‘David – have you been cleaning your pipe with my Afro pick again?’ I call, as I retrieve a bent, smelly, nicotine-stained object from the back of the sofa. (I’m describing my comb incidentally, not my husband.)
I think I could reasonably describe myself as a happily married woman. But there are times when I’ve been known to fling myself down in pre-natal positions. Like that day I tracked down a really smart new washing up bowl in a particularly zingy shade of apple green. And before I could even get it to the kitchen sink, David decided to give the car an oil change. And needed a nice big, deep receptacle to catch the dirty oil …
That was the day a friend of his dropped by to help. A loutish lad but well meaning. ‘We need a bit of rag to get a grip on this nut,’ called my husband from deep within the bowels of the engine.
‘Here, will this do?’ said eager chum, passing him my best Heals drying-up cloth. The one with the pretty pink and purple flower border. And the now permanent black grease marks.
Small incidents really, although over the years they do tend to accumulate. But fortunately I don’t, even in moments of deep certainty that I’m travelling through life on the wrong bus, ever quite reach the stage of ending it all by gulping down every damned thing in the entire medicine cabinet – that’ll show him! Actually, since our cabinet mostly contains nose drops, suppositories and yeast tablets, it is probably as well for all concerned that I don’t settle for this particular alternative to married life.
But there are moments when many a woman might be forgiven for broodingly deciding to divorce the rotter/go home to mother/ go on an eating binge/jump up and down on his stereo equipment/take up smoking again/take a lover and/or drink that entire bottle of cherry brandy left over from last Christmas.
I must say, if I had to make a choice from the above selection, I’d definitely settle for the lover. Someone who’d really appreciate the true, inner, sensitive, vibrant, talented, sexy, radiant, essential Betty B. At least, I think I would.
I’ve never quite got over a play I once saw on telly in which this long-married lady and this middle-aged smoothy clap sparky eyes on each other at a party and rush to the nearest bed … And spend Act I, Scene II blundering around in total darkness. Because they’re both afraid that if they turn on the lights they’ll die laughing at each other’s spindly legs, appendectomy scar, varicose veins, droopy tum, wobbly thighs, etc, etc. And even in total darkness you’ve got to be frightfully passionate not to mind all those wheezy, clicky, creaky, rumbly noises folk can’t seem to help developing as the years go by. Not to mention funny little ways.
Would some new chap, I wonder, still pant heavily and lunge for my ear lobe once he realised that I simply have to chomp away at a nice crisp apple every night upon retiring? And read at least one soothing chapter of my book at bedtime? Would his hot breath still sear my nightie as pages rustled and apple cores whizzed by his quivering shoulders?
Or, for that matter, would some nubile young thing still go on coiling herself around my spouse at parties if she knew that she was, quite possibly, dooming herself to decade upon decade of Hunt the Other Sock?
But I have to admit, looking around at my contemporaries, that the ones who pop off down the primrose path from time to time do seem to weather life a great deal better than the heavy eaters, the hypochondriacs, the boozy flushers and the brave go-it-aloners. (All except one radiant-looking chum who says she gets it all from playing tennis.)
I suppose the ideal safety valve would be to hang on to one’s comfy old marriage partner, warts and all, but to seek out some splendidly ascetic second string companion who would hold one’s hand and yearn in a disciplined, tidy sort of way. Although I imagine one would have to be very old and warty not to want the relationship to lead somewhere. I have a friend who found herself a lovely extra fella with long slender hands and pale corduroy jackets.
‘What is it that makes you seem so different from all the other men I meet?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘Perhaps it’s because I don’t lead with my genitals,’ he replied drily, with a beautifully controlled but probing look into her eyes.
‘The only trouble is,’ she wailed, months and months of eye contact later, ‘that he doesn’t follow with his genitals either!’
In my thoughtful kitchen sink moments (especially when I’m bleaching my teacloths or scouring oily washing up bowls) I often toy with the idea of heading off into old age totally surrounded, like Colette or a character from Iris Murdoch, with doting elderly lovers. But I can’t help wondering who’s going to be matching, soaking and mending their socks while all these fumbling old replays are going on.
I just don’t seem to have the right mental attitude for extra-marital primrose picking. Ah well … anyone for tennis?