Terry, choosing to believe those around him, was convinced that James would desist. From his childhood Terry had learned that people let you down, even or especially when they make promises. The only safe way to react is to push them harder and ask for more. Somewhere there will be the breaking point and the truth of their infidelity will be revealed.
Terry believed this would be their last tea together, and each would return to their former lives. This is how the story usually ends. A brief encounter, a holiday romance, a short affair, to enliven an otherwise dull life. A glimpse of something very special, but too precious to hold, like the mist of a summer morning, or the flash of a meteorite in the night sky, impossible to be sustained. Terry looked at James across the table, their knees secretly touching, outwardly so proper and yet under the cloth managing to be intimate and tactile. Terry straightened up his back and pulled his leg away.
“I can’t see you again,” he said
“But it isn’t midnight yet,” said James with some humour in his voice, “nothing has been decided. You can’t issue an ultimatum and then decide before the time is up!”
“I mean,” said Terry, with weariness in his voice, “I can’t see you again when you decide it is over. It would be too much for me. Maybe we will see each other at meetings, or in the street, and I will always be polite, but nothing more.”
James was trying to think what that would be like seeing Terry across a room and only nodding his head, or catching a glimpse of him in a shop or a pub. James could not imagine what that would be like because in his world it could not happen. He did believe in the missed opportunity, the love lost and never recovered, but he was never going to be the one who carelessly loosened his hold to let someone so precious fall away. It would be like holding a large crystal vase, and in relaxing the grip, let it to crash to the floor. What is more Terry had given James the power to decide and had named his price.
“What about this?” said James holding up the ring on his hand.
“I would want you to keep that, and never take it off.”
“What about these,” said James putting his hand in his pocket and bringing out the three pebbles that he carried with him at all times.
“I have got a little bag for those at home,” began Terry before he realised what he was saying. “God, I need a cigarette, let’s go for a walk.”
They left the teashop and strolled away from the Cathedral. Neither of them wanted to walk quickly in case it was their last time together. They took a turning down a small lane between the houses, which led to a low wall at the top of a flight of steps. Here they had met on many occasions, in a semi-privacy that let them chat unheard but without the air of conspiracy. With a panoramic view of the city below they could see, or so they believed, in the far distance Terry’s village, marked by the fine square tower of the parish church. They reckoned such a vista gave a perspective on life, but today their mood was more sombre.
“I like this place,” said James. “Whatever happens I will remember it as our place, where we chatted and laughed and planned and thought about so much.” As he spoke tears began to fill his eyes, as if part of him did believe this was the end.
“It was good,” said Terry “and I really thank you for everything.”
He could say no more, and James could hear no more, so they hugged and briefly kissed.
“Now I am going to walk away, and drive home, and I won’t phone you or contact you in any way,” said Terry. “I will just wait and if I hear nothing from you by midnight I will know your decision, and everything will be over.”
James stood there watching Terry walk back up the lane, immensely sad but full of hope because he had been given the choice. As Terry reached the top of the lane he turned and waved. James waved back and Terry was gone, possibly forever, and in many stories that is what happens. The love would have been no less real, nor the pain no less strong, had Terry and James returned to their old lives. Their friends would have comforted them, and some would have said how pleased they had made the brave and right decision to finish. But there would have been, as often there is, an aching in their hearts, a pain that could never be entirely eradicated, a love unfulfilled, untested, aborted because the human spirit was too weak, too self-centred, too mundane to accommodate it.
The rest of the day for James was spent in a daze. He sat in his office, quite unable to concentrate on his work. He stayed on until well after six only getting home in time for dinner, and the routine of putting the children to bed. When this was done, he had to talk to Rachel, to whom it became very apparent this night was to be momentous.
“What are you going to do?” she asked once the children were safely asleep. She still did not understand how love had taken hold of James, and seemed to be strangling him. She hardly recognised the man in front of her.
“I don’t know,” answered James without the courage to speak the full truth. He didn’t want to hurt her.
“It is over for us, isn’t it,” she said softly. “I don’t know you anymore.”
“I am sorry, so very sorry.” James was sure of some things. “I want to be your friend, if it is possible, and you know I want to carry on looking after the children because they are everything to me.” He stopped to wipe a tear from his eye with his finger and sniffed. “But this is something I have to do, perhaps something for myself for the first time in my life. I am so tired of following the rules, always putting on a face, living a lie. If I don’t do this now ...”
Rachel burst into tears. He had not seen her cry like that before. He wanted to comfort her but he knew he couldn’t.
At 11.15 pm James took his overnight bag, kissed Rachel on the cheek, and walked to the car. He drove steadily without hurrying but with the determination of a man approaching a precipice. Terry had said Victor was away on business, and he would be alone in the cottage that night. At ten minutes to 12 he pulled up outside Terry’s house and in the very darkness of near midnight, opened the gate and walked up the gravelled drive.
The first thing he noticed with some surprise was Victor’s car, parked up by the back door. This made him stop, not knowing how to respond. He had not expected a confrontation with Victor. He knew he had said he would fight for Terry, but he did not feel ready to do that now. For a moment he stood there wondering how he might proceed. Should he turn around how with his heel in the gravel, and return home knowing the ultimatum would have passed. Should he carry on as he had been so determined to do? A moment of paralysis gripped him, and then he put his foot forward and advanced towards the back door.
There stood Terry with his mobile in his hand. He looked up with a beam on his face. He had been so absorbed in waiting for a message on his phone he had not realised James had come up the driveway.
“I can’t believe it,” Terry said. “You are here. I thought the best I would get was a message to say it was over. But not you standing here!”
“I am here because I am yours,” said James, putting away all doubts in Terry’s mind. “I want you to be mine. Do what you like, I don’t care, but let’s be together.”
Just then a voice was heard from back inside the house. “Who is it?” said Victor. “At this time of night what do they want?”
James suddenly realised the ultimatum had not been told to Victor, perhaps because Terry had thought things between him and James were over.
“Just wait here,” said Terry, holding up a hand and then vanishing into the house.
James waited for perhaps a quarter of an hour. It did not matter because it was a warmish night, and the bright stars of the countryside sky made a beautiful sight. He wondered what Terry was saying to Victor, and he wanted to go in and speak to him himself, but had a fear Victor would turn nasty. He put his hand in his pocket and felt the stones. Just then Terry re-emerged.
“I have got to do something. What can it be?” he muttered as he paced the gravel.
James was a little taken aback by this, wondering what it was Terry was trying to de
cide. Could he not simply accept the ultimatum had been fulfilled, and tell Victor what had happened?
“Hang on,” said Terry, holding up his hand again to pause the moment. “I have got an idea.”
He went back into the house but was soon out again, closing the backdoor behind him. “We can go to the Poachers Arms,” he announced. “They have a spare room.”
So it was, in an old fashioned way, Terry and James eloped to a rather run-down pub in the next village. What Terry had told Victor remained unknown to James, though he reckoned he might have been less than honest about his feelings. That night they made love in a small hotel room crammed with three beds, lurid pink curtains hanging limply at the window, and a carpet with dark brown stains. The bathroom was across the corridor, but the hot tap produced no hot water and the toilet flush was broken. All night Terry’s mobile was ringing intermittently, Victor desperate to know where he was and what was going on. In the end James asked him to turn it off, because it was ceasing to be comical.
But they were happy, happy to be with each other, ecstatic they had survived the ultimatum, that their fears of never seeing each other again, of their relationship being reduced to nods across a room, had been averted.
“I am going to tell Victor to move out,” said Terry lying across James’ chest. “He can live in his own house now the tenants have left.”
“Then I can come and live with you!” James hardly held back the tears.
“He could be gone in the week, maybe even go further, all the way to bloody Holland.” Terry knew this would please James, and that gave him the strength to say it and almost believe it.
When the morning came outwardly life might return to normal, even though there was a plan. James had to go to work, and was at school to pick up the children, bring them home and give them their tea. Again on the surface it might seem that nothing had changed, the ultimatum having had no effect beyond the hearts of two lovers. But for the James the decision had been irrevocably made. He had jumped from a great height, and although he had not yet landed, it was inevitable he would hit the ground, in some way or other. No one could tell what damage there would be.
Rachel and James talked when the children were in bed. He loved her beyond doubt, and was so comfortable in his marriage. They had been the best of friends for over twenty years and lived as husband and wife for ten. Together they had made a home, brought up two lovely children, and shared so many experiences. She had been there for him when work had been difficult, or more crucially when it had been unfulfilling and mundane. At an intellectual level they were always communicating, discussing and teasing each other about cerebral things. She had known about his sexual orientation for years. Before they had married she had accepted it as part of him, and in accepting it thought it might be tamed. She worked with disabled people, and was fond of saying everyone had a disability of some sort. This was James’ and it need not get in the way of their love. It was the price you sometimes have to pay because you love someone, a view James now only fully understood.
Terry had changed everything. He presented to James a new possibility which had simply not been there before. His sexuality, he had thought, was under control. What he had not bargained for was his heart. He only now realised how much he had been waiting to love someone so completely and absolutely, and that someone had to be a man. Not any man, and probably only a few men indeed might qualify, but a man none the less. Perhaps the chances of meeting such a man were remote, and had Terry not stumbled across his path, the possibility of fulfilment would never have arisen. Now that it had, James felt he had no choice.
“I can see it in your eyes,” said Rachel. “You do love him, more than you love me.”
“It is a different kind of love,” said James, not wanting to have to explain the difference to her.
“There is nothing I can do, is there,” was her profoundly sad conclusion. “I thought it might blow over.”
“I am sorry, really sorry,” said James about to cry. “I can’t seem to be without him. He just ... captivates me. Maybe I should have thought about it years ago, how this sort of thing can happen. But I have just lost control.”
The tears rolled down his cheeks but he hastily wiped them with his hands, He did not want to seem pathetic, or in any way engender her sympathy. Why should he cry about such a love that had set him on fire and given him a zest for life he had never known before?
They talked and they cried. James knew that he could never give Rachel the fullness of what she wanted and what she deserved. He could not love her in the physical way that a woman needs, or at least expects from a husband. He could not let himself go and be consumed in their lovemaking. Now that he had experienced it with Terry, to an extent that he had never done with anyone before, he had discovered what he never knew existed. Love so enveloping, so ecstatic, and so self-giving. He looked at her and felt inadequate and a fraud.
“I don’t know what I am going to do,” said James, quickly adding in case she took any hope from his confusion, “all I know is that I have to live with him.”
James had no idea how the ultimatum could be practically fulfilled. He had no mind, counter to his normal organised character, to think of such things. This troubled Rachel because the man she knew would have been so concerned to make proper arrangements. Normally, he was financially astute and careful about his possessions. This change, perhaps as much as anything, showed her that he had undergone some kind of conversion. The heart is the fulcrum of life and when it shifts nothing stays the same. James had become carefree, foolhardy, and almost dismissive of important matters and considerations. Rachel was beginning to realise she would have to take on the responsibility for the everyday lives of the children and the household while James regressed into something of a child. Perhaps this made her jealous of what James had acquired, and in that jealousy a bitterness would begin to brew.
While they were talking the phone began to ring. At first they ignored it but after the third attempt Rachel decided to answer. On the other end was Victor. He sounded polite but stern, if a little loud, asking how she was and why she had thrown her husband out of the house. When she said she hadn’t he called her a liar, the thin veneer of his politeness too brittle for his abrupt French character. He demanded to speak to James.
“You disgusting lying fart!” were the words that greeted James. “You are nothing but a bloody aged vicar. How dare you try and kidnap my husband!” he was becoming all the more angry as English was beginning to fail him.
James had to think whom he meant as he had never thought of Terry as a husband. Victor went on, not giving James any chance to reply. The curtness of the foreign accent gave a sharpness to every word he spoke, especially the verbs. “Can’t you just leave us alone? I will never ever let you have Terry. Just piss off back to your church!” And with that the phone went dead.
Such was James’ second encounter with Victor. This time he was ready for the anger, and as there was no risk of a physical expression James felt safer. But he was confused. Why, thought James, had Victor got the idea Rachel had evicted him? Perhaps it was Victor’s only way of making sense of last night, of James turning up at midnight with nowhere to go. He felt that he wanted to tell Victor the truth and explain how much he loved Terry. Then surely Victor would understand. He would be happy for Terry to be with someone who really loved him.
Such is the naivety of those who are in love and the beginning of their downfall. James had started to lose his grip on reality. He thought Victor would understand and simply let Terry decide for himself what he wanted. He thought Rachel would give way after ten years of marriage and be happy for him. He thought the bishop would recognise the love between him and Terry and give his blessing. He thought all his friends would rejoice he had discovered something so special and wonderful. But in reality none of these would be true, and the blindness of James was something that would take months to be cured. For the time being he was oblivious to his peril, to the pain that he would
bring to others, and ultimately to the great pain he would inflict on himself.
~~*~~
Some streets away in the bishop’s study a hurried meeting was taking place.
“Thank you archdeacon for coming at such short notice. Richard and I do value your advice and help in this rather delicate matter,” the bishop began.
“What is it, bishop? You know you can rely on me,” said the archdeacon.
“It concerns James, our projects officer,” said Richard wanting to be the one who seemed to have a full grasp of the facts. “I suppose you know Charles, our Diocesan Surveyor. He does get about and has been invaluable in providing us with information, so we can keep ahead of the game, so to speak.”
“Go on, tell me what it is.” The archdeacon was impatient.
“Very delicate, you understand,” cautioned the bishop.
“Charles tells me this morning James has decided to move in with this Terry person. You know we can stomach all kinds of things, indeed we have to, but when people start living together it is going too far. If the press get a whiff of it there be a full-bodied scandal,” warned Richard, noticing how the revelation widened the eyes of the archdeacon.
“That is what we don’t want. You know how damaging it was last time,” said the bishop with a strained worried look. “I have tried speaking to him, to make him see sense, but I am afraid it has not worked.”
“Leave it to me, I will sort him out,” said the archdeacon with a slight smile on his face. He actually relished the prospect of a disciplinary.
“Maybe Charles could do something,” said Richard pre-emptively. “He is friends with this Terry, and his partner Victor, a charming man I had dinner with only last week.”
“Bunch of queers, the lot of them,” blurted the archdeacon. “I know we can’t call them that anymore, and we have to be PC, but strangle them at birth is what I say.”
Gay Before God: An Awakening Love Forbidden by the Church Page 9