He took her to the best pubs and clubs, feeling in the prime of youth when older men saw them as so apparently happy. He installed her in the house which, for a while, she kept scrupulously ordered and clean, scrubbing and polishing (in stiff checked aprons Tom lasciviously provided) as if it was a big new toy unwrapped for her birthday.
Even before marrying her he ought to have guessed that such a sloppy proletarian underlip dripping tea into the saucer, or onto herself if the cup was at too much of a slope, meant trouble. What he had assumed to be an endearing pout was the shape of her mouth that had not evolved since birth. It was even more emphasized now that she was transmogrified into a grown-up married woman.
After a few months of wedlock Daddy’s little darling became, as she put it, too bored to live, and took to going out on her own. She came home in the middle of the night, usually on the back of a motorbike ridden by a leather jacketed, well-studded and bearded land pirate.
Tom shouted that it had to stop, as she walked upstairs looking worn and well used in her harlequin shirt of yellow hearts and red stars. She had taken to sweeping her hair up into a bun, which seemed always in danger of crumbling but didn’t until now, when he slapped her.
He had caught her on the rebound from her dead father, though what two lovers didn’t meet in that way, if he thought about it. As an unregenerate specimen she was even more determined in her behaviour than he. Her fixed smile of half-open mouth was too disturbing to look at for more than a moment, so he slapped her harder this time, and she fought back with the violence of a demented cat.
Angela’s departure had been like a loving wartime sendoff compared to hers. A biker gang must have held an all day rave before helping to do the house over, and the professional firm called in to clean up the squalor charged five hundred pounds.
He wondered if he were choosing the wrong sort of woman, or whether the wrong sort of woman was singling him out for special treatment, and if so why? He had spoiled Debbie by keeping her in a style to which he now hoped she would never again have the possibility of becoming accustomed. Norman Bakewell said he shouldn’t have done it, while listening with set mouth and appreciative wide-awake eyes to the sad narrative of his troubles.
A year after being divorced from Debbie he met Diana at a hotel in Leeds. She had come down from a disastrous visit to Northumberland with Jo, and he was there to talk at a publishers’ conference. He asked her to eat at his table and, in a calm, adult and deliberate manner they fell in love again, she missing coffee and he his cigar in the scramble to get up to his room.
He couldn’t hold back from asking what had happened to Jo Hesborn, whispered the query into an ear never known to be of such a warmly beautiful and exquisite shape.
‘That’s all finished. Maybe she went back to her father, or maybe her mother, I don’t know, but I’ve come back to you.’
He stood behind, undoing her blouse while looking over her shoulder into the full length mirror, till she stood naked and half fainting with a sharp and unfamiliar lust as if from the first stirrings of puberty, turning so that they could kiss each other step by step towards the bed.
He couldn’t understand, didn’t care to, and in any case, wasn’t able to because they were fired beyond the limits of reason due to knowing so much about each other, a resurgence of all their previous intimacies fuelling them into a mutual delirium that reminded him of his first lubricious affair with an older woman at sixteen.
They had no option. This time it would be different, and forever — they decided, on marrying again. They went through days and nights of infatuated madness. Why did they leave each other before? She was the only woman for him. Tom was still the same man for her, whom she had been so intoxicated with at Charlotte’s lunch party. She would do anything for him, and he would do whatever his beloved wanted.
She gave up her job at the BBC so as to paint all the time at home, sculpt when she tired of painting. ‘All I want is to be in the house and make sure you’re taken care of,’ she said, ‘but I also need somewhere to paint.’ They sold the place in Holland Park and bought a manor house in Hertfordshire with a suitably spacious barn that could be made into a studio. It cost him an extra twenty K, but his love had never been so intense, genuine and satisfying, which made it easy to be generous.
On reflection — and it had to come sooner or later — he had ricochetted out of his disaster with Debbie, and Diana had ricochetted from the slime of her long affair with Jo Hesborn, and when two ricochets clash in interstellar space the rate of burnout as they fall in the direction of Planet Earth, though not phenomenal to the naked eye, certainly becomes fast when they reach the pull towards gravity. And where do the star-struck lovers hit the deck, except on the lush banks of the alligator playground?
Marrying her again was another worst fatal move he had ever made. The two year itch excoriated, sooner perhaps than could have been expected, but no less sure for that, and he wondered how and when the split would come.
Itch? St Vitus didn’t know he was born. Diana bored and harried him more than he could remember, the complications of their reunion making a Black Forest clock seem like Stonehenge. Why had he been such a fool as to give her a second chance, which she took as an opportunity to spill out all the unresolved grievances saved from the first time? Her muted way of tormenting him, honed by the mill of her abnormal existence with Jo, generated more pain than in their first, which even so had been unendurable.
She declared herself to be an artist, obviously a road which Jo had set her on, but he could make no sense of her splashy style, and hardly knew whether he liked it or not. On a wet Saturday afternoon, which he’d hoped they would spend in bed, she unveiled her latest vast painting in the barn and asked what he thought.
‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘I like it. What colour! What composition! What do you call it?’
‘“Witch Doing Widdershins Under the Great Oak”. I thought you’d have more specific comments, though.’
‘Well, you could take that head out of the tree, and put it closer to the ground.’
‘You don’t know anything, do you? It’s not a head, it’s a ball of mistletoe.’
He looked closer, hoping to make some sense of the bullshit. ‘Ah, so it is. Sorry. I do like it, though. You’re very talented, darling.’
He wasn’t being serious, but she had to talk to somebody about her work. ‘In that case, why don’t you get me a commission from the firm to do a few book jackets?’
And get his head kicked in by Norman Bakewell? ‘The head of the art department likes to choose his own people. He’s very cantankerous, and I wouldn’t like to get rid of him, he’s so good.’
He tried to make up for this festering issue by arranging her first one man (Christ! Woman, you nit!) show. At the vernissage he heard a critic say how profoundly interesting her technique and subjects were, though that may have been due to the top class champagne and food, because even while harried by someone Tom had the capacity to act generously towards them.
Half the paintings and two pieces of sculpture were thumbed with little red sales tabs, and he noted with no resentment that the money went into her piggy-bank account. She would soon have enough saved not to starve when he kicked her out for the final final time.
But how to do it? There were several ways of telling your wife you were fundamentally unsuited to putting up with her volatile moods, cosmic doubts, and too frequent manic depressions, which at the best she assumed went with the artistic temperament, and at the worst blamed on you.