“What do they say if—” Frances broke off.
“Yes? Go on?”
“No, it doesn’t matter.”
“Do go on,” Yasmin invited. “We are not offended.”
“But I’m afraid you are.”
“Oh no,” Samira said. “We really are not, Frances. We like your questions.”
“How can we explain to you,” Yasmin said, “if you don’t ask?”
“Well, I just wondered, what you thought—I just wondered what you thought people in America say, when they have committed adultery?”
Yasmin and Samira smiled at each other. “We don’t know,” Samira said.
Yasmin said, “Perhaps you are teasing us.”
“No, not really.” Sarsaparilla was back: another tray of coffee. She leaned over Frances, to lower the tray to the table, and almost brushed against her. The skin of her neck was creased and faded, like the skin of a much older woman. Samira spoke to her, a single word. The maid straightened up. And then she smiled; thinly, painfully, as if she had been told, very suddenly, to make herself pleasant. Frances caught the smell of her body, a thin odor, sharp and strange.
“I’ve been reading the religious column in the newspaper,” she said, as Samira leaned forward to refill her cup. “Those questions and answers. Is it true that a man can divorce his wife by saying ‘
“That is a common misunderstanding,” Yasmin said gently. “I thought it might be.”
“Really,” Samira said, “he only has to say it once.”
There was a pause. “Does this happen often?” Frances asked.
“Oh yes. But then very often they get remarried.”
“There is a waiting period,” Yasmin said. “You must have read about this, yes? They wait three months, to see if the wife is pregnant, then if she is not, the divorce is valid, unless they decide they want to be married again, you see. They can go through this once, twice, three times, but then after the husband has got her divorced a third time, he can’t marry her again.”
“Unless,” Samira said, “she has been married to someone else in between.”
“Married to someone else, then divorced from someone else?”
“Yes, of course. Sometimes a man may fix for her to marry one of his friends, just in name only, then he can get her back.”
Frances sat, digesting this. “There seems a great deal of—indecision,” she said. “Who gets the children?”
“Oh, the father,” Samira said.
“And what if he doesn’t want to marry her again, when the waiting period is over?”
“Then she must go back and live with her family.”
“And what if she wants to divorce him?”
“Well, that is possible,” Samira conceded.
“But,” Yasmin said with dignity, “that is not what we do.”
Frances put down her coffee cup. There are a million questions, she thought. She looked at her watch. “I’d better go,” she said. “Thank you so much, Samira.”
“But no! Why do you have to go?”
“Well, I must … write a letter.”
“Frances keeps a diary,” Yasmin said teasingly.
“How do you know?”
“I have seen you put it away in a hurry. So it can only be a diary. Unless perhaps you have love letters?”
“I don’t have love letters.”
“Perhaps you might,” Yasmin said. “There are many bachelors in Jeddah. Also many Englishmen and Americans without their wife.”
“And,” Samira observed, “you are quite pretty.”
“No, really.” Frances stood up. “A diary, yes, but that’s all.”
“Frances is in love with her husband,” Yasmin said. The two women laughed.
Samira took her to the door. Already a certain tension had left her face, the tension bred by talking to the outsider. She looked artless, very young. Once she had left, Frances knew, they would withdraw from the formal sitting room, and into the smaller room, strewn with floor cushions, where Samira preferred to spend her mornings. She would gladly have joined them there; but she was a Westerner, and must sit on chairs.
“Will you come down to my flat?” she asked.
“Yes, I will come.”
