prison or chained to lumps of concrete in tunnels underneath the roadworks on Twyford Down. The new decade had also brought with it the threat of war in the Middle East, which was most depressing for Polly, since if there was one meaningful thing she had tried to do over the previous eight years it was fight for peace.
By a strange twist of fate it was because of Saddam Hussein that Polly came to see Jack again, if only for a moment and only on the television, but it was a painful shock none the less. It was in January 1991 and Polly and friends were lying around their squat on their damp mattresses watching the military build-up in the Gulf through the window of their tiny black and white portable television screen. John Major had just been speaking about the need to stand up to aggression and tinpot despots wherever they reared their heads.
“Ha!” said Polly earnestly. “If Kuwait dug potatoes instead of oil we wouldn’t give a toss about them. We didn’t mind about tinpot despots in Chile and Nicaragua, did we? And why? Because they were our tinpot despots, weren’t they?”
Polly was just working herself up into a fair state of righteous anger when it happened. Suddenly, Jack was in the room. Standing in front of a tank, now a full colonel, and giving it as his opinion that Saddam’s men were lions led by donkeys.
“We don’t want to have to kill these soldiers,” Jack said from within the tiny TV, “but let the butcher of Baghdad be under no illusions that we will kill them, and we will kill them quickly and efficiently.”
Polly felt like she had been kicked. It was so unexpected and over so soon. While her companions continued to argue with the talking heads on television she retreated to the kitchen, all the anger and hurt welling up inside her once again.
And the love.
He still looked beautiful to her. Achingly so. Even in one of those awful Wehrmacht-style helmets that the Americans had taken to wearing at that time. He looked so commanding and so confident, so strong, forceful and fit. All of a sudden Polly found that she did not just miss Jack, she was jealous of him. Jack knew what he wanted, he knew where he was going, he always had and he was still on the winning side. Polly wiped the silverfish off the breadboard and started to cry.
23
Jack stared at Polly and smiled.
She was still lovely. Her home might be dowdy and her possessions rather run down and few, but she lit up that room like a searchlight, like a bright star. Jack swallowed hard. He had not expected it, he really had not expected her still to be so very beautiful. As far as Jack was concerned, the passage of time had completely failed to dull her loveliness.
“I don’t think you changed, Polly,” he almost whispered. “You didn’t age a day.”
“Bollocks, Jack.”
Jack laughed. “Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time. But really, how did you do it? Is it some face cream made out of dead whales, or do you have a portrait in your attic of some terrible dissipated old hag?”
“This
Now that Polly had got over the initial shock of Jack’s arrival it was beginning to dawn on her how strange the situation was.
“I don’t know why I’ve let you in. I was asleep… The place is a mess… Why have you come back?”
“Why do you think, Polly? Why do you think I’ve come?”
“How the hell would I know? I don’t even know you.”
“You know me, Polly.”
“I know you’re a bastard!”
Jack shrugged.
“It is nearly two thirty in the bloody morning, Jack!”
“I do unusual work,” said Jack, shrugging again. “Where I come from we keep strange hours.”
He was just the same. Still arrogant, still forceful.
“Yes, well, back here on earth we tend to sleep in the middle of the night!”
“May I take off my coat? May I sit down?”
It was the small hours of the morning. He’d been gone for donkey’s years and he wanted to take off his coat and sit down. Polly’s mind reeled.
“No! This is absurd. I don’t know why I let you in at all. I think you should go. If you want to see me you can come back in the morning.”
“I’ll be gone in the morning, Polly.”
This was too much for Polly. It was hardly what might have been called a tactful thing to say, considering how they had parted the last time they’d been together.
“Yes, well, some things don’t change, then, do they, you… You…”
Polly bit her lip and fell silent. Of course she was angry with him, angry with him for leaving her and angry with him for coming back in such a strange manner. But, for all that, she was so very glad that he had come back.
“It’s just I’m only in Britain for a few hours, Polly. This was the only time I could come.”
“Jack, it’s been, it’s been… I don’t know how long it’s been…”
“Sixteen years.”
“I know how long it’s been!”
As if she could forget. As if she didn’t remember every moment of that summer and every day that had passed since.
“Sixteen years and two months, to be precise,” said Jack, who seemed also to have been carefully marking the passage of time.
“Exactly! Exactly. Sixteen years and two months, during which time it appears that you have been more than capable of getting by without seeing me, and you want to visit me now!”
“Yes.”
“And seeing as how it’s only been sixteen years and two months, seeing as how it’s only been the merest decade and a half since we last set eyes on each other, you have to visit immediately, not a moment to lose, at two fifteen in the morning!”
“I told you. I’m only in town for one night.”
“Well, why not drop by when you have a little more space in your diary! Heaven knows, we might even arrange a mutually convenient appointment.”
“I’m never in Britain, Polly. This is the first time I’ve been here since we… since I… since then,” his voice trailed off rather weakly.
They were both remembering the chill dawn when he had left.
“Why didn’t you come back before?” asked Polly.
“I couldn’t. I go where I’m told.”
Weak. He knew it, and so did she.
“That is pathetic.”
“Polly, I take orders.”
“That’s what they said at Nuremberg.”
Jack bridled somewhat. He knew he was in the wrong but he was not the sort of person who found contrition easy and he certainly wasn’t having Nuremberg thrown at him. All his life he had been deeply irritated at the way people, particularly people of a liberal persuasion, particularly his father and mother, had got into the habit of using the Nazis as some kind of ready benchmark for things of which they disapproved. If somebody wanted to cut welfare benefits they were a Nazi, if somebody wanted to raise the busfares they were a Nazi, if they objected to graffiti they were a Nazi. It was just puerile. Jack was prepared to put up his hand to the fact that he may have acted like a swine but he had not murdered six million Jews.
“Oh, please, Polly. Is everybody still a fascist? Didn’t you grow out of that yet?”
“Didn’t you grow out of not having a personality?” Polly’s withering contempt almost singed Jack’s eyebrows.
