The Lib Dems have been thoroughly ineffectual in the coalition. So much so that some of us — including Hugo Rifkind in this magazine — have asked why they bother to turn up for work. I wonder whether the Lib Dems press on with the coalition because they can’t face admitting to its failure. They are no better than an unhappy housewife, clinging to a loveless marriage because she believes she is happier trapped in a wretched partnership than on her own.
If this is the case, then Nick Clegg would do well to read Elizabeth Jenkins’s 1954 novel The Tortoise and the Hare. Achingly sad, but ultimately uplifting, this elegant book captures every minute detail of a brutally failing marriage.
Naive young Imogen is married to Evelyn, a domineering bully of a barrister. He speaks to her with a ‘faint, unconscious note of contempt’ in his voice that makes her ‘long wildly not only to be dead, but never to have been born’. And yet, while Imogen feels a ‘half-formed dread’ about their problems, she shies away from confronting them: ‘She dreaded to make the fatal movement that would bring down the avalanche.’
I’m sure Nick Clegg would sympathise with her hesitation, but both avalanches and failing marriages must at some point come crashing down. When Imogen — after many sleepless nights lying tearfully alone in the moonlight — at last agrees to give Evelyn a divorce, it comes as something of a relief rather than a terrible blow. Phew, thinks the reader, at least she’s faced it, done something rather than nothing, and now she can move on.
So the novel ends with the marriage over, and while it is sad to see that it has failed, the cloud has rather a substantial silver lining.
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