Natural Improvement, Fast
My wife and I have been married for thirty-nine years. For about three of them, I had been slowly disappearing on her. And I had not had the courage to tell her so. I'm sixty-four years old. Margaret and I met at university in Durham, where she was studying law and I was finishing my degree in mechanical engineering, and we got married eighteen months later, which is something neither of us recommends to our children. It worked out for us. It mostly doesn't. The disappearing I'm talking about did not happen all at once. It almost never does. It happened the way these things happen – in small pieces over a long time, none of which I noticed individually, all of which I could see clearly when I finally turned around and looked at the three years behind me. I had been less present at the dinner table. Less interested in the small things Margaret wanted to tell me about her day. Less inclined to suggest the small Saturday-afternoon outings we used to take – the drive to the orchard, the antiques market in Skipton, the café by the reservoir. I had been falling asleep in my chair earlier in the evening. Quieter on long drives where we used to talk for hours. I had been, in ways I could feel but not put a name to, a smaller version of the man I had been for the first thirty-six years of our marriage. I had also been telling myself it was normal. I told myself it was age. I told myself it was the stress of the business I'd spent thirty years building, the weight of responsibilities I had taken on there that didn't go away when I got home in the evening. I told myself it was the sleep that wasn't as good as it used to be, and the shoulder that ached in the morning the way it didn't when I was forty-five, and the long, hard winter we'd had two years running. And I told myself, in the part of my mind I do not usually visit, that it was something else too. Something I did not want to look at directly. Something I had been carrying quietly for two or three ye
