How to Be a Husband. Tim Dowling

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СКАЧАТЬ but positively quarantined, strolling through the unfamiliar streets of Positano together like two people who share a rare disease. It might well prove an instructive and reinvigorating break from the day-to-day drift of an established relationship, but ten days into a marriage is not a good time to discover you’ve run out of conversation. Under the circumstances, we do the only sensible thing: we run out of money instead.

      In hindsight we could have blamed a lack of preparation, but what really happened amounted to a failure of leadership. Whenever we’d been together in America I’d invariably made the arrangements. In London my wife had organized everything while I watched, agog, as if my life were happening in a museum.

      On neutral territory, however, neither of us takes charge. Nobody keeps proper count of the cash, tots up the receipts, or attempts to square our spending with the number of days left. The exchange rate is often discussed, but never quite mastered. Perhaps we both feel that the hard-nosed financial pragmatism a marriage requires shouldn’t start until after the honeymoon ends. As a team we prove to be both indecisive and extravagant, switching hotels on a whim, hiring boats without checking the price and ordering expensive drinks on the beach. We had been gifted a tidy pile of cash as a reward for getting married, but it runs through our fingers without us even feeling it. This is before – right before – it was possible to put your bank card into a cash machine anywhere in the world and receive handfuls of the local money. In 1992 that sort of preposterous convenience is still a far-off dream. Even a bank wire transfer takes three days.

      Somehow, with two days to go, we wake up in a hotel on Capri with the equivalent of £30 in lira between us. It is not enough to pay the bill we’ve run up already. In fact it is only enough for one of us to take the boat back to Naples to beg some money from the only person we know there.

      ‘You have to go,’ I say to my wife, bravely. ‘He’s your vice-consul.’

      ‘I’ll be back,’ she says. ‘Don’t eat anything.’

      So I sit in a room I cannot check out of because I cannot settle the bill, wondering if I’ll ever see my wife again. It occurs to me that Naples is not the sort of city to which one sends a woman alone on an errand. If anything happens to my wife I will have to live with the guilt. I have an urge to go after her, but then I remember I don’t have the money to cross the bay. I am paralysed by worry, although my mind somehow finds the wherewithal to ask itself whether a dip in the pool might help.

      Finally, at sunset, my wife returns.

      ‘He was very nice about it,’ she says. ‘He gave me some money from the distressed seaman’s fund.’

      We pay our bill and return to the mainland in search of a room close to the bus station, so we can get to the airport first thing and put this whole honeymoon business behind us. The hotel we select is so cheap that it doesn’t even start until the second floor of the run-down building it occupies, and you need to put money in the lift to make it go up. It’s just the sort of place two distressed seamen might spend their last night in Naples.

      The front desk is a man in a hat sitting at a folding table on the landing. He also sells beer, fags and soap. But the room has huge windows and a fresco covering the whole ceiling, apart from a bit in the corner where they cut into the plaster to install a shower cubicle. We sit in the window and take a picture of ourselves with a timer, looking out onto the street at dusk. When I want to remember that I had a romantic honeymoon in Naples with the woman I love, that’s the one I look at.

      In a lot of ways it does not feel as if we’re genuinely married until we turn up at passport control with our paperwork. There are a few more questions, a bit of a wait, some instructions I am too nervous to take in, and, finally, a stamp in my passport that grants me a full year to sort out my new status. At last, I’m an immigrant.

      ‘Now you just have to see the doctor,’ says the official.

      ‘The what?’ I say.

      I am led to a little examination room in a weird, backstage area, where I remove my shirt for Dr Gatwick, a weary-looking man with a mildly sinister bearing.

      ‘Any diseases worth mentioning?’ he asks. If I had any, I think, I wouldn’t mention them to you.

      ‘No,’ I say.

      He listens to my chest, takes my blood pressure, and asks me a few more questions. Then I am allowed to put on my shirt back on, and rejoin my wife on British soil. Dr Gatwick’s seal of approval is the final hurdle to married life, or at least that’s how it seems until we are safely on the train to London, and I realize that virtually all the hurdles are still ahead of us.

4. HOW TO BE WRONG

      Take a moment to cast your eyes around my domain: this blasted promontory, wracked by foul winds, devoid of life, of cheer, of comfort. This is my special place – my fortress of solitude. I’ve been coming here on and off for the last twenty years. Welcome, my friend, to the moral high ground.

      Sit down. Do you want some tea? I’m afraid they only do oat milk up here. It’s the moral high ground – what did you expect? There are some salt-free rice cakes on the shelf there. They’re a bit joyless, but help yourself – just make sure you put 10p in the honesty box.

      What were we talking about? Oh yeah: so, earlier today my wife was giving me a hard time about not putting the ladder back in the shed. I told her it was pointless keeping the ladder in the shed because I use it all the time, almost exclusively in the house; that it was much more convenient and sensible to store it at the back of the cupboard under the stairs, like we used to before we got the shed. And by the way: why wasn’t I consulted about the switch in the first place?

      My wife responded by saying that, at any rate, the ladder didn’t live in the middle of the sitting room, where it had been all weekend, and went on to imply that I was just being lazy and also, quite possibly, a twat. Then I said: OK, this is not about the ladder any more. This is about the proper way to conduct discourse between adults. I refuse on principle – on principle! – to engage with a person who would resort to such a personal attack. Someone has to make a stand against this sort of thing, I said, and for that reason no ladders will be moved today. And that’s how I ended up here, on the moral high ground. It’s like a VIP room for idiots.

      I don’t remember the subject of the first big argument I had with my wife, only its aftermath. I’m sure it began, as in the example above, with some trivial domestic dispute – a failure to do something on my part, let’s assume – which quickly escalated into a frank exploration of my inadequacies.

      It is perhaps a year before we are married. At some point during the argument I decide my character is being assailed in a manner incompatible with my dignity. I say as much, and storm out of her flat, slamming the door as hard as I can behind me, heading straight for the moral high ground. I stomp downstairs and slam the front door, not quite as hard, because its maintenance is covered by a costly leasehold agreement.

      I stand on the front step for a moment, breathing hard and basking in the hot glow of my righteous anger, until it dawns on me that I have no money and don’t know anyone in London who would automatically take my side in this, or any other, matter. I toy with the idea of going back upstairs to pick up the fight where I left off – as if I’d just thought of another point worth making – but I don’t have any keys. The hot glow wears off. It’s cold and windy, and my dramatic exit had not afforded an opportunity to grab a coat СКАЧАТЬ