Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire

“Probably just as well. It’s the house brew.”

She stood where she was a moment, watching him walk up the stairs, which were bracketed on one side by potted ferns and on the other by a wall with ferns painted on it. When he glanced down toward her, mouthing “Not lost yet,” she pretended she had simply been preoccupied by her thoughts and returned to the little table in the alcove, angling her body so that her own shadow kept the sunlight from her computer screen. Slid her fingers over the wooden tabletop, its knots, its burns. Guess who, she started to type into her phone, then stopped and deleted it. She could too easily imagine the tone of Aneeka’s response: Ugh! she’d say, or Why did you even talk to him?

He didn’t return. She imagined him seeing a short line at the counter and placing her mug down with a shrug before walking out the upstairs exit; it left her both vindicated and disappointed. She went up to buy herself another coffee and found that the machine had broken down, so had to settle for hot water and a tea bag that leaked color into it. Returning downstairs, she saw a mug of fresh coffee at her table and a man folded into the chair next to it, legs thrown over the arm, reading a book in the shape of the gap in the bookshelf above his head.

“What is it?” he said, looking at the cup of tea she set down on an empty table. He examined the tag at the end of the tea bag. “Ruby Red. Not even pretending it’s a flavor.”

She held up the mug in thanks. The coffee wasn’t as hot as it could have been, but he must have had to carry it down the street. “How much do I owe you?”

“Five minutes of conversation. That’s what I spent standing in the queue. But after you’re finished with whatever you’re doing.”

“That could be a while.”

“Good. Gives me time to catch up on essential reading about…” He shut the book, looked at its cover. “ The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Complete in One Volume. Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting, and Other Womanly Arts…”

One of the undergraduates looked up, glared.

Isma slung the laptop into her backpack, downed her coffee. “You can walk to the supermarket with me.”

During the short walk to the supermarket, she learned that he’d quit his job with a management consultancy and was taking some time to live life beyond office walls — which included visiting his maternal grandparents in Amherst, a town he loved for its association with childhood summer holidays.

While she tried to choose between one variety of unconvincing tomato and another for tonight’s pasta sauce, Eamonn wandered off and brought back a can of plum tomatoes, as well as leaves for the salad she hadn’t intended to make. “Arugula,” he said, rolling the r extravagantly. “Halfway between a Latin American dance and an ointment for verrucas.” She couldn’t tell if he was trying to impress her or if he was the kind of man in love with his own charm. When she had finished placing the shopping in her backpack he picked it up from the checkout counter and looped it over one shoulder, saying he liked the schoolboy feeling of it, would she mind very much if he carried it for a while? She thought he was making a show of the polished manners that passed as virtue among people like him, but when she said there was no need for such chivalry he said it was the opposite of chivalry to burden a woman with his company just because he was feeling lonely and a London accent was the best possible antidote. So they continued on together, walking toward the nearby woods since the day was so lovely. On the way he asked for a detour via Main Street (he said the name with the slight deprecation of someone newly arrived from a metropolis) so they could stop at an outdoor-clothing store, and in little more than the time it took her to cross the street and withdraw twenty dollars from the ATM he was out again, wearing expensive walking shoes, the backpack more weighed down than previously.

The woods were slushy, but the light piercing through between scrabbling branches was a pleasure, and the river, swollen with snowmelt, roared. They turned up their collars against the dripping from the branches; he didn’t seem to mind yelping when fat, cold drops fell on his head, merely commented on the stylish protection of her wool turban and called her “Greta Garbo.” Every now and then they heard the whump! of a section of dislodged snow landing on the ground, but they felt safe enough to keep going. Their talk was insubstantial — the weather, the overfriendliness of strangers in America, favorite London bus routes (which revealed nothing so much as the distinct geography of their lives) — but even so, the Englishness of his humor, and his cultural references, were a greater treat than she would have expected. Small talk came more naturally to him than to her, but he was careful not to dominate the conversation — listening with interest to even her most banal observations, asking follow-up questions rather than using her lines as springboards to monologues of his own in the manner of most of the men she knew. Someone raised him the way I tried to raise Parvaiz, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking.

Along one of the calmer stretches of water, a fallen tree extended out twenty or more feet from the bank. Isma walked across it, arms out for balance, while he remained behind, making noises that were half anxious, half admiring, wholly pleasing to hear. The sky was a rich blue, the water surged like blood leaving a heart, a lean young man from a world very distant from hers was waiting for her to walk back to him. She breathed in the moment, tried to catch her reflection in the water, but it was too quick, nothing like the slow-moving waterways to which she was accustomed.

She came from a city veined with canals: that had been the revelation of her adolescence while her school friends were embarking on other kinds of discovery that discomforted more than appealed to her. In Alperton, two miles from her old home, she could descend into waterside avenues of calm, unpeopled in comparison to the streets, thick with noise, she’d traveled to arrive there. She knew her mother and grandmother would say it was dangerous, a lone girl walking past industrial estates and along silent stretches with no company other than the foliage, as in the countryside (to her family nowhere was more dangerous than the countryside, where you could scream for help without being heard), so she never said anything more specific than “I’m going for a walk,” which they found both amusing and unthreatening.

Her foot slipped on the slick surface of the branch, and she had to drop to her knees to keep from falling in. The cold water a spray on her hands and sleeves. She walked back cautiously, registering the anxiety in Eamonn’s expression.

After that, he asked more direct questions about her life, as though seeing her walk away from him across a fallen tree had brought her into focus. She gave him the easiest version: Grew up in North London, as he already knew because of the bus routes — the Preston Road neighborhood to be precise, which was obviously too precise for him. Two siblings — much younger. Raised by her mother and grandmother, now both dead; she’d never really known her father. She was here for a PhD program, fully funded, with a stipend from a position as a research assistant that would give her enough to live on. She’d applied too late for the autumn semester, but her former tutor Dr. Shah had arranged permission for her to start in January, and here she now was.

“And so you’re doing what you want to be doing? You lucky thing!”

“Yes,” she said. “Very lucky.” She wondered if she should respond to his questions about her life with some about his. But then he might mention his father, of whom she couldn’t pretend to be unaware, and that might lead them down a road she didn’t want to travel.