Man and Wife

‘My job’s not quite what I wanted. I don’t even get to use my Japanese. What’s the point in working for a Japanese company if I don’t even get to use my Japanese? Don’t worry, we’re not talking about a place in the city. From Connecticut the train into Manhattan only takes –’

‘Don’t worry? But when would I see him? What about his grandmother?’

‘You would see him all the time. The school holidays go on for ages. You could come over. London to New York is nothing. What is it? Six hours?’

‘Have you talked to Pat about this? Does he know it’s not going to be a quick tour round Minnie Mouse and then back home?’

‘Not yet.’

I shook my head, trying to get my breathing under control.

‘I can’t believe you’re thinking of dragging him to the other side of the world,’ I said, although that really wasn’t true. I could believe it very easily. I began to see that she had always had this thing inside her, this belief that life would be better at the other end of a long-haul flight.

For years Gina had felt this way – when she was single, after we split up. And she still did. In the past Japan was the Promised Land. Now it was America. It was completely in character, this desire to start again on the other side of the world. Oh, I could believe it too easily.

‘What’s wrong with London? This is where he belongs. His family and friends – Gina, he’s happy here.’

She lifted her hands, palms raised to the heavens, taking it all in – Miss Wilkins, the trouble at school, the impossibility of our son sitting still for an entire lesson, Paris and the broken Eurostar, life in north London.

‘Well, obviously not. It will be a better life over there. For all of us. I don’t want Pat’s childhood to be like mine – always different homes, always different people around. I want his childhood to be like yours, Harry.’ She placed her hand on my arm. ‘You have to trust me. I only want what’s best for the boy.’

I angrily shook her off.

‘You don’t want what’s best for the boy. You don’t even want what’s best for yourself. Or that loser dickhead you married.’

‘Why don’t you watch your mouth?’

‘You just want revenge.’

‘Believe what you want, Harry. It really doesn’t matter to me what you think.’

‘You can’t do this to me, Gina.’

She was suddenly furious. And I saw again that we could never recreate what had once existed between us. We could be polite, affectionate even, concerned about Pat, but the love we had lost was impossible to duplicate now. Because it was all used up. What do they say? Married for years, divorced forever. That was us. Gina and I were divorced forever.

‘You broke the promises – not me, Harry. You fucked around – not me. You were the one who got bored with the marital bed, Harry. Not me.’

She shook her head and laughed. I looked at the face of this familiar stranger. From his mother my son got his Tiffany-blue eyes, his dirty-blond hair, those slightly gappy teeth. She was definitely his mother, and I no longer recognised her.

‘And now you tell me what I can and can’t do, Harry? You’ve got some nerve. I am taking my son out of the country. Start living with it.’

Then she pressed her car key, and the double flash of lights as the central locking came off seemed to glint on her wedding ring.

Not the one she had when she was with me.

The new one.

six (#ulink_755cc1b5-f374-5483-91ea-e80d52eaeaee)

Richard was one of those pumped-up business types that were starting to show up all over town. The bespectacled hunk. The six-pack nerd.

Ten years ago a man like Richard – who does things with other people’s money – would have been all spindly legs and narrow shoulders. But you have to be tough to live in the city these days, or look like you are. I didn’t know what he was doing – a lot of weights, some cardiovascular stuff, maybe a few boxercise classes – but when I barged into the restaurant where he was having lunch with some business colleagues, for once he looked more like Superman than his mild-mannered alter ego.

Richard was the last one to look up at me. The other three saw me coming. Maybe it was my clothes – the kind of jacket that my mum would call a car coat, old chinos and boots. Pretty much standard uniform for a TV producer, although those clothes stood out in a swanky restaurant where they served hearty Tuscan peasant food for executives on six figures a year.

Richard’s companions saw me all right – the young Armani hotshot, the older, silvery geezer and the fat guy – but they were not quite sure what to make of me. I swear that one of them – the fat guy – was about to ask me for another bottle of sparkling mineral water. But when I opened my mouth, he realised I wasn’t there to pour the Perrier.

‘You’re not taking Pat away from me, you bastard,’ I said. ‘Don’t you even think about taking Pat out of the country.’

His dining companions stared from Richard to me and back again, uncertain what to make of this scene. A cuckolded husband? A homosexual love spat? I could see that they didn’t know Richard well enough to get it immediately. So he spelled it out for them, never taking his eyes off me.

‘This gentleman is the father of my stepson,’ Richard explained. ‘The poor little bastard.’

And that’s when I lost it, lurching across the table, scattering bread rolls and little silver dishes of olive oil, which I am almost certain the peasants don’t have in their Tuscan farmhouses. Richard’s dining companions recoiled, half rising from their chairs, shrinking from the trouble, but two waiters were on me before I could reach him. They started pulling me away, one of them trapping my arms to my side in a bear hug, the other trying to get a grip on the collar of my car coat.

‘You leave us alone,’ I said, digging my heels into the sawdust-strewn floorboards, managing to reach out and grab a fistful of linen tablecloth, despite my pinned arms. ‘You just leave my son alone, Richard.’

The waiters were too strong for me. Unlike Richard, I hadn’t spent hours pumping iron and running on the treadmill. I felt all the strength go out of me as they easily pulled me away. But because I still had hold of the tablecloth, I took it with me, and it all came crashing down: the glasses, the plates of robust pasta dishes, the rough-hewn chunks of bread, the little silver dishes of olive oil.

On to the floor and into their laps.

And Richard was on his feet, angry at last, ready to try out his new biceps and eager to punch my lights out, seafood linguini dripping down the front of his trousers.

‘You’re not taking my son away just because you can’t cut it in this city, Richard.’

‘That’s for Gina and me to decide.’

‘I’m his father, you bastard. And I’ll always be his father. You can’t change that.’

‘One question, Harry.’

‘What’s that, dickhead?’

I watched him wipe a prawn from his tomato-stained flies.

‘What the hell did she ever see in you?’

It was Eamon Fish who first told me about the blended family. Which is ironic, because Eamon was the most single man I knew. The sap was still rising in Eamon, but it hadn’t quite reached his head yet.

Although he was a modern boy about town, Eamon was painfully old-fashioned when it came to love, marriage and all of that. Blame it on his Kilcarney background. He had a single man’s view of wedlock, simultaneously wary and romantic. But I’ll say this for Eamon – he was the only one who warned me about what I was walking into.

‘Harry, good man you are,’ he called to me across my wedding reception. ‘I want a word with you.’

I watched him weave his way through the crowd, nodding and smiling as he went, polite and friendly to people who recognised him, grateful to the ones who didn’t. He was holding his champagne flute aloft to prevent spillage, looking even more dishevelled than usual, all shirt tails and floppy fringe and droopy eyelids, but he had those dark Irish good looks that belonged to a young Jack Kennedy, so even in his cups he resembled a rake rather than a slob. He put his arm around me, clinked our glasses.

‘Here’s to you. And your lovely bride. And your – what do they call it? – blended family.’

‘My what?’ I was still laughing.