‘You’re distorting it all – Ralph said we shouldn’t rush into anything—’
‘Oh, well, if that’s what Ralph suggests, then that’s definitely what we should do! I can’t believe you try and dress it up as what’s best for the kids, when really it’s just your fancy man trying to save on his rent bill!’
The kitchen chair fell over as I brushed past it on the way to the front room to give my children a farewell kiss. Madeleine was still trying to talk to me in the hallway as I marched to the door and put on my old coat, which was hanging by the door.
‘Um … that’s Ralph’s coat,’ mumbled Maddy.
‘What? No, this is mine – I’ve been wearing it all week.’
‘No – it’s Ralph’s. He left it here, it’s his. But I’m sure he wouldn’t mind you borrowing it …’
Chapter 15
‘RIGHT, YEAR ELEVENS, it’s good to be teaching you again. Today we are going to be talking about the causes of the Second World War,’ I predicted a little optimistically. ‘Now, Ms Coney, who I understand was taking you while I was away, has told you all about the Treaty of Versailles, which was of course greatly resented in twenties Germany, but today we are going to ask how extreme politics came out of an extreme economic situation—’
‘Sir! Mr Vaughan, sir?
‘Yes, Tanika?’ I was pleased to demonstrate my apparently effortless grasp of all their names. It had involved much time staring at school photos of spotty faces and committing the matching names to memory. ‘Is this a question about hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic?’
‘Not exactly. Are you a mentalist, sir?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Dean said you’d gone mental in the nut and shit and didn’t know summit or nothin’.’
‘Well, first of all, can you not use that word in my class—’
‘What – “mentalist”?’
‘Well, yes, that one as well actually, but I was thinking of the swear word. And in answer to your question, it is no secret that my absence last term was due to me suffering a very rare neurological condition from which I am rapidly recovering and which in no way affects my abilities to teach you about the fall of the Weimar Republic.’
I pressed a link on the interactive whiteboard and was proud to see it display an image of a one-million-mark banknote.
‘Yeah, but are you off your nut, sir?’
‘No, Tanika, I am not off my nut, as you so charmingly put it.’
‘Are you a loony, though? Do you, like, bark at the moon and shit?’
‘No, but I might be in a minute. Since Tanika insists on referring to my memory loss, it’s worth asking whether it is possible for whole countries to lose their memory as well. That’s why history is so important—’
‘Are you a psycho, though? Are you a nut job, sir?’
‘What exactly a nation chooses to remember or forget comes to define the identity of its people and affect their future choices. And I would suggest, for example, that we in Britain opt to remember too much about the parts of the Second World War that we are comfortable with, and we prefer to forget about all the colonial wars of conquest that weren’t a million miles from what Hitler was attempting.’
This point seemed to have made them think, and a few different hands went up.
‘Yes – Dean?’
‘But are you a mentalist, sir?’
‘Do you think you’re the Messiah, sir? Are you going on a shooting spree in McDonald’s?’
‘Could we concentrate on the lesson plan, please. Now, the failure of democracy in Germany to deliver economic security increased the attraction of a traditional militaristic leader—’
‘Did you find them, sir?’
‘Did I find what?’
‘Your marbles, sir. Oh no – have you still not found them?’
‘Do you want some fruitcake, sir? It’s really nutty …’
‘Do you foam at the mouth, sir? Are you afraid of water?’
‘LOOK!’ I finally snapped. ‘THIS IS THE BLOODY EASY STUFF! THE RISE OF HITLER AND THE BLOODY NAZIS – THIS IS THE EASIEST HISTORY I CAN BLOODY TEACH! IT’S ALL THEY EVER SHOW ON THE HISTORY CHANNEL, SO BLOODY LISTEN OR WE’LL DO MODULE FOUR INSTEAD AND WE’LL TALK ABOUT THE REPEAL OF THE CORN LAWS, ALL RIGHT?’
‘Ooooh!’ said Tanika, seemingly vindicated. ‘Boggy Vaughan’s gone mental.’
After my first lesson with Year 11, I slumped into my chair in exhaustion and reflected on the distressing revelation that I seemed to lack the natural authority required to teach a challenging class of inner-city teenagers. Younger students were just as disrespectful; in fact, it seemed worse hearing the same swear words in higher-pitched voices. Deep down I already knew something, but now this depressing truth was fighting its way to the front of my consciousness: I was not the inspiring, life-changing teacher I had imagined when I had first learned of my occupation.
I stayed at my desk all through lunchtime, marking homework, doing lesson plans and ringing the parents of one particular student to try to understand how their child might have developed an attitude problem.
‘Hello, it’s Mr Vaughan here, Jodie’s history teacher.’
‘Oh yeah, Boggy Vaughan … You’re the mentalist?’
Perhaps there might be something a little more positive on my online memoir. Perhaps by now former pupils had recalled how I had transformed their lives and future prospects with one interesting lesson on the causes of the Agricultural Revolution? When I logged on I found that a number of students had indeed discovered my Wikipedia page, although their accounts of my past did not smack of the rigorous accuracy for which the open-source encyclopaedia has become so famous.
For example, I was sceptical about whether I had indeed genuinely been the so-called ‘Fifth member of Abba’, playing the oboe and tambourine on ‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (A Man After Midnight)’ and supplying backing vocals and handclaps on ‘I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do’. I read with interest that I had spent three years fighting alongside Islamic militants during the Second Chechen War, eventually deputizing for Akhmed Zakayev during the 1999 Siege of Grozny and then switching sides to the Russian Federation ‘because they had nicer trousers’.
Once the sixth-formers had become aware of this open document, it seemed that a competition had ensued for the most outlandish back story to the mystery of Mr Vaughan’s life before he taught history at Wandle Academy. I learned that I had been assistant editor of What Caravan? magazine but had been sacked following a fist-fight with the editor over the merits of the new Alpine Sprite and the easy-to-reach butane regulator mounted on the front bulkhead. I was pleased to learn that I had single-handedly identified the genome of the Giant African Badger, though less proud that I had threatened to kill myself on the steps of Nestlé’s headquarters unless they promised that in future Quality Street would have more of the yummy green triangle ones.
Looking at the document’s history, I could see that new facts about me had been replacing old facts every day. ‘Jack Joseph Neil Vaughan was previously “Ingrid Fjola Johansdottir”, a popular and notorious West End nightclub hostess who, despite her well-documented sexual exploits with Eastern Bloc diplomats during the Cold War, increasingly came to feel that she had been born into the wrong body. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “Icelandic Mata Hari”, as she was known to MI5, was no longer able to procure Communist military secrets for sexual favours and so decided to have a sex change and adopt a new persona as a male history teacher in a South London comprehensive.’
I considered taking down the Wikipedia page, but the worthy teacher in me decided that it was providing a valuable outlet for student creativity and literary experimentation on the blurred borders of fiction and non-fiction. Some of the original true facts that I had put in about myself had been left up there beside the students’ bizarre inventions, but this just had the effect of making everything I had written seem invented as well.
Dr Lewington had asked me to come up with some memories th
at I had recovered, and to think of some significant life events that were still out of reach in my memory banks. I duly arrived for another brain scan with a wide selection of episodes from my past life – happy memories like scoring my first goal in a junior school football match, and unhappy memories like being informed that the teams had changed ends at half time. I was to concentrate on these moments and my brain activity would be compared to the chemical and temperature changes that occurred when I tried to recall chapters that were still blank.
The new brain scanner itself looked as if it had accounted for most of the NHS budget for the previous financial year. It was a huge, hi-tech, gleaming-white module, roughly the size of Apollo 13. There was a gentle whirr as the conveyor transported me inside the pod, and it seemed to know when to stop once my skull was in place for the internal mapping to commence. The idea of a female doctor being able to see inside my brain made me feel slightly uncomfortable. ‘Don’t think about sex,’ I told myself, thus immediately doing so. How would that show up on the screen? Could she search through past thoughts and go back over my imagination’s last browsing session? Over the hum of the machine I could hear Dr Lewington giving me instructions into her microphone and so I duly summoned up a significant recollection.
It is the memorable summer of 1997, and the newspapers are consumed with the new young Prime Minister who can do no wrong and the irredeemable Princess Diana and her scandalous new boyfriend. I am feeling a little stiff and nervous in my new suit, as I stand outside the mildly controversial non-religious venue for our marriage service. Madeleine did not want a traditional church wedding with a big white dress and bridesmaids and the church organist playing Bach’s ‘Cantata for Looking Around And Waving At Relatives’.
‘She’s not pregnant – she’s just very political,’ explains Maddy’s mother to various elderly relatives. ‘Hello, Joyce. Doesn’t Madeleine look lovely in red? She didn’t want a traditional white dress. It’s not because she’s pregnant or anything—’
‘Mum, will you stop telling people I’m not pregnant.’
‘Why – are you?’
‘No, but it’s perfectly normal to want a non-religious service.’
‘I just don’t want people thinking the church wouldn’t have you. Or they might take the red dress as a sign … you know, that you were a fallen woman.’ The last two words are whispered, as if it’s shameful even to think of such a notion.
‘A fallen woman! What is this – Hardy’s Wessex? It’s the nineties, Mum. It doesn’t matter if a woman is pregnant when she gets married!’
‘Oh, are you pregnant?’ says Great-auntie Brenda. ‘Oh, well, it’s good that you’re getting married, dear. It’s better that the baby isn’t a little bastard.’
‘No, she’s not pregnant, Brenda,’ says Maddy’s mum, slightly too desperately. ‘She’s just very political.’
‘Political?’
‘You know – doesn’t believe in things.’
‘Mum, I do believe in things. That’s exactly why … oh, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Don’t let it spoil your day, Madeleine,’ says kindly Auntie Brenda. ‘You’re still the bride, dear, even if, you know …’ and she gives a supportive glance in the direction of Maddy’s womb. And after Great-auntie Brenda has done the rounds at the reception, Maddy can be overheard politely thanking other elderly relatives for the compliment that she looks ‘blooming’, or denying that she ‘must be tired’ and insisting that one portion of food is quite enough.
The ridiculous notion that Maddy must be ‘in the family way’ was memorable because the two of us had laughed about it in the following years; it wasn’t just a neutral series of isolated conversations – I recalled it as a funny anecdote. Maddy and I had imposed a narrative on to it and that became how it happened. As a rule, all my strongest memories had a sort of story to them, either real or subsequently fashioned in the retelling.
I guessed that the same must also be true of the other moments from the wedding that I recalled, as the various images of the day melted into each other like an edited-highlights package. I thought of Maddy waltzing with my father, as he gracefully led her round the scuffed wooden floor like a gentleman ballroom dancer. I could picture a rather drunk Gary remembering every single move to ‘The Birdie Song’, even though the DJ was actually playing Oasis. And I remember Maddy giving me a long and meaningful hug at the end of the evening, the moment before we got into the car. We could have skipped the service and the big party; that embrace was what made me realize that she loved me and wanted to be with me always.
One tradition had been upheld during the wedding ceremony itself, when Maddy and her dad had been the very last people to enter the civic chamber. Her entrance had been delayed outside the building, when a young lawyer had stopped her and handed her an important-looking wax-sealed envelope that he insisted she must open and read before she could proceed with her marriage. With the selected music for the bride’s entrance already filtering through from inside, a flustered Maddy tore open the envelope. Was it a legal bar to their marriage? Did her intended already have a wife? Was her intended an illegal alien, a fraudster, an escaped convict? Finally she had the thing open and she pulled out the contents. It was a postcard of a leprechaun saying ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to yers!!’
The brain scanner hummed and whirred and from outside this huge sarcophagus Dr Lewington instructed me to try to think about something significant of which I currently had no remembrance. I tried to picture my mother, searching for the moment when I had learned of her death, or the funeral that I must have attended with Maddy and probably our children. Now I could see myself standing in a country churchyard, throwing a handful of earth down on to a wooden coffin. It was a detailed image, featuring distraught mourners dressed in black as a lone church bell tolled nearby. I could easily have convinced myself that this was exactly as it had happened, except that I had already learned that my mother had been incinerated in a large municipal crematorium. Even though I knew it was pure fiction, I found it vaguely comforting to have this classic funeral scene to cling to.
Now I was instructed to concentrate on any episodes I had that were only partially reconstructed. I had deliberately saved the most negative moment I could recall to contrast with the bittersweet memories of my wedding day, and had intimated to Dr Lewington that this was what I would be thinking about.
It was the day that Madeleine said she didn’t want to be married to me any more. Without quite understanding why, the memory felt infused with a numbing mixture of injustice, frustration, powerlessness, desperation and anger.
Maddy and I are getting ready for bed late one night, somehow both irritated, but failing to ignore one another in our tiny bathroom. I attempt to suggest that I have had a very tough day at school, but she is not interested. What I have forgotten is that Maddy has just had the results of a test for a health scare that has consumed her for the previous couple of weeks. She had found a lump under her arm and had become convinced it is cancer, and my attempts at reassurance have been interpreted as dismissive.
‘What the hell is non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma?’ I had said when she first mentioned it. ‘You can’t diagnose something like that just from looking it up on the internet.’
‘I have several of the symptoms. And a couple of people said it sounds really serious …’
‘What people?’
‘I don’t know their real names. It was on a blog about women’s health issues.’
From the outset she has interpreted my scorn for online medical chat as lack of interest in her wellbeing. Now she gets into the other side of the bed, but noticeably as far away from me as it is physically possible to be. And then she starts sobbing.
‘What? What is it?’
‘I got the results of my cancer test today.’
Two blows strike me almost simultaneously. First, there is the sudden shame I feel at not having remembered that today was the day she’s been so worried about. I had said I would ring her
immediately after lessons, but that worthy intention had been overtaken by the demands of the school.
But now such petty details count for nothing in the wider scheme of things as I absorb the far greater blow: the follow-up, knock-out punch that comes from nowhere. Maddy’s sobbing tells me that the cancer test must have been positive. Despite my scepticism about self-diagnosis on the internet, despite the little bit of inconclusive research I have done myself, she really does have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Suddenly I see a future in which the kids might lose their mother, and a weakening Maddy will have to endure chemotherapy and operations and we will all be consumed with fear and uncertainty and the pain of seeing her endure an illness that none of us had even heard of until a couple of weeks earlier.
She shakes off my tentative offer of a comforting arm as she weeps, and I try to ascertain what exactly the doctor has said to her and what the treatment options are. She wipes her eyes on her nightie. Finally she is able to say a few words through the tears.
‘It was negative. I don’t have cancer.’
‘What?’
‘The lump is benign.’ She weeps. ‘And he said all the other symptoms were probably just a bug or something—’
‘Oh, thank God for that!’ and I go to hug her but she pushes me away and now her sobbing seems worse than ever.
‘Maddy – it’s fantastic news! I thought from the way you were crying that you must have non-Hodgkinson’s disease or whatever—’
‘Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. You can’t even get the name of the illness right.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter, does it, because you haven’t got it! God, you had me going there, the way you were crying and everything! God, what a relief.’
She wipes her face on her nightie again, and it occurs to me that she never wears anything like that in bed; she always wears one of my baggy T-shirts. Perhaps there hadn’t been any in the drawer.
‘You forgot to ask me about the results.’
‘Yeah, I know – I’m really sorry, but can I just tell you what happened at school today and you might understand—’
The Man Who Forgot His Wife Page 17