by Tim Parks
Fair do’s. I could hardly complain. I’d had a free ride for nearly a year. But it threw me. I wasn’t expecting it. While she was away Mary had been posting a lot of stuff on Facebook. Descriptions of the school where she was working. Stacks of photos of the girls she was teaching to read and write. Pictures of her surrounded by little black kids, or by their mums wearing colourful traditional clothes. That kind of thing. I didn’t really look at it very hard but it seemed to me she was having a good time and would come back positive and cheerful and maybe we could fly over to France again and bring Ricky back in the car. Instead Mary said the dog could stay with her friends. She didn’t want it back. She was through with dogs. And since the car we’d driven to France was her husband’s he could go over there and fetch it himself if he wanted it back. It seems Tom had taken advantage of her long absence to make up his mind at last. He had asked for a divorce.
‘I have to sell the house,’ she told me. ‘That means I need it looking clean and empty, to show people. You’ll have to move your stuff out, I’m afraid.’
Which I did. It was a nightmare, with all the orders and deadlines I had on hand, but in the end it was for the best, because it forced me to hire a commercial space and get serious and then bring in an assistant to help me. I fell on my feet. At least in practical terms. On another level, though, I couldn’t understand it. I felt I’d been really welcomed into the family, I was part of it, and now suddenly I was out in the cold. Not that Mary was unkind, because she really wasn’t. She was always wonderful to me. Just that with not having the dog there were no walks to go on, no reason to see Mark, no reason to go out for drinks together. I mean, we did have a drink a couple of times, but Mary was really distracted, her face was set, like she really wasn’t looking at the things around us at all. So a big part of my life was suddenly blown away, and to be honest, the more I thought about it all, the more I felt the whole thing from beginning to end had been a kind of mystery, or spell. I’d got mixed up in someone else’s world, thinking it was solid, when it was even more precarious than mine. I hadn’t understood anything about Mary. Mark, I understood, and we did meet again a few times and he was friendly. But he had a new girlfriend and didn’t have much time for anyone else. Even Tom I thought I understood, though I’d only seen him half a dozen times and never saw him again. But the more I thought about Mary, the less I understood what had happened between us. For a while I made a point of walking Donna up the hill, past their house. They hadn’t sold it. Perhaps they’d stopped even trying because the For Sale sign had been taken down. Fortunately it was only a matter of months before Bradley junior was born. I thought of driving out there to show him off to Mary, but in the end decided better not.
MONEY
They met on student grants. But she had more than he did. She had won a scholarship. To him it seemed like a lot more, perhaps because she spent so generously. When first she came to visit him in his college room she brought champagne and fancy cakes. She dressed fancily too, in a gauzy blue dress wafting perfume. In fact the difference wasn’t that great. It was just that his parents had taught him to feel poor.
This was Durham, 1978. To save money their first summer together he arranged a house-sit and invited her to join him. After a couple of weeks, the house owner’s daughter turned up, saw them in their underwear in the living room, and reported it to her parents, who invited them to leave. So they found a little place in town on Chapel Hill Street. It wasn’t expensive, being on the fourth floor without a lift. Actually, she found it. And she paid the rent, though he contributed. There never seemed to be any real difficulty with money between them. She bought good fresh food to cook. He made sure there was beer. They never ate out. It was too expensive. But they enjoyed cafés. Even now he can’t remember any arguments about money. Was there some suspicion that he was being bought? Never. It was part of who she was to overwhelm a new friend with gifts. She introduced him to martinis and brandy, she made presents of nice sweaters and shirts. It seemed more impulsive than manipulative. He felt pampered.
Yet she was always practical with money. She knew how much things should cost. She knew when to complain if a bill seemed too high. She knew how to get a phone installed in a flat, what a landlord should provide and what a tenant should pay for. At twenty-three she was already an adult with money, while he was still a child eking out pocket money. Perhaps her knowledge prolonged his innocence. He began to rely on her. They argued about other things, but over money they were fine.
When he found a first job in Manchester she followed and they rented a bedsit in Moss Side. In fact the bed folded up into the wall and the toilet was shared with two other flats. Now he paid the rent, from his salary. He had a salary. Yet there was still this feeling that it was her money that made life sweet. Or the way she spent money. She bought the right quilt for the bed, the right curtains, the right fruit, the right chocolates, the right wine. All slightly outside his range. They decided to marry.
She was working now, for a magazine publisher. When her parents came to stay a week before the wedding she found a service flat for them right on Quay Street. This seemed as grand to him as their Moss Side bedsit seemed downmarket to her. At once there was a money embarrassment. He had bought a second-hand car at the cheapest possible price. The old owner had fooled him and it had worked for just three or four days before turning into a complete lemon. Driving her parents the few hundred yards from station to flat it broke down in heavy rain. She hailed a taxi. He felt pretty stupid.
Now her father insisted on a proper suit for the ceremony. He had never owned a proper suit. They went to a shop on Deansgate. Same thing with the wedding ring. He must have a good ring. ‘If I want brass, I know where to get it,’ her father famously said in his strong Glasgow accent when the jeweller showed them an 18-carat item. This was to be his gift, the older man said, only he didn’t have the cash with him at the moment. So for both suit and ring, the bridegroom paid with a cheque. Back home, she laughed about her father, who was such an old fraud and would never pay. Thomas felt anxious at having spent so much, but proud too. As if unloading all that money had made him more mature.
To save on the wedding reception, his parents organised it for them in their vicarage home. They loved to save. His father, a clergyman, would marry them. It would cost nothing. At his wedding he felt like a boy whose life was being organised by others. During the reception it turned out that his parents had booked them into a hotel on the North Welsh coast for the weekend, as if they had never lived together and this was their first night. It was raining and they were tired and didn’t really want to go, and when they arrived the hotel was hosting a Saturday night disco and the music throbbed into the small hours. She seemed upset and wanted only to sleep. He lay awake. Was she angry, he wondered, because he would never spend what needed to be spent to be comfortable? As they were returning to Manchester on the Monday the exhaust fell off the car on the motorway and they drove the last ten miles in a deafening roar.
But how much money they made over the next twenty years! How much quiet toil and determination on both sides! How much saving and judicious spending! Moving from town to town, climbing the career ladder, discussing bonuses, company cars, pension funds. And always heading for the cheapest place to buy petrol, for the bank with the best mortgage deal. It was she who found the big house in Pendlebury. She negotiated the price. He was happy with that. The money side of their relationship worked perfectly. Everything else fell apart. Ten years after moving in, Thomas betrayed her in that house.
Now after two children and twenty-five years they are going to divide it all. Everything they have built together will be put asunder. His power is absolute now. He declares over £100,000. She less than £10,000. He is still cheap and lives on next to nothing in his bedsit in Liverpool. She still likes quality things and gives generously to the children. Now a lawyer is trying to divide the properties they own and the money in the bank. And of course to establish who is responsible for th
e second child in his last year at school.
These are not happy times. The emails fly back and forth. They no longer talk on the phone. The lawyer is copied in. They use a single lawyer because Thomas refuses to be conflictual. He refuses to fight his corner. He’s not man enough. Without an income, or a pension, having stayed home to bring up the children, she foresees a pauper’s future. The lawyer makes fresh proposals. She has further requests, further revisions. They are detailed. He makes further concessions. When she makes still more requests, the lawyer threatens to bail out. Now it occurs to Thomas that the real relationship was always this: the different way each of them had of relating to money. And so long as the negotiation grinds on, they are still married in a way. In the end and despite all the tension, they haven’t really argued yet. Not properly. They haven’t really fought over money. Thomas wonders if he will ever grow up. He wonders if perhaps the day he signs the first maintenance cheque he will feel adult at last.
TOUGH CHOICES
Life always hits us with tough choices and we waste energy getting anxious over the decisions we make. If only we could know what was the right thing to do and do it, everything would be so much easier. So Thomas took ten years and more to make the decision to leave his wife and even after he made this decision he wasn’t sure he’d made it, because now there was the question, should he go back to her? You would have thought ten years was enough to know you had jumped the right way, but the point his wife made was that it was precisely his leaving that had forced them both to make the changes in heart that made his coming back feasible. If he had left her earlier on, she said, without waiting so long, they would now already be back together and set to enjoy a mellow old age in each other’s company. In his fifties at this point, Thomas felt guilty, thinking that by not acting sooner he had made things worse. His wife was right. On the other hand, he wasn’t yet convinced that going back to her would make them better. Nor was he ready for a mellow old age. For a while he tried to go back at weekends and sleep in the marital bed again, then realised he was only doing this to correct any wrong he had done, certainly not because he wanted to. He didn’t. There and then, it seemed an important distinction. But it is also important to correct the wrongs you have done. His wife talked a great deal about having understood at last what were the important things in life. Neither of them had been perfect, she admitted, but now the thing was to knuckle down and work at it, not run away. Thomas enjoyed the luxuries of his old home, in particular the fireplace, the garden, the well-stocked fridge, the comfortable sitting room. Even the dog. They made a stark contrast to his drab, poky town flat. He especially enjoyed being around his adolescent son, Mark, though the boy could be hard work sometimes and it was depressing seeing him wasted on a loser of a girlfriend and doing poorly at school; still, as his wife pointed out, this was no doubt largely to do with the boy’s loss of self-esteem and confidence in life, consequent on his father’s abandoning his family. The implication was, then, that by coming back Thomas would not only be righting the wrong he had done his wife by leaving it so late to leave her that their new awareness of the important things in life had come too late to bring joy to their mellow old age, but also that his return would bolster his son’s self-esteem to the point that he would be able to fire his below par girlfriend and improve his exam results at college, developments which could hardly fail to cheer Thomas up. It was a lot to be heaping on the getting-back-together side of the scales and you might have expected it would be decisive, except that the enormous relief Thomas felt on returning to his flat in Liverpool on the Monday after a weekend in Pendlebury also seemed pretty damn weighty. If not massive. It would be great, Thomas thought, to act responsibly in his son’s regard, and his wife’s, but it would also be irresponsible not to recognise that there were powerful feelings pushing him the other way. When Thomas now made a sideways movement inviting his son to go on holiday with him for a weekend, his wife wrote an email to say that he should definitely use this time alone with him to clarify once and for all why he had abandoned them. He should explain to his son, she told him, that she (the wife/mother) was only too eager to open her arms to him again and that it was he who hadn’t yet found the generosity and courage to go that extra mile. This message actually gave Thomas the rare pleasure of feeling he was probably doing the right thing, though now he wondered whether he was really duty-bound to broach the question with his son as his wife had asked. Eventually, over dinner, he mentioned it in passing – ‘Your mother asked me to clear this up’ – mostly because he was concerned that if he didn’t his wife would quiz his son on his return and, finding he hadn’t said anything, would accuse him of cowardice. His son, however, said he had no desire to talk about it; he had seen how things had gone, he said. He wasn’t blind. ‘The one thing I hate about you,’ he added bluntly, ‘is that you won’t tell me anything about your life in Liverpool. So,’ he asked point-blank, ‘do you have someone or not?’ Thomas was eating sushi. ‘I can’t be entirely candid about my life,’ he told his son, ‘until things are settled with your mother.’ The last thing he wanted, he said, was to invite him to be custodian of his secrets. ‘Things will never be settled with Mum,’ his son said. ‘Maybe they will be more settled,’ Thomas returned and insisted he didn’t have another woman. Though there was someone he liked, he added cautiously. On returning to his flat after this weekend away he found an email from his wife mentioning that their daughter needed urgent financial help, and another including a photograph of the family as they had been three Christmases ago, which she had found while transferring files from her old PC to her Apple. Thomas phoned his girlfriend. ‘I need a drink,’ he told her. She said fine and they spent the night together. In the end Thomas was very happy with his life in Liverpool and his girlfriend was happy with him; all the same, over the coming months, he continued to work at worrying and making himself unhappy, occasionally going home at weekends, or taking his son away for weekends, and generally imagining he hadn’t yet quite taken a decision that actually life had taken for him more than a decade before.
REVEREND
After his mother died, Thomas started thinking about his father. All too frequently, while she was dying, there had been talk of her going to meet him in paradise, returning to the arms of her husband of thirty-two years, who had died thirty years before she did. This would be bliss.
Thomas did not believe in such things, of course, though it was hard not to try to imagine them, if only to savour the impossibility of the idea: the two insubstantial souls greeting each other in the ether, the airy embrace. She had been ninety at death, he sixty. There would be some adjustment for that, presumably, in heaven. The madness of it confirmed one’s scepticism.
But even assuming that she had gone to meet him, who was he? Who was he now? And if she hadn’t and there are no such meetings, who had he been? Who was my father? thought Thomas. Other people spoke well of him. Quite recently, taking advantage of the Internet, a cousin had been in touch, his father’s younger sister’s son, Hugh. For some reason they had only ever met once before, when Hugh was just a baby. Now in his late forties, this cousin had paid a visit to Thomas’s mother three months before she died. By chance, Thomas was also visiting that day. And almost the first thing the cousin did was speak warmly of the dead man. He helped me, the cousin said. He was kind to me. When and how wasn’t clear. Perhaps the cousin only said this to please Thomas’s mother.
Why was Thomas asking himself these questions now? he wondered. That wasn’t clear. They weren’t exactly urgent. On the other hand, they weren’t going away. He didn’t feel like doing research, putting his father’s name into Google or hunting through archives. He could have looked at his father’s old sermon notes. Thomas’s sister had taken some papers when their mother’s house was sold after the funeral. The notes would have told him something, reminded him of his father’s handwriting, of the way the man thought. But he didn’t want to do that. The thought of his father’s sermons aroused unpleasan
t emotions. It was difficult to put his finger on the reason. A sense of embarrassment and irritation. What he wanted, rather, was to assemble a picture of his father as he, Thomas, remembered him. Who was he for me? A son should be able to say what his father was for him. What part of my personality do I owe him? How does this man still simmer in my life? If he does.
Occasionally Thomas would tell himself that he regretted not having asked his mother more about his father. It was surely the moment to have undertaken this reappraisal, while Mother was still alive, because when a person is gone, they really are gone, and a whole world with them. All her memories of Father were dead now. He could never access them.
Yet he knew he didn’t really regret not asking her. The truth was that for all this chatter of her going to meet him in the beyond, for all her occasional tears when Father was mentioned, Thomas’s mother had spoken very little of his father. Very little. Perhaps the only time his name could reliably be expected to come up was when Thomas and his mother argued over something, usually something of a religious or political nature. Thomas could be provocative, stubborn, and his mother never wanted to lose an argument about things that mattered. Then, between exasperation and amusement, she would say, ‘You’re just like your father, Thomas. He loved to play devil’s advocate, too!’
How was this possible? His father had been a clergyman. Thomas couldn’t remember the man expressing a single idea that went against orthodox Christianity. How could Mother remember him playing devil’s advocate? Presumably, in their own private relationship, Father had liked to get her riled, flustered, indignant. And this had been partly, though perhaps not altogether, in fun. ‘He loved to split hairs, just like you,’ Thomas’s mother said, shaking her grey head. She did not say which hairs Father had split, and Thomas had not asked her to expand. The effect of the remark, of course, was to make it seem that Thomas had no real investment in what he was saying, but was just arguing for the sake of it, to irritate her. While that offered an easy way out of whatever discussion it was, it did feel rather unsatisfying.