Love You Madly

‘Hear, hear,’ agrees Sean. ‘Congratulations on publication.’

‘Thanks very much,’ I mumble.

‘Yes, well,’ says Neville.

We lapse into silence.

‘So, yeah, anyway,’ says Sean. ‘I just love the book.’

I look at him. He hasn’t read a word of it, I know. ‘Really,’ I say.

To my surprise, Neville agrees. ‘Me too,’ he declares. ‘It’s like, what, Anaïs Nin meets Stanley Gibbons.’

I look at him quizzically. ‘You think?’

‘Definitely.’ Neville takes a swig of beer. ‘Nobody else has published anything like it. Whatever else it may be, it’s different.’

‘Thanks,’ I say uncertainly.

‘And November’s a great time to be published,’ enthuses Sean. ‘The book will be in the shops well in time for Christmas.’

At the thought of Christmas and its attendant retail excesses, Neville shudders visibly. We stand about chatting in a desultory way. Anna listens to the rest of us talk, languidly smoking. In the absence of anything better to do, we all begin drinking too much.

‘Excuse me a moment,’ says Anna after a while. ‘I’m off for a pee.’ As she leaves, I turn my attention to Patricia, who is telling us of the squabbles between three Hollywood starlets, who each want to play the lead in the forthcoming film adaptation of one of her books. The story is met with amusement by Sean and Neville, but I am so overcome with bitterness that I can barely muster a smile. Waves of bilious jealousy froth within me. Hollywood? I don’t even have any bloody books at my book launch.

Some time later, Anna has still not returned. My mind drifts as I begin to wonder what could possibly be taking her so long. Suddenly this afternoon’s worries crowd back in on me again. Why did Anna lie to me about her shopping trip? What is she trying to hide? Before long I can no longer ignore the relentless prod of my suspicions. With a mumbled excuse I break off from the group and go in search of her, fearful that I might be missing something – what, I do not know.

I go to the back of the pub. In front of the women’s toilets, I hover uncertainly, wondering what to do next. I can’t very well just barge in. The thought of Anna’s clandestine trip to the cinema this afternoon needles me insistently. I am paralysed by indecision. My spirits, astonishingly, contrive to dip even lower than they already were.

‘Hello,’ says Patricia into my ear.

I spin round. ‘Patricia,’ I gasp.

Patricia eyes me with interest. ‘What are you doing out here?’ she asks, pointing at the door to the ladies’ lavatory. She smiles. I stare at her big teeth.

‘Ah.’ My mind goes blank. ‘Actually, I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to ask you a question.’

She folds her arms across her chest. ‘Be my guest.’

I stare at her, unable to formulate a thought. Then, inspiration strikes. ‘It’s about your name. That is, your pen name. Your pseudonym. Your, um, nom de plume.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, I’ve always wondered. Of all the thousands of names you could have chosen, why did you go for Candida?’ I swallow. ‘Was there, you know, a reason for naming yourself after a fungal infection?’ I attempt a look of serious enquiry.

Patricia draws herself up to her full height and looks down at me through her melting dark eyes.

‘I beg your pardon?’ she says.

To my relief, the door to the toilet opens and Anna comes out. ‘Look, don’t worry,’ I say hastily. ‘Wasn’t important.’

Anna sees me and smiles. ‘Hi.’

‘Anna,’ I breathe. ‘There you are.’

‘I think I’ll just –’ says Patricia, frowning. She turns and pushes open the door to the lavatory.

I wave weakly at her disappearing back.

‘What are you doing out here?’ asks Anna, slipping her arm through mine and giving me a squeeze.

‘I, er, oh, just chatting with Patricia.’

‘Well, come on,’ says Anna. ‘Let’s get back to the party. We’re missing all the fun.’

‘OK,’ I say, my nerves electric.

The rest of the evening passes without further incident. There are no big scenes, no dramas of note. Anna and I finally fall into a cab at about eleven o’clock. As I sit next to her, watching her laugh, I feel myself torn in two. I don’t want this moment to end. I want to stay within the cocoon of this taxi and keep the outside world at bay. This is all right; this will do just fine. But the journey will end, this moment of sanctuary will pass, and then I will have to square up to my wife’s lies.

Anna chats on, unaware of my anxiety, pulling on a cigarette. Her shawl slips as she talks, revealing a bare shoulder, vulnerable in its nakedness. I hold her hand, and watch her talk.

Anna and I have been married for five years. We lived together in glorious, highly enjoyable sin for six years before that, and dated each other for two years before that. A grand total of thirteen years, so far. We have gently graduated from each stage of togetherness to the next, merging our lives in new levels of delicious interconnectedness. There were the obvious things – our paperbacks mingling together on the bookshelf, the joint bank account – but the real intertwining took place in a more private sphere: the reassuring warmth of our collective history, a mutual repository of memories; each other’s favourite jokes fondly tolerated; the solace of shared values; the bliss of unreserved intimacy.

After we left university, we got a place together in London. While Anna spent her days at law school, I did the housework and worked on the first of my five abysmal, unpublished novels. We had only just enough money to survive, but we were young, and in love. We didn’t need much, except each other.

While I remained at home, still seeking the elusive formula for that critically-acclaimed-yet-phenomenally-successful first novel, Anna began her job in a large City law firm. Ten years on, she’s still there. She specialises in non-contentious corporate work, which consists of an apparently never-ending list of gnomic acronyms – M and A, HBOs, IPOs, and the rest. It baffles me how someone as sharp, funny, and quick-witted as Anna could have chosen to do something so excruciatingly boring. She’s very good at her job, though, and has gradually climbed up (or down, depending on your opinion of lawyers) the slippery pole of her profession, determinedly working her way towards promotion to fat-cat partnership. Sometimes she even appears to enjoy it. And, in the final analysis, if she’s happy, then I’m happy. After all, she’s the one who’s been putting bread on the table for all these years, and so it would be churlish of me to object to her career on aesthetic grounds.

My wife is the consummate professional, all snappy suits and ferocious work ethic. Together, we make a great team. That corporate pizzazz of hers is a perfect counterpoint to my flighty artistic temperament. She keeps my feet on the ground; I keep her eyes fixed on the stars. Anna’s colleagues are all married to other lawyers, and my creative, bohemian lifestyle makes us an exotic pair in comparison. At dinner parties I am expected to épater les bourgeois and taunt these affluent contemporaries of mine – a task that I relish, due to my staggering inferiority complex about the size of their incomes and their obvious sense of professional fulfilment.

Anna has never complained about being the sole income provider in our household. In fact she loves it that I’m a writer. She has been unfailingly supportive and generous. It was Anna who picked me up each time the onslaught of publishers’ letters came barrelling through the letterbox, rejecting my latest novel and smashing my confidence. It was Anna who cajoled me back to my typewriter, persuading me to try again. Without her, I would have given up years ago. She is my spine, my support system, as reliable as a mother’s heartbeat.

Of course, we’ve had our moments. We’re human, after all. We fight, like everyone else. My refusal to face up to some of life’s more earthly realities frustrates her sometimes. And there have been occasions when she overanalyses things, which can act as a brake on spontaneity. But we do all right. We’re each other’s biggest fans. I am her hero. She is my life.

Now, I know that I’m one of the lucky ones. After all these years, I am still madly in love with my wife. I have adored her, worshipped her, idolised her, ever since we met. Since I first laid eyes on her, in fact. She is the only woman I have ever loved. She makes me breathless, giddy with the possibilities of life. Not everyone gets dealt the full hand, the love that changes your life for ever. But lucky, lucky me – I got the whole shooting match, the full kit and caboodle. I have felt the ecstasy of indescribable ardour, the delirium of true, deep romance.

But.

Just lately, something is not quite right.

It began with nothing more than a niggle, which I did my best to ignore. While I was looking the other way, though, the niggle quietly worked through my emotional defences, mutating as it did so into fully-fledged disquiet, and then took up residence, implacably unbudging, at the forefront of my brain, holding every idea hostage, souring every felicitous thought.

Here’s the thing: Anna has changed.

It’s nothing big. She hasn’t grown horns. Indeed, the accumulated evidence is flimsy at best, perhaps nothing more than circumstantial. But I’ve become so attuned to her behavioural nuances that even the smallest deviation from the norm is grotesquely distorted through the prism of my expectations. Perhaps I am deluding myself. Maybe I’m seeing ghosts where there are merely shadows. Well, yes. Perhaps. But if you mistake a shadow for a ghost, you’re still spooked. Anyway, my doubts are immune to logic; they mock reasoned analysis. They’re simply there, wreaking their own poisonous brand of havoc.

So, to the naming of parts. Dissecting my paranoia item by item:

In conversation Anna used to latch on to an issue and rip into it mercilessly, analysing and arguing with her flawless, legally-trained logic. For her, intellectual stimulation was a matter of rigorous exercise rather than capricious whimsy. Every opinion, every assertion, had to be backed up and justified with rational and cogent arguments. No intellectual floppiness was tolerated. Talking to Anna was like cerebral boot camp.

But recently there has been an unmistakable change: Anna’s head now seems to be lodged firmly in the clouds. She meanders carelessly from topic to topic, leaving matters unresolved, issues open. She often drifts off into wordless reverie halfway through a sentence, as if she has been distracted by a more diverting train of thought. After years of her unflagging intellectual rigour, this new approach is unnerving. It’s as if a convoy of hippies has accidentally wandered into her brain and set up a commune there.

Next, we have perhaps the most frightening words in the English language: Gym Membership.

For Anna, sport and physical exercise have always been a boring irrelevance, a fatuous waste of time. She has never understood why I cherish my Arsenal season ticket so much. (I once made the mistake of asking her to the pub to watch an away game on the big screen. She didn’t talk to me for two days afterwards, furious that I had ignored her completely for an hour and a half. I tried to explain: you go to watch, not to chat.) There’s a neurone missing up there somewhere, a faulty connection: the excitement, the passion, the despair and the elation all just pass her by. And although I love football, I would never dream of playing myself. Dedicated and indolent smokers, Anna and I were united in our scornful rejection of any activity (except for the obvious) which required any physical exertion.

Suddenly, though, Anna has started going to the gym.

She arrived home one evening with a carrier bag from Lillywhites full of leotards and dazzlingly white trainers with soles as thick as telephone directories. She had decided, she announced, to treat her body with a bit more respect. She was spending too much time sitting behind her desk, letting her body go. I protested that her body hadn’t gone anywhere – and indeed it hasn’t. But her mind was already made up. Now she goes to a swanky gym near her office three times a week. She arrives home completely wiped out, but strangely elated, speaking in riddles about endorphins. I always thought that endorphins were small, grizzled creatures in The Lord of the Rings. I listen to her talk, and wonder what has prompted this madness.

The final piece to this rather hazy jigsaw is the abrupt change in Anna’s musical taste. Or, to be more specific, the sudden advent of Anna’s musical taste. She has never been particularly interested in listening to music. Instead, she listens to pop. And not just pop, but bad pop. Since the heyday of Take That she has had an unfathomable fondness for boy bands. You know the type. There are usually four or five pretty-looking boys, whose only apparent talent is the ability to walk moodily along a windswept beach. For some reason only one of them can ever actually sing, so he does all the work while the others prance about behind him in carefully choreographed ataxy. I have pointed out to Anna on numerous occasions that these manufactured bands are monstrously cynical exercises in the exploitation of the burgeoning libidos of prepubescent girls, and that someone of her age and intelligence should know better. Still, she can’t resist the lure of Tower Records on Camden High Street every Saturday afternoon, where she will eagerly buy the latest offering of undiluted schmaltz from Ronny, Donny, and Johnny. And Brian. (There’s always one called Brian.)

Well, all that has suddenly changed. Anna’s Westlife CD has been consigned to the dusty racks of the unloved, and has been replaced by something which is actually (hard though this may be to imagine) far scarier.

It’s bye-bye boys; hello Ravel.

Now, Ravel: ‘Boléro’, right? Torville and Dean. Dudley Moore and Bo Derek. Naff, pseudo-Spanish gimmickry. Well, yes. But this isn’t ‘Boléro’. This is something altogether different. Anna has brought home a recording of Ravel’s piano trio. And it’s beautiful, beguiling music – rich, compelling, and frightening beyond belief. Anna listens with a rapt, faraway look in her eyes which I do not recognise. As I watch her immerse herself in the music, new barriers silently erect themselves between us. I find myself yearning for the bland awfulness of Anna’s fabricated pop stars and their lovely teeth.

Regarded objectively, I’m aware that all of this may not seem like much, but the accumulation of these tiny changes has slowly been crowding in on me, messing with my head. All I really want is some reassurance. I need to know that none of this portends a more significant, more sinister change.

That’s why, last week, I began to examine the contents of Anna’s suit pockets.

My searches have revealed little so far: a receipt for a new pair of tights, a plastic toothpick, a chewed biro top. This bland innocuity whips me up into ever increasing spirals of anxiety, so I’ve also started to conduct jittery forays into Anna’s handbag while she’s in the bath. Her contented splashes almost make my heart stop as I delve into the bag’s scented darkness, clumsily scattering peppermints and tampons in my quest for clues.

The lack of meaningful results from my surreptitious prying made me realise with an unpleasant jolt how little I know about what Anna actually does all day. Vast swathes of her life are hidden from view behind the grey façade of her office near Moorgate. Consequently I spent last Friday hovering on the street near where she works, waiting to see what would happen. Nothing did, of course. Anna didn’t even leave the office for lunch. She eventually emerged, looking tired and drawn, at seven o’clock in the evening, and went straight home.

It was the frustration of that unenlightening experiment that prompted me to follow Anna on her purported shopping expedition on Saturday afternoon. Out in public, I reasoned, I would be able to observe her without interruption. There was nothing sinister about it, nothing untoward. I’m no deranged obsessive. (Anyway, I doubt whether it’s technically possible to stalk your own wife.) I just wanted to observe Anna with her guard down. I wanted to see how she behaved without me around. That was all.

Of course, I wish I hadn’t done it now. All of my worries have been compounded by Anna’s purposeful stride towards the matinée showing of Citizen Kane, and her cool, deliberate lies.

Why did I not stay at home?

I am trapped, helplessly pinioned on the skewers of my own distrust. Worse, I don’t even know what it is I should be worrying about: my emotional radar isn’t sufficiently well-equipped to interpret all these alien signals. There’s a little green dot flashing angrily on my screen, telling me that there’s something out there, but I can’t tell what it is.

Sometimes I wonder whether I want to know.

On Monday morning, when I wake up, I am alone in the bed.

I roll over and look at the alarm clock. It is just after nine o’clock. I stare at the ceiling for a few moments, then reluctantly pull back the duvet and stagger into the kitchen. On the table is a note.

Have a good Monday,darling. Hope the writing goes well. Please will you get some (lavender!) loo roll when you go shopping today? We’re nearly out.

A

On weekdays Anna is always long gone by the time I wake up. Instead of a goodbye kiss every morning I receive one of these notes, which contain the occasional unsolicited endearment and (more regularly) gentle reminders of the chores that I, the doyen of house-husbandry, am expected to do each day.

Also on the kitchen table is an envelope with a lurid Australian stamp. It is a card from my parents – late as always – wishing me luck for the launch party. My mother has written a brief message inside the card, Sorry we can’t be with you on your special day. I snort at this. They’re not sorry in the slightest.

My parents had been living a quietly middle-aged life in the shallows of Hertfordshire until one Saturday evening four years ago, when their lives changed forever. My mother called me as soon as she had recovered her power of speech after she had watched her numbers roll out of the National Lottery machine. Six balls nestling alongside each other in a narrow Perspex tube: their passport away from Home Counties drudgery. They had to share their jackpot with four other winners, but still pocketed well over one and a half million quid. There was much celebration, not least by me. Two of the numbers that my mother always picked were based on my birthday, so I felt that I had a legitimate claim to some of the proceeds. Anyway, all parents would distribute at least a share of such a huge windfall to their nearest and dearest, wouldn’t they?

Apparently not.

Within a week, my mother and father had put their house in Potters Bar on the market and had decided to move to Australia. I wasn’t given a penny of their new-found fortune. It was explained to me that nowadays one and a half million pounds wasn’t really that much, and that they couldn’t afford to start giving handouts to all and sundry. I pointed out that, as their only child, it was arguably disingenuous to describe me as ‘all and sundry’, but my complaints fell on determinedly deaf ears.

My parents’ new ambition is to annexe the world through their camera lens. They spend more time travelling than they do in their brand-new, architect-designed beach house just outside Perth. The only place they refuse to visit is England – too boring, apparently, my continued presence here notwithstanding. Whatever happened to growing old gracefully? They really shouldn’t be having so much fun at their age, especially not as they’re whittling away my inheritance in the process.

At least Mum and Dad have acknowledged that my novel has been published, which is more than can be said for my parents-in-law. There is nothing that Anna’s father likes to do more than enumerate, at length, my many failings – particularly when I am within earshot. My greatest transgression is that I do not have a Proper Job. A Proper Job, in this context, is one that commands a basic annual salary in the middling six-figure range (that’s excluding twice-yearly bonuses large enough to buy a Porsche or two) and requires a wardrobe full of pinstripe suits. My father-in-law thinks I’m little more than a parasite, greedily feeding off the fruits of his daughter’s industry. He obviously has no idea how much effort goes into writing a novel. I had rather hoped that the publication of Licked would allay his misgivings, but both he and Anna’s obnoxious mother have ignored it completely. There have been no polite enquiries, no words of congratulations, nothing but the icy silence of sour indifference.

Sometimes, I have to admit, I share Anna’s parents’ loathing of my job. There are occasions when I wish I had become an accountant instead, but my fate was writ large in the constellations, indelibly inscribed in the heavens by a celestial hand greater than my own. Ultimately, I was powerless to resist the sweet song of my Muse. I was put on this earth to write; and so write I must.

I began making up stories as a child. I would slave over these heavily derivative tales (one was called, ‘The Tiger, the Wizard, and the Chest of Drawers’) and would then solemnly recite them in front of my parents, who always applauded kindly (and doubtless with relief) when I finished. And this was the key: I loved being the centre of attention. That clapping was for me. The hubristic lure of approbation was what got me in the end. I was powerless to resist my all-consuming egotism.

But it’s not all my fault. I also blame Ernest Hemingway. It was reading A Moveable Feast, his account of his life in Paris during the twenties, that made me think that being a writer would be an enjoyable way to earn a living. Hemingway, the lying bastard, made the writer’s existence sound too alluring to resist. He cavorted around Paris with his glamorous chums, knocking out literary masterpieces in between drinking binges in the glittering bars of the Left Bank. I was captivated by his stories of ordering oysters and a bottle of white wine to celebrate the completion of a story. I wanted a slice of that carefree, bohemian existence.

(I did get a job, once. It was after my third unpublished effort, Peeling the Grape, had been met with the by then familiar chorus of indifference and hostility from thirty-five of the country’s largest publishers. Crushed, I decided to give my self-esteem a break and resolved to abandon fiction completely. I had done my best; it was time to submit to the inevitable. Literature’s loss was to be the advertising industry’s gain. I sent my rather sparse CV – embellished with one or two half-truths and three or four outright whoppers – to a few advertising agencies. To my surprise, I managed to blag my way into a copywriting job in a small agency in Fitzrovia. It wasn’t nearly as glamorous as I had anticipated; there was none of the coke-snorting excess amongst the creatives that I had always imagined. Instead people nervously sat at their desks, desperately trying to think of ways to persuade people to buy things that they didn’t want. The atmosphere of paranoid terror quickly seeped into me by some sort of awful corporate osmosis. I began to lie awake at night, terrified that my creative juices would abandon me. In fact, released from the demanding, unforgiving shackles of writing fiction, my creativity blossomed. It was just a pity that the narrow-minded account executives couldn’t see past the ends of their noses, which were buried in the lucrative feeding trough of bland conventionality. They weren’t interested in my radical ideas. Personally, I thought that my use of some of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, cleverly altered to praise a diabolical brand of versatile low-fat cream cheese (‘How do I eat thee? Let me count the ways’, etc.), was breathtakingly innovative. When I refused to come up with alternative ideas, they sacked me on the spot. I went back to my typewriter, weeping with relief. The experiment had lasted three and a half weeks.)