Rule Four Sex and intimacy have to be a priority, even when life gets in the way
Jack
Dinner is prepared by a chef they’ve brought in, who presents us with some incredible beef thing (delicious, tiny, I could still manage an entire pizza) paired with some massively expensive wine (delicious and by contrast, very generous) and then leaves the kitchen completely spotless.
Everyone seems to be getting on well with their other halves, considering we’re on a My Marriage is in Trouble holiday.
I do wonder if perhaps the simple fact of not having any domestic duties might be making us all happier.
Usually at this point in a weekend Jessica and I have already had a row because she’s changed where ‘we’ keep a utensil without telling me about this unilateral decision, or because I’ve insisted on keeping last week’s newspapers to catch up on.
There’s the ongoing war about whether it’s okay to leave pans to soak (obviously I say yes, she says no) and the perennial dishwasher-stacking debate.
None of them are moral failings, we’re not going to break up over them or anything, but they’re the kind of micro fights which make the whole thing feel heavy and hard, like thousands of tiny paper cuts.
It’s only now we’re here, and there’s nothing small to fight about, that I realise quite how much they all add up.
After we’ve eaten, we move into one of the snugs, a room with massive great sofas and a log burner, which I read recently is terrible for lung health but makes it all feel quite cosy.
The walls are mostly glass but it’s so eco and high-tech that they’re warm to the touch.
I’m worried that everyone is having too nice a time and is too relaxed to be up for this evening’s task, which involves starting a massive row with your other half.
Suze rolls in, having declined dinner with everyone else in favour of a protein shake and replying to emails in the kitchen. Her work ethic is staggering.
‘I’m sure everyone is looking forward to some downtime this evening after our antics out on the water today,’ she says, with the air of a primary school teacher. ‘But we’re not just here to relax. So, on to the next rule!’
No one seems enthused, but Suze ploughs on, reading off a cue card. ‘The old saying tells us to never go to bed angry, but it’s actually much worse to stay up late, going over the same ground, getting too tired to make sense of the argument and then waking up in a bad mood because you didn’t get enough sleep. So tonight you’re going to tackle this practically.’
Ken murmurs that he’s much more of a morning person and doesn’t feel his best late at night anyway and Chloe says she’s the same. The rest of them nod in agreement.
‘Jess?’ says Suze. ‘Did you want to introduce the activity?’
‘Yes,’ she says, almost convincingly. ‘Yes, absolutely. So, Jack and I believe that one of the keys to positive arguments is to approach them prepped and ready. That means you’ve had something to eat, and you’ve had a good night’s sleep. Never fight hungry or tired.’
It’s actually incredibly good advice, when I hear her say it like this.
‘Now I should say,’ Jess tries again to garner some enthusiasm, ‘this doesn’t mean that you just bury the problem. You need to wake up in good time the next morning so that you can have a proper, calm, sensible discussion about what started the fight, once you’ve had a decent sleep and a change of scene. This isn’t about avoiding the fight, it’s about rescheduling it until you’re ready for it.’
‘I’m already almost asleep,’ says Sue cheerfully from her armchair. ‘I don’t think I’ve got another activity in me.’
‘Maybe we could leave it for tonight?’ Stuart ventures.
I drag myself to my feet with superhuman effort. ‘Come on, guys. We’ve got the rest of our lives to chill on the sofa. We’re here to do some work. Let’s crack on.’
Jess looks surprised, which is a fairly damning indication of how helpful I’ve been recently.
‘Jess?’ I gesture. ‘Shall we?’
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘So, we’re going to ask that you go and find space in the house, somewhere you feel you’re private and comfortable, and then we need you to start a fight.’
Everyone laughs.
‘I know.’ Jessica laughs too. ‘I get it. But you need to start a fight. And then, once you’re full flow, I want you to stop it and go to bed. Then you can wake up refreshed and settle it before breakfast.’
‘It just sounds so mad,’ Chloe says from her sofa, where she’s positioned slightly closer to Ben than she was when I last noticed them sitting together.
‘I get it,’ I say, before Jessica can jump in. ‘But just give it a go. That’s why we’re here, right?’
Everyone stands up, stretching, still very much not in the mood. But they file out, their voices moving across the house. And then it’s just me and Jessica, standing in the snug, alone.
‘So,’ I say, standing closer to her, so I can smell the dry citrus scent she wears, the one she’d just started wearing when we first met because she’d read that some French actress wore it.
‘So,’ she replies.
‘We have to go and have a row.’
‘We’re usually quite good at that,’ she says, smiling up at me.
‘Yes.’ I smile too. ‘We are.’ I grab her hand and lead her through the corridor, up the stairs to a nook on the landing next to our bedroom. ‘Go on,’ I encourage her. ‘Let’s fight.’
She just stands there.
‘I mean it,’ I say, taking her hands.
‘You can’t wash up for shit,’ she blurts out. ‘Sometimes after you wash up, I wait until you’ve left the room and then I redo all the wine glasses.’ She takes a deep breath like she feels better to have got that one out.
‘Is that really the best you’ve got?’ I smirk.
‘You want more?’
‘I want more.’
‘You complain about going to events that people would kill to attend, you’re ungrateful for all the amazing things about our lifestyle, you refuse to learn which kitchen spray is for what purpose, you’re snooty about my influencer friends, and you’re obsessed with pleasing your parents, which is literally impossible.’ She inhales before launching into her next slew. ‘You snore, you eat like a teenage boy, you forget plans which are in the diary, you don’t hide how much you dislike Clay and you refuse to learn how to make our bed properly.’ She grins. ‘Okay. Your turn.’
Nothing I didn’t know. Maybe we can do this. I squeeze her hands.
‘Everything in our house is organic and natural, you act like I’ve brought a bag of heroin in if I order a Chinese, there are fifteen hundred cushions in our house and you continue to buy more, you complain about all your friends but insist on seeing them anyway, there are a dozen half-empty bottles of beauty products in every room of our house but I’m not allowed to throw them away, you used to eat McDonald’s in bed when you were hungover and now you won’t let me take a packet of biscuits upstairs.’
‘We’re supposed to be fighting,’ she tells me as I push her against the bedroom door.
‘We are fighting,’ I reply.
‘No, we’re not.’
‘Kind of proving my point here.’ I laugh.
I wrap her arms around my neck and then brush her thigh and slide my hand down her jeans. ‘Problem is,’ I tell her, ‘I want you, and I’m getting the sense that you might want me.’ I kiss her neck and she does her familiar purr-shudder. ‘And if we start a fight, we might spoil that.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she responds, pressing her body against mine. ‘Maybe it’ll be a turn-on to get to complain a bit.’
I laugh. ‘Go on, then. Try it.’
She speaks quietly, into my ear, like she used to when she stayed at my place in Oxford and we couldn’t wake my housemates. ‘The way you stack a dishwasher is a war crime, and you wear too much corduroy.’
‘Low blow,’ I say. ‘There’s no such thing as too much corduroy.’
She smirks up at me, her lips full and her cheeks flushed from the teenage snogging. ‘Your turn,’ she says.
‘You insist on taking taxis when it would be quicker to get the Tube or to walk. You ask me what you should wear even though you know I’ve got no taste. You’re on your phone when we’re watching films, even films with bloody subtitles, and you also snore.’
And weirdly – very weirdly – it’s proving to be something of an aphrodisiac. It feels so good not to try to be good all the time, not to obsess over being kind and getting it right. Admittedly these aren’t the big, heavy truths that we should probably have used this time to unpack, but I’m only human and anyone who prioritised doing an assignment over getting into bed with Jessica would have to be absolutely mad.
‘Also, all the kitchen cleaning sprays do fundamentally the same thing,’ I whisper in Jess’s ear.
‘They fucking don’t.’
She’s laughing as I kiss her and lead her into our bedroom.
‘And I do not snore,’ she says breathily, as my hand moves between her legs and I increase the pressure, just the way she likes it.
‘Yes, you do.’
She kisses me urgently, pressing her hand against my crotch, teasing through my jeans, then she pulls away from me just when I don’t want her to stop.
‘Aren’t we supposed to go to sleep? If we’re doing this properly?’ she asks.
I shake my head. ‘You need to reread your own book, darling. It doesn’t say we have to go to sleep. It says we have to go to bed.’ And with that, I pick her up and drop her down on the mattress.
‘Excellent point,’ she says as she rolls over and climbs on top of me.
Jessica
I wake up early on Sunday morning and go for a run, lacing my trainers in the half-dark bedroom, enjoying the silence of the house as I slip down the stairs and revel in the feeling of putting space between me and everyone else. It’s a cold, grey, misty morning, which I think might turn into a bright blue sunny one. I used to think that people who ran for fun were mad. I’d go to the gym if I wanted to look thinner than the other girls on a hen do, or if my jeans felt tight, but that was it. It was only ever about wanting to look thinner (even if I told that lie we all share, that it’s just about ‘feeling fit’ and ‘wanting to be strong’). But then, when the fertility problems started, I needed something to do with myself, and I found that this helped. I liked pounding the pavements, and I liked getting better and better at it. My body was getting it wrong in so many other ways; at least this was something it could do right.
When I come back to the room, my face flushed and my T-shirt soaked with sweat, Jack is sat up in bed reading on his phone.
‘Tell me you haven’t been for a run.’
‘Lie to you? My lawfully wedded husband?’
‘After all that wine last night. And those fucking rafts.’ Jack groans and rolls over and pulls a pillow over his head. ‘Everything hurts. All of my limbs are going to fall off.’
‘It’s the best thing for a hangover,’ I say smugly. Then I peel off my leggings and top and I realise I’m standing in my underwear in front of Jack, and I feel very, very naked. I don’t know why this feels so weird. We had sex not ten hours ago. And I used to do this all the time, wandering around our flat in my underwear, fake-tanning in my knickers in the living room, sleeping naked when it was hot. But, like so many things, it changed since we’ve been trying to get pregnant. I feel more protective of my body. Guilty, I suppose, that it’s failing us. And even when I’ve got clothes on, I still find myself trying to hide from him, from everyone. Increasingly I’m drawn towards oversized cashmere jumpers and massive linen shirts, tentlike dresses, anything which puts up a barrier between my empty body and the rest of the world.
I notice that Jack is staring at me. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘But you’re staring at me?’
‘I just can’t remember the last time I saw your belly button.’
I half laugh. ‘Is that a thing for you? Belly buttons?’
‘Yes. I’ve been harbouring a secret belly button fetish for years now. I thought this was the time to tell you.’
I take my sports bra off, and I stand there in front of him for a moment so he can see me. Jack sits up with a big grin on his face.
‘Honestly,’ I say, taking my knickers off. ‘You’d think you’d never seen a naked woman before.’
‘It’s not my fault I’ve fancied you for the better part of twenty years!’
I’m standing under the water, my wet hair pushed back from my face, when Jack walks in. He stands for a moment, watching me shower.
‘Do you really still fancy me?’ I ask him, meeting his eye in the mirror.
‘Have you seen you? How could I not?’ Jack joins me under the water, kissing me, and I’m enjoying the sensation of our wet bodies against each other. ‘You’ve got sexier every year I’ve known you, and you were already stunning.’
He slides his hand down my body, between my legs. We’ve been doing this for a lot of years. We know every trick, every motion, every movement. Friends of mine have lamented the predictability of having sex with the same person over and over again, the lack of variety, but I love that Jack knows how to make me come. I lean against the shower tiles, my arms braced, eyes tightly shut. I wonder for a moment what he’s thinking about, whether he’s managed to divorce this from the kind of mechanical conception sex we’ve fallen into, but dismiss the thought. One hand is on my hips and he’s moving against me, grinding the palm of his other hand against me in the way I taught him when we first started sleeping together, just enough contact but not too intense. As we have so many times before, I come slightly before he does, my orgasm the trigger for his. We stay in position for a moment, both slightly shaking, both – I think – slightly surprised.
It’s probably not quite the impression we wanted to send, arriving to breakfast late, both of us still pink in the face from the exertion and the shower.
‘Good morning?’ I overhear Ben ask Jack in front of me at the breakfast buffet. ‘I’m not exactly a reader,’ he tells him, loading his plate. ‘But if your book gets my wife looking like that,’ he points back at me, flushed and happy, ‘I might give it a go.’
Jack certainly isn’t the only person around the table with a hangover – in fact, everyone seems a bit worse for wear. Plus, we did ask them to deliberately start fights with each other last night. In short, it’s no surprise that the atmosphere in here is absolutely dreadful. There’s no conversation, which means that the sound of people chewing is unbearably loud. Eventually Suze shows that whatever she’s being paid isn’t enough, and puts the radio on. But it’s the show Jack used to work on, doing a very depressing report about a drought related to climate change. It’s the kind of topic that he used to spend days grappling with, trying to distil down into a report that anyone could understand. I used to worry, occasionally, that it must be a bit bad for a person to constantly be immersed in terrible news, all day and all night. I get up and switch it to Radio One, and the music hums a much less depressing soundtrack to breakfast.
‘Shall we?’ I turn to ask Jack, when everyone seems finished.
‘Okay.’ Jack gets up. ‘I know no one wants this, but let’s go to the snug, where the chairs are really comfortable, and if everyone makes it there without crying, I’ll make sure someone hands out a round of very cold Diet Cokes.’
Everyone sort of laughs and murmurs their approval, and people start making their way to the snug. Suze looks pained as she stage-whispers to us, ‘The official beverage partner for this weekend is Rafe’s Alkalised Water. We really shouldn’t be providing any other soft drink, in case they mention it in their end-of-weekend interviews.’
‘Suze,’ Jack says beseechingly. ‘Have you ever had a hangover?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I have.’
‘Did you want a Rafe’s Alkalised Water, when you had that hangover?’
She smiles. ‘No, Jack, I did not.’
‘So do you think maybe just this once we could sack off Rafe and give the people what they want? Maybe talk really nicely to the chef about doing some bacon rolls for lunch later?’
Suze rolls her eyes. ‘I’ll tell Cait and Will to sort something out.’
Once everyone’s had a restorative Diet Coke, we’re ready to start this morning’s activity. I’ve played Mr and Mrs on more hen weekends than I can count, and while I’m now officially over watching a scared-looking man answer sex questions at the behest of his fiancée’s bridesmaids, it’s a good format for today. Light and silly, which is what we need, because we’re going to spend today talking about all the problems we’ve got with each other’s families.
Suze is playing master of ceremonies for this one and brings each couple up in turn to sit on bar stools like they’re on a game show. Chloe and Ben are first up, with Ben taking his turn at wearing the noise-cancelling headphones.
‘Has Ben’s family ever hurt your feelings?’ Suze asks.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘A bit. But mine have been way worse.’
‘How?’ Suze asks.
Chloe looks tired. She glances across at Ben, who is in his own world for a moment, tapping his toes to the Dolly Parton Greatest Hits Suze inexplicably chose. ‘To start with, they kept talking about how okay they were with us being together, like there was something to object to. They said the wrong thing a lot – like I remember one time my dad randomly told Ben that he really liked Tiger Woods. We thought they were just being awkward. But then we started talking about a family and they had all these questions about how they’d look, what their hair would be like, and then one day out of the blue, my mum just told us, unprompted, that she didn’t approve of us being together. Just straight out. Over lunch. She said she thought Ben was great, but that it had gone too far, and she couldn’t support it. And my dad just sat there. Said nothing.’
I knew the overview of this story from their application for the workshop, which was written by Chloe. We picked it because it was clearly hastily written, full of spelling mistakes and unfinished sentences. It had all the signs of someone who needed help. She talked about how sorry she was, how she needed some way to make it up to Ben.
Suze gestures at Ben to take his headphones off.
‘What did I miss?’ he jokes, grinning into the painful atmosphere in the room.
‘Chloe shared with us about her family, and how they’ve behaved towards you.’
Ben’s face clouds. ‘Oh. Right.’
‘What do you think she said?’
Ben laughs, clearly trying to keep his tone light. ‘I mean, they told her they didn’t want her to have kids with a black guy, so I’m not excited to buy them Christmas presents. But look, I was the only black kid in my village, it’s not exactly the first time I’ve experienced racism.’
Everyone in the room looks painfully uncomfortable, like they don’t know what to say, or how to explain that they think Chloe’s parents are being horrific.
‘And then I started seeing my mum again,’ Chloe blurts out. ‘We’d cut them off. But she’s my mum, and I—’ She’s welling up. ‘I know it was shit. But then you just wouldn’t talk to me about it.’ Chloe looks at me, as if I can help. ‘He literally never wanted to acknowledge it.’
‘It’s a hard conversation,’ Ben says, after a long pause. He looks at the floor. ‘And I didn’t want to talk badly about your family.’
‘I wouldn’t have cared,’ Chloe insisted. ‘I don’t care what they think.’
‘But you do care,’ he counters. ‘Because you still want to see them, and be around them. Even if it means hurting me.’
She swallows, and thinks about it for a moment. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
Ben puts his hand on her thigh. ‘She’s your mum, Chlo. I get it.’
I’m not sure I would have been so forgiving. Chloe leans into him, looks him straight in the eye, and it’s like no one else is in the room.
‘No, really. I’m sorry,’ she says, from somewhere right inside her chest. I feel it. I think we all feel it.
‘I know,’ he says quietly. ‘I know you are.’
There’s a pause while Suze, who is more brilliant at this than I’d anticipated, gives them a moment to breath, to feel the connection that they’ve found. I wonder if everyone else in the room is thinking the same thing I am, that we want that moment Chloe and Ben have just had, where something clicks and there’s real, meaningful progress.
‘Jack and Jessica,’ Suze says. ‘You two next.’
We settle on to the stools and Suze passes Jack the headphones to put on.
‘Jessica. Do Jack’s family think that you’re a help, or a hindrance, to him?’ Suze reads off the card.
Jack puts the headphones on and I try to think of a diplomatic answer. Do they think that I’ve been a help or a hindrance? I mean, in any normal person’s logic, I’ve been the biggest help imaginable. I founded the thing which bought our house. But would his parents see it like that?
‘Oh, such a good question,’ I say. ‘I think they’d think I’m a hindrance because Jack’s so smart. They probably think he could be winning the Booker Prize if he wasn’t with me.’
‘Jack?’ Suze asks, after prompting him to remove the headphones.
‘Sorry. Um. I think my parents have a different idea of success to Jessica. They only really like old books and professors and stuff. So I guess they’d say hindrance.’
There’s a noise of approval from the group.
‘Did I get it right?’ He laughs. ‘Oh, amazing!’
Arguably it’s not amazing that his parents regard my career as detrimental to their son, but okay.
‘Next question!’ says Suze. ‘What do you think your family would change about Jessica to make your relationship better?’ Then I put the headphones on and listen to a blast of Dolly before Suze motions at me to take them off. Everyone’s looking at me all misty-eyed, like they just watched the last five minutes of The Notebook .
‘What d’you think he said?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Hopefully not that many things.’
‘It was lovely,’ pipes up Ken. ‘He said he’d not change anything about you, and if anyone suggested it, he’d be telling them to get stuffed.’
‘He said it nicer than that,’ Sue adds.
I look across at Jack, who is blushing because he always blushes.
‘Thanks.’ I smile.
‘Welcome,’ he says, looking at the ground.
It’s not quite the seismic breakthrough that Ben and Chloe had; it doesn’t change the energy in the room the same way theirs did. But it’s something. I can feel that it’s something. And I think maybe he can too.