A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  “Hi Peggy,” I tried. Basic, straightforward Pawn to King Four opening.

  “Hi-ie” they both sang back and then dissolved into laughter.

  “I think,” I said, “at least one of you is pulling my plonker.” (A little bit of rather forced Del Boy to leaven the Wooster. Bad move.)

  “Pulling your what?” asked not-Peggy.

  A ham-fisted attempt to explain its literal and vernacular meanings followed. Followed by a pause. Aka a hiatus. Aka a sign that things suddenly seemed to be not going that well.

  “Um, can I get either of you another drink?” Not, it’s true, the witty game changer with which one would have liked to halt the worrying slide, but the tried and trusted basic holding tactic if one can’t think of anything better.

  “Not for me,” said not-Peggy, draining her whatever-it-was. “Gotta TV show to catch.”

  Now my whole future suddenly teetered on a knife-edge. Was this remark by not-Peggy a reference to some duty that her role in ‘casting’ might oblige her to undertake? Had she been asked to check out the ability of a supposed actor to simultaneously walk and chew gum? Or was her connection to ‘the business’ entirely coincidental and was this just a throwaway to indicate that she had nothing much to do but that she knew that we two lovebirds would much rather be left to our own devices?

  The world stopped turning. Would not-not-Peggy stay for a drink and who knew what after that, or had she already decided that yesterday’s tee-shirt had been the funniest thing about me and that this whole drink thing with the weird Limey copywriter was just one big mistake? Milliseconds turned into light years. The inane yellers were frozen mid high-five. And then –

  “Sure, I’ll have an orange juice.”

  Bang. The billion decibels of bar noise instantly came back on. A thousand people stopped playing statues. Palm to palm slapping machine-gunned all around. And I suddenly remembered to breathe again.

  “So” I said, when I’d finally managed to battle my way back from the bar. “Peggy Lee. That’s, er, pretty unusual.”

  “Hmm,” said Peggy Lee. “Do you prefer usual? You don’t look the type that goes for usual.”

  “God no, no I don’t—”

  “Not that it is unusual. Not really. I mean it IS totally unoriginal. Right?”

  “Well, er, yes, if you look at it like that—”

  “You’re telling me I’m totally unoriginal? You buy me one lousy orange juice—”

  And so it went on. All the while her gently teasing me and me a half step behind, unable to get back in control of the conversation. And all the while that almost imperceptible twinkle in the eyes, the enormous, dark brown – dark almost to the point of being black – eyes.

  “Your eyes. They’re very dark. I don’t think I’ve ever seen eyes so dark.”

  “Ah yes, well that’s my ancestry, the Chinese part.”

  “Really? Actually your eyes are quite almond-shaped.”

  “Uhuh. You see, now it’s Lee, L-E-E, but when my great-great … um … well, you know, came over from their shtetl in, ah, Beijing it was spelt L-I.”

  “Shtetl? I thought you only got those in Russia.”

  “They were Jewish, Andrew. Where else would they live?”

  Of course I knew it couldn’t be true. Could it? As I’ve mentioned, I am Jewish myself – in a vague, uncommitted, very British kind of way – and I’d never heard of Chinese Jews. But on the other hand, they’d had Jews everywhere else, so why not China? And that L-I thing. That sounded plausible enough. I decided not to make a challenge. Stupidly, I went back to the name business.

  “But Peggy? Is that a nickname?”

  “How did you guess that?”

  I had a foothold. At last.

  “Well, um, it’s pretty obvious I suppose. I mean who would do that – I mean name their child after a person with such a distinctive name, you know after a really famous star?”

  All wide-eyed innocence, she said, “You mean like Andy Williams?”

  Like I said: stupid. Of course, I’d heard it before, plenty of times. But like I also said, my mother, for some inexplicable reason – probably deciding it was ‘common’ – flatly forbade it, and, without thinking, I’d taken her lead. Even at school I’d just refused to along with it. Without encouragement, and perhaps because of the stony reception I gave ‘Andy’ whenever someone tried it on me, it never stuck. Could have gone the other way I suppose, and led to remorseless piss taking, but for whatever reason, it never did. I was Andrew, always identified myself as Andrew, and that was the end of it. Until now.

  “Peggy Lee and Andy Williams, kinda goes together, don’t you think?”

  I could see there was a certain apt symmetry but I wasn’t ready to admit it, not without my first putting up some kind of a fight. I rose to my mother’s defence. (Neglecting to offer, of course, the most convincing piece of evidence, that Andrew was not the first name I had been originally given.)

  “Number one,” I said. “Even Andy Williams wasn’t Andy Williams when I was born, so for that reason alone my parents could never have named me after him, and number two, I’ve never answered to anything but Andrew.”

  I was, almost immediately, wishing I hadn’t said it quite like that because Peggy was looking straight at me, like she was asking herself a very fundamental question about who I really was. And I was pretty sure I knew what that question was: is this the slightly-less-predictable-than-usual, little-bit-more-interesting-than-your-usual-ad-agency kind of a guy that I thought he might be yesterday when I saw him wearing that tee-shirt? Or is he a broom-up-the-ass, uptight English prig who thinks he’s just too important to have his name shortened?

  She decided to ascertain the answer by first repeating my own pompous phrasing back to me.

  “So you never answer to anything but Androo.”

  And then, without missing a beat, she added a question, on the answer to which, I rapidly realised, our future depended.

  “Is that right – Andy?”

  She’d given me my chance, and I wasn’t going to miss it.

  “For you,” I said, “I am prepared to make an exception.”

  So to Peggy and to Peggy alone, Andrew became Andy, and then Andy asked Peggy if she’d like to get something to eat, and they transferred to a not very salubrious Italian place near the subway on 53rd and Lex.

  We talked about a lot of other things, we must have done, because two or three hours raced by before, just after I had asked for the check, I couldn’t stop myself from bringing the conversation full circle.

  (With any other American girl by the way, I probably would have made a point of asking for ‘the bill’ just to emphasise my irresistible Britishness. But already with Peggy, I knew it couldn’t be like that.)

  So, as we sipped at that stewed-for-hours black stuff that, for some reason, Americans call coffee, I asked her, “If Peggy’s your nickname, what’s your proper name then? Or is it a secret?”

  “No, it’s not a secret,” she said cheerfully, “it’s Brenda.”

  “Brenda,” I repeated as non-committally as I could, but thinking to myself, ‘Brenda! With a name like Brenda I’m not surprised you’re happy to be called something else.’

  And it wasn’t until I had seen her back to the subway station from where she would ride to her apartment on the Upper West Side – I didn’t even try to kiss her that first night, by the way – that the penny dropped. First Peggy Lee, now Brenda Lee! How gullible did she think I was? Not that I minded in the least – I wasn't in a mood to mind anything that night

  As I walked home I felt like Don Lockwood ‘Singin’ In The Rain’. Except it wasn’t raining and it was ‘Let’s Jump The Broomstick’ that kept running through my head.

  Chapter 3

  London, 1999

  It should have been an all-hands-to-the-ground, hit-the-pum
p-running kind of a day. Or something like that. I was very confused that morning.

  Usually, the adrenalin rush of being flat out gets my thinking Sabatier-sharp and already the new client had been on the phone to Vince telling him that he wanted a dozen things done. A dozen things done in addition to the hundred and one things we were already doing for our old clients. But I was never daunted by pressure – just bring it on! As a rule I’d be fizzing with ideas, firing out instructions to all and sundry, whipping everyone up into a lather of enthusiasm.

  But not that day. That day was different. I was subdued, I was distracted, and, frankly, all over the place.

  “Are you feeling okay?” asked Vince, not very solicitously, as he barged into my office.

  “Ever heard of knocking,” I said, not even bothering to swivel back to face him. I was in my state of the art, ergonomically efficient, king-of-the-world office chair looking through the rain-spattered window at the Fitzrovia street scene half a dozen floors below. For some reason, I remember – I mean I don’t remember the reason, I just remember doing it – I was fixating on a bloke trying to get a floor lamp through the back of his hatchback. However many times he tried, and at whichever angle he tried to fit it in, he couldn’t get the door to close. Perhaps I felt there must be some kind of symbolism in this, but I have no idea what I thought it might have been.

  “I have heard of knocking, yes,” said Vince, “and for what it’s worth Julia threw herself bodily in front of me to stop me disturbing you, but we were supposed to be having a meeting in Delibes twenty minutes ago, and everyone was there but you. Thought I’d enquire why.”

  (FYI: Julia was my uber-loyal, faux-posh PA and she’d thrown herself bodily in front of a lot of people but not usually to stop them from entering. Quite the reverse, boom, boom. Delibes was the name we had given to one of our four meeting rooms, each of which had just been redecorated and named after an iconic figure of the wider creative world – it’s the sort of absurdly self-aggrandising thing that advertising agencies do. You cannot believe the time we wasted over this. As this room was to have a musical theme, we’d first considered Mozart. Thumbs down. Too obvious. Likewise Presley, Beethoven and Lennon. We were keen on Armstrong for a while – added ethnic ‘cool’ – but then rejected him because someone said it might look like tokenism. We settled on Delibes on the basis that he wrote that famous British Airways music which we could all hum and because he was certainly not obvious. So not-obvious that none of us had ever heard of Delibes until someone told us about the BA thing, and that, of course, did make him a bit dubious icon-wise. But by this point we were too exhausted to care. The other rooms were Twain, Magritte, and Kurosawa. Isn’t posterity marvellous?)

  “Sorry about the meeting, Vince, but – I dunno – I just didn’t feel like it. Anyway, I’ve twisted my knee. I can hardly walk.”

  “You’ve twisted your knee?! There’s still a room full of people, Andrew – all waiting for the oracle to speak. Come on mate, we need you down there. I’ll carry you if your leg’s that bad.”

  But for reasons I couldn’t have explained – or at least I wasn’t ready to – no, I was right the first time, I couldn’t have, because I really didn’t have the faintest idea what they were – I was determined not to go. I stayed steadfastly looking out of the window.

  “For fuck’s sake, Andrew, what’s the matter? Has somebody died?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “For fuck’s sake!” Vince said again, and turned on his heel and slammed the door shut behind him.

  But I hadn’t been ignoring him; I’d been thinking about what he’d said.

  Had somebody died?

  *

  I was sufficiently long in the tooth to know that when you are accused of something, or asked a question which might lead you to being accused of something, truth should always be your first line of defence. Not only is the weaving of tangled webs neatly avoided, but I have always found that it is far easier to face someone down when you use the truth to do so, even if, as in this case, you are using it to conceal a greater truth that lies behind. So when Alison demanded to know who the girl in the Polaroid was, and after I had got over the shock of seeing the face of someone whom I had once worshipped, suddenly snatched out of the past and dumped into a very, very different present, I answered with what I hoped was an air of total unconcern: “That’s Peggy. I knew her in New York about a hundred years ago. Where did you find that?”

  So: About this air of total unconcern I was trying for. Did I pull it off? How could I? If you were one of those Indian holy men who’s given away all his worldly goods and wears nothing but a loin cloth, I’ll bet you’d still have ‘guilty as hell’ written all over your face every time you walked through customs. It’s human nature. And if a customs officer or one of those community support chaps who’s not even a proper policeman can make an innocent man feel like that, it’s as nothing compared to what a wife can do.

  So Alison carefully weighed my answer and then gave me one of those looks that only a wife can give. She did nothing but raise her eyebrows a half smidgeon but the message was clear. Peggy might have been someone I’d known a hundred years before in New York but there had to be more to it than that. I fought back by making an assault on the moral high ground; what the hell did she think she was doing going through my things – never mind throwing them out – without asking me first? Schoolboy error; in complaining – or pretending to complain – about her going through my things, I was implying that there might be something in there I didn’t want her to see. And she’d just found out what, hadn’t she?

  Peggy indeed! The fact that I hadn’t seen her for the last twenty years, and hadn’t even met Alison until half a dozen after that, made me just as guilty as if I’d been caught red handed in a three-way with the South African nanny and Spot.

  There was only one way to deal with this – go back to watching the television. My reluctance to engage was, in Alison’s eyes, tantamount to accepting the charge and asking for a hundred and fifty-four other offences to be taken into account, but it seemed to draw the matter to a close. I stuffed the photo into my jacket pocket and might, conceivably, have never given the matter another thought but for two things.

  One, I wore the same jacket again on Monday morning. Two, India went into Florence’s room and tried on her new top from Gap. Florence duly went ballistic. Alison then went into her room to find out what the fuss was about, saw what a Godawful mess Florence’s room was in, and she went ballistic. Florence burst into tears and ran to me in the orangerie for consolation which, of course, I provided. Alison then followed Florence into the orangerie and accused me of taking her side as always.

  Alison’s sense of grievance was now well and truly stoked up and she was going to find one pretext or another to pick a fight, no matter what evasive action I took. I could bury my head in ‘Grease’, I could plead a poorly leg, I could do what the hell I liked – it mattered not. War would be declared!

  So what was the invasion of Poland that set it all off? Well Alison didn’t have much to go on, given that I had spent the day injured, immobile and silent in front of the telly. So, in the absence of anything better, it was, as you may have guessed, back to the Polaroid of Peggy. That night, as we were undressing for bed (for sleep only, I hardly need add) she brought it up again. Who exactly was Peggy, precisely how had I known her a hundred years ago, and why, yes, pray tell why, why had I kept her photograph for all this time?

  A furious slanging match followed, punctuated by some foundation-shaking door slamming as Alison marched in and out of the bathroom in order to remove the day’s slap and apply her regimen of mentally expensive, only available from Harvey Nicks, de-wrinkling face creams. (Probably not very effective wrinkle-wise but jolly useful for frightening off night-time intruders.)

  As usual my feeble weapons of logic and common sense proved useless in the face of Alison’s remorsele
ss onslaught – yes, yes I know there are two sides to every story but I’m writing this one – and with a final “Oh for fuck’s sake!” – what a splendidly serviceable expression that is – I turned over and pretended to go to sleep.

  After the day’s events, Peggy’s image, not unsurprisingly, floated into my mind and, even less surprisingly, given the sub-arctic temperature of my current relations with Alison, I was bound to look back at our time together through the very rosiest of rose-tinted glasses. I drifted off that night watching this lovely movie in my head – Peggy and I, the way we were. Or perhaps the way we weren’t, but, as with every movie, whatever bad bits there may have been were left on the cutting room floor.

  But by Sunday, Peggy seemed to have faded into the background once more. The gammy leg prevented me from playing in my regular ten o’ clock tennis match with Geoff and a couple of fellow hackers, but I went to watch them and have the usual latte and croissant afterwards. The rest of the daylight hours were filled with the weekly routine of ferrying the girls to and from birthday parties, play dates, shopping malls, whatever. Bad leg or no, I wasn’t excused, but I quite liked that part of Dadship, so I really didn’t mind. Glenda and Vic, Alison’s parents, came round for an early supper, so Alison and I gave our normal competent performances in the parts of a happily married couple. Sometimes, if you act well enough, you can seem convincing even to yourself – so, by the end of the evening, after the getting-ready-for-the-new-week ritual of bathing and hair washing and finishing off the girls’ homework for them, Alison and I were being quite civil to each other. At one point, as we were watching ‘Antiques Roadshow’ or something similarly Sunday nightish, she even cuddled up on the sofa and gave me a kiss. From the outside, which, remember, is the place where you are measured on the E to P scale, Andrew Williams might not have looked like he had that much to complain about.