We brought a divorced couple - separated for fourteen months, decree passed eleven months ago - into the same room with a tape recorder. They asked us to leave. We did. They sat for an hour and forty minutes on their own. The tape recorder ran. This is what we have. Edited for length and clarity, with both participants’ permission. Names changed. The companion piece on two mothers on shared custody traces the parallel ground of two parents finding a working rhythm; the piece on friends after separation is the social geometry the conversation below assumes.
The first ten minutes
A.: So they’ve gone.
B.: Good. I didn’t want to have this with anyone listening either.
A.: They’ll listen later.
B.: Yes, but it’s different.
(A long pause. Six and a half minutes of silence on the tape.)
A.: The flat looks different.
B.: I’ve moved some things. The big bookshelf.
A.: I noticed. It was always in the wrong place.
B.: You said.
A.: Not in a way that got the bookshelf moved.
B.: No.
The middle hour
A.: Did you read it? The piece they did on us?
B.: The one in March? Yes. It was kind. Kinder than the marriage was, by the end.
A.: That’s a sentence.
B.: It is the sentence.
A.: Are you angry still?
B.: No. I was. I’m not now. I’m more - what is the word - surprised. That this is the version of my life.
A.: Me too. I keep waiting to feel something I had prepared for. I prepared for relief. The relief came in week three and then it went. I prepared for grief. The grief came in month four and is still here, in small instalments, on Thursday afternoons.
B.: Thursdays were always your bad days.
A.: You noticed.
B.: I noticed a lot. I just wasn’t - I wasn’t good at the next sentence.
A.: Neither of us was.
(A pause. Eleven minutes on the tape. Sounds of the cup being put down, the kitchen tap running, a car horn from the street.)
A.: Are you seeing anyone?
B.: Not really. There’s a person. We have coffee sometimes. It’s a coffee. You?
A.: Two months. It’s - it’s the rehearsal, I think. The piece you read?
B.: Yes. I read that one too. Have they all been about us?
A.: No. Or - no, but the ones that are about us are the ones that are most about everyone, I think. That’s the trick of it.
The last twenty minutes
B.: I have a question.
A.: Go.
B.: Would you have done it differently? Knowing what you know now.
(A long pause. Two minutes on the tape.)
A.: Some of the small things. Some of the big things. The bookshelf, probably, in a metaphorical sense. The conversation in March of 2024 specifically - I would have done that differently. The decision itself, no. I don’t think so. You?
B.: The big things, no. I’m at peace with the big things, mostly. The small things - yes. The way I told my parents. That’s the one I would re-do.
A.: They were difficult.
B.: They were not. They were as good as they could be, in the end. I was difficult.
A.: Both, probably.
B.: Both, probably.
(Pause. Sound of footsteps in the corridor outside the room. The mediator coming back to say the studio is needed in twenty minutes.)
A.: Are we friends now?
B.: I don’t know. I think we’re - I think we’re recognisable to each other again. Which is more than I had for a while. Which is what I would have asked for, in week one, and which I have, in month fourteen.
A.: Yes.
B.: Yes.
(The tape continues for another four minutes. Practical things - the keys, an old painting, the gas connection. We have chosen not to transcribe these.)
A year after the decree, the marriage is not what it was and the partners are not what they were. Recognisable to each other again is the most either can ask for, and is more than most receive.