Chapter 11

They left London at 10.30 that Wednesday morning. Andrew had been up and run before Suzanne and Ara joined him in walking over to the pool. They all needed the release of energy, the lowering of their stress as suddenly the meeting with Colonel Myles Roberts REng. (ret.) was happening that day. Andrew had called Trinity College and arranged for two tickets for the graduation ceremony to be sent to Freya and Jim. The three of them delayed leaving until the mail was delivered to see if there were any offers of employment for Ara and Andrew but there was nothing. So they headed north, depending on traffic it would be close to four hours.

“Are you sure that we don’t need to make a hotel or Bed & Breakfast reservation. It seems unfair for the three of us to turn up at your grandfather’s place when he is expecting only you.”

“We have gone over this already Suze. I need to believe that he will understand and be supportive. If we make a reservation it means that Grandfather will not let us stay, and I can’t think about that, even if it is something that may happen. I have to be positive.”

Suzanne put her hand on Ara’s shoulder. Edinburgh was easy, they had the flat, this was causing them all stress. The journey passed mostly in silence, The Waterboys’ This is the Sea quietly playing as they drove north.

The house was easy to find, it was right beside the turn off into the city from the south. As Andrew turned the car into the drive he saw an elderly gentleman through one of the windows. He stood and headed towards the front door. Someone had been watching for his granddaughter. He and Suzanne waited in the car for a moment to let Ara and her grandfather greet each other and have some privacy. But soon they were being waved out of the car and with rapidly beating hearts they headed to the door. Colonel Roberts was full of old world charm and he and Suzanne tried to out-charm each other. It takes a special kind of woman to make an 82 year old man giggle within a minute of meeting her. But then it was his turn.

“So you must be Andrew. I finally get to meet you, eh?”

Andrew didn’t salute, but it was touch and go.

“A pleasure to meet you Colonel. You are right it has been too long.”

“Well come on into the house and find yourself a seat. I’ll get a crick in my neck if we stand here all day. Lead the way Arabella, you know where to go.”

There was no way to disguise the house as anything other than massive. It was much bigger than their mews house in London. As they walked through the hall it felt as if it was a time capsule of the Colonel’s time in India. There were carvings, paintings, silks and fabrics, a living museum. Suzanne and Andrew both stopped to look at a photograph of the Colonel and his wife. Her similarity to Ara was striking, Ara’s grandmother had been a beautiful woman. They hurried to catch up with the two of them and were lead into a large sitting room.

“It is good to see you Arabella, it always is. Are you on your way to Edinburgh?”

“Yes, but we wanted to stop and see you. I have things I need to tell you.”

The canny Yorkshireman looked at her and waited for her to speak. They all did. The Colonel broke the silence.

“I wondered if I would get to meet Andrew the way you talked about him. Is there something you want to tell me?”

Colonel Roberts was looking at Suzanne, trying to hide his confusion. Ara looked at Suzanne and then Andrew, clearly struggling to break the news to her grandfather without just blurting it out. Andrew stood up.

“I saw the kitchen as we came in, why don’t I go and put the kettle on? Suzanne, could you give me a hand please.”

“No Andrew, sit down please.”

Ara looked at her grandfather, who was now completely confused. Andrew saw him check her ring finger, looking for an engagement ring, trying to figure out what was happening.

“Grandfather, Suzanne, Andrew and I are living together in London. We are living in a house in central London.”

She stopped and Andrew saw Ara take a deep breath.

“We are living together Grandfather. Not as a couple, or two couples but as a three. I don’t really know how else to describe it or to break it more gently.”

The Colonel tennis-matched between Suzanne and Andrew before returning to Ara.

“Bloody hell Arabella.”

Andrew had to stifle a laugh.

“Judging by the fact there have been no reports of someone blasting into space from Surrey, I am guessing you haven’t told your mother?”

Suzanne’s snigger was almost muffled. Ara shook her head. The Colonel ran his hand through his thinning hair.

“It is not often I am at a loss for words but bloody hell Arabella.”

His demeanour was stunned not angry. He looked at Andrew sharply and was about to say something when he stopped and looked back at Ara.

“You have told me off too many times for assuming that the man makes all the decisions. I was about to ask Andrew what he had to say for himself but apparently you can teach an old dog a new trick.”

Ara went over and kissed him on the cheek.

“To be honest lass, I don’t know what to say. ‘Are you sure?’ seems idiotic knowing you. Andrew, would you mind and go and put the kettle on while I try and not say the wrong thing to Arabella and Suzanne.”

The kettle was on the counter, mugs hanging from a little tree beside it. He found teabags and sugar without having to open too many cupboards and five minutes later brought through four mugs on a tray. As he opened the door he heard the Colonel laugh which could only be a good thing.

“Here he comes. When was the last time you got to make a decision Andrew?”

What the hell?

“Sorry, how do you mean?”

“With two women telling you what to do you will never get to make a decision ever again.”

Andrew looked over at the two of them and winked, which just made them blush furiously.

“Now that you mention it I have been doing a lot of furniture shopping.”

The Colonel and Andrew laughed as Ara and Suzanne squawked their protests.

“Sorry to send you off but I wanted to get to know Suzanne. I have heard all about you for five years.”

“Grandfather!”

“Oh hush now lass. Every time you visited it was Andrew this or Andrew that. Or pining over Andrew. Or missing Andrew. That you have been so happy for the last two years is not a complete coincidence.”

He patted Ara’s hand before carrying on.

“I don’t profess to completely understand all this, but then I think back 55 years and I was sitting where you are now. Nobody understood then either so maybe I do understand some of what you are dealing with. I will tell you this plain. Not many people are going to understand, my daughter chief among them. All I would ask is that you are sure about this. You are going to endure a lot, your children, if you have any, more so.”

He was already at acceptance and was now just worrying about the impact on their lives going forward. The questions flowed over the afternoon, more to Ara and Suzanne but he asked Andrew some too. Then he asked Ara to show Andrew the back garden clearly wanting to spend some time with Suzanne.

“I was so nervous. I wanted him to be accepting, I needed for him to not to be disappointed. He matters more than my parents.”

Ara shook her head and Andrew gave her a hug.

“He seems to be coping fine, or at least as well as can be expected when his granddaughter brings home her male and female lovers.”

“Andrew!”

Her whack conveyed the truth of that statement. And it hurt.

“It is interesting to see that you have trained him over the years.”

“For someone from an older generation, a very different time, he was amazing when I talked to him about not being so sexist. I think it was the first time he compared me to Grandmother. It is interesting as well, I am his only granddaughter, both my cousins are male and Dad is an only child. So he has three grandsons and me.”

“Does he spoil you?”

“Probably. We spend time together, that is the main thing. I would come here to escape Mum. Even as a teenager I would prefer to be here at the edge of York, away from my friends, than stuck dealing with her. But we never talked about the reason for the visit. I know that I got my love for geopolitics from sitting in this house talking to him, listening to him as he talked about his experiences. When he started in the Army Britain was still a colonial power, yet by the time he retired we had already returned India and the writing was on the wall everywhere else. When you are 14 or 15 talks like that stick with you.”

Ara looked over at Andrew and shrugged.

“You have professed your attraction to intelligent women, but it works the other way as well. Yes, I want my intelligence to be seen as attractive but both Suze and I also find you attractive for the same reason. That you have other qualities is great but neither of us wanted a brainless pretty boy. And for me you remind me of Grandfather.”

“In what ways?”

“Well there are the obvious ones like believing in me, the intelligence I just mentioned, but simple things like listening to me and understanding and knowing enough to let me carry on a conversation that is not just me talking. You pay attention and know enough to understand the basics but then you will ask me something and it makes me think about something else and I will mentally go off in a tangent. And none of that is deliberate, I find myself thinking about things slightly differently after talking to you. The truth is the three of us are geeks. Sure you lead this interesting life but if you ignore the bedroom, Suze and I are deeply boring and conventional women. I am interested in, and want to work on, Middle Eastern geopolitics and Suze is concerned with the environment and the impact of public policy on development. You have worked with the most famous model in France, other models who are known, and yet you have ended up with the two of us.”

Andrew had always thought of the two of them as fascinating, in some slightly insecure old Andrew way he thought they were out of his league, but it was true. They were more likely to be published in an academic journal with a readership in the hundreds than in a newspaper with a readership of millions. As usual, it was all there in front of him but he had never joined all the dots. He turned as they reached the bottom of the large back garden and leaned against the wall.

“Suzanne hasn’t come running out crying, that’s a good sign.”

Andrew missed being whacked for being an idiot.

“Okay, I will stop joking if only so that I am not bruised when I meet Grandma.”

He had to dodge another half-hearted whack.

“What I did find funny was when I brought the tea through and the Colonel is telling me I will never get to make another decision. I had a sudden vision that gave lie to that statement.”

Ara blushed again.

“I couldn’t believe that you winked at me. Just for a second I was at the end of the bed in the arm-binder. I shouldn’t be thinking that way in Grandfather’s living room.”

Andrew pulled her in for a hug and Ara leaned against him enjoying the beautiful day.

“This is a big house, a big garden for one person. How does he cope?”

“There are a retired couple in the village that come out and help about the place.”

“The village?”

“Fulford. It used to be a separate village but it has been swallowed up by York. It is just down the road. This is the end of Fulford, the end of York. There are only fields to the south of us. Anyway they are in their 60s, both retired, and they come out three mornings a week. It is company for him, I think it is company for all three of them. She keeps the house clean and he looks after the garden. They do his shopping for them. It allows him his independence but also means that he can still live here. If he didn’t have anyone then I think the house and especially the garden would be too much.”

They saw Suzanne and the Colonel wave to them from the patio and they walked back up to join them.

“Suzanne and I were talking about dinner, going down to the local pub for some supper and it made us think about what we say to other people. If we go to the local, how do I introduce Suzanne and Andrew?”

“To the rest of the world we are just flatmates, well housemates actually. It is one of the things we have talked about a lot, how we present to the outside world. It is the line between being honest and being misjudged. We have to accept that to most people what we are doing makes no sense. A lot of people will see it as wrong. So we would be delighted to come to the local with you but it is just me and my two friends stopping in on the way to Scotland. Suzanne has her graduation on Monday, so this is just a quick visit. How we deal with this going forward, whether we make more of a statement? I think we have to see the reactions of people.”

The car was cramped but it was only half a mile up into Fulford. It might be called a village but it was a suburb now, although the pub was still very much a local. The Colonel was clearly well known and they were introduced to a bunch of people as they found a table. Dinner was nothing fancy but it was hot and tasty and it was nice to relax, knowing that the Colonel was accepting of them. Despite Andrew’s teasing Ara couldn’t relax and do anything while in her grandfather’s house. The mental block was too strong, so he and Suzanne didn’t either although it didn’t stop them caressing Ara to the point of distraction. They were called mean and so stopped and cuddled her instead, before falling asleep.

Andrew knew he was never going to get to sleep in the middle of the three of them, getting out of bed would be too disruptive. On the outside he could slip out of bed and leave them sleeping. He quietly padded downstairs and did his exercises in the living room. There were no pavements on any of the roads around the house and so Andrew decided not to risk the early morning traffic. Instead his run that morning was up and down the length of the garden. Not ideal but it was maybe 100 metres long, close to it anyway, and so he had a little 250 metre circuit round the edge of the lawn. He ran for his usual 30 minutes and then walked a couple of laps cooling off.

“How do you take your coffee?”

He turned in surprise. The Colonel was at the kitchen door.

“Just milk please.”

Two minutes later the two of them were sitting in the early morning sun on the back patio. Andrew guessed it was his turn to be quizzed.

“Not what I expected when Arabella phoned to let me know she was dropping in on the way to Edinburgh.”

Andrew sipped his coffee and waited.

“Part of me wants to tell her she is being crazy and to give her head a shake. But the larger part of me sees how happy she is. And then there is you. Arabella was in love with you for a long time. Maybe not you the person at first, but the idea of you. She would come and hide here, school holidays, university holidays, it was sad to see how little her own mother understood her.”

So far, the Colonel was talking out loud, to himself as much as to Andrew.

“This is my granddaughter, so leaving aside all the personal details, why are you doing this?”

Andrew must have talked for 20 minutes, going through all the usual things that the three of them had talked about with each other, and then with Olivia, and Freya and Jim.

“You don’t think you could have picked just one of them? I have not been in love with two women but I can understand it. Is it not better to hurt one now then for this to fail in the future and you all to be hurt?”

“It comes back to the areas that are personal. Suzanne and Arabella both told me they would be unhappy in a marriage just to me. Unhappy is too strong, but there would be something missing. If I married one of them then I would have to be accepting of my wife having a lover, a female lover. And it was the same with both of them. The two of them need time together and I think that may have been their first inkling that there was a solution to our issues.”

“Do you think it will last?”

“The easy and instinctive answer is to say yes. But you hear about the divorce statistics for couples. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of all marriages end in divorce, and nobody gets married expecting to divorce. So the truth is it is a risk but maybe for us it is less of a risk. What we are doing is not unique but is definitely rare. Look at last night, we are just friends, rather than anything else. So I think that we will always have to work harder at being a three. And by not taking anything for granted, almost being paranoid about ourselves, maybe that makes things stronger. But there are no absolutes.”

“An honest answer. Interesting idea that your circumstances will keep you close, you will always have to rely on each other. What about children?”

“Another minefield of potential issues. The children will all be borne out of wedlock. We all assume that we want children but when and everything beyond that is just this empty space. Simple things like our children will have a dad, a mum and a? What? Another mum? Never mind the whole half sibling issue.”

He shrugged.

“Do you worry that Arabella and Suzanne will be trapped with you?”

“Trapped?”

“Suzanne told me some of the details of what you have achieved in your life so far. Arabella had given me the barebones but Suzanne fleshed out some of the detail. You are allowing them a lifestyle that will be difficult for them to give up. Particularly as they will not be married to you.”

“I would hope that they never feel trapped. But it is a possibility I suppose. I don’t know that there is anything that I can do about that.”

“No I suppose not. Walk with me.”

The Colonel was not frail but he was in his 80s and so they slowly walked down to the end of the garden.

“I see a lot of my own circumstances when I look at the three of you. Asha and I had to endure a lot worse, especially in the first six months. When I met her it was like being run over by an elephant. She smiled shyly at me and I was gone. It really was love at first sight for both of us. But there were innumerable obstacles to overcome. And the practicalities were easy compared to the attitudes. On both sides. It is the attitudes of people that I am thinking about when I see the three of you, the attitudes of people to my great-grandchildren.”

“I know this is going to sound stupid but was it that bad?”

“In a word, yes. What was surprising was that it was better here than it was in India. It was less than 15 years to independence, the political mood was changing, and India became a republic, abolishing all the Princely States upon independence. There was a very mixed and ambivalent view of them among the general population. The British had exploited their position just as at the same time the Princes of the States, the Rajas, had exploited the British. It was all about power. Then there was the whole ‘going native’ prejudice on top of that. Now it had been happening for hundreds of years, there were thousands of English, sorry British, married to Indians, mostly British males to Indian females. But then Asha and I decided to up the stakes further. The daughter of the Raja of one of the Princely States wanting to marry a British Army officer.”