The Marriage Diaries Read online

  He didn't flirt, didn't flatter, and although I had the impression that his performance was aimed slightly more in my direction than elsewhere, I couldn't be sure.

  And then we were all leaving. I was desperate for some sign that he'd noticed me. And just as I was beginning to despair, he said, “Would you like to do something sometime?” and I can't remember what I said to that, but I doubt if it was clever, and then he said, “I'll get your number off Max.”

  I went away dizzy with excitement and puzzlement and hope. It seemed that I had finally found someone who really did live the life of the mind (sorry, I can't say that without thinking about the scene in the Coen brothers’ film Barton Fink, in which a manic John Goodman runs down a burning corridor screaming “I'll show you the life of the mind, I'll show you the life of the mind” at a cowering screenwriter). Someone who felt ideas the way other people feel hunger. And the best part was that, what with that whole Byronic thing, he was actually quite good-looking and even, under certain special conditions, given the right preparation and lighting, gorgeous.

  So when he didn't call me, I sulked. Well, to be honest, the sulking followed something a bit more dramatic, involving a fair amount of crying and the sort of “What's wrong with me?” questions that I don't normally hold with. But that couldn't go on for long: I was too busy. I'd just made the move into fashion from my wilderness period as the world's worst banker, and I was desperate to make it happen. But whenever I thought about it, about him, I felt a little pang of loss and a huge desire to hit him with a blunt instrument for being so stupid.

  I couldn't say exactly what the proportions were of hope, desire for revenge, curiosity, and boredom that came together in my decision to go to the party with Max, but as soon as I saw him again, through a room full of smoke and people and laughter, I felt only the happy knowledge that it was going to be all right.

  He was wearing a blue velvet suit and a pair of black Chelsea boots, and he looked good. And I completely understand what he means when he says that he knew where I was every second, because I felt it, too, and whenever I couldn't see him, I felt the light go out of the world, just a little. I remember his flustered apologies for not calling me, and I sensed it was shyness and not arrogance that had stood in his way. And I remember the agony and the embarrassment of waiting for the waifs and strays to leave his room, and the sudden quiet in the darkness once we were alone. And he's wrong, because we did kiss that night. He lay behind me, and his lips brushed my neck and then my ear, and then the corners of our mouths touched, and that is how we kissed, chastely, and still in our clothes.

  For the next couple of years, there followed what we saw as an innovative hybrid of intellectual debate and love affair, but which, to most of my friends, looked a lot like one long, tedious bicker. Yes, that's it: the long great bicker of humanity.

  He proposed without much ceremony in a dark pub, where everything that wasn't already brown was stained umber with nicotine. But the ring was beautiful—a copy of a Roman original—and I didn't mind much at all that the stone was a red garnet and not the huge, vulgar diamond so many of my friends seemed to be getting or that the metal was silver and not white gold or platinum.

  We married in a pretty church in the countryside, and it was fun, although I was a little jealous of those of my circle who had hugely glamorous London weddings, with receptions at The Dorchester and a double-page spread in the Tatler. Sean wore contact lenses, but he lost one halfway through and so has a strange squinting look in all of the photographs, as if he's slyly winking at the photographer.

  After a year, and without trying either way, I found that I was pregnant. And once I'd worked out exactly how we would manage, I was happy. Sean looked delighted, then dismayed, and then delighted again, as he ran through what it would mean to our lives, or perhaps just to his. I suspect the sequence of alternating dismay and delight continued for some time. I guess it continues still.

  That flea, by the way, was almost certainly made up.

  SEANJOURNALTHREE.DOC

  INFANT SORROW

  I should never have gone down to the business end. Up top was fine. There was a sort of green canopy thing that shut everything out and made it feel as though we were having a campout in the garden. Just occasionally, you could see elbows working furiously above the canopy, as though someone were pumping up a tire or punching a rabbit to death. There was a hairy moment when Celeste started to feel things. She'd been warned that it would be like someone reaching down into your handbag: you'd be aware that something was happening but not be in any pain.

  Well, this was pain.

  “Will you tell them,” she muttered into my face.

  “It'll probably pass. Just hold on.”

  “Fucking tell them.”

  “Um, … excuse me, I think it hurts.”

  So they put some specially strong stuff into the tube, and then she seemed fine.

  “You've got a baby boy,” said the doctor, the one who looked like a doctor. He leaned over the green partition and beckoned me. Without thinking, I walked around. I saw them holding the baby, wrapping it in towels, weighing it. It looked like something that had just been torn out of a living body, like one of the less fashionable organs, the spleen or pancreas or large intestine, all coiled and knotted and slithery. On impulse, I looked back at Celeste, not at her face, which was hidden now by the green canopy, but at her torso. If you're the kind of person who has nightmares or sits up in bed at noises in the night or watches scary films from behind the sofa, don't ever do what I did, don't look back, don't look down, don't look in. My first thought was to wonder how anyone could survive what they had done to her. It looked like they'd gone in with a sharpened spade, with an ax. I thought of the thing bursting out of John Hurt's stomach in Alien; I thought about the blood eagle, the terrifying rite performed by Vikings on their living captives, involving ripping back ribs and pulling out lungs. I thought of my poor girl having these things done to her by strange men who did not love her. I didn't think anymore about the spleen-boy in the blanket, beginning now to cry like an old man caught up in the ongoing tragedy of his phlegm.

  I ran back to Celeste. She was hurting again and stared at me pleadingly. Someone brought the baby round, and Celeste tried to look as though she were pleased, but there was too much pain. Then I was holding the baby, but I still just wanted to take care of Celeste. Somehow I found Bella, Celeste's mother, who hated me, and gave her the baby. I don't think she expected it and looked at me as if I'd just proposed a quick blow job in the lavatory.

  They were still pulling things out of Celeste—big, heavy clots of stuff, dense as manure. She was white with shock now. You could see how time had slowed for her, and she lived in her pain like a hermit. I don't know if I was useful or just another object there, like the instrument stand or the epidural line.

  I've no idea how we got out of the place, but my next memory takes us upstairs to the room with its flowers and her parents and at least one of her eccentric sisters. A titanic black midwife is holding the baby at Celeste's breast, shoving its face into the flesh like a naughty puppy having its nose rubbed in its muck. But it works, and now I can see the child—who must by now have been given his names—working his jaw like a seasoned tabaccy chewer, and Celeste pulling a getting-into-a-hot-bath face. I deduce it hurts.

  I still hadn't had time to work out what I felt about the whole thing. I'd been thrilled when I saw the urine-washed blue line, and I may even have offered then and there to stay at home and look after the baby. I'd always thought of myself as the kind of man who would be good with children. I couldn't imagine a more interesting or fulfilling job, and it certainly compared well to sitting at my desk at the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport straightening out paper clips and trying to smuggle double entendres into the Minster's speeches.

  (There'd been a report about how conventional games such as netball and hockey were putting teenage girls off exercise altogether. It suggested that if they had th
e choice of other vigorous activities, aerobics or dancing, they might establish the good habits that would keep them healthy for life, avoiding the obesity, diabetes, halitosis, piles, thromboses, rickets, Ebola, split ends, drug addiction, and so forth that went with a sedentary lifestyle. For a week or so, I'd been working out how to phrase it for our man's address to the annual conference of the Association of Physical Education Schoolteachers [APES]. “It's time,” I wrote, “that schoolgirls were released from the tyranny of their gymslips and allowed more freedom in choosing which bed to lie in.”

  I thought the grammar error might help: there's nothing a civil servant enjoys more than finding a split infinitive or a sentence ending in a preposition; and the various layers through which the thing had to pass might content themselves with underlining and rescoring the error, thereby perhaps missing the now-naked schoolgirls’ bedswapping. But no: no matter how hard I worked at it—and whatever my reports said, I could be a hardworking and dedicated civil servant—it just wouldn't come out funny.

  Perhaps, instead, I could develop my idea for the Fast Action Response Team [or FART], which would deal with arts-based emergencies, or continue the in-depth research I'd done on the Annual Network-User Statistics [ANUS]. But I'd come to accept that the Western and Northern Knowledge Evaluation Register [WANKER] was never going to get off the ground.)

  So, no, there wasn't any kind of counterbalancing weight on the side of Work to match the gross, massy tug of Paternity. And with children, surely, I thought, there'd be the downtime. You'd play with them for half an hour, then you'd put them in one of those baby jails with their rattles, and squeaky whatsits, and cuttlefish and millet, where they'd gurgle happily while you read or watched TV for a couple of hours. And then, if necessary, you'd play with them a bit more.

  That's how it was, wasn't it?

  And soon you'd be able to teach them things like cricket and the names for the successive periods of the Paleozoic era (“Okay, listen”—dummy down, now—“first comes Cambrian, then Ordovi-cian, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian. Got that? Have you soiled yourself?”). That would be fun. And fulfilling. And admirable.

  The fury and flurry of the operating room had come between me and the massive love surge I confidently expected to feel on first setting sight on my baby boy. That and the spleen-pancreas thing. There'd been no flash of light, no trumpet blast, no instant bond. I was too scared and too tired. But now here they were, safe and well: my wife and my child.

  Together.

  Locked in an embrace I couldn't share.

  The two of them with me on the outside. I felt dull and numb. I hadn't slept for forty-eight hours. On the way home, some feeling did seep back into my nerves: depression, disappointment, the longing for a chicken kebab, with onions, chili, and garlic sauce. If only I'd known what was coming, I'd have thanked my lucky stars about the exclusion business and got in as much carousing and loafing as I could: “Oh yes, look at them,” I should have yelled, “united, contented. They don't need me. I'm spare! I'm free!”

  Things got better as the week went on. More friends and flowers came to the room. Because it was classed as an emergency ce-sarean, we were covered by Celeste's health insurance. If everything had gone smoothly, not only would I have betrayed my socialist principles, but it would also have cost me some thousands of pounds. God bless you, lazy cervix! Well done, Harry of the huge head!

  The private-health-care-birth thing was an argument I knew I couldn't win. Over the years, most of our disagreements ended up at the place where Celeste would say something like “well, you do it then!” And I would trump her with the martyr's “I will, I will!” But that pattern just didn't fit here. It was her burden, her pain, her enormous belly, and I couldn't get my way by offering to share. All I could do was hope to wear her down by a drip drip drip of whines and complaints, which I knew was both unattractive and futile. Way to go!

  And then it seemed that nature and history were conspiring against me, as all of those friends of Celeste's who'd beaten us to the tape reported terrible experiences in National Health Service hospitals. Surgical gloves, probes, and hacksaws were “left behind;” babies were thrown away and afterbirths smacked on the bottom; midwives boiled up cauldrons of ready-mix eye of newt and toe of frog. It was a miracle anyone came out alive.

  So the Lindo Wing it was, with its wooden paneling and the knowledge, heavy in the air like camphor, that princesses had bled here and princes been born.

  After a week, they came home and took it in turns to cry. But I felt quite good, because I had an obvious purpose again—i.e., doing everything. There had always been certain things that I had done. Cooking. Rearranging books. Cleaning the lavatory bowl by peeing around it in a truly methodical way. And there were things that Celeste did. Making the rooms look spruce. Shouting at me to pick up my clothes. Picking up my clothes properly when I'd picked them up in the wrong way. But now Celeste was too sore to do any of her usual things, and so I had to do them all.

  I don't understand tidying. I spend half an hour in a room moving things about, and at the end, it looks more or less the same as it did at the beginning. But Celeste goes in there for five minutes and suddenly everything's different and better. I don't really hold with evolutionary explanations for particular bits of human behavior. I don't believe there's a gene that makes people like Celeste (i.e., girls) better at tidying. For that to be true, we'd have to posit a profoundly unconvincing just-so story. You'd have to invent a little drama enacted among the early hominids—let's say, homo erectus (because I like saying “homo erectus;” it's a funny name!)—in which the alpha erectus (sorry, still chuckling) male is confronted with a choice of sexual partners, some of whom are slovenly and keep a bad cave, with bits of mammoth bone all over the shop and a serious buildup of lime scale around the stalactites, and others, obsessively cave-proud, spending all their time straightening the cave paintings, beating the bear rugs, and generally making things look nice. And then the alpha male has to pick the one in the hairy-rhino pinafore, dusting the shelves and tutting to herself. It's just not gonna happen. We all know he's going to choose Raquel in her fur bikini over the shrew with the dustpan every day of the week. And without that selection, and the reproductive advantage it imparts, then the tidy-cave gene just can't get going.

  But none of that helps me to explain why, after a week without Celeste-love, and despite the world-class peeing around the lavatory bowl, the apartment looked as if a family of refugees had moved in and then moved on again, complaining of the poor facilities. Things that shouldn't be sticky were sticky. A pair of my underpants (not sticky) were draped over a lamp. I knew I had to move them. I would move them. The very next time I was in that corner. No, really I would move them. And the cubist pagoda of CDs two feet in front of the stereo. I'd do something about that. Maybe shift it about six inches to the left so it was out of my peripheral vision as I watched the TV. The laundry basket had taken a nasty wound to the leg and been forced to shed some of its burden in the hallway, partially blocking access to the kitchen and exposing for the first time in eons some of the stuff at the bottom that never quite made it into a wash. Tights and panties, of course, but also a purple shirt neither of us has ever owned or worn and some unidentifiable matter, molded into lifelike forms by the extreme temperature and pressure conditions prevailing down there. But once you'd stepped over all that (“For God's sake, be careful, there's broken glass there and some concentrated nitric acid I've been meaning to …”) and made it to the kitchen, you couldn't help but be impressed by how neatly the four bin liners full of trash were lined up behind the door.

  And all this was before Harry, that maestro of mess, the king of clutter, the lord of misrule, had extended his powers beyond the reach of his own bum.

  There was another message on my answerphone today. Uma still wants to meet me somewhere without the children. The walk back from the playgroup isn't enough for her anymore. She has to stop calling like this. It's only a ma
tter of time before Celeste picks up the phone or gets back before me and plays the messages. I've asked her to e-mail me instead, if she must, on a Hotmail account Celeste doesn't know about. At least, that way, I can contain the situation. I know nothing's happened, and nothing is going to happen, but, well, I don't understand how she can be so controlled and cool in the group and yet so abandoned outside.

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 4

  Okay, relax now. Deep breaths. Control that urge to break something, to

  kill someone. Abandoned! What the hell does that mean?

  Make some coffee, then start again.

  Nothing happened. Of course, nothing happened. Am I mad? Am I jealous? Maybe I should be, but I'm not. Not now. No, I'm cool about it. Really. I still don't know what he means by “abandoned,” but deranged women are always falling for Sean—he has some sort of affinity with them. There was one crazy Welshwoman (whoops, tautology!) who wrote him a letter after he tutored her at an Open University summer school. She wanted him to come and join her commune, where they could bring in the harvest together, mow sheep, pluck trout from the clear, ice-cold brooks, make love under the stars etc., etc. He showed me the letter (which was written on childish note-paper with flowers and things), no doubt in an attempt to prove to me how much in demand he was and yet at the same time so honest and trustworthy. I ate it, but purely for comic effect, as we had friends around at the time.