The Man Who Forgot His Wife (33 page)

I stopped stroking Maddy’s hair. Her head was actually quite heavy on my collarbone and I shifted my body so her head fell on to the pillow. She had actually changed the locks on the house where I lived with my children! I hadn’t been violent or unfaithful; she just didn’t want me living there any more, so she had changed the locks. How was that not a monstrous thing to have done?

Madeleine shifted slightly in her half-sleep and pulled the quilt off my body. I felt my indignation rising, the deferred anger re surfacing as I thought about the injustice that had been done to me. Now I climbed out of bed, thinking I might go and have breakfast alone, but she rolled over and opened her eyes and smiled dreamily at me.

‘I seem to be in your bedroom …’ she said playfully.

‘Yes,’ I mumbled coldly, avoiding eye contact, finding myself obliged to focus on the cheap kettle on the side table instead.

‘Why don’t you come back to bed?’

‘No, I’m, er, just going to see if I can make some tea.’

And I took the kettle to the sink, but it banged quite hard against the tap as I did so.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Fine,’ I said, as if denying a monstrous allegation. ‘Oh, the bloody kettle doesn’t fit in the sink – how’s that supposed to work? That is so stupid!’

‘Fill it up using the cup. Or use the cold tap in the bath.’ Now she was sitting up in bed. I noticed that she was back to wearing my T-shirts in bed, which I understood was quite significant in the complex code of marital diplomacy.

I banged cups and saucers, and used more force than was strictly necessary to tear open individual sachets. I had felt obliged to offer Maddy a cup too and now, as she sipped it, she said how
lovely
it was to be brought a cup of tea in bed. I failed to return the smile and countered that I hated those little cartons of UHT milk, which I had only mentioned several thousand times before over the course of our marriage. The moment had come to vocalize my fury about what she had done. I knew it might ruin everything, but I couldn’t hold down my anger about the way I’d been treated. I glanced up at her sitting against the pillows, her smooth pale skin still slightly creased from where she had slept. She looked back me with a coy smile and then she pulled the T-shirt over her head so that she was now completely naked in the middle of a soft white bed. ‘So, why don’t we have sex and then go downstairs for a big cooked breakfast?’

‘Oh God, oh God …’ I groaned a few minutes later. ‘You are so beautiful …’

‘All right, shut up!’ She tutted. ‘Blimey, I must look a right state – just woken up, with my hair all sticking up and big bags under my eyes.’

Now that sexual intercourse had occurred, the case of the lock-changing was re-examined and found to be a trivial, inconsequential matter that had really been blown out of all proportion. Actually, now I thought about it again, the fact that in my drunken state I had smashed a window rather vindicated Maddy’s decision to keep me locked out. I recalled that ‘make-up sex’ had always had an extra passionate edge to it, so it was un surprising that ‘make-up after getting divorced’ sex proved to be even more potent. I was still lying on top of her, but we knew each other well enough by now for her to admit this wasn’t actually all that comfortable. So we lay side by side for a moment, and I stroked the stretch marks from way back when she had been pregnant with Jamie. I couldn’t remember sex like that with Maddy. At no point during intercourse had she blithely mentioned that the car was making a funny rattling noise or wondered out loud if her mother still had her school reports in the attic.

After breakfast we walked by the port, hoping to buy
Madeleine’s
parents a present for looking after the house and dog. Only the Post Office and General Store was open at this time of year, and Maddy was torn between a linen tea towel featuring Irish winners of the Eurovision Song Contest or a tub of live lugworms. In the height of summer the quayside buzzed with blubbery local boys hurling themselves into the sea and tourists in chunky jumpers emerging from the pub with trays of Guinness and Tayto crisps. But now the village felt ghostly and suspended; boats were wrapped in damp tarpaulins; eye-mask shutters covered the windows of the hibernating holiday homes.

‘Do you want to go back to Barleycove? You know, for one last swim?’

‘No, thanks, I’m not risking pneumonia a second time. Anyway, it’s nice here – we could walk up to the headland maybe?’

‘You’re right, it’s a lovely spot. We should have stayed at that pub when we were students instead of bloody camping.’

‘Yeah, well … Some things take you twenty years to learn.’

This hadn’t meant to be significant, but now that the words were out it seemed to demand some sort of clarification about where the two of us stood. We stared out at the bobbing yachts and listened to the chorus of cables slapping against aluminium masts.

‘I came out to West Cork to decide something,’ Maddy said finally. ‘And yesterday, staring into that fire at Barleycove, I think I came to a conclusion.’

I felt my heart accelerate and inadvertently whispered my next sentence.

‘What did you decide?’

She took both my hands in hers as she looked me directly in the eye.

‘That next time I’m going swimming in the Atlantic in April, I’m buying a fucking wetsuit.’

‘That seems reasonable … I might not always be there with your cashmere.’

‘Oh, that was the other thing.’ She looked back out across the water. ‘It would be quite nice if you were.’

A couple of seagulls seemed to laugh together in the distance. After about twenty seconds Maddy said, ‘Can you stop hugging me now as I’m having trouble breathing?’

We walked out of the village and towards the cliffs, and I took her hand and she let me hold it, even though the narrow path soon became single file, which made walking like that ridiculous. The wind was stronger up on the hills beyond the village, and the path ahead looked challenging. Finally we were at the cliffs looking down on the bay, sitting on a weathered bench that a bereaved husband had erected in memory of his late wife.

‘Look at those dates,’ I said. ‘Fifty-five years they were married. Do you think we could stay together fifty-five years?’

‘Depends. You might go off and have an affair tomorrow, and then I would have to kill you …’

‘Really? Is that the very worst thing?’

‘No, actually. If you immediately confessed to a one-off infidelity, I might just forgive you. But if you didn’t tell me and then I found out, well, I would kill you slowly and painfully and post the video of your execution on YouTube.’

‘I find that hard to believe. You managing to post anything on YouTube.’

We reminisced fondly about the first time we had come on holiday here; how we had hired bicycles and put them on the ferry to Clear Island, and eaten pub lunches and swum on deserted beaches, and found a beautiful loch in the hills above Ballydehob and camped up there on the edge of the woods for a few nights with nobody seeming to mind. We delighted in parading these liberated memories; during the years of fighting, such stories had been officially suppressed as they had done nothing to help the war effort. Now these folk tales were being positively encouraged as part of the ongoing peace process; we were writing a new history of our marriage, one that
suited
the new ending of the happy, loving, divorced couple.

‘So tell me, are we actually legally divorced yet?’

‘No, that’s in a few weeks’ time – there’s one last court thing, but we’re not expected to go to it.’

‘Well, maybe we should go?’ I half joked.

‘Hey, yeah! I could wear my wedding dress again – and you could wear your best suit, and we could have confetti outside and a big reception afterwards?’

‘Oh, fantastic!

‘Fantastic?’

‘Yeah – you’re up for doing stupid stuff again!’

Suddenly I decided I really ought to do this properly, and by the bench on the windswept headland in our favourite part of the world I took her hand and got down on one knee. ‘Madeleine Vaughan, would you do me the immense privilege of becoming my ex-wife? I’m asking you – no, begging you: will you divorce me?’

A sheep stared at us as, as if it had found its intellectual match.

‘I would be honoured!’

This was going to be a divorce like no other. We both accepted it would be far too complex and expensive to try to reverse the whole process now, so we resolved we would have a different kind of
decree nisi
with champagne and speeches and a big party to celebrate that we were going to live happily ever after now that we were finally divorced. We talked about how the children might adjust to having us both at home again, how we had to be careful not to argue in front of them when disagreements eventually came along. Which then happened immediately …

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t just take you back after your fugue. But I had to be really sure that you wouldn’t walk out on us again.’

I was slightly shocked by just how distorted her version of our split was. For a second I wondered if I could just let this pass, but it seemed too fundamental to leave it in the official record.

‘Erm … it seems a shame to drag this up now, but … I didn’t actually walk out on you. It was you who changed the locks, if you remember?’

‘Changed the locks? What are you talking about?’

‘You changed the lock on the front door, like you threatened. That was the moment I realized the marriage was beyond saving and I had to start divorce proceedings.’

‘I didn’t change the locks, you stupid idiot! I know I used to say it, but I’d never actually do that!’

‘Yes, you did. And you pretended to be out – even after I cut my hand on the glass in the door.’

‘What? That was you? We thought someone had tried to break in! I’d taken the kids to stay at my parents to give them a break from all the fighting – I left you a note and everything. But when I came back the window was smashed and you weren’t there and wouldn’t return my calls for weeks afterwards …’

‘Yeah, because you’d gone and changed the locks!’

Maddy turned to look directly at me. ‘Had you been drinking?’

‘What?’

‘When the particular key you selected from your keyring didn’t work in the front-door lock? Had you been drinking?’

There was a long pause while I opted to forego the incredible view from the cliffs and found myself staring down at the muddy path.

‘Look, er, if you like, I can move my vinyl LPs out of the lounge …’

Chapter 23

IT WAS SPRING
, when a middle-aged man’s fancy turns to divorce. Maddy and I entered the court arm in arm and walked ceremoniously down the central aisle. Fortunately, Madeleine’s old wedding dress had not been a traditional white puffy meringue number, with five-foot train and cascading bridal veil, or else she might have been charged with contempt of court by wearing it to her final divorce hearing. But she was unmistakably a bride, in a classy crimson-silk three-quarter-length dress, clutching a bunch of roses that matched the single rose in her coquettish hat. This was only the second time she had worn this outfit, and I complimented her that after two children and fifteen years she could still get into it.

‘Thank you. Oh, and if an expensive new dress purchase happens to show up on our credit card, then we must have been the victim of identity theft.’

Despite all my recent efforts jogging on my dog walks and giving up alcohol, I failed to fit into the suit I’d worn on my wedding day, which was just as well considering the size of the shoulder pads and the way the sleeves were meant to be pushed up
on
the jacket. Neither did I have sufficient hair to replicate the bouffant 1990s fringe that was already out of date first time round. But I hired a smart grey morning suit and wore a rose in my buttonhole, and we stood side by side in the Principal Registry of the Family Division, ready for the judge to pronounce us man and ex-wife.

The judge himself initially checked that we weren’t in the wrong building when what appeared to be a bride and groom entered his court for the next
decree nisi
on that morning’s roster. Both our long-suffering lawyers were present, now themselves finding some sort of common cause in the obstinate refusal of this impossible couple to follow the traditional script of bitter acrimony. The legal settlement still had to be decreed, but this part was now purely academic. It no longer mattered who got the house or how much I had to pay Madeleine each month, as we would all be part of the same unit.

Only a few minutes were normally allotted for such cases, all financial and custody disputes having generally been sorted long before a separation reached this final formality. Except this time, the stock answers to the usual questions did not quite apply, and it seemed that the judge’s day had been brightened up by this unconventional couple. ‘Sounds more like a marriage than a divorce!’ he observed.

‘You could say that, m’lud,’ said an embarrassed lawyer, and Maddy proudly showed the courtroom a new bejewelled ring on her wedding finger.

‘Counsel, may I just ask the petitioner directly – are you absolutely certain, Mr Vaughan, that you wish to divorce this woman?’

‘Oh yes, your honour.’ I looked lovingly at Maddy, who smiled back. ‘I’ve never been so sure of anything in my whole life!’

The judge then declared that since there were no other legal impediments, the
decree nisi
was granted and the pair were now legally divorced. And then my lawyer mumbled
sarcastically
to himself, ‘You may now kiss the divorcee.’ So I did.

There was no notice outside the divorce court saying that the throwing of confetti was forbidden, so as Maddy and I emerged hand in hand, a small gathering of friends and family showered us with tiny coloured bits of tissue paper. I had to stop myself being concerned about creating litter. Our children were particularly generous with the confetti, tipping whole boxes of the stuff on to their parents’ heads, before asking if they could ride in the white Rolls-Royce that had been booked to drive us to the reception. And so the whole family climbed inside and pulled away to the applause of the crowd, Dillie in the front passenger seat, desperate to be spotted by someone she knew.