People often wondered what exactly it was that triggered the break-up of Benedick and Georgina Hunter's marriage. They had been the first in their group of friends to walk up the aisle together, and had at first seemed very happy. Indeed, before Georgina's weekly column about her domestic life in the Chronicle, describing Benedick's hypochondria, laziness and general irrationality, they seemed like the last couple people expected to split up. Of course, once Georgina started an affair with her publisher it was only a matter of time before divorce became inevitable. But the last straw came, quite literally as a result of being in Georgina's parents' guest bed.

"I don't see why I should put up with this," said Benedick angrily as he drove along the motorway. "Just because your mother occasionally rouses herself from her gin-sodden torpor to play a game of Snap with Cosmo.- "
There was a rumble of thunder from the direction in which they were driving. A lurid light turned the fields of barley and wheat to metal.
Georgie said in a high voice,
"This is a male moan, I can tell, it's a male moan, the next thing you'll be going on about is your missing socks -"
"I will not sleep in that bed again," said Benedick. "Or rather, I would if I could, but I can't. You know that going to your parents for the week-end is torture for both of us."
"Not everyone shares your obsession with sleep," said his wife.
"Oh, don't they? They should try having to get up at least once a night for five years to put a child back to bed, then."

Benedick had always been careful about the beds he slept on. He carried a special Swiss Army penknife in his pocket at all times. This was used to take doors off their hinges and put them beneath any sagging mattresses should he find himself on tour and in digs. Unfortunately, this was out of the question at his wife's parent's house. Caroline refused to allow any of her own screws to come loose. That, she said pointedly, was her son-in-law's problem, not hers.

"I think it's a very pretty bed," said Georgina. "It's antique."
"Antique!" said Benedick. "It probably belonged to Procrustes."
"What is Pro Crustes?" asked Cosmo, from the back.
"A dear old friend of grandma's," said his father. "He would stretch his guests on his bed if they were too short, and cut their feet off if they were too long."
"Slow down, Dick, you're going too fast."
"I'm not going too fast. If I had my way, we'd never get there at all. Look, I'm prepared to endure your mother's bloody joints of roast beef -"
"Don't swear in front of the children."
"I wasn't, I was being factually accurate. Her beef is always swimming in gore - 'perfectly a point'" he said, maliciously imitating Caroline's fluting voice. "I should think she's given us all raging BSE -"
"Well, you've made your bed and you must lie in it," said his wife, half-laughing.
"It isn't my bed, that's the point," he shouted.
The baby woke up and began to howl. Something soft and wet hit the back of Hunter's head and trickled down the back of his neck.
"Yuck!" said Cosmo. "Flora's done a sick."

They arrived. The house seemed to raise immaculate eyebrows at their appearance. One of the things Benedick hated about it was the way it looked so much like his mother-in-law, right down to her trim grey-blonde thatch of hair. Whenever he went up to its front door he felt like the man in the Thurber cartoon trying to escape the grasp of a woman as big as a house.

If only we could go away to a hotel together, he thought. A hotel with a big, comfortable bed, and clean, crisp white sheets. This was now his idea of bliss: not doing anything in the bed, just lying in it. He drove Georgie mad, he knew, by being unemployed and around al the time. Hence her insistence on going home to her parents at least once a month. If only we could get some real rest.

"Welcome darlings!" said Caroline. "Goodness how you've grown. Come and give your granny a big kiss."
"Don't want to," said Cosmo. "You have bristles on your chin."
There was an awkward silence.
"What, what?" said Henry, Benedick's father-in-law. He was deaf in one ear. "What did you say old chap?"
"You're in your usual room," said Caroline, interrupting her grandson's careful repetition of his words.
"I was afraid of that," muttered Benedick.
Slowly, he decanted the paraphernalia of infancy and dragged it upstairs. There, he surveyed the guestroom bed with hatred.

Once, a very long time ago, this four-foot wide mattress had represented the height of luxury. He was used to sleeping with Georgie on a succession of single beds, often no more than mattresses, in crummy digs and borrowed rooms. Invited to her home, he had been astonished and delighted to find that his girlfriend's parents were sufficiently liberal to allow him to sleep with her under their roof. In those days, waking in a tangle of limbs had seemed pleasantly erotic. Then they had had children.

Now, when they brushed against each other at night, they shrank back as if scalded. The very things that had made them mad about each other now drove them insane with fury. At several points in the night there was always a furious tussle, each of them lashing out in uncontrollable hate at the other's shins, or clinging to the edge of the mattress as the lucky sleeper pushed them inexorably towards the floor. Then one or other of the children would wake up, and he would sleepwalk them back to bed. It was always Hunter who did this, because Georgie was the breadwinner.

"Bitch, bitch, bloody bitch," he muttered, after yet another terrible night. It all looked so inviting, with its wooden headboard, fresh flowers and antique furnishings, but the reality was that no couple of normal size could possible sleep well on a queen-sized, 4ft 6 inch bed. The underlying message of every English guestroom was that you were there on sufferance, for a single night only, and should not on any account make yourself comfortable. He had actually started to wonder whether Caroline's bright enquiries about how he'd slept the next morning were inspired by sadism.

Nothing was more important to them than sleep - nothing. They were each poisoned by fatigue, sick with it, prematurely aged by it, maddened by it. Yet his wife refused to confront her parents. Even after another terrible night - a night that left muscles he hadn't even known existed aching and writhing with pain - Georgie was adamant.
"I can't tell them they should change their bed - I just can't," she said. "Don't you see that?"
"Meaning that if you're going to choose between your mother or myself, you'll side with her."
"It isn't that. Oh, all right, it is a bit. But I can't complain."
"OK," he said, his heart sinking, "I'll do it."

He approached the subject, he felt, with a maximum of tact. After solicitous enquiries after her own health, he told Caroline all about the agonising back problems he had experienced since his performance as Mercutio at Stratford.
"I've got just the man for you," she said briskly. He could see that, just like Georgie, she thought him a hypochondriac. People always believed the worst about actors.
"My osteopath has worked wonders on poor Henry's shoulder. Let me give you his number right away."
"Oh - I've tried that," he said hastily. Didn't this stupid woman realise, they couldn't possibly afford an osteopath? What did she think unemployed actors lived on? "Actually, it's Georgie I'm more concerned about. Her back hasn't been right either, since she had the kids. Particularly when she lies down. We've both become, well - rather sensitive to what we sleep on."
"Like the Princess and the Pea?" said Caroline with a robust laugh. "Dear me, I had no idea your lineage was so distinguished."
Benedick ground his teeth. Caroline had had four children herself, surely she could remember how shattering the whole experience was? She and Henry, he had long noticed, slept on a bed so enormous that sheets could only be ordered for it from Harrods. Why did this amnesia strike everyone as soon as they were through the worst? Why didn't they say to themselves, I will never forget this torture, never, never, not if I live to be a hundred?
"The thing is," he said, "what I really mean to say is - we are finding the bed here rather difficult to sleep on. The mattress is - er - " He swallowed. This was harder than he had imagined. "It sags. I don't suppose there's any chance of a bigger one? A new bed? You are supposed to change them every ten years, you know."
Caroline had fixed him with what she called her "Paddington Bear stare", then said,
"Nonsense. We had that bed ourselves when we were first married. I wouldn't dream of getting rid of it. It's a lovely, friendly sort of bed. Couples just roll together in it."
"They can't have been married, then," said Benedick. "Married people only want to roll away from each other."
His mother-in-law said huffily, "A lot of babies have been conceived in that bed, you know."
"Quite," said Benedick. "But the missionary position should be a matter of choice rather than self-preservation."

Caroline's fury for the rest of the day had been palpable. He thought of the story of Theseus and Procrustes. What he wouldn't give to force her to spend the night on her vile guest bed with Henry! Then he could book his own family into a nearby hotel - one of the luxury kinds that would make a severe dent in his credit card, but what the hell - and actually enjoy a single week-end in the country for a change.

The air was darkening, and he could smell rain coming. He went to the window and peered out from under its overhanging eves. Close to, the thatch was almost the same colour as the sky. Georgina's voice floated up.
"Cosmo! Come in darling, it's going to rain."
He stared at the neatly trimmed reeds, and the cloudy rage and misery eddying through his mind tossed up an idea in a flash. He could force Caroline and Henry to sleep in their own guest bed if he rendered their unusable. They deserved to know what it was like.

There was a rectangular shape in the guestroom ceiling, leading to the attic beneath the thatch. Benedick pulled open the trap door, and hauled himself up and in. The attic was stiflingly hot, and crammed with old trunks and black plastic bags. He stepped from rafter to rafter, half-buried in filthy orange loft insulation. Finally, he came to the second trap door that opened onto the roof. This he unbolted. At last he was outside.

It was easy enough to identify his parents-in-law's bedroom, and luckily their bed was just in front of a chimneybreast, so he could straddle the pitch. The thatch pricked his legs where they had been trimmed into a fancy shape at the apex, but he ignored it. The sky was darkening like a great bruise. He selected the strongest blade on his penknife, then sawed furiously at the chicken wire that kept the thatch tied in. There were layers and layers of the stuff, overlapping each other like scales or feathers.
For a moment, he understood what he was doing and was ashamed. Then Caroline's voice floated up through the heavy air.
"Lunch-time!"
A few drops of rain fell on his head.
A truss of thatch came free and slithered off the roof. He began to pound at the rest with his knife. More rain fell. A hole as big as his head was forming, through which he could see the dim outline of a rafter. His hands were bleeding now, but he tore at the thatch, ripping it off and tossing it into the ground below. The rain was sheeting down, the whole roof a waterfall. He watched it pour through the hole he had made, soaking into the loft insulation.
Drenched, he made his way back through the two trapdoors. Then he lay down in the guest bedroom and listened to the sound of the rain dripping next door; and smiled.

Published YOU Magazine, Mail on Sunday August 2000

Amanda Craig's new novel, (about Georgina, Benedick and Cosmo) In A Dark Wood, is published by Fourth Estate £6.99.