Man and Wife Read Online Free Page B

Gina got her looks, a perfect symmetry of features that she was always dismissive of, the way only the truly beautiful can be. From Glenn her inheritance was a hunger for a stable family life. A family of her own that nobody could ever take away. She thought she would find it with me because thatwas exactly where I came from. She thought I was some kind of expert on the traditional set-up of father, mother and child living in a suburban home, untouched by divorce statistics, unshakably nuclear. Until I met Gina, I always thought that my family was embarrassingly ordinary. Gina made us feel exotic – and that was true of my mum and dad, as well as me. This smiling blonde vision came into our world and up our garden path and into our living room, telling us we were special. Us .
    Our friends all thought that Gina and I were too young for marriage. Gina was a student of Japanese, looking for a way to live her life in Tokyo or Yokohama or Osaka. I was a radio producer, looking for a way into television. And our friends all reckoned it was much too soon for wedding vows and a baby, monogamy and a mortgage. Ten years too soon.
    They – the language students who thought the world was waiting for them, and the slightly older cynics at my radio station who thought they had seen it all before – believed that there were planes to catch, lovers to meet, drugs to be taken, music to be heard, adventures to be had, foreign flats to be rented, beaches to be danced on at dawn. And they were right. All of those things were waiting. For them. But we gave them up for each other. Then our son came along. And he was the best thing of all.
    Pat was a good, sweet-natured baby, smiling for most of the day and sleeping for most of the night, as beautiful as his mother, ridiculously easy to love. But our life – already married, already parents, and still with a large chunk of our twenties to go – wasn’t perfect. Far from it.
    It wasn’t just a job. Gina had given up a whole other life in Japan for her boys, and sometimes – when the money was tight, when I came home from work too tired to talk, when Pat’s brand-new teeth were painfully pushing through his shining pink gums and he could no longer sleep all night – she must have wondered what she was missing. But we had no real regrets. For years it was fine. For years it was what we had been waiting for. Both of us.
    A family to replace the one that I had grown up with.
    And a family to replace the one that my wife had never known.
    Then I spent one night with a colleague from work. One of those pale Irish beauties who seemed a little bit smarter, and a little bit softer, than most of the women I worked with.
    And it was madness. Just madness.
    Because after Gina found out, we all had to start again.
    I sent money every month.
    The money was never late. I wanted to send it. I wanted to help bring up my son in any way I could. That was only right and proper. But sometimes I wondered about the money. Was it all being spent on Pat? Really? Every penny? How could I know that none of it was being blown on the guy my ex-wife married? Bloody Richard.
    I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.
    And even that was okay, but I felt like the money should give me certain basic human rights. Such as, I should be able to call my son whenever I needed to talk to him. It shouldn’t be a problem. It should be normal. And how I missed normal . A few days of normality, full board – what a welcome mini-break that would be.
    But when I picked up the phone I always found I couldn’t dial the number. What if Richard – strange the way I called him by his first name, as if we were actually friends – answered? What then? Small talk? Small talk seemed inadequate for our situation. So words failed me, I replaced the receiver, and I didn’t make the call. I stuck to the schedule worked out in advance with Gina, and my only child and I might as well have been on different planets.
    But I still felt like the monthly