Man and Wife

by Tony Parsons

  My mum put on her Dolly Parton wig and went shopping.

  The little neighbourhood store where she had bought her food for decades had recently closed down after the owner retired, and now she had to go to a huge hypermarket miles away. My mum actually preferred the hypermarket – ‘Much more choice, love’ – but the bus service out there was almost non-existent, so once a week Pat and I would go with her in the car.

  We were steering our trolley to the fresh meat counter when an old man with a solitary tin of cat food in his wonky wire basket collided with us. He had grey, three-day-old stubble on his sagging old-geezer chin and a cardigan that looked as though it had been feeding a good-sized family of moths. As I dusted down the shabby old man, I realised we had met before.

  ‘Elizabeth!’ he cried.

  It was Tex, although he definitely looked more like Graham today.

  My mum nonchalantly tossed some organic bacon into her sleek bulging trolley. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, not deigning to call him by his cowboy name, or indeed any name at all. ‘How’s the line dancing going?’

  Tex exhaled with a grimace on his wrinkled face, rubbing his hip. ‘Cracked me femur, Liz. Doing the Hardwood Stomp in Wickford. Had to lay off the old line dancing for a bit.’

  He was staring at my mum as if she was Joan Collins on a good day. And it was true – she looked great.

  It wasn’t just the big blonde country and western hair, or the weight she had lost. There was a confidence about my mum now, a hard-earned inner force that put a glint in her eye that had never been there before. Being unceremoniously dumped by this little old man was the least of it. She had survived far bigger blows than that.

  ‘Well, you look…lovely,’ Tex said.

  ‘Thanks.’ My mum smiled politely, looking at the wizened old man before her as if she couldn’t quite place him. ‘Nice seeing you.’ My mum turned to Pat and me. ‘Let’s roll, boys.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe we could have a cup of tea some time,’ Tex stammered. ‘If you’re not too busy.’

  My mum affected not to have heard. So we left Graham and his lonely can of cat food by the frozen meat counter.

  ‘You could have a cup of tea with him,’ I told my mum, although secretly I was proud of the way she had cut him down to size. ‘He’s a harmless old man.’

  ‘But he’s not my man, Harry. I forgot that for a while. Then I remembered. There’s only one man for me. And that’s the way it has always been.’

  Pat and I struggled to keep up with her as her blonde head bobbed towards the checkout desk. And I thought – Dolly Parton would be proud of my mum. No matter what horrific surgery she had undergone, there was something inside her that was untouchable.

  And as my car was pulling out of the parking lot, we saw Tex waiting for a bus in the drizzling rain. I knew better than to suggest we give him a lift.

  My mum stared straight at him without expression, and for just a moment I thought she was going to stick up a finger or two. I knew in my heart she was far too polite for that. But if she had given Graham also-known-as-Tex the finger, I knew it wouldn’t have been the middle one.

  It would have been the one right next to it, the third finger left hand, the one where she had never stopped wearing her wedding ring.

  There were already three women waiting outside my mum’s house. One of them was in her forties, but the other two were younger than me. They all looked as though they had a world pressing down on them.

  My mum let us all into the house. She didn’t have to tell me that these were some of the women that she counselled about breast cancer. They went into the living room with Pat while my mum and I made tea. I could hear the sound of the women laughing at something my boy had said. It felt as though they hadn’t laughed for quite a while.

  ‘See that young one, Harry? She had the same operation as me. Same breast removed too. Scared to look at herself now. Imagine that. Afraid of the mirror. You can’t let that happen. You can’t be scared to look at yourself. They can talk to me. Because their family – the husband, the daughters, the sons – they want to be reassured. They don’t want the truth – they want reassurance. And they don’t have to reassure me. And they don’t have to be ashamed in front of me. Because I’m the same. And what have we got to be ashamed of? It’s not so bad. They’re shy. I’m older than they are, Harry, and I’m stronger than I’ve ever been. It’s made me stronger. It’s given me a funny kind of power. I’m not scared of this world any more. These girls – and I know I’m meant to say women, but they’re girls to me – they can’t tell their husbands how they feel. That’s okay. There’s no such thing as an uncomplicated life. I see that now. I loved your dad more than life itself. But we don’t need to tell everything to the person we’re married to. There’s no shame in that.’

  ‘But maybe their husbands would understand,’ I said. ‘You should try to understand each other, shouldn’t you? And if they really love them, then maybe they would understand.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said my mum. ‘If they really love them.’

  ‘Can I ask you something? About you and Dad?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Does it change? As the years go by, I mean. Should I expect my marriage to be something different from what it was at the start?’

  My mother smiled.

  ‘It changes all the time, it never stops changing. When you’re young you say – I love you because I need you. When you’re old it’s – I need you because I love you. Big difference. And I’m not saying that one is better than the other, although the second one tends to last a bit longer. But you never stop loving each other, Harry. Not if it’s real.’ She took my hands. ‘Look, Harry. Talk to her if you want to. Talk to Cyd. Tell her what’s been happening. Talk to your wife if you think it will help.’

  ‘But I don’t know if I can. See, I want her to be proud of me, Mum. The way you were proud of Dad.’ I squeezed her hands. ‘And I want you to be proud of me, too.’

  ‘I’m proud of you already,’ said my mum.

  Peggy came home, her plaster cast signed by every child on her ward. There was a way to go before she would be well enough to go back to school. But the fracture was mending and we went to bed that night weak with relief. Peggy was healing. And in a way that I couldn’t quite explain, so was I.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you, Cyd.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me anything. Just as I don’t have to tell you anything about Luke. Because there’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘But I want to say something. It’s about what happened. How we lost each other for a while.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me a thing. Just rest your eyes.’ I felt my wife touch my arm in the darkness. ‘You’re home now,’ she said.

  twenty-nine

  Life holds hostage all those we love.

  That’s why it was so tough for my wife after Peggy came back home. Once you have seen your child in a hospital, you are never truly free again. Never really free the way you were in the past, not once you know how it feels to love a sick child, not once you realise how hard it is out there. Because you are never free from the fear that it could happen again, and next time be even worse.

  And it was not just her daughter. There were late-night calls from Texas, where her sisters were worried about their mother, who had been found wandering around a parking lot in downtown Houston with a DVD of Gone With the Wind in her hand, no money in her purse and no memory of how she got there. ‘Sounds like the start of old-timer’s disease,’ my mum said, and it was terrifying, one more thing for my wife to worry about.

  So when we turned out the light one night and Cyd idly mentioned that she had missed her period, I thought to myself – stress.

  It does strange things to your body.

  And when my wife woke up the next morning, running to the bathroom and retching although nothing came up, I thought to myself – poor kid. Worried sick about her daughter, and now worried sick about her mother.

  And even th
en, standing outside the bathroom door, listening to my wife trying to throw up, even then I still didn’t get it. I still didn’t understand that it was happening all over again.

  The best thing in the world.

  I had seen one of these things before.

  In fact, when Gina first found out about Pat, I saw dozens of them. There was nothing much to it. Just a white plastic handle. It looked as though it had something missing, like a toothbrush without the bristles.

  I picked up the pregnancy test. It felt surprisingly light. And so did my head.

  There were two tiny windows on the thing. In one of them, the little round window, there was a thin blue line. And in the other one, the little square window – which I somehow understood was the important one, the crucial one, the window that would change everything – there was another thin blue line.

  And finally I understood. Not just the missed period and the sickness, but everything. I finally got it. I understood why I had to stay, and why I would always stay.

  That’s when I sensed rather than heard Cyd in the doorway of the bathroom. She was laughing and crying all at once – I guess that must be standard procedure – wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her Gap T-shirt.

  ‘Is this okay with you?’ she asked me.

  I took her in my arms. ‘It’s more than okay. This is great. This is the very best.’

  Then my wife looked at me and smiled and, for perhaps the second time in my life, I knew why I was alive.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Eamon said. ‘You’re staying with your wife because of some stupid wanker in a BMW? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You said the accident changed everything. That she was packing her bags before that happened. She was leaving you, Harry, and you were ready to begin again with someone else.’

  Would Cyd and I have split up if Peggy hadn’t had her accident? In my heart, I didn’t see what could have stopped us.

  That’s how fragile all this is, as gossamer thin as a spider’s web, as intricate and fragile as that, meticulously built but easily torn apart by a few cruel, casual blows. My parents’ marriage looked like it was made of sterner stuff. My mum and dad genuinely believed that they couldn’t be happy with anyone else. And I knew that wasn’t true for me. I could have been happy with Kazumi. Just as Kazumi could find the human bond we all seek with some other man. And just as Cyd could have found someone else to love her. That didn’t make what I had with my wife feel like nothing. In some ways the knowledge that either of us could survive without the other made what we had seem even more precious. We stayed together because we chose to stay together.

  In a world full of choices, we chose each other.

  ‘There’s the baby,’ I told Eamon. ‘That’s the thing that really brought us back together. This baby we’re bringing into the world. We are going to be a real family. Maybe we were already.’

  He didn’t look convinced. I knew he wanted certainty from me, cast-iron guarantees that love would last and marriage would endure.

  But like my mum says – if you want guarantees, kid, buy a toaster.

  ‘Listen, Eamon, the reason I’m still with my wife is not complicated. I’m with her because I love her.’

  ‘Like you loved Kazumi? Or in a different way? A different kind of love, or exactly the same kind of love? I need to know. What if it had been the other way round, Harry? What if you had actually slept with Kazumi in Ireland? And you hadn’t slept with your wife back in London? What – and this is the big one – what if the other woman was the woman carrying your baby?’

  ‘Well, then—’

  But I can’t answer.

  The chaos that lurks just beyond all of our front doors is sometimes best ignored.

  All the other women I could love, all the other lives I could lead, all the babies waiting to be born – I just can’t think about all of that today.

  After all, I’m a married man.

  The blood pressure was down. The hypertension was easing. The blood supply to my brain was not going to be cut off any time soon.

  Good news, I thought. I want to see this baby grow up. I want to be around for long enough for this coming child to think that I am an old fool who doesn’t know anything about life. I want to live long enough to see my youngest child become an adult. That was the plan now. That was my new ambition.

  Increasingly, it felt like the only ambition really worth having.

  ‘It’s 135 over 75,’ my doctor said. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all. You’re keeping your weight down…you don’t smoke…Getting plenty of exercise?’

  ‘Thirty minutes of cardiovascular, three times a week.’

  ‘That’s just about right. You don’t want to overdo it. These days the gym is killing as many middle-aged men as cancer and heart disease. How’s your salt intake?’

  ‘Never touch the stuff.’

  ‘Caffeine?’

  ‘Well. Difficult to give up those cappuccinos. But I’ve cut right back.’

  ‘Sometimes we have to stay away from the things we love, and learn to appreciate the things we need.’

  And I saw my wife’s face before me. The black hair cut in a China chop, the wide-set brown eyes, and the toothy smile, the little nicks of laughter lines that were starting to appear around her small, sweet mouth. That face so familiar, that face so loved.

  ‘But what if they’re the same thing? What if we realise that the things we love are the same as the things we need?’

  My doctor grinned, packing her blood pressure kit away.

  ‘Then you don’t need me any more,’ she said.

  * * *

  Peggy and I came through the gilded doors of the department store and were immediately assaulted by the perfume of a thousand different scents. The store was crowded, and we instinctively reached out and took each other’s hand.

  ‘Look, Harry – free manicure! They do your nails and you don’t even pay nothing at all!’

  ‘Maybe later, darling.’

  We caught an escalator up to the department for children and babies.

  So much had changed since the last time I became a father. Or perhaps Gina and I didn’t have the money to go shopping for every baby aid on the market. But a lot of this stuff was completely new to me.

  A baby bouncer – okay, I recognised that, and vividly recalled Pat bouncing up and down like a little toothless Buddha, baring his gums with delight. But a cot-rail teether to stop a baby gnawing its crib – when did they start selling that? And a car toy tidy – surely toys were still just chucked all over the back seat? And look at all this other gear – a Nature’s Lullaby Baby Soother (plays four relaxing sounds to soothe baby to sleep), a Baby Bath Float (a soft cocoon shape to keep baby’s head out of the water and its body floating safely near the surface).

  And shampoo eye shields – protective glasses for hair washing. Now that’s clever, now that’s a brilliant idea. Pat could have done with some of those. And look at this – a suction bowl. A strong suction base to prevent spillage at mealtime. The twenty-first century baby doesn’t even get to throw its food around.

  ‘What will they think of next, Peg? Peggy?’

  And that’s when I realised she was gone.

  The fear ran through me like a fever.

  I searched all over the children’s department, but she wasn’t there. And I thought of her father, who had gone on honeymoon and never come back, who had broken Peggy’s heart by going to live in Manila, to try his luck again on some other foreign shore, abandoning his child like she was nothing more than a bad debt.

  Jim had deserted his daughter once and for all, and although it made life easier for me with him not around, his leaving had inflicted a wound on Peggy that she would carry for the rest of her life, a wound that would never heal, this beautiful child who deserved only to be loved.

  And I wondered if I was really any different from him, any better than Jim, who always put his child way down on his list of prioritie
s. Was I really a better man than that? Or so wrapped up in dreams of the new baby that I had forgotten about the reality of the living child by my side.

  I searched the entire floor, doing frantic deals with God, praying for a second chance, desperately asking staff and shoppers if they had seen a small girl with a pink Lucy Doll backpack.

  Then all at once I knew where I would find her.

  She was on the ground floor, near those gilded doors, among the perfume of a thousand scents, patiently having her nails done for free in the make-up department.

  ‘Hello, Harry,’ she said. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

  ‘Hello, gorgeous. Yes, I think we’ve got everything now.’

  The white-coated sales assistant beamed at the pair of us.

  ‘What a beautiful daughter you have,’ she said.

  Peggy and I just smiled at each other.

  There was a problem.

  After eight weeks of the pregnancy, Cyd had some bleeding in the morning. And suddenly we didn’t know if our stake in the future was going to be taken away from us.

  When Cyd went for her scan, there was a silver bowl of condoms by the door, as delicately arranged as potpourri. Seeing the question mark hovering above my head, Cyd said that the condoms were for the instrument the obstetrician put inside her, so we could see the baby. To see if it was okay. To see if our baby was still alive.

  ‘My word, you’ve had some strange things inside you, girl,’ I said to my wife, taking her hand.

  ‘But nothing quite as strange as your penis, Harry,’ my wife said to me.

  Later, when the obstetrician arrived, Cyd sat in this complicated chair, like something British Airways might have in First Class, and on the TV screen by her side the doctor showed us the small pulsating light that was the heartbeat of our unborn child. The baby was fine. The baby was still there. The baby was going to live. Nothing could stop this baby being born.

  Cyd squeezed my hand without looking at me – we couldn’t take our eyes from the screen – as the obstetrician showed us the head, comically large, like a light bulb made in heaven, and the tiny arms and legs, which the baby seemed to be crossing and uncrossing.