Man and Wife

Then I spent one night with a colleague from work. One of those pale Irish beauties who seemed a little bit smarter, and a little bit softer, than most of the women I worked with.

And it was madness. Just madness.

Because after Gina found out, we all had to start again.

I sent money every month.

The money was never late. I wanted to send it. I wanted to help bring up my son in any way I could. That was only right and proper. But sometimes I wondered about the money. Was it all being spent on Pat? Really? Every penny? How could I know that none of it was being blown on the guy my ex-wife married? Bloody Richard.

I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.

And even that was okay, but I felt like the money should give me certain basic human rights. Such as, I should be able to call my son whenever I needed to talk to him. It shouldn’t be a problem. It should be normal. And how I missed normal. A few days of normality, full board – what a welcome mini-break that would be.

But when I picked up the phone I always found I couldn’t dial the number. What if Richard – strange the way I called him by his first name, as if we were actually friends – answered? What then? Small talk? Small talk seemed inadequate for our situation. So words failed me, I replaced the receiver, and I didn’t make the call. I stuck to the schedule worked out in advance with Gina, and my only child and I might as well have been on different planets.

But I still felt like the monthly money – which my current wife, I mean my second wife, I mean my wife thought was a tad too generous, by the way, what with us wanting to move to a bigger place in a better area – should mean something.

It wasn’t as though I was some wayward bastard who didn’t want to know, who had already moved on to his new family, who was quite keen to forget all that went before. I was not like one of those scumbags. I was not like Gina’s old man. But what can you do?

I’m only his father.

My wife understood me.

My wife. That’s how I thought of her. Second wife always sounded plain awful. Like second home – something you get away to at the weekend and during the longer school holidays. Or second car – as if she was a rusty VW Beetle.

Second wife sounded like second-hand, second choice, second best – and Cyd deserved far better than all of that. All that second business wasn’t good enough for Cyd, didn’t describe her at all. And new wife – that was no good either.

Too much like trophy wife, too much like so-many-years-my-junior wife, too many images of dirty old men running off with their secretaries.

No – my wife. That’s her. That’s my Cyd.

Like Cyd Charisse. The dancer. The girl in Singin’ in the Rain who danced with Gene Kelly and never said a word. Because she didn’t have to. She had those legs, that face, that flame of pure fire. Gene Kelly looked at Cyd Charisse, and words were not necessary. I knew the feeling.

Cyd understood me. She would even understand about Sunday afternoon in Paris.

Cyd was my wife. That was it. That was all. And this life I was returning to now, it was not new, and it was second to nothing.

This was my marriage.

Before I went into our bedroom I checked on Peggy.

She was out for the count but she had kicked off her duvet and was clutching a nine-inch moulded-plastic doll to her brushed-cotton pyjamas. Peggy was a pale-faced, pretty child with an air of solemnity about her, even when she was what my mum would call soundo, meaning fast asleep.

The doll in her tiny fist was a strange-looking creature, cocoa-coloured but with long blonde hair and blue, blue eyes. Lucy Doll. Marketing slogan – I Love Lucy Doll. Made in Japan but aimed at the global market place. I was becoming an expert on this stuff.

There was nothing WASPy about Lucy Doll, nothing remotely Barbie about her. She looked a little like the blonde one in Destiny’s Child, or one of those new kind of singers, Anastacia and Alicia Keys and a few more I can’t name, who are so racially indeterminate that they look like they could come from anywhere in the world. Lucy Doll. She had fully poseable arms and legs. Peggy was crazy about her. I covered them both up with an official Lucy Doll duvet.

Peggy was Cyd’s child from her previous marriage to a handsome waste of space called Jim. This good-looking loser who did one right thing in his life when he helped to make little Peggy. Jim with his weakness for Asian girls. Jim with his weakness for big motorbikes that he kept crashing. He came round to our house now and then to see his daughter, although he was not on a fixed schedule like me with Pat. Peggy’s dad turned up more or less when he felt like it.

And his daughter was crazy about him.

The bastard.

I had met Peggy before I met Cyd. Back then Peggy was just the little girl who looked after my son, in those awful months when he was still fragile and frightened after I had split up with his mother. Peggy looked after Pat in his early days at school, spent so much time with him that they sometimes seemed like brother and sister. That bond was fading now that their lives were increasingly separate, now that Pat had Bernie Cooper and Peggy had a best friend of her own sex who also loved Lucy Doll, but Peggy still felt like more than my stepdaughter. It felt like I had watched her grow up.

I left Peggy clutching Lucy Doll and went quietly into our bedroom. Cyd was sleeping on her half of the bed, the sleep of a married woman.

As I got undressed she stirred, came half-awake and sleepily listened to my story about Pat and Paris and broken trains. She took my hands in hers and nodded encouragement. She got it immediately.

‘You poor guys. You and Pat will be fine. I promise you, okay? Gina will calm down. She’ll see you didn’t mean it. So how’s the weather in Paris?’

‘It was sort of cloudy. And Gina says she has to think about next Sunday.’

‘Give her a few days. She’s got a right to be mad. But you’ve got a right to take your boy to Paris. Jump in bed. Come on.’

I slipped between the sheets, feeling an enormous surge of gratitude. What Gina saw as an unthinking, reckless act of neglect Cyd saw as a good idea that went badly wrong. An act of love that missed the train home. She was biased, of course. But I said a prayer of thanks that I was married to this woman.

And I knew it wasn’t the wedding band that made her my wife, or the certificate they gave us in that sacred place, or even the promises we had made. It was the fact that she was on my side, that her love and support were there for me, and would always be there.

I talked on in the darkness, feeling the warmth of my wife next to me, trying to reassure myself that this mess could be fixed.

I would call Gina in the morning, I said. I had to get it straight about next Sunday and if I should pick Pat up at the usual time. And I had to apologise for worrying her sick. I hadn’t meant to cause all this trouble. We only went to Paris because I didn’t want Pat to be like the other kids with their part-time dads. The half-French girl who had turned vegetarian, and the countless millions like her. I wanted Pat to feel he had a real father, who did special things with him, adventures that he would remember forever. Like my dad did with me.

My wife kissed me to cheer me up, and no doubt to shut me up, and then she kissed me some more.

It soon became a different kind of kissing. It became the kind of kissing that has nothing to do with soothing and cuddles and reassurance. The kind of kissing that had started everything. I’ll say this for our marriage – it hadn’t changed the quality of the kissing.

Then she was waiting for me, her black hair fanning out across the pillow, her face lit only by the glow of a streetlamp coming through the slats of the blinds. This woman I was still mad about. My wife.

I moved towards her without reaching for the little wooden box in the bedside drawer that contained our family planning.

Then I heard her sigh in the darkness.

‘Don’t make me go through this every time, Harry. Please, darling. Come on. You already have a kid. Didn’t we agree on all that?’

I had been reading a lot about baby hunger recently. It was regularly featured in the ‘You and Yours’ pages of our Sunday paper. Women desperate to give birth. It was supposed to be all the rage. But my wife didn’t have baby hunger. She acted like she had already eaten.

We had discussed having a child of our own, of course. I wanted it now, because it would make us a family. Cyd wanted it one day, because there were other things she had to do first. Work things. Business things. We both had a vision of a happy life. But no matter how much I loved my wife’s adorable bum, I couldn’t kid myself that they were the same vision.

So I reached for the little box of condoms, wondering what she meant about already having a kid. Did she mean Pat? Or Peggy? Or whichever one I happened to be with at the time?

That was the trouble with being a guy like me. It got complicated. All these parts of your life that never seemed to fit together. Sometimes you couldn’t even recognise your own family.

But after we made love I slept facing the same way as my wife, our bodies tucked tight together, my right arm lightly curled around her waist.

And for all those sweet hours that we slept like that, making spoons and dreaming, she was the only one for me, and it wasn’t complicated at all.

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