Home Front Alice Pitman

‘Fifty per cent of sleep disturbances are caused by your bed partner,’ says sleep consultant Dr Neil Stanley, one of the world’s leading exponents of separate sleeping. ‘There’s this romantic notion of couples sharing a bed, but in reality it creates a perfect storm of marital discord.’

Well, Mr Home Front and I can attest to that. When I first told him about his very loud snoring, I wasn’t convinced he believed me. So one night, when the nasal assault was in full symphonic horror, I recorded it on a dictaphone. The following morning, he listened back to the evidence with the grim expression of Albert Speer at the Nuremberg trials, before saying, ‘Are you sure that was me?’ After I managed to convince him that it wasn’t some sort of monster from the BBC sound effects library, he agreed that being subjected to that on a nightly basis must indeed be quite unpleasant.

So, more often than not these days, he sleeps in the spare room. And I’m glad Dr Stanley thinks our arrangement is a perfectly sensible one, as I used to think we were quite weird in that respect. This feeling of inadequacy was compounded by a bombardment of media images in recent years, depicting happily married couples feeding each other breakfast in bed or indulging in playful pillow fights. And also by a local couple, called Mike and Jan, who liked to boast about how they hadn’t spent a night apart in 25 years; even if, the last time Mike dropped this into the conversation, I thought Jan looked a bit fed up.

There is still a stigma attached to couples sleeping in separate beds. It is supposed to be the slippery slope. However, the more I let slip about our nocturnal arrangements, the more other middle-aged couples confess they too sleep apart. And it is not always due to snoring, either. One friend said the mere fact of her husband changing position in his sleep is enough to make her want to suffocate him with clingfilm. And I know of two Surrey wives whose husbands have been sleeping on the sofa for years.

My constant bed companion these days is Lupin, our ten-year-old Irish

rescue terrier. He also snores on occasion, but the canine timbre is at the softer end of the sonic palette. I find it strangely soothing. When his master snores, it can seem supernaturally alarming. The brass bed vibrates, next door’s Romanian rescue dog, Maisie, starts howling, and birds on the roof scatter like something out of an M R James 1970s television adaptation.

I like sleeping with Lupin. He’s so well-behaved – just makes himself comfortable and barely moves for the rest of the night. The two of us are as happy as wolves in a cave. Recently, he has taken to lying stretched out with his head on the pillow, just like a human. In fact, if it weren’t for his muzzle that I see in the morning, I could be fooled into thinking I had spent the night with a not unappealing, small, hairy man.

No matter how haggard I look in the morning, the dog will gaze at me with such devotion that I feel like Ava Gardner in her prime. Mr H F’s morning demeanour increasingly suggests a man who has woken up to find Annie Wilkes from Misery has snuck under the covers during the night.

I know Mr H F is just as satisfied with our arrangement. It also means he can now lie propped up in bed until the early hours, indulging his passion for online chess with other husbands in spare bedrooms across the world. I often hear his excitable exclamations through the wall (‘Got you that time, Eyetie!’, ‘Bloody Frog – outfoxed again’, etc).

The trouble is, Lupin now thinks he is my husband and that Mr Home Front is the ex who keeps trying to wheedle his way back into my affections. If he brings me a cup of tea in the morning, Lupin will very often growl at him, without even bothering to look up from the pillow.

‘Stop that, Lupin,’ I say, secretly flattered.

Sometimes, my number-one fan swaps allegiances to keep me on my toes. If I go up to London, leaving the pair alone for the day, on my return it feels as if I have strayed into Brokeback Mountain. Lupin spends the evening glued to his side, pointedly smothering him in kisses and glaring at me with a curious defiant look that says, ‘Mr Home Front and I are in love and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

His master milks it for all its worth (‘Who loves his Daddy, then?’). I don’t rise to it. But then, later, just as I am on the cusp of sleep, a familiar paw comes scraping at my bedroom door:

‘Traitor,’ I say, letting him in. He jumps on the bed and curls into a ball. And we say no more about it.