Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir) (15 page)

After the film, we spent an hour in the nearby pub discussing the war and its aftermath. She’s deeply affected by the film and so am I.

It takes us about three months to fall in love completely.

They are the happiest months of my life.

Still are
.

They tend to be for everyone, don’t they?

The feeling you’ve at last met someone who
fits
is indescribable.         

True love is never about need.

Need is a greedy little emotion and never leads to anything good.

True love is about
want
.

You
want
to be with this person, you feel comfortable around this person, you know that they complete you.

True love is mutual. It puts you at ease and gives you the confidence to tackle any problem head on.

True love makes you
stand
.

And that’s how it was for me, as my relationship with Sophie deepened into something more than just another one to add to the list.

I knew after only a few weeks that this relationship was going to be long-term and it didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was ready for some serious commitment - much to my surprise.

As we got to know each other better, we fell in love even more and those months flew by faster than I could believe.

One year goes by and we start to plan for marriage.

We only managed to hold off that long because we’re both fairly practical people and wanted to make sure we worked as a couple before taking the plunge.

In hindsight it was pointless to wait. I think we wanted to be married after only a few weeks of being together.

It pays to be patient sometimes, though.

Her job at the florist pays well, and my job at Currys has increased in salary to the point where I’m feeling good about the financial future.

We decide on a small ceremony in a church we’d once had a picnic in. It’s in a small village, about ten miles away from the city.

We invite thirty close friends and family. It’s slightly overcast on the day, but it doesn’t spoil things in the slightest. The wedding goes off without a hitch and we all get nicely drunk at the reception.

Sophie and I make love that night in the hotel, and while it’s not the most rampant or earth-shattering sex we’ve ever had - no body oil, karma sutra positions or handcuffs - it's the most memorable by far.

After the wedding and subsequent honeymoon in Jamaica (bulkhead seats on the plane) we return home and start house hunting.

This ain’t much fun at all.

You’ll recall that I’m crap when it comes to buying large things, and as houses are about the biggest thing you can buy, the levels of my inadequacy sky rocket. In the face of viewings, estate agents reports and mortgage arrangements I collapse under the weight of my own neuroses.

This is the first time Sophie’s skills at negotiating come to the fore. Which is just as well. God knows what kind of dive I would have bought otherwise.

Case in point:

We looked at a house in a leafy country lane, set in a picturesque village - the same one as the church where we had the wedding. On first inspection, the place looked great and I was deeply enamoured with it.

I’m an idealist and when I see something that fits my ideal, I tend to act first, ask questions later. That was certainly the case with this house. It looked beautiful - with climbing ivy on the walls and a spacious front garden, perfect for miniature gnomes.

After only inspecting the outside of the house, I was ready to buy it and move in yesterday.

Sophie counselled caution and suggested it might be a good idea if we saw the inside of the place first.

This was an
extremely
good suggestion.

Seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

If you have, you’ll have an idea of the interior of this house. If you haven’t, just imagine dirt, dust, a disturbing
meaty
smell and a lot of nasty detritus on the floor.

Rotten furniture, musty carpets, broken glass, and what looked like the bones of at least two or three small animals were just some of the delights to be found in this chamber of horrors.

This really was a house built in the country: smelly, dirty and covered in pig-shit.

The estate agent who showed us round admitted it could do with
a bit of a clean up
. This was like saying that Osama Bin Laden could do with
a bit of a telling off
.

We leave the house on Nightmare Avenue, returning to my flat for a good hot shower - and never speak of the place again.

Incidentally, I had cause to drive along that leafy country lane a couple of years ago and saw that the roof had fallen in.

There was a sign saying
abandoned
on it. I might have substituted that for one that read
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
- having been inside.

Bearing this near disaster in mind, I let Sophie take more of the lead in deciding which houses to view from then on.

It took us a couple of months to find the right one, but when we do, we find a place we both love.

She loves it because it sits in a quiet street. I love it because there’s a spare room big enough for me to convert into a study.

We move in - Adam helps out a lot by nicking the Currys delivery van for the weekend - and settle into the kind of domestic bliss most people hear about, but never experience.

All is well in the house of Spalding and his Mrs.

I don’t mention the thing with the sponges for several months.

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it?

And it was.

It was great through the first four years of our marriage. It continued to be great through Sophie’s pregnancy, the birth of our son Tom - named after her grandfather - and my change in job from Curry’s assistant manager to marketing copywriter.

We had tiffs, obviously. Caused by one petty thing or another - including expensive BMWs - but for the most part, they were small and easily settled with a few gentle words of apology and the odd bunch of flowers from the petrol station forecourt.

So where does it all go wrong?

How does the marriage of Nicholas and Sophie Spalding end?

Did I cheat on her?

Did she cheat on me?

Nope.

Nothing so easy to identify and pin down as the cause.

What is it that destroys this particular nuclear family?

Time, my friend:
Time
.

It’s rearing its ugly ahead again, as it has several times in this book. But on this occasion, it’s not a minor annoyance or an unavoidable element of modern life we can ruefully make jokes about.

This time, it’s
serious
.

Lack of time becomes the real problem. Lack of quality time with one another.

Not planned, not expected and certainly not wanted - time drives a rift into our wedded life.

It doesn’t happen at once. Its effects are slow and insidious.

Eight years pass before things come to a head.

I’m working hard by this time - very hard indeed.

I’m spending more and more time at the office, getting in earlier and leaving later. I get home at gone seven o’clock most nights, sometimes only catching a brief few minutes with Tom before he goes to sleep. I then spend an exhausted hour on the couch with Sophie before turning in, getting up again in the morning and repeating the whole cycle.

I can safely say in the average day I see my wife for maybe a total of two hours if I’m very lucky. Sometimes it’s as little as one and never more than four.

The situation is exacerbated by her job at the florists, which keeps her busy from early morning until early evening in a schedule as hectic as mine. Even when she is home, she’s on the phone to a supplier or client, as I sit on the couch watching Sky News, trying to keep my eyes open.

Our poor son sees more of the expensive nanny we’ve had to hire than either of his parents. I wouldn’t have felt quite so bad, but I’m sure the woman’s moustache is starting to frighten him terribly.

Things gets worse.

Sophie and I start to argue.

Properly
, this time.

She accuses me of thinking work is more important than my family. I accuse her of much the same thing. It doesn’t occur to either of us we’re both in the same situation and should work together, instead of throwing recriminations about.
Practise what you preach
is a maxim never employed in our household.

To cut a long - and rather painful - story short, it reaches the point where we’re not sleeping in the same bed and barely speaking.

Something has got to give.

It does in spectacular style one cold January evening, when we have an argument of epic proportions that wakes Tom from his sleep and probably sets off car alarms down the road.

She tells me she’s leaving me. I tell her that’s fine by me.

…I never think she will, of course, I’m just angry as Hell at that moment.

Anger turns to astonishment and grief as I realise she’s going to make good on the threat.

Two weeks later, Sophie has taken Tom and moved in with Adam and his wife.

I will at this point give Sophie a huge amount of credit for establishing with her family that the split was as much her fault as it was mine. I tried to do the same when explaining things to my relatives.

I think this went a long way in making the break-up easier.

There’s nothing guaranteed to make a separation harder than if the families of those involved end up throwing insults at each other across the battlefield.

When I try phoning Sophie at her brother’s house, Adam does his best in the awkward position he’s in and tries to get her to come to the phone. Sophie won’t - which in hindsight is understandable.

We both got on each other’s nerves so much by this point that any conversation was bound to end in another barnstormer of an argument - something neither of us needed.

I hoped against hope this would be just a temporary measure and we would smooth things over enough to salvage our marriage.

My hopes were in vain.

While we were apart physically, we grew even further apart emotionally. Unlike many break-ups, this emotional parting of the ways was a mutual thing.

Living without Sophie became easier as time went by and I became very aware of the fact that I was rapidly falling out of love with her.

This scared and disappointed me in equal measure. I just couldn’t believe that the strong love I felt for her had slowly bled away over a period of eight years and it was equally hard for me to accept the same thing had happened for her.

But, there it was.

Undeniable and true. No matter how much agonising I did over it, it wasn’t going to change.

If I started to miss my wife less and less, I started to miss my son more and more.

Ever since the day he’d emerged squalling and covered in yucky stuff that doesn’t bear mentioning, Tom had become one of the central focuses of my existence.

I’d gone from seeing him every day to only seeing him once a week.

Sophie understood how much I loved him and was happy to let us spend time together whenever I wanted to.

I get down on my knees and thank God for the person Sophie is.

I hear so much about messy divorces and bad break-ups from friends and colleagues that I'm eternally grateful for the way mine went.

We may be apart and only linked by our son, but I still - and always will - respect and love Sophie for the understanding and maturity she showed during that difficult time.

It would have been very easy for her to become selfish and unreasonable when we split - thousands of people do - but she didn’t. It’s because of this I’ve watched my son grow up and been allowed to be a father.

The divorce proceedings started about four months after Sophie moved in with her brother. Just like our courtship, it went smoothly and was over with a minimum of fuss. Sophie was happy for me to keep the house and I was happy to pay her as large an amount as I could for child support and welfare.

I may moan about my job more than is sometimes necessary - and it may have contributed to our divorce - but it’s always kept me solvent enough to provide for my son, which makes it just about the best job in the world, don’t you think?

Sophie and Tom now live about six miles away in a very nice flat, large enough for both of them. I visit Tom regularly and have him to stay with me as much as possible.

When I do visit her house, Sophie is always welcoming and we find ourselves talking like civilised adults. Sometimes one of us will remember something humorous that happened in our time together and we’ll recount it. We’ll have a good laugh over our cups of coffee while Tom plays in the sandpit I bought for him for Christmas.

Sophie told me about a month ago that she’s started seeing a guy who works for the floristry supplier she uses. I couldn’t be happier for her.

Adam and I still meet up now and again for a pint and he even tried pairing me off with the area-manager from the Currys store where he still works. I thought she was uglier than a bull dog chewing a thistle - and told him so.

I’m single at the moment and am fairly happy to be that way.

I do however have my eye on a rather nice young lady who works as a P.A for a marketing client.

She has blonde hair - and when I think about it, bears something of a resemblance to a certain university student I embarrassed myself in front of many years ago.

Do I regret my marriage to Sophie? Not one bit of it.

Do I regret that our marriage ended because of that clock on the wall and how it reminds us of all the time we lose and can never get back again?

Every single day
.

It could have been worse and it could have been better.

On the whole, I’m satisfied with the memories I have and the time we spent together. The best were when the clock on the wall was forgotten and the love we shared made time stop completely.