How to Be Good Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  NippleJesus

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  HOW TO BE GOOD

  A Riverhead Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2001 by Nick Hornby

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1569-2

  A RIVERHEAD BOOK®

  Riverhead Books first published by The Riverhead Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  RIVERHEAD and the “R” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: August, 2003

  Version_3

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nick Hornby was born in 1957. He is the author of Fever Pitch and of three novels: High Fidelity, About a Boy and How to be Good. All four books have been international bestsellers and all are available in Penguin. He has also edited two anthologies, My Favourite Year and Speaking with the Angel. In 1999 he was awarded the E.M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives and works in Highbury, north London.

  c

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to: Tony Lacey, Helen Fraser, Juliet Annan, Joanna Prior, Anya Waddington, Jeremy Ettinghausen, Martin Bryant, Wendy Carlton, Susan Petersen Kennedy, Amanda Posey, Ruth Hallgarten, Caroline Dawnay, Annabel Hardman, Mary Cranitch, Anna Wright and Gaby Chiappe.

  1

  I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don’t want to be married to him any more. David isn’t even in the car park with me. He’s at home, looking after the kids, and I have only called him to remind him that he should write a note for Molly’s class teacher. The other bit just sort of . . . slips out. This is a mistake, obviously. Even though I am, apparently, and to my immense surprise, the kind of person who tells her husband that she doesn’t want to be married to him any more, I really didn’t think that I was the kind of person to say so in a car park, on a mobile phone. That particular self-assessment will now have to be revised, clearly. I can describe myself as the kind of person who doesn’t forget names, for example, because I have remembered names thousands of times and forgotten them only once or twice. But for the majority of people, marriage-ending conversations happen only once, if at all. If you choose to conduct yours on a mobile phone, in a Leeds car park, then you cannot really claim that it is unrepresentative, in the same way that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t really claim that shooting presidents wasn’t like him at all. Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.

  Later, in the hotel room, when I can’t sleep – and that is some sort of consolation, because even though I have turned into the woman who ends marriages in a car park, at least I have the decency to toss and turn afterwards – I retrace the conversation in my head, in as much detail as I can manage, trying to work out how we’d got from there (Molly’s dental appointment) to here (imminent divorce) in three minutes. Ten, anyway. Which turns into an endless, three-in-the-morning brood about how we’d got from there (meeting at a college dance in 1976) to here (imminent divorce) in twenty-four years.

  To tell you the truth, the second part of this self-reflection only takes so long because twenty-four years is a long time, and there are loads of bits that come unbidden into your head, little narrative details, that don’t really have much to do with the story. If my thoughts about our marriage had been turned into a film, the critics would say that it was all padding, no plot, and that it could be summarized thus: two people meet, fall in love, have kids, start arguing, get fat and grumpy (him) and bored, desperate and grumpy (her) and split up. I wouldn’t argue with the synopsis. We’re nothing special.

  The phone call, though . . . I keep missing the link, the point where it turned from a relatively harmonious and genuinely banal chat about minor domestic arrangements into this cataclysmic, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it moment. I can remember the beginning of it, almost word-for-word:

  Me: ‘Hiya.’

  Him: ‘Hello. How’s it going?’

  Me: ‘Yeah, fine. Kids all right?’

  Him: ‘Yeah. Molly’s here watching TV, Tom’s round at Jamie’s.’

  Me: ‘I just phoned to say that you’ve got to write a note for Molly to take in to school tomorrow. About the dentist’s.’

  See? See? It can’t be done, you’d think, not from here. But you’d be wrong, because we did it. I’m almost sure that the first leap was made here, at this point; the way I remember it now, there was a pause, an ominous silence, at the other end of the line. And then I said something like ‘What?’ and he said ‘Nothing’. And I said ‘What?’ again and he said ‘Nothing’ again, except he clearly wasn’t baffled or amused by my question, just tetchy, which means, does it not, that you have to plough on. So I ploughed on.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘No. What you said.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘About just phoning to remind me about Molly’s note.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘It’d be nice if you just phoned for some other reason. You know, to say hello. To see how your husband and children are.’

  ‘Oh, David.’

  ‘What, “Oh David”?’

  ‘That was the first thing I asked. “How are the kids?” ’

  ‘Yeah. OK. “How are the kids?” Not, you know, “How are you?” ’

  You don’t get conversations like this when things are going well. It is not difficult to imagine that in other, better relationships, a phone call that began in this way would not and could not lead to talk of divorce. In better relationships you could sail right through the dentist part and move on to other topics – your day’s work, or plans for the evening, or even, in a spectacularly functional marriage, something that has taken place in the world outside your home, a coughing fit on the Today programme, say – just as ordinary, just as forgettable, but topics that form the substance and perhaps even the sustenance of an ordinary, forgettable, loving relationship. David and I, however . . . this is not our situation, not any more. Phone calls like ours only happen when you’ve spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every word you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play. In fact, when I was lying awake in the hotel room trying to piece it all together, I was even struck by how clever we had been to invent our code: it takes years of miserable ingenuity to get to this place.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do you care how I am?’

  ‘To be honest, David, I don’t need to ask how you are. I can hear how you are. Healthy enough to look after two children while simultaneously sni
ping at me. And very, very aggrieved, for reasons that remain obscure to me at this point. Although I’m sure you’ll enlighten me.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m aggrieved?’

  ‘Ha! You’re the definition of aggrieved. Permanently.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘David, you make your living from being aggrieved.’

  This is true, partly. David’s only steady income derives from a newspaper column he contributes to our local paper. The column is illustrated by a photograph of him snarling at the camera, and is subtitled ‘The Angriest Man in Holloway’. The last one I could bear to read was a diatribe against old people who travelled on buses: Why did they never have their money ready? Why wouldn’t they use the seats set aside for them at the front of the bus? Why did they insist on standing up ten minutes before their stop, thus obliging them to fall over frequently in an alarming and undignified fashion? You get the picture, anyway.

  ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, possibly because you never bother to fucking read me . . .’

  ‘Where’s Molly?’

  ‘Watching TV in the other room. Fuck fuck fuck. Shit.’

  ‘Very mature.’

  ‘. . . Possibly because you never bother to fucking read me, my column is ironic.’

  I laughed ironically.

  ‘Well, please excuse the inhabitants of 32 Webster Road if the irony is lost on us. We wake up with the angriest man in Holloway every day of our lives.’

  ‘What’s the point of all this?’

  Maybe in the film of our marriage, written by a scriptwriter on the lookout for brief and elegant ways of turning dull, superficial arguments into something more meaningful, this would have been the moment: you know, ‘That’s a good question . . . Where are we going? . . . What are we doing? . . . Something something something . . . It’s over.’ OK, it needs a little work, but it would do the trick. As David and I are not Tom and Nicole, however, we are blind to these neat little metaphorical moments.

  ‘I don’t know what the point of all this is. You got cross about me not asking how you were.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  I sighed, right into the mouthpiece of the phone, so that he could hear what I was doing; I had to move the mobile away from my ear and towards my mouth, which robbed the moment of its spontaneity, but I know through experience that my mobile isn’t good on non-verbal nuance.

  ‘Jesus Christ! What was that?’

  ‘It was a sigh.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re on top of a mountain.’

  We said nothing for a while. He was in a North London kitchen saying nothing, and I was in a car park in Leeds saying nothing, and I was suddenly and sickeningly struck by how well I knew this silence, the shape and the feel of it, all of its spiky little corners. (And of course it’s not really silence at all. You can hear the expletive-ridden chatter of your own anger, the blood that pounds in your ears, and on this occasion, the sound of a Fiat Uno reversing into a parking space next to yours.) The truth is, there was no link between domestic inquiry and the decision to divorce. That’s why I can’t find it. I think what happened was, I just launched in.

  ‘I’m so tired of this, David.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘This. Rowing all the time. The silences. The bad atmosphere. All this . . . poison.’

  ‘Oh. That.’ Delivered as if the venom had somehow dripped into our marriage through a leaking roof, and he’d been meaning to fix it. ‘Yeah, well. Too late now.’

  I took a deep breath, for my benefit rather than his, so the phone stayed on my ear this time.

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Do you really want to live the rest of your life like this?’

  ‘No, of course not. Are you suggesting an alternative?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

  ‘Would you care to tell me what it is?’

  ‘You know what it is.’

  ‘Of course I do. But I want you to be the first one to mention it.’

  And by this stage I really didn’t care.

  ‘Do you want a divorce?’

  ‘I want it on record that it wasn’t me who said it.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You, not me.’

  ‘Me, not you. Come on, David. I’m trying to talk about a sad, grown-up thing, and you still want to score points.’

  ‘So I can tell everyone you asked for a divorce. Out of the blue.’

  ‘Oh, it’s completely out of the blue, isn’t it? I mean, there’s been no sign of this, has there, because we’ve been so blissfully happy. And is that what you’re interested in doing? Telling everyone? Is that the point of it, for you?’

  ‘I’m getting straight on the phone as soon as we’ve finished. I want to spin my version before you can spin your version.’

  ‘OK, well, I’ll just stay on the phone, then.’

  And then, sick of myself and him and everything else that went with either of us, I did the opposite, and hung up. Which is how come I have ended up tossing and turning in a Leeds hotel room trying to retrace my conversational steps, occasionally swearing with the frustration of not being able to sleep, turning the light and the TV on and off, and generally making my lover’s life a misery. Oh, I suppose he should go into the film synopsis somewhere. They got married, he got fat and grumpy, she got desperate and grumpy, she took a lover.

  Listen: I’m not a bad person. I’m a doctor. One of the reasons I wanted to become a doctor was because I thought it would be a good – as in Good, rather than exciting or well-paid or glamorous – thing to do. I liked how it sounded: ‘I want to be a doctor’, ‘I’m training to be a doctor’, ‘I’m a GP in a small North London practice’. I thought it made me seem just right – professional, kind of brainy, not too flashy, respectable, mature, caring. You think doctors don’t care about how things look, because they’re doctors? Of course we do. Anyway. I’m a good person, a doctor, and I’m lying in a hotel bed with a man I don’t really know very well called Stephen, and I’ve just asked my husband for a divorce.

  Stephen, not surprisingly, is awake.

  ‘You all right?’ he asks me.

  I can’t look at him. A couple of hours ago his hands were all over me, and I wanted them there, too, but now I don’t want him in the bed, in the room, in Leeds.

  ‘Bit restless.’ I get out of bed and start to get dressed. ‘I’m going out for a walk.’

  It’s my hotel room, so I take the keycard with me, but even as I’m putting it in my bag I realize I’m not coming back. I want to be at home, rowing and crying and feeling guilty about the mess we’re about to make of our children’s lives. The Health Authority is paying for the room. Stephen will have to take care of the minibar, though.

  I drive for a couple of hours and then stop at a service station for a cup of tea and a doughnut. If this was a film, something would happen on the drive home, something that illustrated and illuminated the significance of the journey. I’d meet someone, or decide to become a different person, or get involved in a crime and maybe be abducted by the criminal, a nineteen-year-old with a drug habit and limited education who turns out to be both more intelligent and, indeed, more caring than me – ironically, seeing as I’m a doctor and he’s an armed robber. And he’d learn something, although God knows what, from me, and I’d learn something from him, and then we’d continue alone on our journeys through life, subtly but profoundly modified by our brief time together. But this isn’t a film, as I’ve said before, so I eat my doughnut, drink my tea and get back in the car. (Why do I keep going on about films? I’ve only been to the cinema twice in the last couple of years, and both of the films I saw starred animated insects. For all I know, most adult films currently on general release are about women who drive uneventfully from Leeds to North London, stopping for tea and doughnuts on the M1.) The journey only takes me three hours including doughnuts. I’m home by six, home t
o a sleeping house which, I now notice, is beginning to give off a sour smell of defeat.

  No one wakes up until quarter to eight, so I doze on the sofa. I’m happy to be back in the house, despite mobile phone calls and lovers; I’m happy to feel the warmth of my oblivious children seeping down through the creaking floorboards. I don’t want to go to the marital bed, not tonight, or this morning, or whatever it is now – not because of Stephen but because I have not yet decided whether I’ll ever sleep with David again. What would be the point? But then, what is the point anyway, divorce or no divorce? It’s so strange, all that – I’ve had countless conversations with or about people who are ‘sleeping in separate bedrooms’, as if sleeping in the same bed is all there is to staying married, but however bad things get, sharing a bed has never been problematic; it’s the rest of life that horrifies. There have been times recently, since the beginning of our troubles, when the sight of David awake, active, conscious, walking and talking has made me want to retch, so acute is my loathing of him; at night, though, it’s a different story. We still make love, in a half-hearted, functional way, but it’s not the sex: it’s more that we’ve worked out sleeping in the last twenty-odd years, and how to do it together. I’ve developed contours for his elbows and knees and bum, and nobody else quite fits into me in quite the same way, especially not Stephen, who despite being leaner and taller and all sorts of things that you think might recommend him to a woman looking for a bed partner, seems to have all sorts of body parts in all the wrong places; there were times last night when I began to wonder gloomily whether David is the only person in the world with whom I will ever be comfortable, whether the reason our marriage and maybe countless marriages have survived thus far is because there is some perfect weight/height differential that no one has ever researched properly, and if one or other partner is a fraction of a millimetre wrong either way then the relationship will never take. And it’s not just that, either. When David’s asleep, I can turn him back into the person I still love: I can impose my idea of what David should be, used to be, on to his sleeping form, and the seven hours I spend with that David just about gets me through the next day with the other David.