Chapter 11

Andrew looked at the two of them wondering how the conversation was going to go. The fact that they were all drunk was going to help, in vino veritas and all that. He motioned them back to the couch and sat down on the chair. He waited.

“I spoke to Meredith last year.”

Catherine stopped and looked at Daphne.

“We spoke to Meredith, hell most of the team spoke to her at some point.”

She stopped for a moment before charging on.

“She made it sound so easy, she was so matter of fact about your relationship. She didn’t even call it that, your friendship. You never talked about it, and I wanted to hear what you thought about it.”

Another pause.

“And whether you were going to do the same thing again this year.”

“It was a friendship. Meredith was the friend of a friend that I got to know studying at the end of 2^nd year. I didn’t know when it started how the whole arrangement was going to work, whether it would last, anything like that. But it did, and it was an oasis of stability in a hectic year. But the start was very.”

Andrew stopped to think of the right word.

“Transactional I think is the best way of putting it. We were not close friends, more friendly to each other rather than friends, and it was odd talking about what we were proposing. There are a myriad of reasons why it worked. We became friends, we liked each other, that is essential. We both got something out of the arrangement and we both needed it.”

Daphne spoke for the first time.

“What do you mean?”

The wine made Andrew blunt.

“We both wanted and needed sex and we worked hard to make sure that it was mutually satisfying. That was one of the things that felt weird at the very start, the transactional nature of it, but we acted like a couple in the bedroom and friends outside it. But that is the sex part, and it was the easy part. Fucking each other a couple of times a week was the outcome of the whole arrangement. But it was not the reason for it. The main reason was to allow us to concentrate on what was important to us. We couched it as a reward for studying. We did not have to worry about all the bullshit of a couple. Why has he not called, is he or she only after one thing? In our case it was an unequivocal yes. But we didn’t have to deal with the meat market at each of the College Bars or any of the pubs or clubs in the town. It was lazy but it was by design. We didn’t let anything get in the way of what was important. You have seen Pedro and Justin, they love the chase. We would go to London to see a band. Now despite the fact they were driving back with me to Cambridge at the end of the night it didn’t stop them chasing anything in a skirt. Knowing full well there was never going to be a happy ending. But it is the way they are wired. Me, I am a lazy git who would be their sidekick if necessary but I made no effort. I knew that I would be seeing Merry the following evening back here. Another thing that was important although we did not consider it at the start was that Merry was graduating. So we were out of sync in our degrees. She was leaving, I was coming back. In fact I had a letter from Santiago Chile waiting for me two weeks ago.”

What Andrew had talked about did not have a snappy phrase, the best that he, Merry and Helena had ever come up with was ‘friends that fucked’. That there were three of them in the room was an inhibiting factor for the pair of them so they left but he guessed they would be in touch separately. He drank some water and passed out. After a day at the library Catherine asked if they could talk after dinner. It was not surprising.

“I think it was easier to talk last night with a skinful. I am not sure I would have been so bold or brave without it.”

She stopped for a moment.

“The idea really appeals to me. I got squirrelly a couple of times last year and did some stupid things. As in wake up next to someone not knowing how I got there. Drunk and stupid and still horny. But it also feels very antiseptic, transactional as you say. Are you not meant to like the other person? As opposed to them just being an outlet for your urges?”

“You have to like the other person, that is true. Last year the rest broke down pretty quickly.”

“Really?”

He nodded.

“We both studied all the time and so we treated it as a reward. You talked about being squirrelly, it stopped us getting that way.”

“You have not talked about whether you want to do the same thing again.”

“I know that it helped me last year, 100% positive. But what about Daphne? You were both there last night.”

“I don’t know.”

For the first time she relaxed and giggled.

“Is there an audition?”

He laughed with her.

“No.”

Some silences are companionable and others are awkward. As they walked out the back of the College it was definitely the latter. Andrew sighed.

“Much as I am tempted to suggest that you come back to my room, it does feel far too antiseptic, way to impersonal. I will be going to Cindies with Jack on Wednesday night. Come out with us, let’s have a few beers and dance the night away. It will be much better than trying to do something tonight. In fact, let’s go to the Bar and chat. Some back story will make this all much less weird.”

And of course what ended up happening was that when they went to the bar they relaxed and just enjoyed each other’s company without worrying about what was coming next, which just meant that three hours later Catherine was lying on his bed with Andrew’s face between her thighs. Catherine was a jeans and a jumper kind of woman, even playing hockey her shirt tended to be baggy. So he had been pleasantly surprised when he had undressed her.

What never ceased to amaze him was how few guys went down on women. Of all the things that Leslie talked about on that memorable day in January 1979, it was the one that had made Andrew stand out. He didn’t have a huge dick, he couldn’t go for hours but by relishing pussy-eating he more than made up for any other shortcomings. Once again Andrew was with someone who had never had this done to her, 19 and more than a year at university. Catherine was a taller version of Mary Jones. She had no amazing physical feature, she was just the epitome of cute. A reasonably athletic, fit 19 year old woman with limited experience and a bucket list a mile long. A phrase not in common usage, but very apt to describe the adventurous wishes of many of his partners. Helena had a long bucket list and they got through most of it, Abi had a short list and Meredith had long since thrown her list away. Catherine was like Allison Page, a smart, inquisitive scientist who liked lots of hands-on experiments! That was all to come, pun intended. That first night it was checking out each other’s bodies and getting past the first encounter.

“I really need to send Meredith a thank you card.”

Catherine was lying on him, stretched out, like so many before her, along his body.

“She never got into too many details but she said you were very good. I am glad I fought my nerves and embarrassment and talked to you. I am going to enjoy studying hard this year if you are my reward.”

She was babbling slightly and Andrew let her endorphins absorb back into her body. She suddenly lifted her head and looked at him.

“Why me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why am I here? Me as opposed to someone else?”

“Did you see the queue at the door? What are you talking about?”

“I talked to you about this last year. You are not a person that makes much of an effort to get to know many people, particularly in the years below you. I wondered why I am here.”

“You make me sound like a hermit or misanthropic. Most people tend to hang out with people in their own year or own class. Am I that different than the other people here, other men here?”

“Probably not, it was the way that Navya described you, and how we found you as a coach, versus your everyday demeanour. You are not at the Bar much and Navya always talked about how you lived life on your own terms. She made that sound a very good thing.”

Andrew tried to shrug with her lying on him.

“When I started here that very first weekend when I met Navya and Helena and Nigel and the rest of the corridor we talked about knowing a few people well versus trying to know lots of people and only knowing them superficially. I was lucky in my time here in that I had 10 to 12 good friends through the College, the Department and the OTC. I have never been a ‘player’, someone who chases lots of different women. I think that is why I hang out with Pedro and Justin, and Jack at the OTC. They push me to not just be a loner. I don’t know. One of the things that Meredith and I realised during last year is that having our degrees out of alignment helps. At the end of the year she was graduating and probably travelling. It was just one more way that stopped any notions of happily ever after. I doubt I would make this arrangement with a 4^th year, or a 3^rd year on a three year degree course. At the end of the year I will be graduating and leaving here, you will still have two years to go. This is not love, this is lust. I am not going to make love to you every week I am going to fuck you.”

Right up there in importance with Leslie’s talk in January 1979 was Kenzie’s on the first day of 1980. No euphemisms, no soft peddling of the words. Andrew could tell from Catherine’s face that it was necessary. She didn’t say anything at first but he could see her processing it.

“That was a real slap in the face but I needed that. Here I was trying to be all sophisticated and mature, sex a couple of times a week, keeping emotions in check but I was lying on you thinking about how much I had enjoyed making love to you. It was a shock but you are right. You fucked me, I fucked you. We are going to fuck this year.”

Having a cute, naked 19 year old lying on him talking about fucking produced an inevitable reaction. So rather than talk about it, they did it instead. Life was tough sometime.

In many ways Catherine was like Helena when she arrived at Trinity. Some sexual experience, all rushed, none of it very satisfying whilst at the same time being a typical university student and teenager; just horny all the time. But she was also shy, unsure about being too forward, being perceived to be too slutty, typical female teenage hang-ups. The result, as she alluded to earlier, was too much drink and unsatisfying and unfulfilling one night stands. And at the start she was not very adventurous. A better way of saying that is that she always reined herself in. She never really let go, at least at first. Sure they fucked a lot but it was in the same usual three positions and although Andrew ate her most days, she was not keen on blowjobs at all. She was more like Abi than Helena or Meredith. But the arrangement was set for the year. She would come out to Cindies with him and Jack on a Wednesday night and would come back to the room after a day of studying on a Sunday.

As for Daphne, she avoided Andrew like the plague for most of the term and it was only near the end of first term that she finally confessed it had been too much for her. Despite it being a mutual arrangement and no money changing hands, it felt too transactional for her and she had a hang up about thinking she was being a whore. She intellectually knew it wasn’t that but the whole thing just made her uncomfortable. She didn’t judge or run Catherine down or anything like that, she just realised that it was not for her.

The first term of Andrew’s final year at Cambridge settled into a routine. Classes were challenging but not overwhelming. He was working about 50 hours a week between his project and the modules. But Andrew was working with Olivia on the classwork and on his own for the project and so the year was less stressful than the previous one. He really didn’t play well with other children. In the middle of the term his project got a boost as he started to consider hydraulics and pneumatics within the context of energy absorption and dissipation. This was one of the key moments for him during the year as the project started to have a coherence which frankly had been missing up to that point. So as usual his course was the anchor around which all Andrew’s other activities slotted in.

The volunteering at the hospital was nothing short of a struggle. Andrew was not only giving himself a pep talk at the end of each night, he was having to talk himself into the right frame of mind on the way there. Because it was more and more volunteer work with limited interaction with the patients. As always as the nights drew in and it was dark outside by the time he arrived, so the energy level and the general wakefulness of the patients was much lower. The ward staff were pleased for the assistance but Andrew struggled to see how he was making much of a difference at all. He talked to the sister in charge of the ward about whether he should see about transferring to one of the adult wards as he did not seem to be doing any good on the children’s ward. Her answer had two components, one of which rang true and one of which seemed a sop to his conscious. He was told that his example was used when people came looking to volunteer. However much medicine advanced, and the survival rates did gradually climb, the children’s cancer ward was a terrible place where between a quarter and a third of the patients did not survive. For every Mandy Brown there was Ron’s son Eric or little Graham with his brain cancer. So having someone volunteer there was a message to others. Andrew never saw another volunteer but the sister did say that they talked about him at volunteer sessions to see if anyone else had the mental toughness to also do it. That rang true to him and so he accepted that they wanted him to stay on this ward. She also told him that he was talked about by the medical staff, the nursing staff, to the patients during the days. Even if Andrew had little or no interaction with the patients themselves he was talked about, used as an example. This one seemed more flimsy to him but he could hardly accuse the ward sister of lying. Either way he was committed to continuing until the June of 1987, completing all 12 terms of his time at Cambridge. But it was a struggle.

There were two things that resulted from his evenings at Addenbrooke’s. The first was he was back to worrying about karma again. Now it could be argued, and he did internally, that this was the ultimate karmic act. But Andrew had doubts as to whether he was really doing any good so that hung over him during the term. But the other thing that came out of this was that he became a better officer.

Olivia knew that Andrew would often be out of sorts on a Tuesday morning and she was far too accepting of his moods. By lunchtime he would normally have regained his equilibrium and the day would move on as normal. But in the evening he had no time for stupidity at the OTC. Now he wasn’t an arse, for a start he was not in charge. The Permanent Staff still oversaw the training. But when it came to preparing for an exercise, or getting ready for a training weekend, whatever the situation Andrew was demanding of the other cadets. He had never had any natural leadership, that had been clear back at school. Some people had it, people like Pete or Rollie. Old Andrew was not a natural leader, and however much New Andrew was different to that person there always lurked inside him traces of Old Andrew. But four plus years of CCF, innumerable camps and more than three years of the OTC had changed him enormously. But it was only that term that he finally completely buried Old Andrew when it came to leadership. Much of the previous year Andrew had started to show signs of it but that term it blossomed. He may not have been a natural leader but he was a good soldier. Over the three years, and especially watching officers in the field when he was at camps, Andrew had learned to be a very good officer.