Blast From the Past (17 page)

This was something. After all, it was the Russians and their worryingly unstable army whom Jack and this new NATO would be facing.

‘But it seems,’ Schultz explained, ‘that the admiral of the Russian fleet needs to get back to the Black Sea by suppertime. I think he’s scared they won’t save any food for him. Or that his flagship will have sunk with the rust.’

This was an attempt at a joke, but it fell flat.

‘Funny, Schultz, I’m laughing here. I love to be woken up at two forty-five in the morning by comedians.’

In fact Jack did not think that the desperate plight of the ex-Soviet armed forces was remotely amusing. The fact that the world’s second-largest nuclear force was now in the charge of cold, hungry and embittered guardians who had been stripped of all status and pride struck terror into Jack’s heart whenever he thought about it.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Schultz over the phone. ‘It’s been a long night. Just working out the seating for this thing is a minefield. Who gets priority, the Germans or the French?’

‘The Germans, of course. The French will take offence wherever you sit them, so you might as well give them something to moan about.’

‘Well, anyway, the Russians want the meeting brought forward to noon Brussels time tomorrow,’ said Schultz. ‘That’s eleven a.m. with us here in the UK.’

‘Fucking Euros,’ Jack grumbled. ‘They think they can run a single currency; they can’t even synchronize their watches.’

‘Our plane needs to leave Brize Norton by ten. Can I get them to send a car for eight?’

‘I’ll be here at the hotel waiting.’

Jack put his phone away.

Polly was not happy. She did not like hearing herself denied in such a casual manner. If Jack was ashamed or
embarrassed
to be with her, then he should not have come. He had no right to sit there, on her chair, in her house, pretending that he was in a hotel. Old and bitter memories welled up inside her once more. Memories of a relationship denied, furtive and secret, conducted as if she had something of which to be ashamed. Memories of sneaking away from camp and skulking in bus shelters, waiting, sometimes for an hour, for Jack’s car to appear. Memories of his making her swear over and over again that she had told no one of their affair. Of never being allowed to call Jack or even write to him directly. Of messages sent via the cold anonymity of a post office box. ‘Bus shelter. Six p.m.’

For a time it had all seemed exciting and wicked, as if they were spies. But now it all looked merely deceitful and cowardly.

‘Why did you pretend you were asleep, Jack? Why did you pretend you were still at your hotel?’ Polly demanded. ‘Still the same gutless wonder? Still keeping me a secret? Still scared what the army will think?’

Jack did not want to quarrel. He had only one night and Schultz’s call had just shortened it. There was so much he wanted to say. So much he wanted to know. He pushed NATO and its business from his mind and returned to the matter in hand.

‘You live alone, don’t you?’ he said, ignoring Polly’s irritation and stating the obvious.

‘I do now.’

‘Now?’

‘I was in something for quite a long time but the relationship had problems.’

‘What kind of problems?’

‘Oh, nothing very much, just his wife and kids.’

Jack looked hard at Polly. Now he thought about it she did look older, of course. No less lovely but definitely older. He was a good judge of faces and he did not think that Polly’s life had been a particularly easy one.

‘Tell me about him,’ Jack said gently.

Polly nearly did. She nearly sat down and blurted out the whole painful story of how, just when she had been getting herself back together again, she had allowed her life to be hijacked for a second time by an entirely inappropriate love affair. She nearly told him, but she didn’t. Jack knew quite enough about her uncanny ability to choose the wrong men.

29

POLLY LEFT THE
squat in Acton in the late summer of 1991 and with a little money borrowed from her parents she took up her first entirely legal abode since leaving home eight years previously. A proper rented room in a shared house in Chiswick. From there she enrolled in a part time A-level course at the local college of further education and set about picking up her life where she had left it before the summer of Jack’s love.

It was a new decade, a new prime minister (if still a Conservative one) and a new beginning for Polly, who believed that she had finally really and truly got over Jack. Seeing him on the television had helped, a shock though it had been. Until then he had remained vigorously alive in her memory as her first, her most complete and special love. His sudden devastating departure had been the watershed of her young existence, marking the point at which she had lost a grip upon her life. Then all of a sudden he was on the TV and he was a stranger. A creature from another planet. An anonymous member of a hateful, sand-coloured army of half a million men. He had nothing to do with her. It seemed extraordinary and unreal that he ever had.

The news broadcast had been repeated a number of times that evening, the same footage being shown again and again. Polly nearly told the story, she nearly pointed at the screen and stunned her friends by saying, ‘See that bloke standing in front of the tank? I’ve had him,’ but she didn’t. It was all too strange. Polly no longer really believed it herself.

During her A-level year Polly worked part time as a waitress in an upmarket burger joint called New York New York (address, Chiswick High Street). The hours were unsociable but the tips were good and Polly shocked herself by discovering that with a judicious smile and a flirty manner she could make the tips even better. It did not take long for her to find out that shorter skirts meant more generous gratuities. She occasionally wondered what Madge and the girls from the camp would have made of that, but then she reasoned that if lads wanted to be wankers it seemed silly not to profit from it.

Feminism was changing anyway, at least that was what the style sections of the Sunday papers were saying. It was the year that saw the beginning of what was to become known as the new lad/new laddette trend, a period when it was pronounced all right to be a yob and behave badly. Of course in pubs and clubs up and down the country life simply went on as usual. The lads carried on drinking beer and fighting, while the girls continued to discuss male member size loudly over bucketfuls of vodka and orange. To the metropolitan style media, however, the new lad trend was a
revelation
. It appeared that boys and girls had become tired of the terrible social constrictions of political correctness and were now ready to be naughty again. With hindsight, the only lasting cultural impact of the whole business was that it became possible to have proper bra adverts again and that young women started to swear on Channel Four. At the time, though, it was all taken very seriously.

These were happy times for Polly. She liked having a proper home again, even if it was only a room plus shared everything else. The two girls Polly lived with soon became friends, despite the usual problems of communal living. It seemed to Polly that Sasha always left the bathroom reeking of horrible perfume while Dorothy appeared to require every single saucepan in the house in order to boil one egg. For their part the other girls objected to Polly’s apparent need to keep all of her underwear hanging over the bath even when it was dry. Also, inevitably, each of the three was convinced that they were the only person who ever cleaned the toilet or emptied the swingbin or washed the teatowels, and there must also have been a thirsty ghost in the house because those teacups in the sink were certainly not any of theirs. The phone, of course, was also a constant problem. None of the girls had wanted to bother with a timer which would obviously be completely boring and fascistic; on the other hand, when the bills came none of them could believe that they had made a third of the calls.

There were only occasional real rows, but when these
did
happen they were proper, high-octane, full-volume, three-girl barnies which they all secretly enjoyed. Anything could set one off: the carton of milk that one person had bought and the other two had drunk, the unreplaced washing powder, the hoovering, the boyfriend who vomited on the sofa and just put a cushion on it and left.

‘Right, that’s it!’ they would scream at each other, ‘I’m sick of you bitches. I’m moving out!’ But they didn’t. They were having too much fun.

After A-levels Polly stayed on as a student and took a degree in sociology. Despite being rather depressingly classified as a mature student, she managed to have a pretty wild time in her first year. Illegal raves were the big thing at the time, the idea being to find somewhere vast, concrete and fantastically unpleasant and stay there for fifteen hours. This, she thought, was the reason drugs suddenly got so big again. It was the only possible way to get through such a horrible night. Polly and the other girls took ecstasy on a number of occasions, but soon got scared of it. There were so many stories going around about people who had only looked at a tab before becoming immediately paraplegic or dead.

The aftermath of a night on E was also rather painful. Polly was used to waking up with hangovers, but coming down in the cold grey light of dawn in the middle of a disused cattle market in Sussex presented a new low even for her. When she took a look around her at some of the dazed specimens upon whom she had
bestowed
huge kisses and protestations of undying affection on the previous night, she decided that booze was a safer drug.

It seemed to Polly that studying and raving was all students did any more. She had been most disappointed to find how little political activism there was in the colleges. Fear of the future had long since beaten that out of the young. In the sixties and seventies it had been possible for students to rail and rant against society in the comfortable knowledge that they would shortly be joining it at a fairly elevated level. In the eighties, however, the world for graduates had become as uncertain as it was for everyone else and few students felt they had the luxury to worry about other people.

After graduating Polly managed to get elected to Camden Council, with whom she also acquired a job working in the Equal Opportunities Office. It was here that she met and fell in love with another complete disaster.

The disaster’s name was Campbell. Handsome, clever, highly qualified (a doctor), Campbell was also an extremely married man. He and Polly met during a weekend conference entitled ‘Race, gender, sexual preference and local government’. Until tea on the second day Polly had found the conference only slightly more interesting than being dead, but Campbell changed all that. Like her, he was a Labour Councillor, but unlike her he was a leading light in the local party, very much tipped to be selected as the parliamentary candidate to fight the next election. John Smith had
died
and Tony Blair’s leadership had ushered in a whole new generation of slick, handsome, media-friendly professionals. Campbell was perfect for it, if a little old at forty.

Their affair was electric, one of those instant physical attractions that cannot be denied. Polly and Campbell missed the final session of the conference, ‘How Many Members of Senior Management Have a Clitoris?’, because they were having sex in a stationery cupboard. After that they seemed to be incapable of meeting without having sex. They took appalling risks, having it off in council offices, at Campbell’s surgery, behind the speaker’s chair at the town hall, in carparks, behind hedges, in front of hedges, on top of hedges and in the toilet of the Birmingham Pullman.

Polly worried about Campbell’s wife, but Campbell of course assured her that he and Margaret had long since drifted apart. This, sadly, would have come as surprising news to Margaret, who had absolutely no idea that anything was wrong.

If Margaret was ignorant of what was going on, then Polly was not much wiser. Campbell was arrogant and weak and he spun a web of desperate lies around himself and both women. When he and Polly moved in together he told her that the three or four nights he spent away each week were out of obligation to his children. He explained that although he and Margaret were now separate they were still friends and had decided to maintain the family home until the kids grew up. To Margaret he explained that he had taken up a
part-time
teaching post at the University of Manchester Medical School and hence would be away for half the week.

It could not last, of course. Campbell’s lies got ever more desperate, particularly to Margaret. He told her that Telecom had still not installed a telephone line in his Manchester flat; he told her that for some reason his mobile could not get a signal where he was living. He told her not to phone the university as the cuts had so overstretched the secretarial staff that private calls were frowned upon.

And he told her, of course, he still loved her.

One Sunday morning Margaret turned up while Polly and Campbell were having breakfast together in the house they shared in Islington. Margaret had discovered the address from an electricity bill she had found in the laundry. It was probably the most excruciating encounter of Polly’s life. She had stood there, a piece of toast frozen in her hand while the man who had said he loved her begged tearful forgiveness from the wife he claimed to have left.

Campbell left Polly that day. He had his kids and his political future to consider and the initial all-consuming passion between him and Polly was dying out anyway. Margaret took him back, accepting his protestations that Polly had seduced him. She didn’t want to take him back, she hated the idea, but she was a middle-aged housewife. She did not know what else she could do apart from have it off with the windowcleaner in revenge, which she did.

Polly could no longer afford the house on her own and moved out. After a week or two of sleeping on floors she shifted into the Stoke Newington loft where Jack was to find her. Polly was alone once more, rejected and homeless, just when things had seemed to be shaping up. Polly simply could not believe what an idiot she had been. She did not even have the energy to hate Campbell. She was too annoyed with herself.