Burnt Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page B

that – no doubt, no doubt. James Burton had promised him.
            A few minutes later he was in the Burton property in Civil Lines, walking up the driveway lined with flowerpots. He paused by the Bentley to check his reflection in its window and when all he saw was the car’s interior he moved undaunted to the bonnet, which reflected his image gleamingly back at him. He paid little attention to those aspects of his appearance that made his mother blow prayers over him to cast off the Evil Eye – the fine yet abundant hair, the perfectly proportioned features (except, at certain angles, the nose), the neat moustache, the fair skin of his Turkish ancestors, the confident air of a man of twenty-four who has never known failure – and instead fixed his attention on the beige cashmere jacket from Savile Row, running his hands along its length with sensuous pleasure.
            ‘The peacock is here,’ Elizabeth Burton said, watching from her bedroom window and believing it was the slimness of his torso rather than the softness of the fabric he was admiring. She saw Sajjad bring the sleeve of his jacket to his lips – so embarrassingly pink and fleshy – and her eyes flitted away from him impatiently.
            ‘Say something?’ James asked from the doorway.
            ‘I wish you wouldn’t give him your clothes,’ Elizabeth said without turning towards James. ‘He’s started looking at everything you wear as if it’s his property; did you see how upset he was yesterday when you spilt ink on your shirt?’
            ‘Discarded clothes as metaphor for the end of Empire. That’s an interesting one. I don’t care how he looks at my shirt so long as he allows me to choose the moment at which it becomes his.’
            Elizabeth leaned her cheek against the open window shutters, and James watched her for a moment – the copper hair falling sleekly just above her shoulders, the statuesque figure, the sensuous droop of her eyelids. At thirty-seven she wasn’t fading, just sharpening her edges. Trying to remember the last time they made love, he recalled instead the furious passion that had consumed their nights in the aftermath of Konrad’s death, and the relief he knew they had both felt when it ebbed away. (‘So this must be what sex feels like for animals,’ she had said one night during that crazed period while James was still inside her. He had been unable to meet her eye in daylight for the rest of the weekend.)
            Elizabeth picked up her cup of tea from the windowsill and felt as though she’d posed herself for a portrait, The Colonial Wife Looks upon her Garden . It was worth looking upon, she conceded. The February sun had none of the antagonism that characterised it in later months, and the garden had responded to its benevolence with a burst of colour. Elizabeth made a mental checklist as she looked from one end of the front garden to the other: verbenas, dog flowers, larkspur, roses, sweet peas, phlox. And those were just the flowers at the far end, against the boundary wall. In colonial Delhi, gardens were to the wives what cricket was to the husbands – when conversation became tense, stilted, awkward, it would retreat to Bradman or gladioli. And February, when the chrysanthemums gave way to roses, was the very peak of the gardening year. All those interminable ladies’ lunches!
            Perhaps this would be the year she’d reveal that it wasn’t the winter flowers for which she waited all year, it was the royal poinciana – or the gulmohar, as the Indians more romantically called it. She envisaged the indignation of the Delhi wives if she were to dismiss the winter flowers of Delhi – which were also the summer flowers of England – in favour of that most brazen of India’s trees, with its red-gold flowers that flamed through the city in the summer, offering up resistance to the glare of the sun and, in so doing, unmasking the winter flowers as