Page 3 of Mad About You

Harriet treated dealings with her in-laws like running Churchill’s War Rooms. You napped with one eye open around Jacqueline Barraclough.

Harriet pushed her phone back into her handbag and fiddled with the volume on ‘Missing’ by Everything But The Girl.

‘Actually, can we have it off, please, Hats? I’m getting one of my headaches,’ Jon said.

‘Sure, pull over in a lay-by.’

‘What?’

‘Have it off.Never mind.’

Jon threw her a baffled glance. He was one of those people who thought he had a great sense of humour. His GSOH was more like a burglar alarm: might work if he turned it on, but he often forgot.

‘John F. Kennedy had to have sex several times a day or else he got headaches, you know,’ Harriet said.

‘Inconvenient, given his workload. Would ibuprofen not do the job?’ Jon said.

‘Nope, had to be Marilyn Monroe.’

‘Ah.’

Harriet could tell she was irritating him slightly. She couldn’tsay this sort of thing in front of his tightly wound parents, and they were close to entering their planetary atmosphere. Jon, already on his guard, wanted Harriet to behave accordingly. Like an actor getting into character on set, before they shouted ‘action’.

‘Presume they’re whipping up chicken nugs and chips for Joffrey Baratheon?’ Harriet said.

Jon gave her a sideways look, and tutted. ‘Oh, he’s not that bad. He’s twelve soon, entering adulthood! We’re all allowed a grotty phase as a kid.’

Harriet said nothing more because Jon’s mother, Jackie, his father, Martin Senior, elder brother, Martin Junior, his wife, Melissa and their eleven-year-old son Barty (Bartholomew for tellings-off, which Harriet thought were all too scarce) were all in one big rolling grotty phase.

Jon dwelt in an odd mental space, as regards his family – he never denied they behaved like an absolute shower, because it was pretty hard to pretend otherwise. But he could never go so far as to attribute malice to them either, which Harriet thought left him a day late and a dollar short in terms of having their measure.

They alwaysmeant well.

This wishful claim of Jon’s had [citation needed] after it.It was as if their true personalities had locked-in syndrome, in Jon’s analysis, given their tragic inability to make their inherent kindness known.

‘Nearly there,’ Jon looked at the clock on the dash. ‘An hour to shower and change, I reckon, and then a gin and tonic in the bar.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Harriet, in tacit peace-making, and Jon beamed.

In typically generous fashion, Jon had booked dinner and an overnight stay for all of them at a country house hotel in the Dales for his parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary.

Harriet had agreed to it with the usual sense of dread, but, you know, you couldn’t pick your boyfriend’s family. You also couldn’t stop Jon spending his considerable salary in such expansive ways.

‘No roof racks on hearses, Hats,’ he’d say, riffling her hair.

He was MD of a division of a supermarket chain, developing upmarket ready meals. Harriet’s best friends, Lorna and Roxy, called him Captain Gravy, a nickname he didn’t find funny.

It’s not just gravy I’ve got responsibility for – it’s all sauces and luxury pouched condiments!he’d lightly fume, bewildered to be increasing their mirth.

Harriet had never experienced money the way Jonathan had money. It landed in huge snowdrifts in his account every month and could build up to unwieldy, drain-clogging fatberg size if not dealt with efficiently by lashing on Parker Knoll furniture, spendy meals and five-star weekends away.

Despite his protestations, Harriet had always given him proper rent since she moved into his mansion in Roundhay. She’d maintained basic hygiene and not let him pay for most things – she had her own income, a lifestyle she could afford and self-respect, but with Jon’s profligacy, it was like sharing a bathtub and trying to keep the hot water separate.

Dating him for the last two years had been an education in good living. Maybe money couldn’t buy you happiness;however, it was still a mood-altering, life-changing, addictive substance. It could purchase you not only pleasure, Harriet had discovered, but ease, patience, convenience. A kind of sunny outlook and frictionless existence where your path through any difficulties could always be smoothed by its liberal application.

In choosing the original venue for this celebration, for example, Martin and Mel had carped about the awkward location, and his father had objected to the trendy ‘plant forward’ cuisine. (‘The photos looked like things they’d fling at monkeys at Chester Zoo!’) And Jon simply flipped the booking to another hotel without even checking how much it cost. Everyone should be pleased, that was Jon’s religion, and Jon could facilitate that pleasing, so he did.

He was, Harriet always said to herself and others, an incredibly, ludicrously nice guy. So, given her increasing doubts, what did that make her?

---