kitten. ‘Come on, miss. In the bath.’
‘But – ’
‘Now.’
What made me laugh – or rather what made me want to bury my face in my hands – is that you would never guess that so much of our time was spent dealing with the fall-out of the nuclear family. Cyd’s small flat was like a temple to romance.
The walls were covered with posters from films – films that told tales of perfect love, love that might bang its head against a few obstacles now and again, but love that was ultimately without any of the complications of the modern world.
As soon as you had come into the flat, there was a framed poster of Casablanca in the poky little hallway. There were framed posters of An Affair to Remember and Brief Encounter in the slightly less poky living room. And of course there was Gone with the Wind in the place of honour right above the bed. Even Peggy had a poster of Pocahontas on her wall looking down on all her old Ken and Barbie dolls and Spice Girls merchandise. Everywhere you looked – men smouldering, women melting and true love conquering.
These posters weren’t stuck up in the way that a student might stick them up – half-hearted and thoughtless and mostly to cover a patch of rising damp or some crumbling plaster. There was far more than Blu-tack keeping them up. Placed behind glass and encased in tasteful black frames, they were treated like works of art – which I suppose is what they were.
Cyd had bought those posters from one of those cine-head shops in Soho, taken them to the Frame Factory or somewhere similar, and then lugged them all the way home. She had to go out of her way to have those posters of Gone with the Wind and the rest up on her walls. The message was clear – this is what we are about in this place.
But it wasn’t what we were about, not really. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman might have had their love affair cut short by the Nazi invasion of Paris, but at least Bogey didn’t have to worry about how he should treat Ingrid’s child from her relationship with Victor Laszlo. And it is open to debate if Rhett Butler would have been quite so keen on Scarlett O’Hara if she had been dragging a kid from a previous romance around Georgia.
I had never been around a little girl before, and there was an air of calm about Peggy – it was definitely calm more than sugar and spice or any of that stuff – that I had never seen in Pat or other small boys. There was a composure about her that you wouldn’t see in a boy of the same age. Maybe all little girls are like that. Maybe it was just Peggy.
What I am saying is – I liked her.
But I didn’t know if I was meant to be her friend or her father, if I was meant to be sweetness and light or firm but fair. None of it felt right. When your partner has got a child, it can never be like the movies. And anyone who can’t see that has watched a few too many MGM musicals.
Cyd came back into the room with Peggy all clean and changed and ready for her big night out at Pizza Express with her father. The little girl climbed on my lap and gave me a kiss. She smelled of soap and Junior Timotei.
Her mother ruffled my hair.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked me.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
Peggy’s eyes got big and wide with excitement when she heard the sound of a powerful motorbike pulling up in the street.
‘Daddy!’ she said, scrambling from my lap, and I felt a stab of jealousy that caught me by surprise.
From the window we all watched Jim Mason park the big BMW bike, swinging his legs off as if he were dismounting from a horse. Then he removed his helmet and I saw that Cyd had been right – he was a good-looking bastard, all chiselled jawline and short, thick wavy hair, like the face on a Roman coin or a male model who likes girls.
I had always kind of hoped that there was going to be something of Glenn about him – a fading pretty boy whose years of breaking hearts had come and gone. But this one looked as though he still ate all his greens.
He waved up at us. We waved back.
Meeting your partner’s ex should be awkward and embarrassing. You know the most intimate details of their life and yet you have never met them. You know they did bad things because you have been told all about them and also because, if they hadn’t done bad things, you would not be with your partner.
It should be a bumpy ride meeting the man she knew before she knew you. But meeting Jim wasn’t that much of a problem for me. I got off lightly as there was still so much unfinished business between him and Cyd.
He came into the little flat, big and handsome, all gleaming leathers and wide white smile, tickling his daughter until she howled. We shook hands and swapped some small talk about the problems of parking in this neck of the woods. And when Peggy went to collect her things, Cyd was waiting for him, her face as impassive as a clenched fist.
‘How’s Mem?’ she asked.
‘She’s fine. Sends her love.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t. But thanks anyway. And is her job going well?’
‘Very well, thanks.’
‘Business is booming for strippers, is it?’
‘She’s not a stripper.’
‘She’s not?’
‘She’s a lap dancer.’
‘My apologies.’
Jim looked at me with a what-can-you-do? grin.
‘She always does this,’ he said, as if we had some kind of relationship, as if he could tell me a thing or two.
Peggy came back carrying a child-sized motorbike helmet, smiling from ear to ear, anxious to get going. She kissed her mother and me and took her father’s hand.
From the window we watched Jim carefully place his daughter on the bike and cover her head with the helmet. Sliding behind her, he straddled the machine, kicked it into life and took off down the narrow street. Above the throaty roar of the bike, you could just about hear Peggy squealing with delight.
‘Why do you hate him so much, Cyd?’
She thought about it for a moment.
‘I think it’s because of the way he ended it,’ she said. ‘He was home from work – hurt his leg in another accident, I think he was scraped by a cab, he was always getting scraped by a cab – and he was lying on the sofa when I got back from dropping Peggy off at her nursery school. I bent over him – just to look at his face, because I always liked looking at his face – and he said the name of a girl. Right out loud. The name of this Malaysian girl he was sleeping with. The one he left me for.’
‘He was talking in his sleep?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He was pretending to talk in his sleep. He knew he was going to leave me and Peggy already. But he didn’t have the guts to look me in the eye and tell me. Pretending to talk in his sleep – pretending to say her name while he was sleeping – was the only way he could do it. The only way he could drop the bomb. The only way he could tell me that his bags were packed. And
