The Good Divorce Guide. Cristina Odone

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СКАЧАТЬ yelling. ‘What are you fighting for? We haven’t had a real marriage for years.’

      ‘What’s a REAL marriage?!’

      ‘We weren’t in love. We hardly ever had sex…’

      ‘Last time I checked, once a week was considered pretty normal!’

      ‘Please,’ Babette calls out again from her armchair across the room, ‘will you sit down? The session is not over—’

      ‘Oh yes it is!’ snaps Jonathan as he stomps off.

      I wake up and stretch out my left arm and leg, and feel the rest of the large double bed is empty. I take a minute to adjust to my new circumstances. It’s been like this every morning since Jonathan announced he wants a divorce. The little armchair in the corner of the room is half-hidden by only my clothes—not layers of his and mine. The bathroom door is ajar, but Jonathan is not standing there in his striped pyjamas brushing his teeth as he methodically adjusts the shower jet, lays a towel on the radiator to toast it, and hangs up a clean shirt on the back of the door.

      What is he doing, this Sunday morning? Do he and Linda have leisurely lie-ins, when they have sex non-stop and then eat a huge breakfast and read the papers and then more sex? Or does Linda get them up and out for a brisk run and then a joint shower that leads to hotvolcanicsex?

      I try to picture the room my ex wakes up in—spotless and spartan, or is Linda into Disney princess pink, with a bit of ruffle on the dressing table and a four-poster bed as big as this one? Stop it, I tell myself. Because I can spend hours, in fact have done so, trying to picture their room, and what they do and say. This divorce may be a mutual decision, but how can I help being jealous when my husband of twelve years lies in someone else’s bed?

      I hear Kat moving about next door. I look at my alarm clock: 9.20. As I stir and peep over the white cotton waves, I see an unfamiliar red light blinking at me: I forgot to switch off the DVD player after watching When Harry Met Sally last night until 2 a.m.

      I stir myself, and notice other unusual sights: clothes strewn across the chest of drawers and even on the floor. Jonathan would have gone mad. The curtains only half drawn and, on the bedside table, yesterday’s mug of tea. It’s as if every bit of our bedroom announces that Jonathan’s gone.

      It’s the same downstairs. In the sitting room, the bookshelves look like an elderly East European’s teeth: rows with huge black gaps where Jonathan has pulled out his must-have volumes: Hair Growth, Folliculitis Prevention, Baldness is Not for Life. In the kitchen, the Sabatier knives are missing, and half the Le Creuset set. Newspapers and tins and glass bottles spill out of the bin in one vast, unecological jumble.

      I’m thirty-eight next year. I feel as wary of time passing as I do of crossing a motorway: I’ve made enough mistakes already, I daren’t trust my instincts to get me safely across. I want to see the break-up of my marriage as a beginning; but right now I feel it only as an end.

      I turn on my other side: my gaze meets Jonathan’s in an old photo. It’s taken at uni, he’s nineteen, maybe twenty, and staring with a solemn expression into the camera lens. I know that expression so well: full of determination. Jonathan was the first Martin to finish school, the first to go to university, and the first to make any money. His parents were incredibly proud, and Jonathan could do no wrong in their eyes. Well, except marry a London girl from an uppity family. Thankfully, my dealings with the in-laws were limited by geography, so that I only had to hear about ‘Mary Mullin up the road, she always had a soft spot for you, Johnny’ every now and then.

      My own parents’ reservations that Jonathan was not one of us—comfortable middle class—were carefully concealed behind polite smiles and dry little coughs.

      ‘Your parents,’ Jonathan would say the moment he was behind the wheel and we were pulling out of their gravel driveway in Somerset, ‘think you’ve married beneath you.’

      ‘They don’t,’ I lied. ‘What did they say to make you think that?’

      ‘They look at me as if I were the gamekeeper and you were Lady Chatterley.’

      My parents’ class-consciousness melted in their enthusiasm for Zelkin, Jonathan’s profitable venture; but maybe their son-in-law never forgot it, or forgave them—or me.

      Perhaps, I muse, Jonathan’s humble beginnings have played a role in his infatuation with Linda. My ex-husband has complete faith in meritocracy, and thinks that Britons have a great deal to learn from their American cousins. ‘If you’re bright, ambitious and hard working you can do anything there,’ he would enthuse after his professional trips to the States. ‘No questions asked about who your family is or what school or university you went to.’ Perhaps he sees Linda in the same way: someone who offers him a chance to be anything he wants to be. I, on the other hand, remind Jonathan of where he came from and what is expected of him. Linda is the stars and sky above, I’m a glass ceiling.

      The door squeaks open: ‘Mum?’ Kat looks in. One day she almost looks grown up; the next, like this morning in her pink pyjamas, she looks like a baby. ‘Are you awake?’

      ‘Hmmm…’ I nod my head against the pillow.

      ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’ My tousled-head daughter peers at me anxiously.

      ‘No, yes, I mean…I should get up now.’ I stretch, and smile to reassure her.

      ‘No, you stay there, Mum.’ Kat tucks me in as if I were an invalid and she a nurse.

      ‘Sweetpea, sit down.’ I pat the bed beside me. ‘Did you sleep all right?’

      ‘Hmmm…n-n-n-ot really.’ My daughter’s pretty face crumples. ‘Mummy, it’s all so terrible!’ She dissolves in tears.

      ‘Come here, my darling.’ I take her in my arms, and Kat, now sobbing uncontrollably, slips under the duvet beside me. ‘Don’t cry, my little Kat…’ I try to comfort her by stroking her back; ever since she was tiny this would calm her down. I feel her silky warm skin, and keep up a soft soothing murmur.

      ‘Mummy, is Dad never coming back?’ she sobs, and presses up against my T-shirt. I’ve taken to wearing Freddy’s, now that Jonathan’s are in some flat in Bayswater, and today I’m in a Spiderman red and blue: it rides up, so that I can feel her against my naked stomach almost as clearly as when I carried her twelve years ago. ‘It’s really over?’

      I stroke her hair. ‘Yes, if you mean is my marriage with Daddy really over. No, if you mean fun, and good things, and our family and friends.’

      ‘Mum, if break-ups are this bad, I don’t want a relationship, ever!’

      ‘Not every relationship breaks up. Not every relationship breaks up badly.’ I lift her hair and kiss the back of her neck: a hot sleepy spot that I always go back to. ‘And a good relationship makes you your best.’ I stroke her back again. ‘Are you thinking about someone in particular?’

      ‘Mungo.’ She nods shyly, looks away from me. ‘We’ve been texting.’ I can’t help smiling: as if I hadn’t noticed. ‘When he doesn’t get back to me immediately, I’m scared it’s because he’s broken it off.’

      ‘You can’t run a relationship worrying about it breaking up,’ I murmur into her neck. ‘You mustn’t think like that.’

      ‘The СКАЧАТЬ