All at Sea. Decca Aitkenhead

the day Paul came home Tony was in Leeds with his family, taking care of funeral arrangements. I hoped the 200 miles between us might create some space to accommodate the sudden intrusion of reality – spouses, families, bereavement – and wondered if Paul’s reappearance would bring me to my senses. When he arrived there was a stiff, mechanical quality to our embrace, and a lifelessness in our conversation more deathly than any I could recall. Every attempt at a genuine exchange seemed to run out of steam, tailing off into claustrophobic silence. We were like distant colleagues in a lift.

      I had organised a welcome-home dinner the following night. My cousin Ewan would be joining us. Halfway through cooking I realised we needed sour cream, so jumped in the car to pop to the supermarket. On my way I called Tony. He was back from Leeds, and in a café around the corner. We met in a side street behind the supermarket. I climbed into his car and clung to him like to a life raft. I can’t have been in his car for more than three minutes, but long enough to know that I was about to go home for the last time. Whatever happened next, it couldn’t be this.

      The dinner passed in a charade of distraction, while my words and my thoughts parted company. ‘Pass the pepper, please.’ Am I seriously going to leave Paul for Tony? Of course not. ‘Tell us about your new job, Ewan.’ Then am I leaving Paul because of Tony? Well yes, obviously. But not because I think Tony and I have a future. We would be miserable together. If I couldn’t make a life with Paul work, I’m hardly going to manage it with a crack-smoking drug dealer. ‘What was the press pack like in Indonesia? … Who was out there with you?’ I have to leave, because I cannot be sneaking about having illicit trysts behind supermarkets – it is shameful, this can’t be who I am. If I cannot keep away from Tony now that Paul is back, the only option with any shred of integrity is to leave. What happens after that is irrelevant, so there’s no point even trying to work out a plan. ‘There’s coffee if anyone would like some,’ I say.

      Was it even integrity? I wasn’t sure. It might be staggering naïvety. All I knew was that for all of my life until Tony, I had been immune to infidelity. This was nothing to boast about, for it had nothing to do with virtue. It was simply that I had never been tempted to stray. Even with the most comedic of comedy boyfriends, it didn’t occur to me to be anything other than faithful, because I never looked at anyone else. Now I could not look my own husband in the eye. A longing to go to bed with Tony was no reason to think I could spend my life with him, but enough to tell me I could not be with Paul.

      I scrutinised my own logic anxiously. Was I being ridiculous? Other people happily spend half their married lives fancying someone else. They’re not unworldly enough to mistake common temptation for marital curtains. If only I was French. I still loved my husband, even if I couldn’t stand to be with him; the horror of deceit made me nauseous. Or was I just pretending to be appalled, in order to dress up cheap betrayal in bogus honour?

      After Paul went to bed I sat up late, gazing down on Ainsworth Road from a top-floor window. I thought about our wedding day, and about our families, and our friends. I pictured an imaginary grenade in my hand. Was I really about to pull the pin and lob it into this life we had built together? I wondered what would be left after the explosion.

      My bag was packed before Paul awoke. ‘I’m leaving,’ I told him. The air was flat, deadened by defeat. ‘Okay,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll be at Tom and Charlotte’s,’ I said. ‘Okay,’ he said. I drove to our old friends in Kentish Town, wondering what they would say, and what I had done. They were taken aback. They put me in the spare room, and I thought I would stay for perhaps a week or two while I worked out what to do.

      Two days later Tony called and asked to meet me in Hackney. As he got out of his car, I saw a large black canvas holdall in one hand. He held it up, in the manner of a chancellor on budget day. ‘I’ve left,’ he announced breathlessly. What was he talking about? It took me a moment to register what he meant. ‘I’ve left. I want to be with you. You’re my girl now.’

      And that was how Tony and I became the most implausible couple I have ever known.

      If you have nowhere to live in London, need to find somewhere fast, and don’t own the most rudimentary household items – vacuum cleaner, ironing board, kettle – where do you go? Tony was the sort of person who always knew someone to call. He had a friend who owned a lettings agency – ‘Bit dodgy,’ Tony grinned, ‘but he owes me a favour’ – so after a quick call we made our way to the office.

      Should Channel 4 ever want to make a docusoap about the East End property market, I could show them just the place to film. When we first walked in I half wondered whether cameras weren’t already installed, for every detail had been so finely observed – the directional haircuts and ski tans, the rhyming slang and restless testosterone – the room looked more like a reality TV set than real life. All the young men seemed to know Tony, and were on their feet in a flash. As I watched them fizz and buzz around him, competing for his wisecracks (‘Think you’ve got enough gel in that hairdo, mate?’, ‘Call that a watch?’), I saw the extraordinary effect he had on other men. By my terms, Tony’s social technique was borderline rude. Men found it mysteriously flattering, and compelling.

      What we needed, Tony explained to the boss, was a short-term lease on a fully furnished flat equipped with everything right down to teaspoons. ‘Well that’s Canary Wharf, Tone, innit?’ I thought he had to be joking. I wasn’t living there. In an improbability contest, moving to Canary Wharf would beat leaving my husband for a drug dealer hands down.

      Canary Wharf is a brutally modern development of shiny skyscrapers in what used to be London’s old East End docklands. Only a few miles south of Hackney, it feels more like Tokyo. Early each morning, driverless trains deliver young professionals in suits to their desks in the glittering high-rise concrete forest where they sit at screens all day making multinationals richer until it’s time to eat sushi in air-conditioned branches of international restaurant chains, or work out in corporate gyms. It looks like a child’s drawing of capitalist alienation – only, of course, there are few children there to draw it. There aren’t really any old people either, nor any trees, or greenery, or clutter. It was my idea of perfect hell. Now it was my new home. By teatime we had rented the sort of executive apartment designed for IT executives from Shanghai who like concrete and glass; it made me feel as if we had gone into internal exile.

      Panic mounted when we unpacked our respective bags. Tony kept returning from his car with more armfuls of clothes – designer jeans, endless boots, pair after pair of identical trainers – and wrestled to cram them into his half of the wardrobe. When I had hung all of mine up, they occupied less than nine inches of rail. The comically lopsided spectacle made us both laugh, but as a metaphor for what we had embarked on it felt ominous. I was moving in with someone so fantastically unlike me, even our wardrobe looked like a joke. The recklessness of sudden domestic intimacy with a man I had only just slept with hit me again next morning, when we stood side by side in the bathroom brushing our teeth. I could see our faces in the mirror, but the reflection felt unreal, as if an imposter had kidnapped my identity.