The Man Who Forgot His Wife (38 page)

‘We thought we could all go to the bandstand and get an ice-cream.’

‘Great idea! Get me a coffee,’ I said, as they cycled ahead, pursued by the dog.

‘I don’t want an ice-cream. So can I just have the money it would have cost instead?’ suggested Jamie, not quite entering into the spirit of the moment.

It was just a perfectly ordinary scene, a family sitting outside a café in a London park, spooning the chocolate froth off their parents’ coffee or sharing a taste of each other’s cones. But as I chatted and laughed along, I felt myself detach from the unit, like
some
hidden social anthropologist or lab scientist gazing down in wonder at the whole incredibly unlikely scenario. How blissfully unaware this family was of the preciousness of this moment; how fragile and ethereal a thing was human happiness. This might turn out to be the best moment ever, right here, right now. I might look back in years to come and realize that that was the happiest it ever was.

Maddy was so beautiful and warm-hearted, her face showing the creases of forty years of smiling at everyone. Jamie was quiet and dignified, always so judicious when he did choose to speak. Dillie glowed with enthusiasm and unshakeable trust in the goodness of people; she wanted to agree emphatically with everyone she spoke to, and attempted to chastise the scrounging dog with a voice so gentle and loving that he thought he was being invited to climb on her lap and lick her nostrils. And there was I in the middle of them all, consciously recording this precious memory, cured from the classic paternal blindness to my own importance to my family; finally aware that I was one of the retaining toggles that held this fragile self-assembly unit together. I felt like a born-again father, an evangelical family man; I wanted to knock on doors early on Sunday morning and ask people if they had ever thought about worshipping their partners. ‘For, yea, your wife did bring forth new life, and verily you did call him Wayne.’

Or maybe I had just drifted off, because Dillie was talking and I had learned to filter it out like the rest of the family. ‘Dad-can-I-upgrade-my-phone-to-a-BlackBerry-so-I-can-BBM-Mum-and-my-friends-because-oh-my-cone’s-finished-but-it-is-free-and-so-it-would-actually-save-money-if-you-think-about-it-ah!-look-at-Woody-he’s-so-sweet-have-oh-nice-shirt-by-the-way-and-what-I-should-get-Grandma-for-her-birthday-oh-it’s-
How-I-Met-Your-Mother
-tonight-can-we-watch-that-and-tape-
Glee
-to-watch-later-but-the-BlackBerry-Curve-not-the-BlackBerry-Bold-9000-which-is-for-businessmen …’

Jamie smiled an affectionate smile at his sister and just said,
‘You’re
not due an upgrade till Christmas, and the timer is already set.’

Maddy had told me something remarkable about our quiet, contemplative son. During that terrifying purgatory when Madeleine had been staying with her parents in Berkshire, she had answered the front doorbell to see Jamie standing there in his school uniform. This place was an hour’s train journey and another hour’s walk, so Maddy was both shocked and delighted to see her son suddenly turning up at his grandparents’ house, clutching the present of a chocolate orange for his mother. And while he was supposed to be in double maths, mother and son had sat on a bench in a pretty back garden in the countryside sharing his thoughtful gift.

‘Anyway, me and Dillie were talking …’ he had said.

‘You
and Dillie
?’

‘Yeah. I persuaded her to pay my train fare,’ he said, through a mouth stuffed with chocolate. This was ‘sharing’ in the sense that Maddy had about two or three segments and he had the rest. ‘Anyway, we just thought you should know … that whatever you do, it should be what you want, not what you think we want. Because what we want is what you want.’

Maddy said that was the first time she noticed his voice was breaking.

‘Well, that’s no bloody good,’ she had told him. ‘Because all I want is what you two want, so now we’re completely stuck!’ and she kissed the top of his head so he couldn’t see that she was crying. I later noticed that Maddy kept the cardboard packaging of that chocolate orange in her bedside drawer. Every time I saw it I felt a surge of pride in my teenage son, preceded by a moment’s disappointment that I hadn’t stumbled over some hidden uneaten chocolate.

The day after Gary finally became a father I offered to take my old friend out for a celebratory lager or, in my case, sparkling mineral
water.
Gary took the last empty table, dangerously close to the dartboard, where random darts would occasionally bounce off the board and threaten to skewer us if we touched on anything personal.

‘Well, here’s to your new arrival!’

‘I’ll drink to that … Gazoody-baby!’

‘A baby girl! Now that’s two people in your home you won’t understand.’

‘Talking of which – how are things with Maddy?’ ventured Gary, as a dart spun back off the board and landed near his foot.

‘Great! Really great. I mean, it’s early days, but we’re both making a real effort and I think we’re really happy.’

‘That’s good.’ He took a large sip of beer. ‘So she still hasn’t twigged that her father forged all that false-memory bollocks?’

‘What?!’ My mouth hung open at the enormity of what Gary was suggesting.

‘Don’t give me that!’ said Gary, looking slightly disgusted at my hypocrisy. ‘We both know you
did
shag that French bint. I clearly remember you boasting about it to me at the time. Yeah, he did a good job, old Ron, with his phoney photocopies and made-up psychiatrists. It’s quite flattering that he went to such lengths to get you two back together …’

Another dart bounced off the board and just missed me.

‘You mean …? So I did commit …’ A wave of sickness washed over me. Was everything back in flux? Would I have to tell her, or was living a lie actually the only possible option? Fortunately, this impossible dilemma never had to be faced, because a few seconds later Gary burst out laughing at my intense mortification, spraying a certain amount of lager across the table as he did so.

‘I tell you one thing that has never changed over twenty years. You were gullible when I first met you, and you’re just as fucking gullible now!’

‘Bullseye!’ came the cry from behind us.

‘Ah, you should see your face!’ laughed Gary. And I affected a good-natured smile, using muscles normally intended for screaming. The young darts players made way for an old man with very thick glasses, and we decided to continue our drinks standing up at the bar.

The next morning in school, I found myself wandering off the curriculum in a philosophical discussion during my last lesson with this Year 11 class. ‘So all this history we’ve done over the past year – is it all true, do you think?’

‘Yeah, ’cos if it’s not true, it’s not history.’

‘But who’s to say what’s true?’

‘True is what happened.’

‘Or is “true” what everyone thinks happened? Tanika’s letter to the
South London Press
about how her dad really died – and the big article it prompted – that’s changed the official history, hasn’t it, Tanika?’

‘Yeah, and we’re planting a tree and we’re going to put a notice underneath. Will you come, sir?’

‘I’d be honoured.’

Six months ago, an exchange like this would have prompted catcalls and jeers to the effect that Tanika loved Boggy Vaughan, but all that seemed to have been left behind.

‘You see, it’s all a question of perception. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound?’

There was a pause while they thought about this.

‘Has Tanika’s tree fallen over already?’

‘No, Dean. Try and keep up. The point is, do things just happen, or do they happen because we perceive them to happen?’

‘Maybe she should have put, like, a little fence around the tree?’

‘Sometimes we think we remember something, but have actually reinvented it, because the fictional memory suits us better. And the same is true in history—’

‘Nah,’ interjected Dean, ‘’cos in history I never remember anything.’

‘We all put our own angle on everything that happens to us, consciously and subconsciously. Governments, countries and individuals—’

‘What – even Wikipedia?’

‘Even, incredible as it may seem, Wikipedia.’

‘So, basically, what you’ve been teaching us all year might be a load of old bullshit?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. I’m just saying that history is not what definitely happened. History is … well, history is just old spin.’

That evening, Maddy and I sat out on the wooden decking as the evening light gently fell away. We had banned the children from watching any more repeats of
Friends
, so instead they watched
Friends Bloopers
on YouTube. The garden was in full bloom, brimming with beautiful flowers snapped in two by Jamie’s football, with the lawn now a perfect, uniform dusty brown, where children and the dog had worn away every last blade of grass. Green parakeets swooped over the rooftops, with distressed-sounding shrieks at the realization they’d somehow ended up in South London.

‘Linda and Gary took the baby home today.’

‘Blimey! I wonder how their marriage will cope with all the pressures that’s going to bring.’

‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll get through it,’ said Maddy. ‘Gary’s probably got a special app for it on his iPhone.’

‘Ha! I could have used one of those. GPS technology to tell me where I’d gone wrong in my life …’

‘I think the secret is just to find what it is that really makes you happy. And then drink a few glasses of it every evening.’ She took a sip and visibly relaxed as it hit home.

‘I must tell that to my Year Eleven class.’

‘You seem to be enjoying school much more than you used to.’

‘Yeah, we had a really interesting discussion today. About the nature of history. Quite existential, actually. They so want to be certain about what definitely happened.’

‘Yeah, well, you might not be the best judge of all that …’

‘Fair point. But having completely lost my past, it makes you realize how all that stuff can actually get in the way. Countries go to war over distorted versions of history; couples get divorced from accumulating bitterness about stuff that never quite happened the way they remember it.’

‘So that’s Vaughan’s solution to the spiralling divorce rate? Everyone should get chronic amnesia and not recognize the person in the bed beside them?’

‘You don’t need amnesia for that. Just a swingers’ website. No, I’m just saying that you’ve got
your
version of the past, and now I’ve got mine back, and we should each respect the differences.’

‘You probably still don’t remember the time you promised to do all the ironing for the rest of our marriage …’

‘No, strangely, that memory’s still not come back. But I do have a very strong recollection of you agreeing that whenever it was my turn to cook, it was fine if I just ordered a curry delivered to the front door.’

‘No, I think that was another false memory.’

‘Damn!’

‘Chicken korma, please.’

She went to pour some wine into my empty water glass, but I covered the top of it with my hand.

‘Not drinking any more – remember?’

‘Oh, yeah – sorry. Old habits die hard.’ But the end of the bottle somehow knocked my fingers and the glass fell and broke in two.

‘Shit! Sorry.’

‘No, that was me – I knocked your hand.’

‘No, my fault – I thought I had it.’

‘No, really …’

We burst out laughing at ourselves and I picked up the broken glass.

‘Give it a few months and I’ll remember that was definitely your fault.’

‘In ten years’ time, I’ll say you smashed the glass. After you threw it at me in anger.’

Dillie’s hysterical laugh could be heard coming from in front of the computer.

‘Ten years’ time! Do you think we’ll still be together in ten years’ time?’ I asked.

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ She put her bare feet up on to my lap. ‘Who knows what the past will hold?’

A striking eighteen-year-old redhead walks into the Students’ Union bar
.

I have never seen anyone so beautiful and charismatic, and once she sits down I place myself in an empty seat nearby and hope she might notice the fellow first-year directly in her eye-line. I pull my brand-new textbook from the bookshop bag, but decide I can’t just turn to page one: it will look more impressive if I open it somewhere near the final chapter. The words blur under my gaze and I can’t help glancing up every few minutes to catch her eye
.

‘That’s a very scholarly-sounding book you’ve got there,’ she says eventually
.

‘This? Oh, I’m just reading this for pleasure; it’s not part of my course or anything.’

‘Hmm … Do you mind me asking, why are you starting at the back of the book?’

‘Oh, er, well, that’s just how I prefer to do history.’ I feel myself blushing at having been caught out like this. ‘You know, I can never wait to find out what happens at the end …’

She laughs a little at my attempt at an explanation. I glance down at the final page and exclaim, ‘Oh no! The Romans win!’

‘Oh, shit! Now there’s no point in me reading it!’

‘Sorry about that. I’m Vaughan, by the way.’

‘I’m Madeleine … Sociology.’

‘Unusual surname.’

‘Yeah – Russian or something … Are you here for the Experimental Poetry Performance?’

‘What? Er, yeah. I love that stuff. Oh, you just made that up, didn’t you?’

And she grins and that is the moment I decide this is the woman I want to marry. Then a couple of Maddy’s friends arrive at the table and she invites me to join them. ‘This is Vaughan, everyone. He’s studying history,’ she explains. ‘Backwards.’

Acknowledgements

This story is based on an original lunch with Mark Burton, my former TV co-writer, whose generosity with ideas and advice is quite frankly beyond careless. Enormous thanks are also due to all the other friends and professionals who read various drafts: Georgia Garrett, Bill Scott-Kerr, Sophie Wilson, Brenda Updegraff, Pete Sinclair, Jenny Landreth, John McNally, Karey Kirkpatrick, Jonathan Myerson and Tim Goffe.