The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif Read Free Book Online Page A

dark that you think they’re deep-set, but they’re not.’
    Jasmine’s soft white hair is cut short in a boyish brush. It makes Isabel think of a new-hatched chick, she can’t imagine why. She scans her memory searching for a moment when she might have seen a new-hatched chick, and comes up with a television image: an ad for — she can’t remember what. They say Jasmine had got hold of some scissors and had cut off great chunks of what had become an incongruously full head of hair, and then they had tidied it up. We thought it would be better this way, they said. Isabel doesn’t know whether to believe them — about her mother’s cutting it off. Jasmine had always been proud of her hair. This would be easier to keep clean and tidy; no more brushing, no more fiddling with grips. She had been angry, then sad. Jasmine is even further now from the mother she knows. She wonders whether the hair feels soft or spiky. But if she should try to touch it — if she comes at all close — her mother gets fidgety, worried, frightened. Better to leave things as they are: Jasmine sitting calm and smiling in the grey leather armchair, Isabel on the edge of the bed facing her.
    ‘Mother.’ Isabel leans forward. ‘Mother, dear, are you all right?’
    A shadow of uncertainty passes over Jasmine’s face. Her hands unfold themselves from her lap and hover above thearmrests as though preparing to descend, to lever her up and away. Fine hands still, despite the sprinkling of liver spots. Jonathan, Isabel’s father, had had liver spots too in his last years. The wedding band is on the left hand, the other rings are gone, the nails cut short and square. Isabel leans back and the hands touch down but the eyes are still uncertain.
    ‘This is a lovely room,’ says Isabel, trying to sound bright and reassuring. She does not add ‘isn’t it?’ which would have thrown her mother back into confusion.
    ‘Jonathan never really liked it here,’ says Jasmine. She starts to stroke the arm of her chair.
    And now it is Isabel who is confused. ‘He didn’t?’ she asks cautiously.
    ‘No.’ An emphatic shake of the head. ‘No, he didn’t. Oh, he did his job. He did what he had to do. He always did that. But he never felt comfortable. He never really liked the British. He thought they rather despised Americans. He never made friends. Apart from me. But that was different, he said, since I was only a quarter British. I’m not so sure, though. He once said that he could never tell what I was thinking.’
    ‘Was that true?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘That he — that Jonathan could never tell what you were thinking?’
    ‘Oh, yes. Yes, it was true.’
    ‘Could you tell what
he
was thinking?’
    ‘Mostly, but then he was American — and a man.’
    For a moment the old smile lights up the faded violet eyes and the ghost of vanished beauty breathes over Jasmine’s face. The hand does not stop its rhythmic caress of the chair arm. Isabel feels her heart contract and turns to the window. The Hudson lies steel grey in the chill March sunshine.
    ‘I wanted to tell you about this man. Mother?’ she starts again. ‘I met him at a dinner party and I’ve only seen him once since. He’s divorced. His kids are grown-up. He’s a musician — a conductor. World class. The Philharmonic and everything.He has wonderful hands. And he writes books. I think I’m in love with him.’
    Jasmine is smiling. Looking at her. Does she see her? What does she see?
    Oh, I wish Daddy was here!’ Isabel buries her face in her hands. Her mother’s hand strokes the chair.
    Old people are starved of touch: no husband, no lover, no child to slip a hand into a hand, to plant sticky kisses on nose and cheek and mouth, to snuggle and fit into the curves of the body. I watched my grandmother — my mother’s mother — in her last years: her hand, the skin drawn parchmentlike over the bones, stroking, stroking, the chairs, the table, the bedspread.
    ‘Anyway —’ Isabel