We had a friendship developing which wasn’t bluff, hearty, cruel, as two straight men might seem to us. It wasn’t implicit with use and suspicion like two openly gay men. We were romantic friends.
‘We have a very romantic friendship,’ he told me on the phone the following teatime. He’d rung to say Teri was about to become engaged to some Irish bloke and get her dual citizenship.
‘We do?’ I was sitting on the top stair at home.
‘You’re a very romantic figure in our department,’ he said. ‘Rupert Brooke.’
‘Fucking great.’ Then I delivered a short lecture on flirtatiousness. How I thought people ought to take responsibility for the signals they give off. Watch how you signify; it’s all a language. He thanked me, a little warily. ‘You’re a wise man!’ was how he ended the phone call; hearty, bluff, casual. I put the phone down wondering why I’d lectured him on messing about with things he couldn’t carry through. It was a warning in advance, I thought; just in case he got ideas. Bless him; had he an idea in his head? Oh, it was all high theory and his work seemed prohibitively complex, but he had as much sense as a Labrador I’d kept when I was seven who’d been called, incidentally, Julian. The same brown lucidity in his eyes; a careless and distracted fidelity.
To take my mind off research which had a disturbing knack of creeping up on me every minute of the day and waking me at night with its implications, its references, its myriad, swimming footnotes, I had taken up drawing again. I filled a thick sketchpad each month with scratchy sub-Hockney line drawings. Rooms quivering with poignancy and cluttered everyday use, figures observed from afar in the very act of the humdrum and, more recently, figures and faces of those about me. My fascination with getting their expressions down for all time as if they might suddenly be lost to me in their most ordinary, usual aspects, is apparent now, when I flick through the books, in the way each drawing is labelled and dated. My sketchpads of the time have their own indexed, academic coherence; as if I’d set about cataloguing my friends. I was alert; an old hand at having friends in a town where people do research and come to talk about books; they pass you by. It’s a relay race and the baton is something you can’t afford not to fling away from you, heartlessly, when need be.
1 needed to draw, to have days off, to do things other than read and write in the locked Postgraduate Room. Its windows steamed up with claustrophobia, it seemed. The white board was smeared with words as though they flew about the room like Hitchcock’s birds when we weren’t looking, then flattened themselves to the board when we were. Julian’s desperate concentration wore me out, too; sometimes he was too panicked to break up a morning for coffee. When we did have coffee, in a campus bar with red gingham tablecloths, his conversation was weak and repetitious and you could tell he was just worried about his note-taking on the Renaissance. I’d forgotten, in a year, how intensive MAs can be. I was out to pasture in the grassless hinterlands of a PhD.
So I relished my days at home; breakfast watching the frozen canal and its swans turned clumsy, skidding their way about. The canal went dusty with layers of snow; it was like Orlando. I had the cat twisting about beside me, and I drew some anemones we had on the mantelpiece until half nine that morning, until Julian arrived, fresh from dropping the Child at the creche. I’d persuaded Julian he needed the odd day away from our soundproofed room, too, and, given the circumstances we’d settled on, he agreed.
‘Ready?’ he asked breezily when I opened the front door. He had his flat cap on, jauntily; wrapped up for winter. He looked determined and business-like, as he always did when going for piles of research texts in the library. Today’s activity was something he was equally set on doing right. Meanwhile I was quivering inwardly, having expected him to have run a mile by now, all resolution, curiosity gone. While I made us a pot of tea I found I couldn’t swallow and just nodded as he fussed about with conversation.
‘I ehm…’ he stumbled, and I passed him his tea. He struggled to take off his coat and hat, still holding it. Perhaps he’d gone as nervous as I by now. ‘I told Elsa about this. Asked her, really, if she thought it was all right.’
I took a scalding sip of Earl Grey. Earl Grey was something else we concurred on alongside Michael Nyman’s music, Chagall’s circus paintings. ‘And?’
‘She didn’t see why I even mentioned it. She says it’s up to us. But she’d like to see what we come up with. If you don’t mind…’
I shrugged.
A week ago there’d been a coffee break over scarlet gingham. We’d been joined by Teri and Elsa and Teri’s talk of marriage. She wanted to piss me off, did so, and left. Elsa went after her, a little later; they were doing a writing course together.
Left alone again, Julian started asking me about my drawing. He showed me some contact prints of his he’d done in a rented darkroom the previous night. He had whole films of statues from Italy. Pearly white men stretched out and, in these mismatched, tiny contacts, interlocking in a bizarre panoply. Then there was a film of Stephen, dressed in his usual crumpled cords and jacket, in a dusty room, lying, standing or sitting in a glass cabinet. Julian explained that these were all his father figures; their poses paralleling one another. Oh boy. I said I thought they were very nice and that I’d like to see them finished.
‘And,’ I added, pouring more tea, ‘if you ever have film left over, I’d love some nice, proper photos taken
