this fact made a difference in his level of acceptability. "He'll work with us to set up a system that will modernise every aspect of the company. We'll have computerised word processing for correspondence, spread sheets for accounting, programs for marketing, and desktop design for advertising and labelling. He's done this already for the pier, he tells me, and he says that within six months we'll see the results in accumulated man hours as well as in increased sales."
No one had argued against the wisdom of accepting Theo Shaw's help, not even Muhannad, who was least likely to welcome an Englishman into their midst if that Englishman were to be in any position of superiority, even one as arcane as computer expertise. So Theo Shaw had come to Malik's Mustards, setting up the computer programs that would revolutionise the manner in which the factory did business. He'd trained the staff to operate these same programs. And among the staff had been Sahlah herself.
She hadn't intended to love him. She knew what was expected of her as an Asian daughter, despite her English birth. She would marry a man carefully chosen by her parents because, having her interests at heart and knowing her better than she knew herself, her parents would be able to identify the qualities in a prospective husband most complementary to her own.
"Marriage," Wardah Malik had often told her,
"is like the joining of two hands. Palms meet"
-- she demonstrated by holding her own hands up in an attitude of prayer - "and fingers intertwine.
Similarity of size, shape, and texture make this joining both smooth and lasting."
Sahlah couldn't have this joining with Theo Shaw. Asian parents did not choose Western men for their daughters to marry. Such a choice would only serve to adulterate the mother culture from which the daughter sprang. And that was unthinkable.
So she hadn't considered Theo anything other than the young man - affable, attractive, and casual in a way that only Western men were casual with a woman - who was doing a friendly service for Malik's Mustards. She hadn't really thought of him at all until he placed the stone on her desk.
He'd earlier admired her jewellery, the necklaces and earrings fabricated from antique coins and Victorian buttons, from African and Tibetan beads intricately carved by hand, even from feathers and copperas that she and Rachel collected on the Nez. He'd said,
"That's nice, that necklace you're wearing. It's quite different, isn't it?" And when she'd told him she made it, he'd been openly impressed.
Had she been trained in jewellery making? he'd wanted to know.
Hardly, she'd thought. She'd have had to go off somewhere to school to be educated in her craft, perhaps to Colchester or regions beyond.
That would have taken her away from her family, away from the business where she was needed. It's not allowed was what she wanted to say. But she'd told him instead a version of the truth. I like to teach myself things, she'd informed him.
It's more fun that way.
The next day when she'd come into work, the stone had been on her desk. But it wasn't a stone, Theo explained to her. It was a fossil, the fin of a holostean fish from the Upper Triassic period.
"I like its shape, the way the edges look feathered."
He coloured slightly. "I thought you might be able to use it for a necklace. As a centerpiece or something . . . ? I mean, whatever you call it."
"It would make a fine pendant." Sahlah turned the stone in her hand. "But I'd have to drill a hole through it. You wouldn't mind that?"
Oh, the jewellery wasn't for him, he told her hastily. He meant her to use the fossil in a necklace for herself. He collected fossils out on the Nez, where the cliffs were collapsing, you see.
He'd been looking through his display trays last night. He'd realised this particular fossil had a look and a shape that might lend it to being used artistically. So if she thought she could make something of it and with it, well . . . she was quite welcome to keep it.
Sahlah had known that to accept the stone - no matter how innocently it had been offered
- would be to cross an invisible line with Theo Shaw. And she saw the part of herself that was Asian lowering her head and quietly sliding the serrated bit of prehistoric fish across the desk in polite refusal of the gift. But the part of