Better not to think back. Better to forget fickle human passions from the past and concentrate on the solid reliable loves of the present – his car, his television, his computer. Jomier likes technology. He admires the skill and audacity of scientists and engineers – the Channel Tunnel, the Millau Viaduct, the mobile telephone, the Oyster card, the DSG automatic transmission on his Volkswagen Golf. He feels physically strengthened by the torque of his car’s turbo-diesel engine and mentally empowered by the software on his computer. Each is more than a mere convenience. Jomier rarely drives anywhere because the roads are clogged with traffic; and he is aware that he spends too much of his waking life creating spreadsheets and entering names and numbers into databases; but he is proud of the end result. With only two or three keystrokes he can discover how much money he spent in August 1998 on groceries, petrol, gifts, books, wine, telephone (landline) or telephone (mobile); or how many people he knows who live in W11 (Notting Hill), how many in W6 (Hammersmith), how many he has classed as friends, how many as acquaintances and how many are dead.
When someone dies, Jomier enters ‘dead’ next to their name on his FileMaker Pro database. At first he typed the initials RIP for ‘rest in peace’ or rather, given Jomier’s views on mortality, ‘rot in perpetuity’; but, because the search engine is not case-sensitive, it meant that Johnny Ripley and Sue Ripon come up as deceased when they are not. Or so Jomier supposes. ‘Dead’ serves Jomier’s purpose: he has no friends or acquaintances whose names contain the consecutive letters d-e-a-d. He considers entering ‘lost touch’ by the names of Johnny Ripley (a fellow student at Oxford) and Sue Ripon (a girl he briefly dated before he met Tilly), and by the names of those friends and acquaintances he has not seen for a number of years. But as he flicks through the database, he realises that there are too many. Easier to write ‘still in touch’ or ‘current’, but Jomier does not do this. There are too few.
Thirteen of Jomier’s friends are dead. Three killed themselves. Two died of drink. Six had cancer. One had a weak heart. Another a rare wasting illness. The three suicides were all young women. Statistically, more young men than young women now take their own lives. But this is now. That was then – the 1960s. Two of Jomier’s suicidal girlfriends had fallen in love with ‘unsuitable’ men. One of the swains was Welsh, the other a Pakistani. The third girl was married to an oaf. She had three children. She saw no way out. Jomier wishes he could return to those times and talk them out of it. But what would he say? That they were under a misapprehension that life was meant to be happy? That they set too great a store on human relationships? That if they could only hang on for a few more decades they would find other consolations – a Volkswagen Golf, a mobile phone, a computer, a thirty-two-inch flat-screen TV.
Of Jomier’s six friends who had cancer, four smoked – chain-smoked – one cigarette after another. The health apparatchiks are right: a large ingestion of alcohol and nicotine leads to an early death. But their admonitions are issued on a presumed preference for longevity. They do not consider that there might be some who, just as Achilles opted for a life that was short and glorious, might choose a life that is short and fun.
Only four of Jomier’s friends have died ‘through no fault of their own’. In one, his heart stopped. Two – moderate drinkers, non-smokers – died of cancer all the same. One succumbed to an obscure genetic disease. Schicksal. Fate. Jomier assumes that he too will die of cancer. Like father, like son. But cancer of what? Cancer where? Jomier waits to see where it will strike. He feels his body for lumps and pesters his doctor. He does not want to be told, as his father was told by his doctor, that if only he had come earlier . . . But what is a symptom? Subcutaneous nodules. A change in bowel habits. Festering moles. How is one to know whether blood in the faeces means haemorrhoids or a tumour in the bowels? Is back pain the symptom of a strained ligament or bone cancer? How is one to tell which ache or pain is par for the course, and which the beginning of the end? Jomier takes no risks. He has had barium scans and swallows, cameras up his rectum and down his throat. Jomier is not a hypochondriac. Nor is he afraid of death. But he believes his body merits the same attention as his Volkswagen Golf.
Dead friends. How easily they pass out of one’s life. How soon the waters close over them. How quickly ‘life goes on’. If Jomier thinks of them, it is because of his journal. Their deaths merit entries and comments – about them, about death, about Jomier’s feelings about death. The feelings are not profound. They are mostly ‘better him than me’. If Jomier could save the life of one of his friends by accepting permanent toothache without analgesic, he would not do it. This is what he thinks when he visits his dying friends. He dislikes the silly, sombre expressions that people feel they must put on their faces at funerals. He likes it when, after a couple of drinks at the wake, the mask slips. Jomier does not feel sadness at the time. He feels it later, but the sadness is at his loss, not theirs. They are dead. Their suffering is over. Jomier must go on living with fewer and fewer friends.
Most of Jomier’s remaining friends go back to his youth. Jomier has made few in later life. It is as if friendship requires that we go through things together – schooldays, gap years, college, choosing careers, chasing girls, getting married, having children. A shared purpose in later life does not suffice. The friend from his youth who Jomier misses most is the one who died from an obscure genetic disease. Marco – Mark Davenport. They met in Paris in their year out – both attending a course on French Language and Civilisation laid on for foreigners at the Sorbonne. They hung out together in the Latin Quarter. They hung out together when they got back to London. They hunted as a pair. Marco asked every girl he met to go to bed with him on the grounds that one in ten would say yes. He also had affairs with older women. ‘After the age of fifty, they always say yes.’ He did not mind slack stomachs, sagging bosoms and dry, wrinkled skin. ‘They’re fantastic. Their desperation makes them wild. Girls are dull. Who wants to ride a horse that hasn’t been broken in?’
Jomier did not follow his friend’s example. He was too fastidious. His curiosity had its limits. Nor could he be as cavalier as Marco. ‘You must always sleep with a woman at least twice. Once is insulting.’ Marco moved in without promises and moved on without recrimination. With Marco there were no false expectations: a woman always knew where she stood. He wanted sex, not love. So, it appeared, did some women. But Jomier wanted love. He knew the feeling of animal exultation followed a one-night stand, but then came the backwash – shame – a feeling unknown to Marco. Shame not at the sin – Jomier did not see sex as a sin – but shame at the post-coital repugnance – as powerful as the desire he had felt the night before. ‘This is not flesh of my flesh or bone of my bone.’ He never wanted to see Daphne or Daisy or Susie again.
Jomier always had, in his mind’s eye, a girl who would love him and him alone. He would not be one among others – a bloke to tether once the body clock reached five to menopause and it was time to settle down. She would be dignified, modest, chaste – her body held in reserve for a lifelong love. Even as Jomier snogged and groped and shagged, this imaginary maiden stood in a niche in his psyche, smiling sadly down at his heaving buttocks, like the statue of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.
Jomier had found her. The imaginary maiden had come to life. Tilly. Tilly 1. Marco had liked her. Tilly had liked Marco. She found him amusing. Marco and his escapades. But now that Jomier was one half of a couple, he could no longer hunt with Marco or even talk about the chase. A line had been drawn. So what had they talked about? Jomier toggles back through his digitalised journals. Politics. Theatre. Food. Travel. Books. Even here they followed different paths. Jomier read Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Powell and Angus Wilson; Marco read Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Jomier read the Spectator; Marco the Evergreen Review. Every summer, Jomier and Tilly spent two weeks with other married friends in a rented villa in France or Italy while Marco set off to some part of the world he had never seen – Patagonia, the Atlas Mountains, Lake Van, Damascus, Kashmir. He slept on mud-packed floors in Cambodia and ate guinea pig in Peru. For six months he lived in New York, fighting Norman Mailer in a loft over a woman and going to bed with a man. ‘It was vile,’ he wrote to Jomier, ‘but you have to try everything once.’
Marco was gaunt and prematurely bald. He spoke with a lisp and a faint French accent. The accent was an affectation: he had a foreign mother but she was Austrian, not French, and his education and upbringing had been in England. His rich parents paid him an allowance and the rent of his flat in Chelsea. He was a dilettante, working on and off in the art world, charming old masters out of old ladies – rewards, perhaps, for the sexual ecstasy that they thought they would never know again. Through his mother, a Frycht, he had an entrée into the grandest families in Europe. Christie’s and Sotheby’s vied for his services as a consultant.
Jomier’s recollection is that his friendship with Marco ended with Marco’s death but, rereading his diaries, he sees that some years before he became ill Marco had imperceptibly passed out of his life. He had returned from New York with a passion for tennis acquired when staying with rich Americans on Long Island. Jomier preferred not to play tennis: he only did so when needed by Tilly for a game of doubles. Now Tilly had a partner in Marco to play with her friends at the Campden Hill Tennis Club or on the courts in Ladbroke Square Gardens.
There was an entry which described Marco coming to Sunday lunch. Tilly had asked one of her single girlfriends. Marco showed no interest. His expression throughout suggested that he wished he was elsewhere. Marco was Henry’s godfather; he had held him at the font. But now Henry was eighteen months old – a tiny Caligula who threw tantrums if he did not get his way. Shrieks. The smell of cabbage and damp nappies. A needy spinster. After lunch, Marco declined to join them on a walk in Holland Park. He took his leave.
Soon after Marco went back to live in New York. It was there that he went down with some rare and fatal illness. He had been flown to a clinic in Austria close to the schloss of his grandparents, Graf and Gräfin von Frycht. It was there that he died. Seeing the back of his friend scuttling away up Holland Park Avenue turned out to have been Jomier’s last view of Marco. There was a memorial service at the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Chelsea and a reception afterwards at his parents’ house in Chester Square. No one seemed to know exactly what had killed Marco: there seemed some embarrassment, even shame. These were the early days of Aids. Jomier wondered whether Marco had found his homosexual experience less vile than he had said; or whether he felt that his quest for experience had led him to try it again with other men – perhaps plunging into the Mineshaft to have anonymous gay sex.
A year or so later, Jomier met a young Austrian at a dinner party in Pimlico. Initial probing conversation revealed that they had Marco in common. Jomier was his friend. The Austrian was his cousin. He told Jomier that Marco had died from a rare hereditary blood disease – a galloping anaemia – passed through the Frycht gene. It had been misdiagnosed in New York: it had been thought to be Aids. In Austria the disorder, Frycht’s anaemia, was better known but, by the time Marco had been flown there for treatment, it was too late. Complications had set in. Removal of his spleen. Blood transfusions. All in vain. The young Austrian sighed. Only Frychts were susceptible to the disease. It was a hereditary disability like the Habsburgs’ protruding jaw. He sighed again. Noblesse oblige. Clearly, he thought it was a risk worth running – a fair exchange for the blue blood.
‘So it wasn’t Aids after all,’ Jomier had told Tilly on their way home from Pimlico. Tilly: ‘Whoever thought it was?’
It had never occurred to Jomier until the memorial service at the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Chelsea that Marco had been a Roman Catholic. When Jomier came to think about it, with an aristocratic Austrian mother, he could hardly have been anything else. When Jomier came to think about it further, he realised that it explained a lot. A Catholic takes risks because he is confident that his sins will be forgiven. Sin for a Protestant betrays that he is not one of the elect. Jomier does not think of himself as a Protestant but he has a Huguenot gene. Or a gene that had inclined Jomier the bookbinder to be a Huguenot. Better than a hereditary disease, perhaps. Did Marco know that he was doomed? Was that why he lived so furiously? Never settled down? Like Achilles – a short and glorious life; rather than one that was long and inglorious – like Jomier’s.