I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [47]
22 Dec 1995 – Decided to stop keeping a diary now. I’m not an idiot.
Yes, it seems the French-smelling sex provider was Carol’s fitness instructor. Far from being French, he was actually from Luton. His only Frenchness was his cowardly duplicitousness and the kissing he did with my wife.119
I was waiting for Carol when she got back from the gym that evening. She breezed into the kitchen, as I sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine. I hadn’t drunk from or opened it – drinking during the day makes me nauseous – but I think the effect worked.
‘Been enjoying yourself? I said, but with loads of emphasis so it was clear that ‘enjoying’ might have a double meaning.
‘Mmm-hmm,’ she said, like she didn’t have a bloody clue.
‘Have a nice time at the “gym”?’ I said, making inverted commas around the word ‘gym’ with my fingers.
‘Yes,’ she said. Her knowledge of mimed punctuation was pitiful.
‘Have a good workout?’ I said, slotting my right forefinger in and out of a hole I’d made between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand.120
‘Yes,’ she said. Not a flicker. Who doesn’t understand the finger-sex-mime for goodness sake? I lost it, throwing my empty wine glass crashing to the floor but it landed on the carpet of the hall in one piece.
‘Careful,’ she said, suddenly irritated. ‘You nearly broke that.’
‘What, like you broke my heart?’
Silence. I was particularly pleased with this line because it’s the sort of thing I’d usually think of long, long afterwards and then admonish myself for not having come up with at the time.
‘I know, Carol. I know.’
But then she turned to face me and looked so sad that I started to cry on her behalf. And then on my behalf. And then I didn’t know whose behalf I was crying on because I was making a right mess. I had a cold at the same time so it was like a mucal tsunami.
She picked up the wine glass and handed it to me so I could have another go and this time I clattered it on to the lino where the stem snapped. Still not the smithereen effect I wanted but better than before. ‘Thanks,’ I said.
Then she led me to out to the garden and explained that she’d been having an affair with her gym instructor.
I asked all the obvious questions. Since when? Why him? How can you be attracted to a man who basically wears leotards? She told me all about him, including his name – which I’m not going to publish here in case, like Abba, it somehow entitles him to royalties.121
Eventually, after lots of crying (me), shouting (me), and sighing (both), we went back inside – we’d realised that the next-door neighbours were having pre-Xmas drinks and could hear everything. ‘Enjoying this are you?’ I shouted through the hedge. ‘You like a bit of grief with your mulled wine??’ I thought afterwards.
I explained to Carol that I’d forgive her. We’d try again in the morning, perhaps go and talk to Sue Cook about it, but she was shaking her head. I began frantically pitching shows at her – desperately outlining my portfolio of programme ideas in the hope of convincing her that we could be happy and rich. But she just kept shaking her head.
The doorbell went. Bill Oddie was standing there. I opened the door to him and was just saying, ‘This isn’t a good time, Bill’ when he saw Carol. He could see I’d been crying and was clearly doing the mental maths. No one spoke for a while and then Carol gathered up her things, brushed past us and headed back to the Micra. She turned the ignition and a blast of ‘The Winner Takes It All’ came through the speakers before she could switch it off. I began to cry and she looked at me through the windscreen and reversed, very proficiently, on to the road.
We watched her go until she’d disappeared round the corner. At which point, we stopped watching. I noticed Oddie was just standing there. ‘Not a good time, Bill.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ he said. ‘I just wanted my binoculars back.’
I want to be fair to Carol. Yes, she’s mind-blowingly selfish. Yes, she takes grumpiness to a staggering new level. Yes, she’s manifestly not as clever as me. But she does have