William Walkers First Year of Marriage (20 page)
Kill for pleasure (a wasp in a microwave)
Refer to morning as the best part of the day
Watch and enjoy
Big Brother
Kiss the girl at college with the horse teeth and the easy reputation
Buy chinos
Cry in a girly movie
Get a proper job
Play golf unironically
Pretend a relative had died to skive off work
Make love with the assistance of Barry White (though, in my defence, it was a CD of love songs and Barry came on by accident)
Join a lottery syndicate.
Bloody Valentine’s Day: stupid American invention, just like Father’s Day and Halloween and Christmas. Why can’t they be honest and call it ‘Give lots of money to the florist for flowers that will cost half the price tomorrow’ Day?
What’s most frustrating is that you can’t rise above it. You can’t, for example, phone your mother on Mothering Sunday and say, ‘Sorry I didn’t send flowers. I don’t believe in Mothering Sunday,’ because that still makes you the bastard who doesn’t appreciate
your mother. And although Isabel hates Valentine’s Day as much as I do, I know full well that doesn’t mean I can ignore it. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about women, it’s that what they say they want you to do and what they want you to do are two entirely different things.
So we wake up and tut about how awful an enforced annual celebration of love is. I then say something slushy about how we now have a wedding anniversary to do that, which Isabel misinterprets as me likening the horrors of Valentine’s Day to the horrors of marriage.
At lunch, I join a long queue of grumpy men at Budding Ideas (shop motto: flowers for that special occasion, or just because you want to say I love you. Spew). When it is my turn, I am confronted with that cruel Valentine’s dilemma: do I get six long-stemmed red roses or a dozen stubby-stemmed reddish but actually pink ones for the same extortionate price? Eventually, like every man before and after me, I realise there is no dilemma. You can’t buy pink dwarf roses and you can’t buy only six red ones. So I march off with the dozen long red ones and an eight-million-pound hole in my wallet.
Then I phone every restaurant in London in a desperate why didn’t-I-do-this-earlier? search for a table, eventually securing a smoking one in the basement by the toilets of my nineteenth choice.
Then I spend what’s left of the afternoon looking forward to an evening staring into my wife’s beautiful eyes in what will be a futile attempt to ignore all the other people staring into their wives’ beautiful eyes. And then snogging. And then giggling. And whispering sweet nothings. Oh God.
It doesn’t work out like that because Isabel never comes to the restaurant.
I sit there for half an hour watching a panorama of tonsil hockey, then try calling her but her mobile’s off like it has been all afternoon.
So I have a big argument with the manager of the restaurant who wants me to pay a fine for hogging one of his tables, then fight my way through a whole capital city full of snoggers, get a train home, open the door and immediately realise why I’ve been stood up.
On the table next to a note from Isabel reading ‘Bastard’ is a note from Saskia reading, ‘Maybe they’ll fit you because I don’t want them any more,’ which in itself is next to a note from me saying, ‘Something for later, William,’ which is attached to an extremely saucy set of underwear.
So much for the direct approach.
Isabel’s father won’t put me through to Isabel who is apparently too upset to come to the phone so I spend the rest of Valentine’s Day watching the entirely unhelpful
Four Weddings and a Funeral
and wondering whether the florist will give me a refund.
I drop a note around explaining that it’s not what she thinks, which is, I imagine, pretty much what every philandering bastard must say when it is exactly what they think. Except in my case it really isn’t what she thinks.
When I get home, I find Isabel has been back and packed clothes. This is bad but, at least, as Johnson helpfully points out, she hasn’t taken furniture. Although, as he unhelpfully adds, that could simply be because she hasn’t sorted out storage yet.
At 11 p.m., my phone beeps and I leap down the stairs, already composing a response. The text is from a withheld number but it is clear who sent it: ‘I am going to ruin your life…because you ruined mine.’
This would be the time to lock up the bunny rabbits.
After another day of silence, I decided enough was enough. I decided to be decisive: so I went to Isabel’s office and loitered. Two hours is a long time to work out what you’re going to say to convince your wife you’re not having an affair but, given the great weight of evidence against me (handwritten note, suspenders, etc), it wasn’t long enough. None of the usual tactics—crying, the fake injury trick, self-immolation, begging on hands and knees—would work. This needed something special, something off the page, something not even in the manual. Finally, as I was ready to despair in the acceptance that the something simply didn’t exist, it came to me like a shining light in a 1950s Jesus movie.
I would tell her the truth. Hallelujah.
Then Isabel stepped out of her office.
‘Isabel.’
‘Leave me alone.’
It wasn’t a promising start.
‘Give me ten minutes. You owe me that much. If you want me to leave you alone after that, I will. But I need to tell you the truth.’
The Hollywood melodrama of it all got me my ten minutes. I used it to tell her that the note was about four years old and had been attached, as far as I could recall, to a bottle of champagne, not some filthy underwear. I said I had never seen the underwear in my life before. Then I confessed to the dinner in the restaurant full of beds, that it was my stupid attempt to get rid of Saskia but that I’d misjudged how mad Saskia actually was. She looked sceptical—as wives do when someone tries to pass off an affair as a case of stalking—so I told her about the office-storming, the Brazilian and the final lunch. I showed her the text message. And I apologised for not being honest: it was typical idiot-man behaviour.
When she asked me to promise I was telling the truth, and that nothing had happened between me and Saskia, I knew I was through the worst of it. I promised solemnly and vowed never ever to lie about anything ever again, so long as we both shall live. Isabel then ruthlessly pressed home her advantage, asking me to promise never to say anything nasty about Alex ever again. I had no choice but to agree, thus lying less than a minute after I promised not to.
Things haven’t quite returned to the normality I had hoped and begged for. Isabel says everything is fine but it’s one of those not-fine fines people use when they are women. Our house has been liberally carpeted with eggshells, conversation is barely monosyllabic, my head is bitten off on a quarter-hourly basis and all privileges have been suspended indefinitely. I am forgiven but my behaviour has not been—and probably never will be—forgotten. I have been moved permanently to the doghouse.
- You have no control over when you can leave. Your sentence is recalculated on an hourly basis by the parole board (aka wife).
- All light-hearted banter, flirting or niceness (e.g. ‘Your hair looks different today, darling, I like it’) will be interpreted as attempts to escape the doghouse, resulting in lengthier sentence. This rule is waived for flowers, although no gratitude beyond a suspicious nod of acceptance can be expected.
- Any domestic work undertaken while in the doghouse does not count. For example, in a non-doghouse situation, it is
reasonable to expect that if one makes the dinner, one can expect someone else to do the washing up. In the doghouse, you do both. - Socialising with male friends is severely restricted.
- Doghousers have no vote as regards television, music or whose turn it is to drive.
- Doghousers must give ground on long-running domestic deadlocks. During time in the doghouse, hated pictures will be hung, disputed wallpaper patterns will be picked, prized bachelor-pad items will be confiscated and girly multicoloured flowerbeds will be planted. To continue to offer resistance will be taken into account by the parole board (see rule one).
- Doghousers can be abused and bullied, particularly with regard to the original offence, but have no right to respond (e.g. ‘Shall we go to bed? I mean upstairs, not to a restaurant with a slut like you did last week’).
- Under no circumstances must a doghouser initiate a sexual advance. Only the parole board (see rule one) can decide when, how and where sexual intercourse may take place.
- Sexual intercourse in no way influences early release. Any assumption that it does will result in an instant doubling of the sentence.
Jess and Tony’s marriage is over. Tony and Jacques have run off together. Still in the doghouse.
Still in the doghouse.
Doghouse.
Doghouse.
Out of doghouse. Asked if I could go to the pub with Johnson and Andy. After sarcastic reply about it being fine as long as Andy didn’t have tarty highlights and a belt for a skirt, I am given permission. She is having a drink with Alex, she announces. He’s very upset about something and needs her advice. In the spirit of staying out of the doghouse and restoring marital relations, I pretend that (a) it’s not a problem and (b) I hope he’s okay.
Andy and Johnson are relieved that love is back in the air in the Walker household, even though Alex is still up to his tricks and must be stopped.
More importantly, Andy has decided he no longer wants to pee standing up unless there is a urinal. Sitting down might be a bit
girly, he says, but it reduces splashback and permits momentary relaxation. Johnson confesses he has been sitting down for years because, in addition to the splashback/relaxation benefits, it removes the seat-up/seat-down debate from married life, and is therefore of limitless value. I explain that I have an agreement with Isabel that the seat can be left in the position of last use, given that seat-down is as much of an inconvenience for a man as seat-up is for a woman.
Johnson says the agreement won’t last. It’s one of many perceived freedoms newlyish married men think they have but don’t. He repeats his favourite axiom: man has no say in marriage. ‘The sooner he understands this, the easier for everyone.’
Alex was upset because of the situation in Darfur. It’s a good tactic—you can’t accuse someone of using genocide as a pretext for hitting on your wife. Even though he’s only upset about Darfur because he knows Isabel’s charity does a lot of work in Sudan.
Isabel is in a good mood. I am in a good mood. We decide to construct the perfect Saturday, which goes wrong for three reasons.
A postcoital game of Scrabble is not the same as a postcoital cigarette or snooze or newspaper-reading session because it creates tension. As usual, the argument is over which two-letter words are acceptable and whether you’re allowed to look them up in the dictionary before or after you place your letters. Isabel loses because I enforce the no-dictionary rule (as clearly outlined in paragraph three of the official instructions).
To put the perfect Saturday back on track, we decide to follow a Rick Stein recipe together. Ahhh, how sweet. I go to the fishmonger to order black cod, as instructed. There is no black cod so I get white cod. Then we spend hours, literally hours, preparing the salsa, the light tempura, the home-made wasabi. But even the three mad visits from Primrose (on each occasion wanting to borrow a cup of salt) can’t dent our delight at becoming gourmet chefs.
The delight is dented only on tasting. Maybe we got the temperature of the oil wrong. Or the consistency of the tempura. Or the size of the fish strips. Or maybe Rick Stein is a lying bastard when he says his bloody cod recipe is a piece of cake. Or maybe, we conclude as we prod the soggy, fishy gloop, it just wasn’t meant to be.
Just when I’d convinced myself that tonight was my lucky bloody night, that I was just seconds away from defying the worse-than-lightning-strike odds, someone else has won the quintuple rollover.
I don’t care what they say in the stupid anger-management stupid classes, it is not my ‘marital situation’ that makes me angry. It is Dale Winton and Rick Stein and Scrabble ambiguity.
The woman who won £135 million is called Norma and lives somewhere in the Midlands. She is encased in viscose, she has cankles and her myriad gold bracelets are biting into her bingo-wing arms as she battles to open the champagne. I tell Isabel I worry for the poor woman’s blood supply and Isabel tells me I am a snob.
My marriage is over. I know that because Isabel stormed into my (open-plan) office and told me, as follows.
‘It’s over.’
‘What is, darling?’
‘Our marriage.’
‘What?’
‘Our marriage. You know, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, ‘til you shag someone else do us part. That one.’
A lot of chair-swivelling going on now. Even the managing editor has stepped out of his office to see what all the fun is. Welcome to
EastEnders
Live: first the infuriated floozy, now the wronged wife, next week, the peeved Swedish triplets.
‘I thought we’d been through this.’
‘Well, we had, but then this arrived in the post.’
Exhibit A is a blurry photograph of me and someone who can only be described as Saskia in the sort of gymnastic position you can only achieve through serious lack of inhibition.
‘I can’t believe I believed all your pathetic excuses. I was so stupid.’
‘It isn’t me.’
‘Of course it is.’