I was thinking that I'm sure Alec gets the friend=life partner, but Maurice seems to be capitalising it in a way that goes beyond what I'd expect Alec to assign to the term without having years of public school, Classics and Cambridge as a frame of reference. I'm not sure, to be honest. Didn't Maurice have the dream telling him "this is your friend" when he was still young but he wasn't sure who it would be, so he thought it might be Jesus... and it was only afterwards that he started assigning other meanings to it. Not unlike to the way that Clive spent his youth assigning a very specific and personal meaning to his type of Platonic friendship (I'm not suggesting that Clive's and Maurice's interpretations of "friend" are that much like or connected, just that the way those concepts become meaningful for them are not entirely dissimilar).