A Game of Proof by Tim Vicary Page A

the night, he was annoyed. When she cooked badly, he became irritable. When she was too tired or ill for sex, he became angry.
    The first time he hit her was when she tried to discuss an electricity bill as they were undressing for bed. She had read about this technique for extracting money from your husband in a magazine in the doctor’s waiting room, whose agony aunt had clearly met no one like Kevin. Kevin just slapped her and continued with his lovemaking as though nothing had happened. The electricity was cut off a week later. She covered the bruise on her face with powder.
    After that he began to stay out longer and longer. She prepared meals for him that dried up in the cooker. What do you want me home for? he asked, cruelly. You’ve got cystitis, you can’t do it. Anyway we need the money. It’s only me that earns it. They screamed at each other over the baby’s head. When she stood in the doorway to stop him going out he smacked her head against the door post so that it bled. He didn’t come back until one in the morning.
    A week later he told her it was all over. He had met someone else, he said, an older woman called Sheila. He’d got to know her when he’d been fixing her pipes. Sheila and he had the same interests, and he was moving in with her. Now , today. There would be a divorce. She could keep baby Simon but he might want to see him sometimes at weekends when he was older. Teach him to play football. That was what people did, wasn’t it?
    And then he was gone. The bubble burst, just like that. A week before their first anniversary the fairy tale was over. The coldness, the lack of emotional interest, stunned her so much that for the first, and only time in her life, she completely lost the power of action. When the social worker visited two days later Sarah had done nothing - no housework, no washing up, not even fed little Simon, who was howling upstairs. She just sat blankly on the green plastic sofa, staring at the wall.
    The social worker put Simon in a foster home under a place of safety order. Sarah went back to her parents, there was nowhere else to go. The doctor gave her Valium and for a month she walked around like a zombie. Then her mother forced her to sign up for evening classes and take up studying again.
    Which was the best thing my mother ever did for me, Sarah thought now. The one really good thing she did, the old cow. The thing that changed my life.
    Just as refusing to have little Simon in her house was the very worst. The thing that ruined him, perhaps. Unless it was Kevin’s genes.
    Her mother’s plan was for her to make a complete break with the past. Have Simon adopted, never see Kevin again, go back to school.
    The last part of it worked perfectly. Sarah signed up for evening classes to complete her GCSEs and found, suddenly, a voracious hunger for learning. The more she learned the more she wanted to know; the harder she worked the more she wanted to work. It was an escape, a recreation of herself. It was something that gave her control again. It became as necessary to her as breathing. It lasted the rest of her life.
    But the pain, the guilt about her baby Simon didn’t leave her. She didn’t want him to be adopted. As the work replaced the Valium she railed at her hard-faced mother for refusing to have the baby back in the house. No, her mother said. Have him adopted. It’ll hurt now but you’ll thank me one day. It’ll turn out best for you both in the end.
    One night at the evening class she read the papers explaining adoption and then screwed them up. They’re screwing my mind, she thought. That was when the teacher, Bob, found her crying at her desk half an hour after the class had ended. He took her out for a coffee and three months later they were married.
    Bob was everything that Kevin was not - intelligent, well educated, thoughtful, witty, and kind. Where Kevin had been short, cocky and macho, Bob was tall, with a neat beard and glasses, physically weak,