How to Be Good

by Nick Hornby

  Perhaps I am getting things out of proportion. Maybe all this contemplation of bleach-drinking and Prozac-munching and solitary deaths is an inappropriate response to the crime of giving lasagne away to starving drunks. On our wedding day, the vicar asked us, in that bit where he talks to the bride and groom privately, to respect one another’s thoughts, ideas and suggestions. At the time, this seemed an unexceptionable request, easily granted: David for example suggests going to a restaurant, and I say, ‘OK then.’ Or he has an idea for my birthday present. That sort of thing. Now I realize that there are all sorts of suggestions a husband might make to a wife, and not all of them are worthy of respect. He might suggest that we eat something awful, like sheep’s brains, or form a neo-Nazi party. The same must apply to thoughts and ideas, surely? I am in the middle of pointing all this out to the vicar twenty years after the event when the doorbell rings. I ignore it, but a couple of minutes later David shouts up the stairs to tell me I have a visitor.

  It’s Stephen. My legs almost buckle when I see him, my husband standing next to him, my children running past him, like a scene from a film that mesmerizes simply because it is so far outside the scope of one’s own imagination.

  I start to introduce my lover to my husband, but David stops me.

  ‘I know who it is,’ he says calmly. ‘Stephen introduced himself.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’ I want to ask whether Stephen gave both his name and his position, as it were, but the atmosphere gives me all the answers I need.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ says Stephen. I look anxiously at David. ‘Both of you,’ Stephen adds, although if this is meant to reassure me somehow, it fails. I don’t want to talk. I want David and Stephen to go into a room, come out and tell me what to do. I’d do it, too – anything they came up with, as long as I didn’t have to sit at the kitchen table with the two of them. David ushers Stephen past him, and we go and sit down at the kitchen table.

  David offers Stephen a drink and I pray he doesn’t want one. I get an awful vision of what life would be like while we were all waiting for the kettle to boil, or while David was rummaging through the freezer drawers trying to find the ice tray, and then bashing away at it for ten minutes.

  ‘Can I just have a glass of tap water?’

  ‘I’ll get it.’

  I jump up, grab a glass from the dishwasher, rinse it, fill it from the tap without letting the water run cool, and plonk it in front of him. No ice, no lemon, certainly no grace, but the hope that this might expedite things is dashed by David standing up.

  ‘How about you, Katie? Cup of tea? Shall I make a pot of real coffee?’

  ‘No!’ I shriek.

  ‘How about if I put the kettle on, just in . . .’

  ‘Sit down, please.’

  ‘Right.’

  He sits down, and we stare at each other.

  ‘Who wants to kick off, then?’ David asks, relatively cheerily. I look at him. I’m not entirely sure that he is responding to the gravity of the moment. (Or am I being melodramatic, maybe even self-aggrandizing in some way? Maybe there is no gravity here. Maybe out in the world people do this all the time, hence David’s breeziness. Am I taking it all too seriously, as usual?)

  ‘Maybe I should,’ Stephen says. ‘Seeing as how I’m the one who’s called the meeting, as it were.’

  The two men smile, and I decide that my instinct just now was correct: I’m taking things way too seriously, and clearly this sort of thing does happen all the time, and my discomfort is indicative of a disastrous and embarrassing twentieth-century squareness. Maybe Stephen calls round to see the husbands of the women he has slept with on an almost weekly basis. Maybe . . . Maybe David does, which is why he seems to know what to do and say, and how to be.

  ‘I just kind of wanted to see where we were at,’ says Stephen pleasantly. ‘I’m sorry not to call first or anything, but I left a couple of messages for Katie, and she didn’t return them, and so I thought, why not take the bull by the horns sort of thing?’

  ‘Horns being the operative word,’ says David. ‘Seeing as I’m wearing them.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The horns. Cuckold. Sorry. Stupid joke.’

  Stephen laughs politely. ‘Oh, I see. That’s quite good.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s nothing to do with current North London sexual mores that I know nothing about, and maybe it’s nothing to do with GoodNews and his effect on David; maybe it’s just because I am simply not exciting enough for anyone to get worked up about. OK, I’m just about attractive enough for Stephen to want to sleep with me, but when it comes to jealous rages and dementedly possessive behaviour and lovelorn misery, I simply haven’t got what it takes. I’m Katie Carr, not Helen of Troy, or Patti Boyd, or Elizabeth Taylor. Men don’t fight over me. They saunter over on a Sunday evening and make weak puns.

  ‘If I can interrupt for a second,’ I say tetchily, ‘I’d like to speed things up a bit. Stephen, what the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Ah,’ Stephen says. ‘The 64,000 dollar question. OK. Deep breath. David, I’m sorry if this comes as a shock, because you seem a decent sort of a guy. But, well . . . I’ve come to the conclusion that Katie doesn’t want to be with you. She wants to be with me. I’m sorry, but those are the facts. I want to talk about what . . . you know, about what we’re going to do about it. Man to man.’

  And now, when I hear the ‘facts’ as presented by Stephen, my bleach-drinking view of marriage mysteriously evaporates. In fact, it has now transformed into a bleach-drinking view of Stephen, and I panic.

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ I tell anyone who will listen to me. ‘Stephen, you should stop now and go, before you make an idiot of yourself.’

  ‘I knew she’d say that,’ says Stephen with a sigh and a sad, I-know-you-so-well smile. ‘David, perhaps you and I should talk privately.’

  The outrageous cheek of this enrages me – ‘Sure, yes, right, I’ll leave the room, and you tell me who I should be with when you’ve sorted it out’ – but the truth is that I am tempted to leave, of course I am. I don’t want to live through the next few hideous minutes of this conversation. I remember feeling the same way when I was giving birth to Tom: at one point, bombed out of my head on gas and air and then an epidural, I somehow became convinced it was the maternity room, rather than the baby, that was responsible for the pain I was in, and that if I left it then I could cop out of the whole thing. Not true then, and not true now – the agony has to happen regardless of where I am.

  My snapping at Stephen seems merely to have emboldened and relaxed him.

  ‘David,’ he says, ‘this might hurt, but . . . I know from having talked to Katie over the last couple of months that . . . Well, there are a lot of things that aren’t right.’

  David gently interrupts before Stephen has a chance to enumerate all the problems he thinks we have. ‘Katie and I have talked about that. We’re working on it.’

  I can’t help but love David at this moment. He’s calm when he has every right to be angry with everything and everyone, and as a result I feel, for the first time in a long time, that we are a unit, a couple, a marriage, and that marriage is, after all, something we should all aspire to. At this precise moment I’m happy to be in a marriage, to be two against one, to combine with my partner against this destructive and dangerous outsider with whom I happen to have had sex. The alternative is three-cornered anarchy, and I’m too scared and too tired for that.

  ‘There are some things you can’t sort out,’ Stephen says. He won’t make eye contact with any of us; he’s staring into his glass of water.

  ‘Like?’

  ‘She doesn’t love you.’

  David looks at me, requiring some sort of reaction. I settle for a shake of the head and a roll of the eyes – a suitably ambiguous response, I hope, to what is, after all, a very complicated issue (two seconds ago I loved him, twenty minutes ago I hated him, earlier in the afternoon I wasn’t bothered
one way or the other, and so on and on, right back to the college disco, probably) – but neither the headshake nor the eye rolling seem to do the trick, because both of them are looking at me now.

  ‘I never said that,’ I throw in hopefully.

  ‘You didn’t have to,’ says Stephen, and I can’t deny that whenever I did speak about David, no one listening could have claimed that I was besotted with him. ‘And then there’s the sex . . .’

  ‘I definitely never said anything about . . .’

  ‘You did, actually, Katie. You said something about the difference between art and science, and that you preferred art.’

  Oh. Oh dear. There was no way that was a lucky guess. I hadn’t realized that I’d ever voiced my art versus science theory, but I must have done.

  ‘I never said I preferred art.’

  ‘You said you were a scientist by profession and you didn’t need science in bed.’

  Now he comes to mention it, I do remember saying something like that, but it was intended to make Stephen feel better about, you know, nothing happening from my side. Ironic, then, that it has come to be used as a weapon against David, who did make things happen from my side. (If you’re interested, there is another layer of irony here, because David is a great anti-science man, and constantly bangs on about the superiority of the arts over science, and how all scientists are idiots and so on and so forth. So first of all, in this particular situation, he’s swapped camps and become a scientist, his own worst enemy, without knowing it. And, then, having swapped camps and actually achieved more than the artist – although maybe that’s just me speaking as a scientist – he’s attacked for it.)

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says David mildly. ‘You’ve lost me.’

  Neither Stephen nor I have the heart to explain, so we just let his rather plaintive (and, let’s face it, perfectly understandable) bafflement hang in the air. But I hate the feeling that Stephen and I are now, suddenly, the unit, and that David’s incomprehension isolates him. I don’t want to form any sort of alliance with this twit. Not any more.

  ‘Stephen, I was trying to be nice to you when I told you that. It was an explanation for why I didn’t come.’ I glance at David, hoping that this brutally plain information will cheer him up, and that the cheer will register somewhere in his face, but he is still blank and quiet. I want to make him feel better than he must be feeling, but I can see now that referring to my sexual relationship with Stephen, even given its relative failure, is not the way to do it.

  ‘That’s what you’re saying now,’ Stephen says. There’s a whine in his voice that I’ve never heard before, and I don’t like it. ‘That’s not what you were saying when you were lying on top of me in Leeds.’

  David looks away momentarily, a flinch as the needle finally pierces the skin. ‘No, that’s not what I said then,’ I say, and there is a real heat in my voice. He’s really beginning to upset me now. ‘We know what I said then. I said the thing about arts and science then. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re interpreting the words we know I used. Please try and keep up, Stephen.’

  ‘Oh, terribly sorry if I’m not quick enough for you.’ We glower at each other, and it is this that finally makes David get to his feet.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’m speaking out of turn here,’ he says, ‘but you two really don’t strike me as a couple who stand much chance of a happy and successful relationship together. You don’t seem to get on very well. And you really should be able to, at this stage. Early on. First flush and all that.’

  It’s such an obvious and welcome observation that it makes me smile, even though the ‘you two’ and the ‘couple’ stick in my throat.

  ‘I mean . . . to be honest, Stephen, Katie doesn’t appear to like you very much. I’ll let her speak for herself, but I don’t think she’s in a hurry to rush off with you. And, you know . . . there’s surely got to be a degree of . . . of . . . unanimity about it. Otherwise it’s not going to happen, is it?’

  ‘No it bloody isn’t,’ I say.

  ‘Katie . . .’ Stephen reaches for my hand and I snatch it away. I can’t believe he wants to argue the point.

  ‘I’m not sixteen, Stephen. This isn’t like trying to persuade someone to go to the pictures. I have a husband and two children. You think I’m going to suddenly see your point and leave them? “Oh, yeah, you’re right, I do want to be with you. Silly me.” I made a mistake. I’ve got to live with it, and so has David. Please go.’

  And he does, and I never see him again. (Oh, but I think of him, of course I do. He’s not really a part of this story any more, but in months and years to come I will find myself wondering whether he has a partner, whether he remembers me, whether I left some small but disfiguring scar . . . I haven’t slept with enough men to forget any of them, particularly the most recent. So even though you will not hear much about him again, do not make the mistake of thinking that it is as if he never was.)

  ‘Thank you,’ I say to David when we hear the door slam. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘That must have been horrible for you.’

  ‘It . . . It really was. I was so jealous. I hated him so much. What were you thinking of?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ And I don’t. Stephen now seems to be not a person at all, but the hallucinatory product of some sort of sickness. ‘You were brilliant. And I’m sorry I put you in such a ridiculous situation.’

  He shakes his head, and is quiet for a moment. ‘I put myself in it, too, didn’t I? Wouldn’t have happened if I’d been making you happy. So I’m sorry, too.’

  And now I do feel I owe him. Not because of what I promised a long time ago, but because of what he just did five minutes ago. And that’s how it should work, isn’t it? That night, I go to bed feeling I’d do anything for him.

  ‘There’s a favour I wanted to ask you, actually,’ he says as we’re about to put the light out, and I’m pleased. I’m in the mood for favours.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I spoke to GoodNews yesterday, and . . . Well, he’s got nowhere to live. His landlord’s given him notice. I was wondering if he could come here for a couple of nights.’

  I don’t want GoodNews here, of course I don’t: the prospect fills me with a great deal of apprehension. But my husband has spent some of this evening listening courteously while my ex-lover outlines his shortcomings, and has now asked me if a friend can stay for a while: you don’t have to have had a spiritual conversion to come to the right decision.

  He’s a funny little man, GoodNews. Thirtyish, small, astonishingly skinny; he would be unwise to pick a fight with Tom. He has huge, bright-blue, frightened-looking eyes, and lots of curly, dirty-blond hair, although I suspect that personal hygiene might not necessarily be a priority for him at the moment, and perhaps I should reserve judgement on the hair colour until he has been persuaded to shower. There has been an unwise and spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to grow a goatee, hence a fluffy little tuft of something or other, just underneath the centre of his lower lip, that any mother would want to rub off with a bit of spit. What you notice first of all, however, is that both his eyebrows have been pierced, and he is wearing what appear to be brooches over each eye. The children are particularly and perhaps forgivably fascinated by this.

  ‘Are those tortoises?’ Tom asks, even before he’s said hello. I hadn’t wanted to stare at the eyebrow jewellery before, but now I can see that Tom is right: this man is wearing representations of domestic pets on his face.

  ‘Nah,’ says GoodNews dismissively, as if Tom’s error was ignorant in the extreme, and he’s about to expand when Molly steps in.

  ‘They’re turtles,’ she says. I am momentarily impressed by her authority until I remember that she has met GoodNews before.

  ‘What’s the difference?’ asks Tom.

  ‘Turtles can swim, can’t they?’ says David over-cheerfully, as if trying to enter into the spirit of a completely different occasion – an occasion where we’re
sitting around eating pizza and watching a nature programme, rather than an occasion where we’re welcoming a spiritual healer with animals dangling from his eyebrows into our home. The cheerfulness comes, I can see, from embarrassment – he has, after all, spent an awful lot of time kneeling on the floor with this man, and so he has a lot to be embarrassed about.

  ‘Why did you want turtles and not tortoises?’ Tom asks. It’s not the first question that came to my mind, but DJ GoodNews is such a curious creature that any information he cares to give us is endlessly fascinating.

  ‘You won’t laugh if I tell you?’ I laugh even before he tells us. I can’t help it. The idea that one would laugh at the explanation for the turtles, but not at the turtles themselves, is in itself funny.

  GoodNews looks hurt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘That was quite rude,’ says GoodNews. ‘I’m surprised at you.’

  ‘Do you know me?’

  ‘I feel like I do. David’s talked a lot about you. He loves you very much, but you’ve been going through some bad times, yeah?’

  For a moment I think he’s asking me for confirmation – ‘That’s me!’ – but then I realize that the ‘yeah’ is just one of those annoying verbal tics that this generation pick up like headlice. I have never met anyone like GoodNews. He talks like a dodgy geezer vicar, all cockiness and glottal stops and suspect solicitude.