‘You’re a cynical sod, aren’t you?’ said Paula, smiling. She took another sip of tea. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to give you ten out of ten. You’re basically right, though not about the criteria we used to choose a husband for me and a wife for Damon.’ She sighed. ‘Look, we knew what we were planning was grossly unfair to whichever man and woman we picked. Neither of us had any illusions about our moral rectitude. Damon hated hypocrisy more than anything and … well, I’ve come to hate it too. But we didn’t want to do any more harm than we needed to in order to protect our relationship. I knew our perfect love – and it was perfect – would only survive if we remained separated by circumstances. You can’t still be someone’s perfect woman once they’ve pulled strands of your hair out of the shower plughole enough times! Even I can’t, and look at me.’ She pointed at her face. ‘I’m the most beautiful woman I know, but so what? The second time I met Damon – our all-the-elevens date, when we stopped skirting around the issue and admitted we were soulmates – he told me he’d divorced his second wife for snoring. Between you, me and the gatepost, DC Waterhouse … I snore. You see what I’m saying?’
She leaned forward in her chair. ‘Damon was as madly in love with me on the day he died as he was on 11 November 2011.’ Her eyes were shining again. ‘That’s only because I stood my ground and said no – no marriage, no living together, no sex till he was safely married to someone else. Even after that, when we had our trysts, I’d never agree to share a room with him overnight. You can’t risk it if you really care about making a good impression. Morning breath, stinky armpits …’
Stinky way of looking at the world, thought Simon.
‘Judge me all you like,’ said Paula, ‘but I bet you’ve never been in love with someone who’d divorce you for snoring. And before you conclude that Damon was a monster and I was his brainwashed victim … well, it actually worked both ways. Damon was a perfectionist, but I’m very easily hurt. I find it difficult to recover from any kind of wound. I told Damon; I was very upfront about it. I said, “If I’m ever hurt by you, we’re done for.” When I first met Crummy – my ex-husband, Richard Crumlish – he promised me the earth and more. I thought he was wonderful; he thought I was a goddess. Everything seemed perfect. And then he hurt me in a relatively minor way and that was it for me. I pretended to forgive him, but secretly, from that moment, I was keeping my eyes peeled for someone new.’
‘What was the hurt?’ Simon asked.
‘I needed a lift home from Central London late at night. He told me to get a cab – he couldn’t be bothered to get dressed and come out. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t afford a cab, but he’d always been happy to give me lifts before. I thought, “So, that’s it, then. You care about me less tonight than you did last time I needed a ride home. The golden age is over.” And, frankly, who wants to bother with the dull beige age, which is where all marriages can’t help ending up, however hard they try.’
‘But … Damon Blundy attacked you week after week, in his column,’ said Simon. ‘Didn’t that hurt?’
‘Ah.’ Paula closed her eyes for a few seconds. ‘Yes, it did. But you see, with Damon things moved in the opposite direction, the best direction, always. He hurt me first, before he knew me. Then he met me and fell in love with me and … well, to use my colours metaphor again, it went from black to gold. For him, it was like that too – I loathed him and then I forgave him: black to gold. And so … we did it over and over again: savaged each other publicly, as hurtfully as we could, then made up for it later in private. When the person you love cures the pain they caused by being as loving as they were hateful, it’s an incredible high. The love wouldn’t be anywhere near as powerful if it weren’t the longed-for antidote to the hate. Like having a can of Coke after a long and thirsty game of tennis. Tastes better than any other can of Coke you’ve ever had. Marriage, by contrast, is like starting with a fizzy can of Coke and waiting around while it gets flatter and flatter.’
Simon nodded. Romantic sadism. An intimate, intense agony that only the loved one could take away. Ought he to worry about how easily he understood it, how little Paula’s explanation fazed him?
‘So what were the criteria?’ he asked. ‘For … spouses?’
‘Oh yes, the good-deed part of our plan,’ said Paula.
Good deed? Simon waited. It struck him as unlikely that Paula and Damon Blundy’s conspiracy would have an altruistic strand to it, but he decided to keep an open mind.
‘It was vitally important to me that we didn’t just use people. Damon, of course, said, “Great, I’ll grab a bimbo waitress at the Groucho and propose to her.”’ Paula rolled her eyes in mock despair. ‘I said, “No. You’ll find an intelligent, unattractive woman whom you can love and respect as a person. And you will love and respect her – not in the way you love me, not a grand passion, but in a married way. The best that a marriage can be – that’s what I want you to make with whichever woman you choose, so bloody well choose someone who you think deserves it.” This is going to sound weird and spiritual – I am, in fact, a bit spiritual, though I keep quiet about it to avoid mockery – but … love’s something you get better at with practice. Loving Hannah, every day, behaving in a loving way towards her – that was Damon’s spiritual practice.’
Paula laughed suddenly. ‘I never put it to him in those terms – he’d have told me to pull my brain out of my arse – but I managed to make him understand the basic principle. Men who treat their wives badly treat their lovers badly too. Always, always – maybe not straight away, but eventually. And the opposite’s equally true: if you treat your wife well, you’ll treat your lover well. So, if you’re ever looking for a mistress, make sure you don’t choose a woman who speaks ill of her husband. Choose someone like me – I adore Fergus. Not romantically, and very differently from how I adored Damon, but I still love him to bits. And by putting that love into practice every day, I’m getting better at being a loving person – and that benefits—’ Paula broke off with a sharp intake of breath. ‘That benefitted Damon,’ she said, altering the tense.
‘I can see why you don’t want Hannah to find out,’ said Simon. ‘It’s worse than the average extra-marital affair.’
‘More upsetting,’ Paula corrected him. ‘I’m not sure about worse.’
Simon was. ‘I won’t tell Hannah, but for the record? I don’t think it’s acceptable, what you and Damon did. You did a bad thing. Telling Damon the woman he chose to marry had to be unattractive? I bet you said you’d do the same, didn’t you – find a physically unattractive man?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ Paula asked. ‘What would have been the point of Damon and I inciting each other’s sexual jealousy? We knew we’d be jealous enough as it was – it was always part of the plan that we’d sleep with the people we married. It wouldn’t have been fair not to.’
Simon said nothing. He stared at her for as long as he thought he could get away with. Then he asked, ‘Don’t you feel guilty?’
‘No. Which doesn’t mean I think we behaved entirely well, but … we behaved a bit well. As well as we could, given our goal. If we wanted our love to last forever – and we did, and it will – we had to do what we did, exactly as we did it. Nothing else would have worked. Everyone treats other people instrumentally in their quest for personal happiness, apart from maybe a few self-sacrificing old monks. But most people do.’
Simon put a five-pound note down on the table and stood up to leave. He was thirsty – tea always had that effect on him. ‘Thanks for telling me the truth,’ he said to Paula.
‘I make Fergus extremely happy,’ she called after him.
As he walked through the Sofitel’s lobby, Simon imagined himself telling Hannah Blundy what he’d found out. Should he? It was the answer she’d been waiting for, but would it make her happier to know? Was happiness always the most important consideration? What good would it do her to find out the truth?
Outside the hotel, Simon blinked in the light and enjoyed the f
eeling of the fresh air in his lungs.
He knew it was useless. No matter how much he argued with himself, he would end up telling Hannah what he knew. The truth mattered. If he were in her shoes, he’d rather know.
Time to ring Charlie, who would disagree with him and try to change his mind.
Acknowledgements
I am profoundly grateful to the talented team at Hodder, as always, and to my ace agent Peter Straus. Huge thanks to Emily Winslow, who read an early draft of the novel and made incredibly helpful suggestions for improvement, and to Dominic Gregory and Rosanna Keefe, for the Clark Kent/Superman discussion. Thanks to Chris Gribble for ‘The Cartographer’s Biographer’, which simply had to be included, and to Dan, Phoebe and Guy Jones for putting up with another year of my distracted dishevelment. Thanks to everyone who entered into the ‘Why is sports doping worse than stoned writers?’ debate with me: Morgan and Klair White and Mic Wright, to name but three. Special thanks to my husband Dan for drawing the issue to my attention in the first place, and for always being ready to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable.
I am very grateful to Naomi Alderman, whose use of the term ‘telling error’ in a tweeted conversation gave me a title that I love, and who contributed some valuable psychological insights.
I would like to thank all the controversial newspaper columnists and bloggers whose work I enjoy reading, and who jointly inspired the character of Damon Blundy in this novel; there are too many of them to name (and, to be honest, some are people that one is not allowed to admire if one doesn’t want to get moaned at on Twitter). Speaking of which, this book was heavily inspired by Twitter, the online home of much kindness, much cruelty, and endless pockets of hitherto unimaginable absurdity. Twitter reminds me, daily, that even my most deranged characters are unrealistically well-balanced compared with many actual people. Thanks to my lovely readers who take the time to tweet, email and write to me about the books – I really hope you enjoy this one! And thank you to all my international publishers, who have enabled Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer’s strange partnership to travel far and wide (not to mention Liv and Gibbs’ equally strange relationship).
Thanks to Carcanet for permission to publish an extract from ‘Deep-Rooted Fears’ by C.H. Sisson. The poem appears in his Carcanet collection Antidotes.
Last but far from least, I would like to thank the uniquely awesome Dan Mallory, whose inspiring friendship and endless enthusiasm for discussing books and human beings with me has added a new dimension to my life.
The Telling Error Page 38
