Tony Parsons - Man And Wife

I picked up the pregnancy test. It felt surprisingly light. And so did my head.

There were two tiny windows on the thing. In one of them, the little round window, there was a thin blue line. And in the other one, the little square window – which I somehow understood was the important one, the crucial one, the window that would change everything – there was another thin blue line.

And finally I understood. Not just the missed period and the sickness, but everything. I finally got it. I understood why I had to stay, and why I would always stay.

That’s when I sensed rather than heard Cyd in the doorway of the bathroom. She was laughing and crying all at once – I guess that must be standard procedure – wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her Gap T-shirt.

’Is this okay with you?’ she asked me.

I took her in my arms. ’It’s more than okay. This is great. This is the very best.’

Then my wife looked at me and smiled and, for perhaps the second time in my life, I knew why I was alive.

’Wait a minute,’ Eamon said. ’You’re staying with your wife because of some stupid wanker in a BMW? Is that what you’re saying?’

’I didn’t say that.’

’You said the accident changed everything. That she was packing her bags before that happened. She was leaving you, Harry, and you were ready to begin again with someone else.’

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 Tom 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.