Look What You Made Me Do – John Lanchester

At a maximum they might already be friends, or in adjacent rooms, or who knew what. But instead of arriving in Vera’s room like a welcome breeze from the wider world and sweeping her off her feet with a glimpse of glamour and fun and sexy Oxford, I was standing there dancing attendance while the bridge players shuffled and dealt. We made a plan to meet for coffee. She had no lectures, and in those days I didn’t bother with lectures anyway.

(People didn’t, on the whole, with the exception of unfortunates in the northern chemist subjects. The world was in many respects a more forgiving place. The winners’ enclosure was small, but once you were inside it, you were there for life. That’s what we felt.) The process of arranging to meet Sarah could hardly have been easier.

The tricky part was coming up with an excuse for why I was curious, but I got there via a general enquiry about the kind of person who went to the posh college, then a follow-up about some types I had overheard in the buttery, then zooming in on my specific target. I needn’t have been so careful. Vera was like Daphne: she had a general willingness to get involved, an all-purpose interest in other people’s business, and assumed no ill intent on my part other than a perfectly normal (to her) nosiness.

She knew exactly who Sarah was. As a happy side effect of the posh college only recently having taken female undergraduates, it had a women’s group, and both of them were regular attendees. Vera, again like Daphne, was the kind of person who becomes secretary of any club or society or group on the second meeting, and chair in short order thereafter.

She was more or less running the women’s group already and knew all the other women in college, and had both set the strategy – campaign for one issue at a time – and picked the issue – tampon machines in the girls’ loos. To match the condom machines in the boys’. A simpler time. Sarah was part of the campaign. My own college already had tampon machines. This, I told her, was relevant information for her campaign: ‘come and have a look at our loos and you’ll see’.

And that’s how I first got to meet Sarah, in the course of a walking tour looking at tampon machines. So what was she like? Short answer: first impressions were deceptive. But first impressions lasted for a while and it took some time to get beyond them, because front was important to Sarah. Destructively so. She liked to look put-together, composed, cool calm collected.

very successful marriage has its own private language. I was finishing my make-up in front of the bathroom mirror – the least flattering and therefore the most fit-for-purpose light in the house – when I heard my husband call up the stairs. ‘Want your body, disco doll,’ said Jack. This meant: please hurry up, we’re going to be late. It was a reference to an old New Yorker cartoon. Sad-looking businessman walks past a boom box thumpily blasting the line, ‘want your body, disco doll’.

He thinks to himself: ‘They’re singing songs of love, but not for me.’ ‘Two seconds,’ I called back. That meant: less than five minutes, but possibly not by much. A private language is only part of what a long marriage involves. A marriage has a body of mythology and folklore and anecdote and codes; is its own world, its own ecology, its own system of beliefs and values.

And perhaps more than that, its own closed universe of jokes and references, shorthand and nicknames. These are almost by definition things that are cruel, or mean spirited, or at the very least unfair and inappropriate. The things you wouldn’t say in front of anyone else. The people we were going to visit for dinner that evening, a married couple of architects we’ve known for more than thirty years, are known to us, for reasons lost in the mists of antiquity, as ‘the swingers’.

(They could not be less likely to be swingers.) My closest girlfriends, the book group who I’ve been meeting once a month for the last twenty years, would be aghast to know that Jack referred to them as ‘the hags’, ‘your fatties’ or ‘the enormous great big hairy lesbians’. The prisoners who I’ve been charity-visiting for almost as long are always referred to simply as ‘your axe murderers’. Our well-meaning but irrevocably nosy immediate neighbour, addicted to good works since her husband left her and not coincidentally also addicted to knowing other people’s business, was ‘the Poisoner’.

Jack’s notion, or pretend notion, was that her ex had ‘ended up under the patio’. So sometimes she was Madame Patio, or Mrs DIY, or Mrs B&Q, or Frau Crippen.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: fb0a3cbd3bf4d492
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,548,936 bytes (1.477 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 231
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 424.49 minutes
• Total Words: 84,898
• Total Characters: 453,762
• Average Words per Page: 367.52
• Average Characters per Page: 1964.34

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