Chapter 16

Two hours later Suzanne, Ara and Andrew were sitting on the patio of Maggie and Tony’s house. He was finishing up a shoot but Maggie was sitting there with them. They had made an early start on the wine but were taking it easy. There was no point in falling out of the tree before the sun had even set. Andrew was nursing a beer and not really paying attention.

“Hey!”

His head whipped round.

“Sorry I was miles away.”

Maggie mock scowled.

“Boring you already?”

Andrew ignored the jibe.

“Sorry, what did you ask me?”

“Tony should be done any minute, and he wanted to chat to you. I was just letting you know.”

Andrew nodded. He guessed this would be about a sportscar, keeping up with the McLeods and Strongs!

“I will wander down then. Will you be okay?”

He knew they would be okay, it was more ‘are you okay with me wandering off?’.

All three of them synchronised the ‘yes dear’ to perfection and with kisses for Ara and Suzanne he headed down to the studio. Tony was just finishing up so he sat and chatted with Sheila in her office for a minute. He had been introduced to her earlier in the year.

“How are things? Is it busy, are you busy?”

She thought for a moment.

“It is a nice mix of steady work, quiet times, but with moments when it is quite hectic. On busy days in the studio, and all three of them are working, then it can be hectic dealing with the three models who are ready to shoot while at the same time finishing up with the ones who have just been shot. Now it doesn’t happen often but there is a lot to deal with in a short time. But 10 minutes later they have gone into the studio or headed back to Burntisland for the train and then I can make sure everything is dealt with. I talk to Elspeth pretty much every day, she will talk about what is scheduled, what she has been able to either sell or commission.”

Sheila shrugged.

“It is a nice environment to work, everyone is really nice, the work itself is really interesting, so I have nothing to complain about. Maggie is here one day a week as well which is nice. The biggest issue has been dealing with the movie production company for the barn.”

“The barn?”

“That is what we call the big room on the ground floor. I think it was Fergus that called it ‘a big old barn’ and the name stuck. I know that Maggie dealt with the lawyers a lot getting the deal in place but it is the endless questions that they keep coming up with, that is the issue. There is just a sense that they are chancers, pushing for things that aren’t in the contract. The company is based out of London and they are treating us like the country cousins that they can take advantage of.”

Andrew made a note on a pad on Sheila’s desk.

“I will talk to Maggie, and Tony as well. I want Drummond’s to send a letter to the company. You shouldn’t have to deal with endless crap. And when they are here, I will get one of the lawyers to be here for the first couple of days to deal with their antics.”

Sheila looked at him with wide eyes.

“Do you think that is necessary?”

“I intensely dislike people that take advantage of others. I trust your instincts. If there are no issues then Grace or whoever they send can return to the office but if they try and cause issues then the lawyer will be there with the contract. We might hire a couple of locals to move sets for us that day as well. Not hotheads, but a couple of ex-miners who aren’t going to be impressed by film types.”

Sheila started to chuckle.

“Is it wrong for me to want them to try it on? This will be something to see.”

Tony put his head round the door.

“That is me done, can you deal with the paperwork?”

Andrew left her to it and followed Tony out onto one of the sets.

“Let me tidy up here and then we can chat. I have a lot of developing to do, can we chat in the darkroom?”

Andrew nodded.

“Can I ask you both a personal question? And I don’t mean it to sound as nasty as it does. Are you really happy being part of a threesome? Is it because Andrew wouldn’t commit to just one of you?”

Maggie looked worried that Suzanne or Ara would react badly to the question. They did look slightly taken aback but other than that didn’t react badly. Ara indicated for Suzanne to respond first.

“The easy answer is yes I am, we are, happy in our relationship but I am guessing you want more?”

“I wondered about jealousy when Andrew is with the other person and a sense of disappointment that neither of you were enough for him.”

Although Ara smiled she looked thoughtful.

“Andrew was with me for two weekends when Suzanne was in Glasgow finishing her exams but since then he has never been with just one of us. In fact, the two of us spend considerably more time together than Andrew does with either of us. For more than 18 months from when I reconnected with Andrew in the summer of 1985, he was hopelessly confused about his love for the two of us. We each knew about the other in abstract but Andrew never talks and so it was only when we met at Christmas, and we met without him there, that a lot of things started to fall into place. That sounds too easy. Things that were worrying both of us had a potential solution.”

Ara stopped and motioned for Suzanne to carry on.

“We had both been in casual, and slightly more than casual, same sex relationships. That we both liked men and women was something we were both dealing with. During the winter when Ara and I were talking for hours, and the weekends when we met, well that forced us to face up to things that we were just letting slide along. Was this a phase? Were we lesbians? Given how we felt about Andrew that one was pretty certainly a no, but at the same time we both realised that it wasn’t a phase. So we came up with the idea of living as a three. As you can imagine there was wine involved the first time we thought about it but even nursing a hangover with a cup of coffee the next morning it seemed the perfect solution.”

Ara seamlessly took over.

“Assume that one or other of us weren’t in the picture and it was just Andrew and one of us. Rather than having a conversation about living together as a three it would have been Suzanne or I having to sit down with Andrew and explain to him that he wasn’t enough for us.”

Ara let Maggie think about that for a minute.

“Look at our situation from Andrew’s point of view. Yes, he has two women who love him and he has threesome sex all the time, but it is not Andrew and the two members of his harem. He has to be comfortable and secure enough to cope with the fact that these same two women need more than just him. For a lot of men, most men maybe, that blow to their ego would be too much. From our point of view we get someone who loves us, and who we have both loved for years, but we also get to be ourselves. Which is why we love him in the first place.”

“So you don’t think you are compromising, giving up too much?”

Ara was intrigued at Maggie’s insistent probing. Suzanne answered.

“No we are not. I think he is an incredible catch and that all three of us are lucky to have found each other. Do you not think so?”

“I know how incredible he is, I just don’t know that I would be happy sharing him.”

She shrugged.

“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“You didn’t, you are one of the few people that we can talk honestly about all this. Do you have any more questions?”

“You think the positive aspects outweigh the negatives, or at least the things you are giving up?”

Ara and Suzanne looked at each other seeing if either of them wanted to go first. Ara shrugged and started.

“For me there are three main parts. The most important thing that Andrew did was listening to me, accepting me for who and how I am, and letting me live my dreams. I don’t want to just be someone else’s wife. I wanted to make my own mark on the world. And so finding someone who supported that was key. Andrew spent years listening to me and never once, literally never, said anything other than words of support. You have heard him, he likes intelligent women. So there were years of behaviour to back up his words. Then there is the part that we have talked about, the need to spend time with women. Andrew being close friends with Nikki and Fran made a huge difference there. The first time I told Andrew that I had spent time with a woman I was ashamed and called it wrong. He didn’t tell me off he just said it wasn’t wrong and that it was different, not wrong. And then there is the physical with Andrew. He makes me feel like no other man ever has. No other man has been close to making me feel the way I am with Andrew.”

It was a day for shrugging. Suzanne took up the tale.

“Those three things are the same for me. The first one was not so important growing up but is very important now. I will talk about the physical in a moment but for me the other thing I want to mention that is often overlooked is Andrew’s kindness. I will talk about that in a second. From the ages of 11 to 16 I was overweight. Maybe not fat but I was unhealthily conscious of my weight. Puberty wasn’t kind to me, I didn’t just get big breasts I sort of ballooned up all over, thighs, bum, tummy, everything. When I was with Andrew he went out of his way to make me feel light and desired. His size and strength meant that he could throw me around, often literally. He would carry me towards the bed and then throw me onto it. Then he would grab my ankle and haul me to the end before he fucked me. I spent all my formative teenage years being obsessed about my weight and here was Andrew just treating me like I weighed nothing. That was hugely powerful for me. As Ara said there is nobody remotely like Andrew.”

Both Suzanne and Ara had talked about the physical aspects of their relationship with Andrew, and each other, without even slightly alluding to dominance or submission.

“But I have seen Andrew be kind and generous for years. It was seeing that part of his character that turned lust into love for me. You know that, you have seen it, you live it even now. Andrew likes to do things for other people, to help other people. It is who he is.

“I am sure that it all comes back to his experience with cancer, and particularly that he couldn’t help Faith Campbell. But the time that he spent with her, and the discussions he had with her and Leslie, they fundamentally shaped him. Andrew lived his life, ran his life, by these six goals that the three of them came up with. Some of them were off into the future like career, some just required him to be disciplined, like studying or fitness. But the other three were the dynamic ones. And they came up with karma as one of the goals. And he lives that to this day. Karma, helping others with no expectation of reward. And he doesn’t just talk about karma he really does put it into practice. You know about all the money that he, Leslie and Julian earned, how they created first the medical research trust but then gave away another £1m each to support and grow businesses in Scotland and Northern England. That is CMS, you know that, you will be a trustee soon, if I am not mistaken. But what is not talked about, in fact it is something that I don’t know a lot about, is that Andrew set up a fund that was a small scale trial for CMS. He calls it the People Fund, in that it invests in people. When you have millions of pounds it is easy to give away some money. He invested £50,000 knowing that he might lose the lot when he first made some money from computing. Brian Campbell had advised him to buy a house and it was him that found our house in Mayfair, and it even had the damaged Ferrari in it. But Andrew wanted to do something, wanted to try and alleviate the dreadful employment news. He always worries that it was only a few jobs but he tried. I know that I am going on but how he is today, specifically with you and Elspeth, is exactly the way he has been for nearly 10 years. The two of us are lucky that he loves us both. So the positives hugely outweigh the negatives, like 90:10, even more 95:5.”

Ara leaned over and kissed Suzanne long and hard.

“That was incredibly well said. Those two months in hospital changed him forever.”

Maggie looked sheepishly at them.

“I am sorry for going on about it. I don’t have the slightest attraction to other women and it made me too nosy. That was fascinating to hear what he has been like for years.”

“Andrew would hate it if he knew how we were singing his praises. It makes him very uncomfortable. As for the attraction to women it is funny that you say that. We were with Fran and Nikki last night and they were telling us that bisexual women, so like us attracted to both men and women, are given a hard time by a lot of lesbians. We want to have our cake and eat it too was how they described it. Neither of them has ever been with a man and knew, or at least suspected, from puberty that they preferred women. Now the two of them don’t care but they have heard friends be dismissive about bisexuals.”

Suzanne laughed.

“There is nothing that we can do about it but it did make me stop and think.”

She looked over at Ara and winked before turning to Maggie.

“And don’t worry, we won’t hit on you!”

Maggie blushed as Suzanne and Ara laughed before she realised that they were teasing her and slowly joined in the laughter.

“I suppose I deserved that.”

Ara took her hand.

“Not at all. This is how we live, this is what we are used to. It is interesting to hear our friend talk about being completely un-attracted to women. It is important for us to remember. It is not just that the majority of people think that way, but also that it is combined with judgement. That was what was missing with your questions. There was no judgement there was interest with an underpinning of concern.”