Not Quite a Husband

by Sherry Thomas

“Make it good,” he said.

  He wasn’t swallowing God’s turd—as he’d privately come to think of quinine—for some sisterly peck.

  Her hands cupped his face. She breathed against him, uneven, tooth-powder-scented exhalations. The kiss grazed around his lips, as innocent as Easter bunnies gamboling on a meadow.

  All of a sudden, her tongue was in his mouth. He reacted with equal abruptness. In the space of a heartbeat he had her under him. She tasted sweet, so sweet, pure and delicious. And her body—how he coveted her, an unholy lust, like burning in hell.

  She trembled, his little piece of heaven. So cold, so distant, beloved and despised. He would worship her if she but let him. But she would never let him, would she? She would always remain out of reach, on her icy perch, indifferent to the struggles of mere mortals such as he.

  She set her hands on his shoulders. He expected her to push him away, but she didn’t. Instead, she rubbed her palm across his cheek. And he was lost.

  He shoved her skirts aside, freed himself from his trousers, and sank into her with one push. The sensation—God, the sensation blinded and deafened him. He could not see, hear, or speak; he could only feel. Yes, she was heaven, his heaven. He had never felt pleasure but this knife-sharp pleasure, never known solace but this heart-crushing solace. He shuddered into her, a fanatical release, a hot dark surge that drained everything from him and some more.

  Utter exhaustion came over him. He could barely breathe, let alone move. And he was only dimly aware of her leaving him.

  She slipped the quinine tablet between his lips. “You promised,” she said, her voice shaking.

  He swallowed the quinine, drank the water she gave him, and fell back onto his pillow.

  He was twenty-eight, his marriage three years annulled, and he’d just taken possession of Bryony.

  She was in shock.

  He’d been hallucinating, mumbling about obscure mathematical concepts. She’d been furious and anxious, and truly ready to shove the quinine up his posterior should he continue to resist treatment.

  And then he’d called her name, over and over again. Bryony. Bryony, sweetheart. What’s the matter, Bryony? Once she realized that he was still only barely conscious and not responding to her answers, the repetition of her name on his tongue became a painfully sweet music, an ode, an incantation.

  It had seemed a very logical thing to offer him a kiss, since he’d kissed her just before the malarial attack got the better of him. She could not have predicted that it would lead him to such a fevered concupiscence. One moment she was braced on her arms over him, the next moment she was under him, and the moment after that he was inside her to the hilt, his breaths harsh with pleasure.

  That was not what shocked her—that he’d been able to perform in his condition. But that she’d let him—and that she’d derived such a fierce, if incomplete pleasure from that brief, intense joining.

  And that she wanted more.

  Quinine made Leo wretchedly sick: He was either fighting a violent nausea or being soundly defeated by it. The rest of the time he was so weak he could scarcely lift a finger. She did not leave his side. With a heroic calm, she dealt with his vomitus that profoundedly disgusted him.

  “How do you stand it?” he asked her once.

  “I’ve seen worse,” she answered. And that was that.

  When he could not bear the taste on his own tongue, she made a solution of menthol and thymol for him to use as a mouth rinse. She gave him honey water for nutrition, brushed his teeth, and changed his clothes.

  “Why are you so nice to me?” he asked her another time, too tired to open his eyes, as she rubbed salve on his hands, rope-burned and rock-scraped from crossing the awful terrain between Gilgit and Chitral, the slippery warmth of her hand melting the sweet-smelling beeswax salve into his knuckles, his calluses, the creases between his fingers.

  “You are ill. I’m a doctor.”

  The answer he wanted to hear, of course, was that her meticulous care was motivated by something beyond medical obligation. Even though he already knew better.

  In the last month of their marriage, he had found a crumpled letter in the wastepaper basket of the study when he’d gone to look for a page of equations he’d thrown away in a fit of agitation. The letter, from a young woman who owed her life and the life of her child to a successful caesarean section performed by Bryony, had been one of the most moving pieces of English prose he had ever read.

  He never doubted that Bryony was a first-rate physician. He never doubted her professional devotion. And he’d always understood that her essential interest was in diseases, not patients, her drive less compassion than the desire to triumph over nature’s more pernicious agents.

  During the afternoon he spent standing over the letter, however, its large, painstaking, almost childish handwriting slowly burning into his mind’s eye, he finally had to accept that his wife’s reserve was less aloofness than wholesale apathy: Only a person allergic to human proximity of any kind, physical or emotional, could disdain such heartfelt gratitude.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “As well you should be.” The pad of her thumb massaged circles on the back of his hand, his palm, and even two inches up his wrist. He did not want her to stop. “What were you thinking, concealing your symptoms from a doctor?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Let me have you again. Let me make love to you properly. Let me give you the kind of pleasure that you gave me, delicious, terrible pleasure.

  “I know what you meant.” She let go of his hands. “Let’s not speak of it again.”

  The second day after the malarial attack, a mule train made its way down from Lowari Pass.

  Where Leo and Bryony had stopped at the end of their first day of travel—and where they’d stayed ever since—was the precise spot where their path would diverge from the Chitral River and head up again into the mountains. Since many of the mountain passes surrounding the Chitral Valley were impassible in winter, the bulk of the regional trade was conducted during the more clement months.

  Bryony poked her head out of Leo’s tent long enough to see that the mule train was just a merchant caravan, before she returned inside. Imran and his son, Hamid, offered the traders tea. The men chatted for a while before the traders headed north, presumably to the bazaars at Chitral.

  “I need to speak to Imran,” Leo said.

  She looked at him in surprise. She’d thought him asleep. Besides, he’d asked to see Imran already, earlier in the day. They’d spoken about the provisions, and Leo had issued the necessary rupees for the coolies’ per diem. “Is there anything I can get for you?”

  “No, thank you. I need to know what news the travelers brought,” he said, his eyes still closed.

  She fetched Imran and returned with him to the tent.

  “What news from Swat?” Leo asked directly.

  “They do not come from Swat, but Dir. In Dir they say a great fakir has arrived in Upper Swat Valley. A miracle man. And he will drive out the English.” The guide shook his head. “Always these miracle men.”

  Leo nodded, thanked the guide, and dismissed him.

  “How did you know there was news from Swat?” Bryony asked, half amazed. “What language were they speaking?”

  “Pashto, which I don’t understand, but Swat is still Swat.”

  Most Chitralis belonged to the Khow tribe and spoke Khowar. South of Chitral, however, the population of the North-West Frontier was largely Pathan, or Pashtons, as they were called by some.

  She was even more amazed. “Then how did you know the news from Swat mattered to us? They could have been talking about the crops.”

  “They mentioned ‘fakir’ repeatedly, and also ‘sirkar’ several times. Since ‘sirkar’ almost invariably refers to the government of India, I wanted to at least ask.”

  She nodded. The North-West Frontier was an uneasy place. In ’95 there had been pitched battles at Chitral, when various unhapp
y factions in a nastier-than-usual succession struggle for the princely seat of Chitral had laid siege to a 400-man British garrison sent to settle the dispute.

  And in June of this year, there had been an attack on a British political officer and his convoy in broad daylight in Tochi Valley. It was far enough away—hundreds of miles southwest of Peshawar in the unruly uplands of Waziristan, where no foreign power had ever breathed easy—that neither the Braeburns nor Bryony had been alarmed for their own safety. But still it had been a reminder that the peace they enjoyed was easily ruptured.

  Bryony took the map from Leo’s saddlebag and spread it open on her knees. Their course was marked in red. As soon as they crested Lowari Pass, they would be in Dir. A short distance out of Dir Town, which was some twelve, fifteen miles from the pass—distances were difficult to judge on the map—they’d encounter the Panjkora River. From there, their road would follow the Panjkora River until a village marked Sado, where they’d turn away from the river, strike southeast, and make for Chakdarra, on the bank of the Swat River.

  The Swat River was one of the most important rivers in the region, and Swat Valley one of its greatest population centers. At Chakdarra, the Swat Valley ran roughly east-west, while their route turned directly south. Once they crossed the river, they would be done with Swat Valley almost immediately.

  “Swat Valley is how far from here? A hundred fifty miles?”

  “Thereabout. And where we will cross the Swat River is the Lower Swat Valley. Upper Swat Valley is further away upstream, beyond the Amandara Pass.”

  She folded the map and put it back into his saddlebag. That was too far to worry about for now.

  Besides, on the frontier, the religious profession was and had always been solidly opposed to any outside power. Fire-breathing clerics weren’t exactly new. Most of them failed to inspire anything other than wishful thinking in their followers. The itinerant fakir in Upper Swat Valley was likely merely another fist-shaking imam whose following had been greatly exaggerated in the telling.

  She wasn’t wholly without sympathy for the local population’s desire to be free of the British. After all, the English themselves idolized Boadicea, the great queen who fought against the Romans. But she simply didn’t think this particular imam was the man to accomplish the task.

  “Do you think you can eat anything?” she asked Leo.

  He shook his head, looking green at even the mention of food.

  “Then sleep some more,” she said.

  He closed his eyes. She sat down on her stool by the bed and watched him. After a while, when he seemed asleep, she touched her palm to his cheek. He’d become so thin it hurt to look at him, yet she could not stop looking. Could not stop longing.

  Her thumb skimmed lightly across the tips of his eyelashes. Her index and middle fingers caught his ear between them and felt its cool softness—his fever had come down with the first dose of quinine. Her little finger traced its way to his jugular, and pressed against it to feel the rhythm of his blood.

  It had begun to register on her that his heart was beating too fast when he caught her hand and brought it to his lips. She pulled back, but not before his kiss had left an imprint in the center of her palm.

  An imprint that burned long after he had truly fallen asleep again.

  On the fifth day after the malarial attack, Leo awoke from a shallow sleep in the afternoon. The quinine had been vicious, but also effective. He was still weak, but all his symptoms were gone. He was recovering and recovering well.

  She sat on a stool by his camp bed, holding a half-eaten biscuit in her hand. That hand rested against a deep green wool skirt in which was tucked a white-and-green striped blouse that buttoned all the way up to her chin.

  She had a sweet chin, perfect really; he used to kiss her there, patiently, with hope, when she would not allow him to kiss her on the mouth. Her chin, her jaw, he’d followed the contour of her face to nibble on the delicate folds of her ears. But those too were soon forbidden to him. And the next night she’d asked that he not release her hair from its plait—it would be too much trouble to untangle in the morning, she’d said, and she must be at the hospital on time.

  Today her hair was parted in the middle and pulled back, smooth as glass, glossy as lacquer. She leaned to her left to reach for a canteen on the floor of the tent. He caught a glimpse of white. Her hair-he was shocked anew.

  Her hair turned white because of you.

  Or so Callista had claimed.

  You believe Callista?

  Their eyes met. Heat jolted through him. He’d been deep inside her and she had not protested.

  She turned her head away abruptly. “I’ve your lunch here,” she said. “Mutton broth and chicken biryani. Saif Khan also made a convalescent pudding for you.”

  He sat up to eat. She’d anticipated his needs quite accurately. The five-day course of quinine had concluded the day before. His stomach had ceased its treasonous ways. And he was hungry.

  She watched him; he felt her gaze on him, something with a weight and a touch of its own. Whenever he lifted his head from his plate, she looked elsewhere. But her eyes always came back to him. Straight on or sideways, she studied him, stealthily, surreptitiously, in bits and snatches.

  “Your boots, they have an imprint on the soles,” at length she spoke again. “They were made in Berlin.”

  Once upon a time, he’d been quite fastidious in his appearance. Good quality wasn’t enough. Every piece of apparel he owned had to be a work of art—or at least a work of impeccable craftsmanship. But after the annulment, he didn’t care half as much. When he needed a new pair of boots while he was in Berlin, instead of writing his London bootmaker, he bought a pair ready-made, something that would have dismayed his old self.

  “What were you doing in Berlin?” She offered him a second bowl of mutton broth.

  He accepted the broth. “Thank you. I lectured at the university.”

  She added another heap of biryani to his plate. “Callista said you were in Munich. She said you were going to buy a vineyard somewhere in Bavaria and retire to it.”

  “I was twenty-five, a bit early to retire to a place as old-fashioned as Bavaria.”

  “She also said that you changed your mind after a while and went to America, to Wyoming, to take up cattle ranching.”

  “Not an unlikely scenario for a younger son. But I was in America to corrupt its youth—at Princeton University, in New Jersey, a few thousand miles east of Wyoming.”

  She cleared her throat. “I was in Germany, at the University of Breslau, for advanced surgical training. And America too—I taught at the Women’s Medical College in Pennsylvania.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  He’d moved to Cambridge after the annulment. He’d always loved Cambridge. He’d always meant to become the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the university, a chair once occupied by the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton. The incumbent professor had been at his position nearly fifty years. The timing could not have been better for Leo, his genius hailed left and right in those days, to be appointed the next holder of the professorship.

  But by autumn he was in Berlin. A year later he was at Princeton. And three terms after that, India.

  An annulment, as it turned out, wasn’t quite enough to stop him from caring. Did it bother no one else that she was alone in a foreign country? That she left home further and further behind with each move? That, God forbid, should something happen, her family was thousands of miles away?

  He scorned himself for giving a damn, when she didn’t give a damn about him. But it didn’t matter. He had choices, and each time he chose to accept the one invitation that placed him in the same country as her, so that help, should she need it, didn’t have to be summoned across oceans.

  “You thought I was in Leh when you agreed to the ballooning expedition in Gilgit?”

  He took a drink of water and nodded. Their eyes met again.

  You were the moon of my existence; your moo
ds dictated the tides of my heart.

  It might have been hyperbole, but it wasn’t fiction.

  After lunch, they spoke briefly of their itinerary. He wanted to get back on the road the immediate next day, but she insisted that after the end of quinine treatment he must allow himself at least two days of rest and warned darkly of consequences were he to ignore a physician’s directive on the matter.

  To help him pass the rest of the afternoon, she gave him the old copy of Cornhill magazine he’d picked up when he stayed overnight at the Chitral garrison, told him she was going for a walk, and denied him permission to do anything more strenuous than reading in bed.

  “Take Imran with you,” he said.

  She looked puzzled for a moment, as if she’d forgotten that she was in a place where women rarely left their houses, and certainly never unaccompanied—the Chitral region was particularly conservative that way. “Right, of course.”

  When he estimated she’d gone off far enough, he got up, went out of the tent, and got a pair of coolies to erect the folding table for him and bring him a folding chair. He was still in his unadorned white cotton kurta pyjama, the native tunic-and-trouser set he wore to sleep. But just being outside the tent, unsupported, made him feel more himself already.

  The air had that pellucid mountain clarity that made shapes sharper and colors truer. The green of the paddy fields wasn’t just green, but a lusty green, full of hunger for sunlight and moisture. And the slopes weren’t mere hulks of rock, but the ribs of the valley, protecting the delicate strip of fertile soil from the worst of the harsh elements.

  With the westerly sun on his face and a breeze ruffling his hair, he sat down and opened his notebook.

  After the annulment, he’d produced no original work for almost two years. He taught, and checked the work of other mathematicians with whom he maintained scholarly correspondences, but his own mind had been resolutely barren. Even when he did start to work on new postulates, he managed only derivative scribbles, timid echoes of his earlier output.