Dillie’s friend was supposed to cue the music the moment the ceremony was over, so at this point she nervously pressed ‘Play’ and the opening chorus of ‘She Loves You’ by the Beatles suddenly started up. I didn’t know quite where to look, but ended up attempting a brave smile at my son, who was staring back at me with the fury of a child betrayed by his own father.
‘Oh, fuck!’ said Gary finally. ‘Not again.’
Chapter 24
APPARENTLY THE PARTY went downhill a bit after Madeleine left. The whole ‘Isn’t it funny that they’re getting back together just as they get divorced?’ motif lost its ironic edge after the bride had thrown her bouquet in the groom’s face, shouted that she had never wanted to see him ever again and stormed out in tears. Gary still tried to do one or two of his prepared jokes, but even he soon realized that perhaps the moment had gone. I eventually ran out after Maddy, but she’d grabbed the car keys and sped off as aggressively as is possible in a Honda Jazz automatic.
Her instinct had been to go and seek comfort with a friend, but after she had been driving for a minute or two she realized that all her friends were in her back garden with her adulterous partner, so she ended up in Sainsbury’s car park and when the £5-car-wash man said her car was very dirty, she burst into tears again.
The party guests drifted off, mumbling embarrassed ‘thank-yous’ to me, and saying that most of the party had been very enjoyable. One of them took their wedding gift back home with them. Later that evening Jean came round to collect a few things of Maddy’s, explaining to the children that their mummy was going to stay with her mummy for a night or two and that she would ring them later.
‘If I could just talk to her for a moment,’ I pleaded. ‘Could you tell her that I need to talk to her?’
‘She just needs a bit of headspace at the moment, Vaughan. Every relationship goes through this …’
I thought about this after she had gone and was pretty sure that every relationship did not go through this. Husband and wife split up, he has a mental breakdown resulting in total amnesia, spends an anonymous week in hospital, eventually sees his estranged wife as if for the first time, falls in love with her, bluffs his way through a court hearing, changes his mind about getting a divorce, eventually wins his wife back, then at the party to celebrate their new beginning remembers that he was unfaithful, tells her and she breaks up with him all over again. If every relationship did go through this, I would certainly like to read the self-help book or see the staged photos in the tabloid problem page featuring perplexed-looking models in their underwear.
In fact, Maddy stayed away for more than a couple of nights, and now I was the stressed single parent, getting the kids off to school, dashing on to work, then rushing back and cooking their tea and failing to be of any assistance with their maths homework. After that we’d all sit down to watch ‘an hour’s television’ and a few hours later the kids would wake me up on the sofa and tell me they were going to bed now.
Jamie and Dillie spoke to their mum on the phone, but didn’t ask any questions about what was going to happen in the long term. But passive acceptance is not the same thing as inner contentment.
‘Do you want tuna pasta or sausage and mash?’ I asked Jamie on the second night.
‘Either,’ shrugged my son.
‘Well, say one. Tuna pasta?’
‘Okay.’
‘Or sausage and mash?’
‘Okay.’
‘Which one?’
‘Either.’
I let out a significant sigh. ‘Dillie, do you have a preference?’
Poor Dillie just wanted whatever would lighten the atmosphere and so endeavoured to be as accommodating as possible.
‘I don’t mind,’ she said nervously.
Maddy rang Jamie’s mobile every night and he grunted his few words before passing the handset to Dillie, who used up the talk-plan minutes within the first couple of days. I had texted and emailed Maddy but she couldn’t bring herself to speak to me just yet.
I offered to move out if Maddy wanted to be back at the house with Dillie and Jamie, but in her anger she interpreted this as me not wanting to be responsible for the children so that I would be free to chase other young female members of staff.
Gary and Linda had me round for supper and I learned that they had tried to talk to Maddy about me, pointing out, in my defence, that I had at least told her the truth.
‘Okay, it was wrong, he admits that,’ Linda had said. ‘But not every bloke would have owned up—’
‘I wouldn’t have,’ Gary had chipped in brightly. But now Gary had reasons of his own to be depressed. He reported to me that he had finally decided to close down YouNews.
‘Oh no – I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘I thought that was the big one, man. I thought we were going to blow Murdoch out of the water.’
‘Yeah, well, he is quite powerful. You know, in global media terms …’
‘User-generated news doesn’t work. People were just making stuff up.’
‘What – unlike tabloid journalists?’
‘I liked it,’ said Linda, supportively. ‘There was this really funny clip of a chimpanzee with a power hose—’
‘Linda! That’s not what it was for.’
‘So are you no longer online?’
‘Well, I posted a message saying it was closing down. But then some joker posted another message saying my message was a spoof and that YouNews had bought CNN and now everyone in the chatroom is really excited.’
‘That’s the trouble with the wisdom of crowds. Sometimes the crowd turns out to be really stupid.’
It felt like everything went wrong in the end. In your twenties you’re full of optimism about all the things you’re going to achieve; you pile up ambition and plans to be accomplished at some point in the future. In your thirties, you’re so shell-shocked by babies and toddlers and moving house and working extra hard to pay for it all that you don’t get a moment to glance up to see where you’re going. It’s only in your forties that you finally get time to catch your breath, take stock and reflect on where you are and what you’ve achieved. And that’s when you suddenly realize that it’s nowhere near what you’d hoped and lazily expected would just come to pass of its own accord. Your forties are the Decade of Disappointment.
I had a final appointment with Dr Lewington, who said she had been meaning to call me back in to monitor the progress on my amnesia. ‘But here’s the funny thing – I forgot!’ She chuckled. ‘What an intriguing organ the human brain is!’ We chatted for a while, but when she asked me if I had regained any more significant memories I hesitated for a moment and then said, ‘Er, no. None at all.’ The curious thing that I should have shared with her was that this was the first memory I had regained and then subsequently lost again. I clearly recalled the moment it had all come back to me, but the details of Yolande and Paris were now a vague blur. It was as if my subconscious thought it was a little impolite to dwell on the whole sordid business.
I noticed the ceramic head on her desk had been broken and clumsily glued back together. Finally she announced, ‘Well, I don’t think there is anything else we can do for you. You can just walk out of here and get on with the rest of your life.’
I had decided that, since I was back in the hospital, I would try to locate Bernard. I had kept meaning to visit him before now, but life had been such a helter-skelter that I had never got round to it. I could already hear him chuckling, ‘Better late than never!’
‘Bernard?’ asked Dr Lewington, blankly, when I asked where I could find him.
‘You remember Bernard? Talkative bloke in the bed next to me. Had a brain tumour, but wasn’t going to let it get him down.’
‘Oh yes, him! No – you won’t be able to visit him, I’m afraid.’
‘Is he not here any more?’
‘No. He died.’
Then, on the fourth day of limbo, I was surprised to receive a call from Maddy’s father. Ron want
ed to meet up with me and suggested the Humanities Café at the British Library at Euston. He did not say what he wanted, but I was reassured by his choice of venue. If he wanted to punch me in the face for betraying his daughter, the British Library did not seem the most obvious place to do it.
I had never been to this cultural cathedral before, and felt like a student again as I crossed the vast piazza. Gazing down upon me was a giant bronze statue. ‘Isaac Newton from a drawing by William Blake’; two extraordinary brains at the other end of the scale to my unreliable piece of junk. At the top of the escalators a central pillar cased in glass revealed some of the millions of books contained within. All human knowledge was in there – a sense of quiet reverence came over me as I absorbed the echoes and hushed tones of students and academics all around me.
Ron was already waiting for me in the café when I arrived; he was seated at a booth and got up to shake my hand. He showed no hostility towards me for the trauma I had caused his daughter, even though I felt too embarrassed to look him in the eye.
‘Vaughan, thank you so much for coming.’
‘No problem at all. How’s Maddy?’
‘Well, she’s been staying in her old bedroom most of the time. Her mother puts large plates of food beside her bed, then takes them away again a few hours later …’
‘Right. So … this is a long way from home.’
‘Yes, well, Jean doesn’t like having me under her feet in the house, so I’ve been commuting to London to do a bit of research on your medical condition. I hope you don’t mind?’
Inside I felt a pang of disappointment that this was what he had come all this way to talk to me about. I had hoped he might have a message from Maddy; that he was the junior diplomat sent to make the initial overtures in a historic rapprochement.
‘I think I may have unearthed some interesting case studies,’ he said. I gave a neutral nod, hoping I did not betray my private resignation that I was going to have to indulge him here. I’d already read everything there was to read on retrograde amnesia and dissociative fugues.
At the next table a young student couple were staring at one another, too in love to have separate drinks, their two straws intimately sharing the same iced mocha.
‘Now I’m not saying that this definitely applies in your case, but it’s something I think you should be aware of.’ He indicated the pages he had photocopied from various reference books and old journals that were spread out all over the table.
‘In 1957, this businessman in New York had exactly the same thing as you. He had been under great stress as a chief executive, with millions of dollars riding on his decisions and so forth, when one day he disappeared and was found a week later with no knowledge of who he was or what he did for a living.’
‘Okay, well, I’ve not actually read about that one – but I have read about other cases like my own.’
‘Yes, and just like you this gentleman gradually regained all his memories, until he reached the stage where he could return to work, and eventually the board voted to reinstate him.’
The student took his straw out of the cup and presented the foam on the end for his girlfriend to lick off.
‘But at the moment when he returned to his old life, he suddenly remembered that he had defrauded the company. He was racked with guilt, confessed and resigned.’
‘Sorry, Ron – but I don’t quite see how that helps me now? I remembered all the worst stuff last as well. It’s not much consolation to be told that there might be even worse stuff yet to come …’
‘It’s just I think this might have some bearing on your in-discretion in Paris.’
I blushed to hear the episode even mentioned, least of all by my father-in-law. ‘Yeah, well, the funny thing is, I don’t even remember that any more. It came back to me as clear as anything on the day of our party. But it’s the first memory I’ve regained and then completely lost again.’
‘But that’s one of the symptoms!!’ said Ron, excitedly. ‘Look, this is the interesting bit. His company investigated his confession, and it wasn’t true. There had been no fraud; it was a false memory!’
I had never seen Ron so animated.
‘A false memory? How does that work?’
‘It’s all here. Deep down he was frightened of returning to the stressful challenges of his old life and subconsciously needed an excuse not to make that final leap.’
Only now did I look properly at the photocopied pages on the table.
‘Where did you get all this from?’
‘From books. Just books in the library here. You said you’d read everything there was to read on this?’
‘On the internet, yeah.’
‘Well, these examples are from years back. I suppose they were written up long before online medical journals and suchlike. But it really is amazing what you can find in the libraries when you look.’
‘You mean there are others?’
‘Yes – look. This was in a very interesting 1930s book about psychiatry. A local alderman in Lincoln actually confessed to killing a woman who, it transpired, was still alive.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘The sufferers aren’t pretending to have these memories; they really do believe they did these bad things.’
I hurriedly scanned the rather dense print of the photocopied book, littered with terms I half recognized. The long-dead psychiatrist’s theory was that this handful of individuals had experienced false memories for the same reason that they had suffered their original amnesia. Unable to cope with pressure or the possibility of failure, their brains had created an extreme solution: wipe all memories of the stressful life or create new memories that would make a return to that stressful life impossible.
Neither of us needed to point out that it was possible that I had imagined my affair, but I did so anyway.
‘When I told a language teacher at school the reason Maddy and I had split up again, he said that Yolande never went on the Paris trip. He said she’d already left at that point. I thought he must have got it wrong.’
‘Well, it seems like your brain has been playing tricks on you again.’
‘Oh, Ron, this is fantastic! I feel like I’ve been let out of prison. I didn’t have an affair!’ I declared a little too loudly. A couple of elderly ladies were passing with a tray of tea and biscuits. ‘I wasn’t unfaithful to my wife!’ I told them. ‘This is incredible. Does Maddy know about this?’
‘Yes, I told her last night.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She suggested I came and told you.’
‘Right. Was she happy?’
‘She was quite thoughtful. She said, “So Vaughan may not be an adulterer …”’
‘Oh this is fantastic!’
‘“… he’s just a total nutter.”’
‘Oh.’
Nearby there was the sudden scrape of a chair. One wrong word or gesture had clearly upset the teenage girl and she stormed off as her confused boyfriend called after her.
‘Will you tell her that Yolande didn’t even go to Paris? Will you tell her that I don’t remember an affair any more? That proves my innocence, doesn’t it? Will you tell her and get her to call me?’
‘You’re not really mad at all, are you? You’re just mad about Maddy,’ he said, with a smile. ‘But then, who wouldn’t be?’
A few hours later I was seated in the hall at my children’s school, saving the empty seat beside me, though I had no idea whether it was likely to be filled. Jamie and Dillie were both appearing in the school production of South Pacific, and I had rushed there straight from the British Library. I had texted and emailed Maddy to say that I would leave her ticket at the desk, or that she could always go on her own the following night if she still didn’t want to see her ex-husband. The nerves of all the children on the stage were nothing compared to those of one of the adults watching them.
The band struck up the overture, and Jamie looked as though he wished his guitar was big enough to hide
him completely. All the parents were looking directly ahead except one, who kept looking round. My ability to follow the storyline was further hindered by the director’s decision that the casting of the islanders and their white rulers must not be in line with the skin colour of his cast. I knew that Dillie’s entrance was coming up, so now I endeavoured to concentrate on one of the show’s most famous numbers. It was at that moment that a body quietly slipped in beside me and I heard Maddy whisper, ‘Hi.’
I felt a surge of elation. What better time for my wonderful wife to make an appearance than during the chorus of ‘There Is Nothing Like A Dame’. I turned to her in astonishment and exclaimed, ‘Maddy!’ so loudly that several indignant parents turned and glared at me for interrupting the song. Jamie smiled at having spotted his mother joining his dad, but immediately checked himself and focused on looking cool again. ‘You haven’t missed Dillie yet,’ I whispered.
She said nothing else to me for most of the first act, which made me anxious and distracted throughout ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and ‘A Cockeyed Optimist’. The South London audience were particularly attuned to the musical’s tentative racial discrimination theme and there were gasps of outrage at the use of the term ‘mulatto’ even though almost no one had ever heard it before. Still, it sounded racist, and that was enough for a bit of spirited hissing.
Finally, when the girl playing Emile sang ‘Younger Than Springtime’, I leaned across and whispered, ‘So I spoke to your dad.’
I continued to stare straight ahead, but then she leaned across and whispered back. ‘Yeah, he called me immediately afterwards.’
‘Isn’t it fantastic?’
‘Fantastic? What’s fantastic about it? Thanks for Saturday by the way. I had a really lovely party.’
The Man Who Forgot His Wife Page 28