David Begins Graduate Study Pt. 02

"No, I'm okay thank you," she said, unrolling the condom onto my slimy rigid dick. I resumed kissing her belly.

"Turn over," I said and helped her roll over onto her front. I put my face between her shoulder-blades and proceeded to kiss her down her spine and across the small of her back until I reached her arse. I smothered the two delicious globes with kisses and pushed my tongue into her crack.

"Hey, that's nice!" she said, "no man has ever done that to me before."

"That's because you've never been fucked by a gay before!" I replied. I then moved my kissing along her thighs down to the calves before turning her over again. She spread her legs and I climbed onto the bed and knelt between them. I put her legs one on either side of my shoulders, as if I were going to fuck a man. I then started to rub my berubbered tool in her pubic hair and she smiled sweetly. I started to push my dick into her cunt. When I was about 5 cm inside, she reached out and said to me "you're at the wrong angle you need to reach further up."

Although I was gentle and slow, I suppose that the fuck only lasted about 5 minutes before I came into the condom. I remained inside her for as long afterwards as I could, just kissing her face and neck and her tits. I then withdrew, removed the prophylactic from my cock, knotted it and dropped it on the floor and kissed her face, lips and belly. I was feeling rather exhausted and I asked if she could move over to make room for me beside her, which she obligingly did.

"I'm knackered," I said. "I don't really feel like talking. It was nice, but a totally different experience from doing it with a man."

I lay there for some time, and still naked, Laura got up and began to make us coffee. We each ate a couple of chocolates and drank the coffee. The room still felt comfortably warm. We discussed the topics that she had studied in her first year and I asked her what her career ambitions were, and did they include working in a brothel! She took this quip with an amused smile and was obviously not offended. I poured us each another glass of sherry, which we consumed slowly. I then put another condom on my cock and gently pushed her onto the bed. This time I really needed the lube. I made her kneel on the bed, and I climbed up behind her and proceeded to let her have it up the arsehole.

Afterwards, she told me that most of the men who had fucked her were exhausted after one go. Only two of them had managed it twice, and of them only one had fucked her anally. "So not only have you had it twice tonight," I said with a smile "you had it both front and back!"

I did not spend the night with her. The beds were too small. I was feeling pretty tired after all that exertion. I took away the two used items of rubberware and disposed of them in a rubbish skip behind the college kitchens. I did not want to risk blocking their antiquated plumbing by flushing them down the bog.

The rest of the week was pretty tense. After our conversation in Laura's bedroom, we decided that we did not have a lot in common and our daily lunch meetings ceased. I do not think that the rest of the choir had noticed that anything had changed.

At the end of our week's singing, the Precentor arranged a small drinks party for us. The party was not a lavish affair, being held in the Chapter House immediately after Evensong. We had a glass of sherry each and some pork pies, sausage rolls and vol-au-vents. The Precentor made a small speech thanking us for our services and telling us that he and the Chapter were very grateful to us and hoped to see our choir again the following year. After the reception we picked up our bags from the college where we had been staying and travelled back to Camford in the minibus and arrived back home late in the evening.

Chapter 18 Jon

David's guilt feelings

During the week that David spent in Durham with the choir, the weather was exceptionally warm and beautiful, and in the few short spaces of time when I was not engaged in lab work or getting myself something to eat, I missed him quite dreadfully. We could have been sunbathing together on our balcony overlooking Fountain Street, at least at the weekend. While he was away, a postcard arrived for us with an Italian postmark. It was from Edward, who sent us his best regards and said that he was exploring the beauties of Florence. Curiously enough, within a couple of days another postcard arrived from Italy from Dorothea, David sister. She had gone on a language course to improve her Italian skills prior to her spending six months in an Italian university the following summer. She wrote that the course she was on, which lasted three weeks, was an excellent high-powered medium for learning spoken Italian very quickly, and that if we seriously both wished to learn the language we should find time one summer to go on this course.

When David returned from Durham, I expected him to come in all ebullient and happy about the successful visit. Instead he was very subdued. "Don't kiss me till you've heard the confession I've got to make!" he said. "I've not done anything outside our agreement, but I still feel guilty about it," he said. "I had sex with a woman in Durham! I could have said no when she asked me, but I didn't. I wanted to see if I could do it with a woman, and I'm sorry to say that I did do it, and I enjoyed it. Admittedly she was very sweet and encouraging, but it still seems like disloyalty to you."

"Was it choir member?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied.

"The tall dark-haired contralto?"

"Yes, how did you guess?" he asked.

"I look at women not to give myself pleasure, but to guess which might appeal to you!" I said, "and I thought that she was the most likely. I've always known that deep down you were bi. That's why I mentioned the possibility of the ménage à trois that so upset you. But my sweet faggot-boy, don't feel guilty. Even if you never experience cunt sex again, you'll know that you can do it with a woman, even though you prefer men, or at least me, if not men in general. That should be good for your self-esteem."

"You've not yet heard it all. I fucked her twice, once up her cunt and once up her arsehole."

"And did she enjoy being buggered? Did she say if it had happened before?"

"Yes, it wasn't the first time. She claimed that I was only one out of the dozen or so men whom she had fucked with and at least one other had used her back passage. My main worry is that although I know that it was a one-off occurrence, I have to see her twice a week for the next two years, and I'll always be wondering whom she's going to have it off with next!"

I put my arms round my beloved boy and kissed him hard. "David, David, you've nothing to reproach yourself with. You said yourself that she is a sweet-natured girl, even if she is a nympho, so she's not going to round spreading false stories, and she certainly has no need to feel misused by you. Even if she tells people that she has bedded you, you've nothing to lose. Men are bisexual because they know damn' well what a good time they can have with another man. There's nothing shameful about swinging both ways.

"I think the reason you feel guilty is because you think unconsciously that you have offended God as well as me. I'm telling you that you have NOT offended me. I love you as much as ever. It's up to you to make your peace with that God that you believe in. I can't help you with that!"

I ran one hand through his hair and with the other I caressed the seat of his pants. I held him tightly against me, so that I could feel his heartbeat, and smothered him with kisses. He started crying quietly. I thought of Don, the gay apprentice, whom I had also had to comfort in his period of sexual crisis the year before.

I held David in my arms for about five minutes, and kissed away his tears. "If you can't reason away your guilty feeling," I said, "maybe you should talk to a spiritual director, or confessor or something. Perhaps Edward might be able to help you. Or maybe you need to pray away the straight!" David smiled wanly and kissed me. "You're right of course," he said. "Let's go to bed. No lovemaking, just your warm possessive arms round me in a decent-sized bed."

Chapter 19 David

An Unexpected Trip abroad

One evening in mid-August we were sitting drinking coffee at home after eating in a student restaurant, when the phone rang. Jon answered it. "It's for you," he said. It was my uncle in Amersfoort in Holland. He told me that my grandfather had recently been given six months to live by the doctors and wanted to see me urgently. I said, "What grandfather?" My father's parents had married late, and both had died before I was 5. My mother had never mentioned her parents, and neither had my uncle, so I assumed that they also were dead. My uncle told me that my grandfather had disowned my mother when she married an Englishman, and had forbidden her name to be mentioned to him. Although he had not actually joined the NSB, the Dutch Nazi party, my grandfather had been a fervent Nazi sympathizer, so an English son-in-law horrified him.

The rest of the family did not share his views and after the war, they were ashamed of him. 'Fout in de oorlog' (wrong in the war) was a terrible thing to those Dutch people who had gone through the 'hunger-winter' in 1944-5, so he was more or less ignored by the family. His wife had died in the nineteen-sixties, and he had lived for over ten years very comfortably in a retirement home, and was visited only once or twice a year by my uncle and his wife. So I had grown up not knowing that I had a grandfather. He had recently been diagnosed with cancer of a rather malignant sort, and as my uncle and aunt had no children, he had decided that he wanted to meet his grandchildren before he died, but not to see his daughter. As I was the eldest, and the only one who could speak Dutch, he wanted to meet me first.

From what my uncle had told me, my grandfather did not seem to be the kind of person that a decent human being would want to meet, but I was his flesh-and-blood, and had not lived during World War II, so I had no personal resentment of him. I telephoned my mother that same night. "You never told me that I had a grandfather," I said, and told her what my uncle had said.

"I guess that I should have told you about him," she said, "but after what he said about your father, I decided that he was not a suitable person for you to know, especially when you went to stay with your uncle as a boy. So, now he's dying. I wonder if he has any regrets about his support of the Nazis. Maybe he has, but if he doesn't want to see me, I suspect that his views haven't changed. Will you go?"

"Yes, I think so, though I won't be able to stay for more than a couple of days. I'll find out what state he's in, and what he wants to do. At this stage, I don't think Dorothea or Jeroen should be told about him."

"No, I agree," said my mother. "Let me know how you get on, darling, and give my love to Jon."

Next morning I was on the phone early to the travel agent and secured a seat on a flight from London-Stanstead to Amsterdam-Schiphol for the following day. I went into the lab and explained to Charlie that I had to make an urgent visit to my grandfather who was near death, but that I should only be gone a couple of days.

Jon ran me to Stanstead, which was not far from Camford, in the 4x4. From Schiphol, I took the train to Amersfoort and walked from the station to my uncle's café. He welcomed me with a beer. I had my old room back and we had a cosy supper together.

The next day we went by car to the old people's home where my grandfather lived. It was beautifully situated on the edge of the town. My uncle parked the car and we walked through the gardens to the house. As it was a warm summer day, the man who had begotten my mother and uncle was sitting in a chair in the garden reading a newspaper. He was tall but thin, with the cadaverous appearance that many cancer sufferers have. He stood up as we approached.

"Father, may I introduce your grandson, David Scarborough?"

"Dag, Opa," I said (Hello, Grandad)"

"So you are Helena's eldest," the old man said. "How old are you?"

"I shall be 23 next week," I said.

"How is your mother?" he asked.

"She is fine," I said.

"What do you do?" he asked.

"I am a research student in pharmacology at Camford University," I said.

"So, you're 23. Are you married or engaged yet?"

I could just have said that I was not married, but I am proud of my relationship with Jon, so I said, "I'm homosexual, but I have a permanent relationship with a man friend."

"In the good old days," he said, "people like you would be made to wear a pink triangle and be locked up."

"And then they would be sent to Westerbork, transported to Auschwitz and gassed!" I said.

"You must have inherited your decadent dirty habits from your father, who was a dirty Englishman," he said. I could not believe what I was hearing. To hear such talk in the last quarter of the twentieth century was unbelievable. Here was clearly a totally unregenerate, unrepentant Nazi.

"Grandfather, it's more than 40 years since Hitler killed himself. How can you still believe in such an inhuman philosophy?"

"Dirty faggots should be wiped off the face of the earth!" he replied. "That's the will of God."

"The will of God is to love your neighbour, not beat him, torture him and gas him!" I replied. "God made me what I am. It's likely that I will never have any children. But my man loves me and I love him. I rejoice and thank God that He can make the two of us so happy together!"

My uncle asked his father if he would like a cup of coffee, to which he said yes and my uncle asked me to go inside and ask for three cups of coffee. He told me afterwards that while I was gone he remonstrated with his father. When I came back, the old man still looked at me venomously.

I said to him "Do you feel ashamed of your Nazi beliefs? You ought to!"

"Don't you go telling me what I ought and ought not to do, young pansy!" he said. "You'll burn in hell, like the fire that burnt Sodom."

"Better to burn in hell than to be gassed and burnt in Auschwitz!" I said. We sat there drinking coffee.

"You are just like your mother!" the old man said, "stubborn and argumentative!"

My uncle gaped in amazement. "Father, I don't know how you can say that. You don't know David. He is one of the mildest, kindest and most considerate boys I have ever met! When he worked in the cafe, all the customers loved him."

"Oh, so he has done some useful work in his life then!" said the old man. "Pratting around in a university is just the sort of thing that I would have expected from a young faggot. He should have gone into the building trade where they would have beaten it out of him!"

My initial outrage, indignation and disgust had now moderated, and I began to see the funny side of the discussion. The old man was clearly suffering from the early stages of dementia, in spite of the fact that he clearly recognized people and faces and knew exactly who people were. We sat there for a few minutes longer without speaking, and then the old man said to me, "Give my love to your mother when you get home. Tell her that the spawn of a dirty Englishman was bound to be a filthy degenerate!"

I stood up and told my uncle that his filthy degenerate nephew would wait for him by the car. I walked over to the car park. After about 5 minutes my uncle followed and got into the driving seat. I asked him if he knew of a Catholic church in the vicinity, because I needed to say a prayer for the old man's forgiveness and to ask God to forgive me for my anger. I would only take ten minutes. It had to be a Catholic church, as all Dutch Protestant churches are kept locked when there is no service. My uncle very kindly obliged me. He turned off the main road in a suburb and stopped near a small Roman Catholic church. I established that it was not locked and suggested to him that he should wait for me in the cafe across the road. I went into the church. It was dim and unattractive, but there were candles and a place to light them and a stand to hold them. I lit one, put a guilder in the box and knelt and prayed for the old man and for myself. I then crossed the road and joined him. "Can I buy you a beer?" I asked him.

"No," he replied, "I'm driving, but I will have a cup of coffee." I ordered two coffees, which we drank and then went back to my uncle's cafe.

"Uncle Kees, I need a beer!" I said after he had put the car away. We went into the bar and he drew us two glasses of beer and we told my aunt about our visit. I told her how dreadful I felt and how I now understood why no one had told me about the existence of this old man, my grandfather. "All I can do now," I said "is to pray for him. I never want to meet him again."

I dined with them that evening and having phoned the airport, booked myself in to a flight the following afternoon. My uncle told me that the old man had a lot of money, possibly acquired by black-market activities during WW2. "Well, one thing is certain," I said, "he won't be leaving any of it to me!" It would take an hour or so to get to Schiphol and of course there was an hour's check-in time before the flight, so I left my uncle and aunt after breakfast, promising that on my next visit I would bring Jon with me.

My mother and Jon were disgusted when I told them what the old man had said, although my mother was not surprised.

Chapter 20 David

We move into Rockwell's Barn

It was only relatively late in the planning stages of building Rockwell's Barn that we had realized the total impracticality of constructing a swimming pool that would be in regular use for only two weeks a year for at least the next three years and we arranged for an outside firm to supply flooring material to cover the tiled pool cavity. When we needed a swim, we would have to drive to the public pool in Ixfordingworth, unless we could find a private sports club.

Eventually, early in September, we were able to move into the house. Most of the furniture and fittings of course had been delivered new from the respective retailers and relatively little furniture and movables needed to be taken from the flat in Fountain Street to Ixton. Jon had bought a reasonable sized four-wheel-drive vehicle, and it seemed likely that most of the things that we needed to move could be accommodated in that vehicle, if necessary making perhaps two or three journeys, rather than hiring a small removal van. Because of the fact that we would be unlikely to live there for more than two weeks at a time during the course of the next two years, we did not see the need to keep a large supply of clothes and consumables in the house.

Since we had taken relatively short breaks over Christmas and Easter, both of us were able to obtain three weeks break from our work in order to move in and get the new house sorted out. It had been necessary of course to install electronic security equipment in the house, because it was too far away from the Rockwells' farm for anyone close at hand to keep an eye on the building. Security equipment at that date was relatively primitive, but we did install the best we could get, with an alarm connected to Arthur's farm in the event of a break-in taking place.

Some of the builders were still on the site, which was good, because there were the inevitable teething troubles of getting the new plumbing and electrical and gas appliances fully functional. We had purchased a number of small indoor trees growing in pots to furnish the poolside and the Hall of the house, and in the roof patio area two or three of these were also installed. A number of rooms in the house were not yet furnished. As I have already written, this included three bedrooms and my small prayer room/chapel. The delivery of furniture took about a week, which left us with a fortnight to lay rugs, hang curtains, dust paintwork and actually live in the house and identify any difficulties.