A Sentimental Education Ch. 01

Hindsight is a wonderful gift. It just keeps on giving. You can beat yourself up about it in full knowledge that if you had known then what you know now, none of what you are anguishing would have happened. It's a sort of emotional and mental masturbation; lacking the climax.

At the time it was not so clear. It never is. Historians only appear to be so clever because they know what happened and can choose those facts that fit their theories.

Fact: she had huge pressures on her from work and family; fact, she was not the sort of woman to neglect what needed to be done. Fact: that was one of the reasons I love her. No one had ever told June anything good about herself. Her father was a waste of space, the classic male oxygen-thief. Her mother had suffered at his hands, so had her health. She needed June to help. June never refused help to anyone who asked for it. Fact: she has a heart as big as a planet; another reason to love her.

Leaving school with few qualifications and none of them useful, she had drifted into waitressing and office help type jobs. Working-class girls with no social capital are not expected to make anything of themselves. Get wed, get knocked up (usually the latter first) and do some dead-end job for pin money; ain't life just grand?

Yet from the moment I set eyes on her in that restaurant, I had known she was THE one. She would joke that it had been her sexy arse and lust at first sight. She was not wholly wrong, I'd fancied her from the word go. But there was more. There was something about her. She held herself tense. She was on the defensive. The world was a tough, threatening place and she would fight all the way to survive. I wanted to be there to tell her that it was not so bad, especially if you could love someone. We'd talked. We made love. We got to know each other.

She would hate the comparison - in her blunt northern way she tends to reject compliments, but as our relationship grew, so did she. Maybe it was as she said, because I encouraged her and gave her confidence in herself; maybe. But the determination and the ability were purely hers. I did what a good educationalist is supposed to; I help draw out what was in her.

We married. In her circles there was still a little unease about a lesbian marriage. In mine, an unease about my marrying someone like June. As I said to my Mama when she said that to me: "there is no one like June, that's why I am marrying her."

If I take the historian's prerogative of choosing my facts, I can see how what happened came about. But why could I not see it at the time?

As one very dear friend said to me later: "We're both very intelligent, but stupid in love."

I have an excuse, should I care to use it. I don't because it sounds like special pleading. Ha! Why not admit the real reason? I don't because it draws attention to my Turner's Syndrome (TS), which labels me.

Why am I so small (four foot eight inches); why did I not go through puberty as other girls do; why do I find it hard to work out the right emotional responses; and why can't I count for toffee? The answer is the same - bloody TS. They label you the doctors. Your Mama and Papa can't help but follow suite. Society joins in.

I was lucky. My parents were wealthy, upper class and artistic, and they sent me off to school in the hope it would all be okay. "How awful!" That is what well-meaning people say. They are wrong. I loved school. My TS obsessiveness took the form of loving books, and it turns out I have photographic memory. Unable to cope with games or gym, I had plenty of time to read and do my schoolwork. With the exception of Maths, which I failed with wonderful regularity (what is a Sine or a Cosine, and why should I care?), my work was always in the top three in class. At big school, I was usually top in most things - with three exceptions. Chemistry and Physics counted as Maths, and I was useless at them.

When my peers were getting their periods, growing breasts, and comparing sizes in the showers, and then obsessing over "fit boys," I remained as I had been at the age of twelve: beestings for breasts, no discernible curves, and tiny. That gave me even more space to work.

When I was sixteen, we were allowed to have annual dances with the boy's public school nearby. Papa wondered why, unlike my gorgeous sister, Ella, I had not "found a boyfriend." Mama told him not to be silly: "Pixie likes her books, she has plenty of time for boys when she has been to Oxford and got her degrees." How little she understood. I loved my books; but not boys.

Hindsight tells me I always liked other girls; but hindsight is a liar.

Some TS girls don't have any puberty, some sort of have it, others, with chemical help, can have it. I fell into the first group. With little obvious libido, and no social skills, I fitted the role of "swot" or "nerd" well. I did the same at Oxford.

Having turned eighteen, I did realise in my final term at school that some girls liked me. The captain of the rugby team was sweet on me, which helped stop anyone bullying me. We kissed and fumbled; I liked it. I had no idea what to do. A quick fumble with a working-class girl from the local comprehensive filled that gap; but that was all it was.

At Oxford I got used to what had been unfamiliar at school. There, everyone knew me, and knew about the TS, and it was priced in so to say. At Oxford no one did. I was the fresher who looked like she was fourteen. Then I was the one to watch out for in tutorials, but as I helped other girls with their essays, that mitigated the jealousy. So did the fact that I was no competition for the "fit" boys. I was a useful "spare" to act as cover for friends.

To Mama's delight I got my First, and, even better, my doctorate.

What does hindsight say presented with all this?

There was I, zero empathetic skills, sexually naive, intellectually brilliant, and emotionally lacking - an accident waiting to happen.

That accident was my Master's professor, Ruth. She seduced me. I adored her. I would do anything to please her, and did. However as the song says, "I will do anything for love, but I won't do that." "That," was to be part of a threesome with her new lover.

Discarded, I got on with things and even found an academic post.

Did I say that the discarding included my Mama? It did.

It was a low ebb in my life. But I got on with it as I always had. There are pluses in not being emotionally literate you know. Oh I had observed how it all worked. I could mimic "normal" quite well, given time. But I could retreat into my obsessions and work.

Clichés are just truths so worm smooth by time and experience that they slip down too easily for us not to dismiss them as such. That's another way of saying they are truths as old as time. More evidence for the historian.

Time heals? Well the hurt gets less. Is that the same as healing? Only time will tell, to trot out another cliché. What does it tell you? It tells you that trauma leaves effects. It tells you, if you listen and learn, that you can't know what these are until they are triggered. And thus we get back to the wisdom of hindsight; too late, as usual. Or was it?

All marriages are unique, because no two couples are the same; but all of them have, hindsight says, common features.

There is the love that leads you to marriage. Marriage of any sort is a recent innovation for gay couples, and hard won. It is not entered into lightly; or ought not to be. But since when did high emotions and intellect work well in tandem. Doubtless that is why there is that other cliché: "marry in haste and repent at leisure."

But June and I had not entered into it lightly; we loved each other. Our wedding was a public demonstration of that. We enjoyed each other's company. Our lovemaking was all we could have wanted.

She knew, because being me I blurted it out (a common phenomenon with TS girls) that I worried that my own submissive tendencies might be too much for her. She was right (as so often) when she told me not to worry.

Our lovemaking had about it a joyous quality, and we both delighted in knowing those little things which pleased each other most.

June knew, instinctively, that penetration was not high on my list of wants. One effect of TS is that your vagina never gets that oestrogen boost which makes it elastic enough to enjoy penetration and endure childbirth. As my ovaries never developed (another gift from TS), the latter was not a problem. As I had the normal desires of an adult woman, my first lover wanted to use me that way and it hurt like hell; it had left me wary of it.

June had, however, found ways of getting me aroused enough that I would take her finger in me. By contrast, my June loved penetration. It was a tribute to the level of arousal she induced in me that I found my way there with her.

I adored oral with her. The very scent of her pussy was enough to get me tingling. We would often start with me undressing her, as she undressed me, and then I would be on my knees lapping at her. It was often an effort not to just devour her, and the urge just to press my face into her wetness and coat myself in her was one I seldom resisted. I loved to feel her juices thicken. I adored the way she would press herself against me, allowing my tongue free access to which ever part of her was closest to it.

It was on one such evening, when she was gasping and calling:

"Oh geeez, geeez, Pix, what you do to me!"

My fingers had been parting her lips, and she was so wet and sticky that I pushed two fingers in. I suppose that given my own fears of penetration, it had not quite occurred to me that, like most women, June actually craved it. Her reaction to my curling two fingers up into her was the revelation - and encouragement - I had needed.

"Oh geeez, geeez, Pix, yes, yes, more, more!"

She opened so beautifully. I licked her stiff clit and fumbled a little, and in trying to get a third finger in, slid my thumb under my fingers and my small fist pushed in. June's reaction was ecstatic.

"Oh geeez, geeez, Pix, fuck, yes, yes, fist me!"

Educating myself on these matters as one did, via porn videos, I knew there was such a thing, but as it did nothing for me, I had not paid it much mind; now I regretted it. Or did I? I went by the instincts flowing through from her to me - even as her juices were. I twisted my hand slightly then began to piston her. I felt her grip me. Trying hard not to hit myself as I flicked her clit, I pressed in and twisted again. There was a sudden pain as she gripped my hair, and then there was the huge satisfaction as she came, and hard, squirting into my face.

As she shook and gripped me, I felt a glow like never before. I really could satisfy my wife. The second orgasm which soon followed, confirmed that theory.

As we cuddled and kissed afterwards, she looked at me:

"How did you know?"

"Instinct," I said.

And that was, in hindsight, the most important thing of all, and the most underrated.

As reasoning beings, we tend to place thought over instinct. "Prove it," our scientific age demands, as though you can "prove" love.

June introduced me to a thrill I had seen but never experienced.

One Saturday morning as I devoured her, she said:

"I want to feel your pussy against mine."

So saying she lifted my right leg and slid herself between my thighs, moving herself until my wetness could feel hers mingling with it.

"I want to share my wetness with you."

The very way she said it made me wetter.

Opening me, she pressed against me, grinding. Her lips were fuller than mine and seemed to cover them; the feel of her against me like that was like nothing else I had ever experienced, and when, as she moved, our clits touched, I had a mini orgasm.

June adjusted herself and began pressing. The friction of our wetness as it squelched and mingled, were driving me wild, and when her clit touched my entrance, I lost it totally. That set June's orgasm on fire too.

"Pixxxxxxx!" She screamed, as I screamed her name.

"Don't stop!" June urged.

As she was the one doing most of the work, I had no intention of stopping. Another orgasm followed in quick succession, and the aftershocks continued as we became a hot sweaty mess.

I lay in her arms, exhausted, happy, satisfied, and full of love.

All of which hindsight suggests meant that all was well. In the early days of a marriage that is often the case.

We both had our work. June worked hard and had her mother to look after. I taught at the university that had given me my chance of an academic career after the crashing and burning of my relationship with my supervisor. That meant living apart for a while each week - and great catch-up sex on a Thursday night.

It might have been supposed that the tensions which began to affect our marriage would have had that as their cause; but hindsight would confirm what I thought at the time; it did no such thing.

June would work at a restaurant in the evening, I would prep my lectures and seminars. We would have a late-night loving phone call, even some hot phone sex. We were both busy; we both found time for each other despite the distance. As for the weekends, well friends knew not to bother us on Saturday mornings. They would smirk when June would say it was her "Tesco's time." "Never heard it called that before," one of them giggled.

Counterintuitively it was when that period of our life ended that things began, almost imperceptibly, to go off track.

Work, even commuting, compartmentalised our lives, finding a place for our lovemaking and affection, indeed almost prioritising it by making the opportunities for it available only at certain times. Then my faithful companion, Turner's Syndrome, came to bugger things up.

Some TS sufferers have brittle bones. I am one of them. It was during the winter commute towards the middle of the second year of our marriage that it became clear that my ankles were becoming a problem - again. I say again because plates had been inserted in them which I was fifteen. Thirteen weeks of immobility later, I had been able to begin to walk again. But as Mama reminded me when, on a visit to her, she saw me using a stick, the plate would not last forever.

I talked to the Quacks, who, even after seeing x-rays, could not decide whether they needed replacing.

June was her usual sympathetic and loving self.

One of the joys of our marriage was to see how her self-confidence had grown. Her boss, seeing in her the potential I saw there, had asked her to take on a managerial role in the office. As usual with June, her first reaction was to say no, but she asked me, and I encouraged her to agree. To her amazement (but not to mine or that of her boss) she took to it like a duck to water. As he also owned the restaurant where she worked of an evening, he suggested she take on a more front of house role, where, again, she did brilliantly. How she managed that, and her sick Mum was a marvel. I could see the strain showing sometimes when I came home. "It has to be done, love," was what she would say; my tough northern lass.

Even as I was beginning to find the commute, and the walking, a strain, the university found itself, like many others, in a financial crisis. In the noughties they had expanded in the Arts and Humanities to take advantage of the increased number of students, only to find themselves in a mess as student numbers went down with the demographic dip which started in 2015 and would continue until at least 2021.

It could, of course have decided it needed fewer Pro Vice Chancellors, Managers and HR professionals, but it was much easier to get rid of some academics. My Dean wondered if I would like to take advantage of the situation by accepting a voluntary severance package.

I talked it over with June.

"Look my love," she said, "I am now earning a decent amount, the lump sum would be wonderful for us, and I am sure you could find work closer to us."

By January I was having to tell work that I was signed off sick. It was becoming clear that at some point something would give - probably my ankles. So, one bleak winter morning, I accepted the inevitable. I had had a good run for my money (how I liked the irony of that phrase), but it was time to quit.

Work held a nice farewell party, and friends and students said how sad they were I was going. I knew some colleagues were relieved; my going had saved someone else's job.

So, bliss? No more commuting. No more phone sex. No more catch-up sex. So far so good. It was when it turned into no sex that it was less than bliss, a lot less.

I got it. I was in pain, and our beloved tribbing was not possible for a woman whose ankles gave her such pain. June was tired when she got in. Another promotion on both jobs meant more pressure on her; her Mum's health worsened, and it was not as though I could help, not being able to walk far myself.

I have heard people say how happy they were in retirement. Maybe that's true if you have been at it for forty years. But my career had been cut short. There had been one big plus. My doctor had suggested to me that I should try for early retirement on the grounds of ill-health. The lump sum was less, but I would receive my pension now. The university, which, after all was not paying my pension, was quite happy to save on the lump sum, and the pension company's doctors accepted the claim. That meant that, after you took out the costs of commuting and working (do you know how much a cup of coffee costs in London?) we were not much worse off than when I had been working. When you took into account June's increased salary, we may even have been slightly better off.

That relieved one source of tension. I was not well enough to have worked in any event. I was on the waiting list for the operation. Two titanium plates awaited me. Doing them both together would mean another minimum of thirteen to fourteen weeks immobile except for a wheelchair.

I had gone from being the blushing bride and a moderately successful academic, to a retired invalid. Maybe I should have gone to that seminar on how to prepare from retirement? But I was too ill to make it.

I felt frumpy. Work meant making an effort. When you were my height, you made sure to look as little like a teenager as you could. But I was home all day, so who cared? I could put my leggings and tops on at home, and home was where I spent most of the day.

I read, a lot. I wrote, finishing articles I had on the go. With the help of my walking sticks I could get to a little local café and chat to friends. I could still get to Church on Sundays, and I had Bible study on Tuesdays. It was a quiet and constrained life.

I missed the phone sex; I missed the make-up sex; I missed the sex.

There is a view, which I suspect proceeds, as so many of the assumptions in the public square do, from the male gaze, that not having sex leaves you frustrated and irritable. But for me, and most women I know, sex is a part of love, an important part, but a part. Its absence was a mark of an absence of something more important - contact at a deeper level.

If, in play, I submitted to June, it was not because I wanted a domme, again, that whole BDSM scene is so male inspired (of course it is, and it works for most); for me it was an emptying out of myself. I gave myself, wholly to her, as she would for me. Except now, she did not have time, and I did not feel I could say anything without sounding pathetic and whiny.

I have always had a hatred of whinging. Pity is on free offer to TS sufferers (sometimes), but to have taken it would, for me, to have accepted the pigeon-hole scooped out for me. I was not going there. Besides, June was under such pressure. What sort of love would have led me to say to her: "hey, you, what about little old me?" Hindsight suggests it might have been rather a sensible and humble love. Good old hindsight.