A Polaroid of Peggy Page 6

  Lucille consulted her script, cleared her throat and started reading. I couldn’t tell you what she said – I remember it sounded decent enough to me but not world-shattering which is probably why I can’t remember it – and then, having finished, glanced up at me.

  I said something like “Yeah, that sounds like you’re on the right track,” throwing in some minor suggestion which I knew full well they would do their best to ignore, and that was it. Except that on the way out of the door, Will first, Lucille following, she glanced towards me and offered just the very briefest of smiley farewell-for-nows, a look which, I couldn’t help feeling, was more than a tad on the coquettish side. I couldn’t remember her having done this – at least not quite so unambiguously – before.

  Now, I think you will have deduced from the detail of my description of Lucille, that a) I was not entirely unappreciative of her charms and b) that she looked not one whit, not in any way at all, like Peggy.

  And possibly – no, almost certainly I would say – because Peggy had been so much on my mind, and I had been reliving the glories of our time together, Lucille’s inviting little glance, did not, as it might at any other time, have me figuratively twiddling the ends of my waxed moustache. It left the lounge lizard in me disinterestedly curled up on a rock.

  But then, as I was much later to reflect, perhaps that look was not meant for me at all. Was not Vince right beside me, and effectively in the same line of sight? And did I not mention a little earlier in the piece that Lucille was a girl with naked ambition?

  *

  I tried at home too. I made an effort to get back by eight so I could see India before she went to sleep. I started reading to her again, something I hadn’t done much of since she was four or five. Glenda and Vic had given her some Tracey Beaker books for Christmas so we started working our way through those, and on about the second or third night, Florence wandered into India’s room and sat on the end of her bed while I was reading. After that she came in most nights to listen, and though, theoretically, a little beyond the Tracy Beaker stage – she was chalking off the days to teenhood like a prisoner waiting for release – it didn’t seem to bother her in the least.

  Perhaps because Alison noticed me coming home earlier, she started to do the same, and one evening, for the first time in goodness knows how long, we made a point of sitting down together for dinner. I don’t think we said a lot but the time passed pleasantly enough – and, compared to the way things had been recently, pleasantly enough was half way to paradise.

  We even enjoyed ‘marital relations’ once or twice during this period of calm, though perhaps ‘enjoyed’ is stretching a point. It was your basic rolling on, rolling off kind of thing, without too much preamble and no more than the minimum acceptable amount of post coitus cuddling. I’m pretty sure it didn’t do a lot for Alison and I’m not altogether sure what it did for me. Did it allow me to fool myself for a little longer that we had something approaching a working marriage? Or did the evident lack of passion or romance or anything except the half-hearted desire for release have precisely the opposite effect? Was this just one more piece in a jigsaw which, sooner or later, would inevitably reveal itself to be a picture of a relationship dying on its feet?

  Anyway, we soldiered on, sometimes, I’m sure, genuinely believing that the battle to save Alison and Andrew could be won. It was Alison who came up with the idea of a ‘project’.

  “I was thinking,” she said, as we meandered round Kensington Gardens one Sunday, following Spot with little plastic bags at the ready, and fervently hoping that India, wobbling on her roller blades, wasn’t going to lead us straight to Casualty. (Florence, as usual, was ten pin bowling or ice-skating or some such with her mates.)

  “Why don’t we do something with the basement? We could get rid of the guest bedroom – we haven’t used it for ages – and open it all up and make a kind of rumpus room or something for the kids. Florence will want somewhere to hang out with her friends soon and how long will it be before India does too? And,” she added brightly, now reaching the climax of her clearly well-rehearsed speech, “because it’s for them, we can all be involved, all four of us.”

  “A ‘rumpus’ room you say? You don’t mean a rumpy-pumpus room do you?” Ever the adman – the slick line was my stock-in-trade after all – I was rather pleased with that.

  Alison correctly took my self-satisfied smirk as a sign that I was willing to go along with her plan, and she laughed and put her arm through mine.

  “For God’s sake, Andrew, she’s not even thirteen yet.”

  “I know,” I said, “that’s what I’m worried about.”

  But I wasn’t really worried. It was just the sort of thing you say, something that sounds vaguely meaningful but is actually just froth – a bit of babble to move things along. Alison and I had agreed upon something, we now had a plan, and that seemed like progress of a sort. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore; I wanted to finish the conversation, to run after Spot and throw a stick for him to fetch, and to get home – to draw a line under the day while we were still ahead. This little bit of goodwill could be entered in the credit column of the ledger of our marriage, and it was the first such entry for a long time. I wanted to record it before something on the debit side cancelled it out. Or to put it another way, I just wanted everything to be alright despite all the evidence there might be to the contrary; if I could avoid facing the truth and thus prevent the flimsy edifice of our lives from crashing down for just a little bit longer, then I would. The truth hurts – in a marriage it can be fatal – and isn’t that why we would so often rather go on living a lie?

  *

  “Well, at first glance, I don’t think it looks that complicated,” said Dougal Harris. Dougal – ‘please call me Doug, everyone does’ – was the thirty-fiveish architect-cum-designer who had revamped Geoff’s fund manager brother-in-law’s place in Wandsworth, and whose excellent credentials had thus been brought to my attention. He took a stroll around our basement with Alison and I in tow, Florence slouching, and India bouncing along behind.

  It wasn’t too difficult to guess the lines along which he was thinking – knock a wall down here, put an RSJ in there, add some discreet downlighting, or possibly some discreet uplighting, one of the two, possibly even both, maybe put in some of those clever Danish or Swiss or whatever sweetly sliding doors to replace those fucking awful French windows – or not – all depending how much Alison and I were prepared to run to. Yes, it didn’t look like a bad little job – not going to be as lucrative as Geoff’s brother-in-law’s but these people seem to have a bob or two, and aren’t they just the kind of people who are bound to know other people who might like something done too?

  “Could we have a table tennis table?” Florence suddenly asked.

  I had to laugh – though I was careful not to. I had never witnessed Florence, who considered all sports seriously uncool, so much as lift a table tennis bat.

  “Table tennis?” I said, all pretend naivety. “Doesn’t sound very girly to me.”

  Florence turned to me, and raised her eyebrows in her precocious, knowing way. Alison laughed. And India was baffled.

  “What? What? What is it? Tell me.”

  It was Dougal-call-him-Doug who obliged.

  “I believe some boys are quite keen on table tennis,” he said.

  “Boys?” I said. “Why would you want a table tennis table because boys—”

  “Very funny, Daddy.” said Florence, and she turned to Dougal Harris and gave him the expected sorry-about-that-he’s-my-father-look. India grimaced at the very idea of boys, as nine-year-old girls are obliged to do. And Alison looked on, smiling warmly, the very picture of the glamorous but family-first nineties mother. Everyone had played their part to perfection. Except, in my opinion, our new architect friend, who had slightly annoyed me by his intervention. Completely irrationally perhaps, I just didn’t fee
l he should have had a speaking part in this little family tableau.

  After he had gone, we all sat down to review the meeting.

  “He was nice, wasn’t he, Daddy?” offered India, eyes shining, so that there wasn’t much else I could do but seem to agree.

  “Yes, he was. Doug really seemed to get it,” said Florence.

  I wanted to ask her where she had got ‘really seemed to get it’ from, but I knew that would just provoke her, so I said, “Well, that’s a world first. You two agreeing.” And then I asked Alison what her opinion was. At first she didn’t answer. She seemed miles away. “Alison? Come in.”

  “Oh, what? Sorry. Yes, yes, I thought he was very nice. I liked him a lot.”

  So the girls liked him, and Alison liked him a lot. What could I say? In the fullness of time, after a bit of toing and froing about design details and colour schemes – and costs of course – Doug – Doug, even then his name was beginning to stick in my craw – got the job.

  *

  So it went on for several weeks.’Twas all peace and harmony in the Williams household notwithstanding the odd tantrum from one or other of the girls. On one shopping Saturday, things were so convivial that Alison treated me to a new suit to replace the torn Prada. She decided that Ozwald Boateng was the thing now. Since I was tallish and thinnish, I was able to squeeze into his trademark tight cut and I got a sort of greeny-blue job, with a scarlet lining. Very sharp. I squeezed her hand in genuine gratitude as we left the shop, and we walked back into Savile Row, for all the world like a couple who could stand the sight of each other.

  But it couldn’t last – the old lull/storm thing, I suppose. It was, in fact, just after we’d finally given Doug the job that relations between Alison and me took a turn for the worse again. We were using a building contractor that he had recommended – and was supposedly supervising – but within days of the work starting, the costs started to creep up. Alison was managing affairs from our side, and so it was she who would have the meetings with Doug, at which he would routinely explain that because of this or that unforeseen circumstance, what they thought had been going to cost X would now cost X+. She would then report this to me. I was not impressed.

  “But I thought we’d signed a contract, Alison.”

  “Yes, but building is not a precision science. There always has to be a bit of leeway and if you want to get the best out of people you have to be fair.”

  “What! They gave us a price down to the last screw. That’s what Doug told us. That was his exact phrase.”

  “Nail.”

  “What?”

  “He said ‘down to the last nail’, not ‘screw’.”

  “Oh well, that makes all the bloody difference! Nail, screw, who gives a fuck! What I want to know is why they are asking for more money, a week into the job.”

  “Well you never know what’s underneath until you get the plaster off the walls.”

  “Alison, is this you talking or is it Doug?”

  “Can you see Doug in the room?”

  And then came the descent from mild sarcasm into an increasingly bitter confrontation. What I could not understand is why Alison seemed to be so supine in the face of this pressure from Doug. Part of her job as a commercials producer was to keep costs down, and professionally, she had the reputation of being a pretty hard-arsed negotiator. So what the hell was going on with our ‘project’?

  It didn’t take long for the ill-feeling from these arguments about the building work to infect the rest of our relationship. Walls might be coming down in the basement, but not as fast as the barriers between Alison and me were being rebuilt.

  One day in late June, soon after the building work began, Geoff and I had to fly to Paris to attend a marketing conference at the headquarters of one of our biggest clients and then go onto the big boozy dinner that would follow. Vince, who was also meant to go, cried off with a virus. When I heard this, all I could think was that it would have taken more than a virus to stop me from going. Not because I was any more dedicated to the job than Vince – far from it these days – but because I was desperate to get away from the poisonous atmosphere of ‘New Pemberley’. If I’d had rabies, dengue fever and necrotising fasciitis all at the same time, I think I would still have found a way to go.

  All I had to do was find my passport. I gave my pockets a perfunctory pat but I knew it couldn’t be there because I had the Ozwald Boateng on and I was sure I hadn’t been out of the country since Alison bought it for me. It wasn’t in any of my other jackets either or in any of my trousers or in a pair of plaid Bermudas that I hadn’t worn since Cannes about five years ago. (And which Alison, in her ruthless de-cluttering, had somehow missed.) But I was getting more desperate by the minute, and now I was furiously hunting anywhere and everywhere. The passport hadn’t somehow fallen on the floor of my wardrobe or been kicked under the bed. Or been stuffed in the back of the bathroom cupboard. Or left on top of the fridge. I turned the house upside down looking for it but all to no avail, and, feeling completely hacked off and with only about five minutes left before I was due to meet Geoff to leave for the airport, I marched into the office and totally unfairly accused Julia of having lost it. She promptly burst into tears, I was stricken by remorse, and as I was casting around my office for a tissue to give her, my eyes fell upon my desk and more particularly upon its top left hand drawer. It was then I remembered where I’d last seen my passport – in this very drawer, the same one in which I had locked the Polaroid of Peggy.

  I scrabbled in the pocket of my jacket for the keyring – put my hand on a small packet of tissues I didn’t know I had, thrust one at Julia, and then having finally located my keys, stared at them blankly trying to remember which was the right one for this particular drawer. Frantically I tried about five before I found it and, with a flood of relief, was reunited with my passport. But not, since the passport was lying under the Polaroid, until I had looked once more upon Peggy’s face. For one frozen moment, thoughts of the plane flew out of the window as I gazed at her wistfully. Then, at last hearing Julia’s slightly choked-up but, as ever, piercing voice – “Andrew! Andrew, you’ve got to go! Now!” – I grabbed my passport, and, inadvertently, the Polaroid with it, and tore out of the office, shouting a promise to Julia as I pushed past her that I would bring her back something gorgeous from Paris to make up for my boorish behaviour.

  Julia never did get anything from Paris, gorgeous or otherwise, because when we got to Heathrow we found out that both Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports were fogbound and we were unable to take off for either. But it was hours and hours before we were finally told that all Paris departures would be cancelled, and, in the meantime, Geoff and I installed ourselves in the BA Executive Lounge.

  As Geoff chomped through his second or third stale but complimentary BA croissant – he was one of those wiry little guys who eats like a horse but never puts on an ounce – he casually asked me how things were going with Doug. For a moment I had to stop to think who he was talking about as I’d almost forgotten the connection.

  “Oh, Doug” I said, finally understanding. “Yeah, seems okay. Bit of a cocky sod if you ask me and a bit too cosy with the bloody builders, but Alison seems to rate him.”

  Neutral enough, nothing really to give anything away, but there must have been something in my voice – perhaps I was unwittingly sounding as downbeat as I was feeling – that prompted him to say in a slightly more engaged way, “You alright Andrew? Everything okay at home?”

  Which was when the first of the dams burst. I suppose I was just waiting for the opportunity to tell someone how shitty I was feeling, how fucked-up things were with Alison, how – and this was not a wise thing to mention to Geoff but I was in full flow – how work, well, work just seemed like work these days.

  He stopped eating for a moment, and slowly nodded his head.

  “Yeah well, it’s not always as easy as
it looks. Don’t I know it.” He accompanied the rhetorical question with a rueful look – Geoff was on his third marriage. And I thought that was what he was referring to but he went on, “It’s a young man’s game, we all know that Andrew. You’ve got to pace yourself old mate. How old are you now, forty-five?”

  “Forty-nine.” I replied, stupidly taking the bait. But I wasn’t really sure I liked where this was going – I was the oldest of the three of us by several years and it was a slightly touchy subject – and, besides, Geoff knew exactly how old I was.

  “Forty-nine? Are you now?” he said, grinning. “No, but seriously – all these young blokes you’ve never heard of opening agencies every ten minutes – we all know it’s bloody tough. And the clients, they’re all about twelve too!”

  I realised I should never have mentioned the work part of it – he was bound to dwell on that – and I felt I needed to defend myself.

  “You needn’t worry about it, Geoff. I’m still a five times a night kind of a guy.”

  “Are you Andrew?” he said, more seriously, thoughtfully stirring his coffee.

  “Didn’t seem to be what you were saying a minute ago.”

  Maybe it was this sudden switch back to the subject of my marriage, maybe it was the meaningful look he gave me as he finished speaking, maybe it was the fact that I was just falling to pieces, but out of nowhere I felt tears pricking my eyes, and in a panic, I reached into my pocket to grab one of those tissues, and clumsily pulled out my passport, and with it, the Polaroid of Peggy which fell on the floor.

  Geoff reached down to pick it up, looked at it, nodded to himself as though a penny had suddenly dropped and said, “Haven’t seen one of these for a while. Pretty girl. Who is she?”

  And, in my utterly discombobulated state, dam number two broke. I told him about Peggy and how Alison had come upon the Polaroid, and, well, all of it. When I’d finished he looked at me open mouthed. And then, instead of offering the sympathy and understanding I had somehow been expecting, he let loose.