Beta Male (20 page)

As for me, I was so into the part that there were some days when I questioned whether I actually had gone native. There was a peace in that church, a purpose, a sense of community, role-play or no role-play, which I wasn't sure I had ever found elsewhere. There were also a lot of good people – kind, generous, loving people who thought hard about life's
questions and believed they had found an answer. Who was I to say they were wrong? Could this be my way out, too? My absolution? Could I become Sam again? Write off my sin along with my debt?

But Rosie was my sin and my debt, the girl I was unable to resist, and still unable to be entirely truthful with. So when Mary finally invited me down to Gloucestershire to spend a Sunday in late January with her parents, I accepted and told Rosie I would be away for business, which was a fairly accurate description of how I saw the excursion.

The Money-Baringses lived in a small, pompous village near Stroud in Gloucestershire, where we attended a church service led by a small, pompous vicar.

‘Be nice to the ponce,' said Mr Money-Barings with an attempt at a wink as we left. ‘Might be back here soon yourself, eh?'

The old homophobe quickly warmed to me again, just like the night at
Tosca
. Alan has always had a problem with Jess's parents and vice versa. Ed used to turn into a nervous wreck around Tara's father. Personally, with the exception of Mrs Geoffrey Parker, Lisa's mother, who took an instant dislike to me, I have never found any difficulty with the parents of girls I've been interested in. Their daughters, yes. The parents, no. All you have to do is flirt gently with the mother and convince the father you're a solid sort by discussing manly things neither of you understand, such as quantitative easing or the Middle East peace process.

Mrs Money-Barings was also on fine form on our second meeting. ‘I'm sorry I was so quiet, Sam, that night at the Albert Hall,' she said as we sat down to a Sunday roast in their cavernous dining room. ‘I'm afraid London's just not my scene. Is it your scene?'

I wasn't sure if I had a scene, but I said it was, as that appeared to be the answer she was looking for. Tucking into my lunch,
however, I could see what she meant. Gloucestershire was very definitely
her
scene: several dogs wandered languidly around the hall; a fire was roaring next door in the drawing room; Mrs Money-Barings had already changed out of her church clothes into a threadbare old jumper and corduroys. It was a very pleasant setting, to be honest, and for a while I let myself be carried away by an enjoyable fantasy of Rosie and me one day living somewhere like that. I would play the piano in the evenings. Our friends would come round for weekend house parties. We'd walk the dogs. Maybe I could build a theatre in the garden.

‘And what are you up to at the moment, Sam?' asked Mr Money-Barings over coffee. ‘Any plays in the offing?'

I looked around the table at his wife and daughter. I'd half expected them to withdraw after dessert – sorry,
pudding
– to allow Mr Money-Barings and me to crack open the port and chew a
Romeo y Julieta
while discussing whether or not we should return to the Gold Standard. Maybe I'd been watching the wrong era of films as research.

‘Well,' I said, taking a gulp of coffee, ‘
Ash
ley, I've got a bit bored of waiting around to be cast in something while keeping my business ticking over, so I've decided to put on my own production.'

‘That's great, Sam,' enthused Mary. ‘Isn't that great, Daddy?'

‘Not opera, is it?' barked Mr Money-Barings. ‘No pon – ?'

‘Darling,' interrupted Mrs Money-Barings. ‘Please.'

For a man who professed to have found God late, I felt Mr Money-Barings had a rather unhealthy obsession with homosexuality. Had he only read the Old Testament?

‘No,' I reassured him. ‘Not opera. Actually, I think you'll rather like it. It's going to be a musical about the Prodigal Son. Looking at it in a modern light, and so on.'

‘That
is
great,' said Mr Money-Barings. ‘Expensive business, I imagine.'

‘Well, yes, the production won't be cheap. But I thought I'd finance it through a loan from the company I run.'

Mr Money-Barings rose to his feet, went next door to the drawing room and returned with a cheque book.

‘I think we can do better than that,' he said, producing a fountain pen from his jacket pocket.

‘No. I couldn't possibly.'

‘Nonsense, boy. You're as good as family.'

Mary winced, opposite.

‘No, seriously, I couldn't. It's an expensive production.'

‘How much?'

‘Well, it's going to cost five thousand, all-in.' Then I remembered Claire's opera ticket. ‘Sorry, five thousand one hundred, if we include the lighting guy.'

‘There,' barked Mr Money-Barings, sliding over my get-out-of-jail-free card. ‘Now, who's for a walk?'

I'd argued with Sam before, of course, at various junctures over the last twenty-five years. When we were seven, we fancied the same girl and used to shove each other outside the classroom so we could sit next to her in Geography (Sam always won, incidentally). Then, aged twelve, Sam went through an annoying phase of setting alarm clocks for different times in the middle of the night and hiding them all over my bedroom, which I didn't find very amusing. It was the one occasion my mum got really angry with him. Inevitably, there was also the odd spat over the years while sharing a flat in London. Most of the time, I put up with his many foibles, but occasionally I'd flip and we'd have an argument to clear the air. It's difficult to be angry with Sam for very long.

The row over Jess, however, cut very deep. I know you shouldn't care what your friends think about your girlfriend. I know that no one else can really understand a relationship from the outside, because a relationship is between two people, not an entire group, and that often the couples who are most outwardly gregarious and happy in company are miserable alone. But it was impossible not to care – my friends were important to me. Although I didn't
need
their blessing – Jess was not a trophy for which I demanded applause or recognition – it would be nice to think they didn't loathe her.

Sam's outburst also made it difficult for me not to question my entire relationship with Jess. First my mother; then my friends… Was I the only person who actually saw anything good in her? Was it more likely that all of them were wrong and I was right, or the other way round? They couldn't all just be jealous, surely? Was I simply too lazy to find anyone else? And
why had it taken so long for me to ask her to marry me? For the first time in my life I began to have doubts.

And yet I think I'm as aware of Jess's faults as anyone. The blinkers don't stay on after more than eight years. She can be difficult, awkward, manipulative, snobby and self-obsessed. But she's also loving, kind, funny, intelligent and wonderful in bed (or at least, I think she's wonderful in bed; I haven't really slept with that many other girls). I could make long lists all day with Jess's negative points in one column and the positives in the other. Both lists would be of roughly equal length. But what would be the point? The only real point is that I love her. And that, I thought, was what I had to make everyone who disapproved realise. Frankly, our relationship was none of their business, but still, I wanted the wedding to be a celebration, not a funeral.

Not that we had even got close to setting a date. Jess wanted a winter wedding so we could go skiing for our honeymoon. For what it was worth (this was another argument I probably wouldn't win), I preferred the idea of getting married the following summer – partly, I think, because it would allow me to postpone confronting the issue of Amanda's ultimatum.

All these myriad problems – some voiced, others kept bottled up – combined, I think, to put an unbearable amount of pressure on our relationship. Maybe I should just have told Jess about Amanda's indecent proposal. Perhaps I should have explained that I had argued with my friends about her. But I didn't. Whether through a misplaced desire to protect her or simple cowardice, I kept everything to myself and the relationship suffered as a result. Christmas approached and the engagement ring I'd had commissioned still lay uncollected at the jeweller's. Every day I meant to pick it up and every day I made an excuse to myself. It was symbolic of a malaise that seemed to have taken root the moment we'd started co-habiting. Other friends who have moved in with their girlfriends – fiancées, even – and become their ‘flatmates' have
told me it was the best decision they had ever made. Whereas before they had had to trek across London to have quiet sex without their flatmates overhearing, check diaries to see when they were free and endure constant arguments about not seeing enough of each other, moving in together solved all these problems in one fell swoop. Ironically, a move you would expect to be trapping was actually liberating. Girls know they've ‘got you', my co-habiting friends told me, so they give you much more freedom to do as you wish. Their nesting instinct satisfied, you are free to stay out until 3am on a Saturday with your mates, as they'll always know if you haven't come home eventually. It's difficult to lie to your ‘flatmate', or indeed your flatmates. I knew far more about Sam's life when I was living with him than any girl who thought she'd got close to him ever did.

I, on the other hand, didn't seem to have any friends left to go out with until three in the morning. Ed, I was alarmed to read in the
Guardian
, appeared to have embarked on some kind of kamikaze mission to ensure no woman would ever speak to him again. Matt, who rang occasionally to keep me updated, appeared to have quickly shacked up as a house-husband to a Jewish princess. And Sam? Well, we didn't speak for a while, leaving me trapped with Jess, Jess's friends and Jess's bubble bath, which I had surprised myself by taking quite a shine to.

Throughout the weeks that followed my moving in with Jess, it upset me more than I could really articulate not being in contact with Sam. We had shared everything since we were children and I really wanted him to share my happiness – if that was the right word for it – now. I would certainly be a whole lot happier if he was part of it. I also wanted to know how his little scheme with Matt was going. Sam was fun to live vicariously through. It was like watching a movie featuring a slow car crash from which everyone eventually emerged, shaken but unscathed. But Matt didn't give me many details. Maybe he thought I would be shocked.

So when I saw a letter arrive through the post one Saturday
morning in December – a proper letter, no less; not a misspelled text message or a dashed-off email – bearing Sam's handwriting, I pounced on it eagerly. Long, amusing and heartfelt, it contained everything I hoped for. Sam explained why he felt weird about my moving out, how he had never had any stability in his life, and how our flat and our friendship was one of the few constants he enjoyed. He admitted that he was prone to looking back nostalgically at the ‘good old days' when he should be looking forward to the rest of his life. And to that end, my moving out was really a good thing because it had persuaded him to take some proactive steps to squire a young junior analyst at Taylor Williams called Rosie Morris by assuming the identity of a banker called Max Anderson-Bickley… And so it continued, for several pages, to detail his recent adventures. I felt a small pang of jealousy that he was having all the fun, along with a modicum of disapproval. Most of all, I felt relieved to be back in contact with my friend.

There was a short passage on Amanda, in which he asked if there had been any progress. He also apologised for being insensitive in recommending I screwed her sideways and repeated his recommendation to keep a record of anything she did.

There was no glowing praise of Jess – maybe that was asking too much – but he did apologise for being rude. ‘I didn't really mean what I said,' he wrote in the concluding paragraph. ‘I didn't really want you to go and fuck yourself. I wanted you to go and fuck your nice fiancée, Jess. And most of all, I just want you to be happy.'

Well, I don't mind admitting that I almost cried as I put the letter down in the small corner of the fuchsia-pink study I was allowed to call my own. Sam had called Jess ‘nice'. Not ‘beautiful' or ‘lovely' or ‘just right for you', but still, it was a start. Soon we'd be having him over for dinner parties, Classic FM and After Eights.

That weekend I bought a new fountain pen and started to
compose my reply. We were grown-ups now and it felt right to be communicating in a grown-up way. In any case, there was something I wanted to ask Sam that I thought would come across best in a letter: I wanted him to be my best man, whenever Jess decided our wedding was going to be. I was ready to forgive him.

I also wrote about Amanda and about how I had begun to feel more confident when dealing with her at work. She wasn't stupid, after all. Alcoholic, manipulative and amoral, yes. But not stupid. You didn't get to her position by being stupid. All I had to do was keep my nose clean and she would have nothing on me. Others in my team would vouch for me, if she decided to give a bad report. She had, however, been suspiciously quiet and pleasant of late. Amanda was only quiet when she was scheming.

My letter went on to mention plans for our engagement party, my hopes that my mum would get on with Jess, my concerns about Ed, etc.

In the end, none of this was relevant, because the letter was never sent.

The following Monday, I went to work as usual, wearing my Monday socks and Monday shirt, and left my half-finished reply next to Sam's letter on my desk. When I returned home, later than usual because Amanda had made me stay to do some extra menial work, both letters had vanished. I went through to the bedroom, where Jess was standing in the middle of the room, melodramatically ripping them into tiny shreds. How long had she been waiting there to start doing that, I wondered.