A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  I can tell you a little about Dan and Grace Gardner. I was in Hatchards in Piccadilly only a few months ago, in the travel section, looking for guidebooks for Venice, to which Hattie and I were going for a long weekend in October. (The morning and evening light in Venice in the autumn, Hattie told me – as somebody had told her – was not to be missed, and that seemed as good an excuse as any for going there.) Anyway, my attention drifted away from Venice and Italy and there, amongst the American section, I saw a new edition of Karen Brown’s ‘Country Inns of the Tri-state Area’. Naturally, I felt the need for a thumb through, and, with a little nostalgic quickening of the pulse, found the Gardner Inn. It was Charlie Gardner who was now responsible for the legendary Bloody Mary’s – was he the kid who took our bags up? – but apparently, Grace and Dan, though no longer in the frontline, still kept a weather eye on the place.

  And that I think, covers more or less everyone. With one or two notable exceptions.

  Chapter 26

  Venice, 2015

  A couple of weeks before Hattie and I were due to leave for our weekend in Venice, I was walking around Soho, and, in the window of a shop in Newburgh Street, whose customers, I think I can safely say, were usually somewhat younger, I saw a tee-shirt that took my fancy. It was white with the word ‘Tourist’ printed on it in red, in an elegant sans serif typeface, and below that, in blue, it said ‘Touriste’, and then below that in another colour it said ‘Turista’, and below that it said tourist – or what I presumed was tourist – in Japanese, and then in Arabic and so on and so forth. Rather witty and neatly done I thought. Old habits die hard, and I still have an eye, or like to think I do, for an amusing bit of clobber.

  I was sporting my new purchase as I sat in an armchair in the reception area of the Hotel la Isole, a smart but not eye-wateringly expensive little boutique hotel in the Campo San Provolo. (At least, not as eye-watering as some in Venice.) I was browsing the international copy of ‘The Times’ but actually thinking more about how I was going to spend the day. I had just breakfasted alone and was expecting to stay that way as the demands of a sudden influx of work had forced Hattie to cry off at the last minute, and, rather than waste the ticket, I had thought, what the hell, you’re big enough and ugly enough – and certainly old enough – why not go on your own?

  So there I sat, gazing distractedly at the paper, when I heard someone say, “Nice tee-shirt.”

  Of course, I knew the voice instantly and yes, my heart leaped. I looked up to find a sixty-or-so-year-old version of Peggy smiling down at me, her black hair shorter, streaked with a little grey – or more probably her grey hair streaked with not that much black, but so what, it looked fine – a few lines, but not that many, around the corners of her mouth and eyes, a silk scarf tied around her throat as women of a certain age seem to think they need. But those were just about all the signs there were of the years that had passed, and, all in all, she still looked pretty wonderful to me.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, as you would.

  “What are you doing here?” she replied, as she would be bound to do. We were like two dancers at an assembly ball, about to do a minuet, making the little bow and curtsey before the music starts. And off we went.

  It turned out that Peggy was on a ten-day tour of Italy – Rome, Florence, the Lakes, Venice, the usual – with a group of a half a dozen women friends of the same sort of age.

  “Your husband doesn’t mind you being away for so long?” I asked, perhaps a tad mischievously, without quite realising what I was fishing for.

  She looked at me, slightly sideways. As ever, she had seen right through me.

  “Myron’s dead. A couple of years ago. Heart attack.” Not without feeling but short and to the point. As much as she needed to say. Very Peggy.

  “I’m sorry,” I’m said, not meaning it. I bore Myron Davis no ill-will – apart from the fact that he’d married the woman I loved and brought up my daughter as his own – but although I wouldn’t have wished him dead, I wouldn’t have been me – or, I venture to suggest, most other people – if I hadn’t immediately considered the possibility that his being out of the way might present a promising opportunity. I asked Peggy if she had time for a cup of coffee. She thought for a moment, asked me to hold on, then went over to some women standing talking to the concierge – all of whom looked, quizzically, in my direction, as if saying, ‘what, the guy in the unsuitably youthful tee-shirt?’ – before she returned to say that yes, she’d be happy to join me. We wandered over a bridge or two, until we found a place just off St Mark’s Square.

  While slowly sipping the most expensive Cafe Americanos since the last ones I’d bought in Venice, we ran through the last dozen or so years. You first, she insisted, and she winced in all the right places as I told her about the BWD catastrophe and my divorce and impoverishment – I neglected to mention the part that she’d unwittingly played – and she nodded admiringly when I reached the phoenix from the ashes coda. Then it was her turn.

  “Peggy,” I said, “before you tell me all the rest, and I know how you feel about – you know, about my – er – my part in all this, how’s Bette?”

  Rather deliberately, she put down the spoon with which she’d been idly stirring the dregs of her coffee, and looked at me carefully, slightly squinting in the sunlight.

  “Bette’s fine,” she said. “She’s married.”

  “Is she?” I said, not quite knowing what to think about it, but having a vague idea that her wedding was something else I’d missed out on. “How long?”

  “Oh,” she said, “three years – three years last November.”

  So Myron was there to walk her down the aisle. Or stand by her in the chuppah. Whatever they did. I was pleased and sorry at the same time.

  “And they’re fine? Bette and …”

  “Bette and David. They’re fine.”

  “Good, that’s good.”

  “They, er, they have a little girl.”

  I gulped, figuratively at least. So now, not only did I have a daughter with whom I could have no contact, but a granddaughter too.

  “Why did you tell me that, Peggy?”

  “I don’t know. You asked about her. It was dumb. Sorry.”

  “No, no, I’m glad you told me. Do you have a picture?”

  “Are you sure you want to see?”

  Yes. No.

  “Yes.”

  She dug about in her bag and brought out an iPhone. A few seconds later, and a little girl of about eighteen months, with lots of dark wavy curls, was presented to me. I looked for signs of any Williams in her. Did she have my chin? If she did, she would never know.

  “She’s lovely,” I said. “What’s her name?”

  “Catori.”

  “Catori?”

  “Yup. It’s Native American. Hopi. It means ‘spirit’ they tell me.”

  “He’s – I mean David, he’s, er …?”

  “Not unless the Shapiros are a long lost Native American tribe, no.”

  “Hm. Well, it’s traditional,” I said.

  “Right. Just someone else’s tradition,” she said, anticipating me exactly. Wavelength still fully functional.

  She put the phone back in her bag, and then, when I had her attention again, I said, “You haven’t mentioned anything to Bette I suppose about, er …”

  “No, Andy.”

  “And you still don’t think she ought—”

  “No, Andy.”

  “Okay. Okay.” I exhaled slowly, as though somehow that would draw a line under the matter. But it didn’t, never has, and, for all my blocking-out, never will. “Shall we go for a walk?”

  And, Peggy, keen to get off the subject no doubt, agreed. So we paid and we strolled through Venice and the battalions of tourists in every square, around every corner.

  “What language do they speak here?
” Peggy asked.

  “Mainly Japanese. Some Mandarin.”

  “No Italian?”

  “You still think you’re back in New Jersey,” I said.

  “It’s Joysey,” she said, “and you’ve been watching ‘The Sopranos’ too much.”

  And that’s how it went. The same old banter. Not, I am suggesting, Groucho Marx meets Mae West. But an easy joshing. An effortless sallying back and forth. We could still, after an absence of thirty-five years – bar one organic lunch – carry on like we’d never been apart. We could – it felt to me – still be an ‘us’.

  And you know what happened next. Well, of course – we were in Venice, weren’t we? We climbed across a little bridge, looked down and saw a gondola. I cocked my head in its direction, raised my eyebrows and opened my palms towards her in the little gesture that says ‘what do you think?’ and she raised her eyebrows, and gave the little shrug that says ‘why not?’ So in we climbed – me gripping her hand as she stepped over the side and, did I imagine it or was that her hand giving me a reciprocal squeeze back? – and the gondolier gondolled away and we lay back and floated down the little side canals and into the sun spangled Grand Canal and past all the astonishing palazzos and goggled at the dome of the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute (I had no idea it was called that until I checked later) and floated under the Rialto Bridge and the Bridge of Sighs and anyone who tells you that Venice is not a total mindfuck has no left side of the brain and almost certainly no right side either. And then, when the gondolier indicated we had reached the end of our time, Peggy and I looked towards each other and made more shrugs of agreement, and I waved the gondolier on, and off we went again. And afterwards we went to a little restaurant in a little square which I couldn’t find again in a million years and Peggy pulled out her iPhone and texted her friends and we had some kind of pasta and some kind of vino and we stayed half of the rest of the afternoon. And then we got lost about twelve times trying to get back towards St Mark’s Square and then eventually joined a queue and went inside and did the tour of the Doge’s Palace and marvelled at all the glorious paintings which all seemed to be on the ceilings and none on the walls.

  “These people must have had permanently cricked necks,” I said.

  “It says here,” said Peggy, looking at the guidebook, “that, at the height of Venetian power, it took six weeks to get an appointment with a chiropractor.”

  And then, around seven, we’d had enough of sight-seeing, and we wandered back to the hotel, and, as we went, Peggy put her arm in mine.

  Context is everything, and if romance is in the air anywhere, it’s in Venice and that certainly can’t have done any harm. But I think it was more than that. We were on neutral territory, neither in London or New York, neither of us in a relationship and unconstricted as we never had been before, not even in Pound Ridge. We were in a space uncrowded by anyone we knew – except of course, for Peggy’s holiday pals. And, as we walked into my room, I wondered if she wasn’t a little concerned about what they might say. As ever, she read my mind, and said in a version of the old line that Vince once gave to me in Cannes,

  “What happens in Venice stays in Venice.”

  *

  And that is where it’s going to stay. If I wasn’t prepared to give away the secrets of the boudoir when we weren’t yet thirty, I am certainly not going to describe the goings-on of two people past sixty. All I will say is there was still an ‘us’. No doubt you’re grateful you’ve been spared any further details.

  In the morning, I managed to persuade the nice chap in reception to send some coffee and rolls to my room and we had breakfast by the window overlooking a pretty little tributary canal. As we sat in our hotel dressing gowns – one of which, I suppose, would have been worn by Hattie – I asked Peggy, as delicately as I could, about Herb and Barbara. Herb, she told me, had died before I had been back to see her in ’99 but Barbara, I was pleased to learn, was still going relatively strong and living in a retirement community in Boca Raton. And then she said, “They changed the name, you know.”

  “What name?”

  “Lee’s Eyeglasses.”

  “Really. What to?”

  “A Better Look.”

  “Are you serious? I thought Herb didn’t like it.”

  “It was my Grandmother. She was the only person he ever listened to. She told him he’d always been a lousy judge of names, and ‘A Better Look’ was terrific.”

  I was absolutely chuffed. Good old Betty Lipschitz. No DADA Silver Pencil nor Cannes Golden Lion ever gave me more pleasure. And now that we were back onto names, I told Peggy how I had eventually twigged the significance of Bette.

  “Actually, I’m a bit surprised you did it,” I said, gradually approaching the topic I really wanted to discuss. “You know, naming your own child after someone famous when—”

  “Look, it made Herb happy and by then he was already getting sick. Anyway, I thought it was kind of neat to keep the idea going, and none of Bette’s friends would ever know about the other one. Too long ago. And I liked the name, Bette. So why not? ‘Course, then the song came out, but that made it kind of cool.”

  “It was just that, well,” I said, carefully tiptoeing towards the point, “knowing how sensitive you always were about your name …”

  That sideways look again.

  “Yes?”

  “Peggy, will you just explain to me what the big deal was about telling me your real name was Vivien?”

  “Okay, if you really want to know, there were two big deals,” she said. “In the first place, or no, because really it’s in the second place, it was because you just wouldn’t shut up about it. In the end you could have water-boarded me and I still wouldn’t have told you.”

  “Thought it was something like that. But Miller said you were the same with him.”

  “Well, maybe I was. Because – in the first place – I always hated the name. Simple as that. Viv-ee-en. Stupid broom up-the-ass English name. Nobody in America – nobody I knew – was called Vivien. Now I think it’s just a name, who cares? But when I was a kid I was completely phobic about it. I used to dread other kids finding out. You have no idea.”

  But of course I did. If there was one person in the world who could understand exactly how she’d felt it was me. And then, I was overcome by a need to confess. If my relationship with Peggy was to mean anything at all, then I could not, in all conscience, have extracted that truth from her, without trading mine. I was about to tell her what no living human apart from me knew.

  “Peggy” I said, taking her hand in mine. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “You really don’t,” she said. “Tell me if you want to, not because you have to.”

  Did I want to tell her? No I did not. But there was no going back.

  “No, I do have to tell you.”

  “Honestly, you don’t,” she said.

  “Peggy, my real first name – no, not my real name, because I changed it legally – but the name I was given at birth was – Cyril.”

  She looked at me in such a way that, for a moment, I thought she was going to burst out laughing. But instead she went very serious and said, “Which only goes to prove …”

  “What?”

  “Love is never having to say you’re Cyril.”

  It was then that she burst out laughing.

  *

  It was midday, or just before, and I was standing outside the hotel. There was a little gang of porters ready to schlep all the luggage belonging to Peggy and her friends – they had not travelled light – down to the dock at San Zaccaria where they would get the ‘vaporetto’, the boat that would take them to the railway station, from where they would begin the next leg of their tour. Meanwhile, they were still combing their bills at reception before checking out. The serenity I had been feeling was now tipping into sadness. The last thing
Peggy had told me before she left my room – and, try as I might, I could not change her mind – was that this weekend must be treated as a one-off, that we should leave it there. She was terrified, she said, that if we were to stay in contact, sooner or later, one way or another, Bette would find out the truth, and that, she was as convinced as ever, would lead to more trouble than it could ever be worth. Better, she insisted, that we go out on a high note than risk disaster.

  With checking out finally finished, these half dozen or so sixtyish American women trooped out of the hotel, none, apart from Peggy, having spoken a word to me, and so not quite knowing whether to acknowledge me or not. Peggy was last, and, as she reached me, she stopped, pushed back her bag on her shoulder so her arms would be free, and then threw them around my neck. And she said, “There are some things that are more important, but please always remember this Andy: You’re a complete asshole but I totally like you.”

  And then she turned around, and giving me a little finger wave over her shoulder, walked off with her friends, in pursuit of the porters. I watched them disappear around a corner, and stayed, staring disconsolately after them, though Peggy was gone and dozens of other tourists were already milling about in the space where’d she been.

  As I was about to go back in, the nice chap from reception came rushing out shouting, “Signora Davis, Signora Davis.” He was clutching Peggy’s silk scarf which she must have left on the desk. As he realised they’d gone, he threw up his arms, turned to me, held out the scarf, and said, “You will be seeing Signora Davis, yes?”

  “No,” I said, but then thought better of it. “Yes, I’ll take it to her.”

  I took off after her and ran towards San Zaccaria – I hoped. It was only two hundred metres away, but that can be a long way in Venice if you take the wrong turning. Luckily, for once, my nose was a reliable guide, and I saw her just as she was about to board the vaporetto. I shouted and waved the scarf above my head, and, spotting me and the errand I was on, she stopped and walked back a few paces towards me.