After Cow Girl abruptly terminated our relationship, there was a long radio silence between us, during which time I was fairly demoralised. I’d thought I was lovable. If anyone could be bothered to look hard enough, or dig deep enough, I’d always thought, they’d find gold. But Cow Girl had struck no pay dirt, knew with an old sixty-niner’s instinct that it wasn’t worth looking any further, and she had got out with an almost indecent haste.
The characters in Sex and the City had a handy mathematical formula for calculating how long it takes to recover from a broken relationship. Work out how long the relationship lasted, they said, then halve it. I’d known Cow Girl for five weeks, and for one of those weeks I was in India. So according to the Sex and the City formula, it should have taken two and a half weeks for the dull ache of rejection to subside — which turned out to be about right. But even after my recovery and moral rearmament, I was still puzzled by that instant dismissal. We were getting married, for one thing. I’d given notice at the registry office, fifteen hundred quid’s worth of marital bed and mattress had our ticket on them at the warehouse, and two cases of Majestic’s finest to help us christen them had been delivered.
Then Cow Girl broke the radio silence with an email. It was brief and to the point. Had I cancelled her subscription to The Spectator? She hadn’t received the last two issues. And how was I keeping, anyway?
Nothing to do with me, I said. Maybe the snow was making things difficult for the distributors’ lorry drivers. As to how I was, I was now mainly confused, I said. Could she please explain what it was about me that had put her off me so rapidly? If I knew what it was, I said, maybe I could try and change in case someone else should come along.
‘People don’t change, Jeremy,’ was the short and chilling email response to that.
Cow Girl had criticised every aspect of me when we were together, even down to the design on my pants. I’d laughed it off at the time because her complaints were trivial ones, the product of a narrow mind. And a person with a narrow-ish mind was exactly what I was looking for, as mine had become too broad for its own good. So I was pleased. (I’m with my friend Mr Cameron. A little less tolerance and a little more blame would do us all good, I’m sure.) Also, I’d specifically asked Cow Girl not to hold back on the criticism. I’d been a long time alone before we met, and I probably needed plenty.
So I was again not displeased by the carping as I took it to be a sign of her goodness and conscientiousness.
But now it occurred to me that there might be a fundamental, untrivial flaw in my character that I ought to know about. Something frightful and undreamed of. Had my man-of-the-people posture turned me after all these years into an actual cretin? My anxious speculations ranged far and wide. Please, I begged. Please tell me what is wrong with me. It is important to me. Tell me that, I said, and let’s part friends.
Next day I received from Cow Girl via email about a foot and a half of dense type in a small font, the first sentence of which was: ‘It started when we first spoke.’ The accent. She hadn’t liked it. She’d decided there and then on the phone that she wouldn’t be meeting me. Then she decided she’d try a little more tolerance and a little less blame, just for once. ‘Then it happened the moment I met you. You smelt of BO.’ Even worse was to come. ‘Then when we got to the hotel room and I went into the bathroom the toilet was dirty and you’d left it like that.’
This was only the beginning. I read on with absorbed interest and growing elation. The dirty toilet aside, there was nothing here that Cow Girl hadn’t told me already. The way I dress, my lack of sophistication, my complacency — I’d heard it before. And it spoke well of her, I felt. To have endured this level of disgust right from the outset and yet agree to marry me bordered on heroism, and I replied to her indictment in a humble and contrite spirit, offering to defray any unnecessary expenses she might have incurred during the ordeal. She shot straight back with: ‘You can pay this month’s £190 phone bill, seeing as you’re offering.’ Radio silence has been resumed since then, only now there is a quality about it that feels somehow permanent.
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