“No. I couldn’t warn you. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. All I could do was come and I did. I got into Brize Norton tonight and I came straight here.”
It was a lie, of course, but Jack sort of felt that it was true. He had after all wanted to come straight to Polly. He had certainly come the moment his circumstances allowed him to, the moment he had made his presentation to the Cabinet and said farewell to the ambassador.
The lie worked. Polly stared into Jack’s eyes. He had come straight to her. That was certainly something, something exciting she could not deny. Nor could she deny how handsome he had remained. More handsome than ever, even. She liked the grey at his temples and she preferred him without the early eighties Burt Reynolds moustache. He seemed leaner somehow, tougher. He had certainly not gone old and soft over the years.
Then she remembered that she hated him. That he had dumped her without a word, without so much as a goodbye. He was a shit.
“This is absurd, Jack. I’m bloody dreaming. What are you saying? You came straight here! Why? Why did you come straight here? I was seventeen years old. It was nearly twenty years ago-”
“Sixteen years and two-”
“I know! I know how long it was! It was another life. We are total strangers now! I ought to throw you out.”
Jack fell silent and looked at Polly. He said nothing, but his stare grew in intensity until Polly began to feel quite uncomfortable. It was as if Jack was preparing to unburden himself, to share his secrets with her. Then his spirit appeared to desert him, his shoulders sagged, his eyes dropped and he sighed.
“You’re right,” he said. “This is dumb. Completely dumb. Insane. I should go.”
Jack turned wearily towards the door, deflated and lost, a man whose poor, sad, hopeless dreams had been exposed as just that. It worked, of course.
“Don’t be ridiculous! You can’t just go!”
“I thought you wanted me to.”
“No! That’s not fair! You can’t wait sixteen years and two months, wake me up in the middle of the night, barge in and then barge out again.”
Again a pause. “So you don’t want me to go?”
“I don’t know what I want.”
Polly took up a packet of slightly milder than full-strength cigarettes from the kitchen table. As she bent over the gas stove to light one, the stiff plastic mac she was wearing stood out from her thighs and revealed a little more of her bare legs. She still had wonderful legs, fabulous legs. Jack had always loved Polly’s legs, but then he had always loved everything about Polly. She turned back towards him, leant against the stove and inhaled deeply. Jack almost laughed, remembering the long evenings they had spent lying together after making love, watching the glowing ends of their cigarettes in the darkness, talking, disagreeing on every single thing under the sun except their desire to be together.
24
Peter’s whole being reeled with hatred. He had watched from the shop doorway as the American man entered Polly’s house and had stood for five minutes or so as if in a trance. The jealousy and sense of betrayal were so all-consuming that he had found himself unable to move. She was seeing other men! Sneaking them in in the middle of the night so that he wouldn’t see them! Tricking him into thinking she was being good when in fact she was nothing but a lying, cheating slag. And as for him. As for that American bastard. Peter had no vocabulary in his head with which to encompass the scope of his loathing for that man. It sat in his consciousness as a sort of red blur.
However, once Peter had come round from his state of shock he knew absolutely that he must retrieve his knife at once. If ever he needed it he needed it now. He rushed back up the road to the phonebox, back to the drain down which the hated American had kicked his knife. Peter had seen that it had lodged on a jutting brick before he had run away. The question was, would it still be there?
Of course it was. How could it not be; it was Peter’s precious knife and it would not be taken from him so easily. Kneeling in the gutter he could see it, lodged still, awaiting his retrieval. Peter went off to find a suitable tool with which to recover the knife and soon returned with an old wire coathanger picked from the rubbish in a nearby skip. Out of this he fashioned a long hook. He knew that the knife had a little hinged curve of metal attached to its innocent end by which a person might fasten the weapon to their belt. It was into this that Peter planned to place his hook. His challenge was to do this without dislodging the knife and causing it to fall further out of reach. So he knelt down in the sodden gutter and set to his task, dangling his hook into one of the numerous gaping mouths that fed and watered subterranean London with rubbish, effluence and rain.
“Bastard. Fucking bastard. I’ll get you. I’ll get you,” mumbled Peter under his breath, and he was not referring to the knife.
25
“You still smoke?” Jack enquired.
“I’m giving up soon,” Polly replied defensively, “in a week or two, this month, I hope. Certainly by the end of the year. Don’t tell me you quit?”
Jack hadn’t wanted to give up smoking, but he’d been forced to. He worked for the government; it was either give up or become a pathetic non-person. Quite apart from anything else, smoking had got too tiring. The smoke exclusion zones around public buildings had been getting wider and wider since Clinton got in. In vain had he argued at the highest level that to make the Pentagon a no-smoking area was something of a sick joke. He and his colleagues had pointed out to their political masters that since the Pentagon was a building in which mass chemical and nuclear genocide was planned daily, it seemed almost tasteless to introduce a health code.
Polly was surprised. Jack had always been so gungho about his smoking.
“You said you’d never give up. You said you’d rather die.”
“Yeah, well I didn’t know then that the greatest country in the world would end up getting run by a bunch of killjoy liberal fucking pussies, did I?”
That was the other side of Jack, of course. Polly remembered it well. The unreconstructed reactionary. The bullying, bigoted, yobbo soldier with the sexual and political sensitivity of Ghenghis Khan’s hordes on an angry and randy day. The strange thing was that she had always secretly found conservatism rather attractive. He was so honest and unashamed about being a right-wing bastard. As a deeply confused liberal herself, Polly found that kind of confidence rather compelling.
“Nice to know you haven’t changed,” she said. “The kinder, gentler America passed you by, then?”
“Oh yeah? Maybe we should start trying to be a little kinder and gentler to the guys who like to drink and smoke and read Playboy magazine now and again! It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand. They had their fun. Fifteen years ago those same star fucking Democrat assholes that are banning smokes were taking cocaine in their coffee. Now coffee carries a health warning.”
“Yeah, well, you’re lucky. I’d love to kick the fags,” Polly replied. “Sometimes I buy one Mgs, but then I just smoke them six or seven at a time.”
Polly leant against the table, placed her fingers over the little airholes in the filter that were supposed to dilute the tar and inhaled deeply. Jack watched her chest rise as she did so and he longed to fall upon her as of old. She walked around the table to pick up an ashtray and again Jack could not help but notice how attractive her legs were. As good as ever, he thought; better, in fact. Now how could that be? He had it! They were shaved! Polly had shaved her legs, and recently, too. They were smooth and shiny, the skin bright in the light of the overhead lamp.