Read How to Be Good for Free Online Page B

so bad he can no longer control his language. He can, of course, and does, most of the time, so I in turn hate him for his manipulation.
    â€˜Shut up, David.’
    He sighs and mutters under his breath, filled with despair at my prissiness and my lack of sympathy.
    â€˜What do you want me to do?’
    â€˜Put their tea on and leave me alone. I’ll be able to get up soon. If I’m allowed to rest it.’ As if I were about to ask him to limbo dance, or put a few bookshelves up, or take me upstairs to make love.
    â€˜Do you want the paper?’
    â€˜Already read it.’
    â€˜I’ll put the radio on.’
    So we listen to the arts review thing on Radio 4, and we listen to The Simpsons , and we listen to the fish fingers spitting under the grill, and I try not to tread on my husband while I long for hotel rooms in Leeds and Clerkenwell – not what went on in them, but the rooms themselves: their quiet, their bedlinen, their intimations of a better, blanker life than this one.
    Â 
    David spends the night on the futon in the spare room; I have to help him to take his clothes off, so I’m bound to end up thinking about needs and wants and rights and duties and men with boils in their rectums, although I don’t get anywhere. And then I go to bed and read the paper, and the Archbishop of Canterbury has written about divorce, and the grass-is-greener syndrome, and how he wouldn’t wish to deny anyone the right to end a brutal and degrading marriage, but . . . (Why is every newspaper full of stuff about me me me? I want to read about train crashes I haven’t been in, unsafe beef I won’t eat, peace treaties in places I don’t live; instead my eye is drawn to stories about oral sex and the breakdown of the contemporary family.) So I’m bound to end up thinking about brutal and degrading marriages, and whether I’m in one, and however hard I try to kid myself – ah, but the meaning of these words ‘brutal and degrading’ it’s di ff erent in our particular postal district, he calls me a silly bloody woman, he creates bad atmospheres when my family visit, he is consistently negative about things I hold dear, he thinks old people should stay in the seats specially designated for them on buses – I know, really, that I’m not. I’m neither brutalized nor degraded by my relationship with David; it’s just that I don’t really like it very much, and that is a very different kind of complaint.
    Â 
    What is the point of an affair, when it comes down to it? Over the next three weeks I have sex twice with Stephen, and I don’t come on either occasion (not that coming is everything, although it sort of would be in the long run); we spend time talking about childhoodholidays, my kids, his previous live-in relationship with a woman who moved back to the States, our shared antipathy to people who don’t ask questions . . . Where does any of it get me? And where do I want to get anyway? It’s true that I haven’t talked to David about childhood holidays recently, for obvious reasons, but is that what’s really missing from my marriage – the opportunity to look into the middle distance and wax lyrical about the joys of Cornish rock pools? Maybe I should try it, just like one is supposed to try weekends away without kids and saucy underwear. Maybe I should go home and say, ‘I know you’ve heard this before, but can I repeat the story of how I once found half-a-crown under a dead crab that my dad had told me not to touch?’ But it was a dull story the first time, made palatable only by David’s endless fascination for absolutely anything that had happened to me before I met him. Now I would be lucky to get away with a sigh and an inaudible obscenity.
    You see, what I really want, and what I’m getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David’s picture of