You think you’ll never love again. You just want her to stop being a nagging shrew, and you want to stop being the interminable old bore who makes inappropriate gags and tells pointless long-winded stories about your blessed business, stories that she needs to cut across in company with her own truncated versions, so she can get on and serve the pudding. You show more regard for the dog than you do for her; and now so does she.

And all the time, in those moments when you remember your romantic youth, and the blush of the first and only real love you ever had, whom you miss even though she is lying thin-lipped and silent, just a foot away from you in your bed, all you want to say is, For God’s Sake Please Stop This And Let Us Love.

Shona Khan Discovers Photos

from the Past

SHONA WAS IN her early forties when, much like her father before her, she found herself having something of a mid-life crisis. She looked around at her comfortable three-bedroom house in the gentrified Heaver Estate, at her pretty garden with rosemary and sweet-scented pink rose bushes planted at the end, at her days spent teaching in a convivial, middle-class school. She looked at her own middle-class, middle-of-the-road life that was punctuated by stilted, suburban dinner parties in which she attempted to make up for her mediocre cooking with expensive raw ingredients and lavish puddings; that was made bearable by her occasional art courses, her newly acquired Labrador puppy, and … what else, exactly? Her children had left home, and it was just her and Parvez again; only this time they had all the material comforts that they had done without before. They should have been happy - they had it all: time, space and companionship. And yet Shona felt bereft, perhaps unreasonably bereft. She felt that she had somehow grown into the wrong person, and was living the wrong life, and had only just begun to notice it.

It was a sad truth that as the children grew up, Shona and Parvez began to grow apart, as though the very fact of their growing was driving a wedge between the couple who had been such hopeless, dreaming romantics. They had been united in the struggle against their disapproving families, united in their struggle against their new-found poverty in the UK, united in their struggle to have the children they so desperately wanted and united in their front towards their children, to bring them up the best way they knew. But the more their children grew, the less they needed them, until eventually they had nothing against which to unite.