Tom and Luke's Third Year Pt. 01

Chapter One

Life without Luke

The most wonderful day of my life occurred in August of my second year at Buckingham College, in the University of Camford. It was the day that my boyfriend Luke agreed to become my life partner. I had fallen in love with him the minute I first met him almost two years before, when we were freshmen sharing a room in college. He had beautiful long dark wavy hair and a brown Mediterranean skin. He was about 70 kilos, tall and thin, but wiry rather than skinny, muscular but slender, with sparse body hair and an excitingly big male organ. He was very chatty, open and friendly, and in the first few weeks of term made me feel less strange and alienated in the university city far from my home in the north of England. I felt enormously attracted to him, and the merest sight of him filled me with desire. Perhaps it was fortunate that I met him before I knew his name, or I might have been put off by his double-barrelled surname Singleton-Scarborough. Only much later did I discover that his name was that of his two adoptive fathers, who had brought him up from babyhood. He knew the identity of his mother, but had never met her. She was the sister of one of his cofathers.

In the next six months, we became close friends, but both of us disguised our sexual attraction for each other out of fear that we would spoil our close relationship. We only recognized our love for one another after I had rescued Luke from an embarrassing and threatening situation by falsely claiming that he was mine, when we went by mistake into a gay pub and he was propositioned by a gay weirdo. Afterwards I had to tell him that although what I had said was untrue, I did actually want him. He responded by acknowledging that he felt the same way towards me. You may find this hard to believe, but I did not know at the time that the college of which I was a member had a reputation for being gay, or more correctly, gay-friendly. I should have realized it, because I knew that it was Camford's only college that did not admit women! Luke knew of course, which is why he had chosen to go there.

My mother died when I was 15 years of age. After her death, my father disintegrated as a person. Already unemployed, he subsisted entirely on benefits and lived with a series of worthless women, none of whom had any time for a teenager in the house. Made so unwelcome, I moved in with my elder sister Liz, who had her own house and her own business. I did all my school homework and ate most of my meals at Liz's house. I had very few friends of my own age, so I spent three years, until I came to Camford, with books, either study books or works of history and literature. When not in Liz's house, I also spent a good deal of time in the house of my chemistry master Mr Silverdale, who gave me an enormous amount of help and encouragement. Not only did he coach me through my GCSE and A-Level exams, but he encouraged me to make an application to the University of Camford. He also encouraged and developed my love of classical music that had begun when my mother sent me to piano lessons, which ceased abruptly on her death. It was thanks to the general reading and my retentive memory that at the age of seventeen and a half I successfully passed the interview for admission to Buckingham College.

No-one from my school had ever gone to Camford, so when I got there with good A Levels, just eighteen years old, I was intensely lonely. Even my tutor in my first year did not give me the help and encouragement that he was paid to do. I had spells of feeling suicidal and in the Candlemas term even thought of leaving, although I had nowhere to go to.

Luke was the only person who was nice to me, and indeed went out of his way to help me find my feet in college, university and city. He persuaded me to go to the cinema with him to see foreign-language films, and bought exotic beers, which we consumed in our college room. I would have done anything to gain his affection, but dared not tell him so. When we found one another, the world changed for me, and in the course of the following months with Luke's support and encouragement, I began to appreciate the glories, the pleasures and the beauty of the city and its colleges and the sheer enjoyableness of academic life. I also (to be honest) also took enormous delight in my boy's beautiful body!

I had always been good at chemistry, my chosen field of study, so I had no academic problems, and thanks to the joy that Luke brought to my life, and in spite of poor college tuition, I did so well in my first-year exams that I got a scholarship. It gave me particular pleasure that he too got a scholarship and we continued to share a room in our second year. But my greatest pleasure was when Luke said to me, "It's a pity there are no scholarships for brilliance in fucking. If there were, you would easily win one!"

After a particularly disagreeable episode during my first Easter vacation involving the bitch with whom my father was living, I had left home for good, Luke's parents offered me a home. They were two very distinguished middle-aged gay men. They lived at Rockwell's Barn, a country house near Ixton, but also had a flat in Fountain Street, Camford. Luke and I were (and are) blissfully happy together, but I was unable to contemplate us getting engaged, as he had pots of money because his parents were wealthy, and I had nothing to offer Luke, except myself.

Things changed however, when at Easter in my second year I met one of Luke's grandmothers for the first time, and out of the blue she offered the two of us €75,000 each! So only a few months after this, as we were lying together under an overhanging rock on a Welsh hillside after our first ever open-air sex, I asked him to become my partner for life, and he accepted without hesitation. Luke is a devout Anglican, and his sweet disposition and forgiving nature are good advertisements for the Christian faith. After falling in love, he would never get involved in a relationship that was not lifelong. He brought a sense of security to me that I had never felt since my mother's death. We bought each other identical engagement rings ('mangagement rings' as they later became known) as a token that we belonged to each other. By now I had a female friend Margaret, with whom I went to concerts. She was a lesbian, so Luke had no need to be jealous, and he asked her to keep an eye on me, because shortly after our engagement, he left for Italy as part of his degree studies in Modern Languages.

I got on well with Luke's parents. One, whom he called Pop, was a tutor to first-year chemistry students in St Boniface's College, the other, whom he called Dad, and who was his biological uncle, was a world-famous tenor, whose voice I had admired since I was a young teenager. Dad, whom I call David, is often away singing in recitals, opera and oratorio in all parts of the world. I am sometimes honoured with the responsibility of playing the piano for him when he rehearses at home. On Luke's encouragement, I discovered that I could sing, and was recruited as a tenor into the college chapel choir, which sorely needed tenor and (male) alto voices. Later my friend Margaret encouraged me to audition for the Camford Bach Choir.

Towards the end of that same August, on one of my days off from my vacation work at the Camford Fitness Centre, Dad, who was on one of his short stretches at home, drove with me to Bristol Airport to put Luke on a plane to Bologna-Guglielmo-Marconi Airport. He was going to spend his third academic year as an Erasmus student at the University of Bologna, reputed to be the oldest in Europe (though this is disputed by the University of Salamanca!). Most of his weekends were to be spent with his mother and her family in a small town near Verona. She was Luke's Dad's sister, and had given Luke up at the age of six months to Dad and Pop for adoption. She had later married Massimo Mascagnoli. After his adoption she had no contact with her son until at the age of eighteen, he exercised his right to find her. This had happened the year before, and both I and his English cofathers had already met his mother and her family. I kissed Luke goodbye with regret, but not with a sinking heart. I would be seeing him again in four months time.

About a month later, just before the beginning of the Martinmas term, and after I had finished working at the Fitness Centre, Luke's parents suggested to me that I invite Margaret, who had just got back to Camford, to spend a day with us at Rockwell's Barn. Cathy, Luke's sister was just about to leave for Oxbridge, but her preparations were well organized, and her curiosity to meet my lesbian friend was so great that she spent the day with Margaret and me. The two girls got on like a house on fire and in the end, despairing of getting Margaret to myself, I undressed and swam fifty metres in the pool! Eventually I persuaded the two of them to come for a drink at the Jellycotes Arms.

So much by way of introduction to this story: except that I have not yet told you my name. It is Thomas Appleton. I had by now left behind the black period that I had gone through between the ages of 15 and 18, and had become a normal man of twenty, different only in that I preferred boys to girls. Luke however left for Italy convinced that I would relapse during his absence into my teenage black slough of despond. One of the reasons for me writing this account is to prove him wrong! I proposed to have a good time while he was away, and in any case I had the major exams of my study period at the end of this third year and was determined to do well in them, as I wanted to do research.

Chapter Two

Left behind in Camford

I had arranged with Luke that we would talk on the phone only once per week. We also thought that although we would not restrict the number of E-mails that we exchanged, we would try to limit them to one per week each. The intention was to use the phone calls for phone sex, rather than for rational conversation, for which we would use E-mail.

In Luke's first E-mail, he told us that he had found somewhere to live, a shared apartment with two Italian students. He said that Bologna was a huge and faceless university, with 90,000 students, and few contact hours. He had registered for about six modules in history, literature, politics, regional studies, and music. As he said, all he would get from Bologna was a certificate, and although he would get assessments, they would not count towards his Camford degree. Only the fact that he had studied for an extra year would be taken into account in his Camford assessment, though of course he would be able to use some of the knowledge acquired in Italy in his final year essays and exams. So his studies were much more laid back than in Camford, and the Italian terms were also longer.

When term began, Margaret was an enormous help to me, even though out of consideration for Sarah, her girlfriend, we could not go out together more than twice per week, one of which scarcely counted because it was Bach Choir practice evening. It was thanks to her, but also in part to my sister, that I was becoming much more at ease with women than Luke was. Even after Luke had sought out and met his mother Dorothea, he was never much at ease with her socially, as he had had a totally motherless upbringing. I just hoped that a year of seeing his mother most weekends in Italy would make him grow to love her as much as most men, especially gay men, love their mothers. This however did depend to some extent on the attitude of Massimo, Dorothea's husband, who can scarcely have welcomed regular visits from his wife's love-child, if such a kind name can be applied to the offspring of the worthless Italian who had casually fucked her and then abandoned her when she got pregnant. Luke always refers to himself not as a love-child, a term which devalues marriage, but as a bastard. It was doubly difficult for poor Massimo, because he had married Dorothea when she was pregnant with Alessandro, who had also been begotten by Luke's promiscuous father, and brought him up as his own son. As Luke always said, his paternity and upbringing seemed to be as complex as that of Figaro in Mozart's opera! Later Massimo and Dorothea had a daughter called Bianca.

Although Luke worried enormously about inheriting his biological father's promiscuity, I knew that his Christian upbringing and well-developed conscience would ensure that he never would behave like his biological father. However, he was attractive to both men and women, whereas I was not, on the whole, attractive to men. Indeed on the rare occasions when I perceived a man appraising me sexually, I got highly embarrassed! We had discussed infidelity at length and eventually adopted the rule that Luke's fathers had had, that single acts of infidelity, if produced by severe temptation, would be ignored provided that they were told to the other partner and not repeated. Who can predict how a lonely man in love can feel and behave when away from his lover?

Academically, the content of my third-year studies was different from my second-year work. There was less laboratory work and more lectures. At the end of the year, there would be exams. Students who had elected for a three-year course got a classified degree. Those who opted for four years just got a pass, and the class of degree would be assigned after completion of a laboratory research project in the fourth year. If fourth-year students worked for an additional twenty weeks in the lab during vacations, they could also get an M.Chem. degree.

I got into the habit of having coffee in the departmental snack-bar with Margaret several times a week. Students who knew I was gay were baffled by the sight of us drinking coffee together and I got a lot of teasing about bisexuality! I still enjoyed singing, and because I was no longer strapped for cash, I signed on to go on the choir's tour of Austria during the Easter vac. It just fitted in between the end of term and our annual visit to Luke's grandmother in Nice. There would still be time after we got back for a week's exam revision before the Pentecost term. I did take the trouble to consult my tutor Colin Vaughan about the advisability of going on a singing trip so close to my exams, but as he said, ten weeks is plenty of time for an organized student to get ready for exams. I was becoming very fond of Margaret, and even discussed with her how she felt about kissing and holding hands. She said she didn't mind, but not to do it when Sarah her girlfriend was around. The three of us did occasionally go out for a drink or to watch a film or play together. The girls welcomed my company when they were visiting pubs, because my presence warded off unwanted male attention and crude comments about 'a pair of dykes.' They were not into swimming, so I went by myself twice a week to the Fitness Centre. Occasionally at lunchtime Luke's Pop would join me. He asked me to call him Jon, which I then started to do.

Chapter Three

Exchange of E-mails I

In November I got the following E-mail:

From: l.c.singleton-scarborough@qqqqq.ac.uk to t.appleton@qqqqq.ac.uk

'Darling Tom,

A couple of weeks ago I made my first visit to the opera in Bologna. The opera house is called the Teatro Communale. It is a very historic building, dating from the eighteenth century, and Toscanini was conductor there in the nineteen thirties. In spite of his tour last year singing Monteverdi madrigals, Dad has never performed in an Italian opera house, and I reckon that Marcello is now too old to get him a role, so I can never expect to see your idol on the Italian stage.

I also go to concerts when I get the chance, and I frequently go to the cinema with one of the boys who share the apartment. However, I had to go to the opera on my own, and that's when I most missed you. The performance I saw was Rossini's 'L'Italiana in Algeri,' which I enjoyed very much, and you would have loved it. In the interval I got talking to a girl who was also on her own, and we arranged to go to the next opera together. She gave me her phone number, so I might even try taking her for a meal if we can get to know one another better! There'll be no shagging though, I promise.'

[I doubt whether my darling boy could do it with a woman, he would never get it up. If he's going to fall, it will be to a man.]

'Anyway, next week there is another opera performance, so I rang her and we have arranged to go together.

I go to about six lectures a week, which is a trivial load compared with your twelve plus one tutorial. And I get no tutorial classes, and all written work is voluntary! I do have a long reading list though. My Italian is getting steadily better, and as a result of living with two boys, my vocabulary of dirty words is getting to be very extensive! When you get some spare time, your first priority has to be driving lessons, but after that I'm going to make you learn Italian. Then we can come and live in the house at Montecatini-Terme.

In my next E-mail, I'll tell you more about the next trip to the opera. I'm desperately looking forward to hearing your voice on Thursday. I love you more than words can express.

Your ever-loving boy

Luca. XXXXXXX'

This was my reply:

From t.appleton@qqqqq.ac.uk

to: l.c.singleton-scarborough@qqqqq.camford.ac.uk

'My darling boy,

It's good that you have found someone to go to the opera with. I hope that she turns out to be as sweet as Margaret is. If she hadn't been gay, I think that I could have fallen for her! We hold hands sometimes, and I've even given her a 'family style' kiss, like I give your grandparents. Do the boys that live in your apartment know that you are gay? Are you planning on coming out in Italy? It might be quite different from here. I guess that as you are only going to be there for a matter of months, it might be better to stay in the closet. A guy tried to get off with me at the Fitness Centre today. I tried to discourage him gently. I am going to ask Alex and Steve if they know him; they seem to know half the gays in Camford.

I went out drinking with them the other night at the Fitness Centre bar. There was the usual collection of football obsessives there, but the beer was good. Pop was telling me that they are definitely going ahead with extensions to the Centre. There will be an additional squash court, and a second swimming pool to reduce congestion, and a sports hall for five-a-side football etc. They got the land fairly cheaply by buying up an old department store and its warehouse that had gone bust. Pop put half a million towards it of course. He tells me that Cathy is having a wonderful time in Oxbridge. I just hope that she doesn't let herself get into trouble like your mother! I doubt it very much, she's too shrewd for that, and no doubt has condoms in her handbag at all times, even if she never needs them!

My wonderful Luke, I miss you more than words can tell. I've even reverted to the teenage habit of wanking off in front of your picture. But it's only another six weeks and we'll be in bed together. I'm ticking off the days on my calendar.

Your loving friend and fiancé,

Tom.' XXXXXXX

From: l.c.singleton-scarborough@qqqqq.ac.uk to t.appleton@qqqqq.ac.uk

'Darling Tom,

Careful inspection of the opera tickets that I had revealed that they were for Puccini's 'Il Tabarro,' (The Cloak), the first of a series of one-act operas by Puccini called 'Il Trittico' (The Triptych). The other two operas will follow in the next two weeks. After the performance was over, I asked the girl, whose name btw is Leonora, if she had eaten, as it was only about 8-30 pm. She said that she had not, so we went to a restaurant for dinner. I was amazed when she said yes to the invitation, because you know how awkward I am with women. There are lots of cheapo eating places in Bologna, because like Camford, it's full of students, but I decided that we should eat in a more upmarket place. We had an excellent meal, avoiding pasta, because I tend to eat too much of it, and we had a bottle of Piemonte with it. Afterwards I asked whether she needed escorting home, but she said she would be OK as it only 11 pm, so I saw her to her tram.