Three's A Crowd

I re-read the letter, noting the time and date of the celebration. A part of me thinks I should go; another more cautious side of me whispers that I shouldn’t bother. But there was a time, once, when Stef was my best friend…

              The cardboard box has been under my bed for so long that it’s accumulated enough dust to make me sneeze. I find a cloth and wipe down the outside carefully before removing the lid. Memories I’ve kept hidden for years stare at me – relics of a time when photos were taken with real cameras and developed in processing centres. It doesn’t take long to find the relevant one: all three of us together at someone’s party. Andy’s in between Stef and me. We’ve all got our arms round each other, grinning idiotically at the camera. Looking at it now, we seem more like the three stooges than the three musketeers, but I remember how we swore we’d look out for each other.

              Lies. Betrayal. That’s what made it all go wrong. We’re older now, though – able to forgive and forget.

              And by the following morning, I know I’ll be driving down to Devon in just over a week’s time.

When I set off, the photo’s on the passenger seat next to me along with the envelope containing the invitation, a tin of travel sweets, and a mini road atlas – just in case I run into problems with my phone’s map app. I usually listen to Radio 4, but the programme on offer (an interview with Michael Portillo about his political career) doesn’t interest me, so I turn down the sound until it’s just white noise in the background, letting my mind wander to the past.

Back in the 1980s, when we were at university, Andy, Stef and I were inseparable: a sort of unholy triumvirate. I met Stef first: she was in the same Hall of Residence as me, so I suppose our friendship was inevitable: walking to campus and back every day gives you plenty of time to talk. By the time we’d stumbled through Freshers’ Week and found our feet in the English department, we felt as if we’d known each other for years – and that’s why I could never tell her how I felt about Andy.

Andy. He was one of only six boys doing English, the rest of the First Years preferring to opt for more ‘manly’ pursuits, like Engineering or Physics. Back then, girls weren’t pushed towards sciences, the way they are now. Out of the seventy of us on the course, anyone with testosterone was seen as a bit of a novelty. He was a lovely guy too: well-read, a good listener, and an incredibly dry sense of humour. We clicked straight away. All three of us.

And that’s where the problem lay. When you develop a bit of a crush on someone, you could really do with the chance to spend time with them on your own, to put out feelers and ascertain whether this thing between you is just friendship or whether it has the potential to be something more. I couldn’t do that: not with Stef always there, hanging around like Banquo’s ghost whenever I wanted to find out how Andy felt about me. Every time I suggested a drink after lectures, Stef was there too. When I told him about this restaurant everyone was raving about, ‘The American Food Factory’, and asked if he wanted to try out the lasagne sometime, that turned into a threesome as well. It seemed as if I was fated to have my best friend – the Gooseberry – at my side, no matter where I went.

I’m just past Gloucester when the M5 grinds to a halt – well, not exactly a halt, but I’m crawling along at a speed which makes me worry that I won’t get through the next hundred plus miles in time to make it to the ceremony. I’d thought I’d given myself plenty of contingency time, leaving at 8 – the journey’s only supposed to take a little over two and a half hours; but at 10.30, I’m still sixty-five miles away with an ETA of 12.30, and the service is at 1.

I can’t really afford to stop at motorway services – not when I’m already running so much later than I intended – but I need the loo, and it won’t take many more minutes to grab a takeaway Costa. Necessary tasks performed, I’m back in the car, wondering if I’ll make it to the church on time or go straight to the function afterwards. And then, as I adjust my driving mirror, I catch sight of my reflection and wonder when I started looking so old.

My gaze returns to the photo: all three of us, aged 19 – it had been the party of a friend of a friend, not someone any of us really knew – looking as if nothing could ever come between us. I exit the services and filter back onto the motorway, trying to concentrate on the route, but my mind keeps returning to the point where it all changed – in our Second Year. All three of us decided to audition for the Guild Music Society – they were putting on ‘Oklahoma!’ and we thought it would be fun to mess around in the Chorus together; only, it turned out I had a much better singing voice than the other two did, and I found myself understudying Ado Annie whilst they were relegated to Costumes (Stef) and Props (Andy).

That’s when the trouble started: although Costumes and Props were vital to the whole production, they didn’t have to attend every rehearsal, like I did; and, pretty soon, the two of them were sloping off on their own for meals and walks and trips to the cinema. I could have wept with frustration – except I didn’t want to ruin my voice.

It came as no surprise, then, when Stef burst into my room one morning – whilst I was still getting dressed, no less – all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and bursting with requited love. I tried hard not to let her know how I really felt: plastered a smile on my face, told her I was happy for them both; but deep down, it hurt like hell.

As one week slipped into another, I felt as if I were being slowly suffocated by their cloying togetherness. How could I stand up on stage in a few weeks’ time and join the rest of the cast singing “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’!” when I was carrying a perpetual raincloud around with me? And the worst of it was, they were oblivious to my feelings.

The miles have disappeared while I’ve been lost in the past. I take a quick glance at the speedometer and hurriedly slow down. There’ll be plenty of time to sit and think about what happened and what might have been when I get there. But try as I might, my mind keeps returning to the fateful Friday when disaster struck and I decided to use Stef’s turmoil to my own advantage.

We’d just come out of our Friday morning Anglo-Saxon lecture – sans Andy, who did Combined Honours and had a German Lit class whilst we were struggling through ‘Beowulf’ – when one of the secretaries from the Arts Faculty office came charging up to us with an urgent message. Stef’s mother had been involved in an accident and was currently in Intensive Care at her local hospital.

I saw Stef’s face blanch as she heard the news. “I’ll have to go home straight away,” she said slowly. “It’s what? Eleven o’clock now? I’ll try to catch the twelve fifteen from New Street.”

We walked back to Hall together, my mind rejecting all the unwanted platitudes I knew Stef wouldn’t want to hear. Despite the way she’d stolen Andy from me, I felt sorry for her right now; hoped her mum would be okay.

With my help, Stef was packed in a matter of minutes. “Do you want me to walk to the station with you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I’ll get a taxi – it’ll be quicker.”

Hall was deserted at that hour, so there was no problem ordering a cab via the pay phones in the foyer.

It was as we were waiting for the taxi to arrive that Stef suddenly remembered Andy. “Can you give him a note, Jill?” She was scribbling down her parents’ phone number on a scrap of paper. “I might be at the hospital until quite late, but tell him to keep ringing until he gets hold of me. I’ve no way of contacting him myself.”

It’s strange to think now how different things would have been had mobile phones been invented then – or even email. As it was, Stef did the only thing she could: she trusted her best friend to pass on the necessary information to her boyfriend.

Once she’d gone, I went back to my room and put the note in an envelope with Andy’s name on it. That was my insurance policy, you see: if Stef ever found out that I hadn’t delivered her message, I’d tell her I put the note in an envelope and posted it under Andy’s door. If she insisted that we went to his flat to check, I could easily drop it down the back of the fridge when no one was looking, and there was my alibi. She’d never know the truth.

But, as it turned out, there was no need for such subterfuge. I knew that Andy always met Stef for lunch at 1.15 in the Guild – there was a bargain price salad bar there and they used to make a couple of pounds last an hour – so I set off to meet him and give him my version of events.

He looked a little surprised to see me. “Hi Jill. Are you joining Stef and me for lunch?”

“She’s not coming,” I told him, making my voice sad and sympathetic. “I’m really sorry, Andy – she’s found someone else.”

His face fell, like I knew it would. “No,” he said at last. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know this is hard for you,” I said gently. “They’ve gone to London together, for a romantic weekend. She took a taxi to the station just before twelve.”

At least that last bit was true.

“No,” he said again, looking less certain this time. Then, “Did you know about this? Before today, I mean?”

By the time we’d decamped to the bar and then spent the best part of the afternoon drowning Andy’s sorrows, he’d heard the full story of how Stef had been seeing this other guy behind his back the whole time she’d been dating him. “I had no idea,” he kept on repeating, the words gradually slurring into each other as bewildered incomprehension was replaced with alcohol-induced acceptance. After that, it was simply a matter of walking him back to his student flat, to ‘keep an eye on him’, and then suggesting that the best way to forget Stef would be to sleep with someone else.

I rang Stef myself the following day – ostensibly to enquire after her mother; but then I managed to inject enough guilt and regret into my voice for her to ask what was wrong.

“I’m so sorry,” I kept repeating. “It just happened. Neither of us planned it – honest.”

Stef didn’t come back to Hall until a week later; and, when she did, things were never the same. She didn’t even bother speaking to Andy – she confided to me later that what had hurt most wasn’t the fact that he’d cheated on her but that he hadn’t even rung to ask how her mum was. The light had gone out of her eyes – and pretty soon, it had gone out of our friendship as well.

The unbreakable friendship shattered into tiny pieces after my one-night stand with Stef’s boyfriend. That’s all it ever was between Andy and me: we were both too embarrassed after that single night to look each other in the eyes again. That was when I realised that it would have been better not to know; to hold Andy in my heart as an eternal what-might-have-been.

I’m passing Exeter now – just another 11 miles to go. My stomach tightens at the thought of seeing him again and I wonder what he looks like now he’s in his fifties. Of course, if this were a Hollywood movie, the three of us would end up having a tearful reunion in the last five minutes, and there’d be another photo of the three of us, forty years after the first one was taken.

I’m too late for a space anywhere near the church. Instead, I make do with the short stay car park on Imperial Road. I pay with my phone: I can always top up the time if I end up staying longer.

              Holy Trinity is a Grade II listed building. I sneak in as quietly as I can and take a seat at the back. The vicar’s still intoning the words of the Bible reading – something full of thees and thous from the old-fashioned King James version. I don’t remember Stef being much of a churchgoer, and I wonder whether this was her decision or her family’s.

              The reading’s over and the vicar announces a period of reflection before Andy goes up to the lectern to talk about Stef. “We fell in love forty years ago,” he says, his voice steadier than I expected it to be, “and then something happened – a misunderstanding – and we lost touch for a long time. I married someone else, and so did she. And then, three years ago, when we were both single again, we reconnected on Facebook, and I feel so lucky to have spent the last few years of her life with her.”

              I’d heard through the grapevine that is my mother that Stef had got married again; but until now, I hadn’t known the name of her husband. I hadn’t cared enough to ask.

Although I’d been planning on attending the wake afterwards – more from hunger than because I actually wanted to see anyone from our university days – I decide it would be too awkward if I stick around. It’s as I’m trying to sneak out as surreptitiously as I crept in that Andy spots me and hurries over.

“Jill!” And there’s genuine warmth in his voice. “I’m so glad you made it.”

“It was a lovely speech,” I say quickly. Then, “I’m glad it all worked out for you in the end.”

“Me too!” he says with feeling.

There’s a strained silence while we both try to think of something else to say.

“The next bit’s back at the house,” he says eventually.

“I can’t stay,” I say, hoping he won’t think me rude. “I just wanted to… to say goodbye.”

“She knew what you did.” His voice is quiet; he’s making direct eye contact. “And it really didn’t matter, because we wouldn’t have gone the distance anyway – not back then. You just made it happen a bit sooner.”

He puts his arms around me and hugs me. It’s not a hug like the one in the photo: that was the hug of a carefree boy who thought the fun and partying would last forever; and this is the embrace of a man who’s gained the maturity to find happiness in a few short years with someone he'd loved and lost and found again.

“She’s have been pleased you came,” he whispers, still holding me.

And that’s when I’m finally able to cry.