Peace Talks by Tim Finch

Author:Tim Finch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526611703
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

THE AFTERNOON OF THE WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY

One thing nobody has encouraged me to do is to start a new relationship. Indisputably ‘too soon, too much’: we can all agree on that. I suppose at some point there will come a time. Though, having said that, I wonder if there ever will. One of those touching care-home romances, perhaps? Even then …

For a start, I am still in a relationship with you. That relationship has suffered the most grievous shock and yet I am as committed to it, as intensely in love, as I have ever been. More so, in fact. What is going to change that? People say time – though thankfully never to me. I have found time to be a thin diluting agent. Or rather, it works to purge raw grief but at the same time bathes and beautifies and beatifies love. Steeps and essentialises it. What remains is a perfect distillation; love in its purest form – 100 per cent proof.

Not then the healthiest form?

I can hear you adding the qualifier. And here’s the paradox: more than anyone it is you I can most imagine urging on me a new relationship – not now … but in due course. Whatever that might mean? Look it up, why don’t you. (See, we are squabbling in that way we so enjoyed.) And yet – here’s the paradox again – remembering and so missing you in this irritating form is just what will stop me, give me pause.

Aha! Weakening already.

But I raise this business of a new relationship, why? Given that I appear to have done so only to dismiss it out of hand. I suppose part of it is that it has allowed me to make these declarations of – forgive me – undying love. I have been reflecting on the implications of the story of Phil and Babs, my ‘Unter den Linden’ moment. But also, while I was in London – for the briefest stopover – I had what might be termed a ‘date’.

And having said that, albeit qualified by those quotation marks, let me correct myself. (Why do I keep doing this?) For the word ‘date’ was certainly not used, or even implied, either by our friend Jean, who suggested I might like to meet up with her friend Josephine, or by Josephine herself, who was my dining companion. Dinner was the word used. Not even dinner date. And there was no sense among the parties to it (I include myself emphatically) that if the dinner went well, sex, romance, a relationship would come of it at some point. If not there and then – nothing so vulgar as that – then ‘in due course’, perhaps. And that is what a ‘date’ implies. At least it does to me. Am I wrong? Ignoring your grin, I consult my much-thumbed Shorter Oxford: ‘An appointment or engagement at a particular time (esp. with a person of the opposite sex)’. I am wrong. Or am I? I think we can agree

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