Our House(16)

‘It’s purely a deterrent,’ I said, ‘with the aim of saving lives. Have you told the insurance company?’

‘Of course I have. Seriously, it’s no big deal.’

Not to him. ‘This local one, the kids weren’t in the car with you, were they?’

‘No, I was on my own.’ Insulted now, he roared from defence to offence in about five seconds. ‘Disappointing, isn’t it? I really missed a trick there, eh?’

‘Don’t turn this into a criticism of me!’

Even at the time I recognized the exchange as a perfect illustration of what it was that was failing in our marriage. Not his crimes per se – I hardly need say that this one paled into insignificance compared with those to follow – but the role in which he so readily cast me in the aftermath. Cop, teacher, killjoy, snitch. Grudge holder.

Victim.

‘You’d better let me drive from now on,’ I said. ‘Minimize your chances of re-offending.’ Oh God, now I sounded like his parole officer.

‘Be my guest,’ he said, sullenly.

Later, when I went back to the filing cabinet, I found that the drawer marked ‘Car’ was empty.


Bram, Word document

Like I say, the adultery was a bit of a false trail. Far more destructive in the long run were the speeding tickets, which I would have preferred not to share with her – to be honest, it was easier to avoid the grief. This is the flip side of good citizens like Fi: they find it hard to make concessions for their husbands.

I thought I’d squirrelled away all incriminating evidence (I’d never known her to look in the file marked ‘Car’) and so I was unprepared when she came brandishing the DVLA letters, demanding to know if I’d had the boys in the car with me (for the record I did not, not for any of the offences).

‘I would never risk harming our kids,’ I told her. ‘Surely you know that?’

‘Then why risk harming someone else’s?’ she said, and she looked at me with a distaste that should have warned me that a separation was imminent, with or without the shenanigans in the playhouse still to come.

‘Well, at least I know the truth now,’ she added.

But she didn’t. She didn’t know the half of it. The truth was that by the time she found out about those two speeding tickets there’d already been two further ones, two further sets of three points, and, with the final infraction, a court appearance.

The truth was I’d been fined ￡1,000 and banned from driving for a year, lasting till February 2017.

Of course, now she had found part of the evidence, there was nothing to stop her double-checking my story by ringing the insurance company to see if our premium had gone up, though I’d been careful to establish that the policy was set up in my name and password-protected. Even so, I feared she would look at bank statements and notice that the premium had in fact gone down, not up, since she was now the sole driver of our Audi.

The sole named driver.


‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:42:52

I know some listeners might think I was too hard on him about the speeding tickets, and it’s true that one of the other dads at school also had six points on his licence, and many others three. Even Merle had been stopped by the police for running a red light in Herne Hill and let off with a warning. There was a culture in our circle of such misdeeds being a badge of honour, as if these were victimless crimes.

Right.

I’m not saying I’m a paragon of virtue myself, but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever broken the speed limit, at least not by more than a mile or two. I mean, we have pedestrians and cyclists to navigate, we have kids in our care; there are traffic lights and crossings every two minutes and most of us have cruise control on our cars: when is the situation ever so frantic that you can disregard all that? And does five miles an hour, ten miles, even twenty, really make such a difference to your arrival time? Is it really worth risking a catastrophic outcome?

But I guess most speeders aren’t thinking about outcomes.

They leave outcomes to other people.


Bram, Word document

No, the catastrophically wrong decision was not to conceal the ban. The catastrophically wrong decision was to ignore it. That’s right, I’m admitting it formally: I defied a court-ordered driving disqualification and continued to drive.

If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be in this position now.

Of course, at first I’d told myself it would be just one journey. It was a Saturday afternoon, a couple of weeks after I’d appeared in court, and I was in trouble with Fi for having an especially bad hangover when I was supposed to be fresh for the weekend’s janitorial duties. She was demanding I take the garden waste to the recycling centre and, sod’s law, it was the only time in months there’d been a parking space right outside our door, so I couldn’t just lug the stuff out of sight and ditch it in someone’s skip.

Fi even came out to the car with me, issuing additional instructions. ‘Just swing by Sainsbury’s on the way back and pick up dishwasher tablets and some more milk. Oh, I forgot! Leo needs a gumshield for PE on Monday. They’re starting hockey. Can you go to that sports shop on the South Circular?’ Under her scrutiny, I got into the vehicle I’d been forbidden by law to operate, turned on the ignition and drove down Trinity Avenue to the junction at the Parade. Through muscle memory rather than conscious thought, I drove to the recycling centre and then I drove to Sainsbury’s and then I drove to the sports shop. I held my breath a few times but at no point did the sky fall in.