At work and the phone rings with a friend doing her Katherine Hepburn impersonation, except that this is actually what she sounds like, but breathy and appealing and sort of adorable - if it isn’t kind of wrong for a 47 year old woman to be cute.
Which it isn’t. She's lovely, so shut up.
Marion, she drawls, I wanted to call you after lunch last week because I needed to tell you that about one day a month my husband is totally in love with me and the rest of the time he hardly notices I’m there and you just happened to catch him on a loved up day.
I know what she means. When she took me out last week he was being effusively affectionate in the way that even under normal happily married circumstance makes me want to garrotte myself with a dinner napkin, but these days just impels me to walk in front of a bus. It’s not that you don’t want your friends to be happy, but you wish they would be a little less conspicuous about it and though I really can only celebrate the fact that she and her husband are mutually besotted, it makes me envious.
Yep, envious.
I used to be the one with the doting, if distracted, husband, and now I’m the cast off, no-body loves me, I think I'll go and eat worms.
Oh it’s fine, I said, but I must admit it did make me realise what I was missing, I admitted. Believe me, winsome didn't come in to it.
No, but we have just as unhappy a marriage as anyone I know, she insisted, being a dear and rubbishing her perfectly functioning, relationship just so that I didn’t feel slighted. She goes on:
I know that before I sold my book a friend of mine got hers published and though I was happy for her, it made me less happy with myself.
Yes, precisely. Other people’s success is a dish best served when you are totally satiated by your own cooking.
Anyway, we had a big argument last night and we’re not speaking, she said. I just wanted you to know that.
Quite. I’m the first port of call for the SS Schadenfreud.
I’m not that shallow, I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t, because maybe I am.
She had hardly hung up when another of our authors came into the office – she of the Clever Girls Book Club who has just written the book of her career according to Mr T. And yes, I'm impressed and glad for her and muttering under my breath: success is a dish best served when you’re totally satiated by your own cooking, so I start bulking up on my own modest literary achievements to stop myself feeling peckish when I see her plate piled high with plaudits.
I’m reciting to myself; Look Marion you got American rights (yeah - yeah, I know it was at a mere fraction of what she sold hers for but don't go there - step away from the six figure sum and concentrate), Dutch rights, Italian rights, Portuguese rights, a lovely letter from the Italians telling me how honoured they were to be publishing my 'beautiful book'. Did you see that Marion? ‘Beautiful’. Hah! And then there was the lovely, lovely specially shot cover... how lovely is that?
I’ve run out and have to start chewing back at the beginning again as she tells me how her American publishers don’t seem to be planning much of a publicity tour.
Publicity tour?
Yikes, I hadn’t even thought to be upset that I wasn’t having one, but now I have another thing to feel inadequate about. My 'beautiful book, my 'beautiful' book,’ I recite to myself.
I tell her my husband has just left me.
She reminds me that her ex-fiance, coincidentally a fellow countryman (almost) of my ex-husband, and she broke up a year ago.
'*ing *s,' she fumes.
'Yeah, *ing *s.' I agree.
'Prozac,' she announces, definitively. 'It's a great help.'
'I’m self medication with alcohol, bad dates and chocolate,' I reply.
'Well, whatever gets you through it,' she says.
And suddenly we're sisters, forget the publishing rivalry. We're in the same band. Founding members of the Bad Bloody Relationship Tribute Band. Both wearing the T shirt.
