Man and boy

'Thank you,' she said, that beautifully behaved little girl. Then Cyd was behind her, a stack of paperbacks in her arms.

'Look what Harry brought me,' Peggy said. 'Disco Ken. I've been looking for him.'

Cyd told her to go up to her room and make sure she wasn't leaving anything behind. Peggy left the stuffed toy the size of a fridge on the pavement and disappeared into the house still clutching Disco Ken. 'How about you?' I said. 'You left anything behind?' 'No,' she said. 'I think I've got just about everything.'

The two removal guys brushed past us on their way back into the house.

'Moving without telling me?' I said. 'Some friend you turned out to be.'

'I was going to tell you. It's just - I don't know - it's easier this way. For everybody.' T looked for you at the cafe.' 'I quit.' 'So they told me.' 'We're moving across town. To Notting Hill.' 'West London?'

'Christ, don't look so shocked, Harry. I'm an American. Moving from one side of a city to another isn't quite as traumatic for me as it would be for you. Listen, I'm sorry but I'm really busy. What do you want? I can't believe that you came here just to bring back Disco Ken.'

'Disco Ken was part of it,' I said. 'But also I wanted to tell you that you're wrong.' 'About what?' 'About us. You're wrong about us. If we split up, then it's the end of the world.' 'Oh, Harry.'

'It's true. I know you don't believe in the one, the one person for someone in the whole world, but I do. You make me believe it, Cyd. And anyway, it doesn't matter what we believe. It's good between us. It works. And I've been thinking about it. There's not one more chance for me to get it right - you're it, you're my last chance for happiness, and even if there was another chance, I wouldn't want it. As Olivia Newton John said to John Travolta, you're the one that I want.' 'Wasn't it the other way round? Didn't John Travolta say it to Olivia Newton John?' 'Possibly.'

'Harry,' she said. 'There's something you have to know. I'm getting back with Peggy's dad. Jim and I are going to give it another go.' I stared at her as the removal men carried a sofabed between us. 'Nearly done,' one of them said. They went back inside the house. 'Sorry,' she told me. 'But do you love him?' I said. 'He's the father of my little girl.' 'But do you love him?'

'Come on, Harry, you're the one who's always agonising about the break-up of the family. You're the one who is always complaining about how hard it is to compete with blood, about all the messy, broken bits of what you call the lousy modern world. You should be pleased for me. You should wish me well.'

'But you have to love him, Cyd. None of it means a thing if you don't love him. Do you love him?' 'Yes. Okay? I love him. I never stopped loving him. And I want to give it a shot because he's given up his girlfriend, the Thai stripper, and he promises me that's all out of his system. The whole bamboo thing.' 'She's not a stripper. She's a lap dancer.'

'Whatever,' she said. 'But Peggy's thrilled that we're giving it another go. So even if you hate me, you should be pleased for her.' T don't hate you. I could never hate you.' 'Then please wish me well.'

T wish you well,' I said, and I even sort of meant it. She deserved to be happy. So did Peggy. I kissed her quickly on the cheek. 'Just don't tell me I don't know you, okay?'

I let them get on with their moving. Anything I said now would have sounded empty and selfish, as if they were just weasel words designed to get her to come back to me.

Yet as she prepared to go back to her husband, at last I saw the limits of the nuclear family. Now I realised that dad and mum and the kids is all very well.

But if you don't love each other, you might as well be shacked up with Disco Ken. 'We've had a response from the other side,' Nigel Batty said. 'Your ex-wife says that she remained faithful to you throughout the duration of your marriage but that you committed adultery with a colleague from work.'

'Well, that's true,' I said. 'But it was just a one-night stand. I'm not saying it's nothing, but -'

'She also alleges that your son received a severe head injury while in your care.'

'What does that mean? That sounds like I'beat him up or something. He fell, okay? There was an accident in the local park. He fell into an empty swimming pool and split his head open. And maybe I could have done more. Maybe I should have been watching him more closely. Does she honestly believe that hasn't crossed my mind again and again and again? But at least I was there for him. She was eating tempura with her boyfriend in Tokyo.' The solicitor peered closely at the papers on his desk.

'And she seems to believe that you're not exercising proper parental control over what your son watches or listens to.' 'That's just crazy.'

'He's allowed to watch violent films unsupervised, she suggests. Videos with adult themes. And she says that on her last access visit she discovered that he had in his possession a music tape containing songs of a profane and adult nature.' I could feel my face reddening with anger. 'That fucking… fucking

I couldn't find the word. There was no word strong enough.

Nigel Batty laughed out loud, as though I were finally starting to understand. thirty-four 'Can I see the medal?' I asked. 'Of course you can,' my mother said.

She went to the cabinet where the stereo sat, and I could hear her shuffling through insurance documents, bank statements, letters, all the paperwork of a lifetime.

She came back with a small rectangular box which was coloured somewhere beyond claret, but not quite black. Inside, there was a silver medal, not that clean, resting on purple velvet. My father's medal.

The medal's ribbon was blue and white, two broad vertical white stripes with one thin vertical white stripe between them dissecting a blue background. 'For Distinguished Service,' it said on the medal, next to the image of the head of the King.

In the top of the box the maker's name was inscribed on white silk - 'By Appointment,' it said above the Royal Warrant, 'J. R. Gaunt amp; Son Ltd, 60 Conduit Street, London.' And I remembered how, as a child, the name of that company - did it still exist? would it be there if I looked for it? - had seemed like another part of the citation.

I gently took it out, as surprised by the weight of my father's DSM at thirty as I had been as a boy.

'Pat used to love playing with Dad's medal,' my mother laughed. 'You let Pat play with this?' I said, incredulous. 'He liked pinning it on me,' she smiled. 'I had to be Princess Layla at the end of that film.' 'Leia, Mum. She's Princess Leia.'

It was just past the middle of the night, and we were too tired to sit by his hospital bed any longer, but too restless to sleep. So we were going to have a nice cup of tea. Still my mother's answer to everything.

And as she went off to put the kettle on, I held the medal in my fist and thought about how the games I had played as a boy had prepared me to be the man my father had been, and the man his father had been before him - a fighting man, a man who kissed some tearful woman goodbye and put on a uniform and went to war.

Looking back on the games we had played in the fields and the backstreets of my childhood, they seemed to be more than childish pastimes lauding the manly virtues -they seemed to be preparing us for the next war, for our own Normandy or Dunkirk or Monte Casino.

My generation had played games with toy guns - or sticks pretending to be guns, or fingers pretending to be guns, anything could stand in for a gun - and nobody had thought that it was unhealthy or distasteful. But the only wars we saw as young men were small wars, television wars, as real and as life-threatening to the non-combatants as a video game.

My generation, the last of the generations of small boys who played with toy guns, were luckier than we knew. We didn't have a war waiting for us when we grew up. There were no Germans or Japanese for us to fight.

Our wives, that's who we fought with, this generation of men blessed with peace. And the divorce courts, that's where we fought our own grubby little wars.