by Bella Pollen
‘Lord Pennington, Lady Pennington … with great respect,’ Rory breaks off, ‘look you really must try to understand,’ he says wildly, ‘this is a locations finding agency, not a bloody counselling service.’
‘Absolutely.’ Lord Pennington says, ‘Quite right, quite right. Point entirely taken, totally understood.’ He steers his wife towards the door. ‘Same time next week then?’
Believe me, if I had the power, I’d go down there, take hold of Rory’s head and bang it against the wall for him.
maggie
When I got back to my room in the Cadogan Hotel, Jay was lying on the bed. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Do these trolls in congress actually believe the bumper sticker drivel they spout?’ He was stretched out on top of the chintzy counterpane, reading the Wall Street Journal, glasses on his nose. His hair was flat where he’d been sleeping on it, and he’d been using his old leather briefcase as an extra pillow. His beat-up Nikes had been tossed onto the floor by the armchair. I sat on the bed and grinned at him. There was no point in asking him how he’d broken into my room. Hotels were, after all, his speciality.
Jay was my lover. We’d met at a human rights convention at the Kennedy Centre in Washington. Before I worked at Newsline, I spent five years at WKM TV, a small but respected local station up in Maine, where I did time writing, producing then field producing before I finally made correspondent. Anyway, a local counsellor with whom I’d become friendly while researching a story was speaking and had invited me to come along. It was going to be one of those off the chart scary evenings so I don’t know how I talked myself into saying yes, let alone turning up. Some people have an irrational fear of spiders and mice, but my own room 101 is filled with people in tuxedos drinking champagne and engaging in small talk.
Even the time I picked up an award for a story I’d worked on I was at the ceremony, crouching in the loo with a cigarette for most of the evening, so when my name was announced I didn’t hear it. Coming back into the room I couldn’t think why everyone was looking around expectantly and clapping. I was so discombobulated that when I eventually staggered up to the mike I could only admit that I had to pee rather than say I had to smoke. For obvious reasons that night still ranks as both the best and worst of my life.
So when I walked into the Kennedy Centre that evening a couple of years ago, I wished for a moment that I’d come with a guide, someone who would hold my arm and steer me through. But a career in television, its accompanying obsession with stories and weeks spent holed up in editing rooms, not to mention the sheer amount of travel – well being single just seems to go with the territory. It was OK. Manhattan is one of the few places you can live alone and not feel lonely. People are all around you, life is happening everywhere. If you’re on a Kansas farm, hours from the nearest town, you might be excused for microwaving puppies or pickling the heads of wayward hitchhikers. Real loneliness mitigates all sorts of crimes. In fact, if you think about it, a crime of passion must be a luxury for a lonely person.
Anyway the point was that I had this moment standing alone in that big room. What if I was one of those women who never had long relationships, who never got married or had kids? I’d always loved being attached to nothing and no one – considering it an incredible freedom – but for ever?
The talk began. Courtesy of my friend I’d been placed in the front row so there was to be no escape. After nearly two hours of speeches, I became aware of the man next to me shifting uncomfortably in his seat. The speaker had just shown slides of mass graves in Rwanda and there was a prolonged and uneasy silence in the room during which my fidgety neighbour leaned towards me and produced a partially inflated whoopee cushion. ‘Would it be inappropriate do you think,’ he whispered, ‘if I were to let this off now?’ This was so out of left field that by the time I recovered he was up on stage. He introduced himself as Jay Alder. He was valedictorian of the event and admitted, almost sheepishly, that he had worked for Doctors without Borders for twenty years. He then proceeded to speak for forty minutes without notes and I was totally mesmerized.
By the time I’d come out of my trance the evening had descended into the kind of social maelstrom that leaves me stranded. I stood in its hub, conversation and laughter washing over me, and clutched the program of speakers I’d found on my seat. Jay’s picture was on the back. He had thick grey hair and looks that were strong, rather than handsome. He’d drawn himself a Biro goatee and scribbled the caption ‘In need of major refurbishment’. I felt my face heating up. It was as though he was already asking me to move in.
He appeared at my elbow. ‘Do you know what you look like standing there?’
‘What?’ I accepted the glass of red wine he was holding out.
‘Like an alien who’s landed on earth and only just discovered they don’t know how to breathe oxygen.’
* * *
He was staying at the Elliot Hotel. It was late by the time we got there. The restaurant was virtually empty. My shoes were pinching. My shift kept shifting.
He said, ‘You don’t look all that comfortable.’
I told him I thought I might be a freak of nature.
‘How so?’
‘Because when I’m dressed up as a butterfly, all I want to do is turn back into a caterpillar.’
He laughed.
‘Besides … I borrowed this dress and I hate it.’
‘There’s a simple solution to every problem,’ he said and nodded to the waiter for the check.
* * *
Later Jay said, ‘Of course this would be an entirely inappropriate relationship.’
I was already having inappropriate thoughts about the word relationship so I didn’t answer.
‘Although I realize a man of my age must be almost irresistible for you.’
Lying in the darkness I couldn’t see his face but I heard the irony in his voice.
‘OK, so just how old are you?’
‘Old enough to know better,’ he said.
‘What do you suggest then?’
He lit a cigarette. ‘Maybe I can adopt you.’
* * *
The next morning, packing to leave, he said he would try to call, but it might be difficult.
‘Sure,’ I said lightly.
‘It won’t be for the usual reasons.’
Round up the usual suspects, I nearly said.
I assumed he couldn’t call me because he was married. When I discovered he wasn’t, I didn’t feel relieved. Instead I was shocked to discover I hadn’t felt guilty in the first place. I soon understood why a relationship would be impossible. His life was crazy, genuinely crazy, his world unrecognizable. Half his time was spent bearing witness to some of the world’s most atrocious crimes, the other half, to keep a semblance of normality, he had to force himself to pretend those crimes weren’t happening. Whenever I saw him, I wondered at the huge effort required to move seamlessly from one reality to the other.
Soon after I got back from Washington, I found an aeroplane sick bag amongst my post. On the back was a stamp from Nicaragua and on the front he’d scribbled, ‘Can I get you out of my mind? The hell I can, but I’m working on it.’
Please don’t work too hard, I thought.
daniel
Look I don’t want you thinking that Rory is just some pastiche of a Hooray with a loser’s job, because he’s not. Stately Locations is not his first choice of career, truth be told it’s not his choice of career at all. What he was by trade, and continues to be whenever he gets the chance, is an archaeologist, and a pretty good one at that. An obsession with age, which began in childhood with counting rings in trees, teeth in horses, layers in sedimentary rock and even the dry wrinkles on our mother’s elbow, grew into a passion for dead things, restoration and travel, but despite being consultant to the V&A, it’s a job that has never paid much, and certainly not enough for his current needs. So when the first telephone call Alison puts through to his office this morning is from the museum who want to know whether he’d be prep
ared to go to Turkey on a three month dig, his inability to accept leaves him even more frustrated than when he arrived.
Frustrated he should not be. Last night, I can report, he spent a night of unadulterated passion with Stella – at least let’s qualify this phrase by describing it as a night of reasonable although uninspired sex. Still, this is not to be sniffed at – representing as it does a grand breakthrough for Rory. It would not be an understatement to say that Rory, since the sudden departure of Leona from his life, has been no Tom Jones. There have been precious few pants slung onto the sweaty stage of his libido. Stella is a beautiful, sharp girl who paints and works the London scene with equal ardour though somewhat less equal skill. Unfortunately Stella is also a girl who must take before she can give and I can tell you from personal experience that a sexual encounter with her might be fulfilling for the body but tends to leave the mind emptier than ever. When she asks him, whilst applying toner to her neck, whether he thinks she looks older in the harsh light of day, you can almost see him mentally scarpering off in the opposite direction.
By the time Rory has extricated himself from Stella’s morning neurotics and made his way through the rain to Connelly Mews it’s ten o’clock and a parking ticket is waiting on the windscreen of his Rover. As he peels it off, a garbage truck rolling through a puddle sprays him with the dregs of London’s sewage. Now, hanging up the phone on the V&A, he sits at his desk and in general thinks evil things of the world.
On the other side of the glass partition Alison looks at him longingly. The more broken he seems, the more she yearns to fix him. Her dreams are feverish, peppered with images of stroking away his pain. She imagines clasping him to her bosom as he cries himself dry, at which point she will lead him to bed, remove his clothing and perform a little gentle oral sex in a further effort to exorcise his demons. In her fantasy he is the innocent who’s languished twenty years in jail, the castaway marooned on an inhospitable island, or even the shell-shocked soldier returning from war. Whoever he is, she is there for him because he is, apart from his rotten temper, nearly perfect and she sometimes wonders whether her heart might burst with love.
In the meantime she pours a mug of coffee, spoons in four sugars then securing the morning’s post under her arm, scuttles timidly to his office. She speculates whether a knock is appropriate, decides it is, but is not rewarded with an answer. Plucking up courage she turns the handle.
Rory barely looks up. Alison places the coffee on his desk and finding no further excuse to stay, has little choice but to go. Then luck smiles on her. Her gaze falls on the small pools of water gathering upon the floor.
‘Oh,’ she says happily, ‘you’re soaked.’ She advances on him fussily.
‘No, no,’ Rory pushes his chair back and holds up his hands, ‘I’m fine.’
‘You should take those off you know, you’ll catch a cold.’
‘Back off, Alison,’ Rory gives her a look.
‘Or even flu,’ Alison quavers.
The look turns to a glare. Rory points at his chin, ‘See this?’
Alison creeps a bit closer.
‘What is this?’
‘A chin?’
‘And on the chinny chin chin?’
How she hates him at moments like this. Her verbal artillery is not armed with the necessary warheads to combat such nuclear sarcasm.
‘A spot … uh no … a hair?’ She takes a deep breath. ‘OK I understand what you’re saying. You have stubble, you’re not a baby.’ She attempts a dignified exit.
‘Thank you,’ Rory calls after her. ‘Thank you for being so, so understanding.’ He is in fact behaving exactly like a baby but doesn’t care. Alison is maddening. He lobs the mail into the in tray and is in the process of ripping into a brown paper package when the door opens for the second time. Alison is again bearing down on him.
‘Give me the trousers,’ she says.
He looks at the towel in her hand. The pile has been rubbed bare but he can just make out a pattern of frolicking highland terriers.
‘I’m not putting that on.’
‘You’ve only got that girl for the accounting job.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Your trousers will be dry by then, I’ll put them on the radiator.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Someone has to look after you, Rory.’ Bravely, Alison stands her ground.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ he explodes.
Alison waits patiently while Rory yanks down his trousers. He snatches the towel from her and wraps it round his waist.
Alison plucks the wet trousers from the floor and turns away triumphantly.
‘I have a mother,’ Rory shouts after her. ‘God knows I don’t need another one.’
He reaches for a pair of scissors and stabs at the brown package. Inside are two silver foil containers, one marked ‘bread and butter pudding’ the other ‘cheese and onion pie’. Rory’s face lights up. He reads the accompanying note, ‘To keep the wolf from the door! Happy Birthday, Love Nanny’.
maggie
Jay was gone by the time I surfaced. I pulled the pillow towards me and groaned. Almost always he had to leave before I did. Almost always I wished he could stay. These trysts left me with nothing more tangible than the imprint of his hands on my skin, his smell on the sheets.
I had never once asked how he managed to track me down so successfully. With anybody else, the assumption that I would always be pleased to see him might have seemed like gross arrogance, but not with Jay.
Before Christmas, Jay had left for East Timor where the previous summer Doctors without Borders had been evicted along with all other humanitarian organizations. He re-established health care facilities for the displaced population before travelling on to Bosnia, where he was now based. London was a lot closer to Sarajevo than New York. Jay was a pretty good ulterior motive for staying in England.
All I wanted to do was drift back to sleep but I’d been in negotiations with Simon Brannigan’s aristo ‘wide boy’ and was supposed to be meeting him at his agency to pick up an itinerary covering the next few weeks. I crawled out of bed and padded into the bathroom, standing under a cold shower to force myself awake. There’d been a time at Newsline when we would not have been put up in hotels with marble bathrooms and gold shower fixtures. Those were the days when Newsline was struggling and when some of the stories it ran caused advertisers to yank their budgets. A segment Alan once put out about abortion lost him three hundred thousand dollars and it took a long time to prove to advertisers that contentious subject matter delivered viewers. Contentious subject matter was the reason I went to work for Newsline in the first place. Jay was right. To hell with the puff piece.
‘So how’s it going?’ he’d asked. We’d been lying on the bed, the television tuned into CNN. The crew had finally showed up that morning and I’d whisked them straight from the airport to the Houses of Parliament where we had an appointment to film Lord Canaver. He was a stately old peer and supposedly an expert on Northern Ireland. He’d agreed to be interviewed when I’d done the original research but the minute we started filming he pulled out just like all the others. I was beginning to panic. I almost didn’t care what we got on film as long it was something. We ended up trailing him halfway across London before eventually being turned away at his club.
‘Is it because I’m not wearing a jacket?’ I asked the porter. OK so I was being facetious. I knew full well White’s was a gentleman’s club.
The porter gave me a supercilious once-over.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘Jackets are for potatoes, gentlemen wear coats and ladies are simply not welcome.’
‘You got to hand it to these people,’ I reached for the water by the bed, ‘for dinosaurs, they’ve lasted pretty well.’ Jay was channel-hopping looking for the same report from a different source. Jay’s daily media diet consisted of snacks of NBC, ABC, CNN before embarking on a main course of newspapers, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Was
hington Post. ‘If there’s more than one version of the truth, that means there is no truth,’ he was fond of saying.
‘I’m surprised Alan sent you. Newsline is built on reliable typecasting. He must know he’s better off keeping you on the front line with an Uzi.’
‘Well, I guess I got the sticky end of the lollipop this time.’
‘I tell you why you didn’t get your Middle East piece.’ Jay switched off the television. ‘Some advertising focus group had told CBS to tell their executives to tell your boss that a puff piece shot in grand old houses is exactly what’s needed to recapture the twenty to thirty demographic.’
Jay’s current bête noire was America’s obsession with demographics – and to be fair he had a point. I recently heard even Barbara Walters say on 20/20 that once you’ve reached the age of forty-nine it is statistically proven that you use the same toothpaste for the rest of your life.
‘I like your White’s club story. There’s opportunity there.’
‘Like what?
‘Like, let’s see,’ he rubbed his fingers around his temples, a habit he had when he was tired, ‘there’s snobbery, debauchery, Christ, there’s even lunacy if you want it. Come on, you said it yourself, this is the English aristocracy we’re talking about, a group of people living in ivory towers whose time has come and gone. Just what is their point any more – if any?’
‘They’re hardly falling over each other to tell me. I’m having problems enough with access as it is.’
‘So do a little sleuthing. Ask the right questions, do what you’re good at and blow a little smoke up their butts. Give these people enough rope, Maggie, and sooner or later, I guarantee you, they’ll hang themselves.’
daniel
‘What do you mean you didn’t allow them in to any of the main rooms?’ Rory asks. ‘Surely that’s what they were paying to see?’ He presses his Biro into the notepad. ‘Yes, but you must understand, you are doing this for the money, Lady Harcourt … no, it’s because you are broke … quite penniless in fact.’ From the other end of the line come the unmistakable sounds of his client’s impending breakdown. Lady Harcourt is victim of the usual: heavy taxes, bad investments and an astonishing ability to bury her head in the sand. She has inherited a large but severely encumbered estate to which Rory recently organized a visit by a busload of wealthy Japanese widows prone to extravagant tipping. From the sound of it this outing has not been a resounding success.
