Chapter Text
As Martin pulls off down the street, Sidney turns from the stoop and steps back into the hall. He can hear Mrs M in the kitchen so rather than go make himself a cup of tea he returns to his office, where Leonard has left the sermon notes in a neat stack on the desk, next to the typewriter. Sidney picks them up, then puts them down, and pulls open his desk drawer for the half-empty box of cigarettes and matchbook. He lights a cigarette and takes a drag but then stubs it out because it isn’t helping. The vicarage suddenly seems too dark and too close. There’s a chance he’d find Geordie down at the pub this point in the afternoon -- he glances at the clock on the wall -- but other people will be there, too, and Geordie will want to know what’s wrong.
He looks out the study window into the back garden, where sun and shadows are chasing one another across the budding forsythia. A walk, he decides. He goes back into the hall and whistles for Dickens, who comes loping from the kitchen with Mrs M close behind, drying her hands on her apron.
“Dinner in forty minutes, Mr Chambers,” she says. “Or when Mr Finch gets in.”
“I'll be back,” he assures her. “Just going over to the river. I want to give Dickens a run before it get dark.”
Mrs M sniffs. “Jacket,” she orders.
“It’s warm,” Sidney protests.
“It won’t be once the sun goes down, and you don’t need to be catching cold - worn out as you are, it’ll go straight to your chest again.”
“Mrs M, I’m fine.” Sidney bends to scratch Dickens' ears so she won't see his face. He's not sure what might be betrayed there, but Mrs M has a way of noting thoughts he imagined he’d buried.
She takes the jacket from the coat tree where he'd hung it that morning after coming in from confirmation class and holds it out. “It's only soup tonight,” she adds as he takes it. “It'll keep.”
“I'll be back.” Sidney shrugs the jacket on.
Another skeptical sniff. “Be sure that creature doesn't track in any mud when you get in.”
Dickens dashes out the front door ahead of Sidney and runs in several circles around the front garden as Sidney walks down the path and opens the gate Martin had closed ten minutes earlier. Dickens follows him out onto the pavement and they turn right toward the nearest footpath that will take them out through the fields to the Cam.
The sky is clear and the sun is slanting low across the trees, though darkness won't be complete for several hours yet. Sidney fists his hands in his jacket pockets to keep his fingers warm and is grateful to run into no one on his way to the river who wishes to exchange more than a polite nod. It's rained two days running and the ruts in the path are muddy puddles -- he'll need to wipe Dickens' paws down with a rag before letting him back into the vicarage or risk the wrath of Mrs M.
He passes the spot on the bank, empty now, where Caroline Mackenzie moors the Natalie when she's up from Cambridge. The Easter term has begun and she'll be busy with lectures and tutorials with her graduate students until nearly midsummer. Meanwhile, Cathy has moved her regular night in Cambridge to Monday evenings when Sidney's parish responsibilities are at a low ebb. More often than not, Sidney finds an excuse to go by the Keating house to help Geordie make omelets for the children and read to the girls and Davie before Geordie herds the kids to bed. They're nearly done with Winter Holiday and he makes a mental note to stop in at Heffer’s next time he's in Cambridge and inquire after a copy of Pigeon Post.
He bends down and picks up a stick from the path to throw for Dickens, busily criss-crossing the right-of-way to follow the scents of rabbits and mice, circling back to check on his master at regular intervals before running off again.
Walking helps burn off the restless energy and ease the pressure on Sidney's chest -- forcing him to breath deeply, pulling crisp evening air into his lungs. He squints up into the sky at a hawk -- Cathy would be able to tell him what species -- wheeling in the air above them and tries to sort out what about his conversation with Martin has brought him close to tears.
What floats to the surface of his memory is another spring day, not unlike this one, half a dozen years ago just before the Easter vac. When he and a fellow student had skived off an afternoon study session in the theology library to walk along the banks of the Cam.
“I'm sorry,” Sunil says quickly, pulling his hand back from Sidney’s fingers and stepping back. Sidney takes half a step to follow him before he stops himself and shoves his own hands in his pockets so he won’t reach out for the retreating hand. “Forgive me, Sidney, I... it is common, at home, between men who are friends, to take hands while walking. I know it is not customary in England; I will not forget again. Sometimes I…” He shakes his head. “Forgive me,” he repeats.
Sidney's heart pounds. His palm was hot where it had touched Sunil's, and his mouth was dry. “There's nothing to forgive.” He can’t slow his breathing, but he can make it quiet. “I, I'd consider it a compliment if, for a moment, to you I wasn't an Englishman, only... a friend. Walking with you.”
Sunil studies him for a long moment, then turns, slightly, to squint across the river into the afternoon sun. A flock of starlings have just risen from a copse of trees, en guard in the face of a hawk lazily circling on the updraft keeping watch for mice in the freshly-sown field below. Sidney tries to convince himself it was the birds' sudden movement that has captured Sunil's attention, rather than the man's desire to hide something on his own face -- or a kindness in giving Sidney a few moments' privacy to wrestle himself back into composure.
“I will miss this when I go home,” Sunil says. “The timbered houses. The changing leaves.” He faces Sidney again and puts a hand on his shoulder, a studied gesture that he might have copied from a Boys' Own cover. “You.”
His lips are so close, so smooth now that the English winter isn't chapping them. “I could come to see you,” Sidney says, hardly knowing how he gets the words out.
Sunil shakes his head. “I do not think in India we could forget, even for a moment, that you are English. But I will write, and and I will pray always for you.”
“And I for you.” Sidney pulls a hand from his pocket and puts it out towards Sunil's shoulder, moving slowly to extend the moment in which he can imagine touching Sunil's cheek instead, or the soft-looking edge of hair behind Sunil’s ear.
Sidney manages not to curl his fingers behind Sunil's ear, though the intimacy of the gesture itches at the tips of his fingers. He feints at the last moment and slides his arm across Sunil's shoulder just a little too heartily, turning to squint into the sunset himself as if they're posing for a snapshot on the cricket grounds. Sweaty, grass-stained, bats in hand.
They aren't, of course. The riverbank is deserted and only the hawk and its scrappy antagonists are there to see. But it helps him to keep steady, imagining there might be a camera lens trained on them, rowdy teammates waiting at the edge of the field to haul them off to the nearest pub. It stops him from paying too much mind to the welling disappointment that Sunil's response hadn't been...something more.
Sidney had arrived back at Cambridge, after the war, with the intention of using the small inheritance his parents had left in trust to pursue his inchoate theological yearnings at a university he had good memories of. Memories untainted by the violence of the intervening years.
Sunil Gokahli had been a year ahead of Sidney at theological college, the second son of a local magistrate in Rajasthan. He'd been sent abroad for an English education before returning to teach at the missionary college from which he had graduated -- a condition of the scholarship that brought him to Cambridge.
He and Sidney were older than many of their classmates who’d only just finished undergraduate work, and they often found themselves at work in the library or the common room when their classmates were down in the High Street eyeing women students or motoring down to London for an early weekend. Sunil had taught Sidney to play backgammon and helped him brush up his cricket game, and Sidney had introduced Sunil to the lesser-known country walks in Cambridgeshire as well as a few of his favorite jazz clubs in London.
By the winter vacation, they were fast friends and Sunil had accepted the invitation to spend a few days between Christmas and New Year with Sidney and his sister Jennifer at their aunt and uncle’s home in north London. To help Jennifer avoid the well-meaning concern of their Aunt Violet and Uncle Teddy, Sidney and Sunil would catch the tube with her into central London and drop Jenny with the schoolfriend of the day before picking a neighborhood and wandering aimlessly: bookshops one day, jazz clubs the next, a long morning at the British Museum followed by lunch at one of the new espresso bars in Soho. It had been exhilarating; Sidney hadn’t felt this unburdened since before he’d crossed the channel in ‘41.
By the start of the Lenten term, at the end of January, Sidney couldn’t help but recognize the signs. The exquisite awareness, in the chapel or in the lecture hall, of precisely where Sunil was; the urge to bring him back a gift from even the most mundane excursion to the grocer’s or the tobacconist’s; the joy in seeing his smile and the ache when that smile landed on someone else. Signs he’d known since his school days, but not fully understood until Vic had helped the other shoe to drop. Signs he’d thought a career -- a calling -- in the church might transmute for good into something he wouldn’t have to keep hidden.
On the riverbank, Dickens gives a bark slightly muffled by the stick in his mouth. He mock-growls when Sidney tries to take it and wags his tail so hard it blurs. They tussle for a moment before Dickens lets go and Sidney throws it again. As he waits for Dickens to return, he watches the hawk drop sharply below the treeline for some prey sighted in the field below. Sidney makes himself pull in a slow, deep breath to the count of five, then let it out again. Why had his conversation with Martin, about Victor, brought Sunil -- no, the way a younger Sidney had felt about Sunil -- to the forefront of his thoughts?
His friendship with Sunil, unlike the long silence between him and Victor, had carried on steadily through the years and eventually settled into a regular correspondence, like the letters he exchanged with Hildegard. It’s been years, now -- since he’d been assigned to Grantchester, he thinks, or perhaps around the time he’d first begun spending time with Geordie -- since the arrival of an aerogram from Udaipur had set his pulse racing. Yet something about his conversation with Martin had brought that old pain to the surface.
Dickens lopes up to him and drops the gnawed stick across his toes, and Sidney bends to pick it up and throw it long down the path before starting to walk again, following after the ecstatic blur of Dickens. Perhaps he shouldn’t be so surprised that Sunil is in his thoughts today. After all, a month ago he'd have said Victor Gascoyne-Cecil was nothing to him. Or at most, an object of rather academic forgiveness and gratitude. Gratitude, because if he hadn't kissed Sidney outside the officers' mess that wet night in 1941, how would Sidney have found his way to Geordie? And Sunil was part of this stumbling journey of his, too.
He's nearly to Cambridge before he realizes how far and how fast he's walked. There's a stile across the next field from which, he knows from past experience, he will be able to see the spires of the chapel at King's rising above the playing fields.
Sunil isn’t the only memory who accompanies him across these fields. He used to walk this way with Amanda, too, when she came up from London on a Saturday to visit. It's only been two years since those days, but feels much further away across the landscape of his memory. Further away, right now, than the tumultuous months he'd spent in Vic's orbit. Possibly because it had been clear to him soon after he and Amanda had fallen in together that although he liked her well enough as a friend, what he felt for her would never match what she appeared to feel for him.
He realizes, as he whistles for Dickens to return so they can turn around and start back, that when he charts the course in his mind from Vic to Sunil to Geordie he often circumvents Amanda altogether as if she were a detour. But perhaps she’s more similar than it seems at first glance: another lover with whom he’d been fundamentally mismatched in some way. All three of them -- Vic, Sunil, Amanda -- had left Sidney, intentionally or not, feeling somehow broken. In a way that precluded more lasting, and mutual, commitments.
He would never tell a parishioner, he thinks ruefully, what he’s often told himself: that perhaps he simply isn’t suited to more lasting, and mutual, commitments. That maybe he’ll be forever falling in love with men who are, in one way or another, unwilling or unable to fall in love with him in return.
And only now, thinking on it as he waits for Dickens to finish snuffling at the bottom step of the stile, does it dawn on him with a sort of horror that without even realizing it he’s put Geordie in that category: Someone who might indulge Sidney’s affections but whose primary allegiance is -- and should be -- somewhere else. With Cathy and the children.
Sidney hasn’t asked for anything more since their first kiss almost two years ago. Hasn’t even let himself imagine what more could be when it comes to Geordie and himself. It’s been the limit of his imagination to be able to love Geordie without the restraint of emotion Vic had wanted, or the redirection Sunil had (ever so gently) made. It’s almost physically dizzying, like seeing familiar terrain from the air, to suddenly find it conceivable that someone - that Geordie - might not only agree to reorder his life because it would please Sidney, but might already be wanting to. If Sidney would let him.
It’s embarrassing -- no, worse than that. Almost shameful, Sidney thinks, that it’s taken listening to Martin talk of upending his life and livelihood for Victor while Vic, in turn had gone to the trouble of calling how many Chamberses across the home counties? -- to help him finally understand what he’s been missing. Or, rather, to truly listen to, rather than simply hear, what Geordie’s been telling him -- in Geordie’s own persistent way -- for the past year and a half.
This isn’t how we’ve made it work because we’ve never made it work before, Geordie had said last summer in Ardalainish, before pulling Sidney into bed.
I know it’s my bloody bed, Geordie had said, just weeks ago, just out of hospital and laid up with a chest infection. That’s why I’ve got you in it.
It seems so obvious to him in this moment: that he has been fearful all along of treading somewhere off-limits. Of clumsily upsetting the delicate balance that Geordie and Cathy and Caro have made work so quietly, and so well, for so long. He has been behaving as if theirs were the relationship into which he was the interloper. Perhaps a tolerated -- even a wanted -- interloper, if there could be such a thing, but that still somehow an extraneous element. Unbalancing what was already right. Except now he understands that they’ve been telling, and showing, him -- Geordie’s been telling, and showing, him -- that Sidney's become an integral part of making it right.
He wipes his hand across his mouth and realizes he’s trembling slightly. He inhales carefully, as if too much oxygen might make him feel faint, and listens to the soft exhalation as the air leaves his lungs. Does it again.
As he breathes -- in, then out, in, then out -- on the bank of the Cam, his eyes on the spires of King’s where they rise above the empty playing fields across the river, he thinks of another late afternoon conversation, years ago.
“One moment, Mr Chambers,” Professor Maberly calls from behind his desk just as the other third years are leaving the room. “A word if I may.”
Sidney sighs, inwardly, and lowers his book bag back down to the table from where he had just hefted it after packing his stack of library books and notes from the morning's discussion. “Sir.”
Maberly tilts his head to look at Sidney over his reading glasses. His thick white hair and his round, lined face make him an almost comic archetype of an academic, but there is nothing remote or absent-minded in his gaze. “You've not seemed yourself since the start of Michaelmas term, Chambers,” he observes in a tone that manages to be both reproachful and inquiring at the same time. It’s the lilt of his native Welsh accent, Sidney thinks, that tends to become more pronounced when Maberly is not lecturing to a room full of students. “And your essay on the Gnostic Gospels was not up to your usual standards.”
“I'm sorry, sir. I'll do it over.” Sidney hopes the professor won't ask what he was trying to argue in the essay; he's not even sure the feeble links he’d made between the quotations were in grammatical English.
Maberly inclines his head and then looks out his window as the clatter of footsteps in the passage fades. “The essay is a sign, rather than the substance, of the matter, I think,” he says. “Were you ill in the long vac? There is no difficulty in taking a term's leave if…”
“No!” The word comes out too sharply and Sidney clenches his fingers around the strap of his rucksack even as he forces his tone into something milder. “I beg your pardon, sir, I mean, everything's fine.”
“But it isn't.” Maberly’s voice is gentler than before. “Even if it isn't a matter for the infirmary.”
Sidney feels the bile of panic rising in his throat and swallows, unsuccessfully trying to quell the nausea. He opens his mouth. “I…” he starts, then closes his mouth around whatever might come next.
He glances, before he can help himself, over to the chair at the far end of the seminar table where Sunil had habitually sat last year -- across the table and down from Sidney's own usual place in the corner by the grandfather clock. It's occupied this term by a student from Sidney's year, a Mr Halliwell, whom Sidney only knows in a vague sort of way and dislikes intensely for sitting where he does.
To his right he hears Maberly let out a distinctly professorial sigh. “I have to return these Greek texts to the library,” he says, in what seems like an abrupt shift but which Sidney suspects glumly is not, “and I could use a strong lad like yourself to carry them. My strength isn't what it used to be.” Maberly walks with a cane, but Sidney doubts the weight of the three leather-bound books he's gestured to amount to an undue burden. Still, he moves to pick them up from the desk.
“I’d be happy to drop them on my way --” he begins, only to have Maberly wave the words away dismissively.
“No, no,” he says, pulling his reading glasses off and stuffing them into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Carry them for me, and then come back to my rooms. We’ll see if an application of hot tea and brandy has any effect on your troubles.”
All the way to the library, and back along the quad to his rooms, Maberly tells anecdotes about the Westminster Sisters and the Cairo geniza -- anecdotes far enough from his own specialty to spare Sidney any anxiety that they constitute a covert criticism of his work, and which require no response. Once they're in Maberly's study amid the clutter of dictionaries and commentaries and reproductions of icons, he installs Sidney by the window in the visitor's armchair with a glass of brandy while he makes tea.
“I ought to have said,” Maberly goes on, as if there's been no pause since they left the seminar room, "that I don't mean to force any confidences. But even if you don't wish to tell me what is making you unhappy, it would help me guide my prayers to know how you are unhappy... grief, anger, fear…” He puts a cozy over the teapot, but doesn’t turn towards Sidney. “To name it, I find, often takes the sharpest teeth from the beast. ‘Speak the word only…’ ”
“ ‘...and I shall be healed’.” Sidney finishes the line and takes the last sip of brandy.
The liquor goes some way toward settling Sidney's stomach. As Maberly assembles a small tray with teapot, cups and saucers, a sugar bowl, and a bottle of cream pulled in from the windowsill, Sidney hunches over his empty glass and tries to find something to say that will approximate the truth without getting too close to the dangerous heart.
Of all the words for unhappiness Maberly has put before him grief is perhaps the closest approximation -- except to use it for the ache that has been his constant companion since Sunil set sail for Bombay feels somehow ... illegitimate.
“I've been ... lonely,” he tries, finally, wincing at the inadequacy of the word. “I lost -- I lost a friend. Over the summer.” He feels a pang of guilt at lost, thinking of Sunil's most recent letter. The thin sheets of blue airmail paper, folded into the envelope and addressed in the unmistakably tidy hand. It was sitting on the mantle back in his rooms, waiting for him to have the courage to open it.
Sidney had lost many friends, during the war; they all had. A litany of names, printed in the papers and etched into the stone of memorials that bloomed across the countryside. It feels perverse, somehow, to speak of Sunil as lost when, in fact, the man is unharmed, in good health, and working with great energy and enthusiasm at his school in Udaipur.
But Sidney had lost him. Irrevocably, irretrievably so.
The professor hmmms as he turns toward Sidney with the tea tray and carries it with care to the low table between them. Then he lowers himself stiffly into the worn, obviously well-loved armchair by the radiator with a grunt of satisfaction and considers Sidney for a moment or two before he speaks.
“The return of Mr Gokhali to India has, indeed, resulted in a noticeable absence this year,” he says finally. “And I don’t think I would be wrong in saying he was -- is -- something of a particular friend of yours, is that right?”
Sidney breathes, breathes again. Maberly’s voice is mild, but there's an intensity to his gaze that Sidney doesn't trust himself to read -- and the damn lilt is back. “A particular friend of mine,” Sidney says, avoiding the question of verb tenses. “But not... I of... his.”
“Ah.” Maberly pours a cup of tea. “Lonely even before he left, then.” He holds out the cup.
Sidney thinks, with a sudden pang, of Sunil in a green jumper making chai over the gas ring in the common room, tea and milk and sugar and spices all heated together. And how his heart leapt when Sunil poured him a cup, and then twisted when Daniel Sunderton came in and Sunil offered him one as well. He puts the glass aside to take the teacup. “I... I didn't think of... it that way. At the time. But. Yes. Yes, I suppose so.”
Sidney can feel his hands shaking, slightly, as he lifts the teacup to his lips. The tea sloshes, a little, over the edge of the cup and into the saucer. He can feel Professor Maberly's gaze still on him.
“It is not the first time, I think, that you have felt such ... loneliness,” Maberly finally says, breaking the silence and Sidney's teacup rattles against the china saucer. It isn't precisely a question, but Sidney shakes his head nonetheless in silent confirmation.
Next to Maberly, the radiator rattles gently under the faded brocade cover, and there's a gust of late-afternoon rain on the windowpane to Sidney's right. He glances over, not really seeing either window or rain, but grateful for the excuse to look somewhere other than into his cup or at his professor. He feels ... transparent under Maberly's scrutiny. It isn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation -- in fact he’s beginning to feel as though transparency might bring welcome relief -- but it feels dangerous nonetheless. As if Maberly is making all of the connections, and coming to all of the conclusions, that Sidney has been trying desperately to ignore since the end of the Easter term.
“But with Mr Gokhali…”
“I fell in love with him,” Sidney blurts out, squeezing his eyes shut and then open again against the prickle of tears. He clings to the saucer of the teacup and tips his head to look up toward the crack in the plaster in the far corner of the sitting room ceiling. Anywhere but at the professor sitting without judgement across from him. That Maberly is being kind almost makes it worse. Sidney’s eyes overflow, like the cup in his hands, and his voice cracks as he repeats: "I fell -- I fell in love with him. I thought I could keep ... that we could be like brothers... but it isn't, I can't, I…”
Somehow Maberly is beside him now, taking the cup from his shaking hands and putting a handkerchief there. His hand settles on Sidney's shoulder for a moment, and then he moves quietly across the room to bring the brandy bottle back to their chairs. "Barton is away," he says quietly, referring to the don who has the rooms across the staircase.
Sidney hadn't realized how hard he was struggling not to sob aloud until he knows he can.. And then he can’t think when he’s cried like this, hard enough that the lump in his throat melts and the ache in his ribs becomes the ache of exertion and not the ache of restraint.
"I'm sorry," he tries, thickly, when he can breathe again. "I didn't mean to --" he coughs, roughly, to clear the phlegm from his throat, then hauls in another deep breath. It's surprisingly deep, and he realizes that the tightness in his chest -- a tightness that's been dogging him all through the long summer of working in his uncle's garden and sweating over Hebrew translations when the thought of going to bed and attempting sleep made his stomach revolt -- has gone.
“None of that, now,” Professor Maberly says, gruffly but without censure. “Don't imagine you're the first student to have a good, solid cry in my study and I doubt you'll be the last. Drink your brandy.” He gestures to the table and Sidney realizes that while he was crying himself out Maberly had refilled his empty glass and poured one for himself. Sidney blows his nose on the handkerchief -- resisting the urge to apologize again for the mess -- and picks up the glass. He leans back wearily in the wingback armchair, letting his aching head fall against the worn plush upholstery. He feels like he could sleep for a week, a month, perhaps the entire Michaelmas term: like all the sleepless nights of the past summer are finally catching up with him.
He closes his eyes. It feels easier like this, even though he knows Maberly is still in the room with him. “It feels like such a -- such a failure,” he admits. “I thought I was...better, stronger --”
“A curious choice of words, ‘failure,’ ” Maberly's voice swims in through the clog of Sidney's congested ears and the buzz of brandy. “Is it such a failure, do you think, to make ourselves vulnerable in love?”
“There was... someone. Before Sunil,” Sidney says, his eyes still closed. “In the army. He was the first -- the first man I’d ever kissed. And I thought, at first, ‘Well, he’s the answer.’ ” Vic had felt like one, at the time.
“He didn’t feel the same, I take it?” Maberly asks, managing to make the question both a wry observation and a kind offer of sympathy.
Sidney shakes his head, feeling the tears seep out under his eyelashes. “I thought, maybe,” he whispers. He feels the old tug of shame, threatening to pull him under and heaves a careful breath before he says it. “I found him. My … lover. With someone. We’d had a fight, a stupid argument about --” he laughs, damply, at what feels like an absurdity now, “ -- about the futility of prayer.” He remembers how hurt he had been when Vic had made some cutting remark about the prayers of fellow soldiers, when he knew perfectly well Sidney himself made it a regular practice.
“But I thought --” he has to stop to blow his nose, coughing to clear his throat before spilling the rest of the story in a rush. “I thought I’d at least convinced him that for some of us it was important. That it mattered. And it helped. I thought maybe he cared enough about me to listen -- listen to…” he has to stop again, and realizes distantly in the pause that Professor Maberly is the first person he has told this story to. “But two days later I st-stumbled into him kissing someone else. Kissing and -- more.” A shudder goes through him as he thinks about how hard it had been to tell Victor I’ve had enough and then see, painfully clearly, how little Victor cared. “I was so hurt. But later, when I... I began to think I might have a -- a vocation in the church... it was such a relief, it was such a relief, thinking that I could…”
“Put the genie back in the bottle,” Maberly finishes for him.
“Yes.”
“But it won't stay put, will it.”
“No.”
“No,” Maberly agrees.
Sidney opens his eyes and stares across the table, not sure if he's hearing right.
“I couldn't either.”
“What…” Sidney coughs again to clear his throat. “What do you mean?”
"Exactly what you think I mean. Or think I can't possibly mean. It's fashionable to describe it as a medical problem, but I have found it more useful to think of it as...the shape of my soul.” Maberly lifts the hand not holding the brandy glass on the arm of his chair and draws the tips of his thumb and his ring finger together as he always does to emphasize a point. “An inclination, like others, for science or music, for the mountains or the seaside, for beer or brandy.” There’s a pause.
“... Human love," he says, in nearly his lecturing voice, but with a deeper note of feeling beneath it, "is necessarily imperfect, but that does not make it not love. And love is -- is, Sidney -- of God."
A tremor goes through Sidney, but it isn't terror now. “Even...?”
“Even this.”
He must have made some kind of noise, because Maberly goes on, “You were at King's as an undergraduate, weren't you? Well, perhaps you knew Alan Tregold, even if modern languages weren't your subject.”
Sidney tries to remember the dons and fellows ranged across the high table. “...did he like to wear blue ties?”
Maberly smiles. “And blue braces, when he could get them. And he told the most appalling puns. And had a terrible habit of wandering off between Euston and the British Library because he’d overheard a particular snatch of dialect and wanted to hear more…” He stops, with a private smile, and looks at Sidney. “He,” Maberly says, with unmistakable emphasis, “was my friend. For twenty-seven years.”
Sidney sits very still in the soft armchair and feels more than hears what Maberly is telling him. The way he feels the moment during a session when a group of musicians, who've been playing passably well all evening, find their groove and everything shivers.
Sidney blinks, to make sure the world is still basically the same as it was before Maberly spoke and inhales through flared nostrils as if opening his mouth to draw another deep breath would jeopardize the delicate balance of the moment.
“Twenty-seven years?” is what he finally asks, in a whisper, unsure if he is questioning the accuracy of Maberly's account or simply echoing back the last words spoken.
“Twenty seven,” Maberly confirms. “Twenty-seven years, three months, two days, and thirteen hours from the first time he kissed me to his last breath on this earth. Though he would have said, because he always did say, that I was foolish for keeping such a careful account.” He sighs, and sets his empty brandy glass on the table next to the half-drunk cup of tea. “Ah, well.” The vowels are pure Aberystwyth.
"I'm -- my condolences, sir," Sidney falters. "I didn't realize --" he stops. He'd known men, during the war -- two or three come to mind -- who'd taken it particularly hard when a certain soldier died. All of them had known. But none of them had ever acknowledged it outright. That had been part of the bargain they'd all made from the beginning, wasn't it? Everything had to be temporary because life was temporary. Vic had laughed at him, almost incredulous -- Sidney can still hear the harsh sound, and cringes at the thought -- when Sidney had made the mistake of revealing that he actually cared.
He's assumed, since then, that with men he wasn’t supposed to care. It wasn’t as if there had been so many that he’d been able to test the point and then Sunil had just felt like a confirmation of that.
Twenty-seven years, three months, two days, and thirteen hours.
"You weren't meant to realize," Maberly says, gently. “The love of God aside there are a great many people in this country who don't look kindly on ... men like us.”
Sidney shakes his head, “No, I --” didn’t realize you were a widower is what comes to mind, as foolish as it sounds even in his own head. It seems suddenly like a great offense that Professor Maberly should have lost-- should have lost a friend so dear to him and that none of them had understood to mourn his loss.
“But that doesn't mean, you see, that we aren't here -- that we don't ... find one another.” Maberly leans forward across the table and pats Sidney kindly on the knee. "Dare to believe, Mr Chambers, that God does not wish you to be always alone.”
“Dickens!” Sidney calls after the dog, thinking of the sinking sun and Mrs M’s soup on the hob. For all that she’d said it would keep, he’ll have to endure reproachful looks for the rest of the evening if it has to keep for too long. Dickens slows but doesn't turn, hot on the trail of something interesting that passed along the path earlier in the day.
Sidney waits, watching the ripples on the river, thinking of the way Geordie had chosen, that warm summer evening, to seek him out -- to reach for him. And more than that, to insist upon Sidney reaching back; to be willing to tell Sidney so much that, Sidney has since realised, Geordie has probably never told anyone else.
He thinks about Cathy -- Sidney, love. I don’t think you realise quite how transparent you are at times -- of Caro -- What are you waiting to hear or see or...know? -- of Cathy putting baby David -- David Sidney, you bloody idiot, he says to himself -- into his arms at the font.
He thinks about the girls making flower crowns for Dickens in the back garden of the vicarage and about waking warm and safe and loved in Geordie’s arms as the summer sun rose early in the Highland sky.
“‘Dare to believe, Mr Chambers,’” he says aloud to himself, in words swallowed up by the evening breeze. “Dare to believe that God does not wish you to be alone." And Geordie -- and Cathy, and Caro, but most importantly Geordie -- have made sure, despite his own best efforts, that he wasn’t.
“Dickens!” he shouts, and this time the dog comes bounding. “Let's go home.”