“In his study, of course. See if you can drag him out, while I consider the roses.” He watched for a moment while she walked toward the rose bushes: Terry Lone, née O’Flynn, of Amherst, Massachusetts, one of Europe’s most successful interior designers, with a chain of stores from Helsinki to Dubai bearing her name. When she was sixteen, her parents pulled her out of school a few weeks before the end of the semester to travel to London with them, hoping the visit to a city of “real culture” would cure her growing interest in the worrisome feminist movement that was so active on the nearby Smith College campus. They arrived to stay at the Savoy on April 29, 1978, and the next morning, while her parents slept off jet lag, she dutifully walked down to Trafalgar Square to see the National Gallery, and ran into the thousands gathered for a Rock Against Racism march, which was just setting off for Victoria Park to hear the Clash and other musicians raise their voices louder than the racist chants of the National Front. “You coming?” said a Spanish boy with dark hair falling around the shoulders of his black leather jacket covered in badges letting onlookers know NAZIS ARE NO FUN and RACISTS ARE BAD IN BED. They’d been marching awhile by the time she discovered his parents were from Pakistan, a country she’d never heard of. Considerably later that day, when the compliant side of her personality asserted itself and she said she had to return to her parents, he insisted on accompanying her all the way to the Savoy, even at the risk of missing the Clash, and when she burst into tears at the thought of saying good-bye to someone so thrilling, he vowed to marry her one day. For the next two years they communicated by letter, until she enrolled at Chelsea School of Art, by which point he’d left university and swapped his leather jacket for a banker’s suit, which she found both a disappointment and a relief.
Terry Lone picked up a yellow petal, brushed the smoothness of it against the tip of her nose. It was only now that Eamonn understood how you could decide you wanted to marry someone in the course of an afternoon, and without drugs being the primary factor, as he and his sister had concluded many years ago. Did she ever wish she’d continued on to the National Gallery, he wondered. His parents weren’t unhappy together, but there was a separateness to their lives. His mother winding down her daily involvement in her business just as his father became too busy for holidays or even breakfast—that seemed somehow apt for the state their marriage had reached. Today particularly, he wished they were more like the Rahimis.
Glancing around the terrace, he tried to imagine an occasion later this summer when two families might be sitting out for dinner on a balmy evening. Karamat and Terry and Emily and Eamonn, Aneeka and Isma and Aunty Naseem, and maybe even Parvaiz. He acknowledged to himself he had no idea how the world might take him from this moment to that imagined one—he knew only that they all would have to find a way to make it happen.
He entered the house and made his way to his father’s basement office, a room that lacked his mother’s signature spare style and featured instead dark wood and solid lamps and windowlessness. Those years of nocturnal study had left their mark—Karamat Lone was at his most productive when there was no glimmer of natural sunlight.
“Since when does my son knock before entering?” he said, standing up to kiss and embrace Eamonn, a form of greeting that had embarrassed him for years, until one day it didn’t.
“Since my father started bringing home top-secret documents. Do they actually have ‘top-secret document’ written on them?”
“No, they have ‘If you aren’t important enough to have clearance for this, you’ll be dead soon’ written on them. In very, very small print, otherwise there wouldn’t be room for anything else. Why are you awake, let alone here?”
“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Can we sit a minute?” He gestured his father back to his worn leather chair and perched on the edge of the desk, facing him—the position in which he’d spent so much time in tense arguments with his father (his GCSE subjects, backpacking with Max, arrangements for his girlfriend’s abortion) through that period of adolescence when Karamat Lone was a backbencher with more time for parenting than his wife had. Terry Lone was the one to whom Eamonn and his sister would turn when they wanted new gadgets, cars, and, later, a flat each of their own—the relationship’s binary options of “yes/no,” usually “yes,” giving it solidity. But with father and son everything was more abstract, the baseline love threaded through with contradictory emotions that left the women of the family exhausted by the up-and-down of it all. Who is this posh English boy with my face, the father would say, sometimes with disappointment, sometimes with pride. Who you made me, so blame yourself, the son would reply, and his father would respond with either There is no blame, my jaan, my life or That was your mother’s doing, not mine.
“I’m seeing someone,” he said, and watched his father’s eyebrows lift. One morning, in the brief period when Eamonn was pining over Alice, the door of his bedroom had been kicked open and Karamat Lone had walked in, knees buckling slightly under the weight of the halibut in his arms, ice chips glinting on its skin. He had lowered the massive fish onto his son’s bed, with the single word “replacement.” It was the coarsest thing anyone in his family had ever known him to do, and Terry and Emily Lone were both horrified, words such as “misogynist” and “chauvinist pig” echoing around the house. Eamonn pretended to side with them, but he had been more amused than he’d ever admit, and the act put a decisive end to his pining. Though it was only since Aneeka that he’d come to agree, yes, Alice really had been a cold fish.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Eamonn said. “She’s not like the others.”
“How so?”
“For starters, she’s not from around here.”
“She’s not British?”
“She’s not West London.”
This was received with his father’s extravagant snort, which his children were always amazed he could restrain from in public life. “Well, that is a change. Where’s she from then? Cheltenham? Richmond—my god, not south of the river!”
“Wembley.”
His father looked surprised, and pleased to be surprised. Eamonn picked up a paperweight with a lion and unicorn etched on it, turned it in his hands, a little shy, all the other concerns pushed to the side as he told the man he loved most in the world about the woman he loved most in the world. Aneeka, he said. Yes, Pakistan—her mother raised in Karachi, her father a second-generation Brit whose parents were originally from Gujranwala. An orphan at the age of twelve, raised by her sister. Preston Road. Beautiful, and so smart, Dad, on a scholarship to LSE for law. Only nineteen but far more mature than that. Yes, very serious. Yeh ishq hai. His father took his hand and squeezed it when Eamonn spoke the Urdu words, beaming at his son.
“Well, if it’s love you’d better bring her around. Next Sunday?”
“There’s one thing I should warn you about. She’s a bit, well, Muslim.”
“How ‘well, Muslim,’ exactly?”
“She prays. Not five times a day, but every morning, first thing. Doesn’t drink or eat pork. She fasts during Ramzan. Wears a hijab.”
“Uh-huh. But she has no problem—” He brought the palms of his hands together and then separated them.
“What? Opening a book?”
“Sex.”
“Dad! No, she has no problem with that. There is no problem with that at all. And if you want hand gestures for sex, try one of these.”
“Those could be useful in Parliament, thank you. So, she’s no halibut. Glad to hear it.” He grinned in the way that had earned him the Wolf part of his nickname.