Читать книгу The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys - Tony Parsons - Страница 37

Auntie Ethel was on her knees in her front garden, planting spring bulbs for next year.

Auntie Ethel wasn’t my real auntie but I had called her Auntie Ethel ever since we had moved in next door to her when I was five years old, and the habit had proved hard to break.

Auntie Ethel straightened up, squinting over her lawn mower at Cyd and Peggy and Pat and me as we climbed out of Cyd’s old VW Beetle, and for a moment I felt as though I were a little kid again, asking Auntie Ethel if I could have my ball back.

‘Harry? Is that you, Harry?’

‘Hello, Auntie Ethel,’ I said. ‘What are you planting there?’

‘Tulips, daffodils, hyacinths. And is that your Pat? I don’t believe it! Hasn’t he grown? Hello, Pat!’

Pat half-heartedly saluted her with his light sabre. We had never been able to persuade him to address Auntie Ethel by her proper title, and he clearly wasn’t going to start now. Auntie Ethel turned her attention to Peggy, a cloud of confusion drifting across her familiar old face.

‘And this little girl…’

‘This one’s mine,’ Cyd said. ‘Hi, Auntie Ethel. I’m Cyd. Harry’s friend. How you doing?’

‘Like Sid James?’

‘Like Cyd Charisse.’

Auntie Ethel’s eyes twinkled behind her glasses.

‘The dancer,’ she said. ‘With Fred Astaire in Silk Stockings. A good pair of legs.’ Auntie Ethel sized Cyd up. ‘Just like you!’

‘I like your Auntie Ethel,’ Cyd whispered, taking my arm as we came up the drive. Then I felt her grip tighten. ‘Oh God – that looks like your mother.’

My mum was standing at the door, all smiles, and Pat ran to meet her.

‘Happy birthday!’ she cried, sweeping him up in her arms. ‘Five years old! Aren’t you a big boy – ouch!’ Still holding him under one arm, she pushed his Jedi weapon away with her free hand. ‘Blooming light saver,’ she laughed, looking down at Peggy. ‘You must be Peggy. You haven’t got a light saver too, have you?’

‘No, I don’t like Star Wars very much. I just play it because he likes it.’

‘It’s a boys’ game, isn’t it?’ my mum said, never much of a one for breaking down traditional gender stereotypes.

Peggy followed Pat into the house and my mum smiled at Cyd, who was holding back, half a step behind me, still gripping my arm. I had never seen her looking shy before. My mum grabbed her and kissed her on the cheek.

‘And you must be Cyd. Come in, dear, and make yourself at home.’

‘Thank you,’ Cyd said.

Cyd went into the house where I had grown up and my mum gave me a quick smile behind her back, lifting her eyebrows like a surprised lady in one of those old saucy seaside postcards.

It had been quite a while, but I had brought home enough girls to know what that look meant.

It meant that Cyd was what my mum would call a smasher.

And in the back garden was what my mum would call quite a spread.

The kitchen table had been carried out the back and covered with a paper tablecloth splattered with images of party balloons, exploding champagne bottles and laughing rabbits.

The table had been loaded with bowls of crisps, nuts and little bright orange cheesy things, plates of sandwiches with their crusts cut off, trays of mini sausage rolls and six individual little paper dishes containing jelly and tinned fruit. In the centre of this feast was a birthday cake in the shape of Darth Vader’s helmet, with five candles.

When we were all seated around the table and had sung a few renditions of, ‘Happy birthday, dear Pat,’ my dad offered around the mini sausage rolls, looking at me shrewdly.

‘Bet you had a job all getting into that little sports car,’ he said.

From the living room I could hear one of his favourite albums on the stereo. It was the end of side two of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, Frank breezing his way through Cole Porter’s ‘Anything Goes’.

‘We didn’t come out in the MGF, Dad,’ I said. ‘We came in Cyd’s car.’

‘Completely impractical, a car like that,’ he continued, ignoring me. ‘Nowhere for the children, is there? A man has to think of those things when he buys a motor. Or he should do.’

‘My daddy’s got a motorbike,’ Peggy told him.

My father stared at her, chewing a mini sausage roll, lost for words. Her daddy? A motorbike?

‘That’s nice, dear,’ my mum said.

‘And a Thai girlfriend.’

‘Lovely!’

‘Her name’s Mem.’

‘What a pretty name.’

‘Mem’s a dancer.’

‘Goodness.’

We all watched in silence, waiting for further revelations, as Peggy lifted open her sandwich and examined the contents. The further revelations didn’t come. Peggy closed her sandwich and shoved it in her mouth.

I crunched my way through some bright orange cheesy things, feeling depressed.

My parents were trying as hard as they could. But this tiny little girl already had another life that they would never and could never be a part of. The all-consuming delight that they felt for their grandchild could never be felt for little Peggy. That kind of unconditional love was already impossible. She would always be too much of a stranger. I felt for them. And for Peggy too.

‘Mem’s not really a dancer,’ Cyd said, watching my face, reading my mind. ‘She’s more of a stripper.’

My old man coughed up a piece of barbecue-flavoured crisp.

‘Bit went down the wrong hole,’ he explained.

My mum turned to Cyd with a bright smile. ‘Jelly?’ she said.

Once we had Mem’s job description out of the way, the party settled down. And my parents liked Cyd. I could tell that they liked her a lot.

There were minefields to be negotiated – my dad had this thing about single mothers subsidised by the state and my mum had this thing about working mothers – but Cyd skipped through them without spilling her jelly.

‘The state can never take the place of a parent, Mr Silver – and it shouldn’t try.’

‘Call me Paddy, love,’ my dad said.

‘Some women have to work, Mrs Silver – but that doesn’t mean their children don’t come first.’

‘Call me Elizabeth, dear,’ my mum said.

She talked to Paddy and Elizabeth about all the things they wanted to talk about – the kind of films that a five-year-old should be allowed to watch with my mum, the right time to remove the stabilisers on a child’s bike with my dad.

And she made all the right noises – admiring my mum’s sausage rolls (‘Home-made they are, dear, I’ll give you the recipe if you like’) and my dad’s garden (‘Harry’s never been interested in gardens – I can’t understand that attitude myself’).

But Cyd wasn’t some little local girl who I had danced with a couple of times in a suburban club, one of the Kims and Kellys who I had brought home all the time until the day I brought home Gina.

Cyd was visibly a woman with a past – meaning a past that contained marriage, pregnancy and divorce, although not necessarily in that order. And it felt like the only way my parents could deal with that past was by ignoring it.

Their conversation lurched between her childhood in Houston to the present day in London, as if everything in between had been withdrawn by censors.

‘Texas, you say?’ my dad said. ‘Never been to Texas myself. But I met a few Texans in the war.’ He leaned towards her conspiratorially. ‘Good card players, Texans.’

‘It must be lovely having sisters,’ my mum said. ‘I had six brothers. Can you imagine that? Six brothers! Some women don’t like watching football and boxing on the telly. But it never bothered me. Because I had six brothers.’

But Cyd’s broken marriage was always there waiting to be confronted. In the end, Cyd dealt with it as casually as if it were just a stale sausage roll that had to be found and cast aside. She had never seemed more American.

‘My family is like your family,’ she said to my mother. ‘Very close. I only came over here because Jim – that’s Peggy’s father – is English. That didn’t work out, but somehow I never made it back. Now I’ve met your son, I’m glad I didn’t.’

And that was it.

My mum looked at us as if we were Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw in Love Story. Even my dad seemed to be brushing away a tear from his eye. Then I realised it was just a crumb from a mini sausage roll.

By the time Pat had blown out his five candles and we had cut the cake, my parents were acting as if they had known Cyd and Peggy all their lives.

If they were put out by the fact that the girl of my dreams had chosen someone else to share her dreams with before me, then they were pretty good at hiding it. This should have pleased me 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.