Low life
Test match
Jeffrey Bernard
As I write these lines the sun is smiling down on St Paul's Cathedral. It will all be over in three hours' time. The Kentish Town polo team will celebrate with the odd chukka or two — we've never been able to find out just how many constitute a game — and then we'll all steam in to the pub to take advantage of the extension. But I feel sad. Positively nostalgic. Four times I've been to the altar or registrar I should say and I've seen action at Islington registry office, Hampstead, Sudbury in Suffolk and lastly in Marylebone. This man Charles is an absolute beginner. When I remarked to Tom Baker yesterday, during one of his fleeting visits to London from Chichester in search of a gin and tonic, that they should make it more difficult for people to get married he said, 'Yes, for people like you who mess it up.' Well, I suppose he's got a point. Nevertheless, since marriage is such an extremely dangerous business, occasionally lethal, it occurs to me that there should be a test for it as there is for driving vehicles. Quite frankly I can't see either the future King Charles III or Lady Diana passing it.
Putting myself in the position of the examiner I hear myself saying, 'Now I'd like you to imagine it's midnight and I want to see you stagger through that door and come up with a really good excuse as to why you're so late.' His highness then executes a very bad imitation of a stagger since he's never actually staggered and says, 'Hallo darling, frightfully sorry, been opening a horticultural show and then had to have dinner with the Lord Mayor of London.' I then ripost, Tut why didn't you phone me darling?' (Go on, get out of that one you bastard.) Having failed that lot quite abys mally we move on to the reliability and sense of responsibility test. 'Right, your highness. Now I'd like you to sit down at that table and open six buff-coloured envelopes without flinching and then write out six cheques without blanching and then go and post them without stopping at the Coach and Horses.' That one he manages pretty well. Where Lady Diana falls down though is in the face-pulling tests. She fails when I ask her to show thinly disguised contempt and her voice has far too much nervous vibrato when I ask her to repeat after me, 'You make me sick. Sick, do you hear?'
Mind you, I don't expect Charles to have got an advanced driver's licence like Henry VIII got, a man who took on a Spaniard at his first attempt and then followed up with something of a slut, because there can't be a drop of that blood left in his veins, but! did expect him to think up something a little better in the 'going out for a quick one' test than 'Just popping out for some cigarettes, darling.' He doesn't smoke and must learn to concentrate more. Lack of experience also caused him to fail the domestic tests. He dried two plates before washing them up and has obviously never watched Coronation Street, a programme he seemed to think was about the Strand.
Never mind. They both sailed through the 'kiss and make up' tests. He gave her India and she fixed him up with an arm chair ride on Red Rum. (In my heyday I once gave a wife a week on the wagon and eschewed a visit to Sandown Park for the Eclipse Stakes.) I was slightly shocked over Charles's reluctance to have a joint bank account with Lady Diana although she seemed quite amenable to the idea and I told him to strive toward extravagance since life, as Francis Bacon keeps telling me, is but a short interval twixt birth and death.
They both do pretty well in the end of marriage tests. He says he has to divorce her and marry an Arab lady to prevent a further rise in oil prices and she simply says sorry darling, I've fallen in love with an American man called Mr Simpson. In the end I wasn't best pleased but I passed them and I think this is one marriage that could last even up to the next Australian tour of England and the final recall of Mike Brearley. Meanwhile, when I'm not examining would-be couples. I'm trying to get my fifth wife sorted out. Ideally I'd like to re-marry my last wife. Unfortunately I make her sick. The fact that I also make myself sick is by the by. My other two existing wives are happily remarried so I suppose it's going to have to be a question of pastures new and if, like Henry V, I asked you to show me the mettle of your pastures! doubt very much if any Spectator reader could come up with anything remotely nourishing. It's all very depressing. While Charles and his lady wallow on the royal yacht my search for the next victim will continue, as doomed as Scott's search for the South Pole. And Captain Oates's last words? 'You make me sick. Sick, d'you hear?'
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