This story concerns Iain who, for mainly financial reasons, moves back in with his mother, a successful author, in her isolated house on the edge of Scotland's Cairngorms National Park. It's a bit of a slow burner as it contains a couple of sub-plots for background and context which go some way to explaining Iain's fixation with older ladies. I think it's also the longest story I've written for this site.
The story does contain descriptions of anal intercourse between mother and son so if that's not your thing you may wish to pass. If you continue, I hope you enjoy and look forward to comments.
Sylviafan March 2025
This is the story of how my mother and I started an incestuous sexual relationship the year after I finished university. The whole thing really starts on a raw day in late autumn with the sort of rain-spattered leaden sky and piercing wind that Scotland does so well and nowhere better than its ancient capital, Edinburgh.
I'm Iain, by the way, spelt the Gaelic way. Iain MacKay to be exact and from a long line of MacKays stretching back over Scotland's turbulent history. Not that I'm a dyed-in-the-wool nationalist or anything, but I'm proud of my heritage even though I went to school in England. And I suspect I was sent to a boarding school in England because it was far enough away from my mother that she didn't need to visit me during term time, or at least could excuse herself for not doing so.
My mother's Fiona MacKay, a novelist, and quite a successful one although she publishes under an assumed name. She writes historical thrillers that are set in a slightly altered reality; for example she wrote a series of books set in the reign of Richard the Third. In these books the Stanleys came down on Richard's side at the battle of Bosworth and the usurper Henry Tudor was defeated. Richard went on to reign for another forty years, which gave him plenty of time to explain what happened to his nephews, the Princes in the Tower. Her novels are also notable for having quite a lot of pretty explicit sex scenes in them, leading some critics to dismiss them as little more than historical porn. Personally I loved the sex scenes, it thrilled me to think that my mother had written them, had had those thoughts going through her mind. It seemed to show another side of her from the distant, rather stern parent that I had grown up with.
After I finished school I went to university in Edinburgh and read English literature. Well, it was the family business and I'd always been a big reader. After university I got a job as an assistant editor in a publishing house, though not the one that deals with my mother. I spent my days proof-reading draft books at a desk in a cramped office in Leith. I could have worked in my flat, employees were positively encouraged to work from home, but my place was so small and squalid that I preferred to cycle into the office every morning and enjoy free heating during three seasons of the year.
It was a visit to her publishers, who were on the other side of the city, which brought my mother to Edinburgh on that fateful Thursday that set in motion the events of this story. She'd phoned me the previous weekend to say that she would be in town and would like to come and see me, to take me out for a meal in fact. So I left work a bit early and spent a couple of hours cleaning and tidying my flat and then I had a shower and dressed myself in a presentable pair of trousers, an almost-new shirt and a jacket. My mother arrived on the dot of seven, punctual as always. She had a taxi waiting downstairs so she didn't come in and we drove into the New Town to a French restaurant on Princes Street, where she paid the driver and marched imperiously into the restaurant with me following meekly behind and taking the opportunity to stare at her slender figure and her beautiful stockinged legs.
A waiter took my mother's coat and led us to a table in the window looking out over the evening bustle of what is arguably Edinburgh's principal thoroughfare. 'So what have you been doing with yourself, Iain?' she asked after we'd sat down and ordered aperitifs.
So I told her about my job and about my limited social life and she looked back at me or occasionally out of the window or at the other diners and I got the feeling, as I usually did when talking to my mother, that she wasn't really listening. The other problem I had when talking to my mother was that I found her breathtakingly attractive and I struggled to articulate what I wanted to say through a mixture of desire and shyness. It had been a problem since puberty, I think, and exacerbated (or at least not helped) by attending an all-boys private school.
She let me finish and then she told me, at length, about her latest book and the reviews she'd had, even taking her phone out of her handbag and reading me a selection of them! Then she told me about the book she was in the process of writing and why she had chosen this particular period of British history and where she had done her research and what her influences had been. Like my mother, I barely listened, but where she had been bored, I was entranced. I looked at her as she talked: at the movement of her red lips as she spoke, the slender length of her neck, the oval perfection of her face with its prominent cheekbones, chiselled features and pale, flawless skin, the night-black of her long, straight, centre-parted hair which had led my schoolfriends to christen her Morticia. I admired the dark-blue of her eyes, animated as she told me about her achievements, her tapered, ringless fingers with their carefully manicured and painted nails. I swallowed nervously as her pointed tongue flicked against her perfectly defined upper lip and I melted inside as she smiled her expensive smile.
She talked as we ate and I tried to respond with some enthusiasm but it was hard and I felt weary. Afterwards we took a taxi back to my lodging house and I offered her a coffee, fully expecting her to want to rush off back to her hotel. To my surprise she accepted and I led her up to my first floor flat, glad that I'd cleaned and tidied earlier.
I fussed with the percolator in the tiny kitchen while mum sat in the only comfortable chair, a lumpy old sofa, her legs crossed elegantly, an expression of faint distaste on her face.
'Why do you live in this hovel, Iain?' she asked, after I'd handed her a steaming mug.
I was used to her bluntness, and let's face it, it was a hovel. 'It's all I can afford, Mum,' I explained. 'And I can only just afford this.' Sitting on a wooden chair and facing my mother across the meagre living room I felt a little wave of self-pity wash over me. There she was, just a few feet away from me, achingly remote and untouchable. And in a few minutes she would leave and I'd be on my own again. 'After I've paid the rent and the council tax and the utilities I've got about fifty quid a week to feed myself with,' I added. I wasn't asking for help, though God knows my mother was loaded. I think I just needed to offload a bit.
My mother took a sip of her coffee, her eyes on me. 'We did discuss you coming back to live with me,' she said, 'if you remember. You said your company would be ok with you working remotely.' Her tight dress had ridden up and she was showing a bit more stockinged thigh than normal.
'I remember,' I replied, but I need a decent Wi-Fi signal and you don't have one.'
Mum's eyes flashed triumphantly. 'Ah but I do.' I looked at her quizzically. 'There's a new mast on Driesh, at the back of the house. It's a bit unsightly,' she added, 'but there's a full signal everywhere in the house, now.'
Which is why, a couple of months before Christmas, and at the callow and unfulfilled age of twenty-two, I found myself back in the house I had grown up in, or at least that I had spent the school holidays in. It felt like defeat but I told myself that now I could start doing some serious saving and maybe in a couple of years I could afford to buy my own flat.
It was however a particularly comfortable form of defeat. The house is in the Scottish baronial style and dates back to the mid-eighteen hundreds. Built of local granite, it's got three floors, a multitude of rooms, including a couple of Gothic towers, and it's tucked away at the end of a winding, single-track road on the south-eastern edge of the Cairngorms, a gentle range of heather-clad mountains in the eastern Highlands of Scotland. The 946metre summit of Driesh rises up behind the house so you can easily find it on an Ordnance Survey map; it's about twenty-five miles north of the city of Dundee.
My mother didn't buy the house, despite her money. She inherited it from her parents who inherited it from my grandfather's father. He bought the place around 1920. He was a shipping merchant who had made a lot of money after the first war and fancied himself as a country laird. Mum was an only child and was brought up in the house and has never lived anywhere else apart from three years at the University of Aberdeen, of which more later.
My mother's mum died quite young, in 1990, I think, twelve years before I was born, and mum and granddad lived in the house until he died in 2018. I was only around for school holidays, which seemed to suit my mother, so I didn't feel especially connected to the house (which is called Driesh Castle by the way). Inside it's been sympathetically modernised and for a writer it couldn't really be better with its air of peace and tranquillity and stunning views in all directions.
There was a lady called Agnes who came in every weekday and cleaned and prepared meals and a gardener and odd-job man who pottered about and muttered to himself and smelled of whisky. Apart from that, mum and I had the place to ourselves and I could easily not see anybody all day. Mum had a suite of rooms on the first floor and she also had a writing room and library on the second floor with views over the pine forests that surround the house on three sides. I wasn't encouraged to visit this sanctum and she kept it locked when she wasn't in it. I had a study on the same floor but at the back of the house, looking over the rising bulk of Driesh. It was spacious and comfortable and I loved it, a million miles from my Edinburgh flat.
The one time of the day that mum and I did meet up was dinner, usually about 7pm. Agnes would prepare the meal but she left at five and mum would cook and serve in the formal dining room with its big oaken table that could seat twenty people. After dinner we mostly watched a bit of television or played chess in the snug, a comfortably furnished room on the first floor. About ten o'clock mum would start yawning and a few minutes later she'd give me a perfunctory peck on the cheek and disappear to her rooms.
This, albeit limited, exposure reawakened my carnal desire for my mother, if indeed it had ever slept. I'd fantasised about her for years. Had masturbated to naked and semi-clad visions of her since puberty and I read and re-read the sex scenes in her books and imagined the two of us acting them out. When I developed adolescent crushes, it was invariably older ladies that I focussed on. Was this because of my mother fixation or did I just prefer mature ladies? Or was the one tied inextricably to the other?
