So. I doze on the sofa, and then Tom comes down in his pyjamas, puts the TV on, gets a bowl of cereal together, sits down on an armchair and watches cartoons. He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t say anything.
‘Good morning,’ I say cheerily.
‘Hi.’
‘How are you?’
‘All right.’
‘How was school yesterday?’
But he’s gone now; the curtains have been drawn over the two-minute window of conversational opportunity that my son offers in the morning. I get up off the sofa and put the kettle on. Molly’s next down, already dressed in her school clothes. She stares at me.
‘You said you were going away.’
‘I came back. Missed you too much.’
‘We didn’t miss you. Did we, Tom?’
No answer from Tom. These, apparently, are my choices: naked aggression from my daughter, silent indifference from my son. Except, of course, this is pure self-pity, and they are neither aggressive nor indifferent, simply children, and they haven’t suddenly developed an adult’s intuition overnight, even over this particular night.
Last, but not least, comes David, in his customary T-shirt and boxer shorts. He goes to put the kettle on, looks momentarily confused when he realizes that it is on already and only then casts a bleary eye over the household to see if he can find any explanation for this unexpected kettle activity. He finds it sprawled on the sofa.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I just came to check up on your parenting skills when I’m not around. I’m impressed. You’re last up, the kids get their own breakfast, the telly’s on…’
I’m being unfair, of course, because this is how life works whether I’m here or not, but there’s no point in waiting for his assault: I’m a firm believer in pre-emptive retaliation.
‘So,’ he says. ‘This two-day course finished a day early. What, you all talked crap at twice the normal speed?’
‘I wasn’t in the mood.’
‘No, I can imagine. What sort of mood are you in?’
‘Shall we talk later? When the kids have gone to school?’
‘Oh, yeah, right. Later.’ This last word is spat out, with profound but actually mystifying bitterness—as if I were famous for doing things ‘later’, as if every single problem we have is caused by my obsession with putting things off. I laugh at him, which does little to ease tensions.
‘What?’
‘What’s wrong with suggesting that we talk about things later?’
‘Pathetic,’ he says, but offers no clue as to why. Of course it’s tempting to do things his way and talk about my desire for a divorce in front of our two children, but one of us has to think like an adult, if only temporarily, so I shake my head and pick up my bag. I want to go upstairs and sleep.
‘Have a good day, kids.’
David stares at me. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m whacked.’
‘I thought that one of the problems with our division of labour is that you couldn’t ever drop the kids off at school. I thought you were being denied a basic maternal right.’
I have to be at the surgery before the kids leave in the mornings, so I am spared the school run. And even though I am grateful for this, my gratitude has not prevented me from bemoaning my lot whenever we have arguments about who doesn’t do what. And David, needless to say, knows that I have no genuine desire to take the kids to school, which is why he is taking such delight in reminding me of my previous complaints now. David, like me, is highly skilled in the art of marital warfare, and for a moment I can step outside myself and admire his vicious quick-wittedness. Well played, David.
‘I’ve been up half the night.’
‘Never mind. They’d love it.’
Bastard.
I’ve thought about divorce before, of course. Who hasn’t? I had fantasies about being a divorcee, even before I was married. In my fantasy I was a good, great, single professional mother, who had fantastic relations with her ex—joint attendance at parents’ evenings, wistful evenings going through old photograph albums, that sort of thing—and a series of flings with bohemian younger or older men (see Kris Kristofferson, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, my favourite film when I was seventeen). I can recall having this fantasy the night before I married David, which I suppose should have told me something but didn’t. I think I was troubled by the lack of quirks and kinks in my autobiography: I grew up in leafy suburbia (Richmond), my parents were and still are happily married, I was a prefect at school, I passed my exams, I went to college, I got a good job, I met a nice man, I got engaged to him. The only room I could see for the kind of sophisticated metropolitan variation I craved was post-marriage, so that was where I concentrated my mental energy.
I even had a fantasy about the moment of separation. David and I are looking through travel brochures; he wants to go to New York, I want to go on safari in Africa, and—this being the umpteenth hilarious you-say-tomayto-I-say-tomato conversation in a row—we look at each other and laugh affectionately, and hug, and agree to part. He goes upstairs, packs his bags and moves out, maybe to a flat next door. Later that same day, we have supper together with our new partners, whom we have somehow managed to meet during the afternoon, and everyone gets along famously and teases each other affectionately.
But I can see now just how fantastical this fantasy is; I am already beginning to suspect that the wistful evenings with the photograph albums might not work out. It is far more likely, in fact, that the photographs will be snipped down the middle—indeed, knowing David, they already have been, last night, just after our phone call. It’s kind of obvious, when you think about it: if you hate each other so much that you can’t bear to live in the same house, then it’s unlikely you’ll want to go on camping holidays together afterwards. The trouble with my fantasy was that it skipped straight from the happy wedding to the happy separation; but of course in between weddings and separations, unhappy things happen.
I get in the car, drop the kids off, go home. David’s already in his office with the door closed. Today isn’t a column day, so he’s probably either writing a company brochure, for which he gets paid heaps, or writing his novel, for which he gets paid nothing. He spends more time on the novel than he does on the brochures, which is only a source of tension when things are bad between us; when we’re getting on I want to support him, look after him, help him realize his full potential. When we’re not I want to tear his stupid novel into pieces and force him to get a proper job. I read a bit of the book a while ago and hated it. It’s called The Green Keepers, and it’s a satire about Britain’s post-Diana touchy-feely culture. The last part I read was all about how the staff of Green Keepers, this company that sells banana elbow cream and Brie foot lotion and lots of other amusingly useless cosmetics, all require bereavement counselling when the donkey they have adopted dies. OK, so I am not in any way qualified to be a literary critic, not least because I don’t read books any more. I used to, back in the days when I was a different, happier, more engaged human being, but now I fall asleep every night holding a copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the opening chapter of which I still haven’t finished, after six months of trying. (This is not the author’s fault, incidentally, and I am sure the book is every bit as good as my friend Becca told me it is when she lent it to me. It’s the fault of my eyelids.) Even so, even though I no longer have any idea of what constitutes passable literature, I know that The Green Keepers is terrible: facetious, unkind, full of itself. Rather like David, or the David that has emerged over the last few years.
The day after I’d read this scene, I saw a woman whose baby was stillborn; she’d had to go through labour knowing that she would produce a dead child. Of course I recommended bereavement counselling, and of course I thought of David and his sneering book, and of course I took a bitter pleasure in telling him when I got home that the reason we could rely on our mortgage being paid every month was because I earned money by recommending the very thing that he finds contemptible. That was another good evening.