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On the occasion that I had been invited to attend, as a day-guest, the summertime fête of a former civilian colleague, I had my flannels pressed and prepared for a very dull excursion. It was fashionable to host sporting lawn parties, and as a fit example of a man in his mid-forties, I thought I would be best-served to pass the time with a few rounds of tennis or squash, whichever was on offer, then drinks until I could slip away around supper. It never paid to ungraciously reject an invitation. I was a single man. Rejection was how a single man built a reputation of reclusiveness and being the wrong sort.
Though now a civilian myself, I had never got the hang of leisure. The friends I kept knew to schedule tightly for me. I read or walked or bicycled by the quarter-hour, and it was with great distaste that I approached the concept of an afternoon spent mingling.
The host greeted me kindly, as kindly as the next arrival, and as expediently as all that. I was soon shunted out into the back lawn with a cool drink in hand and my straw hat pulled low, that I might not be seen as welcoming conversation. I chatted, briefly, with another man I recognized from the host’s employer, and then a fellow officer and his wife, and then watched a trembling attempt by a gathering of glee-singers to get a round going. When the third started up with the second and the fourth tripped in half a verse too late, I drank so as not to laugh, and I caught the eye of a man across the way doing quite the same.
He had dark hair worn thick with pomade and a straw hat upon it, the brim pulled as low as mine. I didn’t know him, but I thought he might do well to fill my social card for the remainder of the afternoon. I sidled up to him.
“I say,” he said, before I could settle on my degree of mockery, “you seem awfully familiar.” I looked at him, but his flannels were the same pristine white as anyone else’s, and he was not the sort of outstandingly handsome man who I would have remembered from a glance across a club. He had that air about him, and I was sure he sensed it about me as well; we could not guess that aloud. Instead, he offered, “Have you ever been at Cambridge? Perhaps I played you in cricket, or tennis, or coached you there.” That neatly provided an answer as to this man’s occupation, but yet more mystery, as I hadn’t been remotely scholarly since starting at Sandhurst.
“I’ve played both, but not for university,” I said. Something about his face was resolving into a distantly-familiar picture—we must have known one another as much younger men, and I had never been the most gifted with faces. But there was an expression in his eye that I was sure I liked in a man, going all the way back to—“Maddox!” I had it, I was certain. “Frank Maddox, how’s that!”
He nodded but looked contrite. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage.”
“Hughes, Thomas Hughes,” I said. I was much too astounded to take offense at his forgetting me. “I have grown rather a lot.”
“Hughes,” he repeated my name, somewhat guardedly though not in an unwelcoming manner, and I remembered at once the way in which our acquaintance had ended. “You see I haven’t grown quite as much.”
“Not at all, I would wager.” I laughed when he, self-deprecating, set his face into a grim line of disappointment. He must have been four inches shy of six feet, where I was a couple more than that. Maddox had been so much taller than me as a boy, both in physical inches and mental presence. “What an incredible coincidence. I’m very glad to have come today.”
And I was over-earnest in that expression, but it softened him to me. All at once the stiffness he’d carried along his shoulders melted out and he became again the man willing to laugh with a stranger over an inept singing performance, our childhood woes forgotten. I had no mind to talk that out today, or ever, if I could help it; it had been so long ago, and Maddox had had frightfully little to do with it, and there really was no longer a scab to pick.
We wandered the grounds together for a time, moving on from the terrible glee-singers to observe the phlegmatic croquet, wind around the sharp-eyed gossips, and stop before the empty tennis court. A valet trotted up helpfully to offer to fetch racquets, as soon as he spied our white flannels.
“Match?” Maddox asked me, in that it was a challenge more than an ask—Maddox, his eyes bright and his tennis whites pristine, was not asking me for a genteel round of pinging the ball back and forth, as our fellow guests might have done, moving placidly and allowing strays to go wide with no thought to the points. Maddox in his forties was proving to be no less the boy he had been at sixteen, self-serious about all he touched. I was sure he’d never learned the meaning of casual play.
I thought, more the fool I, that my height and my build and my time in the army would have made this foregone. I accepted his challenge and even thought myself unfair, for Maddox was at most an inch taller than when we’d been boys, and had lived a scholar’s life for near thirty years. In singles, I could span the court with a step or two in either direction, whereas he would have to run.
From the first service, I was wrong: Maddox played like a man who considered the theory of the game. Wickedly, he hit his balls so that they skimmed only a few inches over the net, flying low and fast beyond where I’d thought to place my racquet. If he had less power behind his strokes than he might have had as a young man, he made up for it with his technique, which left me sweating. We played for one match. I was aware, for each miserable call up through deuce, until he scored advantage and game point, that I rested too much on my athleticism in sets against my peers. I had mistaken myself for having talent. Rather, most everyone I knew was getting on.
Humbled, I shook his hand. “Fantastic play, Maddox,” I told him, metaphorically showing my belly. He gave mercy: he smiled, he did not crush my fingers, and he was kind about my volleys. And then, with sunlight pouring over us, and people all across the grounds, and his hair bouncing loose from its pomade so that he looked ten years younger, he said he was going back to the house. He had a room there. He was an overnight guest.
“I rather need a bath,” he said, looking up at me from behind that flop of sweaty, curly fringe. “I suspect you do as well.”
I, who had once been the lucky recipient of Maddox’s attentions, found myself dumb and silent when faced with them again. Mutely, I nodded; we handed our racquets back to the valet without conversation to ease us, and so the anticipation grew.
Inadvisably, I walked with him to his room. It was not quite a scandal for me to follow him indoors, given that the generosity of the guest list this weekend provided an ample crowd for cover. Maddox held the door to his suite for me, and he was the man to slide closed the bolt, and he was the one between us to step out of his shoes and slip off his jacket, which I hung for him.
His shoulders had once seemed immeasurably broad and grown, when I was a boy of fourteen and he was my master. Now I marveled at their slimness, his jacket feeling small in my hands; I was brutishly large, and I was moved to say, “I will take good care of you, Maddox.”
Wanly, he smiled. “I’ve neither the time nor the inclination for reminiscence, Hughes,” he said, a gentle rebuke.
“All the same.”
If he could not face the reversal, then I would keep it in my own head: his gentle sighs of nervous pleasure as I ran my hands down his arms, so different from the Maddox who had led me through this once; his shyness as he stripped, when a boyish version of himself had bathed without shame. He undressed himself and I watched, numbly, sitting on my heels with my back against a bed-frame. Maddox unbuttoned his flannel trousers a single button at a time, so precise as not to strain the button-holes, unheeding of efficiency. And then, absurdly, he let them fall to a crumpled heap, out of which he stepped. His gartered socks pressed red welts into pale skin and sweat stuck down the hair on his thighs. He hadn’t lost tone, but he had lost color—I saw at once a life where activity was defined by traveling up and down steep old stairs every day, rarely breaking for sunshine beyond the time it took to cross a quad. Maddox had always been a funny sort to value studies over sport, but he had needed sport as well. I ached for what it meant that he no longer allowed himself the indulgence.
He shucked his shirt without production, a dozen tiny buttons undone while I had been caught at the sight of his legs. Then he was quite revealed, his vest top cut low enough to show the hair on his chest and under his arms, and the hem riding up on his belly. He was thicker there, too; I wished to press my face to it and taste the give. “Maddox,” I said, rather brokenly. My hands were wrapped around my ankles so that I might not launch myself forward and drag him to the carpet. I was unseemly with my need to touch him.
His name caught him out, and Maddox went still as though aware all over again of what we were engaged to do. “Shall I?” I offered, and mutely, he nodded. I allowed myself that forward motion, kneeling at his feet to unclip his garters, rolling down first one sock and then the next until his fine-boned toes were bare to my eye. They, and his hands, were elegant. He manicured his nails. He had softness to them, hands and feet both, characteristic of a man conscious of their attractiveness.
Unthinkingly, I bent my head and raised one hand to my lips, claiming it as mine—in this moment, each finger-tip, each red bit of soreness from the racquet-handle, each tendon and knuckle was meant for my kisses. “I don’t suppose this is how you usually do it,” he said, and so I sucked his fingers for the cheek. Maddox laughed, then he gasped, then he wobbled; I pitched him over my shoulder and then did bowl him to the floor, at last.
I was dressed, mostly, except for a collar that had come open and the jacket and shoes I had lost. He was not, mostly, his vest pushed up to his ribs and his loose drawers offering no modesty where he most required it. “I feared I would find you in combinations,” I teased him, and his ears went fetchingly red.
I demanded his drawers off, with which he complied, so that I might hold the bare skin of his thighs in my hands as I pushed his legs apart. Maddox moaned and writhed and was embarrassed by his own want, which drove me further, to put my mouth behind his bollocks and suck the skin there. “Oh, Lord, oh, God,” he breathed above me, but he wound his hands into my hair and he tugged as a man who was eager for it. “Oh, please,” he said, so I pleased him.
He seized, stuffing his wrist into his mouth, when I thrust my tongue into him. Ever conscientious, Maddox would not allow himself to be the cause of scandal; I had been a scandal, and it had made me daring. Could we survive someone finding us there, his ass spread open for my mouth on our host’s Persian rug? Could I make him forget his modesty, his inhibitions, his fear, and shout my name? I doubted that I could, but the heady thrill of Maddox trembling under my power filled my senses: his aborted, whimpering moans; the taste of his body, thick on my tongue; the twitching tremors in his thighs, worn from our match and strained by his pleasure. “Oh, oh,” he said, muffled by his own flesh, as I licked him wet enough to dribble on the rug.
Pliant, Maddox moved with my mouth, his hips riding my face as he was so good not to touch himself. I watched his prick strain up at the crest of each thrust. I wanted to touch him, terribly awfully, but I wanted more to see him eager and mindless—as once I had been, devoted to and awed by him as he petted and stroked me. Nothing so petty as revenge filled my heart, only the need to inspire in Maddox the same things I had felt. Still felt, though I would not have said it, for that boyish devotion had led me to speak with him and play with him and follow him here, knowing as I did what would happen. As gone as he was on the wicked ways I used my mouth, I was worse: I hid behind my clothes, my actions, and my experience, but what excited me most was not the sex, but that it was with him.
Maddox was no less a sight for being a grown man and not a handsome youth. He had hair across his stomach and up his chest, down his legs which I wore over my shoulders. His body was thicker but this made his voice deeper, each quiet groan rumbling through his belly so that I could feel it on my lips. I thought about taking him into my mouth and swallowing his seed when he finished, and at that, I could no longer make him wait. I took his prick in my hand and watched, rapt, as Maddox hissed and bent his back and pressed shut his eyes, shuddering twice before he spent over my hand.
I finished not long after, into my handkerchief with my hand shoved down my trousers. I laid my forehead on his hip rather than know his reaction. My heart jumped up my throat; I could feel my pulse in my temples. With my hair falling over my eyes, I kissed his leg, I placed my face against it, and I drank in the smell of him.
“I should,” he said, after a gap. He did not specify what he should, only that he should, and it was enough. I moved away, leaving my handkerchief down my pants so that my trousers might not be stained.
When I had righted myself, I fetched a glass of water from his bedside to rinse my mouth. I would have to make myself presentable without a bath; I was leaving that day. Maddox meanwhile tied a dressing-gown around himself, one that ran from neck to ankle, so that the only remaining evidence of our intimacy was the sight of his bare toes clenching against the rug. “I suppose this is good-bye,” I said to him, and thought that this was why I preferred to find my men at clubs and baths, though if I’d run across Maddox at either, I knew I would have been equally inept at ending it. I didn’t want the end of it, that was, not with Maddox.
“Well,” he said, shyly absent of his usual wit as he tucked his hair behind his ears. “If you are ever in Cambridge.”
“Right-o,” I said, and immediately wished I had not. “I’ll look you up, then.”
Maddox lifted his eyes to me; he was so much smaller than the figure in my mind. “King’s College.”
I stopped a young man on the lawn and asked after Frank Maddox. “The don?” he said, to which I nodded, though only because I assumed Frank would have risen to such heights rather than anything particular I’d been told. He held all of my esteem, and we had not spent our last encounter doing much talking about life and career. “He’s in lecture,” the boy said, “I could show you.”
And he did, though the session was letting out as I entered the hall. I caught sight of Maddox by the front, in his gown and with his cap atop a stack of papers, as he talked to a gathered set of students.
At once, my chest collapsed, all the air knocked out of me. His gentle manner with the students put me back in the place I had been at fourteen, awed and hopeless against the slight smiles he would give when one asked a good question, or the way he nervously twitched his hands to fix his hair, so humble was Maddox about his own magnetic presence. He engendered the sort of fondness that grew stronger as one knew him better, rather than the intense but fleeting admiration of a more strikingly-handsome figure. He’d never got to the point of knowing his own attractiveness, not that I saw, and that meant that he’d stayed sweet, and friendly, and was all the more fanciable for it.
I thought I was damned, and should turn and leave before I cemented this folly, but he must have noticed me because he called my name. “Hughes!” he said, clear as a bell, and all his adoring students turned those adoring gazes to me, only I was irreconcilable with their admiration, lacking academic distinction or any good reason for my attendance. But Maddox, ever darling, made no mention of it. “Excuse me,” he said to his crowd, rushing up with all his papers and his cap aflutter. “You hadn’t said you were coming.”
“I hadn’t meant to,” I admitted.
“Well.” He didn’t know what to do with that; I could have been kinder. “Would you come round for tea?”
I remembered all too well what I had done with his last invitation. This carried none of that heat, and so I was lost—without the implication of sex, I had no edge over Maddox, and I became his junior once more. “It would make me awfully happy,” he said, and “All right,” I said, and I carried his papers for him, besides.
If I had imagined austerity to suit Maddox’s academic life, I had been wrong. A preponderance of seating filled his receiving room, and as he bustled off to make tea—“Won’t be a moment in the gyp, do sit,”—I stared for long minutes at my options. Settee and matching chairs, in velvet blue; window-seat with embroidered cushions; foot-stools with stripes or cross-stitched flowers or stately plaid, seemingly scavenged. Round the hall, through a part-open door, I spied the suggestion of a chaise. He was surely fit to hold twenty, and I hadn’t needed the confirmation of his adoring crowd of students to guess that Maddox would be a popular host.
I chose the settee, low though it was, to have space for my legs. I imagined the preposterousness of crouching upon a foot-stool and discarded it at once.
“Do you have many gatherings?” I asked, once served my tea in a fine little china cup with thistle painted below the rim.
Maddox seemed to look about him and laugh, with some sense of shame, into his hand. “The boys in my seminars do like to come by, though I believe I owe the clutter to the amateur entomologists club.”
“Butterflies,” I said, remembering.
“That cannot be interesting to you.”
It was not, in its particulars, but it was, in its continuity. I had a desire, hot as the tea in my hand, to know what had happened to Maddox in these decades gone by.
“I never got the knack for beetles,” he told me. “I’m strictly a lepidopterist.” And so I came to know, at some length, about his shadow-boxes of butterflies and how he brought back specimens from his travels around Asia and the Continent. The archaeology was secondary, nearly, in his telling of his life; I had the sense that he talked it out every day as he taught, and he didn’t wish to define himself by it at home, even as he lived among his students.
Alone among his students, I noticed; I wasn’t sure whether he could have housed a spouse at the College, but he certainly could have kept one elsewhere. His mantle held no photographs of a family, only an old print of a woman with his nose and brow which I took to be his mother. Her image stirred a distant memory in me that she had been French, and very dear to him.
A married man did not keep his mother as his sole feminine portrait.
Whether Maddox caught me looking, I couldn’t say, but he deftly turned the conversation around on me, and I found myself reciting my campaigns and retirement. “I work in printing and binding now,” I told him, “not for any reason other than family connection, and that I’d grown tired of contracting exotic influenzas every second year.” I had been lucky. None of them killed me. That didn’t make for chipper talk, though.
“Have you enjoyed having stability?” he asked, which I took to mean something more.
“I live quietly,” I answered, which was not an answer. “And you?”
Maddox cast his cup and saucer aside, folding his hands across his stomach. “‘Quietly’ is a certain way to put it.”
“Last I knew you, you were anything but quiet.”
“With David, you mean.” He smiled in that distant way that never avoided looking pained. “I deserve that. I am sorry—”
But I held up my hand. “None of that,” I said, “I don’t want to hear it, any more than I want to hear an apology for scoldings about crib sheets or not keeping my hair tidy.” It was in the past, I meant, long ago and irrelevant. I’d found a way to live, and so had he, and neither of us was the worse for it.
“All the same.”
“Even when you and David—”
Maddox stopped me. “We never did.”
“Never?”
“We were dear friends, as you saw, but there’s a locked chamber in the hearts of most men,” Maddox said to me, “which can’t be perceived until a girl comes along and reveals it with a glance, and then it becomes the most important part of his life, more than all of his friendships together.”
“And that happened to your David,” I guessed. I felt very sorry for Maddox, but not sorrier than he had felt for himself, I was sure. “There was a woman, who became Mrs. Blaize.”
“I knew that it would happen,” he claimed, though he looked anything but knowing in that moment. “Only I thought I might bear it. Perhaps I would marry, and our wives would befriend one another, and leave us to continue our friendship just as it always had been, or close enough.” I did not need to speak, for Maddox shook his head at his own delusion, and kept on. “I could never have married, and even had I managed it with some poor woman, the friendship would always have changed.”
“Do you not think that you possess the same,” I turned my lips down, because Maddox’s poetic phrases didn’t flow naturally from me, “chamber in your heart?”
“I’m afraid that I had the awareness of my own unlocked when I was a mere sixteen,” he said, his baleful eyes on me.
“Ah.” There was nothing more to be said about that, except that Maddox had become a singularly joyless chap since he met Blazes, and this was not the time for rebuke. I sensed that he had rebuked himself enough in the decades since. “Does that heart still have space only for David?”
“As it turns out, I am no Jonathan,” he admitted, with more candor than our reacquaintance deserved, and so I treasured it. I reached between our seats to take his hand in my own, though I couldn’t say what the offer meant to me, or for him, only that I should make it. Maddox tapped his thumb against my palm, absently, fondly. “I strove to be, for many years, but I could no longer deny my habits when David was not around to stop them. London,” he said, unnecessarily, for I had been there as well, “offered temptation.”
“Diversion,” I corrected, thoroughly done with his biblical allusions. “You don’t seem worse for it.”
Maddox’s disapproval, once so crushing to me that I had lost sight of restraint and launched myself into scandal in the wake of it, had no effect in middle-age. I leaned forward. I flicked his nose. He relented; he laughed. “Forgive my melancholy,” he begged, “I tell the story and I find myself back in the mind of it, when really I’ve put years between. David had two daughters, did you hear? They’re charming young ladies. They made real to me what his marriage had not.”
“That the nature of your friendship had changed?”
“That I would need something new to fill my life.” He said this without self-pity, which was a marvel. If I had held doubt as to his readiness, he wiped the slate clean with these words, which offered more than my kisses or touch had quite managed. This was Maddox, a man given to such severity of commitment as to accept agony as his due when making a moral choice. He had committed to a life outside that of being David’s friend, and so I believed it.
Still, I wondered: “You hadn’t seen a man for quite some time before me.” He nodded. I could tell as much, during our first encounter. “You haven’t given it up again, have you?”
“After David, I needed to know if I’d meant it, or if I’d gone mad with the singularity of that friendship and hallucinated the whole idea of attraction.” Wryly, he said: “I had not.”
Then he shifted forward in his seat so that his knee brushed against mine, and put his hand on my thigh. “I hadn’t needed it, either,” he explained. “Once I’d got my proof, I was as happy without as with, if the men weren’t going to be the same each night.”
“Are you inviting me to be the same, each night?”
“I am inviting you to try,” he said, and he kissed me.
I pulled him to my lap, pressed together on the same sofa as though we were still boys. His shirt, stiff with starch, crinkled under my hands as I sought his skin, the small of his back. Ache lodged into my nerves, for touching wasn’t enough, and I wanted endlessly more: Maddox’s sight and sounds and time, all mine again.
The wooden frame creaked when he hitched up into my stomach, and we stopped, scarcely breathing. Then all at once Maddox laughed, and dragged his hand through his hair, and said to me, “I’ve forgotten that I have a bed,” like it was the most natural thing in the world to offer. “Let me.”
He got up and opened his door just to close the one outside it, then closed it again; I wondered at the rituals of Cambridge life. Then we went deeper into his rooms, past the chaise (green brocade), to a bed made up casually with last night’s sheets. “Forgive me,” he said, tossing folded pyjamas to the side, atop a book laid with reading glasses. And then, with a flourish towards the mattress: “If you like.”
I rather liked, but I hesitated to undress first. Presumption stayed my hand, until he caught my meaning and undid his own buttons. I watched as though I hadn’t seen him bare before, a scant month gone, and the revelation of his pale skin made it easier to show mine. A new lover made one worry about the knobbiness of knees and the ways a body started to sag, but his face was rapt with excitement and so I released those fears.
I wanted to take him into my mouth, but he stopped me. “You’ve knelt before me enough.” He guided me to lay beside him and took my cock between his thighs, closed tight. His sat between our bellies, already wet.
Faced with the prospect of looking at Maddox, I kissed him instead. I clutched at his hair with both hands until the grease gave up its hold and I felt his curls wind around my fingers; I kissed his jaw and neck and ripe red mouth. His thighs were hot, slick with sweat, and tight enough around me so that I felt frenetic. I wanted to touch every part of him. It was unfair that I had but one mouth for kissing, one cock for fucking, and only two hands when I needed four.
If I could fuck him well enough, I thought, perhaps I could keep him.
I didn’t need a companion. I’d made a life for myself with friends and colleagues, family when I wanted them and lovers when I did not. I had a flat of my own, in a building with a doorman. All this comfort flashed before me as I took his collarbone in my mouth, because I knew what it was to lose it—I knew men who made lives with a partner, and how that choice rippled throughout, coloring friendships and making one guarded with their own valet. And I saw all around me that Maddox had made a life for himself, too; he had the comforts and habits of a man discreet enough in his personal behavior not to worry about these things.
A companion begot worry. I poured worry into worrying, with teeth and tongue and lips, so that Maddox, who had so long escaped it, might dissolve under the pleasant sort for a while longer yet. He gasped and writhed and bucked against my hips, happy to come into my hand. I brought myself off by that same hand, wet with his seed, when he twitched his thighs away from my desperate thrusts.
My finish hurt, drawn out of me by will; I lay folded into myself after, wishing I hadn’t.
“My dear,” he said, and kissed my brow, which would have been patronizing if not for the way I hung off of every one of his charms. Sweat stuck a curl to his forehead, and so I could fault him for nothing.
“It’s only,” I spoke, “that I could weather another scandal, Madddox.”
“Frank,” he corrected me. “After the second time, it should be ‘Frank.’”
“Frank,” I repeated, for his approval. I’d done very many things for his approval, and I was rather beginning to believe that informed some essential part of my being. “I can’t say I would weather it without disappointment, only that the same members of my family who saw me through to Sandhurst after Marchester work alongside me now, and,” I lost my place, my words tangling among themselves, “I have been a scandal already. I cannot ask the same of you.”
Maddox—Frank—looked a long time at my hand, which he held within his. He traced the webbing between my long fingers with his short ones, and I readied myself for his good-bye. But when he turned his face to me, when I could meet his gaze with my own, he was smiling. “A man does not reach forty without a wife and not raise speculation. Not even as an academic,” he assured me. “I know how to live with discretion, and I would like to offer it. I would like you to trust me to offer it.”
I could see unfolding before me an endless list of questions, of challenges I had not yet faced, of problems even Frank Maddox’s prodigious mind could not singly solve, and it frightened me. I saw also the quiet joy on his face when he looked at our legs entwined together, and I felt the steady, slow thump of his heart in his breast, and I found my own resolve. Someone shouted in the quad below us, young voices drifting up through the window-panes to remind us of the world.
I chose Frank, as I had always wanted. “I somewhat stuck my foot in it, making assumptions,” I said.
“You did, dear fellow, but all is forgiven with a kiss,” he said, and so I kissed him.