Man and Wife by Tony Parsons Page B

Because I knew that Nigel Batty had fought exactly this same fight and lost.
    ‘What happened to me wouldn’t necessarily happen to you,’ he said, reading my mind. ‘Your wife would need to give details of the proposed arrangements for your child. Accommodation, education, health, maintenance, childcare, contact. Then the court would decide if it needed to exercise any of its powers.’
    ‘What are the chances?’
    I could hear him breathing in the silence.
    ‘Not good. There’s something called the maternal preference factor. Do you understand that term?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘It means that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the father gets fucked.’
    ‘But that’s not fair.’
    ‘Post-divorce parenting is almost always the prerogative of the mother. The law is meant to care about the welfare of the child. In reality, the law cares about the wishes of the mother. Spot the difference? Not the welfare of the child, but the wishes of the mother. If your ex-wife can convince the court that she has no intention of denying you contact, and that your child’s wellbeing would not suffer because of the change of residence, then she can pretty much take your child where she wants. And if I may get personal for a moment – that is exactly what happened to me.’
    He picked up the photograph on his desk, studied it for amoment, and then placed it down again, now facing me. I saw two smiling children, lost forever to their father.
    ‘Then there’s no hope.’
    ‘There’s always hope, Mr Silver. You can withhold consent. We can apply for a contact order. At the very least, that would slow her down. Make her go to the airport the long way round. Who knows? It might even stop her leaving the country.’
    ‘And the order would say that I must be allowed to see my boy? She couldn’t stop me seeing Pat?’
    ‘Well, not exactly. You would have contact as the named person in the contact order.’
    The named person. Once I was a father. Now I was a named person.
    ‘We hear a lot about absent fathers in our society, Mr Silver. We don’t hear so much about decent fathers who are denied contact with their children because of the whim of a judge. I have seen men destroyed by losing contact with their children. And I mean quite literally destroyed. Nervous breakdowns. Suicides. Alcoholics. Heart attacks. Blood pressure so high that a stroke was inevitable. Men killed by the loss of their children. Men who had done nothing wrong.’
    ‘But I did.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I did something wrong. I’m not like those other men. My first marriage. The break-up. It was all my fault.’
    ‘What was your fault?’
    ‘Our divorce. The break-up of our marriage. It was my fault. I slept with someone else.’
    My lawyer laughed out loud. ‘Mr Silver. Harry. That’s completely irrelevant. You don’t have to be true to your wife. Goodness me, that’s what this country is all about.’ His face became serious again. ‘There’s something else you have to consider, Mr Silver, and it’s the most important thing of all.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘You have to ask yourself what happens if you win.’
    ‘That’s all good, isn’t it? That’s nothing but good. If I win,then Pat stays in the country and Gina has no choice. That’s just what we want to happen, isn’t it?’
    ‘Well – how’s your ex-wife going to feel if you stop her moving to America?’
    ‘I guess…she will start to hate me. Really and truly hate my guts.’
    Not for the first time, I remembered Gina’s dream of living in Japan that I stole on our wedding day. Now I would be stealing her dream of living in America. I would have denied her two shots at happiness.
    ‘That’s right, Mr Silver. You will be preventing her from living her life where she chooses to live it. And that is highly likely to have some impact on your son. In fact, you can count on it. Frankly, if you stopped her leaving, then she could poison him against you. Make it harder to visit. Make it harder