“Fuck the American taxpayer. I’ve given them twenty-eight years of my life. Uncle Sam owes me.”
“He doesn’t owe you anything. You love being a soldier.”
“Murderer, you used to say.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s because I’m a soldier that I lost you.”
“You didn’t lose me, Jack, you discarded me and I don’t think it was because you were a soldier. I think it’s because you were a gutless bastard. In fact, I think you still are, since you seem to think that calling or writing to an old flame would result in a court-martial for treason.”
“I told you, Polly, I couldn’t.”
Polly didn’t understand and she wasn’t likely to. Of course he had lost her because he was a soldier. The army would not have accepted his and Polly’s relationship in a million years. Jack had been faced with a straight choice and he had chosen his career. That did not mean he liked it, it did not mean that a part of him had not regretted the decision every single day since.
“Why did you have me traced, Jack? Why are you here?”
“I thought you already had your answer. I already told you how I found you.”
“This is a subclause. Why did you find me?”
“Why do you think? To find out what I’d let go. To find out what you’d become.”
“Jack, we knew each other for one summer in a totally different decade and you dropped me. That was it, end of rather stupid story. Now you turn up out of the blue talking about us like we were a Lionel Ritchie lyric. What is this about?”
“That summer was the best summer of my life, Polly. The best anything of my life.”
“You just miss the Cold War, that’s all.”
“Well, hell, who doesn’t?” Jack laughed. “And what’s happening with you in the new world order, then? I noticed when I met him that you weren’t the prime minister yet.”
“I never wanted to be prime minister, Jack. I wanted there not to be any prime ministers. I wanted the nation state with its hierarchies to be replaced by an organically functioning system of autonomous collectives.”
“With you as prime minister.”
“Not at all, although obviously some kind of non-oppressive, non-authoritarian body of governance would be required.”
“And anybody who didn’t like your non-oppressive, non-authoritarian governance could get shot.”
“That wouldn’t happen.”
“Polly, it always happens when you fucking idealists get to defending your revolutions. You always start shooting people. By any means possible, as Lenin said. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao. The most pious murderers in hell…”
Polly very nearly rose to it. Very nearly slammed her fist on the table and launched into the ancient and terminally tedious arguments of the left. Just in time, she hauled herself back from the brink.
“Jack, this is ridiculous! Are you out of your mind! I’m a completely different woman now, twice as old, for a start, and you turn up after nearly twenty years quoting Lenin and trying to continue the conversation we were having.”
Jack smiled. She was just the same. The same passion, the same beauty.
“I don’t know. I just thought it might have been kinda fun, you know, for old times’ sake. Like the first time we talked.”
“Fought.”
“Yeah, fought. In that hellhole on the A34.”
“Except then, of course, we ended up in…”
Polly did not finish the sentence. She did not need to. Her eyes gave the thought away. She did not need to say “bed” because there it was, right there, not ten feet from either of them. Her bed, unmade and inviting, the duvet tossed aside, the deep impression of Polly’s head still there upon the pillow. A bed just climbed out of. A bed ready to be climbed back into.
“I’ve never been in one of those restaurants since,” Polly said.
Jack fixed his stare on hers. She could feel herself going scarlet.
“That day changed me too, Polly. I’ll never forget it.”
“They’re just so disgusting. I mean, how do you ruin tomato soup?”
“I didn’t mean the restaurant, Polly, I meant…” Jack’s tone spoke volumes, but Polly was trying not to listen. She stuck resolutely to her topic.
“Putting a stupid hat on a sixteen-year-old school-leaver does not constitute training a chef.”
“Polly, how long can you stay angry at a bowl of soup?”
“No, but really. How do you mess up tomato soup? It was hot on the top and cold in the middle. With a skin on it! That has to be deliberate,” said Polly, once again reliving the horror of that gruesome cuisine.
“Forget the soup,” Jack pleaded. “Walk away. It’s been sixteen years, you have to let it go now. We weren’t bothered about eating, anyway. We went to that little hotel. Do you remember?”
Polly looked puzzled. “A hotel? Are you sure? I don’t remember that.”
Jack could not conceal his disappointment. “Oh, I thought you would-”
“Of course I fucking remember, you fucking idiot,” Polly said as loudly as she dared without provoking the sleeping milkman downstairs. “I lost my fucking virginity, didn’t I!”
Jack got it. “Oh, right,” he said. “British sarcasm.”
“Irony.”
He hated that. That was a British trick, the sarcasm and irony trick. Earlier in the evening the senior British officer had tried to make the same distinction.
“Oh, yes,” the pompous little khaki shit had said, having cracked some particularly weak sarcastic put-down or other. “You American chaps aren’t big on irony, are you?”
Jack thought it was pathetic the way the British aggrandized their penchant for paltry sarcasm by styling it “irony”. They thought it meant they had a more sophisticated sense of humour than the rest of the world, but it didn’t. It just meant that they were a bunch of pompous smartasses.
“So you do remember,” he said.
“Of course I bloody remember,” Polly replied. “I remember every detail. The soup-”
“Forget the soup.”
“The pie-”
“Forget the pie.”
“I wrote to the restaurant, you know.”
“Christ, hadn’t you made enough fuss already?”
Not that Jack had minded at the time. Usually he hated any kind of scene. Under any normal circumstances the fuss that Polly had made on the first day they met would have ended their relationship right there. The funny thing was that he had loved it then and he loved it still. He remembered every detail. Polly announcing loudly that she resented being forced to eat in a fucking charnel house, supergluing the sauce bottles to the table. Even now he laughed at the memory of that wonderful, funny, sexy, sunny lunchtime.
“You sure showed them,” he said.
“Non-violent direct action. At least we didn’t pay,” Polly replied.
That was one of Polly’s favourite memories of her whole life. That glorious runner. The suggestion, the decision, the execution, it had all happened in one mad moment. Suddenly the two of them, her and an American soldier, were charging for the door and out into the carpark. It had been such fun, so exciting, piling into his car and screeching out onto the A34 before anyone in the restaurant had realized what had happened.
“I just couldn’t believe that you, a soldier and everything, were prepared to run out without paying.”
After sixteen years Jack decided it was time to own up.
“Actually I did pay, Polly. I left a five-pound note under my plate.”
Polly could scarcely believe it. This was astonishing, horrible news.
“You paid! That’s terrible! I thought you were so cool!”
“I was cool. It got you into my car, didn’t it?”
That was true enough. Jack’s astute deception all those years before had certainly got her into his car, certainly made her breathless and excited and ready for anything. Who could tell? Had that little trick not occurred to him then perhaps their relationship might never have happened. After all, if Jack had simply asked Polly to go with him to a field and then to a hotel, it is most unlikely that she would have gone. It had been the drama of that single moment that had carried her into his arms and changed both their lives for ever.