[There is no sex in this instalment! You have been warned. Life is like that!]
Chapter XLI Introducing Roberto and Vittore
Several months had elapsed. Bernardo was now chattering away in both Italian and English and could walk several kilometres. Caterina could walk quite some distance and could say a few full sentences. Olivia had begun driving lessons and was making good progress. To practise, she went out with one of the men immediately after lunch, while the other man or Costanza kept an eye on the children or took them out in the park. She was teaching Giovanni to read simple story books with pictures in both languages.
Luke and Pauline's production of
Andrea Chenier
had been a great success and Pauline had broken off her engagement. "He was not ready for commitment!" she said of her ex-fiancé.
A new research student called Roberto had started work with Tom. Tom initially teamed Roberto to work with Carlo for his first few months. "Your projects are complementary," he told him, "and many of the techniques are ones that Carlo is very experienced in. He can be of more help to you than I can, because he knows all the problems and all the tricks to deal with them."
Tom by now had published over 60 research papers and was considering submitting for a Camford Doctorate of Science. He had become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, like Jon, and was now on the Editorial Board of several chemical research journals, British, American and Italian. He found it increasingly difficult to balance the commitments of a busy and fruitful research lab with his desire to spend precious and delightful hours with the children at home. Both these two factors inevitably meant that sex with either Luke or Olivia was infrequent. One night when he and Luke had gone to bed early and were cuddling up together, Luke said, "Tom, your hair is getting a bit thin on the crown!"
"I know," said Tom, "I'm suffering the penalty of being a man! It's age-related androgenic alopecia -- male baldness. Do you want me to start taking Finasteride? It's said to be effective in about 50% of cases."
"No! Don't worry, Tom," said Luke, "I won't love you any less! I would hate to think of you dosing on drugs, especially anti-dihydrotestosterone agents, just because of hair loss. It might affect your sex-drive!"
Luke's career in contrast, was moving more slowly. The Teatro Musicale was doing very well financially, and work had begun to improve the backstage facilities. The men sometimes wondered if Luke's promotion might be accelerated if he took a job elsewhere, but Tom did not want to leave Trabizona, and travel to another Italian city with an opera house as a commuter, though possible, would only give Luke even less time to spend with the family.
In the end, Luke persuaded Cornelio that they should hire an extra assistant to take on some of Luke's more trivial responsibilities, and give Luke one extra evening free per week. They advertised, and finally recruited a quite young man called Vittore Campodastri. He was keen and enthusiastic, but quiet and modest. He was slim and energetic, and at Luke's suggestion joined Tom, Ben and Alberto in their morning runs in the Parco Emilio Guzzone. Luke wondered if his new colleague might be gay, but soon found out that young as he was, he was a typical Italian womanizer! Fortunately he was tactful enough not to boast of his exploits to his male colleagues at work. Nothing is more tedious to gays than accounts of heterosexual seductions. However, he was good at his job and enabled Luke to concentrate more on producing and rehearsing. Pauline got on well with Vittore, and he began to treat her as a mother figure. His home was at Lecce in the distant south, and he did not go home very often.
Chapter XLII Unhappy Carlo
One afternoon, as he was walking through the lab, Tom saw Carlo sitting at his desk looking miserable.
"What's the matter Carlo, are you missing Rachel?" he said.
"Si," replied Carlo, "I miss her terribly!"
"I had the same experience as you," said Tom, "when I was a third year student in Camford. Luca went to spend a year as an Erasmus student in Bologna, and I missed him enormously. We exchanged E-mails twice a week and had phone sex on our mobiles once a week. But Luca had pots of money and came home at Christmas and Easter, so we saw one another every three months. When we became civil partners, we resolved never to separate for more than a few weeks, which is how I came to Italy to do my dottorato, because Luca wanted to work in Italy as an opera-house manager. It meant that I had to learn Italian in six months! Now we are here for good. We don't want to take our children to England, because at their age they would quickly forget that they're Italian."
"I never thought about phone sex!" said Carlo. "I don't know if Rachel would like it."
"I can't advise you about that!" said Tom, "I don't know enough about women! But look, you need cheering up. Come home with me. I'll ring Olivia and see if there's enough food for you. In any case, I can offer you some nice Belgian beer." Olivia said there was plenty of lasagna, and Carlo was welcome, so about 6-30 the two men left the lab and got home just in time to read the children a bedtime story. Luke had left for work an hour before. Carlo read them an Italian story and Tom an English one. "Don't worry about how much you drink!" said Tom. If you're not in a fit state to go home on the tram, I'll pay for a taxi for you! Do you like sweet things to drink, or bitter things?"
"I prefer bitter things," replied Carlo.
"In that case, try this beer," said Tom and poured him a glass of Orval, a very bitter Trappist beer.
Carlo was a bit of a loner. He was not at all a typical womanizing Italian. He had enjoyed working with Rachel, and was glad when Tom had asked him to work with Roberto for his first few months. He found it difficult to guess whether phone sex, a typical male activity, would attract Rachel or repel her. He had not had enough experience of women even to be able to judge how much she was enjoying it when they had sex together. She never criticized his lovemaking, but that might just have been female modesty. The thought that he might be a lousy lover depressed him, and he was quite happy to taste and enjoy the high-alcohol beers that Tom served up to him. He had not yet come to realize that true love is achieved by being oneself. Being oneself is the secret of the best kind of sex-appeal. It was characteristic of Tom's tact that he did attempt to turn Carlo's sexual uncertainty into pro-gay propaganda, by telling him that man-man sex was much easier, partly because men do not have a menstrual cycle (something that Luke in his more cynical moments called a 'womenstrual cycle').
An evening unwinding his tensions in the company of Tom and Olivia did him good, and by the time that Luca got home from work, Carlo felt much happier, as well as quite drunk. In the end, he spent the night in the men's guest bedroom. By the morning, after having been wakened up by a boisterous Caterina bouncing into his bedroom, he felt the lure of his work, and the ache engendered by his separation from the girl he loved was somewhat relieved.
After breakfast with Tom and family, he said goodbye to the children and travelled with Tom to work. Soon he and Roberto were busy at the bench. It was only a matter of a few weeks now before Carlo should be finishing at the bench and beginning to write his thesis. He had already taken four years. However during that time four published papers had been co-authored by him, so he had plenty of results to write up. Tom and Arturo had begun negotiations to get him funding for post-doc work in Camford. So his lovelorn misery ought, Tom reasoned, to stimulate him into getting his thesis written in record time.
Every week, Tom held a short work-discussion with his group: Carlo, Alberto, Roberto, himself and Laura, the group's technician. Every month, Arturo held a bigger meeting, consisting of both Tom's group and Ben's group, which was similar to Tom's but bigger. At these bigger meetings, one person from each group made a 20-minute presentation. At first, Tom had dreaded having to speak to a group in Italian, but as he got steadily more confident, his worries disappeared, and once he had discovered that he could lecture in Italian to students, his linguistic reserve disappeared. In a move to get Trabizona more widely recognized on the international scientific world, he had recently started to put his research students through the ordeal of holding the weekly discussions in English. Tom noticed after a while that Carlo and Roberto had become close friends, and he gave a sigh of relief. It would give Carlo something else to think about rather than sitting alone brooding.
Chapter XLIII Anne and Jane visit Trabizona
Tom and Luke's two nieces had started at an exclusive girls' school in Cheltenham as weekly boarders, which meant that they were home each weekend. They had longer holidays than children at state schools. As they were now eleven, they were old enough to travel on their own, so it was decided that they should spend the whole of their Easter holidays in Trabizona, to give them more realistic practice in speaking Italian. Their fathers took them by car to Bristol airport, and Tom and Olivia met them at Valerio-Catullo-Villafranca airport, and Olivia drove the car back to Trabizona. It was her first long-distance drive. They had arranged that the twins would spend the week of Easter with their grandparents Dorotea and Massimo, and the rest of the time in Trabizona.
Olivia and Costanza were very glad to see them, and the boys and Caterina were delighted. After some discussion, they arranged that English and Italian should be spoken on alternate days, except of course to Costanza. This helped Olivia as well as the children to get more confident in speaking their non-native languages. Sometimes at the weekends, the men took the twins for various sightseeing trips. Other weekends, Olivia and one of the men took the twins sightseeing while the other stayed at home and looked after the boys and Caterina. This was usually Tom, because he could cook the boys a meal. One day they got up early and caught the train to Venice, admiring the spectacular view as the train made its way over the causeway to the Venice railway terminal. From there they got a vaporetto along the Grand Canal to the Piazza San Marco and visited the basilica of Saint Mark and the Palazzo Ducale. The city was as always, very crowded with tourists, and they were all glad to get back, very late, to Trabizona.
Another day the men took them to Florence, having bought advance timed tickets for the Uffizzi Gallery. Tom and Luke grinned to overhear the two girls' comments (
Vidi suo cazzo piccolo!
) about the small uncircumcized male organ of Michelangelo's Davide! Maybe they thought that by saying it in Italian they would fool their uncles! Tom wondered if he should reprove the girls for this unladylike remark, but Luke just grinned and said that it was a harmless comment, as well as being true! "You could view it as a good understanding of contemporary Italian" said Luke, "but I think that Sandro must be responsible for their vocabulary! Tom, you're too old fashioned. Wait till Caterina gets to their age. You'll be upset by some of the things that she will say. She might even make disapproving comments when you fart!"
