Blast From the Past (22 page)

‘I mean, a note or a call to tell me our affair was over,’ Polly continued bitterly. ‘That might have been just the excuse the Russians had been waiting for to wipe out the free world.’

All the intimacy that had existed between them a moment before had now evaporated. Polly was suddenly cold.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jack pleaded, ‘I couldn’t.’

‘You were too fucking gutless to face up to the fact that you were betraying the trust of a seventeen-year-old girl and, what’s more, over sixteen years later you’re still too fucking gutless to admit it. “It’s my job.” Pathetic!’

She was right, of course. He’d been too scared to say goodbye. Scared of seeing her hurt, scared of a scene, but most of all scared that had he woken her and seen once again that adorable, trusting, innocent love light in her eyes he would not have been able to go through with it. He loved her too much to risk saying goodbye.

Polly, of course, had known nothing of Jack’s tortured emotions. To her his departure had come like a cruel thunderbolt. She had no more expected the relationship to end than she had expected it to begin. She never dreamt that Jack had in fact tried to leave her many times during the latter part of their time together. In fact, from the moment he realized that he was in love with her he had been trying to find a way out.

‘
What can I do, Harry?
’ Jack wrote in anguish to his brother from the camp. ‘
How do I find the courage to end this? How do I find a way to leave?
’

In vain did Harry advise that if the army was forcing Jack to break his own heart and also the heart of an innocent, idealistic girl then maybe it was the army that he should be leaving and not the girl. Jack screwed up Harry’s letter in fury. Harry was a furniture maker, he did not understand the soul of a fighting man, he did not understand the all-encompassing power of truly vaunting ambition. Harry had never dreamt of being a leader of men.

‘
What do you know, you flake? Nothing
,’ Jack wrote back ‘T
ry to understand that your weak sensibilities mean nothing to me. Try to understand that I would break the heart of every girl in the world. That I would tear out my own and feed it to a dog in the street if just once I could get the chance to lead an American army into a battle. Any army into battle. You think that’s sick, I know. You think somehow Mom got inseminated by the devil, but it is what it is. I’m a soldier, first, last and only
.’

‘
Bullshit, Jack!
’ was Harry’s reply. ‘
You call me a flake! You’re the damn flake! You want to lead an army? You want to fight the world? You can’t even find the courage to hurt one seventeen-year-old girl
.’ Except in the end, of course, Jack did find the courage.

39

SHE SAT WAITING
for him, as she always did, hiding in the darkness afforded by the bus shelter. Her heart thumped with excitement, her ears strained at the approach of every car. She was used to waiting for an hour or more for him to appear and as autumn approached it was often chilly. Polly didn’t mind. She knew that when he did arrive she would be instantly warmed by the furnace of their desire. What was more, tonight was to be a rare delight; they were actually to sleep together, sleep in the true sense of the word, be present for each other’s dreams. Usually this was not possible, but occasionally Jack had a pass and those were the best times, times when they had the whole long night in each other’s arms.

As Jack’s car approached, Polly knew he would be moody. He always was of late, glum and preoccupied. She didn’t mind that either. It was his job, no doubt. Who wouldn’t be glum if they were an agent of mass murder? And he always got over it quickly. Polly soon made him smile, sometimes just a glance from her would make his face light up. She never imagined that he was glum because he was trying to say goodbye.

‘
I couldn’t do it
,’ Jack wrote to Harry after one such night. ‘
I tried, just like I tried the other times. I told myself again that this would be the night I would leave her but again it wasn’t. “Goodbye” is such a small word. Why can’t I say it? Every time I try it comes out as “I love you”. Because whenever I look into her eyes I just want to stay looking into them for ever
.’

When Harry read this he tried to phone, he sent a telex, he even thought about getting on a plane. He wanted to shout, ‘Don’t do it, you fool! Don’t throw love away, it’s too rare a thing. Sometimes it only comes once in a lifetime.’ But it was no good. By the time Harry got Jack’s letter Jack had already left Polly in the only way he felt he could. Abruptly and absolutely. Without a word.

It had been a wonderful night. Completely and exclusively passionate to the exclusion of all else, even conversation. Sometimes on their evenings together they would have some supper and talk, but on that last occasion they scarcely said a word. Jack drove them to the little country hotel he had chosen, they checked in, went straight to their room and began to make love. Time and again they made love, fervently, desperately.

Polly’s joy was all in the glory of the moment, but Jack was storing up memories, trying to make love to her enough to last a lifetime. Because he knew that he had to leave her that night. He knew as he lay there beside her afterwards, listening to her gentle breathing as she slowly succumbed to sleep, that this was his last chance. He was certain that his resistance could last no
longer
. Another day or two in the sunlight of her love and he would be lost for ever. As would his career and the life he held dear. Jack was perfectly sure then, as he had been ever since, that if he had not left her that week, that very night, he would never have left her. It was cowardly, of course, but if he had looked back even once, he would have stayed. That was something he had not been prepared to allow.

So, instead of saying goodbye Jack had waited until Polly slept and then had crept silently from their bed, gathered up his clothes and snuck out into the hotel corridor. There he had dressed in the darkness, gone downstairs, paid the bill with the night porter and left.

‘
What could I have done?
’ Jack replied when Harry berated him for being the cowardly shit that he was. ‘
I had to leave. She was a seventeen-year-old anarchist! A radical pacifist. A foul-mouthed swamp creature with a ring through one of her nipples!
’

This detail surprised even Harry, who was quite an alternative sort of person himself. This was back in the days when nipple rings were not something that nice girls had.

‘
I’m a thirty-two-year-old soldier with a crewcut, Harry!
’ Jack pleaded more for himself than his brother’s benefit. ‘
Talk about starcrossed lovers! Jesus, Captain Jack Kent and Polly Sacred Cycle of the Moon and Womb make Romeo and Juliet look like an arranged marriage! Pamela Anderson and the Ayatollah Khomeini would have made a more natural-looking couple. We had no future, Harry, can’t you see that?
’

In truth Jack did not really care if Harry saw it or not, it was Polly he hoped would somehow understand. She hadn’t, of course, and she never would.

She could still remember every detail of that shocking awakening. She could still see herself, a distraught young woman standing alone in a cold, empty room clutching a piece of paper with a single word on it: ‘Goodbye.’

She remembered the brown carpet, the orange coverlet, the floral pattern nylon pillowslips. She could still see the sheet of lace underneath the sheet of glass on top of the mahogany-style MFI dressing-table unit. The stained-glass-effect transfers on the windows, the ancient, scentless potpourri on the windowsill. The clock radio flashing the time at 88 past 88. Her little summer dress and leather jacket crumpled up on the floor where she had left them when she was happy. Her Doc Marten boots lying at the foot of the bed, her bra in the wastepaper basket, her knickers lodged behind a framed print of a fox hunt that hung upon the wall.

And nothing of Jack, no trace of him, remained. Polly might always have been alone in that room. Jack had even plumped his pillow before leaving. The habits of a thousand bed inspections died hard.

Polly dressed herself in a daze and went downstairs to reception.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, her face burning with embarrassment, ‘but the man I was with … the American. Have you seen him?’

The woman inside the little reception hatch had had
the
face of Oliver Cromwell and the same glowering air of violent righteousness.

‘The gentleman’s gone.’ Her voice sounded as if it had been mixed with iron filings. She folded her arms menacingly, as if daring Polly to contaminate her house further. Even the woman’s hair was hard and unforgiving, having been set into an impenetrable helmet of red-tinted Thatcheresque waves that would have kept their shape in a hurricane.

‘He left hours ago. Didn’t he say goodbye, then?’

Throughout the intervening years Polly would never forget the withering contempt of that woman’s tone.

No, he had not said goodbye. Polly stood before the hatch as if bolted down, not knowing what to say or do, not able even to think. Tears started in her eyes, further blotching the black smudged make-up that surrounded them. The hotel lady misunderstood her emotions.

‘Well, he paid my bill, love,’ she said.

Polly knew what the woman meant immediately. The woman thought Polly was a prostitute and that her client had done a runner.

This was indeed exactly what the woman had thought. What else would she think? When a smart-looking chap with money turns up late and signs in some grubby slip of a girl as his wife? A girl with bare legs, black eyeshadow and purple lipstick? When they go straight to bed without so much as ordering a toasted sandwich or spending money at the bar. When they keep the whole house up for hours with their
disgusting
grunting and when the noise finally subsides, after the man’s clearly had his fill, he sneaks off in the small hours leaving his ‘wife’ to get her breath back.

‘Unless there’s anything else?’ the woman said, clearly anxious to rid the sanctified air of her house of Polly’s noxious presence. Polly turned to leave. She could not speak to the woman; she had been struck dumb. The enormity of what was happening to her was too much to take in. Adored, then dumped, now despised. Ecstatic, then distraught, now only numb, all within a few short hours. Polly was only seventeen.

‘He’s paid for your breakfast, by the way,’ the woman said as Polly headed for the door. ‘You can have it if you want, but there’s no more eggs and you’ll have to be fast because I want to set lunch.’

Never had an invitation to eat been offered with less enthusiasm. The woman could not have sounded more unwelcoming if she’d said that she would be serving turds instead of sausages.

40

‘I SHOULD HAVE
had it, though,’ Polly told Jack, ‘because when I got out of the hotel I realized I didn’t even know where I was and I only had about seventy-five pence on me and I hadn’t even had a cup of tea. It took an entire day of buses and hitching to get back to camp and when I did they’d finished supper. It didn’t matter, of course. I couldn’t have eaten anyway. You’d torn my insides out.’

Jack had no answer. There were no tears in his eyes, of course. There never had been, and Polly doubted that there ever would be such a thing, but none the less deep inside him he cried. Thinking about that unhappy morning had always been difficult for him, and at last hearing Polly’s side of the story made it more difficult still.

His own day had been scarcely happier. By the time Polly had awoken he was long gone, pointing his TR7 for the coast. Jack had planned it, as he planned everything, meticulously. Everything he owned was in the car. He would not be returning to Greenham. He had arranged for his leave to begin that morning and when his leave ended he was to go to Wiesbaden in Germany.
There
he would rejoin the regiment that he had left on being posted to Britain. Jack had already done three years at the base and it had not been difficult for him to persuade his superiors that he had earned the right to return to some proper soldiering.

‘I thought about leaving some money for you,’ Jack said in a quiet voice. ‘You know, to get back to camp and all, but you were such a feminist and all, I thought it … it …’

‘Might make me look like a bit of a tart?’ Polly demanded. ‘Yeah, well, no need to worry about that. That was already sorted.’

They relapsed into silence for a moment before Polly continued to unburden herself.

‘I rang the camp, of course,’ Polly said. ‘I didn’t betray you even then, not that they would have believed a mad peace bitch anyway, but I was still careful for your sake. I pretended I was a cab driver who’d overcharged you. They told me not to worry about it. They said you’d gone. They said you’d left the country! Can you imagine how that felt?’

Of course he could, although he knew that she would never believe him. The truth was that he knew how she felt because he’d felt it too. As evening fell that day and he’d leant on the rail of the car ferry, watching England disappear over the horizon, Jack had felt more desolate than he had ever felt. It had been no comfort at all that he had been the architect of his own unhappiness, or that he knew that it was the only thing he could do.

‘You left that day!’ The bitterness of Polly’s tone
wrenched
Jack back from his momentary reverie. ‘You left Britain the same fucking day you left me!’

‘Yeah?’ Jack said. For a moment he was unsure why she was dwelling on this point.

‘Which must have meant that you’d already made your preparations,’ Polly explained. ‘That you’d known you were leaving. That when you made love to me on that last night you knew what you were going to do. Your fucking bags must have been already packed, you bastard!’

‘It hurt me too!’

‘Good. I wish it had killed you!’

Polly did not believe Jack. She did not think he could have felt remotely what she’d felt. He would never have done what he did. She had been so completely in love with him. She’d trusted in him so absolutely and he’d left her all alone. For weeks afterwards she had been quite literally sick with the pain. Unable to keep food down, she’d scarcely eaten for months. She lost two and a half stone, which left her dangerously underweight, and eventually she had had to see a doctor. At seventeen Polly discovered that it is not just the heart that aches when love is lost, but the whole body. Particularly the guts; that’s where a person’s nervous system really makes itself felt.