For Anna, sport and physical exercise have always been a boring irrelevance, a fatuous waste of time. She has never understood why I cherish my Arsenal season ticket so much. (I once made the mistake of asking her to the pub to watch an away game on the big screen. She didn’t talk to me for two days afterwards, furious that I had ignored her completely for an hour and a half. I tried to explain: you go to watch, not to chat.) There’s a neurone missing up there somewhere, a faulty connection: the excitement, the passion, the despair and the elation all just pass her by. And although I love football, I would never dream of playing myself. Dedicated and indolent smokers, Anna and I were united in our scornful rejection of any activity (except for the obvious) which required any physical exertion.
Suddenly, though, Anna has started going to the gym.
She arrived home one evening with a carrier bag from Lillywhites full of leotards and dazzlingly white trainers with soles as thick as telephone directories. She had decided, she announced, to treat her body with a bit more respect. She was spending too much time sitting behind her desk, letting her body go. I protested that her body hadn’t gone anywhere – and indeed it hasn’t. But her mind was already made up. Now she goes to a swanky gym near her office three times a week. She arrives home completely wiped out, but strangely elated, speaking in riddles about endorphins. I always thought that endorphins were small, grizzled creatures in The Lord of the Rings. I listen to her talk, and wonder what has prompted this madness.
The final piece to this rather hazy jigsaw is the abrupt change in Anna’s musical taste. Or, to be more specific, the sudden advent of Anna’s musical taste. She has never been particularly interested in listening to music. Instead, she listens to pop. And not just pop, but bad pop. Since the heyday of Take That she has had an unfathomable fondness for boy bands. You know the type. There are usually four or five pretty-looking boys, whose only apparent talent is the ability to walk moodily along a windswept beach. For some reason only one of them can ever actually sing, so he does all the work while the others prance about behind him in carefully choreographed ataxy. I have pointed out to Anna on numerous occasions that these manufactured bands are monstrously cynical exercises in the exploitation of the burgeoning libidos of prepubescent girls, and that someone of her age and intelligence should know better. Still, she can’t resist the lure of Tower Records on Camden High Street every Saturday afternoon, where she will eagerly buy the latest offering of undiluted schmaltz from Ronny, Donny, and Johnny. And Brian. (There’s always one called Brian.)
Well, all that has suddenly changed. Anna’s Westlife CD has been consigned to the dusty racks of the unloved, and has been replaced by something which is actually (hard though this may be to imagine) far scarier.
It’s bye-bye boys; hello Ravel.
Now, Ravel: ‘Boléro’, right? Torville and Dean. Dudley Moore and Bo Derek. Naff, pseudo-Spanish gimmickry. Well, yes. But this isn’t ‘Boléro’. This is something altogether different. Anna has brought home a recording of Ravel’s piano trio. And it’s beautiful, beguiling music – rich, compelling, and frightening beyond belief. Anna listens with a rapt, faraway look in her eyes which I do not recognise. As I watch her immerse herself in the music, new barriers silently erect themselves between us. I find myself yearning for the bland awfulness of Anna’s fabricated pop stars and their lovely teeth.
Regarded objectively, I’m aware that all of this may not seem like much, but the accumulation of these tiny changes has slowly been crowding in on me, messing with my head. All I really want is some reassurance. I need to know that none of this portends a more significant, more sinister change.
That’s why, last week, I began to examine the contents of Anna’s suit pockets.
My searches have revealed little so far: a receipt for a new pair of tights, a plastic toothpick, a chewed biro top. This bland innocuity whips me up into ever increasing spirals of anxiety, so I’ve also started to conduct jittery forays into Anna’s handbag while she’s in the bath. Her contented splashes almost make my heart stop as I delve into the bag’s scented darkness, clumsily scattering peppermints and tampons in my quest for clues.
The lack of meaningful results from my surreptitious prying made me realise with an unpleasant jolt how little I know about what Anna actually does all day. Vast swathes of her life are hidden from view behind the grey façade of her office near Moorgate. Consequently I spent last Friday hovering on the street near where she works, waiting to see what would happen. Nothing did, of course. Anna didn’t even leave the office for lunch. She eventually emerged, looking tired and drawn, at seven o’clock in the evening, and went straight home.
It was the frustration of that unenlightening experiment that prompted me to follow Anna on her purported shopping expedition on Saturday afternoon. Out in public, I reasoned, I would be able to observe her without interruption. There was nothing sinister about it, nothing untoward. I’m no deranged obsessive. (Anyway, I doubt whether it’s technically possible to stalk your own wife.) I just wanted to observe Anna with her guard down. I wanted to see how she behaved without me around. That was all.
Of course, I wish I hadn’t done it now. All of my worries have been compounded by Anna’s purposeful stride towards the matinée showing of Citizen Kane, and her cool, deliberate lies.
Why did I not stay at home?
I am trapped, helplessly pinioned on the skewers of my own distrust. Worse, I don’t even know what it is I should be worrying about: my emotional radar isn’t sufficiently well-equipped to interpret all these alien signals. There’s a little green dot flashing angrily on my screen, telling me that there’s something out there, but I can’t tell what it is.
Sometimes I wonder whether I want to know.
On Monday morning, when I wake up, I am alone in the bed.
I roll over and look at the alarm clock. It is just after nine o’clock. I stare at the ceiling for a few moments, then reluctantly pull back the duvet and stagger into the kitchen. On the table is a note.
Have a good Monday,darling. Hope the writing goes well. Please will you get some (lavender!) loo roll when you go shopping today? We’re nearly out.
A
On weekdays Anna is always long gone by the time I wake up. Instead of a goodbye kiss every morning I receive one of these notes, which contain the occasional unsolicited endearment and (more regularly) gentle reminders of the chores that I, the doyen of house-husbandry, am expected to do each day.
Also on the kitchen table is an envelope with a lurid Australian stamp. It is a card from my parents – late as always – wishing me luck for the launch party. My mother has written a brief message inside the card, Sorry we can’t be with you on your special day. I snort at this. They’re not sorry in the slightest.
My parents had been living a quietly middle-aged life in the shallows of Hertfordshire until one Saturday evening four years ago, when their lives changed forever. My mother called me as soon as she had recovered her power of speech after she had watched her numbers roll out of the National Lottery machine. Six balls nestling alongside each other in a narrow Perspex tube: their passport away from Home Counties drudgery. They had to share their jackpot with four other winners, but still pocketed well over one and a half million quid. There was much celebration, not least by me. Two of the numbers that my mother always picked were based on my birthday, so I felt that I had a legitimate claim to some of the proceeds. Anyway, all parents would distribute at least a share of such a huge windfall to their nearest and dearest, wouldn’t they?
Apparently not.
