Bad Company
(‘Bad Company’: overlooked film by Robert Benton, director of ‘Kramer v Kramer,’ starring the young Jeff Bridges – and with little relation, being set in the American West, to the sad Twentieth Century metropolitan saga below. But a film well worth checking out).
The ‘I’ of these essays can become a little too easy, wise after the event, self justifying. What follows is hard to defend and still a bit raw. The ‘I’ is not admirable, is foolish and callous. One of the partnership described below is still climbing his way up the greasy pole – and I wish him well, so I won’t name him - or her. I will, of necessity, occasionally be imprecise about when, where and what and we’ll call her Beatrice - Italian pronunciation: Bay-a-tree-chay, which also gives an excuse for the Pre-Raph painting that accompanies this piece.
She arrived late in my life. I was 43. It was a low point: ‘In the middle of the way a dark wood’ and, without knowing it, here was my Beatrice to lead me out of it. The first time she came over to my place she got spectacularly lost along the way, arriving in Chiswick by way of Wimbledon, carrying a bucketload of flowers. Her flat mate and close friend - they were like ‘Babes in the Wood’ I thought - was mainly based outside of London, at a branch of his barrister chambers – indentures? - reluctantly marooned in ‘small town’ he called it. She missed him (though, mainly lesbian, had a series of girlfriends). I became the male pal to knock around with.
I’d met him first. He wasn’t a barrister then (though we’ll call him ‘The Barrister’). We were at a lunch in Canonbury, and the host had decided on a séance, which is an appropriately daft start to this. His palm was warm and fleshy, as we joined hands round the table. Did He write to me, or me Him, afterwards? I remember a beautifully written flowery postcard. He’d be early twenties, and me just over 40. He had seen my television film of ‘Angel Voices’ and, in the card, was asking me over to meet the woman he shared a flat with – Sunday lunch in Deptford. Both were new to London. He worked for Social Services then; she was a journalist, his age, doing very well. He was proud of her: they were friends from schooldays, protective of one another. I met one of her ex-boyfriends at that lunch, or a later one - an attractive pixie faced PhD student. She had fallen asleep during intercourse with him, she told me. (‘I wouldn’t chuck him out of bed,’ as Jack Nicholson says – with a ‘her’ instead of a ‘him’ - in ‘Carnal Knowledge.’) I took it as a sign that she was lesbian, not so fashionable then as now – a partial understanding which has a considerable bearing on what follows. In appearance she was flat faced, a bit Dutch, looked like Vermeer’s ‘Woman in a Red Hat’ (is it a woman?) She was noisy and less confident than she appeared: ‘needy,’ as they say, and thought I was the bees’ knees, which always helps. I think she liked older men, ‘father figures’ (her own had died young). She didn’t go to University ( though is taking a degree all these years later, I gather), had left school to start on the local newspaper, and landed a ‘Fleet Street’ journalistic job one or two of the less squeamish of today’s generation of young job applicants would kill for. Fallen on her – big – feet, in short. She looked like a (pretty) young man, though could be a bit pouting (her glossed lips would drop when unhappy), and was then in a covert and miserable relationship with an elder woman colleague, another journalist whose name was known to me. ‘What do you see in her?’ yet another woman journalist, who knew me well and wanted to keep hold, said to me. ‘Well, she’s lesbian,’ I said to my possessive friend, who wasn’t. I think Beatrice and the Barrister’s attraction to me – they came as a package at first – was the fact that they were young gays in London at a time when it was very heaven to be young and gay. ‘Post’ AIDS Clubland: ‘Fuck you. We’re going to have a good time.’ I was seeing a lot of politicians and journalists, much more staid – and that was what drew me to the two Bs (the grass always greener): her words were, ‘there’s a bit of glamour about you.’
He came to see me at Southwark Crown Court when I was covering the Guinness trial for the BBC. He had had enough of local council work and was thinking of swapping to Law. Later he came back to my flat, which he thought like a ‘don’s den,’ and I made an approach which was rebuffed. He was obsessed, it turned out, with the host of the lunch/ séance. I gave up on my romantic hopes – not difficult with me - and we became friends. He started studying Law, got some advice from the judge at the Guinness trial, finally getting into some decent chambers as a barrister. The big Guinness TV series proved impossible, and took up about a year and a half of my life. I was well paid, but with nothing to show at the end. The terms of trade in television had turned against me in the meantime. There was little demand any more for the one off dramas and films I enjoyed and had come into the business to write. The last big television film I made – around then - co-starred Jane Lapotaire who had been one of the leads in ‘Stocker’s Copper,’ a brilliant BBC Play for Today, directed by (the late great) Jack Gold. I was able to say to her (we have worked together again in radio recently) that it was films like ‘Stocker’s Copper’ fuelled me. They weren’t getting made any more. It was serial killers, six parters. I wasn’t interested. I was smoking dope, contemplating a failing career, not going out, having broken up with my long term agent: depressed in short, without comprehending its full implications. It’s an illness - I couldn’t get out of bed; I thought it was sloth. This greyness went on for well over a year. I sold my car, fought with the VAT people (the VAT man who arrived at my flat one day told me he wanted to be a writer), did some piddling television jobs – one with a top notch director I had worked with before on an big production for Granada TV. He was John Glenister, father of Robert and Philip. Philip – not well known then - was the lead in our little film (’Why are we doing this?’ John said/ or ‘We shouldn’t be doing this’). I was ready to pack in; the TV glory days were over. Which is where Beatrice, with bucketload of flowers, enters my life.
The lunch host – the séance lunch – asked me to a party at that time. He was another young pro on his way up, then living (platonically) with the journalist and ex-Tory M.P. Matthew Parris in the East End. Parris, I remember, was bare footed among the deep shag pile carpets. And, putting in an appearance, were the Barrister and Beatrice. ‘Where’ve you been?’ they said, ‘What have you been doing?’ They didn’t like the party much and encouraged me to set off with them for a meal in Islington. I remember how noisy and confident they were in the taxi – I still had a Northerner’s shyness in taxis - and still scarcely use them (they’re what people who have ‘money’ take). Later we went back to their place. They had moved to Highbury, a rented house owned by a well-known actor. I slept in the Barrister’s bed, while he slept with her. They’d had a go at being lovers once, I think, but it hadn’t worked. All I knew was that I had had a terrific late evening with them and was (praise be) happy for once. The Barrister went back to small town for the week and Beatrice, seizing an opportunity, arrived with the flowers. She had no idea of the space and silence I needed for writing – only I wasn’t writing much. She was on the phone most days, involving me in her romantic toils, where she’d been the night before, what they had got up to.
‘Oh, what fun we had,’ me traipsing after her: she wore Doc Marten’s and my memory is of her just ahead of me – round Soho’s clubs and cafes, one called ‘Café Freedom’, which features, I note, in the ‘Devotion’ essay. She made me over. Shirts were worn outside the trouser – but never if previously tucked in. She escorted me into a trendy hairdresser on Old Compton Street, which would have terrified me to enter solo. ‘Tom’ gave me a new and expensive haircut. I picked up a black leather jacket, from Oxfam, which I still miss: it got nicked in a club one night. And started wearing the ubiquitous Doc Marten’s. I even – we here begin the uncomfortable revelations – had my hair died. Orange. (Orange? Well, it wasn’t boring brown). I was staying in Hackney around this time, and at the (then) Safeway off Roman Road, leaning down to get a packet of penne off a bottom shelf, bumped into Danny Boyle, also reaching for the pasta. At that time Danny, known from Royal Court days, was just beginning his brilliant career as film director with ’Shallow Grave’. ‘Stephen,’ he said, a bit puzzled, ‘I didn’t recognise you.’ Once, I was walking with Beatrice past the Garrick, which I knew in what was feeling like my previous incarnation as a friend of some of its politicos and journos. Staggering out from a heavy lunch was Kingsley Amis. I remember being glad I was doing what I was doing, with whom I was with. She claimed to hate that Garrick world, was delighted I had ‘come over’ to hers.
I started enjoying Ecstasy – thank you ‘Magic Ned’ my supplier, who worked – a responsible administrative job - in Parliament. Later, on my 47th birthday, one of the Barrister’s colleagues pushed a little pill into my hand at ‘Heaven.’ ‘Happy Birthday,’ he said. It was one of the best nights of my life. I talked about it non-stop at a straight friend’s lunch the following day. Among the party of mainstream journos was a guy I had first met in New York, where he was a correspondent, now back in London with wife (a Woman’s Magazine high up) and family. He seemed delighted for me – and (many) years later came out as gay. Alan Rusbridger, also present, (not yet editor of the Guardian and largely silent at such get-togethers), was much more wry and quizzical (jealous?). He’d got me and this mid-life ‘crisis’ about right, I think. What he achieved in the twenty or so years that followed has my admiration, though he was too cool a customer to be likeable – even, lingeringly, on E. My new muse, Beatrice, wasn’t a drug taker, was a bit of a health freak, cycled everywhere. Her drug taking days had been in her teens, much more ‘normal’ than her 47 year old follower. She must have wondered what she had unleashed. A gay friend from this period said, ‘You’ve done most things in life, but in the wrong order.’ What Beatrice, who never interfered or criticised with my pleasures at the time, could see - all too well – was that I wanted to break out, find another identity for myself. Her flat mate, the Barrister, had organised the birthday meal before I hit the ceiling at ‘Heaven’. I went down with him that week to where he was living in ‘small town,’ and met some of his friends. Later in the cavernous loos, I heard these friends talking - it’s like a scene from a film – on the other side of the sinks and little wall that ran down the centre of the place. They were dissing me, I realised, to my horror. ‘Who was that guy??’ I’m used to being - if not admired, then, at least - liked, and I’m tempted to say that even Michaelangelo wouldn’t pass muster on the gay scene, where what you need are looks, youth and a large appendage. I think the reality is that as an older man among these scene-weary youngsters I had been trying too hard. Was maybe even ludicrous. I didn’t fit, and should have got out. I’d had my fun.
The Barrister embarked on a long-ish relationship with a very handsome ‘small town’ guy. Beatrice left her journalistic job, despite some strong advice from me not to, and went to the States, a long term aim. She had some success over there, but got lonely in LA, and came back. Work was tricky for her from then on, with no degree (I had warned her) and I gave her a reference to work, of all places, in Sainsbury’s Head Office. She stayed at my place when I was wandering around at other people’s (see ‘House Sitting’), and then bought, with the Barrister, a flat in fashionable East London. He was the one doing well; she moved among PR jobs. I was in France a lot of the time. And then, back in London, I heard the Barrister’s relationship had broken up – the love object feeling his barrister boy-friend’s job was more important to him. I was just up the hill from Clerkenwell, at Nina Bawden’s (see ‘Nina’) for a time, and the Barrister (whom I had always fancied) said to me, ‘Look, I’m not very good at living on my own…’ It was his turn to be depressed and I went to stay with him in ‘small town’ from which he was about to move for full time life – hence the new flat - in the capital. It was January. He needed help with the move - and at a more fundamental level: I recognised his symptoms. Most of the bulbs in his flat were dead, and the first thing I did was to go out to buy a half dozen from Waitrose. I started cooking for him. My career was underway again: I was having some success, and certainly writing fluently, for radio. Though I didn’t live ‘anywhere’ (I had sold my place) they were happy times – maybe because I was itinerant which, I found, suited me. I’d got bogged down in the smart flat in Chiswick, as if the furniture and surrounds afforded no possibility of escape. I had escaped for a number of years, had a ‘good time,’ developed more of a gay identity, re-fashioning myself consciously. I owed the ‘odd couple’ a lot for that. While I lived with him, he would put his head in my lap, most nights, wanting comfort - but that was as far as it got. He made it clear to me that there was no possibility of anything more, while also saying, ‘Why do I want any more when I’ve got this?’i.e. me. I had said to Nina before I went to live with him, ‘There’s a danger I’ll fall in love,’ and, though she wanted me to stay, had said kindly, ‘Well, that’s not such a terrible thing.’ I did fall - anybody who’s got this far will know the symptoms: looking for clues – hope – clutching at straws. I now wonder about this. Was I in love with the idea of being in love? Was I rehearsing it, to see what it felt like, for possible material for fiction? No, for a couple of months, I have to accept I was thrown completely off balance. I would have given up everything for him. I might as well have torn up the script of my previous life. However, I still - I note - cleared off to France from time to time - and a life of solitude. We want, and we don’t want, love. I don’t need, or only occasionally want, someone to ‘complete’ me, but remember a solo walk along the Regent’s Canal towpath to Victoria Park when I was in a kind of (non-chemical) ecstasy, skies never so blue, life never so benign. But ‘Love’ can fade as rapidly as it arrives. I had, by then, plenty of exposure to some of the less pleasant things about him. He had a phobia about illness and age, ‘wrinkly skin,’ a bit odd, particularly as he was settling into early middle age, waist beginning to thicken. I’d had regular rows with Beatrice over the years – she was combustible and then forgiving. I once thumped him. He fell on the floor. It was bad behaviour. Frustration at his not loving me? It was time to go.
He had met someone on the internet, handsome – looks were always vital to him – and, like his previous boyfriend, not his equal. She got hitched, another woman, and I went along for the celebrations. Both she and the bride were in white. He and me were amused at the small male presence at the gathering. His boyfriend arrived as I left – by arrangement? - we were into the era of mobile phones. He had a horror of embarrassment, probably knew better than me how in thrall I had been. But my feelings for him had abated to such a degree that I felt I had had a narrow escape. There were no hard feelings about my punching him. I had apologised instantly and he said, ‘I deserved it.’ From then on, we then fell into a pattern of having meals a deux, though never with his boyfriend - whom I once saw disappearing as I arrived. There was a lot of family money and he would pick up the bill for these lavish and enjoyable - mainly Spanish - fashionable extravaganzas. I would see Beatrice, also on her own, at more humble establishments, like a Vietnamese place on St. John’s Street, where one evening she told me she had embarked on an affair with a reasonably well known public figure. Male. As I had attended her civil ceremony only a year before, I was unsure what my reaction to this was, stayed stumm. He had about six kids, and was married to someone almost equally well known. I texted Beatrice that weekend – couldn’t phone her as she was presumably with her partner. I said that her relationship was folly and that I would see her when it was all over. I’ve committed adultery with a bloke once, liked the wife I was deceiving, and hated myself to the extent that I broke off the relationship. My attitude was also coloured by the amount of marital breakup I’d seen over the years and, I’m pretty sure, at my disappointment that my lesbian pal (‘breeders’ she called most women) had settled for being a rich and successful man’s mistress: ‘It is not nor it cannot come to good.’ I stuck to what I had said, adamantine, unforgiving, but wished her well. Two years later their relationship was all over the Press. He had left his wife for what her former journalistic acquaintances portrayed as a Doc Marten dyke. The ex-wife turned on him, started using the Press. It got very, very messy, ran and ran. The Barrister told me I ought to ‘support’ his old friend. I didn’t. I thought (Polonius- like) she got what she deserved. I also wondered, if at some level, she enjoyed the drama: she was easily bored. He left his wife. His kids denounced him publicly. But the relationship between Beatrice and him survives - and I still haven’t seen her. I suppose I wanted nothing to do with all that adulterous turmoil - she would have been on the phone daily, detailing it. But I think what it amounts to is this: no longer my lesbian muse, she was of no interest to me anymore. I don’t know if he was a Garrick Club member, but easily could have been. She had seemed to me, twenty or so years earlier, rather callous. ‘Next!’ she had yelled cheerfully, when bored with something, or someone. And once, with her fellow journos, outside the front door, at Downing Street, yelled: ‘When are you going to resign, Mr. Major?’
But I may have, I realise, a harder heart than hers. I am also stubborn – my old agent called me the most stubborn man she had met. I can be unforgiving. When, later, I fell ill and e-mailed the Barrister (from Kent, where I was laying up) about – appropriately enough - my heart problems, I got the tightest of texts back, along the lines of: ‘You can’t expect me to visit you when my father is so ill, and when I’m running on the spot to keep up with my profession.’ So that’s that, then. I haven’t seen him for two years and he hasn’t inquired as to my well-being. I find I miss the Spanish meals, but that’s about it. And I wonder if my only interest in these two was of their use to me at a time when I needed renewal. ‘They weren’t my type’. And, eat your cold writer’s heart out, Hanif (see ‘Almost Famous’), I wonder if there’s a possible fiction in all this? – so many details have had be excluded. She had a heart abnormality which I gave (as in this account) insufficient attention to. I see pictures of ‘Beatrice’ sometimes in the Press with a frumpy middle aged hairdo, and remember her crop haired self ahead of me on Garrick Street. And the barrister may be a judge – or on his way to it - himself by now. I give myself a harsh verdict.
The ‘I’ of these essays can become a little too easy, wise after the event, self justifying. What follows is hard to defend and still a bit raw. The ‘I’ is not admirable, is foolish and callous. One of the partnership described below is still climbing his way up the greasy pole – and I wish him well, so I won’t name him - or her. I will, of necessity, occasionally be imprecise about when, where and what and we’ll call her Beatrice - Italian pronunciation: Bay-a-tree-chay, which also gives an excuse for the Pre-Raph painting that accompanies this piece.
She arrived late in my life. I was 43. It was a low point: ‘In the middle of the way a dark wood’ and, without knowing it, here was my Beatrice to lead me out of it. The first time she came over to my place she got spectacularly lost along the way, arriving in Chiswick by way of Wimbledon, carrying a bucketload of flowers. Her flat mate and close friend - they were like ‘Babes in the Wood’ I thought - was mainly based outside of London, at a branch of his barrister chambers – indentures? - reluctantly marooned in ‘small town’ he called it. She missed him (though, mainly lesbian, had a series of girlfriends). I became the male pal to knock around with.
I’d met him first. He wasn’t a barrister then (though we’ll call him ‘The Barrister’). We were at a lunch in Canonbury, and the host had decided on a séance, which is an appropriately daft start to this. His palm was warm and fleshy, as we joined hands round the table. Did He write to me, or me Him, afterwards? I remember a beautifully written flowery postcard. He’d be early twenties, and me just over 40. He had seen my television film of ‘Angel Voices’ and, in the card, was asking me over to meet the woman he shared a flat with – Sunday lunch in Deptford. Both were new to London. He worked for Social Services then; she was a journalist, his age, doing very well. He was proud of her: they were friends from schooldays, protective of one another. I met one of her ex-boyfriends at that lunch, or a later one - an attractive pixie faced PhD student. She had fallen asleep during intercourse with him, she told me. (‘I wouldn’t chuck him out of bed,’ as Jack Nicholson says – with a ‘her’ instead of a ‘him’ - in ‘Carnal Knowledge.’) I took it as a sign that she was lesbian, not so fashionable then as now – a partial understanding which has a considerable bearing on what follows. In appearance she was flat faced, a bit Dutch, looked like Vermeer’s ‘Woman in a Red Hat’ (is it a woman?) She was noisy and less confident than she appeared: ‘needy,’ as they say, and thought I was the bees’ knees, which always helps. I think she liked older men, ‘father figures’ (her own had died young). She didn’t go to University ( though is taking a degree all these years later, I gather), had left school to start on the local newspaper, and landed a ‘Fleet Street’ journalistic job one or two of the less squeamish of today’s generation of young job applicants would kill for. Fallen on her – big – feet, in short. She looked like a (pretty) young man, though could be a bit pouting (her glossed lips would drop when unhappy), and was then in a covert and miserable relationship with an elder woman colleague, another journalist whose name was known to me. ‘What do you see in her?’ yet another woman journalist, who knew me well and wanted to keep hold, said to me. ‘Well, she’s lesbian,’ I said to my possessive friend, who wasn’t. I think Beatrice and the Barrister’s attraction to me – they came as a package at first – was the fact that they were young gays in London at a time when it was very heaven to be young and gay. ‘Post’ AIDS Clubland: ‘Fuck you. We’re going to have a good time.’ I was seeing a lot of politicians and journalists, much more staid – and that was what drew me to the two Bs (the grass always greener): her words were, ‘there’s a bit of glamour about you.’
He came to see me at Southwark Crown Court when I was covering the Guinness trial for the BBC. He had had enough of local council work and was thinking of swapping to Law. Later he came back to my flat, which he thought like a ‘don’s den,’ and I made an approach which was rebuffed. He was obsessed, it turned out, with the host of the lunch/ séance. I gave up on my romantic hopes – not difficult with me - and we became friends. He started studying Law, got some advice from the judge at the Guinness trial, finally getting into some decent chambers as a barrister. The big Guinness TV series proved impossible, and took up about a year and a half of my life. I was well paid, but with nothing to show at the end. The terms of trade in television had turned against me in the meantime. There was little demand any more for the one off dramas and films I enjoyed and had come into the business to write. The last big television film I made – around then - co-starred Jane Lapotaire who had been one of the leads in ‘Stocker’s Copper,’ a brilliant BBC Play for Today, directed by (the late great) Jack Gold. I was able to say to her (we have worked together again in radio recently) that it was films like ‘Stocker’s Copper’ fuelled me. They weren’t getting made any more. It was serial killers, six parters. I wasn’t interested. I was smoking dope, contemplating a failing career, not going out, having broken up with my long term agent: depressed in short, without comprehending its full implications. It’s an illness - I couldn’t get out of bed; I thought it was sloth. This greyness went on for well over a year. I sold my car, fought with the VAT people (the VAT man who arrived at my flat one day told me he wanted to be a writer), did some piddling television jobs – one with a top notch director I had worked with before on an big production for Granada TV. He was John Glenister, father of Robert and Philip. Philip – not well known then - was the lead in our little film (’Why are we doing this?’ John said/ or ‘We shouldn’t be doing this’). I was ready to pack in; the TV glory days were over. Which is where Beatrice, with bucketload of flowers, enters my life.
The lunch host – the séance lunch – asked me to a party at that time. He was another young pro on his way up, then living (platonically) with the journalist and ex-Tory M.P. Matthew Parris in the East End. Parris, I remember, was bare footed among the deep shag pile carpets. And, putting in an appearance, were the Barrister and Beatrice. ‘Where’ve you been?’ they said, ‘What have you been doing?’ They didn’t like the party much and encouraged me to set off with them for a meal in Islington. I remember how noisy and confident they were in the taxi – I still had a Northerner’s shyness in taxis - and still scarcely use them (they’re what people who have ‘money’ take). Later we went back to their place. They had moved to Highbury, a rented house owned by a well-known actor. I slept in the Barrister’s bed, while he slept with her. They’d had a go at being lovers once, I think, but it hadn’t worked. All I knew was that I had had a terrific late evening with them and was (praise be) happy for once. The Barrister went back to small town for the week and Beatrice, seizing an opportunity, arrived with the flowers. She had no idea of the space and silence I needed for writing – only I wasn’t writing much. She was on the phone most days, involving me in her romantic toils, where she’d been the night before, what they had got up to.
‘Oh, what fun we had,’ me traipsing after her: she wore Doc Marten’s and my memory is of her just ahead of me – round Soho’s clubs and cafes, one called ‘Café Freedom’, which features, I note, in the ‘Devotion’ essay. She made me over. Shirts were worn outside the trouser – but never if previously tucked in. She escorted me into a trendy hairdresser on Old Compton Street, which would have terrified me to enter solo. ‘Tom’ gave me a new and expensive haircut. I picked up a black leather jacket, from Oxfam, which I still miss: it got nicked in a club one night. And started wearing the ubiquitous Doc Marten’s. I even – we here begin the uncomfortable revelations – had my hair died. Orange. (Orange? Well, it wasn’t boring brown). I was staying in Hackney around this time, and at the (then) Safeway off Roman Road, leaning down to get a packet of penne off a bottom shelf, bumped into Danny Boyle, also reaching for the pasta. At that time Danny, known from Royal Court days, was just beginning his brilliant career as film director with ’Shallow Grave’. ‘Stephen,’ he said, a bit puzzled, ‘I didn’t recognise you.’ Once, I was walking with Beatrice past the Garrick, which I knew in what was feeling like my previous incarnation as a friend of some of its politicos and journos. Staggering out from a heavy lunch was Kingsley Amis. I remember being glad I was doing what I was doing, with whom I was with. She claimed to hate that Garrick world, was delighted I had ‘come over’ to hers.
I started enjoying Ecstasy – thank you ‘Magic Ned’ my supplier, who worked – a responsible administrative job - in Parliament. Later, on my 47th birthday, one of the Barrister’s colleagues pushed a little pill into my hand at ‘Heaven.’ ‘Happy Birthday,’ he said. It was one of the best nights of my life. I talked about it non-stop at a straight friend’s lunch the following day. Among the party of mainstream journos was a guy I had first met in New York, where he was a correspondent, now back in London with wife (a Woman’s Magazine high up) and family. He seemed delighted for me – and (many) years later came out as gay. Alan Rusbridger, also present, (not yet editor of the Guardian and largely silent at such get-togethers), was much more wry and quizzical (jealous?). He’d got me and this mid-life ‘crisis’ about right, I think. What he achieved in the twenty or so years that followed has my admiration, though he was too cool a customer to be likeable – even, lingeringly, on E. My new muse, Beatrice, wasn’t a drug taker, was a bit of a health freak, cycled everywhere. Her drug taking days had been in her teens, much more ‘normal’ than her 47 year old follower. She must have wondered what she had unleashed. A gay friend from this period said, ‘You’ve done most things in life, but in the wrong order.’ What Beatrice, who never interfered or criticised with my pleasures at the time, could see - all too well – was that I wanted to break out, find another identity for myself. Her flat mate, the Barrister, had organised the birthday meal before I hit the ceiling at ‘Heaven’. I went down with him that week to where he was living in ‘small town,’ and met some of his friends. Later in the cavernous loos, I heard these friends talking - it’s like a scene from a film – on the other side of the sinks and little wall that ran down the centre of the place. They were dissing me, I realised, to my horror. ‘Who was that guy??’ I’m used to being - if not admired, then, at least - liked, and I’m tempted to say that even Michaelangelo wouldn’t pass muster on the gay scene, where what you need are looks, youth and a large appendage. I think the reality is that as an older man among these scene-weary youngsters I had been trying too hard. Was maybe even ludicrous. I didn’t fit, and should have got out. I’d had my fun.
The Barrister embarked on a long-ish relationship with a very handsome ‘small town’ guy. Beatrice left her journalistic job, despite some strong advice from me not to, and went to the States, a long term aim. She had some success over there, but got lonely in LA, and came back. Work was tricky for her from then on, with no degree (I had warned her) and I gave her a reference to work, of all places, in Sainsbury’s Head Office. She stayed at my place when I was wandering around at other people’s (see ‘House Sitting’), and then bought, with the Barrister, a flat in fashionable East London. He was the one doing well; she moved among PR jobs. I was in France a lot of the time. And then, back in London, I heard the Barrister’s relationship had broken up – the love object feeling his barrister boy-friend’s job was more important to him. I was just up the hill from Clerkenwell, at Nina Bawden’s (see ‘Nina’) for a time, and the Barrister (whom I had always fancied) said to me, ‘Look, I’m not very good at living on my own…’ It was his turn to be depressed and I went to stay with him in ‘small town’ from which he was about to move for full time life – hence the new flat - in the capital. It was January. He needed help with the move - and at a more fundamental level: I recognised his symptoms. Most of the bulbs in his flat were dead, and the first thing I did was to go out to buy a half dozen from Waitrose. I started cooking for him. My career was underway again: I was having some success, and certainly writing fluently, for radio. Though I didn’t live ‘anywhere’ (I had sold my place) they were happy times – maybe because I was itinerant which, I found, suited me. I’d got bogged down in the smart flat in Chiswick, as if the furniture and surrounds afforded no possibility of escape. I had escaped for a number of years, had a ‘good time,’ developed more of a gay identity, re-fashioning myself consciously. I owed the ‘odd couple’ a lot for that. While I lived with him, he would put his head in my lap, most nights, wanting comfort - but that was as far as it got. He made it clear to me that there was no possibility of anything more, while also saying, ‘Why do I want any more when I’ve got this?’i.e. me. I had said to Nina before I went to live with him, ‘There’s a danger I’ll fall in love,’ and, though she wanted me to stay, had said kindly, ‘Well, that’s not such a terrible thing.’ I did fall - anybody who’s got this far will know the symptoms: looking for clues – hope – clutching at straws. I now wonder about this. Was I in love with the idea of being in love? Was I rehearsing it, to see what it felt like, for possible material for fiction? No, for a couple of months, I have to accept I was thrown completely off balance. I would have given up everything for him. I might as well have torn up the script of my previous life. However, I still - I note - cleared off to France from time to time - and a life of solitude. We want, and we don’t want, love. I don’t need, or only occasionally want, someone to ‘complete’ me, but remember a solo walk along the Regent’s Canal towpath to Victoria Park when I was in a kind of (non-chemical) ecstasy, skies never so blue, life never so benign. But ‘Love’ can fade as rapidly as it arrives. I had, by then, plenty of exposure to some of the less pleasant things about him. He had a phobia about illness and age, ‘wrinkly skin,’ a bit odd, particularly as he was settling into early middle age, waist beginning to thicken. I’d had regular rows with Beatrice over the years – she was combustible and then forgiving. I once thumped him. He fell on the floor. It was bad behaviour. Frustration at his not loving me? It was time to go.
He had met someone on the internet, handsome – looks were always vital to him – and, like his previous boyfriend, not his equal. She got hitched, another woman, and I went along for the celebrations. Both she and the bride were in white. He and me were amused at the small male presence at the gathering. His boyfriend arrived as I left – by arrangement? - we were into the era of mobile phones. He had a horror of embarrassment, probably knew better than me how in thrall I had been. But my feelings for him had abated to such a degree that I felt I had had a narrow escape. There were no hard feelings about my punching him. I had apologised instantly and he said, ‘I deserved it.’ From then on, we then fell into a pattern of having meals a deux, though never with his boyfriend - whom I once saw disappearing as I arrived. There was a lot of family money and he would pick up the bill for these lavish and enjoyable - mainly Spanish - fashionable extravaganzas. I would see Beatrice, also on her own, at more humble establishments, like a Vietnamese place on St. John’s Street, where one evening she told me she had embarked on an affair with a reasonably well known public figure. Male. As I had attended her civil ceremony only a year before, I was unsure what my reaction to this was, stayed stumm. He had about six kids, and was married to someone almost equally well known. I texted Beatrice that weekend – couldn’t phone her as she was presumably with her partner. I said that her relationship was folly and that I would see her when it was all over. I’ve committed adultery with a bloke once, liked the wife I was deceiving, and hated myself to the extent that I broke off the relationship. My attitude was also coloured by the amount of marital breakup I’d seen over the years and, I’m pretty sure, at my disappointment that my lesbian pal (‘breeders’ she called most women) had settled for being a rich and successful man’s mistress: ‘It is not nor it cannot come to good.’ I stuck to what I had said, adamantine, unforgiving, but wished her well. Two years later their relationship was all over the Press. He had left his wife for what her former journalistic acquaintances portrayed as a Doc Marten dyke. The ex-wife turned on him, started using the Press. It got very, very messy, ran and ran. The Barrister told me I ought to ‘support’ his old friend. I didn’t. I thought (Polonius- like) she got what she deserved. I also wondered, if at some level, she enjoyed the drama: she was easily bored. He left his wife. His kids denounced him publicly. But the relationship between Beatrice and him survives - and I still haven’t seen her. I suppose I wanted nothing to do with all that adulterous turmoil - she would have been on the phone daily, detailing it. But I think what it amounts to is this: no longer my lesbian muse, she was of no interest to me anymore. I don’t know if he was a Garrick Club member, but easily could have been. She had seemed to me, twenty or so years earlier, rather callous. ‘Next!’ she had yelled cheerfully, when bored with something, or someone. And once, with her fellow journos, outside the front door, at Downing Street, yelled: ‘When are you going to resign, Mr. Major?’
But I may have, I realise, a harder heart than hers. I am also stubborn – my old agent called me the most stubborn man she had met. I can be unforgiving. When, later, I fell ill and e-mailed the Barrister (from Kent, where I was laying up) about – appropriately enough - my heart problems, I got the tightest of texts back, along the lines of: ‘You can’t expect me to visit you when my father is so ill, and when I’m running on the spot to keep up with my profession.’ So that’s that, then. I haven’t seen him for two years and he hasn’t inquired as to my well-being. I find I miss the Spanish meals, but that’s about it. And I wonder if my only interest in these two was of their use to me at a time when I needed renewal. ‘They weren’t my type’. And, eat your cold writer’s heart out, Hanif (see ‘Almost Famous’), I wonder if there’s a possible fiction in all this? – so many details have had be excluded. She had a heart abnormality which I gave (as in this account) insufficient attention to. I see pictures of ‘Beatrice’ sometimes in the Press with a frumpy middle aged hairdo, and remember her crop haired self ahead of me on Garrick Street. And the barrister may be a judge – or on his way to it - himself by now. I give myself a harsh verdict.