Tony Parsons - Man And Wife

You would never guess that a child lived in this house. Where were the toys, the mess, the clutter? Pat took my hand and dragged me up a flight of stairs. Gina followed us, her arms folded across her chest, still smiling.

Pat’s room was the one thing that looked familiar. There were ancient Star Wars toys everywhere – a couple of plastic light sabres, lots of eight-inch action figures, the grubby grey wrecks of the Millennium Falcon and X-Wing fighters that he had played with a few years ago. And there were the books I knew from bedtimes past, books that I had read until he was sleeping – Where the Wild Things Are, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, The Snowman, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and of course all the Star Wars movie tie-ins and picture books. And there were really old toys – a cracked Speak and Spell, a battered stuffed simian who went by the name of George the Monkey, Pat’s one excursion into the comforting world of cuddly toys. There was some new stuff too – a Phantom Menace duvet and pillowcases, books from school, Harry Potter paperbacks on his little desk.

It was a bigger room than he had slept in when we were living together, and it was also a lot tidier. Either he had changed his laid-back ways or he was living in a far more disciplined household.

’What do you think of my room, Daddy?’

’I think it’s fantastic, darling. I can see that you’ve got all your stuff here.’

’That’s right. I do.’

Gina touched his hair. ’Pat, why don’t you go downstairs and watch a video for a bit?’

Our boy looked stunned. ’Can I? Isn’t it bedtime yet?’

’This is a special night. Why don’t you go and watch the first film?’ When Gina talked to Pat about the first film, she meant the first Star Wars film. ’Not all of it – just until the ’droids get taken prisoner, okay?’ That was the old deal, wasn’t it? That was what she always used to say -just until the ’droids get taken prisoner. I had heard that one before. I had even used that one myself. ’Then brush your teeth and put your pyjamas on. I want to talk to your daddy.’

Pat rushed downstairs, not believing his luck, and Gina smiled at me in our son’s bedroom.

’Harry,’ she said.

’Gina,’ I said. She was so thin and pretty. My ex-wife.

’I just wanted to say something to you.’

’Go ahead.’

’I don’t know how to put it into words. I guess I just want to tell you – I’m not trying to steal him away from you.’

’That’s good.’

’Whatever happens – wherever we are – you’ll always be his father. And nothing will ever change that.’

I said nothing. I didn’t tell her that I was seeing a lawyer in the morning. I didn’t tell her that Pat would be making his way to the departure gate over my dead body. I knew she was trying to be kind. But she wasn’t telling me anything that I didn’t know already.

’Life can’t always be about the past, Harry. We’re only thinking of the future, Richard and me. The future of our family. That’s what the move is about. I want you to try to understand. We’re just thinking about the future. That’s what a family does, Harry.’ Then she laughed. ’Can I show you something?’ Suddenly she looked all anxious, as though we were newly introduced strangers, paralysed by politeness. ’Are you okay for time?’

’I’ve got all the time in the world, Gina.’

So I followed her from Pat’s bedroom to a room one flight up. It was some kind of small study. There was a blue iMac, filing cabinets, a bookcase. A photo of Pat on the desk, two years old, naked and grinning in a paddling pool. Gina’s room.

She opened a large flat cardboard box and took out a sheaf of photographs. They were all of Pat. There must have been two dozen of them. Eight by ten, black and white, professional quality.

And they were beautiful.

They must have been taken a couple of months ago, when the summer was holding on, because Pat’s hair was still long and shaggy, before he had it cut, and his skin had a light tan. He was bare-chested, happy, glowing with life. He was laughing in most of the photographs, smiling with a shy kind of amusement in the others. They had all been taken on the same sunny afternoon. He was fooling around for the camera in a garden I didn’t recognise. Probably Gina’s garden. The garden of this house.

And these black-and-white pictures of my son took my breath away. Because the photographer had captured him to perfection.

In the pictures Pat kicked up a glistening sheet of water in a paddling pool, he slid across wet grass, almost exploding with delight, he smashed a plastic football into the garden fence, he rocked with laughter. His eyes, his face, his shy limbs – the photographer hadn’t missed a thing. I was stunned that anyone could catch him so absolutely.

’You take these?’

Gina shook her head. ’Only this one,’ she said.

And she showed me another picture. Clearly taken on the same day, with the same camera, but not by the same photographer. In the picture Pat was standing still, smiling bashfully at the camera. With him was a young woman – exotic, smiling, one arm draped around my son’s bare shoulders. She looked beautiful. And sexy. And nice. All the things that anyone could ever want.

’You never met my friend Kazumi, did you?’ Gina said. ’We shared a flat in Tokyo for a year. She’s in London now. Trying to make it as a photographer. She fell in love with Pat. As you can see.’

And all at once I wanted to meet her. This photographer who looked at my son and saw with total clarity his gentle, laughing spirit. This stranger who saw through the careful, unsmiling mask he had learned to wear. This woman who could see my son with exactly the same eyes as me.

It was suddenly alive in my head, the thought that was the very beginning of betrayal, the most dangerous thought that a married man could ever have.

She is out there. She exists.

I just haven’t met her yet.

I had thought that my lawyer would help me to keep my son. I had assumed he would tell me Gina was planning to break some inviolable law of nature, and that justice wouldn’t allow her to get away with it.

And I was dead wrong.

’But parents have certain rights. Don’t they?’

’Depends what you mean by parent,’ said Nigel Batty. ’There are all kinds of parents, aren’t there? Married parents. Unmarried parents. Adoptive parents, step-parents, foster parents. Define parent, Mr Silver.’

’You know what I mean, Nigel. Love-and-marriage parent. Sperm-and-egg parent. A birds-and-bees parent. A biological parent. The old-fashioned kind.’

’Oh, the old-fashioned kind. That kind of parent.’

Nigel Batty was a small, pugnacious man with a reputation for fighting for the rights of husbands and fathers who were being shafted in the divorce courts.

When I had first met him, when he had acted for me during my divorce from Gina, and our subsequent scrap over where Pat would live, Nigel’s beady eyes had been hidden behind milk-bottle glasses. Laser vision had corrected his myopia and dispensed with the spectacles. But he still squinted out at the world from force of habit, and it made him seem distrustful and wary and hostile, looking for trouble.

I had never really let him off the leash with Gina. He had wanted to make her look like the Whore of Babylon, destroy her in court, and I just didn’t have the heart for it. Whatever had happened between us, Gina didn’t deserve that kind of fight. And neither did my son.

I had thrown in the towel in the fight for custody, believing that it was the best thing for Pat. I had tried to do the decent thing. And now I felt like the biggest sucker of all time.