by Alan Keslian
‘No, you’re supposed to dilute it. Bit awkward in here.’
I put the card and phial back on the cabinet. ‘Is there anything you want me to do at Ferns and Foliage?’
‘You’re busy already. My staff will cope, they’ll probably do better with me out of the way. Perhaps one thing, if you can find the time.’
‘Of course.’
‘As a precaution, could you get a form from the bank so that you can become one of the signatories for cheques? Be an idea to make Tom one too.’
‘You’re beginning to worry me now.’
‘I’m not in any danger, no more than we all are, but we have to be sensible. Cheques require two signatures. At the moment there’s me, the garden centre manager, and the chap who keeps an eye on the flats for me and helps me with paperwork. Another couple of signatories will make sure we’re not caught out. If you don’t mind doing it, that is. I shouldn’t ask; you’re under pressure at work already.’
‘I’m honoured to be asked. What’s the best way of arranging it? If you gave the bank a ring on Monday to let them know, I could pick the form up on Tuesday lunchtime and we can sort out the signatures in the evening. You’re sure there’s nothing else?’
‘No, Tom gets me everything I need, don’t you worry.’ He smiled and pushed himself a little higher onto the pillows. Only fifteen minutes had passed and already we seemed to have run out of conversation. Unable to think of something better I said, ‘This is quite a novel experience for me. I’ve only been into hospitals two or three times in my whole life.’
‘You’ve never been seriously ill? You’re lucky. Another advantage in life?’ He sometimes liked to remind me that, whilst he had been born into a poor family, my circumstances had cushioned me from hardship.
‘No. Sprained my ankle once, but they didn’t keep me in. Other than that, been to visit someone in hospital a couple of times.’ To make my good health seem less exceptional I added, ‘Tom has never been seriously ill either.’
‘Your parents, you mentioned a car crash… ?’
‘My sister and I were taken to the hospital, but they’d been killed outright; they had no need for visitors.’
‘I’m sorry, don’t mean to… ’
‘It was so long ago. I was still at school at the time, studying A-levels. An aunt and uncle on my mother’s side took us in. They did their best for us, but they had a child of their own. We had a miserable couple of years. You can imagine how we felt. Their little girl put up with us and we put up with her, treading carefully all the time, avoiding arguments, being artificially nice to each other. I suppose she didn’t want us in her house any more than we wanted to be there. The alternative, had they not taken us in, would probably have been a children’s home of some kind, so we had reason to be grateful.’
‘But not like being with your own Mum and Dad. Quite a setback at the age of what – seventeen?’
‘Fortunately money wasn’t a problem. My father worked for an insurance company and had taken out maximum cover. They were tough times for us even so; my life has not been all ice cream and expensive toys. I don’t think I stopped feeling miserable until I went to university. In a way life started for me again there.’ Andrew was looking towards me, but although his eyes were fully open they seemed unfocused, giving the impression that he was no longer listening but engaged on some other theme or memory of his own. ‘Sorry, I must have told you all this before.’
For about a minute he did not move, as though he had forgotten I was sitting by his bed. He returned from his reverie and said, ‘You did tell me once before that you lost your parents in a car accident. Must have been very hard. Unhappy memories – not always a good thing to go back over them.’
This was the wrong time for me to be talking about a fatal accident. ‘That one disaster apart I have to own up to a good start in life, middle-class parents, no major accidents or major illnesses. Although actually I did have a bump in the car yesterday.’
‘In that priceless Mercedes? Was anyone hurt?’
‘No, a stupid low speed collision. My fault.’
The clinking of cutlery and crockery at the other end of the ward told us that food was on the way. ‘I’d better go. Sounds like supper.’
‘Don’t let that worry you. You may get a cup of tea if you’re lucky, although I can’t promise it, they watch the pennies on food. I’ve never taken out private health cover. I suppose that firm of yours has fixed something up for you.’
‘Well… yes. You might be able to get a private room here, the charge may not be all that much.’ The smell of onions and gravy drifted into the cubicle. ‘What were we talking about?’
‘The accident – the collision. The other driver was all right?’
I mistakenly assumed he was asking about my parents’ accident, not my bump in the Mercedes. ‘Cuts and bruises. That was what seemed so terribly unfair, he killed my mother and father and got away with minor injuries.’
‘Ah – I meant your collision yesterday.’
‘Oh that, sorry. No, a bit of damage to the cars, not much.’
‘You never told me your parents’ accident had been so… traumatic.’
Desirable as a subject or not, my parents’ deaths had cropped up again. ‘Yes, it got on the front page of the local paper. A stolen car with the police in chase went through a set of red lights straight into them. My parents’ car was pushed off the road, bounced down an embankment, turned over, and smashed into a garden wall. The bodywork was mangled. We were told they wouldn’t have suffered. The car thief who killed them is probably out of jail by now, the bastard.’
When I looked back at Andrew his eyes were wide open and he was staring up at the ceiling. ‘Sorry Andrew, are you OK? Shouldn’t have been talking to you about all that, not here.’ He continued gazing fixedly upwards. ‘Andrew, Andrew,’ I said more loudly, worried that he might be having another attack. He seemed not to hear me, and in a panic I hurried over to the auxiliary nurse who had brought supper. She scurried away to the office at the other end of the ward to seek help.
A stocky nursing sister came out to examine Andrew, her white tunic stretching over her substantial bosom. She leant over the side of the bed, her chest pressing down on the bedspread. In a high pitched coquettish voice she asked: ‘And how are you feeling now my darling?’
His lips moved slightly as he whispered something to her. She took his pulse, concentrating on her watch for the required minute, then released his wrist. ‘Food is on its way. Try and manage some, even if you are tired.’ She looked up at me and said, ‘Shall I leave you to say your goodbyes?’
Hastily doing as she suggested I followed her down the ward until she stopped at the door of the office. ‘Will he be all right?’
‘He seems a bit tense; he’s had several visitors today, probably been very tiring for him.’
‘Something seemed to happen, he was all right, we were talking normally… then he seemed much worse.’
‘Ups and downs, you have to expect it. We are checking him every half hour for observation, so we will know if anything is wrong. His pulse was a little bit fast, that’s all. I expect the last time you saw him he was fit and active. Sometimes simply being in a hospital bed makes people seem very poorly. Bit of a shock for you seeing him like that?’
‘Yes, that may be it.’
‘Maybe do you good to have a cup of tea or something. There is a visitors’ refreshment room on the ground floor. Are you a relative?’
‘No, a friend, the family is not close.’
‘How long will it take you to reach home?’
‘An hour perhaps.’
‘If you like you can ring to ask how he is when you get back. There’s no need, as I say, we are checking him every half hour, but ring up and ask for me if you’re still worried about him.’
Tom and I went to the hospital together the next day. In contrast to me he was relaxed and talked easily with Andrew about his friends and staff at Ferns and Foliage. He tea
sed him about being examined by attractive young doctors and being lifted out of bed by muscular male nurses. The place seemed to stifle my ability to make conversation. Andrew asked Tom to put off whatever work he had planned for the coming week to run errands for him, bringing him paperwork and doing miscellaneous jobs for Ferns and Foliage.
Towards the end of his week in hospital for observation he was conducting business from his bed using a mobile ’phone. He was forced to stop when the senior consultant recommended surgery, and booked the operation for the next day. Arrangements were made for him to recuperate in a nursing home near Eastbourne in the hope that getting him away from London would force him to rest, but after a couple of days he had Tom driving up and down to the south coast with correspondence and was ringing his staff several times a day with queries and to ask for progress reports.
At Ferns and Foliage the manager, whilst knowledgeable and competent, insisted on sticking rigidly to his contracted hours. Except for essential cover for sick absences and unforeseen crises, Andrew disliked paying overtime, believing that bonuses based on profits were the best way of rewarding staff for good work and flexibility, whereas regular overtime encouraged people to work slowly and take unnecessary time off sick. He was worried that the manager would use his absence to change working practices, and persuaded me to go in a couple of times a week on the excuse that he wanted me to ensure the paperwork was well maintained and check on stock levels.
The manager knew about the new arrangements for signing cheques and understandably resented my interference. He occasionally made mildly critical remarks, for instance when I rather stupidly asked why it was necessary to stock a dozen different types of fertilizer, he said contemptuously, ‘Your trouble is you don’t know your chrysanthemums from your dahlias.’ The criticism was largely justified, and for him to voice his irritation was better than letting it fester into a grudge. Even Tom knew more about plants and the uses of the various packets and bottles of stuff on the shelves than I, and sensibly explained that whether so many different types of fertilizer were necessary did not matter much; the garden centre, like shops of all kinds, stocked whatever would sell.
Andrew’s illness, or rather the lack of his company, exposed a weakness in our relationship. From my very first visit to the Beckford Arms, Andrew and I had been the great talkers, discussing everything from the price of crisps to the dangers of global climatic change, while Tom put in a few comments here and there. Since Andrew no longer came to the pub regularly Tom and I were spending more time on our own together. Some of his habits of speech began to irk me: his use of ‘ain’t’ instead of ‘haven’t’, usually followed with another negative as in ‘ain’t got no time for them’ or ‘ain’t never been there’; his ‘going for a quiet drink’ in the Beckford Arms even though the pub was often noisy and overcrowded; and the way he called his clients ‘gov’ on the ’phone as though trying to ingratiate himself by being obsequious.
When he wanted he could be surprisingly articulate. In the early days when we were getting to know each other he told me about his childhood, for instance how he, his brother and a couple of friends used to play at tying each other up with bits of rope they found in an uncle’s garage. They would take it in turns to be the ‘captive’, submit to being tied up and left for five minutes alone in the pitch dark to try to struggle free, sometimes succeeding before the others came to release them, sometimes not. Their escapades sounded imaginative and exciting compared to the games my sister and I used to play in the back garden, never far from parental eyes.
Telling one another the interesting bits from our past lives could not sustain conversation between us forever, and new topics became harder and harder to find. We shared our friendship with Andrew, our visits to the swimming pool, and the sexual side of our relationship, but had little else in common. Looking back, that we should have made the effort to find new interests we could enjoy together is obvious, but what happened was if nobody came over to talk to us in the Beckford Arms we would more often than not run out of things to say. When we were apart I often thought of him with affection, but much the same was true of Andrew, and at times it seemed to me that my sexual relationship with Tom and my friendship with Andrew were not separate things but a sort of combined ‘affair’, the physical part of it being with Tom and the meeting of minds being with Andrew.
After he returned from convalescence Andrew worked much as before on weekdays, and we resumed our practice of meeting for dinner on Sundays, all three of us taking our turn to be host, but he rarely joined us in the Beckford Arms. Most evenings in the pub other regulars chatted to Tom and me and helped prevent too many long silences, but in Andrew’s absence the time often seemed to pass very slowly. Annoyingly, if Tom fancied someone new who turned up in the bar he would unashamedly liven up. ‘Look at that one,’ he would say admiringly, pointedly lusting after another man in front of me. What might go on when we were apart did not bother me. Going into the homes of gay men to do work, and living so conveniently near the Beckford Arms, he must have had many opportunities for casual sex. Having him as my boyfriend left me with no hunger for anyone else, but it would not have been a great surprise to me if he did not feel the same and picked up someone now and again. Monogamy is not common among gay men, and attempts to force anyone into it are bound to fail. Tom was not foolhardy, and if he was having casual sex would take precautions. If he occasionally went with someone for fun, the less I knew about it the better.
On a Friday night a few weeks after Andrew’s return from Eastbourne the entire gay population of London seemed to have invaded the Beckford Arms. When we arrived all the tables were occupied and the crowd at the bar was four deep. The barman explained while serving us that another gay pub a couple of miles away had closed for refurbishment.
The din of music and conversation was so great that we had to shout to be heard. Even to stand in one place was impossible, as we were constantly jostled by other customers fighting their way to the bar or the toilets. Hot and uncomfortable, I was about to suggest we finish our drinks quickly and leave when a black man I had never seen before shoved himself between Tom and me, confidently put an arm around him and kissed him full on the lips. Tom pulled away, shook his head and said, ‘This is not a good time.’ The man looked round at me, then back at Tom who half nodded, and went off to the other end of the pub.
I turned to face Tom, waiting for an explanation.
‘What can I say? You saw what you saw. It wasn’t anything. Let it go, Mark, something made me go for it that one time, maybe I shouldn’t have but I did. The thing was a one-off.’
‘A handsome man. How long has this been going on?’
‘There’s nothing going on. That once, I admit to; let’s say I made a mistake. He would have to turn up here. I sort of let myself fall for it the once, wasn’t like we even spent a night together.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘Because it’s true. If something is true, you should believe it. Give me a chance.’
The intense rush of anger and jealousy made me want to march out of the pub without another word and go back alone to Chiswick, but to give way to this surge of emotion might damage our relationship permanently. Given a little time my feelings would moderate. Then, after thinking calmly, I would decide what to do. If this incident, and all the other trivial annoyances and disappointments of the past, outweighed my positive feelings, clearly the time had come to bring our affair to an end. We stood silently in the congested bar avoiding each other’s eyes. A friend came over to chat, unaware or pretending to be unaware that anything was wrong.
When the pub closed we went back to Tom’s flat and climbed into bed together, knowing the sex would be spoiled by my restrained anger and his guilt. For the rest of the weekend we were polite towards one another but far from happy, avoiding a row but not really wanting each other’s company. At dinner on Sunday we tried to appear friendly to avoid embarrassing Andrew, and somehow maintaining the sembla
nce of normality completely neutralised my feelings of resentment. The incident had confirmed my suspicions about Tom having casual encounters, but nothing important between us had changed.
Ironically since he was at fault, the incident led him to decide to break off with me. A few days later, when I hoped that we would be able to put the tiff behind us, he told me a friend had persuaded him to go up to Manchester to work on the construction of a new shopping centre. Top rates of pay were on offer because the project was behind schedule. Guessing that this was an excuse to finish the relationship, and hoping to make him tell me so unambiguously I asked directly, ‘Are you going because of what happened in the pub on Friday night?’
‘No, it ain’t that. This is my chance to make some real money. With some savings behind me maybe I could be somebody, build up a business for myself even.’
‘Will you be back at weekends?’
‘Sundays is when they pay the best overtime rates. There should be a good few weeks’ work up there. Won’t know exactly until I get there.’
If not goodbye forever, it was goodbye for an indefinite period. ‘When are you going?’
‘Probably go up tomorrow. Might as well get started.’
Although we brought each other to perfunctory orgasm in bed that night, we gave each other little pleasure. Two days later I tried his portable ’phone number, but one of Andrew’s staff at the garden centre answered. Tom had used that ’phone since we first met, but now had left it behind because it belonged to Ferns and Foliage. He had denied me even the pleasure of wishing him well and saying that if we bumped into each other we should say hello and be friends.
Andrew invited me to a restaurant for dinner the following Saturday, saving me the misery of not knowing what to do on my first Saturday night without Tom for over a year. He told me that Tom had travelled up to Manchester by train, had kept on the flat above the garden centre, but he had heard nothing more from him.