by Nick Hornby
So. I doze on the sofa, and then Tom comes down in his pyjamas, puts the TV on, gets a bowl of cereal together, sits down on an armchair and watches cartoons. He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t say anything.
‘Good morning,’ I say cheerily.
‘Hi.’
‘How are you?’
‘All right.’
‘How was school yesterday?’
But he’s gone now; the curtains have been drawn over the two-minute window of conversational opportunity that my son offers in the morning. I get up off the sofa and put the kettle on. Molly’s next down, already dressed in her school clothes. She stares at me.
‘You said you were going away.’
‘I came back. Missed you too much.’
‘We didn’t miss you. Did we, Tom?’
No answer from Tom. These, apparently, are my choices: naked aggression from my daughter, silent indifference from my son. Except, of course, this is pure self-pity, and they are neither aggressive nor indifferent, simply children, and they haven’t suddenly developed an adult’s intuition overnight, even over this particular night.
Last, but not least, comes David, in his customary T-shirt and boxer shorts. He goes to put the kettle on, looks momentarily confused when he realizes that it is on already and only then casts a bleary eye over the household to see if he can find any explanation for this unexpected kettle activity. He finds it sprawled on the sofa.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I just came to check up on your parenting skills when I’m not around. I’m impressed. You’re last up, the kids get their own breakfast, the telly’s on . . .’
I’m being unfair, of course, because this is how life works whether I’m here or not, but there’s no point in waiting for his assault: I’m a firm believer in pre-emptive retaliation.
‘So,’ he says. ‘This two-day course finished a day early. What, you all talked crap at twice the normal speed?’
‘I wasn’t in the mood.’
‘No, I can imagine. What sort of mood are you in?’
‘Shall we talk later? When the kids have gone to school?’
‘Oh, yeah, right. Later.’ This last word is spat out, with profound but actually mystifying bitterness – as if I were famous for doing things ‘later’, as if every single problem we have is caused by my obsession with putting things off. I laugh at him, which does little to ease tensions.
‘What?’
‘What’s wrong with suggesting that we talk about things later?’
‘Pathetic,’ he says, but offers no clue as to why. Of course it’s tempting to do things his way and talk about my desire for a divorce in front of our two children, but one of us has to think like an adult, if only temporarily, so I shake my head and pick up my bag. I want to go upstairs and sleep.
‘Have a good day, kids.’
David stares at me. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m whacked.’
‘I thought that one of the problems with our division of labour is that you couldn’t ever drop the kids off at school. I thought you were being denied a basic maternal right.’
I have to be at the surgery before the kids leave in the mornings, so I am spared the school run. And even though I am grateful for this, my gratitude has not prevented me from bemoaning my lot whenever we have arguments about who doesn’t do what. And David, needless to say, knows that I have no genuine desire to take the kids to school, which is why he is taking such delight in reminding me of my previous complaints now. David, like me, is highly skilled in the art of marital warfare, and for a moment I can step outside myself and admire his vicious quick-wittedness. Well played, David.
‘I’ve been up half the night.’
‘Never mind. They’d love it.’
Bastard.
I’ve thought about divorce before, of course. Who hasn’t? I had fantasies about being a divorcee, even before I was married. In my fantasy I was a good, great, single professional mother, who had fantastic relations with her ex – joint attendance at parents’ evenings, wistful evenings going through old photograph albums, that sort of thing – and a series of flings with bohemian younger or older men (see Kris Kristofferson, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, my favourite film when I was seventeen). I can recall having this fantasy the night before I married David, which I suppose should have told me something but didn’t. I think I was troubled by the lack of quirks and kinks in my autobiography: I grew up in leafy suburbia (Richmond), my parents were and still are happily married, I was a prefect at school, I passed my exams, I went to college, I got a good job, I met a nice man, I got engaged to him. The only room I could see for the kind of sophisticated metropolitan variation I craved was post-marriage, so that was where I concentrated my mental energy.
I even had a fantasy about the moment of separation. David and I are looking through travel brochures; he wants to go to New York, I want to go on safari in Africa, and – this being the umpteenth hilarious you-say-tomayto-I-say-tomato conversation in a row – we look at each other and laugh affectionately, and hug, and agree to part. He goes upstairs, packs his bags and moves out, maybe to a flat next door. Later that same day, we have supper together with our new partners, whom we have somehow managed to meet during the afternoon, and everyone gets along famously and teases each other affectionately.
But I can see now just how fantastical this fantasy is; I am already beginning to suspect that the wistful evenings with the photograph albums might not work out. It is far more likely, in fact, that the photographs will be snipped down the middle – indeed, knowing David, they already have been, last night, just after our phone call. It’s kind of obvious, when you think about it: if you hate each other so much that you can’t bear to live in the same house, then it’s unlikely you’ll want to go on camping holidays together afterwards. The trouble with my fantasy was that it skipped straight from the happy wedding to the happy separation; but of course in between weddings and separations, unhappy things happen.
*
I get in the car, drop the kids off, go home. David’s already in his office with the door closed. Today isn’t a column day, so he’s probably either writing a company brochure, for which he gets paid heaps, or writing his novel, for which he gets paid nothing. He spends more time on the novel than he does on the brochures, which is only a source of tension when things are bad between us; when we’re getting on I want to support him, look after him, help him realize his full potential. When we’re not I want to tear his stupid novel into pieces and force him to get a proper job. I read a bit of the book a while ago and hated it. It’s called The Green Keepers, and it’s a satire about Britain’s post-Diana touchy-feely culture. The last part I read was all about how the staff of Green Keepers, this company that sells banana elbow cream and Brie foot lotion and lots of other amusingly useless cosmetics, all require bereavement counselling when the donkey they have adopted dies. OK, so I am not in any way qualified to be a literary critic, not least because I don’t read books any more. I used to, back in the days when I was a different, happier, more engaged human being, but now I fall asleep every night holding a copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the opening chapter of which I still haven’t finished, after six months of trying. (This is not the author’s fault, incidentally, and I am sure the book is every bit as good as my friend Becca told me it is when she lent it to me. It’s the fault of my eyelids.) Even so, even though I no longer have any idea of what constitutes passable literature, I know that The Green Keepers is terrible: facetious, unkind, full of itself. Rather like David, or the David that has emerged over the last few years.
The day after I’d read this scene, I saw a woman whose baby was stillborn; she’d had to go through labour knowing that she would produce a dead child. Of course I recommended bereavement counselling, and of course I thought of David and his sneering book, and of course I took a bitter pleasure in telling him when I got home that the reason we could rely on our mortgage being paid every month was
because I earned money by recommending the very thing that he finds contemptible. That was another good evening.
When David’s office door is closed it means he cannot be disturbed, even if his wife has asked him for a divorce. (Or, at least, that’s what I’m presuming – it’s not that we have made provision for precisely that eventuality.) I make myself another cup of tea, pick up the Guardian from the kitchen table and go back to bed.
I can only find one story in the paper that I want to read: a married woman is in trouble for giving a man she didn’t know a blow-job in the Club Class section of an aeroplane. The married man is in trouble, too, but it’s the woman I’m interested in. Am I like that? Not outside in the world I’m not, but in my head I am. I’ve lost all my bearings somehow, and it scares me. I know Stephen, of course I know Stephen, but when you have been married for twenty years, any sexual contact with anyone else seems wanton, random, almost bestial. Meeting a man at a Community Health forum, going out for a drink with him, going out for another drink with him, going out for dinner with him, going out for another drink with him and kissing him afterwards, and, eventually, arranging to sleep with him in Leeds after a conference . . . That’s my equivalent of stripping down to my bra and pants in front of a plane full of passengers and performing a sex act, as they say in the papers, on a complete stranger. I fall asleep surrounded by pieces of the Guardian and have dreams that are sexual but not erotic in any way whatsoever, dreams full of people doing things to other people, like some artist’s vision of hell.
When I wake up David’s in the kitchen making himself a sandwich.
‘Hello,’ he says, and gestures at the breadboard with the knife. ‘Want one?’ Something about the easy domesticity of the offer makes me want to cry. Divorce means never having a sandwich made for you – not by your ex-husband, anyway. (Is that really true, or just sentimental claptrap? Is it really impossible to imagine a situation where, some time in the future, David might offer to put a piece of cheese between two pieces of bread for me? I look at David and decide that, yes, it is impossible. If David and I divorce he will be angry for the rest of his life – not because he loves me but because that is who and how he is. It is just about possible to imagine a situation in which he would not run me over if I was crossing the street – Molly is tired, say, and I’m having to carry her – but hard to think of a situation where he might offer to perform a simple act of kindness.)
‘No thanks.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘Suit yourself.’
That’s more like it. A slight note of pique has crept in from somewhere, as if his strenuous attempts to make love not war have been met with continued belligerence.
‘Do you want to talk?’
He shrugs. ‘Yeah. What about?’
‘Well. About yesterday. What I said on the phone.’
‘What did you say on the phone?’
‘I said I wanted a divorce.’
‘Did you? Gosh. That’s not very friendly, is it? Not a very nice thing for a wife to say to her husband.’
‘Please don’t do this.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Talk properly.’
‘OK. You want a divorce. I don’t. Which means that unless you can prove that I’ve been cruel or neglectful or what have you, or that I’ve been shagging someone else, you have to move out and then after five years of living somewhere else you can have one. I’d get going if I were you. Five years is a long time. You don’t want to put it off.’
I hadn’t thought about any of this, of course. Somehow I’d got it into my head that me saying the words would be enough, that the mere expression of the desire would be proof that my marriage wasn’t working.
‘What about if I . . . you know.’
‘No, I don’t know.’
I’m not ready for any of this. It just seems to be coming out of its own accord.
‘Adultery.’
‘You? Miss Goody Two Shoes?’ He laughs. ‘First off you’ve got to find someone who wants to adulter you. Then you’ve got to stop being Katie Carr GP, mother of two, and adulter him back. And even then it wouldn’t matter ’cos I still wouldn’t divorce you. So.’
I’m torn between relief – I’ve stepped back from the brink, the confession of no return – and outrage. He doesn’t think I’ve got the guts to do what I did last night! Worse than that, he doesn’t think anyone would want to do it with me anyway! The relief wins out, of course. My cowardice is more powerful than his insult.
‘So you’re just going to ignore what I said yesterday.’
‘Yeah. Basically. Load of rubbish.’
‘Are you happy?’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’
There is a certain group of people who will respond to one of the most basic and pertinent of questions with a mild and impatient blasphemy; David is a devoted member of this group. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘I said what I said yesterday because I wasn’t happy. And I don’t think you are either.’
‘Course I’m not bloody happy. Idiotic question.’
‘Why not?’
‘For all the usual bloody reasons.’
‘Which are?’
‘My stupid wife just asked me for a divorce, for a start.’
‘The purpose of my question was to help you towards an understanding of why your stupid wife asked you for a divorce.’
‘What, you want a divorce because I’m not happy?’
‘That’s part of it.’
‘How very magnanimous of you.’
‘I’m not being magnanimous. I hate living with someone who’s so unhappy.’
‘Tough.’
‘No. Not tough. I can do something about it. I cannot live with someone who’s so unhappy. You’re driving me up the wall.’
‘Do what the fuck you like.’
And off he goes, with his sandwich, back to his satirical novel.
There are thirteen of us here in the surgery altogether, five GPs and then all the other staff that make the centre work – a manager, and nurses, and receptionists both full- and part-time. I get on well with just about everyone, but my special friend is Becca, one of the other GPs. Becca and I lunch together when we can, and once a month we go out for a drink and a pizza, and she knows more about me than anyone else in the place. We’re very different, Becca and I. She’s cheerfully cynical about our work and why we do it, and sees no difference between working in medicine and, say, advertising, and she thinks my moral self-satisfaction is hilarious. If we’re not talking about work, though, then usually we talk about her. Oh, she always asks me about Tom and Molly and David, and I can usually provide some example of David’s rudeness that amuses her, but there just seems to be more to say about her life, somehow. She sees things and does things, and her love life is sufficiently chaotic to provide narratives with time-consuming twists and turns in them. She’s five years younger than me, and single since a drawn-out and painful break-up with her university sweetheart a couple of years back. Tonight she’s agonizing about some guy she’s seen three times in the last month: she doesn’t think it’s going anywhere, she’s not sure whether they connect, although they connect in bed . . . Usually, I feel old but interested when she talks about this sort of thing – flattered to be confided in, thrilled vicariously by all the break-ups and comings-together and flirtations, even vaguely envious of the acute loneliness Becca endures at periodic intervals, when there’s nothing going on. It all seems indicative of the crackle of life, electrical activity in chambers of the heart that I closed off a long time ago. But tonight, I feel bored. Who cares? See him or don’t see him, it doesn’t make any difference to me. What are the stakes, after all? Now I, on the other hand, a married woman with a lover . . .
‘Well if you’re not sure, why do you need to make a decision? Why don’t you just rub along for a while?’ I can hear the boredom in my voice, but she doesn’t detect it. I don’t get bored when I s
ee Becca. That’s not the arrangement.
‘I don’t know. I mean, if I’m with him, I can’t be with anyone else. I do with-him things instead of single things. We’re going to the Screen on the Green tomorrow night to see some Chinese film. I mean, that’s fine if you’re sure about someone. That’s what you do, isn’t it? But if you’re not sure, then it’s just dead time. I mean, who am I going to meet in the Screen on the Green? In the dark? When you can’t talk?’
I suddenly have a very deep yearning to go and see a Chinese film at the Screen on the Green – the more Chinese it is, in fact, the better I would like it. That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity – the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don’t attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.
‘Sorry. This must all sound so silly to you. It sounds silly to me. If I’d known that I’d be the sort of woman who was going to end up sitting with married friends and moaning about my single status I would have shot myself. Really. I’ll stop. Right now. I’ll never mention it again.’ She takes a parodic deep breath, and then continues before she has exhaled.
‘But he might be OK, mightn’t he? I mean, how would I know? That’s the trouble. I’m in such a tearing hurry that I haven’t got the time to decide whether they’re nice or not. It’s like shopping on Christmas Eve.’
‘I’m having an affair.’
Becca smiles distractedly and, after a brief pause, continues.
‘You bung everything in a basket. And then after Christmas you . . .’