These intermittent friends were of different vintages: of the Fancy Boys, only Eric remained in his life. They were companionable for the necessary hours, and alcohol dissolved any distance between them. But in the way of things – or rather, in his way of things – he tended to remember mainly the phrases that either presumed or grated.
‘Still in the game, eh, Paul?’
‘Footloose and fancy-free?’
‘Not found Miss Right yet? Or should I say Señorita Rita?’
‘Do you think you’ll ever settle down?’
‘A pity you haven’t had kids. You’d have made a good father.’
‘Never too late. Never say die, old chum.’
‘Yes, but don’t forget: sperm degrades as we knock on.’
‘Don’t you long for that little cottage with a blazing log fire and grandchildren on the knee?’
‘He can’t have grandchildren without having children first.’
‘You’d be amazed what medical science can do nowadays.’
His occasional reappearances made some pleased with how their lives had turned out, and others, if not envious, a little restless. Then, in his fifties, he came home, moved to Somerset, and invested some of his savings.
‘What gave you the idea of cheese?’
‘Bad dreams for the rest of your life, old chum.’
‘Maybe there’s a little dairymaid involved?’
‘And look at the arse on that.’
‘Well, at least we’ll be seeing more of you now.’
But there was no dairymaid involved; and strangely, he didn’t end up seeing more of his intermittent friends. Somerset could turn out to be as distant as Valparaiso or Tennessee, if you wanted things that way. And perhaps he chose to remember their heavy joshing because it helped keep them at bay just as he had kept his women friends at bay. Though now some were keeping themselves at bay, having reached the age when illness arrives. There were emails about prostate cancer, and back operations, and that little bit of heart trouble which maybe wasn’t such good news. Vitamin pills and statins were consumed, while the World Service kept them company in their sleeplessness. And soon, no doubt, the funeral years would begin.
He remembered a friend he’d had, a lifetime back, at law college. Alan something. They hadn’t kept up, for one reason or another. Alan had spent seven years training to be a vet, but on qualifying had immediately switched to the law.
One day, he’d asked his friend why he’d thrown up his first career so abruptly. Had he suddenly decided he didn’t like animals? Was it the prospective hours? No, said Alan, none of that. He’d always thought it would be a good, purposeful job, helping to cure sick farmstock, bringing them either to safe birth or pain-free death, working outdoors, meeting all sorts of people. And it would have been all that, he knew. But what had finally put him off was a kind of squeamishness. He explained that if you spent several hours of the day with your arm up the backside of a cow, you couldn’t help breathing in the animal’s noxious exhalations. And that once they were inside you, they would inevitably seek to come back out again.
That was as far as Alan had gone. But he had naturally imagined Alan in bed with a girlfriend, and all going well between them, until some catastrophic build-up of cow gas hurtles from him, and the girl jumps from the bed, rushes for her clothes and is never seen again. Or perhaps this hadn’t happened, but Alan couldn’t bear to think of how it might be, if he was with someone he loved.
What had become of Alan? He had no idea. But Alan’s story had stayed with him ever since. Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared. The cow gas would out, in one direction or another. Then you just had to live with the consequences until it dispersed. And yes, it had caused more than one girlfriend to run for her clothes, not just Anna. And no, at those times, he had not been much of a stoic.
In his youth, hot with pride at his love for Susan, he had been competitive, as all young men are. My cock is bigger than yours; my heart is bigger than yours. Young bucks boasting of their girlfriends’ attributes. Whereas his boast had been: look how much more transgressive my relationship is than yours. And then, as welclass="underline" look at the strength of my feelings for her, and hers for me. Which was what counted, obviously, because the strength of feeling governed the degree of happiness, didn’t it? That had seemed blindingly logical to him at the time.
It used to be said that the Bhutanese were the happiest people on earth. In Bhutan there was little materialism, but a strong sense of kinship, society and religion. Whereas he lived in the materialistic West, where there was little religion and a weaker sense of both society and family. Did this give him an advantage, or a disadvantage?
More recently, the happiest people on earth were said to be the Danes. Not because of their supposed hedonism, but because of the modesty of their expressed hopes. Instead of aiming for the stars and the moon, their ambition was only to reach the next street lamp and, being pleased when they did so, were the happier for it. He remembered again that woman, somebody’s girlfriend, who said that she had lowered her expectations because this made you less likely to be disappointed. And therefore more happy? Was this what it was like to be Danish?
As for whether strength of feeling correlated to degree of happiness, his own experience now led him to doubt it. You might as well say, the more you ate, the better your digestion; or, the faster you drove, the quicker you got there. Not if you drove into a brick wall. He remembered that time, out in his Morris Minor with Susan, when the accelerator cable had broken, or jammed, or whatever. They were certainly roaring away up that hill, until he had the wit to disengage the clutch. He’d been doing two things at the same time: panicking and thinking clearly. That’s how his life had been, back then. Nowadays, he always thought clearly; but occasionally, he found he missed the panic.
And here was another factor, whether you were Bhutanese, Danish or British. If the statistics of happiness depend on personal reporting, how can we be sure that anyone is as happy as they claim to be? What if they aren’t telling the truth? No, we have to assume that they are, or at least that the testing system allows for lying. So the real question lay beneath: assuming that those canvassed by anthropologists and sociologists are reliable witnesses, then surely ‘being happy’ is the same as ‘reporting yourself happy’? Whereupon any subsequent objective analysis – of brain activity, for instance – becomes irrelevant. To say sincerely that you are happy is to be happy. At which point, the question disappears.
And if that was so, then perhaps the argument could be extended. For example, to say that you had once been happy, and to believe what you were saying, was the same as actually to have been happy. Could that be true? No, that was surely specious. On the other hand, the emotional record was not like a history book; its truths were constantly changing, and true even when incompatible.
For instance, he had noticed during his life one difference between the sexes in the reporting of relationships. When a couple broke up, the woman was more likely to say, ‘It was all fine until x happened.’ The x being a change of circumstances or location, the arrival of an extra child, or, all too often, some routine – or not so routine – infidelity. Whereas the man was more likely to say, ‘I’m afraid it was all wrong from the start.’ And he would be referring to a mutual incompatibility, or a marriage made under duress, or an unrevealed secret on one or both sides, which had later emerged. So she was saying ‘We were happy until,’ while he was saying, ‘We were never really happy.’ And when he had first noticed this discrepancy, he had tried to work out which of them was more likely to be telling the truth; but now, at the other end of his life, he accepted that both were doing so. ‘In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.’