Part 3

The Marriage Diaries: A Novel
By Rebecca Campbell

(Page 3 of 3)

I suppose I must have known what I was getting with Sean. I was getting someone kind and funny, with a face that appeared quite handsome until he smiled, and then, once that smile was uncoiled, completely irresistible. Hair sometimes curly, sometimes just messy. Blue eyes, and again, you didn't realize how blue and how lovely they were until he took his glasses off, and it was a real showstopper when he did: people would lose track of what they were saying and fall silent and stare at him. I knew that he'd explain the world to me and make me read books I wouldn't otherwise have picked up. I knew he'd make a wonderful father, full of stories and games. And I knew he'd never earn enough for us to be able to forget about money.

What a very strange thing love is. He, of course, would leap like a wolf - and I mean a brainy wolf with glasses and messy hair - on my terminology, saying that love isn't a thing at all and that turning a thing that isn't a thing into a thing is the root of all our problems. He'd probably call it - I mean love - a "process" or dismiss it completely as a figment, a phantasmagoria, a myth, a tool used by someone, almost certainly the bourgeoisie, to control someone else, most likely his beloved toilers of the field and laborers underground. But all that doesn't mean that, whatever it is, it isn't strange.

By love, I don't really mean the feelings that burn away inside you with a desire you can never quench, or the other kind of love feelings, the ones that come in glorious engulfing waves like the epidural kicking in on top of the shot of really good stuff you've managed to plead out of the soft anesthetist. Or, for that matter, the love that comes over as fear when you look at your child asleep with his one-legged G.I. Joe, and you think of all the terrible things that might happen to him (the child, not the G.I. Joe, about whose fate I find myself curiously unmoved) - the falling out of high windows, the swallowing bleach, the cascade of boiling oil from the pulled-down pan, moving on to the stammering loneliness of school, the killing rejections from hard-faced girls (it takes one to know one), the growing depression and isolation, the bottle of pills and the stomach pump. No, I don't mean the feelings at all. I mean the everything, the situations you find yourself in, the things you do and don't do, the things you say and don't say. Without love, there'd be none of those, and life would come in a much simpler shape.

I woke up without realizing I'd fallen asleep. The room was dark, the candles burned down or blown out. I felt Sean beside me, breathing in a long, slow rhythm. I looked at the bedside clock. It was one thirty. I'd had nothing to eat, and I felt hunger kick inside, like a quickening baby. I weighed up the pros and cons of getting out of this nice, warm bed. But I was too hungry to sleep, and then there was all that futile makeup to remove.

I had to walk past the study. The door was ajar, and I could see the cold light from the monitor. Sean had forgotten to switch it off. There was a screen saver playing, the one that creates a perfect aquarium, with tropical fish turning slowly in the water. It was rather lovely, and so lifelike I didn't want to turn it off - it would have felt like draining the water from a tank of real fish. But as I turned to leave, I accidentally nudged the keyboard. The fish disappeared, replaced by words. At the top, it said "SEANJOURNALONE.DOC." And then it said "POOH." I smiled.

The whole journal thing had been my idea in the first place. Sean was very proud of his new video camera, which connected to his computer in all kinds of clever ways and allowed him to make and edit films, and start talking about Visconti and Tarkovsky and the "spirit of the beehive," whatever that was. The plan was to have a complete record of Harry's development, showing his first steps, his first words, his first successful circumnavigation of his potty, that sort of thing. He bought it in time for Harry's first birthday party.

I'd invited a few friends round - Milo, Galatea, Katie, Ludo - and told them to bring champagne for us rather than presents for the boy, and we all got fairly sloshed. Sean took a couple of minutes of film and then gave the camera to Harry, who was strapped into his high chair, drunk on cake and apple juice. Being a baby rather than Steven Spielberg, he first tried to lick the camera and then threw it on the floor, where, upon impact, it made a sound like a pensioner's hip breaking. Sean found it funny until he realized that the thing was, in his words, "utterly and completely fucked."

Sean wanted to go out and spend £1,000 on a new one, but I thought that I'd already forgone enough pairs of new shoes in the lost cause of the original and forbade it.

"You're supposed to be good at writing," I said. "So why don't you capture it all in words?"

So was planted the seed. And now here it was. The first shoot.

We didn't have secrets, so I read on.

Copyright © 2006 by Rebecca Campbell.

About the Author

Rebecca Campbell was educated at the London School of Economics and the London College of Fashion. She and her mother, Paddy Campbell, run a clothing design firm that sells throughout Ireland and the United Kingdom. She lives in North London with her husband, a writer, and their son, Gabriel.