The Man Who Forgot His Wife by John O'Farrell

‘Silence in court!’ Instead, Maddy’s lawyer seemed utterly bewildered. It was as if he was only programmed to disagree and contradict; he tried to reach for words but none would come. Now my own representative felt compelled to respond to what had just happened. He stood up.
    ‘Your honour, the respondent’s counsel is putting words into my client’s mouth. Surely it is for the court to make a ruling after we have put our own case for a seventy:thirty split.’ And he urgently gestured for me to shut up.
    ‘It appears, Mr Cottington, that you and your client have come to court without agreeing in advance on the apportionment you are seeking.’
    ‘Mr
Cottington
,’ I thought. ‘So that’s my lawyer’s name.’
    I had feared that the judge might be irritated, but in fact he seemed to be suppressing a certain degree of excitement that something slightly out of the ordinary had finally happened. He made a self-consciously formal pronouncement reminding both counsel of the importance of preparation, and resolved to put this issue to one side for the moment as there were a number of other matters to be settled. He entered into a whispered exchange with the alarmingly overweight clerk while I was left standing there. Although I felt certain I had done the right thing, I could feel my legs shaking underneath me.
    Then, in the middle of the most stressful situation I could recall, I suddenly got my first negative memory. Maddy was angrily berating me and I was shouting back. I even felt a twinge of resentment rise up in me as I recalled how over the top she had been about a little thing like a battery in a smoke alarm. This memory was hazier, but the argument had arisen because I had apparently ‘endangered the family’ by taking the battery out of the smoke alarm to put in my bike light.
    ‘Why the hell didn’t you replace the battery?’ she is shouting
.
    ‘I forgot, okay? Don’t you ever forget things?’
    ‘Not where the safety of our children is concerned.’
    ‘Well, this was for the safety of your husband – so that he was visible on the dark, busy roads! Isn’t that important too?’
    ‘No, actually – it’s not as important. Though you could have bought a replacement battery anyway – you just forgot all about it. You just forgot about us but remembered you.’
    Looking at Madeleine standing there in the court, I couldn’t believe that there was such an irrational and aggressive side to her; that she was capable of so much anger about something as trivial as one AA battery.
    The court had come to consider the key point in the settlement, the decision on the Property Adjustment Order. With no agreement on the house, it would have to be sold, but negotiations had completely broken down over a fair split of the money, the furnishings and who was going to have to talk to the estate agent. I had been allowed to stand down, but the more I listened to the arguments from both sides, the clearer it became that neither Maddy nor I would be able to afford a house in the same area that would accommodate two children and an excitable golden retriever. It would mean moving the kids far away from their school, maybe either parent having to sleep on a sofa bed in the living room when the kids were with them; it would mean no garden and the children having tiny bedrooms and no space for friends to come and stay. Maybe they should keep the house, I thought, and we could take turns to borrow that collapsing tent we’d had in Ireland.
    One blindingly obvious solution to all this was not being suggested by anyone in the courtroom and I felt a duty to point it out.
    ‘Excuse me, your honour – is it possible to … change my mind?’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘Can I change my mind? Or is too late?’
    ‘You want to go for a different arrangement regarding the property assets as well?’
    ‘No, no – about the whole divorce thing,’ I heard myself say. ‘I mean, looking at it afresh, as it were, I wonder if