A Polaroid of Peggy Page 9

  And there was another rather rum thing about Vince’s decision to come to Cannes. He was coming without his wife. What self-respecting wife of an adman would ever refuse a free week in Cannes? Yes, alright, I know mine would, and had, but I think I have set out some of the background for her decision. So far as I was aware, Vince and his wife Carol, who had only been married for a couple of years, were still at the two bugs in a rug stage, so to know that he was sitting a couple of rows back from me in the Air France plane might have made me scratch my chin a little harder had I not been so engrossed.

  Yes, engrossed in Peggy. Because for much of the flight I sat there taking the Polaroid of Peggy in and out of my pocket and gazing and reflecting upon it. I was thinking not just about her or the ‘us’ that I supposed she and I once to have been, but trying to examine what was really going in my head. What were the forces – even sub-conscious ones, perhaps – that really were driving me in all this?

  I wasn’t aware of having deliberately brought the Polaroid with me – it had stayed in the pocket of this suit since I had found it there on my aborted trip to Paris with Geoff – but, I asked myself, was I actually surprised to find that I had it to hand? Perhaps I could even have subconsciously chosen to wear the Ozwald Boateng – as a matter of fact, it really should have been more of a tee-shirt and jeans kind of a trip – in order that I would be able to unwittingly put my hand in my pocket and go, oops, gosh what do I have here? – Would you believe it, it’s the Polaroid of Peggy? And if such a thing were possible, then why bother with such self-deceit? Was it that I felt guilty that I was, in merely thinking about Peggy, betraying Alison just as she had implied? Alright, not just thinking about, but obsessing over, but even so, nothing had actually happened – how could it when my co-respondent was only a fading image on a twenty-year-old Polaroid? And besides, why should I feel any guilt towards Alison when she was increasingly and deliberately distancing herself from me; wasn’t her refusal to come to Cannes just that attitude made manifest?

  And so there I sat on the plane, thinking, thinking, thinking. And not looking up, in case I caught Vince’s eye should he pass my row on the way to the loo or wherever. I had told him at the check-in I didn’t want to sit next to him because I had work to do and needed space to spread out. But what I really wanted was space to think – and now I thought about it, we’d had that slightly awkward conversation at the check-in desk before I had ‘found’ the Polaroid of Peggy. Increasingly, this finding looked like less and less of an accidental discovery. In which case …

  *

  I had entered into this phase of deep self-examination – or would-be but not very deep self-examination – when I went to see Donald McEwan.

  Geoff’s thoughtful response to my blubbing confession in the BA Executive Lounge had not been ignored. “You need a fucking shrink!” he had kindly counselled and I saw his point. So I went to see Dr Donald McEwan MD MAPsych PHD at his basement consulting room near Richmond Hill. Or to be more accurate, I went back to see him. For Dr Donald McEwan and I were old sparring chums. I don’t think anything could describe our relationship better than that. He had first been recommended to me some years before, and I’d had spells of – well, not exactly treatment, and not analysis, so, let’s just say ‘appointments’ – after various dodgy periods of my life. The pattern that developed was: I would get in a neurotic tizz about something or other – the emptiness of my life, the black holes I sank into in the dead of night, the usual kind of thing – and I would call Donald. He would then kindly and unfailingly make time for me, and I’d rush off to receive the balm that only he could ever supply. He wasn’t exactly a Freudian, nor a Jungian nor an Adlerian, at least, not I think, with me. He knew all the theory backwards I am sure – had indeed written lots of learned books and lectured for years at London teaching hospitals – but with me he practised what I came to think of as a uniquely Donaldian form of therapy. He knew I would never survive the rigours of analysis, and never tried to push me into it. What I really wanted was a mixture of cosy reassurance and a bit of an argument – usually about something abstract like the nature of feeling or what is instinct and what is intuition? – in other words, anything to distract me from my real problems – and he played his part to a tee. After each group of these sessions – sometimes lasting a few months, sometimes maybe a year or so – I would decide I didn’t really need Donald any more, and then summarily end our relationship until the next time. He never made any objection to being so casually treated, always seemed to welcome me back, and he was never – no matter what I brought up from the darkest depths of my imagination – the least bit judgemental. When I was with him, he seemed to think his only purpose was to make me feel better, which, in my experience, is not an idea that has much currency with other medics. My bottom line on shrinks – and I make no distinction between psychologists, psychiatrists, analysts, therapists, whatever – is that they are, essentially, secular priests and most of them are as unconvincing as the religious kind. Donald was the exception that proved the rule.

  It took more than a few hesitant minutes but I finally finished telling Donald the story of the Polaroid of Peggy, of its discovery and of my obsession with it, of the worrying disintegration of my relations with Alison, of my loss of interest in my work, and of whatever else it was from which my chest demanded to be unburdened. Donald, who had listened carefully throughout but with no more apparent reaction than the occasional raising of a wise old cove’s eyebrow, then sat in thoughtful silence for several moments while he arranged his response. It gave me the chance to steep myself in the atmosphere of his cosy little consulting room, which, with its pair of mismatched woolly armchairs (tartan throws to cover the threadbare bits) and its heatless real-flame gas fire that never seemed to be turned off, was such a peaceful contrast to the early-adopter chic of New Pemberley or the relentless funkiness of the BWD offices. Whenever I entered it, I felt as though I were stepping into some of sort of retreat. (Not that I would ever set foot in a proper retreat. Ten minutes of monastic silence would do my head in.)

  “Do you not think,” he asked in his soft Aberdonian burr, such a reassuringly solid, WASPy sound to flighty Jewish neurotics like me, “that this, eh, business with the photo might not, eh, be symptom rather than cause?”

  “You mean, I am totally fucked up and sooner or later I was going to have a major crisis and the picture was just was one of any number of things that might have set it off?”

  “I’m not sure I would put it in, eh, quite those terms Andrew, but yes, something like that.”

  “Well, is that what you think?”

  Fortunately, Donald was not one of those bloody annoying shrinky types who insist on answering every ‘what do you think?’ question with a ‘what do you think?’ back. Instead, having planted that idea – or rather, having watered it, because, of course, the same thought had already occurred to me – he tried another line.

  “And why do you think it is, that in all the years we’ve known each other, Andrew, you’ve never mentioned Peggy before. My memory may not be quite what it was when I was younger, but, eh, we’ve spoken a lot about your past Andrew, a lot, but I cannot ever recall you telling me about this girl, Peggy.”

  Hadn’t I?

  “Haven’t I?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  Hmm. I pondered. I have the sort of mind that has a superficial knowledge about a lot of things – politics, art, books, music, sport, whatever is in the news today – and could write about one hundred seemingly salient words, but no more, on pretty well anything. It’s exactly the sort of mind you need to write an ad, but not so useful for profound introspection. However it is my default position, and, having spent half my adult life talking to shrinks of one colour or another, psychostuff is another of those subjects that I am glibly versed in. And from this not very deep well of knowledge, I came up with this inspired line of argument.

 
; “Are you suggesting that if Peggy had had real importance in my life, I would have mentioned her at some other point during the past ten years?”

  “Eh yes, something like that.”

  “But could it not mean the very opposite. That it – my time with Peggy I mean – was so important I was repressing it?”

  “Repressing it, you say?” Donald didn’t look convinced.

  “Yes, couldn’t it be that this is a sort of ‘recovered memory’ – you know like you hear about victims of childhood abuse having? Something buried so deep because I wanted to deny it. But, no, Donald hear me out—”

  He was shifting in his seat and beginning to smile.

  “But Donald, but – could it not be that when I saw her picture, I simply couldn’t deny it any longer?”

  “We-hell,” said Donald, “theoretically, I don’t suppose one could categorically rule it out but—”

  But I wasn’t thinking about the buts. I was feeling tremendously cheered up. I had scored a debating point – tendentious, true, but not entirely implausible – and as had often happened in my sessions with Donald I was content with that. Rather than actually suffer the pain of seriously trying to get to the bottom of whatever my problem was, I would manoeuvre us into a sort of verbal fencing match, the sort of thing I really enjoyed, and challenge myself to come up with a point that might have this brilliant man, with his dozens of degrees and doctorates, scratching his head. In other words, I could show him – as I always wanted to show everyone – I’m a fucking adman aren’t I? – how clever I was.

  And, for the rest of the session, as sceptical as he obviously was about my repressed/recovered memory theory, Donald was unable to convincingly, entirely, one hundred per cent, beyond all possible doubt, rule it out. (That’s one of the best things about shrinkery; it’s all basically guesswork. None of them can really prove – really prove, as in show it under a microscope – a damn thing.)

  As I walked out of the door and back up the steps to street level and what passed for my real life, his farewell address, accompanied by a wry smile and a rueful shake of the head, was:

  “I will say this, Andrew. If you had my job, you’d make a bloody fortune.”

  That, of course, was exactly what I wanted to hear from him. I told you he knew how to make me feel better.

  *

  Cannes went exactly as anticipated. Until the last moment. Of the last evening, of the last day.

  We had done all the usual things; eaten confit de this and drunk chateau de that at Michelin starred restaurants (two minimum) in Mougin and St. Paul de Vence. (Insanely expensive naturellement, but, whenever possible, and that was almost all the time, at somebody else’s expense.) We had partied the night away with luscious young floozies and pushed them into swimming pools (and jumped in after them) at sumptuous villas hired for the week by film production companies or music companies or post-production companies or whomever else might have something to flog and surmised that we might be the poor suckers who could be conned into paying for it. We had drunk ourselves into a stupor, night after night, in the Martinez bar, gladhanding all the freeloaders from Serbia to Surinam who had made the pilgrimage to the Cote d’Azure for this glorious gathering of the international brotherhood of advertising.

  And, as expected, we, BWD, had picked up a whole pride of Cannes Lions, Bronze, Silver and Gold, culminating in the award to Will and Lucille’s cat food commercial, which won the Gold Lion for best thirty-second commercial in the highly competitive groceries/non-food category. (Food for animals didn’t count as proper food.) The top cat food client, the Marketing Director, who last year had been in the beer business, and next year would move onto savoury snacks, a sweating, paunchy thirty-five-year-old who already looked fifty, wept tears of pride or envy or pure alcohol as Will and Lucille went on stage at the packed Palais de wotsit to claim their prize.

  After that, BWD, having hired a fleet of black limos, took everyone from the agency and all the cat food clients and all the people from the production company and all their wives, husbands, partners, and one night stands back to our hotel – the coolest place to stay in Cannes except it wasn’t in Cannes, it was the art deco palace, La Belle Rive, along the coast in Juans Les Pins. There, in the balmy open air on a clear, starry night, we held a banquet – nothing less – for fifty or sixty, however many we could squeeze on to the table in the walled terrace overlooking the gleaming black ocean. We, BWD, were the toast of Cannes, or pretended we were, and seemed intent on celebrating by drowning in champagne and choking to death on foie gras and courgette flowers. So far, so good.

  Although I had spent the week without Alison and, in the occasional moments of downtime between freebies, had lain alone on my sunbed by the Med, and spent a fair bit of time dwelling on the true significance of the Polaroid of Peggy, I could not, in the end, fail to be caught up in the spirit of things. I sat in the middle of one side of the table, basking in the reflected glory of our success, whilst modestly declaiming to anyone who would listen that, really, it was nothing to do with me – as indeed, most of it wasn’t. Opposite sat Vince, his left arm around the shoulder of the top cat food client who was getting drunker and sweatier by the minute, and with his other arm, his right, around the shoulder – the satiny, bronzed, bare shoulder – of Lucille, who, dressed in flowing white diaphanous floor length dress, and high on the drug of public acclaim, looked nothing less than ravishing. And, as one couldn’t fail to notice, she seemed to radiate happiness; she was positively beaming.

  After dessert we called for yet more champagne. We toasted Will, we toasted Lucille. We toasted the cat food clients. And the cat food clients toasted us. And then, as the army of waiters arrived with the coffee, came the first sign that something might be going awry. Will tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he might have a word. In private.

  “Of course,” I said, grabbing a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses and beckoning him to follow me down the steps. I thought we might have our private chat at one of the empty tables down by the beach bar.

  The chat didn’t take long. Will told me he had been offered a position as Creative Director at one of our rival agencies and that he planned to take it. My first reaction, predictably, was to ask him if we could do anything to keep him, but he shook his head, smiled, and assured me that he had told nobody about this apart from Lucille, who had known for a couple of days, but that his new agency would be briefing ‘Campaign’ – the advertising trade rag – on Monday. He then rose from the table, thanked me for all that BWD had done for him, and walked away, leaving me there to regret that I hadn’t given him the rise he should have had after the previous cat food commercial awards triumphs. Not that I imagined my oversight had really made all that much difference, but it couldn’t have helped. I then started to vacantly muse about the scene in ‘The Godfather’, one of my all time faves, when Marlon Brando returns from the meeting with the Mafia bosses and says, referring to Sonny’s murder at the toll booth, ‘Until this night, I never knew it was Barzini, all along.’ That was kind of how I felt about Will. All the time I’d been thinking it was Lucille whose ambition we should be wary of, and now, it was Will who had completely blindsided us. And then I got to thinking about Lucille, and how we had better act fast now to buy her off, before somebody came in with an offer for her too. It wouldn’t look too clever that we were losing one of our two biggest creative stars at the moment of their greatest success – thus allowing Will’s new agency to grab the ‘Campaign’ headlines and tap into the cat food glory that should have been BWD’s alone – but to lose both of them, would smack not just of carelessness but of downright incompetence.

  And then I started to think about Lucille, and it was then that I started to get an uneasy feeling that maybe there was a bigger, uglier picture that I wasn’t yet seeing. If Lucille had known since before dinner about Will’s leaving, how come she had looked so deliriously happy? If she was
half as ruthlessly competitive as I’d always believed her to be, then surely, she would be absolutely fuming that Will had landed a job like that before her?

  I tried to examine all the possible explanations. Maybe she too had a piece of news for me that I wouldn’t want to hear – maybe my failure to give Will and Lucille their post DADA rises really had upset them, and they were going to take spectacular revenge with a lethal one-two. Or, maybe, she was playing it ultra-cool and was going to let me do all the worrying, in the belief that this was the way to screw a really good deal out of BWD. (The mild panic I was getting into suggested that, if this was the case, she was right.) Or maybe she appeared to be so happy because she was genuinely pleased for Will and thoroughly content with her lot and … and … and I discounted that possible explanation pretty well immediately.

  As it happened I wasn’t even close. I went back up to rejoin the party and to tell Vince what was going on, but when I pulled him aside, I got another shock.

  “Actually mate, I already knew.”

  “What! How?”

  “Lucille told me.”

  “Lucille told you? Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”

  “Well, I dunno mate, you’ve been so remote lately – you know like on the plane out and everything and down by the beach – kind of into yourself – that I didn’t think I should bother you.”

  “Didn’t think you should bother me? I’m your fucking partner. I’m the Creative Director. Will works in my department – did work in my department. I need to sort Lucille out.”

  “Oh I don’t think you need to worry about Lucille. Lucille and I get on pretty well, you know Andrew—”