Tony Parsons - Man And Wife

I touched her arm. ’Can I get you a drink?’

She laughed. ’Got to work, babe. I’ll see you later, okay? We can go home together, if you can stick around until I’ve cleared up.’

She gave me a peck on the cheek and went back to the kitchen to load up with more satay and fish cakes, while I wandered around the party trying to avoid people who would want to talk about Eamon and his nervous exhaustion. There was a bank of TV sets in the middle of the room, repeating a loop of trailers for the new season’s shows. A lot of Marty Mann shows. Six Pissed Students in a Flat was coming back, so was the CCTV programme, You’ve Been Robbed! I stood there nursing my beer, watching the tasters for irreverent game shows, irreverent talk shows and irreverent dramas.

Tired old irreverence, I thought. It’s killing television.

A couple of suited and booted business types appeared by my side, tossing peanuts into their mouths and gawping at the screens as though they had never seen a television before. They couldn’t be from the TV station or any of the production companies that made the shows, because they were far too formally dressed. We had a strict dress code at the station you had to be fashionably scruffy at all times. Maybe they were advertisers, invited to give them a taste of cut-price glamour.

Cyd brushed past me carrying two silver trays piled high with sashimi. She gave me a wink, and bent to place one of the trays on a table. The men turned away from the bank of screens, their jaws working furiously on their peanuts.

’Look at the legs on that,’ one of them said.

’They go all the way up to her neck,’ said the other.

’No arse, though.’

’Flat as a pancake.’

’And no tits.’

’You don’t get tits with legs like that.’

’You need a nice arse though.’

Til give you that.’

’You need either tits or arse, right, even with legs like that. Because you need something to hold on to when you start your ascent.’

’Great legs, though.’

’Get those wrapped around your neck, mate, you’ll never want to come up for air.’

They chortled in perfect harmony, watching my wife walk away.

I stared at the pair of them, my face burning. I kept staring, wanting them to notice me.

They didn’t notice me.

Then all the peanuts were gone and, after rifling in the salty bowls for a bit, they sloped off, looking for more tasty snacks. I went looking for my wife. When I caught up with her she was handing out her sashimi to a bunch of women I vaguely recognised. They were helping themselves to raw fish while simultaneously managing to ignore Cyd completely. These bloody people. Who did they think she was? Nobody?

Cyd smiled at me. She had a lovely face. She was always going to have a lovely face, no matter how many years went by. But I couldn’t smile back at her.

’Get your coat. We’re leaving.’

’Leaving? I can’t leave. Not yet, babe. What’s wrong? You look all -’

’I want to go.’

’But I’ve got to work. You know that.’

The women were starting to stare at us. They were holding slivers of salmon and tuna in their podgy fingers. I took Cyd’s arm and pulled her aside. Her silver tray banged into someone’s back. The Sashimi wobbled precariously.

’I mean it, Cyd. I’m going home. Right now. And I want you to come with me. Please?’

She wasn’t smiling any more.

’You might be going home, Harry, but I’m working. What happened? Come on. Tell me. Did someone say something about Eamon? Is that why you’re upset? Forget about Eamon. Marty’s right – get something new going for yourself

I wanted to tell her – don’t waste your time here. I know exactly what these men are like, because I’m one of the bastards myself. But she wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. She was all innocence, she thought it was all about raw fish and chicken on a stick and people appreciating you for doing a good job.

’Please, Cyd. Come with me.’

’No, Harry.’

’Then do what you want.’

’I will.’

So I left her at the party, left her feeding all those hard, empty faces, and went out to look for a cab. I left her there, all by herself, even though I knew she was too good for that place, and too good for those people.

When I got home Peggy had been in bed for hours. Sally was on the sofa, idly channel-surfing with one hand and soothing her baby in her carrycot with the other. Soothing Precious. That was the baby’s name. Precious. Sally asked me how the evening had gone – she meant for Food Glorious Food, not the station – and I told her that everything was fine. Then I got her a minicab. Luke Moore drove my wife home. By then I was pretending to be asleep, lying on my side, breathing easily, trying to fake the soft rhythms of sleep. I listened to my wife quietly undressing in the dark, heard her clothes slipping from her long, slim body, and inside my Marks & Spencer pyjamas, my heart ached for her. Then we lay in the darkness for a long time, trying hard not to disturb each other.

Back to back in the marital bed, and never quite touching.

’Your heart is a small miracle, Mr Silver,’ said Dr Baggio. ’A small miracle.’

My wife is having an affair, I thought. She’s fucking this guy. I just know it.

’The heart is a pump about the size of a fist,’ said my doctor, inflating the strap she had wrapped around my arm. I could feel it tightening against my skin. ’We all have blood pressure. It’s simply the pressure created by the constant pumping of blood around the body. In a healthy adult a normal blood pressure is

120 over 80. Yours is… goodness.’

It happens. You promise to love each other forever. You really mean it. You plan to sleep with no one else for the rest of your life. Then time wears away at your love, as the tide wears away a rock. And in the end your feelings – her feelings – are not what they were once upon a time. Other people are let in, like light in a darkened room. You can’t get them out again. Not once you have let them in. What can you do once you have let them in?

’You can put your shirt back on,’ my doctor said.

She didn’t want sex any more. Not with me. Not even with one of my magic condoms. Oh, we still had our Saturday night shag, which was sometimes postponed to Sunday or Monday if the catering business was booming. But I felt as if she was just doing it to keep me quiet. That it was easier to lie back and think of nothing than argue about it. Too tired, she always said. Yeah, right. Tired of me. It wasn’t even the sex I missed most.

It was all the other stuff. It was the being loved.

’There are lots of things you can do to control your blood pressure,’ my doctor said. ’You can reduce your intake of alcohol. Lose weight. Increase physical activity. Most important of all, you can change your wife.’

Change my wife?

Things weren’t that bad. I wanted my marriage to last. I wanted to get it right this time. Get it right once and forever.

’But I love my wife.’

’Not your wife. Your life. Don’t let things get to you. Find time for yourself. Control your anxieties. You need to change your life, Mr Silver. You only get one of them.’

Life. Not wife.

You obviously get more than one of those.

The heart is a small miracle.

’I liked the way it made me feel,’ Eamon said. ’Once upon a time. And I wanted to have that feeling again.’

We were walking in the grounds of a private hospital an hour’s drive south of London. Eamon talked about cocaine as we kicked our way through the leaves. He was only halfway through a 28-day detox programme, but he was already looking fitter than I had seen him since he was fresh from the Edinburgh Festival. He was meant to be playing football this afternoon substance abusers versus the manic dépressives – but the match had been cancelled. The manic dépressives were too depressed.