Man and Wife. Tony Parsons

       five

      Gina was waiting for me in the school car park.

      She must have come straight from the office because she was in a two-piece business suit, wearing heels and carrying a battered old briefcase. She looked great, like some fashion editor’s idea of a working woman, although thinner than I ever remembered her being. My ex-wife was still beautiful, still a woman who turned heads in the street. But she looked more serious than she ever did in her twenties.

      ‘Sorry I’m late, Gina.’

      ‘It’s okay. We’re both early.’ She gave me a peck on the cheek, squeezing my arm. She had forgiven me for Paris, I guess. ‘Let’s go and see teacher, shall we?’

      We went into the main school building and walked down corridors that seemed unchanged from the ones I remembered from all those years ago. Children’s paintings on the wall, the aroma of institutional cooking, distant shouts of physical exercise. Echoes and laughter, the smell of disinfectant and dirt. We made our way to the office of the headmistress without having to ask for directions. This was not the first time we had been summoned to our son’s school.

      Pat’s headmistress, Miss Wilkins, was a pale-faced young woman with a white-blonde crop. With her Eminem haircut and funky trainers, she didn’t look old enough for the top job, she just about looked old enough to be out of school herself. But promotion came fast around here. Pat’s school was ringed by tough estates, and many teachers just couldn’t stand the pace.

      ‘Mr and Mrs Silver. Come in.’

      ‘Actually it’s Mr Silver and Mrs McRae,’ Gina said. ‘Thank you.’

      Miss Wilkins softened us up with the usual comforting preamble – our son was a lovely boy, such a sweet nature, adored by teachers and children alike. And then came the reason why we were here.

      He was completely and totally out of control.

      ‘Pat is never rude or violent,’ said Miss Wilkins. ‘He’s not like some of them. He does everything with a smile.’

      ‘He sounds like Mr Popularity,’ I said. I could never stop myself defending him. I always felt the need to put in a good word.

      ‘He would be. If only he could stay in his seat for an entire lesson.’

      ‘He goes walkabout,’ Gina said, nervously biting her thumbnail, and for a second it was as if she had been brought here because of her own misbehaviour. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? He just wanders around the class. Chatting to other children. Chatting away while they are trying to do their work.’ She looked at me. ‘We’ve been here before. More than once.’

      ‘May I ask you a personal question?’ Miss Wilkins said. She may have had a different kind of haircut, but she still sounded like every teacher I ever knew.

      ‘Of course,’ said Gina.

      A beat.

      ‘Was it a very stressful divorce?’

      ‘Aren’t they all?’ I said.

      We followed Miss Wilkins down the corridor. There was a small square pane of glass in the thick slab of every classroom door. Like the spyhole in a prison cell. The albino head of Miss Wilkins bobbed in front of one of them for a moment and then she stood back, smiling grimly, raising an index finger to her lips. Gina and I peered through the window into our son’s classroom.

      I spotted him immediately. Even surrounded by thirty other six- and seven-year-olds, some of them with the same shaggy mop top, all of them in the same green sweater that passed for a uniform in these parts, I couldn’t miss him.

      Pat was in the middle of the class, bent over a drawing, just like all the other children. And I thought about how shiny his hair always looked, like something from a conditioner commercial, even when it needed what my mum would call a good old wash.

      On the blackboard the teacher had sketched a cartoon of planet earth, a chalky globe lost in all that black space, the blurry lines of the continents just about recognisable. She was writing something above it. Our World, it said.

      The children were all drawing intently. Even Pat. And for a moment I could kid myself that everything was all right. There was something moving about the scene. Because of course these inner-city children came from every ethnic group on the planet. But the trouble was the drawing my son was bent over belonged to someone else. He was helping a little girl to colour it in.

      ‘Pat?’ the teacher said, turning from the blackboard. ‘Excuse me. I’ve asked you before to stay at your own desk, haven’t I?’

      He ignored her. Still radiating that rakish charm, peering out shyly from under that golden fringe, he eased between the desks, peering over the shoulders of his classmates, flashing smiles and muttering comments to children who were all concentrating on planet earth.

      ‘Yes,’ Gina said, and I didn’t need to look at her to know that she was holding back the tears. ‘In answer to your question. It was a very stressful divorce.’

      We did these things together.

      There was no question that only one of us would go to the school, get lectured to by the surprisingly prim punk headmistress, and have to fret about our son all alone.

      We were both his parents, no matter where he lived, and nothing could ever change that fact. That was our attitude.

      Gina was miles better at all of this stuff than me – not feeling the need to be defensive about Pat, always communicating with the staff, opening up about our personal problems, giving anyone who was vaguely curious a guided tour of our dirty laundry, which was surely getting a bit threadbare and old by now. And I took it to heart a lot more than she did. Or at least I let it depress me more. Because deep down, I also blamed the divorce for Pat’s problems at school.

      ‘Cheer up, Harry, he’ll grow out of it,’ Gina told me over coffee. This is what we did. After being dragged along to the school every few weeks or so we went to a small café on Upper Street. We used to come here in the old days, before we had Pat. Now these mid-morning cappuccinos were the extent of our social life together. ‘He’s a good kid. Everybody likes him, he’s smart. He just has difficulty settling. He finds it hard to settle to things. It’s not attention deficiency syndrome, or whatever they call it. It’s just a problem settling.’

      ‘Miss Wilkins thinks it’s our fault. She thinks we’ve messed him up. And maybe she’s right, Gina.’

      ‘It doesn’t matter what Miss bloody Wilkins thinks. Pat’s happiness – that’s all that matters.’

      ‘But he’s not happy, Gina.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘He hasn’t been happy since – you know. Since we split up.’

      ‘Change the record, Harry.’

      ‘I mean it. He’s lost that glow he had. Remember that beautiful glow? Listen, I’m not blaming you or Richard.’

      ‘Richard’s a very good stepfather.’ She always got touchy if I suggested that