Tony Parsons - Man And Wife

Searching for the irreplaceable sight of my mother, and tortured by the thought that she was never coming home again.

Cyd and I took my mum to a show.

My father had always taken my mother to shows. Every six months or so they would put on their best clothes and head for the bright lights of London. For two people who spent most evenings in front of the television set, they were connoisseurs of musical theatre.

When the film versions of Oklahoma!’, West Side Story or My Fair Lady came on TV, they would both sing along, word perfect. My mum would also dance – she did a particularly good imitation of the cool-daddy-o ballet of the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story. For my mum, musicals were not a passive experience. She had been going to the West End for fifty years, and there were few tunes being banged out nightly on Shaftesbury Avenue, the Strand and Haymarket that she didn’t know better than the people singing them.

Now she decided she wanted to catch Les Misérables again.

’I love that one,’ she told Cyd. ’I like the little girl. And I like the prostitutes. And I like it when all the students get shot. It’s very sad and there are some lovely melodies in it.’

She wore a white two-piece suit from Bloomingdale’s that I had brought her back from a trip to New York. She looked lovely but frail, and older, far older, than I had ever thought she would be.

Cyd took her hand when we picked her up, and never let it go as we made our way to the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus. Cyd held her hand on the drive into town, held it as we made our way through the teeming early-evening crowds, my mum looking too easily broken for the city, too delicate to be surrounded by all the traffic and bustle and hordes.

The audience inside the Palace was the usual mixture of foreign tourists, coach trips in from the suburbs and locals on a big night out. Directly in front of us there was a young man in a pinstripe suit, some well-scrubbed junior hotshot from the City, with what looked like his mother on one side and his grandmother on the other side. I didn’t like him from the start.

He made a big deal about turning round and shaking his head just because my mum clipped him around the ear a few times with her coat as she was struggling to take it off. Then he tutted elaborately when she whistled through the overture. And then, when the show began, he kept on loudly clearing his throat when my mum sang along to Fantine’s big dying number, ’I Dreamed a Dream’. Finally, as my mum joined in for the cast’s stirring rendition of ’Do You Hear the People Sing?’, he turned around angrily.

’Will you please shut up?’ he hissed.

’Leave her alone, pal,’ said Cyd, and I loved her for it. ’We’ve paid for our tickets too.’

’We can’t enjoy the show if she acts like she’s part of the chorus!’

’Who’s she?’ I demanded.

Behind us people started going, ’Ssssh!’ Bald and permed heads were turning. Well-fed faces creased with irritation.

’ Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men?’ sang my mum, happily oblivious. ’It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!’

The young suit’s posh old granny stuck her oar in. ’We’ve paid for our seats, too, you know.’

’We can’t concentrate on the performance,’ whined her frumpy daughter.

’You don’t need to concentrate, lady,’ said Cyd. ’You just need to lie back and enjoy it. You know how to lie back and enjoy it, don’t you?’

’Well, really!’

’I’m getting help,’ said her son, and went off to find a young woman with a torch.

Then they threw us out.

They were very nice about it. Told us that if we couldn’t silence my mum then the management reserved the right to ask us to leave. And there was no way of shutting up my mum when we still had the deaths of Valjean, Javert, Eponine and all those nice students to look forward to.

So we went. My wife and my mother and me. Laughing about it already, as though getting thrown out of a musical was actually much more fun than watching one. Making our way through the funky crowds to the Bar Italia where my mum was promised a lovely cup of tea.

The three of us, my wife and my mother and me, arm in arm in the streets of Soho.

Singing ’Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’ at the top of our voices.

I met my son at the airport.

He came through the arrival gate holding the hand of a young British Airways stewardess. There was some sort of identification tag around his neck, as worn by child evacuees in old black-and-white wars, or Paddington Bear.

Please look after this child.

’Pat! Over here! Pat!’

The stewardess spotted me before he did. He was chatting away to her, his face pale and serious, and then he saw me through the legs of all those arriving tourists and business types. He broke away from the BA girl and ran to my arms, and I was on my knees, holding him tight and kissing his mop of blond hair.

’Let me look at you, darling.’

He grinned and yawned, and I saw that the gummy gap that had existed at the front of his mouth had changed. There were now two uneven fragments of pure white bone pushing through. The teeth that would have to last him a lifetime.

There were other changes. He was taller, and his hair was maybe slightly darker, and I didn’t recognise any of his clothes.

’Are you all right? How was the flight? It’s so good to see you, darling!’

’You can’t sleep on planes because they keep coming round making you try to eat things,’ he reflected, blinking his tired blue eyes. ’You have to choose between fish and chicken.’

’He’s a little bit jet-lagged, aren’t you, Pat?’ said the BA girl. Then she gave me a dazzling white smile. ’He’s such a lovely boy.’

It was true. He was a lovely boy. Smart, funny and beautiful. And independent and brave – flying across the Atlantic all by himself. A terrific kid.

My son, when he was seven years old.

We thanked the girl from BA and caught a cab back into town. My heart felt lighter than it had in months.

’Everything okay in Connecticut?’

’Fine.’

’You like your new school? Making friends?’

’Good.’

’Mummy all right?’

’She’s okay.’ He paused, frowning at the slow-moving traffic heading for the motorway. ’But she argues with Richard. They had a little bit of a row about Britney.’

So that was the trouble with Gina. For a moment I wondered who Britney was – some hot little babysitter? Or some cute secretary looking for love? But Britney couldn’t be a secretary. Richard didn’t have a job. It had all fallen through at BridleWorthington. So who was this mystery woman?

’Britney was sick in the living room,’ Pat said. ’Richard was very angry. Then Britney wet the Indian rug and had to have an operation and Richard said it was disgusting the way Britney kept biting at the stitches.’

I was thinking that Britney must be one hell of a babysitter, and then I remembered. Of course. My son had a dog now.

A slow smile spread across Pat’s face.

’Guess what? At dinner he sits right by the table and licks his, you know, willie.’

I raised my eyebrows.

’Richard or Britney?’

My son thought about it for a moment.

’You must be joking,’ he said.

’Come here, you.’

Then he slid across the seat and climbed on to my lap. I could smell that old Pat smell of sugar and dirt, sense his exhaustion. Within minutes he was fast asleep.

The cab driver had pictures of three small children on his dashboard. He looked at us in his rear-view mirror and smiled.