come to him in tears. Her brother had joined the fundamentalists, and was putting pressure on the family to withdraw her from college and marry his friend Sharif.
‘What’s Sharif like?’
‘Ellen, I have no idea. It is hardly the point.’
‘If I was one of your students and you lot were counting up your staff-student contact hours, working to rule and refusing to mark exam papers, I might well prefer to give up the course and marry my brother’s friend Sharif. If he was halfway good-looking.’
Bernard left for college early and said no more about Nerina. Christmas was coming and Ellen took a part-time job in the college office to meet the extra costs of the season, and there met Nerina’s mother, a pleasant woman wearing a serviceable sari and black lace-up shoes.
‘I believe you have a daughter in the college, Mrs Khalid,’ said Ellen. Both women were transferring confidential student records from file cards on to computer. Occasionally, on whim, they would allow a finger to slip and up-grade exam results. ‘I’m just about coming to the Ks.’
‘Her name’s Nerina,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘N. S. Khalid.’ Nerina’s card showed two years of B pluses and A minuses in communication studies and sociology, and then a term of Cs and Ds, and then back up to straight As.
Ellen turned the Cs and Ds into Bs. The girl might yet come out with a first.
‘She went through a bad patch,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘She fell in love with her brother’s friend and wanted to leave college but we made her stay on. I think she’s over it now.’
‘Nerina’s always on at me to wear western clothes,’ confided Mrs Khalid, ‘but I like to be comfortable. I feel happier wrapped, and able to eat as many buttered tea cakes as I like. And of course it keeps her brother Fariq quiet. He’s eighteen; he’s turned fundamental at the moment. But I expect it’s no worse than being a punk. He’s at us all the time, but boys of that age do so like to be morally superior, don’t they?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Ellen. ‘I don’t have children, or mean to.’
‘You’re very young,’ said Mrs Khalid comfortingly. ‘You’ll change your mind.’
Mrs Khalid had a soft expression and lively eyes but a never-say-die-ishness that quite reminded Ellen of Rhoda. She wondered whether, if Mrs Khalid were in love with her son’s friend Sharif, would she do as Rhoda had done, try to marry off her daughter to Sharif just to keep him in the family? And thought no, probably not. Sometimes Ellen felt the need for some understanding older woman in whom to confide. Her mother Wendy hovered round the house in too petty and ethereal a form to be much use: the occasional glimmer of light where no light should be, an object in motion which by rights should be still. And Rhoda, dead and buried, stayed firmly silent, finished and underground. Perhaps the reward of the wronged was to have eternal life? Perhaps the punishment of the wrong-doers was just to be finished, kaput, over? Though to think in terms of rewards and punishments was childish. Story book notions. Nothing to do with real life. ‘I might not change my mind,’ said Ellen.
‘A woman without children might as well not be born,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘It was to have children that Allah put her on this earth. Can you think of any other reason?’
‘No,’ said Ellen. ‘Not really. Unless we lateral think and it wasn’t him put us here.’
‘I wouldn’t want my son to hear a thing like that,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘Especially not as you’re wife to a member of staff. It might be dangerous.’
‘Tell me more about Nerina,’ said Ellen to Bernard, over breakfast. They had both settled down to non-smoking. He put down a volume of Hume—he no longer read the daily papers, but was working through the world’s philosophers, from Plato onwards, and had now reached the Scottish humanists. ‘What about Nerina?’
‘Why did she go from As and Bs and then down to Cs and Ds and then to steady As.’
‘I’m not having a relationship with her,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you think.’
‘That is not what I thought,’ said Ellen, ‘but it must have crossed your mind or you wouldn’t have brought it up.’
‘It is not possible,’ he said, ‘to move amongst these nubile girls and have no reaction whatsoever.’
‘I absolutely understand,’ said Ellen. ‘Any more than it’s possible for me to work up at the college with all