Eleanor, Tommy and Martin Pt. 01

The apartment was on the first floor of a late seventeenth-century building reached, as is often the case in Italy, by an outside staircase from an inner courtyard. Tommy was due to start his new job on August 1, in a modern higher-education institute some 15-minutes walk from their new apartment. Within two weeks, Eleanor was due to join them for a month.

Eleanor Butterfield was a graduate student at Boni's and the girlfriend of Tommy and Martin. She was no mere fag-hag. She was intimate with both of the boys, and had convinced Martin that he could fuck women as well as men. Her ultimate intention was to set up a permanent ménage à trois with the two men. It had taken her two years to convince them that such an arrangement was possible, without jealousy or disputes.

Chapter VI

Eleanor's graduate study

It turned out that there were a lot of useful resources for Eleanor in the Wilsonian Library, and she had made rapid progress with securing photographs of much material, both ancient and modern, as well as borrowing quite a number of library books. Her principal aim was to attempt to investigate the origin of the iconoclastic movement, and whether or not it was due to the influence of Islam. She continued to sing in Saint Boniface's chapel choir and the Camford Bach choir, but virtually gave up cinema attendance. Almost all her undergraduate friends had gone down and were working, so she no longer saw most of them. Occasionally she got invited to eat with Jon and David. She met Martin twice a week, once to eat at a pub or restaurant, and once to have sex.

Of her friends in the theology department who had gone on to theological college, several criticized her severely for deciding not to be ordained. One quoted scripture about looking back after setting her hand to the plough, another accused her of hypocrisy for preferring a worldly life to a spiritual one. In vain she attempted to explain to them that withdrawing from ordination did not mean that she had lost her faith. To these she said the same as she had said to her mother, "I have not lost my faith or my commitment to Jesus Christ. I have merely decided that I am not cut out to be a priest." However, she did discuss her decision with her spiritual director, into whose spiritual hands she had recently put herself. "Am I a hypocrite for choosing a life as a lay person?" she asked him. His reply was that she had only one life, and if she felt that God had called her to live a lay life, that was just as much a spiritual vocation as ordination.

She felt guilty though that she did not tell him that she was choosing to live a life without marriage with two men at the same time, only one of whom was a believer. By now she felt deep love for both Martin and Tommy, though she was not head-over-heels 'in love.' She knew that she wanted them both for life. Because they were firmly bound to one another, she felt that she had no option but to choose both. The successful relationship of Tommy's brother Luke with a man and a woman and their family of three children was a graphic example to her. She did ask herself whether God would approve of such a relationship, but decided that providing all three of them were loving and faithful, it was not incompatible with a life of Christian belief. 'Marriage, after all,' she thought, 'is a human, not a Christian, institution. It's not the relationship, but what the partners do within the relationship that interests God'

She would have loved to discuss her dilemma with Olivia, the partner of Luke and Tom, but felt that her lack of command of Italian made it impossible. She knew that Olivia's command of English was also not up to such a discussion. She needed a wise elderly female counsellor. Eventually, one night after dining with David and Jon at Octavia Avenue she realized that such a counsellor was on her doorstep in the person of Caterina Fabioni, the life tenant of part of Jon's and David's house and the godmother of Luke.

Caterina lived in an annex to the house, of which she had been the original owner, and one day Eleanor knocked on Caterina's door. The old lady welcomed her in and offered her a cup of coffee. While they drank coffee, she said to Caterina, "I know that Tommy loves you like a mother and that you have his interests at heart. Do you think that I am doing the right thing by wanting a lifelong relationship with both Tommy and Martin, and giving them a family? Obviously I can't marry both of them, but if I lived with them without marriage, they would be free to marry each other."

"In principle, my answer would be yes, but it all depends on the persons involved. Indeed, I know Tommy well, but I know Martin and you much less well. Ever since he was adopted by David and Jon, Tommy has been overprotected, and this tends to make him a bad judge of character. So my considered reply to you is, Which of them do you love the most?"

"Tommy," Eleanor replied without hesitation. "He is sweet, whereas Martin is good company. I'm now going to take you deeply into my confidence by telling you about our sex lives. Please don't ever repeat what I tell you to Tommy or his parents. I know Tommy well enough to be certain that he would not fuck me if he did not want a long-term relationship with me, BUT the same thing applies to his relationship with Martin. Martin's first love is Tommy. Indeed, until he slept with me, he thought himself incapable of fucking a woman, which is a feeling that many gays have. We have sex once a week. The curious thing, and I am now speaking as woman to woman, and you must never repeat it, is that Martin can give me an orgasm, and Tommy seems not to be able to, although he is a much more confident lovemaker than Martin."

"I am now going to ask you a deep question," said Caterina, "Which do you want most, good sex or motherhood? Your answer, honestly given, will tell you the solution to your dilemma!"

Eleanor did not reply immediately. She sipped her coffee, lost in thought. She realized then what you, the reader will have known already, that deep down, although she enjoyed scholarship, and was anxious to please her family with a brilliant career, what she really wanted was to have children and bring up a family. This of course is social heresy in the twenty-first century, where women are expected to compete with men in the workplace, and often also try to bring up a family at the same time. This juggling of the work-life balance is one of the major causes of stress in the present era.

She thought about all the happy women that she knew. Her mother had opted out of the struggle to work and breed at the same time and given up her career to bring her up, Olivia had opted to give up her career to be a full-time mother to her three children. Even women like Luke's sister Cathy and Tom's sister Liz, who seemed to be lifetime workers, had ultimately recognized their true biological role by falling in love and giving up the stress of the two conflicting roles of having children and continuing to work. And not just women: Jon had given up a promising research career permanently to bring up Luke and Cathy, while David earned the family's living by singing fixtures all over the world. Of course in many of these cases, family wealth meant that there was no necessity to have two wage-earners in the family in order to live.

When however she came to consider David's sister Dorothea, Luke and Sandro's mother, the similarity got even closer. Luke had been the 'victim' of Dorothea's desire to do high-powered academic research. His accidental conception from a one-night stand had got in the way of Dorothea's academic hopes, and only the fortunate occurrence of David and Jon being available to adopt baby Luke had enabled her to fulfil her desire to do research. She was the example that Eleanor needed to consider!

Of course, Eleanor's situation was not the same, and there was also the realization that Tommy had exactly the same choice to make, between a lifelong relationship with Martin, or with Eleanor (or with both, though clearly only one legal union was possible).

Chapter VII

E in Italia noi

Tommy began at the Parma Business Academy with an induction course lasting a week. The students were a very mixed bunch, ranging from 18 years upward in age. Most attended the Academy part-time, usually one or two days per week. Some were school-leavers who wanted enlarge their English skills, others were businessmen who had missed out on learning English at an earlier age, and needed to learn fluent English quickly. Yet others were in their fifties or sixties and needed to learn either because of their jobs, or as a retirement hobby. Of course, the Academy taught many other topics besides English language. Clearly several different types of English class were necessary to tailor the course to the students' different needs.

After a couple of weeks, Tommy had devised a timetable that seemed to work. One day he would work with beginners, another day with advanced groups and another day with specialist groups. The specialists were the greatest challenge, because his knowledge of the international business world was virtually non-existent. However, it soon became apparent that the universality of English meant that many Italian business terms used English words, and that often what the business students needed most was colloquial, conversational English.

The pressures of work made that August hot, sweaty and oppressive, and it was particularly difficult for him when he saw Martin tackling his research work in a very relaxed and laid-back manner. One Saturday, both men took the train to Bologna, where they were to meet Eleanor off a flight from Gatwick to Guglielmo Marconi airport. She looked cool and happy as she came out of the arrivals gate wheeling her suitcase. She put her arms round each man in turn and kissed him, and Tommy then seized her case and the men led her to catch the train.

On arrival in Parma, they took a cab to their new apartment. Eleanor was delighted with her room, which was very spacious and had a king-size bed. "Eleanor," said Martin, "we hope you don't mind, but we have decided that tonight you should sleep with Tommy. After all, only a few weeks ago, I was fucking you on a regular basis, so I feel that I should let Tommy have a turn with you!" They left her to unpack and shower, and then the three of them went out to a neighbouring trattoria for dinner. All three of them felt elation that they were together again and in their own premises rather than visiting family. They consumed a whole bottle of Gavi before returning to the apartment for coffee and chat.

TO BE CONTINUED