more than it did.
While Cyd was helping my mum clear the table and my dad was showing Pat and Peggy how he dealt with the menace of snails, I went into the living room and over to the stereo.
Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! had stopped playing hours ago, but the cover of the record, an old vinyl LP – my father had never joined the CD revolution – was still propped up against the Sony music station.
That album cover had always been special to me. Sinatra – tie askew, snap-brim fedora on the back of his head – grins down at the perfect fifties couple, some Brylcreemed Romeo in a business suit with his suburban Juliet in pearl earrings and a little red dress.
They look like an ordinary couple – you can’t imagine them hanging out with the Rat Pack in Vegas. But they look as though they have wrung as much joy out of this world as anyone possibly could. And I always loved looking at that couple when I was a child, because I always thought they looked like my parents at the exact moment they fell in love.
Someone called my name from the garden but I stared at the cover of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, pretending that I hadn’t heard.
They don’t make them like that any more, I thought.
‘Everybody had a good time,’ Cyd said.
‘It seemed to go very well,’ I said.
We were back in London and up in her flat. Peggy and Pat were sitting on the sofa watching a tape of Pocahontas (Peggy’s choice). Tired from a couple of hours in Cyd’s wheezing old Beetle, they were starting to bitch at each other. I wanted to get home.
‘Everybody had a good time,’ Cyd said again. ‘Pat liked his presents. Peggy ate so much that I won’t have to feed her for a week. And I really loved meeting your mum and dad. They’re really sweet people. Yes, everybody had a good time. Except you.’
‘What are you talking about? I had a good time.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘And what hurts me – what really hurts me – is that you didn’t even try. Your mum and dad made an effort. I know they loved Gina and I know it couldn’t have been easy for them. But they really tried to make it work today. You just couldn’t be bothered, could you?’
‘What do you want me to do? Start doing the lambada after a couple of Diet Cokes? I had as good a time as I could ever have at a kid’s birthday party.’
‘I’m a grown woman and I have a child, okay? You have to learn to deal with that, Harry. Because if you can’t, we haven’t got any kind of future.’
‘I like Peggy,’ I said. ‘And I get on great with her.’
‘You liked Peggy when she was just the little girl who palled around with your son,’ she said. ‘You liked her when she was just the cute little kid who played nicely on the floor of your home. What you don’t like is what she’s become now that you’ve started going out with me.’
‘And what’s that?’ I asked her.
‘The reminder of another man’s fuck,’ she said.
The reminder of another man’s fuck? That was a bit strong. You couldn’t imagine Sinatra sticking that on one of his album covers.
It was more than the reminder of another man’s fuck.
If living alone with Pat had taught me anything, it was that being a parent is mostly intuitive – we make it up as we go along. Nobody teaches you how to do it. You learn on the job.
When I was a kid I thought that my parents had some secret knowledge about how to keep me in line and bring me up right. I thought that there was some great master plan to make me eat my vegetables and go to my room when I was told. But I was wrong. I knew now that they were doing what every parent in the world does. Just winging it.
If Pat wanted to watch Return of the Jedi at four in the morning or listen to Puff Daddy at midnight, then I didn’t have to think about it – I could just pull the plug and send him back to bed.
And if he was down after a phone call from Gina or because of something that had happened at school, I could take him in my arms and give him a cuddle. When it’s your own flesh and blood, you don’t have to think about doing the right thing. You don’t have to think at all. You just do it.
But I would never have that luxury with Peggy.
She was on the sofa, her little bare legs stretched out on the coffee table, watching her favourite Australian soap.
I was sitting next to her, trying to shut out the background babble of dysfunctional surfers who didn’t know the true identity of their parents, as I read an article about another bank collapsing in Japan. It looked like complete chaos over there.
‘What do you mean – you’re not my mother?’ somebody said on screen, and Peggy began to stir as the theme music began.
Usually she was off and running the moment the Aussies were gone. But now she stayed right where she was, leaning forward across the coffee table and picking up Cyd’s nail polish from among the jumble of magazines and toys. I watched her as she began to unscrew the top of the small glass vial.
‘Peggy?’
‘What?’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t play with that, darling.’
‘It’s okay, Harry. Mommy lets me.’
She removed the lid with the small brush on and, very delicately, began painting crimson nail polish over her tiny, almost non-existent toenails and, I couldn’t help noticing, all over the tips of her toes.
‘Be careful with that stuff, Peggy. It’s not for playing with, okay?’
She shot me a look.
‘Mommy lets me do this.’
Globs of bright red nail polish slid down toes the size of half a matchstick. She soon looked as though she had been treading grapes or wading through an abattoir. She lifted her foot, admiring her handiwork, and a drizzle of red paint plopped on to a copy of Red.
With Pat I would have raised my voice or grabbed the nail polish or sent him to his room. I would have done something. With Peggy, I didn’t know what to do. I certainly couldn’t touch her. I certainly couldn’t raise my voice.
‘Peggy.’
‘What, Harry?’
I really wanted her to do the right thing and not get nail polish all over her feet and the carpet and the coffee table and the magazines. But, far more than all of this, I wanted her to like me. So I sat there watching her small feet turning bright red, making doubtful noises, doing nothing.
Cyd came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white robe, towelling her hair. She saw Peggy daubing her toes with nail polish and sighed.
‘How
