I didn’t force any hyacinths this Christmas. Most years I plant a dozen bulbs at the end of September and hide them in a dark corner so they’re ready for Christmas Day – they never are, of course, but they usually arrive shortly after the Wise Men on Epiphany. But last September I took out the wooden planters – oak boxes stamped with the date of our wedding, a gift for our fourth wedding anniversary (wood) – and they fell apart in my hands, the wood split and rotten.
I always thought the Christmases Yet to Come after my wife and I separated would be sad and un-Christmassy. I saw a vacant seat in the chimney-corner and all that. But even though my wife’s lawyer is pushing through the divorce – her deadline for my completing the paperwork was Advent Sunday, our 12th wedding anniversary (silk: she should have hung in there for that) – neither of us can afford to move out unless we sell the house.
I can’t help feeling it’s my fault. I spent the past few years working in the local MP’s office, campaigning for a more rational property market in Cornwall; the taxes we advocated have worked infuriatingly well, and the bottom has fallen out of the market as if it were a wooden planter rotten with metaphor. A few years ago, a Cornish cottage by the sea (on a spring tide, the sea comes up the river outside the house, which surely qualifies as a sea view) would have been snatched up by a holidaying banker before the listing was in the Cornishman; now we have to watch and wait and ‘declutter’ in case a cash buyer is disgusted by the sight of my stuff being where I can find it.
It should be easier now that my stuff is contained and limited to my sphere of influence, though. Soon after I got the email from contactdivorce@justice.gov.uk I observed, in a Winston Churchill voice, that a William Morris curtain had descended across our property. The master bedroom and her study are under the control of hostile powers; the free zone consists of the spare bedroom and the box room. The bathroom is in the middle, with two doors to east and west; the negotiations for crossing Checkpoint Khazi involve precise timings and tit-for-tat exchanges.
Sometimes marriages are like the eco-friendly crackers I mistakenly bought; they don’t end with a bang
I suppose one should be grateful that it is only a cold war: having separate sitting rooms means that we haven’t engaged in direct conflict. (In fact there are far fewer fights than before, now the nuclear button has been pressed.) Tensions did rise when I bought a pile of logs which were too big to fit in her log-burner but were the right size for mine – a needless provocation (Pravda) – but after an undiplomatic stand-off the cold war didn’t become hot, and the room with the nicer log-burner did.
We were very alert to the danger of fighting a proxy war over our son – his bedroom is in the red zone but I am allowed Berlin airlift-style visits – but he is playing us off against each other as expertly as Marshal Tito. Trips to Disneyland and extra screen time from his mother, and someone prepared to listen to a play-by-play analysis of his rugby matches from me. His first thought when we started discussing Christmas was that, like all the other boys in his class, he might get two dinners and two sets of presents. But after a summit meeting, my soon-to-be-ex-wife and I decided that we would not be buying his affection but, as usual, Stem toys to promote lifelong learning. Our son remains Non-Aligned.
The plan was to make our last family Christmas together a real family Christmas, but the boy was unimpressed. I suggested a family board games night, and cranked out one of my father’s sayings (when he died, I inherited all his sayings): ‘The family that plays together, stays together.’ The boy rolled his eyes: ‘But you’re not staying together.’ The Scrabble remained in its box.
There was, at least, a Christmas truce. The arguments don’t matter any more: we didn’t fall out over whether the Christmas meal should be beef wellington or roast lamb (none of us likes turkey, which would have saved many skirmishes in the past), and neither of us was talking darkly about coercive control on the phone to our sisters when we didn’t get our way. But equally we won’t be working on pieces together – my wife is a journalist – setting out the battle lines between us: he likes Christmas, she celebrates Hanukkah; he is a monarchist and pro-Brexit, she is a republican who hates Britain. I thought we’d be writing these articles forever – and posing for photographs back-to-back, me looking jolly and her scowling – but it turns out these differences were irreconcilable after all. (The most irritating thing about getting divorced is that all the unpleasantest commenters below the line were totally right.)
Divorce is so much less dramatic than I expected: an email from HM Courts and Tribunal Service doesn’t have the same end-of-the-Christmas-episode-of-EastEnders theatricality as a hand-delivered letter saying that the Watts marriage was over. (‘Merry Christmas, Ange.’) I did tell one of my cousins – I’m the only one who didn’t include a round-robin letter with my Christmas cards, and I couldn’t rely on her picking up on the fact that it was signed by my son and me only – and she took it as calmly as the news that we wouldn’t be able to make it to her Christmas party. More calmly, probably. The only person to be even vaguely interested by the news was interested, to be sure, but she manfully lasted five minutes before asking if I was dating again.
Sometimes marriages are like the eco-friendly crackers I mistakenly bought in 2023; they don’t end with a bang. It won’t be the stress of the Christmas season that drives us apart, like all those couples in articles about ‘divorce day’ – the first working day of January, when applications supposedly peak. Apparently it’s not true anyway: my wife’s lawyer says it’s humbug. But she would.
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