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Geordie isn’t expecting Sidney's absence at Ardalanish that August to leave him in quite such bad temper. It's not as though Sidney’s remaining back home is a last-minute disappointment. They've known Leonard's study leave was coming for nearly a year. They had even, collectively, made the decision that having Leonard leave for Boston in June, in time to do a summer course at Harvard Divinity School, so he could be back by Christmas would be less disruptive to both the parish and to all of their interconnected households.
"It's only one year," Sidney had pointed out, reasonably, as he, Geordie, and Cathy had talked it through at the Keatings' kitchen table. That had been back in March, just before Easter, with a driving rain falling hard against the windowpanes. Summer had seemed an age away. "And it means I'll be able to take some extended leave in January when the kids are on holiday." Geordie had tipped his head in acknowledgement of the proposal, distracted by the way Sidney was running the toe of his stockinged foot -- damp from the cycle over -- absently up the bridge of Geordie's foot and back to his toe. Up and back. Up and back. Geordie had had to close his hands around his half-drunk cup of tea to keep from reaching down and pulling Sidney’s foot into his lap for a rub. He could hear the kids arguing over their board game in the sitting room. It wasn’t the time nor the place.
"We’d miss you," Cathy’s voice had interrupted Geordie’s wandering thoughts. She was at the stove, putting the kettle on the hob. "But Jennifer's due in January -- if you were about to help Geordie during the winter holiday, then I could spend a couple of weeks in London. Since Jennifer's not got a mum to help her learn what's what."
Sidney had looked to Geordie, then, who had been unable to think of a rational reason to argue with them. "I'll reserve some of my leave time for the end of the year then, eh?" he says, looking first to Sidney and then Cathy as she settles back at the table and picks up a piece of Mrs M’s shortbread. "It'll be just like old times, aye? You and Caro can go up early with the young savages before I arrive. Sidney and I can use the time to repaint the bedrooms like we've been aiming to."
He had seen Sidney hesitate, because of something he’s seen -- or thinks he’s seen -- in Geordie's expression, and then decide not to raise the question. Instead of speaking, he’d just put a hand, briefly, on Geordie’s wrist before reaching beyond Geordie’s place at the table for another shortbread from the tin. They've been doing this dance of needs and wants for long enough now that all of them know sometimes imperfect solutions are the only way forward. There was never enough time.
They'll have two weeks without the constant interruptions of children not at school, Geordie had told himself. Two weeks with a project that gives Sidney a plausible excuse to come around to the house when Geordie's off duty. Two weeks when he won’t have to stop himself from caressing the arch of Sidney’s foot for fear of being seen. So he’d quieted the grumbling discontent that rose as he imagined Ardalanish without Sidney for the first time in eight years.
It's not until Geordie arrives at the Lodge in mid-August, and drops his suitcase on the neatly-made bed, that he begins to realize he's ill-tempered in a way that goes beyond the long train journey, the wait for the ferry at Oban, and the last, bumpy leg of the journey in Caro’s car.
Caro and Esme had stopped at the quay to pick him up on their way back from a run into the village, and he’d rested his aching forehead against the cool glass of the passenger-side window as Esme had hung over the seat from behind and kept up a running patter of news. He usually enjoys seeing the kids after he, or they, have been away for more than a day or two -- and part of him was, truly, happy to have arrived. But the car had felt wrong, the sea air had felt wrong, the midsummer sun bright overhead had seemed to mock him with its relentless good cheer.
It’s mid afternoon, now, and at least the sun has climbed up over the slate of the roof of the lodge and begun its descent to the west, leaving the north-facing rooms -- including the one in which Geordie now stands -- in shadow. This room used to be the spare bedroom; he has a vague recollection of a cousin of Caro's staying in it one of the early summers they were here. But it's been Sidney's every August since '55 and that means that it's been Geordie's as well -- just a discreet pass through the shared washroom from the bedroom he still nominally shares with Cathy, the one Cathy and Caro had been sharing for the past two weeks. The fact that he'd climbed the stairs and taken his suitcase to Sidney's room without thinking belies the paper-thin pretense of their nod to the more conventional life they outwardly lead.
This one month, he thinks to himself, resisting the urge to kick -- hard -- at the leg of the chair under the window. One month out of twelve when they didn't worry quite so much about who might see a touch shared or hear words exchanged. And he resents Leonard -- even though he knows that's unfair, knows they owe Leonard far more than six months for a thousand small kindnesses -- for having gone off to America and robbed them of this.
Geordie sits down on the bed to untie his shoes. Perhaps he will feel better for having had a wash, before tea, to get the grime of travel off his skin.
Conversation filters up from the garden, Esme and Cathy talking about the shopping. He can hear Caro banging about in the kitchen. The other three children have disappeared for the afternoon -- they know the land around the lodge like they do their own home and will turn up grubby and bruised as Cathy puts food on the table. Unless they've been sent off with sandwiches and a flask of tea. Then they won't see Dora and Davie, at least, until the fireflies are out.
He looks around the room as he undresses for a wash. It's tidy and a bit impersonal; other members of the family have no doubt stayed here since the day last year when he and Sidney had packed their bags. Someone -- probably Cath -- has made up the bed recently. And the top of the bureau is free of dust. There's a drawing of a mermaid -- Ivy's, he thinks, several years old and curled from the humid air -- tucked in a lower corner of the mirror.
Along the back of the bureau are a collection of driftwood and shells -- things he, or Sidney, or one of the children had found and taken a fancy to. A short stack of books -- the essays of E.B. White, the paperback mysteries Cathy and Sidney swap back and forth, a bird identification guide -- sits on the bedside table under the reading lamp.
He shucks off his shirt and unbuckles his trousers, letting them drop to the floor and stepping out of them. He leaves them on the faded carpet to be collected later for the washing and pads barefoot across to the washroom, tracing his fingers across the books as he passes. A reminder that Sidney is present here, in some small way, even if at this particular moment he's back in Grantchester. Conducting a funeral if Geordie remembers right. Wish you were here, he thinks to himself, as he leans over the edge of the porcelain claw-foot tub to turn on the taps.
Lukewarm water from the Lodge's ancient pipes -- installed just before the Great War -- sluices over Geordie's skin as he steps in, washing away the film of travel. He closes his eyes and leans back in the tub, trying to let the water ease the tension in his neck and shoulders. He can feel the dull ache from the work he and Sidney have been doing over the past two weeks. They repainted the kids’ rooms as well as the upstairs hallway. It had been good, productive labor. Like weeding the garden. He'd come home from his day shift in time for afternoon tea and Sidney would show up with Dickens about the time the kettle was whistling. They'd paint from tea time until supper, then putter in the Keating's vegetable garden or the vicarage garden as necessary before the sun went down.
Sidney had brought over his jazz records and Geordie had let him play his wandering tunes from teatime until supper. After supper it was Geordie's turn to pick one of the handful of classical records that Sidney and Caro have been acquiring for him. He's even bought a few of his own, though he finds the selection in the shops where Sidney takes him in London somewhat overwhelming. It's been a slow process, rediscovering the music he'd loved as a boy and then abandoned for so many years.
Several times, when their work obligations had both allowed, Sidney had stayed the night. It had felt a bit like the week between Christmas and New Year's, when Cathy and Caro took the kids to Edinburgh and he and Sidney stayed behind: a still house, slapdash meals, and Sidney -- always Sidney within arm’s reach. There are few things Geordie enjoys more than waking up with Sidney wrapped around him knowing that neither of them have anywhere pressing to be until long after breakfast.
It had been a bit like being at Ardalanish. Except in all of the ways it wasn't because Sidney still had committee meetings to attend and a baptism to perform and Sunday services and sick calls, and Geordie'd had a mountain of paperwork to clear off his desk before his fortnight away, and a string of petty thefts, and a husband who's slapping his wife around, and (thankfully only briefly) a missing child who'd turned out to have followed a cat into the neighbor's shrubbery and fallen asleep.
And then his desk was cleared, and what couldn't be cleared was handed off, and he was packing his suitcase for the morning train and Sidney ... wasn't.
Geordie towels off from the shower and digs a fresh change of clothes from his case. When he makes his way downstairs the kitchen is empty but there's a still-warm kettle and Caro or Cathy has left a cup and saucer on the drainboard. He lights the burner to coax the water back to a boil and goes hunting in the icebox for the milk from the farm up the road.
When he emerges from the kitchen door into the yard, the afternoon sun has gone behind a bank of clouds rolling in from the West.
"Storm's on it's way," Cathy says from the lounge where she's settled with one of her paperbacks and a gin and tonic. "It'll be raining in earnest in an hour."
"The kids know to come in?" Geordie, barefoot, gingerly makes his way across the gravel of the drive to the grass where Cathy's chair stands under the towering pine. Caro and Sidney had found the lawn chairs at a rummage sale the summer before last, had the children help them sand and re-varnish them. He sits back in an empty one with a sigh and stretches his travel-weary legs.
Cathy nods. "Mm. They're to stay away from the ocean in a storm. If they want to get wet that's their business, but they'll be wanting supper. And to see you."
"They see me all the time," Geordie says, blowing on his tea.
"Doesn't mean they haven't been asking after you and Sidney," Cathy says, tipping her head back and closing her eyes.
Geordie sighs. "They'll be disappointed then."
"They know he isn't coming because Leonard's away," Cathy waves away the concern. "It's just he's apparently left off in the middle of a rather exciting bit of The Hobbit and Dora, especially, is pouting."
"She can take her place in the queue then," Geordie grumbles. Cathy gives him a sympathetic look. He takes a cautious sip of tea. It's cooled enough not to burn his tongue.
"You could have stayed at home," Cathy says. "With the children near grown it's not ‘all hands on deck’ like it used to be.
But Geordie shakes his head. They'd talked about that possibility back in June. "If I'd backed out of the entire holiday people would've talked. You know that as well as I do."
Cathy snorts. "Busybodies. Women without enough to do." She says it like she has particular women in mind and he wonders -- not for the first time -- what nosy questions about the health of her marriage she deflects at the church, the W.I., or from the neighbors. She's always been reluctant to share details with him or Sidney because, she says, it will only make them fret. It's better not to know.
Geordie isn't sure he agrees with her, but has given up pressing her for names. He's had to admit, reluctantly, over the years that it is better for Sidney to practice selective ignorance when it comes to parishioners' opinions of his personal life. Mrs M and Cathy between them seem to keep the worst of the gossips firmly in line.
"Where'd Caro get to?" He asks, looking around.
"Mmm," Cathy responds without opening her eyes. "She went upstairs to lie down." She cracks an eyelid. "You didn't hear her?"
Geordie shakes his head. "Must've come up while I was in the bath." He pauses. "I've put my things in Sidney's room. Is that where you wanted me?" It feels odd, to think of sleeping on his own in Sidney's bedroom. In the years before Sidney was in their lives, he and Cathy had always occupied the larger of the two bedrooms along that hall, and if Cathy and Caro wanted to share a bed Cathy would go to Caro's room. For nearly a decade, now, they've nominally kept three rooms occupied when they're at the Lodge -- but in reality Cathy and Caro have shared the master bedroom while Sidney and Geordie have stayed in the smaller. Without Sidney here, it seems like they should revert back to the old system, but he finds he's reluctant to do so.
Cathy smiles. "Why else would I have made the bed up?" She reaches out with a toe and nudges his foot. "You know the kids are used to Caro and I sharing a room when you're not here."
"But now that I am..."
Cathy considers him. "You do realize that just because they haven't asked doesn't mean they don't know?"
Geordie chokes on his tea. "Cath!"
She waves her hand in front of her face as if brushing away midges. "They're not going around saying to themselves 'Mum's getting cozy with Aunt Caro while Dad's shagging Uncle Sidney,' but they know. They know we're not like other families. And I'll bet you ten quid Esme asks one of the two of us before this time next year."
It isn't that Geordie has never imagined the day would come. He's just very used to it being ... not now. Esme might be shooting up like a weed -- she'll be taller than both him and Cath at this rate -- but he still thinks of her as their little girl. He feels the cold trickle of fear that, when she knows this about him, that's all she will be able to see.
"I hope to God she asks you," he says, not entirely in jest. Cathy just looks at him narrowly.
"And what is it you'll be wanting me to say if she does?" They've had this conversation before -- usually much later at night and after they've both been drinking. Geordie's starting to wish he'd made himself a gin and tonic like Cathy's.
"I don't --" he stops. "You know I'm no good at putting words to it."
"Well, what I'm suggesting is we want to start thinking of some," Cathy says. She sighs and dog-ears the page of her paperback, dropping it on the grass next to her chair. "Oh, love, I wish I had easy answers. Every year we come here and I think, if only..."
"If only...?"
"If only it could be like this always," she rolls her head to look at him. "Oh, I'm sure I'd miss village life soon enough. But our life feels so much easier here, when we aren't forever saying, 'who will talk about this,' or 'who might see that,' and wondering what the kids must hear in the school yard. We just get to be."
There's a distant rumble of thunder. It will start to rain soon, Geordie thinks. He looks at his wife and thinks -- not for the first time -- how if not for her steadfast determination this life he has would never have come about. He thinks about how much of what they have she's made possible through what his gran would have called ‘spit’n elbow grease’.
"I don't thank you enough, Cath," he says.
"What for?" She looks at him, surprised.
He shrugs. "For believing in this? In us? For being bloody-minded enough to keep us going all these years?"
Cathy studies him for another long moment. "Geordie," she finally says, leaning forward to put a hand on his bare ankle. "You're welcome. Just remember that we've been a good team since the beginning of this adventure, aye?"
He feels the warmth of her hand, smaller than Sidney's, thumb rubbing small circles against his ankle bone.
"Caro and I, we came to you with a thoroughly outrageous proposal. I would never have had an us to believe in --" said in a way that encompasses not only herself and Caro, but their children, Geordie, and Sidney too "-- if you hadn't dared say 'yes.' "
She squeezes his ankle one last time, briskly, and then stands and puts out a hand as the rain begins to fall. "Come in and help me peel the potatoes for supper."