Man and Wife

by Tony Parsons

  Then there was Richard, this man my ex-wife had married, standing to one side, unsmiling, half lost in the shadows of a white clapboard house. He didn’t look happy. He had the look of an expatriate who had returned home, but not in triumph. But what did I know? He had married my former wife, he lived with my only son. I couldn’t think of him as a loser. There was a piece of paper still in the envelope.

  A note from Gina.

  Harry—

  We are coming back to London for a few weeks. Just the two of us. Pat and me. My dad has something wrong with his leg. He needs some help around the house. We are not staying with him – I have a flat. Will call you when we get in. Pat seems to have had a good time with you. But you know Pat – he doesn’t say much. Please thank Cyd. I hope your mum is okay. Got to go.

  Gina

  ‘Hello, Harry.’

  Peggy was at the top of the stairs. She was dressed in a long white lacy dress with short puffed-up sleeves. She looked like a bride. Or an angel.

  ‘You look lovely, Peg.’

  ‘My daddy’s getting married. To his girlfriend Liberty. She’s a nurse. From Manila. I’m going to be their bridesmaid.’

  ‘Come on,’ Cyd said, appearing on the landing next to her. ‘You go and take off that dress. Watch the pins on the hem, okay? I’ll be right in.’

  My wife came down the stairs.

  ‘Good trip? How’s Eamon? Is he all right?’

  I didn’t reply. I left my bags in the hall and went into the kitchen. The work surfaces were covered with dishes of guacamole, chilli sauce and Tabasco, bottles of Cantonese plum sauce and Caribbean banana ketchup. Sweet and sharp.

  ‘Experimenting with my dips,’ Cyd said. ‘I spoke to your mum. She’s not feeling so good.’

  My wife held out her arms to me but I just stared at her.

  ‘You lied to me,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Before I went away. You told me some story about going out with two women. Two women, you said. But I saw you with him. Luke Moore. In the Merry Leper. I saw you, Cyd.’

  ‘Harry.’

  ‘I saw the pair of you.’

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not what it seems. He wants to buy the company. That’s why I met him. I couldn’t tell you because I knew you would – do this.’

  For the first time since I had come home, I looked my wife in the eye.

  ‘And what did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him what I have told him all along, Harry.’ We stared at each other. ‘I told him no.’

  ‘What else did he try to buy? Don’t tell me. I can fucking guess.’

  I tried to brush past her but she grabbed my arm. ‘I don’t want anyone else, okay? That’s it. You should know that already. I don’t want anyone else, Harry. Never have done. But you can wear out someone’s love, Harry, just like you can wear out anything else. So you either stop all this or…’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.’ She touched my face, and then saw the photograph I was holding. She took my hand and held it.

  ‘Is that a picture of Pat?’

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘Oh Harry.’ She released my hand. ‘That’s not fair. If I don’t love your son in exactly the same way as you, that’s not some kind of betrayal.’

  She had me there, of course.

  Eamon cracked.

  Perhaps it was Evelyn Blunt’s hatchet job. The journalist had pulled off the oldest party trick known to hacks – acting as Eamon’s best friend in the flesh, and then his public executioner in print. Under the headline No Laughing Matter, Blunt devoted 3,000 words to explaining why Eamon Fish was unimportant and the readers of his newspaper should take absolutely no interest in him. The photos were good, though – Eamon wild-eyed and windswept, his dark good looks almost a part of the Kerry landscape. And very, very moody.

  Or perhaps it was the celebrity chef that made him crack. Eamon’s first chore on Wicked World was interviewing Wee Willie Hiscock, the loveable Geordie cook. All through the big English breakfast Hiscock blatantly plugged his new book, Right in Your Gobhole, Too, Bonnie Lad, the sequel to his bestseller, Right in Your Gobhole, Bonnie Lad. Eamon had always been averse to such blatant promotion, but where he had happily slapped it down on Fish on Friday, now he seemed unable to stem the flow of plugs.

  Or perhaps it was the boy group that pushed him over the edge. Hermione Gates made no secret of the fact that she was a huge fan of Lads Unlimited, five young, handsome, hairless men who could carry a tune, but not very far, and who performed a series of dance steps that looked like gentle exercises for sufferers of arthritis.

  The studio monitor clearly showed Hermione flashing her drawers in excitement during Lads Unlimited’s rendition of ‘Our Funky Love Will Live Forever’. The monitor also clearly showed Eamon (favourite albums: Nevermind by Nirvana, Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin and Is This It? by the Strokes) looking at his watch.

  But probably Eamon would still be presenting Wicked World to this very day if he hadn’t been asked to interview the winner of Six Pissed Students in a Flat.

  The winner was Warren, a tanned, pierced, pumped-up plumber with a fashionably shaven head who was hoping that the success of Six Pissed Students in a Flat would allow him to put down his tool box and become something really useful, like a game-show host or a DJ in Ibiza.

  Warren sat between Hermione and a dazed-looking Eamon. The retired plumber idly lifted up his pastel-blue vest, revealing his rippling six-pack and a diamond stud in his navel.

  ‘For me the, like, turning point? Was in week six? When I discovered Darren had taken me milk out of the fridge. Without asking, innit?’

  ‘Hermione frowned at the memory. You were very angry, weren’t you, babes?’

  Eamon’s head was hanging.

  ‘Well, for me, asking before you use someone’s milk is what it’s all about.’

  ‘Absolutely, babes. I’m, like – have a word with yourself, Darren, you muppet.’

  Eamon had buried his face in his hands.

  ‘Chloe and Zoë, right, they wanted to stop me confronting, Darren, innit? Who I could always relate to because we both have issues because of not being properly parented?’

  Suddenly Eamon was on his feet, addressing camera two with its little red light shining above it. I felt a surge of pride. Even at moments of supreme stress, he never looked into the wrong camera.

  ‘Turn it off,’ he said. ‘Turn it off right now!’

  ‘Babes?’ said Hermione Gates.

  ‘You’re poisoning your mind with this rubbish. We all are. What’s wrong with us? We used to fill our screens with heroes. Now we want people we can look down on. People we can look down on.’ He looked with real sadness at Hermione and Warren. ‘I want no part of it.’ He tore off his microphone, pulled out the clear wax earplug that linked him to the gallery, threw them at the feet of the stunned floor manager. ‘I’m going outside now. I may be a while.’

  Then he was gone. In the gloaming of the studio wings, Barry Twist and I watched him go.

  ‘You know he’ll never read an autocue in this town again, don’t you?’ said Barry.

  ‘Sometimes you have to start again,’ I said. ‘It’s painful and it’s messy. But sometimes you just have to make the break and start again.’

  My mother was going into hospital in the morning.

  I would pick her up first thing, and I knew already she would be wearing what she called her Sunday best, and then I would drive her to the hospital in the next town. And that’s where a surgeon would perform what they called a simple mastectomy.

  One of her breasts, the one with the tumour, would be lost so that her life could be saved. That breast – one of the curves my father had fallen in love with when she was a young girl, and never stopped loving as they grew old together, the breast that had sustained me as a baby – would be gone, cut off to separate my mother from the t
umour that wanted to kill her. This thing that had given me life, that had made my father gasp with wonder and gratitude, would be cut off and – what? – thrown away? Burned? Preserved for medical science?

  I couldn’t think about these things, and none of the brochures—not Talking with Your Children about Breast Cancer, or Living with Lymphoedema, or Exercises after Breast Surgery – gave any hint as to the fate of the amputated breast. They didn’t want you to think about it.

  I sat in the living room of the old house, drinking cup after cup of strong sweet tea, feeling that my mother had been thrust into some kind of war. Everything suddenly seemed uncertain, unbalanced, in opposition. The breast and the tumour, love and sickness, life and death.

  My mother was happy. She was happy because the old house was full of people, and this woman – one of seven children, mother of an only child who took years to arrive, widow of two years – seemed to feel that she was fulfilling her destiny again. The tea and biscuits, the sandwiches in the kitchen, the occasional beer produced for one of her brothers. It didn’t feel like the house was full because of cancer surgery. It felt more like Christmas.

  The family is dying off now, that old family I knew as a child. All the aunts and uncles, the brothers of my parents, and the matches they made, beloved wives found in the same few streets, and then kept for a lifetime.

  I knew these people better than I knew anyone. I knew their generosity, their resilience and their loyalty.

  I was thankful that they fussed around my mother now – ‘Anything we can do, love, anything at all, let us know,’ I was told, time after time – but I wasn’t surprised.

  My uncles and my aunts. Retired now, for the most part, or getting there. But I remembered them from the years when I was a child. Their aches and pains, the pills that now had to be taken, the unsettling visits to the doctor – they couldn’t cloud my memory of lean, hard men and their small, pretty wives, the men all factory workers and printers and shopkeepers at first, and later the shops being replaced by supermarkets, back when supermarkets were modern and new, and the women homemakers decades before the term was invented, homemakers the lot of them, even the ones who worked. And how they worked.

  These women, my aunts, would never have thought of themselves as career women, but they worked in school kitchens, on the buses, doing the books in a wholesale warehouse, in shops and supermarkets. They worked because they had to.

  They didn’t work to be fulfilled or to discover themselves. They worked to pay the rent, they worked because there were always children – my army of cousins – and never much money.

  That old family rallied around my mother the night before she had a date with the surgeon. And even though their numbers were diminishing – my old man had been the first to go, but my mother had already lost two of her brothers since then, their hearts giving out on them just when they were ready to enjoy their gardens and their grandchildren – there was still something indomitable about these old Londoners who moved out to the suburbs a lifetime ago.

  The house was full of cowboy music and laughter. I was sent to the local shop for more milk and sugar. The cancer leaflets with their terrible drawings of women who had had a breast surgically removed were ignored, lying on the coffee table next to the TV listings and a biography of Shirley Bassey.

  When I was growing up, dreaming of escape, plotting a career in television, I believed that my family had lived small lives – never thinking of what was out there beyond their few suburban towns, never caring, never dreaming. But now I saw that they had lived better lives than me – fuller, happier lives, lives with more meaning, where loyalty and decency were taken for granted, where you reacted to cancer by putting on the kettle and a Dolly Parton record. How I envied them now, now that I saw that old dying family as my mother fought for her life, now that it was all too late.

  My Aunt Doll talked softly with my mother in the kitchen. Sometimes this old family seemed as segregated as Muslims. There were things that my mother would never dream of discussing with me, or with her brothers. Things that I only read about in the cancer literature.

  Total mastectomy can be the better option when – the tumour is in the centre of the breast or directly behind the nipple; the breast is small and would be distorted by a partial mastectomy; there are several cancerous or precancerous areas in the breast; the woman would rather have the whole breast removed.

  I had to read about these things. Perhaps I was glad my mother would not talk to me about them.

  In the garden my Uncle Jack, my dad’s brother, Aunt Doll’s small, dark, nattily dressed husband, was smoking a roll-up. Smoking outside the house. A new thing. A small concession to the new century, or perhaps my father’s lung cancer. Cigarettes, once consumed as freely as tea and chocolate digestives in this house, now had to be smoked in the garden. I watched my Uncle Jack smoke, and I saw the ghost of my father’s face in his face.

  Uncle Jack’s big black Merc was parked outside the house, a superior set of wheels on a street full of light vans and old Fords. Uncle Jack was a driver – taking businessmen to the airport, waiting for them with his sign at arrivals, smoking his roll-ups outside the car so that the air inside was daisy fresh. Uncle Jack came with me when I went to see my father’s body at the undertaker’s. I wondered if we would have to look at my mother’s body soon.

  When the family had all gone, my Aunt Doll and Uncle Jack the last ones to leave, my mum made some tea for the two of us. The light was failing and there would be no more visitors tonight. No more visitors before the operation. Somehow the years had slipped away, and aunts and uncles who once stayed up playing poker until dawn – smoking their cigarettes, drinking their beer and sherry, their laughter ringing all night long – now liked to be home behind locked doors before it was too dark.

  ‘How are you, Mum?’

  ‘I’m all right, love. Don’t worry about me. How are you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You and Cyd.’

  ‘Things are not so good right now, Mum.’ I didn’t want to upset her, tonight of all nights. Yet I felt her bravery deserved some of my own. ‘I’ve met someone else. Someone I like a lot. And I think Cyd has too.’

  I expected my mother – half of that great double act, my parents, the first husband-and-wife team I knew, the pair who cast their giant shadow on every relationship I’d ever had with a woman – to give me a lecture about the sanctity of the wedding vows, the importance of marriage, the horror of divorce.

  But she didn’t do any of these things.

  ‘Life is very short,’ my mum said. ‘You have to take your pleasures where you can.’

  My mum stood at the window, watching the street, as if waiting for someone. But everyone had been. There was nobody left to visit. And then I realised.

  My dad.

  She was waiting for my dad.

  My mother stood at the window of the house that I had grown up in, the house that she had grown old in, and when I saw her waiting for a husband who would never come home, I loved her more than I could bear.

  Waiting. The night before going into hospital for her simple mastectomy, although there was nothing simple about it, nothing simple at all, my mother standing at the window of the old house, looking out at the empty street beyond the net curtains, waiting for my old man.

  Waiting to see him come around that bend in the road in his company car, and take her in his hard old tattooed arms one more time, my father come home to tell her she is beautiful – her face, her body, all of her – and that he loves her as he has always done, and that everything is going to be all right.

  Or maybe just to take her in his arms.

  I saw Tex.

  I had left my mother at the hospital, left her unpacking her small suitcase in a ward where no bed was empty, a ward full of mostly elderly women in their prim nightdresses, with orange squash, boxes of Quality Street and romantic novels on their bedside tables. My father had died in this hospital and I was surprised how familiar
it all was to me – the rank smell of hospital cooking in the corridors, the queues everywhere, the defiant crowds of smokers sucking their cigarettes outside the main doors. The smell of food, disease and medicine seemed to have seeped into every brick. What was different now was that I was visiting a ward full of women – women who laughed, women who talked and complained and commiserated in a way that didn’t happen in the ward full of men.

  There was a lot to do. A nurse to take my mum’s blood pressure. A chat with the anaesthetist. The surgeon was on his way. And my mum had to change, from her Sunday best two-piece suit into her own Marks & Spencer nightdress. My mum acted as if she was on a day trip to the seaside. She was being too breezy, too jokey, overdoing the jollity, always her defence in the face of crisis.

  I kissed her, much too hard, and left. And when I was filling up my car at the local petrol station, that’s when I saw Tex.

  Or rather Graham the insurance salesman from Southend, dressed up for his weekly line dancing, drawing amused glances from pale Essex teenagers in their souped-up Escorts as he filled his battered old estate with diesel. And he wasn’t alone. In the passenger seat, there was an elderly cowgirl – some game old dear in rhinestone and buckskin, a ten-gallon hat sitting on top of her Maggie Thatcher perm. My mother’s line-dancing replacement. Or maybe there had been a few since Tex dumped my mum because he found out that she was ill.

  I watched him cross the forecourt and enter the garage. When he came out he was carrying a box of After Eight mints and a cheap bouquet of flowers, the kind you can only buy in petrol stations. Maggie Thatcher saw him coming with his gifts and smiled shyly. What a guy. And I moved to go over to him, to take his arm and make him listen while I told him about what was happening to my mum in the hospital down the road that morning, to tell him about the surgery, and to use words like mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, lymphoedema, until I saw him squirm with shame at his cowardice.