Eleanor Meets Tommy and Martin

This story is dedicated to the memory of Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), in appreciation of his book

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded

, the first novel about a girl who fights to get what she wants.

[The sex in this story starts rather late, so be patient and enjoy the preliminaries first. The fun will eventually come.]

*****

Chapter One

Introductions

My name is Eleanor Butterfield. My father, Emeritus Professor the Rev. Charles Butterfield, did not marry until he was 48, so when I was 18 and about to go up to university, he was approaching retirement as a parish priest. We lived in the vicarage of a small country village and I attended a high-powered sixth-form college in the nearest town.

My father had had a chequered career. He had been educated at the University of Oxbridge, and when he graduated with a first class degree in theology, he remained to study for a Ph.D. He was appointed a junior fellow and on the basis of numerous scholarly publications was eventually elected a full fellow of his college. After a year's sabbatical in which he received the necessary hands-on training to become a priest, he was ordained to a Fellowship of the college, first as a deacon and a year later as a priest. He continued to distinguish himself as a scholar and a few years later became a professor of theology in the University of Camford. His title was Hardwick Professor of Divinity, and he was attached as a professorial fellow to Saint Boniface's College in Camford. During this time, he submitted his publications for a Doctorate of Divinity, which he successfully obtained.

There he met a 30-year-old PhD student with whom he fell in love and married. When my father was in his middle fifties, my grandfather died and left him a great deal of money, such that even after inheritance tax had been paid, he became a wealthy man. By now he was weary of the academic rat race and with my mother's encouragement he resigned his chair and moved as a non-stipendiary priest to a parish in the gift of Saint Boniface's College. The Bishop of Fitchey attempted to persuade him to take on half a dozen adjacent parishes as well, but my father was adamant that one parish was sufficient, as he wished to continue with his scholarly work at the same time as the pastoral care ("cure of souls" in traditional Anglican parlance) of the small village of Winksey in which we lived. As he was not on the diocesan payroll, the Bishop could not object to this. Dad's ministry was happy and successful: he attended all the community activities that made up village life in Winksey, and in turn the villagers supported him at his church.

I was an only child and to my father's surprise, I decided in my teens to follow in his footsteps and become a priest. Accordingly, it was to read theology that I entered Saint Boniface's, my father's old college in the University of Camford. I think I must have inherited his intelligence, because by the age of 16 I was joining in the discussions which frequently took place in our hospitable vicarage between my father and our numerous visitors, who were essentially academics, childhood friends and interesting people whom my father or mother had met in the previous 20 or 30 years. My father, though elderly, was by no means stodgy or old-fashioned. He fully approved of the ordination of women in the Church of England and was delighted that his daughter was going to follow in his footsteps.

In spite of all this rather old-fashioned-sounding background, my upbringing had been far from sheltered. Some of the guests who visited the vicarage were distinctly worldly, including actors and even a few politicians. My father in his private life never hesitated to use words that would be regarded by most people as unbecoming for a clergyman to say out loud, and although my mother put on disapproving expressions, she never objected to his use of coarse words within the family. She was just as clever as he was, but had to some extent sacrificed her career to his. However, she never seemed to regret this. What they both regretted, but were unable to do anything about, was the fact that they only had one child: me. This was in spite of what seems to me now (although as a child I never noticed it in detail but I suspected) to have been a very active sex life. It certainly seems that my father had decided to make up for all his years of celibacy, but to no avail! I was his sole success in the progeny stakes and all the more precious to my parents as a result.

I had had the disadvantage of attending an all-girls school up to the age of 16, and even in the sixth form college I was so busy working for my exams that I had little time to spare for boyfriends. So a motive that was one of my priorities when I went up to Camford was to meet members of the opposite sex.

Chapter Two

Eleanor's first Martinmas term at Camford

Winksey was not far from Camford and after a short train journey I arrived in Camford at the beginning of the Martinmas term early in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I found that I had been allocated a single room at the top of a staircase in the third quadrangle of Boni's, as Saint Boniface's College is known by most people in Camford. During the first week of term I signed up to join the college chapel choir. I had sung in the choir of Winksey church for as long as we had lived in the village and I had studied the piano up to grade 7. I had also at school chosen music as one of my A-level subjects.

Four freshmen joined the choir that year: two men and two women. It was with great interest that I examined the male members of the choir at the session in the beer-cellar that followed the first practice. One man who sang tenor in particular caught my attention. He had dark hair, worn fairly long, a nice clean-shaven face, was skinnily built and wore a commoner's gown. While the college did not stipulate particular dress for Sunday evenings, it was generally the practice to wear fairly formal clothes such as a suit, and shoes rather than sandals or trainers. This man was wearing an Italian designer suit. Later when he was wearing jeans I noticed that he had a significant bulge in the vicinity of his genitals, indicating that he might be well-hung! You might think that this is an unladylike thought for a clergyman's daughter to have, but I have already explained that my upbringing was far from conventional and that colloquial, even crude language, was in use in our household.

Freshmen in the choir were the only first-years allowed to go with the rest of the choir into formal dinner on Sunday evenings after we had sung Evensong. I contrived to get a seat next but one to the well-hung man, whom I heard his neighbour call Tommy. From the conversation, it appeared that Tommy was just back from Italy, where he had spent his third year as an Erasmus student. After dinner it was the practice for the choir as a body to take coffee in the junior common room before adjourning to one or other pub in the neighbourhood, where the rest of the evening would be spent. There were three rooms on the top floor of my staircase and the girl in the next room had also joined the chapel choir. As we walked to the pub, I asked her what her reaction was to the men in the Choir, both the new ones and the second and third years who were well established in the choir. "Well," she said, "some of them like Tommy Singleton-Scarborough are gay."

"How do you know that?" I asked. "You've not been here any longer than I have."

"I've got good gaydar!" she said. "One of my brothers is gay."

"How do you know his name?"

"I saw him go into his room in the first quad. It's a ground-floor room, so I just read his name from the board."

I saw no more of Tommy for some weeks after this because I rapidly got involved in my academic work. My tutor, a man called Dr Alwyn Smith, kept me very busy. He himself was an expert in Hebrew and was not a priest or even an Anglican but was Jewish. Hebrew is by no means compulsory for Anglican ordinands, but I went along with Dr Smith's suggestion because it was an intellectual challenge. Even so, I found learning Hebrew rather a chore, because I had to purchase a Hebrew keyboard for my laptop. While it is quite easy to change the keyboard of a computer from a drop-down menu, that does not change the letters on the keys that are essential if you are learning a new alphabet. Writing from right to left however was quite easy on the laptop, and because I could touch-type, typing Roman letters on a Hebrew keyboard was no problem.

Many of my academic choices during that first term were not exactly dictated but gently insisted on by Dr Smith. So I found myself attending lecture courses not just in Hebrew, but in moral theology and also (among other topics) in Middle Eastern history and the interpretation of ancient texts. To my disappointment the only male freshman in Boni's studying theology was a very stuffy, pompous, fundamentalistic and dogmatic young man, whom I was sure would make a very poor Anglican priest. I was certain that he and Dr Smith would not get on together. Not all students reading theology intended to get ordained of course, and a few were not even Christians. Lots of modules in world religions were available.

Chapter Three

Tommy and Eleanor get to know one another

Of course I got to know quite a lot of the female students in Boni's, and several of them became good friends. It turned out that almost all of us in our spare time, which was admittedly rather limited, thought obsessively about men. Like all women, we were all extremely interested in relationships. The tightly-knit community that exists in the Camford colleges has, since the advent of coeducation in the 1980s, fostered numerous close relationships between students, many of whom became partners for life. Hence much of the conversation between the girls both at dinner and at coffee afterwards, revolved round who was fucking whom, and this sort of discussion even extended to gay relationships. On a few occasions, Tommy Singleton-Scarborough's name cropped up, but we knew little about his relationship with his friend from Sanguis Christi College, until one of my female friends was hostess to a friend from another college at the Boni's biweekly guest dinner. She said that Tommy's boyfriend was a ravishingly beautiful redhead. "It's not surprising," she said "that Tommy is in love with him. He would make any woman drool with desire and I'm sure that men feel exactly the same way about someone who's so attractive. I wouldn't mind a night in bed with him myself, I have always been attracted by ginger hair! I suppose his pubic hair will be ginger as well!"

"If he's 100% gay you might find it a disappointing experience!" I told her. "He might not even be able to get it up!"

"You fancy Tommy, don't you?" she asked with a grin.

"Yes, I'd like to get to know him as a friend, even if I can't have sex with him." I said.

My chance came about week 6 of the term, when the choirmaster chose me as soprano soloist and Tommy as tenor soloist for the following Sunday's anthem. Tommy suggested that we have a couple of practice sessions on our own, and of course I agreed with alacrity. The first was held in his room on staircase 2 of the first quad. We had agreed that we should spend an hour running through our parts together, even without accompaniment.

I turned up early at his room, hoping that perhaps his friend might be there, and even hoping that I might disturb them when they were up to something! However, when I knocked, he opened the door at once, and I could see that an Italian book lay open on the desk. I looked at the furnishings with interest. In addition to all the usual computer-related items, there were a lot of books, shelves of them in fact, a couple of landscape paintings on the wall and a single painting of a male nude that betrayed his sexual orientation.

We had both brought our music and we began at once to practise our parts both separately and together. After half an hour, it became clear that we had made reasonable progress and Tommy said to me, "Would you like a cup of tea?" I agreed, and five minutes later, he reappeared with two cups of tea.

"Are you dating someone exclusively? he suddenly asked, "or would you like to come out to dinner with me? I would like you to meet my friend Martin. You would be in no danger from either of us, as we are gay."

"But wouldn't your friend resent you inviting me out? Isn't your relationship a commitment?"

"Yes, it is, but it's not exclusive. Camford life is too busy for us to sit and gaze at one another. We have exams to do and careers to build before we can set up home together. We did share a flat out of college in our second year, but there are other things in life besides sex, even though our age group thinks of little else. I bet that you and your friends eye up men all the time, especially in boring lectures!"

"Let me get this clear," I said, ignoring his very shrewd comment, "you want me to come out and make a threesome for dinner with you and your boyfriend?"

"Just so," Tommy replied. "I hear that you're a parson's daughter. You're surely not wanting a one-night stand with me? Besides, I can tell you from experience that though college beds might be OK for sex, they are a dead loss for a couple to spend the night in together! But I'm quite happy to kiss you if you want me to!" And with that he leant over and kissed me on the cheek. (We were sitting beside one another on the sofa).

My response surprised myself as well as him. I put my arm around him and kissed him on the lips. His response was gratifying. He put both his arms round me and kissed me passionately on the lips. Down below, I could feel his manhood stiffening as he pressed it against my body. I was amazed at myself. My lovemaking experience was, to say the least, limited. "Did you know how sweet you are?" he whispered. "I'm not one-hundred percent gay, you know. My big regret is that my darling Martin is not a believer. Maybe if I introduce you to him, you might be able to bring him to belief. Not that I'm asking you to, mind you. You might not like redheads, though I find him stunningly attractive."

I was puzzled. What did this guy want? Did he want me for himself or for his boyfriend? "Let's just finish with another run-through, but yes, I will come out with you and Martin," I told him.

"Good! We'll fix a date at our next practice. Shall I come round to your room for that?" We ran through the piece once more and arranged to meet before dinner for a second short practice two days later.

As I left, I felt helpless. This man was making all the decisions! This was in total contradiction to all that I had been taught. Liberated women make their own decisions about careers and relationships, they don't allow themselves to be dominated or manipulated. There is an old Dutch phrase that my father often used to quote (he had spent a sabbatical in the Netherlands a few years ago)

baas in eigen huis

master of my own house. 'I'm only nineteen' I thought, 'and Tommy is about 22. Why am I not taking the initiative in this would-be relationship? I hold the cards. He's given himself away, he likes me. I've not yet expressed an opinion in words, even though I did kiss him.'

Two days later, Tommy knocked on my door precisely 35 minutes before dinner. We ran through the piece twice more and were satisfied with our performance. "I think it's good enough to satisfy God, even if our fellow choir-members find fault!" I said. We had fifteen minutes before dinner, during which time we fixed the date for me to go out to dinner with Tommy and his boyfriend.

Chapter Four

Dinner for three

By now, it was the last week of term, and my college Progress Test was due at the end of the week. On the agreed evening, both of us having signed out of dinner, I turned up at Tommy's room at 7 pm, and we set out to walk the few hundred metres to Sanguis Christi College to collect Martin, who was waiting in the lodge. Tommy introduced us. "Martin, this is Eleanor, a first-year theology student and fellow member of Boni's chapel choir."

"Pleased to meet you, Eleanor," said Martin politely, eyeing me up fairly intensively. Martin Robinson was indeed good-looking. His bright copper-coloured hair glowed, and he lacked the pasty complexion that so many redheads have, but he did have quite a lot of freckles. He was tall and slim, and like Tommy, smartly dressed. Speaking for myself, I was glad that I had changed into smart clothes. When we reached the Venezia restaurant, Tommy spoke to the staff in Italian, and we were led to a very nice table in a raised part of the room, so that we had a good view of many of the other diners. Tommy explained that as a native of Camford he had been a regular at the restaurant with his parents for nearly ten years.

We discussed the difficulties that freshmen had of finding their way round the city and learning all the essential facts like the location of pubs, colleges, public toilets, safe bicycle parks and so on, that are essential to day-to-day life. Martin asked me if I was into sport, and I said no, that I had come to Camford to enlarge my mind rather than my muscles. He grinned. He had a most attractive smile. I could see why Tommy was smitten with him. I noticed that they were wearing identical rings on their fourth digit of their right hand. "Those are nice rings" I said.

"Yes," replied Martin. "They are our commitment rings, to show that we regard ourselves as an item, even though we have not as yet got to the stage of contemplating marriage or civil partnership."

"As far as I am concerned," said Tommy, "it will have to be civil partnership. Marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman, and so I can never marry you!"

I was interested in what Tommy said. He was expressing the official Church if England view of marriage, that it was between the two opposite sexes. However, I felt a bit gleeful that Tommy took this line, because clearly, Martin wanted to marry him. In practice in England there is absolutely no difference except in name between same-sex marriage and civil partnership, except for the confusion of applying terms like husband and widower (or wife/widow) to same-sex partnerships. Whether gays like it or not, marriage is biologically a heterosexual relationship because of its intimate relationship with breeding and propagation. However, I was anxious to get to know Martin better, so I was careful not to express my personal opinion on gay marriage, which insofar as I had thought about it at all, was similar to that of Tommy.

"I gather that you are just back from a year in Italy, Tommy," I said. "Where did you go and how did you like it?"

"After a very slow start, because I am not a very assertive sort of person," he replied. "I got to enjoy life in Padua. The university is very old and respected and the city is beautiful, so by the time the year was up, I was quite reluctant to leave, except of course I was aching for Martin, and keen to get back to him. But my Erasmus year worked wonders for my Italian skills and for my self-confidence. I love Italy now so much that I would like to follow my brother's example and get a job there."

"He didn't lack friends, either!" said Martin. "He formed a not-entirely Platonic attachment with a gay student who's going to come and see us next summer. But to change the subject, Eleanor, would you like to come to a concert with us in the first week of next term?"

Well, well. Another invitation to a threesome. Was I going to become fag-hag to these two boys? Yes! I was. Why not? It was not an exclusive relationship. If I met a man I fancied, I could always say goodbye to Tommy and Martin. So I agreed to go to the concert. These lads were good company and the programme looked excellent.