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Dom and Sandro Ch. 01

By: WittePiet



Dom and Sandro Pt 01



[This story continues the saga of three gay couples, David and Jon Singleton-Scarborough, Tom Appleton and Luke Singleton-Scarborough, and Dom Overton and Sandro Mascagnoli. All the characters in the story are imaginary, although some of the main characters are models of the sort of person that I would like to be. Some places and institutions mentioned are real, others are imaginary. All literary quotations are genuine. The opera Anna Veronica and its composer are totally imaginary. I hope that expert readers will forgive any inaccuracies in my representation of the worlds of engineering and opera, and not forget that this is a work of fiction. Once again there are a lot of characters in this story. You can get help to remind you who they are by clicking on WittePiet, then on the Biography tab, and scrolling down till you reach a Character List.]





Chapter I Dom: Life in Fountain Street 

Late in September 20—, I awoke in our room at Rockwell's Barn. I disengaged myself from Sandro's right arm, got out of bed, released a noisy fart from my rear-end, and looked out of the window. The Ixfordshire countryside was beginning to show its autumn colours, and brown and yellow leaves were falling from the trees at the slightest breeze. It had been a long, hot summer, and autumn had started early. I turned round and looked at my darling boy, still lying asleep, his long dark hair spread out over the pillow, his sweet lips slightly parted, showing a hint of his white teeth. As I looked at him, a wave of tenderness swept over me. I realized how lucky I was to have such a wonderful mate. In two weeks' time, my final undergraduate year in Camford would begin, but for most of that year I would be sharing a bed with my sweet boyfriend under my uncle's silk sheets. I resolved that when in the future the two of us had our own house, we also would get silk sheets.

Today however, I was going to London for the day to get a new suit. Most of my clothing was from Giorgio Armani, but my parents liked me to have just one English-cut suit from the family tailors in Savile Row, which they paid for! I had chosen the pattern and the material (wool) and today was to be the final fitting. I was also going to order a pair of hand-made shoes. 

My Italian boyfriend, Sandro Mascagnoli had arrived in England three weeks before, for the wedding of his brother's partner's sister and we were enjoying a short spell together without work or responsibilities. He was to start in his lab later that week, and we would be busy for the next few days getting ready to move our possessions to the flat in Fountain Street, Camford, where he, I and Sandro's uncle Jonathan Singleton-Scarborough would be living. I adjourned to our bathroom, where I had my morning shit. Then we both showered and shaved before joining Jon for breakfast. "Are you sure you did the right thing, moving out of College?" asked Jon. 

"Oh, yes," I said, "it's my final year, and there are too many distractions in College. Jennifer would never leave me alone. Sandro will be busy in his lab, and he has a lot of work to get through, so you needn't think that we will be idling our time away in sex and drinking! Camford is a wonderful place and I want to leave it with a good degree. I can't think why my brother Michael opted for Oxbridge when Camford is much better. Sandro loves it. He says it is better than Venice!" 

"I agree with you about that!" said Jon. "But as you're gay, maybe you should have gone to Buckingham!" Buckingham was Camford's gay-friendly college. Sandro's brother Luke Singleton-Scarborough had been a student there. 

"I didn't know I was gay when I went up to university," I replied. "That was your nephew's doing!" 

Sandro grinned. "Are you having regrets then?" he asked. "Do you wish that you were fucking Jennifer?" he asked with a grin as he named our fag-hag. 

"Of course not!" I replied, "If I didn't have a train to catch, I would punish you mercilessly for that remark!"

About three hours later, I came out of Piccadilly Circus underground station and began to walk up Regent Street towards Savile Row and the shop of Fanthorpe and Crowley. I entered the shop and an assistant came up to me. "I have an appointment for a fitting at 11-30," I said. 

The man looked in a book. "Oh, yes, please come this way, my lord," he said. I nearly died of embarrassment. Clearly my mother had made the appointment! Because she had married into our family and become a countess, she loved the titles that embarrassed my father and me. In Camford, I had gone to extreme lengths to conceal the courtesy title. I was registered with both college and university under my birth names of Dominic Francis Overton, and my signature Dominic Overton gave nothing away. After all, I told myself, Viscount Overton was not a real peerage. The only real lord in the family was my grandfather, the Marquess of Wakefield, who had actually sat in the House of Lords until evicted, with all but 90 of his colleagues, by the Blair government in the nineteen-nineties. 

However, I had nothing to fear about any breach of confidentiality at Fanthorpe and Crowley. A firm that holds delicate and intimate information like on which side a customer's genitals sit in his trouser crotch, is not going to be indiscreet! The fitter commented on how my body measurements had changed since my last suit. I replied that the old suit dated from the days when I was a skinny teenager. The suit would be ready in three days. I told them to send it to Fountain Street, but to address it to Jon, and I gave them his card. They measured me for the shoes, and I was told they would be ready in three weeks. I said that I would slip up from Camford one Saturday so that they could be fitted. Like the suit, they would not be worn every day. My usual garb in Camford was the standard student one of jeans and trainers. In fact, because of his access to Italian clothes, Sandro often looked smarter than me. We never criticized one another's clothes, because we were really only interested in what was underneath!

Alessandro Mascagnoli had transformed my life. Until I met him, I was a geek with little interest in sex, and uncertain of my sexuality. Then this wonderful gay Italian boy came into my life and made it clear very early on in our acquaintance that he wanted me. He was almost my height, but much slimmer, with delicious brown skin and long black hair that he wore in a ponytail. We swam and played squash together and eventually, after taking care of him when he was injured after he had been mugged for his iPhone, I realized that I had fallen in love with him. He is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Coming out to our families was a slow business, complicated in my case by the revelation by my widower grandfather, Lord Wakefield, that he also was gay and was sleeping with his chauffeur, who was actually a very old friend from his student days, whom my grandfather had invited to come and live at Getheringthwaite, family home of the Ovendens, after my grandmother the Marchioness had died. He was very supportive, assuring me that unlike him, I had no reason to hide in the closet, and that I should not fear about succession to the title, because I had two brothers who could succeed if I had no biological children (adopted children cannot succeed to a hereditary title). However, he cleverly gave me the job of revealing to my parents not only my own sexual orientation, but his as well! 

My parents were astonished by the revelation of not one but two gays in the family, and at the time of this story were only just getting used to the idea. My brother Michael was delighted by the fact that I would never have any biological children, and had no interest in living on the family estate in Yorkshire. This meant that he could have the estate, a bigger income than me in order to maintain it, and the prospect of either inheriting the title when I popped my clogs, or if he was already dead, the eldest of any sons that he might legitimately father would get the title. As for me, I just hoped that my grandfather would have many more years of happy fucking with his boyfriend before my father inherited the title, and I would move up one step to become Earl of Batley. At that stage, Michael would get the house and the estate, as my father was happy in his job as a university professor, with no desire to be a country landowner. Michael had promised me a smaller house on the estate.

Sandro had got a first in civil engineering earlier that year and been awarded a Ph.D. studentship by Rail-UK, by which he would spend one further year in Camford, developing a signalling application that would be tested in Rail-UK's development lab in Oxtedborough, where he would spend the next year. So after the coming academic year, we would have to make decisions about our life together. By then, I would have my degree. 

But in the meantime, we were enjoying sleeping together in a king-size bed under silk sheets each night. The narrow single beds in college had been impossible for two to sleep in on a regular basis. I had negotiated a mutually satisfactory rent as a tenant in Fountain Street with Sandro's Uncle Jon. Jon and his partner David had no need to provide an extra room, just a little space to store my books and clothes, as I would be sharing Sandro's bed! There was a small room that we could use as a study, and we had our own small bathroom. The space in the flat was rather restricted, and Sandro made clear to me from day one that we should not be shy about farting. His uncle was very flatulent, he said, and no-one in the family was restrained about releasing gas. No apology was necessary unless the fart was a stinker. Once I got used to hearing the sound of farts regularly, I began to feel that it was a very comfortable habit, at least for an all-male family.





Chapter II Sandro: My first days as a research student 

I was rather worried about how I would get on with my new supervisor, Dr Philip Ashburton, university Reader in Civil and Railway Engineering. He had shown signs of being homophobic when I had first met him, but the things he had said were so extreme as to be libellous, and I suspected that it was some kind of ploy. When I arrived in the lab, he took me round the whole department and introduced me to everyone, which I thought was a good start. I had my own stretch of bench and a small desk beside it. The technicians and other research students seemed friendly and welcoming, and I soon settled down. To my surprise however, there seemed to be no social life in the lab apart from the daily tea and coffee sessions. When term had begun, between 5-30 and 6 pm each day I would finish work and go to the computer lab to meet Dom, who usually had a lecture at 5 pm. We would then often go for a drink and a meal at the Sparrowhawk or a student restaurant, except on Wednesdays and Fridays, when Jon would cook for us at Fountain Street. Sometimes, he joined us to eat, but every Tuesday and Sunday during term, we all dined in college, although Jon was on High Table. He also ate in college when he was not cooking the evening meal, leaving us to cook or eat out. I was hopeless at cooking, but Dom, to my surprise, was quite good. He had learnt cookery at school. 

I had fancied him from the very first moment that I met him, a year previously. He was a muscular blond, slightly taller than me, and in many ways an archetypal Englishman, which my two uncles were not. Before he came up to Camford, he had spent three years working alone in an outhouse as a web developer, and become very introvert. It took several months of hard work on my part to get him to open up and become more socially (and sexually) aware. OK, so I threw myself at him! From very early on in our acquaintance I told him that I was gay, and to my amazement he eventually responded and made me one of the happiest men in Saint Boniface's College.

It always amazed me that a man nearing sixty who possessed as much wealth as Jon did should spend so much time cooking and looking after his lodgers! He left the celebrity lifestyle to his opera-singer partner, though David also hated being in the limelight. When David was not performing, he dressed quite ordinarily, even scruffily, and his maximum publicity was an occasional appearance on Pauw en Witteman, a Dutch television talk show. This of course, as a non-English language programme, totally escaped the attention of the British media. He also presented a radio programme on classical music for one of the Dutch public broadcasting unions. His gayness of course was no secret, and the media did sometimes ask his opinion on gay issues. Fortunately their attention never seemed to focus on his partner. The enthusiasm for gay issues that had fired him in his youth no longer obsessed him. He felt that he had been lucky to live to see an era when to be gay was to be mainstream! I counted myself fortunate to be part of Jon and David's extended gay family. 

Dr Ashburton did not sit at a desk all day. He did not hold tutorials before 5 pm, and when he was not lecturing, he was in the lab doing experiments. I noticed that he kept a close eye on me, which did not disturb me in the slightest. I had insisted that my first two weeks in the lab were on a trial basis, and if I thought that I could not stand working with him, I would quit and renounce the award. But it soon became obvious to him, from the way that I was not only accepted, but made welcome, by his technicians, postdocs and other research students, that I was not going to become a disturbing influence, and he moderated the way he talked to me, although he studiously avoided any conversation of a personal nature. I felt that the topic I was working on was so interesting that I was prepared to put up with his reserve towards me as long as it did not hinder what I was doing. And of course we both had an interest in the problem's progress and success.





Chapter III Sandro: The party in Boni's

Towards the end of term, late November it must have been, I suggested to Dom that we hold a small party in the college function room. It was to be more rather than the traditional college drinks party, but timed to end at 10 pm, so that special permission from the Dean was not required. The stipend that Rail-UK was paying me was considerably more than the typical research studentship, and included free rail travel as an additional perk. My uncles were only charging Dom and me a modest sum in rent, so I could afford to splash out on such an event. It would be unusual in that it transgressed the unwritten rule that undergraduate members of the university should not offer hospitality to senior members. As this was to be a social occasion, with a wide spectrum of guests, I felt confident enough to ignore the rule, although I insisted to Jennifer and Dom that the only conversation with the dons was to be offers of food and drink. 

We decided to invite Jon and David, Professor and Mrs Bairstow, Dom's tutor, Dr Ashburton, Jennifer and my old undergraduate tutor Dr Clarendon. Dom and I had made the acquaintance of Professor and Mrs Bairstow at a dinner given by my uncles the previous term. Professor Bairstow was a priest, and had become a close friend of both my uncles during his period as Chaplain of Boni's, as Saint Boniface's College was popularly known. He had had to migrate colleges to Sanguis Christi College when he became the Parker Professor of Ecclesiastical History. We hoped that when Dom and I decided to become civil partners, he would preside at our blessing service at Getheringthwaite. By then, he would have retired from his chair, and become an Emeritus Fellow. The college kitchen gave me a good quote for supplying the light refreshments, and to keep them happy, I ordered the wine from the college beer cellar. It was not the kind of event at which beer would be drunk. 

There was of course an ulterior motive to the event. It was designed to show Philip Ashburton that I had respectable, indeed influential contacts in the university, people who all knew that I was gay, and that in spite of the fact that I was an Italian outsider, I had a foothold in the Camford establishment. Among the guests, Jennifer was rather an exception, but I did not want Mrs Bairstow to be the only woman present! It seemed to me that if Ashburton was as influenced by prejudice as he seemed to be, his views might at least be modified by meeting senior people who thought differently on the subject of homosexuality. 

If you think that organizing a party like this is a bit improbable for a 22-year-old first-year research student, you must not forget that my biological father was a scheming Italian, the land that produced Niccolò Macchiavelli! I am not the naïve teenager that the author tried to portray me as in the previous book in this series. The only thing that worried me slightly was that someone present other than Jon or David (who were sworn to secrecy) would recognize Dom's identity as the heir to a peerage. Dom thought it unlikely, and in any case, none of those present was indiscreet. 

To my surprise, all those who had been invited accepted the invitation, and when the date arrived everyone settled down to a pleasant evening of French wine and Danish pastries instead of the usual vol-aux-vents. Dom was wearing his Savile Row suit. Dom, Jennifer and I circulated with trays and bottles. I noticed that Dr Ashburton was in deep conversation with Edward Bairstow on theological topics. I lingered in their vicinity, pretending to fiddle with a corkscrew to open a new bottle of wine. It seemed that they were discussing the biblical teaching on homosexuality. From what I could overhear, it seemed that Ashburton was a bible-bashing evangelical, and was clashing sharply with my friendly but coolly rational professorial guest. This observation went some way to explaining Ashburton's attitude to me. He was convinced that I was an immoral sinner! 

Later on when the conversation had ended, l took Dom over and introduced him to my supervisor. "Dr Ashburton, I want to introduce you to my partner, Dominic Overton. We are not yet officially engaged, but hope to become so as soon as Dom has finished his finals." 

"I am very pleased to meet you, Sir," said Dom formally. "I'm reading computer science." After a year in Camford, Dom had now outgrown his geekish phase and was once more the charming self-confident ex-public schoolboy that he had once been. I personally regretted this. I had preferred him as a geek! Jennifer had played a role in this change in Dom, but I saw no reason to blame her. She did not represent a sexual challenge. Dom was mine and I was certain that he would stay that way! I didn't need his social charm, I just needed his lips, his cock and his loving disposition! However, the charm seemed to have an effect on my supervisor, and they were soon involved in a discussion on computer applications in the railway industry. 

Dom's tutor was deep in conversation with David and Jon, three Boni's dons together, while I talked with Jennifer and Mrs Bairstow. Professor Bairstow was talking to Dr Clarendon, recalling old times when the former was a fellow of Boni's. At 10 pm, the party dispersed. It was not clear at all whether those present had enjoyed themselves, but at least nothing disastrous had happened. The following day, Dr Ashburton thanked me for the evening. I hoped that the conversations and people had given him food for thought. My two uncles rang to say that they had enjoyed the party and invited us both to dinner at the Venezia.





Chapter IV Dom: Thoughts about our future

I had already had several interviews with prospective employers all anxious to secure my coding and testing skills. Obviously, no firm was going to make me an offer, even a conditional one, at this stage, but it was an important step to study the market and identify possible employers. I was very anxious not to work for a firm that outsourced any computer work to third-world lands. There were both security and reliability reasons why British industry should employ British computer experts wherever possible. At the time of this story, Britain was not producing enough native computer experts, and outsourcing was rife. Experts with the right experience could get lucrative jobs as self-employed consultants. I believed that outsourced workers, hired on the cheap, were inadequately supervised, got careless and produced buggy software. Jon was considering endowing some scholarships to encourage more British students to study computer science at a high level. The university was making its contribution by introducing a new Master's degree, M.CSt. It occurred to me that I would improve my chances of a high-level job by doing such a course. I did not of course require one of Jon's scholarships, I could pay my own bills!


Dom and Sandro Ch. 01



Chapter V Jennifer: Jennifer finds a boyfriend

Two days before the beginning of the Martinmas term, I got off the train in Camford station with suitcase and backpack and joined the queue for a cab to take me to college. I had chosen a nice single room in the third quad for my second year, with en-suite bathroom. I left my suitcase at the porter's lodge and took the backpack to my new room. I was disappointed that Dom Overton had elected to live out of college, though I could understand his desire for the unlimited opportunities for shagging his boyfriend that an apartment ten minutes away from college could offer. Moreover, we had agreed that I would be accorded the privilege of sitting with them at dinner on Tuesdays and Sundays when they dined in college, as their officially appointed fag-hag! So at least I was guaranteed intelligent conversation on two evenings per week. As the male engineering students in my year in Boni's were boring and poor company, I was hoping to find among the new intake of freshmen someone whom I could spend the rest of my spare time with. It would, if I wanted a man, have to be someone from another part of the college, because the college rigidly segregated its rooms into male and female staircases. There were no mixed staircases. This rule dated from the days when en-suite facilities did not exist. There was hope that now that 90% of rooms had en-suite bathrooms, the rule might be changed for the benefit of couples in a relationship.

My first year at Boni's had begun rather traumatically. The first few men that I had dated had neither charm nor intelligence, but only seemed to want sex. So then I tried girls. They turned out to be (a) obsessed with men, makeup and pop culture or (b) wrapped up in their academic work to the exclusion of anything else or (c) obsessed with politics, student journalism, women's hockey, women's soccer and other such activities, or (d) boring and characterless. So finally I tried gay men. They were much more interesting. They did not threaten me or attempt to seduce me, and they talked about intelligent things. OK, so they did talk about men's clothes rather a lot and some were very arty-crafty, but at least they did not talk about women and some not even about football!

Eventually, purely by accident towards the end of my first term, I met Sandro and his partner Dom. Sandro was cute. He had a brown Mediterranean skin and long black hair, and was tall and slender. He had a small goatee beard, which suited him nicely. His friend was blond, slightly taller but more solidly built. They were into squash, swimming, classical music and foreign cinema. As these interests, except for squash and swimming, overlapped with mine, I became their fag-hag. They were both college scholars, showing that they were very competent in their studies, but were enormously good company, and I missed them a lot during the summer vac. We went out frequently as a threesome, and in spite of the fact that they were very wrapped up with one another, I very rarely felt myself playing the 'gooseberry' role. But when Sandro got a studentship to study for a Ph.D. in railway engineering and would have one further year in Camford, he could no longer live in college and had to move to his uncles' apartment in Fountain Street. Dom of course, eager to sleep every night with his boyfriend, moved out of college for his final year. So although I would still see them frequently, it would not be on a regular basis, and I desperately needed some company. 

These thoughts passed through my mind as I returned to the lodge to collect my suitcase. As a would-be engineer, I am quite tough, and the suitcase was not massively heavy, but when an obviously new young man asked if he could carry my case for me, I certainly did not say no! He was tall and substantially built, muscular, but not fat, with dark crewcut hair. 

When we got to my room, I thanked him and asked if he would like a cup of tea, it being that time in the afternoon. "Yes, please," he said. I filled a kettle in the bathroom and plugged it in and produced tea bags out of my backpack. I introduced myself and asked him to do the same and tell me a bit about himself. "I'm Charles Higgins," he said "and I'm going to read geography. I'm hoping to get involved in rowing and squash." We had a really interesting chat and as term had not yet started, we were able to go into the single-sitting informal dinner together. Normally, second-year students were expected to go into the formal second-sitting dinner. 

Afterwards, I went back with him for coffee in his room. He was very gentlemanly. No attempts at touching me, not even hand-holding! Although he was sporty, he was also intelligent and a good conversationalist and I agreed to go out with him for a drink after dinner on the following Wednesday. On the day before that, I joined Dom and Sandro for dinner. I warned them that they might see rather less of me this term if the possible relationship with Charles actually took off. They wished me luck. 





Chapter VI Sandro: Is being gay sinful?

As the term progressed, my work in the lab also developed. The preliminary experiments looked very promising, and it was clear that Dr Ashburton was impressed. He would even talk to me during the coffee break. One day he called me into his office and said that we ought to make a start on what I needed to do for the professional engineering exams. I had joined the Institute of Civil Engineers in my final undergraduate year, and it was now necessary to get the status of Chartered Engineer. He gave me a copy of the syllabus, and together we mapped out a timescale for me to tackle the various parts. Then he invited me to have dinner with him one evening. It seemed as if he was making a big effort to be friendly. 

We went for dinner to the nearest pub to the campus that did food, the Whale and Wheelbarrow. "I hope that I'm not embarrassing you by raising the topic of homosexuality," he said, over the meal. "I am a bible Christian, and the bible forbids homosexuality." 

"We have both just enjoyed an excellent prawn cocktail at the beginning of our meal," I said, "yet the bible forbids the eating of shellfish, not to mention pork! It also says that menstruating women are ritually unclean! When I came up to Camford, I discovered that I was sexually attracted to men, whereas women left me cold. But that does not mean that I personally want to hang out in gay pubs and shag a different man each night. I have been lucky enough to fall in love with a man with whom I want to spend the rest of my life and ultimately, when we are each established in a career, to start a family with him, either by adoption or by surrogacy. Just because a union of two persons of the same sex cannot lead to progeny does not in any way weaken or invalidate the loving relationship between them. Homosexuality is a biological fact, and the only reason that a lot of gays are promiscuous is that for centuries society denied them the freedom to establish lifetime partnerships, as heterosexuals have always been able to do.

"And as far as religion is concerned, I should point out that my two gay uncles, whom you have met, are firmly of the belief that because they have offered their union to God, He has blessed it and they have lived happily together for nearly thirty years, even though the state only recognized their partnership about five years ago. Indeed it was through sexual union that my uncle Jon came to become a Christian believer and was baptized some twenty years ago. That of course I tell you in confidence, though I am sure that he would be prepared to talk to you about it. Their son, my cousin, is also gay and he and his partner are also regular churchgoers. Indeed they both sing in the choir at the English Church in Bologna. No-one in the congregation there regards them as sinful, and they have never attempted to hide their homosexuality. Jesus Christ never mentions the topic of gayness in the gospels. The great Old Testament king, David had an honourable and loving same-sex relationship with Jonathan, and an extremely dishonourable heterosexual relationship with Bathsheba, another man's wife. So the bible is not a reliable guide to right and wrong!" 

At the end of the evening, I think that we both understood each other better, and from that time onwards the reserve between us had gone. I was grateful to Jon, who during my first few months in England had talked to me a lot about the legal and religious aspects of being gay. At the time, I little realized how useful his instruction would be.





Chapter VII Dom: A comfortable habit 

One Friday evening, David came home for the weekend. We all ate together as a sort of family that evening, Jon having done the cooking. We had started on our second bottle of Bardolino, and we had just finished eating when David raised one of his legs from his seat and released an enormous fart, which was so loud that it seemed to echo round the room. "It's a good job that the neighbours are out!" he said "or they would have come knocking on the door in case we had had a gas explosion! I suppose that we have, only the pipe it escaped from is my shithole!" 

"Don't be embarrassed by my uncle, Dom," said Sandro, "he is even more crude than the rest of us! Just be thankful that he hasn't stunk the room out!" A long discussion on farting followed. If you dislike the topic or feel it inappropriate in a romantic story, feel free to skip the rest of this chapter. 

David said, "But Dom, you must know already that I'm not the most flatulent person in this household. That distinction belongs to Jon. Never stand near him in a public toilet, because he will always let off a loud fart when standing at the urinal." 

"Well," said Jon, "if you can't relieve yourself of wind in a toilet, when can you do it?" 

"You could always lock yourself in a stall and sit on the pot," replied David. "People would still hear the fart, but wouldn't know who had done it!" 

I could feel my dick stiffening as the conversation continued. "I come from a very polite family," I said, "and only occasionally do I hear my brothers fart. It took a bit of getting used to, living with you lot, but now I enjoy being able to relieve myself without causing embarrassment. It takes me back to my days at boarding school, where there was always at least one boy, and often quite a few, who farted noisily in the dorm, though we didn't do it in class!" 

"Have you met Robin Banks yet?" asked David. "He's in charge of the operations of Jon's Afforestation Trust, and he farts more than anyone I have ever met. It's a good job that he works outdoors most of the time! No wonder he's gay. No woman would ever put up with his farting habits! His boyfriend loves it, though." 

"I can understand that," I said, "it always turns me on when Sandro lets one off." 

Sandro grinned. "I never thought that you would ever admit in public to enjoying me farting! I'm glad that Dom and I have become second family to you two guys," he said, smiling comfortably at his two uncles. "Let me just load the dishes into the dishwasher, and then I suggest that we leave coffee until much later. I am sure that David and Jon want some quality time together, and I can see from the way that Dom is squirming in his chair that he and I have some business to see to together. Don't worry, we will keep our bedroom door firmly shut!"

Five minutes later, he and I were in our bedroom feverishly removing each other's clothes. As I bent to pull my underpants off, I backfired loudly. "Farting seems to be catching tonight!" I grinned. 





Chapter VIII Dom: Dom and Sandro make love

Sandro kissed me affectionately, wrapping his arms tightly round my bare chest. "You anally obsessed man-fucker! You uphill gardener! You turd-burglar! You want me to take the chain off and admit you via the back-door!" I was so impressed at Sandro's vocabulary of vulgarity, that I was lost for words, I just said yes, at the moment that his hand grasped my rock-hard cock tightly. 

I disengaged myself from him, bent him over the bed and began to poke lube up his shithole with first one, then two and finally three fingers, which I spread to stretch him. I then slipped a condom onto my cock, parted his arse-cheeks with my hands, and gently began to push my cock into his starfish. 

The doggy position is the classic position for buggery, I think because it facilitates access to the anus. It is however not the best for lovers, because there is no face-to-face contact. In that respect, the missionary position is superior. However, I was so randy that I wanted to get my cock into my boy as quickly as possible. I pushed my dick in, and after a grimace as I penetrated, he relaxed, and though I could not see his face, I guessed that he was smiling as I had my way with him. In and out, in and out, I worked my cock, gently and slowly at first, but increasing in speed until I was violently and roughly fucking him. The sweat ran down from my armpits and coated Sandro's back and my chest and belly. I continued working until the male miracle happened and I muttered, "I'm coming!" as I shot my load into the condom deep inside him. 

I started to kiss his shoulders and back and slid my lips over his sweaty skin as the blood slowly ebbed out of my tool and it slipped out of his rear end. I pulled him up into a standing posture, and got hold of his dick, from which pre-come was flowing copiously. I gently massaged it between my fingers and tickled his balls. He turned round in my arms and pressed himself tightly against me and began to rub his tool against my belly. I reached round him and placed my hands one on each of his smooth round buttocks as he worked himself vigorously to a climax against my belly. He squirted his fuck-juice all over the front of my body, as he clasped me tightly in his arms. His loving excitement transmitted itself to my body, and I relaxed and let another noisy fart escape from my hole. 

I pulled the full condom off my cock and knotted the end of it. We kissed passionately for several minutes before wiping ourselves down and collapsing in exhaustion on to the bed. "My darling boy, my own sweet, loving bed-mate, we've been together for a year and a half, and we've been fucking for over six months, and I still don't know when your birthday is!" I murmured to him. 

"Actually, it's in March," he said "Next year we could have a combined celebration of my twenty-third birthday and the anniversary of our first fuck! Let's go to London and celebrate it in the flat there." 





Chapter IX Dom: Christmas in Italy 

That Christmas, my family had to decide whether to go to Getheringthwaite for the festive season, or to invite my grandfather and Robert his boyfriend to Paradise Place, my parental home in Kent. It was however, not my problem, as Sandro had invited me to spend Christmas and New Year at his home with Luke and Tom and of course Bianca his sister. I really hoped to get to know Bianca better, as well as Luke and Tom. I needed too to convince Sandro's parents, that I was just an ordinary guy (who happened to be gay), hoping to earn a living in the IT sector, rather than a snooty scion of a noble family, born to wealth and power. I could tell them that gayness ran in my family and cite the examples of the first Marquess and the sixth Marquess, the Wicked Lord, without of course mentioning my grandfather.

Three days before Christmas, we drove to Bristol Airport and flew to Valerio-Catullo-Villafranca Airport, where Sandro's mother Dorothea met us. Tom and Sandro's brother Luke would not arrive until Christmas morning, as they always went to Midnight Mass in the English Church in Bologna. When we finally gathered round the table for Christmas dinner, Tom was very ebullient. He had just passed another, quite advanced, piano exam, another of his papers had been accepted for publication, and he had just heard that he was to become an uncle. His sister Liz, whose wedding we had attended three months before was expecting a baby in June. Bianca was working very hard at school. She hoped to do well enough in her exams to get into a university in Paris. 

Luke was extremely busy in his job. There was just a year to go before David would be coming to Trabizona to sing the role of Capes in Antonio di Sicilia's new opera. The opera was called Anna Veronica, and the libretto was based on a novel by H.G. Wells, published in 1909. Just as Shakespeare set many of his plays in Italy, because, perhaps, it seemed more exotic and romantic, and Donnizetti set operas in England or Scotland for the same reason, di Sicilia had chosen a story set in the London of the early twentieth century. It had previously later in the century been used as the basis for a musical, but an opera had never been thought of until David had suggested it to di Sicilia. It tells the story of a bourgeois young girl, Ann Veronica, her fight to lead a life independently of her family, her coming to wisdom and happiness via the trials and errors of love, and her involvement in the Women's Suffrage movement. It paints a good picture of a middle-class female student of zoology in the very early days of women's lib. It seemed to Luke a superb example of the triumph of love over bourgeois moral norms, and like his father, he was desperate for it to be a success. 

His boss Cornelio was enthusiastic and fully committed to the project of hosting the premiere of Italy's greatest opera composer's latest work, but he knew that financially, he was taking an enormous risk. Because of the high cost of a totally new production and the need for a top-notch soprano to sing the title role, David had put €100K of his own money into the production, and had persuaded Jon to do the same. He had also given Trabizona a 50% discount on his usual performance fees. Even so, further patronage would be necessary for a high quality production, and Antonio was lobbying for a government grant, and trying to get financial support from either the culture department or the regional fund of the European Commission. Luke had approached Arturo Sescantanto, Tom's very cultured gay boss, and Arturo had promised a contribution and was seeking donations from his opera-loving friends. 

Luke knew that if the production were a failure, Antonio's reputation would take long time to restore, the Teatro Musicale would go bust, and he, not to mention the orchestra and chorus, Cornelio and Pauline, would all be out of a job! There was no wealthy foundation sponsoring their opera house, they were a purely commercial organization, totally dependent on public support to survive. Moreover, getting another job in opera management would be extremely unlikely if the venture failed. At times Luke almost started to think that if the worst did happen, he would stop work and he and Tom would start a family with him, Luke as the homemaker and Tom the breadwinner. Thus it was absolutely essential that in the coming year, audiences should be maximized, while avoiding expensive soloists. But in the pleasure of the company of his brother and me, these thoughts receded a little, and they had an enjoyable two days before their return to Trabizona until the New Year. Sandro and I of course did not have to work, and I concentrated on getting to know Massimo, Dorotea and Bianca. 

Luke and Tom returned late on New Year's Eve for the New Year holiday. In the evening, Dorotea cooked the traditional New Year dinner, and on New Year's Day, we all went out to a restaurant for lunch with Massimo's sister and her family of two teenagers. It was the first time that these children had met two gay couples at the same time, and teenagers being what they are, a friendly but frank discussion took place at which both Luca and Sandro had to explain why they found men more attractive than women. The discussion of course was totally lost on me, who could not understand more than the odd word. Just as Sandro's first English had been dirty words from the internet, so my Italian vocabulary was limited to words like cazzo (cock) and culo (arse). Sandro's cousins could of course speak quite a lot of English, but it was not the kind of conversation that could be carried on in a foreign language. Tom on the other hand did not have the slightest difficulty in following what was said, and even contributed a few comments himself about what it was like to kiss a man. He was more sober than the rest of the party, because late in the evening he would have to drive Luca back to Trabizona, as he was at work the next day. 




Dom and Sandro Ch. 01



Chapter X Dom: Dom's last Candlemas term

The Candlemas term slipped by rapidly. I was extremely busy with both lectures and revision, and apart from our twice-weekly squash games and our once-weekly swimming at the Fitness Centre, we did not go out much, apart from a concert or film about once every two weeks. We did go to the Rialto a couple of times with Jennifer, but she was now preoccupied with her new man. We used to tease her that it was important for us not to meet him or he might find us more attractive than she was! 

Sandro was also busy in the lab. Sunday evenings we kept free after dinner in college to go out drinking with my computer studies colleagues, but on Tuesdays after dining in college, we returned home for coffee and were occupied with academic work. One evening though, we were sitting together reading on the sofa in the flat when Sandro suddenly reached out and started to unzip my jeans. He put his hand inside and felt around until he had got hold of my cock. Being played with is a delicious sensation and I grinned with delight. I could feel my cock steadily stiffening as he pulled it out of my underpants. He then pulled my underpants and jeans down over my knees and then did the same to himself, kissing me all the time. 

I thought he was going to suck my cock, but to my surprise he just got hold of it, and used his other hand to grab my hand and lay it on his own steadily stiffening dick. "Take your shirt off!" he whispered, "and then take mine off." Clearly the intention was to give each other a hand job, and we had to lie back on the sofa so that any spunk we might squirt hit our own bodies and not the upholstery or floor. We snuggled our two bodies together as closely as possible, so that we could feel each other's breathing and began work on each other's tool, while kissing continually. Our dicks got slimier and slimier and the hand motion more and more lubricated, and our breathing got faster and noisier until with a shout, Sandro discharged his white blood across his chest. It was a couple of minutes before I in turn came, and I kept my boy's balls cupped in my hands until the male miracle happened to me, and my belly was in turn coated with come. To avoid any mess, before we stood up, we licked each other's come off his belly and swallowed it. 

Then we hastily adjourned to the bathroom and cleaned ourselves up. We resumed our seats with underpants and jeans back in place, but got no further work done that night. "That's the first time we've had non-penetrative sex for ages!" I whispered. "It just goes to show that if you love someone you don't always need to fuck or suck or even rim." When Jon came in that evening and found us drinking coffee without our shirts, he grinned. "I can guess what you two have been up to!" he said.

We did decide though that I would spend most of the Easter vac at home, as I could work there without social or sexual distractions. If that evening had been any to go by, my revision could have been seriously disrupted by too much time spent on sex!





Chapter XI: Sandro: A foundling

One Sunday afternoon, early in March soon after the end of term, before Dom had gone home for Easter, he and I went for walk alongside the Camwell. As we left the city limits, we passed an open field gate, and heard a noise of someone crying. We entered the field and heard the sound coming from a barn. We pushed the door open and were greeted by the sight of a boy of about nine or ten, clad in filthy clothes, with a black eye and bruises on his face, crying bitterly. He ran towards us and threw his arms round Dom's waist. "I'm hungry!" he cried. He told us that he had had nothing to eat or drink for a day and that he had spent the night wrapped up in hay in the corner of the barn. 

"What's your name? We'll take you home to your mother and Dad!" said Dom. 

"No you won't! They've beaten me already! They'll just hit me harder than ever! I'm not going back to them EVER!" shrieked the boy. 

"You'd better come home with us then," I said. Twenty minutes later we were climbing the steps to our flat in Fountain Street. The boy had stopped crying some ten minutes before and was looking around with great interest. He told us that his name was Tommy. We got him into the flat and took him to the bathroom. I got out a clean towel, some soap and shampoo and showed him how to turn the shower on and off and control the temperature. Then we left him to clean himself up, leaving an oversized towelling robe for him to put on. We knew that any attempt to clean him up ourselves might lay us open to charges of assault or abuse. 

Twenty minutes later, he called us and he looked a lot better. His clean young body was bruised and scarred, and he had obviously been the subject of abuse for a long time. We told him to put the bathrobe on and I took his clothes and put them in the washing machine. While I was doing this, Dom was frying bacon and egg. We sat the boy down, gave him a knife and fork and cut two thick slices of bread. He obviously didn't know how to use the knife and fork, so I put a rasher of bacon between the two slices of bread, cut into the egg, put some strips of white on the bread and spread some egg yolk on the bacon and so made a sandwich for him. The boy began to eat it ravenously. I poured him a glass of milk, which he drank without taking his mouth away from the glass. 

At that moment Jon came up the stairs. The boy looked frightened when Jon came into the room. "It's OK," I said, "this is my Uncle Jon." 

"So, who's this?" Jon asked. 

"This is Tommy, and he has run away from home," I said.

"I'm not going back to be beaten up again!" said the boy. 

"We'd better ring social services," said Jon. "They will know what to do." Armed with the meagre information that the boy had divulged about himself, Jon rang Camford Social Services Department. All he got was a recorded message saying that the Department was closed until the next day, and inviting callers to 'leave a message after the tone.' Jon said that we had staying with us a ten-year-old boy who refused to tell us where he lived, as he had run away from ill-treatment at home. He left our address and phone number. "So, young man,you are going to have to spend the night here with us. Luckily, we have a spare bed for you." Tommy looked quite happy at this, and we offered him some more milk and a few biscuits, which he rapidly demolished. 

I took Tommy's clothes out of the washing machine and put them in the tumble drier. "It's not too late to slip out to the supermarket and buy him some pyjamas and a couple of pairs of underpants," I said. I took his old underpants with me to get the size right, and came back half an hour later with the clothes. "Now you've got something to sleep in," I said to him. I had also bought him a toothbrush and we took him to the bathroom to pee and clean his teeth. About 7 pm, we popped him into the bed in the small bedroom that I had had when I first arrived in Camford. He had obviously not slept well in the barn, because he fell asleep straight after kissing all three of us goodnight. 

Next morning the doorbell rang at 8 am while we were all having breakfast. It was a lady from Social Services and another lady who introduced herself as Police Child Welfare Officer. Tommy had refused to tell us where he went to school, because he said that the school would ring his parents. The lady from the police said that no child had been reported missing, but that they would be able to trace Tommy's school by the afternoon by checking the names of all the children absent that morning from all the city's schools. In the meantime, they would take Tommy to a temporary foster home, but first they had to arrange this, and to get him seen by an expert in child-abuse injuries. So we agreed to look after him until a place had been found for him. 

When they both had gone, Jon said to me, "Where's that old mobile phone that you stopped using when Dom gave you your new iPhone? I'm going to give it to Tommy along with my card, with my phone number and the charging unit. I've got a spare pay-as-you-go SIM card that you can put in. When his credit runs out, he can ring me and I'll put some more cash on it. Then if he gets sent back to his parents, he can ring us and we can rescue him. I don't think that Social Services would be silly enough to let him go back when he has well documented injuries, but I distrust bureaucracy and officialdom!" 

Jon took Tommy into the sitting room, sat him down and told him what was going to happen. He gave him the phone and showed him how to charge it and how to make a call. Then he said, "Keep this hidden. Never show it to anyone and never let anyone see you when you put it on charge. You're only to use it to ring me if you get sent back to your parents or if you run out of credit. In the meantime, I'm going to take some photographs of your injuries. Please take you shirt off." The boy did as he was told, and Jon took photographs of his face, his arms, shoulders, chest and back. "You will almost certainly find that the Social Services or the Police will also take photographs," he said, "but we need independent evidence, just in case." 

"I would really like to stay here, and live with the three of you," said Tommy, "but as long as I don't get sent back to my parents, I don't mind too much. I hope they will let you come and see me, though." As it was vacation, Jon had no teaching that day, so he and Dom were able to keep an eye on him during the day when I was in the lab. All of us would have loved to have Tommy living with us, but it was impossible. We all of us had jobs to do, and would never have the time to look after a nine-year-old, the age that Tommy finally admitted to. We packed a small bag with the phone accessories and the few clothes we had bought him, and late in the afternoon, Social Services called and collected him. They rather reluctantly gave us the address where the boy would be staying and the phone number. We also managed to get the contact details of the lady who was handling his case. As I snuggled up against my sweet Dom that night in bed, I said to him, "I hope that boy ends up in a nice home. I would hate to think of him in some kind of institution. He needs to live with a family who will give him love and support." 





Chapter XII Dom: Sandro's birthday 

Early the same month, we went for a weekend in London to celebrate Sandro's twenty-third birthday. Unlike my boy, I had plenty of money, and rather than stay in Sandro's uncles' flat, as we had originally planned, we booked into a fancy West End hotel at my expense. The restaurant there was highly thought-of, and we thought that we would eat there, and go to Sandro's Italian restaurant on the Saturday. We got there about 6-30, and after unpacking and sussing out the room, we went down to the bar, where we discovered to our amazement that they had two kinds of cask beer. We settled down each with a pint of a beer called 'Landlord' while we perused the restaurant menu. It looked good, and we both were quite hungry, so about 7 pm, we took our seats in the restaurant. As we were consuming our soup, I noticed that a woman eating at a nearby table with a middle-aged man was staring at me. I thought nothing of it and continued my conversation with my lover. I was telling him that I had a present for him that I would give him later. 

The waiter poured our wine. I was probably regarded as a barbarian by ordering an Italian wine, Barolo, but it is just about the peak of Italian quality wines. Like the Singleton-Scarborough family, I was gradually getting obsessed with things Italian. While we were sipping our wine and awaiting the main course, the woman who had stared at me came over to our table. "Excuse me for interrupting your meal, but I know someone who must be your father," she said. "I don't think that I've ever met you, but the resemblance is unmistakable. You must be Lord Batley's son." "Yes, I am," I said, "I'm Dominic Ovenden, and who are you?" 

"I'm Arabella Jordan, wife of Lord Junkelthorpe" she replied. "I suppose that you would call me an old flame of your father's. We went out together for a while when we were both students at Camford. I was one of the first women students at Boni's. How is your father?" 

"He's fine," I replied. 

"We lost touch when we finished our degrees. Your father stayed on to do a Ph.D., I went out into the wide world and got a job," she said. "So he's not a Marquess yet?" 

"No, my grandfather is still quite fit, and my father is a professor." 

"And what you going to do when you finish your degree?" 

"I'm hoping to stay on to do a Masters in computer studies," I replied. "This is my friend Alessandro. He's a fellow student at Boni's." At this point to my relief, the waiter brought our main courses and the lady had little option but to go back to her table. "What a nosy person!" I said. "I was very reluctant to introduce you because although I am proud to be gay, I don't want to go proclaiming it to strangers! As you know, I'm not a very sociable person. I hate the social world of the nobility. They all think about getting a titled husband or wealthy businessman for their daughters! Let's talk about something else. She would not be put off even if I told her I was gay. She would still be after a title for her daughter. I'll bet Lady Junkelthorpe is a grocer's daughter." 

"But she doesn't know that you are Lord Ovenden," Sandro pointed out, "You might be one of your younger brothers."

We continued our meal, but decided to take coffee in our room. We told the waiter, and he said that he would arrange for Room Service to deliver it. After it had arrived, in a large pot with two cups, we locked the door after putting out the 'Do not Disturb' card. I went to my bag and brought out a box. Sandro opened it and found a gold multi-link bracelet inscribed on the inside: To my darling Sandro with my eternal Love, 14.3.20— He put it on his wrist. It glowed against his brown skin. 

He smiled happily and said, "My darling Dom, thank you, thank you" before wrapping his arms round me and kissing me passionately. "I'll wear it all the time except when I'm involved in a dirty job on the track," he said.

"Do you want a fuck?" I asked him.

"YES!" he replied, "I want you to ride my dick!" The organ in question was making a massive bulge in the front of his trousers. We undressed hastily and Sandro lay on his back on his bed with his rock-hard cock sticking up in the air. I rolled a condom over his manhood, coated it liberally with a thick layer of lube and straddled his body, squatting down and lowering my arse until his dick was pushing its way into my crack. He started to push it upwards, and it passed my sphincter and entered my rectum. I held on tightly to the bed head and began to work myself up and down while Sandro continued to push upwards. It was fantastic. Every so often Sandro's tool hit my prostate and sent me crazy. 

The books never tell you how you can have the most profound mental experiences during sexual intercourse. Although most people never discuss such experiences with third parties, my gay relatives did tell me that for many, sex is a spiritual experience in which the supreme joy of being human demonstrates the power of God's love. Certainly the unique closeness of two human beings during fucking is probably the most wonderful thing that mortals can experience. 

Eventually Sandro came violently and shot his load of man-juice upwards into my gut. By now my legs and knees were getting uncomfortable, so I gently lifted myself off his fast-shrinking cock and collapsed in the king-size bed beside him. He immediately climbed on top of me and began to smother my face and chest with kisses while gently fondling my cock, which rapidly got hard. He rubbed his belly against it, while continuing to kiss me and I could feel my foreskin engaging with the hair on his treasure-trail. The friction got stronger as he continued rubbing, my foreskin was being pushed down and pushed up again as he moved. I could feel the tension building up in my crotch, and finally I came and covered both our bellies with two big squirts of fuck-juice. I hastily jumped out of bed and got a moist flannel from the bathroom to clean ourselves up. "We mustn't leave spunk on the sheets!" I whispered, "The main evidence against Oscar Wilde was the chambermaid at the Savoy finding traces of jism on the sheets in the room where he had slept with Lord Alfred Douglas." 

"Well, this is neither the Savoy nor the Cadogan," grinned Sandro, alluding to Betjeman's famous poem about Wilde's arrest. 

"However, I do have this in common with Douglas: we both have a Marquess in the family!" I said. He snuggled up against me, kissed my chest and we both rapidly fell asleep.





Chapter XIII Sandro: Tommy's future 

A few days later, Jon rang the Social Worker and enquired about Tommy. She told him that he was with a foster family, that he had started a new school near their home and that Tommy's parents had been traced. They wanted nothing more to do with the boy: they said that he had been beaten because he had stolen food. When Social Services raised the subject of him being taken into care, the parents jumped at the offer, and said that they would give their consent if he were put up for adoption. A month later, Jon telephoned and asked if he and I could visit Tommy. The Social Worker said yes, so Jon rang the boy's foster parents and asked if two of us could come and see Tommy. They asked Tommy and he said yes, and when the two of them arrived, Tommy greeted them with great affection and enthusiasm. "This is Sandro, who rescued me when I ran away from home!" he told his foster mother. We took him for a short walk, and the boy told us that although he was quite happy in his present home, he would still rather come and live with us.

Jon called a family council: myself with Dom (who was now at home) and David on a three-way call on Skype. During a lengthy discussion, we addressed the possibilities of offering a home to Tommy. Neither Dom nor myself was in a position to take on a father's role, so we agreed that our two uncles should apply to adopt Tommy. Even though Jon was now in his late fifties, he was fit and wealthy, and David, who within a year or so would be back in England full-time, was about fifty-two. We did not consider this too old to bring up a nine-year-old, provided that Social Services and the Family Court agreed. Jon could rearrange his college teaching to coincide with school hours, and when David retired from the stage, he also could arrange his activities to ensure that there was always someone at home to feed and look after the boy.

It was important though to contact Luke and Cathy and ask them how they felt about the possibility of them acquiring a new little brother. We contacted them both at once via Skype and both agreed with enthusiasm to getting a new family member. Like us, Tom and Luke were not well enough established in their careers to consider parenthood, nor was Cathy. Both Luke and Cathy had been brought up to accept the family wealth as a burden or responsibility, rather than a source of gratification, and were quite happy at sharing the cash burden with a new brother, should the adoption bid succeed. 

Jon went to see the social worker and discuss the possibility. At first she was reluctant to consider adoption, because the boy was settling in happily with his new family. "Suppose I come with you to see him," said Jon, "and we'll see how he reacts. Obviously he must live with his present family until any legal formalities take place. You will also need to meet my partner, David Singleton-Scarborough, so that you can judge his suitability. He is five years younger than me, and at present is abroad a lot, but he is retiring from the stage in just over a year and then can become a resident father. Also the fact that we have two previously adopted children, now grown up, must surely weigh in our favour." By now Jon's charm was beginning to have an effect. 




Dom and Sandro Ch. 02



[Dedicated in the centenary year of her birth, to the memory of Barbara Pym (1913-1980), the greatest English woman novelist since Jane Austen. Forget Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. There is not a lot of sex in this installment, but I hope that you will read and enjoy it as a story rather than as wank literature.] 

Chapter XXII Dom: Christmas at Getheringthwaite

The weeks before Christmas saw me making numerous phone calls and job applications. But about December 20, I received a phone called from my old tutor, Dr Fraser who suggested that immediately after New Year, I should ring a friend of his in the HR department of a large IT service provider, as there might be an interesting job on offer. 

We stayed at Getheringthwaite for Christmas. That year was the first time that my parents and brothers had plucked up courage to come to the Ovenden family home since Lord Wakefield and Robert had come out of the closet. My father told my mother that it was time she had a rest from the hassle of Christmas catering. Mrs Harrison was delighted to cook for a large party and temporary kitchen and serving help was hired in the village. One evening we had a very entertaining time with Michael and Richard recalling the first time that Sandro had come home with me and my assertion that I had too much work to do to date girls, when all the time Sandro and I were having it off together. Sandro told them that if they had asked him if he was dating, he would have told them that he was dating me!

In accordance with custom, the family party was joined by the Vicar and his wife. So it was a large and merry formally dressed party that sat down to Christmas dinner after the service in the hall chapel. My grandfather had been delighted when he heard of our engagement, and he asked the Vicar if he would like to assist in the blessing service that we were planning. We assured him that there would be no breaches of church or civil law, but to be on the safe side, we wanted Professor Bairstow the preside, as he was independent of episcopal rule. The meal was simple and straightforward. We had roast pheasant followed by Christmas pudding. Mrs Harrison was not into Michelin-style cuisine! 

The party did not stay for New Year, they returned home on December 30, but the point was established that Robert was now a member of the Ovenden family, albeit an unofficial one. Sandro's status was essentially the same. However, I was determined that when we became civil partners, it would be mentioned in the newspapers. I did not want a closet existence. I was proud of Sandro and wanted him to go down in history as my mate.

The Hall had modern efficient gas-fired central heating, installed a number of years ago at great expense. I explained to Sandro the source of our family wealth. In the early nineteenth century, coal was discovered in land owned by the Ovendens a few kilometres away from Getheringthwaite. The mining revenues vastly increased the wealth of the family, but instead of dissipating it in high living, or investing in further collieries, they invested the cash in city-centre land, particularly in London. Leasehold development of this land brought in a large rental income, which was invested in a trust and used to purchase more land and pay the family a very substantial income. By the time that the coalmining industry was nationalized in 1947, the collieries had ceased to contribute to the family income.

The complicated management of this fortune was in the safe hands of Tim Ingledown, who also managed the affairs of Jon and David. This hands-off arrangement suited not only the Marquess and his son, but also my brothers and myself. Like Luke and Cathy, we had been brought up with the idea that wealth was a resource to be used for the benefit of society as a whole, and that individual fulfilment should come from work, not from spending money. As you can imagine, this put an additional pressure on me to find a job. 

On January 2, I rang the number given to me by Dr Fraser, and had an interesting conversation about an attractive sounding job at Yeohampton Tech Solutions. The outcome was my dispatch of my CV by E-mail that day and shortly afterwards a summons to interview at the firm's head office in Cheltenham. In the morning I met the head of the unit and we had a discussion about the nature of the work at which I asked several questions. In the afternoon was a formal interview at the end of which I was offered the job. The firm had an office in Sheffield, and it was agreed that I should go there for my first six months. I was delighted because Sheffield was only fifty minutes drive from Getheringthwaite. Accordingly, by mid-February, Sandro and I were sleeping each night together before leaving next morning on our daily commute to our respective jobs. It meant that we had to buy an additional car, so I got a medium-sized second hand vehicle with about 30000 km on the clock. 

Chapter XXIII Luke: Tom gets his doctorate

At this time in Trabizona, Tom was finally putting the finishing touches to the dissertation for his Dottorato di Ricerca (Ph.D.). He had originally written it in English, and with a lot of help from Professor Arturo Sescandanto, his supervisor, had translated it into Italian. Basically, it consisted of seven published papers written in English and already published in international chemical journals, with an extended introduction and a long discussion written in Italian. It was not thought necessary to translate the published papers themselves, as their quality was testified by their publication in peer-reviewed journals. However, he still had to undergo the ordeal of interview by a committee of specialist chemists, and this had to be in Italian. Arturo gave him a lot of help and encouragement, saying that really no-one on the committee knew any more about the topic than he (Tom) did, and that Tom's Italian could cope with anything challenging. I gave him a lot of encouragement too: his command of the language was now as good as my own, even though I had started speaking bits of Italian when I was under ten years old, and Tom had not started to learn till he was twenty-two. Also for two years now, Tom had been involved in teaching students in the laboratory, and had encountered no problems. The dissertation had been submitted and Tom was awaiting the day of his examination. 

During the wait, the two of us, plus Arturo and Bastian, were invited to the wedding of Ben and Leonora in Leonora's home village in Emilia-Romagna. It was a very happy occasion. There were more people from Trabizona and Bologna at the wedding than from the village itself. It was a tribute to the tenderness Leonora felt for Tom that he was invited to read the epistle at the nuptial mass. The villagers must have found his English accent a bit strange, but he read clearly and confidently. The reception was enjoyable without being lavish. The Prosecco flowed freely and the food was delicious. Both Tom and I kissed the bride and wished the happy couple joy. Already Leonora was unrecognizable from the shy quiet would-be nun of a couple of years ago. Whenever she looked at her new husband, she radiated happiness. As for Ben, he was over the moon. He was steadily getting Europeanized! I said to Tom as we were on the way home, "We need to pray for Ben and Leonora. Although they are very much in love, they don't have a lot in common, and I wonder how they will settle down together. I would hate if if their marriage didn't work out." 

"They are both stable and faithful people," said Tom, "and I think they will grow together and make a go of it. As long as Ben can help her to conquer her fear of sex, I think they have a great future together."

It looked as if Arturo was becoming quite fatherly towards Tom. Arturo, now in his middle forties, and settled with his gay partner Bastian, who had finally agreed to move in with him, was beginning to get the feeling that most men experience at some age or other, of needing to be a father, but being gay, this was biologically impossible. One day, at one of our regular monthly dinners, knowing my personal history, he asked me what it had been like to be adopted by two gays. I told him that I had had a very enjoyable childhood and adolescence, and had never regretted not having a mother until I actually met my mother when I was nineteen. Even then it took several years to realize that I might have been even happier with a mother. In fact Tom, who had lost his mother at fifteen, appreciated my mother even more than I did. Nonetheless, I assured Arturo that Tom and I were determined to adopt or have children by surrogate once we had become securely established in jobs. 

Eventually, the day of Tom's doctoral examination came. In spite of very untypical acute nervousness, he successfully passed the ordeal and earned the title of Dottore. Everyone in his lab, with wives and partners, including myself and Bastian, were invited to a party that evening, where once again the Prosecco flowed abundantly. "You are my first non-Italian Ph.D! said Arturo, "And we can tell the Young Leonardo committee that they have supported another promising scientist. Tom, it's great to have you in my lab! By the way, you are also my first gay Ph.D. It's very nice to have someone in the lab who's not always ogling women. Oh, and you can now call me Arturo in the lab!" 

Bastian and I grinned at one another. "You and I had better watch out!" I said to him, "or we might end up finding ourselves exchanging partners!" 

"You're a bit young for me!" said Bastian, "I prefer older men!" 

"Congratulations, Tom!" said Ben to Tom. "Welcome to the Doctoral Club! A Ph.D. is the first step towards a Nobel prize!"

Leonora came up and kissed Tom. "Felicitazioni, Tomaso!" she said, "caro amico mio!" Tom was now assured of a job for another three years. 

My job also was more secure after the success of Anna Veronica. Attendances for the new season were good, the new programme had been very well received, and we were thinking of renovating the backstage facilities, to make them more attractive to international artists. That however would require applications for grants. 

When we got home that night, I was not in the slightest surprised when Tom began to make love to me. "My darling Luke, I owe everything that has happened today to you," he said. "Without you, I might, thanks to Mr Silverdale, have been a good chemist, if I had survived a lonely first year at Buckingham. But without you, I would probably have packed in my course and left Camford. You rescued me from loneliness and despair and gave me a sense of self-worth. I can still scarcely believe that you let me make you mine. I would still relinquish everything I have achieved if you asked me to. You are the light of my life. I know that you belong to God first, as do all believers, but He was willing to share you with me, so I am grateful to Him as well. My precious boy, you are so sweet, you have transformed my life!" He started to smother me with kisses, as he slowly undressed me. I assisted by removing my shoes and socks. 

"Are you sure that you don't want to swap me for Arturo?" I asked him. "He was coming on at you tonight! I hope he doesn't fancy you. I don't want to share your cock with another man, particularly when he's your boss!"

"Don't be silly, fag-boy, he was just feeling fatherly. I know how he feels. I want to be a father. I wish we could have adopted little Tommy." 

"We're too young to adopt a child of eleven. But if we want to adopt, we'll probably have to go back to England. Bastian told me that Italian law does not allow gay couples to adopt." 

"I will do whatever you want, my lover boy," Tom replied. He began to kiss my bellybutton and moved his lips slowly down my treasure trail till he reached the ultimate goal of lovemaking, which was sticking up out of its black undergrowth. He took it into his mouth and began to blow me. As usual I was overwhelmed by a sensation of loving surrender as his tongue and lips worked their magic on my tool. All the time his hands were stroking my belly and nipples. The amatory skills of this man once again amazed me. I felt once more how amazingly fortunate I was to be loved by such a man. I smiled at him with happiness as he did his best to swallow my cock. "Caro dolce uomo mio!" (my darling sweet man) I whispered, "Sei un' amante perfetto!" (you're a perfect lover). I wiggled my manhood around in his mouth and he rubbed his tongue against it and after several minutes of wonderful pleasure, I shot my load into his mouth. He removed my dick from his mouth and swallowed my ejaculate with a happy smile, before pushing me backwards on to the bed and lifting my already wide open legs on to his shoulders. He kissed me passionately on the lips, and I could taste my own come on his lips. He reached for lube and rubber, and in no time at all he was in me, up to the hilt. He bent forward and kept on kissing me before starting to work his dick in my hole.

"Tuo culo mi piace!" he whispered as he had his way with me. He did what a man needs to do and after more blissful minutes, he came inside me with whoop of delight. A few times he hit my prostate gland and convulsed me with shivers of pleasure. As his rapidly softening cock slipped out of my rear hole, he rolled over beside me and lay there kissing my shoulders, neck and chest. As he pulled the condom off his prick and knotted it, he said to me: "This is perishable seed, mere body cells that go to waste; but when I squirt it, I know that God is pouring the imperishable seed of His love into you, and into all humanity. God gives us love so that in loving others, we come to love Him." 

"You're getting like my Dad!" I replied, "preaching in bed!" I turned on my side and laid my head on his chest and kissed his bellybutton.

Chapter XXIV David: Tommy's schooldays

I was determined that I should see more of my new son than I had seen of Luke and Cathy at that age. Tommy had had some difficulties settling in at Winton College School. Part of the problem had been the uniform. All boys up to year 11 (from age ten to sixteen) had to wear a white Tudor-style ruff, fastened at the back of the neck by a button or press-stud, over which was worn a collarless black shirt or black T-shirt with long sleeves. This clothing had been traditional for centuries, and really looked no stranger than the striped ties and blazers worn by boys at other schools. Luke had worn it without protest when he was at WCS. But it took Tommy some weeks to get used to having his throat surrounded by a polyester frill, and he felt self-conscious wearing it on the bus to school, in spite of the fact that there were other boys on the bus wearing the same outfit. The ruff got grimy and sweaty and had to be changed every day. Fortunately polyester ruffs would dry overnight when washed. The younger boys looked sweet in their ruffs, but pubescent sixteen-year-olds tended just to look scruffy. 

Academically Tommy got on well. He was particularly good at maths, music, swimming and football (soccer, for the benefit of American readers. WCS was not a Rugby-playing school). He surprised us all by choosing to learn Latin. After he came to live with us, he soon got used to our comfortable family habit of everyone relieving himself in the home from flatulence whenever necessary. He was a bit startled the first time he heard Jon fart without apologizing, but after he heard Sandro and Dom letting off wind noisily, he soon began to join in, and thought nothing of it. We were happy when we heard him fart, because we knew that he felt secure. For several years Jon and I worried that his infant ill-treatment might have left permanent scars on his personality, but we never found any evidence of mental trauma. He had been rescued just in time. 

The first summer after he had started at WCS, he went with Jon and me to Italy. It was August, and Tom and Luke joined us for a week at Milapoli, an Adriatic seaside resort where Jon and I had spent a happy holiday many years before. We would have preferred to stay in our house in Montecatini Terme, but it was bringing in a good income from holiday lets, and in spite of a visit with us to Nice the previous summer, Tommy had never had a beach holiday. So each day the five of us would set out with bathing trunks and beach towels and spend a morning or afternoon playing with a ball on the beach. Although he was getting rather beyond the age of bathing and sandcastles, Tommy enjoyed himself on the beach. We just wished that he had a special friend of his own age to play with. Even so, he enjoyed visiting ancient churches and ruins and eating at the local trattoria. It was amazing how easily he adapted to adult company without any signs of boredom. Tom and Luke would take charge of him most days, leaving Jon and me to relive our youth, recalling the fact that Milapoli had been the place where my singing talent had first been recognized. By the time we returned to Camford and Luke and Tom to Trabizona, young Tommy was as brown as a berry, and we adults also had significant suntans.

Tommy formed lots of friendships at school, and there were always eight or nine boys at his birthday party. This was the numerical limit that we could manage in Camford. When he became twelve however, we took the birthday guests to Rockwell's Barn and had the party in and around the pool. It was a great success, and a dozen noisy teenage boys had a wonderful time. Although he got on well with his friends, he never had one particular friend whom he wanted to come on holiday with us. 

Each year the boys had tests at the end of the school year in July, and Tommy came top in all his favourite subjects. We were amazingly lucky to have acquired such a bright boy after such a Dickensian birth and infancy. He was also a very affectionate boy. Even in adolescence, he never hesitated to kiss Jon and me goodnight when he went to bed, and kissed Dom and Sandro when they were home with us, and of course he always kissed Caterina. He often asked when Dom and Sandro were next coming home. I told him that in a few months Dom would be working in Cheltenham, which was much nearer Camford than Getheringthwaite, and he would be home at weekends more often, and that when Sandro started to write his thesis, he would be home with us for several months, using the Science Library. 



Chapter XXV David: The end of an era at Fountain Street

After Marcello's death, I used to visit Caterina Fabioni twice a week. She adapted very quickly to life on her own, and had a very active social life with the elderly ladies whom she had known for years. But she said that she missed cooking for Marcello, and got lonely in the evenings. So we agreed that every Wednesday evening Jon, Tommy and I would go to her house for dinner. Tommy took an instant liking to her, he would even sometimes walk round to her house after school and talk to her. We realized that he was missing having a mother figure. One day, she said "Davide, Tomaso needs a good piano to practise on. That upright piano in your flat is not very good. Why doesn't he come here to practise? Not necessarily every day, but at least three times a week. He could stay and do his homework and eat with me as well, if he wanted to." So it was arranged, and Tommy was very happy. He soon loved the old lady like a mother. 

This arrangement went on for some months until one evening when the three of us were enjoying Caterina's superb cooking, she said, "Questa casa è troppo grande (this house is too big). I think I will put it on the market." 

Both Jon and I had the same idea. "Sell it to us," said Jon. "We will convert the side wing into a self-contained apartment, where you can live for a modest rent, and you can cook for us whenever you feel like it, but with no commitment. In the evenings you can watch television in your own apartment, or stay and talk to us. In that way you can make better use of the money you get by selling the house without having to move into a new house. We have been looking for a bigger house for some months."




Dom and Sandro Ch. 02



I added, "We will buy the piano with the house of course! And we will keep on your cleaner and gardener. We can then move out of our poky flat in Fountain Street. Sandro will soon be coming back for a few months to write his thesis, and the flat will be rather crowded. Besides, I could give lessons here and not be dependent on the practice room in the Music Department."

"Yes, auntie Caterina!" said Tommy, "I'd love to live here with you!" In an era in which many of his contemporaries were playing violent shoot-up computer games and viewing porn on their smartphones, Tommy was still a sweet and unspoilt child. He was more interested in people than things, and rarely used the old phone that we had given him when we feared that he might be sent back to his birth-parents. 

Tim Ingledown found us a good architect, drawings were prepared for a two-bedroomed annex with kitchen, bathroom and sitting room, and planning permission was obtained. Within a couple of months work had begun. Caterina decided which items of furniture she wanted to keep, we chose a few from the rest, and the unwanted furniture was sent to the auction room. 

Within six further months, we were ready to move into our new house. Caterina was already installed in the 'granny annex.' "We are all going to have to be more gentlemanly when Caterina is around" Jon warned us as we prepared for the move, "No farting when she is present!" The house had four bedrooms, and we had two additional upstairs bathrooms installed, one to serve Jon's and my bedroom, and one to serve the second bedroom where Dom and Sandro would sleep. The original bathroom would be used by Tommy, who had bedroom number three, which was the smallest. The fourth bedroom was the guest bedroom, where Luke and Tom or Cathy could sleep when they were visiting. The spacious garden had a double garage, with parking for two further cars. 

The old apartment in Fountain Street was returned to the owners, Z College, and we received a small sum to cover the unexpired part of our lease. This marked a landmark in our lives. Jon had purchased the lease from the college in his final year as an undergraduate, and when it expired after twenty-five years, it had been renewed and Jon had lived there for well over thirty years. The 'new' house in Octavia Avenue had been the Fabionis' home for over thirty years. It would have been traumatic to Caterina if she had had to move. Most of the furnishings and books from our flat were moved to the new house, except for Jon's and my small porn library, which we moved to Rockwell's Barn. We would have felt very uneasy if Tommy had been able to access our huge range of gay erotica (although most of it was already at Ixton). At Ixton, they were safely under lock and key, though I knew that Luke knew where we kept the key. However, we did keep the nude male statue and installed it in our new en-suite bathroom. There was no need to hide it now that we were out. 

Soon I started to give a few lessons in the new house. It was within a few minutes walk of Camford station and was thus very convenient for those students coming from London for the day. We used to give them lunch, or even dinner with us, which they seemed to appreciate. In May, Sandro came back to us, having completed his work at the rail test track. He settled down to write his thesis. He had the use of a study which only Jon used on a regular basis, and a half hour walk or short bike ride would take him to the Faraday Science Library. He was joined in September by Dom, who had now been transferred to Cheltenham. Cheltenham was just too far from Camford to commute daily, so Dom took lodgings in Cheltenham Monday to Thursday and came home for the weekends. He was enjoying his work at YTS, as we learnt to call Yeohampton Technical Solutions, and was being paid a very respectable salary. Because they had been together each night when they were at Getheringthwaite, they were not all over each other, which was nice for the rest of us, especially young Tommy. Often out of term we all spent the weekends at Rockwell's Barn at Ixton, rather than in Camford, and that meant that we could all use the pool. Ixton was much nearer to Cheltenham. We had also persuaded my parents to spend six weeks or so each year at Rockwell's Barn, so that both house and pool got more use, and I was able to see them more frequently. Tommy loved it at Ixton, and spent much of the school holidays there with either Jon and me or my parents, whom he also became very fond of. They were both nearing seventy, and they told me too that their newest grandchild had made them feel young again. They had given up hope of our daughter Cathy giving them great-grandchildren, as she showed no signs of getting married.



Chapter XXVI Sandro: Philip Ashburton's confession

The work I was doing at Rail-UK's test track was ended, and I had moved back to Camford to write my thesis. It seemed strange to have the spacious study at Octavia Avenue to work in, rather than our poky little room at Fountain Street. I had to spend a lot of time at the Faraday Library of Science and Engineering in Convocation Street. I would go there on my bike in the mornings, work till about 2 pm, then cycle home for a bite of lunch and continue working at home till 5 pm. I knew that after six years, I would be spending very little time in the future in that beautiful city: that an era of my life was almost over. That city, with its intertwining waterways, honey-coloured stone, ancient buildings and traditions had won my heart in a way that Venice, its Italian equivalent, never could. Those six years had anglicized me. My parents noticed that whenever I went home. It did not worry my mother of course, but Massimo must have felt that in a way I was betraying my upbringing. Everything I did seemed to increase the gulf between me and the father I loved.

When I got to Camford to begin writing, there was about six weeks of the Pentecost term left, and I dined with Jennifer and her boyfriend in Hall on Sunday nights till the end of term. Dom could not accompany me, as he was no longer resident and had not yet taken his M.A., and in any case had to drive back to Cheltenham to start work early the next day. We knew that we could not always live in each other's pocket. I did not stay in college for coffee, though sometimes Jennifer and Charlie would come home with me to have coffee with Dom and my fathers. 

In terms of publications, all I had was a couple of communications, one read to the Institute of Civil Engineers, the other a poster at a meeting of the International Railway Signalling Society. However, Philip, as Dr Ashburton now allowed me to call him, told me that my work looked good, and we were preparing a couple of full length papers on our work. Even if Rail-UK decided not to pursue my project, there would be no problems in my getting the doctorate. I got the thesis finished in a week short of the six months, and the examiners were appointed immediately. The external examiner was a German professor, and I was not looking forward to the oral examination. 

One night I was invited to dinner at Philip's home. I knew nothing about his private life, and it turned out that he was a bachelor, who, while he dined most nights in college, would not take rooms there. He turned out to be an excellent cook, and after the meal we sat drinking Madeira. To my amazement, he apologized to me for the anti-gay stance that he had taken earlier in my career. He told me that after the party that I had arranged in my first year, he had been set thinking. He said that he had known since he was a student that he was himself gay, but had tried to suppress his homosexual feelings, because he felt that fucking men was unnatural, dirty and sinful. Now, in his middle forties, certain that he would never marry, he was feeling desperately lonely. He now thought that maybe sexual relations with a man whom one loved was not sinful. His discussion with Professor Bairstow had convinced him of that. He had started going out with a fairly new postdoc in the department, a man of about thirty-five, and rather fancied him. He suspected that the man was gay, and asked me how he should set about finding out. As a man without experience, he really did not know how to proceed. 

I asked him what they did when they went out together, and how often they went out. Did they go to cinema, theatre or concerts, or what? He said that they usually went to classical concerts or recitals, usually twice per week and ate together on the nights they went out. I asked what the attitude of his friend was, did he for instance give any indication of being gay? He replied that not as far as he could see. I suggested that the only reasonable approach was just to spend more time with him. "Get to know him better, indeed get as nearly intimate as two men can get in friendship, and then you will know, and he will too, if you want to get into bed together. Don't forget that he has needs just as much as you do. Indeed, if you get close, he might make the first move. In the meantime, just enjoy his company and his friendship. That is valuable in itself, and man-man love does not necessarily have to lead to sex. A fulfilling deep friendship is satisfying and comfortable and really more important than ten minutes leading up to an orgasm. If that approach doesn't appeal to you, then it's not really companionship you want, it's just sex. And I'm sorry that that is not something that I can advise you about." 

There was a short silence after I had delivered this long speech. Then Philip said, "Thank you, Sandro. I realize that I have been letting carnal desires dominate my thinking. You are right of course, it's the relationship that counts, not what we do together. I would like to introduce you to Jim, and hear your opinion about him." 

"I won't be able to tell you whether he's gay or not. My own sense of gaydar is not very strong. But if you like him so much, it will be interesting to meet him." 

So the three of us went out to a concert together round about the end of my last term in Boni's. Jim Aldermaston was a handsome man, slim and fit, with short dark hair and an endearing smile. Philip had told me that Jim was not engaged, or dating a woman. The fact that such an attractive man had not been snapped up by a woman, suggested that he might be gay. I could understand why he fancied him. I couldn't help hoping that the evening might excite Jim's jealousy, so I pretended that I knew Philip better than I really did. After the concert, we went for a drink in the Lion, the nearest pub to Boni's. Philip bought a round of drinks, and as he put mine on the table, I reached out fairly obtrusively and touched his hand. When we stood up to go, I touched Philip on the shoulders. When we said our farewells, I put my arm round Philip's shoulders for a brief moment, and then left them. I reckoned that those few gestures would signal to Jim that Philip might be gay, and if he had feelings for Philip, they would certainly be stirred up. The action carried little risk, because everyone in the Engineering department knew that I was gay.

Chapter XXVII Sandro: Sandro's viva voce exam and afterwards

During the usual delay of awaiting my Ph.D. oral exam, I began work as a Rail-UK employee. My place of work was to be at the offices in Swindon, where I was to be trained in the techniques of automated testing of track quality. This involved working in a highly sophisticated train, full of computers and equipment, that several times a week was employed in testing the quality of the rail track on all mainline routes. Sometimes we had to do this at night, but generally the runs could be fitted into gaps between the regular trains. 

I studied the rail timetable carefully, and established that with careful choice of trains, it was possible to commute from Swindon to Cheltenham daily in little more than an hour. A season ticket for my darling Dom would be expensive, but worth it for us both to be together, providing that we could find a decent house near the station. Moreover, home working was possible for YTS employees on a limited scale, and for most of the projects he was engaged in, he could work from home one day per week. He could also work on the train. We managed to find a small, but cosily furnished terrace house near Swindon station on which we took a one-year lease. 

Swindon has always been a major railway centre, and in spite of the closure of the locomotive works, still houses many of the administrative and technical functions of Rail-UK. In recent years it has become known as the home town of Thursday Next and her family in the books of Jasper Fforde. It lies within easy reach of both London and Bristol. Getting to Camford took a little longer. I was hopeless at cooking, and on the days that Dom was commuting, we tended to eat out or use takeaways. We found two decent restaurants, one Italian and one Chinese, and we became regular patrons. 

A couple of months into our stay in Swindon, I was summoned to Camford for my Ph.D. exam. It was on a Friday, and Dom could not take the day off, but arranged to get to Camford in the evening. The big event was timed for 2 pm, and attired in subfusc with B.A. gown and hood, I arrived at a small room in the Engineering department to be cross-examined on my newly developed signalling application. The only persons present were myself and the two examiners also in academic dress, one of whom was a colleague of Philip in the department. The whole experience turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax. Professor Schwarz asked me very searching questions for half an hour, which I answered without too much of a struggle. He then pronounced himself satisfied and we spent another half hour chatting about jobs. He said that while Rail-UK was a good place to get experience, if I wanted to do cutting edge research, Germany, France or Switzerland were the best places for rail engineering. 

I was asked to leave while the examiners discussed their verdict. After ten minutes I was recalled and congratulated, and the examiners shook my hand. We came out to find Philip with Jon and David waiting for me, and again my hand was shaken and my two uncles kissed me. I insisted that we all went to the pub, and the nearest was the Whale and Wheelbarrow. We only had one pint of beer each, as my uncles were taking me to dine on High Table at Boni's. However, before we left, Philip took me on one side and asked me to call round at his house the next morning. He said that I was welcome to bring Dom. 

It was of course the first time I had ever eaten on High Table. After the meal, Dom arrived and joined us for coffee and port in the Senior Common Room. Dom had managed to snatch a meal, and we had a table booked for the next evening at the Michelin two-star Magic Python restaurant. Our uncles treated us generously to the college port before we went home by taxi to Octavia Avenue. 

Next day, Dom and I turned up at Philip's house about 10 am. To our surprise, Jim Aldermaston was with him. Philip introduced him to Dom. "A lot has happened since that evening in June when we went to the concert, Sandro," Philip said, "and I owe you my thanks. After you had left us, Jim asked me if you were gay, and I said that you were. He looked quite cross. He said that he was surprised that I had not objected to you 'pawing me' as he put it. I said that it was OK, that you were in a fixed relationship with your partner and the touching was just a friendly gesture. I did not mind being touched, as you were a good friend and colleague." 

At this point, Jim began to speak. "I felt quite jealous that this young guy had had the cheek to touch you. I liked you very much, but was afraid to say anything because I knew that you were anti-gay. It never occurred to me that you were in the closet! But when you didn't object to his actions, I realized that you must really be gay. It never occurred to me that you fancied me!" 

"So, thanks to you, Sandro, we have found one another!" said Philip. "Jim at once asked me if I was gay and I said yes, that I had been in the closet for years because I was afraid of my unnatural lusts. He asked what was unnatural about loving someone, and he kissed me. The earth seemed to stand still. I had never felt such joy and happiness. I had always envied the fact that you and Dom seemed so happy together, and now I know from my own experience what it feels like." 

Jim said, "Sandro, I'm sorry that I thought that you were making a pass at your Ph.D. supervisor! It turns out that you had been giving him good advice. I've shagged a few men in my time, but this the first time that I have loved someone. Philip is right: love transforms you. I am going to move in with him! Let's go for a drink to celebrate. You are the first people we have shared our joy with." He shook my hand and then Dom's.

I said, "I shouldn't really be saying this, because it's none of my business, but Jim, please be gentle with Philip. He has a lot of inhibitions to lose, and he has to reorient his ways of thinking completely. A Damascene conversion does not instantly reorder the mind, so take it steadily." I was rather proud by now of my command of idiomatic English. Jon would have been impressed to hear me! "Do either of you have family who needs to know your good news?" 

"My family already knows that I'm as queer as a nine-pound note, but they will be glad that I have found a man to settle down with," said Jim. 

"I don't know how I am going to tell my mother," said Philip, "she will be very shocked and might disown me!"

"Not if you introduce him and give her a chance to get acquainted before you break the news. Meeting one's futures is always fraught with apprehension, and there is always the fear of family complications. Dom and I know, we have gone through all that ourselves. But it may well be less of an ordeal than you fear. Most mothers are more inclined to accept that their son is gay than are fathers. And in any case, what the fuck does it matter when you have each other?"

Of course there was a small sensation in the Engineering department when Philip and Jim came out, the more so because of Philip's previous anti-gay attitude. In Philip's college, Islip, there was also something of a sensation. Camford loves to gossip about personal relationships. That is why we were so reluctant to reveal Dom's identity.

The evening after my doctoral exam, David and Jon took Dom and me out to dinner at the Magic Python. Caterina Fabioni was babysitting Tommy. We had the tasting menu: a large number of very small quantities of food, each served with a different wine. We felt that the occasion was too special just to eat at the Venezia, but we missed the gay-friendly waiters. 

Next day all four of us went to the Men's Fitness Centre to shake off our slight hangovers from the night before. We each swam 40 lengths, and then returned home to have brunch with Caterina and Tommy. Tommy was now in the middle of puberty. He was sprouting hair everywhere, and his voice would change pitch suddenly. Fortunately, he showed no signs of teenage stroppiness. He willingly did as he was told. We said goodbye to him in the evening and returned to Swindon on a late train.

Chapter XXVIII Dom: Planning the partnership

After six months in Swindon, we were both established in our jobs, and both enjoying the work. We decided that the time had come to tie the knot and sign up to a lifetime commitment. I had decided that to avoid complications and misunderstandings, we should have the civil partnership ceremony (such as it is) at the Registry Office in Shedley, the nearest town to Getheringthwaite, on a Saturday, followed by a buffet lunch in a pub, and the private act of blessing and worship, (which we regarded as the important bit) in the Hall chapel on the Sunday at noon, followed by a sit-down lunch in the state dining room. The second event would be for close family only, with the exception of course of Tim Ingledown. 




Dom and Sandro Ch. 02



I expected that I would have to take care of most of the arrangements, but to my amazement, my mother showed a great determination to get involved, even though I was not marrying a woman! Of course with three sons, she was never going to have the role of mother of the bride, so I suppose that she had decided to make the best of a bad job, and employ her excellent organizational skills on her sons. She negotiated with my grandfather and Mrs Harrison. She persuaded Mrs Harrison that at least half of the wedding meal should be supplied by a catering firm, because no way could enough skilled temporary staff be found to do all the cooking. Similarly too, serving staff needed to be supplied by the caterers. The number of guests was not small. Sandro had two families, his own and that of his birth brother Luca, which involved Tom, Cathy, Tommy and David's brother Jeroen and his wife and two children. My parents and brothers made up four more. Then of course there was Jon and David, and all our grandparents (plus Robert), so there was going to be more than twenty persons on the Sunday if we included three priests and their wives. They however were not expected to attend the Register Office ceremony, as none of them was a personal friend of either of us.

The Saturday occasion would enable us to entertain less close friends, and again the list was long, but mother left me in sole charge of those arrangements. Overnight accommodation had also to be organized, at least for the family. The Hall could only accommodate ten persons, so I was glad that I was not involved in deciding who were to be house guests and who were to stay in hotels. We had to make all these arrangements months before, because of the numbers of persons involved and making arrangements with the Registrar, hotels and catering firms. We fixed the date for September. In the July we were to take our higher degrees. I would be getting my M.A. and M.CSt. degrees, Sandro his M.A. and Ph.D. 



Chapter XXIX Sandro: Degree day and afterwards 

I will not go into details of the degree day ceremony. The Camford M.A. degree is a bit of a fraud, as it only requires a graduate to turn up twenty-one terms after matriculation and collect it (after payment of a fee, of course). Of course, we were both receiving 'proper' higher degrees in addition, so we had to make two exits and re-entrances. My parents did not come: they had seen me get my bachelor's degree, and they would be coming to our civil partnership ceremony within three months, so it was just Dom's parents and David and Jon that watched the ceremony. Dom said how sweet I looked in my violet and red doctor's gown, and I threatened to beat him up for making me seem a little boy! I was, after all, now twenty-six. The M.A. ceremony is slightly different from other degrees, but it makes the holder a senior member of the university, and we could dine on high table in college at any time (not for free, of course). We naturally assumed this right the same day and dined in our brand-new M.A. gowns with our uncles. We only needed to be introduced to the college fellows in other disciplines: most of the science and engineering dons knew us both already. 

Dom's parents dined at their hotel and we took them to the Venezia the following night, along with David, Jon and Tommy. The following day they came back with us to Swindon for a couple of nights before returning to Paradise Court. "Welcome to Swindon! I said, "According to Jasper Fforde, the third capital of England."

Dom's father was impressed by our little rented terrace-house. "If you're happy here, Dom," he said, "I can understand why you don't want to be master of Getheringthwaite. Nor do I want that responsibility, so it's good for both of us that Michael wants it." We spent Saturday showing Lord and Lady Batley the sights of Swindon. We visited the railway museum and the Neanderthal village, which since it was first made famous in the pages of fiction by Jasper Fforde had become a major tourist attraction.

Their visit enabled us to update ourselves about the forthcoming arrangements for what we thought of as our wedding. Most of the people who had been invited had accepted. Even Philip and Jim had accepted invitations. In sending out invitations for the Registry Office ceremony, Dom had found that it had come as rather a shock to a number of relatives on his mother's side of the family to find that he was gay, and one or two of Lady Batley's brothers had said that they were not going to come to a ten-minute register office affair. He told them that we live in an era of change, and two men who love one another and want society's recognition of their relationship no longer have to hide in the closet. Some relatives asked what his grandfather thought as head of the family and were stunned to hear that Lord Wakefield was delighted that the second-in-line to the title was going to be united with the man he loved, and that arrangements had been made for the estate to pass to his brother!

After lunch on the Sunday, I talked to my future 'mother'. I said to her, "I have never thanked you for giving me your son. He is the most precious thing in the world to me, so I hope you will think in terms of gaining an extra son, rather than losing one!" 

She smiled and kissed me. "You are sweet, Sandro!" She said. "You will be a special extra son. I remember, before we knew how you felt about one another that you told me that you would keep an eye on Dom in his second year as an undergraduate. Little did I realize how close an eye that would be!"

"I should warn you," I said, "that both Luke and Tom and David and Jonathan are very pious. They are regular churchgoers and Luke and Tom are choristers. That's why three priests will be involved in the blessing service, which has no legal status and is a private act of worship. We would not want to get involved in a 'gay wedding'." 

"What name are you going to take when you and Dom become partners?" asked Lady Batley.

"I need to ask Lord Batley if I can be an Overton," I replied. "At first I thought of just the name Overton, but that would be seriously disloyal to my father, who has brought me up as his own son. So I want to be called Sandro Overton-Mascagnoli. I don't think that Dom as a future Marquess should lose or change his family name. My brother Luke and his partner Tom have different surnames."

I went to Lord Batley and said to him in my curious mixture of formality and informality, "Sir, I want you to give me permission to take the surname Ovenden-Mascagnoli when Dom and I get hitched! I have no doubt that your father will be happy with my choice, but you are Dom's father and I need your blessing to take your name." 

"That will be perfectly OK with me," said Dom's father, "and after you become partners, we must get your name change registered with the College of Arms, and a grant of arms for you, which you can impale with the Ovenden family arms. I don't know what procedures the Heralds have developed for civil partnerships, but we can always make our own arrangements. If you do adopt children, even though they cannot inherit the title, they will be entitled to a differenced version of the Ovenden arms, quartered with your own. Do you know what the family motto of the Ovendens is?  Virtus est pulchritudo virilis 'Virtue is manly beauty.' I think it was chosen in the eighteenth century to distract attention from the goings-on of the Perverted Lord."

Dom spent some time discussing with his father the possibility of learning Italian. His father said that he should try an online Italian course that his department had recently developed. Lord Batley could speak four languages fluently, and it seemed unlikely that Dom would have missed out on some linguistic talent. I promised that once he had a vocabulary of a thousand words, and knew the basic tenses and irregular verbs, he and I would try to speak it all the time at home. We could use the flash-card technique to enlarge his vocabulary. That had been very successfully used by Jon when I was learning English. 



Chapter XXX Sandro: The big two days I

Eventually the day of our partnership ceremony arrived. It was a warm and sunny day in early autumn. In accordance with Ovenden family tradition, the Ovendens were all wearing formal morning dress, but my father, (who with Lord Batley was to be the other chief witness), wore a new Giorgio Armani suit with a grey silk tie. As an Ovenden-to-be, I had hired the necessary tailcoat and stripy trousers and top hat. I felt a bit foolish, but Dom told me that I looked splendid, and so did his mother. Dom and I wore pink carnation buttonholes. After the fifteen-minute event (one could scarcely call it a ceremony), and the photo session that followed, the whole party processed on foot from Shedley Register Office along the street to the Crown and Coronet Hotel, where we were welcomed in a private room with glasses of Prosecco. 

The Yorkshire firm of caterers had done us proud, the food and drink were plentiful and excellent, served as a buffet. The newly united couple sat down for twenty minutes to eat, before circulating to greet all our friends. 

We did not need to thank them for their presents. The invitation had asked that in lieu of presents, donations should be made to Saint Boniface's student hardship fund or the Edmund Heptinstall Scholarship Fund. 

The first to greet us were my brother Luca and his partner Tom. Out of deference to the large number of people present, we did not kiss, just embraced briefly. Luke told us that his new productions, Verdi's Falstaff and Boïto's Mefistofele were both doing well and that Pauline van Houtenstok had got herself engaged. Tom told us that his work was going well, and that he was regarded by Sescantanto as sufficiently experienced to make his own grant applications. One application that was in the pipeline would, if successful, involve collaboration with a group in his old department in Camford. 

We moved on then to talk to Cathy, Luke's sister, who said that she had finally got engaged, and introduced us to her new fiancé. He was a banker, without a lot of personality, or at least not sufficiently self-confident to be able to talk easily at what to him might have seemed a bizarre occasion! 

We then met my uncle Jeroen and aunt Liesbet and their two children Andrew and Maria. Andrew was just about to start studying at the Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften in Zürich. 

When we reached my parents, we discarded formality and each kissed both of them before embracing my sister Bianca, who told us that she had succeeded in getting into university in Paris. By now both her French and English were fluent and she spent most of the time deep in conversation with her cousin Maria. 

We then went on to Lord and Lady Batley, with whom we exchanged kisses and handshakes. They asked us about our honeymoon plans, and I told them that we were not going away immediately, but hoped for a week in Madeira early in January. Neither of us had been employed for long enough to qualify for the full holiday entitlement. 

My grandparents were sitting with my great uncle Kees and his wife, both now quite elderly, with whom David had spent many summers in his schooldays. I was introduced to them and they made the usual wry comment about the high incidence of gays among Benedict and Helena's descendants! 

We then went and talked to Philip and Jim. Philip confessed that he had been very apprehensive about attending, but Jim had persuaded him, and he said how relieved he was to see that all the people there were 'normal human beings' as he put it. Jim grinned at us and said that Philip had a lot to learn about being gay. 

Jennifer was there with her boyfriend Charlie, and she kissed us both and wished us the best. 

The day ended with a few speeches, which were repeated the following day, and Dom will tell you about them.

Chapter XXXI Dom: The big two days II 

The following day was quite different. Mrs Harrison and my mother were in their element, and the kitchen at Getheringthwaite Hall was a buzz of activity from early morning. Sandro and I rose and breakfasted about 9 am, and then spent an hour shaving, showering, applying Storing pour Homme and so on, before donning the outfits that we had worn the previous day, except that our grey ties were replaced by pink silk ties presented to us by David and Jon, the same ties they had worn many years before. The congregation were all wearing morning dress and glad rags, with ribbons, medals etc. The Marquess looked particularly distinguished in his outfit of a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, and Robert, immaculately clad as a retired soldier, smiled beside him. My father sported his M.B.E. insignia, Jon his C.B.E. insignia, and my mother wore a beautiful outfit.

We assembled in the chapel at noon, and the Vicar of Getheringthwaite led a procession of Professor Bairstow and the Rev Dr Francis Eglantine, followed closely by myself and Sandro, flanked by Luke and Tom, as best men. We took our seats next to our fathers at the eastern end of the front row of stalls, Massimo and Sandro on the the north side, and my father with me on the south (the stalls were arranged like a college chapel, facing north and south). We used the same form of service that Tom and Luke and Luke's fathers had used, with the same three hymns, accompanied by recorded organ music on a CD. 

We made our vows "for better, for worse..." Then our rings, which we had removed at the beginning of the service, were blessed by Edward Bairstow, and we placed them successively on thumb, second, third and fourth digits of each other's left hands (having previously worn them on our right hands) with no words except an invocation of the Holy Trinity. 

A celebration of the eucharist followed, presided over by Francis Eglantine, with readings by Tom, Luke and the Vicar and a brief address by Edward. All our family and closest friends were present and many of the congregation, men as well as women, were in tears for parts of the service. Most people present received communion. We left the chapel in procession to the sound of Jeremiah Clarke's Trumpet Tune and Air on a CD. The chapel had a perfectly good organ, but no-one in the family could play, and we had no wish for anyone outside the family to be present! Quite a lot of photographs were taken in the chapel and outside afterwards before we all went inside. The formal luncheon that followed was very enjoyable. The combination of Mrs Harrison's cooking and the dishes selected by my mother from the caterers' menu worked splendidly, the Prosecco flowed freely and the meal lingered on for an hour before Sandro and I were called on to make speeches, along with Sandro's brother Luke. 

Luke and Sandro made two speeches each, in English and Italian. Mine was in English alone. Luke began by saying, "My Lords, ladies and gentlemen, I address you in formal terms for two reasons. Firstly, this is my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make such a formal speech and secondly, I know that it will greatly embarrass my new brother and his father! 

"The union that we celebrate today is between a man with an ancestry going back six hundred years and my brother whose paternal birth ancestry, like my own, goes back just one generation! Sandro and I were both blessed with wonderful parents and a very happy upbringing, proving the importance of environment over against heredity. I will not elaborate on the sociological significance of any of this, only say that my own experience of loving a man from an entirely different background has been the most joyful and important feature of my life. If Dom and Sandro have one fifth the happiness of Tom and me, they can look forward to a lifetime of love and contentment. Finally, I am grateful to God for all the loving favour He has shown to all of us. I invite you to drink the health of Alessandro and Dominic!" 

After everyone had drunk the healths of the newly united pair, Sandro was the first to reply. "I have never made any kind of speech before, so I will be short and simple. I want to thank my parents for all the love and help they have given me, especially my father Massimo. Next I want to thank Lord Wakefield for the support and encouragement he has given to Dom and me. Thirdly I want to thank Lord and Lady Batley for giving me their son. They had difficult decisions to make, as what we are celebrating today is a rare if not uniquely historic event. Just as Dom hates to be called 'My Lord', so I am glad that being male has prevented me becoming 'My Lady!' Finally I want to thank both my uncles for the help they gave me to settle in England, and my brother Luca and Tom his partner for their love and support." 

Next it was my turn. I said, "Luke and Alessandro have made most of the acknowledgements that needed to be made. I just want to thank the Mascagnolis for giving me Sandro and my brothers for continuing to love me when I have adopted a new lifestyle. Also I want to thank ALL of you here today for your love, tolerance and support, and for all that you have done for us and been for us. Also I want to thank my new brother Tommy for being such a source of love and joy to all of us." There was a burst of applause after this speech and Tommy, blushing deeply, tried to hide under the table. He looked sweet in his miniature tailcoat. He was now fourteen, and it had taken prolonged efforts by Sandro and myself to get him to wear a morning suit. 

After the meal and the speeches, we all moved to the Portrait Gallery, where coffee and cakes were served and where we were able to talk to family members. Tommy's cousins, Bianca, Andrew and Maria took possession of him and they went off together to explore the house.



Chapter XXXII: Extract from The Times  newspaper of 15 September 20—

Civil Partnerships OVENDEN-MASCAGNOLI. The Civil Partnership register was signed at Shedley Register Office, Shedley, Yorkshire on Saturday September 13, 20— by Dominic Francis, Viscount Overton of Getheringthwaite, M.A., M.CSt., eldest son of the Earl and Countess of Batley and Alessandro Mascagnoli, M.A., Ph.D., son of Massimo and Dorotea Mascagnoli of Verona, Italy. Donations in lieu of presents were in aid of the student hardship fund of Saint Boniface's College, Camford and the Edmund Heptinstall Scholarship Fund.

The appearance of this notice resulted in Lord Batley getting a shoal of telephone calls from reporters, a few of whom turned up without notice at Paradise Lodge, where my mother gave them coffee and a few vague uninformative words to the effect that they were proud of their gay son and had welcomed his partner into the family. A couple of media men got as far as Getheringthwaite Hall, where Lord Wakefield told them that his grandson's union had his full blessing and approval and would they kindly bugger off! Lady Junkelthorpe telephoned Lord Batley to ask him to congratulate Dom and Sandro, mentioning that she had met them at the Lombardy Hotel in London and enquiring after Dom's brothers, especially after she had heard that Michael would inherit the Getheringthwaite estate. 

The Ovendens were not sufficient celebrities for the press to go to the trouble of tracing Dom to Swindon, nor was there any problems with paparazzi. One gossip columnist did publish a paragraph headed 'Wealthy peer's gay grandson in civil partnership' in which it was stated that it was unlikely that Lord Ovenden's union with an Italian railwayman met with the family's full approval. The item was sufficiently vaguely phrased for Dom not to think it worthwhile to write to the newspaper and complain of breach of privacy. Newspapers thrive on publicity. If they are ignored, they soon shut up. However, Jon advised them that if any further such items appeared, Tim Ingledown should be consulted. 




Dom and Sandro Ch. 03



[Chapters 01 and 02 should be read first] 

Dedicated to the memory of Alan Turing and all other gay men who ended their own lives as a result of torment by gossip, prejudice, rejection or repressive legislation. Alan Turing has just received a posthumous Royal pardon. Much good will it do him sixty years after his death.

[Literary Note: Willem Elsschot (1882-1960) was a Flemish poet and novelist. The quotation in Chapter XLIV is from his poem Het Huwelijk (The Marriage)].

Chapter XXXIV Dom: We move house

One night as I was travelling home on the train to Swindon, I started to think about our lives. We delighted in one another's company, and yet we saw so little of one another. Most of the time I worked regular hours, but each day two or more hours on the train, although not wasted, as I could work with my laptop, was time away from my sweetheart. Sandro's hours were sometimes regular, but often he had to work at night and at the weekends. I looked back on the last ten years of my life and thought about it. There had been four blissful years in Camford and many many hours in the company of my darling fag-boy, but the rest of the time had been rather routine work, satisfying without being rewarding. 

In Swindon, we had not made a large circle of friends, because we rarely went out together except to the shops or a pub or restaurant. What we lacked was company. We needed children, and if we were both to continue working, we needed someone to look after them, a nanny, rather than institutional child care. That particular evening, I found myself longing much more strongly than usual, to hold my boy in my arms. I got home about 7 pm, and as soon as I got in at the door, Sandro was waiting with a bottle of White Shield. He poured two glasses and I dragged him off to our bedroom. "I've been wanting you all day!" I said. 

We both took a swig of beer and I pushed him down on the bed and started to undress him. He grinned at me in submission and kissed me on the lips. His lips felt sweet and tender. "And I've been wanting you!" he said. "Ravish me, swive me, fuck the shit out of me! I want you!" He stood up to facilitate the removal of his lower garments, and he began to undress me. Soon, naked, I pushed him back on to the bed and he lay with a pillow behind him as I lubed him up and pulled a rubber onto my cock. However, before penetrating his treasure house, I started to run my lips over his arms, moving thence to his chest and bellybutton, before following his treasure trail down to his pubic bush. The hair on all parts of his sweet body felt soft and silky. I gave the tip of his still softish dick a kiss and then entered him gently. I began to fuck him slowly and he smiled at me in contented delight as my cock hit his prostate. I speeded up as I felt his hands caressing my chest , shoulder and nipples. I pushed my arms behind his shoulders as I drew near to my climax. When it came I shouted his name and pulled him towards me, enfolding him with my arms as my rapidly softening cock slipped out of his hole. We lay on our sides and I smothered him with kisses before whispering, "My darling boy, its time we thought about children. I'm twenty-eight, and you're twenty-six, a good age to think about kids, particularly if we are going to go for adoption. 

"Apparently, even if we find a surrogate mother willing to conceive via A.I.D, we will still have to apply to adopt the child. Then we have to decide which of us is to be the father. I wonder if we could use mixed semen, or if that is just creating unnecessary obscurity. We will also have to decide on a surname for the child. All we can do, I think, is to consult Tim Ingledown as soon as possible. Is he available on Saturdays? We could go next Saturday." 

We spent a lot of time discussing surrogate mothers, and also the problem of finding someone to look after the child when we were at work. Neither of us wanted to become a full-time house-father as Jon had been. We were not far enough advanced in our careers to go down that route. So Tim would have to find a suitable full-time Nanny for us. That might prove difficult, even with money no object. I did wonder if my mother knew anyone suitable.

A phone call or two established that Tim could see us for lunch the following Saturday. We were soon in London, Sandro having travelled free on the train. Tim welcomed us, but what he had to say was disappointing. "If you register to become adoptive parents, your local social services department will ask you a lot of intimate questions about your personal lives, and they will demand details about your finances. They may suggest that you are too young to adopt. You will have to undergo this questioning whatever route you decide to take. 

"As far as surrogacy is concerned, you have to remember that the mother has absolute rights over the baby's future. She can change her mind at any time until the adoption order is finalized, and her decision overrules any contract or agreement previously made and however much has been spent on her expenses. If you decide to let her feed the baby and only adopt after weaning, the chances are even greater that she will decide to keep the child! And as far as child care is concerned, we are not an employment agency. We could go to such an agency on your behalf, but with no guarantee of success. You could of course try looking abroad for a baby, but I do not recommend that route, as there is no way to be sure that a child so obtained could become legally yours. 

"In the matter of child care, there is no substitute for personal recommendation. Maybe your mother could help in that, Dom. It is, I know, a far-fetched suggestion, but the best surrogate would be someone that you know and trust, though that would not in any way guarantee that she would not decide to keep the baby. 

"If you go to Social Services and get put on their adoption list, you might have to wait for years, unless you are prepared to adopt a non-white or handicapped child. And many local authorities are against cross-racial adoption. Another method that might work, but would be difficult in the long term, is the ménage à trois route. You persuade a woman you know to move in as housekeeper, and if the arrangement works, you either fuck her or inseminate her with a syringe, depending on how willing she is to have sexual relations. You would then have built-in child care, but your housekeeper would have to be lesbian for that to work, and then there is the risk that she might run off with a woman and maybe even take your child with her!"

We went home feeling quite depressed at this discouraging meeting. But we did make one important decision. Our cosy rented house in Swindon was too small for a family, especially if we had a resident nanny. With a single bathroom, we had barely managed when my parents were visiting. So we decided to look around for something bigger, with help from family money. The countryside between Swindon and Cheltenham is very beautiful, consisting of sandstone hills called the Cotswolds. It is a highly desirable residential area, and house prices are sky-high. 

Several weekends we drove around looking for a house for sale near a railway station. After weeks of searching, we eventually found what we wanted in the village of Womble. It was a beautiful yellow sandstone house a few hundred yards from the station. It was three metres back from the street, with a minute front garden and a double frontage, with the front door in the middle. It was on three floors and had four bedrooms (one in the attic, where there was also a study), and three bathrooms, and had been recently modernized, with polished hardwood floors. Downstairs were a kitchen, dining room, family room, utility room and a large living room. It was very expensive and we felt that we could not ask David or my family for more than £500K. We would take a mortgage out for the balance. We reckoned that our joint incomes and my trust income would be enough to pay a mortgage, feed and clothe us and pay a nanny and still leave us money for travel. David had become relatively wealthy from his artistic career. He had never had to buy a house: Jon had always done that, and he had reached an age when he had to think about inheritance tax planning. David would have to give a similar amount to his own children when they decided to buy houses. As far as furnishing the new house was concerned, our parents were happy to give us the money that we had refused at the time of our civil partnership ceremony. Also we each had some savings from our early days at work. One of our furnishing priorities was of course silk sheets in our bedroom

Womble was only about 15 minutes by train from Swindon and and 50 minutes from Cheltenham. Sandro of course got free train travel, and my travel costs to Cheltenham would be less than those for the journey from Swindon. As the house needed relatively little doing to it, we were able to move in by the summer of that year. We loved it. It was not as handy for shops and amenities, and indeed several kilometres from the nearest swimming pool, but it was warm, comfortable and spacious. There was off-street parking for both our cars and a patio and small garden at the back, as well as the pocket-handkerchief garden at the front. 

Chapter XXXV Luke: Life in Trabizona 

My life seemed a bit flat after we got back from Dom and Sandro's partnership celebrations. Tom had progressed as a pianist so far that he occasionally was called to accompany singers rehearsing at the opera house when Pauline needed an extra pair of hands in the evening or at weekend rehearsals. His application for a European Collaborative Grant with a group from the Camford Chemical Laboratory was successful, which meant that he would be making short but frequent visits back to his old lab. Arturo told him that he would support him when there was a vacancy for a permanent academic job in Trabizona, as his list of publications was now impressively long, but that Ben was next in line. While not giving lectures regularly, Tom was popular with the students as a demonstrator in the lab. He managed to combine his first trip to Camford with a short visit to Newcastle, where he served as godfather at the baptism of his new niece, Anne Elizabeth Satterthwaite. 

We found ourselves relying more and more on Costanza's cooking for our evening meal, as Tom's commitments got bigger and bigger. He had recently been appointed churchwarden at the English church in Bologna. When he had been approached by the Chaplain, he had refused. He said that the church council would never appoint an openly gay man to a position of authority, as it would set a bad example. He was a man who according to many, he said, indulged in the practice condemned by Saint Paul, men with men working that which is unseemly (Romans 1:27 KJV). Moreover, he lived in Trabizona, which was a long way from Bologna. However, the Chaplain insisted on putting his name forward to the council, and they agreed unanimously to invite him to take on the job. The other churchwarden could deal with business that needed to be dealt with in person in Bologna, and Tom was always contactable by phone. The council said that Tom was a man of prayer and a faithful and humble believer, devoted to his partner, and what they did together was no concern of the church.

Cornelio and Pauline asked me whether I would like to try my hand at directing a new production of Weber's Oberon. After a lot of hesitation I agreed, but because it has an absurd and chaotic plot, much spoken dialogue and an English libretto, it would not be exactly prime box office material in Italy! Only after I had consulted Signora Bruschetti, on whose wise advice both Tom and I were coming to depend, did I agree. With hindsight, I was really putting my career to the test. If we could make a success before a provincial audience of such a difficult work, my career was assured. But if it turned out to be a flop, our financial future at the Teatro Musicale was very shaky and my future in the business very problematic! It was the Anna Veronica scenario all over again. But Cornelio was a great believer in taking risks, and he was convinced that I could make a success of it. "If you can make a success out of a new opera, you should be able, with a bit of imagination and careful casting, to succeed with an old opera, particularly one as important in operatic history as Oberon," he said. He also said that it would open up a whole new door to job opportunities world-wide. Dad refused to offer advice, because he said he was open to blame if Oberon was a flop. However, he did advise us to get a good English tenor for the title role. However, Maestro Lindorini, our resident conductor said he was too old to take such risks, and that we should find a guest conductor, preferably a Weber expert.

Finally however, in the hope of increasing its attractiveness, we opted for an Italian translation of the libretto. Unlike Anna Veronica, this production was to be directed by me. The absurd nature of the plot meant that shifting the time frame and using modern dress would not work: it would have to be presented as a fantasy without any regard to period authenticity. But that meant a huge expenditure on costumes, which could not be reused for any other production. However, I did secure a grant of €200K from the International Carl Maria von Weber Trust, which we thought might cover scenery and costumes. Pauline knew a scenery designer who would do the scenery and costumes for us for a modest sum. Like me he was still trying to make his career. I got a promising young English tenor, who like David had won the Llandewi Mawr Singing Competition, and a German soprano, both of whom were prepared to stick their necks out and learn what were nearly certain to be one-off roles, never to be repeated. I also found a German conductor, who had conducted a good deal of Weber's works who was enthusiastic at beng invited to be guest conductor. The production was scheduled for two years time, and in the meantime, I plodded along with revamped revivals of the standard operatic works that the public of Trabizona knew and loved, and which Lindorini and the orchestra could perform almost with their eyes shut. It struck me that both Tom and I were rapidly becoming professional seekers of grant money. Both scientific research and opera production were so dependent on what the Dutch call geldschieters  that we both spent huge amounts of time writing proposals to enable us to raise funding, instead of getting on and actually doing what we were good at.

One night we invited Ben and Leonora round for a meal. Costanza had done the cooking. It was some time since we had seen Leonora, and even though we were men with no experience of such matters, the large bump in her profile made it immediately apparent that she was pregnant! "Ben, why didn't you tell me?" said Tom. 

"Because so many things can go wrong, and it would be terrible to go round telling everyone if things did go wrong. So we decided not to tell anyone at the lab! Please, Tom and Luke, don't say anything to anyone." 

"Of course not!" we both promised. "But we must celebrate, though I think that we shouldn't be offering Leonora Prosecco, though I guess we can still drink it ourselves! You are lucky, Ben, to be going to become a father. We both want that for ourselves, but if we wanted to adopt, we would have leave Italy, as gay couples here are not allowed to adopt."

"Leonora," said Tom, "we are so happy for you. I hope that you do not have any problems during pregnancy or labour. If there is anything that either of us can do to help at any stage, please ring us at once. We will pray for you." With that he put his arm round Leonora and kissed her. I felt my usual pang of totally stupid jealousy. I often wondered how Ben felt when Tom kissed his wife, or when she kissed Tom, I just hoped that he was not so prone as I was to stupid and irrational feelings.

Chapter XXXVI Sandro: The Getheringthwaite twins

Later that year, we went to Getheringthwaite for a week. Dom's grandfather and Robert his chauffeur and lover always ate with Mrs Harrison, their housekeeper. The Marquess was not class conscious. He preferred to spend his time with the only two people who were close to him. One evening when Robert had done the cooking, and Mrs Harrison was eating with us, she mentioned a friend of hers in the village who was permanently tied up looking after her twin great nieces, aged three, so that her niece could go out to work. The children had no father: their mother refused to reveal his identity, so there was no income from the Child Support Agency. She was obsessively keen on her job, and regarded her children as an obstacle to her career. 

The children's great aunt loved the two girls, but they were always short of money and she found it difficult to make ends meet. Both Dom and I immediately reacted. Dom said, "What would your friend think of moving to the south with the two girls? If she liked the idea, all three of them could come and live with us. We want to adopt children, and would love to be fathers to two little girls. They could come for a few months with no commitment, and if they all liked it in Gloucestershire, and we liked them and the mother gave her consent, we could make arrangements to adopt them, with your friend as their house mother." 

The idea seemed too good to be realistic. We had not met the children or the mother and great aunt, so we did not know what they were like. We did not know whether the girls would settle in the south, nor whether the mother would let them go. But the idea seemed worth pursuing, and the next morning we went with Mrs Harrison to meet Mrs Hambleton and her two little great nieces. The two girls were absolutely sweet. They could walk and talk reasonably well, and were just at the sort of age when they needed close family love and support. We found Mrs Hambleton also to be sweet. She was not at all shocked or hostile at the idea of two gay men wanting to give a home to her and her great nieces, nor did she dislike the idea of moving to the south. "I will be glad to get away from my niece!" she said. 

We said to her, "If you and the twins come to live with us, there are one or two things that we need your reassurance about. We need to know that you will not feel uncomfortable or unhappy about us men showing certain signs of affection with one another within our own home, things like kissing or holding hands. There are things that we will try to avoid doing, like letting off wind in front of you and the girls, but we must feel able to kiss and cuddle and hold hands! Some people, especially men, find things like that very offensive. If this upsets you, tell us now, and we will call the whole thing off. In return, we both promise that we will never touch you or give you any signs of intimacy, unless you want for example to kiss us or be kissed by us. Even though we will be paying you a salary, we will not regard our relationship with you as employment, but as partners in bringing up the twins in a happy and secure home. Are you able to give us assurance about this?" 

"Yes, of course I am!" she said. "I understand how much you love one another, and I know that you will be good fathers to Jane and Anne. As far as kissing me is concerned, I have no strong feelings one way or the other. Let's just wait and see how things work out." Both Dom and I breathed sighs of relief.

However, we knew that we had to get to know the little girls before we could consider taking them away from Getheringthwaite. So every weekend for several months we drove to Getheringthwaite. Lord Wakefield and Robert must have got fed up of our frequent visits, but they both understood what fatherhood meant to us. Jane and Anne were non-identical twins. Jane had dark hair, whereas Anne was a redhead. We used to take them out for walks and feed the ducks on the lake in Getheringthwaite park. They had been toilet-trained, and Mrs Hambleton had taught them good table manners. They were delightful company, and the more we saw of them, the sweeter they became to us.




Dom and Sandro Ch. 03



We also met the girls' mother. That was a difficult meeting, but she seemed to relish the unique opportunity to get rid of her children to a good home, almost like disposing of a brood of unwanted kittens. A good salary was agreed with Mrs Hambleton, and so in the summer of that year, Mrs Hambleton, several large suitcases of her possessions, several small suitcases with the twins' possessions and the two girls themselves were loaded into the 4x4 that we had bought when we moved to Womble, and driven by us back home. The girls were very excited to be moving to a new house, but fortunately slept for most of the seven-hour journey. 

We had planned our change in lifestyle carefully. Mrs Hambleton was to be introduced in the village as our our new housekeeper, and the twins as her great nieces. No mention was to be made of her being a nanny or of any adoption ideas. Once we had got settled, and that involved reordering the house, so that Mrs Hambleton had her own bathroom, the twins would use the general bathroom, and we moved the guest room to the attic bedroom, where a bit of building work was necessary to install an additional bathroom adjacent to it, by taking in part of the unused roof space. 

After a few months, the girls seemed to be settling. Mrs Hambleton gave them their high tea before we got home and the first thing that happened when one of us arrived was that he would help Mrs Hambleton get Anne and Jane bathed and ready for bed and then read them stories for half an hour before their light was put out. The girls would come running to greet us when we got in, and insisted on being kissed goodnight. After they were in bed, we three adults then had dinner together. Mrs Hambleton was an excellent cook and on her generous housekeeping allowance (paid to her separately from her salary) produced superb meals.

At the weekends, the pattern was different. We took all our meals together as a family. The girls went out for walks with us or to the shops, and they seemed to be growing to love us. As for Mrs Hambleton, she was very happy. We paid her a good salary, paid pension contributions for her and she got free accommodation. She soon became a familiar figure to all in the village, and she told us that she did not miss Getheringthwaite or her niece! Most Fridays, Dom would work at home in the study. The twins soon learned that they were not to go to the top floor of the house unless we invited them, so Dom could work undisturbed. But he had lunch with them, and finished work about 4 pm, leaving time to play with them before their tea. 

Chapter XXXVII Dom: Will we become fathers?

Every weekday evening when I came home on the train, i found as time went by that not only was I longing to kiss my sweetheart Sandro, but also to kiss our pair of sweet girls. Most men's ideas about the opposite sex are coloured, or influenced, or determined, by their experiences with their sisters. I was unfortunate, I had been brought up in a family consisting solely of boys. I knew little about the female sex, and after I met Sandro, I no longer was curious about women. So baby girls were a totally new experience for me. Sandro had been luckier than me. His sister Bianca was sufficiently younger than he was not to have competed with him in his parents' affections, so he never experienced sibling jealousy and was extremely fond of his younger sister, now at university in Paris. 

The nature of our work at YTS meant that the employees were not overly communicative. Most of us were of the introvert type that did not spend much, if any, time socializing. Also in my case, I only attended the weekly after-work pub visits once a month: the rest of the time I was anxious to get home to my family. My colleagues knew that I was gay, but it did not occasion much comment. Everyone in the computer world knows about the gay genius Alan Turing and his sad fate. So while I did not broadcast it over the office, I did mention once or twice that I and my partner had adopted two children. 

Both Sandro and I found ourselves getting more and more loving towards these two little girls. Mrs Hambleton had made an excellent job of their upbringing so far. They were toilet-trained, had good manners, did what they were told and had well-developed vocabularies for their age. A year after they had come to Womble, it would be time for them to go to a part-time pre-school nursery. We realized that the time had come to make our relationship to the to girls official, so we contacted Tim Ingledown, and this time he was much more helpful. 

He said that first we must get ourselves and Mrs Hambleton officially recognized as carers for the twins, by registering with Gloucestershire social services department. Only then could we set the machinery leading to adoption in motion. Tim's firm's family and children's specialist was then called in. Gloucestershire social services had to liaise with their South Yorkshire counterparts and secure the mother's consent to the twins' adoption. The whole business dragged on for months, with several visits from Gloucestershire social services to assess us and to see the house. The girls' mother vacillated for several weeks before agreeing: weeks filled for us by tension, apprehension and fear that she would change her mind, but in the end she agreed, the adoption order was made, and we became the fathers of Jane and Anne Overton-Mascagnoli. Yes, we decided that the children should bear my surname, not Dom's. By adopting girls, we were ruling out any claims that a son might try to make to the title later in life. 

There was no question of taking Mrs Hambleton out for a celebratory meal, we knew no-one well enough in the village to baby-sit, so we had a specialist celebratory dinner sent in from a firm of caterers. I was in charge of this. We began with a seafood cocktail, followed by cold roast turkey and salad followed by sticky toffee pudding. All the meal needed was a microwave oven to heat the pudding. We had a delicious bottle of Alsatian gewürztraminer with the meal. It was a Friday night, we did not need to go to work the next day, and we men went to bed early. 

It was obvious, and had been to me throughout our meal, that Sandro wanted me. I hoped that Mrs Hambleton, a widow, had not been too put off her food by Sandro's signs of lust! But she was very good-hearted and by now was getting used to our fairly obvious indications of wanting to fuck. We usually locked our bedroom door at night, just in case one of the girls could not sleep and got out of bed. We trained the twins to go to Mrs Hambleton rather than us. Fortunately the girls slept soundly most nights. 

We tore off our clothes and leapt into bed. I lay on my back and spread my legs and waited for my darling boy to enter me. He liberally anointed my hole with lube and stretched it a little with his fingers before gently pushing his rubber-coated meat into it. He lifted my legs on to his shoulders and before starting to fuck, he bent forward and began to kiss my face and chest. "Fuck me!" I whispered, "Squirt your man-juice into my gut. Have your foul and unnatural way with me. I'm yours, all yours! You can suck my dick, kiss my balls, fondle my cock, tickle my nipples, stroke and kiss my arse, do whatever you fancy to your willing victim! I love you, fag-boy!" I reached up, pulled him down on top of me and began to caress his arse. He started to fuck me and the movements of his cock got faster and faster and his sweat began to drip on me from his armpits. It smelt delicious, mixed with the scent of Storing pour Homme. I lay back and let him have his way with me. How lucky I was, I felt, to be loved by this hot sexy Italian. I counted myself fortunate to be gay. Straight men never know that wonderful experience of total surrender, of giving your body up to your lover and not needing to take any initiative. Eventually Sandro shot his load inside me and lay still, tired from his exertion. I stroked his sweet black hair, pulled him down on top of me and buried my face in his hair as he disengaged his dick from my back passage. I did not wish to be wanked off, we just lay side by side and fell asleep, content with each other's warm presence beside us.

The next evening we had a discussion with Mrs Hambleton. I said, "We are now officially the twins' parents. You have looked after them continuously since they were a few weeks old, and they are always going to regard you as their mother. We hope that Sandro and I will soon be regarded by Anne and Jane as the only fathers that they have ever had. So I think that the time has come to drop formalities. Please call us Dom and Sandro, and may we call you Elizabeth?"

Mrs Hambleton smiled. "Of course," she said. "Although you pay me a salary, and I'm twenty-five years older than you, like you I regard the three of us as joint parents of the twins. I'm not just a nanny, or a cook/housekeeper." 

"We must decide what the girls should call us," I said. "Sandro's brother calls his two fathers Dad and Pop. I think that's a good idea, don't you? I will be Dad and Sandro will be not Pop, but Italian Pappa. Sandro wants to try teaching the girls Italian. Would that worry you? At the same time, I hope to spend some time in the evenings having Italian lessons, if we can find a tutor who will come to the house."

"That would be OK. They are both bright girls and picked up English very quickly."

"What about the furniture and other chattels that you have back at Getheringthorpe? We need to make arrangements to get them here or sent to an auction room. What do you want to do?" 

"There are a few odds and ends that I would really like to have here. It could all be loaded into the 4x4. The rest can be sent for auction and the key to my house returned to the Getheringthwaite Estate Office." 

We did this the following weekend and then settled down into a comfortable routine. Sandro would read to the girls in Italian from a simple Italian picture book. I would read to them from a similar English picture book. After a few weeks, they could talk about the pictures they were seeing in either English or Italian. After a few months, their Italian vocabulary was as big as their English one. I benefitted somewhat from this, as at the weekend I sat in on Sandro's lessons. By now the twins were going to nursery pre-school on two mornings per week, and they still had two hours sleep each weekday afternoon. This left Elizabeth free to get on with household tasks, or even to go into Swindon for a couple of hours in the morning. 

To find an Italian tutor for me proved difficult. Eventually with help from Tim Ingledown, we traced a man in Swindon, who was prepared for the cost of his travel on top of his fee to come out and give me 90 minutes tuition every week. Unlike the girls, I was soon learning irregular verbs and the conjugation of Italian verbs. Before long, I could easily read the books Sandro was using with the girls, but I still found conversation difficult. In the end, we decided that when Elizabeth was not present, we would try to talk in Italian all the time. Soon it became apparent that the girls were listening to what we said and sometimes joined in the conversation. This meant that we had to be careful in not using the dirty Italian words that Sandro had taught me in bed!

Chapter XXXVIII Two E-mails

(1) From a.ovenden-mascagnoli@yyyyy.camf.org.uk to dorotea.mascagnoli@zzzzz.serviziointernetto.it 

Carissima Madre mia e caro Padre mio

Dom e io siamo padri! (Dom and I are fathers) Yes, the adoption order has now been finalized and you are now the grandparents of the Honourable Anne and the Honourable Jane Ovenden-Mascagnoli. We are anxious for you to meet them as soon as possible, but we are limited in the time that we can get off work. We have both elected to take our two weeks paternity leave in small instalments over some months. Could we come to you for five days over Christmas and San Stefano? I have to be back here to work over the New Year with a track renewal project that can only be done over a public holiday. 

We would need to bring Elizabeth Hambleton with us, as she is the girls' de facto mother. If you don't have enough room for all of us, Elizabeth can have our room and Dom and I will stay in the hotel. If Tom and Luca are coming, they will need to join us at the hotel. It shouldn't be a problem for them as neither is short of a bob or two as they say in Yorkshire. We might even have an Italian boys' night out as a foursome! We don't want to overburden you! Please let me know as soon as possible, as we need to apply for passports for the girls, and possibly for Elizabeth as well. They are absolutely sweet children. Elizabeth has done a fantastic job in bringing them up so far and we hope that with two fathers, the twins will grow up to be even more delightful. As far as they are concerned, the adoption order has made no difference, but neither Dom nor I wanted to show them off to our families until they were really ours. I have started to teach them Italian. The sooner we do it, the more likely it is that they will grow up bilingual. In particular, we want to get them talking, however ungrammatically, in Italian before they start school. You see, Pappa, that I have not become totally anglicized! 

Vi amo, a riverderci, 

Sandro XXXXX

(2). From d.f.ovenden@xxxxx.camf.org.uk to e.r.batley@qqqqq.hcu-swanbridge.ac.uk

Dear Mum and Dad 

You are now grandparents! Yes, the adoption order has been finalized and Sandro and I are now fathers. We both have managed to get a few days days off as paternity leave, and we wondered if we could come with Elizabeth and the twins for a long weekend at Paradise Place at the end of next week, so that you can meet our wonderful little daughters. We would come in the 4x4 on Thursday morning and leave on Sunday night. Richard will be able to meet his two nieces as well! Sandro has started to teach the twins Italian, and I am learning too. 

I know that having five of us as guests is a bit demanding, but I'm sure that you are dying to meet the latest members of the Ovenden family. The girls are really sweet and extremely well behaved and are looking forward to meeting Granny and Grandad. Please ring my cellphone to let me know if this is OK. 

Your loving 

Dom XXX

Chapter XXXIX Dom: A visit to Paradise Place 

Very early on a Thursday morning, two sleepy four-year-olds were loaded into baby seats in the car. Elizabeth climbed in beside them, having first supervised the loading of the baggage. I climbed into the driver's seat, Sandro took the front passenger seat, and after several hours on the M4 and M25 we arrived at Paradise Place in time for lunch. My parents came out of the house to welcome us, and I kissed my mother before helping the twins out of the car. I took the hand of both of them and led them to her. I said to the girls "This is your new Granny!" To my mother I said, "This is Anne with the red hair, and this is Jane with the dark hair." My mother put her arms round both of them and kissed them one at a time. Then I took them to my father and said to them, "This is my father. His name is Lord Batley, but you should call him Grandad!" He kissed the girls in turn and they both smiled shyly. 

"Dad," said Anne to me, "when can we go in the pool?" 

At exactly the same moment, Jane said to Sandro "Pappa, quando andiamo nella piscina?"

"Non fino a dopo pranzo," Lord Batley told them. (Not till after lunch). 

The girls were surprised to find that my father could speak Italian. "Why can't Dad speak Italian when his father can?" asked Jane. 

"Because nobody taught me when I was your age!" I replied. 

Lunch was a great success. The twins behaved well, even though they were very talkative. After the meal, Elizabeth insisted that they should lie down for an hour before going into the pool. During their rest, my parents said how sweet and well behaved the twins were. 

We had brought the twins' arm-band floats and their swimming cozzies. Similarly, Sandro and I had brought our own swimwear. He still wore the skimpy yellow briefs that he had been wearing the first time that we swam together in our first term at Boni's. One glance at his slim body and mouthwatering arse were enough to give me a stiffie, which I hoped desperately that no-one would notice if they looked closely at my crotch. The twins had been to our local public pool in Cirencester, but had never been in a private pool. They loved it, and were even jumping in at the shallow end. After an hour or so, we all got out and Lady Batley brought tea for Sandro and me, and milk for the girls. 

On the Friday evening, my brother Richard arrived back from school for the weekend. He was introduced to the girls and they made a great fuss of him and eventually in response to their entreaties, he went into the pool with them. It was the first time that Sandro had seen him stripped, and I noticed that he was ogling him. My brother does look good. He is tall, slim, flat-bellied and fit, due to his sporting activities at school. He was in the sixth form and would be doing A levels the next year.

The next day, at Lady Batley's suggestion, we took the twins to church. They needed to be entertained with books, but they were quiet and well behaved. After the service, my mother asked Elizabeth if the twins had been baptized. She replied that they had not, that when she mentioned it to her niece, the girl had shrugged off the suggestion. Both Sandro and I were shocked by this. We had just assumed that the girls had been made Christians as babies. We decided that we would arrange for them to be baptized in the chapel at Getheringthwaite next time that we were there. In the meantime, we would have to find four women to act as godmothers, women who were not too old. There would be no problems in finding two godfathers, but we did not know a lot of women.

Before we left Paradise Place, my father summoned Sandro and me to talk to him. "I appreciate, and entirely support you lads' determination to work for your living and to bring up your daughters independently, but I would remind you that you live in an expensive area, and as the girls grow up, they will be quite costly to feed, clothe and educate. But there is no need to deny your children the advantages of a good education and the need to pay for for extras like swimming and music lessons. This is where we can help you. The advantage of making use of unearned family wealth is that you can both work in jobs that you enjoy but are not well paid, without your children losing out on educational benefits at the age when they can most profit from them. So I am going to ask Tim Ingledown to invest about £500K on the girls' behalf, to pay for private education for them when they get to the age of ten. Moreover I am going to give you an extra allowance of £15K per year to pay for things like swimming and music lessons, and for any extra clothes that they may need, and moreover to pay annual increments to Elizabeth's salary to at least keep up with inflation. That will enable you to bring up Anne and Jane in the manner suited to an Earl's granddaughter. I respect your desire to be self-supporting, but life in the Cotswolds is expensive, and you will never get the chance to live at Getheringthwaite, where goods and services are a lot cheaper." 

We were both bowled over by this offer, and before I had chance to open my mouth, Sandro, to my father's extreme embarrassment, had thrown his arms round him and kissed him. "Thank you, sir!" he said. "I promise that we will not spoil the twins by using the money for presents or non-essentials." 

"No, you won't!" said my Dad. "I'm going to ask Elizabeth to make absolutely sure that you don't!" I joined Sandro in thanking him. 

Chapter XL Jon: Tommy's adolescence




Dom and Sandro Ch. 03



I missed Sandro and Dom when they left Camford, but it did mean that for the first time for years, we only had young Tommy in the house. The three of us spent every weekend out of term at Rockwell's Barn, with an hour in the pool each day. One day I would cook, the other day we would eat at the Jellycotes Arms. We walked a lot, swam a lot and after Tommy had gone to bed or before he woke up in a morning, David and I fucked a lot. We still wanted one another as much as we had done thirty years before. Tommy knew not to disturb us when our bedroom door was shut! We told him to ring on his cellphone if he needed us. 

He still found having gay parents a bit embarrassing, but he participated in all sorts of after-school activities and we supported him by attending school music events and cheering his school teams from the touchline, much as we hated football. David had become artistic adviser to the Royal Bristol Opera, and was in Bristol about once a month. While there, he used to stay with Dom and Sandro at Womble for a couple of nights and got to know his great nieces very well. They showed signs of being musical. 

Tommy was now nearly sixteen and approaching his GCSE exams. He had gone out with a few girls, and did not show any signs of being gay. He was also quite musical, and had reached grade 7 in his piano exams. 

Chapter XLI Tommy: Tommy's holidays in Womble

Three times a year, every school holiday, I would spend at least a week with Dom and Sandro in Womble. It was a big break from school. While I enjoyed school and had started to study mathematics, classics and Italian for A Level, the two latter being specialities of Winton College School, I had always had a deep affection for the two men who had rescued me when I had run away from the sadistic creeps who were my birth parents. However, in no way was I like the boys in Womble. They were not only gay, they had both specialized at University in disciplines that were rich in jobs. I had chosen to study subjects that had little relevance to everyday life. 

I got to love the Cotswold countryside almost as much as that of Ixfordshire. My cousins would be out most of the day, and after my two little cousins-once-removed had started school, I was left alone with them and Mrs Hambleton. In order to let her get on with household jobs, I used to go off on my own for most of the day. She would give me a picnic pack and a bottle of water, and off I would go to explore the Cotswold countryside, either on foot or on a bike. I visited Fairford, and gazed at the amazing medieval stained glass in the church, I visited Bourton-on-the-Water, with its model village, I explored Tetbury and Cirencester, and once or twice went into Swindon on the train. 

I was that very unusual person, a teenage believer. My parents had brought me up to acknowledge the rule of God in our lives and taught me that the credit for my rescue from parental abuse was due to Him, not to them or Dom and Sandro. I was conditionally baptized and confirmed at the age of twelve and went to church with them every Sunday when we were in Camford (sometimes to Saint Boniface's college chapel), and I always went to Womble parish church on my own when I was staying with Dom and Sandro. I had always been a solitary boy, with a lot of acquaintances, but few friends. At the weekends, when Sandro and Dom were at home, we would either go out with the girls as a group, or one of my cousins would take me off by myself to see or do something interesting. 

As the girls got older, I was allowed to take them for walks, and this was much more fun than going out alone. I even used to take them to church, where they were as quiet as mice. It was a big break from the all-male atmosphere of Camford. I enjoyed the company of the girls and Mrs Hambleton so much that it soon became clear to me that no way could I be gay. At sixteen, I told my fathers this, and they encouraged me to spend as much time as possible in Womble, and even paid my cousins an allowance to keep me when I was living there. The guest bedroom in the attic became mine except when other guests were visiting, when I slept on a sofa-bed in the family room. I loved the little room under the eves. It was especially cosy when it was raining and I could here the rain beating on the roof.

Every day in Camford when I got home from school, I would pop round to Auntie Caterina's, and talk to her as she was preparing dinner. One day, she told me that one of her Italian granddaughters was coming to study in Camford, and outside term would be staying with her. The girl, whose name was Beatrice Semperamini was nearly nineteen, and, like my cousin Sandro, had managed to get a place in the University, at Islip College. She was to read European History. It would not always be practicable for her to go back to Italy for the short vacations, and she would be staying with Caterina. Beatrice would arrive in July to polish up her English before the Martinmas term, and Caterina hoped that both I and my fathers would show her all that she needed to know about Camford before term began. She said to me, "I hope you will continue to call in each day when Beatrice is here. When my own daughters were teenagers, they were a real headache! If Beatrice proves as difficult as her mother was at that age, I will welcome your quiet and hassle-free conversation!" 

I tried to keep an open mind about this change in our lives in Octavia Avenue, but hoped that the Italian girl would be nice, and not fat and ugly. To my relief, when Beatrice arrived, she was very attractive, slim and dark-haired. Her English was extremely good, which was just as well, as my schoolboy Italian was rather halting and not very grammatical. In fact it would need to improve a lot if I was to make a success of university-level study. Beatrice seemed very sophisticated to me, who did not know a lot about women. I hoped that she would not treat me as a child, indeed, I very much wanted her to like me. I did not exactly fall in love with her at first sight, but I certainly fancied her!

Chapter XLII Dom: Christmas in Italy 

In November we took the twins and Elizabeth into Swindon one Saturday to have passport photographs taken, and in December the five of us flew from Bristol to Valerio-Catullo-Villafranca airport, where both my parents were waiting with two cars to take us all home. Bianca was already there and had come with them to meet us. It was well over a year since we had last seen them all, and it must have been a bit of an ordeal for Elizabeth to meet the children's second set of grandparents for the first time. The girls, however had no reservations, and were soon chattering away in a mixture of Italian and English to Nonno and Nonna. Bianca listened in fascination. The girls were on the brink of being bilingual. 

Massimo could scarcely believe his ears. He had been brought up to think of the English as unmusical, cold and passionless as well as bad at languages. Not even the evidence of his own wife, who had none of those qualities, could dissipate that illusion, nor could Tom, with his excellent Italian and his quiet but passionate nature. But when he saw these two sweet and loving little girls chattering away in their broken Italian, he finally began to realize how wrong national stereotypes are. We had explained to the girls that Christmas is rather low-key in Italy, and there would be less tinsel and carols. However, there would be presents and a Christmas dinner with a Christmas pudding specially made by my mother. One night, after the girls had gone to bed, my parents told me how thrilled and happy they were with their two new granddaughters. "It's wonderful that you are teaching them Italian!" they both said.

We told the girls that their uncles Luca and Tom would be there, and would be bringing presents for them. The two boys arrived on Christmas Eve and immediately fell in love with our sweet daughters. They joined us in the hotel, leaving Elizabeth and the twins in the charge of my parents. Christmas Day was very enjoyable and the girls went to bed exhausted, as they had not had their afternoon sleep. On San Stefano, we all went for a walk and the girls got their first real glimpse of Italy. 

This year, Luca had managed to get three days off work, so on the day before they left, we four men managed to get an evening together. Tom and Luke could talk about nothing else but Jane and Anne, and how they envied us. They told us that they could not adopt in Italy, and would have to come home if they wanted to adopt a child. They also said that they could not leave Italy for at least another two years. Sandro kissed them and said that when the girls were a bit older, we would try and organize a visit with them to Trabizona, or perhaps better, rent a villa for the seven of us. When they had gone, we had just one further day before we had to fly back to England. 

The day after we landed, Sandro was back at work. There had been a very long length of track renewal on the outskirts of London. It had been necessary to close several kilometres of track to train services for a whole week over the holiday period, to many loud complaints from the travelling public. The work was nearly complete, but before the line could be reopened, the whole length needed to be checked by Sandro's special track-checking train. One set of new points at a key junction proved to be faulty and it was an all-night job to replace and check the work. Sandro said to me, "I like my work, but I wish that I could see more of the kids." This of course is a complaint of many fathers. We were just glad that we had Elizabeth to play the role of a loving mother. 

Chapter XLIII Sandro: Anne's and Jane's schooldays

Soon after Christmas, it was time for the girls to start school. We renewed our efforts in their spare time to keep up their Italian. Every Friday afternoon, Dom would leave Elizabeth at home and walk to school to meet the girls, who would walk home with him, each holding his hand. On these occasions, fragmentary Italian would be spoken. We now tried never to use English when we spoke to them, even though they often replied in English. We had come back from Italy loaded with simple books and lots of other Italian educational material. At the same time, Dom was far enough advanced with Italian to sit one of the lower level Chartered Institute of Linguists exams, which he passed with distinction. He said that it was a welcome distraction from code-writing and checking. Even so, there were times when one or other of the twins would gleefully correct his Italian! 

We spent our Easter holidays at Loxton with my grandparents. They were delighted to entertain the five us, it made the house the hive of people that it had been when David's and Jeroen's children were younger. It gave the girls a few days to speak just English. We decided not to take the twins to Getheringthwaite until the summer.

The girls' primary school was very caring as well as effective at teaching, and they soon began to learn to read. We tried to find out how the school taught reading, because we wanted to apply the same techniques in teaching them to read Italian. This was of course rather a problem as the pronunciation rules are quite different. However, the girls were rather bright, and once they learnt the spelling rules, they made rapid progress in reading simple Italian books. Through the school, we got to know a lot more of the younger villagers with children of the same age as Anne and Jane, and began to play more of a role in local life. It was an educational experience for most of the villagers to meet a gay couple with children, and as usual the children broke down a lot of the reserve and suspicion that had greeted us when we first moved into Womble. 

It was clear to us that if we were to keep up the girls' progress with Italian, they would have to spend some time in Italy every year. I was sure that my parents would be happy to have them, if we could find someone to go with them on the journey.

In August, we took the girls to Getheringthwaite to meet their great grandfather. We had waited until they were at school before going, because their mother was still living in the village, but we reckoned that by now they would probably have forgotten her. The Marquess was beginning to show his age. He only played golf once a week now, and although he swam in the pool most days, Robert had to help him into and out of the water. But he was delighted to meet the two little girls, and like everyone who met them, fell at once under their spell. We took them for walks in the Park, they spent an hour daily in the pool, and they enjoyed themselves thoroughly. By now they could talk well in both English and Italian, and read elementary English and Italian words. Elizabeth always dressed them nicely, without being extravagant. 

We had contacted the Vicar of Getheringthwaite before our visit and arranged for the twins to be baptized. The chapel had its own tiny seventeenth-century font in which most of the Overton children had been baptized ever since the days of the third Marquess. Indeed Dom himself had been baptized in it. "I bet you were a very sweet baby and didn't pee in your napkin during the service!" I said to him.The girls were much too big to be dipped into the water, so the water was poured over them. We had fitted them with little plastic capes to keep their clothes dry and Elizabeth was at hand with a towel to prevent their wet hair from dripping. The girls were as good as gold during the ceremony, and afterwards they were thrilled to have tea with iced buns and mince pies. They had helped Mrs Harrison to bake the buns and ice them. The godparents were Michael, Liz and Cathy for Anne and Luke, Maria and Bianca for Jane. We had decided not to go outside our families for godparents, mainly because most of the women we knew were too old. Of the godparents, only Cathy, Bianca and Michael were present, and Elizabeth and Mrs Harrison stood proxy for the other godmothers and Robert for Luke. Bianca had come over from Paris specially for the occasion and it was good to see her. She came back to Womble with the five of us and stayed for a week in our new house. The girls were still on holiday from school and Bianca took them out for a walk each day. At the weekend before she went back to Italy, we took her on several walks in the beautiful Cotswold countryside.

Chapter XLIV Tom: Routine work and aspirations

Time went by. Arturo invited me to give a short lecture course to undergraduates, which seemed to be quite well received. In spite of my (to them) strange accent, the feedback was quite favourable. I also had to do two weeks additional demonstrating work in the teaching lab, because Ben had two weeks on paternity leave. Leonora had given birth to a large, healthy baby boy, whom they decided to call Francesco. In spite of not being a Roman catholic, I was honoured to be invited to be godfather to the baby, and at his baptism in the village where Leonora had grown up, there was a big party to celebrate the new arrival. My darling Luke was directing revival productions at the Teatro Musicale, but at least with new principals, he could at no great expense make the productions have a new slant and emphasis. Even the very conservative conductor Maestro Lindorini could be persuaded to try new ways of presentation if one worked hard on him. I've not mentioned it before, but of course I attended every one of the productions at the Teatro Musicale, even though it meant sitting on my own. When young Francesco was nearly a year old, I used to babysit for Ben and Leonora. The boy was very good. He very rarely woke up, and when he did, I was easily able to see to his needs. That enabled Leonora to resume her opera-going. 

Babysitting strengthened my desire for children. But we had the major problem that neither of us, even given a baby, was in a position to give up our job to care for it. Costanza, who had become very fond of us, was too old for the responsibility of caring for a child full-time. She would make an excellent babysitter, but not really a substitute mother.

Occasionally I had to go away and leave Luke alone. Once it was to a meeting of the Italian Chemical society at which I presented a paper and a poster on our work. A couple more times were short visits to Camford in connection with our joint research project. On these visits, I stayed with David and Jon, and I made sure that they and Tommy came out for a meal at the Venezia with me. Tommy was now very tall and energetic and fit, and must have been an attractive figure to both girls and boys, but he was firmly on the 'straight' side of the divide. He was hoping to get into a Camford college, though he had not yet decided what subjects he wanted to read. On my second visit, several months later, Tommy brought along to the meal an Italian girl, who turned out to be Caterina's granddaughter, who would be starting at Islip College a few weeks later. I wondered if a relationship might be forming between the two young people, or whether it was just politeness to her to introduce me as someone who could speak Italian. 

When I got back to Trabizona, I realized how much I had missed my fag-boy. I had no sooner got into the flat (it was mid-afternoon) than I grabbed him and started to undress him. I stripped him down to his underpants and began to play with his nipples. The sight of his golden-brown chest filled me with lust, and I began to pull gently on the hair round his nipples with my teeth. I smothered his chest with kisses before running my lips over the hard lump that was distending his underpants. Even before I put my lips to the silk, a moist patch was spreading from the tip of his cock, outlined by the stretched silk. Carefully, I pulled the silk slip over his hips and down to his ankles, revealing his brown, rock-hard dick projecting from his silky smooth pubic bush. I applied my lips to its tip and kissed it before beginning to lick it with my tongue. An ecstatic smile spread over his face. "I've missed you my darling boy! I have a hollow and empty feeling in my back passage that urgently needs to be filled!" 

"Don't worry, my hole-filling equipment is all ready, but I must get undressed!" I tore off my clothes, dropped them on the floor and pushed Luke on to our bed. I resumed my attention to his man-stick. I licked the sides and moved down to his balls and began to suck and lick his hairy ball-bag. Then I moved back up his shaft and took the head into my mouth. He groaned in delight. I could feel the precome oozing from my dick as I chewed his cock. He began to push excitedly at the back of my throat. I felt his slimy prick sliding to and fro in my welcoming mouth. After a few minutes, he came violently and shot his load into my mouth. As he slowly withdrew his prick, I struggled to swallow his huge cargo. I then turned him over and the sight of his delicious brown arse reinvigorated the hardness of my cock as I began to kiss and lick the wonderful warm, smooth, hairless skin of his lovely curved rump. "You are beautiful, my pretty youth!" I told him. Every time we made love, whichever role I was playing, top or bottom, I never forgot the time that he first told me that he wanted to be mine. I also never forgot how he saved me from a premature departure from Camford in a period of total lack of self-confidence in my second undergraduate term. Now it often seemed that he was the one who was struggling, trying to establish himself in a badly defined and badly paid career role. 

"Come on, my sweet stud, put it in! You're miles away! Get back on to the job! I want you up my arsehole. Fuck me silly!" he said. I put my anxieties for the future out of my mind and concentrated on the job. I took a dollop of lubricant gel on my fingers and poked it inside him, while he unrolled a prophylactic on to my cock. I pushed him on to his back on the bed, put his legs on my shoulders, and entered his poop-chute smoothly and gently, before setting to work fucking him. "My darling boy," I told him, "you are still all I have in the world. Anything you want from me you can have, but all I can give you apart from love is spunk! I bent and kissed his face as I worked my dick in and out.