The Guilty Party

Have you ever done anything wrong?  I know, silly question, but today I am considering guilt and culpability.  Of course, the Absent Father wasn’t the guilty one, according to my solicitor.  Oh no, adultery was a ‘failure of our marriage’ not his fault.  Yes, are your hackles rising too, not his fault, has the world gone mad?  

You can imagine, dear readers of the blog, just how cross I got about that one, seated in the client chair in my solicitor’s comfortable office at the back of the building, with its wall of windows overlooking the rooftops of north Colchester, the photos of handsome children and pretty wife neatly and pointedly arranged on the window sill.  Plenty of us wonder how solicitors justify their fees, but believe me the firm, kind and tactful way he dealt with my raging insanity and hurt was definitely remunerated appropriately.  He was the one who told me I could not take the Absent Father ‘to the cleaners’; I would lose my home, and I would need to find a full time job as the Courts would expect it as I was qualified to work.  Tough stuff for the innocent party to hear.  Except I wasn’t.  He gently but steadfastly told me that in English Law I was not to be pitied as blameless, just I had rights to the accrued wealth during the marriage.  More rights than most as we were a ‘long marriage’ in law.  My Aunt from Ireland always spits fury at this one as apparently with her divorce in Ireland the judge decided she needed less money as she was older and the children were gone.  I am no expert on Irish divorce law, not much of one in English law, just my own, but it seems massively insulting to diminish a relationship because of its longevity.

So my solicitor tutored me in the practical aspects of getting through a divorce.  What I was entitled to, what problems might arise, where I might push the envelope.  It was a life saver, because it drew me away from screaming emotion, cleared my mind and made me think of ‘me’ and not ‘us’  One of the sharp breath things that still stuns me at weak moments is what the AF told me about his decisions about our marriage. He decided he'd leave in March 2007, saw his solicitor for the first time in April. 

His affair with his Woman seemed to have a rolling start, not sure when, he lies by omission I have found, and to be honest it is academic at this point in time.  Anyway the truth is it was in raging passion from January – June 2007, with his Woman breaking off her engagement to the man she was living with in February that year.  Of this I knew absolutely nothing except the Absent Father was difficult to live with, but assuming it was his winter depression and the impossibility of life in general, I struggled on.  You do, don’t you?  My diaries from that time are in my attic now and I have yet to have the strength to go and peruse them.  From what I remember they are peppered with references to prayer to a God I still believe is there, but doubt in ‘his’ goodness, and a belief that good will out, that if I held on it would sort for the best.  Of course implicit within the writing is the fact that ‘the best’ was Our Happy Ever After.  It’s that bit that still breaks my heart, the belief in love.  Was it wrong for him to fall in love with someone else, and stop loving me.  Is he the guilty party?

Yes, of course you are muttering to yourself a firm ‘yes’ at the screen, but isn’t that because you only know my side, the bit I’ve shown you.  What drove the man to chat to a woman on the train because he was lonely at home?  How many of us have stepped across that line, just briefly, and enjoyed something that if we’re honest may not absolutely show us in the best possible light in that book at the Pearly Gates?  Well, if you haven’t then I take my hat off to you, if I was wearing one.  Or maybe not.  What a prim and contained life you must lead, how do you know what your potential is, have you ever challenged yourself, or do you live in fear of retribution? I am, of course, assuming that all my readers of the blog are similarly like-minded at some level and have crossed the line, in thought, word or deed.  I can’t lay my hands on the reference at the moment, my daily bible reading days are long gone, but I seem to remember a verse stating that even thinking of sex with someone else was adultery.  Well, that’s Harry Judd’s career down the pan to start with.  And Daniel Craig.  And Jason Statham.  Yes, I know, you didn’t expect me to be a Stath fan did you?  Especially if you’ve met the Absent Father in the old days.  He was a bit of a Hugh Grant type, well he liked to think so, and so did I.  He was handsome, in a boyish way, with a big, wide slightly sideways smile and a strong jawline.  He also had lots of dark hair which followed the fashions.  Towards the end of our marriage, like Hugh Grant, he had it cut in a short style which he gelled expertly every morning.  A splash of aftershave on the jawline, adjusting the hankie in the top pocket and off he went.  Peacock on the prowl.

But now I find predominately bald men of action the best thing since sliced bread (and Harry Judd, I know, I know, inconsistent me).  Actually, there is a link.  The sheer masculine passion with which Harry danced in Strictly (don’t worry if you’ve never seen it, potter through youtube on a dull afternoon and  you’ll find it, his tango was especially good) and the way Bond and Frank Martin (Stath’s character in the Transporter movies) effect solutions to problems makes me tingle.  Something I couldn’t do and would need a man for.  The Absent Father although stronger than me, had a bad back.  He had to be careful of his back, have regular treatments, and when his back ‘went’ the house stopped.  I remember driving him to the chiropractor lying down in  the back of the Ford Explorer (and trust me they were big cars) as he couldn’t actually sit up, and he had to spend several days lying flat out in the sitting room as he could not do anything else.  He had damage to his back, and a scoliosis.  I remember being told by our chiropractor that the prognosis for his back wasn’t brilliant and there was a possibility he could end his days in a wheelchair.  Yes, bet that made you gasp.  But also he absorbed stress.  I believe, but have no objective evidence for, that we all have a ‘weak spot’, a part of the body that gives us trouble when stress rises.  For me it is my lungs, for some it is their stomach, and for the Absent Father it was his back.  One of the irritating things when he left was how much better his back was.  He claimed that he was having no trouble at all, effectively liberated.  But then he was having the sex of a new relationship and who hasn’t longed for that time again, that first six to twelve months when the passion just courses and you are revived as never before.  All rational judgment put aside for the glory of the moment, which if you are very stupid, you call love.  At some point it fades.  Might be just a flicker, but as with the leaves of the trees in midsummer suddenly that bright and pulsing acid green is darker.  Still beautiful, just not so vibrant.  I’ve written a poem that I posted last year on the blog, called ‘On Beauty’ which explores the idea of beauty through time, and whilst I was writing it I was thinking of physical beauty, being a middle aged woman well past her first flush of youth.  Am I still beautiful, if you accept the uncomfortable notion that I might have been beautiful in the first place?  I find acknowledging my own beauty a very uncomfortable thing because I was brought up to feel guilt for such vanity.  But to return to the main thread, when the sex in a relationship fades, does the relationship die?  If that were the case marriages would last but a few months.  Two years at the most.  There would be no bedding in and making a go of it.  But what if you tried making a go of it, and actually you were living a lie.  Desperately hanging on because some grumpy, itinerant preacher wandering through the eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago, trying to absolve his guilt from being mean to a group of people who just wanted people to be nice to each other, thought that being nice to each other meant not thinking ‘I could go for that’ at someone other than their designated partner.   What if you looked at the fat, ageing woman in your bed every night and thought ‘is this it?’  The endless conversations about schooling and gardening, the dinner parties where you felt inadequate because your bonus was clearly less than everyone else’s at the table.  The sex, that far from comforting in its dependability, made you aware that the best was over?

I heard from a mutual acquaintance that the Absent Father sometimes wishes he could turn the clock back, that he’d never said ‘yes, this is my mobile number’ to that woman.  But if it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else.  My marriage failed.  It ran its course.  Perhaps somehow I knew that before him.  Does that make me the guilty party?