Man and Wife

by Tony Parsons

  Dealing with commissioning editors, production coordinators, and the talent. I could talk to these people, I could get them to do what needed to be done. Tearful make-up girls, surly floor managers, drunken lighting technicians. I had seen it all before. Guests with stage fright, guests who turned up drunk, guests who froze when the red light above the camera came on. That was nothing new. This was my world, and I spent time here because there was nowhere else that I felt so comfortable.

  Even if you have just the one show, television demands that you work long days. Early mornings and late nights, script meetings and full rehearsals, too much coffee and not enough daylight. Sometimes I lost sight of why I worked so hard. And then I remembered.

  I worked hard for Pat, of course. For Cyd and Peggy too. Also for my mum, now that my dad had gone. And whatever my wife said, I couldn’t stop myself feeling that I was also working for my child. Not the little boy who lived with his mother, or the little girl who lived with me. My other child. The one who hadn’t been born yet.

  A young woman came into Marty’s office without knocking. She was one of several slim young redheads who worked at Mad Mann, women who looked a lot like Siobhan did when she was single. This one bent over Marty’s CEO-sized desk, rummaging in one of his drawers.

  ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ Marty smiled. ‘Lost your stapler?’

  ‘I need the pilot of Six Pissed Students in a Flat. For your Hungarians.’

  Marty pulled out a battered-looking VHS and gave it to her.

  ‘We’re selling the concept all over,’ he told me. ‘There’s going to be Six Pissed Chinese Students in a Flat, Six Pissed Polish Students in a Flat. The world is sporting a stiff one.’

  We watched the redhead go.

  ‘We’re going for a couple of drinks at the Merry Leper,’ Marty said. ‘Want to come, Harry? She’s got a friend.’

  ‘I’ve got to get home. There’s a bit of a party.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘Well, it’s a party for seven-year-old girls.’

  ‘Some other time then.’ Marty saw me to the door of his office. ‘Don’t forget what I said about keeping your eggs in more than one chicken.’

  ‘I’ll remember.’

  He embraced me.

  ‘You know the trouble with you, Harry?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You believe in true love.’ My old friend smiled sadly. ‘That stuff always ends in tears.’

  It should have been a happy moment.

  The four of us were eating cake. Cyd and me and Peggy and Pat. Our newly blended family, enjoying their pudding. But when Pat had finished wolfing down his cake, my son – at an age when he was highly amused by all bodily functions – accidentally let out a surprisingly resonant belch.

  ‘Ha!’ he said, grinning sheepishly. ‘Now that’s funny!’

  Peggy daintily dabbed her lips with a napkin. ‘No, actually, it’s not remotely funny, Pat. It’s just disgusting. Isn’t it, Mummy?’

  Cyd smiled at the pair of them. ‘It’s just – well, it’s not very nice. But I’m sure Pat’s not going to do it again.’

  ‘Well, I don’t find it funny,’ said Peggy, who for a little girl could already do a convincing impersonation of minor royalty.

  ‘And I’m sure a big boy like Pat doesn’t find it funny,’ said Cyd, ‘not when he thinks about it.’

  My son was devastated.

  I knew that the belch had just slipped out, and that he had only drawn attention to it because he was certain it would be a source of general hilarity and rejoicing. And for the first time, but not the last, I was torn. Torn between loyalty to my son and loyalty to my wife.

  To be honest, I didn’t particularly want him burping and farting and belching around me either – he could save the gas-orientated gags for his leering little friends at school, who would no doubt reward every windy emission with a standing ovation, and tears of helpless mirth, and much thigh-slapping. But when I saw his cheeks burning with humiliation and his eyes filling up with tears, I could feel my blood rising.

  He didn’t deserve to be shamed. Not for one lousy burp.

  ‘He’s only a kid,’ I said to Cyd. ‘What do you expect? Oscar Wilde? Let him eat his cake in peace, will you?’

  Peggy and Cyd stared at me. My wife said nothing, just sort of widened her beautiful eyes in surprise. But her daughter smirked knowingly.

  ‘Well, goodness me, somebody got out of sleep the wrong side today. May I please have some more cake, Mummy, please?’

  Cyd reached for the cake. It had a little bride and groom on top. Because this was at our wedding reception. We had been married for just under two hours. And although I didn’t realise it yet, the honeymoon was over.

  When my wife was still my girlfriend, she was wonderful with my son.

  Cyd would talk to him about school, ask his expert opinion on how The Phantom Menace compared with the first three Star Wars films, wonder if he would like some more ice cream.

  He grinned shyly at this tall stranger with the Texan accent, and I could tell he shared his old man’s feelings for this woman. He was nuts about her.

  Cyd acted like she had known him all his life, this little boy who she didn’t actually meet until he was ready to start school. She didn’t try to be his mother, because he already had a mother, and she didn’t try to be his best friend, because he soon had Bernie Cooper. She didn’t force her relationship with Pat – and that’s why it worked. It all seemed to come naturally to her. There was genuine warmth and real affection between them, and it was more than I could have hoped for.

  Cyd was as easy with Pat as she was with her own daughter, caring and sweet but not afraid to administer some gentle discipline when he got out of hand. Getting out of hand didn’t happen very often – Pat was an engaging, even-tempered boy of four when Cyd met him, and any infringements were mostly because he was overexcited about some Star Wars-related game. Bouncing on a sofa while wearing muddy trainers and brandishing his plastic light sabre. These were his most heinous crimes.

  And when she talked to my son, this girlfriend who would become my wife, when I heard the fondness in her voice, the warm, casual familiarity that she bestowed on him, I felt almost giddy with happiness and gratitude.

  But after we were married, I needed more than that. I knew it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair at all, but this need came from some secret chamber in my heart, and I just couldn’t deny it.

  From the moment we were pronounced man and wife, I needed her to love him.

  I came home to loud music, wild dancing and a house full of three-foot-high females in their party clothes. Peggy was eight years old today.

  The walls of her bedroom were covered in the moody images of the latest hunky, hairless boy bands, papering over the Pocahontas posters of a few years ago, and many of her games featured Brucie Doll – Lucy Doll’s official, moulded-plastic constant companion.

  But at all of Peggy’s social gatherings, the sexes were now separated by a strict apartheid. A couple of years ago Pat would have been invited to this party. Not any more.

  I picked my way across a living room full of little girls trying to move like Kylie Minogue in her latest video. There was a wrapped present from Hamleys under my arm. Peggy’s eyes widened with theatrical glee as I handed it over.

  ‘Happy birthday, darling.’

  She tore off the wrapper and gasped with wonder.

  ‘Lucy Doll Ballerina!’ she read, hungrily devouring the words on the pink cardboard box. ‘You’ll love her! Marvel at her elegance! Not suitable for children under three years of age! Small parts may pose a choking hazard! All rights reserved!’ Peggy threw her arms around my neck. ‘Thank you, Harry!’ She handed the doll back to me. ‘Make her dance! Make Lucy Doll dance to Kylie!’

  So I jigged around with Lucy Doll Ballerina for a bit. You couldn’t do much with her arms, they either stayed stiffly at her side or had to be raised into a vaguely Fascist salute, but she could do the sp
lits with alarming ease, her plastic pelvis as flexible as any porn star’s.

  Peggy snatched her back from me to show to one of her little friends.

  ‘Look at this, Agnes,’ she said. ‘Lucy Doll Ballerina. Small parts may cause choking! Fantastic.’

  Cyd was in the kitchen with the mothers. I don’t know what had happened to the fathers, but they were all somewhere else. My wife was covering a tray of tapas with clingfilm. She ran her own catering business, so our house was always full of food that someone else was going to eat. She came over and kissed me on the mouth. ‘Did you get her Ibiza DJ Brucie Doll?’

  ‘Sold out. No more Ibiza DJ Brucie Dolls until next week. So I got her Lucy Doll Ballerina instead.’

  ‘They’ve never got any of the Brucie Doll merchandise in stock,’ said one of the mothers. ‘It gets right on my tits.’

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t be encouraging the Lucy Doll thing,’ I said.

  The mothers all stared at me in silence. Most of them were a good few years older than Cyd. My wife became a parent when she was in her middle twenties. Like me. A lot of these mothers had left it until the biological clock was nearing midnight.

  ‘Why on earth not?’ one of them demanded in the tone of voice that had once frozen an entire boardroom of middle-aged male executives with bollock-shrivelling fear.

  ‘Well,’ I said, looking nervously at their disapproving faces. ‘Doesn’t the whole Lucy–Brucie thing reinforce unhealthy sexual stereotypes?’

  ‘I think Lucy Doll is a great role model,’ one of the mothers said.

  ‘Me too,’ said another mother. ‘She’s in a long-term relationship with Brucie Doll.’

  ‘She works,’ said yet another. ‘She has fun. She travels. She has lots of friends.’

  ‘She’s a musician, a dancer, a princess.’

  ‘She lives a very well-rounded and fulfilled life,’ said my wife. ‘I wish I could be Lucy Doll.’

  ‘But-but,’ I stammered, ‘doesn’t she dress like a bimbo? Just to please men? Isn’t she a bit of a tart?’

  The silence before the storm.

  ‘A bit of a tart?’

  ‘Lucy Doll?’

  ‘She’s in touch with her sexuality!’ they all said at once.

  I made my excuses and retreated to my study at the top of the house.

  There was something about the mothers that baffled me. They were all well-educated, intelligent women who had grown up reading their Germaine Greer and Naomi Wolf, women who had gone out into the world and made serious money from high-powered careers, often raising their children alone.

  But inside their Lucy Doll Playhouses, their little girls pretended to be women who were nothing like them. They cooked, cleaned and fretted about when Ibiza DJ Brucie Doll might deign to come home.

  Peggy and her friends, all these children born in the nineties, were confident, self-possessed little girls who spent what felt like every waking hour parodying old-fashioned female virtues. They loved fashion, adored dressing up, knew all about the singers and supermodels of the moment. They had an obsession with shoes that would have shamed Imelda Marcos. For hours on end, they preened, they posed, got lost in the mirror. They constantly practised putting on make-up – seven, eight years old and they were addicted to cosmetics, two years at school and already they put cheap creams and potions on their brand-new, perfect skin. They aspired to be all that their mothers had fled from. They dreamed of being fifties housewives. Perhaps that was why the mothers often seemed on the verge of losing their temper.

  My wife had the balance right. She was a great mother, but she also had this business that was really starting to take off. She could make money, make a home, and make it all seem like the most natural thing in the world.

  I was so proud of her.

  When I ventured back downstairs the mothers had all gone, and their children with them. Cyd and Peggy were plucking party streamers from the carpet.

  ‘Poor Harry,’ my wife laughed. ‘Did they give you a rough time?’

  Peggy looked up and smiled. ‘What’s wrong with Harry?’

  ‘He’s just not used to a world run by women,’ my wife said.

  It was true. For the first thirty years of my life I had lived in homes where males outnumbered females by two to one. First with my dad, my mum and me, then later with Gina and Pat. Now I was in the minority.

  Cyd held out hands that were covered in multi-coloured paper streamers.

  ‘Come on, handsome, dance with your two girls.’

  Sometimes my world felt like one of those warnings on a box – the bit about small parts causing choking.

  But when Cyd and Peggy and I danced to Kylie Minogue in the remains of the party, burst balloons and coloured streamers underfoot, bits of birthday cake trodden into the parquet floor, then we laughed out loud, laughed with pure, undiluted joy, laughed so much that we could hardly sing along to ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’.

  And for once my life seemed as well-rounded and fulfilled as the one lived by Lucy Doll herself.

  four

  My mother still slept with the lights on.

  In the house where she had spent most of her married life, where she was a young wife and mother, the house that had been her home for so long, she attempted to sleep at night with all the bedroom lights blazing.

  ‘I can’t seem to nod off, Harry. I lie there with my Hello! and Radio 2 on low – next door have got a new baby, did I tell you? She’s a little smasher – and as soon as I drop off, I wake up again. Funny, isn’t it? Isn’t it strange?’

  ‘It’s not strange at all, Mum. The reason you can’t sleep is because you’ve got a hundred-watt bulb burning right above your head. It’s a sleep deprivation technique. A form of torture.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that, love.’

  ‘Of course you can’t sleep. You can’t sleep because you don’t turn your light off. Can’t you try sleeping with the light off? Can’t you try it just once, Mum? Please?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ she said, smoothing my son’s golden bell of hair as he sat on the floor between us, consulting the TV listings in the Radio Times. ‘I couldn’t lie there all night in the dark. Not without your dad.’

  My father had been dead for two years.

  It was already two years since my father lay in that hospital bed, his brain fogged by pain and the killers of pain, the sickness overwhelming him. And I thought that the old man’s lung cancer would surely kill both of them. I didn’t think that my mother could live without my father. But they were tougher than they looked, women like my mum, those forever wives, the dutiful homemakers whose one act of rebellion was wearing miniskirts for a brief period as the sixties became the seventies. Women like my mum were built to survive anything. Even their hard man husbands. She couldn’t sleep without leaving the lights on, it was true. But she could live without him. She had proved that by now.

  My parents had seemed like one living organism for so long – Paddy and Elizabeth, who made the long journey from teenage sweethearts to doting grandparents, the grand tour that so few married couples still get to make – and I could never imagine one of them without the other.

  I knew that my father couldn’t live without my mother. Her going first would have killed him, it would have robbed him of his main reason for living. And I always assumed that she could not survive without him.

  I was wrong.

  My mother was from the last generation of women who expected to be taken care of by the men they married. She saw nothing strange in letting my dad do the driving, make the money, sit in the big chair, coming back from work and scoffing his dinner – his ‘tea’ – like a tribal chieftain home from the wars.

  But in old age, in widowhood, it turned out that my mum’s generation of women had an independent streak that they were never given credit for. All those housewives from the fifties and sixties, all those brides of austerity, the last generation of women who made clothes for their children – inside their sen
sible pastel-coloured cardigans, they were made of steel.

  My mum didn’t die. My dad’s death didn’t kill her. She refused to let his death be her death too.

  She saw her friends for coffee and cake, exchanged gossip with a floating social forum known simply as ‘the girls on the bus’, she knitted chunky jumpers for the neighbour’s baby, the little smasher next door – my mum thought that all babies were little smashers – she played Dolly Parton at full volume on her Sony mini stereo system.

  ‘Lovely voice,’ she said of Dolly Parton. ‘Lovely figure.’

  She called her pack of brothers every day – it was almost impossible to reach her on the phone, she was always engaged – she fretted about their jobs, their children, their health.

  My mum was living without my father, the man she built her world around. She was living her life without him. That seemed incredible to me. And, I suspected, to her too.

  My dad’s death had left her maddened with grief. She cried in supermarkets, on the bus, at all the wrong times. She couldn’t help herself. She cried until the tears were all gone. But she coped. More than that, she learned to engage with life, to fend for herself, to laugh again.

  ‘I’m not dead yet,’ she was fond of pointing out.

  Apart from the lights burning all night long – what did she think would happen to her in the darkness? – my mum carried on. Not as normal, because normal was gone now, but in a world that had changed, a world without her beloved Paddy. And she did it because my mother was a woman who didn’t just love my father. She loved people. All kinds of people.

  The young neighbours and their new baby. The old woman on the other side, my Auntie Ethel, who wasn’t really my auntie at all, who was a young wife and mother with my mum, more than half a lifetime ago.

  She loved those old friends who met her in the new Starbucks in the high street of the suburban town where she had made a life. And her family. All her brothers, their numbers only now starting to dwindle. The women they married. Their grown-up children, now with children of their own. And then there was me, her only child.