Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

moment, except the ones in which she and Sajjad sat on the Burton verandah and a new language ceded its secrets to her.
            The bearer circled back to say Mr Burton was asking his wife to join him, and Elizabeth rolled her eyes and stood up.
            ‘You would have liked Konrad,’ Hiroko said. ‘If I’d married him, I’d have made sure you liked each other.’
            Elizabeth touched Hiroko’s hair gently.
            ‘I don’t doubt you would. And I’ve never said this before – I should have. I’m so sorry for all you’ve lost.’
            Together they walked back to the firelit gathering, neither remarking that from the moment Hiroko had mentioned Konrad they had started to speak in German, and that doing so felt like sharing the most intimate of secrets.
     

5
    ‘And then my brother Sikandar’s daughter said—’
            ‘Which one? Rabia Bano or Shireen?’
            ‘Shireen. She said—’
            Elizabeth closed the wooden lattice doors that led from the sitting room to the verandah, blocking off the sound of Hiroko and Sajjad chattering in Urdu. Six weeks of daily classes should not have been enough to make Hiroko quite so conversational, she thought, allowing herself to feel aggrieved at the fixation with which Hiroko spent her days running her index finger along the curlicued script of the vocabulary lists and children’s books that Henry had used for his lessons with Sajjad.
            She sat back at her writing table, acknowledging with a grimace the foolishness of having shut out the breeze as she twisted the weight of her hair away from her neck. On the tabletop were two sheets of letter-writing paper, each with two words inked on it.
            Dearest Henry –
            Willie, Liebling –
            She let her hair fall back into place with a fleeting thought of replicating Hiroko’s haircut, picked up her pen and held it poised above the second letter. Willie – Cousin Wilhelm – was the only one of her German relatives who had ever truly felt like family to her. Perhaps in part it was because he understood – with his penchant for younger, beautifully dressed men – what it felt to be an outsider in the Weiss clan. She had thought him dead early in the war, rounded up with others of his ‘Wildean persuasion’ – his terminology, not hers. Only in ’45 had she discovered he’d been working with the underground in Germany, helping Jews and homosexuals to escape the Nazis, and that at the end of the war he’d migrated to New York. And now he wrote to say it was the finest city in the world, and all it lacked was her presence.
            The pen made a swooping motion as though leading up to some great burst of resolve, and then just before the nib touched the page it veered off to the other letter.
            Dearest Henry  . . .
            She pressed the nib against the page and wrote firmly:
     
    Of course you’re coming home this summer. Yes, there’s trouble in the Punjab but Delhi is perfectly safe, and Mussoorie as peaceful as ever. Your grandmother really shouldn’t worry so much.
            Your father has been boasting to everyone about your bowling average. We’re both delighted to hear of your continued successes.
     
    She stopped, and put down the pen. Why was it that the more Henry settled into boarding school the more formal his letters to her, and hers back to him, became? And why had she ever agreed to let James send him off to England? She batted away a fly with the hand holding the pen and a spray of ink appeared on the wall opposite her. The stigmata of the blue-blooded, she thought, moving the framed picture of Henry so that it covered the speckling.
            It’s the done thing. That’s what James had said to begin and end every argument about Henry and boarding school. But in the end she’d had her own reasons for agreeing to send him away. The looming end of Empire meant they