Amos and I go back a long way, and our relationship has always been one of comfortable familiarity rather than of intimacy. We were at music college together, where we did all the usual student things; rag weeks, beer-drinking contests in The Bell, wild parties and giggling trials of a range of ‘illegal substances’. When I think back to my student days, I wonder why anyone put up with us at all, but then maybe they too had enjoyed their years of reckless irresponsibility.
And of course, we played our music. The one thing we were all passionate about was our music, and we spent long hours in cramped practice rooms playing our scales and studies. Amos’s preferred practice room was adjacent to mine, and to this day I believe that one of the reasons I have tended to play too loudly is all those hours trying to drown out the sound of the trombone. Once, only once, I knocked on his door and asked whether he could tone it down a bit.
‘Tone it down?’ Amos roared, appearing in the doorway like Moses delivering the ten commandments. ‘Tone it down? What do you think this is?’ He waved his instrument at me. ‘A bloody harmonica? You get back to your scraping and I’ll do my blowing, and may the best man win.’
I never complained again, and soon afterwards we became friends.
We laughed at each other’s jokes (Amos could be very funny) and cried on each other’s shoulders. We advised each other on matters of the opposite sex and commiserated when things went wrong (which they frequently did). Amos weaned me off what he called ‘silly drinks’ (Bacardi and coke, snowballs and Avocaat) and introduced me to the delights of Merrydown cider and best bitter, and we even briefly shared a flat. Free from the complications and pitfalls of sexual attraction (we had long since agreed that we were not each other’s type), our friendship lasted happily throughout our student days, and while there have been times when we have had little contact with each other, we have always kept in touch.
Amos is far more gifted than I, and I envied him his musicianship, which he seemed to take for granted. While I had to work hard to pass my exams (college examinations were a far cry from the ones I had taken at school), Amos seemed to sail effortlessly through his. While I panicked and lost sleep, Amos remained calm and optimistic.
‘It’s just an exam,’ he used to tell me. ‘Just a silly little exam.’ And he would clock up yet another distinction.
But the world outside college was tough and competitive, and when we left, Amos struggled as much as I did to find work. He did some jazz, and some teaching, and even spent a season playing in a dance band on a cruise liner, while I spent three years playing in a string quartet, which eventually folded through lack of funds (and, I suspect, talent), taught on the peripatetic circuit, and did a few more run of the mill jobs while ‘resting’ between musical engagements. My parents tempered their disappointment with quiet triumph. Hadn’t they always said that my chosen career was a perilous one? I did my best to ignore them. In the meantime, Amos and I drifted apart.
It was the orchestra which brought us together again.
New, young and enthusiastic, for a while the orchestra did fairly well under its prize-winning youthful conductor (another colleague from college days). We worked hard, travelled long distances, and accepted pitiful salaries to make it work, but in an age when even the best orchestras struggle for money, it was doomed. After a difficult two years, our conductor reluctantly decided to down-size from full symphony orchestra to chamber group, and since there is no room in such an ensemble for second-rate violinists or even first-rate trombonists, Amos and I found ourselves out of a job.
At about the same time, Amos and his wife of eighteen months decided to divorce. I had always had my doubts about Annabelle (so, he told me afterwards, had Amos), but had never voiced them. Annabelle was willowy, glamorous and fiercely intelligent, but utterly unmusical. Having done everything she could to mould Amos into the kind of husband she wanted (if she didn’t like beards, trombones, or beer, why on earth had she married him?), she found herself a sleekly pin-striped financial wizard and settled cosily with him into the gleaming chrome and glass and leather of his riverside flat. This didn’t prevent her from trying to take Amos for everything she could get (he had practically nothing, so her efforts were fruitless), and the experience left Amos disillusioned and miserable.
‘It’s not that I still love her,’ he confided to me in the pub, on that last evening together. ‘It’s just that everything’s turned so nasty. She doesn’t want me. I don’t want her. Period. Why can’t we leave it at that? What’s wrong with “irretrievable breakdown”? Few things could be as irretrievably broken down as our marriage. But no. She wants to cite “unreasonable behaviour”.’
‘Hers or yours?’
‘Mine of course.’
‘What unreasonable behaviour?’ I asked him.
‘Good question.’ Amos sipped his pint. ‘Something about noisy practising and chicken curry and socks —’
‘Socks?’
‘I like brightly-coloured socks and she hates them. Hardly grounds for divorce.’
‘Couldn’t you have worn more subdued ones?’ I ventured.
‘Ruth, you’re missing the point.’
‘Which is?’
‘The woman is totally unreasonable. Another beer?’
‘Please.’
Amos pushed our empty glasses across the bar and nodded to the barman.
‘No mention of her adultery, of course,’ he continued. ‘Now that is grounds for divorce. But, oh dear me, no. I’m not allowed to drag her precious “private life” through the divorce courts. So it’s back to me and my curries and my socks.’ He sighed. ‘I never asked for all this unpleasantness, but it seems that it goes with the territory. I just want to get the whole thing sorted as painlessly as possible. Not a lot to ask, really.’
I agreed that it wasn’t.
‘Thank God we didn’t have a kid.’
‘Did she want one?’
‘No. Annabelle’s career means far too much to her.’
‘And you? Did you want children?’
Amos gazed into this beer glass, as though searching for an answer.
‘Yes. Yes, I think I did. Well, I did once, anyway. But marriage to Annabelle soon put paid to that.’
‘But with the right person?’ I persisted.
‘Ah. The right person.’ Amos grinned. ‘With the right person it might be quite a different story. Yes. I think with the right person kids would be fun.’
How ironical that only a couple of hours after this conversation took place we were destined to make our own baby.
Of course, the baby would never have happened if Amos hadn’t invited me back to his flat for coffee.
‘You’re too tipsy to go home yet,’ he said, steering me out of the pub and down the road (I had driven up to see him). ‘You need coffee, and plenty of it.’
But the coffee failed to make much impression, so Amos suggested that I should stay the night.
‘You can have my bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa,’ he said.
His words hung in the air like something unfinished, as though waiting for one of us to deal with them. I looked at the sofa. It seemed about half the length of Amos; it was even too short for me. Amos caught my glance and smiled at me. I smiled back. I noticed for the first time that he had very sexy eyes (how come it had taken me so long?) and Amos obviously found something he rather liked about me. He took my hand.
‘On the other hand...’ he said.
‘On the other hand,’ I replied.
We both laughed, and suddenly, we were in each other’s arms, tearing at each other’s clothes like a pair of teenagers. Within minutes, the floor was littered with shirts, jeans, socks (including fluorescent green ones) and underwear, and we were hot-footing it to the bedroom.
Amos was a good lover; gentle and considerate as well as passionate; and despite the effects of several pints of beer (usually death to my libido) I found myself responding in a most satisfactory manner. Afterwards, I lay with my head on his chest thinking fondly of the importance of old friends and wondering why on earth we had never done this before.
‘We make a good team, don’t we?’ Amos said, stroking my hair as we drifted towards sleep.
‘Mm.’
‘Shall we do this again some time?’
I laughed.
‘Why not?’
I could feel him smiling in the darkness.
‘Why not indeed.’
But when we parted company the next morning, we made no plans for a repeat performance. Amos had his divorce to worry about, together with the question of where the next pay cheque was coming from, and I had my gap year. But we promised to keep in touch, and meet up again “some time”.
‘I’ll send you a postcard,’ I told him as we kissed each other goodbye.
‘Send me lots,’ Amos said, ‘One from every destination.’
‘I’ll do that,’ I promised.
But we had both forgotten that Amos was having to move out of his flat and didn’t yet know where he would be living, and neither of us could have known that the piece of paper upon which I’d written down his new mobile number had already been left behind, mislaid in a tumble of bedclothes.
By the time I reached my car that morning, I had already lost Amos.