The Boys Are Back

by Simon Carr

  Certainly the Cinderella thing is real, very real, and real enough to be frightening to both sexes. After protestations of love, you marry, you have more children and within a year your boys are packed off to boarding school. You have to be mindful of the expression: ‘It doesn’t matter much whom you marry because it always turns out to be someone else.’

  So now, with these new priorities, it turns out that I have to run my relationships in a way that ensures my boys will stay under my protection. In love, in marriage, a man’s first loyalty is to his lover, his spouse. In solo parenthood your first loyalty is to your children. And that has meant attempting the most extraordinary experiment.

  Until I lived without women it never occurred to me to tell them the truth. As a man, my conditioning has required me to be nice, to shield the woman from nastiness, indifference or unflattering data streams. That’s what a lot of men do. That’s why we slide around direct questions, evade and avoid. We reassure, we support. Rather than criticise we retreat into silence. We get easily manoeuvred by all those trick questions women ask: ‘Can I wear shorts with legs like mine? Did I sound stupid at the party? Have I got too much blusher on? Is my hair awful? Does this lump put you off? Are my feet ugly? Did I say the wrong thing? I can sing in tune all right, can’t I? I wasn’t rude to Debbie, was I? Does your mother like me? How do I look? Do you love me? Does this make me look fat?’

  It doesn’t matter what the facts are, or what the truth is, or however much your lover, your wife, your partner, your girlfriend demands you be honest, there’s only one answer to these questions.

  In the latter part of our marriage Susie asked me whether I liked the dress she was wearing: ‘Do you think I can get away with this?’

  ‘Well, darling, I like everything you wear, as you know, but that dress is a bit – how can I say? I don’t think I could put my hand on my heart and say I liked it.’

  ‘Why not?’ she enquired. ‘Why don’t you like it? You do, actually, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, in principle, yes, but now that I see it on, in practice, I have to say, not as such.’

  ‘No, but you do really, though, you do. Why are you saying you don’t like it?’

  ‘Well, only because you asked what I thought of it.’

  ‘But why don’t you tell me you like it? You do like it and I don’t understand why you’re saying you don’t. Tell me you like it.’

  ‘Well, I could, but it wouldn’t be the case.’

  ‘Don’t be perverse. I know you like it.’

  This went on for a while until I said, ‘Okay, I’ll tell you I like the dress, but only on the understanding that you know I won’t be telling the truth, right?’

  ‘Just tell me what you think of my dress!’ She wasn’t joking in any of this.

  ‘Darling, that dress you’ve got, I think it’s fantastic. I really like it.’

  ‘At last!’ she said quite indignantly. ‘Thank you!’

  But then, years afterwards, in sexual solitude, I discovered a place to stand. There came a time after the quarantine when I had a girlfriend again and, as she lay with her face in the pillow, she asked me the crucial question: ‘Do you think I’ve got a big butt?’

  In that intimate moment I hesitated between two paths and chose the life-changing route. I said quite firmly, ‘Yes.’ After a shocked pause, she laughed – and laughed in such a way that made me think I’d blundered into a deep secret. It was the case that she had a fabulously developed posterior; quite unignorably large. And the tone of her rueful laughter hinted to me that she wasn’t asking this big-butt question for reassurance, but to see how much reality I would deny in order to show how deep my feelings for her were.

  After much practice, I can now sense the difference between requests for reassurance and these other more political questions, the ones that observe you coolly from an intimate angle, the ones that ask you how much reality you are prepared to deny, how far off your base you are prepared to go. Now I have markers I mustn’t go beyond; my first loyalty must be for some years yet to my sons. And for that reason I find myself looking at questions with what must seem a rather shocking objectivity.

  These sudden, obdurate eruptions of the truth came to add an interesting new dimension to my relationships with women. I was shocked at how positive the outcomes were. ‘The truth’, they said, ‘shall set you free.’ That really was wholly unexpected.

  That long, hot summer the New Zealand economy followed the Asian markets down. My artist friend Angie came round to continue our search for the meaning of life (it may have had something to do with her hair, which flared mysteriously when the sun was behind it). Her hair, or maybe her smile. Her hair, her smile or her riding jodhpurs, we never really solved it, but never tired of trying. She painted, I wrote my stupid novel, we ventured into unexplored territory, there, halfway down the gulley, among the covering trees. The cicadas sang loud and long. The garden grew huge, peculiar blooms, in subtropical reds and psychedelic greens.

  Alexander tolerated this new relationship with sullen reserve. He used to complain about Angie’s sweet blonde daughter. That she bossed him. That she followed him around, bossing. Then, one day, we came down the drive and saw the sporty red car, and he burst into tears. Angie said: ‘He’s not upset because of Chantal. It’s you he wants. You are his territory. His property. Anyone coming close to you is going to have him to deal with. Anyone who threatens his position will be his enemy.’

  I told Alexander that I wouldn’t give up Angie on his account. He gave me a look which said, ‘We’ll see.’

  Did we see? We never finally tested it. Because our life was interrupted by an accident, a life-changing accident – it was the most unexpected thing and had shattering consequences. I had my forty-fifth birthday. No one had warned me this would happen. I didn’t know what to do. Panic, age and ambition spliced together into an awful new reality. I was forty-five and didn’t have enough money.

  There was one solace: I discovered the idea of a man’s prime. A man’s prime occurs, doesn’t it, in his middle forties? Since that discovery I’ve got rather older and it is obvious, now, that a man’s prime starts in his early fifties. But at least it’s something to look forward to.

  At any rate it was clear that I couldn’t spend my prime in New Zealand. That year I’d written three best-sellers under different names and I was still just treading water. It wasn’t inevitable that I could write three best-sellers every year for the next twenty years. Somehow I had to get us all out of New Zealand and into a larger market, where I might find one of those elusive breaks you hear about.

  But first there was a serious problem: Hugo still didn’t want to come.

  Hugo’s clever and that presents problems of itself. There is a rivalry, covert or otherwise, that surfaces between us; we’re stags, after all. We’d circle each other, reluctant to agree.

  I had been telling him about the different educational standards in the world: England was higher than New Zealand, (and Germany and Japan were higher again). He was treating this as northern hemisphere chauvinism. It wasn’t clear to him at all that educational standards could be that much higher anywhere in a globalising world.

  But then we went on a summer break down to a beach settlement, to a community of shacks and railway carriages hidden in the manuka scrub. It was a refuge from the world. A broad tidal basin fills at high tide and the surrounding hills are dense with original forests. To get there, you take off from the capital in a tiny plane piloted by a man in shorts and flip-flop sandals, and land an hour later on a grass landing strip on the edge of nowhere.

  It was there that Hugo saw the world differently. On that first night, Simon’s and Mary’s son, a year younger than Hugo, said something that turned his head around. It was something that created an insight into the world’s inequalities and persuaded him to leave his country for the other side of the world. Our lives were changed for ever by Jeremy saying: ‘Mummy, did the Copernican world-view come before or after Galileo?�
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  Copernican? Galileo? What’s a world-view, anyway? And what’s it got to do with astronomy?

  ‘Okay,’ Hugo said later that night, ‘If you want to go to England I’ll come.’

  I had to sell up. The project was fanciful until the house was sold. The market had given up sliding and started slumping. Buyers were walking around town with a remote and contemptuous expression on their faces. I could have sold Seaview Road, probably – quality always holds up – but this cottage in the trees, at the bottom of a ski-slope drive, was eccentric. You should never sell an eccentric house during a recession. We nearly didn’t sell it, in fact, because when we put it to auction the only bid came from the auctioneer.

  Eventually, a family of miserable, pinch-faced, grey-shod bargain hunters took the house at a hundred thousand dollars less than I’d bought it for. There was one upside to the sale, but only one: their child fell down the stairs as they were looking around.

  But it was a sale. Now, if we never looked back we’d never regret it.

  The day after the sale I looked at my List of Things to Do. Book tickets. Decide where to live. Find schools for the boys. Find a house to rent on the other side of the world. That took a whole morning. The theory was that we’d live in Oxford, where the schools were good. Flights were booked for the end of term. Hugo could go to a tutorial college, Alexander to the state school full of academics’ children. An agency reserved us a six-month let of a town house in central north Oxford. It would do while we settled. Angie would come over as well and live in Oxford too. Or possibly in France. Later in the year, perhaps, or maybe the following spring.

  We flew out with brutal suddenness. The house was only half packed-up; the packers were left to finish that job with only one instruction: ‘Put everything into containers – except the freezer under the house.’ Hugo walked out with all his clothes and most of his possessions in a squash bag (packing time: eight minutes, even I was impressed).

  And Angie sat in the upstairs room, stunned, really, looking at her hands; the afternoon light from the thin winter sun formed a halo round her marvellous hair.

  So we landed in England to start again, again.

  Part three

  England

  It’s always a shock coming back to England. Everything had changed in seven years. No one was interested in politics any more; the class war seemed to be over (a score draw). Estuarial English had replaced RP. The weather was better and the economy had recovered. Everyone seemed happier and more polite. Except for the yob in the car who got very angry about my throwing him a V-sign: ‘I’ve got my muvver in the car, you fucker!’ he screamed.

  ‘I don’t like England,’ Alexander said. ‘It’s too old. The houses are too old. The streets are too narrow, and there aren’t any water slides, and there isn’t a bowling alley, and there aren’t any hot springs. It’s not like New Zealand.’

  That was true. You couldn’t argue with that. There were no volcanoes in Oxford, no ultramarine gulf with low, green islands. The nearest bowling alley was in Aylesbury. The nearest water slides were in Swindon. And Angie kept on not leaving New Zealand to live in France. All I had of her was videotape, which I watched at night, when the boys were in bed.

  No, the first thing we did after we landed in England was to start missing New Zealand. On the other side of the world you find out why it’s called the Antipodes. In England’s constricted suburban semis, which cower like coal scuttles under a scab of a sky, you look wistfully to the other side of the world, to the big, welcoming houses with their inexhaustible fridges, the endless skies, the gangs of sun-blond children running across lawns and through the shrubberies. Whenever you go to one country you miss the other.

  That had been my problem for twenty years – and now it’s the boys’.

  Berkeley Homes in Oxford build middle-class estates in the style of Late Lego, one of which we had rented, sight unseen. We drove into the complex, past the faux-Edwardian semis, then past the faux-Georgian crescent down to the faux-slum skimpies at the back of the estate. Craggy Range, our house in Hawke’s Bay, had been really quite big. Seaview Road had been smaller but more idyllic, in a Peter Pan way. Basset Road had been smaller still but fairy tale. But this box of bricks was a modern hovel. This was a crushing re-entry, this unfurnished town house.

  ‘I never say “I told you so”, do I? Admit that.’

  ‘You never said “I told you so”, darling. You were heroic like that.’

  ‘But remember I said you shouldn’t sell the house in Craggy Range? Remember I said you shouldn’t sell Seaview Road? Can you imagine selling Seaview Road if you knew you were going to end up here.’

  ‘Well, no one said we were going to end up here. It’s a stepping stone.’

  ‘It’s a dump. More of a dump than anywhere you’ve ever lived.’

  ‘Oh, you never saw where I lived before I met you: I’ve slept on a camp bed in the office. I’ve lived in a shack under the motorway on a set of bed springs with carpet for a mattress and a blanket. The same carpet folded over!’

  ‘Stop boasting. And you’re all sleeping on the floor here; you haven’t even got bed springs.’

  ‘We’re going to buy air beds, until the furniture arrives.’

  ‘That won’t be here for another three months.’

  ‘Fiona’s lent us some of her furniture out of her flat.’

  ‘That’s nice of her.’

  ‘We’ll be all right. We’ll manage. The lease is only for six months.’

  The boys did everything they could to take a positive view. They admired the door furniture and the bathroom fittings. There was an extractor fan – we’d never had an extractor fan. But in the event we lasted six weeks in that mistake of mine. When I was wandering down St Giles, I saw a house for rent at very little more than we were paying. A Victorian semi with wisteria round the door. Wisteria! It was like a home.

  Southmoor Road is the most intellectual street in Oxford, possibly even in the world. You can tell by the gardens that these are people who live a life of the mind: academics, lecturers, poets, teachers, novelists, economists, political commentators. I was once seen with a copy of the Daily Telegraph. The combination of that and Hugo being at a fee-paying school made us look like illegal aliens.

  It didn’t help that we had once lived, however briefly, in the development on the other side of the canal. Southmoor Road has a particular relationship with this estate that had cut off their five-thousand-yard view. From the gardens of the canal side you had been able to see straight across the grasslands of Port Meadow to the Thames and further, up to Wytham Hill where the sun went down. Now Southmoor’s view extended fifty feet from the bottom of the gardens, to a brick wall that enclosed the compound (which was called, in a marketing sort of way, Waterside). It’s true we’d only lasted six weeks there, but it felt like very much more.

  The developers haven’t overhauled the area entirely, but they’re working on it. There remains, at the time of writing, a good deal of rough ground in the west side of central north Oxford: overgrown orchards and allotments, reed beds and railways land that has run wild with small trees. It’s oddly out-of-time and, in several respects, very similar to my parents’ house in Milton Road, forty years before – a remarkable thing in a popular, overpopulated area like modern Oxford. But the bulldozers are moving in even now and whole tracts are being cleared for town houses, right in my own backyard (you wouldn’t like that).

  Port Meadow is the oldest enclosed space in Britain and mentioned in the Domesday Book. I bought bicycles that summer and after dinner we went cycling round the towpaths in the evening light. We had five hundred acres of grazing land at our disposal with a Bronze Age circle (very uninteresting for boys). We could bike up the towpath to the Perch, past Binsey poplars (replanted after Gerard Manley Hopkins’s famous poem, also very boring for boys) and on to the Trout (the weir, peacocks, trout substitutes). The other way, downstream, we met the Oxford canal, almost at the station. Then we cou
ld ride that towpath north, admiring the houses in the gloaming, with gardens coming down to the water, knowing we’d never be able to buy one. It was an idealised Swallows and Amazons world down there, tumbledown sheds in overgrown gardens; little boathouses, some huge trees, moored rowboats, Wendy houses, garden sheds with little Gothic windows. Fishermen said that very big fish sat on the bottom, down there in the thick, dark water. It’s hard to say how much I wanted a house like that, on the canal, with a boat at the bottom of the garden that you could row and motor down through the locks to Abingdon, to go for picnics up past the ring road.

  The house we had was on the wrong side of Southmoor Road. There was no canal, the garden faced away from the evening sun and when we moved in, it played a very bad trick on us. It got smaller. The kitchen was a rear extension, but only one room wide. Our dinners were cramped in round a table and we couldn’t watch all television at the same time.

  We had a house. We had each other. We had a dwindling pile of capital. We were thrown together on our own resources.

  Now, it so happened that three hundred yards up the road there lived a friend of mine. When I’d seen her last, twenty-five years before, she’d been small, French, wifely. She wasn’t wifely now, having been divorced for a decade and making her own way in the world. She had brought up three children, put them through private school and one through med school. To pay for it all she had started and run a business – a towering character, even without her high heels.

  When I mentioned her in a transworld phone conversation with Angie she said: ‘Ah! She’ll get you.’ And whatever my protests, Angie just laughed.