Marriage Material by Sathnam Sanghera

Author:Sathnam Sanghera [Sathnam Sanghera]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

11 – TIME OUT (LONDON)

THE EDWARDIAN DINING room, with its crystal mouldings and Boucheresque murals, was designed to dazzle. But Surinder was more taken by details regular diners would have considered banal: tablecloths starched and ironed to cardboard stiffness; people scooping soup from bowls in smooth, outward movements, sipping from the sides of spoons. On the table next to her, a lady was wiping her plate with a piece of bread, which itself was on the end of a fork, while straight opposite, a man was eating a banana with a knife and fork. White people would, it seems, do anything not to touch their food with their hands.

Then there was the menu she had been given to examine while Jim visited the bathroom. She guessed, with her schoolgirl French, that ‘carré d’agneau Sarladaise’ might be a duck salad of some variety, and that ‘apéritifs maison’ were the house drinks. But what was the difference between ‘les hors d’oeuvres’ and ‘les entrées’? What on earth was ‘croustade de langoustines’? And as for ‘tête de veau’ – she knew it translated as either ‘new head’ or ‘head of eyes’ or ‘head of a cow’. But the idea of anyone dining on any of these things made her giggle, just as she had giggled when Jim had proposed dinner with the question, ‘Cantonese or Polynesian?’

She had suggested he decide: whatever he wanted was fine with her. In the end he had picked this fashionable French place on the edge of Soho, once apparently the haunt of Whistler, a famous painter whose work she pretended to be familiar with, and staffed by waiters who spoke English in Parisian accents so thick that when one slid towards Surinder as if on wheels and asked if she wanted a drink, she responded, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak French,’ before adding, ‘Je ne parle pas le français.’

He repeated himself slowly and gravely. ‘Non . . . non . . . can I get zee laydee a dreeenk?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She blushed and glanced in the direction of the bathroom into which Jim had disappeared. ‘I think I will wait for my fiancé.’

The waiter withdrew, walking backwards for his first few steps, bowing slightly, unaware that being able to utter the exotic word ‘fiancé’, a word with no apparent counterpart in Punjabi, gave Surinder more of a thrill than any of his fine wines would have done.

She took a deep breath and, alone for the first time in London, tried to digest the events that had led her to this table. Jim turning up at school one home time in his car, offering her a lift home. Jim turning up a week later even though he had been firmly rebuffed, suggesting he take her to visit the perfume counter at Beatties. A month later, he was still at it: driving along as she walked home, pleading for a moment or two of her time. She was flattered and touched, but, more than anything else, terrified. She knew

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