The Happy-ish Ever After
Jack
I know that Paris in the springtime gets great press, but I don’t think you can beat London in the spring.
It’s the exact sort of late-March day that makes me want to jump for joy.
I leave the office to realise that for the first time this year, I am leaving in the light.
The sky is the kind of blue you find in children’s storybooks.
I decide that I will walk home.
My hours are different from my first stint at the Beeb – more sociable, more conducive to a grown-up marriage.
A little part of me misses roaming the Broadcasting House in the middle of the night, knowing that the only people listening are taxi drivers, drunks and insomniacs.
But this is good too.
It’s a different show – a higher profile one.
To my surprise, they offered me a better job, something I wouldn’t have thought I was qualified for.
Ironically they cited my ‘incredible experience navigating the world of social media’ as one of the reasons I was right for the role.
Jessica was kind enough to laugh.
Her following is still growing at a rate of knots.
She’s been asked to contribute to some government investigation into how images can be marked for editing and ‘unrealistic changes’.
She talks about infertility sometimes.
Not all the time.
She turns down requests to talk about it publicly.
She doesn’t want to be a spokesperson for infertility because she doesn’t want to be infertile.
But she’s not hiding it anymore.
Not from them, and not from me.
She invites me to doctor’s appointments and I’m grateful to go with her.
I sit in lobbies and listen when she explains what happened, and then when she’s processed everything, I venture my opinion.
I’ve learned that there’s a middle ground between telling her everything I feel and expecting her to manage it for me, and shutting her out by telling her absolutely nothing.
Nearly at our house, I stop at the wine shop and pick up a bottle of their palest rosé to start the weekend.
Then I turn my key in the door and find her sitting on the sofa, legs twisted underneath her, bashing away at her laptop.
‘You’re going to end up with a wizened spine if you work like that,’ I say, going to get two wine glasses.
‘Fuck off,’ she says good-naturedly.
‘Rosé?’
‘Go on then.’
I bring her a glass and she stretches up to kiss me.
‘Love you,’ she says.
‘How was your day?’
How was my day? Bloody marvellous, actually.
I tell her about the interview we set up, about how Helen’s questions didn’t get approved but that I reworded one of them and it slipped through the net so she had one of the UK’s most odious men twisting on the line.
She laughs at my mean expression.
Her fingers are so long and tanned on the stem of the wine glass, her arms dusted with fine rose-gold hairs which are somehow like sand on a beach.
‘How was yours?’ I ask.
She tells me about her morning yoga and the fact that she wants to try something called ‘oil pulling’.
I laugh at her and she laughs along.
She had a big essay deadline last week, so she’s been taking things easier, but she’s within touching distance of being qualified, a huge step on the road to becoming a bona fide therapist.
And in the meantime, there’s her next book.
The one which doesn’t have my name on.
Pre-orders are better than anyone had hoped.
I had always said that I wouldn’t be jealous if she did this on her own, but I had no idea whether it would be true.
I just knew that I didn’t want to stop her from doing any of the incredible things she’s capable of.
To my relief, it turned out I am not jealous, just overwhelmingly proud.
I love my normal nine-to-five life.
I love shit office coffee and talking about The Apprentice with my colleagues.
I love the Tube and Pret sandwiches just as much as Jessica loves the freedom to wake up when she feels like it, take a long walk in the middle of the day and work exactly as much as she deems necessary.
‘Shall I cook?’ I ask.
She considers me for a moment.
‘No,’ she says.
‘Let’s go to the pub.
But let’s be quick, I’m absolutely starving.’
Within minutes she’s downstairs, wearing jeans and a white jumper.
Her face is bare and there’s a slight softness to her cheeks which she had lost for a while.
She looks so much like she did when we first met that it catches in the back of my throat.
‘Come on,’ she says.
Months ago, when we were desperately trying to get ourselves back on track, Jessica said that she didn’t know what to do anymore.
I think at some point during this whole thing, we realised that there’s actually only one rule either of us needed to understand: there aren’t any universal rules for a happy marriage.
Some days, total honesty is the best policy.
Other days, discretion is the better part of valour.
There are times when we need to stay up late to hash out the argument, and times when a good night’s sleep – even in separate bedrooms – makes us more able to talk calmly to each other the next morning.
There are weeks when we need a kick up the arse to make sex a priority and weeks when it’s fine to just spoon instead, times to cheerlead for each other tempered by times to tell the other one they’re pursuing a very bad idea.
In the end, we didn’t fix our marriage because we followed the rules.
We didn’t ‘fix’ it at all because, happily, we discovered that it wasn’t broken.
We’ve realised that it’s always going to be a work in progress.
Week by week we make it better, by spending time together, by talking about things.
By shouting and crying and shagging and by showing each other in a thousand tiny ways that we’re in this forever.
After dinner we walk hand in hand down the road, stopping to look at the heavy blossom making the tree branches sag.
I always thought that a happy ending would mean parenthood, and that hasn’t happened yet.
Perhaps this time next year we’ll be doing the same thing with a pram, or we’ll be in a hospital waiting room, about to hear a heartbeat on a scan.
But even if we aren’t, if it’s just her hand in mine, even if there is never a third, smaller, sticky hand in ours, I know without any doubt: we’re going to be okay.
And sometimes – not all the time, but in moments like this one – we will be more than that.
Occasionally, we will be perfect.