Man and Wife (3 page)

Cyd was the nicest person I knew, and she also drove me crazy. The only reason I went to the gym was because I didn’t want her to stop fancying me. My sit-ups were all for her. I hoped it would always be that way. But if you have been badly burned once, you can never be totally sure. After you have taken a spin through the divorce courts, forever seems like a very long time. And maybe that’s a positive thing. Maybe that stops you from treating the love of your life like a piece of self-assembly furniture.

It wasn’t like that with my son. I planned to stay with Cyd
until we were both old and grey. But you never know, do you? In my experience, relationships come and go but being a parent lasts a lifetime. What’s the expression?

Till death do us part.

There were lots of things we were planning to do in Paris.

Pat wanted to go up the Eiffel Tower, but the queues were dauntingly long, so we decided to save it for some other time. I contemplated taking him to the Louvre, but I decided he was too small and the museum was too big.

So what we did was take a bateau-mouche down the Seine and then grabbed a couple of croque-monsieurs in a little café in the Marais.

‘French cheese on toast,’ Pat said, tucking in. ‘This is really delicious.’

After that we went for a kickabout in the Jardin du Luxembourg, booting his plastic football around under the chestnut trees while young couples necked on park benches and pampered dogs sauntered around with their noses in the air and everybody smoked as though it was the fifties.

Apart from the boat trip down the river, and the fancy cheese on toast, it wasn’t so different from our usual Sundays. But it felt special, and I think our hearts were lighter than they ever were in London. It was one of those days that you feel like putting in a bottle, so you can keep it for the rest of your life and nobody can ever take it away from you.

It all went well until we got back to the Gare du Nord. As soon as we went up to the departure gates on the station’s first floor, you could see something was wrong. There were people everywhere. Backpackers, businessmen, groups of tourists. All stranded because there was something on the line. Leaves or refugees? Nobody knew.

But there were no trains coming in or leaving.

That’s when I knew we were in trouble.

I was glad that my own father was not alive to see all of this. The shock would have killed him, I swear to God it would.

But I knew in my heart that I didn’t spend endless hours with my own dad. My old man never took me to Paris for the day.

I may have grown up with my dad under the same roof, but he worked six days a week, long hours, and then he came home speechless with exhaustion, sitting there eating his cooked dinner in front of the TV, reflecting silently on the latest dance routine from Pan’s People.

My old man was separated from me by the need for work and money. I was separated from Pat by divorce and residency orders. Was it really so different? Yes, it was different.

Even if I rarely saw my father – and perhaps I am kidding myself, but even now I believe I can recall every kickabout I ever had with my old man, every football match we went to together, every trip to the cinema – my father was never afraid that someone would steal me away, that I might start calling some other man
dad
.

He went through a lot in his life, from a dirt-poor childhood to world war to terminal cancer. But he never had to go through that.

Wait until your father gets home
, I was told by my mum, again and again.

And so I did. I spent my childhood waiting for my father to come home. And perhaps Pat waited too. But he knew in his heart that his father was never coming home. Not any more.

My old man thought that the worst thing in this world you can be is a bad parent to your child. But there’s something almost as bad as that, Dad.

You can be a stranger.

And of course I wanted my son to have a happy life. I wanted him to be a good boy for his mother, and to get on okay with her new husband, and to do well at school, and to realise how lucky he was to have found a friend like Bernie Cooper.

But I also wanted my son to love me the way he used to love me.

Let’s not forget that bit.

two

By the time the black cab finally crawled into the street where he lived, Pat was fast asleep.

I rarely saw my son sleeping these days, and I was surprised how it seemed to wipe away the years. Awake, his sweet face seemed permanently on guard, glazed with the heart-tugging vigilance of a child who has had to find a place between his divorced parents. Awake, he was sharp-eyed and wary, constantly negotiating the minefield between a mother and father who at some point in his short life had grown sick of living under the same roof. But, asleep, he was round-faced and defenceless again, his flimsy shields all gone. Not a care in the world.

The lights in his home were blazing. And they were all out on the little pathway, lit up by the security light, waiting for our return.

Gina, my ex-wife, that face I had once fallen in love with now pinched with fury.

And Richard, her Clark Kent lookalike, gym-toned and bespectacled, every inch the smug second husband, offering comfort and support.

Even Uli the au pair was standing watch, her arms folded across her chest like a junior fishwife.

Only the enormous policeman who was with them looked vaguely sympathetic. Perhaps he was a Sunday dad, too.

Gina marched down the path to meet us as I paid the driver. I pushed open the cab door and gently scooped my son up in my arms. He was getting heavier by the week. Then
Gina was taking him away, looking at me as though we had never met.

‘Are you clinically insane?’

‘The train –’

‘Are you completely mad? Or do you do these things to hurt me?’

‘I called as soon as I knew we weren’t going to make it home by bedtime.’

It was true. I had called them on a borrowed mobile from the Gare du Nord. Gina had been a bit hysterical to discover we were stranded in a foreign country. Lucky I had to cut it short.

‘Paris. Bloody Paris. Without even asking me. Without even thinking.’

‘Sorry, Gina. I really am.’

‘“Sorry, Gina,”’ she parroted. ‘“So sorry, Gina.”’

I might have guessed she was going to start the parrot routine. If you have been married to someone, then you know exactly how they argue. It’s like two boxers who have fought each other before. Ali and Frazier. Duran and Sugar Ray. Me and Gina. You know each other too well.

She did this when our marriage was starting to fall apart – repeating my words, holding them up and finding them wanting, throwing them back at me, along with any household items that were lying around. Making my apologies, alibis and excuses all seem empty and feeble. Below the belt, I always thought.

We actually didn’t fight all that often. It wasn’t that kind of marriage. Not until the very end. Although you would never guess that now.

‘We were worried sick. You were meant to be taking him to the park, not dragging him halfway round Europe.’

Halfway round Europe? That was a bit rich. But then wanton exaggeration was another feature of Gina’s fighting style.

I couldn’t help remembering that this was a woman who had travelled to Japan alone when she was a teenager and lived there for a year. Now that’s halfway round the world. And she loved it. And she would have gone back.

If she hadn’t met me.

If she hadn’t got pregnant.

If she hadn’t given up Japan for her boys.

For Pat and me. We used to be her boys. Both of us. It was a long time ago.

‘It was only Paris, Gina,’ I said, knowing it would infuriate her, and unable to restrain myself. We knew each other far too well to argue in a civilised manner. ‘It’s just like going down the road. Paris is practically next door.’

‘Only Paris? He’s seven years old. He has to go to school in the morning. And you say it’s only Paris? We phoned the police. I was ringing round the hospitals.’

‘I called you, didn’t I?’

‘In the end. When you had no choice. When you knew you weren’t going to get away with it.’ She hefted Pat in her arms. ‘What were you thinking of, Harry? What goes on in your head? Is there anything in there at all?’

How could she possibly understand what went on in my head? She had him every day. And I had him for one lousy day a week.

She was carrying Pat up the garden path now. I trailed behind her, avoiding eye contact with her husband and the au pair and the enormous cop. And what was that cop doing here anyway? It was almost as if someone had reported a possible kidnapping. What kind of nut job would do a thing like that?

‘Look, Gina, I really am sorry you were so worried.’ And it was true. I felt terrible that she had been phoning the hospitals, the police, thinking the worst. I could imagine how that felt. ‘It won’t happen again. Next Sunday I’ll –’

‘I’ll have to think about next Sunday.’

That stopped me in my tracks.

‘What does that mean? I can still see him next Sunday, can’t I?’

She didn’t answer. She was finished with me. Totally finished with me.

Tracked by her husband and the hired help, Gina carried our
son across the threshold of her home, into that place where I could never follow.

Pat yawned, stretched, almost woke up. In a voice so soft and gentle that it did something to my insides, Gina told him to go back to sleep. Then Richard was between us, giving me an oh-how-could-you? look. Slowly shaking his head, and with this maddening little smile, he closed the door in my face.

I reached for the door bell.

I just had to get this straight about Sunday.

And that’s when I felt the cop’s hand on my shoulder.

Once I was the man of her dreams.

Not just the man who looked after her kid on Sundays. The man of her dreams, back in the years when all Gina’s dreams were of family.

Gina yearned for family life, ached for it, in the way that is unique to those who come from what were once called broken homes.

Her father had walked out just before Gina started school. He was a musician, a pretty good guitarist, who would never quite make it. Failure was waiting for him, in both the music business and the smashed families that he left in his wake. Glenn – he was Glenn to everyone and dad to no one, especially not his children – gave rock and roll the best years of his life. He gave the women and children he left behind nothing but heartache and sporadic maintenance payments.

Gina and her mother, who had given up a modestly successful modelling career for her spectacularly unsuccessful husband, were just the first of many. There would be more abandoned families like them – women who had been celebrated beauties in the sixties and seventies, and the children who were left bewildered by separation before they could ride a bike.

From her mother Gina got her looks, a perfect symmetry of features that she was always dismissive of, the way only the truly beautiful can be. From Glenn her inheritance was a hunger for a stable family life. A family of her own that nobody could ever take away. She thought she would find it with me because that
was exactly where I came from. She thought I was some kind of expert on the traditional set-up of father, mother and child living in a suburban home, untouched by divorce statistics, unshakably nuclear. Until I met Gina, I always thought that my family was embarrassingly ordinary. Gina made us feel exotic – and that was true of my mum and dad, as well as me. This smiling blonde vision came into our world and up our garden path and into our living room, telling us we were special.
Us
.

Our friends all thought that Gina and I were too young for marriage. Gina was a student of Japanese, looking for a way to live her life in Tokyo or Yokohama or Osaka. I was a radio producer, looking for a way into television. And our friends all reckoned it was much too soon for wedding vows and a baby, monogamy and a mortgage. Ten years too soon.

They – the language students who thought the world was waiting for them, and the slightly older cynics at my radio station who thought they had seen it all before – believed that there were planes to catch, lovers to meet, drugs to be taken, music to be heard, adventures to be had, foreign flats to be rented, beaches to be danced on at dawn. And they were right. All of those things were waiting. For them. But we gave them up for each other. Then our son came along. And he was the best thing of all.

Pat was a good, sweet-natured baby, smiling for most of the day and sleeping for most of the night, as beautiful as his mother, ridiculously easy to love. But our life – already married, already parents, and still with a large chunk of our twenties to go – wasn’t perfect. Far from it.

It wasn’t just a job. Gina had given up a whole other life in Japan for her boys, and sometimes – when the money was tight, when I came home from work too tired to talk, when Pat’s brand-new teeth were painfully pushing through his shining pink gums and he could no longer sleep all night – she must have wondered what she was missing. But we had no real regrets. For years it was fine. For years it was what we had been waiting for. Both of us.

A family to replace the one that I had grown up with.

And a family to replace the one that my wife had never known.

Then I spent one night with a colleague from work. One of those pale Irish beauties who seemed a little bit smarter, and a little bit softer, than most of the women I worked with.

And it was madness. Just madness.

Because after Gina found out, we all had to start again.

I sent money every month.

The money was never late. I wanted to send it. I wanted to help bring up my son in any way I could. That was only right and proper. But sometimes I wondered about the money. Was it all being spent on Pat? Really? Every penny? How could I know that none of it was being blown on the guy my ex-wife married? Bloody Richard.

I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.

And even that was okay, but I felt like the money should give me certain basic human rights. Such as, I should be able to call my son whenever I needed to talk to him. It shouldn’t be a problem. It should be normal. And how I missed
normal
. A few days of normality, full board – what a welcome mini-break that would be.