Then I wondered, if she had been struck with retrograde amnesia, would this manifest itself in exactly the same way? Would she now fall passionately in love with me all over again? Would she be just like when we were nineteen? Isn’t that every middle-aged couple’s fantasy – to feel that white-hot passion burning as fiercely as when they first fused together? In recent years it had seemed impossible to keep the last few embers of that bonfire alive. The only time you stare into each other’s eyes when you’ve been married for twenty years is to check whether your partner’s looking guilty.
Though it remained possible that Madeleine had experienced a psychogenic fugue, the more I heard about the manner of her disappearance, the less likely it felt. If Maddy’s brain had suddenly wiped all memories, it was a very convenient moment at which to do so. On the Saturday morning both children had left for the school’s skiing trip. It occurred to me that this would have been the first time in twenty years that she’d had her home entirely to herself. At least it would have been, had her mother not insisted that they stay for the week to keep her company. Maddy’s mysterious disappearance had occurred at the end of a period of enormous stress: she’d had her ex-husband disappear and then resurface wanting to turn back the clock; she’d got involved with another man and then broken it off; she’d taken her children to their grandfather’s funeral.
Enduring all that and then having her mother in her house completely focusing on her twenty-four hours a day might be more than any sane person could be expected to endure. ‘But I can’t comprehend why Madeleine would just disappear like that. I can’t comprehend it. Can you comprehend it, Ron? You see, Ron can’t comprehend it either – it’s completely incomprehendible—’
‘Incomprehensible …’
‘It is! Completely incomprehendible! Isn’t it, Ron?’
‘It’s “incomprehensible”.’
‘Completely. Shall I phone the police? I think I should phone the police. Ron, will you phone the police? It’s nine, nine, nine, dear. Three nines.’
‘Hold on – let’s not phone the police just yet,’ I counselled.
‘It’s all right, I’d forgotten the number anyway,’ said Ron, with a twinkling smile towards me.
‘It’s nine, nine, nine, Ron. It used to say it in the middle of the dial, but it’s all buttons now. I don’t know why they have to keep changing things …’
Ron had clearly come to the same conclusion as me: that his daughter’s sudden disappearance might not be so mysterious after all.
‘The thing is, Jean,’ I said, pausing to find exactly the right words, ‘perhaps Maddy just needed a bit of space?’
‘Space? She’s got lots of space. You had the loft converted, didn’t you? And had the cellar dry-lined. Did you know that, Ron? Why couldn’t you ever do anything like that to our house?’
‘Well, we never had a cellar.’
‘No, I mean headspace – from all the pressures she’s been under recently. You know, some time on her own.’
Maddy had only been away for thirty-six hours, and although it was understandable that Jean might have expected an explanation before her daughter simply took off, the required conversation with her mother might well have used up most of that time. I assured her that Madeleine would call soon, but was forced to concede that it was ‘Not Normal’. For Jean, ‘Not Normal’ was a catch-all condemnation that included women’s football, nose piercings and Asian presenters reading ‘our news’.
Privately I remained worried. To leave her parents alone in the house without so much as an explanation was unlike the Maddy I thought I remembered. She was always so ultra-considerate, always thinking of the feelings of others. Whenever an air hostess did the safety talk before take-off, Maddy always felt really sorry for her being ignored by everyone. So there would be forty rows of seasoned travellers blithely reading their magazines, and one supportive-looking mum on the aisle seat, visibly concentrating and nodding and pointedly looking round when she indicated the emergency exits. Her sweetness contrasted sharply with her husband’s grumpiness: he was convinced it was really rude when the passenger in front reclined their seat.
These memories prompted a thought. I knew where she kept the family passports. If she had really wanted to get away, to flee abroad for a few days, that would be an obvious clue. I slipped upstairs to the bedroom, where a large Victorian bureau stood beneath the window. I slid open the little drawer for essential documents. There was our marriage certificate (I was surprised we hadn’t had to give that back). There were her childhood swimming medals and the dog’s vaccination record. There was the stub of an old parking ticket, which had obviously had enormous sentimental value. But my hunch had been correct. Maddy had stolen herself away; the person who had always put herself second had emerged from her cocoon of commitments and responsibilities and just flown.
I stood looking around our old bedroom, imagining her hastily packing a bag while her parents were out walking the dog. I wished I could have seen it as an exciting, spontaneous declaration of independence. But she had left no note, there had been no text message; it smacked of a moment of crisis, a woman at the end of her tether. And then I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to imagine where she might possibly be.
Putting myself back into Maddy’s mindset, this is the sequence of events that I finally projected on to her.
It was unseasonably hot for April and I pictured her skipping nimbly over some rocks to where the water was deep enough to dive in. She would have stopped for a moment and just inhaled the sense of space, the arc of emptiness that was her favourite beach in the world. In the distance a few sheep populated the grey-green hills that surrounded the bay, but no cars came along the coast road. It was so tranquil here: there was only what Maddy called ‘good noise’ – waves and wind and seagulls.
I saw Maddy positioning her bag and towel by a crevice in the rocks, and then she prepared to dive in. The water would be cold, but Maddy always said that she never regretted a swim. Then an unhesitant leap and a splash. The grace and beauty of her dive would probably have been slightly undermined by her coming to the surface and swearing loudly about the iciness of the Atlantic Ocean in springtime. But Maddy was a strong swimmer and I saw her doing a powerful front crawl across the bay. This beach had lifeguards in summer, but she would have checked the tides and stayed close to the shore, and maybe she had spotted a local, collecting wood at the far end of the beach, who might be keeping one eye on the mad swimmer.
When the cold had finally penetrated the fillings in her teeth, I could see her hauling herself back on to the rocks. She knew she could climb out here – she had never forgotten that swim on this beach all those years ago, the shared bottle of wine and the snug-ness of the little tent before the storm pulled it from its moorings. Now the light spring breeze felt like an icy wind and her little towel seemed wholly in adequate as it barely wrapped around her freezing shoulders. The figure at the far end of the beach had lit a fire which sent a plume of white smoke up over the dunes. She wanted to go and warm herself by its flames but she could hardly wander up to a strange man in her wet swimming costume just to recover from an insane swim far too early in the year. But then again, this was Ireland: people were friendly, strangers talked to one another; to wander over and chat would be a perfectly normal thing to do here.
Carrying her sandals, she walked barefoot along the length of the dunes, smelling the tantalizing wood-smoke as she got closer. It was hard to see in all the smoke whether the man was still there or not, and she was quite close before she attempted a friendly good afternoon.
‘Good afternoon,’ replied an English accent she recognized. And then the smoke changed direction and right before her stood her ex-husband, smiling warmly, holding out a canvas bag.
‘I brought your cashmere hoodie,’ I said with a smile. ‘I thought you might be a bit cold.’
Once I became certain that this would be where Maddy had gone, it had been easy enough to follow her here. I had already do
ne the more difficult journey: getting to the point where I finally understood her. Now Maddy looked at me as if too many thoughts were racing through her head for her to articulate any one of them.
‘And I just made a fire to warm you up. But I know you probably came here to get a bit of space from everything, so I’ll be on my way. If you fancy meeting up for a drink later, I’m not flying back till tomorrow, but it’s completely up to you,’ and with that I turned to head back up the beach.
She took quite a few bewildered seconds to call after me and I started to worry that she was actually going to let me just walk away.
‘Wait! Don’t be stupid. How did you …? How come …? Are my mum and dad all right?’
Now I stopped and turned. ‘They’re fine.’ I laughed. ‘See, you can’t help it! You can’t help thinking about other people!’
‘Mum wasn’t too upset, was she? How did you guess I’d come here? How did you find me?’
‘Well, I remembered that whenever you couldn’t hear yourself think, when there were sirens in the street and jumbos roaring overhead and problems overwhelming you, you’d always say, “I wish I was at Barleycove.”’
‘You remembered that?’
‘And finally you just did it! I saw your passport had gone and I just, you know, worked it out … But then I saw that you hadn’t taken your cashmere, and I thought, Oh, she’s going to want that.’
She had already pulled it on and her sea-scrubbed cheeks were glowing in the warmth of the fire.
‘Oh, and I’ve got some sausages and bread by the way, if you fancy a sandwich?’
‘Are they vegetarian sausages? You didn’t forget I’m vegetarian?’
For a split second I believed her.
I was careful to cook the sausages slowly and thoroughly. This was a special day, and having Maddy on her knees vomiting into the sand as a result of my cooking might have slightly taken the edge off the atmosphere. But to Madeleine’s post-swim appetite, these bonfire-roasted Irish sausages were the best meal she’d ever eaten, and when I brought out a small bottle of wine and a plastic cup, I think she had to stop herself hugging me. We sat on the dunes looking out at the blurred horizon, chatting and laughing as the tide went out and our shadows lengthened. I felt so at peace with the world. I didn’t even mind when Maddy interfered with my fire. Well, not much anyway.
Madeleine explained that she had spontaneously decided to disappear abroad without saying anything to her mother, as the only other option would have been to bludgeon her to death with a Le Creuset saucepan. ‘I think Mum sensed that I was a bit depressed, so she thought she might cheer me up by listing all the things that her lucky daughter had that she hadn’t had when she was bringing up children.’
‘And did you feel grateful that you hadn’t had to endure a marriage to your father?’
‘Yesterday I learned that my dad had always been very selfish. Sexually speaking.’
‘Oh, that’s the sort of detail a daughter wants to know!’
‘Yes, and all the other people in the supermarket queue found it very interesting as well. So I thought I would slip away before she got on to the details of which actual sexual positions she had found so unsatisfying.’
Maddy had spotted a cheap flight to Cork (she just happened to be glancing at a budget airline website) and realized that if she left straight away she could make that flight and ring her parents later. ‘But then my phone was out of battery and the telephone box was broken, and actually, it felt quite thrilling for a moment, just to be that selfish.’
‘Don’t worry – we’ll just say that you rang me and asked me to tell them. But then my dodgy memory wiped any trace of it.’
‘Hey, that’s a good idea. On second thoughts, that’s exactly what did happen!’
We talked for a while about my amnesia and just how much had come back to me. Neither of us wanted to refer to the worst memories, but she knew what I meant when I said I was gradually processing it all, good and bad. We watched a distant tanker disappear around the headland and threw our crusts to a slightly scary seagull. When she offered to fill my glass she noticed I wasn’t drinking.
‘Why? Are you driving?’ she joked, then looked as if she regretted being so unkind.
‘Well, um, actually I am. I’ve got a little rented car up the hill …’
‘You learned to drive?’
‘Yes. I did this intensive course and haven’t demolished a single garden wall yet. I can chauffeur you back to Crookhaven later if you like, in my luxury Nissan Micra. It’s got a broken wing-mirror, but that wasn’t my fault; a tree came too close outside Skibbereen.’
She didn’t say anything; she just looked at me long and hard as if she was processing this new person she had known all her life.
When the fire had faded and the temperature had dropped, we headed back to the village and Maddy tried not to grip on to the passenger seat too obviously as we wove around the coast road. We had a drink at the pub where Madeleine had booked a room and we both got an excited skiing update text from the children that we spent a good twenty minutes deciphering. Maddy rang her parents and apologized, then we took turns to quote Jean, remembering how the children had been unable to suppress their laughter at Christmas dinner. ‘Vaughan puts the toilet seat down when he’s finished weeing, you know, Ron,’ said Maddy, in her mother’s voice. ‘Ron splashes urine all over the seat; you’re much more careful with your penis, aren’t you, Vaughan?’
‘Oh, that’s one of the many qualities my mother-in-law reports back to her friends about me. My excellent penis-aiming skills.’
‘Vaughan, why don’t you show Ron how you hold your penis when you wee?’
I asked Maddy about her work, then she asked me about mine and I went on for far too long about the breakthrough I had had with my most difficult pupil, finding myself getting carried away with the excitement of being able to tell her all about it at last: ‘… and then Tanika stood up in front of the whole class and talked about how her father’s death had been misrepresented in the media and you should have seen it, Maddy – I was so proud of her. She did this really impassioned speech saying a lie is like a cancer; you can’t just leave it because it will eat away at you, and it was all the stuff we’d talked about in history – how getting the past wrong will send you off into the wrong future. And she’s written to the South London Press to ask them to print an article setting the record straight on her dad’s death, and the whole class was cheering her, and she shouted that she was going to kill the lie: “Me and Mr Vaughan are going to kill the lie,” she repeated above the cheers, “and I know my dad is looking down from heaven, saying thank you.”’
‘So you’ve remembered that too,’ Maddy said with a smile.
‘Remembered what?’
‘Why you loved teaching. You used to talk with that sort of passion often in the old days. I always loved that about you …’
Eventually Maddy went up to her room and hung her damp towel out to dry, and since the pub had a couple of other rooms free, I took the cheapest of those.
She gave me a peck on the cheek as she said goodnight before the old wooden door closed behind her. An hour later I was still wide awake. I wasn’t used to trying to sleep feeling this strange sense of peace.
Without either of us ever directly referring to it, something momentous had occurred. The two of us had forgiven one another. Eventually I felt the adventure of the long day catching up with me: the flight, the anxious drive, and most of all the very real worry I’d had that she would be utterly appalled that I had followed her here to spy on her like some crazy stalker. But she had been amazed and delighted to see me. It had gone far better than I had dared hope. And then, just as I felt myself losing consciousness, my door opened and Maddy whispered, ‘Budge up,’ and climbed into bed beside me.
I wanted to sit up and hug her, but something told me she’d prefer it if I just shifted across the bed and made sure there was enough quilt for my ex-wife. Or my wife, maybe? I could
n’t be sure.
‘Have you got enough room?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ She was still whispering. ‘Sorry if I woke you.’
‘No, I was awake. How did you know which room I was in?’
‘I didn’t – I tiptoed into the room opposite first. I nearly got into bed with that fat German who was up at the bar earlier.’
‘Could have been interesting …’
‘Anyway, you found me in the West of Ireland. I don’t think finding the right door is quite as impressive as the feat of mind-reading you pulled off today.’
She put her head on my shoulder. ‘You knew I’d come here!’ she said in amazement. ‘You just knew!’
And we didn’t talk any more, but just lay beside one another, my arm around her, her body pressed against me. I had remembered things I never would have remembered before my amnesia. I had remembered her favourite place in the whole world, I had remembered that she loved to swim but never took warm enough clothes, I had remembered that she’d said that sausage sandwich we’d shared on that perfect beach had been the best meal she’d ever had.
And I had also remembered her Gmail log-in so I could check where she had booked her flight and accommodation – but it didn’t seem the moment to mention that right now.
Chapter 22
IF A HISTORIAN had to put a date on the absolute low-point in our marriage it would most likely be 11.15 p.m. on 13 February, eight months before the sudden onset of my amnesia. On that night I had come home late to discover that Maddy had actually carried out her threat to change the locks on our front door. She would not come to the door or answer the phone; indeed she pretended not to be at home and in my anger I struck my hand against the front panel, accidentally smashed the glass and ended up taking myself to casualty, where I had a few stitches, the precise number varying with the level of injustice I felt at the time of recounting this particular episode. In my mind, that blood all over my sleeve was Maddy’s doing; that scar across my hand was from a wound she had inflicted upon me when she barred me from my own home.
The Man Who Forgot His Wife Page 25