‘Can I come, Daddy?’ says Molly, whom I am learning to despise.

‘Of course,’ says David.

‘Please, David,’ I say again. ‘Please let us have a nice lunch.’

‘We can have a nice lunch. Just, not this lunch.’

‘Why can’t they have the other lunch?’

‘I want to give them the hot one.’

‘We can make the other stuff hot. The lasagne. We’ll microwave it and take it down this afternoon. Family outing.’

David pauses. We have, I feel, reached the moment in the movie when the armed but scared criminal pointing the gun at the unarmed policewoman begins to doubt the wisdom of what he is doing; the scene always ends with him throwing the gun on the ground and bursting into tears. In our version, David will take the lasagne out of the freezer tray and burst into tears. Who says that you can’t make authentic British thrillers? What could be more thrilling than that?

David thinks. ‘It’s more convenient for them, lasagne, isn’t it?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘ ’Cos you don’t have to carve it.’

‘No. You could just take the ladle.’

‘Yeah. Or even the, you know, the metal spatula.’

‘If you want.’

He stares at the joint and the beaten-up roast potatoes for a moment longer.

‘OK, then.’

My mum and dad and I breathe the sigh of the unarmed policewoman, and we sit down to eat in silence.

6

None of us feels like eating that night—not that there is much to eat anyway. I had planned to microwave the frozen lasagne, but there is none left. It has already been driven to Finsbury Park, where it was served up in paper plates to the winos who hang out on benches just inside the gates on Seven Sisters Road. (David dished it out on his own while the rest of us sat in the car. Molly wanted to go with him, but I wouldn’t let her—not, if I am honest, because I thought she was in any danger, but because she is nauseating enough at the moment as it is. I was worried that if I had to watch her feeding the poor like an eight-year-old Dickensian charity lady I would begin to hate her too much to provide proper maternal care.)

When we get back home, I excuse myself and go and lie down in the bedroom with the Sunday papers, but I can’t read them. The stories no longer refer to me me me, but to David, and the sorts of things he would Do Something About. After a little while I find that I am beginning to see news stories not in terms of information, but in terms of potential trouble for my family, and for the contents of my bank account and freezer. One article, about a group of Afghan refugees holed up in a church in Bethnal Green, I actually tear out and throw away, because it contains enough misery and hardship to starve us all.

I look at the gaping hole in the newspaper and suddenly feel very tired. We cannot live like this. Not true, of course, because we can, comfortably—less comfortably than before, maybe, but comfortably nonetheless—we will not starve, no matter how much lasagne is given away. OK, then. So. We can, but I don’t want to. This is not the life I chose for myself. Except that is not true, either, because I did choose, I suppose, when I said that I would marry David for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live: this, obviously, is now more relevant than it has ever been, because he may well be sick, and poverty may well be approaching fast.

What did I think I was choosing, when I married David? What do any of us think we are choosing? If I try to recapture now the semi-formed fantasies I had then, I’d say they erred on the side of prosperity and health. I suppose I thought that we would be poor but happy to begin with—meaning that we would be living in a small cute flat, and spending a lot of time watching TV or drinking halves of beer in pubs, and making do with our parents’ hand-me-down furniture. In other words, the difficulties I was prepared to tolerate in the early years of my marriage were essentially romantic in their nature, inspired by the clichés of young married life as depicted in TV comedies—or possibly, given that most TV comedies are more sophisticated and complex than my fantasies, by building society advertisements. Then later on, I thought, one set of difficulties (the difficulties posed by watching TV in a small flat, and by eating baked beans on toast) would be replaced by another: the difficulties that arose when you had two lovely, bright and healthy children. There would be muddy football boots and teenage daughters hogging the phone and husbands who had to be torn from the TV to do the washing-up… Golly gosh, there would be no end to those sorts of problems, and I was under no illusions: muddy football boots would be awfully trying! I was prepared, though. I wasn’t green. I wasn’t born yesterday. There was no way I was going to buy white rugs…

What you don’t ever catch a glimpse of on your wedding day—because how could you?—is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever exchanging a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. Nor is it possible to foresee the desperation and depression, the sense that your life is over, the occasional urge to hit your whining children, even though hitting them is something you knew for a fact you would never ever do. And of course you don’t think about having affairs, and when you get to that stage in life when you do (and everyone gets there sooner or later), you don’t think of the sick feeling you get in your stomach when you’re conducting them, their inherent unhappiness. And nor do you think about your husband waking up in the morning and being someone you don’t recognize. If anyone thought about any of these things, then no one would ever get married, of course they wouldn’t; in fact, the impulse to marry would come from the same place as the impulse to drink a bottle of bleach, and those are the kinds of impulses we try to ignore, rather than celebrate. So we can’t afford to think about these things because getting married—or finding a partner whom we will want to spend our lives with and have children by—is on our agenda. It’s something we know we will do one day, and if you take that away from us then we are left with promotions at work and the possibility of a winning lottery ticket, and it’s not enough, so we kid ourselves that it is possible to enter these partnerships and be faced only with the problems of mud removal, and then we become unhappy and take Prozac and then we get divorced and die alone.

Perhaps I am getting things out of proportion. Maybe all this contemplation of bleach-drinking and Prozac-munching and solitary deaths is an inappropriate response to the crime of giving lasagne away to starving drunks. On our wedding day, the vicar asked us, in that bit where he talks to the bride and groom privately, to respect one another’s thoughts, ideas and suggestions. At the time, this seemed an unexceptionable request, easily granted: David for example suggests going to a restaurant, and I say, ‘OK then.’ Or he has an idea for my birthday present. That sort of thing. Now I realize that there are all sorts of suggestions a husband might make to a wife, and not all of them are worthy of respect. He might suggest that we eat something awful, like sheep’s brains, or form a neo-Nazi party. The same must apply to thoughts and ideas, surely? I am in the middle of pointing all this out to the vicar twenty years after the event when the doorbell rings. I ignore it, but a couple of minutes later David shouts up the stairs to tell me I have a visitor.

It’s Stephen. My legs almost buckle when I see him, my husband standing next to him, my children running past him, like a scene from a film that mesmerizes simply because it is so far outside the scope of one’s own imagination.

I start to introduce my lover to my husband, but David stops me.