Triptych

‘And he crashed your car.’

‘Yes, but it was my fault really. I was egging him on. We were both pissed when we stumbled out of that auberge, and you know me: I adore going fast. Olly talked his way out of it when the police came of course. He always lands on his feet, the bastard. Anyway that’s all ancient history now. He’s toast now as far as I’m concerned.’

So no more Olly then. No more having to listen to the endless tales of his snakes and ladders; his meteoric rise from street trader to high end retailer; his subsequent financial troubles and fraud conviction – against which Lucy had unsuccessfully tried to defend him; his years in prison and then his rubber ball bounce-back, setting up an ex-offenders’ charity, followed inevitably by an MBE and, currently, his grandiose schemes to comprehensively privatise all inmate job training and placement.

Adrian had met Olly only the once, and it had not gone well. A squat figure tightly packed with force, lightly stubbled and heavily tattooed, clad in a tight t-shirt and designer jeans, Olly had clapped Adrian on the back, asked how’s it going with the pretty pictures then, Ade? then ignored him, leaving him feeling wisp-like, practically a zero in the face of Olly’s vigorous vulgar vitality.

Adrian looked at Lucy, marvelling as always at her small, perfectly produced prettiness. ‘Petite’ might be one term to describe her but not for Adrian, who preferred ‘Cranach-like’ in view of her fine-boned blondeness, her air of demure concupiscence.

‘Of course I’d suspected something for months,’ Lucy continued. ‘We’d been having these blazing rows. But finding those messages on his phone was the final straw. He denied it of course but he couldn’t pull the wool over my eyes. I chucked him out then and there. Stuffed his things in bin liners and put them out on the lawn. He tried to get back in when he picked them up – but no way, I’d chained and bolted the door. Learnt my lesson.’

Adrian and Lucy were sat opposite one other, scarfed and gloved behind their drinks, at a rough wooden table in a beer garden off Oxford’s Plantation Road. Adrian, a tall man in his late thirties with dark, darting eyes set in a pale thin face and dabs of grey already at his temples, looked much older than Lucy, but in fact they were roughly the same age. Around them the chill English spring was going through its early motions. The screams and squeals of children in a nearby school pierced the sharp March air, rising and falling alternately as if at the behest of some invisible choirmaster.

So here it is, thought Adrian, the moment when it could happen, the two incomplete pieces joined together. Apprehension shivered through him. What if he were rebuffed?  Suddenly he saw himself as a thing apart: the distinguished connoisseur, the cold and glittering academic ornament lifting branch by branch to the top of his spindly specialism. Sickeningly, a void opened up beneath him. How far and embarrassingly might he fall?

‘So, what has dear Adrian been doing with himself?’ Lucy asked.

‘Oh, I went up to town the other and picked up a couple of nice cheapish water colours in the sales. You know the sort of thing. Unattributed, school of …’

Lucy interrupted. ‘Of course it could never have worked out with Olly. It was impossible right from the word go. I was just his fashion accessory, his bit of posh totty. Everything’s about Olly all the time. He never listens. Not like you. You listen. You’re everything a friend should be in that regard.’

Adrian’s spirits plummeted. Above and around, the infant voices rose and fell, crescendo, then diminuendo, in unwavering, wave-like pattern.

Had they ever really been close? They’d been together at that school down in Somerset and then again at Oxford but always distantly, she fizzing in a whirl of parties and affairs, he a low value card in her otherwise overflowing hand. Afterwards he stayed on to complete a doctorate while she went up to London to enter barristers’ chambers.

‘I was always surprised you went in for the law’ Adrian said. ‘I don’t know, it always seemed somehow too stodgy for someone like you. ’

‘Actually you’re wrong there, Adrian. There’s a lot of detail to master but bags of challenge too. It’s like a game. You can never exactly tell what the outcome will be – who’ll win, who’ll lose. And it’s like theatre too, standing up in front of an audience, all dressed up in your wig and robes. Anyway what about you? What does life hold for dear old Adrian?’

‘Well, there are a few lecture notes I need to tidy up for next term. I’ll be taking them into the Rococo. And there’s always my magnum opus (trusting he gave these words the right ironical twist). ‘You know, my big, big book on Sentiment and sensibility in eighteenth century English art.’ Even as he uttered the words he felt primly tight-lipped title clunk leadenly to the ground.

‘Adrian, I hope you don’t mind but there’s something I’ve always been meaning to ask you.’ For once Lucy sounded oddly unsure. ‘You’re not gay, are you?’

Adrian, taken aback, laughed. ‘What a question! No, certainly not. Not as far as I know anyway. What about you?’

‘What, you mean girl on girl? No, I’ve tried it once or twice. What haven’t I tried?But boring, darling.

‘Do you ever see yourself settling down?’

‘Doubt it’

‘Kids?’

‘Doubt it. People talk about the biological clock as if it’s some kind of iron law but I’m not convinced.’

‘But if you did, what sort of chap might you choose?’

Lucy laughed. ‘Anyone who’d put up with me! No, seriously, not your average Joe. Olly may have been OTT but maybe someone a bit like him, someone with some passion. Someone who could surprise me. Perpetually surprise me.’

‘And me? What sort of woman would suit me do you think?’

Lucy looked taken aback in her turn. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Someone academic perhaps – someone a bit like you.’ She let out a sudden squirt of laughter. ‘Someone a bit square. No, sorry, I didn’t mean that. But you know what I mean.’

Below, the void gaped ever deeper below Adrian, while above and around, the children’s cries seemed to have reached to some terminal spike of excitement. Adrian clung on, small and tight.

‘Any plans for the summer?’ he whispered. 

‘Not really. Probably somewhere hot, somewhere different. Anything to get out of England.’

‘I thought we …’

‘What you and me! Be serious, Adrian. You and your museums and galleries, would drive me crazy. You know how I hate being tied down. I like to keep on the move.’

Suddenly Lucy glanced down at her watch, screamed and leapt to her feet. ‘Christ, look at the time! I’m supposed to be at Soho Farm meeting up with friends for lunch. Must dash. How long does it take, do you think, to get to Great Tew?’

Without waiting for an answer she bustled her things together in a sudden fury of efficiency, then leaned over to Adrian and gave him a peck on the cheek. ‘This has been really lovely. We don’t see anything like enough of one another. Must do it again soon – very soon.’ With that she sped off through a side door into the street. A few moments later he heard the starting cough and vroom of her sports car. 

The children’s voices had now fallen silent. Break must be over. Adrian sighed. As always the moment had eluded him. Never mind. He swallowed off his pint, stood up and headed off to the small Jericho house where his pile of lecture notes awaited him.

*

It was several months before Adrian saw Lucy again at a pre-Christmas party thrown by some mutual friends in Camden. No sooner had he handed over the obligatory bottle of wine to his hosts than he spotted the two of them at the far end of the room: Lucy and Olly, red-faced, yelling at one another at the centre of a blast area of embarrassed fellow guests. Catching sight of Adrian, they abruptly stopped shouting, flapped a vague wave of welcome in his direction, then at once flung themselves back into their quarrel. Adrian muttered he had to fetch something from his car and backed smartly out of the front door. He never went back. And that was how he was always to remember Lucy and Olly in the years to come: two tiny figurines locked in perpetual combat, hard and brassily bright but ever smaller as time passed, and somehow always mysteriously mixed with the piercing cries of children.