I suddenly have a very deep yearning to go and see a Chinese film at the Screen on the Green—the more Chinese it is, in fact, the better I would like it. That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity—the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine deviclass="underline" if I don’t attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.
‘Sorry. This must all sound so silly to you. It sounds silly to me. If I’d known that I’d be the sort of woman who was going to end up sitting with married friends and moaning about my single status I would have shot myself. Really. I’ll stop. Right now. I’ll never mention it again.’ She takes a parodic deep breath, and then continues before she has exhaled.
‘But he might be OK, mightn’t he? I mean, how would I know? That’s the trouble. I’m in such a tearing hurry that I haven’t got the time to decide whether they’re nice or not. It’s like shopping on Christmas Eve.’
‘I’m having an affair.’
Becca smiles distractedly and, after a brief pause, continues.
‘You bung everything in a basket. And then after Christmas you…’
She doesn’t finish the sentence, presumably because she has begun to see that her analogy isn’t going anywhere, and that dating and men are nothing like Christmas shopping and baskets.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
She smiles again. ‘No. Not really.’ I have become a ghost, the comically impotent, unthreatening sort that you find in children’s books and old TV programmes. However much I shout Becca will never hear me.
‘Your brother’s single, isn’t he?’
‘My brother’s a semi-employed depressive.’
‘Is that a genetic thing? Or just circumstance? Because if it’s genetic… It would be a risk. Not for a while, though. I mean, you don’t get so many depressed kids, do you? It’s a late-onset thing. And I’m so old already that I won’t be around when they become depressed adults. So. Maybe it’s worth thinking about. If he’s game, I am.’
‘I’ll pass it on. I think he would like children, yes.’
‘Good. Excellent.’
‘You know the thing you didn’t hear?’
‘No.’
‘When I said, “Did you hear what I said”, and you said “No”.’
‘No.’
‘Right.’
‘He’s my age, isn’t he? More or less?’
And we talk about my brother and his depression and his lack of ambition until Becca has lost all interest in the idea of bearing his children.
2
Nothing happens for a couple of weeks. We don’t have another conversation about anything; we keep to the social arrangements we have already made, which means dinners at weekends with other couples with children, couples who live within roughly the same income bracket and postal district as ours. Stephen leaves three messages on my mobile, and I don’t reply to any of them. Nobody notices that I failed to attend the second day of my Family Health Workshop in Leeds. I have returned to the marital bed, and David and I have had sex, just because we’re there and lying next to each other. (The difference between sex with David and sex with Stephen is like the difference between science and art. With Stephen it’s all empathy and imagination and exploration and the shock of the new, and the outcome is… uncertain, if you know what I mean. I’m engaged by it, but I’m not necessarily sure what it’s all about. David, on the other hand, presses this button, then that one, and bingo! Things happen. It’s like operating a lift—just as romantic, but actually just as useful.)
We have a great belief, those of us who live in this income bracket and postal district, in the power of words: we read, we talk, we write, we have therapists and counsellors and even priests who are happy to listen to us and tell us what to do. So it comes as something of a shock to me that my words, big words, it seemed to me at the time, words that would change my life, might just as well have been bubbles: David swatted them away and they popped, and there is no evidence anywhere that they ever existed.
So now what? What happens when words fail us? If I lived a different sort of life in a different sort of world, a world where action counted for more than words and feelings, I would do something, go somewhere, hit someone, even. But David knows that I don’t live in that world, and has called my bluff; he won’t obey the rules. Once we took Tom to play this shoot-em-up game in a funfair; you had to put on this electronic backpack thing, and when you were hit, it made a noise and you were dead. You could, of course, just ignore the noise and carry on, if you wanted to be anarchic and wreck the game, because a beep is just a beep, after all. And that, as it turns out, was what I was doing when I asked for a divorce. I was making a beeping noise that David won’t recognize.
This is what it feels like: you walk into a room and the door locks behind you and you spend a little while panicking, looking around for a key or a window or something, and then when you realize that there is no way out, you start to make the best of what you’ve got. You try out the chair, and you realize that it’s actually not uncomfortable, and there’s a TV, and a couple of books, and there’s a fridge stocked with food. You know, how bad can it be? And me asking for a divorce was the panic, but very soon I get to this stage of looking around at what I’ve got. And what I’ve got turns out to be two lovely kids, a nice house, a good job, a husband who doesn’t beat me and presses all the right buttons on the lift… I can do this, I think. I can live this life.
One Saturday night David and I go out for a meal with Giles and Christine, these friends of ours we’ve known since college, and David and I are OK with each other, and it’s a nice restaurant, an old-fashioned Italian in Chalk Farm with breadsticks and wine-in-a-basket and really good veal (and if we take it as read that doctors cannot, unless they are Dr Death-type doctors who inject young children and pensioners with deadly serums, be Bad People, then I think I’m entitled to a little veal once in a while); and halfway through the evening, with David in the middle of one of his Angriest Man in Holloway rants (a savage assault, if you’re interested, on the decision-making process at Madame Tussaud’s), I notice that Giles and Christine are almost helpless with laughter. And they’re not even laughing at David, but with him. And even though I’m sick of David’s rants, his apparently inexhaustible and all-consuming anger, I suddenly see that he does have the power to entertain people, and I feel well-disposed, almost warm, towards him, and when we get home we indulge in a little more button pushing.
And the next morning we take Molly and Tom to the Archway Baths, and Molly gets knocked over by one of the puny waves generated by the wave machine and disappears under eighteen inches of water, and all four of us, even David, get the giggles, and the moment we calm down I can see what an awful malcontent I have become. I’m not being sentimentaclass="underline" I am aware that this happy family snapshot was just that, a snapshot, and an unedited video would have captured a sulk from Tom before we arrived at the pool (hates swimming with us, wanted to go round to Jamie’s) and a rant from David after (I refuse the kids permission to buy crisps from the vending machine because we’re going straight home for lunch, David is compelled to tell me that I am a living embodiment of the Nanny State). The point is not that my life is one long golden summer which I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate (although it might be, of course, and I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate it), but that happy moments are possible, and while happy moments are possible I have no right to demand anything more for myself, given the havoc that would be wrought.