Blast From The Past

varied.

“My husband and I have talked things over and decided to put this incident behind us… We remain very much in love… Miss so-and-so is no longer a part of my husband’s life,” etc., etc.

All this actually meant was that the poor woman had nowhere to go, her position, her possessions, her children, her life in general, all being tied up with the mumbling apologist to whom she was married. He had taken her youth and her potential and now she had no obvious life options of her own. Nowhere to go except her doorstep, to assure the world that she was standing by her husband.

Nibs knew that she too would stand by her man. It was true that she was an accomplished professional woman in her own right. She would not be entirely lost on her own. None the less, after twenty-five years and with children still in their teens, her life was inexorably tied up with her husband’s. Her career had always been just a little bit secondary to his; his business had become her business too, she’d worked hard for it. His status was hers. Like many a woman before her, Nibs was caught between a rock and hard place and the hard place was her husband’s dick. She did not like being betrayed, but on the other hand she did not wish to have to rebuild her life from scratch just because she was married to a man who couldn’t keep it to himself.

“I’ll stand by you,” she said, “but I’m not going to lie for you.”

“I wouldn’t ask that,” he replied.

But they both knew that in the end if she had to she would.

43

It occurred to Polly that although they had been talking for nearly an hour she still knew almost nothing about Jack’s life. She realized with a tinge of resentment that she seemed to have been giving most of the information.

“So how about you?” she asked “Are you in a relationship?”

“No, I’m married.”

It was a joke, the sort of sexist little put-down in which Jack specialized. Normally Polly despised men who put their wives down behind their backs. She heard that stuff a lot. Scarcely a month went by without some married man or other telling her what a mistake he’d made with his life and how all he wanted was to be able to give his love to someone who would appreciate it. Experience had taught Polly to react to that sort of thing with nothing but feelings of sisterly solidarity.

This time, however, she scarcely noticed Jack’s blokey humour. The knowledge that he was married had taken her completely by surprise. There was no reason for it to have done so, of course. Jack was an establishment man in an establishment job, he was almost bound to be married. She felt deflated. She knew she had no right to feel that way, but none the less she did. The truth was that deep deep down, without acknowledging it even to herself, Polly had been toying with the exquisitely exciting possibility that Jack might have come back for her. From the first moment she had heard his voice over the answerphone something in her most private self had hoped that he had come back to stay. It was nonsense, of course, a ridiculous notion, and she knew that now for sure. He was married, he had a life. All he had come back for was some easy sex. Perhaps not even that, perhaps he had been motivated by nothing more than curiosity.

“Oh yeah, I’m married all right,” Jack mused into his bourbon. “But whatever we had died a long time ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Polly said, although she wasn’t particularly.

Jack performed his favourite shrug. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. Literally nothing. I can’t remember the last time we made love. She has a Dutch cap which ought to have been an exhibit in a museum of gynaecology. The spermicidal cream is years past its fuck-by date.”

“So why haven’t you left her?”

“I don’t have the guts.” Which was a silly thing to say to Polly.

“You had the guts before.”

“That was different.”

“How was it different?” Polly asked angrily.

“We were together three months, Polly! We weren’t married! Did you ever try to leave someone you’ve been with for years? It’s like trying to get off the Time Life mailing list. I torment myself. Would she kill herself? Who would get custody of the credit cards?”

“Oh, come on, Jack!”

Polly may not have seen Jack for a long time, but she knew him well enough not to buy this type of bullshit. If Jack wanted something he was not going to let any finer emotions or sensibilities stand in his way. He never had.

“OK, OK,” Jack conceded. “The truth is I can’t leave her because I can’t risk damaging my career. I’m near the top now, Polly. I mean real near. I’m tipped to be the man. Unfortunately the army is about a hundred years behind the rest of the world on social matters. They like you to be married and they like you to stay married.”

Polly could hardly believe that it still mattered, that being a divorce could still be a bar to promotion.

“Oh yes, it can be, Polly, in the army it can. More so now than a few years ago, the pendulum’s swinging back. Can you believe it? I had to leave you for my career and now I can’t leave my wife for the same reason. If I wasn’t such a big success I might almost think that I’d fucked up my life.”

Jack had met Courtney shortly after his arrival in Washington to take up his posting at the Pentagon. They were introduced by Jack’s bumbling old friend Schultz. The meeting took place at a Republican Party fundraiser, and it had been a rare moment of intuition on Schultz’s part because Jack and Courtney became instant friends. They were as similar to each other in outlook as Jack and Polly had been opposites. Courtney, like Jack, was a sincere patriot and a conservative, but also like him she was no bubba-style redneck. The daughter of a Congressman, Courtney was accomplished, cultured and beautiful, and although still only twenty-six, she was already respected in her chosen field of company law. She and Jack made a splendid couple, he the tough, handsome soldier, she “the gorgeous girl most likely”. Between them they looked like the stars of a Reagan campaign ad.

Harry had been suspicious from the moment Jack had introduced him to his new girlfriend. Courtney was perfectly nice and Harry could see that she certainly loved Jack, in an uptight, chilly, preppy sort of way, but Harry did not think that Jack loved Courtney. To Harry, Jack looked like a man going through the motions.

For a while Harry kept his silence, presuming that the affair would blow over, but when Jack wrote to tell him that he had asked Courtney to be his wife and that she had done him the honour of accepting, Harry could deny his fears no longer.

“This isn’t a marriage proposal, Jack, it’s a career move!” Harry thundered in his reply. “It’s too damn convenient to be true. If you asked the IBM mainframe to come up with the perfect bride for you it would have come up with Courtney. But real life isn’t like that. You know that better than anyone because you loved Polly. Love is rarely convenient. Courtney isn’t for you, Jack. You aren’t in love with her, you just think you look so good together that you ought to be in love.”

It was combative stuff but Harry was sure that his instincts were right. He still had Jack’s letters from the final summer that Jack had spent at the Greenham camp. Then Jack really had been in love, with all its attendant joy and pain. Now it seemed to Harry that his brother was merely acquiring a lifestyle appropriate to his status and position.

“Have you thought about Courtney?” Harry wrote. “I thought you officers were supposed to be gentlemen. That girl trusts you, she loves you; don’t you think she has a right to know that you’re still in love with another woman?”

This last point was Harry’s secret weapon. He was aware that Jack wouldn’t take it lightly and he didn’t. Fortunately for the two brothers, they were half a continent apart; otherwise there might even have been blows. Jack furiously denied Harry’s accusations. He loved Courtney, she was a terrific person. Of course he knew that he did not feel quite the same for her as he had once felt for Polly. His knees didn’t buckle at the thought of Courtney, his insides didn’t ache, but surely that was a good thing? His love for Polly had been stupid and obstructive, more