Chapter One
Life without Luke
The most wonderful day of my life occurred in August of my second year at Buckingham College, in the University of Camford. It was the day that my boyfriend Luke agreed to become my life partner. I had fallen in love with him the minute I first met him almost two years before, when we were freshmen sharing a room in college. He had beautiful long dark wavy hair and a brown Mediterranean skin. He was about 70 kilos, tall and thin, but wiry rather than skinny, muscular but slender, with sparse body hair and an excitingly big male organ. He was very chatty, open and friendly, and in the first few weeks of term made me feel less strange and alienated in the university city far from my home in the north of England. I felt enormously attracted to him, and the merest sight of him filled me with desire. Perhaps it was fortunate that I met him before I knew his name, or I might have been put off by his double-barrelled surname Singleton-Scarborough. Only much later did I discover that his name was that of his two adoptive fathers, who had brought him up from babyhood. He knew the identity of his mother, but had never met her. She was the sister of one of his cofathers.
In the next six months, we became close friends, but both of us disguised our sexual attraction for each other out of fear that we would spoil our close relationship. We only recognized our love for one another after I had rescued Luke from an embarrassing and threatening situation by falsely claiming that he was mine, when we went by mistake into a gay pub and he was propositioned by a gay weirdo. Afterwards I had to tell him that although what I had said was untrue, I did actually want him. He responded by acknowledging that he felt the same way towards me. You may find this hard to believe, but I did not know at the time that the college of which I was a member had a reputation for being gay, or more correctly, gay-friendly. I should have realized it, because I knew that it was Camford's only college that did not admit women! Luke knew of course, which is why he had chosen to go there.
My mother died when I was 15 years of age. After her death, my father disintegrated as a person. Already unemployed, he subsisted entirely on benefits and lived with a series of worthless women, none of whom had any time for a teenager in the house. Made so unwelcome, I moved in with my elder sister Liz, who had her own house and her own business. I did all my school homework and ate most of my meals at Liz's house. I had very few friends of my own age, so I spent three years, until I came to Camford, with books, either study books or works of history and literature. When not in Liz's house, I also spent a good deal of time in the house of my chemistry master Mr Silverdale, who gave me an enormous amount of help and encouragement. Not only did he coach me through my GCSE and A-Level exams, but he encouraged me to make an application to the University of Camford. He also encouraged and developed my love of classical music that had begun when my mother sent me to piano lessons, which ceased abruptly on her death. It was thanks to the general reading and my retentive memory that at the age of seventeen and a half I successfully passed the interview for admission to Buckingham College.
No-one from my school had ever gone to Camford, so when I got there with good A Levels, just eighteen years old, I was intensely lonely. Even my tutor in my first year did not give me the help and encouragement that he was paid to do. I had spells of feeling suicidal and in the Candlemas term even thought of leaving, although I had nowhere to go to.
Luke was the only person who was nice to me, and indeed went out of his way to help me find my feet in college, university and city. He persuaded me to go to the cinema with him to see foreign-language films, and bought exotic beers, which we consumed in our college room. I would have done anything to gain his affection, but dared not tell him so. When we found one another, the world changed for me, and in the course of the following months with Luke's support and encouragement, I began to appreciate the glories, the pleasures and the beauty of the city and its colleges and the sheer enjoyableness of academic life. I also (to be honest) also took enormous delight in my boy's beautiful body!
I had always been good at chemistry, my chosen field of study, so I had no academic problems, and thanks to the joy that Luke brought to my life, and in spite of poor college tuition, I did so well in my first-year exams that I got a scholarship. It gave me particular pleasure that he too got a scholarship and we continued to share a room in our second year. But my greatest pleasure was when Luke said to me, "It's a pity there are no scholarships for brilliance in fucking. If there were, you would easily win one!"
After a particularly disagreeable episode during my first Easter vacation involving the bitch with whom my father was living, I had left home for good, Luke's parents offered me a home. They were two very distinguished middle-aged gay men. They lived at Rockwell's Barn, a country house near Ixton, but also had a flat in Fountain Street, Camford. Luke and I were (and are) blissfully happy together, but I was unable to contemplate us getting engaged, as he had pots of money because his parents were wealthy, and I had nothing to offer Luke, except myself.
Things changed however, when at Easter in my second year I met one of Luke's grandmothers for the first time, and out of the blue she offered the two of us €75,000 each! So only a few months after this, as we were lying together under an overhanging rock on a Welsh hillside after our first ever open-air sex, I asked him to become my partner for life, and he accepted without hesitation. Luke is a devout Anglican, and his sweet disposition and forgiving nature are good advertisements for the Christian faith. After falling in love, he would never get involved in a relationship that was not lifelong. He brought a sense of security to me that I had never felt since my mother's death. We bought each other identical engagement rings ('mangagement rings' as they later became known) as a token that we belonged to each other. By now I had a female friend Margaret, with whom I went to concerts. She was a lesbian, so Luke had no need to be jealous, and he asked her to keep an eye on me, because shortly after our engagement, he left for Italy as part of his degree studies in Modern Languages.
I got on well with Luke's parents. One, whom he called Pop, was a tutor to first-year chemistry students in St Boniface's College, the other, whom he called Dad, and who was his biological uncle, was a world-famous tenor, whose voice I had admired since I was a young teenager. Dad, whom I call David, is often away singing in recitals, opera and oratorio in all parts of the world. I am sometimes honoured with the responsibility of playing the piano for him when he rehearses at home. On Luke's encouragement, I discovered that I could sing, and was recruited as a tenor into the college chapel choir, which sorely needed tenor and (male) alto voices. Later my friend Margaret encouraged me to audition for the Camford Bach Choir.
Towards the end of that same August, on one of my days off from my vacation work at the Camford Fitness Centre, Dad, who was on one of his short stretches at home, drove with me to Bristol Airport to put Luke on a plane to Bologna-Guglielmo-Marconi Airport. He was going to spend his third academic year as an Erasmus student at the University of Bologna, reputed to be the oldest in Europe (though this is disputed by the University of Salamanca!). Most of his weekends were to be spent with his mother and her family in a small town near Verona. She was Luke's Dad's sister, and had given Luke up at the age of six months to Dad and Pop for adoption. She had later married Massimo Mascagnoli. After his adoption she had no contact with her son until at the age of eighteen, he exercised his right to find her. This had happened the year before, and both I and his English cofathers had already met his mother and her family. I kissed Luke goodbye with regret, but not with a sinking heart. I would be seeing him again in four months time.
About a month later, just before the beginning of the Martinmas term, and after I had finished working at the Fitness Centre, Luke's parents suggested to me that I invite Margaret, who had just got back to Camford, to spend a day with us at Rockwell's Barn. Cathy, Luke's sister was just about to leave for Oxbridge, but her preparations were well organized, and her curiosity to meet my lesbian friend was so great that she spent the day with Margaret and me. The two girls got on like a house on fire and in the end, despairing of getting Margaret to myself, I undressed and swam fifty metres in the pool! Eventually I persuaded the two of them to come for a drink at the Jellycotes Arms.
So much by way of introduction to this story: except that I have not yet told you my name. It is Thomas Appleton. I had by now left behind the black period that I had gone through between the ages of 15 and 18, and had become a normal man of twenty, different only in that I preferred boys to girls. Luke however left for Italy convinced that I would relapse during his absence into my teenage black slough of despond. One of the reasons for me writing this account is to prove him wrong! I proposed to have a good time while he was away, and in any case I had the major exams of my study period at the end of this third year and was determined to do well in them, as I wanted to do research.
Chapter Two
