The guy ropes are never re-set, and the tent stays collapsed on us all night, but it doesn’t matter that we barely sleep and have to dry out our things tomorrow, because right now all we want to do is laugh and laugh. I suppose we are showing each other how upbeat we can be in the face of adversity. Maddy doesn’t mind that I ignored her advice and was proved wrong; nothing is going to be allowed to spoil our happiness. We are young and can doze with canvas on our faces, and arms half wrapped around one another; we are immunized against discomfort by the euphoria of just being together.
‘I’ve had a memory!’ I exclaimed, running out of the bathroom. ‘I’ve just recovered a whole episode of my life!’ Gary and Linda were delighted for me, though their joy was slightly tempered by the vision of an almost naked man laughing manically and dripping foamy bathwater all over their kitchen floor. In fact, I wondered if being stripped and soaking wet was the association that triggered the memory, but somehow I knew that it was having seen Maddy. Linda fetched me her pink towelling dressing gown, and put the hand towel I had used to protect my modesty straight into the washing machine.
We sat around their kitchen table and they assured me that this was only the beginning, that other memories would surely start to flow back.
‘That lady’s bathrobe rather suits you, Vaughan,’ said Gary, ‘’cos you always had a bit of a thing about dressing up in women’s clothes.’
Linda laughed, then reassured me that I had not actually been a transvestite, adding, ‘Well, as far as I know, anyway …’
I wanted more stories, more memories of Maddy. But while I wanted to find out more about my marriage, Gary felt I needed to focus on the ending of it. They had obviously had a conversation while I was in the bath and now I was reminded that I was due in court on Friday, for the final stage of what they earnestly assured me had been a very long, painful and expensive business.
‘To put it off now would be the last thing you would have wanted,’ Gary told me.
‘You have to jump through this last hoop, Vaughan, for Maddy and the kids’ sakes as much as your own,’ added Linda.
The proposition that Gary was putting to me was that I was going to have to go to a court of law and pretend to a judge that nothing had happened to me in order to terminate a marriage I knew nothing about.
‘But what if they ask a question I don’t know the answer to?’
‘Your lawyer will be in there with you – he’ll just tell you what to say,’ Gary assured me.
‘And he’ll know about my condition?’
‘Er, well, probably not,’ said Gary. ‘I mean we could risk telling them, but what will they do? Insist on postponing the case and charge you another ten grand you haven’t got.’
‘Maddy and the kids are geared up to it happening on Friday. They need closure,’ said Linda.
‘I’m pretty sure this last hearing is already scripted. You just repeat your position to your judge, he makes his ruling, you swap CDs with Maddy and then it’s straight to the pub to flirt with the Polish barmaid.’
Gary was insistent that I would deeply regret not having gone through with the divorce if my memory suddenly returned and I awoke to discover that I had lost the chance to break free from an unhappy marriage.
‘Yes, you say it was an unhappy marriage …’ I ventured.
‘Well, you are getting divorced,’ pointed out Gary. ‘That is sometimes a sign …’
I had sensed that our split had been an acrimonious one, but on digging a little deeper I learned that it was not until the actual divorce process was under way that things had turned really nasty. Apparently when Maddy and I had first separated we had still been behaving towards one another like reasonably civilized people. It was only after we were swept along in an adversarial legal system, and learned of the provocative claims and demands being made by the other side’s lawyers, that personal hostilities spiralled out of control. ‘I remember the history teacher in you compared the divorce process to war,’ recalled Gary. ‘You told me that in 1939 the RAF thought it was immoral to bomb the Black Forest to deprive the Germans of timber. But by 1945 they were deliberately creating firestorms to kill as many civilians as possible.’
‘Maddy and I hadn’t quite reached the Dresden stage, I hope?’
‘No, you two were at, sort of, June 1944. She’d invaded Normandy, but you still had the Doodlebug up your sleeve.’
‘Right. So I’m the Nazis in this metaphor?’
However persuasive they were that we’d be better off apart, I felt I couldn’t agree there and then to take this momentous step in the dark. My authority was not helped by the fact that I was still wearing a pink lady’s bathrobe. When I was dressed, I announced that I’d like to go out for a walk on my own, to have a bit of a think, and somewhere between Linda’s nervous concern and Gary’s total indifference, we reached a compromise that it would be fine as long as I took an A–Z with their address and phone number written in the back and twenty pounds in cash, which I promised to return.
‘Are you sure you’ll be okay?’ repeated Linda at the door. ‘You don’t want one of us to come with you?’
‘No, really – I just fancy getting out. After a week in the hospital and everything that’s happened, I just need to clear my head a bit.’
‘I think your head is cleared enough already, mate,’ heckled Gary, from the kitchen.
And then as soon as their front door was closed behind me, I began retracing my steps the mile or so to where we had seen Maddy coming out of her front door. I was going to talk to her. I was going to meet my wife. I had resolved that she had to know about my condition; the event had major consequences for her own life, our children, the court case. I owed it to her to tell her face to face what had happened. It should be done before the children were home from school and with time to postpone the court hearing; and that meant I had to do it right now.
‘In any case,’ I told myself, ‘before I divorce my wife I’d like to get to know her a bit first.’
Chapter 6
GARY HAD RELATED the remarkable course of events that had led to Maddy and me becoming the owners of a large Victorian house in Clapham. The dilapidated building had been boarded up in the 1980s, with visible holes in the roof and shrubs growing from the upstairs balconies. After university, Maddy and I had been friends with a group of housing activists who’d identified the long-abandoned property as a potential squat. But when it actually came to it, Maddy had been the bravest of all of us. While I hovered behind, worrying whether we needed someone’s permission to do this, Maddy took a jemmy to the heavily fortified front windows. Over the following weeks, we raided skips for firewood and propped heavy furniture against the doors to make ourselves secure at night, and it transpired that the council was too chaotic ever to evict us. Friends came and went, including a couple of anarchist performance artists whose idea of turning the whole building into a ‘Permanent Free Festival and Events Laboratory’ rather petered out due to their inability to get out of bed in the mornings.
A few years later we formed ourselves into a registered housing association; it was easier then for the authorities to permit us to stay there. But it was apparently me who did all the paperwork and took legal responsibility for it all, and Maddy and I were the only ones still living there when the law was changed giving housing association tenants the right to buy. In two decades Maddy and I had made the journey from radical squatters to respectable owner-occupiers without ever leaving our front door. The bay window where Maddy had taken a crowbar to the corrugated iron now had a little poster advertising our kids’ School Autumn Fayre. There was a sticker on the letterbox saying ‘NO JUNK MAIL’. I’m guessing we wouldn’t have been so bothered about junk mail when there was a small bush growing out of the kitchen floor.
And now I stood before the family home once again, a place with so many memories, but none of them currently mine. My intention had been to march right up and ring the doorbell, but instead I found myself just taking a moment
to summon up my courage. I was thrown by the fact that the bell was actually an intercom system, which meant that my first words to my wife might have to be through the alienating electronic filter of a voice-distorting microphone. When I had left Gary and Linda’s flat, it had seemed so clear to me that this was what I had to do. But now my finger was shaking as I reached for the button. I left it hovering there uncertainly. What if one of my children was off school and rushed down to say hello? I imagined the terrifying scenario of my daughter emerging with a friend and me not knowing which girl I was father of. It was not just my own mental health that was at issue here.
But it had to be done. I flattened my hair down, pulled my shirt straight and pressed the buzzer. To my surprise this prompted the sound of loud barking from the other side of the door. There was a dog! No one had said anything about a dog. But this was the furious bark of a guard dog in the house on his own – an angry defensive warning that was not mollified by any owner coming down the hallway, calling him away from the door. Maddy was out. I had just presumed she would be at home because she had been there earlier in the day. I realized that I didn’t even know if she worked or not – perhaps I had subconsciously presumed that she didn’t. I rang the doorbell again, on the unlikely off-chance that she had not heard the commotion the dog had caused downstairs, and this set the barking off all over again. I peered through the letterbox, calling an optimistic ‘Hello?’ and instantly the dog’s demeanour changed. Suddenly he was howling with joyful excitement as he recognized me; his tail was wagging so much the whole back half of his body wiggled from side to side to side. He was a big golden retriever, licking the hand that held open the letterbox, then breaking off to howl his emotional hellos, before manically kissing my hand all over again. I had never even thought about whether I liked dogs or not, but I instinctively felt affection for this one.
‘Hello, boy! What’s your name then? Yeah, it’s me! Remember me? Did I used to take you walkies?’
That word made the dog even more manic, and I felt momentarily guilty for getting him so excited when I was going to have to walk away again.
Back on the pavement I studied the house for any more clues about the people who lived there. I crossed the road to get a better view of the place. I noticed it was less well maintained than the houses around it: the paint was peeling on the balustrade, and the panels in the front door didn’t match; one was vintage patterned glass, the other was plain. Looking at this house and what it represented, I was struck by what a beautiful home we’d created. It was brimming with character, with brightly painted shutters and blooming window boxes. The quirky glazed turret that crowned the roof had space for perhaps just one person to sit and read or gaze out over the London skyline. Dormer windows peeked out from the slate-tiled roof, suggesting cosy teenage bedrooms with sloping ceilings. The middle floor had a balcony, and from the side I spotted a faded sun canopy, overlooking the back garden where a chaotic Virginia creeper was in its final blush of copper.
I tried to imagine myself sitting out on the balcony with Maddy, sharing a chilled bottle of white wine on a summer’s night, as the kids played in the garden. Was I recovering a vague memory, or was this some idealistic fantasy that our domestic problems had made impossible? Looking at it all with fresh eyes, I couldn’t help thinking it was the old Vaughan that had needed the psychiatric help for letting all this go.
So lost was I in speculation and fantasy that I almost didn’t notice a car drawing up a few spaces away. I felt terror-stricken and thrilled all at once when I realized who it was and dived behind a parked van. I crouched down out of sight and watched in the van’s wing mirror. Leaning out of her open window, Maddy reversed the slightly grubby car into the tightest of spaces, rather expertly, I thought, which strangely gave me a momentary flush of pride. She stepped out, wearing a funky orange coat that flared out below the waist. She looked classy and more professional than she had seemed before. Her hair was up and she wore small earrings.
And seeing her again, I couldn’t help but feel as if some enormous administrative mistake must have occurred – that the authorities were proceeding recklessly with the wrong divorce. Surely neither of us had ever requested such a thing. Why would I want to stop being married to such a beautiful woman? Well, now was my chance to meet her properly; this was my moment to introduce myself to my wife.
But just as I stepped out from behind the van, the passenger door of Maddy’s car opened, and now I slipped out of view again as I spied a man getting out. The two of them immediately set about taking large frames out of the back of the car and began carrying them up to the front door. Who was this? A business partner? A brother? A lover? The man was younger than me, and too snappily dressed to be a delivery man. He was very matter-of-fact about the job in hand, stacking the frames up by the front door and then going back for more. Was Maddy a painter? An art dealer? Why hadn’t Gary and Linda mentioned any of this? Or, rather, why hadn’t I asked? Crouched down on the pavement out of view, I felt increasingly uncomfortable and slightly dizzy, but I was transfixed as I eagerly scanned the situation for any further clues. He definitely knew her, but there was nothing to suggest that these two were in any sort of relationship. He was comfortable handling heavy-looking frames; my guess was that she had bought them off him and now he was helping to deliver them. But that was a more personal service than you’d expect from a high-street picture framer. I wanted to see if this man followed her into the house or whether he made his own way back.
Maddy unlocked the front door and patted the excited dog, who circled her, wagging his backside and emitting the extended howl with which he had greeted me. I was relieved to see that the family dog showed no affection for the man who was moving the larger frames into the hall. The dog manically sniffed the air as she went inside, but instead of following her, he started down the steps. Maddy called his name, but the dog had got the scent of something, and then I saw the panic in her face as he headed towards the road, ignoring her calls. She put down a smaller picture and started to chase after him; I could tell this behaviour was out of character, but the dog had clearly got something in his nostrils and looked unstoppable.
And that was the moment I realized that the scent the dog had picked up was mine. He could still smell the missing member of the family who’d been here a minute earlier, and he was running across the road towards where I was hiding. Maddy was following and would find me lurking there, and my first encounter with her since my breakdown would be as some creepy stalker with a bizarre mental illness. Behind me was a shady passageway that led down the side of the house opposite ours. I ran down there and dived around the back of a wooden shed. Almost immediately the dog caught up with me, excitedly wagging his tail and jumping up to try to lick my face.
‘Woody! Woody!’ Maddy was desperately calling, getting closer.
‘Go home, Woody,’ I whispered, but the dog took no notice.
‘Woody – come here!’ she shouted, getting closer.
‘WOODY, YOU BAD DOG!’ I scolded in hushed desperation. ‘GO HOME NOW, YOU BAD DOG, GO HOME!’ and, amazingly, a rather disappointed Woody turned around and scampered back in the direction he had come. I heard her say, ‘There you are, you naughty dog!’ and it was weird hearing her voice. She had a slight northern accent, Liverpool maybe – it was hard to tell.
But I was safe. She wouldn’t come down here, so I could wait a while until she was inside and then perhaps I should just slip away. I realized that more than anything I had just wanted to see her again, and now the idea of giving her bad news filled me with dread. I closed my eyes and leaned my head on the creosote-scented shed as I let out a huge sigh of relief.
‘Excuse me, what are you doing in my garden?’ said an indignant upper-class voice. I turned round to see a rotund, ruddy figure in his early sixties armed with what looked like a gin and tonic. ‘Oh, Vaughan, it’s you! Sorry, I thought it might be some sort of intruder. How the bloody hell are you? Haven’t seen you for ages.’
‘Oh, er – hello!’
‘I think I know …’ said this rather self-consciously raffish figure with a cravat under his open-neck shirt ‘… I know why you’re here.’ My mind was racing. How much did he know? Had he seen me spying on my own wife?
‘Do you?’ I stammered.
‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be!’ And with an expectant grin he gave me a knowing nod.
‘Er – Shakespeare?’
‘The bard himself! You want your thingamajig back, don’t you?’
‘My thingamajig?’
‘Yes, you know – God, what do they call those things?’
‘Um …’
‘God, I’ve gone completely blank. Umm …’
‘Yes, what are they called?’
‘I meant to bring it back ages ago – very remiss of me. Anyway, help yourself – it’s in the shed.’
I obediently opened the shed door and stared at the chaotic arrangement of garden furniture, abandoned lawnmowers, rusting barbecues and plant pots piled up before me. I wondered about making a guess; maybe I should just grab the old bicycle wheel and say, ‘Ah, there it is! Well, if you ever need to borrow it again, you know where we are …’
‘How’s Madeleine?’ he enquired, as I pretended to scan the space in front of me.
‘She’s, er, fine. Oh, actually, she’s just been out in the car!’ I blurted, perhaps slightly too proud that I did have one genuine snippet of information to share.
‘Oh. Anywhere special?’
‘Er, not sure. Collecting some big pictures?’
‘She never stops working, does she?’
‘Doesn’t she? No, I mean, she doesn’t, does she?’
‘Well, you two must come round for dinner soon.’
‘Thank you. That’s very nice of you.’
‘Really?’
I seemed to have given a reply that surprised him. In that moment I understood that previous offers must always have been rebuffed.
The Man Who Forgot His Wife Page 6