So when did he and I first…? Not immediately. I think I would have run a mile if that had happened when we’d first met. At first I was just pleased to have a colleague I could socialise with, a friend I could play golf with, a mate I could go to the pub with on Sunday lunchtimes. We were inseparable, always in each other’s houses, on holiday together, working and playing together.
I certainly didn’t see it coming when it did, but then, as I said, I was amazingly naïve about my marriage problems. I thought that if I had married someone else—though I never had a face for this mythical woman who would have made me happy—things might have been different, and sex would have been a delight instead of a chore. Even when I wanked, I didn’t think of anyone. I just concentrated on bringing myself off. I was pretty good at it by the time Phil knocked the bottom out of my world.
It first happened when we were all on holiday in France. Claire’s family owned a gîte south of Bordeaux; we were all self-confessed wine snobs and the time we spent there was a wine lover’s saturnalia. In fact, I don’t think any of us, except for Claire, whose family were vintners, could really tell one wine from another, but we used to have fun being pretentious. When it was all four of us together, Val always seemed to have more fun than when it was just us two together.
It was our third night there. We’d spent the day touring about in my Bentley, re-visiting favourite vineyards and stocking up on cases and bottles. When we came back to the gîte, it was late afternoon, and we sat on the patio, sampling wines, cheeses and fresh crispy bread. By ten, we were all pretty drunk and the girls retired, giggling and yawning, leaving Phil and I half-cut and relaxed, watching the stars in the warm French night.
I don’t remember much of what we talked about at first—probably work, golf and cricket, particularly the chances of winning the Ashes. How we got onto relationships I don’t know. It wasn’t something we usually discussed. We’d roll our eyes at each other from time to time in the pub; we’d tease each other if we suspected the other was “under the thumb.” But we hadn’t ever discussed the nitty-gritty of what went on behind closed doors. Maybe it was the wine, but whoever started it, in half an hour or so we were discussing women and the good and the bad of living with them.
“It’s not that I’m not happy,” I lied through a cushion of green glass and crystal, “but I thought,” and I dropped my cigarette and bent over the chair on Phil’s side to try and pick it up, “I thought there’d be more.” The cigarette had landed in a pool of spilled wine and was ruined.
“More what?” Phil said, filling up the glasses, ignoring my wave of refusal.
“I don’t know, exactly.” The wine was making the front of my head buzz, and I hadn’t noticed how dark it was until that moment. “I just remember being at university—and school—and I thought that marriage would be a bit like that.”
“Like school?” Phil laughed, he was often laughing at me. “Cold beds and fags? Could be.”
“Idiot. You know what I mean,” I said, waving my glass expansively. “Friends—comradeship—all that sort of thing. Minds understanding each other.”
“Minds? Or bodies?” Phil’s voice was suddenly quieter and deeper.
“No. Yes!” I said in confusion. “Bodies—absolutely, but minds too. That has to be a part of it. I thought a marriage would be a partnership. Like sharing your study with a friend on your own wavelength, but more intimate.”
“Then you are living in another universe,” he said shortly.
“You and Claire,” I said, as my inhibitions continued to slide into the sediment at the bottom of the bottle, “seem pretty evenly matched from where I’m sitting.”
“Then you need to sit somewhere else.”
I was about to throw back a smart comment, but warning bells rang in my head; his voice was serious and razor-dark. I turned my head in surprise, not quite knowing what to say.
Phil stood and walked across to the trolley, selecting another bottle. “Looks can be deceiving, that’s all I’m saying.” He pulled his steamer chair a little closer and sat down, unfolding himself, stretching like a big cat. I remember noticing how long and lean his legs looked in the black trousers that clung to his frame.
The wine had loosened my tongue, and it seemed so easy to speak of things we hadn’t before. “You seem happy enough.”
“Happy?” He puffed smoke straight ahead as he stared up at the sky, “I suppose so, in a lot of ways. But contentment, now that’s another thing. You were talking of an equal partnership, weren’t you? Don’t you think, Eddie, that you can’t be fully content unless physical needs are met as well as the intellectual ones?”
I knew the answer to that, but even with the wine I was loath to answer it. I wanted to pour it all out, but even with him, I couldn’t do it. It takes more than one drunken evening to change a lifetime’s worth of instilled belief that one makes one’s bed and then lies on it. For life.
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Liar,” he said.
“You don’t know…” I was getting tongue-tied and annoyed. Phil had always managed to run rings around me, especially when we were drinking.
“No. I don’t,” he said smoothly. “And
