How to Be Good Read online

  She doesn’t finish the sentence, presumably because she has begun to see that her analogy isn’t going anywhere, and that dating and men are nothing like Christmas shopping and baskets.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  She smiles again. ‘No. Not really.’ I have become a ghost, the comically impotent, unthreatening sort that you find in children’s books and old TV programmes. However much I shout Becca will never hear me.

  ‘Your brother’s single, isn’t he?’

  ‘My brother’s a semi-employed depressive.’

  ‘Is that a genetic thing? Or just circumstance? Because if it’s genetic . . . It would be a risk. Not for a while, though. I mean, you don’t get so many depressed kids, do you? It’s a late-onset thing. And I’m so old already that I won’t be around when they become depressed adults. So. Maybe it’s worth thinking about. If he’s game, I am.’

  ‘I’ll pass it on. I think he would like children, yes.’

  ‘Good. Excellent.’

  ‘You know the thing you didn’t hear?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When I said, “Did you hear what I said”, and you said “No”.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘He’s my age, isn’t he? More or less?’

  And we talk about my brother and his depression and his lack of ambition until Becca has lost all interest in the idea of bearing his children.

  2

  Nothing happens for a couple of weeks. We don’t have another conversation about anything; we keep to the social arrangements we have already made, which means dinners at weekends with other couples with children, couples who live within roughly the same income bracket and postal district as ours. Stephen leaves three messages on my mobile, and I don’t reply to any of them. Nobody notices that I failed to attend the second day of my Family Health Workshop in Leeds. I have returned to the marital bed, and David and I have had sex, just because we’re there and lying next to each other. (The difference between sex with David and sex with Stephen is like the difference between science and art. With Stephen it’s all empathy and imagination and exploration and the shock of the new, and the outcome is . . . uncertain, if you know what I mean. I’m engaged by it, but I’m not necessarily sure what it’s all about. David, on the other hand, presses this button, then that one, and bingo! Things happen. It’s like operating a lift – just as romantic, but actually just as useful.)

  We have a great belief, those of us who live in this income bracket and postal district, in the power of words: we read, we talk, we write, we have therapists and counsellors and even priests who are happy to listen to us and tell us what to do. So it comes as something of a shock to me that my words, big words, it seemed to me at the time, words that would change my life, might just as well have been bubbles: David swatted them away and they popped, and there is no evidence anywhere that they ever existed.

  So now what? What happens when words fail us? If I lived a different sort of life in a different sort of world, a world where action counted for more than words and feelings, I would do something, go somewhere, hit someone, even. But David knows that I don’t live in that world, and has called my bluff; he won’t obey the rules. Once we took Tom to play this shoot-em-up game in a funfair; you had to put on this electronic backpack thing, and when you were hit, it made a noise and you were dead. You could, of course, just ignore the noise and carry on, if you wanted to be anarchic and wreck the game, because a beep is just a beep, after all. And that, as it turns out, was what I was doing when I asked for a divorce. I was making a beeping noise that David won’t recognize.

  This is what it feels like: you walk into a room and the door locks behind you and you spend a little while panicking, looking around for a key or a window or something, and then when you realize that there is no way out, you start to make the best of what you’ve got. You try out the chair, and you realize that it’s actually not uncomfortable, and there’s a TV, and a couple of books, and there’s a fridge stocked with food. You know, how bad can it be? And me asking for a divorce was the panic, but very soon I get to this stage of looking around at what I’ve got. And what I’ve got turns out to be two lovely kids, a nice house, a good job, a husband who doesn’t beat me and presses all the right buttons on the lift . . . I can do this, I think. I can live this life.

  One Saturday night David and I go out for a meal with Giles and Christine, these friends of ours we’ve known since college, and David and I are OK with each other, and it’s a nice restaurant, an old-fashioned Italian in Chalk Farm with breadsticks and wine-in-a-basket and really good veal (and if we take it as read that doctors cannot, unless they are Dr Death-type doctors who inject young children and pensioners with deadly serums, be Bad People, then I think I’m entitled to a little veal once in a while); and halfway through the evening, with David in the middle of one of his Angriest Man in Holloway rants (a savage assault, if you’re interested, on the decision-making process at Madame Tussaud’s), I notice that Giles and Christine are almost helpless with laughter. And they’re not even laughing at David, but with him. And even though I’m sick of David’s rants, his apparently inexhaustible and all-consuming anger, I suddenly see that he does have the power to entertain people, and I feel well-disposed, almost warm, towards him, and when we get home we indulge in a little more button pushing.

  And the next morning we take Molly and Tom to the Archway Baths, and Molly gets knocked over by one of the puny waves generated by the wave machine and disappears under eighteen inches of water, and all four of us, even David, get the giggles, and the moment we calm down I can see what an awful malcontent I have become. I’m not being sentimental: I am aware that this happy family snapshot was just that, a snapshot, and an unedited video would have captured a sulk from Tom before we arrived at the pool (hates swimming with us, wanted to go round to Jamie’s) and a rant from David after (I refuse the kids permission to buy crisps from the vending machine because we’re going straight home for lunch, David is compelled to tell me that I am a living embodiment of the Nanny State). The point is not that my life is one long golden summer which I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate (although it might be, of course, and I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate it), but that happy moments are possible, and while happy moments are possible I have no right to demand anything more for myself, given the havoc that would be wrought.

  That night I have a huge row with David, and the next day Stephen turns up at work, and all of a sudden I’ve spilled the half-full glass all over myself.

  The row isn’t worth talking about, really: it’s just a row, between two people who actually don’t like each other enough not to row. It begins with something about a plastic bag with a hole in it (I didn’t know it had a hole in it, and I told David to use it to . . . Oh, forget it); it ends with me telling David that he’s a talentless and evil bastard, and with him telling me that he can’t hear my voice without wanting to throw up. The Stephen thing is altogether more serious. Monday morning is a drop-in surgery, and I’ve just finished seeing a chap who has suddenly become convinced that he has cancer of the rectum. (He doesn’t. He has a boil – a result, I would imagine, of his somewhat cavalier approach to personal hygiene, although I will spare you any further details.) And I go out to the reception to pick up the next set of medical notes, and I see Stephen sitting in the waiting area with his arm in what is very clearly a home-made sling.

  Eva, our receptionist, leans over the desk and starts to whisper.

  ‘The guy in the sling. He says he’s only just moved into the area and he has no proof of residence and no medical card and he only wants to see you. Says someone recommended you. Shall I send him packing?’

  ‘No, it’s OK. I’ll see him now. What’s his name?’

  ‘Ummm . . .’ She looks at the pad in front of her. ‘Stephen Garner.’

  This is his real name, although I wasn’t to know that he’d use it. I look at him.

  ‘Stephen Garner?’


  He jumps to his feet. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Would you like to come through?’

  As I walk down the corridor, I’m aware that several people in the waiting room are bearing down on Eva to complain about Mr Garner’s queue jumping. I feel guilty and I want to get out of earshot, but progress to my surgery is slow, because Stephen, clearly enjoying himself greatly, has also developed a limp. I usher him in and he sits down, grinning broadly.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I ask him.

  ‘How else was I supposed to see you?’

  ‘No, you see, that was the message I was trying to convey by not returning your calls. I don’t want to see you. Enough. I made a mistake.’

  I sound like me, cool and slightly stroppy, but I don’t feel like me. I feel scared, and excited, and much younger than I am, and this emergent juvenile finds herself wondering whether Eva noticed how attractive Mr Garner is. (‘Did you see that guy in the sling?’ I want her to say at some point in the day. ‘Phwooar.’ And I’d only just restrain myself from saying something smug.)

  ‘Can we go for a cup of coffee and talk about this?’

  Stephen is a press officer for a pressure group which looks after political refugees. He worries about the Asylum Bill and Kosovo and East Timor, sometimes, he has confessed, to the extent that he cannot sleep at night. He, like me, is a good person. But turning up at a doctor’s surgery feigning injury in order to harass one of the doctors . . . That’s not Good. That’s Bad. I’m confused.

  ‘I’ve got a room full of patients out there. Unlike you, all of them, without exception, aren’t feeling very well. I can’t skip out for a coffee whenever I feel like it.’

  ‘Do you like my sling?’

  ‘Please go away.’

  ‘When you’ve given me a time when we can meet. Why did you leave the hotel in the middle of the night?’

  ‘I felt bad.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Sleeping with you when I’ve got a husband and two kids, presumably.’

  ‘Oh. That.’

  ‘Yes. That.’

  ‘I’m not leaving until we have a date.’

  The reason I don’t have him thrown out is because I find all this curiously thrilling. A few weeks ago, before I met Stephen, I wasn’t this person who makes men feign serious injury in order to grab a few precious seconds of time with me. I mean, I’m perfectly presentable looking, and I know that when I make an effort I can still extract grudging admiration from my husband, but until now I have been under no illusions about my ability to drive the opposite sex demented with desire. I was Molly’s mum, David’s wife, a local GP; I have been monogamous for two decades. And it’s not like I’ve become asexual, because I have had sex, but it’s sex with David, and attraction and all the rest of it no longer seems to apply: we have sex with each other because we have agreed not to have sex with anyone else, not because we can’t keep our hands to ourselves.

  And now, with Stephen begging in front of me, I do feel a little bit of vanity creeping in. Vanity! I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror in my surgery, and for a moment, just a second, I can see why someone would go to all the trouble of putting his arm in a sling. I’m not being monstrously vain, after all: I’m not saying that I could see why someone would want to throw themselves off a cliff, or starve themselves to death, or sit at home listening to sad music and downing a bottle of whisky. The sling must have taken him all of twenty minutes to knock up, and that’s presuming a certain degree of incompetence; throw in the drive from Kentish Town and we’re talking about a maximum of forty-five minutes of inconvenience, very little expense and absolutely no pain. It’s hardly Fatal Attraction, is it? No, I have a sense of proportion about this, and though it would be preposterous to presume that I’m worth much more than a fake sling, I do suddenly have the sense of being worth that much, and this is an entirely new and not altogether unwelcome feeling. If I were single, or had recently embarked on the latest in a long string of relationships, I would think that Stephen’s behaviour was pathetic, or threatening, or annoying, at least; but I’m not single, I’m a married woman, and as a paradoxical consequence I tell him that I’ll meet him for a drink after work.

  ‘Really?’ He sounds amazed, as if he knows he’s overstepped the mark, and no woman in her right mind would agree to a date in these circumstances; for a moment, my new-found sexual confidence takes a knock.

  ‘Really. Ring me on my mobile later. But please go, and let me see someone who has something wrong with them.’

  ‘Shall I take the sling off? Make it look as though you’ve cured me?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. But maybe you could lose the limp on the way out.’

  ‘Too much?’

  ‘Too much.’

  ‘Right-o. See you later.’

  And he strides cheerfully out of the room.

  With a choreographer’s sense of timing, Becca walks in seconds later – she must have pushed past Stephen on her way.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ she says. ‘I owe you an apology.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can’t sleep so you end up writing out recent conversations you’ve had? So they look like a play?’

  ‘No.’ I love Becca, but it has begun to occur to me that she might be potty.

  ‘Well, you should. It’s fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes.’

  ‘You should get the person you had the conversation with to come round and read their part out loud.’

  She looks at me, and makes a face, as if I am the potty one.

  ‘What would be the point of that? Anyway. You know the last time we went out for pizza?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was, you know, writing out the conversation. And I remembered all that stuff about your brother. But – don’t laugh, OK – did you say something about having an affair?’

  ‘Shhh! Shhh!’ I push the door shut behind her.

  ‘My God! You did, didn’t you!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I just ignored you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Katie, I’m so sorry. I wonder why I did that?’

  I make a face to show that I cannot help her.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes. Just about.’

  ‘So what’s going on?’

  It’s interesting, listening to the tones in her voice. And there are tones plural there. There’s the girly-golly-gosh, I-want-to-hear-all-about-it tone, of course, but she knows David, she knows Tom and Molly, so there is caution there, too, and concern, and probably disapproval.

  ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Becca.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Yes, I did. But now I don’t know what to say about it.’

  ‘Why are you doing it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But I do, I think. It’s just that Becca wouldn’t understand. And if she did, she would begin to feel more sorry for me than I could bear. I could tell her about the excitement of the last couple of weeks, and the dreamy otherworldliness of the lovemaking. But I couldn’t tell her that Stephen’s interest in me, his attraction to me, seems like the only sense of future I have. That’s too pathetic. She wouldn’t like that.

  I’m nervous when I meet Stephen again after work, because it feels as though I’m entering Phase Two of something, and Phase Two seems potentially more serious than Phase One. I know, of course, that Phase One involved all sorts of serious things – infidelity and deceit, to name but two – but it stopped, and I was OK about it stopping; I thought the Stephen thing was something I could brush off, like a crumb, leaving no trace of anything behind. But if it was a crumb, and I’d brushed it off, it wouldn’t have walked in to the surgery wearing a fake sling this morning. It
’s beginning to look less like a crumb and more like a red wine stain, a grease spot, a nasty and very visible patch of Indian takeaway sauce. Anyway. The point is I’m nervous, and I’m nervous because I’m not meeting Stephen with the intention of telling him I never want to see him again.

  I don’t want him to pick me up from work because people are nosy, so we arrange to meet in a residential street around the corner; to avoid missing each other we choose a house to meet outside. And while I’m walking there I try to think of the man with the boil because this is bad, bad, underhand, deceitful, and you have to be good to look at boils in the rectal area (unless you’re very, very bad, I suppose, sick and corrupt and decadent), so when I spot Stephen’s car I’m not really in the right place to focus on what I’m doing, or how I should be with him. I get in and we drive off, all the way to Clerkenwell, because Stephen knows a quiet bar in a smart new hotel, and I don’t wonder until later why a man who works for a pressure group based in Camden knows anything about smart new hotels in Clerkenwell.

  But it is the right place for us, discreet and soulless and full of Germans and Americans, and they bring you a bowl of nuts with your drink, and we sit there for a little while and it occurs to me for the first time, really, how little I know this man. What am I supposed to say now? I can have state-of-relationship conversations with David, because I know the way into them – Jesus, I should do by now – but this guy . . . I don’t even know the name of his sister, so how can I talk to him about whether I should leave my husband and two children?

  ‘What’s your sister’s name?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What’s the name of your sister?’

  ‘Jane. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It doesn’t seem to have helped.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘From me. What do you want from me?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He’s making me angry, although he’d be surprised that his hitherto minimal contribution to the conversation – a couple of ‘Sorrys’ and his sister’s first name, provided on request – could have provoked this response. He just doesn’t seem to get it, somehow. I am facing the imminent destruction of all that I hold dear, or used to hold dear, anyway, and he sits there sipping his designer beer, oblivious to anything but the comfort of his surroundings and his delight in my presence. I’m scared that any second he’s going to lean back in his seat, sigh contentedly, and say, ‘This is nice.’ I want anguish, pain, confusion.