Bram, Word document
I torture myself sometimes with the thought of how the bird’s nest might have panned out if I’d just been able to keep past sins secret and avoid committing future ones. (‘Just’!) I think it would have succeeded, I genuinely do. In terms of the division of time and labour, it really played to our strengths: I’d take care of the weekend rough and tumble, the necessary letting off of steam (the Trinity Avenue mums always used to say that boys needed precisely the same amount of exercise as a Labrador retriever), while Fi handled the school needs, the laundry, the nutritious balanced diet. Okay – so that’s most things.
That’s not to say she didn’t have fun with Leo and Harry. She was probably the only person who could diffuse the fever pitch of competitive spirit between the two of them, to remind them that they could choose to be a team of two. They’d clamour for quizzes, especially ones about capital cities, and just as it risked coming to blows over Bucharest, she’d derail arguments with a bad joke. Like: ‘Where do Tunisians buy their music? iTunis.’ And the boys would look at each other in affectionate resignation. ‘Oh, Mum. Be serious.’
(She looked the jokes up in advance, I guess.)
It breaks my heart to know how deeply she’ll be regretting those arrangements now. It will destroy her to realize that disaster could not have struck without the framework of logistics suggested by her, without the trust she continued to place in me as a family man, a fellow householder.
Even when she could no longer trust me as a husband.
9
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:38:35
It’s hard to say what were the first clues to subterfuge because obviously I didn’t recognize them as clues at the time. The car was an issue even before we separated, I do know that.
It was April or May when I found the speeding tickets. Maybe I’m imagining it now, but I do recall having an uncertain feeling when we discussed them, the sense that more was being concealed than was being shared. Maybe that was why I brought up his speeding with the counsellor later.
‘Bram? What are these?’ I held up a pair of letters from the DVLA that I’d discovered folded between the pages of the coffee machine manual when the thing had suddenly stopped working: two separate notes of confirmation that three points had been added to his licence. His speeding had long been a source of contention between us, though in terms of detection he’d generally got away with it. The way he drove, it was not so much that he thought the rules didn’t apply to him as that he’d identified one of life’s chief pleasures in bending them. ‘Six points? I thought you took that speed awareness course a while back?’
‘I did,’ he said, warily.
‘So why have they given you points?’
‘Because these are different tickets. The course was for the first one.’
I frowned, tried to get the situation straight. ‘So there’ve been three in all? One course and then two sets of points?’
‘Yep. You’re not allowed to do the course more than once in three years.’
More’s the pity, I thought, since he’d clearly learned nothing the first time. ‘Where are the original tickets? Are they in the study?’
‘Why?’
‘I’m just interested to know the details, that’s all.’
He cut me off in my path to the filing cabinet. ‘I’ll get them.’
With supreme reluctance, he handed over the Notices to Prosecute, one from Surrey Police and one from the Metropolitan Police. The Surrey incident had obviously been during a work journey: nine miles an hour over the seventy limit on an A road, not dissimilar to the first offence eighteen months ago, when he’d been ‘running late, not looking at the dial’. The London one was more troubling: forty-three miles an hour in a twenty zone on a road between Crystal Palace and Alder Rise. With that speed limit, it was almost certainly a residential stretch like Trinity Avenue, and forty-three was easily fast enough to kill a pedestrian, a child like one of our own.
Then I noticed the dates: one from a year and a half ago and the other from nine months ago. ‘How am I only hearing about these now?’
Silly question: because I’d stumbled upon them by mistake. Clearly, he thought he’d removed all correspondence from sight. ‘You’re only allowed twelve points before you lose your licence, aren’t you? So just two more mistakes and—’
He cut in, irritated. ‘I know my times tables, Fi. Come on, there are millions of people with points on their licence, including most of our neighbours on this street. Why d’you think they’re suddenly catching record numbers of offenders? It’s purely a money-spinner for the authorities.’
‘It’s purely a deterrent,’ I said, ‘with the aim of saving lives. Have you told the insurance company?’
‘Of course I have. Seriously, it’s no big deal.’
Not to him. ‘This local one, the kids weren’t in the car with you, were they?’
‘No, I was on my own.’ Insulted now, he roared from defence to offence in about five seconds. ‘Disappointing, isn’t it? I really missed a trick there, eh?’
‘Don’t turn this into a criticism of me!’
Even at the time I recognized the exchange as a perfect illustration of what it was that was failing in our marriage. Not his crimes per se – I hardly need say that this one paled into insignificance compared with those to follow – but the role in which he so readily cast me in the aftermath. Cop, teacher, killjoy, snitch. Grudge holder.
Victim.
‘You’d better let me drive from now on,’ I said. ‘Minimize your chances of re-offending.’ Oh God, now I sounded like his parole officer.
‘Be my guest,’ he said, sullenly.
Later, when I went back to the filing cabinet, I found that the drawer marked ‘Car’ was empty.
Bram, Word document
Like I say, the adultery was a bit of a false trail. Far more destructive in the long run were the speeding tickets, which I would have preferred not to share with her – to be honest, it was easier to avoid the grief. This is the flip side of good citizens like Fi: they find it hard to make concessions for their husbands.
I thought I’d squirrelled away all incriminating evidence (I’d never known her to look in the file marked ‘Car’) and so I was unprepared when she came brandishing the DVLA letters, demanding to know if I’d had the boys in the car with me (for the record I did not, not for any of the offences).
‘I would never risk harming our kids,’ I told her. ‘Surely you know that?’
‘Then why risk harming someone else’s?’ she said, and she looked at me with a distaste that should have warned me that a separation was imminent, with or without the shenanigans in the playhouse still to come.
‘Well, at least I know the truth now,’ she added.
But she didn’t. She didn’t know the half of it. The truth was that by the time she found out about those two speeding tickets there’d already been two further ones, two further sets of three points, and, with the final infraction, a court appearance.
The truth was I’d been fined ￡1,000 and banned from driving for a year, lasting till February 2017.
Of course, now she had found part of the evidence, there was nothing to stop her double-checking my story by ringing the insurance company to see if our premium had gone up, though I’d been careful to establish that the policy was set up in my name and password-protected. Even so, I feared she would look at bank statements and notice that the premium had in fact gone down, not up, since she was now the sole driver of our Audi.
The sole named driver.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:42:52
I know some listeners might think I was too hard on him about the speeding tickets, and it’s true that one of the other dads at school also had six points on his licence, and many others three. Even Merle had been stopped by the police for running a red light in Herne Hill and let off with a warning. There was a culture in our circle of such misdeeds being a badge of honour, as if these were victimless crimes.