Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  She met Jim at the wine bar after an hour with a bag containing a pair of peach trousers and some Wrangler jeans. She had also bought a brown and tangerine Madras cotton lace-up dress that she had loved so much that she had packed up her home creation and walked out of the shop in it. Jim, who was on to his second glass of wine, praised her for her choices and raved at how pretty she looked in her new dress. This gushing was constant with Jim. He complimented her almost as much as he touched her, for her eyes and skin, for her thick, luxuriant hair. She appreciated it, though it was odd being admired for the darkness of her skin when aunties normally went on about how fair she was, and she found it difficult to gush in return. Once, sitting in his car in a country lane, he had asked what it was that she liked about him, and all she had managed was ‘I like your hair.’ He had laughed and said, ‘You might as well admire me for my shoes.’ Turns out she did actually admire him for his shoes – he had excellent dress sense. But he didn’t understand. It was not that she didn’t consider him beautiful, or admire him. It was just that the things she loved about him would have sounded silly uttered out loud. His quiet walk, for instance. The way he called her ‘Sue’. How, when he got stuck on a word, he would sometimes repeat it, slowing down and prolonging the first sound until he got it out. Besides, she was afflicted by her mother’s superstitious notion that by praising something, you curse it by attracting ‘nazar’, the evil eye. To admire something was to put it at risk.

  But sitting there, as he stroked the legs she had spent half an hour shaving, and almost as long cleaning up after to ensure there was no incriminating evidence in the bathroom, this time she was the one who kissed Jim in public, in front of everyone. Something flashed in his eyes, and he suggested they return to the hotel to drop off the shopping, and so he could get changed before dinner. But when they got back, he had other ideas. For months she had resisted him, not letting his tongue explore when they kissed, and pushing his hands away when they ranged too far. But this time she did not fight his kisses, or his right hand when he unclasped her bra. She found herself moaning softly, letting him unlace the front of her dress. But she stopped herself going further when he began to undo his belt.

  ‘Let’s wait,’ she whispered.

  ‘Why?’ he implored.

  ‘I just want to wait.’

  ‘For what?’

  She whispered into his ear. ‘Until we’re married.’

  ‘But we’re getting married tomorrow, Sue.’

  ‘Exactly. Just one . . .’ A kiss. ‘More.’ Another kiss. ‘Day.’

  Jim whined, but acquiesced. He disappeared into the bathroom, and when she next saw him he was wearing his new purchases: a safari suit in beige linen, with short sleeves and a matching belt. They were set off with a silk scarf and a smart set of black sunglasses. She cooed. And she was impressed all over again when she saw him returning from the restaurant bathroom, still wearing them. She was fortunate, she told herself, to be with someone like Jim. He had said the same about her when they were walking down the street. And maybe, she thought, this was the secret of a good marriage: both people feeling like they were the lucky one.

  There was a jolt of electricity in her arm as Jim sat next to her. He ordered a gin and tonic and asked Surinder if this was her first French meal. She admitted it was, omitting to mention that it was her first ever restaurant meal, the first time she had come across warmed plates, the first time she had seen people eating mussels, the first time she had worn make-up in public. He unfolded his napkin and placed it across his lap, and Surinder copied him.

  ‘Decided what you fancy?’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand the menu,’ she confessed, coyly. ‘Could you order for me?’

  ‘Let me have a look.’ He removed his sunglasses, placed them on the table, and squinted at the text. ‘Maybe you fancy the snails? Or perhaps the deep-fried frogs’ legs?’

  Surinder looked horrified. ‘Just teasing.’ He squeezed her thigh. ‘I’ll get you something simple. A classic.’ He returned to the menu and continued, as if to himself, ‘Some people say the food is as good in London as in Paris now. But I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Oh. Have you been to Paris?’

  ‘Bien sur. Places like Lasserre, where a dinner might cost £6 or £7 a head, still has no match in London in terms of quality. But in the intermediate £4 range, standards in London have improved.’

  She was, in part, impressed, being reminded of a line from Tess of the d’Urbervilles that had appeared in an exam question the day before: ‘My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!’ But at the same time she was stunned at the thought of anyone spending so much on one meal. In Wolverhampton, there were large families who spent less than £4 on their weekly groceries.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ interjected Jim. ‘I’ll be earning that in an hour now that I’m in London.’

  He stroked her forearm, told her for the fifth or sixth time that evening that she was the prettiest girl in the room, remarked, ‘The truth is, you can’t go wrong in a French restaurant if you start with charcuterie and finish with cheese,’ and then at a speed which made Surinder feel dizzy, clicked his fingers, pointed out a few things on the menu to the waiter, ordered a bottle of wine, asked to be moved to a table with a better view, and, as they were seated elsewhere, joked that the waiter’s accent was so French that he probably came from Guildford.

  Surinder laughed, another lump of her anxiety having been chipped away, and sitting on what was a platform overlooking the whole restaurant she was overcome by a feeling of modernity. Here they were, an Irish man and an Indian woman, dining in a French restaurant in London, dressed in fashions that would be acceptable in Monte Carlo or New York. It was the start of a brand-new decade which would see the beginning of communication by extrasensory perception, the development of tomatoes with no pips, and her free to devour every opportunity that came her way. And she got an opportunity to do so when the food and drink arrived.

  Her first ever gulp of red wine did not go down well: it tasted of cough medicine. She didn’t know how Jim could stomach so much of it. But the platter of cured meats was a delight. Nervous apprehension had suppressed her appetite for days, if not weeks. That morning she had not even managed a quarter of the parontha her mother had cooked, leading to an inevitable lecture on how she wasn’t to waste food at her aunt’s house in Southall. But she motored through the sausages and salt pork ham, reminding herself to hold the knife and fork the correct way round. Soon she was out-eating Jim, dispensing with every last crumb on the platter before washing it down with another, more successful swig of wine. ‘That was delicious,’ she remarked with satisfied finality.

  ‘But there’s more to come!’

  ‘Oh.’ She blushed, gathering she had made yet another faux pas.

  ‘The main course!’ Jim squeezed her arm and drained his glass of wine. ‘Clue’s in the name! Don’t worry. Portions are never that large here. And I ain’t got you snails.’

  A platter of snails might not actually have been as daunting as what did turn up: steak. Greyish on the outside and red in the middle, with a sliver of vegetables on the side. There was no rational reason why a slice of beef should have felt like such a challenge. In the preceding twenty-four hours Surinder had stolen jewellery from her parents, sampled booze, tried on a bikini for Jim’s amusement, kissed a white man in public and walked around the streets of London with her bare legs showing. Besides, while there were strict Sikhs who avoided all meat, there were also some very serious bearded, turbanned sword-wielding Sikhs who freely partook of all kinds of flesh, including beef, the theological position being ambiguous.

  Still, the dish felt like the biggest obstacle she had faced that day. Not least, there was the practical challenge of consuming the meat. How are you meant to eat steak? Should you cut it in half before proceeding to devour each half? Or should you go from the end, progre
ssing through the steak until you reach the core? Also, was it acceptable to ask for ketchup? Or would that be the beef equivalent of putting salt and pepper over your food before you had even tried it, a faux pas she had once made with him at lunch in the Midlands. In the end, she made a timid compromise, sprinkling salt on one end of the slab of meat and taking a tiny bite. She swallowed it whole. And managed to get the next bit down with it barely touching her teeth or tongue. By the third bite she was masticating fully, albeit joylessly.

  ‘This is fabulous,’ said Jim, speaking with his mouth half full, hacking at his fish course. ‘How’s the steak?’

  Surinder struggled to swallow.

  ‘Oh G-God, you don’t eat beef, do you? I completely forgot. Are you all right? Shall I get something else?’ He raised his hand as if about to beckon a waiter. Surinder patted it down.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, coughing. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Seriously. It tastes . . . good.’

  ‘Really?’ Jim leaned over to pour himself another drink. The waiter, seeing him do so, rushed to intervene. ‘Then again, it’s not, strictly speaking, the first time you have had beef.’ A mouthful of booze. ‘You know that pâté you just had?’

  For some reason, the realisation that she had inadvertently eaten beef made her feel more ill than the beef she was actually eating. She put down her cutlery and risked another sip of wine, one unfamiliar taste concealing another. Meanwhile, Jim gestured at the view they enjoyed of the restaurant. ‘So then, my love, have you spotted any famous faces? This place is meant to be packed with them.’

  Surinder sat up and peered across the restaurant. It consisted of two large interconnected rooms. The one they were sitting in was dominated by a zinc bar, at which there were standing a line of well-dressed young women, in the company of a middle-aged man with an ostentatious moustache, all of them laughing along at some remark he had just made. Next to them, a small dancefloor, on the edge of which a three-piece band were swaying along happily to jazz. No sign of any celebrities.

  Jim continued. ‘Do you know who those women are at the bar?’ He tapped the side of his long thin nose. ‘Hookers.’ He whispered into Surinder’s ear. ‘Prostitutes. You don’t see that many on the pavements nowadays since the law was changed; girls have gone indoors, out of the rain. They call themselves hostesses. Not all of them take men back home, but most will if the payment offered is high enough.’

  Surinder stiffened as Jim continued, regaling her with some of the oldest tricks of the oldest of trades. Leaving aside the fact that she was not used to talking during meals, having been brought up to believe that conversation was disrespectful to the food, Jim’s predilection for such talk had been one of her reservations about him. She hadn’t liked it when he had pointed out that the Blue Ball on the corner of Piper’s Row in Wolverhampton was used as a base for ladies of the night. She had bristled when, walking through Soho that afternoon, he had observed that some of the prostitutes working there were as old as seventy-five. She knew he considered her prudish and innocent, that he saw himself as a man of the world, and this was just one of his ways of educating her. But there were things she just didn’t want to know.

  ‘Don’t believe me?’

  ‘Jim, I just don’t want to talk about it.’ She offset the sternness of her tone by stroking the back of his neck, but Jim took this as encouragement.

  ‘Any doubt whether a girl does or does not can usually be settled with a pound note slipped to a waiter or a barman. They usually take a cut of the full sum. Look. I’ll show you.’

  Before Surinder had a chance to stop him, Jim was shouting across the room for the attention of the waiter, slipping a pound note into his jacket pocket. It was at this point Surinder realised he had already polished off their bottle of wine, on top of all the drink he had knocked back during the day. The fear that he might be drunk grew when the waiter removed the pound note from his pocket and, before striding off, thrust it into Jim’s wine glass.

  Jim laughed and shrugged. ‘Turns out it’s the owner. That’s his wife and friends. Her birthday apparently.’ He licked his knife and then raised his empty glass at the revellers. ‘Can’t win them all, eh?’ He stroked Surinder’s inner thigh. ‘Anyway, got room for cheese? The cheeseboard is as good as it gets in London, though it is wasted, I tell you, on English palates. But maybe the lady fancies a dance first?’

  Surinder really didn’t want to dance. But Jim stood up, bellowed an order for more drinks and she followed him, timidly, on to the dancefloor, where the feeling of being watched, of wanting to shrink away, returned. To her mortification, Jim broke into some dramatic Northern Soul moves. She stood by, doing an embarrassed version of the gidda she did at weddings, while an elderly white couple shuffled a foxtrot next to them and the bassist in the band winked at her lasciviously. Mercifully, Jim suggested returning to the table at the end of the song.

  ‘The drinks have come,’ he slurred, sweating through his new shirt, stumbling back to their table.

  The drinks hadn’t come. Nor the cheese. Instead, on the table, a small tin plate with a bill placed on it. Jim pointed out the mistake to a passing waiter, but before they or any other customers realised what was happening, before anyone had a chance to object or bemoan the declining standards of Soho, the young couple were being thrown out of the restaurant, the entire manoeuvre accomplished with such elegance and grace that watching the scene unfold you would have thought they were being taken upstairs for a drink with the proprietor or a tour of the kitchen.

  Outside, Surinder felt sick and disorientated, as if she had just had a near miss on the motorway. She leant against a lamppost, and as her eyes slowly became accustomed to the dark, she made out a nearby doorway marked out with the word ‘model’, and a man, at the end of the street, blowing a perfect smoke ring into the air. The streets were unrecognisable from a few hours earlier, transformed by a rain shower and the descending night. Jim had been pushed to the ground by a doorman. He got up and started pummelling the rear door with his fists.

  ‘Did you s-s-see that?’ he spluttered, covered in a number of scratches and cuts which couldn’t really be explained by the neatness of what had just happened. For some reason, there was even a grass stain on his shirt. ‘They took £10 out of my pocket. And no change! The fucking fuckers have robbed me.’ He switched to kicking the door with his snakeskin loafers. ‘My sunglasses are still on the table. They have nicked my fucking sunglasses.’

  Surinder felt cold on her bare arms. The rear of the restaurant bore no resemblance to the grand front entrance, backing as it did upon a street so narrow that it was almost an alleyway. It was lined with bins, and she could make out a solitary newspaper seller nearby, who, in a cubicle about five square feet, had on display a panoply of international publications – Nuit et Jour, Il Popolo d’Italia – she had never seen in her shop.

  The thought of home provoked her nausea and revived the fear she had struggled to repress for weeks, of being caught by her family, having her face blackened and being dragged along Victoria Road by her hair. But then, something in her – pride, an instinct to survive – switched on, and she repressed the thought. Whatever happened, she decided that she would never, could never, return.

  ‘Calm down, Jim,’ she found herself saying, in a tone she had not used with him or anyone else before. ‘Destroying your new shoes isn’t going to help.’

  Jim paused, momentarily taken aback. He continued to appear perplexed as Surinder took her turn to embark upon a lecture. She told him that she would call the restaurant from the hotel and tell them they had lost some property and collect it in the morning. He should remember what he had told her earlier: that he would soon be earning enough to purchase endless pairs of sunglasses. In the meantime, they should go back to the hotel, get some rest. Tomorrow was a big day, their wedding day, and he had clearly had too much to drink.

  Surinder stood stock-still. For a moment or two, as he sway
ed on the spot, it seemed as if Jim might take her advice. But then he stepped back, pushed Surinder away and said, ‘Do you know how much those sunglasses cost?’ He wiped his nose with the back of his jacket sleeve and gave a two-fingered salute to a curious passer-by. ‘You can go back to the f-fucking hotel.’ Steadying himself, he added, ‘As for the wedding, there isn’t going to be one, you silly bitch.’

  And with that he shot off, zigzagging down the alleyway, ping-ponging along the pavement, as if he were walking through a meteorite shower that only he could see, staggering and tripping along the way.

  Alone in the dark, Surinder felt as if she were falling down the deepest and darkest of wells. She threw up, wine and beef coming up in waves, the booze staining the pavement like blood. Slumped on the floor, she half remembered another line from that Hardy book. It went something like: ‘It was from her lips that came the murmur of unspeakable despair’. She had been confused by it when she had read it, not being able to comprehend how a sound could be ‘unspeakable’. But now she understood. She had grown up, as the result of melodramatic Hindi movies and hysterical funeral rituals, believing that desolation was raucous. But it turned out you could actually lose yourself quite silently, as if it were nothing.

  12 – COUNTRY HOMES & INTERIORS

  I KNOW SOME people so dread the agony of a break-up that they will do anything to avoid it, up to and including spending the rest of their days with someone they don’t love or, in some cases, don’t even like. But not me. In fact, I would say I have a talent for splitting up, the agony of the process being almost always outweighed, in my experience, by the exhilaration of freedom and the titillation of sexual possibility. And for me, before Freya at least, it really was a process, in that it almost always took place after a certain amount of time (usually three months), and almost always at the same place (Pizza Express).