It is half-term. Jomier is telephoned by his son Henry to ask for help with Jomier’s three-year-old grandson Ned. Tracey, the Australian nanny, is to take Samantha to a play-date in Knightsbridge and Alena, the Slovakian au pair, has to go to her language course in Ealing.
‘What about your mother?’ asks Jomier.
‘She can’t. She has things to do.’ Jomier, Henry knows, does not have things to do.
Jomier has no change for a parking meter. He walks along Askew Road, litter swirling around his ankles, past the halt and the lame, the second-hand furniture emporium and dusty vegetable racks outside the Pakistani stores, to the Co-op – the neon-lit supermarket that, like a mission station in the upper Congo, caters for the tastes of the middle class. Jomier buys a packet of Kettle Chips to get change from a £20 note. He returns to his Volkswagen Golf and drives to Queen’s Park. Tracey meets him at the door – tall, bouncy, the quintessence of physical fitness. Her skin is still tanned from the beaches of Queensland and the pores cleansed by regular sweaty sex with her boyfriend, Jeff. Jomier has seen a lot of Tracey over the past two years. He sees more of her than do Henry and Sandra. Tracey lives out. She arrives from Earls Court at eight thirty in the morning when Henry has already left for his office and Sandra is about to leave for hers. She leaves the house ten hours later when either Henry or Sandra returns. It is a long day for Tracey. Jomier admires her stamina. She is good with the children. But she is not their mother. She is paid to care for the children. Weekly. In cash.
Samantha kisses her grandfather with a brush of her lips on his cheek. She has her mother’s drive. Her mind is on the play-date with her friend Alexa. Ned stamps his feet up and down – a little war dance reserved for Grandpa. Jomier takes him by the hand. They walk towards the playground in Queen’s Park. Ned stops in doorways and runs up garden paths. Jomier waits. The objective is not to get to the playground but to look after the child. At the sound of a siren Ned shouts ‘Am’ulance!’ He is not good at pronouncing his bs but he is bright as a button, the star pupil at Top Totts, his nursery school – a future shoo-in for Westminster Junior School or Colet Court, those first rungs on the ladder to worldly success.
At the playground, Jomier sits on a bench watching the mothers and nannies and au pairs pushing their charges on the swings. There are sometimes one or two out-of-work fathers among them but today Jomier is the only man. The young women look at him uneasily: is he Ned’s father or grandfather? Jomier has friends who have children the same age as Ned – ensnared by determined young women with unresolved father complexes.
Over time Jomier has made some playground friends. There are nannies and au pairs who know Ned from his nursery school. Some know Tracey; some Alena; some both. The Australians and New Zealanders are friendly: they tell Jomier about their folks back home. The East European au pairs engage with Jomier to practise their conversational English.
A rare mother, Tessa, is a friend of Henry and Sandra. She knows Jomier from Ned’s birthday parties which she has attended with her four-year-old daughter Tatty (Tatiana). Tessa is happy to talk to Jomier. It makes a change from chatting to her Estonian au pair. Tessa is lean and thin, her long legs tightly clad in designer jeans. She is in her late thirties or early forties – attractive but without the bloom of youth. Tessa has an Eton and Oxford husband who makes bucketfuls of money. They have spent a million pounds on a house and another half a million doing it up. She has a child; an au pair; a Prius – yet she is, Jomier senses, discontented. She wonders if, by not working, she has disappointed her parents who spent so much money on her education. Is she wasting her university degree?
Jomier tries to reassure her. A child surely benefits from the presence of its mother. But is he confident of the truth of what he says? Is a child any better off with a mother who worries about not working than with a mother who works and worries about not looking after her child? Pushing swings, hovering around climbing frames, waiting at the bottom of slides – this is dull stuff. If one turns one’s mind to other things – if one takes one’s eye off the ball and thinks about Virginia Woolf or a Jamie Oliver recipe – then Ivo or Hermione might slip and fall onto bouncy tarmac or bed of wood chippings.
Was it a mistake to educate women? Jomier remembers the buffoon in Stendhal’s De L’Amour: ‘If women are educated they will no longer be content to look after their children.’ Stendhal makes him the mouthpiece of reaction but is there not something in what he says? Jomier’s friend Theo tells Jomier that women should be educated to make them suitable wives for educated men. But that is not the way women see it. They want to be educated to be able to live independently from men. They are empowered by their university degrees. This is why Tessa, the mother in the playground, is uneasy. What was the point of a degree in Politics and Economics from Oxford if it was not to pursue a career? But then what is the point of a nine-to-five job in a boring office when she has more than enough money as it is? She wants Jomier to solve this riddle. He is old and so may be wise.
Jomier prevaricates. He has to think about what he thinks on the question and then decide how many of these thoughts should be expressed to Tessa. He feels he has had the worst of both worlds: a wife who earned nothing, then left him and took him to the cleaners. If Tilly had had a career – a lawyer, a teacher – that had given her a standing in the world as something more than Mrs Jomier, would she have felt less impelled to have sex with Max? Or would she have found some Lothario in the workplace? A partner in the directors’ dining room? The personal trainer in the corporate gym?
Jomier likes Tessa. He feels sympathy over her dilemma. ‘I have a friend,’ he says, ‘who thinks women should be educated to make them good wives for educated men.’
Tessa scowls. ‘That’s medieval,’ she says.
‘He would take that as a compliment,’ says Jomier.
‘You have strange friends,’ says Tessa.
‘We go back a long way,’ says Jomier.
‘Even so,’ says Tessa.
Jomier asks Tessa about the role models in her childhood. Tessa’s mother did not work and was neurotic and so was left by Tessa’s father, a professor of Spanish, who took early retirement and went to live with one of his students in Madrid. Tessa does not visit her father. She remains angry with him for deserting the home. Jomier senses that she looks to him, at that moment, to play his role. Jomier, thinking of his own daughter Louisa, far away on the pampas, accessible only on the telephone or via Skype, tries to rise to Tessa’s expectations but he is afraid to talk. He does not want to infect her with his pessimism, his cynicism, his disillusion. Jomier feels sorry for Tessa just as he feels sorry for Henry and Louisa, and for all those whose adult condition has been blighted by the distress of their parents’ separation. Jomier is against divorce. It enables women to take men to the cleaners and causes children to suffer in ways they do not understand. It lays a time bomb in the child’s unconscious mind which is only detonated in later life – self-obsession, self-doubt, depression, the doomed sense that what happened to their parents will inevitably happen to them.
‘It seems to me,’ says Jomier at last, ‘that children need stability, continuity, firmness and overwhelming love. The first thing, then, is for you and Hugh to stick together . . .’
Tessa shrugs and smiles as if to say ‘take that as given’.
‘But when it comes to caring for the children . . .’ Jomier hesitates. Does he know what he thinks? ‘Nannies and au pairs are fine so far as they go but they are like Gurkhas or prostitutes. They are doing the job for money.’
Tessa listens: so far she seems to like what she hears.
‘You might well find a job that was challenging and fulfilling. You might rise to be the CEO of ICI or the Director General of the BBC or even editor of Vogue. But there will always be others who could do the job as well as you. There is no one else who can be Tatty’s mother.’
Tessa looks uncertain. ICI and the BBC, perhaps, but editor of Vogue?
Jomier reads her thoughts but does not want to get bogged down with detail. ‘We live in an age . . .’ he goes on – but then falters. He wants to attack feminism that has freed women to be wage slaves, neglect their children and let men off the leash. He knows it will not work. Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, Sylvia Plath – these are the saints in the pantheon of the modern woman. Tessa may have a degree from Oxford in Politics and Economics but she is a child of her time. Anti-feminism is a symptom of misogyny and misogyny is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Tessa fills the silence created by Jomier’s hesitation, telling Jomier that she is ashamed of her dissatisfaction because she knows that her life is not bad as lives go. Jomier listens and commiserates and does not think less of her for the whinging leitmotif. Even if a life is free of major aggravations – cancer, poverty, a drunken husband, a sick child – there are plenty of minor ones about which to complain – stepping on dog shit, a broken-down gas boiler, a parking ticket. Women are genetically programmed to complain after generations of being dependent upon men. From the Stone Age to the 1950s, a wife depended upon her husband to get things done – hence the instinct to manipulate by mood. Sulks are the stick: sweet smiles are the carrot. If you want sex, put me in the mood for sex – a pearl necklace, a candlelit dinner, a weekend in Paris – first class on Eurostar, a suite at the Ritz; or, among the financially challenged, a suite of a different kind – a three-piece suite in cream leather from Leather World, or a week on the Costa del Sol, or new shelves in the lounge – SEX bartered for DIY.
Women, Jomier realises, have yet to adapt to their own liberation. Perhaps they never will. Jomier’s mistake when it came to Tilly 1 was to treat her as a liberated woman. Her opinions on this and that – sex outside marriage, the Vietnam War – were ‘progressive’ because progressive views, like Biba dresses, were then in fashion. But she did not want her feminist views to be taken at face value. She did not want to be consulted about what they could or could not afford; she did not want to think about the means to the end. She had been born into a certain position in English society and expected Jomier to maintain it. She hated being treated by Jomier as a compañera – a comrade-wife who went to cheap restaurants to save money; she wanted to be a kept woman who felt sexy eating pâté de foie gras and drinking champagne.
‘Idiot!’ Jomier is not thinking of Tilly. He is thinking of himself. Tessa’s stream of consciousness is momentarily arrested: Jomier has said the word out loud.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t call him that,’ says Tessa.
Who is she talking about? Jomier has not been listening. He tries to pick up the thread of what she is saying.
‘I think the proposal probably wasn’t much good. That’s the trouble these days. You have to do as much research for the proposal as you do for the book . . .’
Jomier remembers. Tessa is a writer. Or she was a writer before she married. What had she written? Chick lit? A biography of her great-aunt? He cannot remember. It does not seem to matter. Tessa burbles on. Jomier wants to look at his watch, to see if the time has come to take Ned home. He is afraid that Tessa will take this as a sign that he is not interested in what she is saying. He waits for a natural break; or for some act of God. Rain. Or Ned falling off the climbing frame.
Feminism. Jomier has a theory that he would like to put to Tessa. Feminism is a form of flirtation. The female of the species is genetically programmed to provoke the male of the species to assert its strength. Only thus can the female discover at whom to squirt her pheromones and direct her come-hither looks. In the past there were wars to sort out the men from the boys but after two world wars they no longer serve this purpose. They cost too many lives – the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. There was no sifting in the trenches: the strong died with the weak. No heroes returned. Technology – the Maxim gun, the cluster bomb, the tactical nuclear weapon. Valour is redundant.
Test men in other ways. In an era when the survival of the fittest depends upon brains rather than brawn, provoke men to assert their prowess with absurd theories about the oppression of women. Tell men whose forefathers fought and laboured to provide for and protect their wives and children that they were tyrants in the home. Bring forward Sartre’s highbrow doxy, Simone de Beauvoir, to ascribe the mediocrity of women to their disdainful treatment by men. Praise Betty Friedan for holding that women are better off without husbands, and Germaine Greer’s view that children flourish without fathers. The female of the species knows this is nonsense. In her viscera she is looking for a mate who will fertilise her and provide for both her and the ensuing offspring but thinks her feminist bravura will eliminate the wimps; that, like a Stone Age hunk with his club, the real man will grab her and fuck her and tell her to shut up.
But he does not. The real man does not rise to the challenge. He does not swat the feminist absurdities like pesky flies. Why not? Because the feminist hypothesis suits him just fine. By all means liberate women! Free them to work. Let them pay their own way and have sex at will. Abolish all those pejorative terms – tart, bolter, slag, slapper, whore, demi-mondaine – and with them cad, bounder, blackguard, roué, scoundrel, rake, libertine. The male of the species who until now had to pay for sex – either in cash to a prostitute or with a joint account to a wife – now calls the feminist’s bluff and enjoys sex without strings. No longer need he deploy the subterfuge of a Vicomte de Valmont to seduce today’s Cécile. Her virginity is an embarrassment. She seduces him.
At the back of her mind there is an endgame – commitment, marriage, children – but before that stretch two decades of mix & match, test drives, sea, sun and sex. Lord Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter gathers dust on the shelves: the norms for today’s young woman come from Friends, Frasier and Sex and the City. She emulates the heroines of Hollywood movies who bestow their ‘final favours’ on the first date. Thanks to the pill, she no longer worries about getting pregnant; and thanks to the zeitgeist, about being thought loose. Her only concerns: Is he wearing a condom? Will he find me ‘good in bed’?
Jomier thinks about these things and feels an emotion he cannot define. Does he approve or disapprove of modern morals? He debates the question with his alter ego – Dr Jekyll in conversazione with Mr Hyde. But which is which? In Stevenson’s story, Mr Hyde is the dark side of Dr Jekyll – passionate and angry rather than sensible and scientific. But today’s sensible and scientific Dr Jekyll would read the Guardian and favour sex as a recreation from the earliest age; while it is the irrational Mr Hyde with his primitive superstitions who bundles sex with marriage, procreation and unromantic love.
Ned wants to pee. Jomier is grateful for this alert. Ned’s potty training is not as established as his mother would have the world believe. Tracey, the nanny, has told Jomier that he can count on a four-minute interval between Ned’s announcement of a call of nature and his answer to that call. The timing has been proved to be imprecise. There have been accidents. Jomier is sympathetic towards his grandson. Soon he too will be incontinent and have accidents too.
Jomier and Ned take their leave of Tessa and Tatty. They stop off at the public lavatory by the entrance to the playground. Ned pees. Then the dawdling walk home. Jomier hands Ned over to Alena, the au pair, who has prepared tea for Ned and Samantha – penne with peas and snippets of ham. She offers Jomier a cup of tea. Jomier would like a cup of tea but making conversation in broken English with Alena is too high a price to pay. He politely declines. He stoops to kiss his grandson, says ‘bye-bye’ in a babyish voice, and leaves.