White Teeth (7 page)

It was a lottery driving along like that, looking out, not knowing whether one was about to settle down for life amongst the trees or amidst the shit. Then finally the van had slowed down in front of a house, a nice house somewhere midway between the trees and the shit, and Clara had felt a tide of gratitude roll over her. It was
nice
, not as nice as she had hoped but not as bad as she had feared; it had two small gardens front and back, a doormat, a doorbell, a toilet
inside
 . . . And she had not paid a high price. Only love. Just love. And whatever Corinthians might say, love is not such a hard thing to forfeit, not if you’ve never really felt it. She did not love Archie, but had made up her mind, from that first moment on the steps, to devote herself to him if he would take her away. And now he had; and, though it wasn’t Morocco or Belgium or Italy, it was nice — not the promised land — but
nice
, nicer than anywhere she had ever been.

Clara understood that Archibald Jones was no romantic hero. Three months spent in one stinking room in Cricklewood had been sufficient revelation. Oh, he could be affectionate and sometimes even charming, he could whistle a clear, crystal note first thing in the morning, he drove calmly and responsibly and he was a surprisingly competent cook, but romance was beyond him, passion, unthinkable. And if you are saddled with a man as average as this, Clara felt, he should at least be utterly devoted to
you
— to your beauty, to your youth — that’s the
least
he could do to make up for things. But not Archie. One month into their marriage and he already had that funny glazed look men have when they are looking through you. He had already reverted back into his bachelorhood: pints with Samad Iqbal, dinner with Samad Iqbal, Sunday breakfasts with Samad Iqbal, every spare moment with the man in that bloody place,
O’Connell’s
, in that bloody dive. She tried to be reasonable. She asked him:
Why are you never here? Why do you spend so much time with the Indian
? But a pat on the back, a kiss on the cheek, he’s grabbing his coat, his foot’s out the door and always the same old answer:
Me and Sam? We go way back
. She couldn’t argue with that. They went back to before she was born.

No white knight, then, this Archibald Jones. No aims, no hopes, no ambitions. A man whose greatest pleasures were English breakfasts and DIY. A dull man. An
old
man. And yet . . . good. He was a
good
man. And
good
might not amount to much,
good
might not light up a life, but it is something. She spotted it in him that first time on the stairs, simply, directly, the same way she could point out a good mango on a Brixton stall without so much as touching the skin.

These were the thoughts Clara clung to as she leant on her garden gate, three months after her wedding, silently watching the way her husband’s brow furrowed and shortened like an accordion, the way his stomach hung pregnant over his belt, the whiteness of his skin, the blueness of his veins, the way his ‘elevens’ were up — those two ropes of flesh that appear on a man’s gullet (so they said in Jamaica) when his time was drawing to a close.

Clara frowned. She hadn’t noticed these afflictions at the wedding. Why not? He had been smiling and he wore a white polo-neck, but no, that wasn’t it — she hadn’t been
looking
for them then,
that
was it. Clara had spent most of her wedding day looking at her feet. It had been a hot day, 14 February, but unusually warm, and there had been a wait because the world had wanted to marry that day in a little registry office on Ludgate Hill. Clara remembered slipping off the petite brown heels she was wearing and placing her bare feet on the chilly floor, making sure to keep them firmly planted either side of a dark crack in the tile, a balancing act upon which she had randomly staked her future happiness.

Archie meanwhile had wiped some moisture from his upper lip and cursed a persistent sunbeam that was sending a trickle of salty water down his inside leg. For his second marriage he had chosen a mohair suit with a white polo-neck and both were proving problematic. The heat prompted rivulets of sweat to spring out all over his body, seeping through the polo-neck to the mohair and giving off an unmistakable odour of damp dog. Clara, of course, was all cat. She wore a long brown woollen Jeff Banks dress and a perfect set of false teeth; the dress was backless, the teeth were white, and the overall effect was feline; a panther in evening dress; where the wool stopped and Clara’s skin started was not clear to the naked eye. And like a cat she responded to the dusty sunbeam that was coursing through a high window on to the waiting couples. She warmed her bare back in it, she almost seemed to
unfurl
. Even the registrar, who had seen it all — horsy women marrying weaselly men, elephantine men marrying owlish women — raised an eyebrow at this most unnatural of unions as they approached his desk. Cat and dog.

‘Hullo, Father,’ said Archie.

‘He’s a registrar, Archibald, you old flake,’ said his friend Samad Miah Iqbal, who, along with his wife Alsana, had been called in from the exile of the Wedding Guest Room to witness the contract. ‘Not a Catholic priest.’

‘Right. Of course. Sorry. Nervous.’

The stuffy registrar said, ‘Shall we get on? We’ve got a lot of you to get through today.’

This and little more had constituted the ceremony. Archie was passed a pen and put down his name (Alfred Archibald Jones), nationality (English) and age (47). Hovering for a moment over the box entitled ‘Occupation’, he decided upon ‘Advertising: (Printed Leaflets)’, then signed himself away. Clara wrote down her name (Clara Iphegenia Bowden), nationality (Jamaican) and age (19). Finding no box interested in her occupation, she went straight for the decisive dotted line, swept her pen across it, and straightened up again, a Jones. A Jones like no other that had come before her.

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 mail:

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 arsenal:
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: