The Late Bloomer's Marriage Playlist

The Flamingos

I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU

My husband was slow dancing with himself around our kitchen.

David was wearing tattered slippers and a red velvet dressing gown befitting of Hugh Hefner.

It was a joke I’d made often whenever he’d worn this outfit – though outfit seems a stretch.

But I’d soon stopped when I realised the idiot took it as a compliment.

That’s how my husband had come to see himself over the five years of our marriage: a modern-day Lothario of sorts.

Though when you marry a man in a shotgun wedding that takes place in Las Vegas – not featuring Elvis Presley, because we weren’t quite drunk enough for that – what else can you expect but a Hefner persona to emerge with time?

David crooned out the lyrics to his favourite slow song as he sliced through a carrot.

Music had always been a way for us to bond, not least because we’d both inherited the same taste for classics from our respective parents.

He paused for one particularly lengthy note where he went as far as to pick the carrot up and use it as a makeshift microphone, then he announced to the kitchen that his love must be a kind of blind love and that he only had eyes for–

‘Yooooooouuuuuu.’

I assumed he was serenading himself.

‘Tell me, love,’ I said as I moved from the doorway to the room proper, ‘were you alive when this was first released?’

David dropped his microphone on the floor and tutted. ‘Piss off, Patricia.’ There was a deliberate pause as he leaned over to collect the carrot. He went back to slicing. ‘You know full well that I wasn’t, and I don’t appreciate age jokes at this time of the day.’

Since we’d hit our forties, David had become terribly sentimental about being old.

I washed my hands and then rested them on my hips. ‘Where do you need me?’

‘Out of the bloody way.’ He collected the carrots and scraped them into the pot that was bubbling away on the stove. ‘Sit down, watch a master at work.’

Despite his faults, my husband was definitely a chef worth eating with.

Even during university – when David and I had truly bonded, over a love of bad wine and even worse literature – he had been the only one in our student halls who could throw a decent meal together.

Coincidentally, that’s probably around the same time that David started to act the Hefner – or rather, a younger version of Hefner – when he also realised that women, without their parents cooking for them, will slap their lips at a home-cooked meal made by a conventionally attractive and single young man, such as he was.

Especially when that man spins the line that his secret ingredient for every meal is, allegedly, ‘The love I put into making it.’

The tripe you put into making it, I remember thinking at the time. But given that his romantic endeavours were, and always have been, embarrassingly more successful than my own, I’d always kept my trap firmly shut rather than share my thoughts.

‘Wine?’ I asked.

‘Now you’re talking.’

‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ circled on a loop.

‘Do you have company tonight?’ I punctuated the question with the clang of the fridge door closing, and squeezed around David to fetch two wine glasses from an open cupboard.

‘Only you, my darling wife. Wait’ – he paused dicing an onion – ‘why do you ask?’

‘Slow music, Hefner robe’ – I leaned over the stew pot full of vegetables and pulled in a greedy sniff – ‘slow cooked lamb with softened vegetables and a…’ I paused for another inhale. ‘My mistake, garlic and onions, you can’t possibly have company.’

‘I can cook for my wife, you know.’

And he did, often. It was one of the reasons this worked: David liked to cook; I loved to eat.

‘Besides which’ – he turned and revealed the open robe – ‘do you really think I’d have company over-dressed like this?

’ With an onion-stained knife he gestured up and down himself.

The open robe revealed the torso of a man who made a professional effort at keeping himself in shape.

It also revealed the briefs of a man who desperately needed to treat himself to new underwear.

‘You’re right.’ I splashed wine into the first glass. ‘You look more like an after shot.’

‘Please, my hair is far too neat for an after shot.’

David went back to his cooking. I set a glass of wine on the kitchen top next to him and placed a single kiss on his cheek before I poured my own glass. I took both the drink and the opened bottle to the table with me.

‘Long day, Patti?’ he asked, still busying himself.

It had been. My little shop – that was currently undergoing an identity crisis of sorts – had had a whopping delivery of antiques that were…

contemporary, in many ways. The taxidermy squirrel with a cigarette hanging from its mouth had caught me by surprise when I’d opened the second box of the shipment, and I wasn’t altogether sure I’d recovered in the hours since then.

That, and the latest arrival of students in the nearest city on the hunt for ‘cheap shit’ to put in their living rooms, had been a blow too far, even in my rusty old bric-a-brac store at the end of our local high street.

And now my husband was serenading me under his breath while I was trying to tell him about all of this and– My God, will the day never end?

My phone pinged loudly from the windowsill.

‘I downloaded that app we were talking about,’ David announced.

‘What app?’

‘You know what app, Patti.’ He turned and flashed me his torso again.

David crossed to the crockery cupboard as he explained, reaching for a bowl, then reaching for a packet of mixed nuts that were open on the side.

‘It’s a new one, for the older woman. I told you about it.

’ He set a small bowl of salted and caramelised peanuts in front of me.

‘The older woman looking to meet her older woman.’ He kissed me on the crown of my head. ‘I told you about it.’

‘Can you stop leaning on older quite so heavily?’ I said, mimicking his tone. ‘And I didn’t think you were being serious about that!’

‘Oh, Patti, come on.’ He leaned back against the kitchen worktop and spoke with folded arms. ‘Don’t you want to at least try?’

‘Is that a serious question?’ I threw a cluster of nuts into my mouth and crunched, my eyebrow raised, each bite purposeful. ‘Is that a serious question?’

‘There’s no helping you, Patti, there really isn’t.’

To show willing, I stood from the table and went to grab my phone – and I took my wine with me. I balanced the two things, one in each hand, and clicked into the notification that hovered on the screen.

‘Was it the app?’

‘It appears to be,’ I answered, hoping that my disinterest was carried in my tone. ‘I have one new match.’

‘See, it’s already helping. Cover yourself in melted chocolate, dive in headfirst.’

I locked my phone and threw it across to the table. ‘David–’

‘Patti, I know you think–’

‘David…’

‘I really do understand that you’re nervous about–’

‘No, David, listen–’

‘For goodness’ sake, Patti, what?’

I raised my arm and gestured for him to tuck himself into me. He wrapped an arm around my waist in answer, kissed my cheek in return.

‘My darling David,’ I said, my forehead resting against his own, ‘your left knacker is hanging out.’

‘Oh, tits.’ He turned away at speed to tuck himself decent.

I sipped my wine and enjoyed the warmth of it. ‘Wash your hands, won’t you, love?’