Page 9 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

I sit bolt up, like a cartoon character. ‘When did I say that?’

‘At that party last night. Your friend asked how long we’d been together and you like, sprained a muscle trying to tell her that we weren’t dating.’

‘What?!’ I say in disbelief. ‘I didn’t want you to thinkIwas being presumptuous. I thought you’d be embarrassed if I said we were together.’

She looks at me in confusion. ‘Why?’

‘Many, many years of being a massive loser?’

Jessica rolls her eyes. ‘Okay, well, I came halfway across the country, we had sex and then you told me to get dressed so we could go to a party with a girl who clearly fancies you, and then rushed to tell her that I’m not your girlfriend. That’s not loser behaviour, that’s horrible fuck-boy behaviour.’

I’m aghast. ‘But that’s not what happened! I was trying to show you that I’ve got a fun life here so you might want to come back. I didn’t think I was supposed to want you to be my girlfriend.’

She smiles and comes to sit back down. ‘Are you telling me that we wasted four hours arguing about this last night, when actually you want us to be together, and I want us to be together?’

I nod.

‘Why didn’t you just say that? Last night?’

I sigh. ‘Honestly? I didn’t really know what we were arguing about. We’d been going for like, hours. I’d completely lost track of where we’d started.’

‘And of how much we like each other.’

‘Exactly.’

‘We’re idiots,’ she says, leaning in for a kiss. ‘Let’s never stay up arguing like that ever, ever again.’

Jessica

It’s half six in the morning and I’m sitting in a well-worn leather chair while a make-up artist makes it look like I had more than four hours of broken sleep. The room smells comfortingly of hairspray and coconut. There are hundreds of neatly organised products arranged on a black towel in front of me, lipsticks and palettes glinting under the huge lights, my coffee cup wedged in among a row of rose-gold-cased lipsticks.

‘You’ve got such beautiful hair,’ says the make-up artist, as she dusts powder over my nose. ‘I like it this length. What made you go for the chop?’

I look at myself in the mirror and wonder if it’s time to go from two areas of Botox to three. I consider telling her that despite captioning my recent pictures #BeautyHasNoAge, I felt having waist-length hair in my mid-thirties was running the risk of looking like someone who homeschools nine children on a farm in Utah. So, the day after my last birthday, I booked an appointment with a snooty French hairdresser who charged an eye-watering sum to take my hair from my mid-back to my shoulders.

‘I’d always had it long and I just fancied a change,’ I tell her. ‘And honestly it’s so much less work.’ I am lying through my teeth – it’s way, way more work to make this perfect cut look half decent. ‘Jack was heartbroken, weren’t you?’

I look over at Jack, who is slumped in his chair, reading a battered Penguin paperback, not listening. ‘Darling?’

‘What?’

‘I was just saying that you were upset when I cut my hair.’

‘Oh. Yes. I liked it long. It’s still nice, though.’ He drains the last of his coffee and then goes back to his book.

‘He’s terrible in the mornings. Not human until after his first coffee!’ I joke. Why am I talking like this? I sound like an embarrassing millennial cliché.

‘You wait until you’ve got kids,’ the make-up artist says, as she takes a bottle of hairspray from a shelf. I hear that comment, or a version of it, at least once a week and every single time it’s like someone’s tipped a glass of cold water over my lap. ‘Close your eyes and hold your breath.’ I’m not sure why she’s going to spray my hair – there’s no chance the glossy curls she created will drop between now and my making it on set. I try to brush off her comment, glad of an excuse to squeeze my eyes shut.

I look at Jack, but he’s too engrossed in whichever dead Russian he’s currently reading to have heard anything. I know he’s tired, and I know it’s been a lot of press, but God, I wish he could just look a bit happier to be here and maybe even try to enjoy it. We’re so unbelievably lucky to have landed this interview, the publishers literally rang us to tell us what a win it was. It could really change things for us, and if we seem like we don’t want to be here, then we might not get asked back. Yes,Morning Chatis a slightly tacky morning programme, and yes, the studio is a long way from our house. But everyone we know has to get up early and wrestle their kids into school uniforms, or drag themselves on to the train to get to an office, and then spend the day sitting at a desk, being told what to do. We get to sit in a chauffeur-driven car, have our hair andmake-up done, and then perch on a sofa for ten minutes and have a quick chat with people about their problems. Clay said we’ll sell at least five hundred books from the exposure, and they’re paying us £400 each for doing it. It’s the easiest, most privileged job a person could do. But Jack is just moping. I’m pretty sure, I think, my outrage mounting, that if this was something like going on Radio 4 to talk about some complicated political crisis, he’d pull it together even if he was tired.

‘Are we nearly ready?’ a runner asks, putting her head around the door. The first time we did the show, I hadn’t been able to believe that they really ran around with headsets and clipboards, just like in a drama. This must be the fourth or fifth time we’ve been here, but I’ve never stopped feeling like a tourist. I know better than to ask for selfies with the other guests but inside I’m still squealing. I have a last look in the mirror, checking that everything is as smooth as it can be. I didn’t used to be vain about it, but HD television is not kind, and if there’s a single bump on my skin, I’ll have people all over Twitter talking about how old I’m looking. I don’t blame them. We’re claiming to have a perfect marriage, we can’t be surprised if that makes people want to pick holes in everything we do. Clay warned me when we started that I was making a tricky bed for myself. And he’s right. I am professionally smug and there are plenty of people on the internet who hate me for it. If I wasn’t me then I would probably hate me for it. I have an easy, fun, lucrative job and a lot of really expensive stuff I don’t pay for, of course people are going to start threads speculating that a spot near my top lip is a cold sore. But I’d take that a million times overgoing back to the miserable marketing job I had before all of this.

They shepherd us from the make-up room, along the dark corridors and down to the sound stage, where the hosts, Graham and Lily, are sitting on a pink sofa, staring at their phones. It’s a strange place. The studio itself is huge, with triple-height ceilings and these enormous doors that slide open so you can move bits of furniture around. It’s dark and there are props and random bits of wood leaning against the walls. And then in the middle of it, brightly lit, sort of like a doll’s house, is the set. It’s a perfect fake living room, with sofas and a kitchen table, even a little breakfast bar with a stove. The backdrop is a TV screen showing a cityscape of Central London, with boats gliding up the river. The first time I came here, I was shocked. All the times I’d had the show on in the background of a morning, I’d always thought it was a real window.

Graham has been on telly for decades, originally in politics, but now soft and fluffy for the morning audience. He used to do the show with a woman named Cate, who was equally smiley and about his age. As of last year, Lily has been her replacement, brought in to appeal to a younger, yummier-mummy audience. She’s beautiful, even more so in real life than she is on telly. Rail-thin, with an enormous diamond engagement ring on her left hand and lips which are very definitely not her own. Last week, the papers were saying that her husband has been sexting someone fromLove Island. I’ve got no idea if it’s true, and I really hope she won’t try to talk to me about it. People do that sometimes. I had an MP come up to me in the bathroom at a restaurant once and ask me how she could get her husbandto listen to her properly. I wanted to tell her that I had no bloody idea, and that if she found something that works, to tell me what it was. I didn’t say that, of course. I told her to assess her communication style and mimic the way that he speaks to her. They haven’t announced a split since then, so I guess that’s something.

A voice from somewhere in the studio starts a countdown, and Graham and Lily’s phones disappear into their laps, replaced by glowing expressions, warm smiles towards the people at home. ‘Good morning, good morning to all of you out there. What a show we’ve got for you today. Later, we’ll be meeting a puppy who was born with two tails, and just after nine a.m., we’ll be joined in the studio by a choir of single dads who are also drag queens.’

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