Sandalwood [an excerpt: 2]

Christian Worne certainly wasn’t the oldest or most distinguished man I had encountered in my adult life, so I knew our differences couldn’t be reduced to something as simple as age or hierarchy. During my time at Oxford, I had come to know a professor in the same research division as me. At fifty-four, Professor Arne Gulbrandsen was twenty-four years my senior when we formed an unlikely bond over our mutual appreciation of properly made coffee.

Norwegian by birth but English by postgraduate education, I had seen him in passing, of course, as I had seen a dozen other academics in the halls of the building we occupied. He was handsome in an understated and slightly dishevelled way; tall and fit-looking, as though he rode a bike to and from work and played squash a few times a week, with greying hair and thin-rimmed glasses, furrows between his eyebrows and sad eyes, and a crooked but kind smile. I, on the other hand, had only come to his attention one morning in mid-June when he overheard my instructions to the barista on how to prepare a ristretto.

Newly separated, I could still make out the indentation and tan line left by the professor’s recently removed wedding band while we talked and drank our coffee, sitting opposite each other in the café, at a table by the window. As a world-renowned philosopher, his reputation preceded him and my respect and admiration for his achievements compelled me to refer to him as Professor Gulbrandsen. As we parted company after that first morning he asked me to call him Arne.

The indentation and tan line faded as the weeks passed and as we continued to meet in the café whenever I was in Oxford, which was at least once a week. Still, discretion dictated he was Professor Gulbrandsen in the halls of our building, and Arne when it was just the two of us. The well-cultivated propriety of our public encounters faltered, though, when I adjusted the collar of his shirt underneath his coat while we said our farewells on the pavement one night in mid-August. Our morning coffee ritual had for the first time morphed into lunch, which had morphed into afternoon ales in a pub down the road from the café, which then morphed into dinner followed by a whisky nightcap.

Straightening his collar, as we stood outside the 140-year-old pub that evening, was an unconscious action on my part. Seconds later we found ourselves in the midst of an inevitable embrace, and the subsequent two-kilometre walk to his two-bedroom, ground floor apartment on Staverton Road was interrupted by surreptitious kisses in the shadows between streetlights.

We made love in his quintessential drawing-room on a nineteenth-century Chesterfield sofa surrounded by books, listening to Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor.

When he suggested I give up my St Cross College tenancy upon its expiration at the end of September and instead stay with him during my weekly visits to Oxford, my acceptance came easily. I spent the next three years of my life feeling adored and allowing the fresh torment of Michael Carbone’s infidelity to slowly ease. At the same time, I witnessed a somewhat despondent man regain his confidence and passion and finally complete a long-stalled book manuscript about digital ethics. I didn’t ask him about his past, nor did he ask me about mine; nonetheless, we revealed our histories to each other on our terms and in our own time and without obligation.

Despite the unorthodox nature of our union, it somehow functioned.

We didn’t deliberately intend to be exclusive to one another, but that’s the way our arrangement unfolded. For those three years, I relaxed in the familiar comfort of being emotionally unavailable to anyone else. For Arne it was an unashamed opportunity to rediscover his sexual desires, which – it transpired – had long been repressed.

Only three people were formally advised of our relationship: the director of our research division, Arne’s personal assistant, and my supervisor. Even though we weren’t in breach of any policies, we still maintained an appropriate level of discretion in public. We did not need to associate with one another during regular business hours – well, as regular as hours in academia can be – so those one or two nights each week were treasured. We walked to his apartment late in the afternoon, and then we cooked and ate together, played chess, read books, worked on our respective research projects and drank whisky together, made love and slept together. Our relationship wasn’t about being in love, as such, but it was about a common need for companionship and intimacy during that fleeting fraction of our lives when our paths serendipitously crossed.

Christian’s voice intruded upon my nostalgia.

“I just realised how much I sounded like my father,” he said after an uneasy silence. “He used to say things like that to me and he still does sometimes.”

“Well, Christian, I have my mother to give me unsolicited advice,” I returned with impatience, annoyed that he had trespassed on my peaceful recollections, “so I definitely do not need you judging my life choices.”