Man and Wife (36 page)

Would Cyd and I have split up if Peggy hadn’t had her accident? In my heart, I didn’t see what could have stopped us.

That’s how fragile all this is, as gossamer thin as a spider’s web, as intricate and fragile as that, meticulously built but easily torn apart by a few cruel, casual blows. My parents’ marriage looked like it was made of sterner stuff. My mum and dad genuinely believed that they couldn’t be happy with anyone else. And I knew that wasn’t true for me. I could have been happy with Kazumi. Just as Kazumi could find the human bond we all seek with some other man. And just as Cyd could have found someone else to love her. That didn’t make what I had with my wife feel like nothing. In some ways the knowledge that either of us could survive without the other made what we had seem even more precious. We stayed together because we chose to stay together.

In a world full of choices, we chose each other.

‘There’s the baby,’ I told Eamon. ‘That’s the thing that really brought us back together. This baby we’re bringing into the world. We are going to be a real family. Maybe we were already.’

He didn’t look convinced. I knew he wanted certainty from me, cast-iron guarantees that love would last and marriage would endure.

But like my mum says – if you want guarantees, kid, buy a toaster.

‘Listen, Eamon, the reason I’m still with my wife is not complicated. I’m with her because I love her.’

‘Like you loved Kazumi? Or in a different way? A different kind of love, or exactly the same kind of love? I need to know. What if it had been the other way round, Harry? What if you had actually slept with Kazumi in Ireland? And you hadn’t slept with your wife back in London? What – and this is the big one – what if the other woman was the woman carrying your baby?’

‘Well, then—’

But I can’t answer.

The chaos that lurks just beyond all of our front doors is sometimes best ignored.

All the other women I could love, all the other lives I could lead, all the babies waiting to be born – I just can’t think about all of that today.

After all, I’m a married man.

The blood pressure was down. The hypertension was easing. The blood supply to my brain was not going to be cut off any time soon.

Good news, I thought. I want to see this baby grow up. I want to be around for long enough for this coming child to think that I am an old fool who doesn’t know anything about life. I want to live long enough to see my youngest child become an adult. That was the plan now. That was my new ambition.

Increasingly, it felt like the only ambition really worth having.

‘It’s 135 over 75,’ my doctor said. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all. You’re keeping your weight down…you don’t smoke…Getting plenty of exercise?’

‘Thirty minutes of cardiovascular, three times a week.’

‘That’s just about right. You don’t want to overdo it. These days the gym is killing as many middle-aged men as cancer and heart disease. How’s your salt intake?’

‘Never touch the stuff.’

‘Caffeine?’

‘Well. Difficult to give up those cappuccinos. But I’ve cut right back.’

‘Sometimes we have to stay away from the things we love, and learn to appreciate the things we need.’

And I saw my wife’s face before me. The black hair cut in a China chop, the wide-set brown eyes, and the toothy smile, the little nicks of laughter lines that were starting to appear around her small, sweet mouth. That face so familiar, that face so loved.

‘But what if they’re the same thing? What if we realise that the things we love are the same as the things we need?’

My doctor grinned, packing her blood pressure kit away.

‘Then you don’t need me any more,’ she said.

*   *   *

Peggy and I came through the gilded doors of the department store and were immediately assaulted by the perfume of a thousand different scents. The store was crowded, and we instinctively reached out and took each other’s hand.

‘Look, Harry – free manicure! They do your nails and you don’t even pay nothing at all!’

‘Maybe later, darling.’

We caught an escalator up to the department for children and babies.

So much had changed since the last time I became a father. Or perhaps Gina and I didn’t have the money to go shopping for every baby aid on the market. But a lot of this stuff was completely new to me.

A baby bouncer – okay, I recognised that, and vividly recalled Pat bouncing up and down like a little toothless Buddha, baring his gums with delight. But a cot-rail teether to stop a baby gnawing its crib – when did they start selling that? And a car toy tidy – surely toys were still just chucked all over the back seat? And look at all this other gear – a Nature’s Lullaby Baby Soother (plays four relaxing sounds to soothe baby to sleep), a Baby Bath Float (a soft cocoon shape to keep baby’s head out of the water and its body floating safely near the surface).

And shampoo eye shields – protective glasses for hair washing. Now
that’s
clever, now that’s a brilliant idea. Pat could have done with some of those. And look at this – a suction bowl. A strong suction base to prevent spillage at mealtime. The twenty-first century baby doesn’t even get to throw its food around.

‘What will they think of next, Peg? Peggy?’

And that’s when I realised she was gone.

The fear ran through me like a fever.

I searched all over the children’s department, but she wasn’t there. And I thought of her father, who had gone on honeymoon and never come back, who had broken Peggy’s heart by going to live in Manila, to try his luck again on some other foreign shore, abandoning his child like she was nothing more than a bad debt.

Jim had deserted his daughter once and for all, and although
it made life easier for me with him not around, his leaving had inflicted a wound on Peggy that she would carry for the rest of her life, a wound that would never heal, this beautiful child who deserved only to be loved.

And I wondered if I was really any different from him, any better than Jim, who always put his child way down on his list of priorities. Was I really a better man than that? Or so wrapped up in dreams of the new baby that I had forgotten about the reality of the living child by my side.

I searched the entire floor, doing frantic deals with God, praying for a second chance, desperately asking staff and shoppers if they had seen a small girl with a pink Lucy Doll backpack.

Then all at once I knew where I would find her.

She was on the ground floor, near those gilded doors, among the perfume of a thousand scents, patiently having her nails done for free in the make-up department.

‘Hello, Harry,’ she said. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

‘Hello, gorgeous. Yes, I think we’ve got everything now.’

The white-coated sales assistant beamed at the pair of us.

‘What a beautiful daughter you have,’ she said.

Peggy and I just smiled at each other.

There was a problem.

After eight weeks of the pregnancy, Cyd had some bleeding in the morning. And suddenly we didn’t know if our stake in the future was going to be taken away from us.

When Cyd went for her scan, there was a silver bowl of condoms by the door, as delicately arranged as potpourri. Seeing the question mark hovering above my head, Cyd said that the condoms were for the instrument the obstetrician put inside her, so we could see the baby. To see if it was okay. To see if our baby was still alive.

‘My word, you’ve had some strange things inside you, girl,’ I said to my wife, taking her hand.

‘But nothing quite as strange as your penis, Harry,’ my wife said to me.

Later, when the obstetrician arrived, Cyd sat in this complicated chair, like something British Airways might have in First Class, and on the TV screen by her side the doctor showed us the small pulsating light that was the heartbeat of our unborn child. The baby was fine. The baby was still there. The baby was going to live. Nothing could stop this baby being born.

Cyd squeezed my hand without looking at me – we couldn’t take our eyes from the screen – as the obstetrician showed us the head, comically large, like a light bulb made in heaven, and the tiny arms and legs, which the baby seemed to be crossing and uncrossing.

We laughed out loud, laughed with the purest joy at this miracle, this tiny miracle, the greatest miracle of all.

And I knew that this child would be loved like every child deserves to be loved, this baby who was our connection to the great unspoilt future, and our bond, our unbreakable bond, to what it means to be alive in this world, and – above and beyond it all – to each other.

thirty

When the weather was good and the sky was clear, my son and I lay on our backs in the garden of the old house, side by side, staring straight up, watching the stars come out.

Pat loved the stars now. Children change, they change so fast, they change even when you are looking at them. After watching a documentary that held him spellbound every Wednesday night for six weeks, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader and Han Solo finally had to make some room in his expanding imagination for the Pole Star and Sirius and Vega.

‘Dad?’

‘What is it, darling?’

‘Bernie Cooper says that the stars are all dead people looking down on us. And guess what? One of them, right? One of them is Bernie Cooper’s granddad.’ A pause. We kept staring up at infinity. Inside the house I could hear soft, female voices – my mother and one of the women who came to visit, wanting to talk, looking for their future. ‘Is that true, Dad?’

‘I’d like to think so, Pat.’

‘Then what I’d like to know is – which one is
my
granddad?’

And I knew that my father would have loved this boy.

My dad would have loved watching Pat’s new teeth coming through, loved his obsession with the stars, loved his devotion to his grandmother and Bernie Cooper and Britney the dog – newly arrived in the country, and settling in very nicely, amiably roaming around all those big London parks – loved the curious, open-hearted kid that my son was growing to be. Horses and
stars. My son was enchanted by horses and stars, and my father would have been enchanted by that.

A hard man for as long as I could remember, the hardest man in the world, my dad had never seemed quite so hard after Pat was born. Perhaps that’s what grandchildren are for – to allow you to give unconditional, unchanging love one last time. Something frozen deep inside my father began to thaw on the morning that Pat was born, and I knew that my dad would have continued to soften with the passing of the years, and with the coming of the new baby.

We just ran out of time, that’s all.

‘Pick the biggest star you can see,’ I told Pat. ‘Pick the brightest one. And that’s your grandfather watching over you. And that’s how you will always know.’

The stars are like photographs. You can read into them what you will. You can believe that they measure all you have lost, or you can believe that they represent all you have loved, and continue to love.

I guess I’m with young Bernie Cooper on that one.

As we watched the stars I thought of the twin babies that Gina had lost at ten weeks, the unborn children who would be with her always, the poor, tiny ghosts of her marriage.

And I thought of my own ghosts.

‘Do you remember my friend Kazu?’ Gina said one morning when I went to pick up Pat, Britney enthusiastically sniffing at my crutch, Gina still pale and drawn from her loss, and finally ready to tell me that she had known all along. ‘She got married, Harry. Back in Japan. Kazu met the man of her dreams. She got stuck in an elevator with him in the Ginza. Just going for dinner, and there he was. Never can tell, can you? Never can tell when it’s going to strike.’

It was a postcard from another life, a map of a road not taken. And I knew that I wanted for Kazumi exactly what my ex-wife wanted for me, what we all want for our former partners.

Happiness, but maybe not too much of it.

As I heard my son breathing by my side, watching the stars above, I thought of my three children.

The boy, the girl, the baby.

The two born, the one unborn.

I looked at the stars and thought of Peggy and Pat forming an orderly queue to feel Cyd’s gently expanding belly, Peggy open-mouthed with awe as she tried to feel the baby’s tiny, miraculous movements, and then, when it was his turn, Pat smiling secretly and murmuring to himself, ‘Oh, the Force is strong in
this
one.’

Soon this modern family would be even more complicated, full of half-brothers and stepsisters and stepbrothers and half-sisters and step-parents and blood parents.

But now I finally saw that it was up to us if we felt like a real family or not. Nobody else mattered. The labels they stuck on us meant nothing at all.

There was a real family here if we wanted it. Anything else, well – as an old friend of mine used to say, it’s all a bollock.

‘Look at you two layabouts,’ laughed my mum, padding into the garden, her last visitor gone home to her family. My mum swung a pink carpet slipper at a plastic football and sent it flying into my dad’s rose bushes.

Our cosmic reverie broken, Pat and I got up to play three-goals-and-you’re-in with my mum. It was getting quite dark now, one of the last days of an Indian summer, but the suburban night was soft and warm and starry, so we were reluctant to go inside.

And so we stayed out in the garden of the old house until we couldn’t see to kick a ball, laughing in the gathering twilight, making the most of the good weather and all the days that were left, our little game watched only by next door’s cat, and every star in the heavens.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Man and Boy
One For My Baby

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