I shifted uneasily in my seat.
‘Well, Pat, some of that stuff you might want to save for the second date.’
He was that age where he still believed in the secret language of girls.
The age where you believe that girls speak in an Esperanto that is alien to you – a mere boy, consumed with longing and unworthiness, tongue-tied by youth and yearning.
And I wanted to help him. I really did. I wanted to be the Yoda of love he could turn to. And even if it did not work out with him and Elizabeth Montgomery – if they never fell in love, if he was not the millionaire who shared her wedding day, if she never became the one the angels asked him to recall – then at least I thought I might be able to help him have a conversation with the girl. That did not seem too much to ask.
A distant bell began to ring. Elizabeth Montgomery moved off, the centre of attention in a blue-blazered crowd of boys and girls. It was not just Pat. Everybody loved Elizabeth Montgomery.
I drove him to school every morning. Although by the time they are pushing fifteen you no longer really drive them to school. You drive them close to school and let them walk the rest of the way before you have a chance to embarrass them with kisses, hugs or words of sage advice on the mysteries of attraction. He opened the passenger door.
‘You around tonight?’ I said.
He pushed his hair out of his eyes. It had grown long over the summer. ‘I’ve got my Lateral Thinking Club after school and then I’m around,’ he said. ‘What about you?’
‘I’m around,’ I said. ‘But late – there’s some black-tie thing. The show’s up for an award. Lateral Thinking?’
‘You know. Thinking outside the box. Creative thinking. Edward de Bono.’
‘Oh right – Edward de Bono. Used to be married to Cher. No, that was Sonny Bono. Before your time.’
‘Everybody was before my time,’ he laughed, getting out of the car. ‘I haven’t had my time yet.’
He slammed the door shut and looked at me through the window.
‘Enjoy your Lateral Thinking,’ I said. ‘And talk to her, kiddo. Talk to Elizabeth Montgomery.’
He waved and went. That was my son. Some kids his age were out mugging old ladies for their iPods. But he had his Lateral Thinking Club and his one-way love for Elizabeth Montgomery. I watched him go as the bell faded away.
Parents were still milling around, so I did not look twice at the woman parked directly across from the school gates. In fact, I didn’t really look at her once. But then she got out of her car and I saw that she was watching Pat too.
And now I looked.
She was tall, blonde, and a little too thin. Dressed for serious exercise – a dark tracksuit, proper trainers – and a raincoat thrown over the top of her running clothes. Looking a touch unkempt and exhausted, but who doesn’t in the aftermath of the school run? Despite the blue September sky, the morning was cold enough for me to see her breath.
I stared straight at her, and straight through her and then we both watched Pat go through the gates, the tail of his white shirt already coming out of his trousers, unfurling like a flag of surrender.
And then I looked at her again and something deep inside me fell away.
Because I always think that it is bizarre – no, I always think that it is unbelievable – that you can love someone, really and truly love someone, and then one day you do not recognise their face.
If you have loved someone, you would think that you would know that face always and forever – wouldn’t you? Shouldn’t every line of that face be stamped on your heart?
But it is not. Your heart forgets.
Especially after – what? Seven years? Could it really be seven years since I had seen her? Where did seven years go?
She got into her car and as she pulled away she looked at me with a kind of wary interest.
So she felt it too. Who is this stranger?
And by then it was all coming back to me. All of it. Oh yes. She had changed – older, thinner and many miles travelled in worlds that had nothing to do with me – but I remembered Gina.
I remembered loving her more than I had ever loved anyone, and I remembered our marriage and the birth of our son, and I remembered how it felt to sleep by her side. And I remembered how all that was good had gone bad, and how it had hurt so much that I truly believed nothing could ever be good again.
So, yes, now that I came to think of it, she did look vaguely familiar.
We envied families who had had a good divorce.
Families where the love was still intact, despite everything. Families where they remembered every birthday – on the actual day. Families that did not let entire years slip by, entire years just wasted. Families where the absent parent turned up at the weekend on time, stone-cold sober and eager to prove the wise old saying, ‘You don’t divorce your children.’
But some people do.
So we – my son and I – looked longingly on the families that had had a good divorce.
To us, they were like the family in a commercial for breakfast cereal, an impossible ideal that we could never truly aspire to, a wonderful dream that we could only gawp at with our noses pressed up against the windowpane.
Families that had had a good divorce – they were the Waltons to us. They were the Jacksons. They were the Little Broken Home on the Prairie. They were what we would have loved to have been and what we would never be.
Families that had had a good divorce – we could hardly stand to look at them. Because it was nothing like that for us. Me and my boy.
It never felt like much to ask. A life like other lives. A divorce that could hold its head up high. Some love to remain after the love had flown.
Dream on, kiddo.
Home at midnight. And in a bit of a state.
I had not really touched dinner – rubber chicken for five hundred – so now my stomach was growling and my head was reeling and I was a shade drunker than I had planned to be. My bow tie was coming undone. There was a smear of crème brûlée on the black satin collar of my dinner jacket. Now how the hell did that happen?
It was a school night and Pat should have been tucked up in bed like the rest of the family. But he was sitting at the dining-room table, Japanese homework scattered around him, pushing a fistful of hair out of his eyes as I came into the room with the exaggerated care of the accidental drunk.
He was always mad at me if he thought I had drunk more than I could take.
‘Celebrating, are you?’ he said, tapping an impatient biro.
I suddenly realised that I was carrying a bag containing a magnum of champagne and – something else. I looked inside. The something else was a shiny gold ear set on a base of glass and chrome. My award. The show’s award. I placed both the bottle and the award on the table, careful to avoid Pat’s homework.
‘Congratulations,’ he said, softening a little. ‘The show won. You won.’ But then he scowled again when he saw me fumbling with the foil on the bottle. Just a nightcap, I thought.
‘No show tomorrow?’ he said. ‘I thought you had a show tomorrow.’
‘I’ll be all right.’
‘And I thought recovering from hangovers became harder as you got older.’
I had removed the foil and now I was easing off the wire. ‘So they say.’
‘They must be getting