Man and Wife

by Tony Parsons

  You might think that my seed would have been spread thin and wide as I bounced from the marital bed to the girlfriend’s futon and back again. But Cyd had moved into the spare bedroom. The world my parents knew had finally turned inside out. For them there was no sex before marriage. For me there was none after.

  We had separate rooms because I usually went to bed long after midnight, while suddenly Cyd was tucked up with a camomile tea just after the ten o’clock news. Cyd and I were both blaming work, because it was just too sad to admit that our problems went far deeper than mere scheduling.

  Now she had turned down the offer to sell him Food Glorious Food, Cyd’s freelance work with Luke Moore was really taking off. She suddenly had a spate of early-morning breakfast meetings to cater, all these jobs in the City and the West End where businessmen ate croissants, pains au raisin and six kinds of bagel. And while my wife got her early nights, I was often out into the early hours, supervising Eamon’s return to stand-up.

  Now that the TV was over, Eamon was going back to his roots, doing stand-up for the first time in years, even some open-mike stuff, and thinking about taking his act on the road. There was no money in it at this stage, and my savings account was steadily shrinking, but we both felt it was the only way back. He performed in small clubs, not much more than basements, where all we had to do was turn up. And I saw that the comedian dreams of stand-up the way the clown yearns to play Hamlet.

  This was the heart of his craft, this was where he was truly tested. By nerves, by drunks, by all his limitations. So we spent our nights in sweaty cellars, where he was sometimes good and sometimes not so good but he was always funnier than his hecklers – ‘Don’t I remember you from medical school? You were the one in the jar’ – and I wondered if he could really still do it without re-takes, an autocue, a full production crew and the Dutch courage of cocaine.

  Eamon’s comeback took up a lot of my time, but in truth not all of it. Sometimes I told Cyd I was seeing Eamon when the person I was really seeing was Kazumi. And when I told her nothing at all, she didn’t seem to care.

  I was out late and my wife was out early. And we both knew it was more than work. There were now long calls to her sisters and her mother in the States, as – I was guessing here, but I believed it was a good guess – the possibility of moving back home finally took shape in her mind. Our problem, this problem my wife and I had, was that we just couldn’t imagine our future together. We still loved each other, but there was a politeness and formality to our dealings that broke my heart. And we just couldn’t see how this thing between us was ever going to work out.

  ‘Let’s see how it goes, shall we?’ Cyd said, making up her bed in the guest room.

  So we see how it goes. Just another man and wife having trouble. But it seemed like the saddest thing in the world, this feeling that what we had right now was not good enough to stay for, and not bad enough to leave.

  And although there was no sex after marriage, there was none in Primrose Hill in the flat that Kazumi shared with a Swedish woman who was a second-year student at the Royal Academy of Music. It felt like our kiss in the dusk above London had opened a door for me, but now I was faced by a locked gate.

  As Kazumi and I lay on her single bed, our clothes on and the curtains drawn, we heard the flatmate practising her cello in the next room. She was so good that the music, just the other side of the wall, was never intrusive. It was strangely soothing to have Chopin and Elgar and Haydn seeping through the thin wall, great swirling sounds of romance, all the passion that felt just out of reach. The flatmate played music that I somehow knew, although I couldn’t say where from, and also things that I had never heard before in my life. One piece that she played again and again – an exam was coming up – turned out to be ‘Song Without Words’ by Mendelssohn.

  The flatmate could have been studying accountancy or tree surgery, but romance is a series of happy accidents, and the fact that she played the most beautiful music ever written as Kazumi lay chastely in my arms seemed predestined, written in the stars, and made me certain that I was in the right place.

  That music would have been the perfect accompaniment to a few hours of passion. But that was not what Kazumi wanted. Kazumi didn’t want to sleep with me. Just like my wife, in fact.

  ‘I don’t want to be your dirty little secret,’ Kazumi said. ‘It never works. Afraid to be seen together. Afraid of bumping against someone you know. What kind of life is that? You can call me but I can’t call you. And all the questions I would have to ask you. Such as, do you still have sex with your wife?’

  ‘I can tell you the answer to that now.’

  ‘No.’ She pressed a finger to my lips. ‘Because I don’t want you to start lying to me. And even if they leave their wife, it never works. I don’t know why. Price too high, maybe.’

  And I was torn. I wanted to look after both of them. To love both of them. Kazumi and Cyd. In the way that they both deserved. And already I knew that was impossible.

  You can love two women at once, but not in the way they deserve.

  So I was constantly looking for the exit sign, trying doors, seeking a way out of this chaos. And I did it with Kazumi as well as Cyd. In my mad moments, when it all became too much, and the music stopped, I wanted someone – Cyd, Kazumi, one of them, either of them – to reveal something so painful that it would drive me away, that it would settle things once and forever.

  ‘You seem to know a lot about sex with a married man, Kazumi. How come you’re such an expert?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Not me. Friend.’

  ‘A friend. Sure.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘So who was this secret friend? Someone here?’

  ‘No. Japan. A close friend in Japan.’ And then the yen finally dropped.

  ‘What was her name, this friend with the married man?’

  On the other side of the wall, the sound of a cello pouring out a kind of stately melancholy. ‘Song Without Words’ again. The exam must be soon.

  ‘Gina,’ Kazumi said. ‘My friend’s name was Gina.’

  My doctor thought that I had something called White Coat Syndrome.

  ‘You see a doctor’ – she smiled, her adorable Italian accent adding unexpected vowels to the ends of nouns – ‘and your blood pressure goes through the roof-a.’

  She was sort of right. When I first entered her surgery, my systolic pressure was usually around 180 and my diastolic pressure around 95. My doctor made me lie down for ten or fifteen minutes, then took another reading. This was always a vast improvement – around 150 over 90. That was not great, but it meant I was unlikely to have a stroke any time soon.

  White Coat Syndrome. Well, maybe. I knew it had something to do with my heart. But what my doctor never factored into her diagnosis was that I came to her surgery from home. So when she took my blood pressure, at least part of it was a judgement on my life with my wife – that bleak, stagnated life of separate beds, blended families and an ex-husband who was getting married next week. Of course my blood pressure was sky high. Where else would it be?

  When I lay there on the couch for a while, listening to the distant traffic rumble down Harley Street, my mind drifted away to the happier part of my life. The first reading was my life with Cyd. And the second reading was my other life, my secret life, my life with Kazumi.

  I knew her now. She was not just a pretty young woman who had caught my eye. I knew about her childhood, the salary man father who drank himself senseless after work, the mother who gave up her dreams of travelling the world for a man who didn’t love her. I knew about Kazumi’s broken marriage, and the courage it took to come to London to start again, and I knew how her face, often seriously dreaming, lost in her thoughts, could suddenly light up with happiness, light up totally without warning, like the old-fashioned lamps on Primrose Hill.

  I knew it wasn’t the same as building a real life with someone. It wasn’t
the same as dealing with the grind of all the things that can break down – washing machines, boilers, cars, families, marriages – but she was still the sweetest thing in my world, and that was real too, more real than anything. We talked to each other, Kazumi and I. We talked about everything. Apart from my wife, of course. We never talked about her.

  ‘We need to be more aggressive in treating you,’ said my doctor.

  She adjusted my prescription. Instead of taking 40 mg of Zestril once a day, I would now take 20 mg of Zestril and 20 mg of Zestoretic.

  But in my heart – my mad, pumping, lovesick heart – I felt that for what ailed me now, pills would never be enough.

  * * *

  How many girls and women had I taken home to meet my mum?

  It was not every girl I ever took to the pictures, and not every woman I ever took to bed. But, what with the teenage girlfriends and the two wives, we must have been in double figures by now. And as Kazumi and I drove deeper into the suburbs, the urban sprawl finally giving way to the fields of summer, I realised the criteria for bringing a woman to meet my mum had always been the same – this one, this special one, would be the last girl that I ever brought home. Why do we place so much importance on the first? It’s the last one that counts.

  At this time in her life, I would like to have spared my mum my latest domestic upheaval. But there was no point in telling her that Kazumi was just a friend.

  My mum knew that for a man whose marriage was in trouble, there was no such thing.

  The old house on a Sunday afternoon.

  Pat let us in, smiling at Kazumi, not quite able to work out what she was doing here. In the living room my mum was sitting on the carpet, rotating her shoulders with a look of quiet concentration on her face. She got up, a little embarrassed to be discovered like this, but kissed Kazumi as if she had known her forever.

  ‘Hello, love, just doing my exercises.’

  My mother had been through hell, and she acted as if it had been a stroll in the park.

  After surgery and radiotherapy, the muscles in her right arm were stiff and tight. She had exercises to control the pain, and different exercises to regain the use of her right arm. She did these exercises with a good grace, never complaining, and I knew now that she was actually tougher than all of us men in her life.

  ‘Two years I have to do them for, sweetheart,’ she told Kazumi. My mum only needed to know you for five seconds before she started calling you love, darling and sweetheart. ‘That’s what they told me.’

  Kazumi, Pat and I watched my mum run through her exercise programme for our benefit. She demonstrated Shoulder Circling. Hair Brushing. Assisted Lift. Back Scratching. Bent Arm. Proudly tossing out the names of her exercises the way she had once mentioned the Walkin’ Wazi, the Lost in Austin and the Four-Star Boogie.

  And I knew that these exercises were the least of it. She would not put this thing behind her with a bit of stretching. Even after the monstrous surgery that was necessary to save her life, she would never really be over this thing. The monitoring, the exercises, the drugs, fear that the cancer would come back—it was all measured in years.

  My mum got pins and needles in her arm, an agonising pain in her chest. And as we had our tea and biscuits, I noticed that she had developed this habit of examining her hand.

  Some of the lymph nodes under her arm had been removed, and my mum had been told that this could cause lymphoedema—a build-up of fluid in the tissues of her arm. She had been told to watch out for swelling on the affected side, her right side, and she watched all the time. Perhaps she would always watch now. Every few minutes or so, she examined her hand, looking for signs of the beginning of the end.

  Chemotherapy had left her feeling as though she had the worst hangover in the world, a hangover that would not get better. Mercifully her hair did not fall out. Radiotherapy left her tired and sore, feeling like she had fallen asleep in a burning sun. She laughed about things that would have grown men – me, for example – weeping in a darkened room.

  ‘I was looking forward to my hair falling out,’ she said, smiling mischievously. ‘I could have worn my Dolly Parton wig.’

  Pat laughed appreciatively. He didn’t understand too much of this, even though my mum and I had both pored over every word in the leaflet Talking with Your Children about Breast Cancer. (If you are able to talk honestly and openly with your family at each step, you will hopefully find that families can be a great source of love and support.) But he knew the signals that indicated a joke was being made – the breezy tilt in the voice, the raised eyebrows, the rolled eyes – and he was always delighted to respond enthusiastically.

  I found it much harder to smile, because I knew my son would be fully grown before we could say this thing inside my mother was truly beaten. Years and years, it would all take years. The best that could happen would take years. The worst that could happen would be there in a moment.

  There were 20 mg of Tamoxifen, a hormone treatment, every day, which made my mum feel like she was having another menopause. She would take it for five years. After two years, perhaps she would no longer have to do exercises. Perhaps. See what the doctors say. Have to wait and see.

  And there were still many things she would not talk to me about, things that I had to guess at, to wheedle out of surgeons and her female friends and all those pink and purple leaflets. What my mum would call – women things.

  She still couldn’t wear a bra because of the scar, because it was still so raw and sore. This seemed insultingly cruel. Again I was reminded that this cancer seemed sadistically committed to making my mum feel like less of a woman than she was before.

  But she dealt with all the indignity, pain and terror without complaint, with the kind of good-natured, mocking pragmatism that she had shown all her life. She went to make more tea, and she smiled at me over Kazumi’s shoulder, raising her eyebrows while giving a little nod. I knew that look. I had seen it when I brought Gina home for the first time. And Cyd, too. That look meant – she’s a smasher.

  Kazumi was on the living-room floor with Pat. They had met before, of course, when she took his photograph in Gina’s garden, and I was both happy and worried that my son remembered her so clearly.

  Would he mention Kazumi to Gina? Or, worse still, to Cyd? How would I get out of that one? Kazumi was patient and kind, playing with one of his video games, while he regarded her with a kind of delighted curiosity. I feared that my son understood more than I would wish. Not yet eight years old, he was already wise to the ways of the world. Or at least the ways of his old man.

  Is this what it would be like for Pat and me at the other end of our lives? In thirty years or so, would I be old and fighting illness, with my son all grown-up and divorced and ready to try again? And when I was fighting for my life, would my adult son still be bringing home some young woman for my approval, acting like he’d never been in love before?

  Kazumi was good with Pat. They laughed together, they played together, and although I knew it was unfair to compare her to Cyd, who had the permanently thankless role of step-parent, I couldn’t help it. This just felt easier.

  Maybe it would have been different if we were living together. No, definitely it would have been different. But as Kazumi and Pat played Nuke Universe Two I dreamed of running off with the pair of them. To Paris or County Kerry or anywhere far from here. I looked at my son with Kazumi and I believed that it was not too late to start again. And as I thought of the infinite kindness in my mother’s face, I also desperately wanted to travel with her, to see some other things while we still could and before it was too late. I wanted to get us all away from this place.

  My mum returned with tea and biscuits and I showed her the brochures that I had brought with me. She handled them carefully, as if she had to give them back to their rightful owner.

  ‘Nashville, Mum. The home of country. Listen to this, Mum. We can go together. Pat, too. In one of the holidays. Kazumi, if she’s not busy with her work. A real
holiday for you. Listen, Mum: Six million people a year travel to Nashville, Tennessee, the home of country music. Enjoy the rhinestone glitter of the Grand Ole Opry, Music Row and the Country Music Hall of Fame. Experience the Nashville Sound of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Kenny Rogers and Shania Twain. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Mum?’

  But my mum was different from me. She didn’t dream of escape. She wanted to stay here.

  ‘Sounds lovely, darling, but I’m happy in my own home.’

  She put the brochure down. And I saw that my mum was never going to make it to Nashville. This is where we were so different. Unlike me, my mother didn’t believe that happiness was always somewhere else.

  ‘I like holidays,’ she said to Kazumi. ‘My husband and I, we used to go somewhere every year. Cornwall and Dorset when Harry was young. We even went to Norway a few times – I’ve got a brother who settled there after the war, met a lovely girl. I had six brothers, did Harry tell you that?’

  Kazumi made suitably impressed noises. She was getting the hang of this very quickly.

  ‘Then Spain later, when Harry didn’t want to come with us any more,’ continued my mum. ‘But I like it here. Do you know what I mean? I like that feeling you get, that feeling you don’t get on holiday, when you’re away from everything familiar. You know, that feeling you get when you’re part of a family.’

  Then my mum looked at her hands, as if admiring her bright-red nail polish, or searching for signs of lymphoedema, or maybe just looking at her wedding ring, a modest band of burnished gold that somehow contained an entire world.

  twenty-four

  You never saw anyone so happy to be having a baby.

  When I came back from running in the park, she was on the stairs, laughing and crying at the same time.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, like it was the best thing in the world. Then she was in my arms and later, when we had untangled our limbs, and stared at each other, laughing out loud, unable to believe our luck, after all of that she showed me the blue line on the pregnancy test – that thin, blue, indisputable line.