THE PHASE THAT Richard hadn’t got stuck in was his youthful affair with Jamie Nevis. It had only lasted a few months. Jamie had been different from Richard, less self-conscious, less cautious. Jamie wore sleeveless T-shirts, army trousers and charity shop jackets. He tied a narrow strip of velvet round his right wrist. Richard wore what he considered to be normal clothes – cords and neutral shirts bought from department stores – not actually chosen by his mother, but with her in mind. Richard never told Jamie that he loved him. He believed that he needed to keep checks in place for the sake of his long-term happiness. Richard’s parents didn’t talk of sexuality, or – much – of love. ‘So and so’s an attractive woman’ was the nearest his father came to it, accompanied by a mild clearing of the throat and a quick glance at his wife, as if the adjective had been an unwise choice. Not everyone was in step, every step of the way, with the prevailing sexual freedoms. There was slippage between social history and personal history, especially in the Epworth family.
Richard was twenty-one and Jamie nineteen when they met. Boys, both of them. Jamie the more clued-up of the two. The meeting took place on the Oxford-to-London bus. Richard had gone home to Abingdon for his mother’s birthday – an unavoidable engagement that required him, by custom and practice, to give presents to the two dogs as well as to Mother. He was on his way back to London. He boarded the bus from Oxford bus station at six o’clock on the Sunday evening. The aisle of the bus was crammed with people. Richard waited while individuals in front of him in the queue inserted themselves into the high-backed seats. He found a single space towards the back next to someone with a book open on his knee. Books were generally a good protection against conversation but a short way along the M40 the person – Jamie Nevis – spoke to him. He asked Richard if he knew that Wilde’s half-sisters had caught fire. Richard had no idea what he was talking about. He had met people before who suddenly passed on random information. They were usually hoping to make a short art film or had recently started writing a novel. Richard was doped by Sunday lunch, his brain befuddled. Twenty-four hours was the usual recovery period after a home visit. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Jamie said. ‘Everyone knows about Reading gaol but no one knows about the sisters. They’re getting ready to go to a party, twirling round in front of the fireplace; first one’s set alight, then the next.’
‘I don’t suppose they had a fire extinguisher handy,’ Richard said.
Jamie laughed. ‘No. They died. I’ve got half-sisters – in Essex.’
Richard was confused. He looked out of the window across the aisle and beyond the next set of seats. In the dim light he could make out the chalk sides of the hill that the motorway sliced through. No sign of girls carelessly dancing by a log fire. No sign of Reading. He realised who Wilde was, Wilde with an ‘e’, but it was too late. When he turned back, Jamie’s eyes were closed and he had fallen asleep. Richard must have slept too because, apart from odd moments of consciousness when his chin jerked down on to his chest, he didn’t wake up until they reached Grosvenor Gardens in Victoria. The bus staggered to a stop. People began to stand up and move forward down the aisle. Richard looked out on to the dark drizzly evening. By nine o’clock on Monday morning he had to have answered a revision question on bounded rationality. ‘Short answers will suffice for the micro-economics paper,’ his tutor had said. ‘But make sure they’re spot on.’ Richard thought of his room in the student house near the Oval, the dismal programming of Sunday evening television, the lack of beer and clean shirts. He patted the backpack that rested in his lap and, through the canvas, felt the brick-shaped package of foil-wrapped leftovers that had been pressed on him by his mother. Eventually he and Jamie Nevis were the only two left on the bus. The driver began locking up the cash box and operating the winder that changed the bus destination back to Oxford. ‘Shall we go somewhere for a drink?’ Jamie said.
The glass doors to the Federation, across the river in Vauxhall, were automatic, gliding apart, so there was no hanging around, half in, half out.
‘Funny smell,’ Jamie said. ‘But you get used to it.’ The bar had been his choice.
‘What is it? Petroleum-based materials? Recently set cement?’ Richard asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Jamie said.
‘It’s supposed to be bad for you, isn’t it? New building sickness.’
Jamie inhaled slowly. ‘Is it? What’s supposed to happen to you?’
‘I don’t know. Headaches. Asthma. That sort of thing probably.’
‘I never get headaches,’ Jamie said. ‘I never get ill.’
They were walking across the empty floor. The walls to either side rose upwards into blackness. The lighted bar, with a handful of people gathered round it and unoccupied low-level seating to each side, formed a tableau in the distance. Change of use became commonplace later – banks converted to bars and schools to residential blocks – but such transformation seemed sophisticated then. The Federation had only been open a month.
‘Extraordinary place,’ Richard said. ‘Like a cathedral. Everything happening at the far end.’
‘A working men’s club, not a cathedral. They stripped the inside out and made it over. I like it,’ Jamie said. ‘Weird music, though. Haven’t you been here?’ He moved away from Richard, stretched out his arms horizontally and turned round slowly, completing a circle. That was the first time Richard really noticed Jamie’s clothes, the narrow strip of velvet round his right wrist.
They were three-quarters of the way through their second pint of beer when Jamie glanced at his watch. It was a nice old sixties Ingersoll that had to be wound. Jamie had already shown it to Richard. He had found it at a boot fair in Essex, near where his family lived. It turned out that he and Richard were both at London University, though at different colleges, reading different subjects. They had swapped information about student life and cheap eating places. Richard had been describing the birthday weekend, meaning to make it sound funny. Jamie had laughed, out of sympathy, not because he found the story amusing. Then the talk petered out. The corner seat where they were sitting was in shadow, dark enough for the luminous paint on the watch numbers to glow. The watch showed half past ten.
‘Say something,’ Richard said, staring into the glass.
‘How do you usually meet people?’ Jamie said rather loudly.
Richard downed his beer. He knew Jamie didn’t mean people. ‘I don’t.’
‘There are no hidden microphones.’
‘I’m not gay,’ Richard said.
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Do you want something else to drink?’ Richard asked, after a few moments of silence.
‘No, thank you.’ Jamie got to his feet.
‘It hasn’t been a great conversation on my part. I’m sorry,’ Richard said.
Jamie smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It was all right.’
Richard stood up too. He put on his coat and buttoned it. Doing up buttons makes some people look like children. Perhaps it’s the way they do it. They show a sort of concentration that makes them look vulnerable. For some reason Richard saw that in himself and fixed the particular image in his mind. He still remembered it, nearly twenty years later, though other pictures that he would have preferred to retain had gone for ever. He picked up his backpack containing the bag of leftovers. But then he was reluctant to move.
‘Shall we go?’ Jamie said.
‘Where?’ The question seemed to come from nowhere.
‘Mine?’ Jamie said.
When Jamie was dying, Richard promised God he’d give him up. It wasn’t a wager – not an either/or promise. He made it when the message got through to him that Jamie was in University College Hospital with acute viral meningitis. If Jamie had survived the terrible fever it would have held, and if he had died, inescapably, the same. The promise needed to be unconditional. It was as if he had been trying to impose a counterweight to Jamie’s soaring temperature; a strike for equilibrium. Richard hadn’t, at that time, been conspicuously Christian – just timidly and conventionally brought up. He hadn’t ‘closed the deal’ as Paula and Hartley would have said – or prayed the prayer asking Jesus to come into his life. That had come later after he had started going out with Vivienne. The emergency appeal to God, at the time of Jamie’s illness, had somehow been primitive, straight from the gut. He had wanted to give something – out of love – and that was all he had to give. The willed attempt at forgetting had begun then. It was the only way he could cope. After returning from the funeral – a dreamlike assembling of strangers and friends at a crematorium in Essex – Richard looked one last time at the photographs. There were twelve of them, in a yellow Kodak packet, all taken on a day trip to Brighton. He walked to Vauxhall Bridge and threw them into the Thames. Richard had never visited Jamie’s family – they were among the strangers – and as far as he knew, no one had ever guessed that he and Jamie were lovers.
Richard survived the turbulent period after Jamie’s death, though at the time he didn’t care about survival. All his everyday actions slowed down, and split into moments of time so tenuous that the days and nights were endless and their shape unrecognisable. He took to his bed at unsuitable times. He moved slowly and aimlessly. He nearly said inappropriate things. He felt on the point of tears. It was as if he were trapped in a lift, with his own thoughts blaring out from an intercom. He let it be known that a friend had died suddenly. He implied an old friend, though he and Jamie had only known each other for a short time. Nothing less than an old friend would have explained his sadness. Of all his circle, Paula and Hartley showed the least alarm. They made their way to the Oval at regular and dependable intervals; brought food, tidied his room, opened windows. They talked to his parents and tutors on his behalf, and tuned out the worried sounds from their messages before they relayed them back to Richard. When Richard revived enough to listen, and even when he barely listened, Paula and Hartley told him who had sent their love and who had been praying for him – all in the same reassuring tone of voice. He came to appreciate these benign communiqués that involved no evident obligation. It was like a return to childhood: receiving Christmas and birthday presents from people he didn’t know.
He couldn’t put a date to a week, or even a month, when he knew he was better. Over time, tiredness became bearable tiredness and anxiety merged with boredom. The waves of grief grew further apart. He managed to sit his final exams. He went on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees. He became articled to a firm of accountants. Paula introduced him to Vivienne and when they became engaged he joined St Dunstan’s. He came to believe in the power of prayer which, combined with some dependable resilience of his own, saw him through.