Ben Elton - Blast From The Past

All the intimacy that had existed between them a moment before had now evaporated. Polly was suddenly cold.

“I’m sorry,” Jack pleaded, “I couldn’t.”

“You were too fucking gutless to face up to the fact that you were betraying the trust of a seventeen-year-old girl and, what’s more, over sixteen years later you’re still too fucking gutless to admit it. ‘It’s my job.’ Pathetic!”

She was right, of course. He’d been too scared to say goodbye. Scared of seeing her hurt, scared of a scene, but most of all scared that had he woken her and seen once again that adorable, trusting, innocent love light in her eyes he would not have been able to go through with it. He loved her too much to risk saying goodbye.

Polly, of course, had known nothing of Jack’s tortured emotions. To her his departure had come like a cruel thunderbolt. She had no more expected the relationship to end than she had expected it to begin. She never dreamt that Jack had in fact tried to leave her many times during the latter part of their time together. In fact, from the moment he realized that he was in love with her he had been trying to find a way out.

“ What can I do, Harry?” Jack wrote in anguish to his brother from the camp. “How do I find the courage to end this? How do I find a way to leave?”

In vain did Harry advise that if the army was forcing Jack to break his own heart and also the heart of an innocent, idealistic girl then maybe it was the army that he should be leaving and not the girl. Jack screwed up Harry’s letter in fury. Harry was a furniture maker, he did not understand the soul of a fighting man, he did not understand the all-encompassing power of truly vaunting ambition. Harry had never dreamt of being a leader of men.

“ What do you know, you flake? Nothing,” Jack wrote back “Try to understand that your weak sensibilities mean nothing to me. Try to understand that I would break the heart of every girl in the world. That I would tear out my own and feed it to a dog in the street if just once I could get the chance to lead an American army into a battle. Any army into battle. You think that’s sick, I know. You think somehow Mom got inseminated by the devil, but it is what it is. I’m a soldier, first, last and only.”

“Bullshit, Jack!” was Harry’s reply. “You call me a flake! You’re the damn flake! You want to lead an army? You want to fight the world? You can’t even find the courage to hurt one seventeen-year-old girl.” Except in the end, of course, Jack did find the courage.

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.