A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part Three

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Praise for ‘A Polaroid of Peggy’

  “I loved it. Funny. Revealing. Wonderful. His voice is authentic, his prose dynamic, his evocation of an era is pinpoint accurate and the whole hilarious fiction deserves an effing ‘OLOGY’.”

  Maureen Lipman

  “Richard Phillips is good on nostalgia, guilt, the emotional messes people make, and the play-acting involved in both the building up or breaking down of a relationship, but the main strength of his book lies in the portrayal of the central character, a superficially shallow man desperately trying to paper over the black holes appearing through the old wallpaper of his life.

  “Cynic and romantic, confident adman, bag of nerves, he is believably ambiguous and skilfully realised, as is the slow build of his obsession with the eponymous Peggy, whose twenty-year-old photograph, randomly found in the pocket of an old jacket, triggers a crisis on levels both existential and material.”

  Carol Birch, author of ‘Jamrach’s Menagerie’, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012

  www.apolaroidofpeggy.com

  [email protected]

  For Hannah

  Copyright © Richard James Phillips 2015

  The right of Richard James Phillips to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission of the Copyright owner.

  First published in the UK in 2015 by Small and Greene, London

  ISBN 978-0-9930910-7-0

  @smallandgreene1

  [email protected]

  Produced by whitefox

  www.wearewhitefox.com

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  London, March 1999

  On the E to P scale, as I am sure you will come to agree, I scored pretty well.

  Haven’t the foggiest what the E to P scale is? Well, don’t feel too badly about it. Seeing as I’m the one who came up with the idea and have only ever previously mentioned it to two people – my partners Geoff Bradley and Vince Dutton – during an insanely alcoholic lunch on the third Friday in March 1999, the only way you’d have a clue is if you had been sitting at the next table and overheard me, which, let’s face it, doesn’t seem very likely. True, we were a bit pissed – possibly more than a bit – and conceivably a little over excited and consequently speaking in unnaturally loud voices, so, if you really want to be picky about it, I suppose you could have been on the next table but one, but even so. (Actually, now I think about it, it might have been Geoff or Vince who first came up with the E to P scale, and not me, but isn’t that always the way with really good ideas? Everyone in the room is convinced that theirs was the head in which the switch was first thrown.)

  To be absolutely honest, it really wasn’t that great an idea but at the time – a couple of bottles of Chateau Petrus in – alright, maybe three – we all loved it. (Correction for the sake of absolute accuracy: probably not Chateau Petrus but definitely something not too shabby.)

  We loved it because we were all feeling terrifically pleased with ourselves – as pleased with ourselves as only the founding partners of rather a successful advertising agency can be, and that was because we had just landed an exceptionally juicy piece of business, the name of which now escapes me. (I have a particular talent for obliterating certain bits of the past, as you will see.) But at the time we were exultant. It was yet another feather in the already densely feathered cap of BWD, the acronym by which our agency was known, standing for Bradley, Williams, Dutton; Williams being me, Andrew Williams, Creative Director extraordinaire. As extraordinaire as I needed to be anyway, at least until I got the Peggy thing, but we’ll come to that soon enough.

  I should say that being pleased with yourself is an essential prerequisite for appreciating the genius of the E to P concept. If you weren’t, you’d think that only smug tossers like the founding partners of BWD would ever come up with something so shallow and trivial, even in jest. And I have to say you’d be absolutely right, so if you’re a BET – that stands for Bitter and Envious Type – one up to you.

  BETs, by the way, are essential to the E to P scale. It is, you see, a wholly unscientific method of measuring one’s success relative to that of one’s peers. And obviously the more of one’s peers who are bitter and envious of one, then, ipso facto, the better one is doing. Any set of peers will do – other people in the industry for instance, or chums from university – if you went to University that is, which, of us, only Vince did, and that was in Australia so it barely counts. But ideally, it should be the peers from your teens. Those are the days when your life standards are truly set, and against which you measure yourself for evermore.

  So the way it works is this. You imagine a school reunion: everyone is there. The brainboxes who went to Oxford and LSE, the sporty types whose Saturday afternoon heroics you ignored to the rafters when announced at Monday morning assembly, the prefects, about whom nothing more damning could be said than that is what they were. And you.

  And you have to work out where on the E to P scale you sit. Having nonchalantly let slip to the assembled company what you are doing and how well you are doing at it, you simply have to fantasise about how much you will be Envied or Pitied.

  If you are B, W or D having a well lubricated lunch at a smart Soho hostelry to celebrate hauling in a socking great account, then you are not in the slightest doubt that all those pimply arsed twats who thought that getting As at A level was the same as being clever, who mistook scoring a 50 for the first XI for being a winner, who thought that being a prison trusty was a path to a golden future, will all be BETs to a man.

  The idea that you, B, W or D, work in something as fashionable – and as full of gorgeous women – as advertising and, what’s more, seem to be making a packet out of it – naturally you park the company Porsche where it can’t be missed – will be guaranteed to get the bile rising in every throat in the class. Always assuming Bryan Ferry or Richard Branson weren’t at school with you, it would be all E and no P.

  Now here’s the sobering thing. (Not that we let it impose on us that day we won the thingummy account.) We did, or at least I did, and what went for W, I am pretty sure went for B and D as well, yes, we really did measure ourselves on the E to P scale. I mean all the hilarious – to us – riffing on the idea of the E to P that we did over the pudding Yquem was obviously done with a lorry load of ironic nods and knowing winks but the tragic and inescapable truth is that, as much as were joking, we were deadly serious.

  To my everlasting sham
e – but I am determined to admit all here so it can’t be ignored – I remember that after we had gone on to Grouchos and I had finally fallen into a cab at about midnight to be disgorged in my dishevelled – but still unmistakably Prada – suit outside my recently restored stucco Westbourne Park semi, and after I had fumbled for my keys and tripped over the cat – didn’t have a cat but you get the idea – I sprawled in my Conran recliner with a bottle of Calvados – I must have been pissed because I cannot bear the stuff – and considered my life in the round. And yes, mortified though I am to say it, I remember quite distinctly that I used the E to P scale to measure it. (Probably having a jokey conversation in my head with Geoff and Vince, but still, definitely, using it.) And, let me be clear: if, which I very much doubt, I appeared at any time to be blushing, that was the drink, not any kind of modesty.

  I considered my family asleep upstairs. I thought about Alison, my Titian-haired (real, well, once anyway) market research executive wife (met her at a group discussion about a lager campaign I was doing) who was forty-two but looked thirty-five. And a bloody fit thirty-five at that. I thought about my two exquisitely pretty tweenie daughters, Florence and India – could have been worse: if India had been a boy we were toying with Paris – and I thought about our recent Christmas in the Seychelles, our forthcoming Easter skiing holiday in Val d’Isere, my week in Cannes at the Film Festival in June – no, alright, not the real one, just the advertising one, but still a week in Cannes is a week in Cannes. I didn’t have any idea where our family summer holiday would be but I knew it would be three weeks in a villa in the South of France or in Italy or on a Greek island or somewhere like that and we’d take the nanny too – if memory serves me right it was the South African girl at the time, sweet face, nice arse – because let’s face it, it was a holiday for Alison too and it would hardly make sense if she was having to do more work when she was on holiday than when she wasn’t.

  I had got to the bottom of this page of the ledger and given it a nice fat tick – I’ll bet Stephen Wilkinson, left half for South of England Grammar Schools circa 1970, the freckly bloke with the massive Adam’s apple who came directly after me on the class register, didn’t take his family on holiday half the bloody year – when I twisted my knee rather painfully, incurred various other minor injuries and damaged about £1000 of Prada suit – at 1999 prices! – beyond repair.

  This happened because, having totted up my good fortune in the family and chattels column, I then unwisely decided to move on to property and cars. I can’t recall the exact sequence of events that led to the accident but it was something like this: I was reclining in my recliner to get a good shufty at the sumptuousness of the living room – lounge was a word I had left behind with Stephen Wilkinson long ago. It was reassuringly swaggy – modernist minimalism was not yet upon us in 1999 – with vases stuffed full of bright early tulips by Alison. (Or possibly by Mrs Whoeverit-was-at-the-time, the daily.)

  Of course, the swagginess was appropriately alleviated by semiotically correct works of art: a couple of Hockneys and a Warhol – prints only but still worth a bob or two even then – and some nicely challenging South African pieces done by a Zulu artist which were, as far as one could tell, montages of township life in Soweto or somewhere like that. They worked a treat in swaggy Westbourne Park.

  Having made a mental note of all that, I then got it into my head – and here was the error – to survey the magnificence of ‘New Pemberley’ from the outside. (We really had called it ‘New Pemberley’ and had had it tastefully painted on the front door. Or rather I had. Colin Firth and Jane Austen had been all over the television the year before we had bought the house, and ‘New Pemberley’ had been borne of the same obviously-not-meaning-it-but-actually-really-meaning-it mindset as the E to P scale – and very possibly at the same restaurant. I thought it was fucking hilarious.)

  So, still holding the Calvados bottle – more for effect than for drinking because, as I said, I can’t abide the stuff – I staggered down the front steps. (Effect on who? The imaginary Geoff and Vince, I suppose. Wouldn’t want them thinking I was the sort of chap who didn’t appreciate a good digestif.)

  Now, to get a really good look at the house, I needed to get back from it, and, as the pavement obviously wasn’t deep enough, this involved wandering backwards into the road. On the one hand this was good, because it did enable me to get the full effect of the finely proportioned sash windows – all remade and double glazed but to the exact spec of the originals including the critically narrow width of the glazing bars which, as any nouveau riche media type knows, is so difficult to achieve it can only be done with the soon-to-die-out skills of the ancient and eye-wateringly expensive joiners whose number only your architect knows.

  And not only that, but having stepped back far enough, I was able to simultaneously observe the full range of the family cars. Parked in front of the newly painted glossy black railings that separated ‘New Pemberley’ from the riff raff were my 911 – two years old, time for a new one? – Alison’s brand new Grand Cherokee – black, tinted windows, natch – and a second-hand Golf that we’d bought for the Nanny. (For personal use only. When she was driving to and from the girls’ school, whose already stratospheric fees were exponentially increasing by the nanosecond – as I was only too happy to jocularly remind the notional Geoff and Vince – we insisted on the higher riding safety of the Cherokee. And so did the girls. You wouldn’t catch Florence and India being seen getting out of a second hand Golf!)

  Alright, alright, I hear you. Not exactly a collection to strike fear into the hearts of Jay Kay or Rowan Atkinson, but then they didn’t go to my school. The point was that I’d have bet five Park Drive to a Sherbert Dab that my modest little motorcade would have had Stephen Wilkinson’s Adam’s apple gulping in horror.

  Yes, no doubt about it. Es all round. So, as I say, stepping back into the road to survey all that was mine had paid dividends. But, as you will long ago have foreseen, pride was about to come before a fall. Roads aren’t principally there for drunks to lurch about in whilst having self-congratulatory conversations with their imaginary mates, but for vehicles to drive down. And, yes, one duly did.

  I vaguely heard an engine noise break through my self-reverie but I didn’t want to be disturbed. So it took a sharp squealing of breaks to prompt evasive action, which in turn led to a dropping of the unloved Calvados bottle, a shattering of glass, a falling to the ground, a cutting of the hand, a tearing of the left Prada trouser leg, a wrenching of the left Williams knee and a lot of unjustified effing and blinding at the young driver who might, not entirely without cause, have got out of the car and remonstrated with me with violence.

  Fortunately – joyriding perhaps? – he contented himself with a sharp up and down movement of the loosely closed right fist (with matching epithet) and drove off. Which left me with the unavoidable task of hauling myself to my feet in the deserted street as best I could, and dragging myself up the steps. Carelessly, but once again fortunately, I had left the front door open so a single push got me through it. Unthinkingly I used my cut hand to do the pushing and left a bloody, crimson smear across the white cursive script of ‘New Pemberley’.

  (See Gods; signs from.)

  *

  The afternoon of the following day, a rare, sunny, early spring Saturday, found me propped up in a comfy chair in the orangerie, my damaged leg resting on what, in my long-deceased parents’ day, was called, without sniggering, a pouffe.

  They certainly wouldn’t have called the orangerie an orangerie. To Syd (heart failure) and Mavis (pneumonia) it would have been a sun lounge. Or Mavis – but definitely not Syd – might possibly have opted for sun ‘loggia’. I am sure loggia was a word that was big back in their day. And frankly, left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have called it an orangerie either. I’d have gone for conservatory. But Alison, a dedicated Interiors disciple, had, in her limitless wisdom, decreed that it sho
uld be an orangerie. Perhaps ‘orangerie’ was the 1999 version of ‘sun loggia’.

  Perhaps Alison was the 1999 version of Mavis.

  Having introduced them to you, this seems an appropriate place to say a word or two about Mavis and Syd, though their part in this story is only small. By and large, I feel nothing but gratitude to my parents, my only serious quibble being their failure to bequeath me better genes longevity-wise, and I still fervently hope to be proved wrong on that point. They did what they saw as their best for me, that I have never doubted. And if some of their ideas seem a little wrong-headed by today’s standards, well wasn’t that bound to be the way, and won’t it always? Until I was nearly old enough to vote, you could be sent to prison for being a practising homosexual or for having an abortion, and parents allowed virtual strangers – and some teachers of my acquaintance were very strange indeed – to beat the living daylights of their children. I am not saying Mavis and Syd went along with any of that but those were the prevailing ideas of the day. Who knows what people will regard as equally morally repugnant in fifty years? Eating vegetables, keeping pets, having cut flowers in the house? I am sure that by the time I reach my dotage – not that long – Florence and India will look back at some of the things I banged on about during their childhood and sadly shake their heads.

  As it happens, Mavis and Syd – Syd particularly – were, I think, rather enlightened for their time, but they had their little foibles. One of Mavis’s was her refusal to countenance the use of diminutives. Except in Syd’s case, which I suppose was the exception that proved the rule. But I was Andrew, always Andrew, and never anything else.

  Except that, at the very outset, I wasn’t. My given names were, God help me, and I am not a believer, Cyril Andrew – Cyril after Mavis’s late father. This was only done in my grandfather’s honour, and not because they had any intention of calling me Cyril, and for that mercy I am truly grateful. I don’t know how old I can have been when I discovered I was a Cyril, but I do know I sensed immediately that I did not want to be one. By the time I was seven, I was already telling schoolmates who were nosey enough to ask, that the C in my name stood for Colin or Christopher – unlikely being Jewish but better than Cyril – or Keith. (At that age, nobody’s spelling is good enough to argue.) By the time I had reached Grammar School, it was Charles, if anyone noticed a document with a C on it, and it has stayed that way. Almost. Because, so much did I hate the whole business, that at the age of twenty-two, I went to a solicitor and paid – using money I had saved up as soon as I was working – to have my name changed, or at least, reordered, by deed poll. I became Andrew Charles Williams. That is how I have been ever since. It is on my passport, on my National Insurance records, driving license, everything. I have never told this to my partners, my wife, my children, to anyone. Mavis and Syd, sadly, are no longer in a position to grass me up. I have very, very nearly forgotten that I was ever anything else.