The Marriage Diaries Read online

  But Harry I love. He woke for a moment when I went in to kiss him good-night. He gripped my shirt and said, “Stay.” I lay with him till he went back to sleep. Oh God. This is terrible.

  I tell myself that nothing will come of this. Such a drama queen. So much sound and fury signifying nothing. It will pass. But how can I love him anymore?

  SEANJOURNALEIGHT.DOC

  A BAGEL WITH HEGEL

  After the group today, Uma said, “Let's take them for a bagel.”

  “Okay.”

  I sometimes took Harry up to the new McDonald's in Hampstead, the one that nobody wanted. I knew it was bad, but he liked it, and the toys that came with the Happy Meal kept him busy while I read the paper. But, as I said, I knew it was wrong, and I was glad for an alternative. And I thought it might be fun. With Uma.

  The bagel café was on one of the cute little historical alleyways that's hardly changed since 1998. And yes, there were bagels. Harry liked bagels. He liked them plain, with nothing on them except more bagel. Uma gave her boy one piled high with broccoli and alfalfa sprouts and other good things.

  “Funny,” I said, “how many philosophers have names rhyming with bagel.”

  “Yeah, funny,” she said, rather than a helpful “Really, I hadn't thought. You mean like … ?”

  “Oh yes, many, er, many.” Now I'd gone and fucking forgotten them. Uma was looking out the big window at people passing by, many of them with dogs.

  “Tell me, if you must.”

  “Well, Hegel, of course. And Ernst Nagel. And the brothers F. W and S. F. Schlegel.”

  “You made the last two up.”

  “I didn't. Well, the initials. I can't remember what they were, but they were definitely called Schlegel. They invented Romanticism. And there are more, but I can't remember them now.”

  Uma had by now entirely disengaged from the discussion. When I didn't say anything for a few seconds, she looked at me and said, “Have we finished with the bagel talk yet? Because, you know, really it wasn't very interesting.”

  I was embarrassed and annoyed.

  “Look, Uma,” I said, making sure that Harry and Uma's child were out of earshot—yes, they were playing on a squidgy sofa upstairs—“first, and I've noticed this about you, you never try to say anything interesting yourself, and then when anyone else makes a bit of an effort, all you do is slag them off. And second, if you find my company so distasteful, then why do you send me what can only be described as flirty e-mails, full of explicit stuff? Christ, I mean I didn't start flirting with you. If truth be told, I don't even want to flirt with you—I was just doing it to be polite.”

  “Flirty e-mails? My God but you're prim. I send about a million e-mails a day. The ones I send to you I send to almost everyone I know. It's what e-mail is for. It's not flirting, it's communicating.”

  “So that stuff about needing a fuck and using the doorknob if you didn't get one wasn't … aimed at me?”

  “Did you look at the address list?”

  “My program doesn't show it unless I tell it to.”

  She laughed her throaty, dirty laugh and then set her face in a mask of mocking piety.

  “I'm really sorry if I gave you the wrong idea or caused any offense. I won't send you any more.”

  “Doesn't your partner mind? I mean about the mucky e-mails?”

  Uma had never mentioned the father of her child. I presumed he was something boring, and, as we've established, she didn't like to talk about boring things.

  “Don't ever use that word again. If you mean boyfriend, say boyfriend. If you mean husband, say husband.”

  “Jesus, I said partner, not pimp. What's wrong with partner?”

  “I don't like it.”

  “Doesn't your husband mind?”

  “I'm not married.”

  “Doesn't your boyfriend mind?”

  “I haven't got one. I'm a single parent.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Don't be. I'm not.”

  I don't know why, but after that, we started to have a good time. The tension between us disappeared, and I gave her an amusing account of Hegel's philosophy, and she told me her favorite sexual positions, but in a very nonflirty way. I realized that I'd made a bad mistake. She was just a larger-than-life character, full of sauce and vim. And now it looks like we might manage to be friends.

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 9

  Ah. Just when I'd managed to work myself up to the point where I might be able to have some fun with revenge, it transpires that they are nothing but good friends. But it doesn't get him entirely off the hook. The fact is, he's been flirting with this bizarre woman, this fiend with her “positions” and no partner, and who sexually assaults doorknobs and God knows what else. I mean, how the hell does she do that? I tried—I don't mean tried doing it, I mean tried seeing how it might be done, if one wanted to, which I certainly don't. It's impossible, and I've had four years of yoga. Unless you stand on a pile of books—say, four inches high—and bend down facing away from the door, and let it take you from behind, praying all the time your mother doesn't pop round or your toddler wake up. No, you'd have to be mad.

  And though he's off the hook in terms of immediate retribution, reading about his involvement made me feel that something had changed, that the complicated balance of dissatisfaction, inertia, virtue, had swung or dipped or whatever complicated balances do. Or perhaps more like a tooth cracking, and though it may hold out for a while, you know that eventually it means the dentist; it means the drill.

  I'm trying to make light of it, but I do feel hurt by all this. Not just Sean's flirtation with the Uma woman; more that sense that I'm not at the center of his world anymore. For so long, I was. Each morning I knew that he would wake up thinking about me and go to sleep thinking about me and then think about me for a lot of the time in between. And it worked the other way round, of course. He was at my center, too. Even at work, when I was supposed to be Little Miss Focused, I'd come across something, a picture, a word, and think, Sean would laugh at that, or I'd pull off some minor triumph, and it would only count for anything once I'd told Sean about it. When Harry came, things changed, and the love and attention got spread around a little more, but there was still plenty of it, or there seemed to be. But now it feels as though the spreading's gone too far, and there's not enough left to cover us all.

  Is this the way a marriage ends, like the bathwater going slowly cold? Or does something dramatic have to happen, a big bang, some shock and awe, a 9/11? I don't want it to. End, I mean. But I miss the being-at-the-center feeling. I miss the love piled thick and heavy.

  And then, talking of something dramatic, Sean arranged a night at the theater with Katie and Ludo. Not exactly my idea of fun— something improving at the National. More Sean's kind of thing than mine, really, but for Sean to arrange anything at all is a rarity, so I was happy to make the most of it. And I hadn't seen Katie for a while, and she always has something vicious to say to help the intermission drinks go down.

  Shame, in a way, that Ludo was going to be there. Easy on the eye, of course, if you go for that grim and chiseled look, but you'd hardly call him amusing company. If it were just me and Katie, we could cut the play and spend the evening being funny about our husbands. Our husbands. How strange and grown-up that sounds.

  But then, half an hour before blastoff, the babysitter, Astrid—a sallow German girl somehow related to the people who live below us, and here to study medicine—called to say she had jaundice and couldn't make it.

  We looked at each other. I didn't want to go on my own, but he got in first with a typical “You go. Anyway, I've got work to do. I need to finish my piece for the radio tomorrow. It's about the time I left Harry on a Jubilee line tube and had to collect him from lost property.”

  “Please tell me you didn't really do that. Did you?”

  “No. But I nearly did. Poetic license. They expect it of me now.”

  So I went. At least it meant I could get a taxi and
not wait for a bus, or until they built a methane gas-powered hydro-tram, which would have been Sean's preferred option. And then, the strangest thing. Ludo turned up on his own. I was in the lobby, exactly on time, as I always am, and he just strode in, wearing tweeds worn smooth with time, and said, “Sorry, Celeste, Katie can't come.”

  “Not ill, I hope?”

  “No, not ill. A production crisis, she said. Had to stay late at work. Where's Sean?”

  “Bloody babysitter. Needs a new liver or something, selfish cow.”

  “Drat. I'm sorry. If you'd rather just go home, that's fine.”

  I won't say my heart hadn't sunk. This was the nightmare scenario. Just Katie would be great, ideal—we had plenty to bitch about. Ludo with Katie was bearable. But Ludo on his own! And then I looked at his face. He so expected me not to want to be there with him. Humility is seldom an attractive quality. Too often it's a weird way of showing off, and when it's not that, then its just sickly. But there was nothing flashy or sickly about Ludo's humility. He just didn't expect me to want to spend the evening in a theater with him. It was sort of nice and unassuming. And the wholly appropriate humility exuded by a pimply jerk (sorry, but I have someone in mind) is not at all the same thing as humility in the form of six feet two of big bone and muscle and broad chest and handsome head and gray-brown eyes. And those hands of his. Broken but clean nails, fingers that looked like they could tie knots in razor wire. Strong, competent, mastering hands. Even thinking about them now makes me feel funny.

  “Fuck it,” I said, knowing the impact it always had on men when I swore, how they were shocked and yet liked it, liked it a lot. “I'm here now. And I've always wanted to see …”—I looked quickly at the poster … Shit, how do you pronounce that?—“Philoctetes.”

  Ludo looked for a second as though he were going to correct me but then said, “Yes, it never gets a run out. Sophocles’ most neglected work. It's the subject matter, of course.”

  “Mmm,” I said, as he guided me into the bit of the theater where the seats are. Because I'd assumed Katie would be there, I was wearing the sort of clothes that she would appreciate and, with any luck, be put out by—my Miu Miu sixties shift in jade silk. Too demure for a boy to understand, but at least I'd been waxed that week, and I had on my Emma Hope beaded gold T-strap heels. Very sexy.

  Ludo was right about the subject matter. A man has a bow-and-arrow arrangement that can't miss. Some other men want him to help them fight a war. But he gets bitten by a snake, and the wound turns into a horrid, smelly, suppurating boil, and he moans a lot. So they dump him. Then things start to go badly in the war, and so they send someone to get the magic bow. Long arguments follow, but the upshot is that he goes back, and the Greeks beat the Trojans and Helen's restored to her rightful place and Troy gets burned to the ground. The play only had the middle bit, the bit with all the talking and none of the killing, but with lots of boil and lots of wailing.

  Sean would have done several things with a night like that. He would first have royally slagged off everything about the translation, the performance, and the staging. He would then have launched out on some crazy interpretation of his own, gesticulating and shouting and making people on the underground stop and stare. All Ludo did was tell me the backstory, as we sipped our intermission gins, and nod when I, quite out of character, suggested that the “message” (how I cringe now) was that you can't have the good thing (the magic bow) without the bad thing (the smelly boil). I may even have said that marriage was a bit like that, although I'm sure I stopped short of pointing out what about Sean was bow and what was boil. He looked very earnest at that, furrowing his brow in a way I'd never seen anyone do before. When I told him how good he was at this sort of thing—encouraging and explaining—he said, “I should be. It was my job. I was a teacher.”

  “I had no idea,” I said. “I thought you'd always worked at Penny Moss with Katie. Isn't Penny your mother?”

  “Yes, but, well, I only started there when Penny … when Penny left. I had to help out. It meant … losing a lot of things that had been important to me. But, hey,” he said—and I could see the effort he was putting into sounding cheerful—“there were big gains, too. Working with Katie. It's good having something in common we can talk about.”

  Well, that didn't sound too healthy. They'd reached the stage at which the only thing they had left to chat about was business. At least Sean and I still talked about, well, things. Didn't we?

  After the intermission, I found that we were, mysteriously, sitting slightly closer together. There was a space under the armrest, and our hips touched in a way I hadn't noticed before. Perhaps, I thought, it's because we were both angling our upper bodies away and leaning on the opposed armrests, me on the left, him on the right. I tried shifting so that my right arm was on the rest. And a thrilling second later, he did the same and our arms were on abutting rests, touching from elbow to shoulder. It quite took my mind off the boil, which, all things considered, was good.

  It must have been then, or around then, that I realized two things. The first was that Ludo was attracted to me. It wasn't a tough call. His movements, his voice, his eyes—they all said the same thing. But I also sensed the struggle within him, the battle between his desire and his conscience. And that struggle, the twists and contortions, gave his desire a rich and sinewy quality, and I liked it.

  And that was the second thing I realized. Sometimes you stumble across a feeling you never expected to find, and it can either be a nasty shock, like the moth in the cupboard, or a moment of stunned pleasure. And there it was, lying inside me, tightly bound and coiled but impossible to ignore.

  When the play ended, and the interminable clapping died away, I suggested that we go for a drink somewhere. I mentioned a little bar I knew, a fashiony hangout. It was a test. Ludo famously hates the fashion world, more even than Sean. If he agreed to come along, well, then, … well, then, who knew what he'd do?

  It wasn't very full, and there was no one there I knew, which was lucky, but also a bit disappointing. I could tell that Ludo was uncomfortable in the blue neon, and he looked at the Philippe Stark bar stool as if it were a gay sex toy with designs on him. He bought me a green cocktail recommended by Vic, the Australian barman, who was the one person there who did know who I was. He gave me a smirk, which was sweet of him.

  “So, apart from working all hours, how is Katie?” I asked, as soon as we were comfortable in a Barbarella booth.

  “Well, you know how Katie is,” he replied.

  I did know just how she was. Katie had used Ludo as a ladder from the shop floor up to the production office. People sometimes said that we were alike. And perhaps we were, in some ways. In fact, if you set out our likes and dislikes side by side, you'd find a lot of things in common. Clothes, books, films, music: the things you pick up from the world around you. But I'd been luckier than her, and my path had been easier. Things had been given to me that she had had to fight for. And the fact that she'd had to scramble had left its mark on her. You could sometimes sense resentment in the set of her jaw, fear in the lines around her eyes, anxiety in the quick, nervous movement of her fingers.

  Great shoes, though.

  “And you, Ludo, how are you?”

  He didn't answer but took a swig from his bottle of beer. I'd known Ludo, or rather known of him, for a long time. He was at school with several of my exes. I'd always thought of him as the dull one, and my boyfriends always laughed at him behind his back and almost as often to his face. He liked birds. I tried again.

  “How do you like working in fashion? I never pictured you at Penny Moss.”

  “Not quite how I pictured myself, either. But I'm not really anything to do with the fashion. I help with the books. And delivering. I drive the van.”

  He was looking like a downed pilot interrogated by the Iraqi secret police.

  “Are you happy?” Not a fair question, I know, but sometimes that's just the way things are.

  He looked at m
e. “I enjoyed tonight. Did you?”

  “Apart from the boil.”

  “How's little Harry?” he said after a moment, in an obvious attempt to steer the subject to safer waters.

  “Sweet as anything.”

  “You're lucky that Sean's so … good with him.”

  “Ha! And doesn't he let the whole world know about it.”

  He laughed. “That's not fair. He never … criticizes … you. He does moan a bit, though. In a joking way.”

  Ludo and Sean weren't exactly friends, but they'd been out for a few drinks together, along with Sean's other weird “mates.” During some football tournament or other, they used to go to a pub and watch the games on a big screen. Once the girls were invited. It wasn't a success. Not so much the game as the venue, and the ugly shouting men, their beer guts bursting out of replica England shirts. The experiment wasn't repeated.

  “And you and Katie? Any thoughts … ?”

  “We were both keen for a while. When I came back from Scotland—I'd been helping there with a conservation project. But nothing came of it, and now, well, she's very busy.”

  “And very slim.”

  He guffawed.

  “Look who's talking.”

  I smiled back. I knew this was his way of making a compliment.

  “Everyone's thin in fashion.”

  Although the booth we were in was very nice and cozy, there was none of the thigh touching we'd had in the theater. In fact, he seemed to be trying deliberately to distance himself and had slid around to the far side.

  On an impulse, I asked him, “Has he ever mentioned someone called Uma Thursday? Stupid name.”

  He looked uneasily at the label on his beer bottle.

  “That's the woman at his playgroup. The Freudian one. He's very funny about it.”

  So, she did exist. Or at least her invention wasn't confined to his silly journal.