Chapter 7

Tuesday morning Andrew got nothing but a ‘thank you’ for the coffee and his puppy eyes were mocked. Ara’s walk and swimming gave no indication of any reaction or regret to the previous night so he let the matter be. At the end of the afternoon Ara was on a roll and so rather than return to the house she stayed at the library continuing to write away. He had arranged to have dinner with Jim and Freya just the three of them, so Ara said she would come over to the flat when she was done at the library and they would walk back down to the house together. Andrew had dinner started by the time the pair of them returned and they went through and changed before coming through to sit and enjoy some wine with him.

“It bears repeating, it is good to have you around.”

Freya did not contradict Jim’s assessment of Andrew’s skills as a housekeeper.

“Are you excited that Moira will potentially be closer?”

“I am excited but it is mostly psychological. The Tube and the wait at the airport are the same, the journey in at the other end is the same, it is only the flight time that is different. And Iceland is only a couple of hours more than Paris. If I left the flat at 9.00 I would be in Paris by 2.00 but Reykjavík by 4.00. We talk every week but we each have our own lives now.”

Having spent a fair amount of time in the last couple of months sitting around airports Andrew knew what he meant.

“Was Christmas bad Andrew?”

He did another quick recap for Freya and Jim; they listened in silence.

“That is a couple of Christmas’ that you have spent on your own. Maybe you need to start a family of your own.”

He managed not to spit the wine out at Freya’s comment but did end up almost choking and Jim had to pat him on the back for him to regain control.

“That was just mean.”

Freya leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. But it was effective in stopping him overthink his parents.

“What are the plans for the term? Will you be down to see us?”

“Yes but I have no idea when. I have two OTC weekends that I will be attending. I also am likely to have the Officer Selection Briefing one weekend this term, and I have been asked to go to Paris for some addition scenes due to the weather on Martinique limiting our shooting on the last couple of days. So there are four weekends, none of which are known yet. And there is no point in me phoning Manon until after OTC next week, I should have an idea of the timing then. I will be down two or three times I would hope. I will let you know.”

“Easter break?”

“A week and I think I will stay here if that is okay.”

“Of course.”

There was no discussion between Freya and Andrew about the software or anything to do with it. It was a quiet night where the three of them sat and chatted, low key and familial. Ara wasn’t that late but it was a good point to take his leave. Freya asked the two of them to dinner on the Thursday so he would see them in a couple of days.

“I am tired, I can’t believe how tiring it is concentrating on writing.”

They were walking down to the house. When they got there he made Ara some scrambled eggs on toast, one of the reasons she was so tired was she was hungry. He had the television on, he was trying to watch the news every day now, the thing he needed to improve on was his knowledge of current affairs. It was one of the things that they asked about at both the Briefing and the Main Board.

“Why do you want to join the Army, even just the Territorials?”

Andrew had thought about that very question many times.

“When I returned to school after my treatment I found the first couple of weeks to be very odd. In my own mind I was new Andrew, there was a plan, I was trying to be a different person. But of course to everyone else I was old Andrew, still scrawny, now with thin hair, and all they knew was the annoying 13 year old from nine months earlier. I had been in the school orchestra in 1^st year at school and so when I turned up for the first practice I was dealing with the comments from the other years for the first time. So a guy two years ahead of me made a comment to me and I reacted badly. As in knee him in the balls reacted badly. I was suspended for the first and only time in my life, for a day. Me the aggressor got one day and the guy with the sore plums got three days. That week I decided that I didn’t like orchestra. The teacher made some comments and things got worse. So I walked away.

“A long rambling intro, sadly all too common for me. But I decided to join the school’s Combined Cadet Force, I turned up near the start of the third term with no history. I was lucky in a couple of guys I knew from my class were in it and they helped me get through that term. And ever since then it has grown. I really enjoyed it, there was lots to learn, and so well before I left school I knew that I would join the Officer Training Corp when I got to university. But all that is background. As to why I am going to see it through after all these years? I am decent at it, that helps. But it has been a way for me to deal with a bunch of blokes in a group setting. Still something that does not come completely naturally to me. I have learned a huge amount about leadership and confidence over the last eight years. And there is a routine, a discipline to the whole thing as well. And I have left this to the end deliberately because I think I talk about this far too much but there is an element of making a difference to it as well. Going into the Armed Forces is not very fashionable, there were more than 60 people from my year in the OTC when I started and it is six or seven of us who are carrying on, either Regulars or TA.”

“So it wasn’t a goal all those years ago?”

“No, but it was something that Faith, Leslie and I talked about while I was still in hospital. I don’t know about you but there was always an assumption from an early age that I would go to university. I don’t know when it started but by the time I was 10 it was completely settled, it was the natural order of my life. Well, although this is different, there is the same sense to it. At some point during school I decided I was going into the Territorial Army when I graduated. And I have never really considered not applying for a commission. Of course there is the small matter of me passing Briefing, the Main Board and the Commissioning Course, but they are minor hurdles.”

Andrew smiled at his own hubris.

“Is there a history of military service in your family?”

“None at all. My great-grandfather was a conscript in the Great War and was injured. In the Second World War, one grandfather was a civilian auxiliary here in Britain, he did not go overseas and fight, the other was already too old. And Dad just did National Service, he was near the tail end of National Service. Anyone other than your grandfather?”

“Since Grandfather no. There were relatives further back in time, the 1700’s and 1800’s, who served but Grandfather was the last.”

Ara stopped and smiled.

“You remind me of him in a lot of ways. You talked about joining up as not being very fashionable yet you don’t care. That is where I see the two of you as alike. You have strong determination and you know your own minds.”

“I would like to meet him, I think it would be fascinating to listen to him, to hear the stories. I did that not this Hogmanay but the one before. I went to the In and Out with Freya and Jim and sat at the edge of a group of retired officers and listened to them reminisce. The evening flew by.”

The pattern was set for the week. Ara and Andrew got into their routine, studied all day and chatted away in the evening, doing the one thing that they had always struggled with, spending time together. It was a training regime as a couple, they had to put the miles in, in this case spending the time talking to each other. Even simple things like living together for a week, Ara getting used to Andrew’s sleep pattern being at least an hour shorter than her own. But the week was punctuated with conversations like the one about the Army, just filling in some of the blanks. Friday night saw them in bed, Ara lying along him, his hands gently squeezing her abused bum.

“Feel different the second time?”

“Physically no, but mentally it was very different. I didn’t have to concentrate on the physical, I knew what was coming and so wasn’t nervous or tense about it. Instead I used your words, the naughty taboo, and thought about that instead. There was a lot of thinking about ‘what is the big deal?’. It is prolific in art and literature for thousands of years, both between men and with a man and a woman. The current common view among historians is that Alexander the Great was gay, and that is 300BC. So the historian in me.”

They both stopped and sniggered.

“Listen to us, are we 12? As I was saying, it doesn’t seem to be worth all the fuss. But then I thought back to family events, back to school and the naughtiness really kicks in. Good girls from good families don’t get buggered, and even more shouldn’t enjoy it. The first time I came I was imagining my mother standing in the doorway, the look on her face. And although I presume we could do this spooning or even with me on my back, I like how you almost cuddle me when we do it this way.”

She stopped and thought for a moment.

“No, I like that you can almost cuddle me, but also that you can lean back, grab my waist and just go for it. That was the image with my mother. Completely side on, your cock pistoning in and out of me, my mother able to see, having no way to hide from, what we were doing.”

Ara stopped and looked at me.

“I don’t know what that all means but it is something that I would like to do more than occasionally but less than regularly, does that make sense?”

“A couple of times a fortnight but not every Thursday night?”

“Exactly.”

Saturday was the first day Ara would have access to her room at the dorm. Andrew had skipped his run and sat and studied in the dining room for a couple of hours before taking two mugs of coffee up to the bedroom. After accepting Ara’s thanks, delivered in the most delicious of ways, they lay in bed, sipping coffee and planning the day.

“When are you going up to Cambridge?”

“Tomorrow after lunch. It will give me some time to get settled in before dinner. You went to the accommodation office yesterday and collected your key, yes”

“Yes I have it.”

“How about we go over with the three unopened bags today and you can get them up and into your room. That way tomorrow you only have to deal with the one small bag.”

“That would be wonderful Andrew. I am in Northumberland House which is on, funnily enough, Northumberland Avenue, just down from Trafalgar Square. That would be a big help.”

So the morning was full of domestic bliss, lugging the three bags over to the very centre of the city and getting Ara into her room. It was a simple single bedroom, and just to make Andrew realise what he was missing at Cambridge, it had a small ensuite. Ara didn’t bother unpacking, she would do that the following day and so once they had got everything up to her room they headed over to Marshall Street for a swim.

It is random things, random moments that have an impact on your life. That lunchtime was one of those occasions. They had walked up to Oxford Street to find somewhere for lunch and in the little pub were a group of four Tottenham Hotspur fans. Now over the years Andrew had been in pubs with lots of footie supporters but that day, at that moment, he and Ara were sitting chatting wondering what to do that afternoon. One of the guys at the bar said something and the other three gave a cheer. They looked over and the thought crossed their mind at the same time.

“Do you want to go and watch a football match?”

“I have wanted to watch one for a while but I never wanted to go on my own, just in case.”

Andrew nodded in understanding. So he walked over to the bar and asked the guys if there were likely to be tickets available at the gate for the game. Two of the blokes were really decent, happy to help them. It was a cup game against lower league opposition so there would be a lot of tickets available, the stadium would only be two thirds full. So there it was. If they had been Arsenal fans they would have gone to Highbury. If they had been south or west of the city centre then they could have been Chelsea or Fulham fans. But in that random moment there were Spurs fans there and so they went and saw Spurs. They got the Tube from Oxford Circus out to north London, the Seven Sisters station. The Tube did not go close to the stadium but they followed the herd, crammed onto a bus and got off when everyone else did. They got two tickets for not much more than a tenner, £12 for the two. Spurs won the game, although the match was closer than it should have been and the two of them had a great time. For both of them it was something very different. The journey back was pretty painless. They ended up walking down to Seven Sisters rather than wait for a series of buses than were always packed. But from there the Victoria Line took them straight to Green Park and a quick walk home. They stopped at The Footman for dinner before finally returning to the house.

“That was a fun day, something I have wanted to do for a while.”

“One of the days I am down this term we should see if there is another Spurs home game. I can leave Justin and Pedro to chase women and we can meet them later.”

“I would like that. It was interesting to be part of a tribe like that.”

Ara’s use of the word tribe rather than crowd made Andrew stop and think. It was tribal, them against the world but he was not sure he would have got there so quickly without Ara’s comment. And she said it so matter of factly. They went upstairs and relaxed on the sofa, not even bothering to put on the television.