How to Be Good (4 page)

‘Is it serious?'

‘I don't want to talk about it, Becca.'

‘You did.'

‘Yes, I did. But now I don't know what to say about it.'

‘Why are you doing it?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Are you in love with him?'

‘No.'

‘So what is it?'

‘I don't know.'

But I do, I think. It's just that Becca wouldn't understand. And if she did, she would begin to feel more sorry for me than I could bear. I could tell her about the excitement of the last couple of weeks, and the dreamy otherworldliness of the lovemaking. But I couldn't tell her that Stephen's interest in me, his attraction to me, seems like the only sense of future I have. That's too pathetic. She wouldn't like that.

 

I'm nervous when I meet Stephen again after work, because it feels as though I'm entering Phase Two of something, and Phase Two seems potentially more serious than Phase One. I know, of course, that Phase One involved all sorts of serious things – infidelity and deceit, to name but two – but it stopped, and I was OK about it stopping; I thought the Stephen thing was something I could brush off, like a crumb, leaving no trace of anything behind. But if it was a crumb, and I'd brushed it off, it wouldn't have walked in to the surgery wearing a fake sling this morning. It's beginning to look less like a crumb and more like a red wine stain, a grease spot, a nasty and very visible patch of Indian takeaway sauce. Anyway. The point is I'm nervous, and I'm nervous because I'm not meeting Stephen with the intention of telling him I never want to see him again.

I don't want him to pick me up from work because people are nosy, so we arrange to meet in a residential street around the corner; to avoid missing each other we choose a house to meet outside. And while I'm walking there I try to think of the man with the boil because this is bad, bad, underhand, deceitful, and you have to be good to look at boils in the rectal area (unless you're very, very bad, I suppose, sick and corrupt and decadent), so when I spot Stephen's car I'm not really in the right place to focus on what I'm doing, or how I should be with him. I get in and we drive off, all the way to Clerkenwell, because Stephen knows a quiet bar in a smart new hotel, and I don't wonder until later why a man who works for a pressure group based in Camden knows anything about smart new hotels in Clerkenwell.

But it is the right place for us, discreet and soulless and full of Germans and Americans, and they bring you a bowl of nuts with your drink, and we sit there for a little while and it occurs to me for the first time, really, how little I know this man. What am I supposed to say now? I can have state-of-relationship conversations with David, because I know the way into them – Jesus, I should do by now – but this guy . . . I don't even know the name of his sister, so how can I talk to him about whether I should leave my husband and two children?

‘What's your sister's name?'

‘Sorry?'

‘What's the name of your sister?'

‘Jane. Why?'

‘I don't know.'

It doesn't seem to have helped.

‘What do you want?'

‘Sorry?'

‘From me. What do you want from me?'

‘How do you mean?'

He's making me angry, although he'd be surprised that his hitherto minimal contribution to the conversation – a couple of ‘Sorrys' and his sister's first name, provided on request – could have provoked this response. He just doesn't seem to get it, somehow. I am facing the imminent destruction of all that I hold dear, or used to hold dear, anyway, and he sits there sipping his designer beer, oblivious to anything but the comfort of his surroundings and his delight in my presence. I'm scared that any second he's going to lean back in his seat, sigh contentedly, and say, ‘This is nice.' I want anguish, pain, confusion.

‘I mean, do you want me to leave home? Come and live with you? Run away with you? What?'

‘Blimey.'

‘ “Blimey”? Is that all you've got to say?'

‘I hadn't really thought about all that, to be honest. I just wanted to see you.'

‘Maybe you should think about it.'

‘Right now?'

‘You do know I'm married with kids, don't you?'

‘Yes, but . . .' He sighs.

‘But what?'

‘But I don't want to think about it right now. I want to get to know you better first.'

‘Lucky you.'

‘Why lucky?'

‘Not everyone has that sort of time.'

‘What, you want to run off with me first and find out about me later?'

‘So you just want an affair.'

‘Is this the right time to tell you that I'm staying here tonight?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘I booked a room here. Just in case.'

I drain my drink and walk out.

 

(‘What was that all about?' he asks me the next time I see him – because there is a next time, and I knew there would be even as I was getting into the taxi that took me back to my husband and family. ‘Why did you walk out on me at the hotel?' And I make some weak what-kind-of-girl-do-you-think-I-am joke, but of course there's nothing much to joke about, really. It's all too sad. It's sad that he doesn't know why I didn't respond to his seedy nightclub-owner gestures; it's sad that I end up convincing myself somehow that the man capable of making them is a significant and valuable figure in my life. We don't talk about sad things, though. We're having an affair. We're having too much fun.)

 

When I get home, David has put his back out again. I don't know that this will turn out to be a turning-point in our lives – why should I? David's back is always with us, and though I'd rather not see him as he is now – in pain, lying motionless on the floor with a couple of books under his head and the cordless telephone, its battery in need of recharging (hence, presumably, no message on the mobile), balanced on his stomach – I've seen him like this often enough not to worry about it.

He's even more angry than I was expecting him to be. He's angry with me for being late (but so angry, luckily, that he isn't really interested in where I've been or what I've been doing), angry with me for leaving him to cope with the kids when he's incapacitated, angry that he's getting older, and that his back troubles him more frequently.

‘How come you're a doctor and you can't ever fucking do anything about this?'

I ignore him.

‘Do you want me to help you up?'

‘Of course I don't want you to help me up, you silly bloody woman. I want to stay here. I don't want to stay here and look after two bloody kids, though.'

‘Have they had their tea?'

‘Oh, yes. Course. They had some of those fish fingers that climb under the grill on their own and cook themselves.'

‘I'm sorry if that was a stupid question. I wasn't sure when your back went.'

‘Fucking ages ago.'

There is no careless use of the f-word in this house; it's all done very, very carefully. When David swears like this in front of the children – who are only pretending to watch television, seeing as how their two heads swivel round immediately when they hear a word they shouldn't – he is communicating to all of us that he is unhappy, that his life is terrible, that he hates me, that things are so bad he can no longer control his language. He can, of course, and does, most of the time, so I in turn hate him for his manipulation.

‘Shut up, David.'

He sighs and mutters under his breath, filled with despair at my prissiness and my lack of sympathy.

‘What do you want me to do?'

‘Put their tea on and leave me alone. I'll be able to get up soon. If I'm allowed to rest it.' As if I were about to ask him to limbo dance, or put a few bookshelves up, or take me upstairs to make love.

‘Do you want the paper?'

‘Already read it.'

‘I'll put the radio on.'

So we listen to the arts review thing on Radio 4, and we listen to
The Simpsons
, and we listen to the fish fingers spitting under the grill, and I try not to tread on my husband while I long for hotel rooms in Leeds and Clerkenwell – not what went on in them, but the rooms themselves: their quiet, their bedlinen, their intimations of a better, blanker life than this one.

 

David spends the night on the futon in the spare room; I have to help him to take his clothes off, so I'm bound to end up thinking about needs and wants and rights and duties and men with boils in their rectums, although I don't get anywhere. And then I go to bed and read the paper, and the Archbishop of Canterbury has written about divorce, and the grass-is-greener syndrome, and how he wouldn't wish to deny anyone the right to end a brutal and degrading marriage, but . . . (Why is every newspaper full of stuff about me me me? I want to read about train crashes I haven't been in, unsafe beef I won't eat, peace treaties in places I don't live; instead my eye is drawn to stories about oral sex and the breakdown of the contemporary family.) So I'm bound to end up thinking about brutal and degrading marriages, and whether I'm in one, and however hard I try to kid myself –
ah, but the meaning of these words ‘brutal and degrading' it's di
ff
erent in our particular postal district, he calls me a silly bloody woman, he creates bad atmospheres when my family visit, he is consistently negative about things I hold dear, he thinks old people should stay in the seats specially designated for them on buses
– I know, really, that I'm not. I'm neither brutalized nor degraded by my relationship with David; it's just that I don't really like it very much, and that is a very different kind of complaint.

 

What is the point of an affair, when it comes down to it? Over the next three weeks I have sex twice with Stephen, and I don't come on either occasion (not that coming is everything, although it sort of would be in the long run); we spend time talking about childhood
holidays, my kids, his previous live-in relationship with a woman who moved back to the States, our shared antipathy to people who don't ask questions . . . Where does any of it get me? And where do I want to get anyway? It's true that I haven't talked to David about childhood holidays recently, for obvious reasons, but is that what's really missing from my marriage – the opportunity to look into the middle distance and wax lyrical about the joys of Cornish rock pools? Maybe I should try it, just like one is supposed to try weekends away without kids and saucy underwear. Maybe I should go home and say, ‘I know you've heard this before, but can I repeat the story of how I once found half-a-crown under a dead crab that my dad had told me not to touch?' But it was a dull story the first time, made palatable only by David's endless fascination for absolutely anything that had happened to me before I met him. Now I would be lucky to get away with a sigh and an inaudible obscenity.

You see, what I really want, and what I'm getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David's picture of me is complete now, and I'm pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn't even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so it's beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything like that. I just want his rapt attention when I tell him that my favourite book is
Middlemarch
, and I just want that feeling, the feeling I get with him, of having not gone wrong yet.

 

I decide to tell my brother about Stephen. My brother is younger than me, no kids, no relationship at the moment; I'm almost sure that he won't judge me, even though he loves Molly and Tom and has even been out for a drink and the odd meal with David when I haven't been around. We're close, Mark and I, and I vow to trust what he says, respect his instincts.

What he says is, ‘You're off your fucking head.' We're in a Thai restaurant in Muswell Hill, around the corner from where he lives,
and the starters haven't even arrived yet; I wish I'd saved the difficult part of the evening for later. (Except I didn't think it would be difficult. How come I got that wrong? Why did I think my brother would shrug all this off? I'd imagined this whispery, jokey, conspiratorial chat over a cold beer and some satay sticks, but now I can see that this was a bit off the mark, and that my brother would be no sort of brother at all if he smiled and shook his head fondly.)

I look at him and smile feebly. ‘I know that's what it must look like,' I say. ‘But you don't really understand.'

‘OK. Explain.'

‘I've been so depressed,' I say. He understands depression. He's what passes for a black sheep in the Carr family: a chequered employment history, unmarried, pills, therapy.

‘So write yourself a prescription. Go and talk to someone. I don't see how an affair is going to help. And a divorce certainly won't.'