A Special Relationship Read online

  Tony was always defensive about one thing: his height … though, as I assured him on more than one occasion, his diminutive stature didn’t matter a damn to me. On the contrary, I found it rather touching that this highly accomplished and amusingly arrogant man would be so vulnerable about his physical stature. And I came to realize that much of Tony’s bravado – his need to ask all the tough questions, his competitiveness for a story, and his reckless self-endangerment – stemmed out of a sense of feeling small. He secretly considered himself inadequate: the perennial outsider with his nose to the window, looking in on a world from which he felt excluded. It took me a while to detect Tony’s curious streak of inferiority since it was masked behind such witty superiority. But then I saw him in action one day with a fellow Brit – a correspondent from the Daily Telegraph named Wilson. Though only in his mid-thirties, Wilson had already lost much of his hair and had started to develop the sort of over-ripe fleshiness that made him (in Tony’s words) look like a wheel of Camembert that had been left out in the sun. Personally, I didn’t mind him – even though his languid vowels and premature jowliness (not to mention the absurd tailored safari jacket he wore all the time with a check Viyella shirt) gave him a certain cartoonish quality. Though he was perfectly amiable in Wilson’s company, Tony couldn’t stand him – especially after an encounter we had with him at the Gezira Club. Wilson was sunning himself by the pool. He was stripped to the waist, wearing a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and suede shoes with socks. It was not a pretty sight. After greeting us, he asked Tony, ‘Going home for Christmas?’

  ‘Not this year.’

  ‘You’re a London chap, right?’

  ‘Buckinghamshire, actually.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Amersham.’

  ‘Ah yes, Amersham. End of the Metropolitan Line, isn’t it? Drink?’

  Tony’s face tightened, but Wilson didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he called over one of the waiters, ordered three gin-and-tonics, then excused himself to use the toilet. As soon as he was out of earshot, Tony hissed, ‘Stupid little prat.’

  ‘Easy, Tony …’ I said, surprised by this uncharacteristic flash of anger.

  ‘“End of the Metropolitan Line, isn’t it?”’ he said, mimicking Wilson’s over-ripe accent. ‘He had to say that, didn’t he? Had to get his little dig in. Had to make the fucking point.’

  ‘Hey, all he said was …’

  ‘I know what he said. And he meant every bloody word …’

  ‘Meant what?’

  ‘You just don’t get it.’

  ‘I think it’s all a little too nuanced for me,’ I said lightly. ‘Or maybe I’m just a dumb American who doesn’t get England.’

  ‘No one gets England.’

  ‘Even if you’re English?’

  ‘Especially if you’re English.’

  This struck me as something of a half-truth. Because Tony understood England all too well. Just as he also understood (and explained to me) his standing in the social hierarchy. Amersham was deeply dull. Seriously petit bourgeois. He hated it, though his only sibling – a sister he hadn’t seen for years – had stayed on, living at home with the parents she could never leave. His dad – now dead, thanks to a life-long love affair with Benson and Hedges – had worked for the local council in their Records Office (which he finally ended up running five years before he died). His mom – also dead – worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery, located opposite the modest little suburban semi in which he was raised.

  Though Tony was determined to run away from Amersham and never look back, he did go out of his way to please his father by landing a place at York University. But when he graduated (with high honours, as it turned out – though, in typical phlegmatic Tony-style, it took him a long time to admit that he received a prized First in English), he decided to dodge the job market for a year or so. Instead, he took off with a couple of friends bound for Kathmandu. But somehow they ended up in Cairo. Within two months, he was working for a dodgy English language newspaper, the Egyptian Gazette. After six months of reporting traffic accidents and petty crimes and the usual small beer stuff, he started offering his services back in Britain as a Cairo-based freelancer. Within a year, he was supplying a steady stream of short pieces to the Chronicle – and when their Egyptian correspondent was called back to London, the paper offered him the job. From that moment on, he was a Chronicle man. With the exception of a brief six-month stint back in London during the mid-eighties (when he threatened to quit if they didn’t post him back in the field), Tony managed to drift from one hot spot to another. Of course, for all his talk of frontline action and total professional independence, he still had to bite the corporate bullet and do a couple of stints as a bureau guy in Frankfurt, Tokyo and Washington, DC (a town he actively hated). But despite these few concessions to the prosaic, Tony Hobbs worked very hard at eluding all the potential traps of domesticity and professional life that ensnared most people. Just like me.

  ‘You know, I always end up cutting and running out of these things,’ I told Tony around a month after we started seeing each other.

  ‘Oh, so that’s what this is – a thing.’

  ‘You know what I’m saying.’

  ‘That I shouldn’t get down on one knee and propose – because you’re planning to break my heart?’

  I laughed and said, ‘I really am not planning to do that.’

  ‘Then your point is … what?’

  ‘My point is …’

  I broke off, feeling profoundly silly.

  ‘You were about to say?’ Tony asked, all smiles.

  ‘The point is …’ I continued, hesitant as hell. ‘I think I sometimes suffer from “foot in mouth” disease. And I should never have made such a dumb comment.’

  ‘No need to apologize,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not apologizing,’ I said, sounding a little cross, then suddenly said, ‘Actually I am. Because …’

  God, I really was sounding tongue-tied and awkward. Once again, Tony just continued smiling an amused smile. Then said, ‘So you’re not planning to cut-and-run?’

  ‘Hardly. Because … uh … oh, will you listen to me …’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘Because … I’m so damn happy with you, and the very fact that I feel this way is surprising the hell out of me, because I really haven’t felt this way for a long time, and I’m just hoping to hell you feel this way, because I don’t want to waste my time on someone who doesn’t feel this way, because …’

  He cut me off by leaning over and kissing me deeply. When he finished, he said, ‘Does that answer your question?’

  ‘Well …’

  I suppose actions speak louder than words – but I still wanted to hear him say what I had just said. Then again, if I wasn’t very good at outwardly articulating matters of the heart, I’d come to realize that Tony was even more taciturn on such subjects. Which is why I was genuinely surprised when he said, ‘I’m very pleased you’re not cutting and running.’

  Was that a declaration of love? I certainly hoped so. At that moment, I knew I was in love with him. Just as I also knew that my bumbling admission of happiness was about as far as I’d go in confessing such a major emotional truth. Such admissions have always been difficult for me. Just as they were also difficult for my schoolteacher parents – who couldn’t have been more supportive and encouraging when it came to their two children, but who also were deeply buttoned-down and reserved when it came to public displays of affection.

  ‘You know, I can only once remember seeing our parents kiss each other,’ my older sister Sandy told me shortly after they were killed in an automobile accident. ‘And they certainly didn’t score big points on the tactile front. But that really didn’t matter, did it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It didn’t at all.’

  At which point Sandy broke down completely and wept so loudly that her grief sounded something like keening. My own displays of raw public grief were few in
the wake of their death. Perhaps because I was too numb from the shock of it all to cry. The year was 1988. I was twenty-one. I had just finished my senior year at Mount Holyoke College – and was due to start a job at the Boston Post in a few weeks. I’d just found an apartment with two friends in the Back Bay area of the city. I’d just bought my first car (a beat-up VW Beetle for a thousand bucks), and had just found out that I was going to graduate magna cum laude. My parents couldn’t have been more pleased. When they drove up to the college to see me get my degree that weekend, they were in such unusually ebullient form that they actually went to a big post-commencement party on campus. I wanted them to spend the night, but they had to get back to Worcester that evening for some big church event the next day (like many liberal New Englanders, they were serious Unitarians). Just before they got into the car, my father gave me a big uncharacteristic hug and said that he loved me.

  Two hours later, while driving south, he nodded off at the wheel on the Interstate. The car veered out of control, crashed through the centre guard rail and careened right into the ongoing path of another car – a Ford station wagon. It was carrying a family of five. Two of the occupants – a young mother and her baby son – were killed. So too were my parents.

  In the wake of their death, Sandy kept expecting me to fall apart (as she was doing constantly). I know that it both upset and worried her that I wasn’t succumbing to loud, outward heartbreak (even though anyone who saw me at the time could tell that I was in the throes of major trauma). Then again, Sandy has always been the emotional roller coaster in the family. Just as she’s also been the one fixed geographic point in my life – someone to watch over me (as I have watched over her). But we couldn’t be more disparate characters. Whereas I was always asserting my independence, Sandy was very much a homebody. She followed my parents into high-school teaching, married a phys ed teacher, moved to the Boston suburbs and had three children by the time she was thirty. She’d also allowed herself to get a little chunky in the process – to the point where she was crowding one hundred and seventy pounds (not a good look on a woman who only stood five foot three), and seemed to have this predilection for eating all the time. Though I occasionally hinted that she might consider padlocking the refrigerator, I didn’t push the point too hard. It wasn’t my style to remonstrate with Sandy – she was so vulnerable to all criticism, so heart-on-her-sleeve, and so damn nice.

  She’s also been the one person with whom I’ve always been open about everything going on with me – with the exception of the period directly after the death of my parents, when I shut down and couldn’t be reached by anybody. The new job at the Post helped. Though my boss on the City Desk didn’t expect me to begin work immediately I insisted on starting at the paper just ten days after my parents were buried. I dived right in. Twelve-hour days were my specialty. I also volunteered for additional assignments, covering every damn story I could – and quickly got a name for myself as a completely reliable workaholic.

  Then, around four months into the job, I was on my way home one evening, when I passed by a couple around my parents’ age, walking hand-in-hand down Bolyston Street. There wasn’t anything unusual about this couple. They didn’t resemble my mom or dad. They were just an ordinary-looking husband-and-wife in their mid-fifties, holding hands. Maybe that’s what undid me – the fact that, unlike many couples at that stage of a marriage, they seemed pleased to be together … just as my parents always seemed pleased to be in each other’s company. Whatever the reason, the next thing I knew, I was leaning against a lamppost, crying wildly. I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t dodge the desperate wave of grief with which I had finally collided. I didn’t move for a long time, clinging on to the lamppost for ballast, the depth of my sorrow suddenly fathomless, immeasurable. A cop showed up. He placed his big hand on my shoulder, and asked me if I needed help.

  ‘I just want my mommy and daddy,’ I felt like screaming, reverting back to the six-year-old self we all carry with us, eternally desperate for parental sheltering at life’s most fearful moments. Instead, I managed to explain that I was simply coping with a bereavement, and all I needed was a cab home. The cop flagged one down (no easy thing in Boston – but then again, he was a policeman). He helped me into it, telling me (in his own faltering, gruff, kind way) that ‘cryin’ was the only way outta grief.’ I thanked him, and kept myself in check on the drive back. But when I got to my apartment I fell on my bed, and surrendered once again to grief’s wild ride. I couldn’t remember how long I spent crying, except that it was suddenly two in the morning, and I was curled up on the bed in a foetal position, completely spent, and hugely grateful that my two roommates had been out that evening. I wanted no one to see me in this condition.

  When I woke up early the next morning, my face was still puffy, my eyes still crimson, and every fibre in my body depleted. But the tears didn’t start again. I knew I couldn’t allow myself another descent into that emotional netherworld. So I put on a mask of stern resolve and went back to work – which is all you can ever do under the circumstances. All accidental deaths are simultaneously absurd and tragic. As I told Tony during the one and only time I recounted this story to him, when you lose the most important people in your life – your parents – through the most random of circumstances, you come to realize pretty damn fast that everything is fragile; that so-called ‘security’ is nothing more than a thin veneer which can fracture without warning.

  ‘Is that when you decided you wanted to be a war correspondent?’ he asked, stroking my face.

  ‘Got me in one.’

  Actually, it took me a good six years to work my way up from the City Desk to Features to a brief stint on the Editorial page. Then, finally, I received my first temporary posting to Washington. Had Richard found a way to get transferred to Tokyo, I might have married him on the spot.

  ‘It’s just you cared for Tokyo a little more,’ Tony said.

  ‘Hey, if I’d married Richard, I’d be living in some comfortable suburb like Wellesley. I’d probably have two kids, and a Jeep Cherokee, and I’d be writing Lifestyle features for the Post… and it wouldn’t be a bad life. But I wouldn’t have lived in assorted mad parts of the world, and I wouldn’t have had a quarter of the adventures that I’ve had and got paid for them.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t have met me,’ Tony said.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, kissing him. ‘I wouldn’t have fallen in love with you.’

  Pause. I was even more dumbfounded than he was by that last remark.

  ‘Now how did that slip out?’ I asked.

  He leaned over and kissed me deeply.

  ‘I’m glad it did,’ he said. ‘Because I feel the same way.’

  I was astonished to find myself in love … and to have that love reciprocated by someone who seemed exactly the sort of man I’d secretly hoped to stumble upon, but really didn’t think existed (journalists, by and large, being the wrong side of seedy).

  A certain innate caution still made me want to move forward with prudence. Just as I didn’t want to think about whether we would last beyond the next week, month, whatever. I sensed this as well about Tony. I couldn’t get much out of him about his romantic past – though he did mention that he once came close to marriage (‘but it all went wrong … and maybe it was best that it did’). I wanted to press him for further details (after all, I had finally told him about Richard), but he quickly sidestepped the matter. I let it drop, figuring that he would eventually get around to telling me the entire story. Or maybe that was me also trying not to push him too hard – because, after two months with Tony Hobbs, I did understand very well that he was somebody who hated being cornered, or asked to explain himself.

  Neither of us made a point of letting our fellow journos in Cairo know that we had become an item. Not because we feared gossip – but rather because we simply didn’t think it was anybody’s damn business. So, in public, we still came across as nothing more than professional associates.

 
Or, at least, that’s what I thought. Until Wilson – the fleshy guy from the Daily Telegraph – let it be known otherwise. He’d called me up at my office to suggest lunch, saying it was about time that we sat down and had an extended chat. He said this in that slightly pompous style of his – which made it sound like a royal invitation, or that he was doing me a favour by taking me out to the coffee shop in the Semiramaris Hotel. As it turned out, he used the lunch to pump me for information about assorted Egyptian government ministers, and to obtain as many of my local contacts as possible. But when he suddenly brought up Tony, I was slightly taken aback … because of the care we had taken to keep things out of the public eye. This was the height of naϊveté, given that journalists in a place like Cairo always know what their colleagues ate for breakfast. But I still wasn’t prepared to hear him ask, ‘And how is Mr Hobbs these days?’