A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  You may think this legal change rather odd, in the light of another conviction I have about my name. I have always considered Andrew Williams about the dullest name a person could have. When I was about ten, I went to Mavis and Syd, and complained bitterly about it, and with the kind of indulgent parental smiles you would expect, they asked me what I would like to be called instead. I came up with Floyd Meccano. Floyd Patterson was the World Heavyweight Boxing Champion at the time, a time when there were only about six sports to know about, so that explains that, and every small boy in those days had a Meccano set. I showed not the slightest interest in engineering, but even then I could appreciate a good brand name.

  ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.’ Well that may be Juliet’s opinion but it’s never been mine. What’s in a name? Why did Cary Grant dump Archibald Leach? Ask Lady Gaga why she doesn’t call herself Stephanie Germanotta. Names matter. Names can be worth money. And it’s always seemed to me that having a name with a bit of a ring to it, providing you have a modicum of ability to back it up, can do you no harm. So why didn’t I go for something more exotic when I went to law? I honestly don’t know. Maybe I felt it would be some kind of betrayal of Mavis and Syd. Anyway, Andrew Charles Williams was the farthest I was prepared to go. And that, despite it still being as boring as it ever was, is how I remain to this day.

  I had woken on that Saturday morning, head and knee apparently locked in competition to see which could throb more agonisingly, to find Alison standing over me, hair swishing meaningfully from side to side and eyes rolling.

  “For Christ’s sake, Andrew, you could at least have taken your bloody clothes off.”

  “Er, yes … well, you see …”

  “And what have you done to your suit. You’ve ruined it!”

  ”Er, yes … well, I fell and twisted my knee. Dunno what I’ve done to it. Hurts like buggery.”

  “Didn’t I buy you that suit? It’s Prada – do you have any idea how much that cost?”

  “Well, um, a lot I expect. But my knee – aargh.”

  “And your hand – what the hell have you – didn’t slip while you were trying to slash your wrists, did you?”

  Cue convulsive laughter at own joke. Personally, I found it a struggle to join in but it did seem to have the benefit of lightening her mood.

  After a perfunctory attempt at cleaning up, and the donning of shorts – hideous and unseasonable but the only thing I could get over my knee without giving away the name of every member of the French Resistance – we went off to Casualty. (Or had it already become A and E by then?) Into the Cherokee we climbed, the three of us, Alison and I and India, all sweet nine-year-old concern for poor Daddy, leaving Florence, all door-slamming-twelve-year-old contempt for just about anybody, to take care of Spot. As if.

  (Spot was our all-black, utterly spot-free, French bulldog whom the six-year-old Florence had, entirely without irony, insisted on so naming.)

  A few hours, a losing argument with a triage nurse, three bloody painful stitches and a reassuringly clear X-ray later, we drove back home, with me constantly repeating Sister’s stricture that my knee needed complete rest.

  Thus my place in the comfy chair in the orangerie. And thus one more fork in the road taken to – well, that will become apparent very soon.

  The point is that my enforced inactivity meant that I couldn’t be dragooned into accompanying (meaning chauffeuring) Alison on her usual weekend shopping expedition and that she had to think of something else to do. And it must have been my torn trousers I think, that served as the catalyst that sent Alison into one of her ‘let’s chuck everything out’ moods.

  If there was one thing Alison loved almost as much as buying new stuff, it was chucking out the old. It was one of the many ways in which she and I were complete opposites. I, the squirreling hoarder, she, the compulsive clearer of decks. And, beginning with those torn trousers, and without bothering to ask if I was agreeable – for the simple reason that she knew I wouldn’t be – it was my stuff that she had decided to chuck out.

  So I happily sat and watched ‘Grease’ for the twelve hundredth time with India and Spot, blissfully unaware that, all the while, Alison was gleefully filling black bin bags with the old shirts and shoes and trousers and sweaters that she decided I didn’t want. And yes, jackets too. And one jacket in particular, a short denim jacket in the style that had been de rigueur in the late seventies and which I probably hadn’t worn since, but from which I would never have voluntarily parted.

  And now we come to the nub of the matter, the crucial, life changing moment. Alison, deck clearing, methodical Alison, naturally decided to methodically check the pockets of any garment before it was dispatched Oxfam-wards. And into the inside pocket of my de rigueur seventies denim jacket she reached and found there, as I was about to discover when she tapped me on the shoulder and thrust it into my line of a sight, the butterfly whose flapping wings would set off the earthquake. It came in the guise of a shiny-feeling, squarish, sort of but not quite cardboardy thing which, when she pulled it out, turned out to be a dog-eared Polaroid of a young woman; rather pretty, dark haired, with almond-shaped eyes, slightly Italianate or possibly Jewish, or maybe even Puerto Rican – it was hard to tell, Polaroids fade – but definitely pretty.

  “Andrew?” she asked, all sweetness and light – almost. “Who is this?”

  Chapter 2

  New York, 1979

  Peggy and I wandered back down Fifth Avenue with the rest of the crowd dribbling out of the Robert Palmer concert that had just reached its exhausted finale in Central Park. It was part of the annual Dr Pepper Central Park Music Festival and whatever Robert Palmer may have thought, I, for one, was extremely grateful for their sponsorship, because it was one of those unbearable summer nights in Manhattan – very late summer, it was already September – when the humidity is a thousand per cent and even the most refined of ladies glistens buckets. We grabbed the ice-cold cans that were being handed out as we left the arena and not just because they were free. On a night like that, an ice-cold anything is a lifeline. With my de rigueur denim jacket slung over my shoulder – don’t know why I’d bought it, far too hot to wear, but once a fashionista always a fashionista, I suppose – I tossed back my head and drained the lot.

  “You like this stuff?” asked Peggy.

  “Actually, I’ve never had it before. We don’t get it in England.”

  “We don’t get it here either,” said Peggy. “I mean, we do, but I don’t know anyone who ever, like, gets it.”

  “Somebody must,” I said.

  “Yup. Somebody must. I guess somebody must.”

  Yes, you’re right. An utterly unremarkable, nothingy, so-what exchange and yet, for me, intoxicating. It was the rhythm of Peggy’s voice that I swooned over. The little staccato bursts, the subtlest of inflections, the bone dry delivery. It was pure essence of New York. Not the ‘On The Waterfront’, Hell’s Kitchen, Hey-Youse-Gimme-A-Cawfee Noo Yawk. But something else; sharp, smart, sassy, seductive. Yes, all those clichés that, when put together, beget another whole alliterating string of them: Manhattan, Martinis, Madison Avenue. It was all there in Peggy’s voice, every time she spoke.

  So maybe you’re thinking it was the idea of Peggy that I was so infatuated with. That any pretty uptown girl might have done just as well. It’s a legitimate debating point, and I will admit that maybe there’s the tiniest scintilla of truth that I was, indeed, in love with the idea of a girl like Peggy. After all, I was, with one or two minor caveats, in love with everything ‘New York’. But inside Peggy’s New York wrapper was someone who rang so many bells for me, I would have become every bit as besotted with her if she’d come from Nanking or Narnia.

  I had the not very original idea – still do – that love is a wavelength thing. It’s just a question of finding someone who is on the same one a
s you. Nobody that I have ever met – not before nor since – received my signal and sent back hers so clearly, with so little interference, as Peggy. No moody dropout. No emotional static. It was, for those few short months, such an unburdening relief to find someone to whom I could get through and who came through to me. As I had had so little real hope of finding someone like that – never got remotely close to it before so why should I ever? – I was simply amazed. And even more amazing was Peggy’s often given and never solicited – well, only very rarely solicited – assurance that the feeling was entirely mutual. There was Peggy in this relationship, there was me, and for the first, and perhaps only, time in my life, there was a real, almost tangible ‘us’, the sum that was greater than the parts.

  So, given all this, how on earth had we managed to get ourselves into a situation where tonight would be our last?

  *

  It had begun in the lift. Or the elevator. Two countries separated by one language as Churchill said, and he wasn’t wrong.

  I had come to New York a few weeks before to work for an agency called McConnell Martin. They had a majority holding in the place I’d been at in London, and Todd Zwiebel, McConnell’s senior VP and ECD (that’s senior Vice President and Executive Creative Director to the uninitiated) had ‘flown over the pond’, as was his wont to say, to supervise a pitch (ad jargon for ‘presentation’) for a big piece of international business that the two agencies, successful pitch permitting, would both get a slice of. The product in question, was a not very revolutionary new kind of sanitary towel produced by a vast multinational shampoo-to-savoury snacks conglomerate, and I, with all my experience of the wonderful world of menstruation, had been chosen to work as a copywriter on the project. (Why, you might ask, would they pick a 29-year-old unmarried, single bloke with neither a regular girlfriend nor even a sister, whose main experience had been on tyre and margarine accounts, to work on a campaign for a sanitary towel? As I say, you might ask. Just so long as you’re not expecting a sensible answer.)

  Anyway, being this 29-year-old single bloke, I had been delighted to get the gig – it was after all, a product connected with that area of a woman’s body in which … oh well, you know what I mean – and I had actually had what Todd Zwiebel thought was a rather witty idea for the campaign. Not so the client, a company man of German Swiss origin who, prior to his recently being appointed to head up the vast multinational conglomerate’s sanitary products operation in Europe and North America, had spent the previous dozen years managing its chewing gum division in South East Asia. Sadly, but not entirely surprisingly perhaps, the wit of my campaign failed to raise a Swiss German smile.

  Nevertheless, Todd, who was soon to be made company President and Chief Creative Officer of the World – a title conferred without a hint of irony, I am certain – had taken something of a shine to me and before he traversed the pond in the reverse direction, he was kind enough to facilitate my transfer to the New York office.

  Hence my stepping in to the lift/elevator in the McConnell Martin building on Madison and 38th.

  I was wearing a white tee-shirt with a specially personalised printed front. Clothes maketh the man, or, as Shakespeare might have said had he been in marketing, clothing is personal packaging and it can make all the difference to whether a punter buys or not. That’s something I’ve always known – Mavis and Syd were in the fashion business and they drummed it into me – but I can safely say that no other item I have ever worn has had such an impact. Few things change your life, but that tee-shirt changed mine.

  In order to explain further, a short historical note is necessary here: Remember, if you will, that we are talking about the late seventies. Long before Al Qaida. Long before identity theft. Long before security was the consuming obsession of every corporation and government department, the world over. In London at that time – despite the activities of the IRA – security at your place of work was, as like as not, in the hands of a chain smoking old geezer called Alf who would man the front desk of the building on those rare occasions when he wasn’t down the betting shop, and even during the brief spells when he was actually present, he was so engrossed in the Racing Post he wouldn’t have noticed if Ronnie Biggs and Charles Manson had strolled past him holding hands. So when I got to New York, I was dumbfounded to find that all employees of McConnell Martin had to be issued with special ID cards, with name, employee number and photograph printed on them.

  I was not alone in my dumbfoundment. With my old schoolboy habit of naturally gravitating towards the nearest troublemaker, I had, within days of my arrival, become pally with a couple of home grown ‘creatives’, whose working days were largely spent with their office door locked and their bong filled. And these two mavericks were not averse, once they had done their daily deep breathing exercises, to a spot of mischief making at the management’s expense. The ID cards provided an ideal opportunity.

  I can’t remember whether it was Brett or Bart who came up with the wheeze – it may even have been me – but what we did was to have each of our ID cards enlarged several times over and then to have it printed on the front of a white tee-shirt, thereby creating a sort of prisoner inmate look. The genius of the idea was that while the powers that be would understand that this was clearly intended to be a subversive act, they wouldn’t be able to put the corporate finger on exactly what we were doing that broke any rules.

  The effect of wearing my prisoner-esque tee-shirt was illuminating. Not a single word was said. Many was the surreptitious glance, occasionally came a nervous tight lipped rictus, but neither humble colleague nor lofty VP ever said a dickybird to me.

  Except for one person. In the elevator. (Enough of this lift business – we’re in America now.) And that person was a short, slight, curly dark-haired girl with slightly almond-shaped eyes, Jewish perhaps, or Italian, perhaps even Puerto Rican – I wasn’t wearing my glasses so it was hard to tell – but pretty, definitely pretty. And she took one look at my tee-shirt and laughed like a drain. She saw it. She got it. And she wasn’t the least bit concerned about showing what she thought about it. We stopped at the ninth floor and out she stepped, still laughing.

  “What’s your name?” I called out after her.

  “Peggy,” she said. And then, after a brief pause, she threw this titbit over her departing shoulder, “Casting.”

  ‘Casting’. Not CARsting with the long, dreary English ‘A’, but the short, snappy American version. The short, snappy, SEXY American version. And why had she said it? Well, why else would she have said it? What could it be but the abridged version of ‘come up and see me sometime’?

  Needless to say, having let about twenty minutes pass – didn’t want her to think I was too keen – I went sniffing about the second floor trying to pick up the scent. I found a group of girls stationed at a row of desks and click-clacking away at golf-ball typewriters.

  “Excuse me,” I said, laying on the diffident English politeness and drawing out my vowels like a poor man’s Bertie Wooster. “Would you happen to know if there is someone called Peggy working in this department?” (I had already discovered, of course, that if a girl with an American accent could get my juices flowing, that was as nothing to the knee-weakening power that an English accent seemed to have over the average American girl.)

  “Sure,” someone said. “You mean Peggy Lee.”

  Did I? Peggy Lee? Peggy LEE? As in the famous American, platinum-blonde, jazz/big-band songstress Peggy Lee? Or rather, and rather weirdly, as in someone definitely not platinum blonde or anything else fitting that Peggy Lee’s description but having the same name as her. That was who I meant?

  “Is she the only Peggy in casting?”

  “I’ll just check. Hey girls, is she the only Peggy in CARsting?”

  “I’m called Peggy.”

  “Me too.”

  “And me.”

  “Well thank you, ladies,” I said. “It’s nic
e to know we can cast all the comedy parts in-house.”

  No, I didn’t. I went slightly red and decided that it would be wiser to retire and pursue the matter by phone.

  Which I duly did and, after the slightly self-conscious hi-I’m-the-guy-in-the-tee-shirt-you-met-in-the-lift-sorry-I-mean-elevator intro, it all proceeded relatively smoothly and we arranged to meet for a drink the following evening after work. I put the phone down feeling pretty damn pleased with myself. (It was always a feeling that came too naturally to me.)

  At the very least I hadn’t had to deal with the humiliation of rejection before we had even got past GO – not likely, I accept, given that she hadn’t exactly tried to cover her spoor but you know women, so always a possibility. And, at the most, it could mean romance, sex – with luck, not in that order – marriage, children, grandchildren, a lifetime’s blissful partnership. Who knew? Maybe she really would turn out to be the one.

  When I got into the bar and after I had battled my way through the usual frenzy of high fiving and inane yelling – my greatest creative effort ever was a two line poem: ‘Noo Yorkers, Too Raucous’ – I spotted Peggy, wedged into a corner by another girl whom I recognised as being one of those golf-ball bashers I had tangled with the day before.