Tim Dowling - How to Be a Husband

The most anodyne enquiries (‘So, how long are you in America for?’) are met with unintentionally provocative responses (‘Oh, not long. About thirty-six hours’). I’m trying to steer the conversation away from questions generally, especially the ones the English girl and I have never asked each other: what exactly is the nature of this relationship? But he lives here and you live there – how is that going to work?

By the time food arrives my mother and my aunt have begun to exchange meaningful glances. My biggest fear is that the English girl will go to the loo at some point, leaving me alone with them.

‘That was weird,’ she says afterwards, lighting a cigarette as we reach the safety of the corner.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘But it’s good you’ve finally met my mother. Now we can be married at last.’

‘Fuck off,’ she says.

In my new passport photo I look stunned, as if someone has just hit me on the back of the head with a skillet, and I have yet to fall down. I’ve only been abroad once before, on the eighth-grade French class’s summer trip to Paris.

The passport shows that I first entered the United Kingdom on 2 March 1990. By the time of the last stamp on the back page, dated 28 October 1999, I will have three children. Whenever I take stock by asking myself that question – ‘What the hell happened to you?’ – I remember that the answers to that question are, by and large, indexed in this passport. It is the table of contents to the most tumultuous ten-year period of my existence. It’s as if someone told me to get a life at the end of the 1980s and I took them literally. Looking at the unshaven, stunned young man in the photo now, I can only think, ‘You don’t know the half of it, you git.’

On the morning of 2 March, I am sitting in a cafe in the King’s Road, waiting for my new girlfriend to come and get me. My friend Pat, who has since moved back to London, is once again my waiter.

She picks me up in her car. As she drives me back to her flat in Olympia, I watch London scroll past the passenger window while making the sort of unappreciative remarks one might expect from a first-time American visitor of no particular sophistication.

‘All these “TO LET” signs,’ I say. ‘Why hasn’t anyone defaced them so they say “TOILET”?’

‘Because no one here is that stupid,’ she says.

‘A lack of initiative, is what it is.’

The ten days go by in a blur. I have no bearings; I’m always lost. She drags me round a series of indistinguishable pubs to show me to a series of friends. On one such occasion I am wearing an old St Louis Cardinals T-shirt I found in a box of clothes collected for a friend whose house had burned down – a shirt rejected by a homeless person with no possessions. ‘This is my new American boyfriend,’ she says, presenting me with two flat palms, ‘in his national costume.’

I spend all my time trying not to look surprised by stuff, but every experience has something quietly remarkable about it. Cigarettes come out of the machine with your change taped to the outside of the box. There are more national newspapers than there are TV channels. Everybody has a tiny hotel fridge and no one ever suggests it’s too early in the day to drink beer. London is unexpectedly old-fashioned and louche, and I am mostly charmed by it.

One night the English girl drives me to a Greek restaurant.

‘We’re meeting my friend Jason,’ she says as we pull up. ‘He’s the last person I slept with before you.’

‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘I can’t go in there now.’

‘Don’t be such a baby,’ she says. ‘Come on.’

Something else unexpected happens during these ten days: we fight. Not the whole time, but more than twice. I cannot now remember anything about these arguments other than the impact they had on me. Our relationship was, in face-to-face terms, barely three weeks old. It seemed far too soon to have rubbed away the veneer of goodwill that comes with initial infatuation. Why are we arguing already? Either she is the most disagreeable person I’ve ever met, or I am the most infuriating person she’s ever met (I should say that, after twenty years of marriage, it’s still possible that both these things are true).

I am also profoundly annoyed because being happy and in love had been a major part of my holiday plans. I keep thinking: I took a week off work for this! I broke up with my girlfriend! I didn’t come all this way just to visit the Tower of London.

Worst of all, she doesn’t seem to share my fear that falling out at this early stage is reckless, or a bad omen. She enters into these arguments without showing the slightest worry about the damage that might result. Maybe she doesn’t care.

I’ve never before had romantic dealings with anyone quite so direct. When she gets angry she does not cry, or attempt to explain her feelings of exasperation. Disagreeing with her is like facing an angry neighbour who has told you to turn down the music one time too many. Two months after we first met, she still scares the shit out of me.

Having committed myself to the high-wire act of a transatlantic relationship, I find myself struggling to cope with the hour-to-hour business of being together. I begin to suspect there is an element of sabotage in her attitude; maybe she sees the bickering as a kind way to euthanize a non-viable love affair. The day of my return flight is fast approaching, and we have no long-term plans. We have no plans at all.

When the final morning arrives, cold and soggy, it seems like the end. I make my own way to the airport in a state of bereaved resignation. I’m not at all sure the English girl is still my girlfriend. This, I realize, is what most long-distance relationships amount to: a brief, heedless romance, an expensive visit apiece, and a tacit acknowledgement of defeat. The English girl has a new job, and is about to buy a flat with a friend. She is embarking on a life in her own country that has no room for me in it. As the Gatwick Express crawls through South London, I think about what I’m going back to: my dead-end job, my stupid life, my tiny room, my gigantic, empty bed. The last place I want to be is home.

It’s ironic, I think to myself as I glare through the window at a stately procession of back gardens, that a train service calling itself the Gatwick Express moves so slowly that I could keep up jogging along beside it. What a stupid country. After a few minutes the train comes to a complete halt. Twenty minutes later, it has still not moved.

I call her from the airport.

‘I missed my flight,’ I say. There follows a brief, unbearable silence.

‘Christ,’ she says, pausing to blow smoke. ‘Come back in on the train and I’ll meet you at Victoria.’

In comparison to the outward journey, the brisk thirty-minute ride to London is a mere flashback: suburban gardens and quilted scraps of wooded ground flash by, reversing, and to some extent undoing, the abortive first leg of my trip home. I’m prepared for her to give me a hard time for being hopeless, but as we drive back to the flat she’s in a giddy mood.

‘You picked a good day to miss a plane,’ she says. ‘ Reach for the Sky is on telly.’

So we spend the afternoon sitting on the floor with a bottle of Bulgarian wine, watching an old black-and-white film. The extra day feels like a reprieve, twenty-four hours of happiness robbed from an unpromising future. Having never seen Reach for the Sky , I’d been expecting a weepy romantic saga, not the life story of double-amputee fighter pilot Douglas Bader. It appears to be her favourite film of all time. I think this is probably when I know she is the one for me.

Midway through Douglas Bader’s rehabilitation, her friend Miranda – the one she’s supposed to be buying a flat with – rings to say she’s pregnant. A little later she rings again to say she’s getting married. In an instant, the future turns fluid.