Marriage, we all agree, is a wonderful institution: useful and helpful in so many ways. It’s good for childcare-sharing at weekends, to name but one. It’s excellent for computer maintenance support at weekends, to name but another. And, of course, it comes into its own at the end of an enjoyable evening out, when the wife, for example, suddenly remembers it’s not her turn to drive home.
In fact gosh I could probably write an entire book on the subject: The Joy of Marriage. Call it something like that. It could be a belated and, I suspect, desperately needed sequel to The Joy of Sex. Why not? Where words run short, or simply fail me, I could pad the thing out with enormous illustrations of happily married couples, the one in the passenger seat clearly comatose while the other one, with the beard, drives her safely home from an array of very slightly different dinner parties.
Just for the record, my husband doesn’t have a beard, thank God.
And, actually, I think it may be my turn to drive. But that’s not really the point. The point is, I have been undergoing a bit of a refresher course in married life these past few weeks and, to be frank, it’s requiring a little adjustment.
The glamorous (beardless) husband has been abroad for a few months. He’s been on location, shooting movies as he must, what with all our outgoings. In his absence, as previously mentioned, I’ve grown accustomed to running the house and my life almost exactly as I like them. Days could pass with only a couple of short, friendly text messages between us: “Blockbuster jst called,” he would text, from the other side of the world. “Yr DVDs a fortnight late.”
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“Oops.
Sorry. Thx.” Stuff like that the stuff, in other words, of simple marital harmony. It was so easy then.
Now he’s back. Which is lovely. Mending my bicycle, which is good. But also turning the heating down, being in the bathroom, asking me how I spent my day, and most unforgivably commenting, in a slightly irritable way, on the fact that we’ve run out of maple syrup.
I read an article the other day about a nice, middle-class wife and mother who surprised all and sundry one ordinary morning by murdering her husband.
When asked why she’d done it, she replied with his warm blood, I like to imagine, still dripping from her hands that “he asked me to pass the mustard”. You see? We’ve all been there. Or I think we have. At any rate, my heart went out to her.
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So far, luckily, he hasn’t been quite reckless enough to ask for mustard which we’ve also run out of. Last week, though, he did suggest that, what with being away so much, it might be nice if he started working from home between films. I am almost certain he was joking. I haven’t yet dared to check, but my mind has been quivering with panic ever since.
So, I have been hatching a plan. As usual. Only, for once, I intend to see this one through. I am going on a writers’ retreat. It’s all booked, and I leave in five days’ time. I am taking myself out of London, far away from all that I know and love: the tennis club, the children and so on. Yes, while my industrious husband spends a solitary week experiencing life as a working-from-home parent ha, ha, ha I shall be staying in a luxurious self-catered apartment somewhere glamorous in the, er, Midlands.
Can’t wait. I shall have a kitchen sans maple syrup sans anything, in fact, but spinsterish health foods, champagne and semi-skimmed milk and a bathroom, which is all my own, and a thermostat cranked up to 30C. And, er oh, yes, the novel. Very important. Mustn’t forget. Seriously got to get on with that.