Lawrence Buckley 24th August 1957 - 10th July 1995

“I came across a cache of old photos…

…cause we were never being boring

We had too much time to find for ourselves…

And we were never holding back or worried that

Time would come to an end”

Being Boring, Pet Shop Boys

I came across an old postcard of Olympia the other day, the ancient stadium to be precise. Hues of sky blue, grass green and sandy beige, each colour slightly faded, its edges slightly frayed. Unwritten on the parchment white writing side, just faint traces of a date stamp to provide a clue of when it was bought, March 1977.

The postcard is one I have glanced at before, among a pile I inherited from my late partner, Lawrence. Images of landscapes and objects from Greece, ancient and modern. From an unlikely start in life, Lawrence was a classicist and had travelled there while reading Greats at Worcester College, Oxford in the mid-1970s, a decade before we met.

Those postcards are an incidental part of the personal chattels he gave to me in his Will when he died 30 years ago today, just shy of 10 years after that first meeting. Some of those chattels remain with me, others have been handed on and down, here and there, in the intervening years. Funny the things we hold on to, almost unconsciously, as life trundles on. Keepsakes to remember by. Ourselves. Others.

As the years have rolled on, they have become jumbled up in a box among other postcards I have collected along the way. Waiting to be sent when occasions arise. I like a postcard – their exchange has scored through many a significant relationship over the years. In another box I have long kept those I have received as a record of connections, past and present.

I have leafed through the box of cards so many times in search of the right one for someone, somewhere. But this time, the image of the stadium stopped me in my tracks. As it flicked through my fingers I recalled my visit there just two years ago on a hot spring day, travelling through Greece for the first time.

Lawrence and I travelled to Italy many times. In the heady days of first love, he took me to Venice and Florence – hand in hand, entranced by Tintoretto at the Accademia and Botticelli at the Uffizi. In the later years, we toured the rolling hills of Le Marche, stopping off in timeless medieval towns and villages along our way. Committed vegetarians, we succumbed to eating spring lamb and ragu to sample the best that local cuisine had to offer – the Rosso Piceno made the sacrifice irresistible.

But we never made it to Greece. Yet, of course, when I finally made it there, I knew he had been there before me, before there was an us. And, of course, I knew that I was visiting a country whose history he had delved into as a scholar. But the image uppermost in my mind was a photo of him 300 miles away from Olympia, at the Acropolis in Athens.

Yet sure enough, returning to the cache of photos, there he was perched on a wall at the ruins of the gymnasium at ancient Olympia, just yards from the stadium. In the background, the same vibrant pink blossom adorning the cheery trees I had strolled between on my visit.

And now, old postcard in hand, I realised we had trodden the same steps in the stadium, 46 years apart. And I couldn’t help but wonder what had been in his mind. Had traversing the grass, dirt and stone ruins of the stadium where foot races and other ancient Olympic events were held captured his imagination as it had mine? Though not a runner like me, we shared a passion for athletics. Cheering on our favourite athletes could make us giddy with excitement even in the darkest moments.

Thirty years is a long time ago. But as Sean Hewitt begins his novel Open, Heaven, “Time runs faster backwards” – we can reach into the past with an effortlessness which closes the gap in a moment. Lawrence would have been 67 now. And I cannot know whether there would still be an us.

But I do know the presence and place of the 10 years we spent together in my 64-year-old story. I can touch and feel it still. The diminishing fraction of my life it represents belying the magnitude. Life changing, life altering. Love which does not leave.

And yet the postcard reminded me of something else. He had a life before me. A life, a Lawrence, I only knew from snippets of conversation about our pasts. But mostly we were fixed on the present. We had no time to lose – because however much we looked the other way, we did know it would come to an end.

Sometimes too I have learnt of that Lawrence exchanging recollections with family and friends who knew him before me. But I did not know him. More than that, I never knew the Lawrence unviolated by the virus which was to break him.

He was already HTLV3 (HIV) positive when we met in 1985. It had already changed him. To borrow Charlie Porter’s words in Nova Scotia House, he had been someone else, someone other – before the virus.

The injustice of its toll on his health and life expectancy seared through the Lawrence I knew. An inner rage which spilled over into everyday life – how could it not? What had he done to deserve this?

Grief takes on new shapes with the passing of time. I have always cherished the life we did have – the best of it anyway. But as my own life shifts from middle to old age, I miss him in a way that I didn’t in the immediate throes of grief. I miss the unlived life – the one he couldn’t live and the one we didn’t have. Even though I cannot know we would have gone on to have it.

But happening upon that old postcard I realised I missed something else, someone else. Not just the younger Lawrence tramping the paths of ancient Olympia, but the Lawrence who had been that someone other. Someone I never had the chance to know.

Perhaps that Lawrence and I would never have been an us. I have long suspected that the Lawrence who lived before the virus got a hold of him would have sought someone other than me – more of a match for his fine physique and his fierce intellect.

The future is harder to touch than the past. Its unknowability both blessing and curse. Yet here I am, within striking distance of three score years and ten. And the most I can ever really know of the past is what has been, not what might have.

I can only know the meaning of the ten years we had. A decade of his life woven into the fabric of my own. Like his postcards in that box interleaved with mine. Postcards waiting to be sent. Though not to him. And I can feel the weight of that meaning. Unbroken. Undimmed.

With thanks to John Post for reflections on an earlier draft