The Honeymoon We Took on Tuesday

On Tuesday, after twenty-one years of marriage, my husband asked what I wanted to do on our honeymoon. I told him I wanted to stop being sensible for six days. He said he would need a clearer itinerary.

We were standing in our hallway with two packed cases. An email had arrived twenty minutes earlier explaining that the cottage we rented was unavailable after a burst pipe. They were sorry. They would refund us. They suggested some dates in February.

It was June. Our son was staying with his cousin. My work cover had been arranged through a negotiation longer than most peace treaties. Len had finally accepted that the shed roof could survive another week without his supervision.

February did not interest me.

Our first honeymoon was cancelled because our son arrived early. Nobody was to blame. We brought him home, learned how little sleep a person could survive and kept the travel brochure in a drawer until the colours faded. After that there was always a better use for the money.

Now the money was set aside, the time was ours and I had bought a green dress that made me feel like somebody who might order a second pudding without checking the price.

Len sat on a suitcase.

“We could look for somewhere else.”

We did. Several places were too far away for the short trip. Several cost more than we could comfortably spend. One had availability because its own bathroom was being repaired, which did not feel like an improvement.

By noon he suggested we unpack and go out for a nice dinner.

“That’s it?”

“Not it. Just today.”

“Today becomes tomorrow. Then we’ll paint the kitchen because we’re home anyway.”

He looked offended, mostly because I had correctly identified what he was thinking.

“I wasn’t going to say kitchen.”

“Which room?”

He hesitated. We both began laughing, though I wasn’t ready to stop being upset.

We had become very good at using time. We filled it with things that needed doing, then wondered why the days had no edges we could remember. The trip mattered because it would interrupt that. Without it, I feared we would slide neatly back into our roles: useful, tired, affectionate when neither had something in their hands.

Len went upstairs. I heard a drawer open and close. When he returned, he carried the old honeymoon brochure.

“I found this when we cleared the study.”

The cover showed a blue bay, a white building and two people whose entire job appeared to be leaning on a balcony. Inside, someone had circled a photograph of a café overlooking the sea. I recognised my own handwriting beside it: Breakfast whenever we wake up.

“We can still do that,” Len said.

“We don’t overlook the sea.”

“No. But I don’t have to make toast at seven like the house will report us.”

He put the brochure on the table. Then he asked what the cottage had really promised us. Privacy, I said. No interruptions. Different things to look at. The freedom to decide something for reasons other than efficiency.

He wrote them down on the back of an envelope. I nearly objected to the list, then saw he wasn’t converting the holiday into chores. He was trying to understand what he had offered to replace with dinner.

We made three rules. No work unless there was a genuine emergency. No household projects. Each day, one of us would choose something the other had never done. We could say no, but we would have to suggest something else.

“A honeymoon in our own town,” I said.

“We already know the best person to share a room with.”

I kissed him. Then we moved the suitcases into the bedroom instead of unpacking them. It was a small, ridiculous act. I wanted evidence that we were still going somewhere.

That afternoon Len booked a table-tennis session at the leisure centre. I had not held a bat since a school outing. He apparently played every winter with people from work and had failed to mention that he was good at it.

“Twenty-one years,” I said, watching his first serve bounce neatly beyond my reach. “What else have you concealed?”

“My relationship with the vacuum attachments is complicated.”

I was terrible. Not charmingly terrible. The ball repeatedly behaved as though it had received instructions from someone else. Len showed me one adjustment, then wisely stopped advising. By the end I could sustain a short rally and had laughed so much my face hurt.

We ate in a place with paper napkins and sticky tables. It bore no resemblance to the café in the brochure. I ordered pudding anyway.

On Wednesday I chose a drawing workshop. Len looked at the announcement, then at me.

“You know I can’t draw.”

“Neither can I. It says beginners.”

We sat beside one another while an instructor asked us to sketch a jug. My jug leaned. Len’s appeared to be melting. He grew quiet, concentrating so hard that I recognised the boy in an old school photograph, trying not to disappoint someone with a clipboard.

At the break he said he wanted to leave.

I nearly persuaded him to stay. The whole holiday was my idea, after all. Then I remembered the rule allowed a no.

“All right. What instead?”

He looked surprised. “There’s a model railway exhibition two streets away.”

I had absolutely no interest in model railways. I went anyway, curious about a man who knew its opening hours.

Inside, he became a different kind of quiet. He noticed tiny doors, carefully painted figures, the way a station roof lifted off for maintenance. He told me his grandfather built a railway on a board in the spare room. Len helped paint the scenery until his grandfather died.

I knew about the death. I did not know about the board, the trees made from twisted wire, the afternoon he spilled green paint on his best trousers and his grandfather turned the stain into a story about a marsh.

We stayed ninety minutes. I found myself asking questions because I wanted the answers.

On Thursday the real world made several attempts to enter. My manager sent a message about a missing document. Len’s sister asked whether we could collect a parcel. A neighbour knocked to discuss a shared fence panel.

None was an emergency. Saying so did not require us to be unkind. The document could be found by someone at work. The parcel could wait. The fence had been leaning for months and seemed willing to continue.

We turned off our phones for the afternoon and took a bus to the end of a route neither of us used. There was a small reservoir, a footpath and a café that closed just before we arrived. We ate the biscuits I found in my bag and sat watching wind move across the water.

“This might be the bit I wanted,” I said.

Len looked relieved. “I was worried it needed a balcony.”

We talked about the years after our son was born. Not a list of grievances, though there were things we could have listed. I told him I missed being invited into his plans before they became decisions. He said he sometimes felt every plan had to justify itself with a useful outcome.

“The trains weren’t useful,” I said.

“I know. I enjoyed them very much.”

There was something tender in his surprise.

On Friday we stayed home until noon. Breakfast happened when we woke up. I wore the green dress to a matinee at the little cinema, then to a market where Len bought cherries in a paper bag. Rain began while we were eating them under a shop awning.

He wiped a drop from my cheek. I looked at him and felt the sudden, almost alarming attraction that sometimes returns when a familiar person stops being part of the furniture of your day.

“What?” he asked.

“You look very nice.”

He glanced at his shirt, suspicious of a joke. I shook my head. He smiled in a way I had not seen often enough lately.

We went home early, leaving the rest of the afternoon unplanned.

Saturday was the day we quarrelled. I suggested spending part of the refunded money on a short trip later in the year. Len mentioned the shed roof. I heard him choosing the shed over me, which was not what he said and was still what I felt.

He said money did not become imaginary because it had once been holiday money. I said romance did not become unnecessary because we had a mortgage. Both excellent speeches, badly aimed.

We spent an hour in separate rooms. Then he came to the bedroom with two cups of tea and the envelope containing our list.

“I don’t want us to go back to waiting twenty years,” he said. “I also don’t want the roof to fall in.”

“Reasonable. Annoyingly.”

We looked at actual figures rather than arguing with symbolic sheds. There was enough to arrange a modest trip later, not the exact one we lost. We would choose it together after the holiday. For now, we had one day left and had spent too much of it deciding who cared more.

Before we left, Len opened the cupboard where he kept paint samples and put the little book of kitchen colours at the back. I watched him, prepared to be annoyed by any ceremonial suggestion that I had forbidden useful work. Instead he took out an old packet of photographs we had meant to sort for years.

“Not a project,” he said. “I wanted to see this one.”

It showed us outside our first rented flat, holding a key neither of us had yet lost. We looked frightened and delighted. We spent ten minutes remembering the terrible carpet, then left the packet open on the table and went out. Nothing needed finishing before the evening could begin.

We went out for dinner. I wore the dress again. Len asked the waiter to take our photograph, a request he usually avoided because he disliked looking posed. In the picture we are both laughing at something the waiter said. My hair is untidy. Len has missed a button near his collar.

It is my favourite photograph of us.

On Sunday we collected our son. He asked if the honeymoon had been good. We told him about the table tennis, the melting jug and the model railway. He listened with the wary interest of a person discovering his parents had been unsupervised.

“Did you actually go anywhere?” he asked.

“Several places,” Len said.

At home we unpacked. The house needed cleaning. Work waited. The roof remained a roof, with all the duties that implied. Nothing had become a film in which people never checked a bank balance.

But Len put the railway exhibition leaflet beside the calendar. I put our photograph in a frame. We marked a Saturday for a day out before either of us could donate it to something useful.

Later, washing dishes, he asked whether I regretted the lost cottage.

“Yes,” I said. “I wanted the sea.”

He nodded. I dried a plate and leaned against him.

“I liked finding you here, though.”

He kissed my forehead, then handed me another plate. We finished together and left the kitchen before thinking of anything else to improve.