A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  *

  Eventually they emerged from the school, India first, from the gate reserved for juniors, in the midst of a little gaggle of friends. I saw her looking around and then I spotted Anneke, who had come to pick them up as always. I had completely forgotten that she would be there. I got out of the car and, as I walked towards Anneke, India saw me, ran over, launched herself and gave me a totally underserved hug. I told Anneke that I would wait for Florence, and she left, if a little reluctantly, no doubt calling Alison immediately to bring her up to speed.

  India seemed hell-bent on hanging on to me, her arms locked tight, her face buried in my midriff. I didn’t know what to do except tell her everything was okay and stroke her hair. It didn’t seem a very adequate response. I felt both deeply moved and rather conspicuous. Then Florence joined us, but was much chillier, refusing to be kissed and ducking under my arm when I tried to put it round her shoulder. But that might have just been being twelve and not wanting to be embarrassed in front of your schoolmates, so I didn’t say anything until we were in the car.

  Then I did my best to offer some kind of explanation. I decided not to give them the bullshit about work that I’d rehearsed, not out of any sudden compulsion to be truthful, but because I couldn’t be sure Alison would back it up. Besides, it would become rapidly apparent to them that Daddy no longer had any work. I just said I’d had to go and see an old friend – which sounded totally feeble – and that one day I hoped they would understand – but would they? I doubted it – and apologised profusely for messing up their plans – I hoped that bit, at least, sounded convincing – and that I would try to make it up to them somehow – when all else fails, try bribery. I brought out the ‘I loved the big apple’ tee-shirts which I didn’t imagine for a minute would do the trick bribery-wise, but they were all I had to hand for the time being. India made an effort to look pleased about hers but I was getting no change out of Florence. Then I offered them a trip to McDonald’s but Florence said she had homework to do, and then I said, maybe I could pop round and see them later, but Florence repeated the homework line. Knowing Florence’s usual enthusiasm for homework, this sounded less than convincing. And when India, perhaps sensing from her sister’s attitude that she too should be more distant, said she’d just remembered she had a playdate at a friend’s, I gave up. I didn’t blame them in the least. In a way, I was pleased their forgiveness wasn’t to be earned that cheaply. I drove them home and spent the rest of the day and the evening alone. Lying in bed, I reflected that, inconceivable as it seemed, I had now begun my second half century. Not an auspicious start.

  *

  I awoke in the morning to my new and empty world. Having no job to go to and no milk in the fridge, I went to a greasy spoon – on that last bit of Queensway that runs up to the Porchester Baths – and ordered a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea. I bought ‘The Times’ and read it from cover to cover. Tony Blair had received a hero’s welcome in Kosovo. Chelsea had won 6–1. I had only the vaguest idea where Kosovo was and wasn’t a Chelsea supporter but when you have no job to go to, you find yourself taking an interest in whatever is available. Christmas was in the news because it was less than two weeks away, but I tried not to notice that because I didn’t have the faintest idea how or where or with whom I was going to spend it. I did however know with whom I wasn’t going to be spending it. Alison had called me the night before to give me the expected dressing down and added that Doug had managed to get a late booking over the holiday at a skiing resort in Val d’Isere – our old stomping piste, as I believe I mentioned at the beginning – and that, in the circumstances, she thought I would understand if they took the girls.

  It wasn’t news I was thrilled to hear, but I accepted it without any more protest than was necessary to make Alison feel at least a little bad. To be alone at Christmas, seemed, I suppose, like a fitting act of penance. Comfort of the hair shirt if you like.

  So there I was: no job, no wife, no house, no money, no Bette, no Peggy, and, just to complete the full set, no Christmas either. Oops, no, not quite the full set, not this year. Because this was a special year, a one in thousand years year. But, no worries, I had that last crappy card too. Nowhere to go for millennium eve either.

  You may remember that, at the time, the big story was the millennium bug. All that media frenzy about whether, at one second past midnight, some sort of universal computer glitch would cause jets to fall out of the sky and the world as we knew it to end.

  Personally, I was rather looking forward to it.

  Part Three

  Chapter 25

  Little Venice, 2015

  When I came back to England, I reverted to my old habit of repressing challenging memories – or blithely ignoring them – however you like to view it. Too painful to remember or too easy to forget, you pays your money and you takes your choice. There were also my money worries and they inevitably swamped whatever else was going on in my head. Occasionally, listening to some golden oldie radio station, I would hear the Kim Carnes track, ‘Bette Davis Eyes’, which had never previously had any particular significance for me, but which, now, unavoidably put me in mind of my never to be known daughter, and those almondy eyes that she had inherited. But, after a while, the great gift of compartmentalisation came to my aid once again, and I shoved the whole sorry business into a drawer somewhere in the back of my mind.

  I still have the Polaroid of Peggy, and that’s in a drawer too, a real one, in a desk in my flat in Little Venice. And if there were a fire in my flat, it would be one of the few things that I would be seriously concerned about saving. You might think that odd after all the trouble it caused me, but all I can say is that it’s stuck with me for all these years and I am sticking with it. Of course, I am sincerely hoping there won’t be a fire. It’s a very comfortable, well proportioned, three-bedroomed flat in quite an expensive part of town, so you’ll have worked out that, after the nadir of ninety-nine, I managed to stage some kind of recovery.

  When you find yourself in such dire straits as I was in, what you must do is revert to the eternal verities of life. Such as the E to P scale. This might surprise you. It might seem like the wrong sort of instrument to be using when you are down on your luck. But one of the beauties of the E to P scale is that it is a scale of relative values. Providing you can find someone who is worse off than you, you will soon begin to feel a whole lot better.

  And if you continue to have doubts about the E to P scale, please consider the name by which it is more commonly known: counting your blessings. Same thing basically, just presented in different ways. Funny, isn’t it? One seems like the height of folly, a complete misreading of what really counts in life, and the other is regarded as ancient wisdom. To quote from the hymn:

  Count your many blessings, name them one by one,

  And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.

  And were you to argue that Ira D. Sankey, who wrote it, wasn’t talking about material things, I’d say, well, wouldn’t a roof over your head and a full belly count amongst his sort of blessings, and what are they, if not material things? You see: material things do matter, up to a point, even to those who believe in the ‘Lord’. It’s just a question of which point. One of the things you learn as you get older is that few things in life are as simple as they seem. Life is untidy. Simple answers are for the very young or the very stupid. (And sometimes I am tempted to think that these days we have far too many of both.)

  So: you tot up your score on the E to P scale, and if all you’ve lost are the kinds of things I’d lost, and you still have the air to breathe and a Porsche to drive, even if it is only for another five months and twenty-nine days, you can always manage to find someone who’s worse off than you, and as I say, that alone will give you the most tremendous fillip.

  So, eventually, after a lengthy spell of wallowing in self-pity, its attractions began to pall and I took the first tentative steps tow
ards re-entering the world of the living. I picked my chin off the floor, pulled myself up by my bootstraps, told myself that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, walked through the door that opens when the other one shuts and I went to see a few headhunters. Despite my summary ejection from BWD, I still had a name and a reputation in the industry and, as a result, I had an enthusiastic reception from most of them. And likewise from the people they sent me to see. By early March of the new millennium, I was appointed European Creative Director for a huge international agency and I took to it as to the manner born. I stayed with them for ten years, in a series of ever more senior jobs, until I retired in 2010. Being an executive in a big organisation doesn’t allow you the freedom that you have when you’re running your own place, but neither does it carry the same ultimate responsibility – the buck doesn’t stop with you. In fact, in all honesty, it’s less about the buck stopping than buck passing and I soon became very adept at it. I flitted from London to Paris and Berlin to Rome, Stockholm to Madrid, Amsterdam to Prague, and I was always on hand when the bouquets were being handed out and always somewhere else when the brickbats were flying. And every year, when June came around, I would be in Cannes, swanning up the Croisette, supping at the tables of whoever was prepared to pay. (Lest I should appear too much the sybarite, may I also add that I had not completely lost my touch creatively and still managed to have the odd idea that picked up a gong here and there.)

  But, as easily as I fitted into this new corporate business-class life, it did nothing to soften the blows inflicted by a couple of events that took place within the first few months of 2000. The leaving party mooted by Geoff on the day they kicked me out did take place but not quite as planned. It was decided it should also serve as the official coronation of Lucille Wood – a passing of the baton kind of thing. I was slightly miffed that I was not to be the sole centre of attention, although I could see that it made a sort of sense and went along with it. But a couple of months later, I saw, in the Media Section of the ‘Guardian’, a big picture of Lucille – looking as luscious as ever – and a long piece about her. A couple of paragraphs in, I read that BWD would no longer be Bradley Williams Dutton but Bradley Wood Dutton, and I found that pretty hard to take. What’s in a name? Sometimes, enough to make you go ouch every time you see it.

  And then, within a couple of weeks of that, came the event that, as I mentioned earlier, proved that my gut had not yet reached the limit of its capacity to be wrenched. BWD was taken over. Our old employers, McConnell Martin, whose London operation had gradually grown less competitive as BWD had grown stronger, had decided to forget and forgive and pay the price of folding their operation into ours. (Idiotically, I never stopped thinking of it as ‘ours’.)

  Hattie du Vivier, whom I happened to see at a school fundraiser, and against whom I bore no grudge, not least because I realised, in my bachelor state, that she was really rather attractive, filled me in on the details over a little supper I invited her to. I have to say I bloody nearly choked on my chablis when she told me that it was strongly rumoured that they would be paid £30 million. That would have made my share – the share they paid me one and a half for – worth nine! I naturally took some legal advice as soon as I heard this, but was told the contracts I’d signed were watertight and there was no way I had any feasible retrospective claim. Did they have wind of this before they screwed me? I thought back to the folded piece of paper that Maxine had handed to Vince in Twain on ‘Seinfeld Reborn?’ day, and my straining to read the message as he opened it. I’d thought it said ‘try-out’ but now I wondered if ‘try’ had been more ‘sounds like’ than the word itself. Still, it made no difference. I just had to suck it up. Treacherous bastards.

  You might be interested to know what happened to the treacherous bastards. As part of the deal they both had a five-year earn-out arrangement, meaning they had to stay with BWD for five years – or BWD-MM as it became. After that, Geoff, by then on his fourth wife, bought a vineyard somewhere in France and never worked in advertising again. Likewise Vince, who went back to Oz, and bought some enormous spread on the Hawkesbury river. Sadly I have yet to hear news of him drowning in it. Lucille Wood meanwhile climbed ever higher and last year became the Chief Creative Officer Worldwide of McConnell Martin, the CCOW, the seacow, the new Manatee, sitting, perhaps, in the very same office as Todd Zwiebel once had.

  And the others? Julia got married and had twins, Frank Connor dropped dead at his desk, and, according to an edition of ‘Campaign’ that I recently saw on the shelf of my local newsagents, mouthy idiot now has my old job, Executive Creative Director of BWD-MM London. Hattie du Vivier left but she still works in the business. She’s in her early forties now, still single, and still rather attractive. I know all this and a lot more about her, because we became good friends for a number of years, and occasionally more than good friends. I think she might have wanted to put our relationship on a firmer footing despite our twenty-yearsish age difference, but – unfairly perhaps, because I would never quite cut her loose – I have resisted anything more than a fairly informal arrangement. Our dalliance/affair/association, call it what you will, is still, in fact, not quite history, but I’ll come back to that in a while.

  My relationship with Florence and India wasn’t too bad at the beginning, but then seemed to weaken. Alison married Doug and the girls were based with them and, as I travelled more and more, the ‘every other weekend’ the divorce papers mandated that we spend together, became not so much every other as most other and then some other and so on. But then, after a couple of years, Alison and Doug had a baby – before she got too old I suppose – and, naturally, that changed the family dynamics. Then I found the girls wanted to spend a lot more time with me, and to avoid the place being completely overpowered by the reeking of dope – or ‘blow’ as I gathered it was now popularly called – I cut back on my overseas trips and spent more time with them. We’ve had our issues over the years, but nowadays I like to think we’re pretty close. Florence is twenty-four and a junior creative in an agency, a career move that was nothing – well, almost nothing – to do with me, and, judging by the number of blokes who seem to be competing for her attention, I’m not the only one who would tell you how beautiful she has become. India is at drama school – Golde turned out to be the beginning of something – and, to my jaundiced eye, is a racing certainty to be the next big thing. She’s very striking but in a completely different way to Florence. Whenever I am out with either of them, my chest puffs up with preposterous paternal pride.

  Alison and Doug are still together and living with their ten-year-old son, Finn, in the house formerly known as New Pemberley. The other day I was wandering around Westbourne Park, and pressing my nose against estate agents’ windows, as one does, and I saw a house identical to ours – theirs! – on sale for six million quid. Didn’t Dougal-call-me-Doug do well? I bump into them occasionally and look at Alison, now the stranger that an ex always becomes, and wonder how it was that once, all those years ago, one of us would happily stand casually cleaning our teeth while the other took a pee. It seems inconceivable and at the same time so terribly sad that it all goes to waste. (And I’m not trying to make a smutty lavatorial pun.)

  I have not a clue – why should I? – what happened to Keith Lyons. And judging by his skills as a detective, I’m not at all sure he would have either. Donald McEwan, with whom I was to enjoy several more bouts of jousting over the years, died in 2006. I felt the loss of a friend as acutely as I have ever done, and have never seen another shrink. And Harriet Braintree made quite a splash in the papers, when she threw over her practice and went to live on some Caribbean idyll with the superannuated pop star.

  As for the American end of things, I’d known about Brett’s progress since the mid-eighties. While a commercial he’d been working on was in production, he had, for some reason, caught the eye of the director, who asked him if he had, himself, ever thought of directing. It was odd because I
’d never heard Brett say that was what he wanted to do and it had never occurred to me that he would have any particular aptitude for it, but the moment you heard that story, you thought, yes, of course, he’s made for it. And he was. After a period of being carefully ‘trained on’, he moved to LA and within a few years – perhaps because he was a whole landmass away from Bart and the bong – became hugely successful. I ran in to him in Cannes one year and he bought me a very nice dinner. He told me then that Christo had died of Aids in the early nineties, and that Noreen and Bart had got married, and lived somewhere in Connecticut with their three kids.

  I have no idea whether Todd Zwiebel or Nick Moreno are dead or alive. After we started BWD, I never heard of either of them again. And neither do I know anything about Laverne, I’m afraid. About three years ago, just before I retired, I went to the West Coast for an international conference, and while I was there I hired a car and moseyed around Santa Monica to see if I could find Miller Prince and his soupery. I found a couple of places which seemed likely, but saw no-one who I thought might be him, so I spoke to the manager of each, and asked if they knew his name. I felt as though Miller had been such a big part of my life and yet I had never met him. But I had no luck. Perhaps there’ll be a late flowering of his acting career and I will see his name in some American police series or something like that. And I sometimes idly wonder what happened to the girl with the spiky green hair. Grey haired now certainly – under whatever she puts on it – and spikeless, probably a respectable hausefrau who wears one of those little tweedy hats with a feather and lives in Hamburg or Düsseldorf or Mönchengladbach. (Or is that just half the name of a football team?)