Let’s play it as a game. Two-player, ideally lovers. You could play with a friend, but for real spice – to truly scope out the game’s gnarly potential – it’s best with a partner or spouse, someone you have pledged to love and cherish for the rest of your days.
The set-up is simple. You’re in a boat in the middle of an ocean. You have no radio. Oh, and one of you can’t swim. That’s key. A whale collides with your boat and as it fills with water you salvage a few tins of food and containers of fresh water, a couple of books, some clothes, a small inflatable dinghy and an even smaller life raft. You climb into the raft and watch your boat sink below the waves. And then the game begins.
The challenges are initially practical: how do you eat? How do you find water? How do you sleep? Then they’re psychological: what do you do all day? How do you stay hopeful? How do you not go insane? For a couple, they are also political. Marriage is a political experience, wrote Phyllis Rose in her book about five Victorian marriages, Parallel Lives. There are questions of power to resolve: who’s in charge? Who makes the decisions? Who chooses what you eat or how much water you’re allowed to drink?
Towards the end, as in all good games, things turn nicely existential. Do you make it or do you die? How do you die? Who dies first?
We know this game, we know this story. It’s a budget reality show with a very small cast. But it’s also canonical, told and retold: Robinson Crusoe, Lord of the Flies, Life of Pi. The version I’ve written, Maurice and Maralyn, isn’t fictional, but tells the true story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, an English couple who, in 1973, endured nearly four months adrift on a small life raft in the Pacific before they were rescued. (I won’t say how – but let’s just say they first had to work through the deep hopelessness of seven ships passing them by without seeing them or stopping.) Somehow, they survived.
When I play this game in my head, I last – at best – a week. I die fast. When I play with my partner, he dies even faster. Day two, he figured he’d just slide over the edge when I wasn’t looking, a kind of backwards surrender-flop into the water. I hoped I’d keep going a little longer, make a blackly comical attempt at fishing and then, faced with the blank fact of the open ocean, succumb to total despair.
The dying part worries me, though. Not death, but dying; the process of dying. Oblivion would be welcome after a week alone on the ocean; I just don’t know how I’d get there. I’d be too scared to kill myself, so something would have to come along and do it for me. Starvation would take too long. I think I’d pray for a massive storm, your common-or-garden capsizing and a quick drowning. All in all, it’s a fiasco. We lose.
Surely most people lose. I tried to console myself that Maurice and Maralyn were exceptional. Or at least half of them were. Maurice – an awkward, particular, melancholic man with a talent for self-sabotage – took no credit for their survival. After their boat went down, he quickly started working out the most reliable way they could kill themselves. Gassing was an option, but he wasn’t sure their small canister had enough left in it to do the job. He imagined swimming away from the raft until they drowned. Maralyn couldn’t swim, so that would dispense with her quickly, but it might take him a while. Death was inevitable, in his view; the question was only what form it would take.
Maurice, however, had Maralyn. She worked out their rations. She turned a safety pin into a hook so they could fish. She figured out how to carve up a turtle and plucked out their eyeballs to eat. She invented card games and word games and made dominoes out of scraps of paper to keep their minds occupied. Somehow, through sheer force of will and a dogged belief in fate, she never stopped believing they would survive. They were meant to survive, she thought, so they would.
It was delusional, magical thinking and it drove Maurice – a rational pessimist – crazy. But afterwards he admitted what he knew to be true: he would never have lived without her. As he unravelled, Maralyn refused to give up. Beyond food and water, believing in survival was the key to survival itself and she supplied enough faith for them both.
Oh, optimists. They are so enviable. So lovable! Sometimes I pretend to be an optimist, just to see what it feels like. Short answer: it feels amazing. When I say the things optimists say – “It’s going to be fine!” – I can feel lights come on in parts of my brain that are used to the dank, windowless conditions of doubt. For as long as I can keep up the pretence, things really do seem more possible. I feel woozy-drunk on confidence. Life is a straight line on a graph going upwards! Put this stuff in my veins.
The problem is sustaining it. Soon enough, the light dims and the confidence leaks. At that point, true optimism, the kind that persists in the face of reason, seems like a sort of adorable insanity. It’s like believing in the supernatural: a story someone tells themselves in the face of all evidence to the contrary. The pessimist believes they have greater access to reality and, therefore, to the truth, and can’t help but see optimism as a kind of benign idiocy. (Misguided arrogance is only one of the many problems of being a pessimist.)
The point is: two pessimists adrift on a life raft and you’ve got a certain death situation. What is the virtue in reason and truth if it robs you of agency? Maurice was right. Without Maralyn, he would have made a reasonable estimate of their chances, decided they were minimal and let himself die. When I thought mournfully about my partner and me on the raft, a doomy double-pessimist cocktail, my only hope was that, over the years, we’ve become a little better at not losing hope in things at the same time. We take turns now. It’s very mature.
On pragmatism, though, we’re screwed. When a light bulb blew in our bathroom a while ago, we quietly carried on using the bathroom in darkness, not for a day or two, not for a week, but for at least a month, maybe two. At one point my partner borrowed one of our kids’ night lights, a white Chinese dumpling, which they’d been given as a birthday present. The battery only lasted a week or so, its glow gradually diminishing to a flicker. Then we returned, without discussion, to darkness, as if we had no say in the matter at all. A calamity had befallen us and we could do nothing but wistfully reminisce about the days when the bathroom was lit and we could see the basin. It wasn’t until we had a friend coming to stay that we acknowledged the scale of the practical task that lay before us, summoned our collective energy, purchased and then, with even greater effort, changed the light bulb. It is a bad light bulb, the wrong light bulb, way too bright, but you can understand why this light bulb will remain, ruining our evenings, until the end of time.
Not for the first time, going to the toilet in darkness, I wondered if two impractical people should be allowed to marry. There should be a law or at least a test. It could be like learning to drive: theory and practical. If a light bulb blew in your bathroom, would you have a stash of the right kind of light bulbs on hand in a cupboard? If the new light bulb was actively unpleasant, blindingly bright, would you change it? How long, on average, would it take you to change the offending light bulb? Anything over a day on both sides and the wedding is off!
I’m all for love, sure, but there’s a strong argument for getting together with someone who has skills you lack. Run the marriage like a goddamn business. Build your team. Hire thoughtfully. Do personality tests. If you can cook, find someone who cleans.
Marriage always used to be a calculation: at best an affectionate arrangement, at worst a miserable but financially sound enterprise. Marriage as a mutually beneficial agreement is truer to its roots than love, though the benefit was obviously tenuous for the generations of women for whom marriage was an economic necessity that deprived them of both their independence and their rights. It was that or a rubbish job as a governess. Even if they had their own money, marriage took it away, granting property rights to their husbands until 1882. Marriage ended stories, happily ever after, because it meant the woman was safe and disarmed, wrapped up like a parcel. Like the publisher says to Jo March in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women: “If the main character’s a girl, make sure she’s married by the end. Or dead.”
No doubt, we’re better off in a world where a woman does not lose all her power the moment she marries. But it’s funny, somehow, that we now embark on lifelong relationships with barely any practical consideration. Seriously, what do you know about a person in your 20s? Their grandiose career aspirations; how rarely they change their sheets; what their eyeballs look like after a night out. You know how to tend each other’s hangovers. And from that you’re supposed to raise children?
There is a naivety to it all which is almost charming. It’s like when you hear people spout wedding vows as wishful and unreliable as a political manifesto. Sure, you mean them when you say them, but who, when committing to loving someone in sickness and in health, is able to fully imagine the reality of that situation? I’ve seen people love each other through prolonged sickness, including my own parents, and I still don’t understand how they did it, or know how I would do it, or if I would do it well.
The only thing we know for sure, obviously, is how the game ends, and it’s not with salvation. Ending Maurice and Maralyn’s story with their rescue would be like ending a love story with a wedding. A sentimental misrepresentation: bullshit. No, the game can only end one way, which is death. I say that as lightly as possible. When I’m at a wedding, having a lovely time, I wonder if I’m the only person in the room thinking almost nonstop about death. I mean, the old vows raise the issue – till death us do part – so it’s not entirely my fault. But I guess most people don’t particularly want to dwell on the ending at the beginning.
Still, there’s no escaping it; the great narrative deception of partnership is the idea that you are together forever, when we know absolutely that you are not. It is the only thing we know. I don’t think that has to be a bleak thought, although it can lead you quite close to “the solving emptiness/That lies just under all we do”, as Larkin put it. You can avoid the emptiness, but sometimes I wonder if it’s better to stare at it, right in the eye. Acknowledge the emptiness and know that you have to keep doing anyway, that you have to live in the knowledge of death without it dictating the terms.
Don’t get me wrong: I have no idea how to do this. Hell, I’m the person thinking about death nonstop at a wedding. (Avoid me!) But I think that’s how Maralyn played the game. Maurice uncovered the emptiness, bathed in the stuff, almost let it smother him, while she kept going, kept doing. She didn’t feel she had a choice. In fact, she was grateful for the purpose he gave her. Later, an interviewer asked Maralyn how Maurice had helped her. “I think it was having someone else to think about, rather than think about myself all the time,” she replied.
It wasn’t just the doing; it was the thinking, too. She thought, and found meaning, beyond the limits of herself – which is, if you think about it, the ultimate cheat code. Death can’t touch you once you’re no longer supremely invested in yourself. She won.
Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst is published by Vintage at £18.99, or £16.14 at guardianbookshop.com
