A House Called Askival by Merryn Glover Page A

sad.’ And he winked at James. Ruth followed his gaze but her father gave nothing away.
    â€˜But,’ she probed, slicing into her sticky gulab jamun. ‘Do you work?’
    â€˜Not so well,’ he said, rubbing his hip and grinning. ‘Rusting a bit, you know, and losing some marbles.’
    She sighed. ‘Are you retired?’
    â€˜Oh no! Doctor-ji is retired, Ruthie, and he goes to meetings every day, writes reports, plants trees, clears rubbish and visits the villages. Is very hard work and I am avoiding for long as possible, Inshallah.’
    â€˜But—!’ Ruth huffed with an exasperated half-laugh.
    James wiped his mouth on a napkin and spoke. ‘Iqbal was down at Oaklands three days a week teaching Indian Music and a cookery class.’
    â€˜Really—?’
    â€˜What he doesn’t want to tell you is that he has taken leave so he can look after me. It is against my wishes.’
    â€˜Oh,’ said Ruth, and swallowed a lump of gulab jamun.
    Iqbal tilted his head and eyebrows, a helpless little shrug, a diminished smile. Rain shattered on the stone terrace outside.
    â€˜I’m… here,’ she offered, slowly. James turned his gaze on her, a pale blue searchlight; it made her tighten.
    Iqbal jumped up and started gathering dishes. ‘But you are not here to be house-maid,’ he said, voice bouncy as a ball.
    No.
    Cigarette finished, she took up the cane chair opposite her father and pulled a kashmiri shawl round her shoulders. Iqbal’s tune was slower now, sadder. A friend , James had said. Yet he waited on them hand and foot, second-guessing their needs, fussing and spoiling, just like a devoted servant, or a doting mother. Though Ellen, she thought bitterly, had not been allowed the spoiling.
    Warming her hands on the mug, Ruth sipped her chai and looked around the room, struggling to remember the old servants’ quarters it once was. Grey concrete, streaked with damp and hung with ragged washing. Scabby children in the dirt at the front, chickens pecking, a broken chair. James had said the servants were moved to a smart, new block about five years ago and this would have been pulled down, hadhe not bought it. He’d hired unemployed Garhwali labourers to re-build it with strong stone walls and a tiled roof. Inside was all white and wood and glass. Ruth was surprised by its beauty. James had scorned beauty in all things but nature; only God could create beauty. Man’s efforts were vain, illusory and decadent.
    Yet on the wall behind James there was a painting: a bluish shape against a background like sun-burned rock. Gradually she recognised the shape was a woman with her eyes closed and face lifted, as if for a kiss. The more Ruth looked at it, the more it gave.
    Her gaze dropped to James, his head resting against the wall, fine white hair falling over his forehead and down to the caterpillar eyebrows. Shadows pooled in the hollows of his face and there was a scattering of dandruff on the shoulders of his sweater, a brown thing with patched elbows and sagging sides that hung on him like a dust sheet. He’d always been lean, but when she’d held him so briefly at their greeting on the road, the jutting of his ribs had shocked her.
    Like that day in Tennessee when she was seventeen and had walked into his bedroom. It was just a few weeks after they’d left India and the morning of Hannah’s wedding. He was curled up on his side, back to her, in nothing but underpants. His ribs were convulsing like the poles of a wind-blown tent, and there was a sound she’d never heard before. A strange, almost silent hacking; the beating of breath; the rise and fall of sobs. In it she recognised a loss greater than her own, and a source deeper than she understood, and though she felt a tearing rush of love, she could not reach for him. She slipped out, frightened and alone.
    Outside, the rain had softened into a dripping dark. From the