My sexual conduct… For a moment I forget that for the last twenty years I have had a monogamous relationship with my husband, punctuated only recently by a brief and rather hapless affair (and what happened to him, by the way? A couple of unreturned phone calls seem to have dampened his ardour considerably). The phrase enables me to see myself as someone who may have to check herself into one of those sex addiction clinics that Hollywood stars have to go to, someone who, despite her best intentions, cannot keep her pants on. It’s quite a thrilling picture, but its main purpose, I can see, is to convince me that David is being preposterous; the truth is that I am a married woman who was sleeping with someone else just a couple of weeks ago. David’s language might be pompous, but there is, I suppose, a case to answer.
‘You’ve never wanted to talk about that.’
‘There isn’t much to talk about, is there?’
I think about whether this is true and decide that it is. I could waffle on about context, but he knows about that already; the rest of it makes for a short and banal little story without much resonance.
‘So what else do I do wrong?’
‘It’s not what you do wrong. It’s what we all do wrong.’
‘Which is?’
‘We don’t care enough. We look after ourselves and ignore the weak and the poor. We despise our politicians for doing nothing, and think that this is somehow enough to show we care, and meanwhile we live in centrally heated houses that are too big for us…’
‘Hey, hold on…’ Our dream—before DJ GoodNews came into our lives, was to move out of our poky terraced house and into something that gave us room to turn around in without knocking a child over in the process. Now, suddenly, we are rattling around in Holloway’s equivalent of Graceland. But I am allowed to say none of this, because David has the bit between his teeth.
‘We have a spare bedroom, and a study, and meanwhile people are sleeping outside on pavements. We scrape perfectly edible food into our compost maker, and meanwhile people at the end of our road are begging for the price of a cup of tea and a bag of chips. We have two televisions, we did have three computers until I gave one away—and even that was a crime, apparently, reducing the number of computers available to a family of four by one third. We think nothing of spending ten pounds each on a takeaway curry…’
I plead guilty to this. I thought David was going to say ‘…forty pounds a head on a meal in a smart restaurant’, which we have done, on occasions—occasions which have, of course, prompted all sorts of doubts and qualms. But ten pounds on a takeaway? Yes, guilty, I admit it: I have frequently thought nothing of spending ten pounds on a takeaway, and it has never occurred to me that my thoughtlessness was negligent or culpable in any way. One has to respect David for this thoroughness, at least.
‘We spend thirteen pounds on compact discs which we already own in a different format…’
‘That’s you, not me.’
‘…We buy films for our children that they’ve already seen at the cinema and never watch again…’ There ensues a long list of similar crimes, all of which sound petty and, in any other household, completely legal, but which suddenly seem, with David’s spin on them, selfish and despicable. I drift off for a while.
‘I’m a liberal’s worst nightmare,’ David says at the end of his litany, with a smile that could be described, were one feeling uncharitable or paranoid, as malicious.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I think everything you think. But I’m going to walk it like I talk it.’
On Sunday my mother and father visit for lunch. They don’t come very often—usually we all have to go there—and when they do come I have somehow allowed myself to turn the day into An Occasion, thus inflicting on my children the misery that was inflicted on me during equivalent Occasions in my childhood: combed hair, the best clothes they possess, assistance in tidying up, attendance at table compulsory for the whole of the meal, even though my mother talks so much that the last mouthful of Viennese Whirl does not disappear down her throat for what seems like hours after the rest of us have finished. And, of course, a roast dinner, which my brother and I detested (very possibly because it was invariably detestable: gristly, dry lamb, overcooked cabbage, lumpy Bisto, greasy and disintegrating roast potatoes, the usual 1960s wartime fare), but which Tom and Molly love. Unlike either of my parents, David and I can cook; unlike either of my parents, we very rarely bother to waste this skill on our children.
Finally the clothes argument is over, the tidying has been done, my parents have arrived, and we are drinking our dry sherry and eating our mixed nuts in the living room. David has just gone into the kitchen to carve the beef and make the gravy. Moments later—much too soon to have achieved the tasks he disappeared to do—he comes back.
‘Roast beef and roast potatoes? Or frozen lasagne?’
‘Roast beef and roast potatoes,’ the kids yell happily, and my mum and dad chuckle.
‘I think so, too,’ says David, and disappears again.
‘He’s a tease, your dad, isn’t he?’ says my mum to Tom and Molly—an appropriate response to what she has just seen and heard in just about any domestic situation but ours. David isn’t a tease. He wasn’t a tease before (he hated my parents’ visits, and would never have been able to muster the kind of cheery goodwill necessary for joshing everyone along), and he certainly isn’t a tease since his sense of humour disappeared into DJ GoodNews’s fingertips along with his back pain. I excuse myself and go into the kitchen, where David is transferring everything we have spent the last couple of hours cooking into the largest Le Creuset casserole dish we own.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask calmly.
‘I can’t do this,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘I can’t sit here and eat this while there are people out there with nothing. Have we got any paper plates?’
‘No, David.’
‘We have. We had loads left over from the Christmas party.’
‘I’m not talking about the plates. You can’t do this.’
‘I have to.’
‘I… I understand if you can’t eat it.’ (I don’t understand at all, of course, but I’m trying to talk him off the ledge.) ‘You could refuse, and… and… tell us all why.’ There is no point in worrying just yet about the excruciating lunch ahead of us, the embarrassment and bewilderment as my poor mother and father (Tories both, but neither of them actively evil, in the accepted non-David use of the word) receive a lecture about their wicked, wicked ways. In fact I vow to myself that if we get as far as the lunch, if this food is actually served on to actual plates and people (by which I mean people I know, God forgive me) actually sit down to eat it, I will not worry at all; I will listen to David’s views with sympathy and interest. I watch while David crams the Delia-style roast potatoes into the dish. The painstakingly achieved crunchy golden shells start to crumble as he attempts to wedge them down the side of the joint.
‘I have to give this away,’ says David. ‘I went to the freezer to get the stock out and I saw all that stuff in there and… I just realized that I can’t sustain my position any more. The homeless…’
‘FUCK YOUR POSITION! FUCK THE HOMELESS!’ Fuck the homeless? Is this what has become of me? Has a Guardian-reading Labour voter ever shouted those words and meant them in the whole history of the liberal metropolitan universe?
‘Katie! What’s going on?’ My parents and my children have gathered in the doorway to watch; my father, still every inch of him a headmaster despite the decade of retirement, is red-faced with anger.
‘David’s gone mad. He wants to give our lunch away.’
‘To whom?’
‘Tramps. Alkies. Drug addicts. People who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives.’ This is a desperate and blatant appeal to win my father over to my side, and I’m not proud of it, but I want my roast lunch. I WANT MY ROAST LUNCH.