Page 61 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

He swivels on his chair, like a truculent child. ‘Jessica, I know how we pay for it.’

‘So where do you get off being angry with me for trying to do damage limitation?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, getting to his feet. He picks up a stress ball, some stupid freebie we got at one of the first events we ever went to. Pushes it between his hands, worrying at it. ‘I’m not angry with you,’ he says. ‘I’m angry with them.’ He gestures at my phone. ‘All these strangers in parasocialrelationships with people on the internet, and our so-called management team who are making us prostrate ourselves for forgiveness when we haven’t done anything wrong. They keep saying the word “accountable”, over and over again, and I don’t want to be accountable. I don’t want to apologise to them because I didn’t do anything to any of them!’

I say nothing. Jack says nothing. I leave the room and I post the picture. But it doesn’t work. The next day Clay gets a call from the American publisher telling us that they love the book, but the timing isn’t right. The contracts will not be drafted, the great American dream is dead. Jack tries very hard to pretend that he’s sad about it, but I know the truth now. He hated our work together, and rather than telling me that, he sabotaged it. Subconsciously, I think. I don’t think he’s cruel enough to do anything like that on purpose. But the outcome is the same.

Jack

It feels a bit like someone has died. Everything feels wrong, and the atmosphere in the house has curdled. There’s a sort of hush over it and I find myself in a weird kind of purgatory. Jessica isn’t playing music on the speaker; the flat screen in the kitchen doesn’t have reality TV on while she cooks. It’s too quiet, and it’s made me realise that it’s everything she does that makes our house feel like a home. But despite the silence and the weird grief that hangs in the air, we still keep going about our daily routines. I don’t know what else to do. I assume she doesn’t either. Jessica goes to the gym, replies to work emails, and makes salads she barely eats. I go for long walks, read the papers and try to sort thegarden out in an attempt to do something useful for once in my life. We hardly speak to each other. I realise she probably doesn’t have anything nice to say to me at the moment, but I’d still prefer her shouting and screaming to politely freezing me out. She’s stopped cooking for ‘us’, just making her own meals, so I wait until she’s finished and then go and make myself something. I leave her to have the big TV in the living room, giving her space as I read in the study, pretty much living out of there so she can have the run of the rest of the house. I don’t know how long it can go on like this, honestly. It’s three days since the story broke, and everything about her is still a walking ‘do not disturb’ sign. She claimed in the crisis meeting with Clay, Suze and the team that she didn’t blame ‘anyone’ for what happened. She was ostensibly reassuring Suze that she wasn’t angry for the Verity story getting out, and me that she wasn’t angry that I poured my heart out to a stranger, a stranger who happened to really need cash. But she didn’t mean it. I know she didn’t mean it. I don’t blame her for not meaning it. She was in touching distance of having everything she’d ever wanted, and if I’d kept my mouth shut, she’d have it by now. When the news about the American deal falling apart came through, I realised that I’d never truly known the meaning of the word guilt before. Clay said loads of things in an attempt at reassurance, that it’s better to start afresh with a different US publisher than to take a reduced deal from this one, that the news cycle is fast and people will forget about all of this, that our sales numbers are still strong and our career is not over. I don’t think Jessica believed a word of it. I think she’d hoped that we’d put a post on our account and everyone would sort of getover it, but it hasn’t worked. Clay commissioned a ‘social listening report’ which is basically a big document where they tell you what people don’t like about you. Which means that we paid several thousand pounds to have a social media consultant tell us that people think we’re ‘fake and pretentious’ because our apology sounded like an act. The worst part of the entire thing is that when the report came through, Jessica gave me this look of resignation. Like she was gearing up for me to gloat, to point out that I was right and the apology was pointless. I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t even think it. And I actively hated the idea that she believed I could watch her hurt and struggling and even dream of saying ‘I told you so’.

Tonight’s activity, as part of the ‘pretending everything is normal in the hope that it might one day feel okay again’ plan, is taking my parents to the opera. I’m getting changed into my smart suit because my mother likes that, and Jessica is sitting at her dressing table, applying a lipstick which is exactly the same colour as her actual lips. I go to kiss her goodbye. She doesn’t pull away but she instantly tenses up when I touch her, which is much worse. She smells sweet and sharp, like blood orange.

‘Remind me what you’re doing this evening?’ I ask, trying to make conversation.

‘Quick drink with Clay and then dinner with Grace.’ She dusts powder over her cheekbones.

She would usually offer to join us at the opera, and I would thank her but say that I didn’t like to put her through it, but clearly we’re not dancing that dance anymore. She did actually used to insist, years and years ago, before we came up with the ‘your family are your responsibility’thing. Which was for the best. The four of us have always had a terrible time together, and it’s only marginally better if my elder brothers are in attendance. Jessica gets defensive of me because everyone thinks I’m the family halfwit ever since the not-getting-into-Oxford thing. My parents think Jessica is sweet but ‘unchallenging’, which for them is on par with being a racist or a nonce. For her part, Jessica finds my parents judgemental and stressful, which again I can’t fight her on. My parents have always seemed to regard her as flighty. Fluffy. A pretty girl lacking substance. Which makes absolutely no sense when you consider that we met at the same university on the same course where she got a better degree than me. Jessica isn’t stupid. She’s incredibly bright. She’s just completely unconcerned about whether things are high- or lowbrow. She finds the Kardashians as interesting as she found the Borgias, and will talk about any of them in equally rapt detail. My parents have developed a charming tendency of pretending that they don’t understand what we do for a living, which would be more convincing if they weren’t both fluent in five languages and entirely abreast of current affairs.

We spent the pre-marriage years buying our families thoughtful Christmas presents (Jessica for my mother), feigning interest in investment portfolios (me for Jessica’s father), and generally pandering to our parents’ every whim, hoping it might make the whole thing work better. And it never did, so when we came up with the policy of handling our own parents, which would eventually become rule six, it was a staggering relief.

At exactly 6.45, I meet my parents outside the Royal Opera House. They’ve been seeing whatever opera was induring the autumn/winter season since I was a child, a treat that I was allowed to take part in once I turned eight, just as my brothers had been. Because what eight-year-old doesn’t dream of seeingDie Fledermaus? Obviously, we go in November, because non-serious operagoers attend in December when ‘tourists’ turn up for a festive outing, whispering and rustling sweets.

It’s not pretentiousness from my parents. They really just love this stuff. Their CDs of Tutti Van Whatsit have worn through. The car cassette of Verdi’sMacbethhas had the spooling brown tape rewound more times than I can count. They can’t imagine that anyone would turn up to watch an opera to show off, or to wear a smart outfit. My mother has worn the same navy blue dress, my father the same black jacket, for every one of these trips we’ve ever taken. The routine for these jaunts is always the same. An early supper beforehand, the opera, then a frantic Tube ride to the station where the only topic of conversation is missing the train, before a freezing twenty-minute wait on the station platform because we had allotted twice the requisite time to get there.

This year I decided to try and change it up, maybe even improve the age-old routine. I used my connections – or rather, connection singular, Clay – to get decent tickets. I figured given that he takes 15 per cent of our money, we might as well take advantage of the full ‘service’ that he claims to provide on his website. My parents’ usual high-octane thrill comes from sitting in their specified seats for the first half, working out if there are any better unclaimed seats, and then grabbing them after the interval. This year I chose to ruin their fun by getting us a box. Butas a result of this very generous arrangement, I now have to take pictures of myself in said box, because the nice people at the Royal Opera House would appreciate some content from me about our visit. We all know that my parents find my transition from reputable producer on a serious political programme to influencer distasteful at best, so why I have chosen to rub their noses in it is anyone’s guess. I suppose on some level I’m hoping they might see the enormous privilege it affords us and think,Fair play, why not make hay while the sun shines?And, as it’s increasingly looking like the only way to make things right with Jessica is to sign on to spend the next year salvaging ‘the Brand’, and writing another book, I’m keener than usual for their buy-in. The voice in my head which most vehemently looks down on our career has always been my parents’, so perhaps if they understood it a bit better, I might judge myself less. Flimsy, I know. But I’ve got to try something.

What the opera house actually wanted in exchange for the best seats in the house was a picture of Jessica posing in the lobby, but she’s not here, so I have to do it. Jessica has a skill for taking a large number of pictures discreetly so that we don’t look like embarrassing tourists. My mother, on the other hand, can’t find her glasses, or work my phone. She complains loudly about missing disposable cameras and I want to die. Then we (very slowly) make our way to the box, where I have to relive the horrors of the lobby by asking my mother to take yet more pictures of me, this time sitting in my seat. It’s a very easy quid pro quo, and this is a very generous exchange, but I still feel like actually I would have paid basically all the money I have to avoid ever doing this again.

There are programmes on our seats and free drinks waiting on a small table in the box. My parents bear this odd scene with benevolent confusion and say all the right things about what a lovely treat it is.

‘This is lovely, Jack,’ says my mother as we settle into our seats. ‘Aren’t you generous?’

‘I mean, I didn’t pay for it,’ I say, unable to just let this go. ‘It was a press freebie.’

‘Are you press?’ my father asks, switching his everyday glasses for his watching-theatre glasses. He doesn’t mean this to be a devastating put-down, he’s just a nice man in his seventies who doesn’t get it.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I suppose not.’

The music starts and I’ve never been so glad to hear someone warming up an instrument.

We watch the opera. Or rather they watch it and I watch their faces, wondering if they’re having fun, trying not to reflect on what a terrible idea this whole thing was. My mother is rapt by the performance in a way that she’s never consumed by anything else. My father looks calmly content. The opera, if nothing else about the evening, is perfect to them. I scold myself for trying to improve on a routine they’ve had since they were students, when they used to take the bus down from Cambridge and queue up for return tickets on the off-chance they’d be able to catch the show. Thinking of them, queuing in their coats, two post-war babies who loved each other almost as much as they loved the silence of their libraries, makes me feel happy and sad in equally enormous measures. In the forty-five years they’ve been married, I am relatively sure that they’venever had a real argument. They’ve gone blue murder over Kant or Keats. But nothing any closer to home.

As I try to focus on the stage, I notice in the half-light that my mother’s hands, resting on her opera glasses, are red, presumably from the garden. She’s had a bumper crop of cauliflower this year, she told me earlier with pride. My brother was also made a don at an Oxford college. She said that with a little less pride than the bit about the cauliflowers and a nasty part of me was pleased. It’s reassuring to see that no matter what any of us do, we’re never going to be able to compete with the joy of a really good vegetable harvest. I had therapy a year or so back, mostly out of interest. Jessica went, so I thought I should. We talked a bit about my parents and my relationship with them, and the therapist asked whether I’d ever considered telling my parents that their lack of approval hurt me. I didn’t know how to explain to him that I don’t need to. I know what they’d say. My mother would be sympathetic, of course. She’d be sad to hear that she had in any way hurt my feelings. But she would also be genuinely bemused that an adult man in his mid-thirties could possibly crave approval from his mother.

The show finishes and my parents applaud enthusiastically. Obviously this is the only correct time to express approval; they do not approve of people who clap between movements. We find our way through the crowds and out into the Covent Garden Piazza, where the air is crisp and cold. Someone’s selling roast chestnuts, which is weird because I don’t think anyone has ever wanted to buy any, but it makes the air smell like Bonfire Night, which is lovely.

‘Would you like to go for a drink? I’m actually a member of a club nearby so it won’t be too crowded or anything,’ I offer. By ‘club’ I mean Soho House, because I secretly think it’s quite impressive that I’m a member there, so despite knowing my parents as well as I do, on some level I want them to be impressed too. I made faces about the pretentious application process to join and rolled my eyes at the annual fee, but I love it there. I was, of course, utterly delighted when our membership cards arrived. I started suggesting it to friends instead of the pub. ‘I know it’s pretentious as fuck,’ I’d say, as we drank expensive beers on the smoking terrace. ‘But it’s central and it stays open late?’

My parents both look at their watches. It’s 9.30. ‘We’d probably best be getting off,’ my father says.

‘The train—’ my mother ventures.

I already know that this is a mistake, but I can’t seem to stop myself. ‘I’ve booked a car to drive you home.’ If I’d said that I had booked them two places at a local orgy, they couldn’t have looked more shocked. If I felt gauche earlier for getting them seats in a box, it’s nothing to how I feel now. To my parsimonious parents, who darn socks until they’re more darn than sock, and shop at Aldi (‘like being in East Germany, darling, but very good quality’), taxis are sacrilege.

‘Is it part of the opera house thing?’ my mother asks, confused.

‘Will they want a picture of you standing next to the taxi?’ laughs my father.

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