My wife is the consummate professional, all snappy suits and ferocious work ethic. Together, we make a great team. That corporate pizzazz of hers is a perfect counterpoint to my flighty artistic temperament. She keeps my feet on the ground; I keep her eyes fixed on the stars. Anna’s colleagues are all married to other lawyers, and my creative, bohemian lifestyle makes us an exotic pair in comparison. At dinner parties I am expected to épater les bourgeois and taunt these affluent contemporaries of mine – a task that I relish, due to my staggering inferiority complex about the size of their incomes and their obvious sense of professional fulfilment.
Anna has never complained about being the sole income provider in our household. In fact she loves it that I’m a writer. She has been unfailingly supportive and generous. It was Anna who picked me up each time the onslaught of publishers’ letters came barrelling through the letterbox, rejecting my latest novel and smashing my confidence. It was Anna who cajoled me back to my typewriter, persuading me to try again. Without her, I would have given up years ago. She is my spine, my support system, as reliable as a mother’s heartbeat.
Of course, we’ve had our moments. We’re human, after all. We fight, like everyone else. My refusal to face up to some of life’s more earthly realities frustrates her sometimes. And there have been occasions when she overanalyses things, which can act as a brake on spontaneity. But we do all right. We’re each other’s biggest fans. I am her hero. She is my life.
Now, I know that I’m one of the lucky ones. After all these years, I am still madly in love with my wife. I have adored her, worshipped her, idolised her, ever since we met. Since I first laid eyes on her, in fact. She is the only woman I have ever loved. She makes me breathless, giddy with the possibilities of life. Not everyone gets dealt the full hand, the love that changes your life for ever. But lucky, lucky me – I got the whole shooting match, the full kit and caboodle. I have felt the ecstasy of indescribable ardour, the delirium of true, deep romance.
But.
Just lately, something is not quite right.
It began with nothing more than a niggle, which I did my best to ignore. While I was looking the other way, though, the niggle quietly worked through my emotional defences, mutating as it did so into fully-fledged disquiet, and then took up residence, implacably unbudging, at the forefront of my brain, holding every idea hostage, souring every felicitous thought.
Here’s the thing: Anna has changed.
It’s nothing big. She hasn’t grown horns. Indeed, the accumulated evidence is flimsy at best, perhaps nothing more than circumstantial. But I’ve become so attuned to her behavioural nuances that even the smallest deviation from the norm is grotesquely distorted through the prism of my expectations. Perhaps I am deluding myself. Maybe I’m seeing ghosts where there are merely shadows. Well, yes. Perhaps. But if you mistake a shadow for a ghost, you’re still spooked. Anyway, my doubts are immune to logic; they mock reasoned analysis. They’re simply there, wreaking their own poisonous brand of havoc.
So, to the naming of parts. Dissecting my paranoia item by item:
In conversation Anna used to latch on to an issue and rip into it mercilessly, analysing and arguing with her flawless, legally-trained logic. For her, intellectual stimulation was a matter of rigorous exercise rather than capricious whimsy. Every opinion, every assertion, had to be backed up and justified with rational and cogent arguments. No intellectual floppiness was tolerated. Talking to Anna was like cerebral boot camp.
But recently there has been an unmistakable change: Anna’s head now seems to be lodged firmly in the clouds. She meanders carelessly from topic to topic, leaving matters unresolved, issues open. She often drifts off into wordless reverie halfway through a sentence, as if she has been distracted by a more diverting train of thought. After years of her unflagging intellectual rigour, this new approach is unnerving. It’s as if a convoy of hippies has accidentally wandered into her brain and set up a commune there.
Next, we have perhaps the most frightening words in the English language: Gym Membership.
For Anna, sport and physical exercise have always been a boring irrelevance, a fatuous waste of time. She has never understood why I cherish my Arsenal season ticket so much. (I once made the mistake of asking her to the pub to watch an away game on the big screen. She didn’t talk to me for two days afterwards, furious that I had ignored her completely for an hour and a half. I tried to explain: you go to watch, not to chat.) There’s a neurone missing up there somewhere, a faulty connection: the excitement, the passion, the despair and the elation all just pass her by. And although I love football, I would never dream of playing myself. Dedicated and indolent smokers, Anna and I were united in our scornful rejection of any activity (except for the obvious) which required any physical exertion.
Suddenly, though, Anna has started going to the gym.
She arrived home one evening with a carrier bag from Lillywhites full of leotards and dazzlingly white trainers with soles as thick as telephone directories. She had decided, she announced, to treat her body with a bit more respect. She was spending too much time sitting behind her desk, letting her body go. I protested that her body hadn’t gone anywhere – and indeed it hasn’t. But her mind was already made up. Now she goes to a swanky gym near her office three times a week. She arrives home completely wiped out, but strangely elated, speaking in riddles about endorphins. I always thought that endorphins were small, grizzled creatures in The Lord of the Rings. I listen to her talk, and wonder what has prompted this madness.
The final piece to this rather hazy jigsaw is the abrupt change in Anna’s musical taste. Or, to be more specific, the sudden advent of Anna’s musical taste. She has never been particularly interested in listening to music. Instead, she listens to pop. And not just pop, but bad pop. Since the heyday of Take That she has had an unfathomable fondness for boy bands. You know the type. There are usually four or five pretty-looking boys, whose only apparent talent is the ability to walk moodily along a windswept beach. For some reason only one of them can ever actually sing, so he does all the work while the others prance about behind him in carefully choreographed ataxy. I have pointed out to Anna on numerous occasions that these manufactured bands are monstrously cynical exercises in the exploitation of the burgeoning libidos of prepubescent girls, and that someone of her age and intelligence should know better. Still, she can’t resist the lure of Tower Records on Camden High Street every Saturday afternoon, where she will eagerly buy the latest offering of undiluted schmaltz from Ronny, Donny, and Johnny. And Brian. (There’s always one called Brian.)
Well, all that has suddenly changed. Anna’s Westlife CD has been consigned to the dusty racks of the unloved, and has been replaced by something which is actually (hard though this may be to imagine) far scarier.
It’s bye-bye boys; hello Ravel.
Now, Ravel: ‘Boléro’, right? Torville and Dean. Dudley Moore and Bo Derek. Naff, pseudo-Spanish gimmickry. Well, yes. But this isn’t ‘Boléro’. This is something altogether different. Anna has brought home a recording of Ravel’s piano trio. And it’s beautiful, beguiling music – rich, compelling, and frightening beyond belief. Anna listens with a rapt, faraway look in her eyes which I do not recognise. As I watch her immerse herself in the music, new barriers silently erect themselves between us. I find myself yearning for the bland awfulness of Anna’s fabricated pop stars and their lovely teeth.
Regarded objectively, I’m aware that all of this may not seem like much, but the accumulation of these tiny changes has slowly been crowding in on me, messing with my head. All I really want is some reassurance. I need to know that none of this portends a more significant, more sinister change.
That’s why, last week, I began to examine the contents of Anna’s suit pockets.