by India Knight
To be perfectly honest with you, and if I’m to be completely realistic, Sam and I are no longer at the passionately romantic stage. Not by any means. It pains me to say this. It actually makes me feel prickly in my armpits, that sort of shame-guilt prickle you get. And it makes me feel sad. Because, why? Some people go on for ever, happy as two happy clams at the bottom of the happy sea, for decades and decades until death do them part, and even then they probably fly around heaven chastely kissing each other and having joint hobbies. I see them in Sainsbury’s sometimes, ancient old couples holding hands. They make me want to cry. I’m not just saying that: they literally make my eyes fill with tears. Sometimes I follow them around for a couple of aisles, until I can’t bear it any more.
What’s so wrong with me and Sam, with us – well, with me mostly – that I know we won’t be buying cheap ham together holding hands when we’re eighty-two? And why do I assume the fading of romance – the perfectly normal fading of romance – is somehow fatal, against ham? I bet most of these old couples went through some rough patches. Like, you know, loved ones dying in wars, like the Blitz, not just some low-level pissed-offness. So actually there is no reason why we shouldn’t buy cheap ham in our time of decrepitude. I want to buy cheap ham with Sam. Sam’s my man, for ham.
But anyway: it’s true. The passionate, easy tiger, grr-grr bit is petering out. There’s a bit of tiger and a bit of grr, but – how can this be? – I don’t get that ache of longing any more. I just think, ‘Oh look, there’s Sam.’ Occasionally I think, ‘Oh look, there’s Sam, who is quite easy on the eye.’ Or, ‘There’s Sam, who makes me laugh, which I find attractive.’ Or, ‘Sam has said an intelligent thing, and that appeals to me.’ And then I carry on with whatever I’m doing. This seems really pretty incredible, considering the longing I used to feel for him. I used to watch him when he didn’t know I was there – coming up the stairs at a party, once – and feel dizzy. I used to think, ‘Oh my God, that’s my boyfriend. That man – that clever, funny, charming, talented man, whom I fancy to the point of giddiness – has chosen me. Me! Out of all the gazillions of women in the whole gigantic universe. Me!’ And then I’d want to laugh wildly, hahahahahaha, to roll around the floor kicking my legs in the air and whooping with incredulous, delighted joy. I didn’t, obviously. But I wanted to. Inside, I whooped. I whooped on our wedding day; and when Maisy was born, I cried with happiness and whooped some more.
And then, slowly, the petering. Oh, it kills me. On so many levels, really. But mostly because it’s so sad. I’m like Kate: I believe in romance. But I don’t want to be like Kate and show the strength of my belief by marrying four different men – at the last count, though I think she’s pretty settled with Max. Two should suffice, which means I’ve run out of options: it’s the end of the line. (My friend Amber sang that at our wedding – ‘The Trolley Song’ from Meet Me in St. Louis, which ends, ‘And it was grand just to stand with his hand holding mine/ To the end of the line.’ Everyone thought it was a sweet, camp choice, but I knew.)
I also know perfectly well – I’ve read the books, and as I keep saying, I am an adult – that the kind of romance I believe in is silly, unrealistic, schoolgirl, Emma Bovary-ish. Penny novella, cheapo stuff, with coups de foudre and manly chests and sweepings into arms and elopements and never any boredom or nappy-changing or sleepless nights or wee on the loo seat. I know. I know I’m silly. But it slays me. It pierces me that the early bits are always the best bits, that you go from falling into bed every hour on the hour to being lucky if you feel like it once a fortnight. I don’t mean just sex – I mean that feeling of being transported, of your stomach plummeting three storeys when he gives you a call. The first time I found Sam’s wee on the loo seat, I stared at it reverentially. I thought, ‘That is His wee, on my lowly loo seat,’ and I felt privileged.
And anyway, there are things you can do. I can’t guarantee that Sam and I will be buying ham when we are tiny, withered old people, but I do know how to maximize our chances. I know – I have observed – that the secret to a happy marriage, apart from the obvious stuff like saintly patience and award-winning acting skills, the ability to cope with disappointment, and a dramatic lowering of expectations, is to put out regularly. Oh yes. You may frown, and I’ll grant you the concept doesn’t exactly thrill my good feminist heart, but it’s true. Put out regularly, seem extraordinarily eager for the mighty husbandly front bottom, and you’re improving the chances of your marriage succeeding – whatever that means – by about 300 per cent. Do the whiny thing about being tired and how you were up half the night with X or Y child, and you’re doomed. The whiny thing, which starts off as a temporary measure based on the simple fact that you are, actually, broken with child-exhaustion and cracked-nipple agony, segues seamlessly, over the months and years, into ‘We are lovely friends’. It’s insidious. When you are lovely friends – and it’s lovely to be lovely friends, I’m not knocking it – sex slips down the list of stuff to do. And there is no man alive who wouldn’t like more sex. Ergo, there is no man alive who would like less. So. Put out. I know it sounds simplistic, but I’m not making this stuff up: I learned it from my first marriage and from all of my girlfriends. It’s very crude and very effective.
The thing is, even if you give a good impression of being permanently up for it – if you came top of the class at RADA, say – the petering usually comes along anyway. It does for me, at any rate. I don’t see how it can’t. Perhaps it’s different if you don’t have children. But I have children: three of the blighters. I love them to pieces, but children do stuff to relationships, or maybe just to mine – there’s no point in pretending that once they sleep through the night or start getting their own breakfasts, or going to school, you slip magically back to where you were to start off with: madly in love and dizzy with longing. You don’t. You reinvent the relationship to incorporate Mr Muscle and cooking and nits and arguments and in-laws, and all the claustrophobia that brings with it. And because you’re an adult, you crash through it. You say to yourself, ‘It’s like this for pretty much every married couple in the world. You get through it. I love him. He loves me. It’s fine.’
And it is fine. It’s more than fine, and besides there are compensations. Many, many compensations, which it behoves me to remember. You may no longer live with Mr Take Me Now, but you’ve acquired a new best friend, someone who knows you intimately in the way that your girlfriends never could, someone who truly loves you, warts and all, though hopefully not literally. You never have to do anything on your own again. You have a permanent ally, someone who’s always going to be on your side, someone who winks at you at parties and whisks you home, lying about babysitters, because he knows you’re not enjoying yourself. Someone to cook for (I love cooking) and save up your jokes for, someone to communicate with in shorthand, someone to laugh with and hug and sleep with – that lovely comforting sleep, like two peas in a pod, all cosy. Someone, more to the point, who loves the children you have together as insanely much as you do. That’s no small thing, is it? That’s maybe the most important thing of all. There are literally hundreds of compensations for the death of passion. Thousands. Millions, I expect. It’s just a question of persuading yourself, as other people seem to have no difficulty doing, that this bit – companionship – is in fact better than what came before it. And I’m a horrible person, because I want both. I want companionship – obviously, who doesn’t? – and passion. And I don’t think it’s possible for them to co-exist. I’m forty: I don’t want just passion, like some sort of super-slag, hopping about for the hot rumpo for all eternity. On balance, I’d rather have companionship. And I do, plus the hottish rumpo as often as I like. So. I don’t really know what I’m moaning about. Except, you know a really beautiful, huge roaring fire? I wouldn’t trade the beautiful roaring fire for cosy central heating in every room. I’d rather be cold, and then go and sit in front of the amazing, blazing fire in all its glory. That is my problem. I don’t want my children to die of
hypothermia, so I’m grateful for the central heating. But.
Sam was a dancer when I met him, though now he’s a much-esteemed, manageably famous choreographer. He’s fit, in both senses. He is extremely attractive. But you see, even with that – I lie in bed and watch him getting dressed and I think, ‘He’s extremely attractive,’ but I think it like one might think, ‘What a sweet dog,’ or, ‘I really like what the Browns have done to their spare room.’ It’s become objective. I would prefer it if I had the thought and then felt compelled to remove his pants with my teeth.
Do I sound sex-obsessed? It’s to do with my age. Eleven years ago, when my older children were small, it was pretty far removed from my mind. Everything was removed from my mind, really, and not only because when you have young children you basically lose a decade – a large part of the nineties, in my case. I existed in them, obviously, but I’d have a hard time telling you much about them beyond the basics – Britpop, Blair, opaque tights, my discovery that avocado houmous existed. And then my marriage to Robert was breaking up, though Sam and I got together pretty quickly afterwards. And then Maisy came along, and the children grew up, and I hit forty and realized that my prime was pretty much behind me. I mean, I’m okay, I’m in good nick, I look all right, but I’m never going to see twenty-one again, obviously. And what I really don’t fancy very much at all is spending the next twenty or thirty – or forty – years pootling about all filled with companionship, like an old lady, like a bloody nan. To tell you the absolute truth, the idea of it kind of freaks me out. I repeat: what’s wrong with me?
Anyway. Sam’s annoyed because I said we couldn’t have his entire family to stay for Christmas. There are so many of them: he has four brothers, who all have wives and children. We have one spare room, which Pat, his mother, is in this week. He said that his family didn’t mind, that they could all bunk down on the floor (kids) and sofas (adults), but the idea filled me with distress. I don’t want to be stepping over bodies on Christmas morning, you know? I don’t want my painstakingly decorated tree to be surrounded by teenagers’ worn socks and the debris of their lives – crisp packets, cans of fizzy drinks, general crap. I just don’t. Not at any time, really, unless someone wants to buy me a twelve-bedroomed mansion, but especially not at Christmas. I suggested we put them up in a nice B&B I know locally, but that was like suggesting we round them up and slaughter them like pigs. I’m still not quite sure why it was like that, but it was. Something to do with the Celtic concept of families, I’m guessing – Sam’s Irish. I said they could come to our house from breakfast to bedtime, but sleep elsewhere. No go. Apparently they have to do their actual snoring under our roof, otherwise it doesn’t count as hospitality. I used to think this kind of thing was charming – amusing cultural differences and all that. Now I’m not so sure: it just seems stupid, and a stupid thing to be arguing over. But it’s okay. I’m going to fix it. It’s Christmas.
All of this works, I must tell you. My marriage works. There is nothing the matter with it. I just wish that marriage wasn’t predicated on everything being perfectly balanced, positioned just so. It’s like a stack of tins in a supermarket: it only works if every tin is in the right place. And we both, consciously or not, work very hard at moving the tins back into place when they start to slip out of position and threaten the structure of the whole edifice: it’s become second nature. It’s just what you do, when you’re in a long-term relationship – keep shoving the tins back into place, like a couple moonlighting as shelf-stackers in their sleep. Of course, all of that presupposes that a wrecking ball doesn’t swing in out of nowhere and demolish the pyramid in three nanoseconds.
Home, to the known universe, and where my love does not lie waiting silently for me. Maisy’s in bed already and Pat is kindly tidying the kitchen, Jack and Charlie having made themselves and a couple of their mates supper – spaghetti with butter and cheese, by the looks of things: to think there was a time when I imagined them whipping me up little snacks for treats; I even taught them how to cook.
‘You shouldn’t tidy up after them, Pat,’ I say, bending to kiss her hello. ‘They’re perfectly capable of using the dishwasher.’ This is a lie: the dishwasher exists, their dirty plates exist, and never the twain shall meet, unless you make dire threats involving either gating or pocket money – and even then, they don’t rinse them first and the filter gets clogged up with disgusting bits of old mince. ‘It’s no trouble,’ Pat says sweetly. ‘And Maisy was good as gold.’
We’ve known each other for six years, Pat and I, and she’s never been anything but lovely to me. Well, you know. ‘Lovely’ in the mother-in-law sense, where the word is elastic enough to encompass a high degree of competitiveness, some jealousy, plenty of resentment, and more childrearing advice than the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe would know what to do with. This latter is especially bold considering her own – how shall we put it? – complicated relationship with her children. Pat, like so many former matriarchs, now sees herself as a martyr, a sort of Mater Dolorosa who has been abandoned by her ingrate offspring; it seems never to have occurred to her that her children demonstrably love her but are a) a bit busy, what with work and families and children of their own, and b) wary (justifiably, frankly) of giving up a weekend to go and stay with her and be told, tearfully, what complete disappointments they are to their mammy. Happily, Pat doesn’t find me disappointing – just perplexing, as though I were a different species, which I suppose I am. Pat is originally from County Tyrone and has worked hard all her life, first in factories and then as a shop assistant in a bakery; I am from west London, privileged and spoiled. The difference used to thrill us in the beginning: I was, in those early months and years, fantastically excited by her modest origins, her salt-of-the-earthness, her council flat with its china cats and artificial flowers. Here, I would think, sipping vodka on her unfeasibly plump, immaculate sofa, was proof that we were all the same. We weren’t: I was just pissed and filled with hippie-love for all of mankind. But I know she liked my accent, and the way I knew how to order in restaurants – the way I took her to restaurants in the first place, or to shops, and was, unlike her, never made to feel small by a maître d’ or snooty sales assistant. I have my uses. Also, I make her laugh, and she me.
‘Tamsin called to say she was on her way over,’ Pat says. ‘She’s bringing Jake. Is he the oul’ fella you told me about?’
I am torn between loyalty to my friend and wanting to know what Pat, who is despite everything quite wise about stuff other than her family, makes of the age discrepancy.
‘He’s a bit older than her, yes,’ I say, with princely understatement.
‘Ah, it’s a shame,’ says Pat, looking fantastically – disproportionately, really – downcast and wiping down the table for the third time. ‘A dirty oul’ fella like that, with a young girl.’
‘She’s hardly a young girl, Pat,’ I say, wanting to laugh hysterically at her description. ‘We’re practically the same age. We’re middle-aged women.’
‘All the same,’ she sniffs. ‘It’s not right, fellas like that playing the goat. And she should know better. A beautiful girl like that!’
‘But she loves him, Pat.’
‘Love!’ Pat says, quite forcefully.
‘Pat. Did I tell you about my friend Fay?’
‘Does she have an oul’ fella as well?’ Pat says, quite waspishly.
‘No, she has a very young fella. Er, man. Boyfriend. Husband.’ And therein lies a tale, which I am about to share with Pat, except that Sam and the boys burst into the kitchen.
‘Is dinner ready? I’m starving,’ says Jack.
‘You’ve just had spaghetti!’
‘Yeah, but that was only a snack,’ says Charlie, who is, incredibly considering the amount he eats, not clinically obese.
‘I thought you’d eaten,’ I say. ‘Lay two more places then. It’ll be ready in about half an hour.’
‘Oh man,’ says Charlie, clutching his flat stomach. ‘I’m so fuckin
g hungry.’
‘Charlie! For God’s sake. Please don’t swear.’
‘Mum?’ says Jack. ‘I think Charlie has worms. Seriously. He eats like a freak. He never stops.’
‘I don’t have worms, you twat,’ says Charlie. ‘You have worms in your brain. And if I did have worms, I’d get them all together and put them in your bed.’
‘Whatever,’ says Jack. ‘And if you did that, I’d crap on your head while you were asleep.’
‘Please don’t be revolting,’ I say, pointlessly. Such are the joys of boys, especially twelve- and fourteen-year-old ones. ‘And do your friends want to stay and eat? And could you do me a favour and go back upstairs and stay there until supper’s ready?’
‘They’re going home in a minute. Don’t you love us?’ says Charlie, making a comedy sad-face.
‘Sometimes,’ I say.
‘Cool. See ya,’ they say, blurring into one, and galumphing back upstairs.
‘Hello, babe,’ says Sam.
2
23 December 2009, 8 p.m.
We have drinks in the drawing room, which is a complete mess of presents, wrapping paper, scissors, packs of batteries, teenage boys, used plates, gift-containing carrier bags, Sellotape, empty mugs, one laptop opened to MySpace, Maisy’s sizeable pig-pink pop-up tent, which she has ignored all year and chosen to erect ‘for Christmas’ as a cool place for the reindeer to relax in for a while, a couple of school projects, half-started, and this morning’s newspapers, not in an orderly stack.
Treading gingerly over these – Pat immediately sets about tidying up, until I tell her to leave it – we arrange ourselves in a little huddle near the tree, which is nine feet tall and shining like a beacon, bedecked with white fairy lights, the red baubles I bought when I left home and lugged about with me from house to house over the years, and a manageably scant number of child-made decorations (sweet but often hideous, let’s be frank). The tree is beautiful. It’s blazing magnificently by the window, with an obscene pile of presents already underneath. The sight of these presents – they cascade all the way around the room because no under-tree is roomy enough to contain them – would be enough to cause any sane person to denounce capitalism and join Class War on the spot, but there are only so many because there are so many of us: sixteen on the day, plus all the friends and relatives who’ve sent the children gifts.