Aoife, in her pink bridesmaid’s finery, is sitting next to Holly by the font. She’s holding the velvet tray with the bride’s and groom’s wedding rings on. Look at them both. About two months after our Northumbrian sojourn, I called Holly from a phone kiosk in Charles de Gaulle airport, with actual francs. I was on my way back from the Congo, where I’d done a lengthy piece on the Lord’s Resistance Army’s child soldiers and sex slaves. Holly picked up the phone, I said, “Hi, it’s me,” and Holly said, “Why, hello, Daddy.”
I said, “It’s not your dad, it’s me, Ed.”
Holly said: “I know, you idiot. I’m pregnant.”
I thought, I’m not ready for this, and said, “That’s fantastic.”
“On marriage,” continues the Reverend Audrey Withers, “Jesus made only one direct remark: ‘What God has joined, let no man strike asunder.’ Theologians have debated what this means down the ages, but it profits us to consider Jesus’s actions as well as his words. Many of us know the story of the wedding at Cana, as it’s trotted out at most Christian wedding sermons you’ll ever hear, this one included. The banquet at Cana was down to its last drop of wine, so Mary asked Jesus to save the day and not even the Son of God could refuse a determined mother, so he told the servants to fill the wine jars with water. When the servants poured the jars, out came wine — and not your mediocre plonk, either. This was vintage. The master of the banquet told the bridegroom, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first, and then the cheaper stuff after the guests are legless, but you have saved the best until last.” How human of the Son of God — to make his debut as a miracle worker, not as raiser of the dead, a healer of leprosy, or a walker on the water, but as a good son and loyal friend.” The Reverend Audrey gazes over our heads, as if watching a home video of Cana. “I believe that if God cared what size and shape and form human marriage should take, He would have given us clear instructions, via the Gospels. I believe, therefore, that God is willing to trust us with the small print.”
Brendan’s next to me. His phone, set to silent, buzzes. His hand goes to his jacket, but a glare from Kath in front aborts the mission.
“Sharon and Peter,” the vicar carries on, “have written their own wedding vows. I am a big fan of self-penned vows. To get the job done, they had to sit down, talk, and listen, both to what was said aloud and to what wasn’t, which is where the real truth so often hides. They had to compromise — a holy word, that, as well as a practical art. Now, a vicar isn’t a fortune-teller,” I see Aoife prick up her ears, “so I can’t tell Sharon and Peter what awaits them in the years ahead, but marriage can, should, and must evolve. Don’t be alarmed, and don’t resent it. Be patient and kind, unflaggingly. In the long run, it’s the unasked-for hot-water bottles on winter nights that matter more than the extravagant gestures. Express gratitude, especially for work that tends to get taken for granted. Identify problems as they arise, remembering that anger is flammable. When you’ve behaved like a donkey, Peter,” the groom smiles at his toes, “remember that a sincere apology never diminishes the apologizer. Wrong turns teach us the right way.”
What grade, I wonder, would me and Holly get, on the relationship scorecard of the Reverend Audrey Withers? C+? D—?
“When’s the bit where Uncle Peter kisses her?” asks a kid.
The congregation laughs. “Great idea.” The Reverend Audrey Withers looks like a woman who enjoys her job. “Why not just skip to the good bit?”
NASSER DROVE THE half-Corolla half — Fiat 5. Aziz occupied the passenger seat with his camera under a blanket at his feet, and I sat in the back behind a screen of dry cleaning, ready to burrow into the footwell under sheets and boxes of infant formula. Baghdad’s low-rise western suburbs stretched out along the four-lane highway to Fallujah. After a mile or two the apartment blocks gave way to middle-class streets from the money-slick 1970s: whitewashed, flat-roofed houses surrounded by high walls and steel gates. Then we passed a few miles of two-story cinder-block buildings, with shops or workshops below and meager living quarters above. These acquired the visual repetition of a cheap cartoon. We passed several petrol stations, whose queues went on for many hundreds of vehicles. The drivers would be waiting there all day. Even in April, the sun was more of a glaring sky zone than the bright disk of northern latitudes. Unemployed men of all ages stood around in dishdashas, smoking and talking. Women in hijabs or full-length burkas walked in small groups, carrying plastic bags of vegetables: It struck me that Iraq was looking more Iranian by the week. Kids Aoife’s age played at Insurgents Versus Americans. Nasser fed a cassette into the player, and Arabic music blammed out through the tinny speakers. A woman sang scales I’m not hardwired for, and the song must have been a classic because both Nasser and Aziz got to work on the backing vocals. During an instrumental break, I asked Nasser — half shouting above the din of the car and the music — what the song was about. “A girl,” my fixer half-shouted back. “Man she love go to Iran to fight the war, but he never come back. She very beautiful, so other men say, ‘Hey, honey, I got money, I got big house, I got wasta, you marry me?’ But the girl she say, ‘No, I wait one thousand years for my soldier.’ Sure, this song is very … How you say? — like sugar too much? I forget word — santi-mantle?”
“Sentimental.”
“Veeery sentimental, and my wife say, the girl of this song, she is crazy! If she don’t marry, what happen to her? Dead soldiers can’t send money! She gonna starve! Only a man write so stupid song, my wife say. But I say, ‘Ah …’ ” Nasser made a dismissive motion with his hand. “This song touch me.” He thumped his chest. “Love is more strong than the death.” He turned around. “You know?”
IVANO DEL PIO at the Sydney Morning Herald had recommended Nasser as a fixer when he left Baghdad, and he was one of the best I’ve ever employed. Preinvasion, Nasser had worked in broadcasting and had reached management level, which meant he’d had to join the Ba’ath Party. He had a decent house and could support his wife and three children, even in a society starved by U.S. and UN sanctions. Postinvasion, Nasser scraped a living from working for foreign press. Under Saddam’s regime the official fixers were a shifty crew, paid to feed you Saddam’s line and inform the Mukhabarat about any ordinary Iraqis foolish enough to try to tell you anything true about life under the dictator. Nasser, however, had a journalist’s nose and eye, and on some of my best stories for Spyglass I insisted he received credit and pay as co-writer. He never used his real name, however, in case an enemy denounced him to any of a dozen insurgency groups as a collaborator. Aziz the photographer was an ex-colleague of Nasser’s, but his English was as limited as my Arabic so I didn’t know him as closely as I did my fixer. He knew his trade, though, and was cautious, crafty, and brave in pursuit of a good shot. Photography is a dangerous hobby in Iraq; the police assume that you’re recceing for a suicide mission.