An Anniversary

 

Whilst I was having my blogging holiday, I celebrated my thirteenth wedding anniversary. First of all I wondered how on earth I had grown so old, and then I realized that, having dated my husband for nigh on six years before we married, I had known him longer than I’d been without him. We met for the first time on the first evening we arrived at university. At that time I had not discovered contact lenses and was very unenthused about wearing my glasses. Imagine my pleasure, then, to find a friendly, six foot four, blond boy who stood out like a beacon at every social gathering organized for our induction week. It wasn’t long before he began to misread my smiles of relief as I fought my way through a crowd to him. I’d left a boyfriend back home and wasn’t looking (isn’t it always the way?) to get attached. Still, by the end of the first term we were together. I was hopelessly flaky back then, afraid of most things, overwhelmed by the experience and struggling to come to terms with a new life that I wanted very badly but was unsure how to live. My husband had already had a year out and he arrived on a wave of confidence he says he has never managed to repeat; to me he looked like he had all the answers. He was very charming and very conventionally correct. His upbringing might have meant that he wouldn’t hold my hand outside in daylight, but he was remarkably keen to meet my parents when they came to fetch me home for the Christmas vacation. My parents hadn’t met anyone quite like him before either; in a gesture of helpfulness, he had picked up my large potted fern to carry down to the car, but whilst talking, he popped it onto the nearest space that came to hand: the very top shelf of my bookcase. I did mention he was tall, didn’t I? Now, we’re not exactly short in my family, but I saw my parents’ eyes follow his arm in a hypnotized kind of way and knew we were all hoping he’d remember to pick it up again in the near future. Getting it down from there was going to be a pain otherwise.

As ever, the first impressions I had of him were both true and completely insufficient. He has a lot of superficial confidence, but is really very unsure of himself. I thought he had his life planned out, but in fact he is often assailed by radical doubt as to the path he should follow; he’s human, in other words. I don’t think we could be more different and inevitably, in part, this is due to our backgrounds. I come from a very small, very close family, he comes from a large, loud and highly competitive family. Probably because of this, our relationships with people are radically opposed. My husband would be happy if life could be one long cocktail party; he shies away from intimacy, much preferring the more general talk of relative strangers and is reluctant to deal with people’s problems. By contrast, I like people in very small groups, in delineated periods of time, and I like to get to know them well; I find people only become interesting once I begin to see their complexities. My husband is bursting with sociability but isn’t keen on organizing things; I’m hideously anti-social but reasonably good at organization; our social life is therefore wildly erratic. My husband is also dyslexic in bizarre and creative ways; if you put a sentence in his mind, it will re-emerge in metamorphosed form. It’s very intriguing and I’ve become quite good over the years at translating back. He also has no sense of time passing. One winter’s day he dug in the garden until the light failed. Unbeknownst to him, however, we had had a power cut and when he returned to the kitchen the clock still read two in the afternoon. He was simply delighted at having accomplished so much in so little time…

Inevitably, one of the other areas in which we differ fundamentally is literature. My husband is a walker and a sailor and a woodworker. He trained as an engineer, that most practical of occupations. If you asked him, he’d probably say that books don’t feature high in his hierarchy of important pursuits. Yet, for all this, when he’s reading a book that grips him he can tune out demands for food and/or attention from his wife, his son and the domestic animals in a way that for all my love of literature, I never can. But there is one aspect of my husband’s relationship to books that strikes a deadly chill in my heart. One abuse of literature that has me fearing for his soul; I have visions of him arriving at the pearly gates, not to be met by Saint Peter, but by a deputation of literary hardnuts – Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, the Goncourt brothers (probably very slippy in a fight) – and held to account for his actions. You see, my husband thinks that it is perfectly all right to discuss a book that you haven’t read, as if you have read it. For instance, he is very proud of his knowledge of a passage in Proust that concerns a speck of yellow paint (I cannot myself recognize the passage in question from this description) which he claims to be the key to the work and which is, in any case, enough information to go on with, should he need to discuss Proust at a dinner party. There are all kinds of book crimes – borrowing books and not returning them, or returning them with the spines broken and the pages crumpled, sneery reviews of books designed to make the reviewer look clever at the expense of the novel (literary GBH), literary snobbism of any kind, and my husband’s favourite offence – literary fraud. Still, he tolerates my book buying and he’s supportive of the blog, so hopefully when he confronts Hemingway et al, he can plead acts of literary charity in his defence….