The old Polly, the young Polly, would on principle never have shaved her legs. She would have considered leg shaving to be a disgusting capitulation to sexist male stereotyping of the female form, a very short step from having four kilos of silicon pumped into her tits and appearing naked in Hustler. Not that Polly’s legs had been particularly hirsute in the old days. No hairier than most girls, but then most girls actually do have quite hairy legs if they let it grow free, even seventeen-year-olds. At the time Jack had sort of liked it because he loved her. She had been so different from the plucked, waxed and sanded-down, cheerleading Barbies whom he had dated previously, but even then he had only sort of liked it. Jack was in many things a traditionalist. He liked his petrol leaded and his ladies smooth and there was no denying that Polly’s shapely calf muscles were all the finer without the fuzzy edges.
Polly exhaled again. The smell of smoke had filled the room by now and Jack breathed it in greedily.
“I’d love to take up smoking again,” he said, “but I just don’t have the guts. I fought the Iraqis, but the American anti-smoking lobby scares the shit out of me. If you light up in New York some mom in California will sue you for murdering her unborn child. It’s insane. Guys who operate nuclear missiles for a living are getting sacked for perpetrating secondary lung cancer.”
Polly realized that they were having a conversation. It had happened so easily she hadn’t even noticed. After sixteen years and two months of pain and resentment, there they were, just having a conversation.
“Well, since you’re here, Jack, you’d better give me your coat.”
Jack took off his coat and Polly gulped with surprise. Underneath the coat Jack was resplendent in the dress uniform of an American four-star general. Polly laughed. It seemed the only thing to do. Jack could not have looked more out of place if he’d been a Baywatch babe in a nunnery. His epaulettes glinted, his belt buckle sparkled, his buttons shone, his shoulder braid strutted grandly and his medal ribbons competed for attention upon his splendid chest. Anybody who had known Jack a decade or so earlier when he had believed his career to be grinding to a halt would have gasped to see him now. In the cabinet room at Ten Downing Street Jack had looked superb. The creaky, threadbare, down-at-heel members of Her Majesty’s Government had provided a more than fitting setting for this splendid warrior from the New World. But context is everything and in Polly’s bedsit he looked like the conductor in a rather tasteless brass band.
“Jesus, Jack, what are you? John Wayne? Did you come back to Britain to invade it?”
It had not occurred to Jack until that point that he was dressed in a manner that some might consider unusual. In Jack’s position he was expected to wear dress uniform all the time, and on the whole he rather enjoyed it. Now, however, he felt self-conscious. Like a person who has proudly put on a black tie to attend a very special function but still has to get to the event by bus. It feels great while you are attaching the bowtie and the cufflinks. It’ll feel great again when you’re greedily plucking the first flute of Italian sparkling from a passing tray. The period in between, however, is not so good, when one is forced by circumstance to mix with the less exalted, the ordinarily dressed. At this point, frankly, one feels a bit of a prick.
“You never did like uniforms much, did you?” he said with the tiniest hint of ill grace.
“I think they’re a bit sad, that’s all. If you can’t express your authority without poncing about like a fascist, then you can’t have had much authority in the first place.”
Again that childish fascist thing. Jack let it go.
“Yeah, well, I had to wear this stuff,” he said instead. “It was required.”
“What, for me?”
Jack would have to be honest. “No, not you. When I said I came straight here, what I meant was that I came straight here when I could. I had a meeting earlier, that’s why I’m in Britain. Politicians like to see you in uniform. I think it makes them feel important. They’re the only kind of people who ever get to play with real soldiers.”
Jack had calculated that this last comment would appeal to Polly, but if it did she ignored it.
“Politicians? What politicians?”
“Mainly your prime minister.”
Polly gulped again in astonishment. When the phone had woken her a little while ago she’d been dreaming, of what she couldn’t remember, but being a dream it would no doubt have been fairly surreal, possibly containing marshmallow hippopotamuses in tutus and a great deal of falling. Since then her life had been a whirl of psycho-stalkers, old flames and ancient enemies and now casual references to visits with the highest in the land. Reality was proving far more bizarre than anything Polly’s subconscious mind had been conjuring up. The pink hippos were beginning to seem rather mundane.
“The prime minister! The prime fucking minister! You’ve come here after seeing the prime minister!”
To Jack this wasn’t such a big deal. He saw top people all the time. Certainly the prime minister of Britain was an important person, but there were any number of prime ministers dotted about the world, fifty at a minimum. They came and they went, sometimes before the newsreaders had even learnt how to pronounce their names properly. Jack had met most of them one way or another and Polly’s astonished reaction rather took him aback. He was about to say, “Yeah, the PM. So what?” but then decided it would be rude. To her, he supposed, it was as if he’d turned up at an apartment in the Bronx and casually remarked that he’d just been visiting with the president and first lady.
“It wasn’t just me, you know, one on one,” he said, as if to downplay the grandeur of the situation. “There were the chiefs of staff… That’s the top guys in your…”
“I know who the chiefs of staff are, Jack. Unless you’d forgotten, I once had the opportunity to study matters military at close quarters.”
“Yeah,” Jack laughed. “I guess you were a combatant too, weren’t you? A soldier of the Cold War.”
How many were there like her now? Ex-combatants of an ideological struggle that had simply faded away. All around the world were people hidden in flats and bedsits, eking out their lives, who had once been warriors. Who had once locked horns with superpowers. Soldiers, spies, resistance fighters, protesters. In her way Polly was such a one, another Cold War loser. For a time she had fought NATO with the same commitment that Jack had defended it. But it was over now and the battle that Polly had fought was fast fading in the memory of all but the people involved.
Jack remembered it, of course, and suddenly he longed with all his heart to return once again to that golden time, the summer of his and Polly’s love. How he ached to see her naked once more. To be blinded afresh by her youth and beauty. A beauty that had been so pure and unencumbered by artifice. So naturally erotic, so effortlessly sexual. Jack longed to advance upon Polly then and there, as once he had, breathless and shaking with a dizzying, overwhelming passion, his entire being utterly and completely focused. No longer a whole and complex man but a desperate, straining sexual entity that knew no other time than the moment and no other purpose than to make love.
Polly caught the look in Jack’s eyes as they journeyed downwards and then up again over her body, lingering for a moment on her legs, bare to just above the knee and again on the triangle of flesh visible at her open collar.
“Look, if you’re staying,” she said, “I should get dressed.”
“Why?” Jack replied.
26
Outside in the wet and empty street Peter knelt in the gutter, his fingers straining at the metal grid that covered the drain. His upper lip was crusted with blood from when the door of the telephone box had bashed his nose. The knees of his trousers were soaking up the filthy London water and the rain was falling on his head.