Peter noticed none of these things.
His whole being was concentrated on the black hilt and glinting steel blade that he could see lodged three feet or so below him. His precious knife, sitting precariously on the jutting brick within the wall of that water-bloated urban intestine. His precious weapon, teetering on the brink of the bowels of the city.
“Bastard. Bastard. Fucking bastard,” he muttered through the soggy scabs of blood and the bitter-tasting rain.
27
Polly stared at Jack. What had he just said? Don’t bother getting dressed?
His eyes had been awash with sensual longing and he had told her not to bother getting dressed. Now she scarcely knew what to think. Was he asking her to bed? That would be a bold move indeed. Had he burst back into her life in order to fuck her as quickly as possible? It was, after all, how it had happened the first time, in his TR7. They had been unable to keep their hands off each other. Looking at Jack as he looked at her Polly was shocked to discover that a substantial part of her was excited at the prospect of leaping instantly into bed with this man who had betrayed her. Her sensual self wanted to surrender instantly to whatever Jack wanted. Why not? She was a grown woman, she was entitled to take a bit of comfort as and when she pleased. Unfortunately for Polly’s sensual self, her intellectual and emotional self recoiled at the idea, feeling angry and abused. Her political self felt even worse about it; outraged would not be too strong a word for how her political self felt. Did Jack think that he could have it all? That he could shatter her life into tiny little bits and then pick up a piece when the fancy took him?
“What do you mean?” said Polly, defiantly drawing herself up to her full height. A gesture which served merely to raise her plastic mac higher, thus revealing rather more of her legs than was already showing.
Jack had not meant what Polly was thinking, in fact. Of course, to make love there and then would be nice, ecstatic in fact. Like Polly, a part of Jack longed to pick up where they had left off so many years before and go to bed. His sensual self would have delighted in spending the remainder of the night making the crockery rattle and furniture jump round the room. But also like Polly, Jack’s intellectual self was raising objections; sex was not what he had come for, or what he had expected. There were things he wanted to discuss, things he needed to know. Sex would get in the way and Jack did not have a limitless amount of time. He tried to correct any misunderstanding.
“When I said ‘Why get dressed?’ what I meant, of course, was why get dressed when you’d only have to get undressed again?”
Which of course did not correct any misunderstandings at all.
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
Jack tried again. “No, I don’t mean… What I mean is I can’t stay long… I don’t want to inconvenience you.”
“Which is why you dropped round at two in the morning.”
Polly had always had a caustic side. Jack could remember having found it rather cute. At this point he couldn’t quite remember why.
“I don’t have long, that’s all.”
“Well, thank you so much for giving me a whole five minutes out of your busy schedule after seventeen years without a word and at two thirty in the morning. I’m so grateful.”
“Look!” said Jack, a little more firmly than he had intended. “I just don’t have all that long. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Anyway, why get dressed? You’re probably better dressed now than you were when we met the first time.”
Both Polly and Jack were straddling two different times. Principally they were in the here and now and it was late and their relationship was edgy to say the least. But also, for a moment, they were back there and then and it was glorious summer and love was flowering in the very shadow of Armageddon. The first time that their paths had crossed, before their encounter at the restaurant on the A34, when they had met and did not know even that they were meeting. At the gates of the camp, when out of the valley of death had ridden a handsome soldier mounted on a jeep who had found his way obstructed by a beautiful golden maiden, a symbol of peace.
“Yes, well, sartorial considerations tended to go out of the window in those days,” Polly replied.
“Not that you had any windows,” said Jack.
“No, I didn’t, that’s right. You can’t put windows in a woodland bender.”
Jack had not expected that he would feel things quite this violently, that his emotions would be so very much the same as they had been before.
“You were so beautiful, Polly,” said Jack. “So wild. I can see you now as if it was only a heartbeat ago. Like some kind of…” He struggled for words. Jack had never been big on flowery prose, but he had a go: “… like some gorgeous woodland creature running along the side of the road, tanned legs in the long grass, the sun in your hair.”
“Screaming at you to fuck off and die.”
It was true. To her shame (and the embarrassment of Madge), Polly had often chosen to ignore the non-aggressive principles of the peace camp and address the soldiers in most unpeaceful terms.
“We love you! We want to understand you!” Madge would shout.
“Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!” Polly would add.
And in the evening around the fire the women would all agree that it was important to try not to give mixed signals.
“You were perfect, Polly,” said Jack, his eyes half closed. “A vision. I remember the first moment I saw you exactly. I have it fixed in my mind like some kind of idyll… like an Impressionist painting.”
“Jack, I was wearing a dustbin liner.”
“You still like plastic, I see.”
Polly remembered that she was wearing a rainmac and returned to the present with a bump.
“I don’t have a dressing gown, I’m afraid.”
In her punkier days Polly would not have thought twice about receiving guests in a nightie and a plastic mac, but times had changed. “I’m not used to entertaining under these circumstances. Sit down, Jack. I’d ask you to step through into the lounge, but I haven’t got one.”
“Hey, you never used to have a roof.”
“Yeah, haven’t I done well? I no longer sleep in the open.”
Polly was embarrassed about everything. What she was wearing, her little flat, her stuff. Why couldn’t he have given her some warning of his visit? Just so she could have got herself together? She would not have needed long. Just enough time to move house and acquire some beautiful and glamorous possessions. Shift her career up ten or fifteen gears and have a little minor repair work done on the cellulite that was beginning to appear on her upper thighs.
Instead Jack was seeing her life as it really was.
“Still rejecting capitalist materialism, I see.”
Jack had never been the most tactful of people.
“No. These days capitalist materialism is rejecting me,” Polly replied. “Getting its own back for the years I abused it. Sit down. You won’t catch anything, you know.”
There were two easy chairs for Jack to choose from, both, of course, already occupied with assorted stuff. Polly’s theory was that when you live in one room everything is a wardrobe. Chairs, tables, plantpots, casserole dishes. Everything is a place in or on which to put other things. In fact as far as Polly was concerned her whole flat was one big wardrobe and she was just one of the things in it. Jack could never have lived like that. Being a military man who had spent most of his life ready to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice, he knew that the key to comfort was organization.