Page 11 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

‘Well, first up, great on you,’ I chime in. ‘It’s absolutely never too late, and I think you’ll be inspiring a lot of other older people to take that leap. Maybe we can fix you up with someone who’s watching at home right now – what’s your type?’

‘Channing Tatum,’ she replies, and we all laugh. ‘I’m not fussy,’ she goes on, in her husky smoker’s voice. ‘But I do prefer a man with a bigger—’

Someone in the gallery cuts Janice off in case she’s about to say what we all think she’s about to say on morning television. We all laugh and resettle ourselves while they find someone else to bring in.

‘Our next caller is Willa from West London. Hi Willa!’

‘Hi Lily, hi Graham. My question for Jessica and Jack is this: how do you keep your marriage fresh and exciting when you’ve decided not to have children? My partner and I have decided that we’re going to be child-free, but as all of our friends start their families, we’re feeling a bit left behind.’

I pick up my water glass, trying to unstick my throat, praying that in the seconds of silence, Jack will pick up the question. But he doesn’t. And now he’s silent, and the silence isn’t getting any less silent. Graham leans forward, waiting for one of us to say something. Lily is checking her cue cards again as if there’s going to be any kind of answer on there. Why weren’t we offered the chance to vet these questions? I try to pick the glass up again but my fingers slip and it clatters, wobbling. I grasp for it and set it right. Surely someone was supposed to check? There’s no way Clay and Suze would have allowed them to ask that without at least telling me first. And why the fuck isn’t Jack saying anything? Of all the questions in the world to leave me to answer, how could he possibly leave me to answer this one?

‘That’s a really good question,’ I say, my voice too high as I break the world’s longest silence. ‘In our book,Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage,which came out, uh, last week...’ I move my hair forward over my shoulder, looking at the camera, and wonder if this is one of those moments where only I can tell how badly this is going, or if people at home are cringing for me, noticing the tear in my left eye, the fact that I’m digging my fingernails into the palm of my hand. ‘In our book, we, uh, we talk about the importanceof shared hobbies, goals and interests. Perhaps you and your husband could look at trying a new activity together, which might provide a new focus for your life. All marriages go through different stages, whether you’re having children or not, and it’s important to make sure that you’ve got a shared goal throughout.’

I try to fix a smile on my face but I can feel my thighs sweating. And if there weren’t tears in my eyes, and my voice wasn’t so high, that would have been a decent answer. I hope against hope that someone in the gallery will realise that I have nothing else to say on the topic. The woman’s voice starts again, asking something else, but it’s cut off almost straight away. I catch sight of myself in the giant monitor, my own face displayed three times its actual size, as is Jack’s. He’s smiling away. Has he even noticed that I’m having a nervous fucking breakdown next to him?

‘Some really great questions,’ says Graham. ‘We’ll be back shortly, but if you’d like to win ten thousand pounds and a brand-new Ford Fiesta, stay put and listen to this ...’

I can’t tell if our section was supposed to run longer, or we’ve taken the appropriate amount of time, and obviously I can’t ask them. We get up and do hugs and kisses before having our microphones taken off us. Then we’re walked to the exit by an enthusiastic posh boy doing work experience as a runner, and finally, waiting for our car to arrive, Jack and I are alone.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jack says quietly, as we stand in the dark corridor, even darker after the blazing lights of the studio.

‘Sure,’ I say. It would be a lot easier to be forgiving towards him if this was the first time he’d left me to fend for myself when it comes to fertility.

Jack

The show booked us a return car – generally speaking, the ‘talent’ doesn’t like to take the Tube. We’re in stationary traffic, because apparently the ‘talent’ prefers privacy to expediency. Jessica, sitting on the other side of the people carrier, has put her earphones in, wireless ones, which means that she loses them about six times a day, and most of the time when she wants to use them, they haven’t got any charge. I pointed out once that the old headphones we all used to have, the kind with wires, were far harder to lose and couldn’t get a dead battery. She looked at me like I was pissing on her bonfire, which I suppose I was. I feel like I do that a lot these days and I really don’t mean to; it’s the same sarky humour I’ve always been able to charm her with in the past. Apparently it’s not charming anymore.

The headphones are very clearly a ‘do not disturb’ sign. She’s wearing sunglasses, too, so she might as well be on a different continent. But then, even if she were listening, even if she weren’t crushed into the farthest corner of the taxi possible, as if she's trying to put every millimetre of distance between us that she possibly can, it’s not as if I would have anything to say.

My inability to express myself is another thing she always used to find charming. Or, at least tolerable. She said it was British and repressed in the sweetest possible way. When we were first seeing each other, we would lie in bed together, tangled and naked, and she would turn the lights out and ask me questions about my feelings. She knew I found it easier to talk to her in the dark. She didn’t seem to mind. And then, one day, she suddenly stopped finding itendearing. She told me I was an adult, and I should be able to talk about complicated issues like one. But I couldn’t. I still can’t. All of the things I want to say sort of swarm around my head, but I can’t catch any of them. I want to make her feel better. And I know that there is a combination of words which would do that. But I’m no closer to knowing which combination it is than I am to guessing the seventieth digit of Pi.

It was beyond shit of me to leave her to answer that caller’s question. Unforgivable, actually. She’s wanted to be a mother for as long as I’ve known her, and every month it doesn’t happen is torture for her. I know that. Christ, what if she thinks that I don’t know that? That I didn’t answer the question because I wasn’t sure? Obviously I tried. I opened my mouth. I wanted to think of something fast and flippant to say. But there weren’t any words, because why the fuck were they asking us about that? Since when did being in our mid-thirties without kids make us some sort of poster couple for child-free life? I wanted to ask the woman on the phone why she was sitting at home watching breakfast telly, calling in to ask questions about the lives of strangers. But I couldn’t even get those words out fast enough, and they would probably have stymied our career, which is the one thing that would have made Jessica even angrier than she is right now. So maybe it’s not such a bad thing that I went silent. It’s the same thing that happens all the time lately, when she says something that hurts my feelings and I want to explain it but I can’t. This screaming silence, where words become so slippery that I can’t force them out. Which meant that I left her there, on national television, to answer the worst question a personcan ask her. I’d like to say some of this to her. But I know from previous experience that if I try to start a meaningful conversation in front of the cab driver, it’ll make her even angrier. Obviously this guy neither knows nor cares who we are, but sometime around hitting 100,000 followers, she seemed to implement this policy that disagreements needed to exclusively take place in private. And once we hit a million, it became ironclad. We used to cheerfully bicker on buses and call each other dicks at dinner parties. But not anymore. She wants us to act like members of the royal family, keeping everything on emotional lockdown until we’re away from the world, which means in a period of time where we’ve been deliberately thrust into the spotlight, there hasn’t been a moment to let any of it out. I want to say something right now, not wait hours until we’re home. But the only way to do that would be to break her number-one rule and raise it in front of a stranger. So instead I’m going to have to say nothing and compound the fact that I sat there and left her to flounder on TV.

The car windows are blacked out, and I’m struggling to work out whereabouts we are. The studio is over in West London. For some inexplicable reason, they all are. The car is dropping us in Central London and what should have been a thirty-minute journey is taking forever. Or the horrible purgatory between Jess and me is making it feel like hours. Either way, we need to get a move on because we’re meeting with our management to discuss plans for the year ahead. I never quite know how I feel about being the kind of person who has a ‘team’. When we signed with CMA a few years ago, we’d both laughed and laughed at them. The idea that we needed a team ofpeople to manage our social media account was hilarious. But, we agreed, we’d do it for a year. Make as much money as we could, and then cash out. We’d sworn blind that we would never say ‘my agent’ or ‘my manager’ out loud; it’s a promise that only one of us ended up keeping. And three years later there is absolutely no sign of us tapping out any time soon. We haven’t even finished the press for the first book and it’s time to talk about the next one. Happily, Jess and I have agreed that whatever we do next, we’re going to take a decent break first.

We arrive at the office, an open-plan one with lots of glass and a bike inexplicably hung on the reception wall. Clay, our manager, an oleaginous fuck who unquestionably has regular Botox, greets us. He’s got a sort of frenetic energy, like he’s perpetually on coke, but it’s probably just untreated ADHD.

‘My two favourite clients!’ Clay exclaims as we get through the revolving door. He holds his arms out to Jessica first and she hugs him.

‘I bet you say that to everyone.’ She smiles.

‘I absolutely do. But it’s true in your case.’

It bloody should be. We’ve made him eye-watering sums of money. He steers us through the lobby and up to the second floor, where we get a sort of hero’s welcome, if heroes were ever welcomed into meeting rooms. Jessica hugs and kisses everyone, remembering little details about people that make it seem like she actually cares. Or maybe she really does. I hang back, nodding and waving from a safe distance. Eventually, everyone makes a huge performance about sitting down.

Across the table from us, like an episode ofThe Apprentice, Clay is flanked by Maya, who is Clay’s number two. She is terrifying, which Jessica and I agree is probably a good thing. Next to her is Alec, the Head of Vision for the company, whatever that means.

‘So first things first, we want to say congratulations on your success. It’s a genuinely astonishing debut. Official numbers aren’t in yet, but from the preliminary figures the publisher sent over, it’s looking very strong, and as we’d all hoped, we can confirm that you’ll be on theSunday Timesbestseller list. Hopefully at number one. You should both be very proud.’

We both look at the desk because neither of us is sure what to say. Jessica is pink. I want to put my hand on her thigh and squeeze, because she’s done what most people only dream of. But the memory of her pushing my hand away in the taxi back from Leeds stops me.

‘The PR has been a huge success, and we know what a big ask it was to be constantly going from interview to event.’

We both make embarrassed noises to indicate that it’s fine.

‘How are you both feeling about the retreat?’

I’ve been trying not to think about it, but as part of the last push for PR for the book, we said that we’d take a group of readers – people who’d applied via a competition on our account – to some big house in the country and do a sort of marital bootcamp. The publishers are paying for it, and Jessica seemed into the idea, largely because (as she said, breathlessly excited), ‘If it works, maybe wecould do more of them?’ I said yes because I always say yes to her, and then pretended that it wasn’t happening because it’s my personal idea of hell. But now the ‘it’s Sunday and I haven’t done my homework’ feeling erupts in my sternum.

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