Douglas Kennedy: A Special Relationship

'Fine', he said, then added, 'That was fun'.

'Yes. It was'.

An awkward pause. I gathered up my things.

'See you, I guess', I said.

'Yes', he said with a smile. 'See you'.

As soon as I was upstairs in my empty, silent apartment, I kicked myself for playing the tough dame. 'No,you make the first move'. What a profoundly dumb thing to say. Because I knew that guys like Tony Hobbs didn't cross my path every day.

Still, I could now do nothing but put the entire business out of my mind. So I spent the better part of an hour soaking in a bath, then crawled into bed and passed out for nearly ten hours - having hardly slept for the past two nights. I was up just after seven in the morning. I made breakfast. I powered up my laptop. I turned out my weekly 'Letter from Cairo', in which I recounted my dizzying flight in a Red Cross helicopter under fire from Somalian militia men. When the phone rang around noon, I jumped for it.

'Hello', Tony said. 'This is the first move'.

He came by ten minutes later to pick me up for lunch. We never made it to the restaurant. I won't say I dragged him off to my bed - because he came very willingly. Suffice to say, from the moment I opened the door, I was all over him. As he was me.

Much later, in bed, he turned to me and said, 'So who's making the second move?'

It would be the stuff of romantic cliché to say that, from that moment on we were inseparable. Nonetheless, I do count that afternoon as the official start of us - when we started becoming an essential part of each other's lives. What most surprised me was this: it was about the easiest transition imaginable. The arrival of Tony Hobbs into my existence wasn't marked by the usual doubts, questions, worries, let alone the overt romantic extremities associated with a coup de foudre. The fact that we were both self-reliant types - used to falling back on our separate resources - meant that we were attuned to each other's independent streak. We also seemed to be amused by each other's national quirks. He would often gently deride a certain American literalness that I do possess - a need to ask questions all the damn time, and analyse situations a little too much. Just as I would express amusement at his incessant need to find the flippant underside to all situations. He also happened to be absolutely fearless when it came to journalistic practice. I saw this at first hand around a month after we first hooked up, when a call came one evening that a busload of German tourists had been machine-gunned by Islamic fundamentalists while visiting the Pyramids at Giza. Immediately, we jumped into my car and headed out in the direction of the Sphinx. When we reached the sight of the Giza massacre, Tony managed to push his way past several Egyptian soldiers to get right up to the blood-splattered bus itself - even though there were fears that the terrorists might have thrown grenades into it before vanishing. The next afternoon, at the news conference following this attack, the Egyptian Minister for Tourism tried to blame foreign terrorists for the massacre... at which point Tony interrupted him, holding up a statement, which had been faxed directly to his office, in which the Cairo Muslim Brotherhood took complete responsibility for the attack. Not only did Tony read out the statement in near perfect Arabic, he then turned to the minister and asked him, 'Now would you mind explaining why you're lying to us?'

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.