Then they had gone outside, on to the steps, where a breeze lifted second-hand confetti and swept it over new couples, where Clara met her only wedding guests formally for the first time: two Indians, both dressed in purple silk. Samad Iqbal, a tall, handsome man with the whitest teeth and a dead hand, who kept patting her on the back with the one that worked.
‘My idea this, you know,’ he repeated again and again. ‘My idea, all this marriage business. I have known the old boy since – when?’
‘1945, Sam.’
‘That’s what I am trying to tell your lovely wife, 1945 – when you know a man that long, and you’ve fought alongside him, then it’s your mission to make him happy if he is not. And he wasn’t! Quite the opposite until you made an appearance! Wallowing in the shit-heap, if you will pardon the French. Thankfully, she’s all packed off now. There’s only one place for the mad, and that’s with others like them,’ said Samad, losing steam halfway through the sentence, for Clara clearly had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Anyway, no need to dwell on… My idea, though, you know, all this.’
And then there was his wife, Alsana, who was tiny and tight-lipped and seemed to disapprove of Clara somehow (though she could only be a few years older); said only ‘Oh yes, Mrs Jones’ or ‘Oh no, Mrs Jones’, making Clara so nervous, so sheepish, she felt compelled to put her shoes back on.
Archie felt bad for Clara that it wasn’t a bigger reception. But there was no one else to invite. All other relatives and friends had declined the wedding invitation; some tersely, some horrified; others, thinking silence the best option, had spent the past week studiously stepping over the mail and avoiding the phone. The only well-wisher was Ibelgaufts, who had neither been invited nor informed of the event, but from whom, curiously, a note arrived in the morning maiclass="underline"
14 February 1975
Dear Archibald,
Usually, there is something about weddings that brings out the misanthrope in me, but today, as I attempted to save a bed of petunias from extinction, I felt a not inconsiderable warmth at the thought of the union of one man and one woman in lifelong cohabitation. It is truly remarkable that we humans undertake such an impossible feat, don’t you think? But to be serious for a moment: as you know, I am a man whose profession it is to look deep inside of ‘Woman’, and, like a psychiatrist, mark her with a full bill of health or otherwise. And I feel sure, my friend (to extend a metaphor), that you have explored your lady-wife-to-be in such a manner, both spiritually and mentally, and found her not lacking in any particular, and so what else can I offer but the hearty congratulations of your earnest competitor,
Horst Ibelgaufts
What other memories of that day could make it unique and lift it out of the other 364 that made up 1975? Clara remembered a young black man stood atop an apple crate, sweating in a black suit, who began pleading to his brothers and sisters; an old bag-lady retrieving a carnation from the bin to put in her hair. But then it was all over: the cling-filmed sandwiches Clara had made had been forgotten and sat suffering at the bottom of a bag, the sky had clouded over, and when they walked up the hill to the King Ludd Pub, past the jeering Fleet Street lads with their Saturday pints, it was discovered that Archie had been given a parking ticket.
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.