Biographies. Would he like a biography? Hitler? Montgomery? Dickens? Jack Nicklaus? The woman out of Eastenders who ran the pub? But Dad’s not much of a pub man, I think, so he’s not likely to… Jesus, Katie. It wasn’t a real pub. The point of this book is that the woman used to be in Eastenders. Dad doesn’t watch Eastenders. That’s why you’re not going to buy him this book. I find a reassuringly present-sized biography of God on the ‘Staff Picks’ table, and just as I am about to take it to the till, I see the book about Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s artist sister, the woman who, according to the book review I read, lived a rich and beautiful life. So I buy that, too, to see how it’s done. And when David and GoodNews have finished ‘How to be Good’, we can sit down and compare notes.
David has gone back to writing company brochures. He is no longer interested in his novel, and even if he were angry any more—which he isn’t—he would not be able to vent his spleen in the local paper, because he has been displaced, dethroned, out-raged: there is a new, and even angrier, Angriest Man in Holloway now—which is as it should be, I suppose. If the new columnist were not angrier than David at his angriest, then he would be the Second Angriest Man in Holloway, and that would look a bit feeble on the page. And anyway, people get angrier all the time. It was inevitable that David’s anger levels would end up looking a bit late 90s. He was never going to hang on to the title for ever, just like Martina was never going to remain Wimbledon champion for ever. Younger, meaner people come along. The new chap has just called for the closure of all public parks, on the grounds that they are magnets for gays, dogs, alcoholics and children; we have to hold up our hands in defeat. The better man has won.
In the old days, David’s failure to have remained angry enough to keep his job would have made him furious—furious enough to become angry enough to keep his job. This David, though, just shrinks back into himself a little more. He has offered the paper a different sort of column, one based on the book he is writing with GoodNews, but no one was interested. He is properly depressed now, I think, and if he were to come to see me in the surgery I would prescribe something. But he won’t. He still spends all his spare time with GoodNews, scribbling notes for ‘How to be Good’, although spare time is much harder to find now—there are a lot of brochures to be written.
After much heart-searching, GoodNews has been given three months to find somewhere to live. He says he appreciates that he has been a burden on us; we are, after all, a middle-class nuclear family, he knows that, and he should respect our, y’know, our nuclearness. We know we are being insulted, but we don’t care very much—or at least, I don’t. David agonizes about it every night just before we go to sleep, wonders aloud whether we want to be nuclear, whether we should become a denuclearized zone, but much of his conviction has gone.
The children seem pretty depressed, too. They were shaken by my outburst, and I have had to talk to them about my boyfriend, and they watch their parents with panic-filled eyes each time we eat, or go out together anywhere. We have only had one argument in the last few days, David and I—about a grillpan—and the kids needed counselling afterwards. I suspect that after a few months of dullness they will forget our woes, but right now I feel sorry for them, and I wish that we had not contrived to make them feel so insecure.
Me, I don’t think I’m depressed. That’s not the right word. I’m daunted. I no longer think about whether I want a divorce or not—the nice vicar took that option away from me. It is just beginning to register that those post-divorce fantasies I had before I was married were untenable, and that I am likely to remain married at least until the children are adults. So that’s… Fifteen years? By which time I will be in my mid-fifties, and one part of life—the Kris Kristofferson part—will be a long way behind me. But there is a sort of virtue in having no choices remaining, I think. It certainly clarifies the mind. And there is always the possibility that David and I will be able to say to each other one day ‘Do you remember when we nearly packed it in?’, and we will laugh at the sheer idiocy of these last few months. It is, I cannot help feeling, a remote possibility, but it is there nonetheless. I’m sure it’s right, that thing about leaving the knife in when you’ve been stabbed. Maybe I should check it out again. Just to be sure.
We are cooking my father’s birthday dinner, and my mother has called to say that he has given up red meat. David buys a free-range chicken, and it is nearly ready when Molly asks us what we are eating.
‘Hooray!’ she says, with more excitement than the menu really warrants.
‘I didn’t know you liked chicken that much.’
‘I don’t. But it means that Brian can come for dinner.’
‘It’s Grandpa’s birthday.’
‘Yes. But chicken. You promised.’
I had forgotten my promise. When I made it, it seemed like the best and easiest deal I could possibly strike; now it is preposterous, unreasonable, a deal with God made by an atheist at a time of crisis, forgotten when the crisis has passed.
‘Brian can’t come tonight.’
‘He has to. That’s why he’s not living with us, because he was allowed to come whenever we’re having chicken.’
‘Grandpa won’t like Brian.’
‘Why did you promise, if you were going to break it straightaway?’
Because I didn’t mean it. Because I did it to get myself out of a hole. Because we have done enough for Brian, even though we have done almost nothing, and even though he is a sad and pathetic man who will devour any crumb of comfort that is thrown at him, like a duck in winter.
‘I didn’t mean birthdays.’
‘Did you tell him that birthdays didn’t count?’
‘Molly’s right,’ says David. ‘We can’t just go around making promises to people like Brian and then breaking them when it is inconvenient.’
‘Brian is not coming to my father’s birthday dinner,’ I say. Of course he isn’t. It’s obvious, surely? It’s common sense.
‘You’re a liar, then,’ Molly says.
‘Fine.’
‘You don’t even care you’re a liar.’
‘No.’
‘OK. Well, I’ll be a liar, too, whenever I feel like it.’
I suddenly realize that David’s part in the chicken debacle might not be entirely innocent.
‘You bought that chicken deliberately,’ I say to him.
‘Deliberately? Well, it wasn’t an unconscious purchase, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
‘OK. I wasn’t entirely unaware of your promise to Brian and Molly when I put it in the trolley.’
‘So you were trying to catch me out?’
‘It didn’t occur to me that you would need catching out. It didn’t occur to me that your offer was anything but genuine.’
‘Liar.’
‘So what you’re saying is I should have realized that you didn’t really mean it? Even though you said you meant it with all your heart?’
‘Is this really what it’s all come down to, David? Playing games with chicken dinners?’
‘It rather looks like it. I don’t know what else is left. I couldn’t get you to do anything else. I’d rather hoped we’d drawn the last line in the sand.’