Man and Wife

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Why is she talking French then?’ he asked me, suddenly perking up. And it was just like the old days – Pat bringing me one of life’s little puzzles to unravel. I leapt upon it with gratitude.

  ‘That little girl is French,’ I said, keeping my voice down. I looked at the poor bastard who was her father. ‘Half French.’

  Pat widened his eyes. ‘That’s a long way to come. French is a long way.’

  ‘France, you mean. France is not as far as you think, darling.’

  ‘It is, though. You’re wrong. France is as far as I think. Maybe even further.’

  ‘No, it’s not. France – well, Paris – is just three hours in the train from London.’ ‘What train?’

  ‘A special train. A very fast train that runs from London to Paris. The Eurostar. It does the journey in just three hours. It goes through a tunnel under the sea.’

  My son pulled a doubtful face. ‘Under the sea?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Bernie Cooper went to French in the summer.’ Bernie Cooper – always addressed by his full name – was Pat’s best friend. The first best friend of his life. The best friend he would remember forever. Pat always quoted Bernie with all the fervour of a Red Guard citing the thoughts of Chairman Mao at the height of the Cultural Revolution. ‘Bernie Cooper went to the seaside in French. France. They got a Jumbo. So you can’t get a train to France. Bernie Cooper said.’

  ‘Bernie and his family must have gone to the south of France. Paris is a lot closer. I promise you, darling. You can get there from London in three hours. We’ll go there one day. You and me. Paris is a beautiful city.’

  ‘When will we go?’

  ‘When you’re a big boy.’

  He looked at me shrewdly. ‘But I’m a big boy now.’

  And I thought to myself – that’s right. You’re a big boy now. That baby I held in my arms has gone and I will never get him back.

  I glanced at my watch. It was still early. They were still serving McBreakfasts in here.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let me help you with your coat. We’re going. Don’t forget your football and your mittens.’

  He looked out the window at the rain-lashed streets of north London.

  ‘Are we going to the park?’

  ‘We’re going to Paris.’

  We could make it. I had worked it out. You don’t think I would just rush off to Paris with him, do you? No, we could do it. Not comfortably, but just about. Three hours to Paris on Eurostar, an afternoon wandering around the sights, and then – whoosh – back home for bedtime. Pat’s bedtime not mine.

  Nobody would know we had gone to Paris – that is, his mother would not know – until we were safely back in London. All we needed were our passports.

  Luck was with us. At my place, Cyd and Peggy were not around. At Pat’s place, the only sign of life was Uli, the dreamy German au pair. So I didn’t have to explain to my wife why I needed my passport for a kickabout on Primrose Hill and I didn’t have to explain to my ex-wife why I needed Pat’s passport to play Sega Rally in Funland.

  It was a quick run down to Waterloo and soon Pat had his face pressed against the glass as the Eurostar pulled out of the station, his breath making mist on the glass.

  He looked at me slyly.

  ‘We’re having an adventure, aren’t we? This is an adventure, isn’t it?’

  ‘A big adventure.’

  ‘What a laugh,’ smiled my son.

  Three little words, and I will never forget them. And when he said those three little words, it was worth it. Whatever happened next, it was all worth it. Paris for the day. Just the two of us.

  What a laugh.

  My son lived in one of those new kind of families. What do they call them?

  A blended family.

  As though people can be endlessly mixed and matched. Ground up and seamless. A blended family. Just like coffee beans. But it’s not so easy with men and women and children.

  They only lived a mile or so away from us, but there were things about their life together that were forever hidden from me.

  I could guess at what happened between Gina and our son – I could see her still, washing his hair, reading him Where the Wild Things Are, placing a bowl of green pasta before him, hugging him so fiercely that you couldn’t tell where she ended and where he began.

  But I had no real idea what went on between Richard and Pat, this man in his middle thirties who I didn’t know at all, and this seven-year-old child whose skin, whose voice, whose face were more familiar to me than my own.

  Did Richard kiss my son good night? I didn’t ask. Because I really didn’t know what would hurt me more. The warmth, the closeness, the caring that a good-night kiss would indicate. Or the cold distance implicit in the absence of a kiss.

  Richard was not a bad guy. Even I could see that. My ex-wife wouldn’t be married to him if he was any kind of child-hater. I knew, even in my bleakest moments, that there were worse step-parents than Richard. Not that anyone says step-parent any more. Too loaded with meaning.

  Pat and I had both learned to call Richard a partner –as though he were involved in an exciting business venture with the mother of my son, or possibly a game of bridge.

  The thing that drove me nuts about Richard, that had me raising my voice on the phone to my ex-wife – something I would really have preferred to avoid – was that Richard just didn’t seem to understand that my son was one in a million, ten million, a billion.

  Richard thought Pat needed improving. And my son didn’t need improving. He was special already.

  Richard wanted my son to love Harry Potter, wooden toys and tofu. Or was it lentils? But my son loved Star Wars, plastic light sabres and pizza. My son stubbornly remained true to the cause of mindless violence and carbohydrates with extra cheese.

  At first Richard was happy to play along, back in the days when he was still trying to gain entry into Gina’s pants. Before he was finally granted a multiple-entry visa into those pants, before he married my ex-wife, my son’s mum, Richard used to love pretending to be Han Solo to my son’s Luke Skywalker. Loved it. Or at least acted like he did.

  And quite frankly my son would warm to Saddam Hussein if he pretended to be Han Solo for five minutes.

  Now Richard was no longer trying, or he was trying in a different way. He didn’t want to be my son’s friend any more. He wanted to be more like a parent. Improving my boy.

  As though improving someone is any kind of substitute for loving them.

  You make all those promises to your spouse and then one day you get some lawyer to prove that they no longer mean a thing. Gina was part of my past now. But you don’t get divorced from your children. And you can never break free of your vows to them.

  That’s what Paris was all about.

  I was trying to keep my unspoken promises to my son. To still matter to him. To always matter. I was trying to convince him, or perhaps myself, that nothing fundamental had changed between us. Because I missed my boy.

  When he was not there, that’s when I really knew how much I loved him. Loved him so much that it physically hurt, loved him so much that I was afraid some nameless harm would come to him, and afraid that he was going to forget me, that I would drift to the very edge of his life, and my love and the missing would all count for nothing.

  I was terrified that I might turn up for one of my access visits and he wouldn’t be able to quite place me. Ridiculous? Maybe. But we spent most of the week apart. Most of the weekends, too, even with our legally approved trysts. I was never there to tuck him in, to read him a story, to dry his eyes when he cried, to calm his fears, to just be the man who came home to him at night. The way my old man was there for me.

  Can you be a proper dad in days like these? Can you be a real father to your child if you are never around?

  Already, just two years after he went to live with his mother, I was on the fast track to becoming a distant figure. Not a real dad at al
l. A weekend dad, at the very best. As much of a pretend dad as Richard. That was not the kind of father I wanted to be. I needed my son to be a part of my life.

  My new life.

  Cyd and I had been married for just over a year.

  It had been a great year. The best year ever. She had become my closest friend and she hadn’t stopped being my lover. We were at that stage when you feel both familiarity and excitement, when things are getting better and nothing has worn off, that happy period when you divide your time between building a home and fucking each other’s brains out. Shopping at Habitat and Heal’s followed by wild, athletic sex. You can’t beat it.

  Cyd was the nicest person I knew, and she also drove me crazy. The only reason I went to the gym was because I didn’t want her to stop fancying me. My sit-ups were all for her. I hoped it would always be that way. But if you have been badly burned once, you can never be totally sure. After you have taken a spin through the divorce courts, forever seems like a very long time. And maybe that’s a positive thing. Maybe that stops you from treating the love of your life like a piece of self-assembly furniture.

  It wasn’t like that with my son. I planned to stay with Cyd until we were both old and grey. But you never know, do you? In my experience, relationships come and go but being a parent lasts a lifetime. What’s the expression?

  Till death do us part.

  There were lots of things we were planning to do in Paris.

  Pat wanted to go up the Eiffel Tower, but the queues were dauntingly long, so we decided to save it for some other time. I contemplated taking him to the Louvre, but I decided he was too small and the museum was too big.

  So what we did was take a bateau-mouche down the Seine and then grabbed a couple of croque-monsieurs in a little café in the Marais.

  ‘French cheese on toast,’ Pat said, tucking in. ‘This is really delicious.’

  After that we went for a kickabout in the Jardin du Luxembourg, booting his plastic football around under the chestnut trees while young couples necked on park benches and pampered dogs sauntered around with their noses in the air and everybody smoked as though it was the fifties.

  Apart from the boat trip down the river, and the fancy cheese on toast, it wasn’t so different from our usual Sundays. But it felt special, and I think our hearts were lighter than they ever were in London. It was one of those days that you feel like putting in a bottle, so you can keep it for the rest of your life and nobody can ever take it away from you.

  It all went well until we got back to the Gare du Nord. As soon as we went up to the departure gates on the station’s first floor, you could see something was wrong. There were people everywhere. Backpackers, businessmen, groups of tourists. All stranded because there was something on the line. Leaves or refugees? Nobody knew.

  But there were no trains coming in or leaving.

  That’s when I knew we were in trouble.

  I was glad that my own father was not alive to see all of this. The shock would have killed him, I swear to God it would.

  But I knew in my heart that I didn’t spend endless hours with my own dad. My old man never took me to Paris for the day.

  I may have grown up with my dad under the same roof, but he worked six days a week, long hours, and then he came home speechless with exhaustion, sitting there eating his cooked dinner in front of the TV, reflecting silently on the latest dance routine from Pan’s People.

  My old man was separated from me by the need for work and money. I was separated from Pat by divorce and residency orders. Was it really so different? Yes, it was different.

  Even if I rarely saw my father – and perhaps I am kidding myself, but even now I believe I can recall every kickabout I ever had with my old man, every football match we went to together, every trip to the cinema – my father was never afraid that someone would steal me away, that I might start calling some other man dad.

  He went through a lot in his life, from a dirt-poor childhood to world war to terminal cancer. But he never had to go through that.

  Wait until your father gets home, I was told by my mum, again and again.

  And so I did. I spent my childhood waiting for my father to come home. And perhaps Pat waited too. But he knew in his heart that his father was never coming home. Not any more.

  My old man thought that the worst thing in this world you can be is a bad parent to your child. But there’s something almost as bad as that, Dad.

  You can be a stranger.

  And of course I wanted my son to have a happy life. I wanted him to be a good boy for his mother, and to get on okay with her new husband, and to do well at school, and to realise how lucky he was to have found a friend like Bernie Cooper.

  But I also wanted my son to love me the way he used to love me.

  Let’s not forget that bit.

  two

  By the time the black cab finally crawled into the street where he lived, Pat was fast asleep.

  I rarely saw my son sleeping these days, and I was surprised how it seemed to wipe away the years. Awake, his sweet face seemed permanently on guard, glazed with the heart-tugging vigilance of a child who has had to find a place between his divorced parents. Awake, he was sharp-eyed and wary, constantly negotiating the minefield between a mother and father who at some point in his short life had grown sick of living under the same roof. But, asleep, he was round-faced and defenceless again, his flimsy shields all gone. Not a care in the world.

  The lights in his home were blazing. And they were all out on the little pathway, lit up by the security light, waiting for our return.

  Gina, my ex-wife, that face I had once fallen in love with now pinched with fury.

  And Richard, her Clark Kent lookalike, gym-toned and bespectacled, every inch the smug second husband, offering comfort and support.

  Even Uli the au pair was standing watch, her arms folded across her chest like a junior fishwife.

  Only the enormous policeman who was with them looked vaguely sympathetic. Perhaps he was a Sunday dad, too.

  Gina marched down the path to meet us as I paid the driver. I pushed open the cab door and gently scooped my son up in my arms. He was getting heavier by the week. Then Gina was taking him away, looking at me as though we had never met.

  ‘Are you clinically insane?’

  ‘The train –’

  ‘Are you completely mad? Or do you do these things to hurt me?’

  ‘I called as soon as I knew we weren’t going to make it home by bedtime.’

  It was true. I had called them on a borrowed mobile from the Gare du Nord. Gina had been a bit hysterical to discover we were stranded in a foreign country. Lucky I had to cut it short.

  ‘Paris. Bloody Paris. Without even asking me. Without even thinking.’

  ‘Sorry, Gina. I really am.’

  ‘“Sorry, Gina,”’ she parroted. ‘“So sorry, Gina.”’

  I might have guessed she was going to start the parrot routine. If you have been married to someone, then you know exactly how they argue. It’s like two boxers who have fought each other before. Ali and Frazier. Duran and Sugar Ray. Me and Gina. You know each other too well.

  She did this when our marriage was starting to fall apart – repeating my words, holding them up and finding them wanting, throwing them back at me, along with any household items that were lying around. Making my apologies, alibis and excuses all seem empty and feeble. Below the belt, I always thought.

  We actually didn’t fight all that often. It wasn’t that kind of marriage. Not until the very end. Although you would never guess that now.

  ‘We were worried sick. You were meant to be taking him to the park, not dragging him halfway round Europe.’

  Halfway round Europe? That was a bit rich. But then wanton exaggeration was another feature of Gina’s fighting style.

  I couldn’t help remembering that this was a woman who had travelled to Japan alone when she was a teenager and lived there for a year. Now that’s halfway round the worl
d. And she loved it. And she would have gone back.

  If she hadn’t met me.

  If she hadn’t got pregnant.

  If she hadn’t given up Japan for her boys.

  For Pat and me. We used to be her boys. Both of us. It was a long time ago.

  ‘It was only Paris, Gina,’ I said, knowing it would infuriate her, and unable to restrain myself. We knew each other far too well to argue in a civilised manner. ‘It’s just like going down the road. Paris is practically next door.’

  ‘Only Paris? He’s seven years old. He has to go to school in the morning. And you say it’s only Paris? We phoned the police. I was ringing round the hospitals.’

  ‘I called you, didn’t I?’

  ‘In the end. When you had no choice. When you knew you weren’t going to get away with it.’ She hefted Pat in her arms. ‘What were you thinking of, Harry? What goes on in your head? Is there anything in there at all?’

  How could she possibly understand what went on in my head? She had him every day. And I had him for one lousy day a week.

  She was carrying Pat up the garden path now. I trailed behind her, avoiding eye contact with her husband and the au pair and the enormous cop. And what was that cop doing here anyway? It was almost as if someone had reported a possible kidnapping. What kind of nut job would do a thing like that?

  ‘Look, Gina, I really am sorry you were so worried.’ And it was true. I felt terrible that she had been phoning the hospitals, the police, thinking the worst. I could imagine how that felt. ‘It won’t happen again. Next Sunday I’ll –’

  ‘I’ll have to think about next Sunday.’

  That stopped me in my tracks.

  ‘What does that mean? I can still see him next Sunday, can’t I?’

  She didn’t answer. She was finished with me. Totally finished with me.

  Tracked by her husband and the hired help, Gina carried our son across the threshold of her home, into that place where I could never follow.

  Pat yawned, stretched, almost woke up. In a voice so soft and gentle that it did something to my insides, Gina told him to go back to sleep. Then Richard was between us, giving me an oh-how-could-you? look. Slowly shaking his head, and with this maddening little smile, he closed the door in my face.