On the way to work I have a sudden panic that Stephen will call the mobile, so I call him as soon as I get in and he wants to know what’s happening and I don’t want to talk about it and he asks to see me and I end up arranging to meet him and booking a babysitter.
‘Where are you going?’ Tom asks when I’m getting ready to go out.
‘To meet a friend for a drink.’
‘What friend?’
‘No one you know.’
‘Your boyfriend?’
Molly thinks this is one of the funniest lines she has ever heard, but Tom isn’t joking. He wants me to answer the question.
‘What are you talking about, Tom?’
Tom is beginning to give me the creeps. I feel that any moment now he will be able to tell me Stephen’s name and describe what he looks like.
‘What’s this friend’s name, then?’
‘Stephen.’
‘What’s his wife’s name?’
‘He hasn’t got a…’ Tricked by a ten-year-old. ‘He hasn’t got a wife. His girlfriend’s name is Victoria.’ His girlfriend’s name is Victoria because there is a photograph of Victoria Adams and David Beckham on the front of a magazine lying on the kitchen table; if Tom had asked me this morning, when I wasn’t feeling very sharp, I would have told him that Stephen’s girlfriend’s name was Posh.
‘Is she going?’
‘I hope so. She’s nice.’
‘Do you think he’ll marry her?’
‘I’ve no idea, Tom. I’ll ask him tonight, if you want.’
‘Yes please.’
‘Fine.’
There is almost no point in talking about the rest of the evening, such is its dismal predictability. Stephen flatters me, I feel desired and stimulated, I see, as if for the first time, how unhappy my relationship with David makes me, and I go home wanting out. Oh and when I get home David is there waiting, and everything changes again.
I’m frightened when I see him sitting there, and initially the fear consoles me, because it surely means that my marriage is brutal, and that therefore the Archbishop of Canterbury will approve my divorce. But on further reflection I can see that brutality is a less likely explanation for my fear than other factors: the existence of Stephen, say, or my failure to talk to the kids about what has been going on, and I can feel the Archbishop’s approval vanish as quickly as it appeared.
‘Did you have a nice evening?’ David asks me. He says it quietly, and I take the quiet as menace.
‘Yes. Thank you. I went… I was out…’ For some reason I’m trying to remember the name of Stephen’s girlfriend until I remember she was a whole other lie told to someone else for different reasons.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘Listen. I haven’t loved you enough.’
I gape at him.
‘I haven’t loved you enough, and I’m really sorry. I do love you, and I haven’t communicated that properly or positively.’
‘No. Well. Thank you.’
‘And I’m sorry that I said I wanted a divorce. I don’t know what I was thinking of.’
‘Right.’
‘And will you come to the theatre with me tomorrow night? I’ve booked tickets for the Tom Stoppard. I know you wanted to go.’
The theatre has provided David with more rant material than probably anything else in his ranting career, with the possible exception of the Germans. He hates the theatre. He hates the playwrights, he hates the plays, he hates the actors, he hates the critics, he hates the audience, he hates the programmes, he hates the little tubs of ice-cream they sell in the intervals. He once tried to write a column explaining why he hated safety curtains, but he couldn’t quite find the requisite 800 words.
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘I’d like us to go to bed and sleep in separate rooms, and wake up in the morning and try to start again from scratch. Rebuild our lives.’
‘Right-o.’ He probably thinks I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. A daft, cheerful phrase like ‘Right-o’ seems, at that precise moment, the only appropriate response to David’s blithe, bland suggestion, ignoring as it does all the complication and bitterness of the last few years of our lives together.
‘Good. I’m going to bed, then. Good night.’ He comes over and kisses me on the cheek, hugs me, and starts to walk upstairs.
‘Which bedroom are you sleeping in?’ I ask him.
‘Oh. Sorry. I don’t mind. Which would you prefer?’
‘Shall I sleep in the spare room?’ I don’t mind either, and anyway, it seems churlish to ask this polite, accommodating man, whoever he is, to move out of his own bed.
‘Is that what you want?’ But he says this solicitously—he’s double-checking, rather than drawing attention to his hurt at my desertion of him.
I shrug. ‘Yeah.’
‘OK. If you’re sure. Sleep well.’
When I wake up I’m almost sure that I will be greeted with a snarl and an insult, possibly followed by a request to vacate the house by the evening, but he makes me tea and toast, pours the kids their cereal, tells me to have a nice day. After work I go straight home, we eat an early supper, and go out to the theatre. He asks about the surgery, even laughs at a story I tell him about a guy with a chest infection who had no idea that smoking really was bad for one’s health. (I can’t make David laugh. Nobody can make David laugh, apart from the people he is prepared to concede are funnier than him, namely, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Tony Hancock and Peter Cook, 1960s model. Making people laugh is his job.) We go by Tube to the theatre, and he continues in this vein: he’s friendly, curious, he listens, he asks questions, he buys me one of the much-despised tubs of ice-cream. (True, he buys it for me out of my money—it transpires that he has forgotten his wallet—but the point is not that he is being generous, but that he is choosing to overlook one of London theatre’s myriad crimes.) I’m starting to feel giddy; I’m also starting to get confused about who I’m with. This is what Stephen’s like, this is why I was seduced into the idea of Stephen in the first place, and I’m worried that the contrast between my lover and my husband is becoming blurred. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is the most vicious and manipulative thing David has done yet: pretending to be a nice person so that… what? So that I’ll be nice back? So that I’ll want to stay married to him? Is that really so vicious and manipulative, trying to make one’s marriage function properly? In most cases one would argue not, but my mistrust of David runs very deep.
I love every second of the play. I drink it, like someone with dehydration might drink a glass of iced water. I love being made to think about something else other than my work and my marriage, and I love its wit and its seriousness, and I vow for the millionth time to nourish myself in this way on a more regular basis, while knowing that I will wake up in the morning with my unread novel on top of me. I spend almost as much time trying to snatch glimpses of David’s profile as I do watching the stage, though. Something weird has happened, definitely, because the struggle to enjoy the evening is written on David’s face: a war is taking place there, around the eyes and the lips and the forehead. The old David wants to frown and scowl and make faces to indicate his contempt for everything; the new one is clearly trying to learn how to enjoy himself in a place of entertainment, watching a new and brilliant piece of work from one of the world’s leading playwrights. Sometimes this attempt at self-education takes the form of simple imitation—when he remembers, he allows himself to laugh when the audience laughs, although he never quite times it right, and as a consequence he reminds me of Tom and Molly attempting to join in on songs when they were little—and sometimes he makes an attempt to self-start, as if a nod of the head here and a gentle smile there will stimulate his withered capacity for benign, as opposed to malicious, pleasure. And sometimes he forgets himself, and the odd line provokes a fleeting expression of rage and bile. (Such is my intimate acquaintance with David’s bile that I can tell what kind of line will do this to him: it’s the kind that flatters the intellectual pretensions of the audience, makes them feel that unless they laugh they’ll be demonstrating their own ignorance. I don’t like it much either, but it doesn’t make me want to get a gun and kill people.) Even then, however, it’s as if an invisible pair of hands grabs his face and twists it back into shape, smooths it out, makes David resemble somebody who’s paid a reasonable amount of money to have a good time and is therefore determined to do so. It’s so unlike him that it gives me the creeps.