from other people. He’s sort of better than other people. He is my age. He is a public law barrister in what people describe to me as ‘a sexy set’. (What can this possibly mean?) His father is very high up in the newspaper and magazine business, and a baronet. Tom is happily married to Lucy, a beautiful woman (Varsity sweetheart) who trades bonds. He drives an Alfa Spider. He got a rowing Half-Blue at Oxford. He wrote a novel about art theft when he was 26. As I was being reminded now, as the cab came to a growling halt outside his house, he lives in a mews house in Holland Park. He’s funny, clever, charming and handsome. He speaks three languages. He’s my ‘best friend’. He scores 73. The maths in detail:
Nowadays, I have to mark him down on
He is my best friend as I say, but it is a friendship increasingly sustained by distant historical links, rather than current behaviour. I have somewhere a chart which illustrates our drifting apart. The salient points are as follows: in the first couple of years after university we saw each other on average 2.1 times a week. He moved in with Lucy, at this point, and the average over the next year went down suddenly to 1.3, but didn’t further decline over the next year, in fact it held firm at 1.4. Then things started to go wrong; a sudden dive to 0.6, and a constant decline, until here we were at the end of 1995 and I’d seen him four times all year, and not since the summer.
The reason was simple: he was changing, I was staying the same. The best example of this was in our attitude to children.
My view was concise and uncontroversial: the process of acquiring children, as it takes place in the British middle classes, is an exercise in eugenics. Both parties in the enterprise spend their early sexual career sifting and sorting prospective mates on the basis of their appearance, bloodstock, prosperity, psychology, intelligence, hair colour, etc. It is not until it is felt by both parties that a satisfactory balance is struck on these criteria that any firm agreement on procreation is made, and this agreement is usually consecrated in a formal, social context. This gathering, setting the couple off in their best light, effectively invites the others in attendance to speculate on how beautiful, intelligent and socially useful the putative offspring will be. The male attempts to inseminate the female shortly after. If at any stage of the incubation period it is determined that the child is likely to be sub-standard in any of the crucial respects, it is ‘terminated’, and you start all over again. Preferences are for obedient, outgoing, straight-backed, easy-tanning, blue-eyed blonds who are capable of propagating the genetic inheritance into the distant future. A thousand years, perhaps. You can see where this is heading.
Tom, although perhaps not quite as visionary, was, in his early twenties, sceptical. He could see that children often represent dilution rather than increase, and place intolerable restrictions on freedom, and unforeseeable destructive pressures on existing relationships. Indeed, this view seemed to be increasingly widely held. Here was a generation on the cusp of their thirties, the women with their best gestating days behind them, and the slither, thud and squeal of childbirth was as yet utterly unheard. The difference was, amongst our disparate circle, that the book was now closed on who would be first to drop. Tom and Lucy had, it was rumoured, ‘been trying’ for six months, which was interesting as I had found them trying for somewhat longer. Tom was already an authority on school fees and IQ-enhancing dietary supplements. Interleaved with The Economist and EuroMoney in their magazine rack were copies of Spawn, Your Foetus and Perineal Suture Today, or whatever those baby-zines are called. Anyway, I stood there outside their Downing Street-style door, and as soon as Lucy opened the door, the beam on her face told me everything. The master race was goosestepping into town.
I managed a hurried, ‘Oh, you clever girl!’ and an awkward hug and air kiss before unconvincingly bolting up the stairs for their toilet to avoid unnecessary kerfuffle. When I reappeared I hailed Tom, who was unloading wine from a case.
‘Well done, you grubby little fucker. I knew you’d muster a chubby eventually.’
Tom and Lucy were moving between the sitting room and the doll’s house kitchen, laying out bottles and decanting snack foods, mainly those gnarled and weighty crisps that are about four quid a bag, and some sweaty-looking black olives.
Lucy walked over and gave me another hug. ‘Aren’t you happy for us?’
Happy, no. Nauseated, yes. I avoided eye contact as she withdrew.
‘Cnava drink?’
‘Oh, Frank, you’re such a charmer.’ She tried to make it sound jovial, but there was an undercurrent of exasperation. Or hurt.
‘Leave him alone, Luce. What do you want, Frank?’
‘Champagne. Can I throw my coat somewhere?’
‘Yeah, chuck it in our room but come down quickly, we want to ask you something.’
I went upstairs, feeling a little scared. They were obviously going to give me some duty to perform, and to be honest I just don’t do duties, as a rule, they’re a bit too close to responsibilities.
I had always found their house unsettling. It was, effectively, a miniature replica of both their family homes, perhaps an acknowledgement that their parents had been right about most things after all. Every wall that wasn’t cream was magnolia and the doorframes and skirting boards were an unrealistic icing-sugar white. In fact the entire house was a cake, a three-hundred-grand cake: from the outside, it was pastel-pink with three big sash windows again painted pure white, all of which suggested Battenburg. Their tiny bedroom where I was now dumping my coat was baby-blue, with a snowdrift of duvet swathing the wrought-iron bed. The curtains were pale blue and white gingham. There was a Renoir print. The whole thing whispered ‘fondant fancy’. I understood the frisson that burglars must feel when they crap in the houses they burgle as I draped my disgraceful brackish overcoat on the bed.
Back downstairs Tom and Lucy were standing parentally by their glacier-white christening-cake mantelpiece, swirling their champagne in their glasses. The huge brass-framed mirror behind them held me in its placid stare. Tom looked conspiratorially at his wife, who nodded at him.
‘Well, Frank, we got you here early because we’d really like you to be godfather to our baby.’
He was beaming like a maniac. She was grinning at me with her eyebrows raised. I panicked.
‘Oh, my God. I don’t have to do anything, do I?’
They both thought about it for a moment and then looked at each other quizzically.
‘I think you have to renounce Satan, but not much else.’
‘No, I mean, if anything happens to you two, do I have to do anything?’
‘Well, that’s a bit of a negative thought, Frank. We hadn’t really got that far.’
‘No, of course not, I’m sorry, I just don’t want to let anyone down.’
Tom’s brow creased. ‘For Christ’s sake, Frank. Come on! We’re trying to tell you that we like you and we want you to be our child’s godfather. Ey? Ey?’
He was prodding me in the stomach now.
‘Yeah,
