by Tim Parks
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tim Parks
Title Page
Rings
Bedtimes
Common Friend
Four-Star Breakfast
Brotherly Love
Day and Night
Goat
Promotion
Zoning
Black Tie
Harry
Denial
List
Mrs P
The Wedding Plant
Whereof One Cannot Speak
Bivouac
Vespa
Julie
Money
Tough Choices
Reverend
Blissful Brush
Grandparenthood
Storming the Tower
Winner
Missing
Concrete
Martha and Edward
The Second Mrs P
Shrink
Music
Even Tenderness
Circumambulation
Copyright
About the Book
‘Somehow it seemed to him the only thing that would really solve the problem would be to return to the sea and find the old ring with their names and the wedding date engraved inside, in 22-carat gold, and put it on again and then the world would magically return to what it had been before. Many years before.
This did not happen.’
Thomas and Mary have been married for thirty years. They have two children, a dog, a house in the suburbs. But after years of drifting apart, things – finally – come to a head.
In this love story in reverse, Tim Parks recounts what happens when youthful devotion has long given way to dog walking, separate bed times, and tensions over who left the fridge door open.
Lurching from comedy to tragedy, via dependence, cold re-examination, tenderness and betrayal, Thomas and Mary is a fiercely intimate chronicle of a marriage – capturing the offshoots of pain sent through an entire family, when the couple at its heart decide it’s all over.
About the Author
Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since.
He is the acclaimed author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, Cleaver, A Season with Verona, Teach Us to Sit Still and Italian Ways. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on literary translation in Milan, writes for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and his many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi and Machiavelli.
Also by Tim Parks
Fiction
TONGUES OF FLAME
LOVING ROGER
HOME THOUGHTS
FAMILY PLANNING
GOODNESS
CARA MASSIMINA
MIMI’S GHOST
SHEAR
EUROPA
DESTINY
JUDGE SAVAGE
RAPIDS
CLEAVER
DREAMS OF RIVERS AND SEAS
SEX IS FORBIDDEN (FIRST PUBLISHED AS THE SERVER)
PAINTING DEATH
Non-fiction
ITALIAN NEIGHBOURS
AN ITALIAN EDUCATION
ADULTERY & OTHER DIVERSIONS
TRANSLATING STYLE
HELL AND BACK
A SEASON WITH VERONA
THE FIGHTER
TEACH US TO SIT STILL
ITALIAN WAYS
WHERE I’M READING FROM
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any number of readers will see some resemblance to their lives or the lives of people they know. And perhaps there is indeed some resemblance. But it is coincidental. Thomas and Mary never existed, nor their two children, nor their world in the suburbs of Manchester.
RINGS
This is how Thomas lost his ring. They were on Blackpool beach and wanted to go for a proper swim but they couldn’t do this together because of the children, who couldn’t swim and had anyway already been in the water and just wanted to play round the windbreak. So they decided to take turns. Him first. And because the cold water made his skin shrink a little and made it slippery, he pulled his ring off so that he shouldn’t lose it. He didn’t want to lose it. It was solid gold. He had a long swim, came back, got dressed and asked Mary for the ring but she frowned and said she hadn’t got it. ‘I gave it to you,’ he said. ‘No, you didn’t.’ She thought he must have put it in a pocket. ‘But I’m sure!’ ‘Why are you looking in your pockets, then?’ she smiled.
The ring wasn’t among his clothes. He couldn’t find it. So she thought maybe he had hidden it, somewhere. ‘I would have some memory of having hidden it,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t I?’ Again she laughed. ‘You forget all kinds of things!’ ‘Maybe you forgot I gave it to you,’ he said. She shook her head. Unlike him, she did not forget things. She wasn’t that kind of person. He was the forgetful one, the distracted one.
Thomas searched in the sand, first on the spot where he had changed, then round the poles of the windbreak. If he had hidden it, it would have been right next to something fixed. Mary said the kids had moved the windbreak. Hadn’t he noticed the wind had shifted? Thomas began to feel panicky, because it seemed to him that a wedding ring was important, symbolic, quite apart from the money. ‘I took it off to look after it,’ he protested. ‘Not to lose it.’
He grabbed one of the kids’ spades and began to dig where he thought the windbreak had been. Not there, Mary thought. She wanted to go for her swim now and set off across the sand. ‘Can we help, Daddy?’ the kids asked. Mark crouched down and pushed sand back between his legs like a dog. ‘Stop it!’ Sally screamed. ‘Don’t you remember if I gave it to Mum, or if I hid it?’ Thomas asked them. They didn’t remember anything. By the time his wife came back they had dug up an area of five square yards. ‘My towel is sandy,’ she complained. ‘Things can’t just disappear,’ Thomas protested. Drying herself, she shook her head. ‘Somehow or other you’ve managed to lose it,’ she said.
Later, half a mile down the beach, they saw a man with a metal detector scanning the base of the pier supports. Thomas offered him a reward if he found the ring and they walked back down the beach together. ‘I thought I’d given it to my wife for safe-keeping,’ he explained, ‘but she says I must have hidden it in my clothes. So it’s probably fallen in the sand, though I can’t find it.’ As they walked, the man told him how many rings he’d found with his detector, some of them lost decades ago. And coins. Pocket knives. Even a hand grenade.
When they reached the spot, Thomas wasn’t sure it was the spot. The tide was coming in fast. Everyone else had gone. It all looked different. But almost at once the metal detector beeped. Thomas’s heart twitched. The man unearthed a ring pull from a Coke can. In the end they found half a dozen ring pulls, a self-tapping screw and an old-fashioned tin opener.
Another week of sea and sunshine and all trace of the ring on his wedding finger was gone. The kids continued to dig in the sand, but nothing was found. The same year, towards Christmas, Thomas noticed that Mary was no longer wearing her ring. ‘I thought,’ she explained, ‘that if you weren’t wearing yours there was no point in me wearing mine.’ ‘But I’ve lost mine, I can’t wear it.’ ‘You could have bought a new one,’ she said. She was right, Thomas thought, but he wasn’t sure that that would be the same thing. ‘You didn’t tell me to buy a new one,’ he observed. She asked did he need to be told?
The more Thomas thought about this, the more distressed he f
elt. Yet at the same time he did not want to buy a new ring. Somehow it seemed to him the only thing that would really solve the problem would be to return to the sea and find the old ring with their names and the wedding date engraved inside, in 22-carat gold, and put it on again and then the world would magically return to what it had been before. Many years before.
This did not happen.
BEDTIMES
Monday evening, 10.30. Thomas is sitting on the sofa with his laptop reading for work. Mary has been talking to a friend on Skype.
If he is going to work all night, I may as well go to bed, Mary decides and goes upstairs without a word. Thomas joins her at midnight when she is sound asleep, face to the wall.
Tuesday evening, 10.45. Mary decides that their dog Ricky needs a late walk. Thomas, who has been watching a Champions League game in the old playroom, wanders back to the sitting room to find it empty. If she is out with the dog, I may as well go to bed, he decides. Mary joins him at midnight when he is sound asleep, face to the wall.
Wednesday evening, 11.00. Thomas is still out playing billiards with his friend Alan. Mary concludes she may as well turn in and leads her dog Ricky up the stairs to his basket on her side of the bed. ‘Go to sleep now,’ she tells him when he puts his cold nose between the sheets. ‘Bed, Ricky! Bed!’ Thomas joins her at 1.30 when she is sound asleep, face to the wall.
Thursday evening, 9.30. Thomas and Mary are in their sitting room reading, he on the sofa, she at her place at the table. He is reading a novel by Haruki Murakami, she a book about training cocker spaniels. Unusually, their son Mark comes downstairs. It is warmer here, he says, and proceeds to open his computer to watch a film, with headphones. The boy is fourteen. Thomas looks up and says he’d like to watch the film too if that’s okay. Mark tells him he won’t like the film, but Thomas says he’ll give it half an hour if that’s all right. Mark says fine and unplugs the headphones. Thomas asks Mary if she would like to watch the film too. Mary says there’s hardly room for three to watch a film on their son’s laptop. Mark says they could go and watch the film on the TV in the playroom. Mary says it’s too cold in the playroom to sit through a film and decides to take Ricky for a walk. Thomas finds the film dull, stupid and disturbingly violent. It’s nice sitting beside his son but at 10.30 he bails out and goes to bed. Mary joins him at 11.30 when he is not asleep, but pretends he is, face to the wall.
Friday evening, 7.30. Mary has arranged an evening out with her friends from the dog park. She invites Thomas to come. He would enjoy meeting them, she says, and they are eager to meet him. Thomas is not convinced – he doesn’t want to meet her friends from the dog park; it is not his scene he says; he will take Ricky out while she is at the pub. Mary repeats that their son can take the dog out, leaving Thomas free to come to the pub and meet her friends. He repeats that it really isn’t his scene. He has some work to do. In the event he has a long conversation on Skype with an old friend. So as not to have to pretend to be asleep again, something he finds painful, he goes to bed early. Mary joins him at 11.30 and hardly cares whether he is asleep or not, since she has nothing to say to a man who she believes is having an affair.
Saturday evening. Mary says there is a good film on at the local cinema about ten minutes away in the car. She asks their daughter if she would like to go, but she wouldn’t. So she asks Thomas if he would like to go. Thomas asks for some more details about the film, which she provides, and he decides yes he would like to go to see this film, so Thomas and Mary go to the cinema and watch the film which is called We Need To Talk About Kevin and both of them enjoy it up to a point and afterwards they go out to a bar and have a drink and talk for quite a long time about the film and about their children and their relationship with their children, since the film is largely about parents and the terrible mistakes you can make with your children, and both of them feel how pleasant it has been to chat together and what a good decision it was to come out together and see a film. Back home, Mary asks Mark if he took the dog out and Mark says he did, about two hours ago, and Mary says that since they are back much later than she expected she feels the dog should be taken out again for another quick walk and she keeps her coat on. She asks Thomas if he would like to come with her to walk the dog for a few minutes, perhaps just around the block and back, but he says he’d better check his email since there’s an issue with one of his company’s clients in the USA and this is prime time for people emailing from the USA before the end of their working day, and so she goes out alone. As it turns out there is no mail from the USA. Thomas sends a few private emails and text messages and waits, expecting Mary will be back, but after forty minutes she is still out. Thomas is feeling conflicted but now decides he may as well go to bed and is in fact fast asleep when his wife follows him half an hour later. ‘Tom,’ she asks, checking to see if he would perhaps like to talk, but he doesn’t respond, face to the wall, snoring lightly.
Sunday evenings Thomas has always taken one or both his children out for a burger or even to a restaurant, depending on their choice, and since his daughter is home today he takes the two of them out to a burger bar. He asks his wife and the children ask their mother whether she would like to come, but she says no, she doesn’t really want to come and have a burger, they are so fattening; the children then suggest that in that case she could have a salad, why not?, and she says there is no point in going out to pay for a salad that she could perfectly well have at home, so they say let’s go to a restaurant then, maybe Indian or Japanese, but she says no you go, she doesn’t want to go out to eat, and so Thomas takes his son and daughter out to the burger bar where they chat and joke very merrily eating burgers and drinking Coke, and after-wards Thomas persuades them to go to a pub as well so that he can have a beer and the children discuss music and boyfriends and girlfriends and how not to get fat despite eating burgers and drinking Coke, and Mark who is four years younger than his sister worries about school and Sally who has left home now worries about university and they all have a good time laughing at some of the other people in the pub, one of whom has an offensively loud voice, and in the end they return home around 10.30. Given the early hour, Thomas is surprised to find that Mary has already retired to bed. He sits at his computer to look at email while his children go to the playroom to sit in the cold with a sleeping bag on their laps and watch a horror film, and he smiles on hearing them giggling down there and decides to go to bed, where he finds that his wife is not sleeping with her face to the wall but reading a book.
Thomas is taken aback. ‘Coinciding bedtimes,’ she laughs, and there is something of a challenge in her voice. ‘A miracle,’ Thomas agrees and he takes off his clothes but for pants and T-shirt and lies down beside her. Propped up on a pillow, she continues to read with the light of the bedside lamp. Thomas lies on his side, face towards her, watching. The air between them is tense. Thomas feels his wife is a good-looking woman. She is aware of the pressure of his eyes on her. ‘How can you go on reading so many books about dogs?’ he finally asks. ‘They’re fascinating,’ she replies at once. ‘Absolutely fascinating. Aren’t you, Ricky?’ she addresses the dog, which is dozing in its basket and raises a silky ear. ‘Speaking of which,’ she suddenly says, ‘he probably needs a last pee. Poor thing.’ And she climbs out of bed and pulls on her jeans. Thomas watches. He feels he should protest, but doesn’t. Perhaps she is waiting for him to protest, but if she is, she doesn’t make it clear. ‘Do you really think he needs to go out again?’ Thomas eventually asks, but it’s too late, the dog is now racing round and round the room in inane canine excitement and she is saying, ‘Come on. Come on, darling!’ And she disappears through the door and downstairs.
Thomas lies on his back. He has had a nice evening with his children but now he feels drained and lost. He wonders, should he wait up for his wife and confront her, but in the end it is only a passing thought. Surely it’s she who should confront him. These thoughts are discouraging and eventually he rolls over towards the wall and fall
s asleep. Finding him in that position forty minutes later, Mary sheds a tear or two before falling asleep herself. Another week has gone by. In the playroom the two children are wondering whether there’s anything they can do about their parents.
COMMON FRIEND
Thomas and Mary do not have friends in common, though they do sometimes have people to dinner. For example, they had their daughter’s boyfriend’s parents over recently and served them fish. Unfortunately, it turned out that the one thing the mother never ate, in fact absolutely couldn’t eat, was fish. It was a shame because on the rare occasions when she does cook dinner for guests, Mary does it in style and here she had prepared a truly wonderful dish of salmon trout, as well as fish soup and some fishy hors d’oeuvres.
‘You don’t eat fish? Oh, for heaven’s sake! If only I’d known!’
While the others sat down at the table and raised a glass or two, Mary rushed back into the kitchen to prepare an equally elaborate meal without fish for her daughter’s boyfriend’s mother. Thomas knew Mary wouldn’t mind doing this because in the end Mary doesn’t like to spend too much time sitting at table with other people. Often she eats alone. But she does like a chance to show off her cooking skills and generosity. So actually this was a rather successful evening for Mary. Thomas held the fort conversationally, Mary cooked, then cleaned. All well.
This wasn’t always the case. If Thomas’s mother came to stay, for example, particularly if she came at Easter or Christmas, the older woman would fuss around trying to help. ‘For heaven’s sake, Mum! Sit down,’ Mary would say. ‘Take it easy when you’re on holiday.’ And the younger woman set to work. Thomas would have liked to do some cooking himself, with Mary or with his mother or alone, but Mary’s kitchen was Mary’s kitchen. As the (elaborate) lunch was served, there would be a little tension around the table. Why? There just was. Almost the only thing that could be said was how good the food was. And again it was. Beyond that, an abyss. Mary served, running back and forth from kitchen to sitting room, because they ate at the big table in the sitting room when there were guests. Just occasionally she sat a moment or two before springing up again. The children wolfed the food down and hurried off to their computers. Often for hours on end each separate member of the family was in his or her separate room with his or her computer. Then there was peace.
