How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette (7 ebook reader .TXT) 📕

should be nice to you, but you can be such a bitch,’ Hannah scorched back.

‘No, I can’t.’ Jazz lit up a fag and smoked fakely. ‘If I were a real bitch, I would tell Cassie that her husband is a lazy, misogynistic bastard, and I haven’t, have I?’

‘Just because you’re unhappy in your marriage, Jazz, don’t undermine Cassie’s or mine.’ Hannah stubbed out Jazz’s cigarette with vehemence and primly steepled her hands.

‘I do still adore Rory, Jazz,’ I added. ‘We aren’t exactly on Cloud Nine. But Cloud Seven and a Half, for sure.’

‘Maybe so. But women need emotional intimacy to stay attracted to a bloke. And how can you feel emotionally intimate with a man you resent for not helping around the house?’

She had a point. Yes, I adored Rory but, of late, my biggest sex fantasy in the bedroom involved me discovering that he’d picked his underpants up off the floor. But divorce? It sounded so scandalous. So satiny underwear and sloe gins. If hostages in Iraq could survive being shackled together to a radiator, surely I could stand a little ball and chain? My parents had been married for nearly forty years. How had they done it?

Spending time with most family members is like eating brussel sprouts, a dreary duty we endure at Christmas. But I was close to my mum and dad, who divided their time between Sydney and Surrey. So, the next Sunday, as we endured a traditional English barbecue, eating half-raw, carcinogenic sausages made from pigs’ lips and cows’ nipples, while being wind-whipped in the back garden, I cornered my mother.

‘Mum, I need advice. Lately with Rory, I dunno, I just feel that I do everything and that I’m totally taken advantage of. He’s so emotionally withdrawn.’

My mother laughed caustically. ‘Wait until you both retire and he discovers the Internet, dear. Whenever your father gets back from a trip he rushes into the study, embracing his PC crying, “Hi, honey, I’m home.” I mean, he completely ignores me all day, even eats his meals at the computer, then comes to me for a bit of slap and tickle at night! When we’ve hardly even spoken! It’s bloody infuriating.’

My heart sank. Is this what I had to look forward to? ‘But haven’t you talked to Dad about it? Haven’t you complained?’

‘Talk? Oh no, dear. There’s no point. Wives must just drink gin and bear it,’ she quipped, topping up my glass.

I may have started to resemble her physically, but did I really want to turn into my mother emotionally? To become acquiescent and compromising? To wander around, endlessly sighing, with my freeze-dried feelings and vaccuum-packed dreams?

My mother may have pressed Ctrl Alt Delete on her self-esteem, and Jazz’s marriage may have been Brigadoon-ing before her eyes, but mine was not melting into the mist. It was just that Jazz was so unhappy I’d begun to get maritally psychosomatic. Yes, that was it! I’d started to develop divorce symptoms. But Rory was not lazy or misogynistic or emotionally inarticulate. Okay, recently the air had been seeping out of my marriage like a tyre with a slow puncture. But it was time to patch things up.

My girlfriends warned me I was gullible . . . I only wish I’d believed them.

8. To Love, Hoover and Obey

In a marriage, no news is bad news. I therefore determined to talk to my husband on Saturday morning, over breakfast.

‘Rory, I don’t seem to remember that my wedding vows were “To Love, Hoover and Obey”.’

‘What exactly are those Japanese researching on whales?’ was his answer. He was scrutinizing an Animal Welfare report.

‘Rory, are you listening to me?’

He munched on some cereal, sending milk splattering. ‘I mean, they’ve killed so many and yet made no announcements. Are they suddenly going to reveal that whales can tap dance? Yodel? Do calculus?’

‘Great! You can’t even hear me asking if you’re listening!’ (Note to self. Never attempt conversation with man if newspaper, sports programme or work folder is within one-mile radius.)

‘Huh?’ Rory was so unused to me shouting at him that he looked up in wounded bewilderment. But for once I was not going to do the traditional Anglo-Saxon thing of bottling it all inside and then finally psychologically imploding one afternoon by the cheese counter of Sainsbury’s.

‘YOU NEVER HELP ME AROUND THE HOUSE ANY MORE.’

‘Huh?’ A schoolboy head of floppy hair fell into his eyes. ‘That’s not true, puss.’

‘Rory, your only contribution to anything domestic of late was when your brother and his new bride were coming to stay and I asked you to get the bedroom in the surgery flat ready and you put the baby monitor under the bed so you could hear them having sex. I mean, how old are you exactly?’

Grinning cheekily, he answered my query with a melodious belch.

‘I had hoped one day that you might grow up and perhaps discover that a burp is not an after-dinner speech,’ I sighed, stacking newspapers into the recycling bin. ‘All I ask of life is a hygienic toilet environment. Peeing on the loo seat, leaving your underwear all over the floor . . . you’re like an animal marking its territory.’

‘But we have a cleaner.’

‘So? You still have to clean for the cleaner. Besides, she only comes once a week which is not enough to clean up all the mess you make.’

‘Where?’ Rory smiled lazily. ‘I can’t see all this mess I’ve allegedly made.’

‘My point exactly. Why is it that you can see a naked boob a hundred miles away, but you can’t see a dirty sock in the middle of the floor?’ I snapped, clearing away his breakfast plates. ‘And then there’s the childcare . . .’

‘Hey, that’s not fair. I help with the kids. What about Jenny’s last birthday? I brought that retired sheep dog in from the surgery and it had all the kids rounded up into a holding position in the garden for the entire party.’

‘Exactly. You do all the fun stuff, making me the ogre who has