Man and Wife Read Online Free Page A

the very end. Although you would never guess that now.
    ‘We were worried sick. You were meant to be taking him to the park, not dragging him halfway round Europe.’
    Halfway round Europe? That was a bit rich. But then wanton exaggeration was another feature of Gina’s fighting style.
    I couldn’t help remembering that this was a woman who had travelled to Japan alone when she was a teenager and lived there for a year. Now that’s halfway round the world. And she loved it. And she would have gone back.
    If she hadn’t met me.
    If she hadn’t got pregnant.
    If she hadn’t given up Japan for her boys.
    For Pat and me. We used to be her boys. Both of us. It was a long time ago.
    ‘It was only Paris, Gina,’ I said, knowing it would infuriate her, and unable to restrain myself. We knew each other far too well to argue in a civilised manner. ‘It’s just like going down the road. Paris is practically next door.’
    ‘Only Paris? He’s seven years old. He has to go to school in the morning. And you say it’s only Paris? We phoned the police. I was ringing round the hospitals.’
    ‘I called you, didn’t I?’
    ‘In the end. When you had no choice. When you knew you weren’t going to get away with it.’ She hefted Pat in her arms. ‘What were you thinking of, Harry? What goes on in your head? Is there anything in there at all?’
    How could she possibly understand what went on in my head? She had him every day. And I had him for one lousy day a week.
    She was carrying Pat up the garden path now. I trailed behind her, avoiding eye contact with her husband and the au pair and the enormous cop. And what was that cop doing here anyway? It was almost as if someone had reported a possible kidnapping. What kind of nut job would do a thing like that?
    ‘Look, Gina, I really am sorry you were so worried.’ And it was true. I felt terrible that she had been phoning the hospitals, the police, thinking the worst. I could imagine how that felt. ‘It won’t happen again. Next Sunday I’ll –’
    ‘I’ll have to think about next Sunday.’
    That stopped me in my tracks.
    ‘What does that mean? I can still see him next Sunday, can’t I?’
    She didn’t answer. She was finished with me. Totally finished with me.
    Tracked by her husband and the hired help, Gina carried ourson across the threshold of her home, into that place where I could never follow.
    Pat yawned, stretched, almost woke up. In a voice so soft and gentle that it did something to my insides, Gina told him to go back to sleep. Then Richard was between us, giving me an oh-how-could-you? look. Slowly shaking his head, and with this maddening little smile, he closed the door in my face.
    I reached for the door bell.
    I just had to get this straight about Sunday.
    And that’s when I felt the cop’s hand on my shoulder.
    Once I was the man of her dreams.
    Not just the man who looked after her kid on Sundays. The man of her dreams, back in the years when all Gina’s dreams were of family.
    Gina yearned for family life, ached for it, in the way that is unique to those who come from what were once called broken homes.
    Her father had walked out just before Gina started school. He was a musician, a pretty good guitarist, who would never quite make it. Failure was waiting for him, in both the music business and the smashed families that he left in his wake. Glenn – he was Glenn to everyone and dad to no one, especially not his children – gave rock and roll the best years of his life. He gave the women and children he left behind nothing but heartache and sporadic maintenance payments.
    Gina and her mother, who had given up a modestly successful modelling career for her spectacularly unsuccessful husband, were just the first of many. There would be more abandoned families like them – women who had been celebrated beauties in the sixties and seventies, and the children who were left bewildered by separation before they could ride a bike.
    From her mother