Page 21 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

Ada studies him, considering his offer. ‘Yes, okay,’ she says gravely. ‘But you mustn’t break anything.’

‘I promise I will do my best not to,’ Jack replies with equal solemnity.

‘Grace’ll be down in a mo,’ Tom says, retreating to the kitchen. ‘I’ll open a bottle.’

I follow Raffy to the playroom. They’re so posh they have a playroom so the rest of the house looks like kids don’t live here. When Grace comes downstairs, she looks perfect in a pair of oversized jeans and a paper-thin cashmere jumper. She’s tanned and slim with delicate gold jewellery at her neck and her wrist, and lots of tiny hoops in her earlobes like a reminder that she’s a Cool Mum. She looks at me, crouching over the Lego. ‘So glad you made it in time for bedtime, would have been awful to miss the children.’

I nod, and don’t say anything, but I pick up a little Lego man and put him in the car. ‘He doesn’t go there,’ Raffy yells, smacking it out of my hand.

I wait for Grace to respond to her son’s impressive right hook. Instead she smiles. ‘You’re so good with kids. How are you, anyway?’ she exclaims. I get up to hug her and she puts her hands on my arms, looking at me searchingly. ‘It’s been ages. Have you even been here since Ada’s birthday?’

I could point out that she hasn’t been to my house since we moved in, but I don’t. I know the rules. She’s got kids. I don’t. So we do things on her terms. Which is probably reasonable – at least, I tell myself that it’s reasonable. But it’s also half the reason I’ve stopped making plans with her; I just can’t deal with hearing ‘it’s probably best we do things at my place, you’ve just got so much more flexibility’ over and over again.

‘All good,’ I say. ‘Before you came down, I was allowed to put five bricks into the new house he’s building.’

‘High honour indeed. Do you want a drink?’

It’s probably not a test. But whenever one of my friends offers me a cocktail or a glass of wine, I feel fairly sure that they’re really asking whether or not I’m pregnant. Not that many of them even know we’re trying – just our age, our lifestyle, all of our demographics add up to wanting children.

‘Yes, please,’ I say.

Tom comes back into the playroom with glasses of wine for me and Jack, who has been released from Ada’s Sylvanian hospital.

‘You two would make great parents,’ he says. Neither of us reply. I know we would, I want to scream. I fucking know we would. Sometimes I wonder if he might say these things to try to prompt a discussion, if he’s asking without asking. But surely no one that smart could be so stupid? If I wanted to tell them, I’d tell them. And I don’t. Grace would offer me advice, and supplements, and the names of doctors we could see – none of which she herself needed because she got pregnant with her perfect children the first months she tried, but she’d source them from her network of other barren women and then hand them over with a sympathetic grimace and I can’t do it.

There’s a long pre-bedtime routine starting with some French nursery rhymes, then Grace attempts to read them a lovely Victorian picture book while they both scream that they want theFrozenbook, and eventually Grace takes both kids upstairs to bed. By Grace. Tom stays downstairs, holding court and laughing at his own jokes. I know I’mexpected to follow Grace up and help her, but I just can’t face it, and surely if anyone should be giving her a hand, it’s her husband?

When Graces comes back there’s toothpaste on her jeans and she looks suddenly exhausted.

‘All okay?’ I ask.

‘Me? Oh yeah, of course. Brilliant. Great.’

She serves dinner in their dining room, a glass extension at the back of the huge Georgian house which absolutely could not be called a conservatory. They dub it a ‘garden room’ and while yes, it’s pretentious, it’s also so nice that it’s made me jealous again. The table is laid beautifully, with cut roses and pristine glassware. We chat about work (Tom’s is great, he’s ‘smashing’ his target and thinking about starting a podcast, because he thinks the world needs to hear some of his thoughts), the kids (they’re both in the top sets for every subject, but sadly their school just isn’t stretching them enough) and holidays (Barbados has been ruined, so apparently ‘everyone’ is stumping up for Mustique). We’ve exhausted pretty much every subject possible by the time Grace brings out a Baccarat plate laden with brownies and a bowl of fresh berries.

‘Very lazy pudding, I’m afraid,’ she apologises as she serves the perfectly cooked brownies. ‘Couldn’t face anything more complicated.’

Everyone has a cup of coffee and then a strange hush falls over the room.

‘So listen,’ Tom says into the silence. ‘Bit of an awkward one this, but we did actually ask you over here for a reason.’

‘We’re not sure we’re up for experimenting with swinging, but we’re very grateful to have been asked.’ Jack smiles.I laugh. Neither Tom nor Grace do. Instead they both adopt expressions of amusement despite clearly not thinking this was funny.

‘We’re getting divorced,’ Grace announces.

‘What?’ I inhale, almost dropping my tiny hand-painted coffee cup.

‘Tom and I. We’ve just filed for divorce.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Jack looks aghast. ‘How is that possible?’

Tom shrugs. ‘We’ve tried pretty hard, and we’re not making each other happy, so we think it’s best to call time. Before we make it worse and really hurt each other.’

‘We just think it’s easier this way,’ Grace explains. She looks bone-tired, now I look properly. Really, really tired.

I’m not saying that I can read Jack’s mind. Obviously that’s not a real thing that people can do. But we’ve been together since we were twenty-one, and at this point I can certainly read every tiny micro expression on his face, and I’m sure that right now he’s having the exact same thought process as me. We’ve known these people since university. We introduced them to each other, for God’s sake. Grace was my best friend and club buddy, Tom was Jack’s library bestie. We watched them flirt at our crass twenty-something attempts at dinner parties, pretended to be surprised when they admitted they were shagging. We saw Grace mop up after Tom when he got ill from a bad oyster on our group holiday to Cornwall. Tom queued with Grace for seven hours when she wanted to audition forThe X Factor, and told Dermot that he thought she was the most talented woman in London (something we are absolutely forbidden from talking about now). We were there as he agonised over the ring he designed for her.We were the first people to visit them when they were cocooned in their new baby bubble when Raffy was born. They have always been happy, and connected, and right for each other. They hit every single note of how you’re supposed to build a life. If Tom and Grace, the two most perfect people in the world, who loved each other more than anyone else we know, who sometimes made us feel a bit shit about our own relationship because they were so happy, can end up getting divorced, then holy fuck. What hope is there for us?

It’s hard to think of a conversational gambit at this point. We can’t ask about anything they’ve got coming up, because presumably the answer is ‘divorce admin’. Grace doesn’t work, and Tom’s job is so boring that I’ve managed to avoid learning anything about it, so beyond asking about the weather, I’ve got nothing. I can’t even bring myself to gossip about our shared friends, because let’s face it, Tom and Grace getting a divorce kind of tops the rumour that Holly from our corridor in first year is on Ozempic.

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