Page 20 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

‘We’ve got Tom and Grace’s dinner.’

‘Can’t let Tom and Grace down,’ I say, sarcastic. I’m not even really attempting to be polite anymore. She rolls her eyes.

‘I was thinking we’d leave at seven,’ she responds, telling me without saying it that even if I had been attempting to clear the air with a blazing row, it’s not happening. Sometimes I wonder if she does this on purpose, refuses to rise to it when I’m sort of asking for a fight.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ she says eventually. ‘I get that you want to do other things. And eventually I’m sure you can. But for now, can’t we just enjoy what we’ve got? It’s a pretty amazing job. No cramming on the Tube at rush hour, no last-minute bailing because you’ve got a breaking story – it’s a sweet deal.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, looking at the floor.

The day I found out I’d got the job at the BBC was – after the day I kissed Jessica for the first time, and our wedding day – the best day of my life. I’d grown up idolising the place, probably because the only things my parents really valued were the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the NHS, and the BBC. Old, clever, brick sort of institutions which they trusted with their whole hearts. They weren’t the only reason I enjoyed the job, obviously. I loved it, all of it. Finding stories, trying to cover them better and deeper than our competitors. Shrinking a huge, long-running news story down into a seven-minute piece which would leave the listener feeling equipped to debate it at dinner. It was brilliant. I worked there for the better part of a decade and I didn’t ever think I’d leave. Seven Rules changed that. One afternoon I was at my desk and Helen, the terrifying and brilliant editor, asked me for a ‘quickchat’. I cheerfully assumed it was about some long working programme she wanted me to produce. But instead she sat across from me and told me that I was distracted, tired and not myself, that my social media book project was clearly zapping my focus and that technically I wasn’t allowed to moonlight anywhere else. She said it all nicely, obviously. She was a nice person. Then she put her very cold hand on mine and said, ‘Why don’t you take a sabbatical, and when the book stuff is finished, we can look at you coming back?’ So I did. And then I went home and told Jessica, who didn’t pause before she started jumping up and down about how great it was.

I didn’t tell my parents. Still haven’t. I don’t mention work. My name isn’t read out in the credits to programmes anymore, so they must know. I have absolutely no desire to discuss it with them, so I’m not going to.

‘Jack?’ Jessica says, in a tone which suggests she’s been trying to get my attention for a while. I shake my head, dismissing the memory.

‘Yep, sorry.’

‘I was asking whether you minded going down to the wine shop and getting something to take to Tom and Grace’s?’

‘Of course,’ I say, going to find my coat.

I close the front door behind me and breathe in the cold, pleasingly dirty London air. It’s starting to get dark so the sky is orange-pink, the old-fashioned streetlights giving their best Mary Poppins impression. I stride down the road towards the wine shop, trying not to ask how it’s possible that Jessica can have misunderstood my feelings about my career so completely.

Jessica

Ever since we took the Seven Rules money and bought the kind of house I used to salivate over on Rightmove, we’ve lived a ten-minute walk from Tom and Grace. If I’m letting myself be a cow, I’ll also internally acknowledge that we now have a much fancier address than they do. Obviously thinking this, even privately, is not the hallmark of a good friend, but I’m still a bit bitter from the times Grace declined to come over to our house because she didn’t think she could park their brand-new Volvo on our scuzzy street, her word.

As we stride down the pavement, Jack is half a pace ahead of me and I’m unfairly annoyed that his longer leg length means he’s winning the race he probably doesn’t know we’re in. ‘Slow down,’ I whine.

‘We’re late!’ he says, as if I need to be told.

‘It’s dinner with our friends, not a train.’

Jack slows. ‘In fairness, I don’t know why I’m in a rush. If we get there late, we might not have to hang out with their dreadful kids.’

I laugh. Jack isn’t often bitchy about people, and I love it when he is. And I especially love it when he’s snide about other people’s parenting. Maybe it’s that whole ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ thing, but there’s something uniting about complaining about people together.

We turn a corner and see their house, big and white with a pale blue front door and somehow perpetually flowering window boxes.

Tom and Grace were the first of our friends to get married, in our mid-twenties. Jack and I were secretly abit perturbed because we were engaged, expecting to be the first with our sweet little Central London church-and-then-pub affair. Then Tom and Grace swept in with their six-month engagement culminating in a huge country house wedding in the Cotswolds. Obviously we were both being wildly unreasonable, but we enjoyed driving down in our tiny little Peugeot, complaining about the expense of the whole thing, maligning huge weddings, and then obviously had a brilliant time pounding the free bar and hurling each other around the dance floor. When they got back from their honeymoon, they took their fat parentally gifted deposits and spent them on this huge great house. The rest of us still all lived in damp rented flats, so it became the default hang-out for us all. We cooked roasts in their kitchen, threw parties in their garden, treated it like a common room and a co-working space and a nightclub, all with Tom and Grace cheerfully loving each other at the centre of it.

Obviously, these days we’re all older and more grown-up, and basically everyone we know is tied to a mile radius of their own houses because of nap schedules, so Tom and Grace’s is not the social hub it used to be. When Grace first got pregnant, she had grim morning sickness most hours of the day, and understandably couldn’t face hosting long boozy nights in their garden or roasts around their kitchen table, so they closed up shop, and to my massive embarrassment it left a sizeable hole in my social life. For years I didn’t need to plan anything because Grace always did. And on balance it was probably good for me, having to think about what I actually wanted to do, who I really wanted to hang out with rather than just spending time with herfriends and then complaining about the ones I didn’t like. I wonder if tonight’s dinner might signal a return to Grace wanting to be hostess again. And I wonder if I want that anymore.

Eventually we hear a small voice shouting, ‘I want to do it, I want to do it, I want to do it.’ After a long pause the door opens and a small child – Raffy – adorable in white linen pyjamas, smiles. ‘I opened the door!’ he exclaims.

‘You did!’ I reply brightly.

Tom stands behind the little boy, sleeves rolled up, smiling and slightly balder than last time I saw him. ‘Hello, darling,’ he says, kissing me on each cheek.

Raffy takes my hand. ‘Come and see my Lego,’ he instructs me. I swallow. I can do this. This isn’t difficult. It’s fine. It’s fun. I’m a happy, child-free woman enjoying her friend’s child.

‘LEGO,’ Raffy repeats.

‘I don’t know if Jessica wants to have a tour of all your Lego,’ Tom laughs, doing absolutely nothing to intervene. He smiles as I’m dragged into the playroom. I know without a shadow of a doubt that later he’ll either thank me for entertaining the kids, or even worse, act like he was doing me a favour by giving me some ‘parenting practice’.

‘If she’s looking at your Lego, she has to look at my animal hospital,’ Ada says, hurtling around the corner in the same White Company pyjamas and shoving her older brother out of the way.

‘Can I see the animals?’ Jack asks from behind us.

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