How to Be Good

‘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 to a sleeping house which, I now notice, is begi

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 begi