The Man Who Forgot His Wife

by John O'Farrell

  Maddy’s father, Ron, might have felt offended by the stream of unsubtle reminders of his apparent failings as a father and husband had he been listening to any of it. But long ago he had developed the skill of tuning out the background noise of his wife, reacting only to occasional trigger words that might be of interest to him.

  ‘Vaughan offered to make the coffee. That was nice of him, wasn’t it, Ron?’

  ‘Coffee? Oh, yes please.’

  The whole day had gone reasonably well considering that most civil wars can trace their origins back to a difficult family Christmas. I gave the children their presents, having previously spent a happy afternoon at the shops so that Jamie could actually come with me to the cashpoint and choose his money himself. Dillie had wanted a little electronic diary into which you could type your secrets and no one could read them because only you knew how to access it. A bit like my brain, I thought, except that she hadn’t forgotten the password yet.

  I had been unsure whether or not I should get Maddy anything. I was guessing that divorcing husbands don’t usually give their ex-wives Christmas presents; the house is usually enough. But I happened to stumble upon a beautiful but understated gold necklace after browsing through a number of jewellery shops. And I have to confess there was a satisfactory moment of tension after lunch when Madeleine unwrapped it, gasped, and murmured, ‘You shouldn’t have.’ I knew she really meant it. I had clearly spent a great deal of time and money choosing the perfect gift, which made it even worse. Right now Maddy would have preferred a useless present from her ex-partner, something that confirmed how wrong for her I really was. She shook her head when the children urged her to try it on, and put it back in the box, although later when she visited the bathroom, I noticed that the box went with her.

  Jean was very effusive about what a lovely present the gold necklace was, as if somehow to suggest that she was not quite as thrilled with the shoe rack she had received from her husband.

  ‘What have you got Vaughan, Madeleine? Are you going to give Vaughan his present now?’

  ‘I didn’t get him a present, Mum. We’re getting divorced, remember?’

  ‘Well, he’s still your husband till then, dear. You could have made a bit of an effort …’

  But my gift had clearly been more than a casual act of generosity and Maddy knew it. It was making a point; this was me showing my magnanimity, resolutely defending the moral high ground that I felt I had seized after discovering that she was seeing another man. (‘She’s not seeing another man,’ Gary had insisted when I had told him. ‘She’s just seeing a man.’)

  So throughout Christmas Day I pointedly played the role of perfect son-in-law and attentive husband with my unexpected ally Jean, making the trip to Venice seem selfish and unnecessary. Jean was particularly worried about her daughter going on a boat after some of the stories she had seen on the news.

  ‘For God’s sake, Jean, Venice is in Europe,’ repeated her exasperated husband. ‘She is not going to be kidnapped by Somali pirates.’

  ‘She might be. Several Westerners have been taken hostage.’

  ‘Yes, off the Horn of Africa. Somali pirates are not going to sail all the way up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal, across the Med and up the Adriatic just to kidnap a bloody gondola.’

  ‘Well, it’s all in the same direction, isn’t it? Venice, Somalia. They’re ruthless these people. In my day pirates were jolly, swashbuckling types, with parrots and wooden legs. I don’t know why they have to change everything.’

  Undaunted by this obvious danger, Maddy would head off to the airport the following morning at six, and I would be left alone with my children. I had initially worried that my mother-in-law might be indignant that she was no longer required to look after her grand children, but it transpired that Jean thought the idea of me returning to the family home was an excellent one. ‘Isn’t it wonderful that Vaughan’s moving back in? We should have champagne!’

  ‘He’s not moving back in, Mum; he’s staying here while I’m away.’

  ‘And I’ll be sleeping in the spare room,’ I confirmed, with a glance to Maddy. ‘The double bed is strictly reserved for the dog.’

  ‘Still,’ said Jean, ‘it’ll be lovely for the children to have their father at home. So many children don’t have a father these days and I think it’s a terrible shame.’

  The seasonal tradition of too much food was followed by the tradition of too much television, with the grandparents setting the volume to ‘Too Loud’ and turning the central heating to ‘Too Hot’. Ron initiated only two conversations: one asking after my father, to which I reported that he had been sleeping when I had seen him that morning in the hospital; and the other enquiring about my own condition, during which he surprised me by sharing a couple of books he had got from the library on amnesia and neuropsychology.

  ‘He doesn’t want to look at those, Ron,’ said Jean. ‘Christmas is supposed to be a happy time, not for reminding people they’ve gone mental.’

  In the evening we watched a film together, despite the director carelessly neglecting to include a running commentary from Maddy’s mother. Dillie had got the DVD of Love Actually for Christmas and I was entranced by Emma Thompson as the betrayed wife holding the family together despite everything. And I was utterly unconvinced by the little boy jumping the barriers at airport security and not being gunned down by armed police. ‘I remember this bit!’ I declared. ‘Where he talks about how much love there is in the world by looking at the arrivals lounge in the airport.’

  ‘Yes, but of course they love each other then!’ said Maddy scornfully. ‘That’s because they’ve spent months in separate continents. Film the same couples a week later and they’d be back to shouting and screaming at one another.’

  Jean had never really entered the spirit of Love Actually either. ‘Kiera Knightley’s a lovely-looking girl,’ she said. ‘Why’s she marrying a black?’

  The grandparents went to bed, as Jean needed a couple of hours before lights out to take things out of her overnight bag and then put them back in again. Then it was just the four of us, sat around the fire in the family home: mother, father and the two children.

  ‘Let’s play a game,’ enthused Dillie.

  ‘Yeah, we always play games at Christmas,’ agreed her brother.

  ‘What about charades?’

  ‘Depends on your dad. Films and TV shows and everything? Personal or extra-personal memory?’

  ‘Bit of both actually. Even if I know about the films, I don’t remember seeing them. It’s like Jaws is part of the general cultural furniture. But even though Dillie says I took her to see 27 Dresses, I can’t remember a thing about it.’

  ‘Yeah, I think that’s true for everyone who saw 27 Dresses.’

  ‘What about the water game?’ suggested Jamie, to excited agreement from his sister.

  ‘The water game? I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘You think of a category – like “Premiership football teams” or something – and one person has the name of a club, like say “Fulham”, in his head. Then he goes around behind everyone, holding an eggcup full of water above their head, and the first person to say “Fulham” gets a drenching!’

  ‘Okay, why don’t you go first, Jamie?’

  Jamie chose the category of ‘Simpsons characters’ and although I could only recall Bart and Homer, the latter was sufficient to get the water tipped over my head, which the kids thought was hilarious. I had actually been surprised by how much fun was involved in this Russian roulette lite: the moment of tension as you said your selection out loud and the relief when the pourer moved to the next player. Now it was my turn to wield the eggcup. I chose ‘Fruits’ and selected ‘orange’ as the detonator.

  ‘Banana,’ said Dillie nervously.

  ‘Starfruit,’ declared Jamie, tactically. I moved on to Maddy.

  ‘Orange,’ she said.

  There was a split-second pause. ‘No …’ and I moved on. I quickly revised m
y chosen fruit to ‘apple’, but Maddy said that next time round as well, so I changed it again. I was struggling to remember which fruit they had and hadn’t said, and then there was an argument as to whether a tangerine was the same thing as a satsuma, and because Dillie was so desperate to have a go I just decided to pour the water over her whatever she said, which looked a bit suspicious when she said ‘Potato’. But just as she was laughing and wiping her head with the tea towel, I suddenly had a strong memory of the four of us together, doing exactly this.

  ‘We played this before. On holiday, by a swimming pool?’

  ‘That’s right, we did,’ said Maddy. ‘In France. You’ve had another memory!’

  ‘And instead of tipping the cup on my head,’ remembered Jamie, ‘you picked me up and threw me in the pool!’

  ‘That’s right. And then I pretended not to notice Dillie creeping up behind me …’

  ‘And I pushed you into the water too!’

  The room fell quiet for a moment and then Dillie said, ‘Can we go back there?’ The silence answered the question for her.

  ‘Maybe I’ll take you back there again one day,’ said her mother, unconvincingly.

  ‘No, like, all of us. And play the water game by the pool?’

  I had to stop myself looking at Maddy for an answer and I struggled to find anything to say to fill the heavy silence. Eventually Jamie rescued the situation with a tactful clarification: ‘No, stupid. They’re getting divorced.’

  And finally came the moment when the children had gone to bed and there was only Maddy and me left downstairs. I made an effort to pick up stray bits of wrapping paper, rescuing Dillie’s cryptic note to herself containing the coded top-secret prompt for her diary’s password. It would take a team of genius de-coders many months to decipher the enigmatic clue: ‘Our dog’s name’.

  ‘Well, that all went as well as can be expected,’ I suggested.

  ‘Better than last year, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Sorry, you’ll have to remind me …’

  ‘Last Christmas we had a huge row after you sat in that chair all day drinking yourself into a stupor. Which you claimed was “the only way to make this marriage bearable”.’

  I picked the last few bits of ribbon off the floor, brushed against a dangling bauble and another thousand needles fell off the non-drop Christmas tree.

  ‘Forgive me for asking, but did we ever try and get any counselling?’

  ‘Yeah, but we couldn’t even agree on that. I wanted to share the problems with a woman counsellor, and you said not having a bloke would tip the scales against you from the outset.’

  This did strike me as a difficult stand-off in which to find a compromise. Maybe we could have found a counsellor who was also a pre-op transsexual? But then I thought our marriage had been screwed up enough already, without me staring at the new breasts of our marriage guidance counsellor while trying to ignore his Adam’s apple. I flopped on to the sofa and she sat down too, filling up her wine glass and offering the last of the bottle to me.

  ‘I thought my drinking was one of the reasons you didn’t want to be with me?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter any more, does it?’

  I poured my wine into the potted plant she had just been given by her mother. ‘Okay, so I’ll stop drinking. What else was it?’

  ‘I don’t want to have this discussion now.’

  ‘No, I have to know, because it doesn’t make any sense. Why are we getting divorced? What was it that was so impossible for us to work out?’

  ‘Oh it was just … everything.’

  ‘You see, that’s no good. You have to give me concrete examples, actual points of contention or issues.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her head was tilted up towards the ceiling. ‘When you were young you were so passionate about things; so incisive about what was wrong with the world and how we had to change it. But somehow over the years that just turned into general moaning.’

  ‘Okay, that’s one thing,’ I noted. ‘Allegedly—’

  ‘I mean, it was so bloody boring! All these stupid unimportant things making you too cross.’ She was in full flow now. ‘I mean, I didn’t mind that your hair thinned and turned grey, or the lines on your face, or your expanding waistline. It was the ageing of your soul that made you so much harder to love; all the goodness in you that got all flabby and unexercised.’

  ‘All right! You don’t have to be so bloody personal!’

  I got up and disposed of the empty wine bottle rather too forcefully, so that it nearly smashed as it hit the others in the recycling bin. ‘Anyway, that’s hardly grounds for divorce, is it? You still haven’t given me a good reason.’

  ‘We weren’t happy.’ She sighed. ‘We were fighting all the time, and it made the kids miserable. What better reason do you need?’

  ‘But what did we fight about?’

  ‘Lots of things. You’d always encouraged me to do more photography, to try and exhibit my pictures. But once it finally started to take off, you resented having to accommodate me not being there all the time. You talked the talk of a supportive husband, but when it actually came to it, on a day-to-day basis, taking up the slack, getting home from school in time or giving up stuff like fiddling around on Gary’s stupid internet site, you were just never there.’

  ‘Well, I must admit I don’t quite understand why I wanted to get involved with YouNews …’

  ‘It was just a reason not to be here, wasn’t it? And then you couldn’t believe that a certain gallery owner could be interested in exhibiting my photography. You said it was just because he fancied me.’

  ‘Okay – well, that does sound annoying. Clearly, I was jealous of other men. You are very attractive, and perhaps this gallery owner thought so too.’

  ‘But it shows you couldn’t see me as anything other than a bit of skirt. I was feeling insecure about my work and putting it out there, and you made it a hundred times worse by demeaning my achievement of getting a gallery interested.’

  ‘All right, fair point. I can see that must have been insulting and unsupportive.’

  ‘I mean, why couldn’t he exhibit my stuff because I was an interesting photographer? Why did you presume it was only because Ralph fancied me?’

  I nearly dropped the empty glass in my hand. I don’t think she had intended to let slip the name.

  ‘What?! So this “certain gallery owner” was Ralph? You’re saying I shouldn’t have seen him as a threat or suggested he fancied you, and tomorrow he’s taking you to Venice?’

  ‘Yes, but things are different now. Back then he was just a professional acquaintance.’

  ‘Who fancied you! I was right.’

  ‘You don’t know that!’

  ‘Well of course I do! God, you act as if everything was my fault – at least I never ran off with anyone else! At least I was never unfaithful!’

  ‘What are you talking about? Neither was I.’

  ‘No? Isn’t that your suitcase waiting by the front door? With two tickets to Venice in the front pocket?’

  ‘That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You can’t accept I might have met someone else.’

  ‘No – I can’t accept that you won’t give our marriage another go when I still don’t see why it failed.’

  Early the following morning Maddy crept downstairs with her suitcase to find me already dressed and occupied in the kitchen.

  ‘Wow – you’re up early!’

  ‘Oh, I wanted to unload the dishwasher and get the kids’ breakfast things ready before your mother witnessed it and nominated me for a knighthood. Here – I’ve made you a cup of tea.’

  ‘Thanks. “Did you see that, Ron? He made his wife a cup of tea.”’ And the two of us were able to smile in a way that put the previous night’s argument behind us.

  The darkness outside seemed to add to the illicitness of this encounter – she was about to fly off with her boyfriend, but here she was sharing a half-joke with her last partner.

&nbs
p; ‘What was it like sleeping on the sofa bed?’

  ‘Yeah – it was fine. Except Woody hogged most of the duvet …’

  Maddy got a text message. ‘Oh, that’s … er, the car’s outside.’

  She wheeled her bag to the doorway and the two of us hovered there for a moment. ‘Okay – ’bye.’ And she gave an exaggerated wave, the sort of gesture you would make to someone who was a long, long way away, and it was clear that I was not to lean in and kiss her. ‘Send my love to your wonderful dad when you see him.’

  ‘I’m taking the kids to see him on Wednesday. Hope that’s okay?’

  ‘Yeah – that’s good.’

  ‘So, have a great time.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She unlocked the front door and forced an awkward smile.

  ‘Just out of interest,’ I mused, ‘did we ever go to Venice?’

  ‘No. I always wanted to go and you always said you’d take me …’ she broke off eye contact ‘… but it never happened.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m going now, aren’t I? ’Bye.’

  And the door closed and I heard a muffled man’s voice and Maddy’s upbeat response and the sound of a car taking her away.

  Chapter 14

  IF THE NAME of the place was supposed to fill you with excitement and wonder, it didn’t work on me. In fact, I was highly suspicious that Splash City might not be a proper city at all; almost certainly lacking the basic local government and municipal infrastructure that would have justified it applying for official city status. So when the kids launched their plan to go to this massive indoor water park, I was not quite able to share their enthusiasm.