The Man Who Forgot His Wife (23 page)

‘Just as a matter of interest,’ I said, as I stood up, ‘is there any scientific basis for what they say, you know, that “there’s a fine line between love and hate”?’

‘Yes, actually. Both emotions occur in the same neural circuits, located in the putamen and the insula. Neurologists at UCL recently logged levels of emotion from the amount of activity in that part of the sub-cortex.’

‘What, so you can actually scientifically measure how much you love someone?’

‘Well, it might be love. It might be hate. Their scans only measured the strength of feeling.’

The memory of my concussion increased the sense of injustice I was already feeling inside. Now I was the determined defence lawyer who had just unearthed a crucial piece of evidence proving the innocence of the wrongly accused. I had to confront Maddy with this new development; she had played the neglected martyr about her worrying health test, but at the end of that fateful day she did not have a serious medical condition and I did. I went directly to the house to share my revelation with her. I don’t know how I was expecting her to react; perhaps I was just seeking some sort of vindication. But I knew the children would be at school, and I think I was actually looking forward to a really good argument with her. That’s the problem with being single: there’s
just
no one there when you feel that physical need for a really good row. Sure, you can pick up a woman in a bar and have a one-night spat, but deep down you know it is an empty, meaningless experience. Companionship, mutual attraction and regular fights – that’s what makes a marriage work. In the fantasy scenario spinning around in my head, she was actually conceding that she had been over-hasty and pleading with me to take her back. ‘No, it’s too late now,’ I told her. ‘You had your chance but you threw it away.’

Forty minutes later I had worked myself up into a state of indignation as I skipped up the front steps and pressed the entry-phone buzzer hard enough to break it. There was a pause and then a buzz.

‘It’s Vaughan! I need to talk to you.’

There was another long pause and then the door lock buzzed and clicked and I pushed my way in. The dog greeted me enthusiastically, but Maddy did not appear as quickly as my state of excitement demanded. Through the ceiling I could hear her walking about in the bathroom above, and I fantasized that she might be putting on a little make-up before she came down to see me. Eventually a toilet flushed and I heard her footsteps. I stiffened in anticipation of the coming difficult conversation. But it would be more awkward than I expected. Coming down the stairs was not Maddy, but her boyfriend, Ralph.

Chapter 16

I RECOGNIZED HIM
before he introduced himself. I had already guessed that the man I had seen helping Maddy with the picture frames must have been Ralph. In any case, the confident way he jumped down two steps at a time wearing a towelling dressing gown suggested that he was probably not a telephone engineer or a burglar. He was tall, and maybe a decade younger than me, and indeed Maddy. His hair was wet and he looked fresh and clean compared to the flushed and sweaty mental case who had just rushed here on his bicycle.

‘Hi, Vaughan – I’m Ralph! Great to meet you.’

I felt I had no alternative to accepting the outstretched hand.

‘Maddy’s out at the moment. Sorry about my state of undress – just showered after my run!’

‘Ah, right. Hence the dressing gown. “Hilton Hotels”!’ I hadn’t intended this to come across like an accusation of theft, but that was how it sounded.

‘Yes, it’s Egyptian cotton – they were selling them in the Venice Hilton so I thought, why not?’

I was disorientated by the detail that he had taken Maddy to a
luxury
hotel, and found myself forced into polite conversation.

‘Yes, Venice, of course. How was that?’

‘Amazing! What a city! You ever been?’

‘Er, no. Maddy always wanted to go – but, you know …’

We stood there for a moment. I was sure the clock in the hall didn’t usually tick that loudly.

‘Yes, so – Venice,’ I mused. ‘Is it still sinking?’

‘What?’

‘Venice. Wasn’t there some problem with it sinking or something?’

‘I dunno if they sorted that out or not.’ Ralph concentrated hard, and went to put one foot on the first stair so that he could place his elbow thoughtfully on his knee, but then became aware that this was opening the front of the dressing gown and so he deftly reversed the movement. This meeting was embarrassing enough without him contriving to show me his penis. ‘But then, er, I suppose even if they did stop it sinking, now sea levels are rising it’s going to be back to square one!’

‘Honestly, if it’s not one thing it’s another.’ I tutted.

‘You just do what you can …’

‘Yes,’ I agreed carelessly, although it was a pretty safe bet that neither of us had ever done very much. ‘I mean, I used to order the Veneziana in Pizza Express because they added twenty-five pence on to your bill for the Venice in Peril fund.’

‘Well, that’s great! And do you still have the Veneziana now?’

‘No – I got fed up with the sultanas.’

‘Urgh, sultanas on pizza? No!’

The dog yawned and I knew that it was time at least to acknowledge this tense situation and say something about his relationship with Maddy.

‘So …’ I said ominously, and I saw him prepare himself. ‘I wonder … if they’ve thought about building, like, a huge tidal barrier across the strait of Gibraltar?’

‘What?’

‘You know – like the Thames Barrier, only really massive so it could stop the rising Atlantic flowing into the Med and flooding all the low-lying coastal areas?’

Ralph was also aware of the need to clear the air; he must have been feeling defensive about where he stood with regard to the children and the difficult emotional journey of Maddy and everyone else wrapped up in this.

‘Nah – it’s about twenty miles between Spain and Morocco!’ he said. ‘I mean, the engineering logistics alone would be insurmountable, before you’d even considered all the political and funding obstacles …’

The arrogance with which he dismissed my idea rubbed me up the wrong way.

‘Well, something’s got to be done!’ I said, hearing my voice rising. ‘We can’t just do nothing and leave things as they are.’

‘There’s no point – it’s all too late anyway. Just accept it.’

‘Oh, right, so we can put a man on the moon or organize the D-Day landings, but don’t bother trying to safeguard the homes and livelihoods of a billion people?’

‘All the other coasts are going to disappear anyway – just deal with it!’

‘No – I’m not going to “just deal with it”! I’m going to try and do something about it. I’m going to start having the Veneziana again. Even if I have to pick off all the sultanas!’

Admittedly my idea had been a bold one, and this had probably not been the forum to hammer out all the minutiae. Ralph might have tried to clinch the argument by pointing out the geo-political strategic power that control of this barrier would bestow upon Spain or Morocco, but instead he opted for a personal blow way below the belt.

‘So, I understand you’ve been having some mental-health issues?’

It was at this point that I felt that my argument for this massive engineering project would become unanswerable if I punched
Ralph
in the face. It seemed to me that this deft tactic would crystallize all the arguments and make the point more emphatically than anything I might say. I felt my fist clench and my face redden as an alarmed Ralph suddenly took a step back. Only in the last nanoseconds of this thought process did something inside me put the brakes on. I had no memory of ever hitting anyone, and I had just remembered how stupid and upsetting the incident with the psycho-dad at school had been. That’s why I had come here – to tell Maddy about my concussion.

‘Where’s Maddy?’ I demanded.

When he told me, I instantly knew I wanted to be there too. Failing to bother with the niceties of saying goodbye, I turned and slammed the door on my way out, feeling my hands shaking as I unlocked my bike. It was not a short cycle ride, but it was made considerably quicker by just how fired up I was. Frightened cabbies swerved out of my way, pedestrians didn’t dare step on to zebra crossings.

‘Hello, Maddy,’ I said quietly, as I pushed the door open.

‘Oh, hi. I didn’t know you were coming.’

‘No, well – spontaneous decision. Hi, Dad, how you feeling?’

My father’s gaunt face peeked out of the top of the NHS blanket, which failed to conceal how thin and frail the body was underneath.

‘Is that you, son?’

‘Hello, Dad. You’re looking a little better.’

‘That’s for seeing. Your lovely wife!’ he suggested breathlessly. ‘You don’t. Normally. Come together.’

Maddy and I glanced at one another.

‘Well, we thought you’d prefer more frequent visits, so we take it in turns,’ improvised Maddy, rising from her chair to remove the paper from her flowers and put them in a vase.

‘Yes, that!’ I blurted. ‘But – it’s nice to be here together, isn’t it, Maddy?’

I was still angry with her and Ralph and realized that there would be nothing she could do if I put my arm around her waist. I felt her stiffen as I placed my hand just above her hip, but I held it there as we stood before the old man’s approving gaze. Maddy did not pull away; instead she explained to my father that she had put the flowers in a vase now, and that they certainly brightened up the room. Her waist felt softer than my own bony body; there was a tender, perfect hand-shaped ledge above her hip that felt like the most natural place in the world for a man to place his hand. But I wasn’t sure that this was an affectionate act; part of me worried that I had wrapped my arm around her in the search for some sort of sarcastic revenge. I could feel the warmth of her leg against mine, and her perfume could be detected over the odour of the hospital and its patients.

‘Look at you two!’ wheezed my dad. ‘You still make such a lovely couple.’

I gave her an extra squeeze towards me, and I was contemplating planting a kiss on her cheek. But this was Madeleine’s cue to pull away from me and adjust the blanket where a discoloured foot had become exposed. She quickly sat down and told him what the children had been up to, and I sat in the chair beside hers, chipping in with inferior contributions inexpertly copied from her.

‘Maddy’s been. Very good.’ His breath seemed weaker now; the effort of this visit could not be sustained much longer.

‘Of course she’s been very good!’

‘She’s the daughter. I never had.’

‘You have a sleep now, Keith,’ she said, in a cracking voice. I looked across at her and was startled to see that her eyes had welled up and that she was close to losing control.

‘I’m just popping to the loo!’ she blurted, as she dashed out to the corridor to cry in private.

Soon the old man was asleep and I went out and found our family car and waited to catch her there.

‘Hi. You okay?’

‘Your father is such a wonderful man,’ she mused, her eyes still red.

‘Yeah, I wish I could remember more, you know, of what he was like before.’

Madeleine seemed a little irritated by this, and said nothing.

‘Look, I need to talk to you. Any chance of a lift if you’re going back over the river?’ Madeleine was too grown-up to refuse me.

‘You didn’t have to do the whole lovey-dovey thing in front of him.’

‘I didn’t want him to be suspicious.’

‘Sure! Do that again and I’ll stamp on your foot.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll take whatever attention I can get.’

Maddy had put her seatbelt on and was just checking her texts when she suddenly looked up, astonished and a little nervous. ‘So you … you met Ralph?’

‘Oh – yes. We had a brief conversation,’ I said, trying to affect an attitude somewhere between indifference and mild antipathy.

‘Oh. Did you, like, work anything out?’

‘Not really.’

‘Not really? Well, come on, what did you say to him? What did he say back?’

‘You wouldn’t be interested.’

‘What – my ex-husband and father of my children meets my boyfriend and you think I wouldn’t be interested?’

She had put the ticket into the machine, and the barrier juddered upwards to let us out.

‘Okay, well, he said you could never build a tidal barrier across the strait of Gibraltar, and I said it would be worth trying to stop all of southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East losing their coastlines.’

She took her eyes off the road to look at me in confusion.

‘Sorry? I don’t understand.’

‘Rising sea levels? Hello? Venice in Peril? He was actually quite
dismissive
of my idea of a massive Thames Barrier-type sea-wall.’

‘Right. So you didn’t talk about anything important?’

‘Rising sea levels are important. But no, we never really talked about the elephant in the room.’

‘What was the elephant in the room?’

‘Well,
you
, obviously …’

‘So you’re saying I’m an elephant?’ she said dangerously.

‘No – the subject of you was like an elephant in the room.’

‘So I’m a big fat elephant – that you can’t ignore because I’m so enormous and fat?’

I couldn’t quite understand how I found myself on the defensive. Her phone beeped again, and she read the next message at the traffic lights.

‘He says he thought you were going to hit him!’

‘What? Over a discussion on sea levels? Talk about paranoid! And as if I’d hit a man in a dressing gown!’ That detail embarrassed her, which had been my intention. ‘From which I am deducing that he’s already moved in.’

‘No! The kids were on sleepovers, so he stayed the night. They don’t know he ever stays either, so don’t say anything.’

‘Anyway, I went round there because I wanted to talk to you about something. I had another brain scan today—’

‘Okay – back to
you
, then.’

‘It’s important. I remembered something. The day you had the results of your test for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The thing is I had concussion that day – I had been shoved to the ground by an aggressive parent and I banged my head on the kerb. I think it might be related to my amnesia since October.’