How to Be Good
Chapter One
I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don't want
to be married to him anymore. David isn't even in the car park
with me. He's at home, looking after the kids, and I have only
called him to remind him that he should write a note for
Molly's class teacher. The other bit just sort of . . . slips out.
This is a mistake, obviously. Even though I am, apparently,
and to my immense surprise, the kind of person who tells her
husband that she doesn't want to be married to him anymore,
I really didn't think that I was the kind of person to say so in a
car park, on a mobile phone. That particular self-assessment
will now have to be revised, clearly. I can describe myself as the
kind of person who doesn't forget names, for example, because
I have remembered names thousands of times and forgotten
them only once or twice. But for the majority of people,
marriage-ending conversations happen only once, if at all. If
you choose to conduct yours on a mobile phone, in a Leeds car
park, then you cannot really claim that it is unrepresentative,
in the same way that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't really ... read full excerpt from How To Be Good: A Novel ebook
