The Dhow House Read Online Free PDF

edges of their faces. On closer inspection she saw these patches were milky freckles; some sort of reversed melanistic adjustment to a lifetime in the tropical sun, perhaps. The edges of their faces – their hairline, the perimeter of skin around their lips, were lightly crisped, like crème caramel.
    The teak dining table was laden with food. Sweating hunks of cheese squatted on plates. Strawberries sat defeated in bowls on a bed of ice, their pores hairy and dilated.
    The housekeeper, whose name she had learned was Grace, approached her with a glass of champagne. Grace held it like a chalice, cupping the bottom of the glass in her palm.
    Julia’s voice rang out. ‘Rebecca, would you mind taking that chair upstairs? It’s getting in the way down here. I’d ask Storm, but I don’t know where he is.’ Julia pointed to a large rattan armchair. People were still arriving and her aunt shuttled back and forth to the door. She went to the chair – she had supposed she might be called upon to perform such tasks in the house. She would be with them for two months, she had to pay her way somehow.
    She put the chair at the end of the corridor, in a large alcove. On the way back, she saw Storm’s door was open. Without thinking, she walked in. She went to the dartboard on which he’d pinned photographs; more, in frames, were arranged on the table underneath.
    There were many photographs of Lucy – or rather Lucy and Evan – she had heard Julia say his name, Storm’s friend who she had met the day before, or at least it looked like him – in the light of a full moon on a beach, a party by the smudged look on their faces. Another showed Lucy in London, she supposed, swaddled in a thick knitted scarf, drinking a coffee at an outdoor café.
    On the edge of her perception she saw the light move. The torso of her cousin solidified out of the darkness.
    ‘What are you doing here?’
    ‘I thought you were downstairs. Your mum asked me to move a chair. I saw the light was on.’
    This was a weak explanation, more a list of unrelated facts. She saw his face decide something. Whether it was to believe her or distrust her, she could not say.
    She cast her head in the direction of the photograph of Lucy and Evan. ‘I didn’t know they were a couple.’
    ‘Since last Christmas. I think they’ll last.’ He said this with a defensive finality, as if she’d suggested they wouldn’t.
    She gestured towards the chair, uselessly. ‘Well, that’s done. Let’s go downstairs.’
    They rejoined the group. Several men were having an energetic discussion. She hung on its fringes. The men were all of Julia’s age, she guessed, their thick wrists gripped by metal watches. They were discussing a development close to Bahari ya Manda, on the last remaining strip of beach unoccupied by a hotel. It would be secluded, they avowed, looking out as it did onto a headland. From there you could see the curve of the coast, the limitless glass-blue of the Indian Ocean. They would call it Paradise.
    ‘Do you know what it means?’
    She had inserted her comment awkwardly, in a bid to enter the conversation. Julia gave her a blank look. ‘Of course, Rebecca. It means a perfect place. Perfection.’
    ‘It’s a Persian word for walled garden.’
    ‘How do you know that?’ Storm was beside her. She hadn’t heard him arrive.
    ‘I learned it in Paradise Lost . I studied it in school.’
    ‘Is that a book?’
    She returned his stare. ‘Yes.’
    The conversation moved on, to mangrove draining, environmental impact studies, contractors. Storm continued to stare at her from across the table, a flat, unreadable stare that could have been anger. He might have felt shown up by their exchange, she thought. Perhaps he didn’t care about books.
    Night congealed. It came in stages here, she had observed. Beginning at five o’clock, when the shadows thrown by the five coconut palms at the edge of the garden lengthened. The sun sank on the side of the house