So it was that Clara spent the first three hours of married life in Cheapside Police Station, her shoes in her hands, watching her saviour argue relentlessly with a traffic inspector who failed to understand Archie’s subtle interpretation of the Sunday parking laws.
‘Clara, Clara, love-’
It was Archie, struggling past her to the front door, partly obscured by a coffee table.
‘We’ve got the Ick-Balls coming round tonight, and I want to get this house in some kind of order – so mind out the way.’
‘You wan’ help?’ asked Clara patiently, though still half in daydream. ‘I can lift someting if-’
‘No, no, no, no – I’ll manage.’
Clara reached out to take one side of the table. ‘Let me jus’-’
Archie battled to push through the narrow frame, trying to hold both the legs and the table’s large removable glass top.
‘It’s man’s work, love.’
‘But – ’ Clara lifted a large armchair with enviable ease and brought it over to where Archie had collapsed, gasping for breath on the hall steps. ‘ ’Sno prob-lem. If you wan’ help: jus’ arks farrit.’ She brushed her hand softly across his forehead.
‘Yes, yes, yes.’ He shook her off in irritation, as if batting a fly. ‘I’m quite capable, you know-’
‘I know dat-’
‘It’s man’s work.’
‘Yes, yes, I see – I didn’t mean-’
‘Look, Clara, love, just get out of my way and I’ll get on with it, OK?’
Clara watched him roll up his sleeves with some determination, and tackle the coffee table once more.
‘If you really want to be of some help, love, you can start bringing in some of your clothes. God knows there’s enough of ’em to sink a bloody battleship. How we’re going to fit them in what little space we have I’m sure I don’t know.’
‘I say before – we can trow some dem out, if you tink it best.’
‘Not up to me now, not up to me, is it? I mean, is it? And what about the coat-stand?’
This was the man: never able to make a decision, never able to state a position.
‘I alreddy say: if ya nah like it, den send da damn ting back. I bought it ’cos I taut you like it.’
‘Well, love,’ said Archie, cautious now that she had raised her voice, ‘it was my money – it would have been nice at least to ask my opinion.’
‘Man! It a coat-stand. It jus’ red. An’ red is red is red. What’s wrong wid red all of a sudden?’
‘I’m just trying,’ said Archie, lowering his voice to a hoarse, forced whisper (a favourite voice-weapon in the marital arsenaclass="underline" Not in front of the neighbours/children), ‘to lift the tone in the house a bit. This is a nice neighbourhood, new life, you know. Look, let’s not argue. Let’s flip a coin; heads it stays, tails…’
True lovers row, then fall the next second back into each other’s arms; more seasoned lovers will walk up the stairs or into the next room before they relent and retrace their steps. A relationship on the brink of collapse will find one partner two blocks down the road or two countries to the east before something tugs, some responsibility, some memory, a pull of a child’s hand or a heart string, which induces them to make the long journey back to their other half. On this Richter scale, then, Clara made only the tiniest of rumbles. She turned towards the gate, walked two steps only and stopped.
‘Heads!’ said Archie, seemingly without resentment. ‘It stays. See? That wasn’t too hard.’
‘I don’ wanna argue.’ She turned round to face him, having made a silent renewed resolution to remember her debt to him. ‘You said the Iqbals are comin’ to dinner. I was just thinkin’… if they’re going to want me to cook dem some curry – I mean, I can cook curry – but it’s my type of curry.’
‘For God’s sake, they’re not those kind of Indians,’ said Archie irritably, offended at the suggestion. ‘Sam’ll have a Sunday roast like the next man. He serves Indian food all the time, he doesn’t want to eat it too.’
‘I was just wondering-’
‘Well, don’t, Clara. Please.’
He gave her an affectionate kiss on the forehead, for which she bent downwards a little.
‘I’ve known Sam for years, and his wife seems a quiet sort. They’re not the royal family, you know. They’re not those kind of Indians,’ he repeated, and shook his head, troubled by some problem, some knotty feeling he could not entirely unravel.
Samad and Alsana Iqbal, who were not those kind of Indians (as, in Archie’s mind, Clara was not that kind of black), who were, in fact, not Indian at all but Bangladeshi, lived four blocks down on the wrong side of Willesden High Road. It had taken them a year to get there, a year of mercilessly hard graft to make the momentous move from the wrong side of Whitechapel to the wrong side of Willesden. A year’s worth of Alsana banging away at the old Singer that sat in the kitchen, sewing together pieces of black plastic for a shop called Domination in Soho (many were the nights Alsana would hold up a piece of clothing she had just made, following the pattern she was given, and wonder what on earth it was). A year’s worth of Samad softly inclining his head at exactly the correct deferential angle, pencil in his left hand, listening to the appalling pronunciation of the British, Spanish, American, French, Australian:
Go Bye Ello Sag, please.
Chicken Jail Fret See wiv Chips, fanks.
From six in the evening until three in the morning; and then every day was spent asleep, until daylight was as rare as a decent tip. For what is the point, Samad would think, pushing aside two mints and a receipt to find fifteen pence, what is the point of tipping a man the same amount you would throw in a fountain to chase a wish? But before the illegal thought of folding the fifteen pence discreetly in his napkin hand even had a chance to give itself form, Mukhul – Ardashir Mukhul, who ran the Palace and whose wiry frame paced the restaurant, one benevolent eye on the customers, one ever watchful eye on the staff – Mukhul was upon him.
‘Saaamaad’ – he had a cloying, oleaginous way of speaking – ‘did you kiss the necessary backside this evening, cousin?’
Samad and Ardashir were distant cousins, Samad the elder by six years. With what joy (pure bliss!) had Ardashir opened the letter last January, to find his older, cleverer, handsomer cousin was finding it hard to get work in England and could he possibly…
‘Fifteen pence, cousin,’ said Samad, lifting his palm.