Devoted
Lucien Freud, David & Eli, 2003
There’s a rider to the events of the previous essay. Just after I arrived at the Barrister’s in ‘small town,’ on a sunny January afternoon, I was working happily, alone, in his living room, when there was a sense of presence. It was as if someone was in the room with me. This sense manifested itself as a smell – utterly distinctive and sickly sweet. Like rotten lilies? It wasn’t any cleansing agent, or something from the flat downstairs. It was close to me in the room – next to me rather than surrounding me - and faded after about fifteen minutes. Why did it vanish? I have never talked about this before and am aware it must sound odd. I investigated unsuccessfully. Where did it come from? Six months later on a Friday evening at the Barrister’s new pad in Clerkenwell – purpose built and modern – the experience recurred. The smell (no doubting it), the sense of presence; its eventual fading. I found it reassuring – and mysterious. I’ve read up about the phenomenon, and realise it’s called ‘the smell of sanctity.’ Not me, but ‘someone’ holy. Why ‘appear’ to me, at that time – and not before or since? I will only add that my barrister pal was Catholic, though how that helps I don’t know. I’ve written about a numinous experience elsewhere – ‘Bumping into God in Kent’ and - among this latest series of essays - describe some odd prophetic dreams. ‘There are more things in Heaven and earth than in your philosophy, Horatio.’ It’s all a puzzle and I set it down plainly, unadorned, here. Well, a ghost appeared to Hamlet. In more cautious productions it’s not a visible presence. I’m in good company.
To more earthly pleasures. I’m an admirer of the short stories of Chekhov which, even if they detail a happy build up, generally end in disaster, failure – his (wonderful) metier of ‘high hopes collapsing among the jam jars,’ as someone put it. Some of my accounts of friendships on this site have followed that pattern, I realise. So let’s buck the trend. I mentioned Evan Davis, the journalist, a few essays back. I saw him first on television as an Economics correspondent in the early 90s, knew straight away he was gay (don’t know how), and also knew that I would like to meet him. A few weeks later I saw him at the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on the South Bank, walking up the cinema aisle, with someone in his tow, and took up courage to write to him – the privilege of a playwright. I was working on a play about the City (true) ‘and wondered if he could pick his brains.’ He responded immediately – phone, I think (established playwrights have a cache) - saying that he wasn’t a business correspondent but it would be good to meet.. Café Freedom, half way up Wardour Street was the venue. He talked, among other things, freely and unprompted, about gayness and sex (gays do – the result of all those years of secrecy) before a friend of his from Oxford interrupted us. They then had the kind of super-bright semi-formal argument about whatever it was that I imagine student Elizabethans – Edmund Campion, say - used to have. I was out of my depth – and entranced. There was a ‘Pink Pride Pub Crawl’ that weekend and Evan asked me along. He had a group of friends – approaching a dozen – and I was a welcome recruit. A number later became my friends (and one my dentist, though he later left the profession to become a hairdresser). There was a canal holiday – a weekend - coming up. Evan, it appeared, had a boyfriend, and I accompanied the two of them in the back of their car, to the canal basin. They bickered a lot. I had hope. We were enough of a sight – a canal boat full of gay men, boots, shorts, cropped hair, body piercings - for the otherwise straight denizens of the canals and its banks (Ratty and Mole and their wives) to stare. We later went on a couple of Christmas holidays as a group: a cottage in the Lake District (there was snow), and on a second occasion to the Cornwall Devon border. Evan’s affair was over by then, and I yearned for him a bit - he had/has the best brain, the pleasantest voice, the oddest eyes. And yet, and yet. My yen was never painful. What I knew is that in the great comprehensive classroom of life, he is top table, with others I have been occasionally and eclectically acquainted with: James Fenton, Clive James, Germaine Greer, David Hare, Margaret Drabble, Alan Hollinghurst - while I am next table down (I hope), David Moyes’ Everton to Ferguson’s Manchester United (as was). I’m Boswell, not Johnson. I’m a good 68%, Evan an effortless 80. I’ve written elsewhere – the line is adapted from one of Matthew Parris’ - that I’ve never wanted to give myself completely to another, just as I’ve never really wanted anyone to give themselves completely to me. I may, from time to time, want the experience of ‘being in love’. But friendship is much more important to me. Someone like Evan would take over your life. As Flaubert once said of his would-be wife Louise Colet: ‘She would enter the study.’ So I affected an insouciance – even a severity - with Evan :’Why are you so thin, Evan?’/ ‘Because if I put weight on my face I also put weight on round my middle, and I don’t like that.’ The yen passed. I came across another of Evan’s boyfriends, a Brazilian, a few years after their relationship had finished, at the opera at Covent Garden. He was with a group of similarly beautiful men at the champagne bar. I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ve never had a better time,’ he said, ‘than with Evan and that excitement he brought to my life’ - before turning back to his party of gilded gays. I don’t need excitement. As a writer - too late to change – I need the quiet life. It’s equanimity I want.
I have visited Evan lately at his castle in France (a small castle but a castle nonetheless), been invited to his civil partnership there. When I first knew him he lived in a grey, back, near windowless flat in Earl’s Court. The boy has done well. I left London as his career was taking off. ‘Don’t disappear for good,’ he said. I haven’t. Occasionally we text or e-mail. When he trial-ed for the Today programme, I wrote that I had heard the future of that programme and it worked. He wrote back to say that he loved his Economics job so much, and was doubtful, ‘It’s such an interesting time’: he meant the Great Crash. He is, over twenty years on from our meeting, now very happy in his private life with his civil partner, who’s French. They have (is it a gay cliché?) a Lucien Freud whippet who farts where I sit, as recently, next to his bed/blanket in the back of the car. Have I ever sat in the front seat of a car alongside Evan? No. As from the start, the back seat gets me and it’s where I want to be with him.
To more earthly pleasures. I’m an admirer of the short stories of Chekhov which, even if they detail a happy build up, generally end in disaster, failure – his (wonderful) metier of ‘high hopes collapsing among the jam jars,’ as someone put it. Some of my accounts of friendships on this site have followed that pattern, I realise. So let’s buck the trend. I mentioned Evan Davis, the journalist, a few essays back. I saw him first on television as an Economics correspondent in the early 90s, knew straight away he was gay (don’t know how), and also knew that I would like to meet him. A few weeks later I saw him at the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on the South Bank, walking up the cinema aisle, with someone in his tow, and took up courage to write to him – the privilege of a playwright. I was working on a play about the City (true) ‘and wondered if he could pick his brains.’ He responded immediately – phone, I think (established playwrights have a cache) - saying that he wasn’t a business correspondent but it would be good to meet.. Café Freedom, half way up Wardour Street was the venue. He talked, among other things, freely and unprompted, about gayness and sex (gays do – the result of all those years of secrecy) before a friend of his from Oxford interrupted us. They then had the kind of super-bright semi-formal argument about whatever it was that I imagine student Elizabethans – Edmund Campion, say - used to have. I was out of my depth – and entranced. There was a ‘Pink Pride Pub Crawl’ that weekend and Evan asked me along. He had a group of friends – approaching a dozen – and I was a welcome recruit. A number later became my friends (and one my dentist, though he later left the profession to become a hairdresser). There was a canal holiday – a weekend - coming up. Evan, it appeared, had a boyfriend, and I accompanied the two of them in the back of their car, to the canal basin. They bickered a lot. I had hope. We were enough of a sight – a canal boat full of gay men, boots, shorts, cropped hair, body piercings - for the otherwise straight denizens of the canals and its banks (Ratty and Mole and their wives) to stare. We later went on a couple of Christmas holidays as a group: a cottage in the Lake District (there was snow), and on a second occasion to the Cornwall Devon border. Evan’s affair was over by then, and I yearned for him a bit - he had/has the best brain, the pleasantest voice, the oddest eyes. And yet, and yet. My yen was never painful. What I knew is that in the great comprehensive classroom of life, he is top table, with others I have been occasionally and eclectically acquainted with: James Fenton, Clive James, Germaine Greer, David Hare, Margaret Drabble, Alan Hollinghurst - while I am next table down (I hope), David Moyes’ Everton to Ferguson’s Manchester United (as was). I’m Boswell, not Johnson. I’m a good 68%, Evan an effortless 80. I’ve written elsewhere – the line is adapted from one of Matthew Parris’ - that I’ve never wanted to give myself completely to another, just as I’ve never really wanted anyone to give themselves completely to me. I may, from time to time, want the experience of ‘being in love’. But friendship is much more important to me. Someone like Evan would take over your life. As Flaubert once said of his would-be wife Louise Colet: ‘She would enter the study.’ So I affected an insouciance – even a severity - with Evan :’Why are you so thin, Evan?’/ ‘Because if I put weight on my face I also put weight on round my middle, and I don’t like that.’ The yen passed. I came across another of Evan’s boyfriends, a Brazilian, a few years after their relationship had finished, at the opera at Covent Garden. He was with a group of similarly beautiful men at the champagne bar. I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ve never had a better time,’ he said, ‘than with Evan and that excitement he brought to my life’ - before turning back to his party of gilded gays. I don’t need excitement. As a writer - too late to change – I need the quiet life. It’s equanimity I want.
I have visited Evan lately at his castle in France (a small castle but a castle nonetheless), been invited to his civil partnership there. When I first knew him he lived in a grey, back, near windowless flat in Earl’s Court. The boy has done well. I left London as his career was taking off. ‘Don’t disappear for good,’ he said. I haven’t. Occasionally we text or e-mail. When he trial-ed for the Today programme, I wrote that I had heard the future of that programme and it worked. He wrote back to say that he loved his Economics job so much, and was doubtful, ‘It’s such an interesting time’: he meant the Great Crash. He is, over twenty years on from our meeting, now very happy in his private life with his civil partner, who’s French. They have (is it a gay cliché?) a Lucien Freud whippet who farts where I sit, as recently, next to his bed/blanket in the back of the car. Have I ever sat in the front seat of a car alongside Evan? No. As from the start, the back seat gets me and it’s where I want to be with him.