53

The following weekend Jamie went to Bristol to stay with Geoff and Andrew. Something else he was able to do now he was single again. He and Geoff had seen each other pretty much every month since college. Then Jamie made the mistake of bringing Tony along.

God, the last visit would be burnt into his memory forever. Andrew talking about imaginary numbers and Tony assuming it was some kind of intellectual one-upmanship. Despite Andrew being an actual maths lecturer. Tony getting his own back with the KY toothpaste story and some rather theatrical belching. So that Jamie had to send flowers and a long letter when they got back to London.

Geoff had put on a bit of weight since their last meeting, and he’d gone back to wearing glasses. He looked like the wise owl in a children’s story. He had a new job, too, doing the finances for a software firm that did something utterly incomprehensible. He and Andrew had moved into a rather grand house in Clifton and adopted a Highland terrier called Jock who clambered into Jamie’s lap as they sat in the garden drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.

Then Andrew arrived, and Jamie was shocked. The age difference had never seemed relevant. Andrew had always been the leaner, fitter man. But he looked old now. It wasn’t just the stick. You could break an ankle at eighteen. It was the way he moved. As if he expected to fall.

He shook Jamie’s hand. “Sorry I’m late. Got held up in some stupid committee. You’re looking well.”

“Thank you,” said Jamie, wanting to return the compliment but not being able to.

Jamie and Geoff cycled to a postcard pub in the country while Andrew and Jock took the car.

It seemed sad, at first, the way Geoff’s life was being narrowed by Andrew’s illness. But Geoff seemed as devoted as he’d ever been, and eager to do anything to help Andrew. And this made Jamie sad in a different way.

He simply didn’t understand. Because he could suddenly see Tony’s point. Andrew was a generous man. But he didn’t do small talk and he didn’t ask questions. When the conversation moved out of his sphere he switched off and waited for it to move back.

Andrew retired to bed early and Jamie and Geoff sat in the garden finishing off a bottle of wine.

Jamie talked about Katie and Ray and tried to explain why the relationship made him uneasy. The way Ray cramped her style. The gulf between them. And only when he was doing this did he realize how much of what he was saying applied to Geoff and Andrew. He tried to change the subject.

Geoff could read him like a book. Perhaps every conversation came round to this subject eventually. “Andrew and I have a very nice life together. We love one another. We look after one another. We don’t have as much sex as we once did. To be honest, we don’t really have sex at all. But, without putting too fine a point on it, there are ways of dealing with that.”

“Does Andrew know?”

Geoff didn’t answer the question. “I’ll be there for him. Always. Until the end. That’s the thing he knows.”

An hour later Jamie lay on the pull-out bed, looking at the roll of carpet and the defunct skiing machine and the cello case and felt that rootless ache he always felt in business hotels and spare rooms, the smallness of your life when you took the props away.

It disturbed him, Geoff and Andrew. And he wasn’t sure why. Was it Geoff having sex with other men and Andrew knowing and not knowing? Was it the thought of Geoff watching his lover growing old? Was it because Jamie wanted the unconditional love they had? Or because that unconditional love seemed so unattractive?

The following week he spent three days running the interviews for the new secretary and sorting out all the attendant paperwork. He went to Johnny’s leaving do. He saw A Beautiful Mind with Charlie. He went swimming for the first time in two months. He ate a takeaway Chinese in the bath with The Dark Side of the Moon cranked up to nine downstairs. He read The Farewell Symphony and the fact that he finished it in three days almost made up for how fantastically depressing it was.

He needed someone.

Not for sex. Not yet. That came a couple of weeks later, in his experience. You started finding ugly guys attractive. Then you started finding straight guys attractive. Then you had to do something about it pretty quickly because by the time you started thinking you’d settle for sex with one of your female friends you were heading for a whole barrel-load of trouble.

He needed…The word companion always made him think of elderly playwrights in silk smoking jackets holed up in Italian coastal towns with their handsome secretaries. Like Geoff, but with more glamour.

He wanted…There was that feeling when you held someone, or when someone held you. The way your body relaxed. Like having a dog on your lap.

He needed to be close to someone. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted?

He was getting a bit old for the outdoor stuff and clubs always seemed to him like stag nights, with the hormones flowing in the opposite direction. Men doing what they’d done since they came down from the trees, gathering in herds to get drunk and talk bollocks, anything to avoid the nightmares of being serious or having nothing to do.

Besides, Jamie’s track record was not good. Simon the Catholic priest. Garry and his Nazi memorabilia. Christ, you’d think people would either confess these things up front or avoid mentioning them at all, instead of announcing them over breakfast.

Halfway round Tesco he put a tin of sweetened condensed milk into his basket but came to his senses at the checkout and quietly slid it to the side of the conveyor belt when no one was watching.

Back at home he was lying on the sofa toggling idly between Antiques Roadshow and something about the Great Wall of China when he realized that he could ring Ryan.

He went to get his address book.