignore how relieved he felt at knowing she didn’t expect him to raise the issue of her father with the home secretary. Of course if this continued — and he desperately wanted it to — Eamonn would eventually have to tell his father that he was involved with the daughter of a jihadi. Not now, though, not yet. Let Aneeka’s game of secrecy allow things to remain simple for as long as they could.

The weeks went by. Life adjusted around the rules she set. In the hours when he knew Aneeka wouldn’t visit, he went to the gym, did his shopping, dropped in on his mother to prevent her dropping in on him. He fired his cleaning lady, who also worked for his parents, claiming it was a temporary situation until he started earning again — then hired someone else, whose details he found in a corner shop window. In the time he had at home without her he started learning Urdu, the difficulty of it made worthwhile by her delight in his growing vocabulary, which she augmented with words no online tutorial would ever teach. She started e-mailing him surprisingly interesting articles related to contract law, and they were both pleased to discover that his short time in the working world had given him insights she wouldn’t necessarily find in course reading. They cooked together, alternating roles of chef and sous-chef with perfect good cheer. Parallel to all this, his friends’ teasing about his “double life” faded away — as did their invitations to join them on weekends in the country, Friday evenings in the pub, picnics in the park, and dinners within the two-mile radius in which they all lived. He knew it was a paramount failure of friendship to disappear into a relationship, but to be in his friends’ company now felt like stepping back into the aimlessness that had characterized his life before Aneeka came along and became both focus and direction.

“When you’re ready for reentry let us know,” his ex-girlfriend, Alice, now engaged to his best friend, Max, said sympathetically one Wednesday evening when he was over at their place with the rest of the old school gaggle, the discomfort of the patio furniture dulled by Pimm’s. A few glasses in he learned that his friends had decided he was in a slump brought on by unemployment, his feeling of failure exacerbated by his father’s continued conquest of the world. This midweek gathering in Brook Green, consequence of Alice calling up and demanding a date from him, was an intervention. Helen recommended a doctor who would prescribe pills without making a fuss, Hari invited him to join a rowing club on the Thames, Will offered to set him up with a “fantastic” work colleague who wouldn’t expect anything serious, Alice proffered a job in her family’s PR company, and Max rested a hand on his shoulder and reminded Eamonn that he was as good at listening as he was at creating distractions.