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The psychologist Robert Epstein’s ongoing study of arranged marriages suggests that a brokered match generally works out better than a relationship between two people who have chosen one another. In arranged marriages the amount of love a couple reports feeling for one another tends to increase over time. In most Western marriages, you will not be surprised to hear, the opposite happens.
Epstein isn’t necessarily an advocate of arranged marriage; he just believes virtually any two people can deliberately teach themselves to love one another, as long as they’re both fully committed to the project. In practice my own marriage probably subscribes less to the ‘soul mates’ model and more to a ‘cell mates’ one, but I realize I’m not really selling the idea of wedded bliss with that admission.
And anyway, neither model quite dispenses with the notion of compatibility: an attraction strong enough to allow you to think about the daunting prospect of marriage in the first place; an affinity that makes your relationship a better bet than some others; an irrational emotional response that makes you break up with your girlfriend of four years a week after meeting an English girl in a red duffel coat. Could there actually be something deeper at work, something chemical? Something genetic, even?
In his book The Compatibility Gene, Daniel M. Davis reported on a curious study – the so-called ‘smelly T-shirt experiment’. First performed by the Swiss zoologist Claus Wedekind in 1994, the experiment involved a group of students, forty-four males and forty-nine females. Wedekind first analysed the students’ DNA, in particular their Major Histocompatibility Genes (MHCs). The group was then divided along gender lines. The men were told to wear plain cotton T-shirts for a certain period while abstaining from anything – soap, sex, alcohol – that might alter their natural scent. After two days the shirts were placed in unmarked cardboard boxes with holes in them, and the forty-nine women were asked to rank the boxes by smell using three criteria: intensity, pleasantness and sexiness.
Wedekind’s initial results showed that the women preferred the T-shirts worn by men whose compatibility genes were most different from their own. Your MHCs contain the code to make your immune system, and the range you inherit – one set, or haplotype, from each parent – is, in a sense, your genetic identity. It’s the ‘self’ that your immune system checks against when distinguishing between your own cells and something ‘non-self’ like a virus.
Although the results were controversial, the smelly T-shirt experiment seemed to indicate that women unconsciously select mates whose MHCs would diversify the immune systems of any potential offspring, thereby increasing their chance of survival against disease.
No one quite understands the mechanism by which we might sniff out the individual genes of someone we meet at a party (especially through a fog of perfume, soap and alcohol), but this hasn’t stopped dating agencies from employing MHC typing as a matchmaking tool. One lab offering such testing to online dating services claims that ‘with genetically compatible people we feel that rare sensation of perfect chemistry’.
I’m not sure there’s a geneticist on the planet who would stand by that statement, but the advent of DNA testing for genetic compatibility raises the intriguing possibility that one might, for the sake of argument, find out if two people who had already been married for twenty years were actually meant for each other at the molecular level. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it. But I did do it. It’s OK – I’m a journalist. I did it for money.
To test your marital compatibility after two decades together seems, to say the least, a bit reckless. While I might well think that the length of the marriage itself constitutes proof of compatibility that no DNA sample can contradict, I am also worried about my wife reading the test results and saying, ‘Well that certainly explains a lot.’
My wife’s only fear has nothing to do with our possible incompatibility; she just doesn’t want any needles stuck in her. Fortunately, to test your DNA all you have to do is put a little bit of your spit in the post.
‘If I have to watch you do that,’ says my wife, ‘I’m going to be sick.’ I turn my back and continue drooling into the test tube. An attached lid flips over the funnelled top, piercing a membrane and releasing a measured amount of blue preservative. After shaking up the samples and labelling them according to the instructions, I seal them in a pre-addressed envelope while quietly admiring how idiot-proof the whole process has been made. I’m halfway to the post box before I realize I’ve left out the signed consent forms.
It takes two weeks for the samples to be processed by a method I cannot begin to explain, during which time I worry ceaselessly. Without ever quite admitting it to myself, I have long suspected that romantic love – or at least the first flush of it – is some kind of biologically triggered delusion, one you might sum up with words as empty and meaningless as ‘that rare sensation of perfect chemistry’.
As the date for the test results approaches I am seized by an irrational fear that the natural smell of my genes is actually quite off-putting, and that twenty years ago my wife fell in love with the brand of deodorant I used to use. Do they even still make it?
On further investigation I learn that the hormones in the contraceptive pill can interfere with a woman’s response to olfactory signals. In the smelly T-shirt experiment, women who were on the pill actually preferred the smell of men with compatibility genes similar to their own – they were getting it exactly wrong. I go in search of my wife, whom I find sitting in the kitchen.
‘Were you on the pill when you met me?’ I say. She looks up from the newspaper she’s reading and stares at me.
‘It’s a bit late to ask me that now,’ she says. ‘But yes.’
Oh my God, I think: are the people at the lab going to tell her that she picked the wrong husband? While I don’t actually believe you can find the perfect partner by sending your spit to a company in Switzerland – or that body odour is the start and finish of attraction – I do not underestimate the psychological force of being told there are rather better genetic matches out there for you than the git you married. Such news might not be easy to dismiss. Who knows? I’m finding it hard enough to imagine my reaction, much less my wife’s. What have I done?
At the end of the fortnight we are both summoned to the Anthony Nolan Lab in Hampstead to receive our results from Professor Steve Marsh. They don’t analyse DNA for dating agencies at Anthony Nolan, but they use the same sort of testing to match tissue types for bone marrow transplantation. As we sit down in a conference room with Professor Marsh, I steel myself to receive bad news I won’t understand.
Marsh explains a bit about the specific genes the testing looks for – genes which contain instructions to make proteins called human leukocyte antigens (HLAs). HLA proteins don’t exist to facilitate online matchmaking; nor are they there to make bone marrow transplantation a pain in the arse. Their job is to fight infection.
‘If you have a virus,’ says Marsh, ‘these are the molecules that are taking little bits of the virus and showing it to other cells and saying, “Is this me? Or is it foreign?” If it’s foreign, the cell is killed.’
Some HLA molecules are better at snatching up certain protein fragments than others; people with a particular HLA type have increased resistance to the HIV virus. Some HLA genes, however, make you more susceptible to certain disorders. None of this sounds terribly sexy, but it makes sense that a decent spread of HLA types would be of benefit, and that a member of the opposite sex who’s got some HLAs you don’t have would make a good partner, and therefore might possibly smell more attractive to you.
Marsh has good news. My wife and I share just one HLA type (an allele, as it is called): HLA-A*32:01:01. The rest are different, a level of diversity which makes us a good genetic match, and allegedly highly desirable to one another. ‘If the whole sniffing-your-mate-out thing is to be believed,’ says Marsh, ‘then you’ve managed to sniff out a good mate.’ It’s not clear which one of us he is talking to.
My overall HLA makeup turns out to be fairly common, which means, I suppose, that a broad range of women of European Caucasian extraction would, upon meeting me, find me inexplicably unattractive (a lifetime of anecdotal evidence does, to some extent, support this theory). Conversely, it also means there are two perfect tissue matches for me on the bone marrow donor register in the UK, and five more in the US. Being common has its advantages.
Fortunately for our progeny, my wife comes from less common stock. So uncommon, in fact, that her HLA-B*27 allele doesn’t end in a bunch of numbers, but with XX. A footnote at the bottom of her report says, ‘The HLA-B locus appears to be novel, with the novel allele likely to be a new B*27. Further work is currently being undertaken to confirm this finding.’ Professor March confirms that this means what I think it means: my wife has a B*27 allele that no one has ever seen before, one that does not exist on a worldwide database of 22 million recorded tissue types. She is, as I always suspected, more than rare: she is weird, unique, a one-off. And I smelled her first.
3. GETTING MARRIED: WHY WOULD YOU? (#uc88cc8e2-5773-59b3-a9cc-ddb4bd9954cc)
In my first summer in Britain I get taken to a lot of weddings. I feel out of place for a number of reasons. Back in America I had never attended the wedding of a friend. Nobody I knew had ever got married. Here in the UK, people my age hardly seem to be doing anything else. I’m happy for them, but I do not feel like someone heading in that direction at all. I’m at the very start of a relationship, and its long-term prospects are a little shaky. I’m not embarking on a new life so much as running away from my old one. Responsibility, commitment, adulthood: I’ve deliberately put as much distance – an ocean – between me and all that stuff as possible. I’m here to have fun. I’ll go home when it all goes wrong and suffer the consequences then.
The main reason I feel out of place is that I don’t know anyone. I am foreign. In the past I may have sabotaged relationships through my maddening aloofness, but now – out of bald self-interest – I am as clingy a boyfriend as you could want. Wherever my girlfriend goes I go; wherever she stands I stand slightly behind her. But at wedding receptions we usually get put at different tables. I sit in front of place cards with the words ‘Plus 1’ on them, in the company of strangers. I sit with flower girls, vicars, the groom’s nanny, ex-neighbours of the bride’s parents. People don’t believe me when I tell them that I was once seated next to a pug, and that I didn’t really mind because there was no need for small talk and he had such beautiful manners. Perhaps I am exaggerating a little. He had beautiful manners for a dog.
I have nothing against all these people who are getting married at my age. It just seems so heedless, this headlong leap into the future. What makes them think they’re ready for it? Why the hurry? What’s the point?
In the meantime I am starting to wonder if my new girlfriend and I are actually compatible. Our relationship began as a sort of verbal sparring match – with me losing most of the time. Initially I was fine with this; it was amusing. In some ways it was the sort of relationship I’d always dreamed of – a spiky, muscular exchange that kept both parties on their toes. The first time I saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf I was actually envious of the dynamic (I’ve seen it since, quite recently, and I now get that it’s not supposed to be tremendous fun).
But as we spend more time in the confines of her flat, perpetually low on funds, the sparring often gets combative. She can become disagreeable and hard to reach without much warning. As much as I admire her refusal to suffer fools gladly, I prefer it when the fool is someone other than me.
She can also suddenly turn fragile if the wrong button is accidentally pushed. I find it difficult to respect someone’s forthrightness and their feelings at the same time, and I am aware that my increasing tendency to be at once defensive, cautious and needy is not an attractive thing in a man.
My lack of independence doesn’t help matters. I’d run out of money not long after I’d arrived. My mental map of London is confined to a circle with a half-mile radius; I never go far on my own. The relationship is the same: everything outside its claustrophobic centre, where two people are arguing about the correct pronunciation of ‘beret’, is uncharted territory. She’s supposed to be my girlfriend, but I sometimes feel as if I’m just trying to navigate my way round a woman I don’t understand at all.
At the time it didn’t occur to me that I was learning, through a tortuous process of trial and error, to be a grown-up. I just thought English women were really weird.
I have a photograph from that first summer that sits on the shelf behind my desk. It’s just a creased snap, unframed, one I rescued from a drawer full of pictures that never made it onto any walls or into any albums. It shows both of us lying side by side in the long matted grass near a Cornish cliff, on top of the same red duffel coat she wore the night we met. My arms are wrapped round her from behind. She is smiling, her half-lidded eyes gazing sleepily at the camera lens. I look as if I might be asleep.
I like this photograph because it is a lie. I remember clearly that she woke up that morning in a tricky mood, and that we argued on and off for most of the day. We argued right before that picture was taken, and right after. It actually captures a moment of supreme neediness on my part, and her smile is nothing but a brief, wry acknowledgement of her reluctance to tolerate my display of affection even for the time it takes a shutter to open and close.
You can’t tell that from the picture, though. It just looks like two happy people lying on some grass. That’s probably why I never put it in a frame, but it’s also why I keep it where I can see it.
Less than half the population is married. 231,490 people got married in England and Wales in 2009, which sounds a lot but was the lowest annual figure since 1895, and not much more than half the 1972 number. Cohabiting, meanwhile, has doubled since 1996. That makes me feel old, because I was already married in 1996.
There are many good reasons not to get married. It costs, on average, £16,000. Divorce, a disease for which marriage is a necessary precondition, is also expensive, and your chances of avoiding it aren’t great. Roughly 40 per cent of UK marriages fail.
If you are already living happily together as a couple, the change in status can hardly be said to be worth the outlay. There are some recently introduced tax advantages for the lawfully wedded, but you’d still have to be married for 106 years to break even. In terms of its impact on your personal life, marriage is much the same as cohabitation. I’ve tried both, and there isn’t a tremendous amount of difference. Either way, on the subject of what should happen to a towel when you’re done using it, you will always enjoy the benefit of a second opinion.
In any case, there is nothing wrong with your cohabitational arrangement that marriage is going to fix. The PAIR project’s findings showed that among the couples who divorced soonest, a high percentage got married because they thought a wedding would somehow improve an already troubled relationship.
Marriage will, as numerous studies have indicated, improve both your health and your longevity, especially if you’re a man (contrary to popular belief, marriage doesn’t actually reduce the life expectancy of women; it extends it, just not as much as it does for men). Never-married men are three times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than married men. Married men also have better cancer survival rates. But divorced men die sooner than married men, and you can’t be divorced unless you get married first.
Most people have particular and deeply personal reasons for wanting to get married, and my primary motivation was, I like to think, as good as any: the Home Office forced my hand. Couples who live together without getting married will sometimes say things like, ‘We don’t need a piece of paper from the government to validate our relationship.’ Well, I did.
From the beginning, being together proves difficult. Every time my six-month tourist visa nears its expiration, I have to go back to the States and make arrangements to return. It’s both expensive and heart-wrenching. Over the two years that my relationship with my English girlfriend develops, my relationship with the people at immigration deteriorates markedly. Each time I hand over my passport they seem less charmed by my tale of true love. My reasons for entering the UK strike them as implausible. They think I’m working in Britain illegally, and say as much.
In fact all the travelling back and forth makes it impossible to secure proper employment in either country. I am broke. The periods in America are the hardest to endure, months spent living with my parents. They are supportive, but also quite clearly of the opinion that I am fucking up my life, squandering it in six-month chunks. Whenever I’m home I take odd jobs – anything, including painting my dad’s office – until I earn enough money for a cheap airline ticket. In an effort to impress the immigration officers with my continued commitment to US residency, I always show up with a return ticket on a flight a fortnight hence. It’s usually non-refundable, so I chuck it.
Every time I come back they grill me for longer, make plainer their suspicions and threaten to send me straight home. I am a bag of nerves for weeks before each visit. Some people are afraid to fly; I am afraid to land.
On my arrival on 24 March 1992, I am held at immigration for over an hour, left on a bench next to a guy who has no passport at all and refuses to tell anyone what country he’s come from. It does not feel like a lucky bench. The immigration officer who finally deals with me is professionally unpleasant, like a disappointed geometry teacher. He treats me to a long and disheartening lecture about my unsuitability for admission, before suddenly relenting and letting me through; it’s eerily reminiscent of the day I got my driving licence. The stamp in my passport is extra large and contains specific restrictions and the official’s handwritten ID number. I’m pretty certain I have exhausted the forbearance of the United Kingdom.
This episode overshadows our reunion. I am delighted to have slipped through, but aware it may well be the last time I’ll get away with it. It seems quite possible that after two years our relationship has finally run out of road.
There hardly seems enough time for my girlfriend and I to decide what should happen next. To start with, we do nothing. April and May drift by. Finally, in mid-June, we sit down together, me at the little drop-leaf table in the kitchen, her on the worktop, to discuss the future.
So daunting is the prospect of a wedding, much less a marriage, that the first option my girlfriend puts on the table is that we split up and live out the remainder of our lives on separate continents. As unpalatable as this idea is, I have to admit it sounds marginally less horrible than the prospect of having engagement photos taken. After an hour of circular debate, we arrive at what seems a dead end.
‘So that’s it,’ she says. ‘We’re getting married.’
‘I suppose,’ I say.
‘Never mind,’ she says, crossing the kitchen to light a fag on the hob. ‘We can always get divorced.’
Given our deep mutual reluctance to take the plunge, it would be insane for me to make any grand claims favouring marriage over simply living together for a very long time. They are very different arrangements legally – at present cohabitation comes with no rights or advantages at all – and of course they are slightly different constructs emotionally. With one a shared sense of commitment agglomerates over a long period of time, as two lives become increasingly intertwined; with the other you get all the commitment squared away on a specific day, generally before you’ve had lunch. But for the sake of argument I’ll presume that in the long term the result is much the same. If you resisted the pressure to have a wedding, good for you. You probably saved a lot of money. I, on the other hand, have four salad bowls.
I will only say this about the trauma of actually getting married: it may be something you never thought you’d be interested in, and something you imagine to be painfully embarrassing while you are doing it (you imagine right), but afterwards you will consider it a life-changing ordeal from which you emerged stronger; an ordeal that, for all its hideousness, created a special, unshakable bond between you and your partner. In this sense getting married is, I imagine, a lot like agreeing to do Dancing on Ice: you’ll end up being pleased with yourself for enduring something terrifying, difficult and unutterably naff.
When she finishes telling her mother the news on the phone, we go to see her father. I ask him for his daughter’s hand while he is showing me the progress of the work on his new loft extension. We are alone, standing on joists, looking down into the room below us. I consider the likelihood of him pushing me through.
‘How are you going to keep my daughter in the style to which she has become accustomed?’ he asks, looking stern. I don’t know that he’s been tipped off by my future mother-in-law, that he already has champagne on ice downstairs, that he’s only messing with me. I briefly contemplate jumping.
When I speak to my mother, I try to play down the whole business as a tiresome piece of administration, an elaborate exchange of paperwork which must be done at short notice. I don’t want to put anyone to any trouble just because I am obliged to jump through some bureaucratic hoops. Because my mother is a devout Catholic, I am hoping she won’t think a register office wedding counts, and therefore won’t feel she’s missing much. I suggest that after enduring whatever dry little ceremony constitutes the bare legal requirement for marriage in Britain, we will travel to the States, where she can arrange a blessing and throw an embarrassing party for us. There is a silence at the other end.
‘You can do whatever you want,’ she says. ‘But whatever it is, we’re coming over for it.’
Within weeks of us setting a date – just three months hence – my mother has invited sufficient relatives to fill a minibus. In addition to our booking at Chelsea Register Office, my future mother-in-law has secured, on my mother’s behalf, an hour slot in a Catholic church in Wimbledon, and a friendly priest who has agreed to put us through the pre-Cana period of instruction that will allow us to be married in the eyes of God. To my surprise, my new fiancée agrees to all of this without protest. Perhaps she believes that if the marriage is going to stick it must be done to the satisfaction of all concerned. I don’t know; I’m not asking a lot of questions at this point. I think the fact that in many ways it’s no longer about what we want makes us both feel a little better.
As we pull up outside the rectory for our first meeting with the priest, I realize I am far more anxious than she is. My stance regarding God is akin to the author Peter Ackroyd’s position on ghosts. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he once wrote, ‘but I am frightened of them.’ I am scared of the God I don’t believe in, and also of priests. I’m worried my double agnosticism – doubt, doubtfully held – will be transparent enough to get us disqualified. She has no such fear, and this also scares me. I look over at her as she turns off the headlights.
‘You’re not going to suddenly say that Jesus is a pillock, or anything like that, are you?’ I say.
‘I don’t think so,’ she says.
‘And don’t say, “If it doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced.”’
‘We can, though.’
‘I know. But he might not find your robust outlook as charming as I do.’
‘Christ.’
‘Don’t say Christ,’ I say. ‘Not in there.’
In fact Father Jim is welcoming, kind and prone to reward a half-hour’s earnest chat with an extremely strong gin and tonic. Our meetings with him are the only time we ever discuss topics including love, commitment, children and, more generally, the future with anyone. My wife-to-be, who has virtually no experience of religion and is therefore free to take from it what she wishes, finds it all rather bracing. For me, Catholicism remains an unfinished school assignment, a dropped subject. I sweat a lot during these meetings, but I am grateful that someone took the time to impress upon us the seriousness of the whole undertaking.
Father Jim is not the only person we have meetings with, though. We have meetings about flowers, about venues, about food, booze, music and printed invitations. I’d somehow imagined that our whirlwind engagement might relieve us of some of the stresses associated with a big wedding, but it just means we have to do the same stuff faster. We do have engagement photos taken – I look like a frightened potato in them – and our pending nuptials are announced in a national newspaper. It’s going to look terribly convincing, this sham marriage we’ve hastily arranged just so we can stay together for ever.
I am prone to nightmares in which I find myself back at school or still in college, suddenly facing the prospect of sitting a final exam for a class I signed up for but never attended, taught by a teacher who would not recognize me (they may be dreams, but they’re based on true stories). At the point where the full consequences of my unpreparedness are about to be made plain I wake up and discover, to my immense relief, that I am middle-aged, and therefore closer to the sweet release of death than I am to tenth-grade chemistry.
Waking on my wedding day, the reverse happens: I had been dreaming of mundane things, only to open my eyes and find myself in a foreign country where I’m about to get married. My life’s greatest test to date is scheduled for 11.30 a.m., and I could not be less ready.
I have borrowed a dark blue suit from my friend Bill, without trying it on first. He’s much taller than me; the trousers, it transpires, are three or four inches too long. Only the night before, my friend Jennifer had had to come round and staple new hems into place. I need to step into the trousers very gingerly in the morning to avoid undoing her work.
My memory of the next four or five hours is dangerously unreliable, and full of blank spots. It’s a good thing there are pictures. My imminent wife and I spent the night apart – she at her mother’s, me in the flat. I don’t remember meeting up the next morning outside Chelsea Register Office at all; only the part where I watched her write out a cheque to cover the cost of the ceremony in a back office. I remember stepping from the office into a venue area – a big sitting room, really – crammed with about forty people I either knew or was related to, and trying not to catch anyone’s eye. I recall a bit of the rigorously bland language in the vow I recited: ‘I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediment why I, Robert Timothy Dowling, may not be joined in matrimony to …’ I was basically petitioning to get married because I could not think of a solid legal reason to stop myself.
A lunch follows the ceremony, followed by a big party in a pub and a night in a posh hotel. The first real test of our marriage doesn’t come until the next morning, when we have to get married again. After getting to bed at about 4 a.m., I am up and waiting for a taxi at 7.30. My Catholic wedding is at ten, and by prior arrangement I am attending the preceding mass with my family. My wife is to arrive later for the ceremony. I am badly hungover, nervous and shaking. I am in no fit state to get married and, had I not already been married, I might have got cold feet. But I didn’t. Reader, I married her, again. I married the shit out of her.
The next day, we fly to Naples. It seems odd to leave behind such a large collection of normally far-flung friends, relatives and in-laws – an assemblage that will never recur – while they’re all having fun in London, but we need to go on honeymoon. It’s booked, and more importantly, I can only apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain from outside the UK. We are leaving the country so I can get back in.
Our priority in Naples is a visit to the British vice-consul, the only man in the area with the authority to approve my re-entry into the UK, excepting, I suppose, the consul. We turn up with our marriage certificate, some required paperwork and a selection of specially taken Polaroid wedding photos, and we are prepared to hold hands if it will help. The vice-consul waves away our photos, signs our papers and gives us tea. He regards our case as a welcome distraction, he says, from his regular duties, which seem to revolve largely around repatriating penniless students. The business is completed in under an hour. The remaining nine days of our honeymoon on the Amalfi coast stretch uncertainly before us.
In the days when couples had tightly restricted access to one another before the wedding, a honeymoon made sense. If you’ve already spent two years living in a tiny flat together, the honeymoon does not coincide with the honeymoon period. Nine days seems like an awful lot of enforced togetherness, especially when you’ve just embarked upon a project that quietly terrifies you both.
As a young married couple in a foreign country, you feel not just alone but positively quarantined, strolling through the unfamiliar streets of Positano together like two people who share a rare disease. It might well prove an instructive and reinvigorating break from the day-to-day drift of an established relationship, but ten days into a marriage is not a good time to discover you’ve run out of conversation. Under the circumstances, we do the only sensible thing: we run out of money instead.
In hindsight we could have blamed a lack of preparation, but what really happened amounted to a failure of leadership. Whenever we’d been together in America I’d invariably made the arrangements. In London my wife had organized everything while I watched, agog, as if my life were happening in a museum.
On neutral territory, however, neither of us takes charge. Nobody keeps proper count of the cash, tots up the receipts, or attempts to square our spending with the number of days left. The exchange rate is often discussed, but never quite mastered. Perhaps we both feel that the hard-nosed financial pragmatism a marriage requires shouldn’t start until after the honeymoon ends. As a team we prove to be both indecisive and extravagant, switching hotels on a whim, hiring boats without checking the price and ordering expensive drinks on the beach. We had been gifted a tidy pile of cash as a reward for getting married, but it runs through our fingers without us even feeling it. This is before – right before – it was possible to put your bank card into a cash machine anywhere in the world and receive handfuls of the local money. In 1992 that sort of preposterous convenience is still a far-off dream. Even a bank wire transfer takes three days.
Somehow, with two days to go, we wake up in a hotel on Capri with the equivalent of £30 in lira between us. It is not enough to pay the bill we’ve run up already. In fact it is only enough for one of us to take the boat back to Naples to beg some money from the only person we know there.
‘You have to go,’ I say to my wife, bravely. ‘He’s your vice-consul.’
‘I’ll be back,’ she says. ‘Don’t eat anything.’
So I sit in a room I cannot check out of because I cannot settle the bill, wondering if I’ll ever see my wife again. It occurs to me that Naples is not the sort of city to which one sends a woman alone on an errand. If anything happens to my wife I will have to live with the guilt. I have an urge to go after her, but then I remember I don’t have the money to cross the bay. I am paralysed by worry, although my mind somehow finds the wherewithal to ask itself whether a dip in the pool might help.
Finally, at sunset, my wife returns.
‘He was very nice about it,’ she says. ‘He gave me some money from the distressed seaman’s fund.’
We pay our bill and return to the mainland in search of a room close to the bus station, so we can get to the airport first thing and put this whole honeymoon business behind us. The hotel we select is so cheap that it doesn’t even start until the second floor of the run-down building it occupies, and you need to put money in the lift to make it go up. It’s just the sort of place two distressed seamen might spend their last night in Naples.
The front desk is a man in a hat sitting at a folding table on the landing. He also sells beer, fags and soap. But the room has huge windows and a fresco covering the whole ceiling, apart from a bit in the corner where they cut into the plaster to install a shower cubicle. We sit in the window and take a picture of ourselves with a timer, looking out onto the street at dusk. When I want to remember that I had a romantic honeymoon in Naples with the woman I love, that’s the one I look at.
In a lot of ways it does not feel as if we’re genuinely married until we turn up at passport control with our paperwork. There are a few more questions, a bit of a wait, some instructions I am too nervous to take in, and, finally, a stamp in my passport that grants me a full year to sort out my new status. At last, I’m an immigrant.
‘Now you just have to see the doctor,’ says the official.
‘The what?’ I say.
I am led to a little examination room in a weird, backstage area, where I remove my shirt for Dr Gatwick, a weary-looking man with a mildly sinister bearing.
‘Any diseases worth mentioning?’ he asks. If I had any, I think, I wouldn’t mention them to you.
‘No,’ I say.
He listens to my chest, takes my blood pressure, and asks me a few more questions. Then I am allowed to put on my shirt back on, and rejoin my wife on British soil. Dr Gatwick’s seal of approval is the final hurdle to married life, or at least that’s how it seems until we are safely on the train to London, and I realize that virtually all the hurdles are still ahead of us.
4. HOW TO BE WRONG (#uc88cc8e2-5773-59b3-a9cc-ddb4bd9954cc)
Take a moment to cast your eyes around my domain: this blasted promontory, wracked by foul winds, devoid of life, of cheer, of comfort. This is my special place – my fortress of solitude. I’ve been coming here on and off for the last twenty years. Welcome, my friend, to the moral high ground.
Sit down. Do you want some tea? I’m afraid they only do oat milk up here. It’s the moral high ground – what did you expect? There are some salt-free rice cakes on the shelf there. They’re a bit joyless, but help yourself – just make sure you put 10p in the honesty box.
What were we talking about? Oh yeah: so, earlier today my wife was giving me a hard time about not putting the ladder back in the shed. I told her it was pointless keeping the ladder in the shed because I use it all the time, almost exclusively in the house; that it was much more convenient and sensible to store it at the back of the cupboard under the stairs, like we used to before we got the shed. And by the way: why wasn’t I consulted about the switch in the first place?
My wife responded by saying that, at any rate, the ladder didn’t live in the middle of the sitting room, where it had been all weekend, and went on to imply that I was just being lazy and also, quite possibly, a twat. Then I said: OK, this is not about the ladder any more. This is about the proper way to conduct discourse between adults. I refuse on principle – on principle! – to engage with a person who would resort to such a personal attack. Someone has to make a stand against this sort of thing, I said, and for that reason no ladders will be moved today. And that’s how I ended up here, on the moral high ground. It’s like a VIP room for idiots.
