‘You don’t mean that.’

I say this even though I know that he almost certainly does. He’s that sort of man. Maybe when it comes down to it, this is the only way in which men in our particular postal district are unreconstructed. They know about changing nappies and talking about feelings and women working and all the basics, but he would still rather close things off right now than admit any possibility of doubt or confusion or hurt, however much it costs him, however much he is eaten up by what I have done. And he told me once, and I’m sure it will come up…

‘Why don’t you think I mean it? Don’t you remember? We talked about it?’

‘I remember.’

‘So.’

We were in bed, and we’d just made love—we had Tom but not Molly, and I wasn’t pregnant, so this must have been some time in 1992—and I asked David if the prospect of having sex with me and no one else but me for the rest of his life depressed him. And he was uncharacteristically reflective about it: he said that it did get him down sometimes, but the alternatives were too horrible to contemplate, and anyway he knew that he would never be able to tolerate anything other than monogamy in me, so he could hardly expect indulgence for himself. So of course we ended up playing the game that all lovers play at some time or another, and I asked him whether there were any circumstances in which he would forgive me an infidelity—a drunken one-night stand, say, followed the morning after by immediate and piercing remorse. He pointed out that I never got drunk, and I’d never had a one-night stand in my life, so it was hard to imagine this particular circumstance; he said that if I were unfaithful, it would be for other reasons, and those other reasons he felt would spell trouble—trouble he wouldn’t want to think about. I very rarely credit David with any perspicacity, but I take my hat off to him now: I wasn’t drunk. It wasn’t a one-night stand. I have been sleeping with Stephen for all sorts of other reasons, every one of which spells trouble.

‘Have you thought about where you’re going to stay?’ he asks—still apparently untroubled by any of this.

‘No, of course not. Are you telling me I’m the one that has to go?’

David just looks at me, and it’s a look that is so full of contempt I want to run away from everything—my husband, my home, my children—and never come back.

I’m a good person. In most ways. But I’m beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn’t count for anything very much, if you’re a bad person in one way. Because most people are good people, aren’t they? Most people want to help others, and if their work doesn’t allow them to help others then they do it however they can—by manning the phones at the Samaritans once a month, or going on sponsored walks, or filling in standing orders. It’s no good me telling you that I’m a doctor, because I’m only a doctor during weekdays. I’ve been sleeping with someone other than my husband outside working hours—I’m not so bad that I’d do it inside working hours—and at the moment, being a doctor can’t make up for that, however many rectal boils I look at.

4

David tells me he’s going away for a couple of nights. He doesn’t say where, and he won’t leave a number—he takes my mobile with him in case of family emergencies—but I presume he’s gone to stay with his friend Mike (divorcee, local, good job, nice flat, spare bedroom). Before he leaves, he tells me that I’ve got forty-eight hours to talk to the kids; the unspoken assumption is that when I have told them how naughty I’ve been, I will pack my bags and go. That first night I don’t sleep at all, and I feel that I’ll never be able to rest until I’ve answered every single one of the questions that thrash around in my head like fish in a trawler net. Most of these questions (will David let me come round to watch the dinosaur programme on Monday nights?) choke and die; a couple of them, the bigger, more tenacious ones, just refuse to let go. Here’s one: what rights do I have? You see, I don’t want a divorce. OK, I know I did, before, when I didn’t know what it meant and I didn’t know what I felt and I didn’t know how awful the prospect would seem—but now I don’t, and I’m (almost) positive I’d do (almost) anything to get my marriage back on track. And if that is the case, why should I be the one who tells the kids? If he won’t contemplate any pacific alternative, why should I do his dirty work? What if I just don’t go? What would he do then? I go round and round on this other loop, too: we’re never going to get out of this mess, things have gone too far, it’s always going to be awful whenever it happens, best get out now… And all the time I know, somewhere in me, that I will never be able to sit down and tell my children that I’m leaving them.

‘Where’s Dad?’ Molly asks next morning. It’s always Molly who asks that question, especially since David’s Wisdom of Solomon judgement the other day; Tom no longer seems interested.

‘He’s away on business,’ I say, as if David were another person altogether. It’s an answer born out of a lack of sleep, because it could never apply to David’s life and work. For the last few years the children have listened to him grumbling about having to go down to the newsagent’s to use the photocopier; how, then, has he suddenly become the kind of man who stays in hotels in the major capitals of Europe eating power breakfasts?

‘He hasn’t got any business,’ says Tom matter-of-factly.

‘Yes he has,’ says Molly, sweetly and loyally.

‘What is it then?’ Tom may prefer his mother to his father at the moment, but his inability to resist cruelty when the opportunity presents itself does not, I would argue, come from me.

‘Why are you always horrible to Daddy?’

‘Why is it horrible asking what business he does?’

‘Because you know he doesn’t do any and you’re rubbing it in.’

Tom looks at me and shakes his head.

‘You’re rubbish at arguing, Molly.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you just said he doesn’t do any. That’s what I said, and you told me I was being horrible.’

Molly stops, thinks for a moment, tells Tom that she hates him and wanders off to get ready for school. Poor David! Even his staunchest defender cannot actually convince herself that he does anything resembling a proper Daddy job. If I were any kind of right-thinking parent I’d get involved, explain that fathers do all sorts of different things, but I hate David so much at the moment that I can’t be bothered.

‘So where is he really?’ Tom asks me.

‘He’s gone to stay with a friend.’

‘Because you’re getting divorced?’

‘We’re not getting divorced.’

‘So why has he gone to stay with a friend?’

‘You’ve been to stay with friends. Doesn’t mean you’re getting divorced.’

‘I’m not married. And when I go to stay with a friend I tell you I’m going and I say goodbye.’

‘Is that what’s bothering you? He didn’t tell you he was going?’

‘I don’t care whether he says goodbye or not. But I know something’s wrong.’

‘Daddy and I had an argument.’

‘See. You’re getting a divorce.’

It would be so easy to say something now. Not easy as in comfortable, but easy as in logical, natural, appropriate, right, no jerky changing of gear: Tom knows that something is up, I may well have to say something at sometime anyway, David may well tell them himself as soon as he comes home…

‘Tom! How many more times! And when are you going to get ready for school?’

He gives me a long stare and then turns violently on his heels to convey anger without disobedience. I want to go to the surgery and work and work. I want the day to be as unpleasant and as demanding as any working day has ever been, just so that at the end of it I will have regained something of myself. I want to look at blocked rectums and oozing warts and all sorts of things that would make the rest of the world sick to its collective stomach, and hope that by so doing I will feel like a good person again. A bad mother, maybe, and a terrible wife, undoubtedly, but a good person.