21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Charming new romance depicts a love story like no other
Muswell Press, £12.99
Rarely is romance depicted quite as Andrew Meehan does it here.
"Why does a kiss in the rain always signal the end of a story?" he asks, positioning that climactic moment roughly at the midway point of this slim novel, where it marks just another milestone in a relationship rather than a cue for the end credits to roll.
The fact that his couple decide they're pretty much done with kissing after that is an even bigger snub to the conventional love story.
Ray Draper and June Wylie are 70 and 74 respectively, and although they've both been living for many years in the Dublin suburb of Glasthule (a location Best Friends shares with Jamie O'Neill's 2001 novel At Swim, Two Boys), they've never met.
June cleans the grand houses of well-off families.
She's been married three times, though only her second husband, who died young, seems to be remembered fondly.
She lives in a little house with beehives in the garden and a rosebush that will never flower again.
Ray has tended to bounce from one thing to another.
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A failed architect, he was a tree surgeon for 30 years until the realisation hit him that tree surgeons don't actually love trees, they love cutting them up.
He spent a year in a monastery long ago, something even he seems to find hard to believe now.
Unlike June, he's sexually inexperienced and has never known a woman's love.
A chance meeting in a grocer's, where Ray impulsively decides to buy every jar of June's honey when he learns they're going to stop stocking it, leads to a courtship.
What follows is a touching little gem of a story, a romance distinguished by a kind of hard-nosed tenderness, in which two OAPs who are both set in their ways learn how to accommodate each other in their lives, going through a process of negotiation and compromise on their way to coming to terms with the notion that "the end of being alone is not the end of who you are".
It also, importantly, I think, reminds its readers what counts as a pensioner nowadays: June used to fancy herself as a ringer for Chrissie Hynde and Ray bears a passing resemblance to Willie Nelson.
So not quite like your gran and grandad.
Best Friends by Andrew Meehan (Image: Supplied)
The thrice-married June is the warier and more emotionally pragmatic of the two: more fixed about what she's willing to compromise on and more alert to the signs that they might not be compatible.
Ray is sweet and eager to please but clumsy at romancing, and their edges rub against one another as they try to work out what each other wants from their relationship.
Ray, with his "lingering air of old spaniel", isn't it.
Or so June convinces herself for a while.
But for all the caution and uncertainty of taking on a relationship that's likely to be their last roll of the dice, this is still a romance.
Meehan, from Dublin but currently teaching Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, brings to the page the quiet excitement of falling in love, the way that ordinary moments and mundane objects are imbued with magic and significance.
It's no less romantic for their decision to think of each other as best friends rather than lovers and leave the physical stuff out of it, when you see the companionship and intimacy June and Ray provide for each other.
Short enough that you won't want it to end, Best Friends is a love story that's charmingly and wittily told, shot through with tenderness and poignancy.
