Pulse

sometimes we think this is the problem, whereas it’s actually that , which makes this seem trivial. She looked at me like one of my stroppier pupils, and said that was typical – a typical justification of my natural evasiveness, my refusal to face facts and deal with issues. She said she could always smell a lie on me. She actually put it like that.
    ‘Very well, then,’ I replied. ‘Let’s be straightforward. Let’s deal with issues. You’re having an affair and I’m having an affair. Is that facing facts or not?’
    ‘That’s what you think it is. You make it sound like a one-all draw.’ And then she explained the falseness of my apparent candour, and the difference between our infidelities – hers born of despair, mine of revenge – and how it was symptomatic that I thought the affairs were the significant thing, rather than the circumstances which gave rise to them. And so we came full circle to the original charges.
    What do we look for in a partner? Someone like us,someone different? Someone like us but different, different but like us? Someone to complete us? Oh, I know you can’t generalise, but even so. The point is: if we’re looking for someone who matches us, we only ever think of their good matching bits. What about their bad matching bits? Do you think we’re sometimes driven towards people with the same faults as we have?
    My mother. When I think of her now, there’s a phrase that comes to mind – one I used when Dad was rabbiting on about his six Chinese pulses. Dad, I said to him, there’s only one pulse – the pulse of the heart, the pulse of the blood. The photographs of my parents that I’m most attached to are those taken before I was born. And – thank you, Janice – I do actually think I know what they were like back then.
    My parents sitting on a pebble beach somewhere, his arm around her shoulders; he has a sports jacket with leather elbow patches, she’s in a polka-dot dress, looking out at the camera with passionate hopefulness. My parents on their honeymoon in Spain, with mountains behind them, both wearing sunglasses, so you have to work out how they’re feeling from their stance, their obvious relaxation with one another, and the sly fact that my mother has her hand slipped into my father’s trouser pocket. And then a picture which must have meant a lot to them despite its shortcomings: the two of them at a party, clearly more than a bit drunk, with the camera flash giving them the pink eyes of white mice. My father has absurd muttonchop whiskers, Mum frizzy hair, big hoop earrings and a kaftan. Neither looks as if they could possibly grow up enough to be a parent. I suspect this is the first picture ever taken of them together, the first time they are officially recorded as sharing the same space, breathing the same air.
    There’s also a photo on the sideboard of me with my parents. I’m about four or five, standing between them with the expression of a child who’s been told to watch the birdie, or however they might have put it: concentrating, but at the same time not quite certain of what’s going on. I’m holding a junior watering can, though I have no memory of being given a junior gardener’s kit, or indeed of having any interest, real or suggested, in gardening.
    Nowadays, when I examine this photo – my mother looking down at me protectively, my father smiling at the camera, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other – I can’t help remembering Janice’s words. About how parents decide who they are before the child has any awareness of it, how they develop a front which the child will never be able to penetrate. Whether intentional or not, there was something poisonous in her remarks. ‘You want him to be Just a Dad. No one’s just a dad, just a mum.’ And then: ‘There’s probably some secret in your mother’s life you’ve never suspected.’ What am I to do with that thought? Even if I were to pursue it and find it led nowhere?
    There’s nothing mimsy or flaky about my mum and nothing – note this, please, Janice – nothing neurotically self-dramatising. She’s a solid presence in a room, whether talking or not. And she’s the person you would turn to if anything went wrong. Once, when I was little, she managed to gash herself in the thigh. There was no one else in the house. Most people would have called an ambulance, or at least disturbed Dad at his work. But Mum just got a needle and some surgical thread, pulled the