Chapter One: In the Sauna
1:00 a.m., New Year's Day, 1941
The Stable Baths, London
Sir Neville had just lowered himself into the main bath of The Stable, a private gentlemen's bathhouse near Covent Garden, on Endall Street, after having taken Irma home at the end of a round of New Year's Eve parties. He was scanning the baths for likely young men when an attendant came in, crouched down beside the senior civil servant, and whispered, "It is starting again, sir. Jack here will show you to the basement shelter. The sauna there has been reinforced to serve as an air raid shelter. There aren't many at the baths this evening, so you shouldn't be inconvenienced."
No sooner had the man said that than the first of the evening's bombs burst not far away in the city, close enough that the building trembled.
"No respite even on New Year's Day," Sir Neville muttered. He was a large, but well-built, florid, reddish-gray-haired man in his fifties, of strong constitution and appetites, and with endowments to be proud of. He was a man not to stint on the exercise of either his appetites or his endowments. With Jack's help, he pulled himself up from the water and, wrapping a large towel around his midsection, followed the solicitous Jack to the stairs leading down to the lower level of the gay baths.
Jack flinched as a German bomb exploded nearer to Covent Gardens than the previous shell, but Neville did not. The London blitz, a near-nightly occurrence since it had started on September 7th of the now-previous year, was nothing new for Neville. As with all who remained in London, the constant fear of destruction and instant death in bombing attacks that came on every clear, or mostly clear, night, no longer wore heavy in the mind of anyone who had remained in the city. Now it was more the prayer that, if a bomb had one's name written on it, please have it make a direct hit. Medical and rescue support was stretched to such a limit that the suffering of being wounded but living through being bombed was more a fear than dying from being bombed.
Sir Neville had been recognized as an important patron of the baths. He was already at the head of the stairs, being guided by Jack, as the attendant who had told him he needed to go to the air raid shelter was telling that to the other men in the pool area. Neville, in deference to his position, was being given a head start to find a comfortable resting place. His eyes descended to the orbs of the young, handsome Jack as he padded down the stairs in his slippers, holding his towel together, and he fantasized being alone with the young man and fingering between those orbs in preparation for a mounting. Alone with him again, that is to say, as Sir Neville had enjoyed the charms of the young man on earlier occasions, and Jack had been quite compliant.
Neville liked his men young, blond, small of stature, but perfectly formed, which Jack approximated well enough. And he liked them submissive. He did like them educated, clean, and of good class, though, which made scratching his itches somewhat delicate and failed to make Jack fully satisfactory.
With the advance notice, Sir Neville was nearly the only one in the sauna when he arrived and thus was able to pick his spot, on the highest, third tier on the wall to the right of the door, from whence he could continue his voyeur activities. It had been a tiring, glutinous, and wine-filled round of New Year's Eve ceremonies and parties through the government realms earlier, starting in the afternoon and mostly winding down before midnight, and he was in the mood to window shop rather than to buy. But he was wound up enough not to have wanted to go straight home with his wife, Irma, married because, despite being from a manufacturing family, and thus of a lower class, she'd come with money. She'd also been imposed on him by those he served when he reached the step in the ladder to power where having a wife was at least protective coloring. There were many like him in government service, but it was still very much a private vice for the titled.
The New Year's Eve festivities had gone on despite the threat of the blitz, because, after four months or unrelentless fire from heaven, London was becoming accustomed to the inconvenience and gambler's luck of it all and the British had mused, falsely it turned out, that even the Germans would stay home and celebrate the advent of a new year. It was a new year that portended to be to the Third Reich's satisfaction. But this Hitler fellow was totally without humor and a sense of having a good time and every good time having its due.
Neville was no sooner settled on his perch than other men started coming into the sauna. There weren't too many, because the partying had mostly been done earlier and Londoners tended to stay close to their own neighborhoods and shelters on clear nights, regardless of a celebration.
Two of the men who came in, though, caught Neville's attention—primarily the younger of the two and that because, shockingly, Neville knew the young man. He recognized him instantly because the young man, although only clothed in a towel as Neville was, was limping. He had suffered a wound in his leg, which was why, at his age and in his condition, he was here in London rather than on the battlefield. Neville knew the young man had fought the Germans in France and had been wounded in the evacuation at Dunkirk in May and June of the previous year. He could serve the Allied cause, but no longer on the battlefield. Sir Neville had also been pursuing the young man, albeit still in a preliminary fashion. He was everything that made Sir Neville's juices flow. He hadn't seen him in this club before.
The young man was named Neal, and Neville had lusted for him in the previous few months that he had known the young, blond, perfectly formed, sunny-dispositioned man of small stature and angelic face. He just hadn't known for sure Neal would be of the preference to be coming to The Stables baths. There had been signs, but Neville couldn't be sure of his chances. Neville also had struggled over the possible conquest. The young man was too closely associated with Neville professionally. Neville had a policy of not taking his pleasures where he worked. In his position and considering his activities, he couldn't—or, at least knew he shouldn't—take chances.
As it was, Neville knew the other young man who came into the sauna with Neal as well. Phillip was in his early thirties and thus a good five or six years older than Neal. Phillip didn't arouse Neville. They were too much of the same desire in what they were looking for in a partner. But it had been Neville's experience that men who aroused Phillip also aroused him. Neville gave Neal a more searching assessment.
The two, Phillip and Neal, obviously were together—and almost as obviously had been close to or in the early stages of intimacy somewhere else in the baths before the air raid had started—because they came in arm in arm and with dreamy eyes only for each other. Phillip was a mid-level officer at the Foreign Office, often coming to the Ministry of Information to avail his seniors of the services of Neville's office. Neville didn't know what Phillip's duties were at the Foreign Office beyond liaison work. Before tonight he had his suspicions of what they were, but obviously a man who pursued other men in public, in a bathhouse as known as The Stable, would not be handling those types of sensitive functions, whether or not he was of the titled class.
