‘Survival is what it is about!’ she concluded out loud (she spoke to her baby; she liked to give it one sensible thought a day), making the bell above Crazy Shoes tinkle as she opened the door. Her niece Neena worked there. It was an old-fashioned cobblers. Neena fixed heels back on to stilettos.

‘Alsana, you look like dog shit,’ Neena called over in Bengali. ‘What is that horrible coat?’

‘It’s none of your business, is what it is,’ replied Alsana in English. ‘I came to collect my husband’s shoes, not to chit-chat with Niece-of-Shame.’

Neena was used to this, and now that Alsana had moved to Willesden there would only be more of it. It used to come in longer sentences, i.e., You have brought nothing but shame… or My niece, the shameful… but now because Alsana no longer had the time or energy to summon up the necessary shock each time, it had become abridged to Niece-of-Shame, an all-purpose tag that summed up the general feeling.

‘See these soles?’ said Neena, moving one of her dyed blonde bangs from her eye, taking Samad’s shoes off a shelf and handing Alsana the little blue ticket. ‘They were so worn through, Auntie Alsi, I had to reconstruct them from the very base. From the base! What does he do in them? Run marathons?’

‘He works,’ replied Alsana tersely. ‘And prays,’ she added, for she liked to show people her respectability, and besides she was really very traditional, very religious, lacking nothing except the faith. ‘And don’t call me Auntie. I am two years older than you.’ Alsana swept the shoes into a plastic carrier bag and turned to leave.

‘I thought that praying was done on people’s knees,’ said Neena, laughing lightly.

‘Both, both, asleep, waking, walking,’ snapped Alsana, as she passed under the tinkly bell once more. ‘We are never out of sight of the Creator.’

‘How’s the new house, then?’ Neena called after her.

But she had gone; Neena shook her head and sighed as she watched her young aunt disappear down the road like a little brown bullet. Alsana. She was young and old at the same time, Neena reflected. She acted so sensible, so straight-down-the-line in her long sensible coat, but you got the feeling…

‘Oi! Miss! There’s shoes back here that need your attention,’ came a voice from the store room.

‘Keep your tits on,’ said Neena.

At the corner of the road Alsana popped behind the post office and removed her pinchy sandals in favour of Samad’s shoes. (It was an oddity about Alsana. She was small but her feet were enormous. You felt instinctively when looking at her that she had yet more growing to do.) In seconds she whipped her hair into an efficient bun, and wrapped her coat tighter around her to keep out the wind. Then she set off up past the library and up a long green road she had never walked along before. ‘Survival is all, little Iqbal,’ she said to her bump once more. ‘Survival.’

Halfway up the road, she crossed the street, intending to turn left and circle round back to the high road. But then, as she approached a large white van open at the back and looked enviously at the furniture that was piled up in it, she recognized the black lady who was leaning over a garden fence, looking dreamily into the air towards the library (half dressed, though! A lurid purple vest, underwear almost), as if her future lay in that direction. Before she could cross over once more to avoid her, Alsana found herself spotted.

‘Mrs Iqbal!’ said Clara, waving her over.

‘Mrs Jones.’

Both women were momentarily embarrassed at what they were wearing, but, looking at the other, gained confidence.

‘Now, isn’t that strange, Archie?’ said Clara, filling in all her consonants. She was already some way to losing her accent and she liked to work on it at every opportunity.

‘What? What?’ said Archie, who was in the hallway, becoming exasperated with a bookcase.

‘It’s just that we were just talking about you – you’re coming to dinner tonight, yes?’

Black people are often friendly, thought Alsana, smiling at Clara, and adding this fact subconsciously to the short ‘pro’ side of the pro and con list she had on the black girl. From every minority she disliked, Alsana liked to single out one specimen for spiritual forgiveness. From Whitechapel, there had been many such redeemed characters. Mr Van, the Chinese chiropodist, Mr Segal, a Jewish carpenter, Rosie, a Dominican woman who continuously popped round, much to Alsana’s grievance and delight, in an attempt to convert her into a Seventh-Day Adventist – all these lucky individuals were given Alsana’s golden reprieve and magically extrapolated from their skins like Indian tigers.

‘Yes, Samad mentioned it,’ said Alsana, though Samad had not.

Clara beamed. ‘Good… good!’

There was a pause. Neither could think of what to say. They both looked downwards.

‘Those shoes look truly comfortable,’ said Clara.

‘Yes. Yes. I do a lot of walking, you see. And with this – ’ She patted her stomach.

‘You’re pregnant?’ said Clara surprised. ‘Pickney, you so small me kyant even see it.’

Clara blushed the moment after she had spoken; she always dropped into the vernacular when she was excited or pleased about something. Alsana just smiled pleasantly, unsure what she had said.

‘I wouldn’t have known,’ said Clara, more subdued.

‘Dear me,’ said Alsana with a forced hilarity. ‘Don’t our husbands tell each other anything?’

But as soon as she had said it, the weight of the other possibility rested on the brains of the two girl-wives. That their husbands told each other everything. That it was they themselves who were kept in the dark.

4 Three Coming

Archie was at work when he heard the news. Clara was two and a half months up the spout.

‘You’re not, love!’

‘I am!’

‘You’re not!’

‘I am! And I arks de doctor what it will look like, half black an’ half white an’ all dat bizness. And ’im say anyting could happen. Dere’s even a chance it may be blue-eyed! Kyan you imagine dat?’

Archie couldn’t imagine that. He couldn’t imagine any piece of him slugging it out in the gene pool with a piece of Clara and winning. But what a possibility! What a thing that would be! He dashed out of the office on to the Euston Road for a box of cigars. Twenty minutes later he swaggered back into MorganHero with a huge box of Indian sweets and started making his way round the room.

‘Noel, have a sticky thing. That one’s good.’

Noel, the office junior, looked inside the oily box with suspicion. ‘What’s all this in aid…?’

Archie pounded him on the back. ‘Going to have a kid, ain’t I? Blue eyes, would you credit it? I’m celebrating! Thing is, you can get fourteen types of dal, but you can’t get a bloody cigar in the Euston Road for love nor money. Go on, Noel. How about this one?’

Archie held up a half-white, half-pink one with an unwelcoming odour.

‘Erm, Mr Jones, that’s very… But it’s not really my cup of…’ Noel made as if to return to his filing. ‘I’d better get on with…’

‘Oh, go on, Noel. I’m going to have a kid. Forty-seven and I’m going to have a little baby. That calls for a bit of a party, don’t it? Go on… you won’t know till you try. Just give it a nibble.’

‘Just them Pakistani foods aren’t always… I’ve got a bit of a funny…’

Noel patted his stomach and looked desperate. Despite being in the direct mail business, Noel hated to be spoken to directly. He liked being the intermediary at MorganHero. He liked putting calls through, telling one person what another person said, forwarding letters.

‘Bloody hell, Noel… it’s just a sweet. I’m just trying to celebrate, mate. Don’t you hippies eat sweets or something?’

Noel’s hair was ever so slightly longer than everyone else’s, and he had once bought an incense stick to burn in the coffee room. It was a small office, there was little to talk about, so these two things made Noel second only to Janis Joplin, just as Archie was the white Jesse Owens because he came thirteenth in the Olympics twenty-seven years ago, Gary from Accounts had a French grandmother and blew cigarette smoke out of his nose so he was Maurice Chevalier, and Elmott, Archie’s fellow paper-folder, was Einstein because he could manage two thirds of The Times crossword.