course I forgive you,’ Aisha said gently. ‘I understand why you behaved as you did.’
‘Do you? Really?’ Mark asked slightly surprised.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Aisha, can you ever trust me …’ His voice faltered. ‘Can you ever love me again? Can it be the same as before?’ ‘Yes I can, Mark. It will be.’
‘Can you trust and love me enough to be my wife? Aisha, will you marry me?’
Aisha gasped. Love flooded her heart as all fear of him vanished. It was going to be all right after all. She turned to him, took one of his hands in hers and kissed it gently. ‘Yes, Mark. I will.’
Chapter Nine
Mark and Aisha were married on the anniversary of their first date, exactly one year to the day after Mark had met her outside Harrods and taken her to The Crooked Chimney to eat. The date had been Mark’s idea, it was part of his happy knack of saying and doing the most romantic things, wanting above all to please her. He asked her father formally for his daughter’s hand in marriage, knowing he would appreciate the traditional approach.
‘I shall always regret my divorce prohibits us having a church wedding,’ Mark said. ‘I know how much you and Mrs Hussein would have liked it. I am so very sorry.’
‘We are all entitled to one mistake,’ her father replied convivially. ‘I was fortunate in being found the wife I was. I am pleased you’ve decided to follow the ceremony with a church blessing. You know that means a lot to us, as practising Christians.’
Aisha had said nothing to her parents about Mark’s ‘second mistake’ – his dreadful ordeal with Christine – only about his marriage to Angela. Why upset them with what they didn’t need to know? she reasoned. Why complicate the past, or detract from the present, when there was no need to? And perhaps part of Aisha knew that her father might have questioned her further about the circumstances of the break-up of Mark’s relationship with Christine, or cast doubt about his culpability, or disapproved of Mark having lived in sin, or disapproved completely. For there was a gap between her generation and her parents’, and indeed their cultures, which, since meeting Mark, seemed to Aisha to have widened. She had come to realize that while she was a true Westerner, her parents were not and would never be, even though they had tried and so wanted to be.
Aisha’s father shook Mark’s hand after he had given his consent and then congratulated them both, while her mother kissed their cheeks and dabbed at her eyes with a little lace handkerchief she kept tucked in the waistband of her sari. Then Aisha’s father had presented Mark with a cheque for ten thousand pounds. ‘Towards the cost of setting up home,’ he said. ‘It’s not a dowry.’ And they all laughed.
Mark hadn’t wanted to accept the money to begin with, but Aisha nodded to him that he should. It was a matter of pride and family honour, and to have refused her father, even for the right motives, would have been unforgivable.
‘It costs a lot to get started nowadays,’ her father said, ‘and it’s no more than I would have spent on a full white wedding had my daughter had one.’
Aisha’s heart went out to her father as he handed over his hard-earned money. He seemed so small and humble beside Mark’s worldly sophistication. But Mark’s gratitude was heartfelt and sincere and her father seemed to grow from his response. Aisha thought then, as she had done countless times before, that she was the luckiest woman alive, both to have found Mark, and to have his love. She couldn’t have been happier.
The wedding was a small, simple affair with twenty guests including Mark’s parents, brother, an aunt and uncle, Aisha’s parents, and a few close friends of Mark’s from work. Aisha had invited Grace, the only person from work she wanted to ask, but unfortunately she had been taken ill two days before and wasn’t able to attend. Aisha’s relatives in India were sent invitations, but for protocol only as there was no possibility of them coming – they couldn’t afford it. As her father had said, ‘If I offer to pay for some, the others will take it as a personal slight.’ Including cousins and their children, there were over sixty members of the extended family so they decided it was better to send the invitation only, and then post wedding photographs to all of them after the day.
Aisha wore a very simple beige silk two-piece suit made by a dressmaker in London who Mark knew. It cost nearly as much as a full-length wedding dress, but Mark said it was more refined and in keeping with their maturity and a registry office wedding than something more flamboyant, and Aisha agreed. She carried a bouquet of lilies which her mother had arranged and wired together herself. Mark’s brother, whom he hadn’t seen in three years, was the best man, and naturally Aisha’s father gave her away. Aisha didn’t have a bridesmaid – with no sisters or relatives in England there wasn’t anyone she felt close enough to have comfortably asked. She had lost contact with her university friends, and since moving back home had been so busy with work she hadn’t had time to make new ones.
As Aisha repeated the words of the marriage service that she’d had so many years to practise, she said a silent prayer of thanks. Thank you God for sending me my perfect partner. You have made me very happy, and my parents unbelievably proud.
After the blessing, they were driven to the reception in a white Rolls-Royce – their one real extravagance of the day which Mark had insisted on. The reception was a five-course meal at The Crooked Chimney. The restaurant had been Mark’s suggestion although her father had paid for it. The sentiment of the venue was obvious, and Mark made it the focal point of his speech. He stood tall and proud and so very handsome in his suit as he spoke and pointed to the table where they’d sat on their first date, and where there was now a huge spray of flowers in the shape of a heart which he’d ordered secretly as a surprise for Aisha. He reminisced how he had gazed at Aisha across that candlelit table, and had been unable to eat because of his nerves. Aisha laughed for his nerves hadn’t been obvious and were nothing compared to how she had felt. Mark described how his first glimpse of Aisha had been sheltering from the rain and that he’d been immediately struck by her natural and unassuming beauty. He said he’d known from that moment on that one day he would make her his wife. He proposed a toast to Aisha’s parents, and thanked them for giving him their most cherished possession, and promised to look after Aisha as well as they had done. He said he would strive to live up to the honour of being their son-in-law and make them as proud of him as they were of their daughter. Aisha saw the look on her parents’ faces and those of the other guests as they raised their glasses for the toast, and felt a burst of pride. They obviously thought as she did, that to be loved and adored so much would create as near a perfect union as it was possible to get.
That evening, after the reception, they left for a week’s holiday in Dubai. They had purposely not called it a honeymoon – they felt that would have sounded frivolous at their age, a ‘short holiday’ was better Mark said. The destination was Mark’s choice, he had visited Dubai on business a number of times and wanted to share the splendour of its modern architecture with Aisha. As they waved goodbye through the rear window of the Rolls and the photographer took his last picture, Mark sat back in the car and sighed with relief. ‘Thank goodness that’s over with,’ he said. ‘It’s been the longest day of my life.’
Aisha laughed and poked him playfully in the ribs. ‘It wasn’t that bad! In fact, I quite enjoyed myself once I got over my nerves.’
‘So did I,’ he said. ‘But I had a nightmare last night that you would change your mind and call it off. It was so real I woke up in a cold sweat.’
‘Did you?’ she asked laughing. ‘But you know me better than that. I would never change my mind about you,
