Intimacy Pt. 04

EIGHT

Rather than resolving once and for all her issues of sexual identity, Eleanor's encounter with Linda had if anything confused matters still further. Her enjoyment of the sex had, she realised, as she reflected on that day in the weeks that followed, had much to do with the control she wielded. The strap-on stood as a metaphor for the will to dominion over others; it also stood as a stark reminder of a residual appreciation for cock. She had always thought of bisexuality as a positive thing: the ability to enjoy having sex with both men and women. Now, she felt of it rather differently: as the inability to be able to fully enjoy sex with members of either sex.

Linda had been keen that her relationship with Eleanor should be more than a one-night stand, but she soon realised that she must bow to the inevitable. Eleanor would never put it in so many words, but essentially she didn't want to see Linda again - at least, not in a romantic way. At first, she made excuses about her studies (it was her final year, she had exams to prepare for, plus a special project, etc. etc.) and then she just drifted out of Linda's life.

When she was about to graduate, Linda attempted to get in touch with her, but it appeared that she had changed her mobile number. It was as if she wanted to start a new life with a new identity, as she made the move away from London (where she had never really felt at home) to Lancaster, where she would be spending a year doing an MSc in Quantum Technologies. It would be a challenge, certainly, requiring her to learn new skills in the fields of engineering and information sciences, but it was a challenge she felt she was ready for and would benefit from.

After spending a month or so back home in rural Gloucestershire with her parents and her younger sister, reading textbooks and research articles which had been recommended by her new supervisor, Eleanor headed north in the car her mother had lent her to find accommodation for the year that lay ahead. Lancaster itself proving to be too expensive, Eleanor drove to nearby Morecambe to check out the situation there. What she had intended to be a whole morning's stay lasted less than an hour, by which time she had seen all she wanted to of this most depressing of English seaside towns, over which kitsch, vagrancy and obesity ruled as a kind of unholy trinity.

That afternoon, after a light lunch in Lancaster and half an hour or so searching possible accommodation options online, she headed south on the A6 past the campus to a village called Cockerham, which nestled in a quiet area a couple of miles from the main road. Here she found the place she was looking for, a studio flat that occupied the loft of a converted barn. It didn't come cheap, but then again it ticked most of Eleanor's boxes: it was furnished, it was clean, it was bright and it was quiet. The landlords lived on site just across a yard, and they seemed agreeable enough: a couple in their mid-thirties with a young son and an energetic black cocker spaniel.

After trying to knock the price down and being told that they had already had two expressions of interest, Eleanor wrote a cheque for the deposit and the first month's rent, and the place was hers for ten months. She would need to buy herself a second-hand car, but that shouldn't be a problem with the money she had earned from the summer jobs she had done in each of the last four years - her most recent (as an events assistant) having ended just a few days previously. It was arranged for her to move in on the following Monday, giving her time to go back south to spend some time with her family over the weekend, and - hopefully - buy a car.

Her father helped her out both financially and practically with the car, using his contacts with the local garage in Nailsworth to get her a nine-year-old Suzuki Swift for just £2,000. So, by the time Monday morning came round and it was time to make the three and a half hour journey up the M5 and M6, Eleanor felt that everything had come together about as well as it could. She just hoped this didn't mean that she was due a piece of bad luck to even things out.

Once the teaching term proper had started after a few days of orientation, during which she joined the Ninjitsu Club and put her name down for a walk across the sands of Morecambe Bay, she had her first classes in each of the two compulsory modules: Advanced Quantum Theory, and Quantum Computation and Communication. She also met up with the man who would be her supervisor on her Quantum Technologies Research Project, Dr Ravichandran Dhawan. In common with the majority of the teaching staff, Ravi, as he asked her to call him, was from Asia. Indeed, a quick glance at the list of the lecturers in the department indicated that roughly three-quarters hailed from either India or Mainland China.

Ravi didn't fit the bill, though, as far as the stereotypical Indian professor at Lancaster went. He wore no glasses, enjoyed sports (not just watching the cricket on TV either!) and was married to an English woman. He enjoyed nothing more than showing Eleanor photos on his phone of his wife (who hailed from Shrewsbury) and their twin children - a boy and a girl - who were still young and would regularly attend the creche that the university provided for the children of staff.

Ravi also proved very useful in terms of talking with Eleanor about which optional modules she might want to take. He positively raved about Advanced Physical Cosmology, while also speaking highly of the lecturers who took Quantum Field Theory and Theoretical Condensed Matter. Each of these subjects interested Eleanor (even if her knowledge of the last named was very sketchy as yet), while Techniques of High Performance Computing was a course she was very keen to take, given her need to fast-track her knowledge of computer science. Ravi himself took the Particle Physics module, which had been a particular area of interest to Eleanor since she was in the sixth form, and in which field she would be doing her research project.

The social life at Lancaster featured the usual round of parties and concerts, some held on campus, others in the city and still others in what Eleanor had taken to describing simply as The Cesspit - Morecambe. The circle of friends she took to spending most time with were in fact her fellow Ninjitsu practitioners - an eclectic bunch that included a gregarious Venezuelan called Jesús and his Eurasian girlfriend Jeannie. They were a little older than Eleanor, which suited her just fine, as she had always preferred the company of people older than herself.

Meetings of the club, which had previously taken place once a week, on a Tuesday, were doubled, with sessions added on Fridays from the second week onwards. Of course, holding a session on a Friday evening from 6.00 to 8.00 meant that it was the most natural thing in the world to adjourn to the pub, or indeed someone's house, after the strenuous activity had ended for a bit of R&R.

Romantically, Eleanor remained 'gloriously unattached' (as she liked to put it when people pried into her personal life) for the first term of her studies, which wound up a couple of weeks before Christmas. She found that practising the time-honoured strategy of avoidance worked perfectly adequately: she typically avoided situations where she might be chatted up, and she was quite happy to encourage her reputation for being cool and even a little aloof.

As in the past, she continued to prefer the company of men in the main, with Jesús being a particular favourite on account of the fact he was funny and interesting, as well as being a good listener. He also possessed the advantage of being someone Eleanor would never be able to fancy; he might have been good looking, but he just wasn't her type.

But what exactly was her type, she wondered? She didn't seem to have progressed a long way since she had had her fling with Adam. One man and one woman in four years was hardly a stellar return, although she had to say that such abstinence was arguably better for her mental health than the promiscuity practised by some of the people she knew or heard cautionary tales about.

But how could any healthy, well balanced person be as uncertain about her sexual orientation as she was? About the best way she was able to put it after years of thinking about it, was that she preferred the company of men but she preferred the sex with women. She couldn't be bicurious, because she knew what it was like to have relations with both sexes, and she didn't really think she was bisexual either. She had, indeed, come round to thinking that bisexuality didn't really exist. The evidence just didn't support it; and that, to a scientist, was very important. Everyone she knew who claimed to be bisexual, and everyone she read about (the Virginia Wolfes, the Leonard Bernsteins, and so on), weren't really bisexual at all, or so it seemed to her. Invariably, the person would end up a throughgoing homosexual.

Academically, the pressure was ratcheted up a couple of notches in the spring term, when she enrolled in three challenging modules (Astronomical Spectroscopy, Materials and Energy Materials, and Physics of the Earth), as well as getting down to serious business on her Particle Physics project.

January was also the month when she first went fell walking in the Lake District with Jesús, Jeannie and a locally born PhD student called Luke, who was doing his thesis in the economics of education, having obtained a first-class honours degree at Lancaster the previous summer. Although he was the youngest of the group, Luke had a car and, more importantly, he had a fair bit of experience of walking in the Lakes - especially important in the winter months, when the weather could turn suddenly.

Their first walk actually took place - in part, at least - during a snowfall, as they took the direct route up Helvellyn from Thirlmere. They made such good time (after their very early start) that it wasn't yet ten o'clock when they reached the 3,000-foot peak, so they decided to do the Swirral Edge/Striding Edge loop via Hole-in-the-Wall back to Helvellyn before descending the way they had come back down to the car, parked beside the A591. Eleanor, together with the irrepressible Jesús, took advantage of the three-inch snow cover to roll part of the way down the grassy hillside.

The walk was such a great success that they tried to go out at least every other week to do some of the most scenic walks in the Lakes, including Great Gable, Skiddaw, Coniston Old Man and, of course, England's highest peak, Scafell Pike. At Eleanor's suggestion, they also made a booking to do the three-hour walk across the sands of Morecambe Bay in the spring.

Luke, who was passably good looking in his own way, tall and reasonably fit, even if he was possessed of an oversized chin, wasn't short on confidence when it came to the ladies. It was only natural that with Jesús and Jeannie being paired off, Luke should fancy his chances with Eleanor. It was perhaps equally predictable to anyone who has followed Eleanor's story thus far that his advances didn't really cut much ice with her. Even though she wasn't entirely sure what she was looking for in a significant other, she had a good idea what she wasn't looking for, and that included the kind of braggadocio which he favoured.

People who talked a great deal about themselves could be tolerated when their enthusiasm for the topic spilled over into an interest in others, but when such outlets were, as it were, blocked off from the outset, then the attraction they held for her was severely curtailed.

NINE

The incident that was to change her life actually came about in the most ordinary way possible. Her grandfather on her mother's side had always talked to her during her childhood about the 'kitchen-sink' British dramas of the 1950s by the likes of Joe Orton and Alan Osborne. How he would have enjoyed the way she met the man who was to become her husband, if only he had still been alive!

For they bumped into each other in the kitchen and appliances section of the local DIY warehouse, where he was looking for a splashback for his cooker, while she had taken Jesús and Jeannie there to get a replacement tap for their kitchen sink - a trip which wasn't strictly necessary, since their landlady hadn't been consulted. But, what the heck, Jesús was a bit of a handyman and he said the tap was only operating at less than half capacity.

His name was Hayden and she liked him from the beginning. Maybe that should have sounded a warning to her, as she reflected much later. Just because a necessary condition for an event is present, that alone doesn't provide sufficient cause for the occurrence of the event. Only sufficient grounds can do that. She knew this theoretically, but the practical wisdom that would be able to apply it to her own situation was sadly lacking - with predictably disastrous consequences.

Within a week of that first meeting in B&Q, Hayden had asked Eleanor out. For that, she had Jesús to blame, since he was the one who sensed the spark between the two of them and managed to get Hayden's phone number on the pretext that he had some tools he might be able to lend him. As a go-between, the Venezuelan proved extreme able and efficient, and he was perhaps more excited than anyone when Eleanor accepted Hayden's invitation to dinner at the local Peruvian restaurant, Coracora.

Their first date was relatively painless, as these things go, and Eleanor learned quite a bit about Hayden. He had just turned 30 and worked as a civil engineer for a company that specialised in road surfacing projects. This naturally prompted jokes about his never being out of work, since England's motorway system seemed to be in a perpetual state of being dug up, with 'cones' and 'contraflows' words that had worked their way into the lexicon of everyone who had ever ventured onto the M1, the M5, and the M6, let alone the black hole that was the M25.

His father had named him after the film star Hayden Sterling, who had made a big impression on him in films such as The Killing and The Godfather, as well as a bunch of westerns that no one watches any more.

When Eleanor said that she thought he'd been named after the Austrian composer, Hayden laughed. After all, if someone knew that Franz Joseph Haydn was Austrian, then they were bound to know how to spell him. Eleanor was impressed that here was a male who on first impressions at any rate didn't need to mansplain. Another obvious plus point was that he had a decent sense of humour, which hadn't been the case with all the other engineers she had met, even if most of them had been of the software variety.

They began to go out quite regularly not long after their first date, and, although they kissed and made out after a fashion, there seemed to exist a tacit understanding between them that they wouldn't go all the way. Eleanor wasn't sure whether she was cool with this or not; after all, even though it was all well and good for a man to treat a woman with respect and not as a sex object, it was also nice to feel that he found you so attractive that he couldn't keep his hands off you.

So, as she expected, if she was quite honest with herself, there were issues from the start. But these issues were as nothing compared to what quickly became the major complication in their relationship. The name of that complication was Caroline, and she was Hayden's sister.

Caroline was a couple of years older than Hayden, which made her ten years older than Eleanor. She had been fast tracked to several promotions by the national health service (which Eleanor thought was too bureaucratic to allow for that), before leaving to join a private healthcare provider in some sort of executive position shortly before Eleanor met her. She had also recently been divorced, so ending a union that had lasted only a few years, as far as Eleanor could gather, producing no offspring.

She was by no means an unattractive woman, with dark hair of almost shoulder length that she liked to keep in a Kristin Scott Thomas style bob - albeit not as severe as the original. Like that actress's character in Four Weddings and a Funeral, she liked to wear black, whether dresses, skirts or trousers, and, above all, it seemed, she liked to flirt with Eleanor.

The first time the two women met, Caroline had basically ignored Eleanor, giving the younger woman the impression that she wasn't good enough for her brother. Eleanor put it down to possessiveness of her younger brother at first, but didn't say anything to Hayden. Hayden himself appeared - bizarrely, as far as Eleanor was concerned - to see nothing peculiar in his sister's behaviour, even telling her as they drove back up the M6 from his parents' house in Blackburn that she had made a great hit with Caroline.

As the weeks and months went by, as indeed Eleanor was coming towards the end of her time at Lancaster and was busy not only on her research project but also on firing off job applications to a number of companies in the aeronautics as well as the computing field. She received a couple of expressions of interest and one interview with a multinational IT company, which was looking for people with a background in quantum technologies for its network security arm. It seemed that Eleanor's background in physics gave her an edge, as the company appeared to favour those with a more engineering-oriented approach to the quantum world.

It was therefore a particularly busy time for Eleanor, as a seemingly unending period of wet and windy weather was finally replaced by blue skies and milder temperatures, ushering in a bonanza in the nearby woods of startlingly green new growth, as well as a nest-building frenzy by an array of native and migrant birdlife.

Despite her activity on many fronts, Eleanor managed to see a fair bit of Hayden, and a curiously large amount (or so she thought) of Caroline. It seemed that whenever she arranged to meet up with him at his neat town house in Lancaster, big sister would be there as well. Once, Eleanor even got the impression that Caroline was trying to invite her to her place in Kirkby Lonsdale 25 minutes away - without Hayden.

Hayden had invited Eleanor over for Sunday lunch at his place - no mention of Caroline - and when she arrived, who was it who opened the door, but Caroline? Not only that, but she aimed a kiss at Eleanor's lips, which the younger woman was only able to avoid by turning her head at the last minute, meaning that the intended smacker landed on her jaw.

After that, Eleanor had made every effort to avoid being left alone with Caroline for even the shortest time - something she managed until Hayden got up to clear the plates away and expressly told her to stay in her seat and chat with Eleanor while he sorted out the dessert.

'I don't know what's got into you,' he said. 'Why, you're like a jack-in-the-box. Can't seem to stay still for a minute.'

It was then that Caroline put her hand on Eleanor's (why she had left it on the table, Eleanor could never understand), holding it tight enough so she couldn't release it without sending glasses and cutlery flying, and told her about her lovely place by the river where Eleanor could always go if she 'wanted to get away from it all'.

'It's a great place for recharging the batteries,' Caroline had said, giving Eleanor's hand a final squeeze before Hayden came back into the room with the treacle tart.

Caroline managed to bring the topic of the conversation back to her place down the road in no time at all, eliciting the most unwelcome intervention from Hayden, who suggested that Eleanor drove there one day to visit his sister.

'It really is the most beautiful spot,' he said. 'And I'm sure you two have so much to talk about.'