Unfaithfully Yours (27 page)

While we are on the subject of your funeral, no, I cannot ‘guarantee that awful little man from Oriel will not be there’ or that Julia will not want to read that awful bit of schlocky prose about you not being dead really but just nipped round the corner for a packet of fags. It’s a funeral. You won’t be there. OK? And don’t get me started on you and tobacco.

It’s the urge for control I can’t take, Elizabeth. It’s the way you want to manage everything and everybody – from how we lay the table to what kind of prepositions we do or do not end a sentence with; and, most of all, I suspect, it is the way you are with our children. I think it is just possible that before they arrived I quite liked you. Don’t, by the way, assume that this thought is going to lead me in the direction of being positive about our relationship. I do not want any part of this letter to somehow give you the illusion there is anything worth preserving in our marriage or that there might be some point in our meeting to discuss the fact that we have been wasting each other’s time for nearly half a century.

This is a rejection letter, Elizabeth, and one I am trying to make as thorough as I can. So let us start with Conrad.

I think you began winking at him when he was about three. I don’t think, at the time, he even knew what a wink meant. I think I had said something you regarded as foolish or self-aggrandizing – so almost any remark of mine would have done, I imagine. I looked across and saw you giving him a sort of musical-comedy twitch of the left eye. It cannot be that this was actually the case, but I could have sworn that he gave you a saucy wink in return. I certainly felt, from the very beginning, that he was on your side rather than mine; and there were sides in our house, Elizabeth, from very early on. Weren’t there?

He was about eight when he started to refer to himself in the third person. ‘Conrad is tying his shoes!’ ‘Conrad doesn’t like cheese!’ ‘Conrad is bored of skiing!’ From the very first you seemed to find this hugely amusing. In fact, as I recall, you started to do it yourself. ‘Elizabeth is distressed to hear Conrad does not like cheese!’ To which the little ponce would reply, ‘Conrad is concerned to hear Elizabeth is distressed that Conrad does not like cheese!’ He used words like ‘concerned’ from about the age of four.

I think the moment I snapped was when I heard you say something along the lines of ‘Elizabeth was interested to learn that Conrad was irritated to discover that Gerald was not amused to notice that Conrad always referred to himself in the third person.’ I think I said I thought you were both beginning to sound like psychiatric patients. I may even have made one of my many pleas for you and me to be called Mummy and Daddy, as opposed to Elizabeth and Gerald, but that, too, fell on deaf ears.

‘I don’t think of myself,’ you said, tapping fag ash all over the carpet, ‘as a mummy. Aren’t they the things in the third room on the left in the British Museum?’

‘That,’ I should have answered, ‘is exactly the kind of mummy you are like. You are certainly not a warm-smells-of-baking-bread-jam-on-the-apron-let’s-make-potato-paintings-and-do-animal-impressions kind of mummy. Only that is the kind of mummy I would like to have in charge of my children. Not some fucking Martian who keeps quoting Greek verse at them.’

I never said those things, though, did I? I know everyone thinks I always say what I feel because, so much of the time, the things I say are crude or unacceptable so they assume they must come from the heart. They do not come from my heart, Elizabeth. That is not the person I am. I wanted to have a nice, normal family who called each other ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ and ‘son’ and ‘darling precious girlie’, a family where my boy played football with me on Saturdays and my daughter wore pretty dresses and sat on my knee and asked me if she was my princess, but I didn’t get that kind of family, did I? I got a mad, twitching freak, who referred to himself in the third person, and a daughter who looked and sounded like someone who had been rejected by the Addams Family as too weird.

Don’t start me on Julia. I think we both know what happened with Julia. I know that wasn’t my fault, Elizabeth.

I thought I was going to enjoy writing this letter but, of course, I haven’t. I can’t bear to write any more. It reminds me of what a total fuck-up our marriage was. I thought I was going to say all the things I have never dared to say to you but, now I look at them, I can see they don’t, any of them, really express what went wrong or, rather, never got started between the two of us. Most importantly, I suspect, it was about me not having the courage to admit I never really loved you, but I have found that courage now. That’s sad. That it has got to the point where it is easier to say these hurtful things than not to say them. Of course it makes me sad, but there is nothing I can do about it. There isn’t anyone else – well, if there is, they are not the reason for my writing this letter. I am going away for a while and I think we should sell the house and split the proceeds. There is enough money for both of us. There just isn’t any use in pretending any more. That’s all I am saying.

Gerald

From:

John Goldsmith MRCGP, DRCOG

Writing from the desk of

Gerald Price QC

112 Heathland Avenue

Putney

29 November

To:

Said Gerald, Sad Wanker that He Is

Hi, Gerry,

This is not your family doctor speaking, John Goldsmith. Come out wherever you are so as I can punch you on the nose. I have just read your letter to Elizabeth. I am writing in reply as she doesn’t really want to go to the bother of writing to you herself. Having read your little effort, I can quite understand her position. Bloody hell, Gerry – I always knew you were a shit but I never realized quite how much of a shit you actually are until I wrested your last communication from her trembling fingers and, on her instruction, read every line of it – twice.

Why do people imagine their letters are private? Nothing else is, these days, is it? My brother once wrote my mother a letter in which he referred to me as ‘a loathsomely creepy member of the shiny-shoes brigade’ and he seemed surprised to find that she had shown it to me, that I had read it and I was standing on his front porch preparing to whack him on his horrible little beatnik jaw.

I haven’t ever told you about my brother, have I, Gerry? But, then, you never listen to anything anyone ever says to you so there would not have been much point, would there?

You may be equally surprised to learn that I am writing this letter to you from your own house. Yes, Gerry, I am sitting in your chair as I write this. I am looking at your horrible Russell Flint watercolours and sitting at your carefully restored Victorian escritoire and using one of your large collection of Montblanc fountain pens. Your taste in music is shocking. All you have on offer is CDs of Bruckner. What happened to the Tamla Motown, Gerald? Have you no life in you at all?

Last night, Gerry, I slept, very peacefully, in your immaculate Hülsta bed with its high-quality Vi-Spring mattress. I was lying next to your very attractive, sweet-natured, intelligent, moral and highly sexed wife, and we both enjoyed a very good night together. I made love to her four times, Gerald, which, she tells me, is more than you could manage in six months. She has also told me, Gerald, something I had always suspected but had never quite been able to put myself to the trouble of verifying: that you have a very small penis.

Who are you ‘doing’ up there in Norfolk, Gerry? That is the kind of word you would use, isn’t it? If it is, indeed, Norfolk where you are hiding. You are probably lying about that as well. ‘There isn’t anyone else – well, if there is they are not the reason for my writing this letter.’ Hmm. So there is someone else but you haven’t got the guts to tell Elizabeth who it is. A thirteen-year-old Thai hostess, perhaps? Mrs Dimmock? You were ‘doing’ her, weren’t you?

I have left Barbara by the way. You may as well know that. I haven’t communicated with her since I walked out after reading that letter of hers.

Barbara was always going on about something called ‘the unreliable narrator’. I must say, I could never see the point of reading a story told by someone who was supposed to be unreliable – unless the reader was supposed to flatter him- or herself by working out where the narrator was on the money and where he or she was not. What is, or is not, interesting about a story is the story itself – not our attitude to it. Unreliability, in physics or in storytelling, is not helpful, and in life it is downright disgusting.

I just did not recognize the woman you described in your letter. That is not Elizabeth. All you have done is pick on a few of her mannerisms, exaggerate them and then take issue with them. I simply do not believe you have been in any kind of torment as far as your marriage is concerned – ever. All that has happened is that you have decided to leave Elizabeth for someone who has managed to flatter you into believing that you love her. I am sure she makes all the right noises, Gerald, in and out of the bedroom. What you couldn’t take about Elizabeth was that, from time to time, she told the truth about you to your face. You have no idea, Gerald, how lucky you were to have been loved by a woman like that. If you want to know what people are really like, Gerald, look at what they do, not at what they say about themselves. Elizabeth has loved you faithfully. She has been true to you. She has supported you when other people – such as myself – touched on the fact that you are a reprehensible little cunt. She has tried to pass on her love of the thing she loves most in the world – Latin and Greek literature – to her pupils. This, Gerald, seems a rather more useful way of passing the time than making money out of the sometimes inevitable errors of judgement committed by people like me. What you do Gerald, professionally and privately, is disgusting. You cheat on your wife. You bully people who are supposed to be your friends, unless they are people like me, because you know I am capable of pushing your teeth back down your throat – 6–4, 6–3, 6–0, wasn’t it, Gerald?

What do you do that allows you to pronounce on Elizabeth’s love of classical languages or, indeed, the teaching of them? You present a version of the truth in open court that often you know to be false, even if it makes perfectly decent people miserable. While Elizabeth feels mortified at her inability to love Julia as she feels she should – something you have never helped her with at all – you think it amusing to make a cutting remark about either of your children without appearing to realize that you have any responsibility for them at all.

Oh, sorry, Gerald, I’m being ‘pompous’. You use that word about me quite a lot, don’t you?

‘
Don’t start me on Julia. I think we both know what happened with Julia. I know that wasn’t my fault, Elizabeth
.’

What on earth is that supposed to mean? Don’t you take responsibility for anything that happens in this house, Gerald? She’s your daughter as well. You do not seem to have grasped that simple point. I have been having quite lengthy conversations with Elizabeth about Julia and it’s clear she feels terrible guilt, loaded on to her by you. I’m sure you did want a simpering idiot to sit on your knee and pose as your ‘princess’ (Jesus – inside you are pure marshmallow) and I’m sure you made your disappointment all too clear to the poor girl.

I can still see you by that pool in Corsica. I think it was Julia’s birthday. She was eight or nine, perhaps. Maybe ten. What she really wanted was a book. She had made that pretty clear. She wanted a particular book, obviously, because she wanted to be like her mum, who always had her nose in one.
Alice in Wonderland
. She had set her heart on it. You didn’t think she should have a book. You had made that perfectly clear. You had told her she was getting a pretty dress, and that was what you got her. I happened to know that, like many other stupid people, you never really understood
Alice in Wonderland
. As she unwrapped the parcel, Elizabeth did her very best to keep the glass smile at the edge of her lips, but little Julia, with her funny glasses and her lank hair and her permanent look of anxiety, couldn’t manage to conceal her feelings. She was a kid, Gerry. Give her a fucking break. Her lip was on the edge of trembling when you said, in that horrible, jocular tone you use when you’re insulting someone – because that makes it all right, doesn’t it? – ‘You’ll be pretty enough for it one day, darling, won’t you?’

Then she did cry. As she ran into the house you looked around at us as if, for some reason, you thought we were the kind of adoring audience to which you usually perform – brainless bimbos, elderly judges – and you said, spreading those pointlessly large hands of yours, ‘Did I say something?’ I don’t think Elizabeth said anything. She just got up and followed her little girl into the house. If anyone destroyed Julia’s ability to be herself, it was you, Gerry. It is entirely typical of you that you seek to shift the blame on to your long-suffering wife.

‘
You are certainly not a warm-smells-of-baking-bread-jam-on-the-apron-let’s-make-potato-paintings-and-do-animal-impressions kind of mummy. Only that is the kind of mummy I would like to have in charge of my children
.’

Actually, Elizabeth does rather good animal impressions. You just never thought to ask her. Her wounded rabbit is hilarious. Her giraffe whose neck is trapped in a power cable is even funnier. But, of course, the mummy – a revealing word for someone brought up in the fifties – to whom you are referring is nothing to do with Conrad or Julia. She is the kind of mummy you want to have all to yourself, Gerald. Isn’t she? From what I hear, your mother and father had the kind of happy marriage from which someone with an inadequate sense of themselves might well feel excluded; and, of course, you would be much happier with a less intelligent woman. Barbara would destroy you in two weeks.

You have spent more than half your life with a woman and you have never really seen her. Shame on you.

I can’t really send this letter to you as this is your house (well, half your house anyway) and you are not here. I suppose you will skulk back at some point. I am taking Elizabeth away from here and, at some point, I expect I will have the conversation I need to have with Barbara.