Coming Clean (6 page)

I find myself admitting to my feelings of abandonment. “I think I’d be coping better if Greg and I were OK.”

“Do your parents know how things are between you?”

I shake my head. “Like I said, they’re elderly. They’ve got enough to worry about with the move. It would be too much for them to cope with.”

“That must be a strain—keeping it bottled up.”

“I guess.”

Greg looks at me. “So, go on . . . say it.”

“Say what?”

“That since you found out your parents were moving, I haven’t exactly been the supportive husband.”

“Well, you haven’t. When your dad died, I was so there for you.”

“You were and I was very grateful, but he
died
.
Your parents are still alive.”

“I know, but they won’t be in my life the way they used to be and I’m really going to miss them. I know we can visit, but I find myself wondering how many times I’ll get to see them before they die. The kids keep telling me they’re going to miss them, too, but it hasn’t even occurred to you to ask them how they’re feeling.”

“Great. Something else to blame me for. OK, I’m sorry I haven’t been very sympathetic towards you and I will speak to the kids. How’s that?”

“Don’t knock yourself out.”

Virginia Pruitt says that this issue is something we can pick up in our next session, but for now she wants to stay focused on our childhoods. She wants to find out more about Greg’s early years. Greg often talks about his upbringing, so I know that he’s not about to tell Virginia Pruitt anything that he hasn’t told me.

He begins by explaining that he isn’t Jewish. “So significantly less emoting and fretting went on in our house compared to Sophie’s. For example, my mum and dad tended not to call the dermatologist if somebody had a paper cut.”

I’m straight back at him. “On the other hand, your father did die of heartburn.”

Virginia Pruitt looks puzzled. Greg explains that his workaholic father ignored his symptoms for years on the grounds that a) he didn’t have time to get them checked out and b) nobody ever died of heartburn. “When he finally saw a doctor, it was too late. Stomach acid had eroded his esophagus and it had become cancerous. He’s been gone two years.”

I wonder if he’s going to tell Virginia Pruitt the Connect Four story, but he doesn’t. “When she was young, my mother was a legal secretary, but she stopped working to raise my younger brother and me. I guess she fussed over us rather a lot.” Virginia Pruitt presses him for details. Before he has a chance to say anything, I hear myself butt in.

“Val thinks all human beings in possession of a penis are totally helpless. Even now, she cuts the crusts of his bread.”

“OK,” Greg says, red with embarrassment. “I admit that I was pretty cosseted and that I still have a few bad habits.”

“A few? That’s a laugh.”

Greg glares at me.

Virginia Pruitt suggests that Val babied her two sons in order to prevent them from growing up.

“Possibly,” Greg says with a shrug. “But what I know for certain is that my mother taught me and my brother about the things that really matter in life. Mum might have spoiled my brother and me, but she had another side to her personality. She did charity work. She thought about the world. She went back to school and got a degree. Most of all, she never got het up about the house being a bit grubby or untidy. She certainly didn’t nag and yell because there were a few dirty dishes in the sink.”

“And you wish that Sophie would stop nagging and be a bit more like your mother?”

“Yes, I do.”

I turn on him. “I can’t believe you just said that. How dare you set your mother up as some kind of gold standard. This is the woman who takes a drooling greyhound to bed with her and lets it sleep under the duvet. This is the woman who goes on holiday leaving a stack of filthy dishes in the sink and comes back to a kitchen full of maggots. Every time we visit with the kids, I think they’re going to come back with salmonella. But worse than any of that, this is the woman who would still bloody breast-feed you if she could.”

Greg is grimacing. “Thank you for that last image.”

“You’re welcome. The thing is, all you ever do is sing your mother’s praises. Meanwhile, here I am trying to run a career, two kids and a home and what thanks do I get?”

“What do you mean, what thanks do you get? I’m always thanking you.”

“In your dreams. OK, when was the last time you thanked me for unblocking the toilet or digging hair out of the drain?”

“I dunno. You want actual dates?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be so bloody ridiculous. I thank you all the time, but, being a martyr, you choose not to hear it. And anyway, what about me? What about the career I’m trying to run? The people I’ve got on my back? The worries I have? The exhaustion I feel? Do you thank me for taking all that on my shoulders?”

“Actually, yes, I do. Frequently.”

“Bollocks. You take me completely for granted. This whole thing has only ever been about you and your neurotic obsession with the state of the house. It has to stop.”

I’m practically weeping with frustration. He’s called me neurotic once too often. I want to ask him if it’s neurotic to yearn for a clean, tidy adult space where, after the kids have gone to bed, we can sit and have a glass of wine, read a book or listen to music . . . and practice “connecting” again. But I can’t get the words out. I’m way too angry.

That’s when that I do it. I wasn’t intending to put my plan into action so soon into our therapy. It was meant as a last resort—when I felt that talking had failed. I hoped the moment would never come, but it has. I open my large canvas tote, pull out a plastic carrier bag and tip the contents into Greg’s lap.

Greg sits blinking. “What the fuck?”

“That, Greg, is a week’s worth of your smelly, crusty underpants and socks. All of which I have picked up off the bedroom floor.” I’m not done. I produce a small freezer bag and dangle it in front of his face. It contains a load of toe and fingernail clippings. There are also several earbuds thick with orange earwax. I tip the lot onto the pants and socks. Then comes the coup de grâce. “And in here,” I say, waving a second freezer bag, “is a load of your pubic hair.” I open the bag and shake the contents onto the rest of the pile.

He recoils in disgust. “Oh, for crying out loud!”

“And do you know where I found the pubes?” I’m looking at Virginia Pruitt, who for once is giving the impression of being ever so slightly ill at ease. “On top of a frozen chicken casserole.”

Greg tells me I’m being ridiculous. How could pubic hairs have got onto a casserole?

“I’ll tell you how. Last night, you were in the upstairs bathroom trimming your pubes, right?”

“I dunno. I may have been.”

“And may you also have thrown them out the window?”

He’s coloring up again. “Possibly.”

“Well, the wind blew them in through the kitchen window and onto the counter where I had left a chicken casserole out to thaw.”

“Oh, come on. That’s an act of God. It’s not like I did it on purpose.”

“Stop making excuses.” I’m yelling now. “For once in your life, just take some bloody responsibility.”

“But it wasn’t my fault.” He is staring down at the mess of pants, pubes and nail clippings, clearly not knowing what to do.

I want to hear him say he’s sorry, that he didn’t realize how much he’s hurt me over the years, that I could be right when I accuse him of being a spoiled overgrown kid. But all he says is: “You’re mad—you know that.”

“Fine. If this is madness, then so be it. I don’t care.”

I have made my point. There is nothing left to say other than that, as far as I am concerned, this session is over. I get up to go.

“Please stay,” Virginia Pruitt says. “Believe it or not, I think this has been very positive. Sophie, you have communicated something very powerful here today.”

“Yeah, that she’s totally insane,” Greg says. His tone is bitter and weary. He waves his hand. “Let her go. I’ve had enough.”

Virginia Pruitt is still pleading with me to come back, but I’m already heading down the hall.

I open the front door and step onto Virginia Pruitt’s immaculately restored porch. It’s raining pitchforks. I can hear thunder in the distance. I haven’t got a jacket or an umbrella and Greg has the car keys.

Six months later

I
knocked on the cubicle door a second time. “Nancy, what’s going on? Please talk to me. Why won’t you come out?”

“Go away.”

It was ten minutes to airtime and Nancy Faraday, the presenter of
Coffee Break
, had locked herself in the ladies’ and was refusing to come out. Nancy was your regular program presenter nightmare. I’d worked with many like her in my time. These people were the “talent.” They had fans, hair and clothes budgets and they let it go to their heads. Hence the tantrums and hissy fits. With Nancy, these tended to be about nothing much: the air-conditioning in the studio was too low, too high; she’d been given a cappuccino when she’d ordered a flat white; the new intern stood too close and invaded her personal space.

It was always me who was called upon to calm her down. Apparently I was the only one who knew how to handle her. Coming from a home where emotions and opinions were expressed freely and at volume, I wasn’t frightened by her outbursts. I would give Nancy this careworn look along with a sigh add-on and say something along the lines of: “OK, what is it now? Talk to me.” Then I’d adjust the air-conditioning or whatever and the whole thing would be over. But today was different. Until now, she’d confined her behavior to her office. I’d never known her to lock herself in the loo or risk the program not going out.

“Nancy, I’m not going away. Whatever has happened, we need to discuss it.”

I could hear her sobbing. This was a first. Her tantrums never included actual tears. It occurred to me that for once something serious was going on.

“Come on, what is it?”

“I hate my Volvo,” Nancy wailed.

“Why? What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing as far as I know.”

“So trade it in for a new one.”

“What? I didn’t say Volvo
.
I hate my
vulva
.”

“Ah. Oh . . . kay.”

“I have this friend who’s a shrink and she says I’m suffering from a poor genital self-image.”

I took a deep breath. “I see. So why do you think that might be? I mean, has your vulva changed in any way? I was reading this article in one of the women’s magazines about how the lips sag as we age.”

Bad move. Nancy had just turned forty-five and hated being reminded of it. She was also a mother. Not that this fact was relevant to her plight, since she had refused to give birth vaginally.

“Omigod. You’re suggesting that I’ve got saggy labia?”

“No, of course I’m not. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know what I was thinking. So why do you think you have a poor genital self-image?”

“When Brian and I have sex, he never remarks on it.” Brian was her chap. They’d been together a year or so and he’d just moved in with Nancy and her children. “It’s not fair. I’m always telling him how powerful and hard his penis is—even when it isn’t because he’s forgotten to take his Viagra.” Brian was over sixty. Nancy had a penchant for stylish silver foxes even if, like Brian, they sometimes struggled to rise to the occasion.

“Well, I admit the situation does seem a bit one-sided.”

“I’ve told him that he should return the compliment by telling me how beautiful my vulva is, but he says he can’t think of anything to say. He says it’s embarrassing. How can he find my vulva embarrassing?”

“Nancy, he doesn’t find your vulva embarrassing per se. It’s just that he has difficulty talking dirty. Men of his age can be a bit conservative. You need to encourage him.”

“How?”

How? Why wasn’t her friend the shrink telling her how? “OK, let me think . . . Well, you could suggest the odd phrase, like, ‘Your pussy’s so hot and wet. I can’t wait to come inside you.’ That kind of thing.”

“That could work. I’m not sure where he stands on ‘pussy,’ though. He’d probably prefer ‘love tunnel.’”

“‘Love tunnel’ is fine. Now, then, why don’t you come out of the loo? We can do the program and then afterwards we could go for a coffee and talk about this some more.”

“OK, I’d like that.” Sniff. She slid the bolt across, opened the door and stood in front of me puffy eyed, her face streaked with mascara. She was otherwise immaculate in a size six navy blue wrap dress, patent slingbacks and shoulder-length auburn curls. Style-wise, Nancy was embracing “the new prim” as championed by Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. I reached for some loo roll and dabbed at her implausibly well-defined cheekbones. Nancy was perfectly open about her Botox habit.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go down to the studio. I’ve sent somebody to fetch you a cup of tea from the canteen.”

“Oh God—not canteen tea. The stuff tastes like cigarette ash in water.” Nancy preferred her favorite orange pekoe from the specialist tea shop across the road. Her face performed a half grimace. The Botox wouldn’t allow her muscles to complete the full contortion.

“Thanks for the advice, Sophie,” she said as we stepped into the lift. “I really appreciate it. I couldn’t bear Brian dumping me for another woman the way Greg dumped you.”

“Excuse me? Greg didn’t dump me for Roz. When we split up he didn’t even know her.”

“Well, that’s not what I heard. You know what the gossip’s like in this place.”

No, I knew what Nancy was like.

As the lift began its descent towards the basement, I explained that Roz had been living in the States for ten years and had only just returned to London when she and Greg met.

“Really? I had no idea.” I waited for Nancy to apologize for her original comment, but she didn’t. Instead, as we stepped out of the lift, she gave me one of her looks. Nancy did this a lot—stared at normal-sized women and tried to figure out why they hadn’t committed suicide.

•   •   •

P
hil, the studio manager, looked up from his copy of
Official Xbox Magazine
. “Blimey, you’re cutting it a bit fine,” he said by way of greeting.

I said something vague about us getting held up and took a seat next to him at the control panel. Meanwhile, Nancy went through to the studio. She put on her headphones. Phil did a quick sound check. Nancy’s voice—honed during her years at the BBC—was authoritative but smooth and easy on the ear. Male listeners found it exceedingly sexy and wrote in to the program asking for signed photographs. A few dared to admit that her voice, combined with her intelligence and stern interviewing technique (particularly with scoundrels and politicians), triggered dominatrix fantasies. I imagined these saddos jerking off in seedy bedsits as they listed to the program, crying out: “Beat me, Nancy, beat me.”

A moment later the green light on Nancy’s desk started to flash and she was welcoming listeners to another edition of
Coffee Break
—her poor genital self-image forgotten, for the time being at least.

Today the program lineup included a report on female craft cooperatives in Uganda, a live debate on whether the law on payments to surrogates should be updated and a ten-minute feature on the English hedgerow in winter.
Coffee Break
had been going for forty years and the stuffy-but-worthy formula had barely changed.

Until recently there seemed no need to change it. Middle-aged, middle-class women in middle England adored the program and appreciative letters and e-mails flooded in daily. Several newspapers had even reported that the Queen was a fan. Since most mornings the monarch was too busy reigning to catch the program, she would instruct a footman to record it and would listen in later with a cup of tea and a slice of Dundee cake.

The problem was that, after four decades, the program’s fiercely loyal fan base was dwindling. The audience was aging and even dying off. As a result, listening figures were falling at an alarming rate. Everybody who worked on
Coffee Break
agreed that the program required a revamp and that we needed to attract younger listeners. There were far too many features of the English-hedgerow-in-winter variety. Liz Crawford, the program editor, who had worked on the show for over twenty years and was its fiercest and most outspoken champion, wasn’t against modernization in principle, but she knew it would have to be done with much thought and care, so as not to take the program down-market.

Dated as the program was,
Coffee Break
—not to mention Nancy Faraday—was “intelligent.” There wasn’t a daytime show on radio or TV that came close to offering such a high standard of debate on issues that concerned women. We regularly discussed topics like rape, female circumcision, incest and domestic violence. Recently, after an item on postmastectomy breast reconstruction, a newspaper critic described our coverage of women’s health issues as “second to none.” The program was also well known for its campaigns. For years we’d fought to increase the number of state-run nurseries and preschools. A few months ago we launched a campaign to improve care for the elderly. As a result, writers and commentators as well as politicians—mainly male—who rather enjoyed sparring with Nancy, flocked to appear on the show. “Lose that intelligence, that
gravitas
,” Liz insisted, “and the program as we know it will be dead in the water.”

Everybody knew that she was making a valid point. We were all worried about what the future held, but most of us were convinced that Greater London Broadcasting, the company that made
Coffee Break
and syndicated it to radio stations all over the country, would be crazy to destroy a national institution.

•   •   •

A
fter forty-five minutes we were approaching the final item: the serial. This was always a novel, suitably abridged, invariably literary. Today was the first installment of Saki’s
The Unbearable Bassington
. It had all been prerecorded and approved, so unless something went drastically wrong technically, my attention was free to wander—at least a little.

These days, when nothing else was pressing (and sometimes even when it was), my thoughts turned to Amy and Ben and how they were coping with Greg and me splitting up. I worried about the kids all the time. When I wasn’t worrying, I was feeling guilty about how we’d let them down.

Looking back, maybe we didn’t try hard enough to stay together. Maybe Annie was right when she said that we’d ended therapy too soon and hadn’t given Virginia Pruitt a chance.

After the fiasco of that second session, Greg and I had a huge fight. It happened in the car. Greg found me walking along Virginia Pruitt’s street, heading towards the bus stop, in what had turned into a summer hailstorm. He pulled up, opened the passenger door and barked at me to get in. Under any other circumstances, I would have refused, but I was wearing a cotton dress with nothing on top and was quite literally soaked through.

His gallantry was in no sense a peace offering. Before I’d even shut the car door he was yelling at me: “How could you humiliate me like that? . . . In front of our
therapist
? After you left, all the hair and nails and earbuds fell onto the floor. I was on my knees for ten minutes clearing it up.”

“Ten minutes! Ten effing minutes! Have you any idea how long I spend tidying up after you? And I don’t care if I humiliated you. You humiliate me in front of the children every day. You tell them I’m neurotic . . . that I’m a martyr.”

“Only because I get so frustrated and angry.”

“You’re angry! What about me? How do you think I feel after years of you treating me like the hired help?”

Greg pulled over and yanked on the handbrake and said that if I wanted a divorce it was fine by him.

“It’s fine by me, too.”

“OK, I guess we’re both fine with it.”

There was nothing left so say. We drove home in silence.

That night he slept in the spare room. The next morning he came into our bedroom to get dressed. By then, we’d both calmed down and were feeling a bit sheepish. Greg said that he was still angry, but had been having second thoughts about getting divorced. I let him know that he wasn’t the only one who was still angry, but I agreed that we’d made a decision in the heat of the moment and that more discussion was required. We decided to carry on with therapy.

We had four more sessions with Virginia Pruitt, but it felt as though we were simply going through the motions. There was still the odd moment when we found ourselves connecting, but deep down we knew our marriage was over. We’d known it that night in the car. The problem was that neither of us was strong enough to come out and say it. Deciding to divorce when you’re both high on vitriol and adrenaline is easy. People did it all the time and then took it back, the way we had. But it’s not so easy in the calm of a new morning. And as for ending it all in the home you’ve made together, surrounded by wedding photographs, goofy snaps of the kids, your babies’ plaster of paris hand- and footprints hanging on the kitchen wall . . . It brought tears to my eyes just thinking about it.

Neither of us had the courage to draw a line under eleven years of marriage. We couldn’t say good-bye to a relationship that had begun with so much love and hope. Then there was the question of the children. Other kids coped with divorce, but Amy and Ben weren’t other kids. How would they manage? Would they ever forgive us? The pain was too excruciating, so we held off saying what needed to be said.

Virginia Pruitt, on the other hand, seemed desperate to “save” us. So much so that she decided to throw all her psychotherapeutic recourses at our problem. This involved her performing a complete U-turn regarding our need for sex therapy. She informed us that it would be of help after all and started setting us all sorts of “sexy” homework.

There was the nude picnic, which required us to take food and champagne to bed. Spillages that landed on our bodies had to be licked off by the other person. This failed to have the required effect since neither of us found being covered in tuna mayo and saliva very sexy. The naked Ping-Pong ball fights—in which we had to pelt each other with Ping-Pong balls—were sort of fun, but we kept losing the balls under the bed or behind the wardrobe. Retrieving the things took forever and in the end the game became a chore.

The end came quietly, late one night. We were lying in bed, both aware that we should be doing our sex homework. That week we were required to stroke each other’s naked bodies with a feather duster, but neither of us could be bothered. As I lay staring at the ceiling, I was overcome by a feeling of utter leaden defeat. Nothing was changing between us. For me at least, the cycle of arguments and silences had finally got to be too much. “Greg, I can’t go on like this,” I heard myself say.