Those Whom the Gods Love

‘Good, a carnivore. We can go on drinking red.’

‘Fine. Whatever. You know, I’ve been wanting to ask you something.’

‘Yes?’ He didn’t sound interested, probably too busy signalling to the waiter. Ginty kept quiet until they’d ordered and been left alone again. She wanted Harbinger to concentrate before she launched her quest.

‘I’m thinking of writing a piece about this new crisis of masculinity,’ she began when she had his attention again. He laughed.

‘You know,’ she went on, ‘all these young men who are killing themselves either because they can’t cope with competition from strong women, or because they feel undervalued in a world in which female skills are needed much more than traditionally macho strength.’

‘It’s a load of cock.’ Harbinger’s shoulders had tightened under the loose, cream linen jacket. ‘Nothing more than a product of all those noisy feminists seeing their sons growing up. Now that they have to watch their cosseted darlings being made to suffer by girlfriends, they’re at last realizing what they’ve put their husbands and lovers through all these years. They’re manufacturing this idea of a new crisis to get themselves off the hook of their own guilt.’ He shook his head, as though he’d got water in his ears.

‘You could be right,’ Ginty said, drooping over her plate. She picked at some wax from the leaky candle that had settled on the rough wooden table in a warm, yielding mass. ‘After all, young men killing themselves isn’t anything new, is it?’

Harbinger said nothing. When she looked up, he was staring at her.

‘I mean, you did have rather a traumatic time yourself at Oxford, when that friend of yours hanged himself, didn’t you?’

‘How did you get on to that?’

She’d been prepared for him to be angry or contemptuous, but he wasn’t. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was grateful. But that was absurd.

‘I’ve been reading the account of the inquest in The Times and talking to one or two people. What happened, John?’ Her voice was gentle and she knew her eyes were soft. It wasn’t completely fake. He’d known her father and she wanted to find her father loveable.

‘Oh, God!’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m not sure that I can. But … Hell!’

The waiter was back, bringing their food. Ginty waited, but the moment had passed. Harbinger picked up his fork and started eating, gulping down his twice-cooked goat’s cheese souffleé like a pelican choking down an enormous fish. She ate some of the slippery roasted peppers on her plate. The oil coating them had been spiked with balsamic vinegar, and the caramelized edges of the skin added bitterness. The sweet sliding flesh turned to pulp between her tongue and her palate. She swallowed easily.

‘You’re right. I did have a friend who topped himself,’ Harbinger said abruptly. He picked up two lettuce leaves from the garnish on his plate, rolled them into a sausage and stuffed them in his mouth, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. Before he’d swallowed, he muttered something.

‘Sorry?’ Ginty leaned forwards to hear better. He didn’t repeat himself. She poured more wine into his glass. ‘Tell me about him, John. I know his name and I’ve seen his photograph. But what was he like? Steven Flyford.’

Harbinger flinched. Staring at the table, he said: ‘He was my best friend: vulnerable, anxious, eager to please. Good company, too, and clever and kind.’

Something in Ginty’s neck let go and her teeth unclamped.

‘What made him so unhappy, then, that he had to kill himself? The inquest report wasn’t clear.’

Harbinger shook his head. ‘There were all sorts of theories. None of them seemed quite right.’

‘Didn’t he leave any kind of note?’

Harbinger couldn’t think why she was asking all these questions. She’d let him off the hook with her resounding statement on the radio about date rape. That should have been the end of it. Not this inquisition that seemed to go nagging on and on. Somehow he had to stop her asking questions.

He took a great swig of wine, trying not to remember the inquest, trying to concentrate on the face in front of him, with its freckles and its crossed teeth and the wide, hurt, brown eyes. But it didn’t work. He even tried to think about pulling her to distract himself from his memories. But that didn’t work either. That bloody, wet day in Oxford came rolling back like the waves up a beach where he and Steve had once nearly drowned.

They hadn’t known how sharply the ground would shelve away or how strong the undertow that would suck them down. It had been Sasha who’d rescued them then, standing on the beach yelling instructions, wading into the surf to pull them out of the grip of the water with a strong arm.

Coming out of the inquest had been a bit like that, too, with Sasha sniffing back tears as she pulled off her big black felt Biba hat and announced that they’d all better go for a drink now to take the taste away.

‘We could have stopped him,’ she said as she twisted the big, black felt hat between her hands. ‘He never talked about suicide, even when he was most depressed. If it was getting that bad, he should’ve told us. We could have helped, got him into the Warnford even.’

Dom pushed up his spectacles with one lanky finger, hovered on the edge of the first word, then got it out without too much stammering: ‘He w-wouldn’t have wanted to worry us. He never did. That’s why he wrote that letter: ‘Don’t let this make you sad. It’s the best way. And afterwards n-nothing will matter any more.’

The coroner had asked each of them in turn if they had any idea who the ‘you’ in the letter might be, just as he’d asked Steve’s parents and his two elder sisters. None of them had had any suggestion to make. Sasha had said she thought it must be a member of his family because he hadn’t been close enough to anyone else to care that much about them. John had been sure it was a plural ‘you’, addressed to everyone who’d liked Steve. Robert thought it might be Steve’s girlfriend, Virginia Callader. But she hadn’t thought so.

They’d half expected her or one of her rugger-bugger friends to start telling the court all about the supposed rape, but no one had actually said the word. Even she seemed to have thought better of the whole idiotic story.

‘But why didn’t he tell us why he did it?’ Robert burst out. ‘Didn’t he realize how we’d worry? Bloody selfish.’

They were at the door of The King’s Arms by then, so they went in and Harbinger got four pints. Sasha took her usual healthy swallow and saw that they were all looking at her.

‘Just because I’m a medical student, it doesn’t mean I …’

‘Not because of that,’ John said impatiently, ‘but because you’re a girl. What d’you think Virginia did to make him kill himself?’

Sasha shrugged. In her black coat, her shoulders looked almost as broad as Robert’s. Dom’s were puny by comparison.

‘At the beginning she said he raped her,’ she started uncertainly, then couldn’t think of anything else.

‘Bollocks to that,’ John said. ‘Steve couldn’t have raped anyone. You know that. And he couldn’t have heard the story either. Didn’t you hear the pathologist say he must have died some time in the night? The one good thing is that he can’t ever have heard what she said about him. Where’s Fergus?’

‘Couldn’t face talking. He went back to Merton as soon as he’d given his evidence.’

‘Poor bugger!’

John’s cheek muscles began to tighten as he tried not to laugh. Sasha glared at him. He knew why: Steve was dead, Fergus was pretty nearly desperate, but John still couldn’t stop himself seeing the joke. He caught her eye and grinned at her, making her smile back. Suddenly she let go and roared with laughter. Robert and John joined in, but Dom pushed up his specs again, looking like an adult disgusted at children’s antics, and that made it worse.

Suddenly John coughed, and the black joke stopped being at all funny. He tried to get some more bitter down his throat.

‘D’you think maybe Virginia laughed that night?’ he said. ‘At him, I mean. Steve.’

Sasha’s face reminded him of a hare that’s heard something in the undergrowth. After a moment she nodded.

‘You mean that if he couldn’t get it up she might have teased him?’

‘Yeah. It was his first time, after all; he wasn’t sure he could do it. I know he was worried. Don’t you think it could’ve been that?’

‘But Virginia looked awful in The Goat that day. She wouldn’t have if she’d …’

‘I’m not so sure,’ John said soberly. ‘You know what Steve could be like when he was in a state about something. What if he realized he couldn’t screw her, hated her laughing at him, and went silent on her? You know how he got sometimes, Sash.’

‘White, silent and shaking,’ she said nodding.

After a second, she brushed the back of her hand over her eyes. It came away wet and black. She was crying again. Sasha of all people, who never minded anything. The smell of beer and fag ends sickened him.

‘With that suggestion of tears making his eyes go pink?’

‘Yes,’ John said, staring at the festoons of foam that hung on the inside of his empty tankard. ‘That could be grim.’

‘And the more you tried to help, to get him to talk, the whiter he’d get and the bigger his eyes.’

John wondered why it hadn’t ever occurred to any of them to suggest that Steve shagged Sasha. That would have been infinitely more sensible. Sasha wouldn’t have gone in for all this rape nonsense. And Steve would still be alive. Of course, he hadn’t fancied her. Who could, with that great arse of hers? But she’d have been kind to him, and it would have been a lot better for all of them.

Robert and Dom were turning from Sasha to John, as though they were at a tennis match. Both looked astonished. Obviously neither of them had ever known the real Steve. Dom got up and fished in his pocket for a handkerchief. When he’d polished his spectacles, he blew his nose. John and Sasha both started to speak at the same time. He deferred to her.

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