The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [158]
ONE-NIGHT STAND
The two men had first met at the age of five when they were placed side by side at school, for no more compelling reason than that their names, Thompson and Townsend, came one after each other on the class register. They soon became best friends, a tie which at that age is more binding than any marriage. After passing their eleven-plus examination they proceeded to the local grammar school with no Timpsons, Tooleys, or Tomlinsons to divide them and, having completed seven years in that academic institution, reached an age when one either has to go to work or to the university. They opted for the latter on the grounds that work should be put off until the last possible moment. Happily, they both possessed enough brains and native wit to earn themselves places at Durham University to major in English.
Undergraduate life turned out to be as sociable as at primary school. They both enjoyed English, tennis, cricket, good food, and girls. Luckily, in the last of these predilections they differed only on points of detail. Michael, who was six feet two, willowy, with dark curly hair, preferred tall, bosomy blonds with blue eyes and long legs. Adrian, a stocky man of five feet-ten, with straight, sandy hair, always fell for small, slim, dark-haired, dark-eyed girls. So whenever Adrian came across a girl that Michael took an interest in or vice versa, whether she was an undergraduate or a barmaid, the one would happily exaggerate his friend’s virtues. Thus they spent three idyllic years in unison at Durham, gaining considerably more than a bachelor of arts degree. As neither of them had impressed the examiners enough to waste a further two years expounding their theories for a Ph.D., they could no longer avoid the real world.
Twin Dick Whittingtons, they set off for London, where Michael joined the BBC as a trainee while Adrian was signed up by Benton & Bowles, the international advertising agency, as an accounts assistant. They acquired a small flat in the Earls Court Road which they painted orange and brown, and proceeded to live the life of two young blades, for that is undoubtedly how they saw themselves.
Both men spent a further five years in this blissful bachelor state, until they each fell for a girl who fulfilled their particular requirements. They were married within weeks of each other: Michael to a tall, blue-eyed blond whom he met while playing tennis at the Hurlingham Club; Adrian to a slim, dark-eyed, dark-haired executive in charge of the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes account. Each officiated as the other’s best man, and each proceeded to sire three children at yearly intervals, and in that again they differed, but as before only on points of detail, Michael having two sons and a daughter, Adrian two daughters and a son. Each became godfather to the other’s first-born son.
Marriage hardly separated them in anything as they continued to follow much of their old routine, playing cricket together on weekends in the summer and football in the winter, not to mention regular luncheons during the week.
After the celebration of his tenth wedding anniversary, Michael, now a senior producer with Thames Television, admitted rather coyly to Adrian that he had had his first affair: he had been unable to resist a tall, well-built blond from the typing pool who was offering more than shorthand at seventy words a minute. Only a few weeks later, Adrian, now a senior account manager with Pearl and Dean, also went under, selecting a journalist from Fleet Street who was seeking some inside information on one of the companies he represented. She became a tax-deductible item. After that the two men quickly fell back into their old routine. Any help they could give each other was provided unstintingly, creating no conflict of interests because of their different tastes. Their married lives were not suffering—or so they convinced each other—and at thirty-five, having come through the swinging sixties unscathed, they began to make the most of the seventies.
Early in that decade,