Catherine may have been looking at me, but she was keeping one eye on the television in case the commercial she’d been cast in suddenly came on. That was the other consequence of the day Henry was born. The fact that I had been completely convinced by Catherine’s bitter self-defence and defiant tears in the maternity ward reminded me of what a brilliant actor she had always been. With some encouragement from me, she contacted her old agent and started going to auditions again, and soon she got a small part in an appalling sitcom that stretched her acting abilities to the limit when the writer asked her whether she thought the script was funny. The amount she was paid was insulting; it was far more than I ever got.
When she was away working I’d take my turn at looking after the kids. She’d be out from early in the morning till late at night, and sometimes the filming even involved overnights. And so I’d find myself alone with the children for a couple of days at a stretch, being woken up throughout the night and still having to look after them all day. I’d have to put on all their clothes, feed them breakfast, then try to prevent Millie and Alfie from throwing wet Multi-Cheerios at each other while I changed Henry’s nappy, get myself dressed while brushing their teeth, then put on their coats and gloves, rush Millie off to nursery for nine o’clock while pushing Alfie and Henry along in the double buggy and always trying to maintain a loving, harmonious atmosphere in the home throughout. Well, nine out of ten’s not bad.
Everyone expected me to say that looking after my children all day was the most wonderfully fulfilling thing I’d ever done. Well, it was certainly the hardest thing I’d ever done, but nothing changed my opinion that small children are boring. But now I understood that having kids and raising a family was hard, because anything really worth achieving is hard. It’s the difference between one of my jingles and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Catherine’s advert never came on, so she consoled herself by disappearing off to use the hotel’s sauna and swimming pool while I played with the kids in the hotel grounds. Then she suggested I had some time on my own using the hotel’s sports facilities or something, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but I soon discovered you can only play croquet on your own for so long. Now at last we seemed to have established some equilibrium in our marriage, an understanding that we were in this together, for the good of each other as well as for the good of our children. We promised that we would always be straight with one another, that we would always work as a team, and privately I felt rather pleased with myself that after all we’d been through there was now so much honesty and confidence between us.
I paid our hotel bill and the manager said thank you and then, as an apparent afterthought, he shouted after us, ‘See you again soon, Mrs Adams.’ As we walked down the steps I asked her why he’d said that. And then Catherine giggled slightly and told me. None of her acting jobs had involved overnights at all. She’d spent all those nights on her own in luxury hotels like this one.
The Best a Man Can Get Page 26