Peggy

©

I’ve known passion. My first husband, Charles, was a passionate man. He didn’t love me and I didn’t love him, but we had passion. I was young; he was charming. He was sophistication itself. His long black coat swept gracefully from his shoulders. His fine shoes made a beautiful sound on the marble floor of The Clermont Club, the casino where I worked. His shirts were cut just so and his cufflinks winked at me from beneath his Savile Row smoking jacket.

He told me I had the most beautiful neckline he had ever seen. He'd travelled far and wide but had never before seen the angle of shoulder so fine, the indentation of collarbone as perfect. I still tingle at the thought of how he used to kiss that perfect hollow, how he would run a single gentle finger across my bare shoulder.

It wasn’t long before cool evenings on the casino balcony became hot nights between silken sheets. There wasn’t an inch of my squirming body that had not felt his caress.

He did love, yes, but it was not I, the object of his true affection. His loves were many: money, power, speed, beauty, adrenaline.

It was fun at first. At twenty-five I thought I was a woman of the world being carried off by the man of my dreams. I left my job at the casino. I waved goodbye to my friends as he picked me up in his polished deep blue Bristol 407 to take me to our new house. He carried me over the threshold and he opened a bottle of 1952 Bollinger. We lived in a beautiful Georgian house in St James’s. Well, I lived there. He graced it with his presence occasionally when he had engagements in London. He often arrived with a new dress for me, announcing that our presence was required at the theatre, the Opera, at the Café Royale or the Ritz.

I quite enjoyed setting up home. I scoured the pages of The Tatler and Vogue looking for fashionable pieces for our fashionable home. Charles was always impressed by my finds. I had wonderful taste, he told me.

I thought, for a while I had everything, until I realised that I was just one of the fashionable pieces in our fashionable home. Then champagne breakfasts merged with champagne lunches followed by vodka martinis before dinner and lengthy investigation of Charles’ single malt collection late into the evening, as I sought solace with Charlie. And of course hours and hours and hours I spent waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the promise of a visit. Yes that’s what it was, a visit. He didn’t really ever come home. Charles didn’t need a home.

It could have been a beautiful life, were I a stronger person - were I a person who could live without love.

But what of love? I have known love. My second husband, Andrew, loved me deeply. I was fond of him. We were friends. He took me away, foreseeing my downfall: the drink, the drugs, the self -neglect. He told me he loved me. He knew that was what I needed to hear. Love was what I needed most then. To love myself was what I really needed, but that was much harder. To enfold myself in the love of a dear friend was a good start. He made me promise that if we were to be together, to love each other, that I had to love myself too.  And I learnt to love myself, eventually.

And what of passion? With a love so deep, so lasting – thirty years we had loved each other by then, Andrew and I, since way before The Clermont Club, since long before I met Charles. In fact, since we were both eleven. We'd known each other, we'd trusted each other, we'd grown up together and we'd grown to love each other. How could there not be passion? We both thought it would come; perhaps when I’d healed, perhaps when I needed less of a brotherly hand. But sexuality is a beast that is not to be coaxed, an animal that cannot be tamed.

I was sixteen when Andrew told me he felt different. We were out walking by the Thames at Teddington. I was wearing my best dress, the pretty lavender halter-neck one with the white polka dots. ‘You know I do love you, Peggy,’ he said out of the blue. ’You know that don’t you? You’re my best friend. But I’m different. You do know that too, don’t you.’ His eyes met with the floor and he shrugged his shoulders. I kissed him anyway and he didn’t stop me.

That love lasted but the passion never came. And though I am told, that love without passion, can become bitter and twisted, that never happened for us. It just became colourless and we both new that out there somewhere there was a whole rainbow of discovery for us both to make. We were 42. Not young, not old and times had changed.

Ten years we had been married and we had been happy. But we both wanted a chance to taste that real magic. He still loves me and I still love him, but now he loves a man named Tony. Deeply, passionately he loves Tony.

As for me, I enjoyed that all-consuming magic with Ted, my third husband, until last week, in fact. But last week the bottom dropped out of my world. Not slowly, like it had with Charles. Well, I suppose that was really without Charles, loneliness being the demon that consumed me. No, this time it was quick. It was so quick that I find it all too easy to forget that Ted is gone. Ted is like a mirage now. I see him there so clearly. I go to him but when I get there he is gone.

Last Thursday it happened. Ted was out running, as was his wont. He brought me a cup of coffee, and he kissed the first sip cheekily from my lips. He said he’d be back before I was up. I snuggled back against my propped up pillows with last weekend's Sunday Times magazine hiding the pile of holiday brochures I had sneaked into the house. Plotting, Ted called it. I liked plotting.

The car was stolen apparently. The boy ran off. The PCSO that found him told me herself that Ted had spoken to her. He’d spoken of a boy. He’d seen him clearly as the car hurtled towards him.

There is a passion rising in me now, a deep and dangerous one. I want to find that boy and ask him why he was such a coward. All the kids these days carry mobile phones. If he was stealing cars, surely if he didn’t own a mobile phone himself he’d have stolen one. Why was he so much a coward that he couldn’t dial 999 before he ran off? Ten minutes. Ten minutes is all the PCSO thought it was. That ten minutes could have saved him. He died in the ambulance. Ten minutes could have saved my beloved Ted. That is the passion that is raging inside me now; a deep and angry passion.

Andrew wants to save me from such a passion. Andrew and Tony are coming to pick me up today. They want me to face the world before I face it at the funeral, which is tomorrow. We are going to lunch at The Royal Oak. It will seem strange, being just the three of us. We often went there together: Andrew and Tony and Ted and I. Andrew is impatient, I feel, in making me do such a thing. It will be difficult, and Andrew knows it, but for Ted’s sake I’m going to do it. I’m going to remember fondly the countless times we’ve been there as a foursome. I’m going to remember the laughs, I’m going to remember the tears – for though we have had many laughs, inevitably we have shared some sad news over the twenty-five years the four of us have spilled the ups and downs of our lives at that little table in the corner next to the open fire. I’m going to look at that amber wrapper of the flame and focus on how it encircles the blue spirit. I am not going to let that spirit escape, unaccompanied to rage and grow and rage and flow.

I am going to think about the magic – the love and passion that Ted and I shared and I’m going to forget about that boy and his mobile phone. Passion without love, even if it has the pretext of being for and on behalf of love, can be an evil, manipulative demon.

Love and Passion. Passion and Love. I will not let myself forget that I have lived that magic.