William’s Progress. Matt Rudd
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or that work-experience girl who is now your boss. You’re negative about everything, even the things you are positive about.’
‘I am not.’
‘You were even negative about our wedding.’
‘Let’s not go there again. I wasn’t negative. I was emotional. It’s not the same thing. The fact that Alex tutted all the way through it was a bit of a dampener. Especially after he turned up with all those horses. You’d think he wouldn’t have bother—’
‘If we are going to survive this whole parenting thing – and we probably should, don’t you think, for Jacob’s sake at the very least – then you are going to have to get a grip.’
‘I have got a grip. You are the one who thought it was a good idea to go on holiday to a bog in February.’
‘Is everything all right?’ It was the chipper farmer, peering out of his probably properly insulated window across the yard.
‘Yes, everything’s fine. Just another power cut. Sorry to disturb,’ I replied, pausing only for the slightest second to marvel at how, even in this terrible crisis, I am still so English that I will apologise to the person largely responsible for it. Would I apologise to a tailgater if he crashed into the back of our car? Would I apologise if someone spilled my pint? Would I apologise to a hoodie for getting his knife covered in my blood? Probably.
‘Can we continue this discussion inside, dearest? I am now soaking wet and I have bronchitis.’
She let me in. How kind. ‘Where were we?’ One thing you become quite good at as a parent is continuing conversations over many interruptions. It works particularly well with arguments.
‘This bog. February.’
‘Oh, yes. Right. Well, I have two things to say: one, we’re never coming to Devon again; two, we’re going home tomorrow. How’s that for negative?’
In the cold light of day, we packed in silence. I thanked the farmer for a lovely stay, apologised for breaking the window and offered him £20 to cover it, which he accepted. I then spent the whole return journey furious with myself for paying someone £20 because their dodgy electrics trapped me outside in the rain at 4 a.m. when I already had early-stage triple pneumonia. The whole journey, that is, minus the time spent driving at ninety-eight miles an hour to a service station because we mistimed Jacob’s feeds again and even the prospect of another speeding ticket won’t make me put up with that screaming a second longer than I have to. And minus the time spent queuing outside the only baby-changing facility on the whole M4. And minus the time spent queuing outside the same baby-changing facility again because Jacob always likes to poo twice when he knows there’s a queue for the changing facilities.
Saturday 23 February
We are all friends again.
Jacob, who hadn’t smiled for a week – and who could blame him – has been grinning away all morning. So much so that, by midday, I was wondering if he was grinning too much. Have they done a Channel Five documentary called The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Grinning?
Isabel is as relieved to be home as I am. We apologise to each other, we cuddle, we kiss. I can’t remember the last time we kissed…certainly not last week. But that was probably because of the hacking coughs. Maybe the week before. I think we might have done it then.
We haven’t had sex since Christmas Day when she was forty weeks pregnant, frightened and frightening. I do not intend to have anything approximating sex with Isabel until she is completely and utterly recovered from childbirth. My benchmark for this is a full month after the last time she says ‘Owwwwwch’ and clutches her stomach when trying to pick something up. If it takes six months, that is fine. Or a year. Or ten years, even. (Well, maybe not ten years.) But kissing…we always kiss. Or we always did.
HOW MUCH ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO KISS ONCE YOU BECOME PARENTS?
I always assumed that kissing each other good night was the absolute cornerstone of a healthy marriage. Kissing in the morning went out the window soon after the honeymoon, but if you don’t even bother to kiss each other at bedtime, then you may as well accept that your relationship has become entirely platonic. An affair is more or less inevitable.
I assumed wrong. Since having Jacob, kissing, even at bedtime, has become intermittent at best. It is enough to be alive and/or dressed in the daytime. Other things previously considered essential, such as teeth-brushing, tea-drinking, shaving more than once a week, going to the toilet and not falling asleep while standing up, are now very much optional luxuries. Kissing is going this way, too.
Does it matter? When I ask Isabel, she says it hadn’t occurred to her that we hadn’t been kissing although now that I mention it, I’m right. But then again, we have other priorities, like not killing each other. Ha ha. And anyway, we’ll have plenty of time to kiss when we’re in our rocking chairs. Ewww. ‘Darling,’ she says, reassuringly, ‘right now, going to the shops not wearing my pyjamas is a more important target to aim for.’
All the same, we make a point of kissing each other good night. The kiss is awkward, toothy, self-conscious. We bang our noses together. It’s like we’re teenagers again, except with an unmanageable mortgage, a nearly unmanageable baby and a vague memory that we have sworn we’ll spend the rest of our lives together in sickness and in health.
This is my fault. I have ruined kissing. I don’t even need a barn owl to keep me up worrying about it.
Monday 25 February
Johnson says he still kisses Ali at least twice a day, but (a) they don’t have children and (b) the kissing is now so utterly devoid of emotional meaning that he could be kissing the postman. Like he reckons she does every time he goes to work. Not for the first time, I wonder why on earth Ali puts up with Johnson.
I ask my seventeen Facebook friends how much they kiss. Most of them are people I haven’t seen for years and will probably never see again. They are virtual friends and I can ask them virtually anything I like but I immediately wish I hadn’t. The one I used to play clarinet duets with when I was fourteen, who now has three children, a dog, a goldfish and a husband who is in the army, kisses her husband all the time. Except when he’s on tour (and presumably when she is Face-booking, which also appears to be all the time). I Facebook back asking how long he’s away at a time, which is annoying of me. I am being further assimilated into a system of social networking that will ultimately destroy face-to-face human interaction, leaving us controlled by computers, plugged into a mainframe, devoid of legs and fed through tubes.
‘Nine months,’ she Facebooks and then does some random punctuation :( which I’m given to believe is teenage shorthand for a sad face. This is good news. Not for her but for me. I think Isabel and I would kiss all the time if I had been in Afghanistan for nine months. Maybe I should sign up? The adverts look quite exciting. Building bridges out of oil drums, jumping in and out of helicopters and so forth. Of course there’s the shooting and the bombing, too. That’s a given. But it does have its pluses. No nappies to change, for example. Quite a lot of kissing and so forth when I was back. And no unfeasibly young, over-promoted, man-hating boss who still holds a grudge against me because I once, almost accidentally, threw a cup of tea over her. They wouldn’t allow that sort of nonsense in the army.
‘Shouldn’t you be a bit too busy catching up after yet another week off to have time to muck around on social-networking sites?’ says the unfeasibly young, over-promoted, man-hating boss after a particularly fast pass through the office. ‘Everyone else is striving to make Life & Times a great magazine once again. It would be nice if you could at least pretend to help.’
Right, that’s it. I’m joining the army.
No, I’m not. According to the stupid website, I am too old. Even though the army is desperate for recruits, someone in their very early thirties, someone