Blast From The Past

“In the fucking army! Why not? Some Congresswoman is going to announce that pacifists have a right to join the army. In fact, the army should be encouraging them! Running a programme to attract them! Because the constitutional rights of American pacifists are being denied by-”

Jack was becoming red in the face. For the first time he looked his age. A confused, middle-aged man with a chip on his shoulder.

“I’m not interested in your paranoid ravings, Jack. I want to know why-”

But Polly might as well have been talking to herself.

“Fucking constitution! It’s a sponge, it’ll absorb anything anybody wants. It’s like the damn Bible. Everybody can make it work for them. Well, the constitution can only take so much. One day the Supreme Court is going to rule that the constitution is unconstitutional and the United States will implode! It’ll disappear up its ass.”

“Good! I’m glad.” Polly felt tired. She had to leave for work at seven forty-five.

“Jack, I can’t have this conversation with you now. I have to work tomorrow. Maybe we could meet some other-”

Jack lowered his tone. He spoke quietly and firmly. “I’ve told you, Polly, I only have tonight. I leave in the morning.”

He stared at Polly as if that was all he needed to say, as if Polly could like it or lump it, neither of which she was prepared to do.

“Well go, then! Go! I don’t want you here. I didn’t ask you to come.”

Jack did not move at all. He just stood in the middle of the room, looking at her.

“I’m staying, Polly,” he said, and for the first time Polly began to feel a little nervous. Something about Jack had changed. He was being so intense.

“OK, stay, stay if you want to, but… but you can’t just drop in after sixteen years and talk about sexual politics and the constitution, and… It’s… it’s stupid.”

Jack looked tired too now. “You always used to want to talk about politics, Polly. What’s changed? Is there nothing of value left for you people to fuck up?”

He seemed to say it more in sorrow than in anger. None the less Polly wasn’t having any of it.

“I have nothing to do with you or your hangups, Jack,” said Polly calmly. “We knew each other briefly, years ago. We don’t even live in the same country.”

“Politics is international, you always used to tell me that,” said Jack, and he smiled at the memory. “You read it me out of that damn political cartoon book you had, The Start-Up Guide to Being an Asshole… ”

“Marxism for Beginners.”

“That’s the one.”

Polly blushed at the memory of how naive she’d been. She had actually given Jack a copy of Marxism for Beginners. Not that she had ever been able to get through it herself, of course. Huge quotes from Das Kapital do not get clearer just because there’s a little cartoon of Karl Marx in the corner of the page. It had been a gesture, a nod towards civilizing him. All Jack ever admitted to reading was the sports pages, and Polly had dreamt of politicizing him. Fantasizing about walking into the peace camp one day with Jack on her arm and saying to the girls, “I’ve got one! I’ve converted him.” She had imagined herself the toast of the peace movement, having persuaded a genuine baby killer to see the light. Polly had been going to make the world’s first vegetarian fighter pilot.

“Wasn’t I the starry-eyed little pillock?” she said.

“Well, did you ever read Churchill’s History of the Second World War?” Jack replied. The book-giving had, after all, been a two-way thing.

“Be serious, Jack, it was about fifty volumes!”

“Oh, and Marx is easy reading, is it?”

Now they were both laughing. Neither of them had changed at all. They were still a million miles apart in every way but one.

“I wanted you to be a part of my world as much as you wanted me to be part of yours, Polly,” said Jack. “You’re not the only person who got disappointed. I believe that in my own way I loved you every bit as much as you loved me.”

Jack was terrified to discover that he still did.

“You can’t have done,” said Polly quietly, avoiding Jack’s eye, “or you wouldn’t have left.”

“That’s not true, Polly. I had to leave. I’m a soldier. I’m not good at love, I admit that. I don’t find it easy to live with. But whatever love there is inside me I felt for you, to its very limits and beyond.”

35

While Jack and Polly were wrestling with their pasts in London, back in the States another drama of betrayal was being played out. A man and a woman were sitting alone together in the faded splendour of a dining room that had been beautifully decorated twenty years before. It was dinner time in the eastern states and the couple had been sitting at their evening meal for an hour or so, but neither of them was hungry. Their food had gone cold before them. Hers remained entirely untouched; he had had a stab at his, but really all he had done was play nervously with the cold, congealed gravy.

“I’m sorry, Nibs,” he said. “What more can I say? I don’t want to do it but sometimes it just happens. I just can’t help myself.”

“Nibs” was the man’s private name for his wife. It was what he always called her when they were alone, their little secret, a token of his affection. These days they were alone together less and less. Their professional lives had grown so complex that dining together had become a matter for diaries, and when his work took him away she could no longer go with him. Perhaps it was that, she thought. Perhaps her career had driven him into the arms of other, stupider, more available women. She wondered if he had special names for them. Perhaps he had called them Nibs also, for convenience and to avoid embarrassing mistakes. At the thought of this Nibs’ eyes grew misty and briefly she took refuge in her napkin.

“I’m so sorry,” he said again, “but it meant nothing, it was meaningless.”

“What does she do?” Nibs enquired, attempting to make her voice sound calm.

“She works at the office. She’s with the travel department. She books cars and flights and stuff,” he replied.

“Fascinating,” she said bitterly. “You must have so much to talk about.”

“The point is, Nibs…”

“Don’t call me Nibs,” she snapped. “I don’t feel like being your Nibs right now.”

“The point is…”

His voice faltered. The point was that he was in trouble. That was the only reason he’d arranged the dinner, the only reason they were having the conversation. If he hadn’t been in trouble he would never have told her about the girl, just as he hadn’t told her about any of the other girls. Unfortunately, this current girl had not taken kindly to the brevity of their affair and had decided to hit back.

“She says she’s going to accuse me of harassing her.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Did you?”

“Not unless taking a girl to bed a couple of times is harassment.”

Nibs bit her lip. Why had he done it? Why did he keep doing it? He thought she didn’t know about the others but she’d heard the rumours. She knew about the jokes they told at his office. She’d caught the expressions of those dumb booby women when she accompanied him to business functions. She knew what they were thinking. “You may be a fancy lawyer, lady, but when your husband needs satisfying he comes to me.”

“I have plenty of enemies,” he said. “If this thing gets any kind of heat under it at all it could be very bad for me at work. I could lose my job.”

“You fool!” Nibs snapped. “You damn stupid fool.”