Chapter 2

The rest of the day was low key, not unexpected given the fragility of Jim and Freya. They both spoke to Andrew separately checking he was okay after the fight with his parents. But they also did not go on about it either. What came across was support and concern, which just made the contrast even more stark. New Year’s night the three of them went round the corner to the little Trattoria and had a quiet family dinner. The next day Ara phoned late morning and Andrew walked over to see her. Jim and Freya had returned to work and he had been in the flat on his own having returned from his usual morning swim. When Ara opened the door Andrew was invited in for the first time.

“Relax, the place is empty. I don’t expect anyone back until Sunday.”

He followed her through into the shared kitchen and living area. It was a different layout but the same concept as Lilja’s flat in Helsinki. Shyly Ara turned and pulled Andrew towards her kissing him for a long time. The kiss triggered so many memories of his teenage years, the impossibly worldly Ara and everything that she meant to him then. Her look as she approached him may have been shy but her kisses were firm and insistent. Andrew responded to them with passion and he didn’t know how long they stood there in the middle of her living room snogging away. Finally they broke apart and her smile was sparkling.

“In case you weren’t sure, I loved the scarf.”

“If you want to thank me some more...”

Many more seconds passed before they broke apart with a smile and Andrew sat at the kitchen table as Ara prepared some tea.

“I almost came up yesterday. Mother and George were getting on my nerves. Grandfather was down for Christmas so everything was calm and under control but as soon as he left then things changed.”

She stopped and looked at him.

“Shit, I am starting already. Let me get the tea and then we can chat. How was your Christmas?”

Out of the frying pan...

“The time seemed to fly by but that was my own fault, I was there for less than two weeks.”

An answer to a slightly different question. Ara brought the tea over and sat down with him.

“When did you come back down?”

“I got back on Monday evening and went out on Hogmanay with Jim and Freya.”

Ara smiled at that.

“Lord and Lady Barnes to the rest of us.”

Andrew ignored the jibe and looked over at her.

“So things have been tough at home?”

After a big sigh Ara started.

“One of the ways that I coexist with my family, especially Mum, is that I don’t really talk about my doctorate with them, what it actually entails, any of the detail. With Grandfather down staying with us for the holidays I talked about it much more, mainly with him but once or twice the rest of the family were there. Talking with him was great, he asked a lot of really interesting questions and he challenged me on several things. But after he left things changed.”

Ara stopped and took a sip of tea.

“I don’t know whether it was the closeness between Grandfather and me, hearing the reality of life as a PhD student, I don’t know what it was but the last week has been a lot of questioning about why I am doing this, why am I ‘wasting my time’. It was back to where we were two years ago, even further back. I just don’t understand it.”

Ara stood up abruptly and left the room for a few moments before returning back.

“Sorry, it just makes me so mad. Do you know she has started another list? Maybe it is the same list just updated but she produced a list of eligible men from her handbag. It started with Princess Margaret’s son but there were sons of Dukes.”

She stopped suddenly and took a deep breath.

“You don’t need to hear all the details. There were more than 20 men on the list. All first born, all in line to inherit and have a title. Go back 175 years and it could have been something out of a Regency drama. So I needed to escape all the plotting so here I am. And then you turned up, tall and handsome, calm and supportive, you remind me of Grandfather in so many ways.”

Andrew held her in his arms until the tears dried up and then made fresh tea while Ara went through to the bathroom and splashed some water on her face.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t get all emotional when we met and look at me.”

She sounded angry at herself.

“I deluded myself that things had changed when in fact they have not. Pursuing my PhD, in my mother’s view, is a waste of time. Dad doesn’t want to confront her and goes along for a quiet life and George is just an ignorant Neanderthal. Bah.”

She managed to stop herself slamming her fist on the table. But only just.

“Like I said I wasn’t sad to jump on the train this morning. I don’t know when I will go back down and see them. I think I am more likely to go north and see Grandfather than deal with more of that rubbish.”

Ara continued talking for several more minutes until she had it purged from her system. Then she smiled at me.

“Thank you for listening. The support I get from you is hugely important.”

“What about on your course, your professors? Surely it is not just me and your grandfather?”

“No, but they are evaluating my performance, not commenting on doing the doctorate in the first place. I am on track to be awarded it sometime in the middle of 1987, so I am about half way through. There is no way I am giving up now. If I am in London and keeping Mum at a distance then her plotting can come to naught. I just turned 22 though and I don’t get access to my Trust for another three years. I worry about the money and I hope Grandfather is being honest with me when he says he can afford it.”

Andrew managed not to immediately blurt out that she could stay at his house in her final year, but he had to swallow the instinct. Ara was finally done with talking about her parents.

“We got a bit sidetracked there but I really did love the scarf. I wore it up to town this morning. In fact I have been wearing it most days.”

“I am glad you liked it.”

“I felt really guilty I didn’t get you anything.”

Andrew waved away her concern.

“I must admit I didn’t wait until Christmas Day to open it. I did a lot of thinking about you in the run up to Christmas. Even although we have been very low key these last six months I think back to our time in Edinburgh. I think about it a lot. I talked to Gwen about you.”

Andrew waited as he was pretty sure Gwen was not one of his supporters.

“Don’t look like that. You two never got a chance to really meet, talk for any length of time. I think the last time you saw Gwen she was naked on the couch with another woman.”

He smiled and Ara giggled at the memory. Her timing wasn’t completely accurate but the sentiment was the same.

“She knows me better than anyone else and had to deal with all my moods in Edinburgh when we had all our ups and downs. She helps me deal with my frustrations, get them out of my system.”

Ara flushed as soon as she said that Andrew had to work hard to remove the mental picture. He let Ara hurry the conversation along.

“Anyway, it wasn’t a very relaxing break. Enough of my whinging, how was your break.”

Andrew decided not to pry further about Ara and Gwen, much as he was tempted, or try and one-up her with his own tale of woe about his parents so instead talked about how little by little he was slowly moving away from Edinburgh.

“I only spend two weeks there every break now. The rest of the time I am here or in Cambridge. Breaks seem to upset me more than term time. Upset is too strong but there is a sense of stability during term time that is missing when I am moving about during the break. My university friends are all over the country, and none of them are Scottish, so it feels like every time I return there I am taking a step back. I have changed and yet.”

Andrew stopped.

“I don’t know, I will be glad to get back to Cambridge in 10 days. I am happiest when I am studying, when I have a routine.”

He noticed Ara’s face as he said that.

“Don’t look like that, I mean it that I need the stability. Going back to Edinburgh can be tough. It is great to see you for these two or three days but I am off to Paris on Sunday, the start of a long day of travelling. When I get back to Cambridge there is a certainty to the place, even if I am down here seeing you on some of the weekends.”

He could see that Ara started to suspect there was more to his time in Edinburgh than he was letting on but she moved past it.

“I saw you just before your last trip to Paris, how was that trip?”

“Hard work. Yes I know, I am hardly going to get any sympathy but they work me hard when I am there and the last couple of days in particular were long hours.”

He explained about all the different clothes combinations and the endless dressing and undressing.

“Do you get turned on by all the nudity, the closeness to all these bodies?”

Andrew looked at her. He had found talking about his modelling was dangerous, some people were fascinated whereas others became uncomfortable. He had seen that himself with Ara.

“Most of the time no. There is nothing sexy about a 15 stone man four feet away from you as you try to convey lust, desire, romance, whatever they are wanting. That is where I have got much better. I had to really like the other model when I first started doing this whereas now I find it much easier to fake it. But then you see me with one of my friends and the difference is very obvious.”

“You have made friends.”

He nodded.

“That’s it? A nod.”

“I have found that people think they want to hear the details but then it seems to backfire on me. You did not react well to seeing some of the commercials back in November.”

“I know but I am interested in this part of your life. It seems very unlike you and I am surprised that you have made friends with people so very different than you.”

“I am easy to work with and I get on with most of the models, but there is very little time for anything other than the next shot. I have been more friendly with several of the models, just where the shoot has gone well. But yes, I am friends with three of the models, all very different.”

Ara smiled and took his hand.

“Don’t sound so defensive. Will you tell me about them? Why did they make the grade?”

So swallowing his misgivings Andrew took the chance and told Ara about all of his modelling sessions with Heloise, Renee and Chiara. Other than having sex with them he left nothing out.

“They could not be more different. Do they know all about you?”

“No not at all. They know my real name, as opposed to my modelling name, and that I am a student at Cambridge. We write letters back and forth, but life before Cambridge? No, none of them know that.”

“Do any of your friends know all the details?”

“Only one friend at Cambridge knows most of it. She was my date at Julian and Leslie’s wedding and I didn’t want to have to blatantly lie to her and it would have been too complicated. Who knew what, what can you say in conversations, all that sort of thing. As it turned out there was a fair bit of that anyway. So Helena knows everything, okay this is me we are talking about, so not everything but most of it, and one other person knows that I did part of a computer science degree but not that I graduated or about any of the business stuff. She and a third person know about the modelling.”

Andrew shook his head in disgust.

“It is all a complicated mess.”

Ara laughed.

“You have a complicated mess of a life to explain, why are you surprised. Do you think you ever will be comfortable explaining it?”

He pondered that.

“Having two university degrees will be less of an issue once I am finished at Cambridge, time will have passed and although it will always be unusual it will hardly be a big deal any more when I am pushing 30. The money to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund from the Trust? Personally I would prefer that it was never known but if I can survive another 18 months then I will be happy. I expect it to come out some day and the fucking press will make a big deal of it. Leslie is the face of the Trusts so I will do what I need to support her, but if I had my way I would never talk of it again. The modelling is just a phase. When I stop most of the risk of exposure.” Sniggers from both of them. “Will be over.”

“That was a good one. I see your point, it is just stuff from the past. Can I ask about us Andrew?”

Just for a moment Andrew wished he was in Cambridge.

“I think it is overdue that we talk about us. We probably have a lot to talk about.”

They sat looking at each other for a moment before rueful smiles crossed both their faces.

“I have talked about getting to know you as somebody other than a schoolboy crush. You were the only person I ever crushed on when I was at school, the only person I have ever crushed on. The last few months have been trying to get beyond that. It has also been deliberately low key and slow paced.”

“I understand that, and I agree to a point. But you were not a crush rather someone I was drawn to. I found myself looking for you, thinking about you, even before I knew you were a 15 year old schoolboy. And although it took me a while it didn’t stop me even when I did know that you were 16 with two more years of school. I was so happy to reconnect with you in the summer, even if it is only every month or so that we have time together. So I am drawn to you but also have all these doubts, as my meltdown in November showed. Rather than leave a lot of things unsaid and try and guess each other’s feelings I thought we should talk about them.”

Andrew stood up and paced the room trying to get all his thoughts aligned rather than just blurt out the first thing that came into his head. He moved over to the kettle as a cover for a few more moments of thought. Ara watched him until Andrew finally retook his seat.

“I do not think anything serious can happen until I graduate. Other than an occasional weekend I am busy at Cambridge all through term time. And OTC takes up a chunk of the weekends as well. I can be in London two weekends this term then I have six weeks of studying until my exams. After the exams the weekends ease up but I still have two projects to finish for this year’s course. There are 15 weeks of holiday with a week in Edinburgh, two weeks of annual camp for the OTC, 10 weeks of work notionally here in London, a week of modelling and a week back in Edinburgh. Then fourth year which will likely be even busier than this year but will follow the same pattern. And as you saw with my job last summer I don’t have control over where I work.”

Andrew stopped and looked at Ara.

“All of that is my way of saying I don’t know what we have and that I think it makes sense to not try to make it something more than it is. I could be here all summer and we could see each other regularly, if not daily. But I could also be away most of the summer.”

He did his standard shrug.

“I think we keep getting to know one and other better but anything more is premature as the time we have together is so limited during term time and potentially in the breaks as well.”

Ara was smiling, which was encouraging if nothing else.

“You are such an engineer!”

“Eh, okay.”

“That was the most practical, least romantic thing I have ever heard.”

Andrew belatedly recognised that it was time for him to shut up.

“Everything you said makes sense but it was also devoid of much passion or romance.”

She took his hand.

“I am drawn to you Andrew, you unconditionally support me in my dreams of a career, wherever it takes me. I have no idea what that career will be but around you my resolve increases. And then there is the personal stuff. No one has made me feel the way you did in Edinburgh. There have been very few other guys but there was something missing. There is a whole lot I need to talk to you about although now is not the right moment. Tell me how you feel Andrew.”

“I am confused by you Ara. I am not ready to make decisions about my personal life until I graduate. I want to get to know you better, deal with you as an adult, both of us as adults. I remember Leslie mentioned this exact situation. Me 20, and you 22. Not a big deal. We both should graduate about the same time, I will have just turned 22 and you will still only be 23. A world of difference between 15 and at school and 17 and at university. I have changed a lot over these years. We need to spend time together, which is the one thing that is tough. I realise that was not the most romantic summary of our situation but it was a practical one. We need time together, I just laid out the obstacles.”