Chapter 1

So many of the words people say you quickly forget. But others you remember. It was like that when we came to get our official blessing from my Aunt Jessie, before our wedding.

It wasn’t as though Samira was someone new in my life: we’d met five years before as university students here in England in Manchester. She’d been talked about and seen for some time; she’d come to those dreadful Christmas family gatherings with my parents. We’d even been living together in London for almost two years, since we graduated. But now that we were going to tie the knot, my lordly aunt, my father’s sister, a queen bee with a job in the Government’s Foreign Office, insisted we take tea with her so she could pat our heads and give us some advice. Samira joked beforehand that she was probably going to tell us about condoms, and we’d have to pretend she was telling us something new.

But it was nothing about birth control. Once we’d been through the cucumber sandwiches and the topics both of us expected – the kind of wedding ceremony, the religious and ethnic things (Samira is Anglo-Indian) – she suddenly leaned forward like the Tower of Pisa. Then she announced very grandly, “This is the advice of someone who knows.”

She paused. We paused.

“Everything will be fine in your marriage as long as you’re flexible. People change. Things come up. You just can’t predict. People change.” That’s the second time she’d said that. “But be flexible and go with the flow, and you’ll probably have a good marriage. Kiss me,” she said, finishing off her sermon by standing up, holding herself like a statue, waiting for lips on each cheek.

Frankly, we found this unsettling. Not because of Aunt Jessie’s grand manner: I was used to that. It was the implication that we were going to change. Here we were, in love with each other just as we were, and now we were being told that we were going to become different people. It was as though she was telling us that in a few years Samira would start growing another head. Or I’d become an axe-murderer. In such circumstances would we still love each other? Well, we’d try to, but there’s no use denying there’d be difficulties.

“How could Samira change?” I thought to myself then. It wasn’t possible. She hadn’t at all in the five years we’d known each other. Each bewitching thing about her that had bowled me over when she walked into that first history class was still intact. Her lovely dark skin, with bright brown eyes to match, and black hair cascading down. The trim, compact physique, five foot three at the outside, every inch lean and graceful as a gazelle’s. The cheekbones, and little apple breasts. The voice: oh yes, the voice, with its liveliness and quick tempo – something I’d noticed with other people of Indian extraction, though no other voice beguiled me like Sam’s. The warmth of her hands when you touched them: small hands, cosy hands, warmed even on the coldest days by her body’s central heating. The way she raised an eyebrow whenever she looked quizzical. Her curiosity. Her intelligence. Her slimness: did I mention that? Her sense of humour. So many different things about her. I didn’t want to lose any of them.

Quite what she’d list as my own desirable qualities – well, modesty forbids. My blond hair? Yes, I remember her mentioning that in the early days. I also recall her laughing at my large feet; but those wouldn’t make the list, except as a quirk. And I know the list wouldn’t include my parents. Even I found them difficult: not my mother so much, but definitely my father, a real dictator who viewed everything in the world around him as an opportunity for a moan and a scowl.

I can still see the wince on his face when he realised that his precious son had fallen for someone whose colour was other than white. I tried to make allowances: he was a child of his time I told myself, born to a colonial officer who’d seen out the last days of the Raj in India in the 1940s and hadn’t come back with the warmest feelings about the continent that was kicking the British out. Bad feelings had obviously trickled down from father to son. Of course he voted Conservative; read the right-wing papers. I tried to see him as a human being, not a type, but it was a struggle.

“We notice she’s coloured,” he said, insufferably, very early on, when Samira had her first “getting to know you” visit at the farm he managed down in Devon.

“She’s also British. Born in Northampton.”

“Ah, Northampton,” he said with a kind of sneer. “Famous for manufacturing boots.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” I countered. He was definitely a hurdle to jump over.

For myself I loved the fact that Samira’s colour and ethnic origin were different than mine. Who’d want to go through life coloured a pasty white? Samira, now, she was honey brown: the kind of colour that made you want to scoop her up in a spoon and start licking. But it wasn’t just the shade of her skin. I loved the differences in her background. She may have been brought up and shaped in England, but she’d been well trained by her delightful parents and her relatives, some still in Calcutta; and she told me plenty about a culture and a country I’d never known before. The intricacies of the caste system. The crazy Bollywood films. The different kinds of curry. The fact that traffic in India drives on the left: a hang-over from the Raj. Big things and small things: I loved hearing about them all, and Samira liked talking about them.

By the time marriage was decided upon, my father had grudgingly come to accept the inevitable and tried to be what the old brigade would have called a “good sport”. He knew Samira made me happy, and he tried to cling to that. I assured him that marriage wouldn’t involve the slaughter of a sacred bull, or my conversion to the Hindu faith. And so it didn’t. The Chowdhoury-Hartfield nuptials in Northampton took place in a civil ceremony, simple, quite dignified, with Samira looking incredibly beautiful in a clinging dress, black and silver, decorated with the most gorgeous brocade designs, with a mellow orange sash draped around one shoulder. After the ceremony, we all piled into a modestly up-market Indian restaurant, for a leisurely and vast meal, though I was too nervous I remember to eat much myself. Samira was the same, though she made up for it on our honeymoon.

We went to Barbados for ten days. Ten days of sun, sitting on beaches, lingering over meals, and lingering even longer in bed. By this time in our relationship there wasn’t a part of our bodies each of us didn’t know intimately – sex with Samira, I’ll tell you right out, was terrific. But somehow the fact that we’d made this legal pact, signed and sealed, and were now man and wife, made a bed even more memorable a place than usual.

I loved to stroke her, and work myself down to her fringed, golden gateway by sweeping over her little breasts and her taut flat stomach, rubbing each of her hips before starting to “circle the roundabout” – that’s what we called it – with the tip of my forefinger. Hard to say which of us became the more aroused. I’d gaze into her face, flat on the pillow, and see her eyes start to moisten. She’d groan lightly; I’d withdraw my hands – just a tactical retreat – and then bring on the big gun. No need to give further details. After that, we’d lie still, exhausted, entwined. And after that, another bout, perhaps, or the shower. She’d rise up from the bed, not a stitch on, and wend her way to the bathroom; I’d look at her neat little bottom, her athletic physique, and think myself the luckiest person in the world.

After Barbados reality called. Back to work. Samira at that point was nearing the end of her current public relations job. At university she’d done geography and economics and became convinced that her life goal was to save the planet. But a university friend, Sally, had pulled her into the media and Big Snout PR, where planet-saving wasn’t a priority at all. Saving paper certainly wasn’t, despite electronic mail-outs. “It’s all experience,” Sam used to say. True enough, and I know if I heard Samira down the phone, with that silver, rapid voice, I’d buy anything she was selling. Me, I was due back at a desk and computer at TFL - Transport for London. I dealt with finances, budgets, strategic economic planning. Pretty boring, really; it’s even boring just writing it down.

Outside office hours, none of us had time for boredom. Big Snout was publicising London’s first Pan-Continental Film Festival: a small event, but exotic and time-consuming. Then on nights when Samira wasn’t at some reception or screening, there were assorted friends to see, sharing wedding snaps, showing off the honeymoon ones: Sam looking lissom in a bikini on the beach; me silly in a tropical shirt, all turquoise and flying fish. Meals were mostly hurried, snatched at the end of the day, though occasionally we splurged on something lavish.

After a few weeks of this, things quietened down, and we had more time to ourselves. Time to visit Sam’s parents in Northampton, who kept on saying how well she looked. Over another weekend, I remember, Samira said she wanted to see a Vietnamese film that had washed up in town, “The Story of Three Oxen”. It had had great reviews. I told you her voice could sell me anything, so I went fairly happily. One ox looked much like another to me, and the experience didn’t enlarge my interest in Vietnamese agricultural policy.

“I liked the earth colours. Brilliant!” Samira said afterwards. “And great camerawork, don’t you think?” We were in a restaurant: not Vietnamese, which would really have put the lid on the night, but French. Samira had gone for chicken. I was eating a lamb.

“Static. I thought it was static.”

“You’ve got to remember, Tom, that time moves slowly in Vietnam.”

I replied that it didn’t move slowly during the Vietnam war, and she gave a sad little laugh there. By this point I was spooning out the vegetables.

“Oh no potatoes for me,” she said. “Do you know I’ve put on four pounds since we got married?”

I didn’t, I said, though I suppose her question was rhetorical. “I haven’t noticed anything,” I added. Which was true.

“That’s a relief,” she said, spearing her first piece of broccoli.

I was bemused, curious, and slightly worried. “Where do you think the pounds have gone?”

Samira glanced down, a wince in her cheeks. “Onto my tummy. Some of my slacks have got a little tight.” She sounded embarrassed. I found her vulnerability touching.

“Oh it’s just a blip, I’m sure.”

“I hope so. I’ve never been 108 pounds before.” She gave a little grimace. “You haven’t been gaining weight, have you?”

“Don’t think so. I suppose the gym helps.” I went at least three times a week; a free membership came with the job, and I liked being trim, just like Sam. Then I told her she looked absolutely fine, which she did, and we moved on to the big thing on our horizon: the new job she was going to get in the PR department at Shell. It was a controversial move: here was Samira, green as the grass, proposing to work for one of the world’s biggest multi-national oil companies. What about ethical employment? We rehearsed the arguments once again. It was experience. It was good money. It would look great on her CV. It would give her an insight into how big business works, which she could later use somehow as ammunition. Plenty to talk over. Even so, I had time to notice how she licked her lips eating dessert. “She didn’t have potatoes,” I thought to myself, “but she still wants dessert!” Samira’s concern about a few extra pounds was contagious

In bed that night there was no time to circle the roundabout, or even crash straight into it. But we fondled a bit, enough for me to realise what I must have been blind to before: there was indeed some extra flesh on her stomach now, just a little more for the fingers to press into. Odd that I hadn’t noticed it before. Well, I thought, it would soon go. No point making a fuss.

I tried to push the matter towards the back of my mind, and was mostly successful. But those four extra pounds kept creeping back from time to time. Sometimes with her slacks and jeans I could tell the waistband had obviously become a bit tight, or perhaps I spotted a front zip that didn’t quite travel all the way to the top. Once, as she sat opposite me on a crowded Tube train, I caught a surprise flash of her belly-button, surrounded by flesh, poking through a gap in her blouse. All these were small signs of a softer tummy. None of them were things I really wanted to see – I liked my Sam slim – so I told myself that what I saw wasn’t important, or even that I was not seeing them at all. I expect Sam played exactly the same mental tricks. Always used to being slim, it couldn’t have been easy for her to find that married bliss was ever so slightly softening her up.

***