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Cathy is drying the last of the breakfast dishes when there’s a knock at the front door.
Geordie left for work half an hour past, and Caro has the three older children down at the houseboat for the morning so Cathy can get some housework done without tripping over the girls. That leaves her with only Davie to look after, in his highchair in the corner chewing thoughtfully on his teething ring, occasionally banging it on the chair’s wooden tray.
She’s been expecting the knock, which is part of why Caro had offered to whisk the girls away after breakfast, and isn’t at all surprised to open the front door to a hopeful looking vicar with a gangly black Labrador sitting obediently (though with an equally hopeful expression) at his heels.
“You’ll be wanting to come in then,” she says with a smile and a tip of her head toward the kitchen. “It’s just me ‘n wee Davie at present. Caro’s got the girls down at the river.” Even in the shadow of the doorway she can see the fine lines around his eyes, the faint sluggishness to his responses. If she hadn’t spent near ten years living with a policeman she never would have seen his tells -- but Sidney is carrying a deep weariness about and has come here in hopes of laying his burden down.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” Sidney says by way of greeting, ducking inside and waiting in the narrow hall as she pulls the door shut.
“And you don’t look as if you slept much more than Geordie did last night,” Cathy remarks, shooing him down the hall with a flap of her dishtowel. “Go on, I’ve the kettle on and we’ll set ourselves up with a cuppa so you can say what’s on your mind.”
“You know,” Sidney offers lightly -- if a bit tiredly -- as he drops into the chair Cathy indicates at the kitchen table. “I’m usually the one offering the tea.” That’s part of the problem, Cathy thinks but doesn’t say, You and Geordie. Always looking after us all. Dickens circles the small room, then settles next to his master. Davie squawks at the newcomer, banging his ring on the tray, and Cathy goes over to pick him up.
“You know Sidney, and Dickens,” she observes rhetorically, juggling Davie on her hip as he coos and twists to look at the dog below.
“Here, Cathy, let me take him for you,” Sidney offers, reaching up to accept the wriggling toddler from her arms. She lets him pull Davie into his lap, where Davie sprawls on Sidney’s knee and leans precipitously out over his arm to drop the teething ring on Dickens’ head. Dickens looks up and wags his tail. Davie squeals at the movement he’s precipitated and stretches both hands toward the floor. Cathy scoops up the toy, giving Dickens a scratch behind the ears, and hands it back to Davie on her way to the stove. She turns up the flame under the kettle she’s been keeping warm in anticipation of Sidney’s arrival.
She busies herself with preparing the teapot and setting out cups and saucers, fetching the cream from the icebox, while Sidney talks nonsense to the baby. She knows he has questions and can hazard a guess as to what they are, but thinks it best if he finds his own way to asking them. He waits until she pours the boiling water into the pot and sets the pot in its cozy on the table between them, settling as she does so into the chair opposite, before he speaks.
“Geordie came to see me last night,” he begins, and it doesn’t escape her notice that he’s watching her face for a reaction. She nods, agreeing with the statement -- yes, she knows, he’d gone with her blessing -- and waits.
“He told me some things about...We spoke about your family. And I...I am not impartial when it comes to Geordie, Cathy, I --” He runs his free hand distractedly through his hair. His face is a paler shade of pale than usual, even under the midsummer tan, and his eyes are faintly red-rimmed as if from crying. She sees the slight tremble in his hand as he forces himself to lay it flat on the table next to his teacup and wonders how much it’s cost him to come here.
“It’s not that I don’t...trust Geordie. To tell the truth,” he tries again, choosing his words carefully. She almost thinks painfully. “It’s that in this particular instance I am afraid I will give in too willingly to … what I hope to hear. And I can’t in good conscience continue if it would be to … if it would betray ...” His ring and middle fingers are restless against the table, tapping out a staccato rhythm against the well-worn wood.
She takes sympathy on him and reaches out with both hands to cover his, stilling the fingers and giving his wrist a reassuring squeeze.
“Geordie’s made a hash of explanations, hasn’t he?” she asks, laughing softly to herself at the image. In the near-decade this has been their life, the world has been divided into two categories: people who already knew and people who must never find out. It will be years, she thinks, before the children can cross from one category to the other. None of them have needed words to explain themselves to outsiders. At her laugh, Sidney smiles. It’s faint but a smile nevertheless, and once more Cathy feels gratitude welling up in her chest, thankfulness that this generous, inquisitive man has found his way -- that Geordie’s taken the chance of inviting him -- into their odd little circle.
“Perhaps just a bit,” he hedges. “I admit I was rather...distracted. By events.”
Cathy raises an eyebrow, “ ‘Events’?” She has a general idea of what shape the evening must have taken. Geordie had looked good this morning. Lighter was the word that came to mind. He’d been a bit ragged around the edges, but relieved, and managed to tell her on his way out the door that the she had been right after all -- this said with a boyish grin both she and Caro had seen and delighted in -- and that she would probably see the vicar ‘round sometime today. To check in on the family.
Sidney has the grace to blush, though he lets Cathy hold his gaze. “I hadn’t exactly expected him to -- last night, in the garden.”
Cathy withdraws her hand from his wrist to pour the tea. “No,” she agrees, not even trying to suppress the genuine smile that comes to her at the thought, “Geordie is often rather unexpected.”
She thinks of the way Caro had introduced Geordie, so many years ago, into their lives. How she never anticipated that a dozen years later she would be sitting here, across from the village vicar, having a conversation about how the vicar wished to kiss her husband.
“That’s one way to put it,” Sidney snorts, shaking his head. “If you’d asked me teatime yesterday what I --” He stops short and licks his lips, and Cathy has the impression he’s remembering something. She thinks, suddenly and unavoidably, of his mouth on Geordie’s, of the two of them kissing. She feels it like a tug and release deep in her belly -- an unexpectedly visceral reaction, a relief from tension she hasn’t been aware of holding. Finally -- finally -- Geordie has this, too.
She closes her eyes against the sudden fear that any one of them might misstep, might cause this fragile new reality to crumble before they even --
“Cathy --?” She hears a new note of alarm in his voice. He’s mistaken her relief for sadness, perhaps, or disappointment. “Cathy, I didn’t mean -- if you want me to go away and never come back -- I’ll, I can talk to the Bishop, ask to be moved. There need be no -- I’ll make up a reason.” She hears the creak of the table and chair as he leans forward, opens her eyes as he reaches urgently across the table to lay his free hand on her arm.
She shakes her head over his scrambled offers and folds a reassuring hand over his. Stay. “I’m glad, Sidney,” is what actually comes out of her mouth, and she’s surprised to feel tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. “I wasn’t certain --” -- that Geordie would ever find someone, that he would listen to me, that he would actually take the chance, that you’d meet him halfway --
“Geordie said you knew he was coming to talk to me last night,” Sidney says, half statement, half question. “That he had your permission to -- but I didn’t exactly anticipate -- Cathy, you were the one suggesting he ‘find me a girl’ not twenty-four hours ago! And now you’re...now you’re...” He leans back in his chair, adjusting Davie in his lap, and runs the hand he’s pulled from Cathy’s arm through his curls again. He digs his fingers in and pulls at his hair as if he wants it to hurt.
She narrows her eyes at him: “I had to test my theory, didn’t I. Couldn’t exactly come right out and ask if you were interested in my husband, now, could I?”
He blanches. “I am not that bloody obvious.”
She gives him a look. “Life hasn’t treated our Geordie kindly in these matters. He wasn’t ever going to risk it unless I gave him a nudge. And I wasn’t going to nudge until I was sure.” She takes a sip of her tea.
“And, just so we’re clear, you’re bloody obvious to those of us who know what to look for.”
He opens his mouth as if to speak, then flushes and looks away toward the window behind her left shoulder. She wonders what he’s seeing. Whatever it is, it’s beyond her ken because it isn’t in the window but locked in that muddled brain of his.
She sips her tea and resists the impulse to fill the space left by an absence of words.
“Look,” he says, finally, “Cathy. I think it might be best if I just ask you outright. Geordie explained to me last night that you wouldn’t... mind if he and I -- he and I were -- were lovers.” He stumbles over the word. Cathy watches him struggle and wonders how many times he’s turned the idea around in his own head before saying the word aloud. How many times he’s thought it about himself in relation to another man. How many times he’s thought about it in relation to their Geordie.
As a vicar she knows he’s spoken of such men without recrimination, but she also knows that’s different. Geordie’s made half a dozen indecency charges disappear from the record books, but that doesn’t do much to mitigate the self-loathing, the anger, the fear she sometimes sees in moments of exhaustion or particular vulnerability. People might look at Caro and herself and see sickness; they would look at her husband and Sidney and see criminality.
She thinks about how much it’s cost Sidney to bicycle over here, today, and sit himself down at her kitchen table. His fingers are drumming on the table again. Perhaps in his head there’s a tune from one of his jazz records. Itchy, like the jitterbug they used to dance during the war.
“I married Geordie knowing that he loved men,” Cathy says. “That was never a secret, or something shameful between us. It is part of what makes us...work."
“But you have --” Sidney can’t stop himself from glancing down at the child on his knee.
“Geordie and I both wanted children,” Cathy says. “And we are friends with a great deal of affection for one another.” She takes another sip of her lukewarm tea, smiling around the edge of her cup as she considers how to answer the question he hasn’t exactly asked. “You’d be surprised what can be accomplished with friendship, patience, and a good bottle of wine.”
That startles a laugh out of him, as she had hoped it would. The noise makes Davie look up from where he’s drooling on his toy, craning his neck to look up at Sidney, then his mother, trying to decide whether making a fuss will get him more attention than either of them are currently paying him.
“The children are his, Sidney,” Cathy says. “His and mine. We wanted them. Together. And we are both happy to have them. But I’ve always --” Oh, but it’s difficult to speak of Caro to a stranger. Not a stranger any longer, she reminds herself. Geordie’s invited him in. She herself has invited him in. She trusts him. Not because he’s the vicar, but because he’s been there for Geordie -- and for her -- when they needed him. And because he’s kind. And because of the way he looks at Geordie when he doesn’t think Geordie’s looking back.
She sets her cup before herself and turns it until the handle lines up with the edge of the table, squared. Takes a deep breath.
“ ‘Not the romance of the century’?” he finally asks, wry, and she hears the quotation in his voice. “That’s how Geordie put it to me last night. He said you had -- you had a friend.”
“Caro,” Cathy says, feeling the shape of Caroline's name in her mouth as an invocation.
“ ‘I’d no more think of asking them to separate than I would sending one of me own kids away,’ he said,” Sidney continues, looking down at Davie, and Cathy wonders if he remembers the confessions of all his parishioners in such minute and ready detail -- or if it’s Geordie whose words have made such a particular impression.
“He never has,” she agrees. “It’s never been that way between the three of us. It was Caro and me first, you see, and then Geordie -- but I’ll get it as muddled as Geordie did telling it this way, won't I?” She pauses, toying with the handle of her teacup, and tries to think how to begin. At the beginning, she supposes. But where that is...
“I was born in Kenya,” she says, finally. “Between the wars. My father managed a plantation in the mountains above Mombasa. I lived there, with my parents until I was seven and then -- like my two older sisters -- I was sent back home to England, where I had never been, to a boarding school in Kent.”
“Must have been hard," Sidney quietly interjects.
“It was,” Cathy agrees, “but I think that’s a story for another day. Although it did teach me to recognize the feeling of...of not-belonging at an early age.” She considers the tea at the bottom of her cup.
“It was at school that I met Caro. Caroline Mackenzie. She was three years ahead of me, but like me had been recently sent home from abroad -- India in her case -- so we found friendship in the anger and misery of homesickness, of knowing no one here in England except relatives we had never met with whom we were expected to stay on holiday. Her family had more money than mine, and she would insist to her grandparents I was required as a companion … they never said no to Caro.”
Davie’s grown bored with his toy and the distraction of a sleeping Dickens on the floor and is beginning to fuss, so Cathy pauses in her story to get up from her chair to take him from Sidney. She settles the baby on her hip and begins the practiced one-handed routine of heating formula for his mid-morning feed.
“Your sisters?” Sidney asks, turning in his chair to watch her at the stove.
“My eldest sister May was already in a nurse training program,” Cathy says as she lights the gas. “Seven years older than me, I barely remembered her. She was an ambulance driver during the war and died in London, during the Blitz.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Sidney says, more or less automatically, although Cathy can tell the sentiment is genuine.
“Thank you,” she says, an equally automatic response. The loss is no longer fresh, one of many they suffered during the war, though she still remembers how helpless she had felt, at the time, in the face of her sister Tess’s grief.
“Tess, my other sister, is a year older than Caroline. When I arrived she was still at St. Agnes’s, and I spent my first Christmas with her and my aunt and uncle -- my mother’s brother, he was a vicar,” this earns her a smile, “-- in Basingstoke. They had a daughter Tess’s age, Charlotte, and a son Tommy who ignored me. I was dreadfully bored.”
“Enter Caro?” Sidney asks, with raised eyebrow and a smile.
“Enter Caro,” she agrees, “who put up with my moaning for less than a week before hatching a scheme to invite me to Edinburgh for the Easter hols. We had a wonderful time and after that...after that we were inseparable.”
She tests the warming formula with a finger, then pours it into the waiting bottle. Davie watches her with his head heavy against her shoulder. Perhaps he’ll eat and drift off to sleep for a bit. “Soon enough,” she continues, “we’d become Cath-and-Caro. Everyone at school expected us to be seen together, inseparable. Girls at school had passionate friendships, you understand, ‘crushes’ on the older girls. We were expected to grow out them of course. But Caro and I never did.”
Cathy remembers, clearly, the moment in her health sciences class when it dawned upon her that she and Caro were expected to move on from one another. That Caro was a way-station, a stage, in preparation for an adult life spent with someone else in the place Caro had come to occupy.
It had been a horrifying thought.
It had been followed by the even more horrifying realization that Caroline, being older and more worldly (young Cathy believed at the time), might expect the same. That perhaps Cathy had misunderstood all along.
But just let them try, Caroline had whispered fiercely under the covers of their shared bed that Christmas, in Edinburgh, when Cathy had finally shared her fears in faltering, uncertain whispers. I won’t let them Cathy, they can’t make you.
Cathy, who had been made to do other unimaginable things -- leave Kenya, for example -- was not so sure. But she had clung to Caro in the darkness, and let the heat of Caro’s certainty seep into her bones until it became hers as well.
“We met Geordie during the war,” Cathy says, screwing the rubber top on the bottle and putting it into Davie’s eager hands before settling herself back at the table.
“Caroline met him, more precisely. I was in the Women’s Land Army up in Cumbria. Caro was splitting her time between Cambridge and London where she was working for the war department, something to do with chemistry -- all covered by the official secrets act. She still can’t talk about most of it,” she rolls her eyes and elicits the hoped-for snort of camaraderie from Sidney. Everyone knows someone who can’t talk.
“She met Geordie in a...club. A place in London, for those who know the right sort of people.” She watches Sidney’s face and doesn’t miss the flicker of recognition that passes across it. She wonders if he’d known the right sort of people, too, during the war. Wonders whether he and Geordie might have brushed elbows once or twice in dim, smoke-filled rooms. “He’d just been thrown over by a Navy officer and...well, you know how he gets when things are rough for him.”
Sidney coughs and lifts his teacup to his mouth before realizing it’s empty. He sets it back on the saucer and Cathy pushes the teapot across the table so he can replenish his cup.
“I’m afraid I still don’t see how this story leads us all...here,” he says, almost imploringly.
“It was toward the end of the war, you see,” Cathy says. “We’d survived. Caro was returning to Canterbury as a lecturer, and me -- I’d not thought what I would do, next. Caroline has always had a very strong understanding about her place in the world. And since we were children I’d followed her lead. But during the war … both of my parents had died, in Kenya, of blackwater fever. And May in the Blitz. Tess is the only family I’ve left now, apart from Uncle Andrew, Aunt Edna, and the cousins. I started to realize how much I had enjoyed living at the Walkers’ house -- the family Dee, Nora, and I billeted with in Micklethwaite. They had seven children, always lively about the place. Made me realize how much I wanted a big family with lots of children.”
She remembers the pain of realizing that part of the future she now wanted was something Caro was incapable of giving her -- and not especially interested in sharing. There had been stilted conversations and tense silences that spring and summer as Caroline prepared for the start of Michaelmas term. She was dividing her time between visits to Micklethwaite, where Cathy was working long hours during the growing season, London, where she was still needed, and Cambridge where she was laying the groundwork for their future. Her work, their flat, the local connections that might help Cathy find a job. When they were together, Caroline’s vision had sustained them both … when she was gone, Cathy would lie in the dark garret of the farmhouse and fear that the war had irrevocably changed them.
She wanted Caro. Still and always. She also wanted...some version of this: the Walkers’ easy partnership in running the farm, the children and soon-to-be grandchildren tumbling about the place. It reminded her, in some way, of her childhood on the coffee plantation. Perhaps it was selfishness, or nostalgia -- wanting to return to a time and place she could no longer have.
But she wanted it all the same.
And that desire had terrified Caroline. Because she didn’t understand it. But she had listened, when Cathy had screwed up her courage to speak, and tried to believe Cathy when Cathy swore with tears streaming down her cheeks that it wasn’t a man that she was missing. That whatever it was she wanted, leaving Caro was unthinkable.
It had been a long and sleepless summer for them both.
Then, toward the end of that September -- not long after Cathy had moved to the tiny flat Caro had found them on the outskirts of Cambridge -- she and Caro had been out for a pint at the pub with Geordie in London. Caro was still required in London on a regular basis and Cathy, at loose ends without her Land Army work and loathe to be alone, often went with her. And that night, at some point between the second round and the third, Geordie had said something about how he supposed the kids he’d always thought to have weren’t in the cards and Caro had looked...thoughtful.
She hadn’t said anything, in the pub -- it wasn’t that sort of pub. But in the privacy of their bed that night had curled in close and whispered against the shell of Cathy’s ear the seeds of a rather outlandish proposal.
A story, indeed, for another day.
“It turned out,” she settles for, “Geordie was wanting that too -- a big family, a house full of children. Geordie makes this part of our life possible.” The sweep of her hand takes in the kitchen, the children, the home and garden, their lives in Grantchester. “We’ve made a home, here, for ourselves and our children. That’s not Caro’s way. She prefers to be an auntie, swooping in for the weekend and taking them off on exotic adventures. But she’s a part of the family. Geordie and I -- we wouldn’t have seen our way to this without her, and Geordie and I wouldn’t … wouldn’t work any other way.”
“And it truly wouldn’t … upset you if he and I were to --”
“You would give him something I never can, Sidney, just as he gives me something Caro never could. He’s been alone too long … and I think, perhaps, so have you.” She doesn’t miss the way his throat constricts at this, the swallowing of something too private for her to see.
She hopes he can share it with Geordie.
“Come,” she says suddenly, with decision. “Walk with me and Davie down to the river. I’ve someone who’d like very much to meet you.”