The Marriage Diaries

by Rebecca Campbell

  And that's what I was last night. It was joyless and uncomfortable. Once she'd stopped, I started, and I could see that that part was as uninteresting to her as the preceding had been to me.

  Afterward I felt as though I'd been sacked and then got a letter through the post telling me I wasn't entitled to any redundancy money.

  “Night,” I said. But she was already sleeping.

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 7

  Not sleeping. And if I didn't reply to his good-night, then I certainly stretched a toe back and nudged his foot with it, in a consoling way.

  Oh yes, I meant to say,

  BASTARD

  BASTARD

  BASTARD.

  SEANJOURNALSEVEN.DOC

  TEMPTATION

  She did it. She e-mailed me. I wasn't expecting it. I thought I'd been rude enough to discourage her. I thought it was over. Now I'm sunk.

  I see I may have to fill in a bit of backstory. I've been trying to remember, trying to tell the story of Harry from the beginning, but I find I'm going to have to leap over a year and a half of his life—a year of some joy, a little misery, a lot of work. It means missing out on his first words (mutt, meaning “milk,” and no, meaning “no”), his first tottering steps, his first authentic tantrums. It means passing over without comment the growing chill between Celeste and me—intermingled with plenty of thaws and one bout of global warming but tending in the same direction: nuclear winter.

  The problem was that my involvement in the relationship was like the Augustinian view of the relationship between God and the world. For St. Augustine, God had to act constantly to keep creation ticking over. Without the gentle pressure of his hand, a dropped stone would cease to fall and would hover, perplexed, in midair; the planets would cease to revolve around the earth; the very matter of our bodies would disintegrate into its constituents— yellow bile, black bile, blood, phlegm—and in time, they would return to their essence in fire, water, or earth. In the same way, without my unfailing attention, our relationship stopped working. The little endearments were left unuttered, the cement that kept us together crumbled, and we separated like oil and vinegar in a neglected French dressing.

  But, as I said, all of that must be omitted, and we speed ahead to Harry's initiation into the strange world of the Freudian playgroup. I'd heard about this organization through a mother I met in the scruffy park in Kilburn. We were chatting about the usual mother things—walking, talking, sickness, sadness, fish sticks, eggy bread— while pushing our charges in the swings. It was important not to synchronize the pushes with each other, as that might be taken for flirting. I was complaining about the need for new things to do with Harry. She began to enthuse about the Freudian playgroup her son had just, at the age of three, grown out of.

  “It's not what you'd think,” she said. “They don't do your head in with mumbo jumbo. It's just a normal playgroup, but with students watching behind one-way glass. And it's free.”

  “Free!” I almost certainly exclaimed. Possibly in a comical Scots accent. “And you're sure they don't go in for all that fancying-your-mom stuff?”

  “Not at the playgroup. Really, it's just a big room with toys and a supervisor. The students have to observe how the parents and children interact. There's no therapy or anything.”

  “Oh. And you're sure it's … free?”

  I phoned up the next day. They had a place. They seemed quite interested in having a “male carer,” which should perhaps have set a smoke alarm off somewhere. But I was getting desperate. We spent most of our afternoons in the children's library at Swiss Cottage. There were a few dirty toys, and lots of books and videos for Harry to throw on the floor, but it wasn't much of a place, really. Nannies— it was mainly nannies: Australian, Filipina, Czech, Welsh, mostly thickset and swarthy, sometimes actively misshapen—sat around a central arena while their charges fought and bit one another. I could see why the nannies liked it. The kids were more or less safe, and they could all meet up to bitch about their employers and compare notes about how vigorously you could shake a child without killing it. But for me, it didn't feel like good parenting. Not day after day. Not hour after hour. It was time for new delights.

  And then I craved company. It's different for real mothers, mothers with wombs and so forth. They, you, have networks. You can get together and talk about the things you talk about. You can roll your eyes about how stupid and untidy men are. There are makeup tips and amusing sanitary napkin stories to exchange, i.e., things that aren't just to do with baby.

  But with me, a male mother, there was always going to be a gulf. True, there's baby stuff. We can talk about poo. And then I can try to widen the subject by comparing the types of poo-squirt Harry is capable of to the different shapes of spout produced by the various species of toothed and baleen whale—the aggressively forward angle of the sperm whale, the bifurcated V of the right whale, the pear-shaped plume of the rorqual. And then I could try to impress further with a smattering of high culture. “And talking of sperm whales, you know, of course, how in chapter twenty-eight of Moby-Dick— What? You haven't? Oh, well, you see, the harpoonist who killed the whale is put in charge of cutting it up, and the first thing he does is to make a kind of temporary mackintosh for himself out of the whale's foreskin. Yes, yes, it's true. Cuts holes for his arms and puts it over his head. I believe it may be the only time a character dresses up in a whale's foreskin in a major novel in the Western tradition. No, wait. Please come back. I promise to stop talking about whales’ genitals.”

  Except I never get that far. It would all have been different for Celeste. At least three of her friends had babies around the same time. She could have gone round for coffee mornings or just generally hung out. But they don't want a big, smelly man hanging around, a big, smelly man who might, just might, start talking about whales’ foreskins in front of their kosher kids.

  So I was lonely, and the Freudian playgroup seemed the ideal opportunity to talk to people who wouldn't be allowed to run away.

  Monday morning came around. Celeste dressed Harry in his fussiest clothes and made me promise not to change him back.

  “Please, can he not be in gangsta mode today?” she implored. “I want him to look nice for his group. They probably have contacts with social services.”

  “No, you're right. We don't want Harry taken into care because he looks too comfortable.”

  But I gave in. It was before the Pooh hat.

  The Freud people seemed to have taken over a whole street's worth of prime North London real estate, but the Freudian playgroup lived in a portacabin around the back of one of the main buildings. Harry's initial reaction to the place was to say “no” decisively, nine times, as I unstrapped him from the stroller.

  Stacey, the ringmaster, came out to meet us. She was a small, severe American woman in her fifties, I'd guess. I mean guess that she was in her fifties; I knew she was small and severe and American.

  “Hello, you must be Sean, and this is Harry,” she said, getting it the wrong way round. I had a feeling a secretary somewhere would suffer later on for the mistake.

  I tried asking her about the methodology behind the group as I unhooked Harry from the Jean Paul Gautier bustier affair into which Celeste had bolted him.

  “I have nothing to do with methodology. I just make sure the children have a good time without burning the place down.”

  I made a joke about how, yes, that would be terrible and might cause several pounds’ worth of damage. She gave me a resigned look and introduced me to the other mothers.

  I was maybe a little disingenuous when I went through, earlier on, my reasons for wanting to meet more people in a mother-and-baby-style context. I left out sex. I'd read somewhere about the exciting new concept of the “yummy mummy”: foxy twenty-somethings who wouldn't let child raising get in the way of being beautiful. Technically Celeste was a yummy mummy, but she didn't count, as she was also my lifey wifey. I didn't want to do anything with the yummies; I certainly did no
t, back in those days, want an affair. There was no room for an affair. I had as much spare time as I had spare energy, and I had enough spare energy to uncork the evening bottle of New Zealand sauvignon, and that was it. If it weren't for the remote control, I wouldn't even put the TV on. So affairs weren't on the menu, but maybe a little innocent lechery, followed up by harmless flirting, might not be out of the question.

  It didn't take long to establish just how low the yummy quotient was. I'd been fooled by the “Freud” bit of the playgroup into thinking that it would be full of middle-class mums, the sort who had peopled the tedious National Childbirth Trust classes Celeste had made us attend. Perhaps prone to tie-dye and sandals and alternative therapies, but basically nice and quite possibly pretty. What fun we'd have discussing interesting Freudian concepts, the universal incest taboo, the death wish, the relationship between pipe smoking and stool retention.

  I should have been alerted to the truth when the lady I first spoke to on the phone asked me hopefully if Harry had any problems.

  “Do you prefer them with problems?”

  “Well, no, not necessarily prefer, but we—”

  “He's fairly quiet. Is that enough of a problem?”

  “I suppose it will do. You've nothing better?”

  “He sometimes throws things.”

  “Ah, good, violent behavior. That's fine.”

  First to be introduced was Stanka, a squat Pole, along with her enormous daughter, Natasha, who looked about seven years old. Then came lank-haired Julie, who seemed to have crocheted her own poncho, which concealed, deep in its folds, a boy called Ricky. Over the next few months, he made three forays from the poncho to snatch food from the table at snack time. Both he and his mother needed not so much a good wash as a thorough pest eradication program. I wasn't too concerned until I saw the telltale red-rawness of scabies in the webbing between Julie's fingers. Next was Brenda, with her cute little girl, Maria. She looked normal enough and smiled pleasantly but then spent five minutes apologizing for being called Brenda and cursing her parents for inflicting such an awful name on her. I tried to assure her that there were several worse names than Brenda, including Galatea, Clytemnestra, and Nigella. Luck was on my side, and there weren't any Galateas, Clytemnestras, or Nigellas among the ones to come.

  Next up, Stacey introduced me to a Bosnian refugee whose name seemed to be Aargh Ack Ack Aarghk. In the nick of time, a mere nanosecond before I proved my cosmopolitan savoir faire by a perfectly accented rendition of her name, Stacey apologized for the frog in her throat, and the Bosnian lady became Vesna. Her child, a bullet-headed boy whose name I didn't catch, was rampaging around like an enraged rhino, butting the furniture and other children. I was inclined toward sympathy—after all, who could know what horrors the family had endured?—but I still tried hard to keep Harry out of goring range for the time it took Stacey to find a game reserve prepared to take him. That just left an impossibly elegant Somali woman and her beautiful, willowy boy and, finally, an eighteen-year-old DJ and her daughter. These last two mothers were undeniably attractive, but the look of disdain the Somali woman (whose name sounded like, but could not have actually been, despite my speculations about Welsh missionaries reaching the hinterland in the 1870s, Myfanwy) threw my way, and the impossible youth of the DJ, Miranda, who was clearly fighting the urge to call me granddad, prevented either from fully entering the yummy zone.

  Miranda was one of those people blessed with a name they themselves can't pronounce, like lispers called Sebastian or stammerers called Titus. Her problem was r's, which became w 's, leaving her Miwander. In my head, this soon transformed itself, as these things will, into Rwanda, which is how I always think of her.

  The odd thing is that I felt instantly comfortable—much more so than I usually felt when thrust among Celeste's successful and glamorous crowd. I suppose it could just be that as a man, as a stay-at-home dad, I was the weirdest of them all. Or perhaps it was the fact that Harry suddenly found himself in heaven. He took to the place like a vandal to a bus shelter. Here were new experiences: whole farmyards to explore, train sets, dolls in ministrollers, a trampoline, curious little mind-expanding puzzles involving mazes and wooden balls, Play-Doh still in separate colors rather than squidged into an amorphous brown, and two sinks full of water toys.

  At that stage, he didn't bother much with other children, but he liked adults around to pass him things. As well as me and Stacey (who roamed around alternately saying softly “That's nice” and loudly “No!”), there was also Stacey's helper, Anita, to keep Harry occupied.

  Now Anita was yummy but not mummy. She was also far too professional to flirt with me. And probably a lesbian.

  No, I promised I wouldn't do that anymore. Say it fifty times: Not fancying me doesn't make a woman a lesbian. It makes her sighted.

  I spotted the mirrored glass of the cubicle where the students lurked. Stacey hadn't mentioned them, no doubt to keep it “natural,” but I made sure I did all my best parenting over in that corner. My God, I was good: we did the puzzles together, read through a Noddy book, assembled some several miles of railway track. I soothed his hurts and cleaned his nose. In short, the very model of a modern carer. And then Stacey made a general announcement about the students’ term starting the next week and we'd all get to meet them then. So the booth was empty. I thought for a moment about comparing my ridiculous performance before the empty room to Wittgenstein's black box theory of language, but then I realized that I didn't know what Wittgenstein's black box theory of language was, and that besides, it would have been insane.

  About halfway through the two-hour stretch, the door was flung open and a huge coat came in, carrying one small child under its arm, like a big log of firewood.

  “Sorry I'm late, Stacey,” said a voice from within the coat. “Complete cunt of a time. Couldn't find a parking space, so I had to drive home again and call a taxi.”

  What a crazily rational, strangely Celeste-like thing to do, I thought.

  The coat came off, and a woman stepped out. I felt an instant prickle of unease. She wasn't a stunner. Her features were maybe 5 percent below what she'd need to be a stunner, and she was dressed carelessly, in a pink cardigan and a tweed skirt and thick tights, so that even I could see that she wasn't interested in style. But she was still mighty fine, and she had a laughing, immoral confidence about her, and the sort of crinkly eyes that could well spell trouble. In general, I could never decide if red hair was a good or a bad thing. You know, up top, good, down below, less so. But it was impossible not to be impressed by the way she threw her locks around like an actress “doing” a free spirit.

  Yummy? Yes, I think you would have to call her yummy.

  She came over and introduced herself.

  “I'm Uma,” she said, with another extravagant hair-flourish. “You must be the Token Man Stacey warned us about.”

  Before I had time to come out with anything witty (or, more likely, a sound like a man who has just put a whole pork pie in his mouth trying to yodel), she'd leaped across the room to save her child, who wore an intimidating and superior look, from the rampaging rhino.

  For the next hour, she danced around the room, returning every few minutes to make some more or less offensive and more or less generally audible remark about the other mothers and children. It was top-class stuff. It turned out that she had a list of irrational prejudices almost as long as mine: she was against sportswear in a non-sporting context (Rwanda the target there); against overlarge children (sorry, Natasha); against small, severe American women in their fifties (a bit obvious, that one); and against people called Brenda (well, … Brenda, I suppose).

  I found that I wanted more. It was home time. Coats and bobble hats were thrust onto unwilling children. There were a couple of major tantrums. Irresistible force met immovable object when rhino-boy ran into Natasha. I quite liked the idea of walking a little way down the road with Uma. I'd finally thought of something interesting to say that had nothing to
do with fish or whales or Wittgenstein or potty training. And I got the impression that in the general jockeying for pole position in the stroller Grand Prix, she might have been maneuvering in my direction.

  But then I found that I'd been cut off by Brenda, who said, “I think we're walking the same way, aren't we?” in a voice that brooked no disagreement. And true, she lived distressingly close, which meant that for the next twenty-five minutes, I was treated to a detailed analysis of exactly what was wrong with Brenda's parents.

  “I wouldn't mind, but they were spaced-out hippies living in a fucking wigwam in a commune in Wales. All the other kids were called Starvoyager or Fern or Moonshadow. And what do I get? Brenda. And, you know, they never bothered to help out. She once said, ‘Shall I come down and give you a hand?’ and I said, ‘No, stay in your fucking wigwam.’ And do you know what? She never offered again, which just sums them up. Brenda. It's just not funny, not funny at all.”

  I listened for the first five minutes and then settled in for a good long think about Uma Thursday. But soon the prickle of fear at my neck and the iron grip of angst around my testicles drove me back to Brenda and the wigwam.

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 8

  Okay, okay, just what the fuck is going on here? Suddenly I can see her. So, she's a stunner? He thought it was over. She e-mailed. He's sunk. Say that again. I had to bite my tongue when he came to bed tonight, after I'd finished reading this. He obviously likes the bitch. But has he done anything? Not based on what he has written. Can I trust that? Well, if he was going to write as much as he did, then why would he stop short of that? No, I don't think he's slept with her. But I think he might. Should I talk to him about it? The same problem. I'd have to admit having read his journal. The only way I'll know the truth is to keep reading. If he sleeps with her, I'll leave him. I might leave him anyway. I don't think I love him anymore.