‘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.
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 sensible 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