Chapter 8

The six hour drive south gave Andrew plenty time to think. Surprise, surprise. But rather than obsess about one particular thing he thought about his goals. His referencing against his goals had become much less frequent. Partly because several of them were complete, or an easy steady state. That later was fitness, something that was just part of his day now, and something he noticed and missed when he was unable to either run or swim. The original goal had been to make that ingrained and it had worked. One thing that Andrew did notice was he was very sporadic in his eating habits. He was better during term time than the breaks but rarely cooked for himself. It was one thing that all the students were spoiled with at Trinity, meals were provided. He resolved that his fitness goal going forward would need to include healthier eating, knowing that it would take until the following summer to fully implement it. He also needed to learn to cook consistently, there were too many take-outs. But fitness was no longer really a goal, it was part of his life. Of the original six goals devised with Faith and Leslie the goal had been school which seamlessly morphed into university. Now that was coming to a close and unlike making a difference Andrew was okay with replacing it with something else. He was happy with his balance as well. He was probably too busy but the different circles of his life were in good condition. And he was happy and excited to be returning to Cambridge. Things would change this year, Meredith having graduated being the main one, but he was looking forward to the year. These three goals were easy; the other three not so much. More and more in his mind he was finding them intertwined and he was confused and uncertain as to what he should do. Andrew also knew that it was entirely of his own making.

He was nine months away from graduating with a Masters Degree in Engineering from Cambridge University. He had set up his own engineering company and bought premises for it. He should have been planning on starting his own engineering firm in a year’s time after the endless hours and pressure at Cambridge to get his degree. But Andrew’s thinking was hopelessly muddled because of two main things.

Firstly was his decision to focus on a very niche, borderline arcane, aspect of engineering. He didn’t want to work for the government at Fort Halstead or somewhere like that and wasn’t sure that there was a career in designing blast proof buildings. So that gave him pause as to being an engineer. And adjacent to that was the reality that Andrew had no experience being a civilian engineer. All his engineering experience was with the Royal Engineers. And as he had come to discover, you were a soldier first and an engineer second. Oh, and on top of all that he was used to being his own boss. He was 21 and would be 22 when he graduated but had been involved in running companies since he was 14. And he always went back to Julian’s experience at Ferranti with his boss there. For two years Julian was working in the summer with the goal of joining Ferranti on graduation. Then in his third summer he got a dickhead of a boss who belittled him and didn’t value his contribution and in the space of weeks his desire to work for Ferranti was gone. As a junior graduate engineer Andrew would be liable to that kind of treatment. He also knew that there would be jealousy, deserved or not, that he was a Cambridge graduate. So working for someone else did not appeal, at least right at that moment.

The second thing that was muddling his thinking was the conversation with Freya at the start of the year. And here making a difference and career intersected. She had dangled the possibility of making a difference through the world of intelligence. Andrew was honest enough to know that it appealed initially through teenage conditioning. Too many Bond films, too many Forsyth and LeCarré novels. So he had been swayed by that allure, however far it was from the reality. Then had come his immersion in that ice-bath of reality. Instead of spending the summer peripherally attached to that world he had been sent as far away as possible and left to rot. That anything had come of his summer job was mainly due to his own initiative, or flagrant disregard for the rules, depending on your point of view. But making a difference was something that Andrew wanted to continue to do. He had jettisoned the need to be as successful as he had been previously, that was a toxic disappointment waiting to happen. And it was to that need that Freya had appealed nine months earlier.

Finally into this stew of muddled thinking Andrew also had karma, and his karmic balance, to consider. Throughout his life it had always felt like he should be doing more. Too many wonderful and amazing things had happened to him for him not to believe in karma, and also to know that he was going to be forever in karmic debt. Part of him wondered whether going into intelligence was in some way a karmic act. Now this was all predicated on the assumption that he would be hired, but everything Andrew had seen about large hierarchical organisations showed him that there was politicking, glad-handing, getting on with your fellow man, including the ones you thought were an idiot. Maybe especially with those people. It did not seem like anything he was good at, or frankly wanted to be good at. For the last seven years wherever possible Andrew had walked away from idiots. Working for one struck him as his worst nightmare.

With all this going through his head, Cumbria and Lancashire passed in the blink of an eye. His challenge was that the summer had not really resolved anything and he wasn’t sure how the coming year was going to provide enough insight or nudges in one direction or the other. The other thing he was conscious of, on top of everything else, was that if he did decide to apply to work in intelligence he would have spent eight years doing two university degrees and have ended up not be using either one of them upon graduation. Which given all the time he had sacrificed seemed stupid.

So of his original six goals, one was complete, fitness was no longer a specific goal, and university would obviously be complete when he graduated. Which left the goal that Suzanne had suggested years after the original six, love. And if Andrew thought his thinking on his career was muddled it was clear and straightforward compared to his thinking about women, and two women in particular. The planner in him wanted to try and resolve what he was going to do about Suzanne and Ara but there was no resolution. Trying to resolve it when they were in three different places made no sense. But at the same time fucking Suzanne while he was in Scotland, fucking Ara while in London, fucking Renee when he was modelling and fucking someone in Cambridge during the coming year also seemed to suggest that he wasn’t taking the whole thing very seriously.

Andrew knew he had a compulsive personality, it wasn’t a secret, particularly around studying, exams and intellectual pursuits. The way that he stood out as a child was his brain. He was clever at school and useless athletically, at pretty well all sports. So in his mind, the thing he was good at was schoolwork. Now he had coasted for years before his cancer and it was only after he recovered that Andrew buckled down and studied in a disciplined manner. And it had become compulsive. He knew he could study ten hours a week less and still get a First. And he was not bitter about the German at Emmanuel College who had pipped him for top spot in Engineering for the last two years. But Andrew had a compulsion to study, almost an addiction. He wondered if it carried over into other areas, in this case women. Now he shielded himself by claiming he was not leading any one on, he had made no commitments to anyone that he had subsequently broken. Andrew had never looked at another woman when in Scotland, even when Suzanne was distant from him it had just never crossed his mind. The same in London with Ara. It was easy to rationalise away but he wasn’t sure what it meant. Andrew had fucked Suzanne that very morning, passionately, vigorously and had held her tenderly in his arms mere hours ago but he knew that sometime in the coming week he would be contemplating sex with another woman. There would be less, if not no, emotion behind it but it would not stop him. Other than being some combination of a pig and an ostrich, he did not know what that all meant.

And then there was Andrew the photographer. All year he had used the times photographing Maggie and Elspeth as a way to relax. And he couldn’t explain why. And it was also a part of his life that he kept separate from all his other confidantes. Elspeth, in her guise as Ursula Schmidt, had pushed the boat out with the shoot the previous Wednesday. But her husband had been beside her and Andrew the whole day and she had repeatedly told Andrew that she wanted to pose that way. For the overwhelming majority of women their fantasy shoots had been a one off, a tasteful and tentative walk on the wild side. But for Elspeth it had unleashed a desire to be a model. And through Andrew’s random purchase of a magazine in West Berlin she had found an outlet for that desire. Now they still had to sell the pictures, she still had to be selected, but she had embraced an explicit and brazen version of her sexuality. And Andrew was the enabler of that. It was one more thing that he didn’t understand about himself.

Despite all these uncertainties in his life Andrew was cheerful that late September morning. It was the 28^th and he had pushed hard as soon as he left Glasgow as he had a 4.30 prep meeting for all the ‘College Parents’ before the hour long session at 5.00. The M6 motorway ended at Rugby and it was the A14 for the rest of the way. He survived Sunday traffic and when he arrived at the caravan park got them to call him a cab, no walking in the hot sun that year. 1.10 saw him at the Gate. He was back.

Andrew surveyed the Great Court with a world-weary superiority as Freshers and their families wandered back and forth. The Bursar’s office was quick and efficient as always and minutes later he was puffing up the familiar stairs to his room. Bev had graduated that June and was off to spend the rest of his life explaining why his parents named their son Beverly. It might have been a family name but to Andrew it seemed cruel and stupid. Anyway, his replacement was a 3^rd year astrophysicist who rather conformed to the mad scientist stereotype. He had met Henry once when he got the room in the ballot but he was socially awkward and, Andrew couldn’t help the pun, off in the clouds. Bright, eccentric but harmless, of which there were no shortage at Cambridge. His door was closed when Andrew got to his room so he deposited everything on the floor and started to unpack. Always quick and easy for him although he laid out a suit for Formal Hall later. That done he headed to the South Paddock as usual to see who was around. As Andrew walked through New Court it struck him that for the first time since he had come up, Helena would not be there. There had been a large packet of mail waiting for him at the Porter’s Lodge but he had not bothered checking any of it before heading out. He hoped that there would be letters from her and Meredith. Matt and Navya were sitting on the lawn and he wandered over.

“Right on time, we got here two minutes ago.”

They did the obligatory five minutes of ‘how are you?’ and ‘how was the summer?’.

“So tell me about your parents. How did it go?”

Matt was supposed to be meeting Navya’s parents near the end of the summer. Their expressions were some sort of combination of frustrated laughter.

“Working back from the end it was fine. By the time Matt left the four of us were able to be in the same room and nobody had to be checked for weapons. Dad is 90% okay with it I think, and I know that he is pleased that we were open and honest with him, even if it was a shock. Well not a shock, I think they suspected a white boyfriend but suspecting is a whole lot different than having him in the front room. So Dad is fine. Mum on the other hand.”

Navya shook her head.

“She managed to stop being an idiot by the end and had redeemed herself somewhat but she fell off the deep end for a while. Matt only knows a tiny bit of Hindi so she was safe berating him and me in Hindi. I don’t know what she would have done if you had turned up. I am not going to dignify the stupidities of my mother and just say she eventually calmed down and like I said, by the end of the visit she was bordering on pleasant. But it was an eye-opener for me, and for Ru. We had dinner with her and Pranav and I told her how the day had gone. You know what she is like Andrew. She is determined to attack racism head on, that is why she is training to be a lawyer. It made us both think when we had to confront our own mother’s unpleasant behaviour to Matt.

“I have been down to Barnstaple three times now, and other than a few more stares there has been no issue. Now I think there is a novelty factor as the place is pretty lily white, but when we have been out in the village or in Barnstaple there has not been any problem. And his parents have been lovely. And not just superficial lovely but genuinely nice. Mind you when Matt’s dad stabbed me with a pin it was a shock. But then he stabbed Matt too and as we both dealt with blood on our finger he told us to look at it. ‘Regardless of the colour of your skin, everyone bleeds the same colour.’”

Matt’s father was a haematologist and it was an unusual but effective way to look at it. Andrew turned to Matt.

“So you survived?”

“More than that. It was something that needed to be done and without getting all Mills and Boon about it, I wanted Navya and her parents to know how important she was. The first meeting needed to happen and it was always going to be that way. Every subsequent meeting will be better. Although I think Pranav has favourite son-in-law locked up.”