Surprise Me

At last, Clarissa calms down and says she’s going to make coffee. I sit down at my desk and start typing up my report, trying to put the morning’s events behind me. But I can’t. I’m all churned up. My anxious fears are fighting with defiance. Why shouldn’t this be the last quirky corner of the world? Why should we conform? I don’t care who this guy is or what claim he has on Willoughby House. If he wants to destroy this special, precious place and turn it into condos, he’ll have to go through me first.

After work I have to go to a talk on Italian painting given by one of our supporters, so I don’t arrive home till nearly 8 p.m. There’s a quiet atmosphere in the house, which means the girls have gone to sleep. I pop upstairs to kiss their slumbering cheeks, tuck them in and turn Anna the right way around in bed. (Her feet always end up on the pillow, like Pippi Longstocking.) Then I head downstairs to find Dan sitting in the kitchen with a bottle of wine in front of him.

‘Hi,’ I greet him. ‘How was your day?’

‘Fine.’ Dan gives a shrug. ‘Yours?’

‘Some pencil-pusher is coming to boss us about,’ I say gloomily. ‘Mrs Kendrick’s nephew. He wants to “take an interest”, apparently. Or, you know, shut us down and build condos.’

Dan looks up, alarmed. ‘Did he say that? Jesus.’

‘Well, no,’ I admit. ‘But he said we had to change, or else.’ I try to convey the menace of those two words with my tone of voice, but Dan’s features have already relaxed.

‘He probably meant “or else no Christmas party”,’ he says. ‘You want some?’ He pours me a glass of wine before I can even answer. As he slides it across the table, I eye him, and then the bottle. It’s half-empty. And Dan seems preoccupied.

‘Hey,’ I say cautiously. ‘Are you OK?’

For a few moments, Dan just stares into space. He’s drunk, I suddenly realize. I bet he went to the pub after work. He sometimes does, if I’m going to be out and Karen’s on duty. And then he came home and started on the wine.

‘I sat at work today,’ he says at last. ‘And I thought: Am I really going to do this for another sixty-eight years? Build offices, sell offices, build offices, sell offices, build offices—’

‘I get it.’

‘—sell offices.’ He finally looks at me. ‘Forever.’

‘It’s not forever.’ I laugh, trying to lighten things. ‘And you don’t have to work till your deathbed.’

‘It feels like forever. We’re immortal, that’s what we are, Sylvie.’ He eyes me moodily. ‘And you know what the immortals are?’

‘Heroic?’ I venture.

‘Fucked-up. That’s what.’

He reaches across the table, pulls the wine bottle towards himself and pours a fresh glass.

OK, this is not good.

‘Dan, are you having a midlife crisis?’ I say, before I can stop myself.

‘How can I be having a midlife crisis?’ Dan erupts. ‘I’m nowhere near my midlife! Nowhere near! I’m in the bloody foothills!’

‘But that’s good!’ I say emphatically. ‘We’ve got so much time.’

‘But what are we going to do with it, Sylvie? How are we going to fill the endless, soulless years of mindless drone work? Where’s the joy in our lives?’ He looks around the kitchen with a questing gaze, as though it might be in a jar labelled ‘joy’, next to ‘turmeric’.

‘Like I said this morning! We just need to plan. Take control of our lives. Vincit qui se vincit,’ I add proudly. ‘It means: He conquers who conquers himself.’ (I googled it at work, earlier on, when it was my turn on the computer.)

‘Well, how do we conquer ourselves?’

‘I don’t know!’

I take a slug of wine and it tastes so good that I take another. I get some plates out of the cupboard, ladle chicken stew out of our slow cooker and sprinkle it with coriander while Dan reaches in the drawer for cutlery.

‘Let alone … you know.’ He dumps the cutlery heavily on to the table.

‘What?’

‘You know.’

‘I don’t!’

‘Sex,’ he says, as though it’s obvious.

For God’s sake. Sex again? Really?

Why does it always come back to sex with Dan? I mean, I know sex is important, but there are other things in life too, things he doesn’t even seem to see, or appreciate. Like curtain tie-backs. Or The Great British Bake-Off.

‘What do you mean, “sex”?’ I counter.

‘I mean—’ He breaks off.

‘What?’

‘I mean, sex with the same person forever. And ever. And ever. For a million years.’

There’s silence. I bring our plates over to the table, put them down and then pause, my mind circling uneasily. Is that how he sees it? A million-year marriage? I’m remembering Tilda, too: ‘Isn’t “till death us do part” a bit over-ambitious? Isn’t it a bit of a gamble?’

I eye Dan, this man I’ve gambled on. It seemed like good odds at the time. But now, here he is behaving as though sex with me forever is some sort of punishment, and I feel like the odds are slipping.

‘I suppose we could have a sabbatical or something,’ I say, without even knowing what I quite mean.

Dan lifts his head to look at me. ‘A sabbatical?’

‘A relationship sabbatical. Time apart. Be with other people. That could be one of our decades.’ I shrug, trying to sound cool. ‘I mean, it’s a thought.’

I’m sounding so much braver than I feel. I don’t want Dan to shag other people for a decade. I don’t want him to be with anyone except me. But nor do I want him to feel like he’s in an orange jumpsuit staring down the barrel of a life sentence.

Dan is just staring at me incredulously. ‘So, what, we talk Italian for a decade, we shag other people for a decade and then – what was the last one? Move to South America?’

‘Well, I don’t know!’ I retort defensively. ‘I’m just trying to be helpful!’

‘Do you want a sabbatical?’ Dan focuses on me more closely. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’

‘No!’ I exclaim in frustration. ‘I just want you to be happy! I thought you were happy. But now you want to leave us—’

‘No I don’t!’ he says hotly. ‘You’re the one who wants me to leave! Would you like me to do that now?’

‘I don’t want you to leave!’ I practically shriek.

How has this conversation gone so wrong? I drain my wine glass and reach for the bottle, rewinding back in my mind. OK, maybe I slightly jumped to conclusions. But maybe he did, too.

We eat silently for a while and I take several more gulps of wine, hoping it might straighten out my mind. As I do so, a warm sensation creeps over me and I gradually start to feel calmer. Although by ‘calmer’ I really mean ‘drunk’. The two Proseccos I had at the talk are catching up with me, but I still drain my wine glass a second time. This is essential. This is remedial.

‘I just want a long and happy marriage,’ I say finally, my voice a little slurred. ‘And for us not to be bored or feel like we’re in a jumpsuit, scratching tallies on the wall. And I don’t want a sabbatical,’ I add defiantly. ‘As for sex, we’ll just have to …’ I shrug hopelessly. ‘I mean, I could always buy some new underwear …’