A Family Man Read online

  ‘If there are any no-go areas, obviously I would respect them absolutely.’

  When she bumped into him again after the play, Beth suggested dinner. ‘Or will you be rushing off to write your review? I know what you guys are like, scribbling to get your pieces on to breakfast tables.’

  Matt was tempted. He didn’t have to file his review until the morning.

  But the invitation reminded him that he had a home to return to, a home about which he suddenly felt an involuntary spasm of guilt. He had left before Kath’s return, his departure made possible by the unexpected materialisation of a teenager called Clare, waving a five-pound note.

  ‘I owe you this, remember? You only had twenty and I said I’d drop by with the change. I’ve been meaning to for ages. And now I’m going away – to start a hotel management course in Bristol – so I won’t be able to sit any more. Sorry it’s taken so long —’

  ‘You’re not free now, are you?’ blurted Matt, who had forgotten completely about the unpaid debt. ‘Just to cover for an hour or so? Until Kath gets back. She’s out with a friend. She knows I’m working tonight but I forgot to tell her I’ve got to be at the theatre earlier than usual. What with the traffic being what it is, the sooner I set off the better.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She looked uncertain. ‘You could keep the fiver as a bonus.’ ‘I guess.’

  Matt had rushed out of the house a few minutes later, primed both by a genuine sense of anticipation about the evening and an ignoble reluctance to be involved in the laborious, noisy rituals of persuading his son into bed.

  ‘Thanks.’ He smiled at Beth Durant. ‘But I’d better not.’

  ‘Other commitments?’

  ‘A wife and small son, counting every second till my return.’

  ‘How sweet. I love that. I’ll call you next week, then, just as soon as I’ve gotten a response from Andrea.’

  Matt strode off in search of his third taxi of the day, wondering whether he had imagined the innuendo in Beth Durant’s dinner invitation. The flutter of regret at being in no position to explore the matter further had, he knew, little to do with desire and everything to do with being thirty- one years old and half a decade into a marriage with one demanding child. Before Josh, Kath would often come to the theatre with him, making use of the perk of free tickets that went with the job. Now she usually chose to baby-sit and was often asleep when he got in. It was of considerable regret to Matt that their sex life had suffered accordingly, a state of affairs made no easier by the fact that their son had celebrated the transition from cot to the freedom of an uncaged mattress by acquiring the habit of wandering into his parents’ bedroom at all times of the night. With the result that on the rare occasions they did make love, Matt often caught himself pinning one feverish eye on the door handle, or resisting turning the light on when he would have liked to, for fear of glancing up to find the pale elfin face of his only child watching them from the doorway. His suggestion that they put a lock on the bedroom door had been rejected out of hand. It wouldn’t be right, Kath said, to close Joshua’s only avenue of comfort, to make him feel unwanted on any level.

  He was imagining things, Matt told himself, his thoughts returning to the press agent. Apart from anything else she was clearly several years older than him and rather too heavy-featured for his tastes. He went for willowy, dark-eyed women, with cropped haircuts and high cheekbones.

  Reminded thus of his wife, he walked with a fresh sense of purpose towards a street less likely to be in demand with a post-theatre crowd. He would make love to Kath that very night, he decided, wake her if necessary, tease her till she was begging for it, clawing his back like she used to in the squeaky lopsided bed in Shepherd’s Bush.

  By the time he put the key in the door it was almost 11.30. The hall was dark, lit at the far end by a slice of buttery light coming from the sitting room.

  ‘It’s me, returned from another night at the coalface.’ Matt slung his coat over the banisters and kicked off his shoes. ‘Are you full of white wine and loving thoughts …?’ He was stopped short by the appearance of the girl Clare, rubbing her knuckles in her eyes and yawning deeply. Her face was pasty pale and there were purple smudges under her eyes.

  ‘Sorry, I fell asleep on the sofa.’ She stretched, revealing a section of flat white midriff and a gold loop stapled through her tummy button.

  ‘Is Kath upstairs, then?’

  ‘No … at least, I don’t think so.’ ‘So she’s not back yet?’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  ‘No phone calls?’

  The girl shook her head.

  ‘Right. Thanks.’ Matt spoke briskly, trying not to show his irritation at the girl’s sulkiness. He reached into his back pocket for his wallet and handed over a twenty-pound note. ‘Sorry you ended up doing the whole night. You’d better keep all of that this time.’

  ‘And the fiver?’

  ‘And the fiver.’ Matt wanted her to be gone, so he could stop pretending to be polite and give way to his anger instead. Not even to call was unforgivable. He poured himself a large glass of wine and took it up to the bedroom. Flicking on the small television positioned on top of the chest of drawers opposite the bed, he reached for his bedside pad and began making a few notes for his review, which would need filing by eleven o’clock the next morning. He would not look at the time, he told himself, nonetheless glancing at his wristwatch and wondering how Louise’s husband, Anthony, was faring as the victim of similar abandonment in Camberwell.

  A few minutes later he cast aside his notepad with a sigh. Kath put up with a lot, he reminded himself. With his job he was out late three or four nights every week. How could he begrudge her one small impromptu outing with her oldest friend?

  At midnight he made a final sortie to the kitchen to refill his wineglass and make a note of the Bryants’ phone number, which lived in the address book next to the phone. Anthony wouldn’t mind him calling at such an hour, he was sure. According to Kath, he was always up late, fielding hospital emergencies or working on one of his endless research papers.

  Anthony’s voice came on the line after only the second ring. ‘I hope they’ve got money for a taxi.’

  ‘I beg your pardon? Who is this?’

  All Matt’s vague hopes of a dose of male solidarity faded in an instant. Instead he remembered in a rush the extent to which he did not like Anthony, with all his medical pomposity and studied air of academic gravitas. ‘Anthony, sorry, I know it’s fiendishly late – it’s me, Matthew Webster. I was just ringing to ask if you’d had any news of our errant wives. Kath hasn’t got a mobile so I —’

  He was prevented from continuing by a burst of puzzled laughter. ‘Louise is fast asleep upstairs.’ It was Matt’s turn to laugh, but with diminishing conviction. ‘But they went out together – if Louise is back then Kath presumably is —’

  ‘Hold your horses. Louise had a bridge evening round the corner. She got back hours ago.’

  ‘But your au pair said she was with Kath.’

  ‘Which confirms that the girl’s a Slovakian imbecile with the language skills of a five-year-old. There was a much better Spanish one for half the price. No, my dear fellow,’ he went on more kindly, ‘whatever party Kath is at I’m afraid it does not involve my wife. I’m only up because I’m working on a paper for a conference in Boston … Hello? Are you still there? Matt? I hope everything is all right…’

  ‘Yes – sorry to have bothered you, Anthony. I think I can hear the front door now. Goodnight.’ Moving in slow motion, Matt returned the telephone to his bedside table, his eyes fixed, as they had been for the preceding two minutes, on the small white envelope propped against a vase on the mantelpiece over the fireplace; a fake hole of a fireplace, which they had kept for the sake of the pretty surround – imitation Delft with a rich blue border that just happened to match the blue in the only pair of curtains they had bothered to bring from the flat. Which in turn matched the uplighters over the bed. Everything fitting a
nd perfect and full of hope. The diamonds on the vase blurred under Matt’s gaze. It had been a wedding present from his friend Graham, heavy lead crystal with such a narrow base that Kath complained she could never get enough stems in it to make a decent bunch.

  She had written his name in full across the middle of the envelope, her tiny tidy writing looking small and lost in the middle of all the whiteness. Matthew. Seeing the formality of it, Matt knew at once that there could be nothing good inside, that he was standing on the precipice of catastrophe. He slid his finger under the flap and took out the single folded sheet inside.

  I am leaving you. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. I have been living a death. Kath.

  Matt stared at the torn envelope, marvelling at how long it had sat there, how he had managed not to see it or sense its presence. He had come in and out of the bedroom numerous times during the course of the afternoon – after the bath, pulling on his clothes from the chair, crawling under the bed for his smart shoes. And each time he had failed to notice it. Just as he had failed to notice that his wife was living a death. Matt looked again at the sentence. That they had rowed, compromised and not made love enough had always struck him as the general run of things, no different from any other self-respecting young parents trying to lead decent lives.

  Kath had expressed frustration sometimes, reluctant to return to the seesaw of euphoria and depression that had gone with being an actress, yet wanting something beyond domesticity and motherhood to fill her time. But living a death. Matt screwed the paper into a ball, snorting in an attempt at disbelief.

  It wasn’t until he got up and opened the wardrobe doors and saw the half-emptiness inside that he experienced the first rush of anger, so strong that he could taste it, a thick, gagging, metallic taste that made it hard to breathe. Living a death. How dare she wipe out six years with one such outrageous sentence? Without giving him the chance to argue his part, to sort it out. He kicked the wardrobe door shut with his bare foot. So hard that it swung open again, while the score of empty metal coat hangers chimed in protest. Numbed by shock, it was a little while before he thought of Josh.

  Then he was across the landing in three strides, a part of him fully expecting to find the small wooden bed unoccupied. On seeing the skinny frame of his son, spread-eagled peacefully on his back, one leg thrust out of his duvet, his pyjama top rucked up round his ribcage, Matt froze in the doorway, suffused with a terrible confusion of tenderness and terror.

  He was breathing heavily, one thick clump of hair plastered across his forehead. Stroking the hair away, Matt bent over and softly kissed the patch of skin underneath. Standing upright again, he felt momentarily reassured.

  Not taking Josh meant she would come back. Of course she would come back. Then he remembered the empty coat hangers and felt less sure. Back out on the landing he became aware of a strange groaning noise. It took a few seconds to register that it was pushing up from somewhere inside his own chest. He lurched back into his bedroom and quietly pressed the door shut before daring to open his mouth and release the sound. Turning out the light, he groped for the bed and lay flat on his back, his throat pumping, the tears spilling down the side of his face, cold in the warm crevices of his ears.

  3

  Some plays are like old friends, loved as much for their innate qualities as their sheer predictability. We expect to be pleased but not surprised, entertained, but not shaken. Taking my seat at the Aldwych in such a frame of mind for the latest revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, it was therefore thrilling to find that the erstwhile enfant terrible of the West End theatre, director David Travis, has somehow pushed both the packaging and subtext of this national treasure to new heights …

  Matt stopped typing and rubbed his eyes till a palette of vivid yellows and pinks filled his vision. The terror that had descended in the doorway of his son’s bedroom was with him still, bulldozing through his concentration, stilting his usually fluid style, making the target of five hundred respectable words even harder than usual. He would have to talk to his boss, Oliver Parkin, he realised, tell him what had happened, beg for some time off. His heart galloped. If Kath did not come back he would need help, childcare on a regular basis, for hours every day, evenings too.

  It was half past five on Saturday morning. He had slept for one hour, maybe two, his mind in a wretched state of vigilance over both the mayhem of his own reactions and any creak suggestive of a key turning in a door.

  Mothers did not leave their children. Kath would relent, he was sure. She was punishing him, making him see what it was like to be alone all day with a child, teaching him a lesson. A lesson which, through his hurt and anger, Matt knew he would be able to forgive, in part out of sheer desperation and in part because he had the grace to recognise an element of justification to the reasoning behind it. The bounce of relief with which he kissed his wife and son goodbye in the mornings, the latter splashing through breakfast cereal, already bellowing and demanding, was not something of which he was proud. Early zeal to share bottle and nappy-changing duties had quickly waned. He never seemed to manage it as well as Kath anyway, all fingers and thumbs. Besides which, as Kath herself agreed, working in an office all day and out so many evenings, he needed his sleep.

  Through the window next to his desk, dawn was breaking over south- east London, an insipid light seeping through the thick cloud like the dim glow of a lamp in fog. Below lay the twenty-foot square of muddied grass which passed for a garden, surrounded on all three sides by other similar squares, each marked by a rough assortment of walls and fences in varying states of disrepair. In the distance were treetops and a greenish bulge that was the dome of the Imperial War Museum, once a common destination for their Sunday walks with the pram, not because of an interest in military memorabilia so much as the need to have something to aim for, some purpose other than the gruelling challenge of persuading their son to sleep.

  Matt blinked, wresting his attention back to the words on the screen in front of him.

  … Andrea Beauchamp as Amanda is a revelation, capturing both the flirtatious scheming and the beguiling vulnerability of the character in a way that highlights the ultimately tragic push-and-pull of the plot. We hate what we have and long for what we have not …

  What had Kath longed for? And who with? The possibility that his wife had deserted him for another man was a scenario that Matt still found hard to consider head-on, even in the private turmoil of his own mind. He could not shake the belief that he would have had an inkling of such a truth, or at least be able to look back with grim hindsight and pinpoint the signs.

  But as Kath herself had joked once or twice, mothers of young children simply did not have enough time to conduct affairs. It was only Fridays that Josh did a full day at the nursery; for the rest of the week it was just three hours each morning. Three or four nights out of seven Kath baby-sat while Matt went to the theatre. The other evenings they spent together. If ever his reviewing took him out of town for a night, she was invariably there when he called home. For the two-week stint in Edinburgh the previous summer she had come with him, seeming to enjoy the frenetic atmosphere and even finding a local baby-sitter so that they could attend some of the evening events hand in hand.

  The more Matt thought about it the more it seemed likely that Kath had actually gone a little mad, turned a corner of sanity inside her own head. He imagined her holed up in some drab motel, sobbing into grey sheets and resisting the urge to pick up the phone. Attention-seeking maybe. She had been an actress, after all, and an over-sensitive one at that, Matt reminded himself, recalling the fragile state of his wife’s confidence during their first year together, when she seemed to be in a perpetual state of dread, either at having to go on-stage or at not being required to do so. Once over the shock of the pregnancy Kath seemed to relish the diversion it offered, the legitimate pretext for putting away her grease paints for a far worthier long-term alternative.

  ‘Is it the morning?’

 
‘Hey, Josh, come here.’ Matt patted his knees, aware that his entire body was trembling.

  His son remained standing in the doorway, the picture of sleepy indecision. His hair was fuzzed and matted at the crown; one leg of his Disney pajamas was up above his knee, the other looped over the back of his heel. Under his arm was a large acrylic green seal which Matt had won during an excursion to a funfair the previous summer. ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘So am I. Shall we have breakfast together?’ ‘I want Frosties.’

  ‘Me too. Masses of them.’

  Josh looked at him so curiously that Matt blushed, ashamed of the false heartiness of his tone. The lump that had been blocking his throat for some moments began to ache from the effort of containment. He felt a terrible urge to bury his face in the Mickey Mouse print, to confess that the linchpin of both their lives had left and he didn’t have a clue what to do about it.

  ‘I’m afraid Mum has had to go away for a little while.’ The words came out in a clumsy rush, triggered by the realisation that Josh, unconvinced by the Frosties diversion, was about to go in search of her.

  ‘But I want Mummy,’ he replied stoutly, as if the very fact of this requirement was enough to ensure its fulfilment.

  ‘I want Mummy too,’ said Matt, his mouth so dry he could feel his gums sticking together, ‘but she has had to go away for a special holiday. Mummies do that sometimes, you know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they need to rest.’

  ‘I’m going to feed Spotty,’ Josh shouted suddenly, rushing from the room. ‘Spotty likes Frosties.’

  Matt listened to the tiny feet pounding down the stairs with a heavy heart, grateful for the small reprieve. Spotty was a hamster, given as a fourth birthday present by Matt’s father, and so lovingly manhandled that every day of its survival seemed a minor miracle. ‘Not too much – it’s bad for him, remember?’ he called weakly, clinging to the banisters as he descended the stairs.