Man and Wife

by Tony Parsons

  ‘I want to build something of my own,’ she said. ‘I’ve never done that in my life. I’ve always worked for other people in little jobs that didn’t mean a thing to me. For most of Peggy’s life I’ve been a waitress. But I’ve got this thing I’m good at, Harry. This thing I can do really well. I can cook anything, and I’m not afraid of hard work, and I’m smart enough to understand what my clients want. I’m not useless. I’ve got skills.’

  ‘I know you do, I know you do.’

  ‘I want to make something of my own, make some money, make you and Peggy proud of me.’

  ‘I’m proud of you already.’

  ‘But you understand? Please try to understand. I want this marriage to work. And of course children are one of the things that marriage is all about. But so is understanding each other.’

  ‘I understand.’

  And I smiled when I said it, to show her it was true. I understood. At least, I think I did. I wanted her business to do well. I knew it was important to her. I could see Cyd wasn’t like the mothers of Peggy’s friends who had retired from high-octane careers to have children. My wife was doing it the other way around. And she was at least as smart as those other mothers. Why shouldn’t she have it all, too?

  But I guessed it wasn’t just her catering business that was staving off baby hunger. She had been worn out by Jim, and maybe she just wanted to give our marriage time to grow before adding any more complications to the mix. And in my heart I suspected that there was some other reason, a reason that could never be spoken, that Cyd wanted to defer pregnancy.

  I had a hunch that my wife didn’t completely believe that I could keep all those wedding vows, that in the end I would turn out to be nothing special. Just another Jim. She didn’t want a baby with someone who wouldn’t stay with her. Not a second time. And I could understand that. Because I felt the same way.

  But as I drove home from the restaurant, I saw that having a baby wouldn’t make things more complicated for us. It would make everything a lot simpler. A baby of our own was just what we needed. To hold it all together. To create a home that would find room for all of us. Including Pat.

  As I felt the muscles in my upper arms throb, still sore from the grappling techniques of the waiters, I realised we needed a baby to make our blended family into a proper family.

  I needed to be a real father again. To Peggy. To the baby that Cyd and I would have together.

  And to the boy they wanted to take away.

  ‘Can you give me a hand with this stuff, honey?’

  Cyd was getting ready to go out to a gig. The kitchen was full of silver trays covered in clingfilm. Tonight it was antipasti – fat tomatoes stuffed with rice, prosciutto served with figs, thick slices of mozzarella decorated with sprigs of basil, pane alle olive, and tiny pizza marinara the size of compact discs.

  So I helped my wife to carry it all out to the car, while she told me about the event. The business was still new enough for her to be excited.

  ‘First night. Off-Shaftesbury Avenue. Some Hollywood star who wants to do theatre. Ibsen, I think. I don’t know. Something Scandinavian. We’re catering for 200 at the after-show party.’

  When her station wagon was loaded with Italian delicacies she slammed it shut and looked at me. And that’s when she knew that something was wrong.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Gina. And that loser she married. They want to leave the country. Taking Pat with them.’

  ‘For good?’

  I nodded. ‘Bastards, the pair of them.’

  ‘What’s caused all this?’

  ‘Richard. London hasn’t worked out for him. He wants to try his luck in New York. As if his little career is the only thing that matters. As if Pat hasn’t got any rights.’

  She put her arms around me. She knew what this meant.

  ‘How would you feel about Pat coming to live with us?’ I said.

  ‘Gina wouldn’t agree to it, would she?’

  ‘What if she did? Would it be okay with you?’

  ‘Whatever makes you happy, babe.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I felt a stab of sadness. Because she didn’t say that having Pat come to live with us would make her equally happy. Of course she didn’t say that. How could she? She said that she wouldn’t object – and I knew that my wife was a kind-hearted, generous woman, and that she loved me, and that she meant it.

  So why wasn’t that enough?

  Because I wanted him to matter as much to her as he did to me. Even though marriage had changed everything, and being the wife of Pat’s dad was very different from being the girlfriend of Pat’s dad. But I wanted her to see him with my eyes – how unique he was, how special, how beautiful. I wanted Cyd to look at Pat with the eyes of a parent. But only blood can make you feel like that. And with the best will in the world, you can’t fake blood.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘I’ve got to run. Can we talk about this when I get home?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She squeezed my hand, kissed my cheek. ‘It’ll all work out, babe, I promise you. Got to run now. Don’t forget that Jim’s picking up Peg.’

  How could I forget?

  Jim’s sporadic outings to see his daughter had taken on the importance of a state visit. Excitement mounted in our house days before the event. I should have been sympathetic to Jim – another part-time dad, separated from his flesh and blood. But I was resentful, bitter and jealous. For all the usual reasons—that my wife loved him first (definitely) and best (probably). And there were reasons that had nothing to do with my jealous heart.

  Jim turned up when he felt like it. He stayed away when it suited him. This should have reduced his stock in our house, but somehow it didn’t. He got away with murder. No matter what he did, Peggy was mad about him, was delirious with excitement when he came to call on his Norton.

  And from Jim and Peggy I learned that children want to love their parents, want to love them with all their heart.

  Even when they don’t deserve it.

  Jim was late. Very late.

  Peggy was perched on the back of a chair by the window, her face pressed against the glass, waiting for the appearance of her father’s motorbike.

  But Jim wasn’t coming. I could sense it, because it had happened before. There would be no night out with Peggy’s old man. Not this time.

  The phone rang and Peggy rushed to get it. I knelt on the floor, picking up the accessories of Air Pilot Lucy Doll and her high-flying friends. It’s so easy for a kid to lose these fiddly bits, and then they go crazy because they can’t find them. I carefully replaced a male flight attendant’s drinks tray.

  Peggy came back into the room with the phone, trying to be brave, sucking in her bottom lip to stop it shaking.

  ‘It’s Daddy. He wants to talk to you.’

  I took the phone. ‘Jim?’

  In the background I could hear the music. ‘Baby, pull my love pump/ Baby, pull my love pump/ Baby, pull my love pump/ But not so hard next time.’

  ‘I’m at the dentist,’ Jim said, raising his voice above the music. ‘I can’t make it this time. Bloody shame. Try to explain it to her, will you, Harry? I feel really bad, but I’ve found something that urgently needs filling.’

  I hung up the phone.

  Peggy had disappeared.

  I found her in her bedroom, hiding under her duvet. On the walls were posters of boy bands and Lucy Doll in all her incarnations, their fixed grins and perfect worlds shining down on one sad little girl.

  I stroked her head. ‘Your dad will see you next time, darling. You know he loves you.’

  ‘He’s got a bad tooth.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And it hurts him.’

  She sat up and I dried her eyes with an official Lucy Doll tissue, thinking what a great kid she was, and how she deserved better than her feckless father. But then every child in the world deserved a better father than Jim.

  ‘Tell a story, Harry. Not
from a book. Tell a story from your head. A real one.’

  ‘A real one?’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘Okay, Peg.’ I thought about it for a minute. ‘Once upon a time, there was an old man called Geppetto.’

  ‘That’s a funny name.’

  ‘And Geppetto found a magical piece of wood that – guess what? – could laugh and cry.’

  She gave me a dubious smile.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘You’re making this up, Harry,’ she said, her smile growing.

  ‘I’m not, Peg,’ I said, smiling back at her. ‘Every single word is true. And from that piece of magic wood – guess what? – Geppetto made Pinocchio.’

  ‘Who was Pinocchio?’

  ‘He was a puppet, Peg. Just this piece of wood that could act like a human. He could laugh and cry and everything. But what he wanted, more than anything in the world, was to be a real dad.’

  Did I say dad?

  I meant boy.

  Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy.

  seven

  ‘Only twice in your life do they pronounce you anything,’ Eamon said. ‘The first is man and wife. The second is dead.’

  There was always work. Even when my mother was sleeping with the lights on, and my wife was directing me to the condoms and my son was packing for a new life on the other side of the ocean, there was always work.

  Work is far easier than family. It is easier to feel like you are some kind of successful human being at work. Whatever you do, don’t try that at home.

  ‘I come from one of those huge Irish families,’ Eamon said, moving across a TV studio floor that was set and lit to look like one of those clubs where he honed his stand-up routine. ‘Ten kids.’

  Whistles from the audience, who were encouraged to act as though they were in some intimate Soho basement, rather than an antiseptic television studio in White City.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Can you believe it? Ten of us. But after the tenth my parents had this great method of contraception. Never failed. Every night before they went to bed, they would spend a couple of hours with me and my brothers and sisters.’

  Even when my ex-wife was accusing me of harassing her husband, and talking about restraining orders, when there was really no need because soon I would be restrained by the Atlantic Ocean, there was still work. And when every hour with my son felt like another hour gone – that’s what the absent dad feels most acutely, not the being with, but the countdown to the being apart – there was still work, with its cold crumbs of comfort, with its quick fix of fulfilment, and Eamon and his brilliant career.

  ‘One day my dad came home early and found me mam in bed with the milkman,’ Eamon said. ‘She was naturally horrified. “Oh God!” she says. “Don’t tell the postman!”’

  Eamon Fish had come a long way since he first showed up at my door two years ago, dark-eyed and good-looking and scared, fresh off the stand-up circuit, wondering if TV was going to make him famous or swallow him alive. Now he had all the trappings of success – a show that was in its fourth series, three National Television Awards, two undecorated flats in fashionable neighbourhoods (Temple Bar, Dublin and Docklands, London) and – oh yes – a £200-a-day cocaine habit.

  Despite coming so far from the green fields of Kilcarney, and despite making such a splash in London, Eamon still enjoyed playing the wide-eyed Irish boy, fresh off the farm and the early Aer Lingus flight from Cork. He clung to the myths of his past life like a drowning man with a wonky lifebelt.

  I had produced Eamon’s late-night talk show from the start. Fish on Friday worked because we played to Eamon’s strengths. Despite those two years on the box, he was still a stand-up at heart. He could talk to the guests, banter with all the bit players of the showbiz whirl, but he was never so good as when he was talking to himself.

  ‘Most of the babies in Kilcarney are very beautiful. It’s true, I tell you.’ The little nervous cough he used for punctuation. Stolen from his hero, Woody Allen, although Eamon had made that cough his own. ‘But I was so ugly when I was born that the midwife said, “He’s not done yet,” and shoved me back in. I don’t know. It’s so different over here – all the gynaecologists are men. What’s that about? That’s like getting a mechanic who has never owned a car.’

  His monologues about the men and women back in his home town of Kilcarney were always the best segments, with the biggest laughs, and when he was most at ease. And he was young enough to still be getting better. After two years in front of the cameras, Eamon had a confidence that wasn’t there before. These days Eamon wasn’t quite so desperate to be liked, he could relax into his material, knowing that he still had control over his audience. Like other people I had worked with in television, his audience was the one thing in his life that he could actually control.

  ‘I’m thinking of getting back together with my girlfriend. Mem. She’s Thai. A dancer. Well, not really a dancer.’ Cough. ‘More of a stripper.’ Cackles all round. The studio audience were eating out of his hand. They laughed even when he wasn’t joking. ‘Great, great girl. And I look at all these photographs of when we were together – on holiday in Koh Samui, at Christmas in Kilcarney, the lap dance she gave me for my birthday – and it just feels like we should be together. But those photographs are a warped record of our relationship. I know that. Where are all the bad times? We didn’t take photos of those. And I wonder why we only take pictures of the good times. Why didn’t I take a photograph of Mem when she had cystitis? Her PMT – where’s that in the photo album?’ Rueful laughter. Mocking catcalls from the girls. ‘We broke up because we disagreed about marriage. Single men actually know more about marriage than married men. If we didn’t, we would be married too. Personally I think that marriage consists of overestimating the difference between one woman and all the other women. And my ex-girlfriend thinks – oh, Jesus, Jesus.’

  Suddenly there was blood everywhere. The blood was over Eamon’s hands and face, splashing on the microphone. So much blood that you couldn’t see where it was coming from.

  The floor manager stared at me, as Eamon reeled backwards, covering his face with his hands, and the audience gasped – shocked, appalled, but laughing a little, wondering if this was all part of the act. I was making cut-it, cut-it, cut-it gestures across my throat to the director up in the gallery when it dawned on me that the blood was coming from Eamon’s nose.

  There was always work. No matter how bad things got at home, there was always that.

  Then Eamon’s nose almost fell off on live television.

  And then there wasn’t even work.

  Pat didn’t talk about moving.

  I knew Gina had discussed it with him, had tried to explain why it was happening and what it would mean. She had spoken of Richard’s job in Manhattan, the family home in Connecticut – names that were as remote to Pat as Mars and Venus. She had attempted to reassure him that although he wouldn’t see me every Sunday, like now, there would be long, long holidays where he could stay with me and see his grandmother and Bernie Cooper and all the things he loved in London. She had told our son that he would be happy.

  All that old bullshit.

  And in the end – I could imagine his pale face staring at her, giving nothing away, not even his fear – she played her trump card.

  When they left London and moved to their new home in Connecticut, surrounded by all those fresh green pastures on the far side of the hill, she would buy him the one thing that he had always wanted.

  A dog.

  That’s what my ex-wife promised her son, that was his compensation for giving up London, his grandmother, his father, his best friend, his life. When he moved to another country, she would buy him a dog. A magical mutt who would make everything all right.

  I cursed Gina, and the way her decisions, her choices, could still tear my world apart. After all this time I still wasn’t free of her. Fragments of Gina were embedded in every part of my life, like a grenade that had expl
oded long ago, like the black shards of shrapnel that wormed their way out of my father’s body for fifty years. The past never setting you free, long gone and there forever. I would never be free, because she had my son. And now she was planning to take him away.

  Only the lawyers could stop her.

  When I raised the subject of moving – always with a breeziness I did not feel – that little face I loved so much seemed to turn into a mask.

  ‘You going to send me a postcard, Pat? You going to send your dad a postcard as soon as you get to America?’

  ‘I’ll text you. Or email. Or phone on the telephone, maybe.’

  ‘You don’t want to send me a postcard? I like getting postcards. Postcards are great.’

  ‘But I don’t know how.’

  ‘Mummy will show you.’

  ‘Will she? Then I might post a card to you. I might.’

  ‘The important thing is – come home soon. Come and stay with me. In your holiday. That’s what matters. Okay, darling?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And Pat?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll miss you.’

  ‘Miss you too,’ he said, and I got down on my knees and held him in my arms, my face buried in his dirty-blond hair, smelling the hot chocolate on his breath, and choked with love for him.

  ‘America will be lovely,’ my mum said, and I felt she was trying to cheer up both her grandson and her son. ‘New York, New York – my word! So good they named it twice! What a lucky boy.’

  ‘It’s over the water,’ Pat said, tilting his face to her. ‘Like France. In Paris. Only a bit further. You can’t get a train, you know. You have to go on the plane.’

  ‘You’ll have a lovely time in America, sweetheart.’

  And the funny thing about my mum is that she probably meant it. She loved her grandson so much, and with such a purity of love, that what she cared about most was his happiness.