Tim Vicary - A Game of Proof

After that he began to stay out longer and longer. She prepared meals for him that dried up in the cooker. What do you want me home for? he asked, cruelly. You’ve got cystitis, you can’t do it. Anyway we need the money. It’s only me that earns it. They screamed at each other over the baby’s head. When she stood in the doorway to stop him going out he smacked her head against the door post so that it bled. He didn’t come back until one in the morning.

A week later he told her it was all over. He had met someone else, he said, an older woman called Sheila. He’d got to know her when he’d been fixing her pipes. Sheila and he had the same interests, and he was moving in with her. Now , today. There would be a divorce. She could keep baby Simon but he might want to see him sometimes at weekends when he was older. Teach him to play football. That was what people did, wasn’t it?

And then he was gone. The bubble burst, just like that. A week before their first anniversary the fairy tale was over. The coldness, the lack of emotional interest, stunned her so much that for the first, and only time in her life, she completely lost the power of action. When the social worker visited two days later Sarah had done nothing — no housework, no washing up, not even fed little Simon, who was howling upstairs. She just sat blankly on the green plastic sofa, staring at the wall.

The social worker put Simon in a foster home under a place of safety order. Sarah went back to her parents, there was nowhere else to go. The doctor gave her Valium and for a month she walked around like a zombie. Then her mother forced her to sign up for evening classes and take up studying again.

Which was the best thing my mother ever did for me, Sarah thought now. The one really good thing she did, the old cow. The thing that changed my life.

Just as refusing to have little Simon in her house was the very worst. The thing that ruined him, perhaps. Unless it was Kevin’s genes.

Her mother’s plan was for her to make a complete break with the past. Have Simon adopted, never see Kevin again, go back to school.

The last part of it worked perfectly. Sarah signed up for evening classes to complete her GCSEs and found, suddenly, a voracious hunger for learning. The more she learned the more she wanted to know; the harder she worked the more she wanted to work. It was an escape, a recreation of herself. It was something that gave her control again. It became as necessary to her as breathing. It lasted the rest of her life.

But the pain, the guilt about her baby Simon didn’t leave her. She didn’t want him to be adopted. As the work replaced the Valium she railed at her hard-faced mother for refusing to have the baby back in the house. No, her mother said. Have him adopted. It’ll hurt now but you’ll thank me one day. It’ll turn out best for you both in the end.

One night at the evening class she read the papers explaining adoption and then screwed them up. They’re screwing my mind, she thought. That was when the teacher, Bob, found her crying at her desk half an hour after the class had ended. He took her out for a coffee and three months later they were married.

Bob was everything that Kevin was not — intelligent, well educated, thoughtful, witty, and kind. Where Kevin had been short, cocky and macho, Bob was tall, with a neat beard and glasses, physically weak, gauche and unassertive. Where Kevin had been a ravenous, demanding, insatiable lover Bob was gentle, sensitive, almost shy. He was also idealistic. He was fascinated not by Sarah’s body, as Kevin had been, but by her story. It seemed to him she had lived a whole novel by the age of eighteen. Her hard work and determination to succeed reflected something in himself; her disastrous circumstances challenged him to help her.

If she married him, he would adopt Simon too. It was the right thing to do.

And so it might have been, too, if they hadn’t had Emily.

Not that Emily was a mistake, of course not, Sarah told herself, as she turned her bike onto the quiet country road that led to home. The mistake had been having her so soon after they married. While Bob’s relationship with Simon, his project to demonstrate the benefits of having a teacher for a stepfather, had only just begun. Of course Bob tried to be fair and kind to Simon but his enormous delight at Emily’s birth had been obvious to everyone. Especially to the troubled little boy, who had just come back to live with the mother who had abandoned him, and now had a new baby. And this strange, bearded man who wanted to teach him things.

Perhaps if we’d waited a year, Sarah wondered sadly. Would that have made the difference? Or were the difficulties in his genes? Simon was Kevin’s son; that had become clearer the older he got. But he was hers too — if only he’d wanted to learn from her and Bob, instead of defying them as he always had. But now he was nineteen and had left home. He had his own life to lead, his own mistakes to make. There was no more she could do.

Whereas Emily and Bob were at home, waiting for her impatiently. Sarah pushed her guilt about Simon into a drawer at the back of her mind, and closed it. For the moment, Emily and Bob were more important. And things were not going particularly well with them, either.

As she approached home Sarah saw Bob’s Volvo parked in the drive. When Sarah had first seen this house three years ago she had thought it entrancing. It was a detached modern house, in half an acre of its own grounds. It had a lawn and a golden Robinia tree in front. But it was the back that was its real glory. The spacious rooms had large picture windows which opened onto a fifty metre lawn which sloped away towards a meadow with grazing cows the far side of a little gate. Beyond the meadow was a footpath and willow trees on the banks of the river, and beyond that again, more meadows and the church of a distant village whose bells they could hear on Sunday mornings. Socially it was as far from Seacroft as you could get.

With Sarah earning fees for the first time and Bob just having become a head teacher they took a deep breath, an enormous loan, and joined the middle classes.

Or at least, Sarah, Bob and Emily did.

Simon hated it from the start. He had been sixteen then, beginning his last year at school. The new house meant long bus journeys, and hassle when he wanted to meet his friends. To him it was the final proof that he meant less to his mother than her own lust for success. Two years later he moved into a small terraced house in town, the deposit paid by Sarah and Bob.

The loss of Simon twitched in Simon’s mind daily, like the nerves from a missing limb. He was the family ghost, the casualty of her conflict with Kevin.

She parked her bike in the garage, and walked into the dining room. Bob was in his shirt sleeves, eating baked beans and reading the paper. Emily was nowhere to be seen

‘Hi!’ she said. ‘Anything for me?’

‘Beans in the warmer,’ Bob answered, frowning. ‘You’ve got ten minutes.’

‘Why ten minutes?’

‘Emily’s concert. She’s got to be there by eight fifteen. Or have you forgotten?’

‘Oh Christ!’ She went into the hall and began to peel off her boots and leather trousers. The trousers snagged in her tights, pulling them half down too, and as she struggled, bent over, Emily came down the stairs.

‘Mum! For God’s sake!’

‘Hello, Em. I’m sorry I’m …’

‘We’ve got to go! I’m late! And nobody wants to see your bum!’

The tone of mingled exasperation and pure disgust in Emily’s voice made it quite clear to Sarah that the girl saw nothing attractive or funny about her mother’s nether regions. Emily herself had clearly taken pains with her appearance — hair neatly brushed, eye-liner, blusher and lipstick generously applied. The only drawback was the anxious, petulant frown on her face.