Man and Wife

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 splits 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.