When I married Tony Parsons in the late 1970s, he immediately took me to live in a town called Billericay in Essex — his ‘calf country’, I suppose, in a Spam sort of way. To say it was a one-horse town would be to insult horses, any one of which with reasonable social aspirations would have turned back to Brentwood the minute he realised that there wasn’t even so much as a teashop in the high street.
The reason Mr Parsons took me to live there, I can’t help but think, is that I was at the height of my pallid, livid beauty and he figured that before long I’d be off with someone a bit cuter, smarter — better in every way, basically. I do remember the time I looked at him and said, ‘Didn’t you used to be taller?’ — a sure sign that the rose-coloured spectacles handed out free with every romance had fallen off good and proper. Anyway, after four years of total devotion on my part the poor guy figured he could trust me and took me to London, to a book launch at the Turf Club. And you know what, it turned out that he’d been totally right about Sin City, because the first sexy man I spoke to, I ran off with. Moral: if you want to keep your wife, move to Billericay and stay there!
Anyway, this character I eloped with was Cosmo Landesman, and the very first words I spoke to him were, ‘Oh! You must be the son of that marriage!’
Even ten years on I could remember reading about the Landesmans and their Open Marriage in a sneakily purloined Cosmopolitan, and didn’t it make my prudish, provincial eyes grow big! Sex-obsessed, adolescent virgin that I was, even I felt that Open Marriage was somehow Absolutely Vile — if you don’t want to think of your parents having sex with each other, you certainly don’t want to think of them having sex with every Dom, Mick and Barry who wanders in off the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Teenagers didn’t say ‘Like, ewww, gross!’ in those days, but my thoughts were definitely along those lines.
Well, Cosmo and I got married and went to live with the in-laws, and I quickly learned that there was a lot more to them than That Marriage. (My new husband’s only half-humorous definition of open marriage was ‘Two slags, soon to be divorced’.) I grew to love, in my fashion, talented Fran and stylish Jay — Scott and Zelda crossed with Ma and Pa Kettle — and drove my poor spouse mad with Monkey-from-Portnoy’s-Complaint-type ravings about their Jewish ‘warmth’, outrageousness and artiness. He, poor fellow, having grown up with it, had had a gutful of outlandishness, and was conversely never happier than in my parents’ straightforward, working-class, West Country home, comatose in front of ITV with my mum fetching him another hunk of Black Forest G
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