How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette (top 10 novels to read TXT) 📗

falling to her knees, beating her breasts, tearing her hair and ripping at her taffeta frock. Her day had started as calmly as any other and then she’d just drifted into disaster, like a boat without a rudder, ending up shipwrecked.

What a trio we were. Women fantasize about being ‘taken’. Well, we’d been taken, all right, but not quite in the muscley-thighed, half-naked Adonis way we’d wet-dreamed of.

Jazz was being taken to the cleaners by her husband.

Hannah had been taken for a ride by her husband.

And I’d been taken for granted.

Wedding vows really need updating. They should read: Have faith in your husband. Respect your husband. Idealize your husband . . . but get as much as you possibly can in your own name.

PART FOUR

21. Underachievers Anonymous

Now is the summer of my discontent. Well, our discontent really. Hannah, Jazz and I needed a Low Self-Esteem Support Group, but the class would be cancelled as no teacher would want to hang out with such losers. Besides which, it would be a very small class because Jazz and Hannah were not on speaking terms. I was so low, I changed the joint ‘We’re out’ message Rory and I had left on our answermachine to say instead, ‘I’m out of my mind – but leave a message.’ When feeling blue, it helps to start breathing again, but just in case, I took to reading impressive Booker Prize-winning tomes, so that at least I’d look intelligent if I died in the middle of one.

Early in August the bank foreclosed on Jazz’s house. Too frightened to divorce, she had to move with Studz into a minuscule, rented two-bedroom flat on Finchley Road. Her beloved Josh, traumatized by all the change and tension, turned remote and withdrawn. He was suddenly quoting Goethe and becoming intellectually precocious. Jazz thought he might be seeing someone, but he wouldn’t tell her anything. ‘I’ve done everything except a polygraph test,’ she confided in me anxiously.

She couldn’t even cook for him as the poky kitchen was so decrepit. I suggested that we shop for some new fittings. ‘There must be something cheap and cheerful we can stump up for?’

‘Oh, good idea!’ Jazz replied sarcastically. ‘Just what I need when I’m this depressed and my husband’s being blackmailed by a Sylvia Plath expert – an extra oven lying around.’

For Hannah, it was all over bar the shouting and the exchange of real estate. Her twenty-year marriage was now confined to a file in a divorce lawyer’s office. A marriage is about as manoeuvrable as a supertanker, but at least she had started the process of changing course. Her husband, who had promised that no sperm of his would ever get near an ovary without written permission, had moved in with the mother of his child.

Hannah was so humiliated by the realization that her life had been nothing more than a mirage of convenience, that she was threatening to change her name and move to another member state of the European union. And I had a strong desire to join her.

My marriage to Rory had dwindled to one affair, a mortgage and two children between us. As news seeped out, women friends clucked sympathetically, but were secretly relieved that it was me and not them. I felt like a rubber glove which had been turned inside out.

Rory, meanwhile, had gone on holiday to Greece with Bianca. As she always seemed to be drawing on our savings, I now referred to her as Biancaccount, and our dwindling finances as Rory’s Bonk Statement.

Otherwise things were great. Fab. Hunky-fucking-dory.

Like a war-weary soldier, I crawled back to my parent’s house to seek refuge over the holiday month. It’s the only time in my adult life that I’ve cried in my mother’s arms. I was always teasing my parents with complaints that they should have screwed me up more when I was a kid as ‘I’ve got nobody to blame now.’ Well, my kids would have nothing to worry about in that department because I was about to screw them up big time. When I told them that Rory and I had separated, they looked at me with huge, dismayed eyes, no longer tough and cool, but frightened little babies. Jenny, who’d now turned twelve, shattered into tears. I set her down on my lap gingerly, as if she were a Ming vase. How could I have coquetted with divorce? I was like a woman who flirts with a sex offender and is then surprised to be indecently assaulted.

I tried to distract them with endless excursions to funfairs for rides on the ‘Twist and Vomit’ or the ‘Plunge and Chunder’, but nothing could lift their gloomy spirits. My marital chaos must have been contagious because by the end of the summer, my parents were also fighting. My mother maintained that she was a computer widow, a shed widow and a golf widow. She told my dad that the reason he loves his computer is because he is a computer – hard to figure out and never enough memory.

‘You’re lucky to have got rid of your husband,’ Mum told me, loudly over dinner one night, within Dad’s earshot. ‘You must be so relieved you no longer have to make a pretence of finding him attractive in the bedroom.’

But I did still find Rory attractive. Rory was my rock, my lighthouse. I missed the blinking, intermittent warmth of him. Every time the phone rang I lunged for the receiver – but it was never my man.

I heard from regular clients and neighbours that the surgery was no longer taking mottled strays or giving freebie consultations to the poor and the elderly, but only administering to pedigree pooches. When neighbours did glimpse Rory, he usually had a pair of poodle clippers in his hand. Not a good look on a red-blooded man. Now that Rory had two households to help finance, Bianca had initiated a more lucrative line of work