Free The Black Madonna by Peter Millar Page B

through the dark and quickly emptying streets of the City, Marcus checked his rear-view mirror carefully. There was no obvious sign of an unusually attentive black Mercedes.
    Perhaps he had been over-reacting, although he was not quite sure he believed that. He knew he should tell Nazreem what he had seen. If she was really being followed, she ought to know. But to tell her would expose her lie to him. It was difficult. The whole thing made him slightly uneasy.
    Priji’s in Brick Lane would cheer him up. It was his favourite curry restaurant in London. Maybe dinner would provide a chance for them to talk properly, for Nazreem to open up. He found a parking space in Fournier Street, by the side of Christ Church, Spitalfields, the newly restored eighteenth-century masterpiece that was one of his favourite London buildings. It had been designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the same architect who had given All Souls its Gothic spires. It was also in easy walking distance of Priji’s.
    The rain meant there were fewer than usual of the curry touts hassling passers-by. Priji’s had been recommended to him by a South African friend of Asian extraction. The food, like most of the Brick Lane eateries, was not actually Indian but Bangladeshi, and the chef-owner, a second generation Londoner of Bengali extraction was not just a master in the kitchen but a host with a heart of gold. He noticed Nazreem looking disconcertedly at the sea of brown faces and at the street names written in both English and Bengali.
    ‘This is … like a ghetto?’ she said.
    ‘I suppose, but the word has too many negative connotations these days. I prefer to think of it as the historical equivalent of an airport arrivals lounge.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    Marcus smiled. ‘Well, it’s called Brick Lane because back in the middle ages there were fields here where workmen dug the clay tomake London bricks. They didn’t build houses on any scale until after the Great Fire of 1666. Once they did, because the area was so close to the docks, it became a bedding-in zone for new immigrants.
    ‘Back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were mostly Huguenot Protestants, expelled from Louis XIV’s fervently Catholic France. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it filled up with eastern European Jews, fleeing the pogroms. And from the early twentieth century onwards Bengali seamen off tea clippers from Calcutta began to settle here. Gradually the community grew until just after the Second World War they opened Britain’s first “Indian” restaurants. It has been a magnet for others ever since so that now the dominant community is Muslim. The Brick Lane area is now home to the biggest community of Bangladeshi Muslims outside Southeast Asia. The locals call it Bangla Town. You see that building on the corner, the one with the sundial protruding from high up on the wall?’
    Nazreem looked in the direction he was pointing and saw a big, old-looking building of stone and brick with what looked like Arabic on a board that was just too far for her to read. ‘Yes?’
    ‘The whole history of this part of the East End is summed up by that building. When it was built in 1743 it was a Huguenot church; by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a prominent synagogue . It’s now a mosque. There are shops around here that started life as French butchers, became kosher and are now halal. I like it. It’s the sort of place that makes you understand why history matters.’
    Priji’s was in the middle of a line of similar-looking restaurants, but first Marcus took Nazreem into a newsagent opposite that also advertised itself as an off-licence and bought two bottles of cold Cobra lager from the cooler. ‘A lot of the restaurants around her don’t sell alcohol to avoid offending their Muslim customers but they don’t mind if you bring your own,’ he explained. ‘Drink?’
    Nazreem nodded with just a hint of a self-conscious smile: