The Man Who Forgot His Wife (7 page)

‘And your voice badly re-dubbed by a British actor.’

‘Definitely.’

Without really thinking about where we are going, we continue on to the next hill, the backpacks and camping gear doing little to slow us down as we march optimistically across the Irish countryside. This is our first holiday together – it is sunny, we have a brand-new tent – what can possibly go wrong?

‘Oh, no! I don’t believe it!’ exclaims Maddy, sounding genuinely alarmed
.

‘What? What is it?’

‘I forgot to send off that postcard to Great-auntie Brenda. Again!’

‘What, the racist one?’

‘It’s not racist. It’s just an affectionate Irish stereotype.’

The postcard to Great-auntie Brenda features a smiling cartoon leprechaun drinking a pint of Guinness and bears the caption ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to yers!!’ I suggest that it might be of questionable taste, but Maddy stands firmly by her selection of a suitable postcard for her very elderly widowed great-aunt
.

‘I thought she’d like it. She has gnomes.’

‘She has gnomes?’

‘You know, in her garden.’

‘Well, obviously in her garden. I didn’t think they were infesting her hair.’

The leprechaun is not looking any less cheerful for having been
stuffed
into the side pocket of Madeleine’s rucksack for three days. She has already written a short upbeat message on the back, lovingly completed the address and affixed a specially purchased Irish stamp. Just that last detail of actually putting the card in a postbox keeps eluding her. And when Maddy gets back to England and unpacks her bag, there is the leprechaun, still wishing her the top o’ the mornin’. She resolves to stick an English stamp over the Irish one in the hope that Great-auntie Brenda won’t notice, or has not yet found out about Ireland gaining independence in 1921. She gives it to me to post when I am going out that evening, and I place it carefully in my inside jacket pocket. It is several months later that I find it there, and wonder how I might possibly tell my girlfriend that I have forgotten to send off the vaguely racist postcard to the legendary Great-auntie Brenda
.

Maddy and I have hitched and walked through west Cork and now gaze down on a huge stretch of sand known as Barleycove. Hills on either side lead down to a perfect beach with steep, grassy dunes behind. A shallow stream sweeps around to a tidal saltwater lake; occasional white bungalows speckle the hills and the hazy horizon is punctured by the tiny outline of the Fastnet lighthouse
.

‘Why don’t we camp here for the night?’ I suggest enthusiastically. ‘We could have a swim and make a fire out of driftwood and have a back-to-nature barbecue with those economy sausages and the Pot Noodle?’

‘But the lady in the pub said there was going to be a storm, remember? We could go back to Crookhaven. That pub had a few rooms upstairs.’

‘Come on – it’s blazing sunshine. This is the perfect spot. This is what it’s all about!’ and I am already taking off my backpack
.

Six hours later, we are awoken by the tent’s top sheet coming loose in the gale and flapping aggressively above us. Now the rain drums even more noisily against the canvas sound box in which we’re supposed to be sleeping as water trickles down the tentpole, forming a puddle at our feet. Despite the foolhardy decision to ignore the local prophet, the
night-time
storm has actually made us even cosier inside; it is exciting and romantic to be thrown together in this contrived crisis
.

‘I told you to take no notice of that woman in the pub.’

‘You were right. Everyone knows it never rains in Ireland. Famous for its desert-like conditions. That’s how Bob Geldof developed his interest in droughts.’

Another violent gust of wind makes the tent shudder and then the guy ropes break free on one side, the poles fall inwards and the roof collapses on top of us. I swear loudly, sounding momentarily scared, which prompts shrieks of laughter from Maddy, who is still enjoying the effects of a bottle of white wine shared as the sun went down
.

Now I attempt to right the tentpoles from inside, but the gale pulls the tent flat again, as a stream of water flows on to our things. Maddy laughs all over again, then sticks her head out of the tent to see what she can see
.

‘Maybe you should go out and try to fix it from the outside?’ she suggests
.

‘Why me?’

‘Well, because I don’t want to get my T-shirt wet – whereas you can go out there like that.’

‘But I’m completely naked!’

‘Yeah, well, there’s not going to be anyone out there on a night like this, is there?’ she points out. ‘Go on, I’ll have a towel ready for when you come back in!’

And so my pale, naked frame steps out into the night to do battle against the wind and rain as Maddy zips the door closed behind me. It is then, from inside the tent, that Maddy hears an elderly-sounding Irish man non chalantly ask me if I am ‘all right there’
.

‘Oh, hello, er, yes, thank you very much. Our tent blew over in the storm …’

‘Ah, well, I saw that you’d camped down here,’ the old man muses from the shelter of a golfing umbrella, ‘so I thought I’d better check you hadn’t blown away, like.’

I can just hear Maddy giggling inside the tent – she had obviously seen him coming and deliberately set me up
.

‘Not yet!’ I quip, and my fake laughter goes on far too long
.

‘There’s a barn up the lane. I’d say you could always move up there if you want.’

‘Thank you, that’s very kind.’

‘But you don’t want to be prancing about in this weather stark-bollock-naked. You’ll catch your death of cold.’

I hear another snort of laughter as I stand there in the driving rain, trying to make casual chit-chat with a local farmer while cupping my hands over my genitals
.

‘Oh, this? Well, I didn’t want to get my clothes wet, you see. But good advice – I’ll get back inside right now. Thanks for checking on us!’

The guy ropes are never re-set, and the tent stays collapsed on us all night, but it doesn’t matter that we barely sleep and have to dry out our things tomorrow, because right now all we want to do is laugh and laugh. I suppose we are showing each other how upbeat we can be in the face of adversity. Maddy doesn’t mind that I ignored her advice and was proved wrong; nothing is going to be allowed to spoil our happiness. We are young and can doze with canvas on our faces, and arms half wrapped around one another; we are immunized against discomfort by the euphoria of just being together
.

‘I’ve had a memory!’ I exclaimed, running out of the bathroom. ‘I’ve just recovered a whole episode of my life!’ Gary and Linda were delighted for me, though their joy was slightly tempered by the vision of an almost naked man laughing manically and dripping foamy bathwater all over their kitchen floor. In fact, I wondered if being stripped and soaking wet was the association that triggered the memory, but somehow I knew that it was having seen Maddy. Linda fetched me her pink towelling dressing gown, and put the hand towel I had used to protect my modesty straight into the washing machine.

We sat around their kitchen table and they assured me that this was only the beginning, that other memories would surely start to flow back.

‘That lady’s bathrobe rather suits you, Vaughan,’ said Gary, ‘’cos you always had a bit of a thing about dressing up in women’s clothes.’

Linda laughed, then reassured me that I had not actually been a transvestite, adding, ‘Well, as far as I know, anyway …’

I wanted more stories, more memories of Maddy. But while I wanted to find out more about my marriage, Gary felt I needed to focus on the ending of it. They had obviously had a conversation while I was in the bath and now I was reminded that I was due in court on Friday, for the final stage of what they earnestly assured me had been a very long, painful and expensive business.

‘To put it off now would be the last thing you would have wanted,’ Gary told me.

‘You have to jump through this last hoop, Vaughan, for Maddy and the kids’ sakes as much as your own,’ added Linda.

The proposition that Gary was putting to me was that I was going to have to go to a court of law and pretend to a judge that nothing had happened to me in order to terminate a marriage I knew nothing about.

‘But what if they ask a question I don’t know the answer to?’

‘Your lawyer will be in there with you – he’ll just tell you what to say,’ Gary assured me.

‘And he’ll know about my condition?’

‘Er, well, probably not,’ said Gary. ‘I mean we could risk telling them, but what will they do? Insist on postponing the case and charge you another ten grand you haven’t got.’

‘Maddy and the kids are geared up to it happening on Friday. They need closure,’ said Linda.

‘I’m pretty sure this last hearing is already scripted. You just repeat your position to your judge, he makes his ruling, you swap
CDs
with Maddy and then it’s straight to the pub to flirt with the Polish barmaid.’

Gary was insistent that I would deeply regret not having gone through with the divorce if my memory suddenly returned and I awoke to discover that I had lost the chance to break free from an unhappy marriage.

‘Yes, you
say
it was an unhappy marriage …’ I ventured.

‘Well, you
are
getting divorced,’ pointed out Gary. ‘That is sometimes a sign …’

I had sensed that our split had been an acrimonious one, but on digging a little deeper I learned that it was not until the actual divorce process was under way that things had turned really nasty. Apparently when Maddy and I had first separated we had still been behaving towards one another like reasonably civilized people. It was only after we were swept along in an adversarial legal system, and learned of the provocative claims and demands being made by the other side’s lawyers, that personal hostilities spiralled out of control. ‘I remember the history teacher in you compared the divorce process to war,’ recalled Gary. ‘You told me that in 1939 the RAF thought it was immoral to bomb the Black Forest to deprive the Germans of timber. But by 1945 they were deliberately creating firestorms to kill as many civilians as possible.’

‘Maddy and I hadn’t quite reached the Dresden stage, I hope?’

‘No, you two were at, sort of, June 1944. She’d invaded Normandy, but you still had the Doodlebug up your sleeve.’

‘Right. So I’m the Nazis in this metaphor?’

However persuasive they were that we’d be better off apart, I felt I couldn’t agree there and then to take this momentous step in the dark. My authority was not helped by the fact that I was still wearing a pink lady’s bathrobe. When I was dressed, I announced that I’d like to go out for a walk on my own, to have a bit of a think, and somewhere between Linda’s nervous concern and Gary’s total indifference, we reached a compromise that it would
be
fine as long as I took an
A–Z
with their address and phone number written in the back and twenty pounds in cash, which I promised to return.

‘Are you sure you’ll be okay?’ repeated Linda at the door. ‘You don’t want one of us to come with you?’

‘No, really – I just fancy getting out. After a week in the hospital and everything that’s happened, I just need to clear my head a bit.’

‘I think your head is cleared enough already, mate,’ heckled Gary, from the kitchen.

And then as soon as their front door was closed behind me, I began retracing my steps the mile or so to where we had seen Maddy coming out of her front door. I was going to talk to her. I was going to meet my wife. I had resolved that she had to know about my condition; the event had major consequences for her own life, our children, the court case. I owed it to her to tell her face to face what had happened. It should be done before the children were home from school and with time to postpone the court hearing; and that meant I had to do it right now.

‘In any case,’ I told myself, ‘before I divorce my wife I’d like to get to know her a bit first.’

Chapter 6

GARY HAD RELATED
the remarkable course of events that had led to Maddy and me becoming the owners of a large Victorian house in Clapham. The dilapidated building had been boarded up in the 1980s, with visible holes in the roof and shrubs growing from the upstairs balconies. After university, Maddy and I had been friends with a group of housing activists who’d identified the long-abandoned property as a potential squat. But when it actually came to it, Maddy had been the bravest of all of us. While I hovered behind, worrying whether we needed someone’s permission to do this, Maddy took a jemmy to the heavily fortified front windows. Over the following weeks, we raided skips for firewood and propped heavy furniture against the doors to make ourselves secure at night, and it transpired that the council was too chaotic ever to evict us. Friends came and went, including a couple of anarchist performance artists whose idea of turning the whole building into a ‘Permanent Free Festival and Events Laboratory’ rather petered out due to their inability to get out of bed in the mornings.

A few years later we formed ourselves into a registered housing
association;
it was easier then for the authorities to permit us to stay there. But it was apparently
me
who did all the paperwork and took legal responsibility for it all, and Maddy and I were the only ones still living there when the law was changed giving housing association tenants the right to buy. In two decades Maddy and I had made the journey from radical squatters to respectable owner-occupiers without ever leaving our front door. The bay window where Maddy had taken a crowbar to the corrugated iron now had a little poster advertising our kids’ School Autumn Fayre. There was a sticker on the letterbox saying ‘
NO JUNK MAIL
’. I’m guessing we wouldn’t have been so bothered about junk mail when there was a small bush growing out of the kitchen floor.