Chapter Text
Sidney is in his study, staring at a blank sheet of paper wound into the typewriter, when Mrs M calls down the hall: "There's a Mr Gascoyne-Cecil on the telephone wishing to speak to you!"
He can hear the sniff in her voice -- even at twenty paces and through the oak paneling of the study door.
He blinks as his brain catches up with his ears and feels his stomach lurch unpleasantly as he makes sense of the familiar name. Victor. How the hell had the man -- Sidney hasn’t spoken to Vic in years.
And he doesn’t especially want to speak with him now.
He swallows back the urge to ask Mrs M to claim he isn’t at home, but no doubt Vic has already heard her calling for him down the open line. "In a moment!" he calls instead, pushing back his desk chair and getting reluctantly to his feet.
He opens the concordance on the desk to lend credence to his claim of having been working on his sermon, then hurries out to the phone. Mrs M is standing with the receiver in hand, as always treating the live line as a nervous visitor who ought not to be left alone. "Thank you," Sidney says firmly, and turns his back on her to put the instrument to his ear.
"Vic?" It comes out a question, more tentative in tone than Sidney would like.
“Good, it is you. There can’t be that many Chamberses, but you as village vicar was hard to picture.” The voice at the other end of the line is tinny and faint, a poor connection. But the clipped rhythm of Vic's speech, and the confiding tone that had once made Sidney feel like the most interesting man in a crowded mess hall comes through as clearly as ever. Sidney sets his jaw against both the painfully familiar pull of that confidence and the burn of his own resentment of its lure, and prepares for the request, knowing there will be one. Vic wouldn’t go to the trouble of seeking him out simply to get an address for a Christmas card.
When the request finally comes it startles a brief, unbelieving laugh from Sidney. "Perform a wedding?!"
"Yes. Well, it's your game, these days, isn't it? Saturday week suit you?"
"It... I'd have to... no.” Sidney twists the telephone cord around his thumb until it bites. “Vic, there are... there are rules."
There's a brief, uncharacteristic pause -- so uncharacteristic that Sidney wonders if the line has gone dead.
"Sid," Vic starts, and then stops again. Sidney winces at the nickname. He’d never liked it -- protested it at the time -- but Vic had found it amusing and eventually Sidney had given up the battle. One of the many small ways in which he’d capitulated.
"It's...not that sort of wedding."
"Not what sort of wedding?" If Sidney wasn't certain he had lost hold of this conversation, he's certain now. Behind him, the front door opens and when he twists to look over his shoulder at who's come in; it's Leonard with a parcel of what looks to be books under his arm, sorting through the post as he absently elbows the door shut.
“Hullo, Sidney, I --” Leonard cuts off his greeting when he realizes Sidney is at the telephone and Sidney grimaces and nods in return -- yes, sorry -- as Leonard passes over a letter postmarked from Germany. Hildegard, Sidney thinks with a slight lightening of spirit; she had promised to send him a review of the new jazz club in Kreuzberg. Dickens comes clattering down the stair, tail wagging to greet Leonard who goes to pet him, and with the sudden bustle Sidney almost misses Vic's response.
"...a chap can just explain over the telephone," Vic is saying. "Look -- is there somewhere in London we could meet? I'd buy you a drink?"
Sidney swallows down reflexive irritation at the request, taking note of the way Vic is maneuvering for a meeting on his own terms -- even if he is footing the bill. Sidney knows he should tell Vic to tell him what he wants here and now or fuck off. But he’s also curious, and he doesn’t want Leonard to drop dead from the shock of hearing his vicar say ‘fuck off’ to a faceless parishioner on the telephone. So he finds himself naming a bar -- one in Piccadilly that even Amanda called ‘a bit dear’, but if Vic is paying Sidney had better get his money’s worth -- and ringing off with plans to go down the day after tomorrow.
“Well, fuck,” he says under his breath to the wall -- hoping neither Mrs M nor Leonard have heard -- before turning back to his study in search of a desperately-needed cigarette.
Two days later Sidney finds himself in a sleek hotel bar in Piccadilly, holding a tumbler of excellent Scotch and staring at the snapshot Vic has pushed across the table. It shows Vic in shirtsleeves, his straight dark hair tousled and his mustache untidy, smiling in a way Sidney never saw, mouth open and his eyes soft as he leans into a younger man who's laughing at the camera.
"We met in Burma," Vic says, punctuating disclosure with a tight drag on his cigarette. "In '49."
Sidney pushes the photograph back across their table. At the bottom of a desk drawer in his study at the vicarage, he has a snapshot Caro took last August when he'd gone with the Keating family to the seaside. Himself and Geordie with the kids in the surf, shoulder to shoulder -- Geordie laughing at something Sidney no longer remembers, their eyes on the girls but their attention unmistakably on each other. He still remembers the feel of the hot sun, the cold salt spray, the feel of Geordie's bare shoulder sticking slightly against his upper arm as they leaned into one another.
He can't imagine carrying that photograph anywhere, or showing it to anyone in a place this public.
He swallows his whiskey and leans back, waiting for Vic to say more. He knows Vic will start talking again if Sidney waits him out; the man never could stand silence that might be filled with his own words. In the early days of Sidney’s infatuation, it had been a relief to exist quietly on the margins of Vic’s bright socialialty. His desire to fill space had more than covered Sidney’s own desire to disappear, not that he’d thought of it like that at the time. Toward the end, he had begun to understand how much Vic’s dislike of quiet contemplation shaped his impatience at Sidney’s religious yearnings. Vic is compact and wiry like Geordie, but he has none of Geordie’s focus, or his pleasure in a quiet shared activity. Vic could hardly bear Sidney reading a chapter of a book or writing a paragraph of a letter while they were in the same room, far less spend an afternoon like last Saturday’s when Geordie whittled shims to repair David’s strained highchair while Sidney read over Leonard’s sermon draft.
"His name's Martin. He was born there -- father was a missionary, Methodist or something of that sort. Sent Martin home to school, of course, but he returned after the war, and." Another drag. "I was out there on business." The mysterious, amorphous, and very lucrative family firm that kept him in silk socks.
"And you kept in touch?" Sidney pushes past the bitter sarcasm that's quick to rise, but can't quite reach the tone of bland pastoral curiosity he's trying for.
Vic exhales, almost a sigh, and reaches down to pick up the photograph Sidney has returned to him. He reaches inside the front of his tailored suit coat and pulls out a fine leather billfold. The photograph disappears inside and he tucks the billfold back again.
"You might say that," he says, finally. "Until this past August, Martin ran a club in Tavoy - in the south, on the Malaysian peninsula,” Vic adds before Sidney asks “I stayed with him whenever I had reason to be in the country." Another pause, and Sidney suspects that Vic is giving him time to imagine what staying with him entails, a suspicion reinforced by the smugly insinuating tone of Vic’s next words: "I found reasons to be in Tavoy quite regularly."
"And now?" Sidney asks. He gets the intonation right this time, as if Vic is half a pair of what Mrs M calls "hand-holders" in his study at the vicarage. The whiskey shouldn't be going to his head already, or at all, but he feels as if the room is wavering gently. Someone, he thinks, should give ordinands better warning about what risks the priesthood brings to personal relationships. Why must his past mistakes insist on seeking him out to request his services?
"Now he's in England. In London."
"In your flat."
"No." Vic's lips purse slightly. "In rooms. He won't...he wants...if we're to be… He says it doesn’t feel right.”
"And that's not cause for you to take your pleasure elsewhere?" Sidney allows himself the petty pleasure of being snide; the old wound apparently not as healed as he had thought it was. Sodding hell, he thinks, and takes a long drag on his cigarette. Think about that later.
"Believe me, Sid, I'm surprised as you are, but as it happens it's not."
Sidney struggles to find the end of the conversation that, if pulled, will loose the knot. He’s ridiculously distracted by the fact that Vic keeps calling him Sid. For some reason, what keeps coming to mind is what Geordie’s expression would be if he could hear it.
"And this is where...marriage comes in? Is there...a girl? Woman," he corrects, then -- thinking of Cathy and Caroline -- "or...women?"
But he's fumbling this, badly, because Vic is already shaking his head, lips pursed in amusement around the dwindling cigarette.
"Can you imagine -- me, Sid, married to a woman?" He manages to make the proposition sound utterly ridiculous, as if Sidney had just suggested he become a curate. Sidney has to admit that the sum of his acquaintance with Vic indicates both are, indeed, equally implausible.
He knocks back the rest of his whiskey and pushes the glass toward Vic in an unsubtle suggestion a second round would be most welcome.
"So where do I, and the question of marriage vows, enter into it, then?" Hauling Sidney all the way to London just to show off a current lover seems a little low even for Vic.
Vic stubs out his cigarette and draws another from a silver case. He offers it to Sidney, but Sidney's is still smoldering in his hand. He shakes his head and waits while Vic summons a waiter with a flick of a hand and secures both a light for himself and the-same-again for both of them.
"The surprising thing about this, for me, has been the contentment," he says, while behind the bar there's a great play with the cocktail shaker to produce whatever brilliantly-colored confection he's been drinking. "For Martin, it's been confusing. The early influence of religion, perhaps."
"Had he not...? Before..?" Sidney hopes his ellipses are enough to keep the topic of the conversation from the waiter who delivers his whiskey.
"Oh, certainly. Widely," Vic adds with a smirk. "I did say he had a club, didn’t I? But that's just the trouble, it seems... as long as he was wholly dissolute nothing worried him, but the closer we come to being settled, the more he feels a lack of what I believe you lot call 'the benefit of clergy.'"
"You want me. To... you and...? Vic, have you ever read…” Sidney switches his cigarette to his other hand in order to tap the ash off in the convenient glass dish. “Have you ever actually listened to a marriage service?"
"Once or twice." He sits easily under Sidney's stare as the waiter hands over his cocktail and takes Vic's coins. "All other forsaking, sickness and health, with my body I thee worship..." The smirk again.
Sidney remembers, suddenly, the precise angle of the sunlight through the dust motes and the pressure of the too-low table against his knees in the theological college library the afternoon he read the connotations of "pais" in first-century Greek. Now there's the same sense of shifting, of something slotting into place as the rest of the world goes askew. The words he's prompted dozens of brides with echo like the tolling of a great bell: love, honor, and keep him... In his mind is Geordie's face and the answer is inescapable: I do, I do, I do.
He takes a deep breath, then realizes that he has no words at the ready, no a clear idea of how to navigate this conversation. He always has found it difficult to give Vic a flat-out "no." Which is probably why Vic had gone to the trouble of looking him up and placing the telephone call. Damn the man.
"You do realize that whatever we ... that it couldn't take place in the church. Or the vicarage."
Vic shrugs, affecting nonchalance, even though Sidney doesn't miss the way his shoulders relax ever so slightly when he realizes that Sidney is taking the question as a legitimate one to be examined rather than rejected outright.
"And it wouldn't have any...there would be no license, Vic." Sidney has to swallow around a traitorous lump in his throat as he says this. He hasn't spent five minutes altogether since the first time Geordie's lips touched his own thinking about the pieces of paper that tie Geordie to Cathy, Cathy to Geordie in the eyes of the state -- yet leave himself and Geordie, Cathy and Caro legal strangers to one another. And now, from the distance that whiskey brings, he’s aware that he resents Vic for asking the question, for making the request, for forcing him to imagine that it would be a request that should be possible to fulfill.
"I've already put him in my will," Vic says, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward. "I did that years ago. That's not the point."
"And what is the point? For you," Sidney clarifies, not that he thinks he needs to, but this is uncharted territory in more than one way. He can think of a number of points, none of them either flattering or charitable to Vic, but he holds those back and takes another swallow of his drink.
"A mark," Vic says. "Not visible, of course, or only in certain settings. But a...line. A start. To say that how we are is how we mean to go on."
It's a better answer than Sidney gets from many couples of the conventional sort. "And Martin?"
Vic smokes in silence.
"Or haven't you asked him?"
"He came back to England for me," Vic says abruptly. "I didn't want to raise specifics about... something I might not be able to give him."
"So you're only guessing that he wants..."
"No."
"No?" Sidney tries to keep the question tonally neutral and fails. He's here, after all, so he must trust Vic up to a point -- but only up to it. Vic hasn't asked if Sidney's been involved recently and Sidney won’t offer. And he's having a difficult time picturing Victor Gascoyne-Cecil as the marrying type even if the marriage was to be a clandestine and legally meaningless one.
Vic's mouth twists in acknowledgement of the sharp skepticism in Sidney's voice, but he repeat the assertion: "No. I -- he's been dropping...hints."
"Hints."
"Look, do you want an enumerated list in triplicate? He hasn’t said outright, but I get the sense that wants to do things on the up and up with his God; I find -- against all precedent and expectation -- that I want to do things on the up and up with Martin. That's the beginning, middle, and end of it."
Sidney sighs. "You know, it's customary to have this conversation with bri-- with both -- with the couple, together." He looks around the room, almost as if he expects Martin to be hanging back at the doorway waiting for a signal from Vic.
"So you'll do it."
Sidney sits back, wishing as he only rarely does that he had ever found the rituals of the high-church party useful. It's the sort of moment that seems to call for a rosary, and not a setting that works for his own style of conversational extemporaneous prayer. Lord, help, he thinks. In the blank that follows he takes a long drag on his forgotten cigarette. All that comes to his mind is the story of the centurion asking Jesus to heal his servant (and, perhaps, lover). The story of the marriage at Cana. And the words (printed in red in the Salvation Army New Testament that had been the only book to be found in the military transport barracks) “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.”
"I'll talk with you, both of you, about what I can -- what I’d be willing to -- do," he answers, finally. "Someplace private. Where we can be frank."
“Thank you,” Vic says quietly.
Sidney thinks, as he crushes out the end of his cigarette, that that is the most unexpected piece of the entire thing.