Man and Wife (26 page)

‘Stop thinking about TV for five minutes of your life, will you?’

My son’s chin began to tremble, a sure sign that he was fighting back tears. Peggy sighed elaborately.

‘Please
may I leave the table now?’ she said. ‘I am
very
busy tonight.’

‘Wait a little while longer,’ Cyd said, not looking up from her accounts. ‘You can go and get Brucie Doll Secret Agent if you want. He can talk to Lucy Doll about their mission while we’re waiting for Harry.’

‘Yeah, everybody just wait a little while longer,’ I said, furiously stirring my meat sauce. ‘Lucy Doll’s costume change can wait until after dinner.’

‘Well!’ said Peggy.
‘Someone
got out of bed the wrong day.’

Cyd looked up from her accounts. ‘It’s okay, Harry. I’ve
spoken to her. You don’t have to put your five cents in, darling.’

‘If you did it more often, I wouldn’t have to,
darling.’

My wife put down her calculator and sighed. ‘How much longer anyway?’

‘I don’t know. It’s this minced beef. It’s taking ages.’

‘Beef?’ Peggy said. ‘Did you say – beef? I can’t eat
beef.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because meat is murder.’ She paused dramatically. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I am not eating meat any more. I’ve decided to become a vegetarian.’

‘Me too,’ said Pat. ‘I’m a vegetable, too. Can I watch TV now?
Dude, Where’s My Trousers?
is on soon.’

I wanted a meal that would make us feel like a real family. That’s all. Not much to ask for. And maybe that’s exactly what I achieved.

Because by the time my spaghetti Bolognese was ready, none of us were talking to each other.

Eamon was walking towards me. Blunt and Kazumi were still down on the beach. He was saying something to her while scratching his distended belly. She was shaking her head and packing away her equipment. They began making their way back to the farmhouse, Blunt making no attempt to help Kazumi carry her gear.

‘Good night last night?’ Eamon said.

‘Nothing happened.’

‘Hey, who am I to cast the first stone? What you get up to on a business trip is none of my business.’

‘I mean it, Eamon. Nothing happened.’

‘Sort of like Tantric sex, you mean?’

‘Nothing happened.’

Nothing happened and everything happened. Because for the first time it had occurred to me that, if I couldn’t have a family with my wife, then perhaps I could have one with someone else.

‘I love a bit of the old Tantric sex, me,’ Eamon said. ‘Lasts for
hours, doesn’t it? You know my favourite position in Tantric sex? The plumber. You stay in all day and nobody comes.’

If we had slept together – or rather, if we had not just slept together – there would have been a shyness between us now. Or, far worse, a false intimacy that we hadn’t really earned. But we walked on the beach, away from the farmhouse where Blunt was interviewing Eamon, and there was no postcoital awkwardness between us. We had spent the night in each other’s arms, but that was all we had done. Walking on that rocky beach, the clouds whipping in off the sea, the first of the day’s tourist coaches creeping around Dingle Bay, felt like the most natural thing in the world.

‘I hope the pictures are okay,’ Kazumi said. ‘This is my first job for them. The photo editor is – how to say? – a tough old bitch. She doesn’t give you second chances.’

‘The pictures will be fine. You’re a brilliant photographer.’

She gave me a smile. ‘Smooth talk.’

‘No, not smooth talk. I’ve seen your photographs. You took pictures of my son.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Pat.’

I liked it that she could see my boy’s spark. That she could tell he was special. I really liked it quite a lot. ‘Will I see you in London?’

She stopped and stared out to sea. Another storm was coming in, the clouds bigger and blacker than they had been yesterday, rolling and tumbling low above the surf-skimmed Atlantic towards the shore. It was coming in quickly. Eamon’s folk wisdom – that you could have a pint of Guinness and listen to the Corrs’ greatest hits before a storm arrived – looked increasingly like a load of old bollocks.

‘Kazumi?’

‘What’s the point?’

‘The point?’

‘If we see each other in London, what’s the point?’ She abruptly took my left hand and pulled at my wedding ring. ‘Doesn’t come off. You see? Not so easy.’

‘We haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’ll meet you on Primrose Hill. Right on the top where you can see the entire city. Sunday morning. About ten?’

The rain started to fall. We were a long way down the beach now. The farmhouse was disappearing in a sudden shroud of sea mist.

‘This way,’ she said, breaking into a run.

I followed her to a broken-down shed with a rotting rowing boat outside. The door was unlocked. Inside it was dark. It smelled of tobacco and kelp. It was some kind of abandoned fisherman’s hut. Either that, or a holiday home for a family of affluent Bavarians.

We were both soaked through to the skin. I thought perhaps that this was the bit where we would take off our sodden clothes and fall into each other’s arms. But she just sat shivering on the kitchen table and fussed over the camera that she had slung around her neck, examining it for damage.

I stood at the window, watching the fog come in, hearing but no longer seeing the waves crash against the rocks. I was cold inside my damp clothes but then a pair of arms were wrapping around me from behind, hugging me hard, bringing the warmth that I needed.

This is what it is, I thought. Nothing more. Just two animals, huddling together on the west coast of Ireland. Looking for a little comfort. Doing nothing wrong.

‘I’m not going to Primrose Hill.’

‘Okay.’

‘Not on Sunday morning.’

‘Fine.’

‘Not ever.’

‘All right then.’

Somehow I had turned around and faced her, and she was tilting her head, lifting it towards me. Then I kissed her, and I saw her brown eyes close, and open, shining in the misty twilight, the rattle of the rain on the roof, and I felt the heat of her body through the dampness of her clothes, and I tasted the sea on her lips.

This is what it is, I thought. Two cold, wet creatures shivering in the fog. That’s all. Don’t turn it into something that it’s not, Harry.

And I thought of Gina, and also of Cyd. I had lost the two best friends I ever had by having sex with them, by marrying them, by trying to make it last forever. Kazumi and I were never going to get that far, and it was probably just as well.

But I knew that I would keep this moment. I would lock it away and take it out when the world was hard and lonely. This was enough.

Primrose Hill was too much to hope for.

twenty-two

When I arrived home there was an airmail envelope on the welcome mat. My name and address in Gina’s neat, elegant handwriting.

And inside, a photograph – a man, woman and child, standing by a white picket fence in dazzling sunshine. Pat was at the front of the picture, in faded
Phantom Menace
T-shirt and shorts, squinting in the light, that half-filled gap in the middle of his smile. Gina was right behind him, one hand raised against the sun, the other lightly resting on our son’s shoulder. She was thinner than I had ever seen her, wearing some worn sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled up. But for all the years and whatever her troubles in her new life, she still had that radiant beauty that I had fallen in love with, she still had those looks that she didn’t really like you to talk about.

Then there was Richard, this man my ex-wife had married, standing to one side, unsmiling, half lost in the shadows of a white clapboard house. He didn’t look happy. He had the look of an expatriate who had returned home, but not in triumph. But what did I know? He had married my former wife, he lived with my only son. I couldn’t think of him as a loser. There was a piece of paper still in the envelope.

A note from Gina.

Harry—

We are coming back to London for a few weeks. Just the two of us. Pat and me. My dad has something wrong with his leg. He needs some help around the house. We are not staying with him – I have a flat. Will call you when we get in. Pat seems to have had a good time with you. But you know Pat – he doesn’t say much. Please thank Cyd. I hope your mum is okay. Got to go.

Gina

‘Hello, Harry.’

Peggy was at the top of the stairs. She was dressed in a long white lacy dress with short puffed-up sleeves. She looked like a bride. Or an angel.

‘You look lovely, Peg.’

‘My daddy’s getting married. To his girlfriend Liberty. She’s a nurse. From Manila. I’m going to be their bridesmaid.’

‘Come on,’ Cyd said, appearing on the landing next to her. ‘You go and take off that dress. Watch the pins on the hem, okay? I’ll be right in.’

My wife came down the stairs.

‘Good trip? How’s Eamon? Is he all right?’

I didn’t reply. I left my bags in the hall and went into the kitchen. The work surfaces were covered with dishes of guacamole, chilli sauce and Tabasco, bottles of Cantonese plum sauce and Caribbean banana ketchup. Sweet and sharp.

‘Experimenting with my dips,’ Cyd said. ‘I spoke to your mum. She’s not feeling so good.’

My wife held out her arms to me but I just stared at her.

‘You lied to me,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Before I went away. You told me some story about going out with two women. Two women, you said. But I saw you with him. Luke Moore. In the Merry Leper. I saw you, Cyd.’

‘Harry.’

‘I saw the pair of you.’

‘Harry?’

‘What?’

‘It’s not what it seems. He wants to buy the company. That’s why I met him. I couldn’t tell you because I knew you would – do this.’

For the first time since I had come home, I looked my wife in the eye.

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘I told him what I have told him all along, Harry.’ We stared at each other. ‘I told him no.’

‘What else did he try to buy? Don’t tell me. I can fucking guess.’

I tried to brush past her but she grabbed my arm. ‘I don’t want anyone else, okay? That’s it. You should know that already. I don’t want anyone else, Harry. Never have done. But you can wear out someone’s love, Harry, just like you can wear out anything else. So you either stop all this or…’

‘Or what?’

‘Or I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.’ She touched my face, and then saw the photograph I was holding. She took my hand and held it.

‘Is that a picture of Pat?’

‘What do you care?’

‘Oh Harry.’ She released my hand. ‘That’s not fair. If I don’t love your son in exactly the same way as you, that’s not some kind of betrayal.’

She had me there, of course.

Eamon cracked.

Perhaps it was Evelyn Blunt’s hatchet job. The journalist had pulled off the oldest party trick known to hacks – acting as Eamon’s best friend in the flesh, and then his public executioner in print. Under the headline
No Laughing Matter
, Blunt devoted 3,000 words to explaining why Eamon Fish was unimportant and the readers of his newspaper should take absolutely no interest in him. The photos were good, though – Eamon wild-eyed and windswept, his dark good looks almost a part of the Kerry landscape. And very, very moody.

Or perhaps it was the celebrity chef that made him crack. Eamon’s first chore on
Wicked World
was interviewing Wee Willie Hiscock, the loveable Geordie cook. All through the big English breakfast Hiscock blatantly plugged his new book,
Right in Your Gobhole, Too, Bonnie Lad
, the sequel to his bestseller,
Right in Your Gobhole, Bonnie Lad
. Eamon had always been averse to such blatant promotion, but where he had happily slapped it down on
Fish on Friday
, now he seemed unable to stem the flow of plugs.

Or perhaps it was the boy group that pushed him over the edge. Hermione Gates made no secret of the fact that she was a huge fan of Lads Unlimited, five young, handsome, hairless men who could carry a tune, but not very far, and who performed a series of dance steps that looked like gentle exercises for sufferers of arthritis.

The studio monitor clearly showed Hermione flashing her drawers in excitement during Lads Unlimited’s rendition of ‘Our Funky Love Will Live Forever’. The monitor also clearly showed Eamon (favourite albums:
Nevermind
by Nirvana,
Physical Graffiti
by Led Zeppelin and
Is This It?
by the Strokes) looking at his watch.

But probably Eamon would still be presenting
Wicked World
to this very day if he hadn’t been asked to interview the winner of
Six Pissed Students in a Flat
.

The winner was Warren, a tanned, pierced, pumped-up plumber with a fashionably shaven head who was hoping that the success of
Six Pissed Students in a Flat
would allow him to put down his tool box and become something really useful, like a game-show host or a DJ in Ibiza.

Warren sat between Hermione and a dazed-looking Eamon. The retired plumber idly lifted up his pastel-blue vest, revealing his rippling six-pack and a diamond stud in his navel.

‘For me the, like, turning point? Was in week six? When I discovered Darren had taken me milk out of the fridge. Without asking, innit?’

‘Hermione frowned at the memory. You were very angry, weren’t you, babes?’

Eamon’s head was hanging.

‘Well, for me, asking before you use someone’s milk is what it’s all about.’

‘Absolutely, babes. I’m, like – have a word with yourself, Darren, you muppet.’

Eamon had buried his face in his hands.

‘Chloe and Zoë, right, they wanted to stop me confronting, Darren, innit? Who I could always relate to because we both have issues because of not being properly parented?’

Suddenly Eamon was on his feet, addressing camera two with its little red light shining above it. I felt a surge of pride. Even at moments of supreme stress, he never looked into the wrong camera.