The Saint Zita Society Read Online Free PDF

married other people, those men. Probably she would end up like Miss Grieves, single and solitary, an aged crone.

CHAPTER FOUR
    A bram Siddiqui was walking along the aisle between shrubs and conifers, checking that everything was in its proper place and everything clearly labelled. He was tall and sturdy, handsome like the majority of those from that part of the world where he was born, with a strong aquiline face rather softened by his black beard. For work he dressed like an English country gentleman, even though the Belgrave Nursery was in the heart of Victoria, and today he wore fawn-coloured cavalry twill trousers, a brushed cotton check shirt with dark green knitted tie, and a lighter green tweed jacket with leather pads on the elbows.
    If half his mind was intent on checking that the full complement of cypresses, macrocarpas and thujas were in stock, the other half was thinking about his daughter Rabia. He was worrying about her and the sad disappointed life she led, and she so pretty and modest and quiet, when, turning the corner into the next aisle, the one between the ericas and the lavenders, he saw her coming towards him from the Warwick Way entrance. She was pushing a new pushchair, the grandest Abram had ever seen, a coach fit for a prince, but she looked rather small to be in charge of such a splendid equipage and such a big lusty boy. Rabia wore a long black skirt and grey blouse, a spotted black scarf tied round her head in such away as to hide all her hair and cover the neckline of the blouse.
    ‘It is a whole week time since I’ve seen you, Father. Are you too busy for Thomas and me this morning?’
    ‘Come, my daughter,’ said Abram in Urdu, ‘we will take him into the hothouse and let him look at the tropical fish.’
    Thomas crowed with delight at the fish, red and green and yellow-striped fish and blue fish sparkling like jewels, as they wove their way between the fronds of green weed and the pillars of artificial coral. Abram picked a red flower from a branch and gave it to him to hold, assuring Rabia that it would do him no harm if he put it in his mouth.
    ‘I was thinking of you before you came,’ he said to his daughter. ‘I worry that these people you work for will corrupt you. I worry that they are ungodly and immoral.’
    He seemed to have guessed, as he so often did, at the problem which these days was often in her mind. But she was sure she was not yet ready to consult him, if she would ever be. Strange then that a man so sensitive should believe that his attempts to get her to marry again, to let him find her a husband, should be so wide of the mark. He took her to the nursery’s café, bought her a cup of coffee and an ice cream for Thomas, choosing a tub rather than a cornet because he liked children to be kept clean and tidy. Rabia tied a huckaback napkin round Thomas’s neck and fed him the ice cream by means of a silver sugar spoon.
    Her father moved on to a different tack. ‘Rabia, you know you don’t have to work. I am not a rich man but I am what they call in UK comfortably off. You come home and stay at home and I can keep you. It would be a pleasure to me.’
    She was looking at Thomas and he saw such love and yearning come into her eyes that he had his answer. ‘I know you have suffered. There is no worse suffering for a womanthan to lose her children, but only marry and there will be more children. Yes, my daughter, more children will come. There is a good man who works for me here. No, he is not in today, he is driving one of the vans. He is your auntie Malia’s sister-in-law’s brother; he has seen you and admired you as any sensible man must. And he is not your cousin, or even a relative, so your fears – mind you, I don’t believe in them – of something to do with a gene mix-up, that you could forget. I will speak to him for you and a meeting can soon be arranged. Rabia, you are thirty years old but you look no more than twenty-one or -two …’
    She let him