The Marriage Diaries Page 5

  As the Sean Lovell journal is clearly going to be a bit light on facts and rather stronger on fantasy, I ought, perhaps, to set some facts down. Or one big one, at least. Harry was born on January 15, exactly two years, three months, and six days ago, which makes him twenty-eight months, or according to Sean, two and a bit. For Sean, there are two units of measurement when it comes to children's ages. There is the year. And there is the bit.

  That also makes him, like his father, a Capricorn. Sean told me that, according to an ex-girlfriend of his (there are lots of them, and he has a very bad habit of beginning a sentence by saying “My ex-girlfriend …”) who used to work as an astrologer for a Sunday tabloid newspaper, 50 percent of prison wardens are Capricorn. Reliable, steady, ambitious, rule-obsessed, boring. If only Sean had been truer to the type.

  I can't remember anything about the cesarean, so I'm afraid we're stuck with the recollections of our unreliable narrator. But if I'd known how bad he thought it was for me, I'd have made more capital out of it. Such a missed opportunity.

  The week in the Lindo Wing of St. Mary's hospital, Paddington, was one of the loveliest of my life. Showered with flowers (except by Sean—he brought me a supermarket pot of basil, which he thought “more practical”), brought food on a tray, nothing to do but lie with my beautiful baby. “Beautiful” I should have said, stressing the quotes. I'd always assumed that I was above the foolish delusions of motherhood, but looking now at the photographs of Harry, I can see that he wasn't remotely beautiful; no angel then, but an imp, red and blotchy and oozing. But he sucked and slept, in an easy rhythm, and I showed him to all my friends with a “Beat that, then” look on my face.

  Sean bicycled backward and foreward, and my main concern that week was that he'd be knocked down by a bus before he'd had the chance to keep his promise about being a househusband. And though, of course, that wasn't the main reason I married him, it was, you know, part of the package. I loved my job too much to want to give it up, but I never liked the idea of depositing my child with strangers. A partner who actually seemed to want to stay at home sounded like the ideal solution. I'd be lying if I said that a worm of guilt didn't wiggle and dig at the back of my mind. Guilt about leaving my boys to fend for themselves. But the world is the way it is, and wishing can't change it.

  The first week back at home was more traumatic. I still spent most of my time in bed, but I knew that the apartment was slowly decaying around me.

  It was then that I started to interview cleaning ladies. Someone recommended Janice, and she seemed quite capable. Sean gave a sort of grumbling approval, swayed by the fact that Janice was, for a cleaner, quite pretty. Certainly a notch up from the old Irish and Polish women with varicose veins and head scarves, their mops at the ready, who passed for the competition. After a few days, it was safe for me and the baby to come out.

  Sean's general hopelessness around the house used to bother me more than it does now. Even more than the messiness, I mind his inability to find anything. Almost every morning begins with a list of “wheresmys”: “Where's my socks? Where's my trousers? Where's my wallet? Where's my keys?” When I berate him, he just says, “I'm not very good at finding things; I'm not very good at looking.” Now, as far as I can see, not being good at “ ” works where “——” equals tennis or tightrope walking or algebra, but not for things such as ordinary walking, not on a tightrope, or breathing or finding things. Oh, unless, of course, you're one of the people who are supposed to find those sorts of things difficult, if you haven't got enough legs or whatever. It's all because he just can't really be bothered with it and nothing to do with not having the right genes or, his usual excuse, having his mind fixed on “higher matters.”

  Harry slept a lot, and we had peaceful mornings reading the newspapers in Starbucks, only slightly spoiled by Sean complaining about globalization and saying that with every sip another child died in slavery or poverty or impoverished slavery, and it was all my fault. It didn't seem to stop his eating two muffins with his grande latte.

  It must have been a black, cold time, but my memories are drenched in warmth. My abiding memory is of the two of us walking through the streets soaking up the admiration of the world for our baby. Think new mothers must get tired of strangers cooing? Think again. You're perhaps confusing it with the heavily pregnant woman's hatred of having her bump patted by anyone other than her gynecologist or her husband. On second thought, strike “husband.” And particularly by the sort of weirdo perverts who just come up to you in the street and have a feel, as if the bulge belongs to the world. “Fancy a squeeze of my tits as well, eh?” I often wanted to yell at the postman or the old bag downstairs with her lipstick and her claws. “What about my fanny? Go on, have a feel.” But once the thing was out of me, I bitterly resented anyone who didn't stop to ogle the contents of my stroller.

  I seriously thought about fashioning a giant pointing finger to suspend above the stroller, with the words “i made this ” painted on it. But that was the time of hormonal flux, and I thought lots of crazy things. The maddest of all, the one that should have been enough on its own to get me institutionalized, medicated, possibly even lobotomized, was “Oh, wouldn't it be fun to have

  another.”

  Raymond is disappointed about the continuing poverty of my sexual fantasies. I told him about Uma Thursday, and he suggested that I might secretly want a threesome, and couldn't I open myself up to that in imagination as a way of transcending it?

  “No,” I said.

  On a whim, I looked up “xanthar gum” from the previous journal entry. I thought it was too good to be true. It should be “xanthan gum,” an anagram of “thannax” and “naxthan,” but not “anthrax.” I wish I hadn't looked it up, because the actual substance turns out to be even more disgusting than the name sounds. “A powdery polysaccharide composed of glucose, mannose, and glucuronic acid, produced”—and this is the yucky bit—“by the bacteria Xanthomonas campestris and used in drilling muds and the food industry.”

  And they put it in baby food! Such are the pitfalls on the quest for knowledge.

  SEANJOURNALFOUR.DOC

  NYMPHO WOMAN FROM PLANET IDIOT

  With my accumulated vacation and paternity leave, I had, if I needed it, three months off work. Celeste had arranged the same amount of maternity leave. Bliss predominated. Celeste was proving to be a surprisingly competent mother. I'd secretly had her down as the kind who would eat her own young when stressed, but as the breast-feeding took hold, the eating was all the other way round.

  Although I'd promised to look after Harry, we still weren't sure exactly what that meant—whether I'd go part-time or take a longer break or pack the whole thing in forever. But as those three months progressed, the knowledge grew between us that I wouldn't be going back to work at all. We did discuss other possibilities: muddling through, with both of us working part-time, her parents helping out, and some kind of childminder taking up any slack. But fitting all those elements together was an intellectual task beyond either of our sleep-deprived brains. Celeste earned a lot more than I did, or could, and so she was never going to take the permanent-full-time-mother route. Logic, circumstance, and Celeste demanded that it be me.

  So I went back to the Culture Department for a day and handed in my notice. The resignation letter wasn't hard. I'd been writing them ever since I first became a civil servant, and I'd saved them all on my hard disk, numbered joy1.doc and so on, right up to joy9. Joy4 was the shortest (“I find that I am unable to go on”), and joy7, the most baroque, beginning as it did with a detailed description of the glorious death of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, before the walls of Constantinople in 1453 and going on to mention the battle for Stalingrad, the extinction of steller's sea cow (a close relation of the manatee and dugong), the breakup of the Beatles, and England's exit from the 1996 European Championship finals after a penalty shoot-out.

  My manager looked relieved rather than actively pleased, as though she'd finall
y found a cigarette machine prepared to believe that her stash of Polish zlotys were really pound coins. At least she didn't whoop. Leaving necessarily involved a leaving party and some sort of presentation. I made it clear that, instead of the usual parting gift, any collection should be given to charity. In honor of my new status, I suggested either Save the Children or Children in Need. From the puzzled looks around me, I deduced that there had, in fact, been no thought of a collection. But after my hint, the hat was passed around pretty quickly, and upon my departure, the children of the world were better off by nearly seven pounds, or one and a half measles vaccinations, a new bucket for the well in Somalia, or a two months’ supply of condoms for an overstretched family in Peru.

  There was also an embarrassingly large leaving card signed by lots of people whom I didn't know and who were unlikely to have known me. Trying to write something original and witty on a leaving card is one of the great trials of civil service life. I had some success, in my time, with anagrams, my best achievement being, on the retirement of a senior official: “Did you know that Stuart Kingaby is a big nasty turk?” But nobody had bothered much with mine. There were several “cheers,” endless “best wishes,” and one “love” from somebody called Humbert, which, unless it was the little man with whole-body dandruff who hung around by the water cooler, was likely to be a nom de plume. Lucinda, the office fox, hadn't signed it at all, despite the fact that we had a seven-minute snog in a cupboard followed by a nine-second shag in the service elevator at the Christmas party the year before I got married. Perhaps she'd just never recovered from the blow of losing me or was still irritated about the dry cleaning bill (“It won't come off—they'll all see.” “Try spit.” “I've tried it. Have you got a hanky?”).

  Then, as I was finally leaving the civil service altogether rather than just skipping departments, some of my old colleagues from years gone by turned up, in a Night of the Living Dead kind of way. I'd managed to forge myself a reasonably cool persona at Culture, but the sudden appearance of the bandaged and bedraggled crew from Customs, the Department of Health, and the Overseas Development Agency hauling themselves through the pub door did nothing for my credibility. At least two old flames materialized, both looking much, much worse than I remembered. Shirley Essen had run to fat, and Miriam Restorick now appeared to be sixty-two years old. The worst thing was that they actually looked quite disappointed at how I'd weathered.

  The drift away began as soon as the fifty quid I'd put behind the bar ran out, and I was left almost on my own, chatting with the One Who Might Have Been Humbert. He was telling me about his skin condition. Already, twice that evening, he had disappeared into the gents to reapply his WD-40 cream (or whatever it was), but within ten minutes of the ritual smearing, his skin would lose the fatty glisten it had temporarily acquired and again take on the look of scorched puff pastry. Many of his words began with a peculiar nasal sound, as if he were trying to swallow a buildup of snot from the back of his face.

  “Nnngthbegan when nnngthI was nnngthseven,” he was saying.

  I tried not listening and just saying “Really” and “Oh” in a prime-number sequence of my own devising.

  And then there came a tiny shimmer from the line of optics behind the bar and a sound of sighing, and a light without source filled the pub, and Celeste stood by me. I'd forgotten she was coming. Her parents were babysitting. It was the first time she'd been out since the birth. It was about eight o'clock.

  “Hi,” she said. “Your crowd not here yet? I've brought Milo and Galatea along.”

  Fantastic. Just what I needed. Celeste's two most fashionably sneering friends to witness my shame. Milo was the head of some sort of PR company and combined a camp effervescence with a streak of cartoon villainy. I'd first met him at a party years before, and his barely understandable opening words to me were, I'm fairly sure, “Sorry, can't kiss now, mouth full of cum.” I'd heard he'd recently arrived back from “updating” the Dalai Lama's image. (“Think we need a harder edge, you know, more street punk, more leather, more spacey, yeah?”) Galatea was the world's trendiest designer. Celeste would soon ask her to work on our new apartment, but she replied that she didn't “do domestic” with all the haughty grandeur of a high-class prostitute saying that she didn't do anal.

  I knew that my job had always been a bit of a joke to Celeste and her friends. Apart from me, she didn't know anyone who wasn't either doing something glamorous in fashion or the media or at least earning enough in the City to buy into those worlds, taking on the glamour by association. There'd be a look of mixed puzzlement and boredom when I told her friends what I did. “Why?” they'd ask with their eyes, “why do that?” as if I'd just told them I was a professional fish wanker. But they managed to make me feel embarrassed, despite myself, and then I'd feel ashamed of being embarrassed.

  “Here yet?” I said. “Well, some have gone already, you know … top civil servants, early starts … and we began drinking, … but there's still a few around. This is, um, Humbert.”

  “Nnngthello,” said Humbert.

  Before he had the chance to show them his embrocation, I hurriedly waved behind me, saying, as I turned, “And here's …” But all I could see was Shirley, sitting with her chubby legs and mouth open, looking, in her white vinyl microskirt, like an extra from the 1950s cult classic Nympho Woman from Planet Idiot. Obviously the succession of Tia Marias had softened her disappointment in my appearance, and she was hanging on in the hope of a knee-trembler round by the garbage cans.

  “Such a long time since I've been to an actual pub,” said Milo. “All this jouissance I've been missing out on. And, look, they have etched glass, and here's a man with authentic BO and a real stain down his trousers serving people drinks.”

  Galatea sniggered.

  I'd always fancied Galatea—she had the kind of dark naughtiness that I prized—but now I hated her for being there. I had no word for my feelings about Milo, more just a series of images: a mushroom cloud with the word Why? emblazoned across it, a swarm of locusts, a skull and crossbones. He represented everything I despised about the modern world: he was shallow, cynical, rich, good-looking, successful, popular.

  Celeste, Milo, and Galatea were whispering together.

  “We thought we'd go on to the Met Bar,” said Celeste cheerily. “Why don't you come along? It'll be fun. Most of the gang'll be there—Katie, Veronica, everyone.”

  “No, you go on. I'll stay here. Not the done thing to flee your own leaving do while there's still a man left standing. Anyway, me and Humbert were just about to get to the bottom of his skin complaint.”

  They left. After half an hour—no, it wasn't psoriasis or eczema, but a rare and deep-seated fungal condition (and sadly he was allergic to most of the antifungal agents)—Shirley came over, and she and Humbert soon went around the back, his love for me proving as fickle as hers.

  And so I departed the civil service, with no regrets and an index-linked pension already worth £42 per calendar month, payable from August 2025.

  No e-mails or calls for six days now. I feel something about this, but I genuinely don't know if it is relief or disappointment. She makes things difficult and complicated, but in a way I seem to like, seem to want. Funny. What she doesn't do is make me feel good about myself. She has a way of maneuvering me into situations in which none of the things that I say—I mean, none of the things that I usually say, my little evasions, jokes, routines—work. So I'm left like a big, dumb idiot, with no choice but to act. And this vexes me because my whole life has been based around saying and not doing.

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 5

  What now, after SEANJOURNALFOUR.DOC, should I make of Uma Thursday? After reading Sean's last paragraph, I seriously thought about bringing her up. But that would have given away the fact that I've been reading what he writes, and then I'd lose my advantage. I assumed that he'd have dropped her into the conversation before now. I mean, it's what you do, isn't it? You talk about people you've seen during the
day, funny things that happened. So why hasn't he?

  She obviously goes to his playgroup, and so I tried asking about the other mothers, what they were like. He just said, “God, I couldn't even begin to describe them. They're from all over the place, and most of them are insane or disturbed. There's someone called Brenda. She doesn't like being called Brenda.”

  “Are any of them pretty?”

  “Pretty? Jesus, no. Well, there's a beautiful Somali woman. Can't remember what she's called.”

  What could I then do? Ask if there was anyone there named after a day of the week? No, as long as I'm confident nothing has happened, and as long as I have the journal to keep me up to date, I think I should keep my powder dry.

  Anyway, I feel relatively benign after finding out that at least I wasn't the Nympho Woman from Planet Idiot. And so, Uma aside, I'm prepared to let go the gratuitous dragging in of ex-girlfriends and the frankly disgusting tales of office-party fornication, assuming it really was before we were married.

  But of course, whatever he believes, we'd thoroughly discussed the arrangements for Harry, and of course, Sean had insisted that he would leap at the chance to give up his boring work to look after him. Too, too naughty to suggest that he was somehow bamboozled into the whole thing.

  As for his paranoid fantasies about none of my friends liking him, well, it may be true that some of them were a little surprised about my choice of life partner, but, on the whole, they were fully supportive of my right to make my own mistakes. And if he was (and is) looked upon as something of an oddity, I don't believe that there has been anything that could be called a discourteous or malicious snubbing. All of the rudeness has, in fact, been directed the other way, with Sean playing his man-of-the-people part or setting himself up as a hammer of the London Elite. Most unconvincing now that he's become part of it.