A Perfect Divorce

by Francesca Clementis

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Jenny and Mark have been together since they were at school, but are now going their separate ways. They are determined that their carefully planned separation will lead to the world's first truly amicable divorce. They'll divide up their possessions without any argument; each eager to show that he/she was the most reasonable party. They'll even go out occasionally, just as good friends do.

But Jenny and Mark's friends and family are not so happy about their plans for a 'perfect divorce'. People say that divorce can be painless if there are no children involved. But at least children grow up, get over it and get on with their own lives. Some friends never do . . .

Release date: October 4, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

It took over twenty years, from the day we met, for Mark and I to decide to get married and less than ten months to decide we were getting a divorce.

I think this might be a record. Maybe Jerry Springer would be interested. Although perhaps there is some culture somewhere in which this is a sign of success, where short marriages are regarded as beautiful in the same way that in some African societies very fat women are seen as beautiful.

I’ll look that up one day. Maybe when I’m a divorcee living alone with fifty-six cats and talking to myself and wearing tweed slippers and looking for ways to occupy the empty hours.

It’s not the typical tale of a couple living together for years who become restless and interpret this feeling as a sign that it is time to get married. Then, months after the wedding, they discover that they’d made a mistake, that the feeling had actually been a sign that it was time for them to split up.

That wasn’t us because we weren’t living together in the most committed sense of the words. Although Mark had effectively moved in years earlier, he still kept his own flat and even slept there occasionally. Everyone found this strange but it made financial sense. For some time now, property had been such a fast-returning investment, that it would have been considered insane not to hang on to a decent London apartment if affordable. And if it bothered me occasionally … often… well, I was too reasonable to say anything.

We got married because I wanted to. To be precise, I wanted children and it seemed a natural progression to formalize our relationship first. Besides, that’s what couples do. They get married and then they have kids. Statistics still bear that out.

OK, so maybe it was a tactical error not actually spelling this out to Mark. But after two decades together, you’d think that some things didn’t need to be said. Or is that just me being defensive?

When I casually mentioned that I was ready to try for a baby last week, I was not prepared for his reaction.

‘But we agreed we weren’t going to have children. You’ve never wanted babies. Not ever.’

‘That was when I was younger. I changed my mind. Loads of women do. Even you’ve heard of the biological clock.’

‘But you promised me that you didn’t have one, that you were born with the battery missing.’ He was becoming agitated, a state of mind that he’d been displaying quite frequently recently.

‘Mark, I’m not being unreasonable. When we were eighteen we said that we’d never own property, that we wanted to live in a gypsy caravan and travel around the country, eking out a living selling my work at craft fairs, while you wrote a novel. Are you holding me to that too?’

‘Now you’re being ridiculous.’

I was becoming scared now. With most of our rows, I could always see the conclusion. I’d always win, of course, but I’d make him think that he’d obtained a partial victory then we’d take a bag of Revels to bed and make up.

But this time, I saw a big black wall ahead of us.

‘Why are you so opposed to the idea?’ I asked.

‘Because kids will spoil everything. We won’t be able to do any of the things that we like doing, that we’ve always liked doing. We won’t be able to stay in bed until midday or watch violent videos on Sunday afternoons, or leave a Scrabble game on the floor for days on end. Look at this.’ He pulled me over to our games cupboard. ‘All of our games have warnings on them: Not suitable for children under thirty-six months because of small pieces. It’s official: our lifestyle comes with health warnings.’

My voice was starting to shake. I was running out of arguments. ‘But children could bring us new pleasures.’

Mark became exasperated. ‘Jenny, I like our old pleasures. I don’t need new ones. We’ve always agreed that most couples only have kids because they’re bored with each other and don’t know what to do next. Well, I’m not bored with you and I never could be. You’re my best friend and I just want to be with you!’

I calmed myself down, or I tried to. ‘Mark, I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I really, really want a baby.’

‘And I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I really, really don’t.’

We had this same argument, with a few variations over the next few days. It always ended the same way, without resolution. If there was a compromise to be found in this situation, then we couldn’t find it. We couldn’t settle on having half a baby or a cocker spaniel.

Do couples, happy couples who’ve been together forever, get divorced over the subject of children? Well, what else are they to do? You see, while I love Mark, I have a physical need for a baby. It crept up on me unawares. It is so real it hurts. And it’s not exactly unusual. If I suddenly announced I wanted us to join the Hare Krishnas or move to Upper Volta and study locusts, he’d be entitled to feel that I was being unreasonable. But a baby? The most natural thing in the world for a woman of my age.

‘Out of interest,’ I asked him the other day, ‘what would you have done if I’d become pregnant accidentally?’

He shrugged. ‘I’d have supported you and gone through with it, of course, because we’d have been starting out from the same position of reluctant resignation.’

I felt sick that I could have avoided all this if only I’d been deliberately careless. But we’d always been honest with each other and this had never occurred to me. And I couldn’t possibly now forget we’d had this conversation then go and get myself pregnant anyway. He’d never forgive me.

‘So why can’t you pretend that this is the situation we’re in now?’ I argued. ‘You’ve admitted that it is theoretically possible to stay married to me, to continue loving me, even if I became unexpectedly pregnant. So surely that means that you can’t feel as strongly against kids as you insist?’

This just made him angry. ‘So what you are saying is that you couldn’t stay married to me, continue loving me, without kids? That all of a sudden your love has become conditional? So now who’s the unreasonable one?’

I couldn’t make him understand that this was nothing to do with my love for him. This was all about a need that just happened to be stronger than anything else.

I knew that nobody was going to understand that I needed a baby more than I loved Mark. But I’ve come to understand in the last week that this is not the real reason why I’m divorcing Mark. All these years when I thought we’d been moving together, we’d actually been on slightly warped tracks, gradually veering off on an imperceptible tangent.

And now, when I wanted – needed – us to embark upon our biggest journey together, when I’d packed my emotional sandwiches, paid for the overpriced ticket, spent hours on the Internet working out the route and finally declared myself ready to climb aboard, I learned that Mark had deceived me, that he was, in reality, nothing but a trainspotter.

At the moment, Mark and I still live together. By that I mean, he didn’t storm out of the flat and I didn’t rip his shirts up with my teeth and hurl them out of the window after him. Nor did we scrub the toilet with each other’s toothbrush or bother with any of the other acts of revenge so beloved of TV dramas.

He simply moved into the spare room with his Ryder Cup 1982 T-shirt, his Terry Pratchett books and his one-armed teddy that he swears he only keeps as an investment, having watched Bargain Hunt once and seen an antique German teddy sold for £15,000.

Instead of snarling and trading accusations of decade-old transgressions, we drew up lists and evenly divided our possessions.

But every word had to be carefully filtered through a civilizing sieve and we both had to pretend that we no longer knew what the other was thinking.

Mark went first. ‘Why don’t you have the coffee set?’ (Do you remember when we bought it in Crete? I got drunk and started juggling which is why we have six saucers and four cups.)

‘OK. But I think you should have the hideous dishes shaped like cabbages.’ (Do you remember when you won them in that tombola at the Christmas Fair? I tried to switch the ticket secretly with the one on a bottle of wine and we got thrown out – the first ever recording of an eviction from a church hall.)

‘We’ll split the photos down the middle. I’ll have the ones where my head isn’t shining.’ (Even though you always liked my head and enjoyed playing assorted film themes on it with your fingernails).

‘I’ll keep the ones where I’m wearing a skirt, just to prove I occasionally wore one.’ (Even though you preferred me in jeans and told me I looked like Calamity Jane, which led to that time when I pretended my umbrella was a rifle and accidentally chipped a silver of bone from your jaw. I said that it was romantic to be spending a Saturday night in Casualty together, better than watching it.)

Every single possession was a bond that glued us together and simply putting them into separate boxes didn’t seem to break the bond. It just stirred up memories, film clips that reminded us why we’d been together for so long as well as why we were breaking up.

I found the hand-decorated photo frame that some friends’ children gave us as a wedding present. I fingered it with affection.

‘Do you remember when Jocasta and Ellery gave us this?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Mark replied tightly. ‘It was shortly after they’d ruined our wedding reception by fighting throughout the meal and refusing to eat any of the food. We were then all forced to sit at the table and wait twenty minutes – until they’d eaten three mouthfuls – by their parents who appeared to have forgotten whose party it was. When they’d finally swallowed it, they were both sick. Then when it was time for us to have our first dance as a married couple, Ellery kept karate-chopping me and screaming “Pokemon!” while Jocasta wrapped her arms around your right leg.’

‘I thought that was quite sweet,’ I said faintly.

‘She was wiping her nose on your dress! Jenny, they were a nightmare! Even the baby didn’t stop crying for the whole day despite my suggestion to put a measure of gin in her bottle.’

‘But it doesn’t have to be like that! There are nice children, kids who don’t destroy other peoples’ houses, who read books and do cross-stitch and never remove their underwear in public places.’

Mark stared at me in disbelief. ‘But we don’t know any of them, do we? Think about all the happy times of our lives, thousands of them …’ his voice broke abruptly and it took him a while to get control back. ‘Do you see any kids in those memories? No. Now think of all the miserable afternoons and weekends we’ve spent, not able to finish conversations, not able to relax for a moment in case some child comes and drinks our wine, or sticks a steak knife into their eye, or throws up over our shoes. Sound familiar?’

It did. We’d always shared our loathing of these enforced family encounters in the past. Just now I felt – knew – that it would be different for us. But I couldn’t think of another way to say this, having tried communicating it continuously for the past week.

Mark shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t like kids or babies. Maybe it’s something to do with being an only child. They seem so alien to me. I’m not even sure I was a child myself. I think I was born middle-aged – maybe that’s why I lost my hair so young.’

‘But I’m an only child too,’ I argued.

He smiled suddenly and I ached. ‘Maybe that’s why you and I have always had such fun together, making up for a lost youth.’

I smiled too. We were like kids, the two of us. The trouble was, I wanted to grow up and Mark didn’t. How do you build a bridge across that kind of gulf?

But nobody could accuse of being uncivilized. We smiled so politely, so incessantly, that yesterday I went to the dentist in pain thinking I had a jaw infection.

And Mark never once saw or heard me cry. I kept all my makeup in the bedroom so that I could repair the damage each night inflicted on my face. When this is all over I’m going to have to go to the optician because I think I might have cried so much that my prescription must have changed. My contact lenses sting like needles but I put them in anyway. I don’t know if Mark cries. If he does, then he’s better at applying under-eye concealer than I am.

We’ve never been big weepers. We’re very English like that. If films get a bit teary, I chew my nails and Mark tugs his earlobes as if he can’t believe what he’s hearing. Since we both know the other is doing this to avoid crying, I don’t know why we haven’t just abandoned the pretence and let ourselves bawl.

But we don’t do that. And we don’t shout. So why would we be any different now this is happening? We’re nice people, we were a nice couple – everyone said so. And we had a catchphrase, a slogan, for this divorce. ‘Nothing will change, not really.’ That’s what we agreed.

We were determined that we would break the mould, prove the sceptics wrong. Ours would be an amicable divorce. How could it be anything else after spending all our adult lives together? We would stay friends, we agreed, meet up all the time, move in the same circles without any awkwardness.

No lawyers, we agreed. We wouldn’t need them. Instead we bought a £9.99 Handle Your Own Divorce kit from the newsagent down the road. It even came with a free CD-ROM. Now you don’t get one of them from a lawyer.

The CD-ROM was not presented by a reassuring American with a shiny suit, fluorescent teeth and big hair making us feel good about ourselves. In fact, it just seemed to have a whole load of forms to download but it was a focus away from ourselves, a non-judgemental recording facility, allowing us to note who was keeping what. Everything was shared out without any argument in this, the world’s first completely blame-free divorce, although there was a bit of tension when we were dividing up the videos.

We bought nearly all of them together. They were our most valued possessions, a lifetime’s collection of the most lowbrow films ever released, our shared passion. Some of them were so bad they’d become cult classics in the meantime and possibly quite valuable. Obviously not Xanadu with Olivia Newton-John, which is too marginal in its appeal even to be called ironic, but that was the first film we saw together at the cinema in 1980. Mark smiled sadly and told me he wanted me to keep it.

He’s not making it easy for me to stop loving him.

We watched every single one of these hundreds of videos together. In the past. Ago. Once. All our terms of reference have changed. Since we were sixteen, we’ve always talked about the now and the future. But ‘now’ has been replaced with ‘yesterday’. And I can’t quite get a handle on the concept of a future without Mark.

All I have to do is make someone else understand all this. Maybe then they can explain it to me. And I can explain it to Mark.

‘I can’t talk to you while you’re wearing your hair like Princess Leia in Star Wars.’

I can always rely on Maria to make me feel faintly ridiculous. It’s a gift.

‘If you’d ever seen Star Wars,’ I pointed out, ‘rather than just played Star Wars Monopoly with us once, then you’d know that she had her plaits wrapped around her ears like doughnuts. Mine are plain pigtails and I am wearing them like that because I haven’t washed my hair.’

Maria leaned over and began undoing the plaits. ‘I still can’t let you do this. It’s a crime against my eyes.’ She pulled them loose into a long, heavy sheet of relentlessly straight black hair. ‘There, that’s more like you. You need to wear your hair down to minimize your long nose and high forehead.’

I’ve heard that there are some things your best friends won’t tell you. Sadly there is nothing Maria won’t tell me.

She took a deep breath. ‘Now I need a drink.’ With the merest rise of her hand, a waiter miraculously appeared to take the order.

‘A bottle of house champagne, two glasses and six packets of cheese-and-onion crisps please.’

‘I’ve already ordered champagne,’ I interjected, holding the waiter’s arm before he disappeared. Not because there was anything to celebrate but because that was all Maria drank.

She laughed. ‘So we’ll have two bottles. On the phone you sounded as if this was going to be a multi-bottle evening.’ She then dismissed the waiter with a dramatic flourish of her hand. ‘So, tell me, when are you due?’

I expected this. No I didn’t actually. It was only when she said this that I realized this was the obvious assumption. ‘I’m not pregnant.’

Maria looked perturbed. ‘But I had it all planned. You would insist that you couldn’t drink too much and then I would persuade you that this was a perfect opportunity to introduce my future godchild to the life I have planned for her. I even got all this stuff on the Internet.’

She pulled out sheaves of paper, all closely printed, all bearing titles such as: ALCOHOL IN PREGNANCY – THE GOOD NEWS. ‘I had to find some pretty obscure sites to come up with this many reasons why drinking champagne in pregnancy is a good thing, most of them sponsored by the French wine industry, but if you can’t trust a champagne producer, well then …’

I closed my eyes. ‘It was a reasonable assumption. My life has been the same for me since I left university. It’s been Mark, Mark’s business, living with Mark, marrying Mark, what else would I have to talk about apart from a baby with Mark?’ My voice was rising disturbingly.

Two waiters arrived at the same time with champagne. I wondered if now was an appropriate time to order a third.

Maria lifted her glass. ‘So what are we drinking to?’ she asked apprehensively.

‘Well, you won’t be surprised to hear it’s about Mark.’

Maria couldn’t help herself. She never could, self-control being one of many virtues she’d not bothered acquiring, along with legible handwriting, table manners and a way with animals. ‘Don’t tell me – he’s finally giving up the gym game and getting a proper job?’

‘No.’ I realized that Maria would continue to make inappropriate suggestions until forcibly restrained, so I decided to get it over with. ‘We’re getting a divorce.’

‘What do you mean, getting a divorce?’ Maria put her glass down to give this mystery her full concentration.

‘Getting a divorce. What no man is supposed to put asunder, we’re putting asunder. Going our separate ways. Splitting up. What don’t you understand?’

‘You don’t mean splitting up completely?’ Maria wanted to clarify this baffling announcement. ‘You’re just getting a divorce, right? It’s only the marriage thing that wasn’t a great success? You’re still staying together?’

I ought to point out that Maria and I have been friends for eighteen years and, in that time, I have always been half of Jennyandmark. I’ve never existed for her as anything else. The concept of me as a separate entity is a new one for her. For me too, if I can bear to admit it.

We met when I was working in a department store as a holiday job and Maria was already working her way up to becoming one of the high street’s youngest fashion buyers. She even looked the part, with her swirly skirts and tailored blouses that, with her long corkscrew brown hair and pale skin made her look like a 1950s Hollywood siren, a style she never abandoned even while she became more sophisticated in her interpretation.

To me she would always be utterly exotic and a bit foreign, even though I eventually learned that she came from Walthamstow and all her influences were derived from the films she loved. I suppose this made her no different from me. In occasional moments of introspection, I often wondered how my life might have turned out if I’d met a boyfriend who exposed me to punk rock or Renaissance art rather than bad movies.

We’d got through the first bottle of champagne without noticing and moved onto the second.

‘I presume he’s got another woman, although I can’t imagine who else, apart from you, could see anything in him.’ Maria has never been a great admirer of Mark on any level. Mark’s hair started thinning at the age of twenty-two, a gift from his father (‘I’d rather have had a car’) and decided he couldn’t face the agonizing process of watching his youth decline so visibly. He had his hair cropped as short as he could without looking like Steven Berkoff and scaring small children and he’s kept it at that length ever since.

Maria likes men with lots of hair. She hides a lot behind hers and feels that everybody needs a veil of some kind. ‘If you can’t play with a man’s hair, there’s nothing else to do except look into his eyes,’ she would argue.

I’ve always liked to believe that, one day, Maria will meet a man and want to do nothing but look into his eyes. She’s not convinced.

But the thing that Maria has always really disliked about Mark is his existence. He has robbed Maria of my company on all the single woman’s adventures that she’s enjoyed through the years. All the early cheap package trips to Magaluf, the later treks to the Himalayas, long weekends in Barcelona flirting with waiters, singles nights in tacky West End nightclubs, experiments with Lonely Hearts ads and expensive dating agencies. Maria would have loved me to go through all that with her but I was Part of a Couple.

She also blamed Mark for what she saw as my stunted personal growth. ‘He’s kept you sixteen,’ she complained. I thought about this a lot and wondered if it was, in fact, the other way round.

‘No, he hasn’t got another woman and, before you ask, I haven’t got another man.’

Maria raised her eyebrows. ‘I wasn’t going to ask.’

I knew what she was thinking, that I’m a prude. And maybe I am. I look away during sultry sex scenes in the cinema, I’ve never used the word ‘womb’ in a public place and I don’t even own a thong. But I’m sure there’s a trollop inside me too, fighting out of its low-heeled shoes, desperate to break out and wear a Wonderbra. I’ve just never had the courage. Breaking out always implies, well, breaking something. And Mark and I worked hard to keep our life intact.

Yes, we are nice people, who don’t, didn’t, cheat on each other. But we’re not completely repressed. I mean, we once went to a Frankie Goes To Hollywood concert, still have the T-shirts.

‘So why are you splitting up?’ Maria asked. ‘Mark’s realized he’s gay? A transvestite? He’s becoming a Roman Catholic priest? He’s dying and doesn’t want to put you through the ordeal of nursing a terminally-ill man? He’s become mentally unstable? Mid-life crisis?’

‘You hit a raw nerve when you asked if I was pregnant. I want a baby and Mark doesn’t.’ I shrugged. ‘Simple as that, really.’

Maria screwed up her eyes, trying to comprehend all this. ‘But I thought that was why you got married?’

‘So did I. But Mark didn’t. Maybe he just believed it was a way of undoing the damage caused when he gave me that sandwich toaster for my birthday and I accused him of not loving me. I suppose, to him, marriage was the ultimate good present.’

‘But surely you talked about it?’ Maria was completely baffled. And she was right. It sounds silly now, but I never actually got round to mentioning to Mark why I wanted to get married. I thought he would realize.

‘We did,’ I said. ‘I remember vividly us having a conversation where we agreed that if we ever decided to have children, we would get married.’

‘When was that?’ Maria asked.

I thought about it. ‘I think we were in my bedroom revising for our A-Levels.’

Maria slapped her forehead in despair. She hit herself quite a lot in my presence. I have that effect on people. ‘But how could you have been together all this time without at least catching up on where you both stood on kids? You must have made comments of some kind when your friends had children or when your parents started dropping hints about grandchildren. What did you talk about all that time?’

‘If you’d ever lowered your standards in men to the faintly reasonable and taken a chance on a long-term relationship, you’d know that after the first couple of years, you’ve covered all the big topics. After that, you discuss congestion charges, easyJet fares and, in Mark’s case, whether male film stars are losing their hair.’

‘So what does the Rottweiler have to say about this?’ Maria had wisely changed the subject.

I sighed. It’s not easy when your two best friends don’t get on. Maria doesn’t like any of my university friends, mainly due to a real complex about not having a degree, but she particularly dislikes Lisa. ‘I haven’t spoken to her about this, yet.’

Maria smiled wryly. ‘I’m not surprised. This will play havoc with her lists. I presume she still has her lists?’

Ludicrous question. At my last lunch with Lisa, two weeks ago, she even had a new list.

I already knew that Mark and I were in trouble and I wanted to talk to Lisa about it but, as often happened, my real problems got swept aside to make way for her perceived ones.

She pulled out her leather list folder and turned immediately to the Christmas schedule. ‘The problem is, Jen, the last posting dates. Nobody ever lets me know until the last minute if we’re going to be seeing them over the holiday. So I never know whether to get something light for the post or whether I can buy whatever I want. And all the best turkeys will be gone if I don’t order quickly. Well, how am I supposed to know what size to get if people refuse to get their acts together and let me know if they’re coming over on The Day?’

‘It is only August,’ I pointed out reasonably, fully aware that reason was the enemy of the neurotic.

‘Yes, but anything could happen between now and December. I want everything sorted, just in case.’

When Lisa writes her autobiography, it will be entitled Just In Case. Even her fiercely short blonde bob and unmoveable makeup are designed Just In Case she should be rushed to hospital after an accident which robs her of the facilities to take care of her appearance for more than twenty-four hours. OK, that’s not why she does it. She just believes that once she has spray-gunned her hairspray and super-glued her make-up on, she can face the world knowing that there is one part of her life that will not require attention.

‘What could happen?’ I asked her, forgetting that this wasn’t the point.

‘I could get pregnant,’ she said quickly.

Oh yes. How could I forget? She and her husband Kieran had been trying for a baby since Mark and I got married. Not that we’d planned to have babies at the same time.

Our wedding was a turning point for Lisa in a different way. Mark and Kieran had set up a business together straight after graduation. But it never made the sort of money they’d envisaged. Then when Mark sold his flat to move in with me last year, he put the whole £100,000 profit into the company. With this investment, they were expecting big returns. This eliminated Kieran’s arguments that they couldn’t afford to start a family.

Lisa was flicking through her folder again. I felt queasy. ‘Lisa, tell me that you don’t have a Making A Baby list.’ I had this awful feeling she was going to show me graphs with temperatures and positions. I’ve never been comfortable talking gynaecologically, not even with my own doctor. I always wish they’d bring out those dolls that they use for children so I could just point and mumble.

‘Not a list as such. Obviously I’ve done research and drawn up notes and a plan. You have to be methodical when you’re thirtyeight. No, this is my maternity leave plan. I’ve prepared a sliding schedule of handing over my duties to all my sub-editors and assistant editors. I’m going to try it out on them, have a dummy run.’

I groaned inwardly. Having met her colleagues on Uptown Woman, I didn’t think they’d respond well to trying out another of her sliding schedules, however excited they might be that they were potentially getting rid of Lisa in the imminent future. At a drunken office party to which I’d been invited, they’d all confessed their loathing of Lisa, assuming that I must feel the same way since I looked so sensible.

‘So how does Kieran feel about all this baby-planning?’ I asked her, already aware that Mark and I had a big, big problem with this very subject.

Lisa suddenly became over-animated. ‘Well, he says he’s not sure about it. But he’ll come round.’

‘You mean, he doesn’t want a baby?’ I was suddenly interested.

Lisa raised a finger to object. ‘He thinks he doesn’t want a baby. He’ll be fine when it comes along. I’ll organize everything.’ She waved her hand vaguely.

‘So you’re just carrying on trying even though Kieran isn’t keen?’

‘Of course!’

And for the rest of the lunch I wondered if it might be that easy for me and Mark.

The last thing I remember saying to Lisa was, ‘Of course we’ll be coming over on Christmas Day as usual.’ That enabled her to make a big tick on her list and made her very happy.

I can only hope she hasn’t ordered the turkey.

Now I had a list of my own to consider: People Who Need To Be Informed That There Is No Jennyandmark Any More. Mark and I looked at the list. There was only the one list because our l