The Complete Man and Boy Trilogy: Man and Boy, Man and Wife, Men From the Boys

So after the crowds were starting to thin out, just when all the young mums had gone and the worst was over and I didn’t actually mind standing at the school gates any more, we went into the front office and I told the secretary that Peggy was coming home with us.

Delighted at their unexpected chance to hang out together, Pat and Peggy squealed with delight as they crammed their little bodies into the front seat of the MGF. And I found myself making an effort not to cry, which was something I found myself doing every once in a while at those school gates. I felt sorry for Peggy, just as I felt sorry for Pat. We mess up our lives, and it is these forlorn little figures who pick up the bill.

Now I looked at her playing quietly on the floor, ignored even by Pat as he listened to Sally’s brutal songs, the bells of the ding-dong man starting to fade away, and I felt a knot of regret and shame in my heart.

‘Do you want an ice cream?’ I asked her, feeling about as inadequate as I had ever felt in my life, feeling that I owed her some sort of apology.

Sorry about the collapse of the modern marriage, Peggy. Sorry that adults these days are so self-centred and dumb that we can’t even manage to bring up our own children. Sorry that the world is so messed up that we think about our sons and our daughters about as deeply as the average barnyard animal.

But how about a Cornetto?

I was paying the ice-cream man for three 99s when Cyd came around the corner.

‘You want a 99?’ I asked her.

‘What’s a 99?’

‘One of these,’ I said. ‘A cornet with a chocolate flake stuck in it. They’re great.’

‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll keep a few teeth for dinner. How you doing?’

‘I’m okay,’ I said, leaning forward and kissing her on the mouth. She didn’t make much of an attempt to kiss me back. ‘I thought you were at work.’

‘I got a call to come and pick up Peggy,’ she said. ‘Bianca couldn’t make it. Sorry about that.’

I stared at her for a moment, unable to work out how these two worlds were connected.

‘You know Peggy?’ I said.

She shook her head. I didn’t get it, did I?

‘She’s my daughter, Harry.’

We were standing outside the front door of my house.

She looked at me with those wide-set brown eyes. Waiting.

‘Peggy’s your daughter?’

‘I was going to tell you,’ she said. ‘Honest.’ She gave a little laugh that said she knew it wasn’t all that funny. ‘I was just waiting for the right time. That’s all.’

‘The right time? Why didn’t you tell me straightaway? Why wasn’t that the right time?’

‘I’ll explain later.’

‘Explain now.’

‘Okay,’ she said, pulling the front door so that it was almost closed. So the kids couldn’t hear us. Our kids. ‘Because I don’t want my daughter to meet strange men who might be out of my life very soon.’

‘You don’t want her to meet strange men? What are you going on about, Cyd? I’m not a strange man. She spends more time in this house than she does anywhere. Peggy knows me already.’

‘She knows you as Pat’s dad. She doesn’t know you as my – well. What are you, Harry? I guess you’re my boyfriend, aren’t you? She doesn’t know you as my boyfriend. And I don’t want her to meet a boyfriend until I’ve been seeing him for a while. Okay?’

This didn’t make any kind of sense to me. A blob of ice cream dropped on to my hand.

‘But she had dinner here almost every night last week!’ I said. ‘She sees more of me than she does of that feckless bastard you married!’

‘You don’t know him.’

I loved that.

‘Oh – good guy, is he?’

‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want her to grow up believing that every man is going to disappear the way her father disappeared. I don’t want her finding strange men in my bed – and you are strange. In that way, you are, Harry. I don’t want a strange man there when she wakes up. I don’t want her thinking that it doesn’t mean anything. And I don’t want her getting attached to someone who might not be around that long.’

She was trying to be calm, but her voice was choking up a bit now and I felt like putting my arms around her. Which would have been very messy, as I was still holding three melting 99s.

‘Because I don’t want her getting more hurt than she has been already,’ she said. ‘I don’t want her to give her little heart to someone and then he casually breaks it. Okay, Harry? Okay?’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay.’

She blinked hard, tightening her mouth. I cleaned the ice cream from my hands. Then we went inside and I realised that nothing is extraordinary to a child.

Maybe when you are a kid life is still so full of wonder that there can be no real surprises, because almost everything is a surprise. Or perhaps children just adapt faster than adults. Either way, Peggy and Pat didn’t faint with shock when Cyd walked into the house.

‘Mommy,’ Peggy said, and I thought – of course. Now I knew where I had seen those eyes before.

Cyd sat down on the floor and listened to her daughter explaining the domestic set-up on the Millennium Falcon. She took the headphones from my son and listened to a song he liked. Then, after we had all finished our ice creams, she told Peggy that it was time to go home.

‘I’ll call you,’ I said.

‘If you want to,’ she said. ‘I know this must be a bit of a shock.’

‘You crazy or what? Of course I want to.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure,’ I said, touching her arm. ‘This doesn’t change anything.’

It changed everything.

Twenty-Five (#ulink_becfca13-1263-590a-95b3-8e47dfc475b3)

‘Did you make love to the make-up girl?’ I asked Eamon.

He looked at me in his dressing-room mirror and I caught a flash of something passing across his face. Fear maybe. Or anger. Then it was gone.

‘What’s that?’ he said.