Nick Hornby

How to Be Good

Acknowledgements

Thanks to: Tony Lacey, Helen Fraser, Juliet Annan, Joanna Prior, Anya Waddington, Jeremy Ettinghausen, Martin Bryant, Wendy Carlton, Susan Petersen Kennedy, Amanda Posey, Ruth Hallgarten, Caroline Dawnay, Annabel Hardman, Mary Cranitch, Anna Wright and Gaby Chiappe.

1

I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don’t want to be married to him any more. David isn’t even in the car park with me. He’s at home, looking after the kids, and I have only called him to remind him that he should write a note for Molly’s class teacher. The other bit just sort of… slips out. This is a mistake, obviously. Even though I am, apparently, and to my immense surprise, the kind of person who tells her husband that she doesn’t want to be married to him any more, I really didn’t think that I was the kind of person to say so in a car park, on a mobile phone. That particular self-assessment will now have to be revised, clearly. I can describe myself as the kind of person who doesn’t forget names, for example, because I have remembered names thousands of times and forgotten them only once or twice. But for the majority of people, marriage-ending conversations happen only once, if at all. If you choose to conduct yours on a mobile phone, in a Leeds car park, then you cannot really claim that it is unrepresentative, in the same way that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t really claim that shooting presidents wasn’t like him at all. Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.

Later, in the hotel room, when I can’t sleep—and that is some sort of consolation, because even though I have turned into the woman who ends marriages in a car park, at least I have the decency to toss and turn afterwards—I retrace the conversation in my head, in as much detail as I can manage, trying to work out how we’d got from there (Molly’s dental appointment) to here (imminent divorce) in three minutes. Ten, anyway. Which turns into an endless, three-in-the-morning brood about how we’d got from there (meeting at a college dance in 1976) to here (imminent divorce) in twenty-four years.

To tell you the truth, the second part of this self-reflection only takes so long because twenty-four years is a long time, and there are loads of bits that come unbidden into your head, little narrative details, that don’t really have much to do with the story. If my thoughts about our marriage had been turned into a film, the critics would say that it was all padding, no plot, and that it could be summarized thus: two people meet, fall in love, have kids, start arguing, get fat and grumpy (him) and bored, desperate and grumpy (her) and split up. I wouldn’t argue with the synopsis. We’re nothing special.

The phone call, though… I keep missing the link, the point where it turned from a relatively harmonious and genuinely banal chat about minor domestic arrangements into this cataclysmic, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it moment. I can remember the beginning of it, almost word-for-word:

Me: ‘Hiya.’

Him: ‘Hello. How’s it going?’

Me: ‘Yeah, fine. Kids all right?’

Him: ‘Yeah. Molly’s here watching TV, Tom’s round at Jamie’s.’

Me: ‘I just phoned to say that you’ve got to write a note for Molly to take in to school tomorrow. About the dentist’s.’

See? See? It can’t be done, you’d think, not from here. But you’d be wrong, because we did it. I’m almost sure that the first leap was made here, at this point; the way I remember it now, there was a pause, an ominous silence, at the other end of the line. And then I said something like ‘What?’ and he said ‘Nothing’. And I said ‘What?’ again and he said ‘Nothing’ again, except he clearly wasn’t baffled or amused by my question, just tetchy, which means, does it not, that you have to plough on. So I ploughed on.

‘Come on.’

‘No.’

‘Come on.’

‘No. What you said.’

‘What did I say?’

‘About just phoning to remind me about Molly’s note.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘It’d be nice if you just phoned for some other reason. You know, to say hello. To see how your husband and children are.’

‘Oh, David.’

‘What, “Oh David”?’

‘That was the first thing I asked. “How are the kids?” ’

‘Yeah. OK. “How are the kids?” Not, you know, “How are you?” ’

You don’t get conversations like this when things are going well. It is not difficult to imagine that in other, better relationships, a phone call that began in this way would not and could not lead to talk of divorce. In better relationships you could sail right through the dentist part and move on to other topics—your day’s work, or plans for the evening, or even, in a spectacularly functional marriage, something that has taken place in the world outside your home, a coughing fit on the Today programme, say—just as ordinary, just as forgettable, but topics that form the substance and perhaps even the sustenance of an ordinary, forgettable, loving relationship. David and I, however… this is not our situation, not any more. Phone calls like ours only happen when you’ve spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every word you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play. In fact, when I was lying awake in the hotel room trying to piece it all together, I was even struck by how clever we had been to invent our code: it takes years of miserable ingenuity to get to this place.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Do you care how I am?’

‘To be honest, David, I don’t need to ask how you are. I can hear how you are. Healthy enough to look after two children while simultaneously sniping at me. And very, very aggrieved, for reasons that remain obscure to me at this point. Although I’m sure you’ll enlighten me.’

‘What makes you think I’m aggrieved?’

‘Ha! You’re the definition of aggrieved. Permanently.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘David, you make your living from being aggrieved.’

This is true, partly. David’s only steady income derives from a newspaper column he contributes to our local paper. The column is illustrated by a photograph of him snarling at the camera, and is subtitled ‘The Angriest Man in Holloway’. The last one I could bear to read was a diatribe against old people who travelled on buses: Why did they never have their money ready? Why wouldn’t they use the seats set aside for them at the front of the bus? Why did they insist on standing up ten minutes before their stop, thus obliging them to fall over frequently in an alarming and undignified fashion? You get the picture, anyway.

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, possibly because you never bother to fucking read me…’

‘Where’s Molly?’

‘Watching TV in the other room. Fuck fuck fuck. Shit.’

‘Very mature.’

‘…Possibly because you never bother to fucking read me, my column is ironic.’

I laughed ironically.

‘Well, please excuse the inhabitants of 32 Webster Road if the irony is lost on us. We wake up with the angriest man in Holloway every day of our lives.’

‘What’s the point of all this?’

Maybe in the film of our marriage, written by a scriptwriter on the lookout for brief and elegant ways of turning dull, superficial arguments into something more meaningful, this would have been the moment: you know, ‘That’s a good question… Where are we going?… What are we doing?… Something something something… It’s over.’ OK, it needs a little work, but it would do the trick. As David and I are not Tom and Nicole, however, we are blind to these neat little metaphorical moments.

‘I don’t know what the point of all this is. You got cross about me not asking how you were.’