David Begins Graduate Study Pt. 02

It was a great thrill for us to make up the bed in our new bedroom with the new bed-linen, including a new supply of silken sheets. We soon made sure that all the plumbing facilities in all rooms were fully functional. This involved us both in shaving and using the toilet and showering in every single bathroom in the house! As there were four bathrooms downstairs including the male and female changing rooms and a further five bathrooms upstairs, this was a fairly marathon task. The plumbers and electricians however had done a very good job and we found that all the bathroom facilities seemed to be fully functional without any leaks. The water heating system worked well and we hoped that the frost insulation precautions would survive a prolonged period of cold weather during the winter when the house would almost certainly be uninhabited.

Also of course we had to try out the facilities of the new kitchen, and Jon's cooking skills were tested quite rigorously by him deliberately choosing dishes to cook that placed demands on the various oven and grill facilities in the kitchen. He even found time to give me a few lessons in cookery. My busy teenage years had not allowed me to learn anything more than very basic cooking skills. My mother always said that teaching male teenagers hygiene was more important than teaching them to cook, although I was quite capable of preparing breakfast and simple evening meals, not to mention sandwiches! Again he had assumed his role as mentor who was teaching me life skills and reinforcing my love and gratitude for him. Jon had to admit that he had never done any baking, but he did in fact make one attempt to make a cake in order to test out the new oven and to my surprise it worked out reasonably successfully!

One of the most wonderful experiences of that happy but hectic three weeks was the fact that the house offered an enormous number of places to make love in. Not only did we use our own bed, but we also used the sofa in the big sitting-room, the sofa in the small sitting-room, the upstairs patio and even one of the changing rooms by the swimming pool in which to have sex.

One difficulty of course about the decorations in the house was the extent to which we were prepared to allow the display of homoerotic images and pictures. We finally settled on pictures that were in the main not explicit. So for example in the men's pool changing room there was a picture of nude males bathing, and in the women's changing room a picture of nude females bathing. You might of course regard this as homosexual, on the grounds that if we had been heterosexuals the male nudes would have been in the female changing room and vice versa! We did have an explicit mural in our own bathroom but as that was only accessible via our bedroom it was not open to inspection by anyone other than ourselves. The pictures had been executed in acrylic by an artist who had been at school with Jon. He was of course gay: one felt it would be insulting to artists for gay clients to commission work from a heterosexual artist! The decorations in the pool room were simply coloured key pattern and floral tile motifs set in the white tiled walls. Some of the floor in the pool room also had mosaics, but these were simply fish or sea monsters. The overall aim about which we were both fully agreed was that the decorations in the house should be restrained rather than kitsch.

The new lift was a great success. It had almost soundless stainless steel doors. At the subterranean level, it opened into a small lobby some 1.5 metres square into which the street door opened. This door was only used for deliveries or pedestrian access. Anyone arriving in a vehicle who rang the bell was directed to the front door at field level access, even though the distance between the two doors by road was the better part of one and a half kilometres.

The study that we both shared was a large room. At one end we each had a desk, at right angles to one another and at the other end of the room was a second desk that either of us could use if we wanted to be quiet and alone. The space in between was effectively the library. The walls were lined on both sides with books and in between were a whole series of freestanding bookcases. We planned to install there most of the books from Fountain Street that were not in everyday use. Jon planned to divide his large library of pornography into two sections, one of which he kept in Fountain Street, the other of which would be kept in Rockwell's barn. We had each over the last few years accumulated a significant number of books, as living in a university city one tends to do. Remember also that this was before the days of DVDs and ebooks. There was only one computer, which we would share, as computers were extremely expensive at that time and not very widely used. The house had been cabled with category 5 cable, which proved to be a very forward-looking move on Jon's part.

On the last weekend before we had to go back to Camford, we arranged to have a house-warming party to which we invited Arthur Rockwell and his family and all who had been involved in the construction of the house. Tim Ingledown came for the occasion, and would stay as our first overnight guest. Jon arranged with a firm of caterers to have a top-quality buffet delivered, and we ourselves saw to the provision of wine and beer. We did not want the guests to be shown the upper floors in the house, so we arranged for the buffet eating and drinking to be held partly in the empty poolroom, for which we provided trestle tables and stacking chairs, and in our splendid hall. The weather was warm also, so that people were able to sit outside, although the outside seating area was quite limited because we did not have very much land outside the house.

We invited the workers to bring their wives or girlfriends and Don to bring his boyfriend. We were both curious to meet Don's boy, who turned out to rather shy and had not yet grown out of his teenage awkwardness, but was cute and obviously very fond of Don. Whether there were the seeds of a permanent relationship there was not yet apparent, and in any case neither boy was in a position to settle into such a relationship: they were both young and not yet established in jobs. So it might only be a teenage romance, but they made a sweet and touching pair. Don's work colleagues had obviously discovered his inclinations, and tactfully refrained from teasing him, at least in public. By now most of the workers had left the site for a new project, but Jon took the opportunity to take Alec the foreman on one side and asked him how Don was getting on. To our surprise and relief, the building team had accepted Don's gayness and only occasionally teased him. Alec told us that Don was nearly at the end of his apprenticeship and, barring a serious recession in the construction industry, was certain to be taken on as a permanent employee. One of the factors that had influenced Jon and Tim Ingledown at the time that they had engaged the building firm was that, despite financial disadvantages, it resolutely refused to employ labour-only subcontract workers and preferred to work with established firms and their own employees. Stable teams produce much better quality workmanship, and Jon had felt no obligation to choose the minimum tender.

Tim was a great social catalyst. He went round and talked to everyone present, and made them feel welcome and at ease. Jon was fine with Arthur and the site workers, but found difficulty in talking to the women present. I got talking to Mrs Rockwell, who has scarcely figured in this saga. She was a very nice motherly person and I reckoned she could be a good source of advice in any of our domestic crises.

By early evening the last of the guests had gone. To judge from the large number of empty bottles, glasses and cans and the relatively small amount of remaining food, we concluded that everyone must have had a good time. I made us coffee, and Jon and Tim and myself settled down in the big sitting room to discuss how the day had gone. We felt that on the whole it had been a big success. We did wonder slightly about the security risks of showing some strangers what it was like inside our house, but we decided there was no reason to think that any of them were unreliable or indiscreet.

"So Tim," I said, "when are you going to settle down? Are you going to remain a bachelor for the rest of your life, or do you see yourself in some kind of partnership?"

"Only you, David, could ask a question as cheeky as that!" said Tim. "Do you know that Jon has never asked me about my personal relationships? As a matter of fact, I'm not gay, and I go out with a lot of women, but have not yet met anyone that I want to settle down with for life. In fact, if I did, it might well be to my clients' detriment, as at present I am usually almost instantly available to them. Female company is good for me, because women are not inclined to ask me questions about my clients and their wealth and activities, which I am highly paid to keep quiet about! Most of my clients are wealthy and reluctant to get the attention of the media, so the major responsibility in my life outside my job is to be VERY discreet. So I am a very restrained drinker, but enjoy occasions like today when I can relax and not be always parrying nosy questions about my clients."

It seemed to me that our house had been completed at precisely the wrong time in our lives, a time when both of us were incredibly busy seven days per week in activities which did not permit us to down tools on a Friday afternoon and resume towards lunchtime on Monday. However, with our new vehicle it was perfectly possible to be at Rockwell's Barn in a little over an hour from Camford and out of term we could certainly spend the whole weekend there. During term we would have to truncate our weekends by leaving early on Sunday afternoon to be back in Camford for chapel and dinner on the Sunday night.

By now we were approaching the end of September and the anniversary of my first year in research and Jon's first year as a post-doc. What happened during the following year we will narrate in the next part of this roman fleuve.

THE END