Blast from the Past

39

She sat waiting for him, as she always did, hiding in the darkness afforded by the bus shelter. Her heart thumped with excitement, her ears strained at the approach of every car. She was used to waiting for an hour or more for him to appear and as autumn approached it was often chilly. Polly didn’t mind. She knew that when he did arrive she would be instantly warmed by the furnace of their desire. What was more, tonight was to be a rare delight; they were actually to sleep together, sleep in the true sense of the word, be present for each other’s dreams. Usually this was not possible, but occasionally Jack had a pass and those were the best times, times when they had the whole long night in each other’s arms.

As Jack’s car approached, Polly knew he would be moody. He always was of late, glum and preoccupied. She didn’t mind that either. It was his job, no doubt. Who wouldn’t be glum if they were an agent of mass murder? And he always got over it quickly. Polly soon made him smile, sometimes just a glance from her would make his face light up. She never imagined that he was glum because he was trying to say goodbye.

“I couldn’t do it,” Jack wrote to Harry after one such night. “I tried, just like I tried the other times. I told myself again that this would be the night I would leave her but again it wasn’t. ‘Goodbye’ is such a small word. Why can’t I say it? Every time I try it comes out as ‘I love you’. Because whenever I look into her eyes I just want to stay looking into them for ever.”

When Harry read this he tried to phone, he sent a telex, he even thought about getting on a plane. He wanted to shout, “Don’t do it, you fool! Don’t throw love away, it’s too rare a thing. Sometimes it only comes once in a lifetime.” But it was no good. By the time Harry got Jack’s letter Jack had already left Polly in the only way he felt he could. Abruptly and absolutely. Without a word.

It had been a wonderful night. Completely and exclusively passionate to the exclusion of all else, even conversation. Sometimes on their evenings together they would have some supper and talk, but on that last occasion they scarcely said a word. Jack drove them to the little country hotel he had chosen, they checked in, went straight to their room and began to make love. Time and again they made love, fervently, desperately.

Polly’s joy was all in the glory of the moment, but Jack was storing up memories, trying to make love to her enough to last a lifetime. Because he knew that he had to leave her that night. He knew as he lay there beside her afterwards, listening to her gentle breathing as she slowly succumbed to sleep, that this was his last chance. He was certain that his resistance could last no longer. Another day or two in the sunlight of her love and he would be lost for ever. As would his career and the life he held dear. Jack was perfectly sure then, as he had been ever since, that if he had not left her that week, that very night, he would never have left her. It was cowardly, of course, but if he had looked back even once, he would have stayed. That was something he had not been prepared to allow.

So, instead of saying goodbye Jack had waited until Polly slept and then had crept silently from their bed, gathered up his clothes and snuck out into the hotel corridor. There he had dressed in the darkness, gone downstairs, paid the bill with the night porter and left.

“What could I have done?” Jack replied when Harry berated him for being the cowardly shit that he was. “I had to leave. She was a seventeen-year-old anarchist! A radical pacifist. A foul-mouthed swamp creature with a ring through one of her nipples!”

This detail surprised even Harry, who was quite an alternative sort of person himself. This was back in the days when nipple rings were not something that nice girls had.

“I’m a thirty-two-year-old soldier with a crewcut, Harry!” Jack pleaded more for himself than his brother’s benefit. “Talk about starcrossed lovers! Jesus, Captain Jack Kent and Polly Sacred Cycle of the Moon and Womb make Romeo and Juliet look like an arranged marriage! Pamela Anderson and the Ayatollah Khomeini would have made a more natural-looking couple. We had no future, Harry, can’t you see that?”

In truth Jack did not really care if Harry saw it or not, it was Polly he hoped would somehow understand. She hadn’t, of course, and she never would.

She could still remember every detail of that shocking awakening. She could still see herself, a distraught young woman standing alone in a cold, empty room clutching a piece of paper with a single word on it: “Goodbye.”

She remembered the brown carpet, the orange coverlet, the floral pattern nylon pillowslips. She could still see the sheet of lace underneath the sheet of glass on top of the mahogany-style MFI dressing-table unit. The stained-glass-effect transfers on the windows, the ancient, scentless potpourri on the windowsill. The clock radio flashing the time at 88 past 88. Her little summer dress and leather jacket crumpled up on the floor where she had left them when she was happy. Her Doc Marten boots lying at the foot of the bed, her bra in the wastepaper basket, her knickers lodged behind a framed print of a fox hunt that hung upon the wall.

And nothing of Jack, no trace of him, remained. Polly might always have been alone in that room. Jack had even plumped his pillow before leaving. The habits of a thousand bed inspections died hard.

Polly dressed herself in a daze and went downstairs to reception.

“Excuse me,” she said, her face burning with embarrassment, “but the man I was with… the American. Have you seen him?”

The woman inside the little reception hatch had had the face of Oliver Cromwell and the same glowering air of violent righteousness.

“The gentleman’s gone.” Her voice sounded as if it had been mixed with iron filings. She folded her arms menacingly, as if daring Polly to contaminate her house further. Even the woman’s hair was hard and unforgiving, having been set into an impenetrable helmet of red-tinted Thatcheresque waves that would have kept their shape in a hurricane.

“He left hours ago. Didn’t he say goodbye, then?”

Throughout the intervening years Polly would never forget the withering contempt of that woman’s tone.

No, he had not said goodbye. Polly stood before the hatch as if bolted down, not knowing what to say or do, not able even to think. Tears started in her eyes, further blotching the black smudged make-up that surrounded them. The hotel lady misunderstood her emotions.

“Well, he paid my bill, love,” she said.

Polly knew what the woman meant immediately. The woman thought Polly was a prostitute and that her client had done a runner.

This was indeed exactly what the woman had thought. What else would she think? When a smart-looking chap with money turns up late and signs in some grubby slip of a girl as his wife? A girl with bare legs, black eyeshadow and purple lipstick? When they go straight to bed without so much as ordering a toasted sandwich or spending money at the bar. When they keep the whole house up for hours with their disgusting grunting and when the noise finally subsides, after the man’s clearly had his fill, he sneaks off in the small hours leaving his “wife” to get her breath back.

“Unless there’s anything else?” the woman said, clearly anxious to rid the sanctified air of her house of Polly’s noxious presence. Polly turned to leave. She could not speak to the woman; she had been struck dumb. The enormity of what was happening to her was too much to take in. Adored, then dumped, now despised. Ecstatic, then distraught, now only numb, all within a few short hours. Polly was only seventeen.

“He’s paid for your breakfast, by the way,” the woman said as Polly headed for the door. “You can have it if you want, but there’s no more eggs and you’ll have to be fast because I want to set lunch.”

Never had an invitation to eat been offered with less enthusiasm. The woman could not have sounded more unwelcoming if she’d said that she would be serving turds instead of sausages.