What Came Before He Shot Her

you happen to have on. It is not meant to be worn within.”

            “Your son’s presence . . . ,” Rand murmured.

            “Oh yes, my dear, my goodness me, but he will surely ravish you if your face is exposed. Is that not the truth, Sayf al Din? Have you not ravished two hundred women and counting? Where is your dance card, my son?”

            “Score card,” Sayf al Din corrected her. He took up the headpiece he’d been fashioning for Miss Rivelle and placed it carefully on a wooden form. He said to the singer, “I’ll try to reduce the weight, but it’ll come down to Peterson-Hayes, so you’ll want to have a word with him.” He went to a monstrously cluttered desk beneath one of the room’s windows and there he unearthed a diary. He said, “Thursday? Four o’clock?”

            “If I must,” she replied languidly. She gathered her belongings— which consisted of shopping bags and a handbag the size of a picnic basket—and approached Sayf al Din for a formal farewell. This consisted of air kisses, three of them in the Italian fashion, after which she patted his cheek and he kissed her hand. Then she was gone, fluttering her fingers at the rest of them. One of the shalwar kamis women murmured, “Divas,” with some scorn.

            “They are our bread and butter,” Sayf al Din reminded her, “despite sometimes being caricatures of themselves.” He smiled at his mother.

            “And I am, beyond that, quite  used to divas.”

            Majidah tutted, but Ness could tell she took no offence. Indeed, she sounded pleased as she said to Ness, “This piece of nonsense is my Sayf al Din, Vanessa, the eldest of my children,” which made him the child of her first husband, less than thirteen years younger than his own mother. He was quite handsome—olive skinned and dark eyed—and he had about him an air of perpetual amusement.

            “And how is that wife of yours, Sayf al Din?” his mother asked him. “Is she still scraping away at the teeth of the unfortunate rather than having more babies? This son of mine has wed a dentist, Vanessa. She produces two children and returns to her work when they are six weeks old. I cannot comprehend this lunacy: to wish to be looking into the mouths of strangers instead of gazing upon the faces of your infants. She should be like your sisters and like your brothers’ wives, Sayf al Din. Nine children among them  so far and not one of them placed into the hands of a child minder.”

            Sayf al Din had obviously heard this recitation before, as he said the last sentence of it in concert with his mother. He went on with, “What a scandal it is, this woman using her education as it was meant to be used when she could be at home making chicken tikka for her husband’s dinner, Vanessa.” He did such an accurate imitation of his mother that Ness laughed, as did the others in the room.

            “Oh, you may find him amusing,” Majidah told them. “But he will be laughing out of his posterior should that woman walk off with—”

            “An orthodontist,” he finished. “Ah, what dangers there are when one’s wife is a dentist. Beware. Beware.” He kissed his mother loudly on the cheek. “Let me look at you,” he said. “Why have you not come for Sunday dinner all this month?”

            “And eat her dried-out chicken tikka? You must be mad, Sayf al Din. That wife of yours needs to learn how to cook.”

            He looked at Ness, “She’s a record playing a single song, my mum.”

            “I got that ’bout her,” Ness agreed. “Only the song’s diff ’rent for everyone she knows.”

            “She’s clever that way,” Sayf al Din said. “It makes one think she actually possesses conversation.” He put his arm around his mother’s shoulders and squeezed. “You’re losing weight again,” he told her.

            “Are you skipping meals, Ma? If you keep doing that, you know, I shall be forced to strap you down and feed you May’s samosas till you burst.”

            “You might go ahead and just poison me instead,” Majidah said.

            “This is Vanessa Campbell, as you have guessed, Sayf al Din. She has come to assist me, but you might show her your studio first.”

            Sayf al Din accommodated his mother with pleasure, like any man might who enjoys his work. He showed off a loft of organised chaos, where he designed and fashioned headwear for the Royal Opera, for West End theatrical productions, for television and film. He explained the process and brought out sketches. In these, Ness recognised the finished hand-coloured drawings and their penciled notes as very similar to the framed pieces that hung on Majidah’s sitting-room walls. She said, “Oh yeah, I seen these at your mum’s. I wondered ’bout them.”

            “What did you wonder?” he asked.

            “Who did ’em, I s’pose. An’ why they ’as on the wall. Not that they ain’t—”

            “‘Are not,’ Vanessa,” Majidah said patiently.

            “Aren’t  pretty, cos they are. Just not what you ’spect to see . . .”

            “Ah. Yes. But she’s proud of me, aren’t you, Ma? You wouldn’t think so, considering how she goes on, but she’d not have it any other way. Is that not the truth, Ma?”

            “Have no misconception about it,” Majidah said. “You are the most troublesome of my children.”

            He smiled, as did she. He said, “As that will be. Rand, of whom you so disapprove, will help you gather up the materials you want. And while you do that, I’ll show your companion how the drawings get themselves made into the headgear.”

            Sayf al Din was as much a talker as his mother. He gave Ness not only explanations of what he did but demonstrations as well. He offered not only demonstrations but gossip, too. He was as amusing a companion as he looked, and part of his pleasure in his work was to try his millinery on others. He beckoned Ness to put on everything from turbans to tiaras. He perched hats and headdresses on his workers, who chuckled and continued with their sewing. He put a sequined Stetson on Rand’s veiled head, and for himself he chose the hat and plume of a musketeer.

            His enthusiasm got directly into Ness’s blood and filled her with what she had least expected upon setting out on this jaunt with Majidah: pleasure, interest, and curiosity. After several days reliving in her mind the experience in Sayf al Din’s studio, Ness took action. She went to the offices of the Youth Offending Team on a day when Fabia Bender was not expecting her.

            Ness was different from what she’d been at their last meeting, and Fabia Bender had no trouble seeing this, although she couldn’t put a name to what had altered the girl. She learned soon enough when Ness introduced the reason for her call. She finally had a plan for her education, she said, and she needed the approval of the magistrate.

So far the matter of Ness’s schooling had been a dicey one for Fabia Bender. Holland Park School had refused to take the girl back, using as their excuse the lack of places for the autumn term. Every comprehensive nearby had told the same tale, and it was only on the south bank of the Thames that the social worker had finally found a school willing to take her. But an inspection of it had given Fabia pause. Not only was it in Peckham, which would have necessitated more than an hour’s commute by bus in either direction, but it was also in the worst part of Peckham, acting as a blatant invitation for Vanessa Campbell to fall in with the sort of young people most easily available to a troubled adolescent, which is to say the wrong sort of young people altogether. So Fabia had made a plea to the magistrate for more time. She would find something suitable, she told him, and in the meantime Vanessa Campbell was taking a simple course in music appreciation at the college and fulfilling her community-service sentence without a complaint from the Meanwhile Gardens Child Drop-in Centre. Surely  that had to count in her favour . . . ? It had done, and a reprieve was given. But, she was told, something permanent had to be arranged before the winter term.

            “Millinery?” Fabia Bender said when Ness told her what she wanted to pursue. “Making hats?” It wasn’t that she thought Ness had no ability to do this. It was just that out of every possible line of work that the girl might have come up with to define her future, millinery seemed the last of them. “Do you fancy designing for Royal Ascot or something?”

            Ness heard the astonishment in the social worker’s voice, and she did not take it well. She shifted her weight onto one hip, that belligerent pose so common to girls her age. “Wha’ if I do?” she asked, although designing the huge and often nonsensical pieces of headgear worn by posh white ladies during that annual period of horseracing was the last thing on her mind. Indeed, she hadn’t even considered it and barely knew what Royal Ascot was, aside from a source of tabloid pictures of champagne-drinking, skinny females with titles in front of their names.