lunch-time slot on Wednesday and a double-slot on the Friday late-shift.” As if regretting how bleak this sounded he added quickly: “But I never minded his appointments. I really did like him.”
I thought: you ploughed him under. It took me an enormous effort to sustain the conversation by saying: “What was it about him that you liked?”
I had expected some facile answer but to my surprise he gave me a weird spiel, shocking in its old-fashioned ideology, about how Richard had “lived out his own truth” as a closet gay despite his “handicap.”
“Handicap!” I could hardly believe my ears.
“His word, not mine! He said he had the right to choose what to call his orientation and the right to choose how to live his life!”
But I thought of Moira and the children, impaled on that right to choose, and before I could stop myself I was saying: “There can be no rights without corresponding responsibilities. Did it never occur to him he could mess up other people’s lives as well as his own?”
“Oh wow, Ms. Priggy, you’re so sexy when you take the moral high ground!”
I ignored this rubbish. “You’ve got it wrong,” I said strongly. “Richard was the very opposite of a man who lived out his own truth. I also think he’d come to realise this but he was frantically trying to push the truth away with all this desperate talk about rights. He should have come out of the closet, and society’s to blame for the fact that he felt he couldn’t.”
“Oh God, a bleeding-heart liberal!”
“Well, of course I’m not surprised you’re a homophobe. You can’t acknowledge your real orientation so you despise gays while hamming it up as a straight!”
Gavin just laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded in fury.
“You, sweetie! You and your ignorance! Okay, ready for the learning curve? First of all, there’s no block of identical people who can be labelled ‘gay’ and explained according to a single set of rules. Gays are as diverse as us straights, and Richard was a wonderful example of an up-yours individualist who couldn’t stand the gay activists ordering him about.”
“Yes, but—”
“The next thing to take on board is that I’m not a homophobe. As I see it, there are shits and there are good guys, and each category has gay and straight people in it.”
“Well, all right, but—”
“And finally I think you should allow the gays to take some responsibility for their actions instead of blaming their rough deal on ‘society’— whatever that is. If you tell any mixed bunch of people that society’s at the root of their problems, you’ll always find some who’ll develop a poor-little-me victim culture and start whingeing—and I don’t know about you but I happen to find moaning minnies bloody unattractive. The great thing about Richard was that he was nobody’s victim, he never whinged—”
“—and he went through hell because the strain of living a lie had become too damn much for him!”
Gavin said abruptly in a cut-glass public-school accent: “The double-life was his choice and it was a choice he was entitled to make. If it turned out to be the wrong choice that’s tough, but I’d still defend his right to go to hell in any way he chose.”
We drove on without speaking to Mayfair.
II
Richard’s flat was on the first floor of one of those elderly Mayfair houses built in pinkish-red stone. Gavin had trouble parking the car, but when we finally walked away up North Audley Street he said: “Can we have a truce, Frosty-Puss?”
“Not unless you call me by my correct name.”
“Okay, Catriona.”
“Carta will do.”
“You bet she will! I got lucky!”
I stopped in the middle of the pavement and swung to face him. “Look,” I said exasperated, “what’s the point of all these heavy passes? You don’t need them to get your message across so why do you have to keep ramming it down my throat the whole time?”
“I should be so lucky!”
“Right.
Michael Cunningham
Janet Eckford
Jackie Ivie
Cynthia Hickey
Anne Perry
A. D. Elliott
Author's Note
Leslie Gilbert Elman
Becky Riker
Roxanne Rustand