All the lives you could lead

What's in your attic?

Our wedding was not like this

On Christmas Day, my husband gave me a book. It had a bright blue cover. It had a snappy title. The book my husband gave me was called The Husbands. “Great title!” I said politely and then I put it on a pile of books near the fireplace and didn’t pick it up again.

I am not keen on the word “husband”. As a verb, it sounds rather pinched. Who wants to “husband” their resources? Which means to ration them, apparently, or eek them out? The Oxford English Dictionary also suggests “conserve”, “preserve”, “reserve”, “stockpile”, “save for a rainy day” and “hoard”. It doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs.

The noun isn’t much better. “Spouse” is the first option offered by the OED. It makes me think, for no reason I can explain, of some kind of inedible root vegetable. “Partner” sounds like diversity training at Camden Council. “Consort” is velvet breeches, clicking to attention and a silk hanky. “Mate” is biology lessons at school and a builder gulping down a mug of PG Tips. “Man”, among the OED options, is probably the best. Short, sharp, but embarrassingly primal. Here he is, in his leopard skin, clutching a mammoth’s jaw. But you can’t really go round saying “hello, this is my man”. Unless, perhaps, you’re Dolly Parton.

For decades I thought a husband was a thing other people acquired, like air fryers or complicated juicers. It wasn’t that I didn’t want one. I just couldn’t quite work out where you got them.

As a teenager, after discovering the novels of Mary Stewart (romantic thrillers, I think you would call them), I dreamt of electric encounters on Greek islands followed by honeymoons in Paris or Rome. After reading Pride and Prejudice, I dreamt of barbed exchanges leading to swooning adoration. On his side, obviously. I would remain enigmatic as he struggled to control the passion that seized him in the face of my searing intelligence and dazzling beauty.

I probably don’t need to tell you that the reality proved a bit different.

I have written in my book The Art of Not Falling Apart about my decades of dating. Let’s just say they were eventful, but fraught. And in my second book, Outside, the Sky is Blue, I talk about the events that led to my pandemic wedding and the metamorphosis of my “lovely bloke” into a husband.

So yes, at 57 I joined the huddled masses who have this thing called “a husband” and every time I use the word it sounds absolutely ridiculous.

(Just imagine saying “my hubby”! It’s the kind of thing someone in The Archers would say, someone who looks like a cottage loaf and spies on her neighbours through her net curtains.)

Anyway, last weekend I was attempting a bit of light dusting around the fireplace (quite a rare event in our household) and I picked up The Husbands. I read the first page. I read the second page. I read the third page. Since then, and until I read the last, glorious page yesterday, I’ve struggled, when I’ve picked it up, to put it down.

The premise is simple, but ingenious. Lauren, who lives, or thinks she lives, alone in a flat in South London and works at Croydon Council, gets back from a drunken night out with a friend to find a strange man at the top her stairs. He offers to make her some tea. He knows her name. He’s wearing a wedding ring. She picks up her phone to call the police, but on its locked screen she sees a photo of herself with the man on a beach. The next day, as she grapples with her hangover, the surreal truth dawns. She’s married to this man. She’s stuck with a husband she doesn’t remember ever having met.

On her phone, she finds loving text messages from the man, who she discovers is called Michael. From her email, she finds out his surname. She googles him and discovers he’s an architect. “What a perfect job for a husband,” she muses. “Ambitious yet concrete, glamorous yet without an industry-wide drug problem. No wonder he’s filled in the dent in the kitchen wall and planted a vegetable garden.”

I read this out to my hubby, I mean my husband. Who is, you’ve guessed it, an architect, and very good indeed with practical things. Who do you think does most of the shopping, cooking and odd jobs around our house? Tiny clue: it’s not me.

But the perfect Michael doesn’t stick around. He nips up to the attic to change a bulb and the man who comes down the ladder is “gratuitously handsome” with sharp cheekbones and "immaculate eyebrows”. Confused by Michael’s sudden disappearance, Lauren asks him to check the attic and another man emerges, this time with a Welsh accent and wearing blue furry slippers with purple spots and black claws.

And so it goes on. In the course of the novel, Lauren meets more than 200 husbands. Some are despatched back to the attic pretty swiftly. Some go straight back up. And some she spends days, or even weeks, with. With each husband, she has a different history, a different wedding and a different life.

It's exhausting trying to piece together the details of her current life. Sometimes she’s so tired she finds herself phoning in sick. With one husband, she finds herself in a job she has no idea how to do. With another, she discovers she’s filthy rich and doesn’t need to work. She has a coffee machine she doesn’t know how to work, security cameras everywhere and a swimming pool. With another, she finds herself married to an am-dram enthusiast in a doublet and hose who’s also a swinger. Worst of all, he appears to be swinging with her downstairs neighbours.

Almost 200 husbands in, she finds herself married to Michael again. The flat is immaculate. She goes to the gym every day. They eat healthy meals, full of the knobbly vegetables from the organic veg box that she spends hours peeling and chopping. “The maintenance required to keep up this elegant and energetic life” is, she discovers, “a lot”. This, she thinks, “is the life she would design if she was drunk and trying to think through the best possible version of who she could be”. It’s “stuff she’s sure she’s written on intentional lists in the past, and now she’s doing it”. But is it really the life she wants?

It’s a wildly original idea for a novel and it’s also hilarious. Its author, Holly Damazio, is a game designer who founded an experimental games festival called Now Play This. The Husbands is certainly playful. I don’t remember the last time I laughed so much at a book. I rushed to it, for a daily dose of dopamine. It was like a glug of champagne or a negroni. For all kinds of reasons, I’ve had a horrible week, which has included being scammed. (All I’ll say on that is if you’re trying to book a trip on Booking.com, be very careful indeed.) The Husbands reminded me what pure fun it is to be taken on an adventure that’s like a game of drunken roulette. Who knows where you might end up? Or at least where the character might end up. I have, metaphorically speaking, had quite enough games of drunken roulette in my own life. I am more than happy at this point to be a spectator of other people’s.

The Husbands is not just a funny and clever book. It captures that sense of all the different lives we could lead. It also captures the sense of dating, and so much else, as a giant warehouse of consumer choice, where everyone is always ripping off the cardboard, inspecting the product and then moving on in search of something better. But the “better” you think you find is never quite good enough.

My own husband (hubby, spouse, partner, consort, mate, man) is a sweetie. He took a very long time to pop up in my life and I count myself extremely lucky. That is, of course, when I’m not enumerating his failings and listing them back to him at great length. Once a critic, always a critic. I’m lucky that Anthony is not a critic. He believes in building, not knocking down.

My hubby and me at our minuscule pandemic wedding (with just two guests)

At the end of The Husbands, Lauren asks her current husband whether he’d prefer to be with her, in a sub-optimal situation I won’t give away, or not in that situation, having never met her. He asks if he can have a life where he’s with her, but without the mess. “I know it doesn’t sound fair,” she says, “but you actually can’t.”

“I guess I’ll take this one, then,” he says. And her reply spoke to me and speaks to us all. “That’s lucky,” she says. “Because this is the one we’ve got.”

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Do you have any recommendations for books, films or plays that have really made you laugh? I feel we all need more laughter in our lives at the moment. I certainly do.

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