The Man Who Forgot His Wife (22 page)

It is the memorable summer of 1997, and the newspapers are consumed with the new young Prime Minister who can do no wrong and the irredeemable Princess Diana and her scandalous new boyfriend. I am feeling a little stiff and nervous in my new suit, as I stand outside the mildly controversial non-religious venue for our marriage service. Madeleine did not want a traditional church wedding with a big white dress and bridesmaids and the church organist playing Bach’s ‘Cantata for Looking Around And Waving At Relatives’
.

‘She’s not pregnant – she’s just very political,’ explains Maddy’s mother to various elderly relatives. ‘Hello, Joyce. Doesn’t Madeleine look lovely in red? She didn’t want a traditional white dress. It’s not because she’s pregnant or anything—’

‘Mum, will you stop telling people I’m not pregnant.’

‘Why – are you?’

‘No, but it’s perfectly normal to want a non-religious service.’

‘I just don’t want people thinking the church wouldn’t have you. Or they might take the red dress as a sign … you know, that you were a fallen woman.’ The last two words are whispered, as if it’s shameful even to think of such a notion
.

‘A fallen woman! What is this – Hardy’s Wessex? It’s the nineties, Mum. It doesn’t matter if a woman is pregnant when she gets married!’

‘Oh, are you pregnant?’ says Great-auntie Brenda. ‘Oh, well, it’s good that you’re getting married, dear. It’s better that the baby isn’t a little bastard.’

‘No, she’s not pregnant, Brenda,’ says Maddy’s mum, slightly too desperately. ‘She’s just very political.’

‘Political?’

‘You know – doesn’t believe in things.’

‘Mum, I do believe in things. That’s exactly why … oh, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Don’t let it spoil your day, Madeleine,’ says kindly Auntie Brenda. ‘You’re still the bride, dear, even if, you know …’ and she
gives
a supportive glance in the direction of Maddy’s womb. And after Great-auntie Brenda has done the rounds at the reception, Maddy can be overheard politely thanking other elderly relatives for the compliment that she looks ‘blooming’, or denying that she ‘must be tired’ and insisting that one portion of food is quite enough
.

The ridiculous notion that Maddy must be ‘in the family way’ was memorable because the two of us had laughed about it in the following years; it wasn’t just a neutral series of isolated conversations – I recalled it as a funny anecdote. Maddy and I had imposed a narrative on to it and that became how it happened. As a rule, all my strongest memories had a sort of story to them, either real or subsequently fashioned in the retelling.

I guessed that the same must also be true of the other moments from the wedding that I recalled, as the various images of the day melted into each other like an edited-highlights package. I thought of Maddy waltzing with my father, as he gracefully led her round the scuffed wooden floor like a gentleman ballroom dancer. I could picture a rather drunk Gary remembering every single move to ‘The Birdie Song’, even though the DJ was actually playing Oasis. And I remember Maddy giving me a long and meaningful hug at the end of the evening, the moment before we got into the car. We could have skipped the service and the big party; that embrace was what made me realize that she loved me and wanted to be with me always.

One tradition had been upheld during the wedding ceremony itself, when Maddy and her dad had been the very last people to enter the civic chamber. Her entrance had been delayed outside the building, when a young lawyer had stopped her and handed her an important-looking wax-sealed envelope that he insisted she must open and read before she could proceed with her marriage. With the selected music for the bride’s entrance already filtering through from inside, a flustered Maddy tore open the envelope. Was it a legal bar to their marriage? Did her intended already have
a
wife? Was her intended an illegal alien, a fraudster, an escaped convict? Finally she had the thing open and she pulled out the contents. It was a postcard of a leprechaun saying ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to yers!!’

The brain scanner hummed and whirred and from outside this huge sarcophagus Dr Lewington instructed me to try to think about something significant of which I currently had no remembrance. I tried to picture my mother, searching for the moment when I had learned of her death, or the funeral that I must have attended with Maddy and probably our children. Now I could see myself standing in a country churchyard, throwing a handful of earth down on to a wooden coffin. It was a detailed image, featuring distraught mourners dressed in black as a lone church bell tolled nearby. I could easily have convinced myself that this was exactly as it had happened, except that I had already learned that my mother had been incinerated in a large municipal crematorium. Even though I knew it was pure fiction, I found it vaguely comforting to have this classic funeral scene to cling to.

Now I was instructed to concentrate on any episodes I had that were only partially reconstructed. I had deliberately saved the most negative moment I could recall to contrast with the bittersweet memories of my wedding day, and had intimated to Dr Lewington that this was what I would be thinking about.

It was the day that Madeleine said she didn’t want to be married to me any more. Without quite understanding why, the memory felt infused with a numbing mixture of injustice, frustration, powerlessness, desperation and anger.

Maddy and I are getting ready for bed late one night, somehow both irritated, but failing to ignore one another in our tiny bathroom. I attempt to suggest that I have had a very tough day at school, but she is not interested. What I have forgotten is that Maddy has just had the results of a test for a health scare that has consumed her for the
previous
couple of weeks. She had found a lump under her arm and had become convinced it is cancer, and my attempts at reassurance have been interpreted as dismissive
.

‘What the hell is non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma?’ I had said when she first mentioned it. ‘You can’t diagnose something like that just from looking it up on the internet.’

‘I have several of the symptoms. And a couple of people said it sounds really serious …’

‘What people?’

‘I don’t know their real names. It was on a blog about women’s health issues.’

From the outset she has interpreted my scorn for online medical chat as lack of interest in her wellbeing. Now she gets into the other side of the bed, but noticeably as far away from me as it is physically possible to be. And then she starts sobbing
.

‘What? What is it?’

‘I got the results of my cancer test today.’

Two blows strike me almost simultaneously. First, there is the sudden shame I feel at not having remembered that today was the day she’s been so worried about. I had said I would ring her immediately after lessons, but that worthy intention had been overtaken by the demands of the school
.

But now such petty details count for nothing in the wider scheme of things as I absorb the far greater blow: the follow-up, knock-out punch that comes from nowhere. Maddy’s sobbing tells me that the cancer test must have been positive. Despite my scepticism about self-diagnosis on the internet, despite the little bit of inconclusive research I have done myself, she really does have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Suddenly I see a future in which the kids might lose their mother, and a weakening Maddy will have to endure chemotherapy and operations and we will all be consumed with fear and uncertainty and the pain of seeing her endure an illness that none of us had even heard of until a couple of weeks earlier
.

She shakes off my tentative offer of a comforting arm as she
weeps
, and I try to ascertain what exactly the doctor has said to her and what the treatment options are. She wipes her eyes on her nightie. Finally she is able to say a few words through the tears
.

‘It was negative. I don’t have cancer.’

‘What?’

‘The lump is benign.’ She weeps. ‘And he said all the other symptoms were probably just a bug or something—’

‘Oh, thank God for that!’ and I go to hug her but she pushes me away and now her sobbing seems worse than ever
.

‘Maddy – it’s fantastic news! I thought from the way you were crying that you must have non-Hodgkinson’s disease or whatever—’

‘Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. You can’t even get the name of the illness right.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter, does it, because you haven’t got it! God, you had me going there, the way you were crying and everything! God, what a relief.’

She wipes her face on her nightie again, and it occurs to me that she never wears anything like that in bed; she always wears one of my baggy T-shirts. Perhaps there hadn’t been any in the drawer
.

‘You forgot to ask me about the results.’

‘Yeah, I know – I’m really sorry, but can I just tell you what happened at school today and you might understand—’

‘You didn’t even remember to ask! You don’t care enough to ask if I’m going to live or die, to find out whether I have cancer or not.’

‘Well, obviously I do care whether you live or die, that’s just ridiculous. As it happens, I never thought that you did have cancer, although I could see you were worried about it.’

‘But you didn’t come to the hospital, did you?’

‘Because you never asked me to.’

‘You still should have offered.’

‘Where’s the logic in that? If you had said, “Please come”, I would have come; but you never asked, so I judged from that that there was no need. For God’s sake, you don’t have cancer – why are we arguing again? We should be celebrating.’

‘Our marriage has cancer. Aggressive non-operable terminal cancer. If you can’t be there for me when I go through something like this, then I don’t think I want to be married to you any more …’

‘Look, it’s understandable that you’re not thinking straight. The worry of this whole lymphoma thing means that you’re getting this out of proportion. I’ll take a couple of days off work, and maybe we should take the kids down to your parents—’

‘It’s too late, Vaughan. You’ve never been there for me. You never made the jump, you never actually got married – it’s always been about you, never about us …’

And I realize that she wouldn’t have sobbed like this about the uncertainty of cancer; she would have been silent and thoughtful. She is crying because she feels that something has died
.

Lying in the scanner, I could almost feel my head throbbing as I trawled over that terrible night again; homing in on the tiny details that made it feel so real and recent. The moment when we finished talking and she got up from the bed and went to sleep in the spare room, never to return for all the time that we stayed under the same roof. The broken light bulb that I had meant to replace in the bedside lamp. The throbbing ache on the back of my skull and the crippling headache that kept me company until dawn.

Then, lying there inside that machine, I realized I had just had an actual new memory. Live on camera, the scan would have seen what happened when a new file was opened up and my brain accessed previously lost information. I had had a blow on the head! I was sure of it; the whole time this marriage-ending argument was going on, I had had an overpowering headache and could feel a large, tender swelling on the back of my head. Yes, I had been concussed. That was what I had been trying to tell her: I had been confronted outside the school by an angry father, who had accused me of picking on his child. He had shoved me over and I had hit the back of my head on the kerb and I had been
concussed.
I had refused to go to hospital, but despite my attempt at heroics, I knew it had been a pretty bad blow.

Now I realized that my amnesia might be a delayed reaction to that injury. That was why I had forgotten Maddy’s medical results! I wasn’t being indifferent or selfish – I was concussed. It was the first symptom of an amnesia that was later to swallow me completely.

Back in her office, Dr Lewington listened to the whole episode. She was interested in the detail about the blow to my head but, to her excitement and wonder, it seemed that nothing would unlock the mystery of what had happened to me. She showed me the results of the different scans. One image showed lots of blues and reds in the middle part of my brain. And in all the others there were lots of blues and reds in the same part of my brain. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Absolutely no difference whatsoever!’ she enthused. ‘The brain really is such a fascinating enigma.’ Even the moment when I recovered the brand-new memory revealed no brain activity that was discernibly different.

On her desk was a life-size ceramic human head, with lines and writing all over the cranium denoting the confident Victorian nonsense that had been phrenology. Things had moved forward enormously in a hundred and fifty years. Now they knew that they knew nothing.

‘Of course, we have to be aware that the memories you are recovering may not be all that accurate …’ she commented cautiously.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, there’s plenty of research proving how memories change over time. You might be regaining memories that were already distorted, and they might have been twisted further in the recovery – they might even be completely false.’

‘False?’ I exclaimed, feeling vaguely offended. Each returning episode had made me feel a little bit more normal. Now Dr Lewington was suggesting that I might be growing madder with every one.

‘Certainly. I’ve had patients with vivid recollections of things that happened when they weren’t there. They can become quite angry when their versions of their own past are directly challenged. Such is the wonderful power of memory to affect our emotions!’ she enthused, clicking her computer to close down my file. She made another appointment to see me in a couple of months and I realized that that would be after I was officially divorced. The ceramic head showed all the different parts of the human brain that were supposed to correspond to the major functions of the mind: ‘veneration’, ‘caution’, ‘love’.