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towards him. ‘Do look at your wife,’ she whispered. ‘I think she’s going native.’
    Donald turned. Chairs had been arranged for eating. In one group sat Mr Samir, his office manager, and Mr Samir’s wife in a turquoise sari. They forked in the food, nodding and smiling. The third person was Christine. She looked large, pale and shabby. She alone was eating with her hand. To be precise, swabbing her plate with a folded flap of chapatti.

6
    By noon Christine admitted defeat. She moved her idle paraphernalia – Nivea oil, cigarettes, damp, half-finished airletter to Joyce – into the one air-conditioned downstairs room, a small study. She clicked the switch; soon the air grew lukewarm, then almost fresh. On the dot of twelve-thirty there would be a tap on the door. There Mohammed would stand, her gin and tonic on a tray. She had a hangover but she did not dare tell him, as he was a Muslim.
    The window looked on to the side wall. A strip of earth separated the front lawn from the back where Mohammed’s quarters lay. This consisted of one room jutting from the kitchen, with its own curtained doorway. Unpainted concrete, it was stuck to the white building like a wasps’ nest. From it came cooking smells and the sound of a radio. The front garden was empty but at the back it was always busy; chickens scratched around, but when they came up this side alley children ran out to shoo them back. She did not like to step around the back of the house; she felt shy. Mohammed’s wife was a plump woman who was probably the same age as Christine; when she saw Christine she giggled and pulled her scarf across her face. Yesterday she had been sitting outside on a rug. She had looked approachable for once. It was in the heat of the day; the children were quiet. Christine had walked up, cleared her throat and said
‘Salaam.’
The woman had lifted her head and bent down. Oh heavens she was praying.
    Once she knew she was coming out East Christine had started reading bits in the newspapers she would never normally have done – reports on the new order in the Middle East and articles called ‘Behind the Veil’. By now she knew a little about women in Islamic countries. Behind the veil sounded gauzy and romantic, an enticement. But down in the streets she had seen women enveloped in grubby white sheets, a bit of crochet where their eyes were, stumbling along the pavement behind their husbands. She had been to a gathering at Mr Samir’s house where chairs were lined against the wall and women sat in rows, pink sari, blue sari, glinting with jewels and drinking Fanta while from the next room came men’s laughter. They had talked about somebody’s wedding, speaking polite English for her sake. ‘You have children?’ the next lady asked her. ‘No,’ she had replied. And there the conversation had ended.
    Last night after the film show she had asked Shamime about women here.
    â€˜Don’t be fooled, it’s a confederacy,’ Shamime had said. ‘We run the place really but we’re too clever to show it.’
    Christine thought of London and Roz, the girl who owned Rags Period Frocks. Roz, herself and some others had a kind of women’s group, too informal to be given a name, just something that had evolved. They did not quite call each other ‘sisters’ but they felt like a sisterhood. A confederacy of women.
    â€˜Women rule’, said Shamime, ‘but subtly. We may not have much power but we’ve got influence. Far more effective, my girl. Women here are the real personalities. Every man I know is dominated by his mother. Just you wait and see. They’re led by the nose. But we’re cleverer than you; we don’t let them realize it.’
    In Shamime’s nose was a jewel. There was something primitive as well as exotic about this; to pierce a nose seemed more shocking than piercing an ear. It looked like bondage.