How to Be Good (11 page)

‘I'm nothing. I've just seen sense.'

‘But what does that mean?'

‘We've all been living the wrong life, and I want to put that right.'

‘I don't feel I've been living the wrong life.'

‘I disagree.'

‘Oh, is that right?'

‘You live the right life during the working week, I suppose. But the rest of the time . . .'

‘What?'

‘There's your sexual conduct, for a start.'

My sexual conduct . . . For a moment I forget that for the last twenty years I have had a monogamous relationship with my husband, punctuated only recently by a brief and rather hapless affair (and what happened to him, by the way? A couple of unreturned phone calls seem to have dampened his ardour considerably). The phrase enables me to see myself as someone who may have to check herself into one of those sex addiction clinics that Hollywood stars have to go to, someone who, despite her best intentions, cannot keep her pants on. It's quite a thrilling picture, but its main purpose, I can see, is to convince me that David is being preposterous; the truth is that I am a married woman who was sleeping with someone else just a couple of weeks ago. David's language might be pompous, but there is, I suppose, a case to answer.

‘You've never wanted to talk about that.'

‘There isn't much to talk about, is there?'

I think about whether this is true and decide that it is. I could waffle on about context, but he knows about that already; the rest of it makes for a short and banal little story without much resonance.

‘So what else do I do wrong?'

‘It's not what you do wrong. It's what we all do wrong.'

‘Which is?'

‘We don't care enough. We look after ourselves and ignore the weak and the poor. We despise our politicians for doing nothing, and think that this is somehow enough to show we care, and meanwhile we live in centrally heated houses that are too big for us. . .'

‘Hey, hold on . . .' Our dream – before DJ GoodNews came into our lives, was to move out of our poky terraced house and into something that gave us room to turn around in without knocking a child over in the process. Now, suddenly, we are rattling around in Holloway's equivalent of Graceland. But I am allowed to say none of this, because David has the bit between his teeth.

‘We have a spare bedroom, and a study, and meanwhile people are sleeping outside on pavements. We scrape perfectly edible food into our compost maker, and meanwhile people at the end of our road are begging for the price of a cup of tea and a bag of chips. We have two televisions, we did have three computers until I gave one away – and even that was a crime, apparently, reducing the number of computers available to a family of four by one third. We think nothing of spending ten pounds each on a takeaway curry . . .'

I plead guilty to this. I thought David was going to say ‘. . . forty pounds a head on a meal in a smart restaurant', which we have done, on occasions – occasions which have, of course, prompted all sorts of doubts and qualms. But ten pounds on a takeaway? Yes, guilty, I admit it: I have frequently thought nothing of spending ten pounds on a takeaway, and it has never occurred to me that my thoughtlessness was negligent or culpable in any way. One has to respect David for this thoroughness, at least.

‘We spend thirteen pounds on compact discs which we already own in a different format . . .'

‘That's you, not me.'

‘. . . We buy films for our children that they've already seen at the cinema and never watch again . . .' There ensues a long list of similar crimes, all of which sound petty and, in any other household, completely legal, but which suddenly seem, with David's spin on them, selfish and despicable. I drift off for a while.

‘I'm a liberal's worst nightmare,' David says at the end of his litany, with a smile that could be described, were one feeling uncharitable or paranoid, as malicious.

‘What does that mean?'

‘I think everything you think. But I'm going to walk it like I talk it.'

 

On Sunday my mother and father visit for lunch. They don't come very often – usually we all have to go there – and when they do come I have somehow allowed myself to turn the day into An Occasion, thus inflicting on my children the misery that was inflicted on me during equivalent Occasions in my childhood: combed hair, the best clothes they possess, assistance in tidying up, attendance at table compulsory for the whole of the meal, even though my mother talks so much that the last mouthful of Viennese Whirl does not disappear down her throat for what seems like hours after the rest of us have finished. And, of course, a roast dinner, which my brother and I detested (very possibly because it was invariably detestable: gristly, dry lamb, overcooked cabbage, lumpy Bisto, greasy and disintegrating roast potatoes, the usual 1960s wartime fare), but which Tom and Molly love. Unlike either of my parents, David and I can cook; unlike either of my parents, we very rarely bother to waste this skill on our children.

Finally the clothes argument is over, the tidying has been done, my parents have arrived, and we are drinking our dry sherry and eating our mixed nuts in the living room. David has just gone into the kitchen to carve the beef and make the gravy. Moments later – much too soon to have achieved the tasks he disappeared to do – he comes back.

‘Roast beef and roast potatoes? Or frozen lasagne?'

‘Roast beef and roast potatoes,' the kids yell happily, and my mum and dad chuckle.

‘I think so, too,' says David, and disappears again.

‘He's a tease, your dad, isn't he?' says my mum to Tom and Molly – an appropriate response to what she has just seen and heard in just about any domestic situation but ours. David isn't a tease. He wasn't a tease before (he hated my parents' visits, and would never have been able to muster the kind of cheery goodwill necessary for joshing everyone along), and he certainly isn't a tease since his sense of humour disappeared into DJ GoodNews's fingertips along with his back pain. I excuse myself and go into the kitchen, where David is transferring everything we have spent the last couple of hours cooking into the largest Le Creuset casserole dish we own.

‘What are you doing?' I ask calmly.

‘I can't do this,' he says.

‘What?'

‘I can't sit here and eat this while there are people out there with nothing. Have we got any paper plates?'

‘No, David.'

‘We have. We had loads left over from the Christmas party.'

‘I'm not talking about the plates. You can't do this.'

‘I have to.'

‘I . . . I understand if you can't eat it.' (I don't understand at all, of course, but I'm trying to talk him off the ledge.) ‘You could refuse, and . . . and . . . tell us all why.' There is no point in worrying just yet about the excruciating lunch ahead of us, the embarrassment and bewilderment as my poor mother and father (Tories both, but neither of them actively evil, in the accepted non-David use of the word) receive a lecture about their wicked, wicked ways. In fact I vow to myself that if we get as far as the lunch, if this food is actually served on to actual plates and people (by which I mean people I know, God forgive me) actually sit down to eat it, I will not worry at all; I will listen to David's views with sympathy and interest. I watch while David crams the Delia-style roast potatoes into the dish. The painstakingly achieved crunchy golden shells
start to crumble as he attempts to wedge them down the side of the joint.

‘I have to give this away,' says David. ‘I went to the freezer to get the stock out and I saw all that stuff in there and . . . I just realized that I can't sustain my position any more. The homeless . . .'

‘FUCK YOUR POSITION! FUCK THE HOMELESS!' Fuck the homeless? Is this what has become of me? Has a
Guardian
-reading Labour voter ever shouted those words and meant them in the whole history of the liberal metropolitan universe?

‘Katie! What's going on?' My parents and my children have gathered in the doorway to watch; my father, still every inch of him a headmaster despite the decade of retirement, is red-faced with anger.

‘David's gone mad. He wants to give our lunch away.'

‘To whom?'

‘Tramps. Alkies. Drug addicts. People who have never done an honest day's work in their lives.' This is a desperate and blatant appeal to win my father over to my side, and I'm not proud of it, but I want my roast lunch. I WANT MY ROAST LUNCH.

‘Can I come, Daddy?' says Molly, whom I am learning to despise.

‘Of course,' says David.

‘Please, David,' I say again. ‘Please let us have a nice lunch.'

‘We can have a nice lunch. Just, not this lunch.'

‘Why can't they have the other lunch?'

‘I want to give them the hot one.'

‘We can make the other stuff hot. The lasagne. We'll microwave it and take it down this afternoon. Family outing.'

David pauses. We have, I feel, reached the moment in the movie when the armed but scared criminal pointing the gun at the unarmed policewoman begins to doubt the wisdom of what he is doing; the scene always ends with him throwing the gun on the ground and bursting into tears. In our version, David will take the lasagne out of the freezer tray and burst into tears. Who says that you can't make authentic British thrillers? What could be more thrilling than that?

David thinks. ‘It's more convenient for them, lasagne, isn't it?'

‘Absolutely.'

‘ 'Cos you don't have to carve it.'

‘No. You could just take the ladle.'

‘Yeah. Or even the, you know, the metal spatula.'

‘If you want.'

He stares at the joint and the beaten-up roast potatoes for a moment longer.

‘OK, then.'

My mum and dad and I breathe the sigh of the unarmed policewoman, and we sit down to eat in silence.

None of us feels like eating that night – not that there is much to eat anyway. I had planned to microwave the frozen lasagne, but there is none left. It has already been driven to Finsbury Park, where it was served up in paper plates to the winos who hang out on benches just inside the gates on Seven Sisters Road. (David dished it out on his own while the rest of us sat in the car. Molly wanted to go with him, but I wouldn't let her – not, if I am honest, because I thought she was in any danger, but because she is nauseating enough at the moment as it is. I was worried that if I had to watch her feeding the poor like an eight-year-old Dickensian charity lady I would begin to hate her too much to provide proper maternal care.)

When we get back home, I excuse myself and go and lie down in the bedroom with the Sunday papers, but I can't read them. The stories no longer refer to me me me, but to David, and the sorts of things he would Do Something About. After a little while I find that I am beginning to see news stories not in terms of information, but in terms of potential trouble for my family, and for the contents of my bank account and freezer. One article, about a group of Afghan refugees holed up in a church in Bethnal Green, I actually tear out and throw away, because it contains enough misery and hardship to starve us all.

I look at the gaping hole in the newspaper and suddenly feel very tired. We cannot live like this. Not true, of course, because we can, comfortably – less comfortably than before, maybe, but comfortably nonetheless – we will not starve, no matter how much lasagne is given away. OK, then. So. We can, but I don't want to. This is not the life I chose for myself. Except that is not true, either, because I did choose, I suppose, when I said that I would marry David for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall
live: this, obviously, is now more relevant than it has ever been, because he may well be sick, and poverty may well be approaching fast.

What did I think I was choosing, when I married David? What do any of us think we are choosing? If I try to recapture now the semi-formed fantasies I had then, I'd say they erred on the side of prosperity and health. I suppose I thought that we would be poor but happy to begin with – meaning that we would be living in a small cute flat, and spending a lot of time watching TV or drinking halves of beer in pubs, and making do with our parents' hand-me-down furniture. In other words, the difficulties I was prepared to tolerate in the early years of my marriage were essentially romantic in their nature, inspired by the clichés of young married life as depicted in TV comedies – or possibly, given that most TV comedies are more sophisticated and complex than my fantasies, by building society advertisements. Then later on, I thought, one set of difficulties (the difficulties posed by watching TV in a small flat, and by eating baked beans on toast) would be replaced by another: the difficulties that arose when you had two lovely, bright and healthy children. There would be muddy football boots and teenage daughters hogging the phone and husbands who had to be torn from the TV to do the washing-up . . . Golly gosh, there would be no end to those sorts of problems, and I was under no illusions: muddy football boots would be awfully trying! I was prepared, though. I wasn't green. I wasn't born yesterday. There was no way I was going to buy white rugs . . .

What you don't ever catch a glimpse of on your wedding day – because how could you? – is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever exchanging a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. Nor is it possible to foresee the desperation and depression, the sense that your life is over, the occasional urge to hit your whining children, even though hitting them is something you knew for a fact you would never ever do. And of course you don't think about having affairs, and when you get to that stage in life when you do (and everyone gets there sooner or later), you don't think of the sick feeling you
get in your stomach when you're conducting them, their inherent unhappiness. And nor do you think about your husband waking up in the morning and being someone you don't recognize. If anyone thought about any of these things, then no one would ever get married, of course they wouldn't; in fact, the impulse to marry would come from the same place as the impulse to drink a bottle of bleach, and those are the kinds of impulses we try to ignore, rather than celebrate. So we can't afford to think about these things because getting married – or finding a partner whom we will want to spend our lives with and have children by – is on our agenda. It's something we know we will do one day, and if you take that away from us then we are left with promotions at work and the possibility of a winning lottery ticket, and it's not enough, so we kid ourselves that it is possible to enter these partnerships and be faced only with the problems of mud removal, and then we become unhappy and take Prozac and then we get divorced and die alone.

Perhaps I am getting things out of proportion. Maybe all this contemplation of bleach-drinking and Prozac-munching and solitary deaths is an inappropriate response to the crime of giving lasagne away to starving drunks. On our wedding day, the vicar asked us, in that bit where he talks to the bride and groom privately, to respect one another's thoughts, ideas and suggestions. At the time, this seemed an unexceptionable request, easily granted: David for example suggests going to a restaurant, and I say, ‘OK then.' Or he has an idea for my birthday present. That sort of thing. Now I realize that there are all sorts of suggestions a husband might make to a wife, and not all of them are worthy of respect. He might suggest that we eat something awful, like sheep's brains, or form a neo-Nazi party. The same must apply to thoughts and ideas, surely? I am in the middle of pointing all this out to the vicar twenty years after the event when the doorbell rings. I ignore it, but a couple of minutes later David shouts up the stairs to tell me I have a visitor.

It's Stephen. My legs almost buckle when I see him, my husband standing next to him, my children running past him, like a scene from a film that mesmerizes simply because it is so far outside the scope of one's own imagination.

I start to introduce my lover to my husband, but David stops me.

‘I know who it is,' he says calmly. ‘Stephen introduced himself.'

‘Oh. Right.' I want to ask whether Stephen gave both his name and his position, as it were, but the atmosphere gives me all the answers I need.

‘I'd like to talk to you,' says Stephen. I look anxiously at David. ‘Both of you,' Stephen adds, although if this is meant to reassure me somehow, it fails. I don't want to talk. I want David and Stephen to go into a room, come out and tell me what to do. I'd do it, too – anything they came up with, as long as I didn't have to sit at the kitchen table with the two of them. David ushers Stephen past him, and we go and sit down at the kitchen table.

David offers Stephen a drink and I pray he doesn't want one. I get an awful vision of what life would be like while we were all waiting for the kettle to boil, or while David was rummaging through the freezer drawers trying to find the ice tray, and then bashing away at it for ten minutes.

‘Can I just have a glass of tap water?'

‘I'll get it.'

I jump up, grab a glass from the dishwasher, rinse it, fill it from the tap without letting the water run cool, and plonk it in front of him. No ice, no lemon, certainly no grace, but the hope that this might expedite things is dashed by David standing up.

‘How about you, Katie? Cup of tea? Shall I make a pot of real coffee?'

‘No!' I shriek.

‘How about if I put the kettle on, just in . . .'

‘Sit down, please.'

‘Right.'

He sits down, and we stare at each other.

‘Who wants to kick off, then?' David asks, relatively cheerily. I look at him. I'm not entirely sure that he is responding to the gravity of the moment. (Or am I being melodramatic, maybe even self-aggrandizing in some way? Maybe there is no gravity here. Maybe out in the world people do this all the time, hence David's breeziness. Am I taking it all too seriously, as usual?)

‘Maybe I should,' Stephen says. ‘Seeing as how I'm the one who's called the meeting, as it were.'

The two men smile, and I decide that my instinct just now was correct: I'm taking things way too seriously, and clearly this sort of thing does happen all the time, and my discomfort is indicative of a disastrous and embarrassing twentieth-century squareness. Maybe Stephen calls round to see the husbands of the women he has slept with on an almost weekly basis. Maybe . . . Maybe David does, which is why he seems to know what to do and say, and how to be.

‘I just kind of wanted to see where we were at,' says Stephen pleasantly. ‘I'm sorry not to call first or anything, but I left a couple of messages for Katie, and she didn't return them, and so I thought, why not take the bull by the horns sort of thing?'

‘Horns being the operative word,' says David. ‘Seeing as I'm wearing them.'

‘Sorry?'

‘The horns. Cuckold. Sorry. Stupid joke.'

Stephen laughs politely. ‘Oh, I see. That's quite good.'

‘Thank you.'

Maybe it's me. Maybe it's nothing to do with current North London sexual mores that I know nothing about, and maybe it's nothing to do with GoodNews and his effect on David; maybe it's just because I am simply not exciting enough for anyone to get worked up about. OK, I'm just about attractive enough for Stephen to want to sleep with me, but when it comes to jealous rages and dementedly possessive behaviour and lovelorn misery, I simply haven't got what it takes. I'm Katie Carr, not Helen of Troy, or Patti Boyd, or Elizabeth Taylor. Men don't fight over me. They saunter over on a Sunday evening and make weak puns.

‘If I can interrupt for a second,' I say tetchily, ‘I'd like to speed things up a bit. Stephen, what the hell are you doing here?'

‘Ah,' Stephen says. ‘The 64,000 dollar question. OK. Deep breath. David, I'm sorry if this comes as a shock, because you seem a decent sort of a guy. But, well . . . I've come to the conclusion that Katie doesn't want to be with you. She wants to be with me. I'm
sorry, but those are the facts. I want to talk about what . . . you know, about what we're going to do about it. Man to man.'

And now, when I hear the ‘facts' as presented by Stephen, my bleach-drinking view of marriage mysteriously evaporates. In fact, it has now transformed into a bleach-drinking view of Stephen, and I panic.

‘That's nonsense,' I tell anyone who will listen to me. ‘Stephen, you should stop now and go, before you make an idiot of yourself.'

‘I knew she'd say that,' says Stephen with a sigh and a sad, I-know-you-so-well smile. ‘David, perhaps you and I should talk privately.'

The outrageous cheek of this enrages me – ‘Sure, yes, right, I'll leave the room, and you tell me who I should be with when you've sorted it out' – but the truth is that I am tempted to leave, of course I am. I don't want to live through the next few hideous minutes of this conversation. I remember feeling the same way when I was giving birth to Tom: at one point, bombed out of my head on gas and air and then an epidural, I somehow became convinced it was the maternity room, rather than the baby, that was responsible for the pain I was in, and that if I left it then I could cop out of the whole thing. Not true then, and not true now – the agony has to happen regardless of where I am.

My snapping at Stephen seems merely to have emboldened and relaxed him.

‘David,' he says, ‘this might hurt, but . . . I know from having talked to Katie over the last couple of months that . . . Well, there are a lot of things that aren't right.'

David gently interrupts before Stephen has a chance to enumerate all the problems he thinks we have. ‘Katie and I have talked about that. We're working on it.'

I can't help but love David at this moment. He's calm when he has every right to be angry with everything and everyone, and as a result I feel, for the first time in a long time, that we are a unit, a couple, a marriage, and that marriage is, after all, something we should all aspire to. At this precise moment I'm happy to be in a marriage, to be two against one, to combine with my partner
against this destructive and dangerous outsider with whom I happen to have had sex. The alternative is three-cornered anarchy, and I'm too scared and too tired for that.

‘There are some things you can't sort out,' Stephen says. He won't make eye contact with any of us; he's staring into his glass of water.

‘Like?'

‘She doesn't love you.'

David looks at me, requiring some sort of reaction. I settle for a shake of the head and a roll of the eyes – a suitably ambiguous response, I hope, to what is, after all, a very complicated issue (two seconds ago I loved him, twenty minutes ago I hated him, earlier in the afternoon I wasn't bothered one way or the other, and so on and on, right back to the college disco, probably) – but neither the headshake nor the eye rolling seem to do the trick, because both of them are looking at me now.

‘I never said that,' I throw in hopefully.

‘You didn't have to,' says Stephen, and I can't deny that whenever I did speak about David, no one listening could have claimed that I was besotted with him. ‘And then there's the sex . . .'