White Teeth (41 page)

Pulchritude. From the Latin,
pulcher
, beautiful. That was the word that first struck Joyce when Millat Iqbal stepped forward on to the steps of her conservatory, sneering at Marcus’s bad jokes, shading his violet eyes from a fading winter sun. Pulchritude: not just the concept but the whole physical word appeared before her as if someone had typed it on to her retina — Pulchritude — beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her chequebook to from behind the thick glass of a bank till.

‘Mill-yat Ick-Ball,’ said Marcus, making a performance of the foreign syllables. ‘And Irie Jones, apparently. Friends of Josh’s. I was just saying to Josh, these are the best-looking friends of his we’ve ever seen! They’re usually small and weedy, so long-sighted they’re short-sighted, and with club-feet. And they’re
never
female. Well!’ continued Marcus jovially, dismissing Joshua’s look of horror. ‘It’s a damn good thing you turned up. We’ve been looking for a woman to marry old Joshua . . .’

Marcus was standing on the garden steps, quite openly admiring Irie’s breasts (though, to be fair, Irie was a good head and shoulders taller than him). ‘He’s a good sort, smart, a bit weak on fractals but we love him anyway. Well . . .’

Marcus paused for Joyce to come out of the garden, take off her gloves, shake hands with Millat and follow them all into the kitchen. ‘You
are
a big girl.’

‘Er . . . thanks.’

‘We like that around here — a healthy eater. All Chalfens are healthy eaters. I don’t put on a pound, but Joyce does. In all the right places, naturally. You’re staying for dinner?’

Irie stood dumb in the middle of the kitchen, too nervous to speak. These were not any species of parent she recognized.

‘Oh, don’t worry about Marcus,’ said Joshua with a jolly wink. ‘He’s a bit of an old letch. It’s a Chalfen joke. They like to bombard you the minute you get in the door. Find out how sharp you are. Chalfens don’t think there’s any point in pleasantries. Joyce, this is Irie and Millat. They’re the two from behind the science block.’

Joyce, partially recovered from the vision of Millat Iqbal, gathered herself together sufficiently to play her designated role as Mother Chalfen.

‘So
you’re
the two who’ve been corrupting my eldest son. I’m Joyce. Do you want some tea? So
you’re
Josh’s
bad crowd
. I was just pruning the delphiniums. This is Benjamin, Jack — and that’s Oscar in the hallway. Strawberry and mango or normal?’

‘Normal for me, thanks, Joyce,’ said Joshua.

‘Same, thanks,’ said Irie.

‘Yeah,’ said Millat.

‘Three normal and one mango, please, Marcus, darling,
please
.’

Marcus, who was just heading out the door with a newly packed tobacco pipe, backtracked with a weary smile. ‘I’m a slave to this woman,’ he said, grabbing her around the waist, like a gambler collecting his chips in circled arms. ‘But if I wasn’t, she might run off with any pretty young man who rolled into the house. I don’t fancy falling victim to Darwinism this week.’

This hug, explicit as a hug can be, was directed front-ways-on, seemingly for the appreciation of Millat. Joyce’s big milky-blue eyes were on him all the time.

‘That’s what you want, Irie,’ said Joyce in a familial stage whisper, as if they’d known each other for five years rather than five minutes, ‘a man like Marcus for the long term. These fly-by-nights are all right for fun, but what kind of fathers do they make?’

Joshua coloured. ‘Joyce, she just stepped into the house! Let her have some tea!’

Joyce feigned surprise. ‘I haven’t embarrassed you, have I? You have to forgive Mother Chalfen, my foot and mouth are on intimate terms.’

But Irie wasn’t embarrassed; she was fascinated, enamoured after five minutes. No one in the Jones household made jokes about Darwin, or said ‘my foot and mouth are on intimate terms’, or offered choices of tea, or let speech flow freely from adult to child, child to adult, as if the channel of communication between these two tribes was untrammelled, unblocked by history,
free
.

‘Well,’ said Joyce, released by Marcus and planting herself down at the circular table, inviting them to do the same, ‘you look very exotic. Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Willesden,’ said Irie and Millat simultaneously.

‘Yes, yes, of course, but where
originally
?’

‘
Oh
,’ said Millat, putting on what he called a
bud-bud-ding-ding
accent. ‘You are meaning where from am I
originally
.’

Joyce looked confused. ‘Yes,
originally
.’

‘Whitechapel,’ said Millat, pulling out a fag. ‘Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus.’

All the Chalfens milling through the kitchen, Marcus, Josh, Benjamin, Jack, exploded into laughter. Joyce obediently followed suit.

‘Chill out, man,’ said Millat, suspicious. ‘It wasn’t that fucking funny.’

But the Chalfens carried on. Chalfens rarely made jokes unless they were exceptionally lame or numerical in nature or both: What did the zero say to the eight?
Nice belt
.

‘Are you going to smoke that?’ asked Joyce suddenly when the laughter died down, a note of panic in her voice. ‘In here? Only, we hate the smell. We only like the smell of German tobacco. And if we smoke it we smoke it in Marcus’s room, because it upsets Oscar otherwise, doesn’t it, Oscar?’

‘No,’ said Oscar, the youngest and most cherubic of the boys, busy building a Lego empire, ‘I don’t care.’

‘It upsets Oscar,’ repeated Joyce, in that stage-whisper again. ‘He hates it.’

‘I’ll . . . take . . . it . . . to . . . the . . . garden,’ said Millat slowly, in the kind of voice you use on the insane or foreign. ‘Back . . . in . . . a . . . minute.’

As soon as Millat was out of earshot, and as Marcus brought over the teas, the years seemed to fall like dead skin from Joyce and she bent across the table like a schoolgirl. ‘God, he’s
gorgeous
, isn’t he? Like Omar Sharif thirty years ago. Funny Roman nose. Are you and he . . . ?’

‘Leave the girl alone, Joyce,’ admonished Marcus. ‘She’s hardly going to tell you about it, is she?’

‘No,’ said Irie, feeling she’d like to tell these people everything. ‘We’re not.’

‘Just as well. His parents probably have something arranged for him, no? The headmaster told me he was a Muslim boy. I suppose he should be thankful he’s not a girl, though, hmm? Unbelievable what they do to the girls. Remember that
Time
article, Marcus?’

Marcus was foraging in the fridge for a cold plate of yesterday’s potatoes. ‘Mmm. Unbelievable.’

‘But you know, just from the little I’ve seen, he doesn’t seem at all like most Muslim children. I mean, I’m talking from personal experience, I go into a lot of schools with my gardening, working with kids of all ages. They’re usually so silent, you know, terribly meek — but he’s so full of . . . spunk! But boys like that want the tall blondes, don’t they? I mean, that’s the bottom line, when they’re that handsome. I know how you feel . . . I used to like the troublemakers when I was your age, but you learn later, you really do. Danger isn’t really sexy, take my word for it. You’d do a lot better with someone like Joshua.’

‘Mum!’

‘He’s been talking about you non-stop all week.’

‘Mum!’

Joyce faced her reprimand with a little smile. ‘Well, maybe I’m being too frank for you young people. I don’t know . . . in my day, you just were a lot more direct, you
had
to be if you wanted to catch the right man. Two hundred girls in the university and two thousand men! They were fighting for a girl — but if you were smart, you were
choosy
.’

‘My, you were choosy,’ said Marcus, shuffling up behind her and kissing her ear. ‘And with such good
taste
.’

Joyce took the kisses like a girl indulging her best friend’s younger brother.

‘But your mother wasn’t sure, was she? She thought I was too intellectual, that I wouldn’t want children.’

‘But you convinced her. Those hips would convince anyone!’

‘Yes, in the end . . . but she underestimated me, didn’t she? She didn’t think I was Chalfen material.’

‘She just didn’t know you then.’

‘Well, we surprised her, didn’t we!’

‘A lot of hard copulation went into pleasing that woman!’

‘Four grandchildren later!’

During this exchange, Irie tried to concentrate on Oscar, now creating an ouroboros from a big pink elephant by stuffing the trunk into its own rear end. She’d never been so
close
to this strange and beautiful thing, the
middle class
, and experienced the kind of embarrassment that is actually intrigue, fascination. It was both strange and wondrous. She felt like the prude who walks through a nudist beach, examining the sand. She felt like Columbus meeting the exposed arawaks, not knowing where to look.

‘Excuse my parents,’ said Joshua. ‘They can’t keep their hands off each other.’

But even this was said with pride, because the Chalfen children knew their parents were rare creatures, a
happily married couple
, numbering no more than a dozen in the whole of Glenard Oak. Irie thought of her own parents, whose touches were now virtual, existing only in the absences where both sets of fingers had previously been: the remote control, the biscuit tin lid, the light switches.

She said, ‘It must be great to feel that way after twenty years or whatever.’

Joyce swivelled round as if someone had released a catch. ‘It’s marvellous! It’s incredible! You just wake up one morning and realize monogamy isn’t a bind — it sets you free! And children need to grow up around that. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced it — you read a lot about how Afro-Caribbeans seem to find it hard to establish long-term relationships. That’s terribly sad, isn’t it? I wrote about one Dominican woman in
The Inner Life of Houseplants
who had moved her potted azalea through six different men’s houses; once by the windowsill, then in a dark corner, then in the south-facing bedroom, etc. You just can’t do that to a plant.’

This was a classic Joyce tangent, and Marcus and Joshua rolled their eyes, affectionately.

Millat, fag finished, sloped back in.

‘Are we going to get some studying done, yeah? This is all very nice but I want to go out this evening. At some point.’

While Irie had been lost in her reveries assessing the Chalfens like a romantic anthropologist, Millat had been out in the garden, looking through the windows, casing the joint. Where Irie saw culture, refinement, class, intellect, Millat saw money, lazy money, money that was just hanging around this family not doing anything in particular, money in need of a good cause that might as well be him.

‘So,’ said Joyce, clapping her hands, trying to keep them all in the room a little longer, trying to hold off, for as long as possible, the reassertion of Chalfen silence, ‘you’re all going to be studying together! Well, you and Irie are really welcome. I was saying to your headmaster, wasn’t I, Marcus, that this really shouldn’t feel like punishment. It’s not exactly a heinous crime. Between us, I used to be a pretty good marijuana gardener myself at one time . . .’

‘Way
out
,’ said Millat.

Nurture, thought Joyce. Be patient, water regularly and don’t lose your temper when pruning.

‘. . . and your headmaster explained to us how your own home environments aren’t exactly . . . well . . . I’m sure you’ll find it easier to work here. Such an important year, the GCSEs. And it’s so obvious that you’re both bright — anyone can tell that just by looking at your eyes. Can’t they, Marcus?’

‘Josh, your mother’s asking me whether IQ expresses itself in the secondary physical characteristics of eye colour, eye shape, etc. Is there a sensible answer to this inquiry?’

Joyce pressed on. Mice and men, genes and germs, that was Marcus’s corner. Seedlings, light sources, growth, nurture, the buried heart of things — that was
hers
. As on any missionary vessel, tasks were delegated. Marcus on the prow, looking for the storm. Joyce beneath deck, checking the linen for bedbugs.

‘Your headmaster knows how much I hate to see potential wasted — that’s why he sent you to
us
.’

‘And because he knows most of the Chalfens are four hundred times smarter than him!’ said Jack, doing a star jump. He was still young and hadn’t yet learnt to demonstrate his pride in his family in a more socially acceptable manner. ‘Even Oscar is.’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Oscar, kicking in a Lego garage he had recently made. ‘I’m the stupidest in the world.’

‘Oscar’s got an IQ of 178,’ whispered Joyce. ‘It’s a bit daunting, even when you’re his mum.’

‘Wow,’ said Irie, turning, with the rest of the room, to appreciate Oscar trying to ingest the head of a plastic giraffe. ‘That’s remarkable.’

‘Yes, but he’s had everything, and so much of it is nurture, isn’t it? I really believe that. We’ve just been lucky enough to give him so much and with a daddy like Marcus — it’s like having a strong sunbeam shining on him twenty-four hours a day, isn’t it, darling? He’s so fortunate to have that. Well, they all are. Now, you may think this sounds strange, but it was always my aim to marry a man cleverer than me.’ Joyce put her hands on her hips and waited for Irie to think that sounded strange. ‘No, I really did. And I’m a staunch feminist, Marcus will tell you.’

‘She’s a staunch feminist,’ said Marcus from the inner sanctum of the fridge.

‘I don’t suppose you can understand that — your generation have different ideas — but I knew it would be liberating. And I knew what kind of father I wanted for my children. Now, that’s surprised you, hasn’t it? I’m sorry, but we really
don’t
do small talk around here. If you’re going to be here every week, I thought it best you got a proper dose of the Chalfens now.’