William Walkers First Year of Marriage (10 page)

Isabel meets me at work unexpectedly and behaves quite erratically. She wants to take me out for a pre-birthday drink. I say we have to go home and clean the flat, ready for the four people who were bothering to turn up to the world’s least-attended thirtieth. She says to hell with it, we’re going for a drink.

We have to go to a bar in Soho. One where we used to go when we couldn’t stop snogging each other. One where Saskia and I used to go because it had a hidden downstairs bit. It is the last place I want to be. Saskia is bound to strut in any minute. I contemplate coming clean to Isabel, given the fact that I haven’t actually done anything wrong, but she’s in such a good mood, and she’s obvi
ously more excited about my wretched birthday than I am. So I don’t. I continue to live the lie.

Then, halfway through the drink in the bar I don’t want to be in, Isabel receives a mysterious mobile call, won’t say who it is, then says we have to go home, she’s not feeling well. No, we can’t finish our drink. We have to go now. Right now. Then she takes another call as we’re on the way to the Tube, mutters something to whoever it is, tells me it’s her mum, then says she’s feeling better, let’s go for another drink.

As soon as I’ve battled to the bar of some horribly busy it’s-a-Friday-night pub, established it is Saskia-free, got drinks and settled down, Isabel says she’s feeling unwell again.

Period pain.

Before I can protest, we are on the Tube; then we’re run-walking through Finsbury Park. If I slow down, Isabel says hurry up. When I say I’m not going any faster and that if she’s feeling unwell, shouldn’t we take it a bit easier, she says she’s got diarrhoea, which makes me have Vietnam-style flashbacks to the honeymoon. So now we’re sprinting down our road, making a big scene, and I’m carrying all the bags so Isabel can get the key ready. I don’t know why she couldn’t have gone to the toilet in the pub and I don’t know why I have to run as well. When we reach the flat, Isabel opens the outside door and stops.

‘You go first,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a stone in my shoe.’

‘But I thought you were about to explode,’ I reply, hot and bothered, as I push past her and climb up the stairs. While I fumble for the key to the door of the flat in the pitch darkness of the upstairs landing, Isabel is standing in the hall not looking very unwell at all. I’m weighed down by her ridiculously heavy work bag and she’s just standing by the light switch that quite clearly needs flicking on while I scratch away at the paintwork on the door with a key that I can’t be sure is the right one because it’s so dark. And that’s when I snap.

‘Turn the light on, you stupid cow,’ I shout in a flash of fury brought on by a freak combination of alcohol, exhaustion, Saskiarelated stress and eve-of-thirtieth depression. This is easily the worst thing I’ve ever shouted at Isabel. I’m not the sort of person that calls people stupid cows, not to their faces anyway. And never Isabel, woman of my dreams, etc, etc. It was just a sudden, uncharacteristic verbal splurge, never to be repeated.

So it’s a shame that, in the same second the blasphemy comes out, the key finds the keyhole, the door swings open and I step into a room full of friends standing motionless, clutching party poppers.

‘Happy birthday!’ they all shout, their faces etched with My God We Didn’t Know He Was a Wife-Beater horror. Half-heartedly, someone blows a party whistle. Hoorah, I am popular after all. Or at least I was.

Thirty, thirty, thirty. Sod it.

Mum called, as she does every year, at 7.04 a.m. and tells me her birth story.

‘This time thirty years ago, I was lying prostrate…thirty-eight hours of agony…a student doctor…epidural headache…forceps weren’t big enough for your head…came out sideways…your father thought he had a brain-damaged wife and a mongrel for a son…’

Isabel wakes while I’m on the phone and scrawls on a piece of paper, ‘I want you packed and ready to leave in one hour.’ So I stop Mum mid-sentence and follow Isabel through to the kitchen, the full impact of my ‘stupid cow’ faux pas sinking in only now. But it turns out she’s coming with me…on my surprise weekend away. The ‘stupid cow’ thing is long forgotten, silly me. She is so great.

Two hours later we’re in a traffic jam crawling south but it’s okay because this is all part of the surprise weekend and at least we’re out of London and away from Saskia and I’m determined not to spoil it.

It’s a furnace-hot August day and, now that we’re in the country, the overpopulated stinking metropolis well behind us, even the fact that I am thirty isn’t bothering me. Thirty is nothing. Barely even started. Decades and decades to go.

Now we’re in Sussex, driving up a drive so long and well-weeded, I thank my stars I did go for chinos rather than jeans, even though that’s something someone in their thirties not their twenties would do. Isabel parks us between a Jaguar and a Bentley in the car park of the very beautiful Bailiffscourt, country house hotel, spa and highly suitable venue for the start of my new decade. This is perfect, I think, as a man unloads the boot of our Corsa without the slightest hint of disapproval.

Champagne waiting in the room—nice. Open fireplace—unnecessary but nice. Peacocks outside the window—also unnecessary but nice. Four-poster bed—marvellous. What could possibly spoil the perfect birthday?

‘My God, this is a coincidence.’

And there it was, the only thing worse than Saskia, the only thing that could ruin the perfect birthday. Alex, sitting alone in the corner of the restaurant, about to tuck into his
amuse-bouche
.

‘What are you doing here?’ spluttered Isabel. Even she was shocked.

Yes, what are you doing here, alone, in a romantic country house hotel on exactly the same night we’re here?

‘I read about the place in the
Guardian
a few weeks ago. Thought it sounded romantic. Booked it as a treat for Monica, then’—pause for effect—‘everything, as you know, went’—sniff for effect—‘wrong. Seemed a shame to let the weekend go to waste so
I came down on my own.’ He looks even more pathetic with his bruised cheek and his missing bit of tooth.

‘Couldn’t you have cancelled and got a refund?’ I asked, and for a moment, I saw a flicker of confusion in his eyes. Like he hadn’t thought through every plot hole in his premeditated tale of woe.

‘I’ve been in such a mess over this whole break-up, I clean forgot to call until Thursday, by which time I could only get a fifty per cent refund.’

Damn he was good. So good he actually gives me a smirking grin while Isabel is stepping out of the way of a waiter.

‘Anyway, why are you here, guys?’ The smirk vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

‘Because it’s William’s birthday. Surely I must have mentioned it?’

Yes, you maniac, because it’s my birthday, as you very well knew. And Isabel is taking me away for a quiet, romantic weekend, which you also very well knew, you evil psycho-stalker.

‘Happy birthday, William. Now look, your table’s ready. Don’t let me get in the way of your evening. You might attack me with my own squash racquet again.’

‘Hahahahahaha. Fine, see you later.’

And it all would have been fine, extremely weird but fine, if we’d left it there. Except, as we make our way across the restaurant, Isabel whispers to me about getting Alex to join us at our table. I whisper no way and she says she knows, she really does, but this has happened, it’s a bad coincidence and now we can’t really sit at tables on opposite sides of a room ignoring each other, can we? Even if it does mean ruining our romantic meal.

[Yes we can yes we can yes we can yes we can yes we can yes we can yes we can yes we can can can can can can can can.]

‘No, I suppose not.’ And then I have to get up and ask Alex if he’ll join us.

‘Oh, I couldn’t.’

‘You must.’

‘I couldn’t.’

Well, don’t then. Just fuck off back to London.

‘You must.’

‘Oh, all right then. But I’m ordering champagne.’

Two’s company, three is a complete and utter disaster. And guess who coincidentally had the same slot booked in the spa the next morning.

‘I couldn’t.’

‘You must.’

‘I couldn’t.’

Well, you’re bloody going to anyway, aren’t you?

I decide the journey back to the stinking, overpopulated metropolis is the right time to mention what’s been on my mind for the last week.

‘What exactly does “a kiss” mean in relation to Alex?’

‘A kiss,’ she replies after a lot of theatrical eye-rolling.

‘Oh, come on. That’s what you told your mum. No one ever tells their mum the truth.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ she says, stalling. ‘Can we not talk about Alex any more this weekend? I’ve had enough of him.’

‘Believe me, you’re not the only one. But tell me, I won’t mind,’ I say, lying.

‘It was ten years ago. You really don’t need to go on about this,’ she says, still stalling.

‘Look, I want to know what happened. I’m not going to go on about it.’

‘It was a kiss.’

‘With tongues?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Did he touch your breasts?’

‘The traffic light’s green.’

‘Did he touch your breasts?’

‘I can’t remember. Go, it’s green.’

‘Bra or no bra?’

‘No bra.’

‘How was East Timor?’

‘Hot.’

‘Not as hot as New York. I’ve found that if I cover myself in baby oil and stand right next to the fan, I stop getting all steamed up. But only for a minute. It’s just sizzling over here.’

‘I thought you were back in London.’

‘Had to cancel. Work. Men. Thinking of moving back at some point though.’

‘Great.’

‘Really?’

You see, that’s why she’s the Destroyer of Relationships. She twists everything into innuendo. And always turns perfectly innocent expressions such as ‘great’ into something more…intimate.

The tension in the Walker household has been palpable since our return. She doesn’t find it funny when, every time I open a cupboard, I shout, ‘Ohmygod Alex, what a marvellous surprise. Why don’t you join us for dinner or breakfast or how about full sex? Why don’t we just all get married and spend the rest of our lives together?’ I don’t find it funny when she keeps reminding me
I called her a stupid cow, which I thought we’d agreed we’d forgotten.

In other crises, I have four missed calls from Denise at Avocado, but I don’t care—I’m allowed a week off for my birthday. And the strange couple who live below us have put their flat on the market as well. It’s bigger than ours and they’re asking less. And they’re with Foxtons, all branded Mini Coopers, virtual tours online and ten viewings a minute. We’re still stuck with Arthur Arsehole. We don’t stand a chance.

The phone rang off when I answered it this morning. Either a wrong number who couldn’t be bothered to apologise or a stalker who once fondled my wife.

Force myself to go to the gym but my heart’s not in it. The sweaty fat guy is pushing himself so preposterously hard that he’s leaving whole bits of himself on the machines. I tell Denise that I think he’s pushing himself too hard and she tells me to stop transferring my own inadequacies onto others. ‘Now get back on that running machine and do twenty minutes at four per cent incline and seven miles per hour.’

I feel really inadequate for the rest of the evening.

Emergency pub session. Johnson helpfully explains that a first-base kiss to parents is a second-base breast-fondling to the husband which is a third-base groping in reality. Andy says I should stop asking questions and behave like a grown-up. Isabel loves me, not Alex, but the more I behave like I don’t trust her, the more likely she is to run off with Alex.

Until then, I hadn’t actually considered the running-off possibility. Andy says, ‘Well, he’s a nice guy. He’s not neurotic like you, my friend. And you’ve broken his arm and his tooth in the last two months alone. Isn’t that enough hostility for now?’

Then he tells me to take a leaf out of his own highly researched book on the opposite sex and trust them. He’s now planning to move to Geneva with a girl he met last week in Liberia. She’s the one, although he doesn’t speak French and she doesn’t speak English and they’ve only communicated their undying love through sign language. Trust, he says, is the fertiliser upon which love grows.

I tell Andy to go stuff himself. I’ve never done that before.

‘My advice for any newlyweds is stick at it, you will
always have the snags but use a bit of sense!’

G
LADYS
M
OTT
, 81
on celebrating her diamond wedding anniversary
with husband Percy, 90, as reported in the
Lancashire Evening Telegraph
, 12 August 1999

Denise was right: I am transferring inadequacies. I am the sort of man who would lose a woman to another man. I used to be mildly adventurous. I used to take the occasional risk. Now, I worry about forgetting not to put the rubbish out and feel threatened by my wife’s male friends.

I need to do something exciting with my life.

Isabel gets in from the first in the new term’s yoga classes and, when I tell her I’m bored, I’m having a midlife crisis and I need
some new challenge in my life, she suggests I give yoga another go. I wait for at least ten seconds for her to show she was joking but she wasn’t. I phone Andy, apologise profusely for telling him to get stuffed and ask him if he can help me find myself again.

He suggests hang-gliding. Googling ‘hang-gliding’ and ‘killed’ brings up 40,928 results. I decide that it’s all very well wanting a fresh adventure in life but that there are limits. Abseiling will do fine. I book onto a course in the Peak District after Andy promises to come too.

Abseil

Learn French

Remain calm during take-off and landing

Toboggan the really steep slope where my parents live

Enjoy queuing and paying to get into a trendy bar, then queuing to get to the bar to get a drink, then having to stand holding my drink inches from my face because the bar is so packed, then not being able to have a conversation with anyone because the music is so loud.

Drive without terrifying my passengers

Intimidate an intimidating waiter

Get up early and make the most of the best part of the day (and, in so doing, pathetically avoid having sex)

Prefer a nice, quiet evening with friends in a country pub.

Barely two weeks have passed and the strange reclusive gnomes in the flat downstairs, the ones with the dingy subterranean living room but without the new kitchen, have now got an Under Offer sticker emblazoned across their For Bloody Sale sign. Their bedroom is painted in swirly blood red and purple. They have no stainless-steel cooker hood. Their kitchen smells of urinary infection, not freshly baked bread like ours. Arthur the Absolute A1 Arsehole is unreachable but could I please leave a message?

‘Oi, Arsehole. The flat downstairs is already under offer. The one with the dingy basement and the much higher risk of being broken into by heroin addicts if you go on holiday. Whatrugonnadoaboudit?’

…or words to that effect.

Another look at the house in Isabel’s mum’s village and one a few miles away and one a few more miles away. I like the one quite a few more miles away but it’s been on the market for months.

‘Why does no one else want to buy it?’ I ask Isabel, hopefully. ‘It’s lovely.’

‘Maybe it’s because its bedrooms are downstairs and its kitchen is upstairs, because it’s on the hard shoulder of the M25 and because no one’s quite sure if that mobile phone mast at the end of the garden will mean we have deformed children,’ replies Isabel. ‘I think we should make an offer on the first one.’

So I say, ‘The one near your mum’s?’

So she says, ‘Yes.’

So I say, ‘I’m not sure I like the kitchen.’

So she says, ‘I know, we’ll have to start saving for a new one.’

So I say, ‘But, but, but, but, but…’

So she bats her eyelashes and flutters her eyelids and squeezes my arm.

So now it looks like we’re moving into the house near her mum. If Arsehole can ever shift the flat.

An even worse start to the week than I’ve come to expect over the past few months. First because the world’s dumbest criminal tried to steal our car last night. Dumb because, of all the cars in the street, ours is the oldest and slowest. If he was a joy rider, he wasn’t ever going to get much joy from a 0.997-litre Vauxhall Corsa Breeze (Breeze, I think, because it has a sunroof ). Dumb also because he didn’t manage to steal it, or the radio. All he did was bend the whole door open, jemmy the radio just enough so it doesn’t work and steal only one of my favourite shoes, so neither he nor I can enjoy them.

I go to work in my second favourite pair of shoes and find I have been awarded a work-experience girl for the next two weeks. She’s starting tomorrow because today she’s interviewing Bill Clinton for a magazine she was doing work experience with last week. Oh God.

By 10.15 a.m., I have run out of things to make the work-experience girl do. She has filed everything, made an Excel spreadsheet to denote her new filing system and everyone in the
office is having a caffeine overdose because she’s made so much tea. Her name is Anastasia, she speaks five languages, got a quadruple first from Oxford and a Master’s from Columbia, has 58 A-levels, 3,276 GCSEs, worked as a peace envoy for the UN in Sierra Leone last summer, plays hockey, rugby, tennis and mahjong, and, at the age of sixteen, won silver for England in the under-21s three-day-eventing world championship.

She is proficient in everything computery, can type 900 words per minute and knows shorthand. In her spare time, she organises charity balls, fights Third World debt and enjoys listening to music. Why on earth she wants to do work experience here when she should really be running for prime minister, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just to make the rest of us ageing mortals feel even more inadequate.

Saw Alex walking past my office at lunch but managed to avoid him. Strange because he works in Victoria. Can’t mention it to Isabel because, since the breast revelation, the topic is entirely taboo.

‘If you wannit perfickt, it’s gonna cost ya, mate,’ says the mechanic, scratching his chin as he surveys our bent door.

‘Yes, obviously. How much?’

‘Ohffffffff,’ he says, as if I’ve just asked him to estimate how long it will take to climb the Eiger via the west ridge without ropes. ‘Pfffffffff,’ like he’s trying to calculate how many matchboxes it would take to stretch to the moon. ‘You’re looking at, oooooooh, seven hundred quid for a new door. Maybe, tssssssssskkk, another two hundred parts and labour.’

‘Isn’t the door the parts?’

‘Yeah, right. But there’s ‘inges ‘n’ panelling ‘n’ stuff.’

I phone my insurance company and a woman who sounds like she’s trying to stifle a giggle says I have to pay the first £500 of a claim tap tap tap and that if I make a claim, my premium will go up by approximately tap tap tap tap £420 next year. In my head, I go around to the insurance company and machine-gun the woman and all her colleagues to death for being such evil, tricksy bastards. In reality, I thank her, decline her offer to initiate a claim, hang up and tell the mechanic just to bend the door back as best he can.

Horrible dream last night. It was the day before my finals or A-levels or GCSEs. I couldn’t tell which because no one had told me, and I hadn’t even started to revise. I was in a library, hemmed in by giant stacks of books and folders but I wasn’t a student, I was me: the thirty-year-old magazine journalist. Worse, I had the mind of a thirty-year-old magazine journalist. I started leafing through some of the textbooks, and it was all complicated political theory and graphs and timelines. There were long essays full of long words in my handwriting but I couldn’t understand any of it because I had the useless brain of a thirty-year-old. I started reading frantically, conscious I had only twelve hours until the first exam, entitled British Political History 1747 to 1979, began. Every time I reached a point where I almost understood something, my mind was invaded by thoughts of Isabel. Not sexy thoughts. No dreamy fantasy with stockings and university tutor outfits. Only panicky thoughts about losing her, about letting her get away, about driving her away with my own blockheaded stubbornness and/or her stupid loyalty to Alex. With all that going on, I hadn’t even reached the Industrial Revolution and its Impact on the Political Structure of Eighteenth-Century Britain before it was time to wake
up and go to the exam. Except when I woke up, exhausted, there wasn’t any exam at all.

On the bright side, it rained for the first time in weeks and our garden-free flat in sweltering Finsbury Park became slightly more bearable and slightly less like the perfect venue for humidity-induced wife-killing.

On the less bright side, our car is no longer waterproof and Isabel is blaming me for not insisting the garage did a proper job and not getting a proper insurance policy and just generally being me.

I asked Anastasia to research an article on Russian billionaires and their role in London society. I had hoped it would take her a week but she finished it in an hour and a half, then just sat opposite me looking bored while I tried to work the fax machine. (Try putting a ‘nine’ in front, she says. As if that would work. Oh, thanks.) After lunch, I told her to update a spreadsheet of contact details for every celebrity on our database. Fifty-four minutes. I told her to stick some front covers on the wall. Fourteen minutes. And make coffee. Three minutes. And fact-check my article. Seven minutes, during which she found four typos, a split infinitive and two sentences that could have been expressed better.

I tell her I’m going to the gym tonight.

She tells me she’s going to kick-boxing class.

I tell her I’m going abseiling in the Peak District at the weekend.

She tells me she’s going base-jumping in the Massif Central.

I tell her to go and make another cup of coffee.

‘Would I like to increase my sperm volume by five hundred per cent?’ ask the first seven emails I open this morning. The sex thing that I hoped was a blip and was in actual fact a trend has now
bottomed out at twice a week. Isabel says that as our love grows and our marriage strengthens, physical love becomes less relevant. Advertising tells us we should be having sex all the time but life is richer than that. It sounds like something Astrid, her yoga teacher, would say, which means she has been talking to Astrid, which means it is an issue she has to talk about, which means I may have to increase my sperm volume by five hundred per cent.

Anastasia wants to leave early today so she can catch her flight to France to do her base-jump. I don’t have to leave early because I’m only going to the bloody Peak District to do stupid abseiling tomorrow.

Even though it’s not base-jumping, there really wasn’t enough safety training for my liking. Our instructor was called Barney and he had long hair, round glasses and a pair of tie-dye poo-catchers. He wouldn’t have looked out of place on a beach in Bali in the Seventies. He did look out of place explaining how the ropes we were entrusting our lives to worked. ‘The green one feeds through…errr…this loop, and this one goes…errr…no, it’s the yellow one that goes through that loop and the green one goes here. Hahahahahaha, always getting those muddled. Hahahahahaha. Right, off you go.’

I let Andy go first, straight off a sixty-metre-high viaduct. I waited for a scream, a crunch and a splatter, but Andy just seemed to be enjoying himself. Finally, he emerged ant-like and whooping at the bottom of the bridge and yelled an echoey ‘Your turn’ back up. As he did so, a minibus pulled up next to me and Barney, disgorging a dozen skinheads from a borstal in Stockport. ‘Part of the new day-release programme,’ muttered their hounded instructor to Barney. ‘See if we can’t lose a few today, ey?’

The skinheads were so excited to be out of their detention centre that they were trying to set each other on fire with cigarette lighters and deodorants. Only the sight of me climbing up onto the ledge distracted them long enough to save the skinniest one from incineration.

‘Go on, mate, see if you can fucking fly, you fucking cock,’ they said encouragingly. But I couldn’t move. I just stood up on the rail, rooted to the spot. Then I got disco leg: I wobbled involuntarily to a non-existent disco beat. The cruel laughter swam around me, the soft encouragement of Barney doing little to help. I thought of my life back in London, of the leaking car, the unsellable flat, the wife. And then I thought of the bloody infinitely bloody talented work experience who right now was jumping off a two-mile-high cliff without any ropes. And then I jumped.

You’re not supposed to jump.

You’re supposed to walk over the edge. I swung back into the side of the viaduct; there was a loud snapping sound. ‘I think I broke my foot,’ I shouted up to twelve hysterical skinheads and a hippy. None of them believed me.

When I did eventually get to the bottom, I sat waiting despondently for Andy to have another go—naturally he had taken to it like Spiderman—before we went to hospital. The humiliation was complete when the nurse told me it was only a broken toe and there was no need for a cast—and no, I wouldn’t need crutches. I couldn’t even injure myself properly.

Anastasia wasn’t killed base-jumping. In fact, nothing is going right until Isabel makes a surprise visit to my office to meet me for lunch. That goes right only briefly, until she picks a fight with a total stranger. We go to a place claiming to be a French deli and she
orders a ham and cheese croissant. It isn’t fresh, despite claiming to be and costing £3.49, so she starts remonstrating with a teenage manager about how this place shouldn’t be allowed to claim that it’s French because no one in France would serve a £3.49 croissant that isn’t fresh. Almost immediately, a very aggressive security guard comes over to help the discussion along and things start to get heated. Just when she’s telling him to mind his own business, he actually prods Isabel in the chest. I grab Isabel and we leave. Isabel says I should have grabbed the security guard, not her, and says I should have defended her.