How to Be Good (10 page)

‘And that was OK, was it? When he asked you to meditate? You didn't, you know, hit him or anything?'

‘No. The old David would have, I know. And that would have been wrong.' He says this with such earnestness that I am temporarily tempted to abandon my own position on domestic violence. ‘I must admit, it did make me feel a little uncomfortable at first, but there's so much to think about. Isn't there?'

I agree that yes, there is an enormous amount to think about.

‘I mean, just thinking about one's own personal circumstances . . .' (‘One's own personal circumstances'? Who is this man, who talks to his own wife in his own bed in phrases from ‘Thought
for the Day'?) ‘. . . That could occupy you for hours. Days. And then there's everything else . . .'

‘What, the world and all that? Suffering and so on?' It is impossible not to be facetious, I am beginning to find, with someone from whom all trace of facetiousness, every atom of self-irony, seems to have vanished.

‘Yes, of course. I had no idea how much people suffered until I was given the time and space to think about it.'

‘So now what?' I don't want to go through this process. I want to take a short cut and go right to the part where I find out what all this means for me me me.

‘I don't know. All I know is I want to live a better life. I want us to live a better life.'

‘And how do we do that?'

‘I don't know.'

I cannot help but feel that all this sounds very ominous indeed.

 

Stephen leaves a message on my mobile. I don't return the call.

 

I come home the next night to the sound of trouble; even as I'm putting the key in the lock I can hear Tom shouting and Molly crying.

‘What's going on?' David and the kids are sitting around the kitchen table, David at the head, Molly to his left, Tom to his right. The table has been cleared of its usual detritus – post, old newspapers, small plastic models found in cereal packets – apparently in an attempt to create the atmosphere of a conference.

‘He's given my computer away,' says Tom. Tom doesn't often cry, but his eyes are glistening, either with fury or tears, it's hard to tell.

‘And now I've got to share mine,' says Molly, whose ability to cry has never been in any doubt, and who now looks as though she has been mourning the deaths of her entire family in a car crash.

‘We didn't need two,' says David. ‘Two is . . . Not obscene, exactly. But certainly greedy. They're never on the things at the same time.'

‘So you just gave one away. Without consulting them. Or me.'

‘I felt that consultation would have been pointless.'

‘You mean that they wouldn't have wanted you to do it?'

‘They maybe wouldn't have understood why I wanted to.'

It was David, of course, who insisted on the kids having a computer each for Christmas last year. I had wanted them to share, not because I'm mean, but because I was beginning to worry about spoiling them, and the sight of these two enormous boxes beside the tree (they wouldn't fit under it) did nothing to ease my queasiness. This wasn't the kind of parent I wanted to be, I remember thinking, as Tom and Molly attacked the acres of wrapping paper with a violence that repelled me; David saw the look on my face and whispered to me that I was a typical joyless liberal, the sort of person who would deny their kids everything and themselves nothing. And here I am six months later, outraged that my son and daughter aren't allowed to keep what is theirs, and yet still, somehow, on the wrong side, an agent of the forces of darkness.

‘Where did you take it?'

‘The women's refuge in Kentish Town. I read about it in the local paper. They had nothing there for the kids at all.'

I don't know what to say. The frightened, unhappy children of frightened, unhappy women have nothing; we have two of everything. We give away some, a tiny fraction, of what we have too much of. What is there for me to be angry about?

‘Why does it have to be us who gives them something? Why can't the Government?' asks Tom.

‘The Government can't pay for everything,' says David. ‘We've got to pay for some things ourselves.'

‘We did,' says Tom. ‘We paid for that computer ourselves.'

‘I mean,' says David, ‘that if we're worried about what's happening to poor people, we can't wait for the Government to do anything. We have to do what we think is right.'

‘Well, I don't think this is right,' says Tom.

‘Why not?'

‘Because it's my computer.'

David merely flashes him a beatific smile.

‘Why isn't it just their bad luck?' Molly asks him, and I laugh. ‘Just your bad luck' was, until relatively recently, David's explanation for why our kids didn't own a Dreamcast, or a new Arsenal away shirt, or anything else that every other person at school owns.

‘These children don't have much luck anyway,' David explains with the slow, over-confident patience of a recently created angel. ‘Their dads have been hitting their mums, and they've had to run away from home and hide, and they haven't got their toys with them . . . You have lots of luck. Don't you want to help them?'

‘A bit,' says Tom grudgingly. ‘But not as much as a whole computer.'

‘Let's go and see them,' says David. ‘Then you can tell them that. You can say you want to help them a bit and then ask for your computer back.'

‘David, this is outrageous.'

‘Why?'

‘You can't blackmail your own children like that.'

I'm beginning to feel better. I was struggling for a while back there, pinned back by the moral force of David's arguments, but now I can see that he's gone mad, that he wants to humiliate us all. How could I have forgotten that this is what always happens with zealots? They go too far, they lose all sense of appropriateness and logic, and ultimately they are interested in nobody but themselves, nothing but their own piousness.

David drums his fingers on the table and thinks furiously.

‘No, I'm sorry, you're right. It is outrageous. I've overstepped the mark. Please forgive me.'

Shit.

 

It is a fractious family dinner. Somehow David has managed to recruit Molly to the cause – possibly because she has spotted an opportunity to taunt Tom, possibly because Molly has never been able to see her father as anything less than a perfect and perfectly reasonable man, possibly because the computer David gave away was in Tom's bedroom rather than hers, although the one we have left has now been placed in the neutral territory of the spare
bedroom. Tom, however, is clinging stubbornly to his deeply held Western materialist beliefs.

‘You're just being selfish, Tom. Isn't he, Dad?'

David refuses to be drawn.

‘There are children there who don't have anything,' she continues. ‘And you've got lots.'

‘I haven't got anything now. He's given it all away.'

‘What are all those things in the bedroom, then?' asks David gently.

‘And you've got half a computer.'

‘Can I get down?' Tom has hardly eaten anything, but he's clearly had his fill of the great steaming bowls of sanctimony being pushed at him from all directions, and I can't say I blame him.

‘Finish your dinner,' says David. He opens his mouth to say something else – almost certainly something about how fortunate Tom is to have a plate of lukewarm spaghetti bolognese in front of him given the plight of blah blah blah – but he catches my eye and thinks better of it.

‘Do you really not want anything else?' I ask Tom.

‘I want to go on the computer before she gets it.'

‘Go on, then.' Tom shoots off.

‘You shouldn't have let him, Mummy. He'll think he never has to eat his dinner now.'

‘Molly, shut up.'

‘She's right.'

‘Oh, you shut up, too.'

 

I need to think. I need guidance. I'm a good person, I'm a doctor, and here I am championing greed over selflessness, cheering on the haves against the have-nots. Except I'm not really championing anything, am I? I am not, after all, standing up to my unbearably smug husband and – now – my unbearably smug eight-year-old daughter and saying, ‘Now look here, we worked jolly hard to pay for that computer, and if some women are daft enough to shack up with men who beat them, that's hardly our fault, is it?' That would be championing. All I'm doing is thinking unworthy thoughts that
nobody can hear, and then sniping about unfinished spaghetti bolognese. If I had any real conviction, I'd be passing on some offensive piece of homespun wisdom about how the Good Samaritan could only afford to be the Good Samaritan because he held on to his old computers and . . . and . . . gave them to a charity shop when they were knackered. Something like that, anyway.

So what do I believe? Nothing much, apparently. I believe that there shouldn't be homelessness, and I'd definitely be prepared to argue with anyone who says otherwise. Ditto battered women. Ditto, I don't know, racism, poverty and sexism. I believe that the National Health Service is underfunded, and that Red-Nose Day is a sort of OK thing, although slightly annoying, I grant you, when young men dressed as Patsy and Edina from
Absolutely Fabulous
come up to you in Waitrose and wave buckets in your face. And, finally, I am of the reasonably firm conviction that Tom's Christmas presents are his, and shouldn't be given away. There you are. That is my manifesto. Vote for me.

Three days later the children seem to have forgotten that they ever needed two computers – Molly has lost the little interest she had in the first place, and Tom is spending most of his time on Pokémon – and we receive a letter from the women's refuge telling us that we have made an enormous difference to some very unhappy young lives. I still believe the other things, though, the things about poverty and Health Service underfunding. You won't shake me on those – unless, that is, you have any sort of persuasive evidence at all to the contrary.

 

David has abandoned his novel, now, as well as his column. ‘No longer appropriate' – like just about everything else he ever thought or did or wanted to do. During the day, as far as I can tell, he sits in his office reading; late afternoons he cooks, he plays, he helps with homework, he wants to talk about the days that everyone has had . . . in short, he is a model husband and father. I described him as such to Becca the other day, and a picture of a model husband and father came unbidden into my head: this particular model, however, is made of plastic and has his features moulded into a
permanent expression of concern and consideration. David has become a sort of happy-clappy right-on Christian version of Barbie's Ken, except without Ken's rugged good looks and contoured body.

And I don't think that David has become a Christian, although it is hard to fathom precisely what he has become. Asking him directly doesn't really clarify things. The evening after we get the letter from the women's refuge, Tom asks – mournfully but rather percipiently, I thought – whether we are all going to have to start going to church.

‘Church?' says David – but gently, not with the explosion of anger and disdain that would have accompanied that word in any context just a few weeks ago. ‘Of course not. Why? Do you want to go to church?'

‘No.'

‘So why did you ask?'

‘Dunno,' Tom says. ‘Just, I thought, that's what we'd have to do now.'

‘Why now?'

‘Because we give things away. That's what they do in church, isn't it?'

‘Not as far as I know.'

And that's the end of it; Tom's fears are assuaged. Later, though, when David and I are on our own, I make my own enquiries.

‘That was funny, wasn't it? Tom thinking we'd have to go to church now?'

‘I didn't understand where all that came from. Just because we gave a computer to someone.'

‘I don't think it's just that.'

‘What else is there?'

‘They both know about you giving the money away. And anyway, it's . . . You asked me if I'd noticed a change of atmosphere. Well, I think they have, too. And they sort of associate it with church, somehow.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know. I suppose . . . You do give off the air of someone who has undergone a religious conversion.'

‘Well, I haven't.'

‘You haven't become a Christian?'

‘No.'

‘What are you, then?'

‘What am I?'

‘Yes, what are you? You know, Buddhist or, or . . .' I try to think of other world religions that might fit the bill, and fail. Moslem doesn't seem right, nor Hindu . . . Maybe a Hare Krishna offshoot, or something involving self-denial and some podgy guru driving around in an Alfa Romeo?