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.’