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is just a beep, after all. And that, as it turns out, was what I was doing when I asked for a divorce. I was making a beeping noise that David won’t recognize.
    This is what it feels like: you walk into a room and the door locks behind you and you spend a little while panicking, looking around for a key or a window or something, and then when you realize that there is no way out, you start to make the best of what you’ve got. You try out the chair, and you realize that it’s actually not uncomfortable, and there’s a TV, and a couple of books, and there’s a fridge stocked with food. You know, how bad can it be? And me asking for a divorce was the panic, but very soon I get to this stage of looking around at what I’ve got. And what I’ve got turns out to be two lovely kids, a nice house, a good job, a husband who doesn’t beat me and presses all the right buttons on the lift . . . I can do this, I think. I can live this life.
    One Saturday night David and I go out for a meal with Giles and Christine, these friends of ours we’ve known since college, and David and I are OK with each other, and it’s a nice restaurant, an old-fashioned Italian in Chalk Farm with breadsticks and wine-in-a-basket and really good veal (and if we take it as read that doctors cannot, unless they are Dr Death-type doctors who inject young children and pensioners with deadly serums, be Bad People, then I think I’m entitled to a little veal once in a while); and halfway through the evening, with David in the middle of one of his Angriest Man in Holloway rants (a savage assault, if you’re interested, on the decision-making process at Madame Tussaud’s), I notice that Giles and Christine are almost helpless with laughter. And they’re not even laughing at David, but with him. And even though I’m sick of David’s rants, his apparently inexhaustible and all-consuming anger, I suddenly see that he does have the power to entertain people, and I feel well-disposed, almost warm, towards him, andwhen we get home we indulge in a little more button pushing.
    And the next morning we take Molly and Tom to the Archway Baths, and Molly gets knocked over by one of the puny waves generated by the wave machine and disappears under eighteen inches of water, and all four of us, even David, get the giggles, and the moment we calm down I can see what an awful malcontent I have become. I’m not being sentimental: I am aware that this happy family snapshot was just that, a snapshot, and an unedited video would have captured a sulk from Tom before we arrived at the pool (hates swimming with us, wanted to go round to Jamie’s) and a rant from David after (I refuse the kids permission to buy crisps from the vending machine because we’re going straight home for lunch, David is compelled to tell me that I am a living embodiment of the Nanny State). The point is not that my life is one long golden summer which I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate (although it might be, of course, and I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate it), but that happy moments are possible, and while happy moments are possible I have no right to demand anything more for myself, given the havoc that would be wrought.
    That night I have a huge row with David, and the next day Stephen turns up at work, and all of a sudden I’ve spilled the half-full glass all over myself.
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    The row isn’t worth talking about, really: it’s just a row, between two people who actually don’t like each other enough not to row. It begins with something about a plastic bag with a hole in it (I didn’t know it had a hole in it, and I told David to use it to . . . Oh, forget it); it ends with me telling David that he’s a talentless and evil bastard, and with him telling me that he can’t hear my voice without wanting to throw up. The Stephen thing is altogether more serious. Monday morning is a