A Matter of Marriage by Lesley Jorgensen Read Free Book Online

her.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” he asked.
    She didn’t say, I’m the artist, these are my paintings—didn’t want to say that. She wanted nothing to do with those daubs on the walls with their spreading pox of little red stickers. She was sure he could tell they were rubbish, like all the people there, who were either just being polite or were too stupid to know.
    â€œI’m Rohimun.”
    â€œSimon. Drink up, love,” he said, with the casual authority of an expert in these matters, and she had drunk then, automatically obedient to his confidence, his sureness of touch, the waiter’s deference to his Eton accent. She drank the whole glass down, as if she was a patient in casualty told to take her medicine, or a bride swallowing her sherbet drink, and the yeasty bitterness made the wound of Tariq’s condemnation and abandonment throb more softly, for a while.
    Simon watched her empty her glass, laughed in the face of her agent’s disapproving stare, then spoke softly, close to her ear. “Let’s go, love. Let’s get out of here. Fuck them, you’ve had enough of this function.”
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œLove, you can do anything you want: it’s your show. Come with me. They’ve had enough of you, those vultures.”
    And he gave her a wide, can-do-anything grin that was surely sympathetic, and she had felt suddenly released from a great burden, flying upward like a diver who had slipped a weight belt and was rising irresistibly to the surface of things. Why should she stay when she hated it so much, felt so uncomfortable?
    Afterward, Rohimun had never given a thought to going back. Not even on that first Monday morning when she lay in Simon’s bed and watched him put on his suit and transform into a city stockbroker. Not when, a mere two weeks later, Simon, high as a kite, left her at a party while he was chasing some deal and forgot to come back. What was there to go back to anyway? A lonely merry-go-round of more second-rate paintings and more rubbish commissions, or going home to Mum and Dad and letting them marry her off to some Desi optometrist or accountant. She’d made her bed.
    If Tariq had been there, the old Tariq, perhaps at least she’d have been able to see the differences between him and Simon. Whatever they were. But then, what was worse: the humorless judgemental fundo prick that Tariq had become, or the revelation of Simon as a snob and a
casra charsi
, a dirty addict? Or indeed, herself: a painter who couldn’t paint, a fat whiny girlfriend, a
casra sudary
, dirty slut.
    â€”
    W HEN R OHIMUN WOKE late the next day, Simon was still in bed. She should have known that he would take the day off, to keep an eye on her on the day of the exhibition. For the rest of Friday morning, she lay on the very edge of the bed with her eyes closed, feeling the grittiness of unwashed sheets and the thick itch of dirty hair. While she pretended to sleep, tried to ignore Simon’s hungover body weighing down the mattress behind her, she thought about the invitation and what it meant. But then he rolled into her back, and she held on to the side of the bed and feigned lumpish unconsciousness as he fumbled with her halfheartedly, trying to jam his half-soft cock between her legs from behind. He soon gave up, giving her one last mean shove before getting up and going into the kitchen.
    The sucking kiss of the fridge door and the rattle of ice against glass announced that he was not coming back to bed. She thought of who would be at the V&A tonight, and what she could wear that would not cause trouble, and why she was suddenly so willing to court it at all. The creak of sofa springs from the sitting room was drowned out almost immediately by the staccato cheeriness of television ads, then the thoughtful, reasoned voices of two men.
    There go the seagulls . . .
    The crowd certainly enjoyed that. And who knows what