“If we have to?” She sat back and laughed. Bitterly? Ironically? I really don’t know. Seems probable now but at the time I was too busy with my own misery to observe all the subtleties of her performance.
“Look, Andy …” She seemed as though she was beginning again and was setting herself to say something when she stopped, and said once more, “No. No, I’m sorry, but you have to go to London and I have to stay here.”
And then, she stood, leaned across and kissed me one last time on the lips, and walked out.
*
I went home and went to bed. I must have done because that’s where I woke up but I remember nothing of that evening after she left. Perhaps the blocking out was already beginning.
Today, Friday, was to be my last at work in America. I knew that, somehow, I would have to put on a show. For half an hour I sat at my desk, trying to collect myself, still, I think, crazily clinging on to the smallest of hopes that Peggy might walk into my office and say it had all been a terrible mistake. Then I got a call from Noreen, this time sounding sweetly sympathetic, saying that she had a message from Peggy, but, mercifully, going straight on to tell me what the message was so that the smallest of hopes weren’t allowed to get any bigger. Peggy wouldn’t be in today, she said, she’d gone to New Rochelle for the weekend, and had asked me please not to get in touch, she was sure I would understand. I wanted to scream no, I do not fucking understand, but didn’t and just said, thanks Noreen, and then I fixed a smile of sorts, and, setting myself to the simple but impossible task of getting through the day, I went out to face the world of McConnell Martin New York one last time.
Despite the temptations of the bong, and Brett and Bart constantly urging me to loosen up and have a valedictory hit, I stayed well away. I couldn’t imagine or rather, I could imagine only too well, what sort of dark places I might be taken to given the state of mind in which I already was. Alcohol, for whatever reason, I deemed a different matter, and made no attempt to resist being dragged off at lunchtime for the made-up-on-the-spot tradition of downing farewell daiquiris made with every fruit in or out of season. Bart and Brett and the rest had by now clearly decided that the party on Saturday had begun a day and half early and I was only too happy – happy in the sense of it being a euphemism for contentedly intoxicated – to go along.
They were mindful enough of the proprieties of employment – since I was leaving I couldn’t have given a monkey’s – to return to the office in mid-afternoon, but not with the intention of actually working. Instead they disappeared for an hour before summoning me once more, this time to an impromptu gathering around Laverne’s desk in Creative reception, where they produced a huge leaving card they had dreamed up and produced exquisitely as is the rule in advertising agencies. The idea was rather convoluted – too much dope, almost certainly – and based upon bees. Both the notions of buzzing off and being under bonnets were included, though I forget quite how. It really didn’t matter – they all thought it was as funny as fuck. Everyone had signed it, including the Manatee himself, and even, in a very perfunctory way – Good luck, Nick – that shit, Moreno. Everyone, that is, except for one person. I hardly expected her name to be there – I consoled myself with the thought that her disappearance to New Rochelle meant she couldn’t have signed it – but that didn’t stop me from scouring the card, back to front, top to bottom, looking for it.
I wasn’t allowed to be morose – not visibly anyway – for long. Christo had been out to buy a big cake of some description and then bottles of wine were being uncorked and little plastic cups brought out, and Bart and Brett both stood on a desk and demanded silence, and, between the two of them, they managed to make a semi-coherent speech with all the usual mildly deprecating but good humoured references to Limeys and Brits that the occasion demanded. And they threw in one or two nice things about me too which, despite my determination to keep all feelings in lockdown, I could not fail to be touched by. I had never felt so popular and yet so utterly alone.
Then there was the usual ‘speech, speech’ stuff and I was required to reciprocate, and even as I stood on the desk and did so, I found myself scanning the edges of the packed crowd to see if Peggy had crept in. But there was no sign of her. Then Bart and Brett and the rest of the team gave me a present: they had clubbed together and bought me a bong of my own. Try getting that through customs, they shouted. I did hide it in my suitcase and bring it back to London, but like the Polaroids – all but one – it was lost in the proverbial mists of time.
With the general sense that all pretence of work had been abandoned for the day, the party drifted on for the rest of the afternoon. At one point, I escaped back to my office, just to make absolutely sure that there was no possibility that she hadn’t come in while the party was going on, and left a note or card. She hadn’t.
*
I strapped myself into the seat of the 747 and gratefully accepted the complimentary glass of champagne from the nice TWA lady. I stretched my legs out, luxuriating in the unfamiliar space of my Business Class seat – it may well have been the first time I had been thus privileged. I was still feeling pretty pissed from the leaving party that had only ended when I was finally pushed into the cab by Bart. Or was it Brett?
We had all gone on – and on and on – from the drinking in the office on Friday to one bar after another and then ended up squeezed into Noreen’s apartment in Brooklyn. I had actually slept on the famous couch, part of it anyway, as I’d had to share it with Brett. (Bart, I discovered in the morning, had, as it were, revisited Fire Island – it must have been him that night too unless they were taking turns – and spent the night with Noreen.)
So where had we got to now? Some time late on Saturday morning, not that it mattered, because we just carried on where we had left off. Day merged into night, Saturday into Sunday – couldn’t tell you where I slept – until, late on Sunday afternoon, enough sense forced its way into my consciousness to tell me I had a plane to catch. So all back to my place, clothes and bong slung into my case – tennis racquet and press and a few other dearly beloved items to be shipped on later – a tearless farewell to the cat and I was on my way. I actually got out the door and was on the sixth and final lock when I realised I’d left my passport inside. I was wearing the denim jacket – I’d hardly taken it off since Thursday – and went to put the passport inside one of its pockets when I found it was full of the Polaroid camera. In an unaccustomed act of generosity – which I ever so slightly regret, as the model I had, a brown SX70, now goes for a good few bob on eBay – I took it out and handed it to Brett and Bart as a parting gift, suggesting they fight over it later. Then into the cab – and the plaintiff trumpet of Chuck Mangione on WGBO or some other jazz station, which always seemed to be playing in every cab you took, and which I came to think of as the sound of New York, and which played me out of Manhattan as the driver plunged us into the Holland tunnel.
And then check-in, customs, take-off and the lights of the skyscrapers disappearing away into the distance.
Nicely sozzled – a second glass of champagne topped me up perfectly – I was ready to sleep. I hadn’t taken the Polaroid of Peggy out my pocket since I put it in there to warm, the moment after I took it. With that special gift of mine I had managed to forget all about it. And it stayed there until Alison found it, almost twenty years later.
Chapter 21
London, 1999
“Yes, this is Miller Prince.”
I might have expected the voice to have matured, but I remembered how it had struck me as being so rich and deep on the day I had rung his doorbell. (Before running away.) He sounded just the same to me. Voices never really change.
“Well, er, Miller, my name is Andrew Williams. I think your agent may have told you I was going to call.”
“Yes, excuse me, but don’t I know your name? Aren’t you the guy who was a friend of Peggy’s?”
So she’d mentio
ned me to him. Well, why shouldn’t she have done? In a sense that made it easier, though having invented this story, I felt, absurdly, that I had to maintain the fiction until I could work my way out of it.
“Peggy’s?” I said trying to sound as I though I wasn’t quite sure who he meant.
Then he made it even easier.
“I thought I recognised the name when my agent called me. And then – as soon as you spoke, I kind of knew.” No, voices never change. He paused and then picked up again, but sounded slightly deflated. “You haven’t called about a job have you? Don’t worry about it. Nobody ever does these days.”
When I’d first spoken to the agent and sniffed the truth about Miller’s career – or rather, had it confirmed, because, let’s face it, what else could ‘man in soup kitchen’ mean? – I won’t pretend that, in a kind of E to P scale way of thinking about things, I had been entirely displeased. Frankly, I hadn’t been that upset that my ex-love rival, the actor who had gone up for the shaving gel commercial, he of the supposed granite jaw and rippling pecs, was not the most sought after actor in Hollywood. But hearing him now, who could not feel a little sympathy? Perhaps, given the sorry mess I was in, it brought us closer together.
“Yes, look Miller, sorry about all the subterfuge. I needed to speak to you. I’ve been trying to find Peggy. Do you have any idea where she is?”
“Yeah, I guessed it might be something like that. No, I don’t. Why are you looking for her?”
Yes, well, obvious question. And hard to answer. I doubt I could have given a sensible explanation to myself.
“Oh, just for old times’ sake.”
Another pause, and he said, “Well, sorry I can’t help you. Good luck.”
Fuck. Another dead end. And with nothing left to lose, I took one last shot in the dark.
“Look, this may sound, um, a bit strange, but do you happen to have any idea what her real name is?”
He immediately brightened up. He chuckled, only word for it.
“You mean she wouldn’t tell you either?”
Hearing that, it sent me the opposite way of course. If it was possible I became even gloomier.
“No, I kept asking and she kept making up things which I realised couldn’t be true, and I kept on about it, and then, I don’t know, it got to the point where she wasn’t going to tell me, come hell or high water.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You too?”
“You have no idea!”
Adversity, as they say, makes strange bedfellows. Now, we were the best of friends.
“Yeah, but—” he said.
Yeah, what?
“She once left her passport lying around.”
What!
“And you saw her real name?”
“I did. Look, er, Andrew, I don’t know why the hell I should help a guy who tries to steal my girl and rings my doorbell and then runs away. Jeez you looked like a jerk” – he’d seen me? – “but okay, I’ll tell you. To be honest, I have no idea what the big deal was, but people are funny about names aren’t they?’
Yes they are Miller. People are funny about names. Names like Miller Pronski. I myself – never mind. Now what the fuck was her name?
“Anyway, it was Vivien. I don’t know if that’s going to help you any, but it was Vivien.”
Vivien? Wait a minute. Hadn’t we – hadn’t I—
“Okay pal, well I have to go now. Gotta living to make. Not the living I planned, but what was it John Lennon said? Anyways, I got a share in a little store in Santa Monica. We sell soup. If you’re ever round here, you should come in – we’re real nice to our customers.” Another chuckle. “Nice talking to you.”
“Wait,” I said, “thanks. And look, please take my number, you know, just in case you think of anything else.”
He said that he couldn’t think what that might be but he took my number anyway and the two old love rivals holstered their guns and said goodbye.
Vivien! Old conversations floated up from the deep. The one in the coffee place after we’d seen that awful film. ‘Ice Castles’ – that was it. Vivien had come up then. I’d suddenly connected it with Lee – different spelling of course – and she … and she … That was right, she’d had that funny expression on her face, the half-smile half-frown, as though she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing and I’d thought what she couldn’t believe was me refusing to let the matter drop, when in fact what had got to her was that I had guessed right. Shit! And then I was back in New Rochelle again with Herb and all that smell of the greasepaint stuff, and, of course, hadn’t he told me his favourite film had been ‘Gone With The Wind’ – starring Vivien Leigh, doh! – and that his favourite actor was Sir Laurence Olivier? And I’d thought he’d just said that to make an effort at some silly British connection with me. Which he might have done. But the clue was there. Larry had been married to Vivien Leigh! And then I thought back to the train journey home to New York that day, and the vague idea I’d had that all the clues were there, if only I could piece them together. And they had been, and I hadn’t! And then the phone rang.
“Hi Andrew, this is Miller Prince again. You know what, I did remember something. A couple years ago, a guy came in for some soup, and I recognised him from way back in New York when I’d been with Peggy and we got talking and he said he’d run into her and she’d said something about being married to a dentist. He mentioned the name of the place she said they lived, been trying to think but I can’t remember. Jersey somewhere, that rings a bell. But I’m pretty sure he said the dentist’s name was Davis.”
“D-A-V-I-S or I-E-S?”
“I don’t know. That’s all I can tell you.”
And that was all he told me, and he rang off once more, and we never spoke again, and I never again saw his name in the credits for anything. But I remember thinking, as I twirled joyfully around in my office chair, that I sincerely hoped that he would end up with a chain of stores selling soup and that he would retire a very rich man. And I swore to myself that the next time I was in New York – or maybe in New Jersey! – which I planned on being very soon – I would buy myself a beer, make sure it was a Miller, and toast his health. Miller Prince. What a guy!
Then I stopped twirling, called Keith Lyons, told him what I had, and asked him to get on to it immediately.
“How are you spelling Vivien?”
“How many ways are there? Never mind. However Vivien Leigh spelt it.”
“Who?”
“Vivien Leigh, the actress. ‘Gone With The Wind’. Married to Laurence Olivier.”
“You don’t happen to know how—”
“No, I don’t. Aren’t you supposed to be a detective?”
“And Davis – I-S or I-E-S?”
“Don’t know.”
“First name or last.”
“Don’t know.”
“Well, it’s something I suppose.”
Something! Compared with what we’d had before, it was fingerprints, DNA and a signed confession.
“It’ll be another two days. Five hundred per plus VAT plus expenses. The usual.”
Yes, fine, whatever, will you please just get the fuck on with it?, was the gist of what I said in reply.
*
Half term had come and gone weeks ago. Florence and India had been up to Scotland with Alison and Doug and had returned depressingly enthusiastic about what they’d found. If you believed half of what they said, Doug’s ‘little place’ was the size of Saudi Arabia, the wild ponies were more adorable than Bambi, and his mother Lady Harris – Lady Harris – whose presence on earth, let alone at the little place in Scotland, I had not been previously aware of, had a double first in twinkly-eyed granniness. None of which bothered me half so much as the news that Doug had been “sooooo fun” and was “like a really amazing like rider” and oh, a whole lot o
f other stuff, which all amounted to the same thing, namely, that they were being carefully softened up for the moment when Doug would become a de facto second dad. Or worse than that, a de facto dad in residence. Because I would have bet my house – sorry, I no longer had a house, so my cramped, miserable, poxy Bayswater flat then – that Doug would be moving his pipe and slippers into New Pemberley before the ink on the decree nisi was dry.
But, what really, really got my goat, was that, just as I was heading back out into the wintry night after I had dropped Florence and India off after a not very successful outing to the McDonalds in Whiteleys – Florence had said she was far too old for a ‘Happy Meal’ and then grabbed the free plastic Tarzan from India’s and refused to give it back – Alison casually said to me, “You know this show India is doing at school next week? Well, she’s asked Doug if he’d like to come. I hope you don’t mind.”
“What? Really Alison, I don’t think that’s appropriate.”
“What do you mean, not appropriate?”
“Well, I mean surely it’s for the parents.”
“Not just parents. Other people can go to. Grandparents. Friends. Anneke’s going.”
“Yes but not, not – you know – I’m India’s father and it’s not his place.”
“That’s what he said you say.”
“Well, I’ve said it.”
“Well, you’d better tell India then.”
“Okay I will.”
But of course, I didn’t. So that was that would be that then. Me sitting in some excruciatingly uncomfortable folding wooden chair, side by side with Doug for an hour and a half, watching India being an old Jewish woman – probably with no lines – in a school nativity play. I think that’s what they mean by the phrase, exquisite torture.
*
Geoff leaned forward, elbows on his big glass desk, hands clasped, looking almost as though he were in prayer. If he had been asking for divine guidance it should have been to help him see how to deal with a repentant sinner. I hoped for mercy. I had just come, if not exactly cap in hand – I quite often favoured a Borsalino style fedora in the winter months, but never a cap – then with as much humility as I could muster, to ask for their assistance in resolving my divorce issues. Geoff pondered my request, with or without help from above, before announcing that the one he really needed to commune with was Vince who was back on his spot on the cappuccino Corbusier sofa. He asked if I would give them half an hour’s grace while they considered their response and, as I was banking on millions in return, I gladly obliged, not exactly knuckling my forehead on the way out, but if I’d known the proper technique, I very well might have done. I can think I fairly claim to have wiped away all traces of my previous stroppiness.
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