Tablake Pt. 01

On the surface I was a successful man working in a profession I enjoyed, earning as much money as any sensible man needs. I lived in London, one of the most exciting cities on earth. I had a pleasant house. I was thirty-five, five feet ten inches tall, slightly built but not at all bad looking. I knew that some of my colleagues envied me my success and my life-style. And I was so lonely I sometimes ached with misery.

As I pushed my balls into their cavities, stroked my cock back between my legs and pulled the peach coloured silk and lace panties up to keep everything in place I started to feel an improvement. I was becoming my real self. I felt even better as I rolled my thigh-high stockings up my clean-shaven legs. I ran my fingers along the band at their tops then stroked my clitie through her silk covering so that she began to stir. I put on my matching bra and eased my pecs towards one another to make a more distinct cleavage. My nipples hardened as I stroked them to fulness and imagined my babies suckling on them. I sat down at my dressing table and made up my face before brushing my hair into feminine, soft waves.

I stood up again, took my favourite dark blue silk dress from the wardrobe and slipped it over my head. It cascaded down my body sending shivers through me as it glided across my skin. I pulled it down so that it clung seductively to my figure. I fastened around my neck a narrow silver chain, scattered with tiny pearls, and attached pearl clip-on earings to my lobes. Then I pulled on a pair of dark blue silk-covered shoes with two-inch heels to give me poise without too much pain and I looked at myself in the full-length mirror. At that moment I liked what I saw and my spirits rose.

'Stephanie,' I said to my reflexion. 'What you need, my girl, is a man.'

By my age, of course, I had had, or rather had been had, by various men. Some had even lasted for a year or more, but only one had wanted me as a wife, a permanent fixture in his life as a man-woman to whom he would be husband. The man I had always longed for would be built like a wrestler. He would be a gentle giant who would appreciate me as the girl I really was. I had thought I had met such a man in Philip ten years ago and I had been his wife for five years, but his longing to be a father and one half of a conventional couple had led him from me to a biological woman. He had wanted to retain me as his mistress but that involved his having me only when it was convenient in his family life. I had gone along with this for over a year but had found it intolerable. I still wondered if I had been too hasty in sending him on his way.

Now, at thirty-five, I wondered if any man would ever desire me in the life-long manner I wanted. I saw for the first time, under the makeup, the beginnings of wrinkles near the eyes. I thought I discerned a slight slackening of the flesh by my jaw. My heart plummeted. I sat on my bed and wept, suddenly overcome by a sense of futility which disabled me. After ten minutes I pulled myself together. I removed most of my girly clothes and my makeup and returned to being the pretend man, Stephen Glossop, the persona with which I faced the world. All that was left of the real me was the enclosure of my cock and balls into my clitie, in its sheath of silk and lace, hidden by my man's trousers.

...

I first met Giles at one of those parties you don't want to go to but feel that it would be rude to stay away from. The noise was deafening. I was trying, not too hard it's true, to give the impression of listening to a man who always sees me as an audience for his interminable stories, when I noticed another man similarly engaged with a woman who was finding her own anecdotes hilarious. He had a wrestler's build and my eyes had been drawn towards him as soon as he entered the room but then he and I had been captured by our respective boredoms. For a moment our eyes met as we both recognised the other's predicament. He smiled; I smiled, and then the moment was over and he and his still- chattering companion moved away towards the room where the usual lavish buffet had been spread. Half an hour later, sated with noise and small talk, I found the only quiet room in the house. I walked over to the fireplace and was turning around to sit on the raised fender, when I found myself facing the same large man, sitting in a wing chair. The wings and arms had made him invisible from anyone just looking in at the door.

'I'm hiding,' he said, 'Are you?'

'From everybody,' I replied, then realising the implications of what I had said I went on, 'Except possibly from you. You looked as though Gloria had captured you as Larry captured me.'

'Flies in the spiders' webs?'

'I hope something a bit more attractive than flies,' I said and, as I spoke, I saw that he was actually very attractive, not in a film-starry or gym-haunting way, but in an 'I am an ordinary bloke who just happens to take your breath away' sort of way. He smiled at me again and I was smitten.

'Oh, definitely something more attractive than flies,' he said and stretched out his hand towards me. 'Giles.'

'Stephen,' I replied, shaking his hand.

I thought he must be between forty-five and fifty years old. He was taller than me, perhaps about six foot, and whereas I was slim he was a huge man, probably weighing around three hundred pounds. He looked as though he could break grown trees with his bare hands and he set my juices going. Added to his other attractions for a girl like me he had one of the most open, smiling faces I had ever encountered, with vivid blue eyes and the longest lashes I had seen on a man. He also had the most beautifully shaped, huge hands. I shivered at the thought of them running over my body, cradling my breasts, my clitie and my buttocks and exploring my crack as a prelude to even more entrancing intimacies.

He stood up and I realised that he was actually six inches taller than me. The chair was deep and had disguised the true massiveness of his torso.

'I fancy a drink without the screaming horde. How about you?' he asked.

He must have seen that I was pleased that he wanted my company and he beamed his heart-stopping smile at me again. He went on, 'Do you know a good, quiet pub anywhere near here? This isn't my part of London.'

We made our farewells to our host, who said, 'I had no idea you two knew one another.' He added, to me, as though suddenly enlightened, 'You must be working on Tablake.' We said something non-comital and walked along to the Jolly Fisherman, one of my favourite old pubs on the river, which happened to be only a few hundred yards from the house where the party was taking place.

Once we had ordered our drinks and settled into a window seat, Giles asked, 'What brought you to that dreadful party? You clearly weren't enjoying it much.'

'A mixture of politeness and cowardice, if I'm honest. The Mortons always ask me, because they think I may be useful to them, and there aren't enough excuses in the world to cover every time. And I dislike falling out with people. And you?'

'Much the same. I avoid them as much as I can but there are times when I forget how bloody the last one was and accept.'

I asked, 'Have you any idea what Tony meant about something that sounded like Tablake?'

'It's my house in Derbyshire but why he should think you are working on it I've no idea.'

'I'm an architect.'

'What's your full name?'

'Stephen Glossop.'

'Ah, now I understand. You renovated the Mortons' previous house.'

'Don't remind me and please don't judge my work on that job. I am so ashamed of it. They had me rip the heart out of a perfectly charming, small Georgian house and turn it into a monster four times the size with all the charm of a municipal leisure centre, with Gym, swimming pool, media room...'

'Media room?' asked Giles.

'Home cinema to you and me and an abomination in that sort of house, whatever name you give it. I swore I would never do anything like that again and I haven't.'

'I take it you don't need the work.'

'I'm not made of money but I get by well enough without doing work I disapprove of for people I despise.'

'Strong words.'

'Strong feelings.'

Suddenly we both laughed and I realised that this wonderful stranger liked me. I wondered if his liking might extend to the sort of feelings I was developing for him.

'It occurs to me you might be the right man to do a job for me, if you don't disapprove of me, that is,' he said.

'Tell me what it is and let's see how we get on. You might not want me when you know me better.'

'I doubt that,' he replied and I felt an extraordinary rising of my heart.

'What's the job?' I asked.

'I inherited Tablake from an uncle a year ago. It's an interesting house, with a medieval core and extensions from several different periods. Visually it's a mess. It is far too big, in a ruinous state of disrepair, heating it is impossible and I love it dearly. I need an architect to pull the house together, to make it both pleasing to look at and somewhere I can afford to live in. Could I see some of your other work, besides the monstrosity, and might you be interested?'

By this point I was not only interested I was gagging for the job and, to be honest, for him.

'Take it slowly,' I told myself. I had intended to ask Giles back to my house in the hope that he might make a move on me but something told me that I wanted far more from this man I had just met than a one night or even a few nights stand and, though this sounds silly in this day and age, I didn't want him to think I was an easy lay, available to just anybody. He made me wish I was a virgin again for him to take my cherry. I may have been born male but I wanted to be entirely a girl for him and I hoped I could persuade him that this is what he would want from me too.

I said I would contact some of my clients the following day and, if he wished, I could take him to see a selection of jobs later in the week, depending on said clients' agreement. We exchanged addresses and telephone numbers. I saw that his surname was Tablake, like the house, and I assumed I must be hob-nobbing with the gentry.

I made the necessary arrangements and picked Giles up in my car on the Wednesday morning and drove him to the first project I wanted him to see. I had chosen country properties I had worked on, rather than town ones, so that he could compare like with like, at least to some extent, though none of them was of the scale he had hinted at for Tablake.

We looked at a seventeenth century farmhouse which I had rescued from dereliction, preserving all the genuine old work but removing a series of concrete bunker-like sties which had disfigured the rear elevation of the house. We moved the piggery to a new site and installed mod cons in the house unobtrusively. The second property was nearer in size to what I imagined Tablake to be; it was an eighteenth- century house which had been in institutional use as a care home for nearly a century. Rooms had been divided up and little early plasterwork or woodwork survived except for a fine staircase which had been boarded in to fit with fire regulations for such places. I had ripped out the boarding and partitions in the rooms to restore the proportions of the Georgian architecture. Where it was possible to tell what the plaster decoration had been like from photographs or remaining fragments my client and I had made a decision to restore the original work. This we did for the staircase hall, the principal drawing room and dining room but in other rooms we installed a simple cornice and made plain, airy rooms of our own period to accommodate my client's collection of twentieth century paintings, but we retained, as works of art in their own right, fine looking fragments of plaster-work on several of the walls.

I was proud of the result and, after being conducted around the house for an hour, Giles said, 'I'd love to see some of your other work sometime but you have the job at Tablake if you want it.'

We drove back to London. I dropped Giles off at his house and, for a moment, I thought he was going to invite me in. He looked uncertain as though he was milling over a course of action. Then, rather awkwardly for such a sophisticated man, he said, 'I think you know I like you a lot. It's more than that.' Then he was gone.

I realised with something like shock that he was shy and that, implicitly, he had, possibly, told me that he was falling in love with me. My heart turned over and I started to shake. I have no recollection of driving home or of getting out of the car and going into my house. I came to sitting in my study with a drink in my hand and, as I saw reflected in a window pane, an idiotically drooling, girly smile on my face.

He rang that evening and we arranged that he would drive me down to Tablake two days later. He suggested that I bring an overnight bag since it was too far to go there and back and inspect the house properly in the day. That night I dreamt I lay in his arms and he made love to me. I had always been gay and a bottom but I was what is known as 'straight acting', probably in reaction to my feminine longing to be the wife of a loving, virile man and my secretly wearing the pretty clothes appropriate to my inner womanliness. But, in my dream, I was all woman and he was all man.

***

My first view of Tablake took my breath away. Giles had picked me up from my house in Chiswick at six in the morning so that we should avoid the traffic. We drove north on the M1. Giles's sports car packed a mighty punch. Whilst we were in the suburbs and were driving along relatively slowly I was entranced that my legs were lying so close to his and I kept glancing surreptitiously at his massive thighs, over which the cloth was stretched so tightly as to make his cock and balls a feast for my eyes. I longed to reach over, cradle them in my hands and transfer the feast to my mouth, but as soon as we reached the motorway I was so terrified of the speed he picked up I lost all thoughts of sex.

We had hardly driven twenty miles before my silence told Giles that something was badly amiss.

'What's up?' he asked. 'Have you gone off me?'

'Not at all but I'm terrified of speed.'

He slowed down immediately.

'You must always tell me if I do anything you don't like,' he said.

His assumption that we should spend time together, embodied in that word 'always', touched me like a benediction.

I relaxed and we talked about our lives all the way to the Chesterfield turning off the motorway, from where we drove into the area known as the White Peak, a countryside of pale limestone villages with ancient churches in green fields with mighty trees and sudden descents into wooded ravines. It turned out that he was gay, that he had lived with a partner for twenty years and the partner had died two years ago. He had been devoted to Colin, whom he had nursed through cancer, and when Colin died he had considered killing himself. He had been saved by inheriting Tablake, which he had visited many times as a child and where he had been at his happiest, before his uncle and his father fell out and the visits ceased. The house, and the need to rescue it from dereliction, became his life-line.

I told him about my recently bleak love life and we commiserated with one another. All the time I was falling more and more in love with this man whom I had met for the first time less than a week earlier and he was hinting that he was feeling something similar. The only problem was that my self-doubt kept on telling me that it was wishful thinking on my part. How could a girl like me be worthy of such a magnificent man?

We turned off the road, past a pair of stone gate piers, through a belt of woodland, and found ourselves looking down into a small valley of green fields, through the bottom of which ran a brook, which fell over a weir into a lake, before it resumed its journey from the other end of the lake and disappeared into more woodland.

The drive ran downwards and to our right to skirt the lake. Opposite us, beyond the lake, stood a house, shining a pale silver-grey in the morning sunshine. The right-hand side of the main block ended in a short tower; a long building with gothic windows ran from the tower to a half-timbered section with the entrance porch in the middle of it, beyond which was the side of an obviously eighteenth-century block, which faced off to the left, where there was a topiary garden. A wooded hill rose almost vertically behind the house to a long terrace on which stood a small, fourteenth-century church, made of the same glowing limestone as most of the house, before the woods rose again to a crest, framing the whole picture. It would have been the most idyllic and English of scenes except that beside the tower stretched a bizarre series of derelict prefabricated units which filled and overflowed a walled garden and straggled down to the lakeside.

'What bloody lunatic did this?' I asked.

'Blame the Second World War. The house was taken over, first of all for an evacuated boys' school and, when they were found somewhere more suitable, by the army. Uncle James regained the house when the army vacated it in 1946. He was eighteen. His father and mother had been killed in an air raid early in the war and he had inherited the house from his grandfather in 1944. He died last year aged ninety-two and in the last thirty or forty years he seems to have done no more than was necessary to keep the house and the church watertight.'

Giles had stopped the car for me to take in the situation.

'It's not fair to ask you before you've seen the full horror but do you think you could take it in hand?'

I was on the point of saying that I could take hell itself in hand if he went with the deal but I tried to be professional and not to frighten him off by being too eager.

'I think so,' I said judiciously, whilst thinking 'Just let anyone try to keep me away from it and from you.'

***

Giles's housekeeper, Mrs Green, an old lady who had worked for his uncle, had prepared a light lunch for us. She had also made up beds in two of the rooms in the eighteenth-century block and I left my bag in the one she indicated to me. I fervently hoped we might dispense with one of the beds.

After lunch Giles took me on a tour of the house. To begin with we walked around the outside. I realised that the tower and the gothic- windowed building were medieval and the half -timbered central section was sixteenth century. When I saw the west-facing front of the eighteenth century building I was rendered speechless for a moment. It was one of the most superb examples of English baroque architecture I had ever seen. It must have been built between 1710 and 1720 and its giant pilasters and decorative stone carving were, on a much smaller scale, as sumptuous as anything at Castle Howard or Blenheim Palace.

I turned to Giles and he saw the rapture on my face. He smiled and said, 'It is rather something, isn't it?'

'It's stupendous,' I said. 'How is it possible I've never heard of it? It must be Grade 1, surely.'

'It's never been listed. It's always been a private house except when it was requisitioned and Uncle James lived like a hermit and refused to let experts of any kind near the place.'

We continued walking around the house and I saw that the whole of the back of the building was enclosed in a nineteenth century shell whose only purpose was to add further bedrooms and a maze of kitchens, larders, laundry rooms and so on which could cater for the most gargantuan of Victorian house parties. It was built in ugly, mass-produced brick, with poor quality woodwork whose only virtue was its cheapness; time had taken advantage of the false economy and had made the structure disturbingly unsafe. Not only that, the ties into the older buildings meant that they were also endangered.