A comment from an anonymous reader to my story ‘An Erotic Odyssey’ (from which this follows on) said it had way too many words and the dialogue was archaic. That’s just how I write, so I guess he’d have the same reaction to this story, which tells of the potential complexities of a nearly-new relationship between not-so-young lovers. Comments welcome. If you don’t want to comment in public please go to the author page and click ‘contact’.
“For Christ’s sake why do you always have to be so bloody reasonable? Don’t you care?” Sophie rarely raised her voice, but this was a shout.
“If you don’t know now you never will. You are the most important and precious thing in my life bar only my children. I don’t just care for you, I adore you. But a knee-jerk reaction to what you just asked me isn’t going to get either of us anywhere. We will both end up saying things we don’t mean or things we regret.”
Sophie looked me straight in the eyes, put her hands on her hips, paused a moment, but then dropped them to her side, walked over and threw her arms round me.
“I’m sorry. Many times I’ve exploited your reasonableness; I can’t turn round now and complain. It’s just that it was so difficult to ask and I suppose I had hoped for a reaction that would clarify my own mind.” Sophie’s voice was now calm and conciliatory.
“It’s o.k. I understand why my cool response might be inflammatory. What do you know about his present circumstances?” I asked.
“He’s got some kind of high powered City job playing with other peoples’ money and earning himself squillions. He was married for a time but says it’s over. No children, and he lives on his own in a £3 million flat in St Katharine’s Dock by Tower Bridge.”
Stuart Newton had been Sophie’s lover when he was a post-grad student in Oxford. They had parted, at Sophie’s insistence, when it became obvious that the relationship was too fraught with difficulties to continue. Just recently he had sent her a message via their college, asking if she would meet him in London. It was the first time she had heard from him in 13 years.
“I’m struggling to find a reason for him contacting you. Curiosity? To show off his fantastic sexual prowess? To boast about how well he’s done? To screw up any relationship you may now have and carry you off as a trophy to demonstrate the amazing power of all these wonderful things?” I was interested to know if Sophie had any better explanation.
By now Sophie was grinning. “That’s better. I’m much more comfortable when you get sarcastic. It feels as if you’re becoming defensive, instead of just sitting on the wall and watching the flowers grow. The answer to your question is that I don’t have a better explanation. Maybe he’s bored?”
“Are you happy to alleviate his boredom? What do you think you might get out of it? Apart of course from gymnastic sex with someone more than twenty years younger than me.” (A bit more sarcasm from me since that appeared to be appreciated.)
“Whey-hey! You’re jumping the gun a bit, aren’t you? Who said anything about having sex with him?” Sophie was calling me to account. O.K.
“Well it looks like a bloody great pink elephant in the room to me, and it’s got its tusks painted bright red as a warning. Do you think that he is inviting you up to take you out to an exotic meal and stay in his palatial flat, just so that he can show you his stamp collection?” Careful, don’t lay the sarcasm on too thick.
There was silence for a minute (60 seconds). Quite long, as silences go.
“O.K. let’s address the bright pink jumbo with flashing red tusks: how would you react to him screwing me?”
“If you go up there to meet him I will have factored in the possibility of him screwing you. I would hate the idea, but I would not try to stop you – just as you told Eleni that you didn’t own me, and it was up to me to decide if I wished to pleasure her bottom. The thing that would trouble me most is the possibility of you and he deciding, explicitly or by default, to start up a relationship again. So if it was one fuck I can take it, any more would be cruel to me, and I don’t react well to cruelty.” I hoped that was not too obscure.
“You’re a good man, and you have reacted like one. I completely understand your position and thank you for reminding me of the Eleni incident. I won’t start a relationship, and I may not fuck either.”
“The other thing I would ask is that you give me a full account of what happens. I am old enough and experienced enough to deal with it, but not knowing is corrosive to a happy relationship.”
“That’s completely reasonable. Agreed. And thank you.”
* * * * *
We were in Oxford. It was July 2020, and we had been together for a year since our return from Greece. We had three homes between us, but in their ways they were all necessary, and they were all used by our families as well as ourselves. My son Ben was sivas escort in the Dulverton house most of the time: he works with the Exmoor National Park Authority. The house is ideally placed for him and enables him to live on his modest salary and save a bit for buying his own cottage.
In London the flat was occupied by my daughter Jo who works for a publisher.
Sophie’s daughters were away: Beth was near Bournemouth on the south coast and is a specialist nurse, married to a paramedic; Tanya is living with her wife in Faringdon and they are both teachers.
Last, but certainly not least, is my son Phil who is a scientist working for a drug company in Germany. He is a committed Triathlete and competes regularly across the globe.
The Covid-19 lockdown had restricted our movements, and we had spent the previous four months in Oxford. Now it was possible to move around a bit more I was anxious to go to my own house in Dulverton. I missed it, and all the things that made Oxford potentially special — music, theatre, bookshops, restaurants and pubs and specialist food shops — had been shut up, so the rural option seemed even more attractive.
The lockdown had been stressful for everyone, but we were trying to establish a comfortable way of living together and attempting, at the same time, to preserve elements of our separate lives. The first five months were good, because we moved freely between our three residences. While we were in Oxford I had access to wonderful libraries for my work, as well as the other delights I describe above. From Sophie’s point of view there was her natural affinity for the countryside, and her happy relationship with Ben. She also enjoyed the museums and libraries of Bloomsbury, for the odd days we spent in London.
Now though we had just endured 4 months of frustration, and I suppose that my indulgence – if that’s what it was – towards Sophie and her lover from 17 years ago, was at least partly due to acceptance that a bit of freedom would be good for both of us. We walked to the station together, hand in hand as usual, and I tried to put aside potential misgivings. Trust was everything, and I needed to show it if I wanted it affirmed by her actions.
* * * * *
Hello, I’m Sophie. Tom’s told me that the ‘full report’ he has asked for could be written as a section of our story that he has been chronicling since we met. It has been a full and frank record and only names and a few details of location have been changed. Tom has been honest in his record, so I will continue the same way.
I felt such a debt of gratitude to Tom that I was determined to behave myself! I say that, but since I met Tom I have not been tempted to indulge in the misbehaviour that has been part of my history. If I have been lonely on occasions in the past I have to say I have often had only myself to blame.
We said goodbye at the station. I squeezed his hand and whispered “You have no need to worry”. Why was I doing this odd thing? Partly through guilt, because it was me that ended my relationship with Stuart; partly through the need to get out and do something potentially slightly wild; and partly out of curiosity to see how this young man had turned out.
The train from Oxford to London Paddington took just under an hour. From there I caught an underground (tube) to Tower Hill and took a 10 minute walk into the Katharine Docks complex, where Stuart’s flat was on the third floor, looking across the river and the marina.
The timing had worked well. It was about 5.30pm. The evening started quite comfortably. We sat in the beautiful flat and I drank tea while he drank coffee and we talked about mutual acquaintances, some of whom he knew as fellow students, some had been colleagues of mine. I think that Tom has recorded that Stuart was 22 when we came together, and that there was a 17-year difference in our ages — I think actually he was 23 and I was 42, so there’s 19 years between us. I suppose because of the closeness of our past relationship there was no awkwardness now. We all experience sometimes the feeling that a suspended relationship seems never to have stopped. We just pick up enough threads to rapidly rebuild the pattern.
What was his appearance like: how had he changed after 13 years? Well this is where the gap was very discernible. He hadn’t started to shrink (yet) so he was still six feet tall. He was, however, a lot heavier. I had known him as a barely-mature young adult, quite skinny and weighing not much more than 10 stone. I guessed that he had added at least another 2 stone to that.
With the extra weight his face was fuller. I disliked the fashionable stubble that covered his face, and one discreet wedding ring is all that a man needs, not a whole set of digital decorations. He wore the standard uniform of his kind: dark single-breasted suit and white open-necked shirt. sivas escort bayan He wasn’t, in any way, the man that I had tossed around with in bed all those years ago. Nevertheless he still had charm, and even glimmerings of that spark that had attracted me in the first place. By the time we had finished character-assassinating our peers and remembering a few choice bits of our times together it was time to set off for dinner.
We walked across the bridge to reach a pleasant French restaurant on the other side. After we’d placed our orders and there was a bottle of wine, a basket of bread and a bottle of water on the table I said to him “Are you going to tell me what this is all about Stuart? I’m a bit puzzled.”
“I’m at a sort of crossroads. I’ve cleared up all the mess from the divorce and I’m trying to decide whether I want to continue this lifestyle and this high-adrenalin, exhausting way of earning a living.”
“Do you still get a kick out of it?” I asked.
“Oh yes. When it goes well I can’t imagine anything better. The trouble is that I find it very difficult to manage relationships that last: the job and the type of woman whom it attracts are not made for a permanent attachment. I could attract any number of women ten or fifteen years younger, but the attraction is so superficial that I’m bored with them after two or three fucks, and it’s probably mutual.”
“Poor lamb,” I cooed. Must be careful not to be too sympathetic, I told myself.
The first course arrived.
“I still think the City world is exciting, and I might try to find some other niche within it, to hang on to the excitement. But that still leaves the problem of how to find a companion.” Stuart continued to relay the story of his present life.
“Do you ever think about an academic life again?” I asked.
“Good God no! It’s full of ageing weasels, waiting to chew each other’s balls in an effort to prove who’s right, who’s best. After the City it would seem like an early death.”
There was a pause, but as I refrained from commenting on that gross generalisation (which admittedly contained an element of truth) he went on: “I’m looking for someone with a bit of maturity, who can bring some stability into my life.”
I could scarcely believe my ears. “So where do I come into the picture?”
“Well, you brought stability and maturity into my life once before. I’ve often thought about that time with gratitude — why couldn’t we do it again?”
I stared at him and after a suitable pause I said “I’ll tell you why: because I don’t want to. There’s not even a tiny flicker of interest stirring in me. I’m now 57, not 42; I don’t want to live in London; I am not in the business of supporting a guy to do a job that I despise; I doubt very much that I would like your friends or what they get up to; and I can’t bear to think what life would be like when I’m 70 and you’re 51.”
The next course arrived. There was silence for a while, then “Why do you despise the job I do?” he asked, sounding genuinely shocked.
“Because you’re parasites. You move vast amounts of other peoples’ money around the world, and in the process cream off a large chunk which you use to pay yourselves obscene salaries. Your principals bribe politicians or become politicians themselves, and if you screw up it’s us, the general public, who pays. After the crash of 2008 who paid the price? Not the bankers or the financiers. The austerity which followed affected the poorest disproportionally. You don’t produce, design or sell anything. You provide no useful services for the general public. Yes, you pay a lot of tax, but even that is arranged so that you pay, through dubious schemes, less than you ought to.”
“So you have become a socialist?”
“No. I don’t believe in state ownership of everything. I do believe in levelling down as well as levelling up; but the present government is unmatched for incompetence in the 50 years that I have had any interest in politics, and stands as much chance of ‘levelling’ as I do of swimming the Channel.” I had become quite worked up, as you will have detected, but I managed to keep my delivery calmer than I felt.
“What we do is essential to a capitalist world,” was Stuart’s self-satisfied but rather feeble response.
“I think it best to abandon this line of conversation. We both know we are never going to agree. Tell me about your children. I assume that they live with their mother?”
“Yes, there’s an older girl, 13, and a boy of 11. They are now at an independent school in Essex, and my wife lives with her boyfriend nearby. I see them on alternate weekends, and it’s quite easy because I have lots of space, and there’s plenty to do up here.”
I nearly said ‘well that’s alright then’ but instead “Thank you for the supper: it was delicious. I suppose they were closed escort sivas for ages?”.
“Yes, it all got noticeably quiet around here through the lockdown. Quite nice in a way. Shall we wander back over the river then?”
I took this as a rhetorical question, as he was waving the waiter for a bill.
Parts of London look their best after dark, and this was one of them. The sparkle of the lights reflected in the surface of the Thames disguise the murkiness of its waters, and the towers around it have sufficient lights to avoid being dark oppressive shapes. We walked in silence. I hoped he wouldn’t try to take my hand.
As we walked I struggled with the next decision I would probably have to make: would I let him fuck me? Pro was the thought that dear Tom had sort of given me a pass; that I still owed Stuart something from a long ago (according to my conscience); and he had done his best to give me a good evening, which deserved more than a slap in the face. Against was the thought that I would be swapping one guilt for another because, despite Tom’s pass, it would feel like a disloyalty to him. Added to which Stuart no longer attracted me physically, so it would be a lust-free fuck. Neutral was the fact that my persistent curiosity wanted to know what it would be like.
Further thought suggested that the fact it would be lust-free could make it easier and reduce the guilt quotient. Clutching at plastic straws.
We had got back to the flat. I think I had only drunk one glass of wine with the meal, and I hoped I might get offered a bit more alcohol to fortify my resolve.
“I think we could have a glass of something, don’t you?” he asked. “What would you like?”
“If you’ve got it — which I am sure you have — I’d like a single malt scotch with a dash of water.”
“Not much of a lady’s drink, but yes, can do.”
The heavy glass tumbler, a bottle of Tobermory, and a small jug of water appeared in due course. I poured and sipped. Immediately I felt myself relax into the stylish, but slightly uncomfortable armchair.
“I’m sorry I got at you Stuart. Even without the pandemic I feel we are not living in happy times. I’m 60 soon, but I can’t draw my state pension for another 7 years, and at the moment I feel as if I will want to withdraw from the world when I get to that point.”
“What on earth will you do with yourself then?”
“Live in the countryside, grow things, cook and bake, make love, read a lot and help with some local charities.”
“On your own?”
“No, I don’t fancy making love to myself for twenty or more years, and I’m not going to be buying a blow-up doll.”
“Perhaps that’s when I can appear and draw you back into the real world!?”
I didn’t answer that one. I rather wanted to keep Tom to myself as long as possible. I smiled my Mona Lisa smile — enigmatic.
“Will you stay the night Sophie?”
“If you’re asking will I go to bed with you, the answer is probably yes. But I can’t promise to stay all night.”
“Where will you go, if you decide to push off?”
“I have part ownership of a little flat in Bloomsbury. I’ll get a taxi up there.”
There was a pause. I suppose he was wondering if this was the moment to invite me into his bed. “Tell me about working at Brookes. It must be quite different from the University?”
I had abandoned my job at the University, largely catalysed by Stuart himself, who at that time was going to be around for another year or more. I went to Oxford’s other University, called Brookes, where I had been ever since.
“It’s been a liberation. I recognise that I am a teacher rather than an academic producing original works. I think I do that job rather well. I have managed to keep a fresh outlook and not be intimidated by pushy, opinionated and highly intelligent students. Mutual respect is vital and difficult to acquire in today’s climate of instant reaction and amplified views.”
Having written that down it sounds slightly pompous — the sort of statement my students would have had a go at. No matter, I am who I am. Stuart didn’t seem to mind. “Well I’m certainly glad you got out of the ‘World’s no.1 University’ to the sanctuary up Headington Hill. Good move, I thought.”
“Oxford Uni for sure didn’t need me, and the feeling was mutual.”
We nattered on for a while; I poured myself another drink, and felt very calm about what might come next. It turned out to be very mundane. For all his suave charm Stuart still demonstrated a slight deference towards me.
He came over and took both hands and pulled me to my feet and into his arms. He kissed me on the lips but didn’t attempt anything with his tongue. I put my arms round him to trap his hands and prevent them wandering. I wanted this to be as low-key as possible.
“Will you come to bed with me?” he asked.
“Show me the way. I need a bathroom first.”
We moved towards a passage off the open-plan living area.
“You can use this bathroom,” he said, opening the door for me to see. “There is an en-suite bathroom, but I’m afraid it’s a bit of a tip. The bedroom is up here.” He pointed to the door facing us at the end of the corridor. “See you in a minute.”