So, your wealthy elderly husband’s dead, you’re a good-looking South American, footloose in Scotland. What’s your next move? There are some people who would actually say that. I’m not one of those people. I’m with the rest of the world—who’d just think it. And, despite the fact that we were on our way to see a lawyer, and presumably that very question was going to be discussed behind doors that would be closed to me, she didn’t volunteer any information on the subject. Instead, she talked about Felix.

  He was midway through his studies at medical school in Glasgow, where he shared a flat with other medics. In my brief conversations with him so far this morning I hadn’t got as far as finding that out. When you go to family gatherings and meet distant cousins in their parents’ homes you often make the lazy assumption that that’s where they live. Of course they rarely do. Just because I was living with my parents at age twenty-one didn’t mean that Felix also was. The other thing that Lolli told me was that Felix had a girlfriend called Rhona, daughter of another prominent local family, whom he was expected to marry.

  I met Rhona a couple of hours later. She came to lunch. She sat very prettily next to Felix at the table and was charming when she talked to me. Soon after lunch she left. I was alone with Felix for a brief spell after that. He showed me round the house, not all of which I’d seen as a child. If I say there were eight bedrooms upstairs, and attic rooms above that, that gives some idea of how big a place Endes was. “Rhona’s very nice,” was all I managed to say about his girlfriend. “Oh, yes, she is,” he answered, and smiled. We were in the snooker room at the time and, as he spoke, Felix picked up a cue and neatly pocketed a stray ball, as if to show beyond argument that that particular avenue of conversation was closed.

  Rhona didn’t appear for dinner, though some elderly neighbors did, a Mrs. MacComb and a couple called McClerg. Felix’s sister Isabel was there, without her husband. She and Marie were taking it in turns to stay over, night on night off, and be company for Lolli. I thought that very good of them, though obviously it wouldn’t go on forever. Some time after dinner was ended a moment was reached when the guests had gone and Lolli and Isabel had retired to their rooms, as some people still say, and Felix and I were suddenly left alone. I was about to say, out of politeness (and shyness also), that I would “retire” too, but Felix, probably sensing this, jumped in very quickly with, “Do you want a whisky? We could take it out on the terrace.”

  There was nothing I’d have liked better. Well, there was, but with Felix practically engaged to Rhona that didn’t seem an alternative realistically to be hoped for. “Laphroaig do you?” Felix asked. One of those smoky, peaty single malts that taste like burnt toast crumbs—a flavor I don’t much care for. I said it would be perfect.

  We sat out in the long northern midsummer dusk, and while light lasted in the sky, and the rolling hills and woods went gray, we talked. I told Felix I’d just completed my degree in English but what did you do with that? He understood: he had friends in Glasgow and Edinburgh in the same position. I told him I was working as a postman. He laughed and said, so were they. I learned about Felix, his studies in Glasgow, his life there… I found we had interests in common, opinions and tastes we shared. I dared to think that our personalities were a little bit alike. I told him, rather shyly, that I wanted to be a writer. He said, “If I knew you a bit better I’d ask to read something you wrote.” Everything he said, everything he was, I liked. He was a wonderful new discovery, and I couldn’t get enough of him. We didn’t discuss sex. With someone who’s going to be married and who you’ve only known as an adult for a dozen hours…well, you don’t. Only after several whiskies (I take back what I said about Laphroaig: it’s brilliant stuff) was I bold enough to say, “About this place.” I gestured to the house behind us and waved vaguely across the lawns in front of us, and the darkening landscape beyond. “What happens to it now?”

  “It’s mine,” he said. “All mine. Every brick and stone. Every wood and field and pond. Every cottage on the estate.” He didn’t sound at all happy about this. “And I’m just trying to become a doctor.”

  “But your sisters?” I said. “And Lolli?”

  “Lolli gets a house on the estate to live in rent free for life—if that’s what she wants to do.”

  “And you get the big house?” I should have worked this out for myself but I hadn’t. I was slightly gobsmacked. “It sounds more like 1910 than 2010,” I said, which was not very diplomatic of me. When whisky talks it rarely counsels prudence. But Felix didn’t take it badly. He laughed and said, “It may be 2010 in London. Even Glasgow…” and left it there. “My sisters,” he went on, “each got a packet when they got married. A very generous one. They don’t come in for any more.”

  “You mean, like a dowry?” I said. It sounded medieval.

  “No, Jonty,” Felix answered, the use of my name making me feel like a reprimanded schoolboy. “The money remains theirs; it wasn’t handed over to their husbands. We may not have joined the twenty-first century but we’ve got beyond the Middle Ages.”

  “Sorry, Felix,” I said. He topped up my glass.

  “The thing is,” he said, sounding like this thing was rather a big thing, “it’s all in the expectation of my getting married. Marrying Rhona. Who as well as being stunning looking and intelligent is pretty wealthy in her own right.”

  Mind your mouth, I told myself. Don’t let the whisky say anything. “Hmm,” I said, and asked about the agenda for the morning.

  It did get dark eventually and we went inside. “Will Rhona be over tomorrow?” I asked then, as we washed up our glasses in the kitchen rather than leave them in the dishwasher for Jenny to deal with in the morning.

  “No,” he said. “She won’t be over again till the funeral. She lives in Edinburgh. Her own flat in the New Town.”

  Edinburgh. I was astonished by that. A pretty long drive from Glasgow, an even longer one from here. I’d drunk two large whiskies since I thought we didn’t know each other well enough to talk about sex. I said, “Do you…I mean…do you sleep together?”

  Felix looked suddenly awkward and for a moment I saw him as a three-year-old again as his eyes hid themselves behind his long lashes. “No, we don’t.”

  To spare him I looked up at the kitchen clock. It said one o’clock. “Hey,” I said. “I can’t believe that’s the time.” I’d been awake since four, watching the dawn on the fells and the Scottish border, and Felix must have woken early himself to come and meet me off the train at six. “I guess it’s bedtime.” We said good night at the top of the stairs and went our different ways along the landing.

  The next day was another round of errands and tasks that kept Felix and me in separate orbits for most of the time. I drove where I was told to, delivering and collecting things and people as required. You don’t realize how much there is to do when someone dies, until you find yourself in the thick of it. It was after dinner, nightcap time, before Felix and I were alone together. I’d spent all day looking forward to this moment: stupid, lovelorn me. And yet when the moment came, there was a look of something in Felix’s eyes—soon to be married Felix, didn’t sleep with his girlfriend Felix—that made me wonder, though not too hopefully, might he have been looking forward to this moment too?

  We took our glasses—and for good measure the bottle too—out through the French windows and onto the lawn. There was some special stuff you had to burn (Felix had used it the night before too) to keep the midges away. We said, “Cheers,” to each other, clinked glasses, then Felix, sitting beside me on the grass, turned his whole body toward me, looked me full in the face—his own face looking very serious, troubled even—and said, “I’m gay.”

  There followed an echoing silence, like in a cavern. It was as if Felix had heaved a boulder over the edge of something and was waiting for the splash. I realized that he was waiting for me to speak. I said, “So am I.” It wasn’t the moment to tell him I’d been in love with him for forty hours.

  He really did, quite literally, sigh with relief. “I didn’t know you were,” he said very quietly. “I really didn’t. You don’t show it in any obvious way…”

  “Neither do you…”

  “…But I kind of hoped it. Since I heard your voice answer your parents’ phone the other day. You were so…friendly. I mean, I know that doesn’t mean a person’s gay. I mean… Oh, shit, I’m sounding stupid.”

  Not half as stupid as I wanted to sound, blurting “I love you” into his face. I had almost physically to restrain myself. “It doesn’t sound stupid,” I told him instead. “It sounds…nice.”

  Two guys tell each other they’re gay. It doesn’t mean they want to sleep together, let alone that they’re going to. I mean, imagine it in a hetero context. He: “I’m straight.” She: “Me too.” See what I mean? Doesn’t get you very far. I took a sip of whisky to give my racing thoughts time to catch up. “What about Rhona?” I asked eventually. “Does she know?”

  He shook his head, his face tense with worry again. “No. No one does.”

  I could understand him being reticent with his very traditional family. “But your friends in Glasgow,” I said. “You must be out to them?”

  “Only one or two. Not with most of them.”

  “But are you…?” I didn’t know how to put this. Did he have sex with anyone? Had he ever?

  “Do I have a busy sex life, you mean. No. Except for the obvious. Though I’ve done enough to know what and who I am. But that’s it.”

  I decided not to pursue this further. But he did, with me. “What about you?”

  “I had a couple of affairs at uni,” I said. “Nothing major. And I don’t have anyone now.” Actually I’d had more than a couple of affairs at university, but I wasn’t going to rub his nose in it. And the last part was true at least. I hadn’t had sex with anyone for months.

  Now it was I who’d pushed something over the precipice, and it was his turn to react. But he took his time, gazing away through the dusk toward the distant fields, which all belonged to him. Then he looked back at me, his eyes haunted and big, like dark lamps. He said, “Can I kiss you?”

  We went to his room that night. It was farther away from the others’ than mine. Stripped naked, he was more beautiful than ever, more beautiful than anyone I’d slept with or even seen. To my surprise, and probably to his, neither of us had much of a hard-on. We were too awed, I think, by the situation, by whatever (we didn’t dare to name it aloud) had happened to us. We simply stood facing each other, next to his bed, taking in each other’s naked, glowing form. I reached out a hand and ran it down the middle of his chest to just above his navel, where a tiny central line of hair licked up from below like a slender black flame. He began, silently, to cry.

  He had every right to, I thought. The stress of losing a father and now this. But by what right did I then follow his example and into the silence spill a load of tears myself? I took him in my arms and he took me in his.

  No other kind of load was spilled by either of us that night. We cuddled ourselves to sleep. But first light found us both with robust hard dicks, and we each came, with almost comical superabundance, in the other’s hand, overflowing our bellies and soaking the sheet, before I reluctantly tiptoed from his room and back to mine.

  For the next two days we led a double life. We spent our nights together, in the full flood of new love, and we spent our days pretending that we didn’t, pretending that we weren’t. In the evenings we couldn’t wait for the others to go to bed. Our whisky intake was reduced (good for our livers) to a single glass, and that was downed in record-breaking time, so impatient were we for bed, for the other’s body, the other’s dick. For the whole, wonderful, wondrous other person. Felix for his Jonty. Jonty for his Felix.

  After a couple of days—we were in the garden at the time—Felix said, “Stay on a few more days after the funeral. Please. Phone your parents. Tell the Post Office you need a few more days off.”

  “The Royal Mail,” I said. “They’re not the same thing anymore.”

  “Whatever,” Felix said. “I don’t want this to end. It can’t.”

  That was how I felt too. But I said, “It can’t go on forever. You know it can’t. I can’t live under your roof indefinitely and nobody twig. Think about Rhona. Unless you intend to tell her and have the whole thing out.”

  “I want you here indefinitely,” he said crossly. I’d never known him other than mild tempered in the four days since our idyll began, though he was cross with himself more than with me. Then he stamped away across the lawn.

  I didn’t attempt to follow him. I want that too, I want that more than anything. But I said the words to myself.

  I didn’t think we’d have to wait till the funeral before seeing Rhona again, and I was right. She came for lunch that day and stayed most of the afternoon. She was friendly toward me as before, and we talked easily over the lunch table, but I let Felix be alone with her in the afternoon, finding jobs for myself to do, taking the dogs for a run. After she’d gone, Felix said to me, “I’ve told her you’ll be in the front row with us in the church tomorrow. You and me with Lolli and Rhona on one side, my sisters and their husbands on the other.”

  I thought this an odd way to proceed. It fell right between what I’d thought of as the only two alternatives—to go on clandestinely as we were until our affair petered out, or for Felix to make a clean breast of it and let his house fall about his ears. For I was quite sure that if he did come out to Rhona and his family, his sisters and Lolli would be able to challenge his father’s will and kick him out of Endes for good. Then what would happen to him and me? Would we share a small room at my parents’? Both of us work part time delivering letters? Or would I go to the Glasgow flat and be unemployed and in the way there? I couldn’t see our fragile, new-hatched love surviving either of those eventualities. I couldn’t see anything that didn’t look like a dead end, a brick wall. I guessed the same went for him. “How did she react to that?” I asked.

  “She was fine with it,” was all he said.

  We didn’t discuss Rhona or any of this again that day. Neither of us was able to. We waited till night came and then took refuge in each other, in sex. We were good for that, at least. Felix had had his first fucks with me, on the giving and receiving end just half an hour apart, on our third night. He was a gentle lover and a wonderful one. When he first entered me he made sure we were face-to-face. He wanted to see the blue light of my eyes, he said. He said they were like the sky. Often we were happy enough to pleasure each other by hand, to enjoy the sight of our milk-white spurts and our bellies aflood. His cock was not enormous and neither were his balls. But they were the most beautiful I’d ever seen, his cock elegantly hooded, which mine (he laughingly compared it to a shillelagh) is not. He also called me beautiful, which stunned me. Other people had done, once or twice before, when they’d had a certain amount of drink inside them, but none of those had Felix’s looks: that face, that perfect body. I wouldn’t have imagined for a moment that I might appear beautiful in Felix’s eyes, but apparently I did. That night before we buried his late dad we hugged each other closely, with little hope for the future beyond the next few days.

  The service went like clockwork. Felix was a meticulous planner, his sisters too, and I’d helped. The little church in Dalbeattie was packed, and bright with sun; the showers held off. When the coffin was carried in, a swallow followed through the open door and flew quickly round the church before returning to the outdoors. I heard Lolli whisper to Felix that it was his father’s soul, freed now to fly through the sunshine. Caterers came to Endes to prepare food and drink. A huge number of people came back from the church to eat and drink it. And though you’re not supposed to notice this, the quality of the provisions was seriously good. Felix looked outrageously handsome, formally attired and in a kilt. He looked terrifically sexy in it, those handsome legs of his, which I knew so well the feel of, on public show; those well-formed, perfect calves. I wondered, watching him, what everyone always wonders about kilt-wearing Scotsmen and couldn’t wait for the opportunity—which I knew wouldn’t come before nightcap time—to find out. (I did find out at nightcap time, out on the lawn. I ran my hand up the soft inside of his warm thighs and found no barrier between my fingers and his businesslike cock and balls. He was already very wet up there in anticipation, and hardening at my approach, and my exploring hand was shortly replaced in that warm darkness by my head. But I’m running on a bit too fast.)

  Rhona came looking for me among the crowds that drank to Max’s memory that afternoon. She was dressed in brilliant black. I was nervous of her now but could hardly run away. “It was nice to have you with us in the church,” she said. “I mean at Felix’s side.” I must have gaped at her, because she smiled and said, “Sorry. I know that sounded really silly. Those things are. But today it mattered. You see, I know it mattered, because I know what it means.”

  “You know what it means?” I blustered. “What does it mean?”

  She put a hand on my arm, very gently. “You know what it means.” She stopped a moment. “Sorry. These things are difficult. What is expected of us. Who we are. They don’t always fit. Jonty, you don’t need to look at me like that.” (I didn’t know how I was looking at her. I tried to smile. It felt a bit flinty.) “Felix is a very sensitive boy. You know that, of course, because so are you.” She paused a half second. Then, “I know that Felix is gay. We’ve been friends since childhood, and I know him very well. I guessed some time ago.”

  “You’re all set to marry him,” I protested.

 

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