Chapter 5

There were two applications waiting for Andrew the following morning. One was a short application form to be a summer student at the Ministry of Defence again. The other was the authorisation for the Positive Vetting checks. He was in two minds about that. Perhaps most troubling was that Freya seemed to be bending the rules for him. Andrew didn’t see how he could be positively vetted without a job that needed it. And even if that was rationalised away he was not sure he wanted such a job anyway. Time for a walk and talk with Auntie Freya.

“I finally get possession of my house after more than five years this summer. It will be waiting for me when I get back from annual camp. I don’t know that I want to spend the whole 10 weeks working again. And not knowing whether I am even going to be in London or not. I don’t want to appear ungrateful but I am debating whether to apply for the summer job. Right now I am inclined to not apply.”

Might as well rip the plaster right off.

“Will you be happy doing nothing?”

“No, but I won’t be doing nothing. I can work on my 4^th year project plus I am bound to have stuff to do with the house.”

Freya walked quietly with him.

“Are you concerned that I am positioning you, removing obstacles?”

Well that didn’t take long.

“I understand based on my performance that the Police would take me back without a second thought. Positive Vetting, without a job that requires that, especially as a summer student, seems to be stretching the rules beyond their limits. It troubles me that I am getting things, or at least the chance of things, not open to anyone else.”

“Would it ease your conscious to know that people are pre-screened and pre-vetted so that they are able to apply for jobs with these security requirements. Otherwise it becomes the chicken and the egg.”

“Summer students?”

“We did not, and do not other than you, have any summer students with Secret clearance. You were the guinea pig. A huge number of roles within the Ministry require it. We are using your example as a way of demonstrating that we can have more productive graduate entrants if the security requirements are dealt with as summer students.”

“But I am not a graduate entrant.”

“Oh I know that, it is clearly documented. The Permanent Secretary knows about our relationship, he was at the wedding for goodness sake, and our relationship is seen as an advantage in this test case. We want to see how easily students can meet the requirements. This is the next stage. And you are right, this is not normal and has had to be sanctioned by a minister. And no, he knows none of your details. But he was told that a summer student was granted Secret clearance two years ago and has spent the last two summers working at the MoD Police. He has allowed us to continue to use you as the guinea pig, now for Positive Vetting for Top Secret clearance. What will be interesting is to see how the resistant parts of the Ministry react to having to potentially accept summer students.”

They walked past the American Ambassador’s residence as Andrew mulled over her confession.

“Okay I accept what you say. But I really don’t know if I want to do this. Knowing my luck I’ll end up in the Falkland Islands for the whole bloody summer, well winter, whatever.”

Freya sighed.

“Sorry to put it this way Andrew, but don’t you want to make a difference? Sometimes making a difference involves taking the tough path not the easy one.”

It was unfair, bloody manipulative in fact, but it got his attention. Now Freya was conflating making a difference and tough choices but her point stood. Andrew had an absurdly blessed life. He was doing very well at university, was moonlighting as a model and spent days at a time with naked women in his arms. And he was paid for it. He was healthy, rich and worried he was having sex with too many women. Andrew thought about those last four sentences; if he ever dared to say them out loud there would be an orderly and very long queue to smack him.

They turned to return to the flat and Freya slipped her arm into his and they walked back in silence. She knew she had won and she also knew when to be quiet. Andrew completed, signed and dated the two forms while the two of them were out at church and then prepared Sunday lunch for the three of them before he returned to Cambridge. Freya hugged Andrew tight and kissed his cheek, a closeness that he couldn’t remember getting from his own mother, before sending him on his way.

Somehow Andrew got back to Cambridge and didn’t think he had an accident but he had no recollection of the journey. The whole time he pondered the direction his life was taking. Freya never mentioned any parts of the Ministry that needed Top Secret clearance but Andrew knew the two main ones, although he was sure there were others. Nuclear weapons, and all the components of them; and Intelligence. Although he understood the basic physics he would be outside the fence not inside the labs, so the first made no sense. Which left intelligence.

There were four main parts. The spies, the real world James Bonds. Officially the Secret Intelligence Service, known more commonly by the public as MI6. Then there were the spy-catchers, the counter-intelligence organisation, the Security Service. Unsurprisingly the British never called them the SS, a tarnished brand. Instead they were commonly known as MI5. Then there were the listeners, the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, who tried to protect British communications and tried to intercept everyone else’s, especially the Soviet Union. It was them that tasked the signals unit in the hills of Cyprus that Andrew had heard about the previous summer. And finally there were a whole bunch of intelligence organisations within the Ministry of Defence. Probably close to double figures of organisations, big and small. The largest of them was the Defence Intelligence Staff based next door to the main building in the heart of Whitehall. A summer job there was a daily walk to work. But there was also a listening station in Hong Kong, and knowing his luck...

Lots of fiefdoms, lots of empires, lots of politics. Andrew’s very, very limited interaction with them at points of the investigation into the missing armour, was not positive. It was Vestie that told him there were five other organisations sniffing around that investigation in addition to the MoD Police. And most of them appeared to be back-stabbing and enjoying the misfortune of the Police. The real world.

Walking through the Gate at Trinity allowed him to mentally stow all that crap. There was no point in borrowing problems forward. Andrew had a quiet Sunday afternoon and evening until Meredith came over. She saw the look in his eye and her smile broadened.

“Oh I like that look.”

Meredith was brilliant in moments like those. There was no romance, no small talk and the foreplay was minimal, just enough to lube everything up. Physically he didn’t think he acted any differently but mentally Andrew was in a different place. He was not even sure he could have told anyone what he was frustrated about but he took out his frustration on Meredith. At least in his head. It was a hard physical fuck with Andrew looking to purge everything from his system. If draining his balls counted, then he succeeded.

“You should do that more often.”

Merry was lying on him looking lovely.

“What do you mean?”

“Let go like that. I couldn’t cope with that all the time but when you get all worked up like that it is amazing.”

“Why?”

“It is different, and with you it is quite rare. And I think it is intimate. We are not all lovey-dovey but there is an intimacy to letting yourself be secondary occasionally. Maybe it is more trust than intimacy but whatever the right word is we have it. I needed a serious reset last Sunday night when you came back from invading Norfolk and you had a look when I got here tonight. I pushed you onto the bed last weekend and rode you hard, this week it was your turn.”

Uncomplicated and matter of fact, yet also quite profound.

The next two weeks passed with nothing out of the ordinary happening, other than the anniversary of Faith’s death. The OTC attacked Norfolk again and the weekend was painless. It was miserable weather and Andrew was senior enough that he didn’t have to ‘use the available terrain’ which was Army speak for lying in a ditch. Hockey training settled down and the camaraderie between the him and the women increased over term one. Subconsciously Catherine’s comments at the start of the term had something to do with that. And so far, nothing had changed at Addenbrooke’s.

Life at College was not as relaxed as in 2^nd year, but that was understandable. There was an ever increasing focus on academics, at least amongst Andrew and his friends. Olivia, although not at Trinity, studied with them and she and Andrew were similarly compulsive in their studying habits. Matt, Navya and Pedro were in the library with them just as often. Helena and Justin had different demands from their courses and spent more time reading than working on assignments. But they saw them both all the time. As for Abi? She was around but even more remote than in 1^st year. There was daily contact but not daily interaction. She still sat and chatted to Navya and Helena all the time but her social circle had otherwise changed. She hung out with the rugby and rowing crowds, by far the largest and most popular of the sports at Trinity and across the university. ‘Hi’ and ‘see you’ were about the extent of their interactions.

Andrew realised that he was not someone who made much of an effort to widen his social circle. He had his three groups of friends, Trinity, the Department and the OTC and focused his limited time with them. But surprisingly Catherine Vickers, the 1^st year from the weekend before term, slowly became part of the group. She was on the hockey team, was a Nat Sci student like Navya, and had become friends with her. Maybe if his stair had been more welcoming in second year then he might have known other years but other than waving hello to Enfys and a couple of dances with her at the May Ball Andrew had ignored the stair the previous year. A judgemental goth, judgemental leftie, judgemental wannabe vicar, it was easier to ignore them. And no he didn’t look in the mirror.

His thoughts on the normalcy of these two weeks was overshadowed by the seventh anniversary of Faith’s death. It fell on a Tuesday that year and as always it was a reflective time. Between classes and the OTC training there didn’t seem like an opportunity to quietly reflect on Faith so instead he worked late at Addenbrooke’s on the Monday evening and walked the long way back to Trinity. Andrew cut across the Cam and approached the Backs from the West, as if he was returning from the Library. There were a few drunken souls returning to various Colleges and so he stood under the trees in the dark at the far side of the South Paddock. It was cold and dark, and most importantly, without distraction or interruption.

After seven years Faith was a blurred memory. He had seen the pictures of the healthy 13 year old girl at the Campbell’s house but to Andrew she would always be the bald emaciated young woman lying on the bed beside him. That night he talked about the future with her. Not out loud, he hoped, but just an internal dialogue as he stood there wondering about living two lives seven years later. It seemed to him that living two lives meant never switching off. Even his half-hearted attempt 10 days earlier had been ruthlessly squashed by Freya. It was a constant challenge and constant effort. He had taken three weeks’ holiday in those seven years. The summer after her death Andrew had worked every day bar four before returning to school. It was universally acknowledged that he was incapable of just sitting and doing nothing. And yet it was all he knew. His own memories of old Andrew, pre-cancer Andrew, tended to focus on the negative, the immaturity, the stupidity, the laziness. There were no memories of reading, doing jigsaws, watching television, even although he knew he did all these things.

Even his physiology added to it. What made a lot of his extra activities possible was Andrew was not someone who needed a lot of sleep. Seven hours was about all he could manage without naturally waking up, and often he would get by on five and a half or six hours sleep a night for a whole week. The start of each day, the two or three hours of exercise over these last seven years, that was possible because he could go to bed at 11.00 or later and still be up at 5.45.

The coming summer was approaching with goodness only knows what challenges, and even more the summer after was looming. September 1^st 1987, he would have graduated and finished modelling. A blank piece of paper on which to write the next chapter in his life. And Andrew didn’t know what that was. And how ‘living two lives’ fitted into that, or even if it was possible to continue the punishing pace that he had lived his life since Faith’s death.

Andrew’s thoughts that year, that night, were about the future, not about the plan or all the goals that they had painstakingly crafted in January 1979. More and more the past had to be accepted but he was not even that keen for it to be acknowledged. The Open University, so important for three and a half years, never crossed his mind. Even the Trusts were starting to become less consuming. The Faith Campbell Cancer Research Trust, to give it it’s full name, was on autopilot. The returns from the stock market were excellent and it had grown substantially already, partially through Leslie’s careful stewardship and partly as a result of the booming market. The CMS Venture Endowment Trust, again that was the full name, was also starting to get to a more steady state. Leslie was working to fund the two projects she had outlined and the rest of the Trust was nearly fully invested. They had managed one substantial winner and several losses. But it did not need his oversight, or indeed his input. Unless he was convinced otherwise he would be resigning as a Trustee when he graduated. But these were the dreams and actions of his past. Andrew was not understating or diminishing their importance at all. Faith’s Trust was probably the most important and profound thing he would ever do. But they were at a steady state now. And whenever they were talked about there was always this undercurrent of congratulations about them. What they achieved was bloody fantastic, a ‘once in a lifetime’ outcome and would outlive the three of them. But there are only so many times you can be praised, either directly or indirectly before it became uncomfortable, at least for him.

It was the next stage in his life, the years after Cambridge that were full of uncertainty. And that cold winter’s night Faith could provide Andrew no answers. As he walked slowly back to his room he was chilled and just as confused as at the start of the night. Some things never changed.