No Concubine

Mary Beard

• The Oxford Book of Marriage edited by Helge Rubinstein
  Oxford, 383 pp, £15.00, March 1990, ISBN 0 19 214150 3
• The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive: Systems of Marriage and the Family in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia by Jack Goody
  Cambridge, 542 pp, £37.50, February 1990, ISBN 0 521 36574 0

There is not much romance in the average British Registry Office. The decorations are dirty and largely plastic, the notices forbidding. ‘Quiet please – marriage in progress,’ runs the standard government-issue warning hanging on the Registrar’s door – presumably to stop the expectant crowd in the waiting room disrupting the magic moments of those five minutes ahead in the queue. It is, after all, just a five-minute job – three minutes for handing over the fee and collecting your receipt, two for promising a lifetime’s commitment. And (in Cambridge at least – maybe other places have a more human face) the whole ceremony is conducted in the kind of petty bureaucratic style you associate with a driving test. Try asking to sign the register with your own pen. ‘No sir, it’s regulation blue or black ink I’m afraid,’ comes the response. ‘I’ll do it in black then,’ you say. ‘But we’ve only got blue.’ Smile please; kiss the bride; you’ve passed.