Man and Wife (11 page)

‘I see.’

‘Look – what can we do? How can we stop her? I don’t care what it takes, Nigel. I don’t care what you have to say or do. It’s all fine.’

‘I hate to say I told you so. But you were the one who wanted to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules.’

‘Bottom line, Nigel – can she just take my boy out of the country?’

‘Bottom line? Not without your consent.’

‘My consent?’

He nodded. ‘If she takes your son out of the country without your consent, then she is doing something very naughty.’ He smiled nastily. ‘We call it abduction.’

‘She needs my okay?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But that’s great news! Isn’t it? That’s terrific news, Nigel. And what can she do if I don’t give my consent?’

‘She would have to make an application to court for leave to remove the child permanently from jurisdiction.’

‘So just by withholding consent, I can’t be sure I’d stop her?’

‘If you wanted to deny consent, and she wanted to fight, then the court would decide. That’s what it comes down to. Would it be difficult for you to visit your child if the move went ahead?’

‘Well, it’s Connecticut. I can’t nip round on a Sunday afternoon, can I?’

‘No, but her side would no doubt argue that there are plenty of cheap flights from London to the East Coast. And you’re in gainful employment, as I recall.’ He glanced at his notes. ‘Television producer. Of course. That must be interesting. Anything that I might have seen?’

‘I started out on
The Marty Mann Show
. Now I do
Fish on Friday.’

‘Ah, excellent.
Why do Kilcarney girls close their eyes during sex?’
Little Woody Allen cough. He did it very well.
‘Because they hate to see a man enjoying himself
. Most amusing.’

Which reminded me that Barry Twist, the show’s commissioning editor, had been leaving messages for me to call him all week. The station was suddenly worried about Eamon just as I had other things to worry about. But for the first time it really dawned on me what Marty meant about not keeping all your eggs in one chicken. If Eamon went down, I would go with him.

‘If this move to America goes ahead, is your ex-wife denying you reasonable access?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Would you ever see your son again?’

‘Well, she says I could come over. And see him in the holidays. Or he could come back here. But it’s not the same, is it? It’s not the same as being in London together. It’s not the same as having a life together.’ I shook my head. ‘I can feel him…slipping away.’

‘I know the feeling.’

‘I don’t know how we can explain it to him. Moving to America, I mean.’

‘Oh, you can sell a seven-year-old anything. The question is – why should you? Listen, Mr Silver. We can make her seek permission to take the child out of the country. Convince the court that your child would be at risk in some way if the move goes ahead. Letting it go to court would be time-consuming, traumatic and expensive though. I have to warn you – it would also be unpredictable.’

I made an effort not to look at the photograph of two smiling small girls on his desk. Because I knew that Nigel Batty had fought exactly this same fight and lost.

‘What happened to me wouldn’t necessarily happen to you,’ he said, reading my mind. ‘Your wife would need to give details of the proposed arrangements for your child. Accommodation, education, health, maintenance, childcare, contact. Then the court would decide if it needed to exercise any of its powers.’

‘What are the chances?’

I could hear him breathing in the silence.

‘Not good. There’s something called the maternal preference factor. Do you understand that term?’

‘No.’

‘It means that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the father gets fucked.’

‘But that’s not fair.’

‘Post-divorce parenting is almost always the prerogative of the mother. The law is meant to care about the welfare of the child. In reality, the law cares about the wishes of the mother. Spot the difference? Not the welfare of the child, but the wishes of the mother. If your ex-wife can convince the court that she has no intention of denying you contact, and that your child’s wellbeing would not suffer because of the change of residence, then she can pretty much take your child where she wants. And if I may get personal for a moment – that is exactly what happened to me.’

He picked up the photograph on his desk, studied it for a
moment, and then placed it down again, now facing me. I saw two smiling children, lost forever to their father.

‘Then there’s no hope.’

‘There’s always hope, Mr Silver. You can withhold consent. We can apply for a contact order. At the very least, that would slow her down. Make her go to the airport the long way round. Who knows? It might even stop her leaving the country.’

‘And the order would say that I must be allowed to see my boy? She couldn’t stop me seeing Pat?’

‘Well, not exactly. You would have contact as the named person in the contact order.’

The named person. Once I was a father. Now I was a named person.

‘We hear a lot about absent fathers in our society, Mr Silver. We don’t hear so much about decent fathers who are denied contact with their children because of the whim of a judge. I have seen men destroyed by losing contact with their children. And I mean quite literally destroyed. Nervous breakdowns. Suicides. Alcoholics. Heart attacks. Blood pressure so high that a stroke was inevitable. Men killed by the loss of their children. Men who had done nothing wrong.’

‘But I did.’

‘What?’

‘I did something wrong. I’m not like those other men. My first marriage. The break-up. It was all my fault.’

‘What was your fault?’

‘Our divorce. The break-up of our marriage. It was my fault. I slept with someone else.’

My lawyer laughed out loud. ‘Mr Silver. Harry. That’s completely irrelevant. You don’t have to be true to your wife. Goodness me, that’s what this country is all about.’ His face became serious again. ‘There’s something else you have to consider, Mr Silver, and it’s the most important thing of all.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You have to ask yourself what happens if you win.’

‘That’s all good, isn’t it? That’s nothing but good. If I win,
then Pat stays in the country and Gina has no choice. That’s just what we want to happen, isn’t it?’

‘Well – how’s your ex-wife going to feel if you stop her moving to America?’

‘I guess…she will start to hate me. Really and truly hate my guts.’

Not for the first time, I remembered Gina’s dream of living in Japan that I stole on our wedding day. Now I would be stealing her dream of living in America. I would have denied her two shots at happiness.

‘That’s right, Mr Silver. You will be preventing her from living her life where she chooses to live it. And that is highly likely to have some impact on your son. In fact, you can count on it. Frankly, if you stopped her leaving, then she could poison him against you. Make it harder to visit. Make it harder all round. That’s what usually happens.’

‘So you think I should give her my consent to take Pat out of the country?’

‘I didn’t say that. But you have to understand something about family law, Mr Silver. We don’t get involved. The lawyers, I mean. As long as the parents agree, we leave you to it. If you can’t agree, then we come in. And it can be very hard to get rid of us.’

I thought of what my life would be like with Pat in America. How empty it would feel. And I thought about what my life with Cyd and Peggy would be like with Pat gone. The three of us had had some great times together, and we would do again. I remembered mostly silly things like dancing to Kylie, mucking about with Lucy Doll, and all of those still, quiet moments when we closed the door on the world and didn’t even feel the need to talk. But with Pat in another time zone, there would always be a shadow hanging over even the best of times. I looked forward to watching Peggy grow up. Yet at the same time I wondered how well you could bring up someone else’s kid when you couldn’t even bring up your own. And I thought of my life if Gina and Pat stayed. I could see her loathing me, resenting me for her husband’s stalled career, blaming me for everything that was
wrong in her life. I tried to think about what was best for my son – I really did – but I was consumed by the knowledge of how much I was going to miss him.

‘Whatever I do, I lose him,’ I said. ‘I can’t win, can I? Because if I give my consent or withhold it, the same thing happens. I lose him for a second time.’

Nigel Batty watched me carefully.

‘Make the most of your family,’ said Nigel Batty. ‘That’s my advice. Not as a lawyer, but as a man. Count your blessings, Mr Silver. Love your family. Not the family you once had. But the family that you have now.’

nine

At the entrance to the supermarket, Peggy and I had our way barred by a fat young mother stooping to shout at a small, grizzling boy of about five.

‘And I’m telling you, Ronan, for the last time –
bloody no!’

‘But I want,’ sobbed Ronan, snot and tears all over his trembling chin. ‘But I want, Mum. I want, I want, I want.’

‘You can’t
have
any more, Ronan. You might
want
but you can’t
have
, okay? You’ve had enough, all right? You’ll be sick if you have any more today. You can have some more tomorrow, if you’re a good boy and eat up all your dinner.’

‘But I want now, Mum, I want right now.’

‘You’re not getting any more and that’s final. So shut it, Ronan.’

‘Want, want, want!’

‘This is what you want, Ronan,’ said the woman, suddenly losing it, and she grabbed Ronan’s arm, spun him around and slapped him hard across the top of his legs. Once, twice, three times. And I realised the woman wasn’t fat at all. She was pregnant.

Ronan was silent for a split second, his eyes widening with shock, and then the real howling began. The pregnant young woman dragged him away, his screams echoing all the way from cooked meats to household goods.

Peggy and I exchanged a knowing look.

She was sitting in the supermarket trolley, facing me, her legs dangling, and I could tell that we were thinking the same thing.

Thank God we are not like that.

The pair of us often felt a bit superior in the supermarket. We looked in mute horror at all those frazzled, frequently pregnant young mums dragging their sobbing brats past another sugar counter, and all those ominously silent, red-faced fathers ready to explode at the first wrong word from their sulking, surly children, and we thought – we are better than that.

I think Peggy thought that it was just a question of good manners. For an eight-year-old child, she had a sense of decorum worthy of Nancy Mitford. These dreadful people clearly didn’t know how to act in a supermarket. Common as muck, most of them. But for me it was about more than correct supermarket etiquette.

When Cyd was working, out catering for a conference in the City or a launch party in the West End, and Peggy and I did the supermarket run alone, I often looked at those real mums and dads shopping with their real sons and daughters, and I thought – what’s to envy?

When you looked at the bickering reality of genuine parents and their genuine children, what was so great about it? In a crowded supermarket near closing time, it was easy to believe that the real thing wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.

Peggy and I had fun. Perhaps it was because going to the supermarket together was still a rare enough event to feel like a minor adventure, although it was happening more and more now that Food Glorious Food was taking off, but we always zipped happily up and down the aisles, Peggy holding our list in her snug trolley chair, laughing appreciatively as I casually disregarded the aisle speed limit. And although to the world we must have looked like just another dad out with his daughter, there was none of the petty squabbling that we saw among many of the real parents and their real children.

We were better than that.

Peggy and I always had a laugh in the supermarket.

At least we did until today.

It was Tony the Tiger’s fault. If Peggy hadn’t had a hopeless three-bowls-a-day addiction to Frosties, then this trip to the
supermarket would have been just as painless and uneventful as all the rest.

But Tony the Tiger spoilt everything.

‘Bread,’ Peggy said, frowning as she read her mother’s shopping list.

‘Got it,’ I said.

‘Milk?’

I held up a plastic pint of semi-skinned. ‘Da-da!’

Peggy laughed, then scrunched up her eyes. ‘To…to-i…er.’

‘Toilet rolls. Check! That’s it, Peg. We got the lot. Let’s rock and roll.’

‘Just my breakfast then.’ We were in the aisle next to all the cereals. The brightly coloured boxes and leering cartoon characters were all around. ‘Frosties. They’re grrreat!’

‘Don’t need any, Peg. There’s lots of cereal at home.’

‘Not Frosties, Harry. Not Tony the Tiger. They’re grrreat!’

Peggy liked her Frosties. Or perhaps she just liked Tony the Tiger and his catch phrase. But I had seen her have this exact confrontation with her mother a few times before.

Peggy liked Frosties, but Cyd always bought multi-packs of cereal. And the unwritten rule in our house clearly stated that Peggy had to eat the lot – including Coco Pops, Wheaties and the dreaded Special K – before we bought another multi-pack. We couldn’t get another multi-pack just because she had noshed all the Frosties.

When the Frosties controversy had arisen in the past, Cyd simply moved on down the aisle, and the subject was dropped. But with me, Peggy sensed that victory and extra Frosties were in her grasp.

‘Mummy said, Harry.’ She reached out and pulled a jumbo pack of Frosties from the shelf. Tony the Tiger grinned at me. He kept grinning even when I took the box from her and put it back on the shelf. ‘Oh,
Harry
. You disappoint me, you really do.’

‘No, Peg. Listen, we’ll get some more Frosties when you’ve eaten all the other stuff. I promise, okay?’