A Polaroid of Peggy Page 14

  And wasn’t it true that on the one occasion when I had just beaten my chest and swung from the vine, when I had just gone out and made all the arrangements for the weekend without asking Peggy, had she not agreed, without hesitation, to play Jane to my Tarzan? Wasn’t the lesson I had to learn, clear?

  Or was it? Boldness, yes, I must be bold. But what about patience? Didn’t I need that just as much? To be boldly patient; how did you do that?

  In the end I was so tired I gave up trying to square the circle and fell happily asleep reviewing my – mostly – fabulous trip to Pound Ridge. Featuring Rob and Laura, Benjamin and Mrs Robinson, Doris and Rock, Bing and Grace, Tarzan and Jane, but, starring, above all, Peggy and Andy.

  Really, quite a weekend.

  Chapter 11

  London, Sardinia, Richmond Upon Thames, 1999

  Poor Jerry Seinfeld.

  As my conversations with Donald McEwan testify, I seem to have blocked out almost everything about Peggy when I returned to London. And, along with her, I rejected just about anything that might in some way be connected to her. Jerry Seinfeld was one such blameless casualty.

  When they started to run his TV show in Britain, the early adopters, of which the advertising world is full, were quick to get in on the act. Pretty soon they were all talking about Jerry.

  “Have you seen that ‘Seinfeld’ show?” they would ask, hoping, of course, that you would shake your head, so that they could feel smugly confirmed in the knowledge that their trendiness was greater than yours. They seemed to particularly like Kramer and occasionally I would catch some young copywriter or art director ruffling his air and sliding across the floor in an attempt to demonstrate just how hilarious he had been in last night’s episode.

  At such times, instead of doing as I usually did which was to try to ingratiate myself with the agency youngsters by pretending to like whatever they liked – and thus show how agelessly ‘cool’ I was – I would walk sniffily by. This being so out of character with my usual simpering, I would then invariably catch one of them muttering “What the fuck’s the matter with him today?” If only they’d known. (If only I’d known.)

  “Actually, you little prats, it’s not just about today, it’s about my whole fucking life. You see, I once lived in New York and I met this girl called Peggy and I was fucking insane about her and she liked Jerry Sein—” But, of course, for a thousand and one very good reasons, I would never have said any such thing, not the least of them being that I didn’t really have any understanding of why I was behaving like this. It was one of those visceral reactions in which the brain is completely bypassed. All I knew was – in my water – that I didn’t want anything to do with Jerry Seinfeld or anyone who was anything to do with him.

  And so determined was this refusal to admit the world of Jerry into my consciousness that I barely knew who any of the characters were, and I only knew about Kramer because two young idiots in my department, having discovered him and been desperate to be the first people in London to use him in a commercial – which would involve meeting him, a bloke off the telly!, not to mention getting an all-expenses-paid trip to LA – came into my office one day and tried to flog me a script for a Cornish Pasty with Kramer and wotsisname the postman in it.

  They soon wished they hadn’t.

  “Are you fucking deranged? A Cornish Pasty with a couple of actors from an American sitcom no-one has ever heard of—”

  “Yes, they have.”

  “Apart from anything else, do you have any idea how much American actors cost?”

  “Yeah, but you’re always telling us not to worry about things like that, just do the most creative thing we can.”

  If there was one thing I hated, it was being told what I’d told someone.

  “Yes, but I also expect you to have some fucking common sense! Just get out of here will you!”

  They needed no second bidding, but in their anxiety to escape, they’d left their ‘work’ on the table. I crumpled the script up, charged towards the door, and threw it after them.

  “And take this shit with you!”

  So that was my general disposition vis-à-vis Jerry Seinfeld and all those who sailed with him, and it may provide some explanation for my actions when I finally arrived back in ‘New Pemberley’, a little less than fresh from my trip to Cannes. It was about ten in the evening I suppose, the girls were in bed, and the South African nanny was sitting on the sofa in the open plan kitchen stroke living room – quite separate from the drawing room as Alison insisted on calling it, which was reserved for special poncey occasions – with her feet tucked under her arse, painting her nails and watching the telly.

  Having tried to find – unsuccessfully – something to eat in the fridge that wasn’t in some way chocolatey, and having settled instead for drinking some tasteless Mexican beer – all we had – I slumped down on the sofa next to her – but not too close – and picked up a copy of ‘Hello’ that she must have been reading, and absent mindedly scrutinised the lovely home of whichever Z-lister had graciously invited me in so to do. Without looking up, and just to pass the time of day, I casually asked the South African nanny what she was watching. The answer, as I am sure you have long since deduced, was ‘Seinfeld’. Normally, that is to say pre-Polaroid of Peggy, that would have prompted a neuro-transmitter to have got in touch with a synapse or the other way around or something like that and, without my registering any conscious thought, I would have got up and left the room. But on this occasion, now that Peggy was back on my radar, I suppose the neuro-transmitters, synapses etc had got the message – if they hadn’t heard, who would have? – and I looked up at the screen to see what was going on. And what I saw was Jerry talking to someone whom he called Elaine. Which I found very confusing because I could have sworn the person he was talking to was someone called Peggy.

  I concentrated harder. I got up and walked over to the screen and dropped on to my haunches to have a closer look. I could hear rustling and barely suppressed harrumphing from the direction of the sofa as the South African nanny – Anneke, that was her name! – wriggled about trying to see around my head which was evidently blocking her view. I made no effort to accommodate her – this was important, for fuck’s sake. Annoyingly they kept cutting from one shot size to another so I could never get a long enough look at Elaine/Peggy’s face to be absolutely certain. I ran out into the hall and opened my suitcase and dragged crumpled shirts and worn underpants and grubby espadrilles and half the rest of the stuff out of it trying to locate my Ozwald Boateng suit, which was buried at the bottom. Got it! Out came the jacket, and yes, in the inside pocket I found the Polaroid of Peggy.

  I ran back in again to see someone called George and that Kramer person now occupying the screen.

  “Come on, come on,” I muttered, adding some impatient foot tapping. I caught Anneke flashing one of those supposed to be secret employee looks – doubtless tomorrow she would be telling her nanny mates all about it at the post school-run session at Starbucks.

  At last Elaine/Peggy came back on and I checked from the Polaroid to the screen and back. No, it was not as I had first feared. (Yes, feared – jealousy, as always, trumping generosity.) Incredibly, I had already computed the possibility that this must have something to do with Miller and that under his evil influence Peggy had done a gamekeeper turned poacher thing and switched from casting to cast – but eventually I was able to convince myself that this Elaine was not actually Peggy herself. She had the same black tumbling hair, the same Jewish/Italian New York looks, the effervescence and the sudden smile but her features were just a little sharper – maybe that little touch of could-be Puerto Rican wasn’t there – her hair was a tad straighter, her manner slightly more direct.

  But, on the other hand, she was, in essence, Peggy to a tee. This Elaine woman, or whatever her real name was, was so much like Peggy it was impossible not to be reminded of her. I sat t
here, clutching the Polaroid, utterly transfixed.

  So transfixed, that I barely registered the commotion coming from the hall – “Ouch! Fuck! Who the hell left this bloody suitcase here – bugger, bugger, bugger – I’ve laddered my tights!” – and didn’t notice Alison come up behind me. It was only when Anneke, clearly sensing imminent war, scuttled out of the room, that I looked up and saw her.

  “Good evening Andrew,” she said coolly and then, as she looked down at the Polaroid of Peggy in my hand, her tone dropped another few degrees to icy. “Gosh, I’m sorry. Am I interrupting something?”

  Of course, I had another of those just-been-caught-watching-bestial-porn hot flushes – it’s just not possible not to feel guilty as hell at such moments – and then tried to cover it up by saying something totally not to the point like, “Oh hi Alison – had a good week?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Alison, turning sharply on her heel, “I’ve had a simply marvellous week.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by this, and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to know.

  *

  Alison reappeared in the kitchen a few minutes later, having repackaged herself in slobbing about the house wear – only jeans and tee-shirt but appropriately labelled – and poured herself a glass of Sancerre. She had a look on her face that did not augur well and although I could hardly have failed to notice that relations between us were going ever more awry, I wasn’t quite ready to admit to myself that our marriage was in the last chance saloon. (Even if an objective view might have been that it wasn’t so much in it, as half way out of the swing doors and about to be deposited on its arse in the dusty street.) I tried – though to what purpose other than the maintenance of a quiet life I have no idea – to sue for peace.

  “How’s the basement going?”

  This was genuinely meant to be a nice, neutral, unthreatening, completely unloaded question to which – rather like a wildlife programme on the telly – no-one could object. But, having been completely wrapped up in my own world, I had not yet quite come to realise, despite all the evidence that was there for me to see, where Dougal-call-me-Doug fitted in to things. Alison, on the other hand, knew only too well, and assuming that even I couldn’t be quite so self-absorbed as not to have noticed – she always underestimated me – interpreted my ‘how’s the basement?’ question as being a particularly snide means of getting at her.

  “If you want to know about Doug and me, what don’t you stop trying to be so bloody clever for once in your life and just ask?”

  Well, clearly – clear even to me who would much rather not have seen – there was now no need to ask.

  Some men – and most women probably – faced with this de facto confession of guilt – quite a bit more than de facto really – would have just said get the hell out of here and never darken my door again. In the modern world, where no-one quits the marital home until the judge has assured them that their slice of the cake – their very big slice of the cake – and the cake stand – and at least half of the cake forks – are now unchallengeably theirs, these might just be empty words, but at least you might have the benefit of some kind of catharsis from just saying them.

  I, however, typically, didn’t say anything nearly so decisive. I just gawped. And I can’t say that I found gawping in the least bit cathartic. I don’t think feeling utterly empty, as I did, is quite the same thing. I also remember looking at Alison and thinking how incredibly beautiful she looked. A bit late to start appreciating her perhaps, but there you are. And I felt an overwhelming sadness. Despite everything I just wanted to take her in my arms and cuddle her. It might have been proof of that old saying about only realising what you’ve got when you’ve lost it. Or maybe, and I think this is nearer the mark, it was just sentimentality.

  “So what do you want to do?” I asked when I eventually spoke.

  Now it was Alison’s turn to confront the truth of the situation. And if she’d come in to this conversation with a clear idea of where she wanted to come out, her confidence in whatever plans she’d had, appeared to falter.

  “I don’t really know,” she said, and suddenly looked rather small. In that instant, the whole tenor of the conversation changed. All the confrontation and bitterness seemed to evaporate. Now we were equals again: two lost souls – just talking figuratively of course, I still didn’t do souls – trying to see a way forward.

  During this conversation we’d been standing on either side of the kitchen island. Now Alison walked around and sat on the edge of the sofa cradling her glass, and I picked up the bottle and another glass and perched next to her, topping her up and pouring myself a drink too. There we sat, side by side, in silence. And then it seemed as though, whatever the outcome was going to be, we had both decided we wanted to park it for the time being and leave all the ghastly possibilities of splitting up and telling the children and dealing with fucking lawyers and deciding which of us would be lumbered with Spot and all the rest until some other time.

  In that odd spirit of sudden comradeship, I told her all about Cannes.

  “Legga,” she said, “What an arsehole!” ‘Legga’ was an old nickname for Vince (Dutton, rhyming slang) that had fallen into disuse since, in his more exalted status of recent years, he had become a tiny bit self-important and refused to answer to it.

  And she also said, “Lucille! Huh! Didn’t I always tell you she was trouble?”

  And she had, many times. I’d always shrugged it off as one good looking girl’s instinctive dissing of another. But now that I thought about it, I realised how right she had been, not just about Lucille, but about so many things professionally, and how much I would miss that, when, as seemed inevitable, the break eventually came.

  In fact, it didn’t come for many months. We soldiered on – for the usual reasons. For the sake of the children. To avoid the heartache. Because, you never knew, we might find a way back. And because too, we had a family holiday booked, three weeks in a stunning – and stunningly expensive – villa somewhere just south of the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. It was booked and a hefty deposit paid, and we weren’t going to get that back. And perhaps, just perhaps, three weeks in the Sardinian sun might begin to heal the wounds.

  So we left it there. I said no more about Doug, asked for no promises as to future conduct, fought no duel. I even sat through a couple of meetings about ‘snagging’ the now all but completed basement conversion and, pretending, for some unearthly reason to be civilised, even congratulated him on having done a damned good job, which, by the way, he had. Even if introducing Doug on to the scene had – or would soon – cost me my marriage, I had the consolation that, even after the lunatic overruns on costs, we would, when you calculated the increased value of the house, still come out well ahead. And, yes, even in the midst of all this turmoil, I made those calculations and derived some comfort from them.

  What Doug must have thought about me, I cannot imagine. If maybe seeming just a touch nervous at times, he certainly played his part in this little tragicomedy well enough, which can’t have been easy because Alison must have told him that I knew, if not everything, then all that I needed to know. What can he have thought was going on in my head? Perhaps, being not just creative, but a properly qualified professional, an architect – Dougal Harris RIBA – he had a dim view of admen and thought not a lot went on in my head, which as regards Alison and him, was just about the truth of it. One thing I worried about a lot was missing ‘Seinfeld’. (Or rather the scenes with Elaine/Peggy.) I really wanted to be able to sit and watch it with Anneke but I was terrified of being caught by Alison. I don’t think I would have been nearly so nervous if it really had been bestial porn that I’d wanted to see.

  At the end of July, we set off en famille in two huge Mercedes taxis bound for Heathrow, before struggling aboard a plane to Sardinia. It was the five of us; Alison, Florence – who made it explicitly – and expletively – clear that
she didn’t want to come and would far rather hang around with her mates in Whiteleys, our local mall – India, revelling in her role as angelic goodie goodie by comparison with Florence, Anneke and me. Spot had gone into kennels that were about as expensive as the Sardinian villa. I was rather hoping Anneke might bring some ‘Seinfeld’ videos with her but she didn’t.

  The holiday went as most such holidays do. Sunbathing, sunblocking, swimming in the pool, shrieking in the pool, bitter tearful arguments about who had first dibs on the floating poolchair – I usually won those – expensive meals in supposedly family restaurants where the kids turned their noses up at everything they hadn’t had a million times before at home, family games of tennis which never got past thirty love before somebody stormed off in a huff, reading – or pretending to read – whichever three for the price of two novels we’d picked up at the airport Waterstones on the way out, and desperately looking for some way to engage India whenever she uttered her nine-year-old’s mantra: “I’m bored!” This happened increasingly as the holiday progressed (progressed?) because Florence had met some little local oik who was staying two villas down, and spent as much time as she could doing fuck knows what with him, thus making herself unavailable for relentlessly teasing her sister, which treatment you might have thought would have upset India, but which, for some unfathomable reason, she seemed to prefer to being left alone.

  And I, not being able to find enough to distract me – despite all of the above – could not fail to do some serious thinking. (I dare say that Alison – stretched out on the other side of the pool, face down on the sunbed, bra unclasped, head and copper hair hanging over the end so she could read her book positioned on the ground below, Cutler and Gross shades on, aluminium foil nose piece defying laws of gravity and still in place – was doing some serious thinking too, but though we managed a fair copy of exchanging pleasantries, the one thing we were never going to do was reveal any of our serious thinking to each other, so I cannot report on anything of consequence that she may have had under consideration.)