Don’t Let Him In

I turn and smile at my wife. ‘I love you,’ I say.

‘I love you too,’ she replies.

Then I say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m speaking to George today.’

George is my fictional financial advisor.

‘He wants us to put a little more into our pensions. Just a thousand or two. He’s found a little wriggle room.’

Fictional pensions too. For the fictional future that we will be spending together.

‘Oh,’ says my wife. ‘That’s good. But I don’t really have the cash to hand right now. Not after paying for your knee surgery.’

I feel my jaw clench.

‘I really think we should do it, though. Darling.’ The word almost hurts to utter. ‘Think about our future. You don’t want to be doing this for ever. You work so hard. We both work so hard. We need something soft to fall back on to, and the sooner the better. Every penny we put into that pension now, the closer we get to what we both want.’ I hear her sigh and I know it’s a sigh of acquiescence and I feel my jaw unlock. The picture of the future I have painted for us is so exquisite that I almost wish it could be real. We will sell this house, this stupid house she bought when she left her stupid husband (nothing makes me happier than talking about how stupid her ex-husband is), and we will buy a house in the Algarve and she will paint and I will potter, and her children will come to stay and all of this, this dreadful day-after-day toil and drudgery, it will be over and we will be happy, for ever.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she says.

‘Thank you, darling,’ I say and this time the word doesn’t hurt because this time I mean it. She is my darling. My darling wife who would do anything for me. Absolutely anything.