From The Times

December 24, 2009

Negative equity

'The decision to dissolve a marriage of nine years’ standing made for a warmer evening than they’d conducted in months'

Lionel Shriver

The Landers’ predicament came home to them when they decided to divorce and then nothing happened.

Graham must have been working himself up to the scene for weeks. With sympathy borne of habit and temperament, Rosalind pitied him in retrospect; no wonder that for the last several evenings he’d come home from the restaurant feeling ill. In the end, the decision to dissolve a marriage of nine years’ standing made for a warmer, sweeter evening than they’d conducted in months.

“I don’t quite know how to say this,” he’d begun, and even in the declaration of inarticulacy she detected rehearsal. “I don’t want you to think there’s someone else. There isn’t.”

“Who isn’t someone else?” Honestly, she was trying to help him.

They were sitting at the ample rough-hewn table made from a barn door that so many dinner guests of yore had envied. Alongside, a generous six-foot prep table divided this dining area from the kitchen she’d always pined for: with cast iron dangling from the ceiling, slate flooring, funky lines of mismatched spice jars and retro tomato tins brambling with spatulas and tenderisers. Overhead, the triple-glazed skylights that Graham had specially ordered and the double-doors on to their long, lush garden would welcome fierce shafts of sunlight in the morning, although at well past midnight the open-plan ground floor glowed quietly with inset halogen bulbs on a dimmer switch. It was a beautiful house. Whatever the property websites claimed, this semi-detached Georgian freehold was no less fetching than it had been a year before.

“It just shouldn’t be possible!” Graham burst out opaquely. She sensed this presentation was already muddled, as if his mental PowerPoint had frozen. “See, one of the waitresses ... ”

“Which one?” Way ahead of him, Rosalind sifted through the possibilities. In the “credit crunch” — a breezy newsreader thumbnail that made the misery of millions sound like a chocolate bar — Tabasco, Graham’s cosy city-centre bistro, had already let one waitress go. Of the remaining three, one was a cow, the other over 60. How hard was it?

“It doesn’t matter which one. We haven’t done anything. We haven’t had an affair.”

He insisted that he didn’t want to leave his wife for Chantelle, a willowy, athletic blonde a decade his junior whom he persistently refused to name. But for even his eyes to have strayed, his passion for Rosalind must have waned. Whether she believed him that there’d been no quickies in the pantry was of no importance. He wanted a divorce, and it really didn’t matter if an ex-husband was a liar.

Rosalind would enjoy plenty of leisure to contemplate the nature of the worm in their marriage. To indulge Graham’s dream of starting Tabasco five years ago, she’d been game for moving to Sheffield, closer to Graham’s family with an eye to having their own — though in the current economic circumstances they’d put off a pregnancy yet another year. She got on better with his parents than hers, and one could be a dental hygienist just about anywhere. Still she missed the sense of possibility in London, and particular friends. Perhaps she’d been a little depressed. She didn’t feel depressed, but depression appeared to concern less what you did feel than what you didn’t.

Yet never mind the autopsy. They’d taken out a massive home equity loan when the restaurant’s clientele first began to flag. It had seemed to make sense; the loan might see them through the downturn, and the house had appreciated a staggering 50 per cent. But now that the property market had sagged as well, they owed more on the house than it was worth. If they sold up now, they’d be saddled with debt that would snuffle at both their heels for years like a scabby stray. Graham may have been suffering from workplace lechery or worse, but for the time being, like it or not, they were stuck with each other.

* * * * * * * * *

For the proceeding fortnight, Rosalind and Graham experienced a curious flowering of their relationship. They’d both sensed something amiss, and getting it out in the open was a relief. As housemates rather than spouses, too, they were much more courteous — remembering to say please could you pick up some milk, thank you for doing my laundry as well, or oh, I’m so sorry when they bumped into each other in the hall. Rosalind took unusually careful phone messages — printing neatly, ears ever pricked for a voice that sounded blonde. As they fixed their separate breakfasts, Graham offered to boil an extra egg. She actually listened to him when he described that night’s specials, even suggesting that the celeriac mash might benefit from a dash of horseradish. He actually listened to her when she described scraping the tartar off a lower right molar the day before and having the tooth come out horrifyingly in her hand. Sticking to his story that he’d done nothing to be ashamed of, Graham insisted firmly that letting Rosalind stay in the master bedroom and moving his own things down the hall was an act of chivalry, not guilt. In all, the new politeness was shocking, since it emphasised the contrasting obliviousness and even rudeness into which the two had hitherto bewilderingly slipped. Rosalind knew she shouldn’t allow herself to misinterpret the transformation, but the fresh descent of kindness and consideration couldn’t help but get her hopes up a bit.

Meantime, while breathing through her mouth at the surgery to keep from recoiling from cases of chronic halitosis, naturally she pondered what had gone wrong. The difficulties at Tabasco hadn’t helped. After only one exhausting year, Graham had confessed ruefully that if you really loved to cook, the last thing you should ever do is open a restaurant. She’d admired his candour, though he was not a quitter.

Yet in addition the couple seemed to have lost, well — a sense of occasion. Initially, they’d both made a fuss over each other’s birthdays, with piles of presents, many of them silly. Wedding anniversaries had sponsored a grand splurge, gloriously, at someone else’s restaurant. On their second Valentine’s Day together, Graham had lavished hours on the fiddly construction of a great heart-shaped onion tart, scalloped with tiny cut-out pastry hearts along its edge. Back in London they’d bought Christmas trees, once decorating the fir with a culinary theme: whisks, egg-slicers, and dangling wooden spoons. Stockings having been her favourite yuletide ritual as a child, the woollen knee-highs they’d hung from the mantle in Kennington were as lumpy and bloated as the gout-ridden legs of a stout old man. Rosalind used to spend days finding droll trinkets for Graham’s stocking: garish candies in the shape of pizzas, hotdogs, and fried eggs; gadgets like mussel-holders and strawberry hullers that he’d never use, but utility hadn’t been the point. Stockings were vessels for the small, the frivolous, and the tender.

What had happened? Boredom, practicality, and running dry of ideas. Birthdays had grown perfunctory; Rosalind might find him a package of Dalmatian-print boxers and not even bother to wrap it. Graham might find her something for the house — stainless-steel coasters to protect their beloved table — that was really for them both. It was a miracle if either even remembered to say “Happy Valentine’s Day!” on February 14, and as for Christmas, proximity to Graham’s family had allowed them lazily to rely on her in-laws’ festivities. They’d given a tree a miss since moving to Sheffield; the needles made such a mess, and it was a fire hazard. Why, this last Christmas they may have bought the obligatory bits for Graham’s family, but had made a pact to economise and skip buying presents for each other: the kind of pact you were meant secretly to break, and they’d kept their words. The problem wasn’t the loss of any one holiday or marker; it was collective. In failing to celebrate a host of single occasions, Rosalind and Graham had neglected to celebrate the biggest of occasions: their own lives, so brief and fleeting; their lives together, abruptly so truncated and finite.

* * * * * * * * *

The second honeymoon came to end on a Monday, when Tabasco was closed. Graham was out late, without explanation. He didn’t owe her explanations any more, which didn’t keep Rosalind from waiting up and fretting.

“Where have you been?” she snapped when he walked in at 2am.

“Well, I could say,” he said cautiously, “that’s none of your business.”

“Could say, or is that what you’re saying? Because if it isn’t, don’t say it!” The corners of her eyes leaked mean, aggrieved tears.

“Ros. I realise it doesn’t look like it, but we’re separated. If I want to go out to dinner, I don’t have to ask your permission.”

“You don’t even like going out to dinner! It’s been ‘demythologised’, you said! Restaurants are a waste of money, and a real treat nowadays is to eat in!”

“I’ve also said,” he reminded her gently, “that the main thing you pay for isn’t food but venue. It’s like renting eight square feet of elsewhere for the night. Which with our current arrangements is exactly what I needed.”

“It’s that Chantelle, isn’t it?”

He didn’t deny it. She was inconsolable.

He shook his head. “This isn’t working. I’d find a flat, but I’m not sure I could manage the rent, keep Tabasco open, and still meet the mortgage payments. But maybe I should try . . .”

Rosalind got herself together, for she suddenly realised that the only way to keep him — and part of what she realised is that she wanted to keep him — was to keep him in this house. “No, no, that’s not feasible. Money-wise, I mean. I guess what I can’t stand is any secrecy. Being shut out. Obviously, you have every right . . . But since you do like nothing more than a night at home, next time . . . Well, why not bring her here?”

* * * * * * * * *

Thus the following Monday, Rosalind found herself enmeshed in what was lightly christened “romantic comedy”, something of an oxymoron in her view; nothing about romance had ever struck her as funny. When Graham rocked up with this Chantelle creature, Rosalind had prepared the dating couple a candlelit dinner. Begging off joining them, she declared gaily, “Just think of me as your waitress” — flicking her not-especially-estranged husband a wicked glance. Becoming the other woman in her own home was rather stimulating, really, and Rosalind didn’t, as she had feared, mope through the courses or fall into fits of weeping. Instead she was bright, witty, and hyperactive. Whisking around the prep island to lift dishes and condiments, she made a great show of graciousness in relation to Chantelle, asking where her family was from and where she’d gone to school.

“Of course, Tabasco must be a ‘day job’,” she gushed warmly. “Have you thought about what you really want to do?”

Chantelle had begun the evening understandably guarded, answering Rosalind’s many merry questions formally and with few words. It was an odd situation, as they’d all agreed at the outset. Yet gradually the girl had relaxed, even seeming to find the circumstances a kick — doubtless a good story to share with her girlfriends when they were binge-drinking at the weekend. She had that uninvested, dismissive nonchalance typical of her age; Chantelle was from the Whatever Generation, who as a group displayed a flip, arch airiness, as if apathy were a mark of superiority. But Ros had seen plenty such girls come and go at the surgery, and they all grew up eventually; life didn’t let you get away with being blasé for long, if only because everybody cares about pain. And Rosalind had to concede that, with long swaying straight hair that was almost white and legs at which even another woman couldn’t help but stare, the young lady was fetching.

“Have you considered becoming a dental hygienist?” Ros proposed. “Now, I know it seems a turn-off at first. But if you work for a private dentist, the pay’s pretty good, and your day’s over at five sharp. You’re doing something important, and when you clean up some lad’s smile, that came in coffee-grey and tobacco-stained? You’ve made him a lot more confident about himself in just half an hour, and it’s surprisingly satisfying!”

Of course there was a subtext: you can train as a hygienist and then you can get married and buy a house and put your assets into a fledgeling business, until your husband hires a waitress like you. Perhaps fortunately, Chantelle didn’t extrapolate quite this far, and when she said she’d consider the career she seemed to mean it.

“Well, even if Chantelle and I don’t work out, at least you two will still be fast friends,” said Graham after he returned from driving the girl home; at 24, Chantelle still lived with her parents. “I felt like a right third wheel.”

“Well, it’s obviously, you know, awkward,” said Rosalind, loading the dishwasher. “I was trying to set her at ease.”

“Went a bit overboard,” Graham chided, though he was smiling.

“I wasn’t attempting to co-opt her or anything.”

“Oh, no? Always telling what people claim they’re not doing. Though I have to say” — Graham balanced an oatmeal cluster on a slice of peach — “with just the amount of clove so it’s strong but not dominating . . . your crumble’s top drawer.”

* * * * * * * * *

It was inevitable, Rosalind supposed, that after the next Monday’s dinner those two would decamp to the guest room and close the door. If only to safeguard her own dignity, when a patient was flirtatious the following week she lured him home. She hadn’t meant to start a contest, only to preserve her sanity, her sense of herself as desirable, and a certain domestic balance. Let Graham find out what it was like to wake in his own house and have to make small talk with total stranger who’d just had it off with his spouse.

With Aidan, Graham was not himself given to Rosalind’s approach — football badinage, invitations to play golf, offers of complimentary glasses of champagne at Tabasco. To the contrary, at breakfast he was gruff, insulting, and visibly put out. Indeed, so well did the gambit work — if gambit is what it was — that it was a terrible shame Aidan’s halitosis had not cleared up after the cleaning, not even once he’d followed her advice to brush his tongue.

Nevertheless, Christmas was around the corner, and it wouldn’t do to be seen drooping through the holiday pathetically on her own. Thus she kept up the pretence of seeing Aidan, maintaining that, since Graham had been so unpleasant to her suitor over kippers, they preferred her boyfriend’s flat; to explain her continued presence at breakfast, she invented a whole new erotic tradition of post-prandial passion and a truthful preference for waking in her own bed. She made a few lewd allusions to a mythically massive member for effect, and aping the jaunty liberation of soon-to-be-divorcée discovering a whole new lease on life helped her in some measure to inhabit the role. Still, Graham’s trysts were real.

All too real as well were her visits to property websites, which left Rosalind increasingly dejected, and a pretend-boyfriend was no consolation in the cold blue glare of the computer. The market in Sheffield was recovering. The value of their comely Georgian freehold would be steadily rising, too.

* * * * * * * * *

“So what are your plans for Christmas?” Rosalind attempted the airy delivery she’d learnt from Chantelle.

“Oh, Chant and I will go to my parents’, I reckon,” said Graham with an identical airiness. “Do the usual pressies, soup-to-nuts palaver. What about you?”

“Well, my parents will be in Spain, so there’s no point in my heading to Wimbledon.” Honesty about this bit made it a tad easier to append more fanciful assertions. “Aidan’s not on speaking terms with his family,” she extemporised, curious what this tragic falling out might possibly be over. Storytelling was so demanding! She’d no understanding of how novelists and congenital liars managed. “So we thought we’d splash out on big holiday meal at Kenwood Hall, just the two of us.”

Since Graham could resort to the more seasonally apt comforts of hearth and home, she’d no idea why his expression grew so wistful.

* * * * * * * * *

Rosalind’s pride in her budding narrative prowess wilted on the realisation that she was now obliged to make herself scarce on a day when in truth she had no earthly thing to do. On Christmas Eve, her new powers of invention failed her dismally, and to Graham she made up something lame about “a party”, with none of those decorative details like where and whose that would make it ring true. She doubted people ever threw parties on Christmas Eve, and if Graham had been paying attention — if he weren’t himself so oddly distracted and perhaps even a shade dolorous — he’d have smelt something fishy. He said “Chant” wanted to spend Christmas Eve with her own family; he’d probably just stay in.

Thus at the door around 8pm, Rosalind stalled in one of her best frocks — in which to head to a pub by herself, and that was assuming she could find one open. Graham was settled contentedly in front of a recording of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on their set-top box, sipping cabernet. It was cold out, and she wanted desperately to fling off her coat along with the pretence of this apocryphal “party” and help to prepare one of his simple-but-stylish suppers, a knack for which had so disastrously inspired Tabasco. But when he said, “Have fun then!” she was trapped by her own theatre, and ended up spending the evening around a bunch of pawing drunks who presumably like poor Aidan were also not on speaking terms with their families — for good reason, as far as she could tell.

Christmas proper was even worse. She kept waiting for Graham to leave that morning, and he seemed oddly to be waiting for her to leave as well; in the end, they left the house together, waving with forced smiles out on the pavement and then walking off in opposite directions. Not wanting to drink and drive, neither had bid for the car; Rosalind was ostensibly meeting Aidan in the city centre, and Graham could walk to his parents’.

Rosalind trudged just long enough to confirm that the atmosphere in the city was like one of those post-holocaust movies, after a plague or a neutron bomb. Not a soul was on the streets, and everything was closed. Tracing a route sure not to intersect with Graham’s, she circled back: it was Christmas, it had started to rain, and she wanted to go home. There was some Stinking Bishop in the fridge, a few savoury biscuits in the breadbox, which could stand in for the fabulous bash at Kenwood Hall she’d be obliged to invent when Graham returned, like feeding the five thousand from a few loaves and fishes.

Yet when she turned on to their street, there was Graham not 20 feet from their gate, approaching from the opposite side.

“What are you doing back here?” she asked.

He sighed at his hands. “Truth is, I’ve never got up the courage to tell my parents we’re splitting up. They like you. So I could hardly show up with Chant on my arm, eh? And coming alone would have set off alarm bells.”

Rosalind unlocked their front door with its lovely fronded pattern in the frosted panes, eager to get out of the rain.

“But what are you doing back here?” asked Graham behind her. “Have a fight with Aidan?”

He’d handed her an excuse, but plopping into a dining chair and drying her face with a tea towel Rosalind declined it. “Oh, there is no Aidan.”

“For a figment of your imagination, he sure had powerful bad breath.”

“I mean there hasn’t been an Aidan for weeks.”

“Ah,” he registered. “So you won’t mind my having borrowed your Kenwood Hall story. I told the family we’d decided to have Christmas just the two of us.”

“Well, why don’t we?” she proposed shyly. “I’m starving, aren’t you?”

Of course, no turkey was browning in the oven; no potatoes were crusting in goose fat. Yet together they rustled up the very sort of ad hoc supper that Rosalind had envisioned the night before. He caramelised oodles of sticky sliced garlic while she whisked up a toasted pumpkinseed oil vinaigrette; he roasted walnuts for the salad while she shaved parmesan. They’d always made a good team — in the kitchen, at least. It may have lacked cranberry sauce and mistletoe, but this holiday had, however wanly, a sense of occasion. According to her web research, this would be their last Christmas. So they were celebrating the end of celebration. But maybe that beat not celebrating anything.

“To be honest, I don’t mind taking a break from Chant,” Graham confided, adding another slug of olive oil to the garlic. “She’s a sweet kid, but . . . Lives on chips and ready-meals. Can’t tell pomegranate molasses from Red Bull. And the music . . . ! Oh, and you know she really is planning to train as a dental hygienist? She said to thank you, by the way.”

“It’s a good career,” said Rosalind, grinding pepper over the dressing. “In this economy, it’s canny to be doing something necessary.”

“As opposed to running one more failing restaurant.”

“Tabasco will recover, sweetheart!” she said passionately, forgetting herself with the endearment.

Graham opened a claret while the pasta water was still coming to a boil, and Rosalind popped off to what it still didn’t feel natural to call “her” bedroom, returning to slide a lumpy, overstuffed woollen knee-high sheepishly on the table. She’d originally planned the stocking’s delivery for Boxing Day — always a bit of a downer; fittingly, a day of overness, of disappointment, of closure.

“I know we shouldn’t be buying presents this of all years,” she said. “But all those evenings I was pretending to be with Aidan . . . Well, I had to occupy myself somehow.”

Indeed, she had applied herself to his stocking with all the ingenuity and humour that had escaped her in years previous. One by one Graham pulled out the individually wrapped cherry-pitter and pastry crimper, a chocolate-mud-pie flavoured lip moisturiser, a crackling packet of dried wild mushrooms, lavender truffles, a miniature of avocado oil, and a clockwork toy helicopter — all mixed in with Smarties, kumquats, and Post-it notes for marking recipes. Seeming abashed that he’d not got her anything in return, finally Graham worked himself down to the folded, rolled-up piece of paper in the toe, beribboned like a diploma — for it betokened a graduation of sorts.

Rosalind bowed her head. “The rest is just a goof. That’s your real present.”

Graham pulled the ribbon, unfolded a page of printout, and looked baffled.

“Upmystreet-dot-com,” she explained. “See that graph of property prices in Sheffield? They’ve gone back up.” She took a brave breath. “We can sell the house.”

Graham cocked his head. “But don’t you want candlelight with your Christmas dinner?”

“I suppose, but . . . ?”

Rolling the printout into a cylinder, he strode to their range cooker and poked the paper wand into the burner under the pasta pot. With the flaming page of A4, he lit the tapers on the table, then tossed the rising graph from upmystreet.com into the sink.

They sat down to dinner, and Graham raised his glass. “To negative equity!”

“To negative equity!” she returned with a clink, then tucked into a supper of garlic spaghetti and rocket salad with parmesan and walnuts that, while hardly conventional fare, had all the makings of a long-established, joyous, and faithfully kept tradition.

© Lionel Shriver. The auther was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award which celebrates the best of the contemporary British short story. See www.bbc.co.uk/nssa. The award anthology is priced £4.99, published by Short Books.

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