Chapter 12

Thank goodness for the Forestry Commission. Northern England and Southern Scotland have lots of forests and there was a road leading off into the hills on their left. Two miles later they had backed into an access road for a section of the forest. And it was Ullapool all over again, although this time they took their jeans off so that Suzanne could straddle Andrew unencumbered. Once again, they had turned themselves on to the extent that they were fucking publicly, only hidden by the car door. Having gotten themselves so excited just talking about setting up a dungeon as well as the illicit thrill of fucking outdoors, neither of them took long to come. It felt to Andrew that he pulsed longer and harder than normal though. It wasn’t just Suzanne who found talking about all this to be exciting. She commented on it.

“I love how you get just as excited as I do talking about all this. You have completely filled me up.”

They were going to have to put a couple of hand towels in the car for moments such as these, since they appeared to be a regular occurrence. Suzanne sat bare-arsed leaking onto one of her undershirts until they were through Jedburgh. She draped her jeans over her legs but whenever Andrew peeked over all he saw was bare thigh. He really had to concentrate to keep his eyes on the road. When they finally got to Edinburgh the flat felt familiar and yet strange when they returned. They had stopped and got the essentials but were only going to be there for a couple of days. In fact rather than fool around they walked through the house thinking about what they were going to take down south with them.

“Do you have a lot of stuff in Glasgow at Fran and Nikki’s place?”

“Probably more than I think. I was through and back a lot, and I have left stuff at the end of each term, so there may be more than we can take down with us on this trip.”

“Okay, so there is no point in packing stuff from here into the car, as it will just mean more of your stuff will be left with them.”

“Yeah. What were you thinking of taking?”

“Not that much.”

“Are you going to take your double bass south?”

“I haven’t played it since I left school. Other than the little bit of jazz in Paris, I haven’t played since Easter more than four years ago. I think I will leave it. Hell, I should probably sell it.”

“You are not a big hoarder of stuff. Other than some clothes, is there anything else? The computer?”

“Also should be sold. It is five years old now. I will get a new one in London. What about your stuff?”

“What are you going to do with the flat?”

“Keep it. I am going to be up here every couple of months for the weekend, to see Grandma and to see Leslie and Julian, and Maggie and Tony. I presume you are going to see your parents as well. So we will need a base here, and sure it is a luxury and you could stay with your folks or we all could stay with Leslie but this just lets us close the door on the world. It is fully paid for, there is no mortgage. I will probably sell it one day but right now it is an indulgence we can keep.”

“Well if we are keeping the place then I am not going to worry about a lot of the clothes and accessories here. Whenever we are up I will take some stuff back down to the house but I should go through the last of the clothes here, see if they still fit and donate a bunch, take some down to the charity shops.”

So the rest of the afternoon was spent trying on, and mostly ditching clothes. It was the second time in four months she had done this but Suzanne seemed more ruthless this time. They filled a couple of bags and would drop them off over the weekend. They teased and felt each other up, but were waiting for Ara to get here. She rushed over to greet them when she got off the train, looking relaxed and happy.

“Thank you for letting me spend time with Grandfather. What was amazing was he didn’t try and talk me out of it. We spent more time talking about my grandmother than anything else. Our situation really does remind him of the two of them. There are a bunch of things that we need to talk about but it will wait until we are at the flat. How was the drive?”

Andrew smiled and Ara turned to look at Suzanne in the back seat.

“I was naughty.”

Ara laughed.

“Well of course you were. That was a racing certainty.”

She teased Suzanne while Andrew drove them back to the flat. Once they were settled in the living room she resumed her conversation.

“There are three main things, one of which I know he talked about with you Suze. He worries about jealousy between us if one of us cannot get pregnant and the other one can.”

“I mentioned it to Andrew, but we didn’t talk about it, waiting for you to get here. It was one thing I had not even considered for a moment. My whole life has been about making sure I don’t get pregnant, so to worry suddenly that I can’t get pregnant just.”

She stopped.

“I don’t know what to think. We all came from families where our parents had multiple children and pretty soon after getting married. Do we think it is an issue?”

Ara shrugged but then they both looked at Andrew, surprised at his silence.

“I had radiation therapy and chemotherapy when I was 13, right as I was going through puberty. Maybe I should go and check that I can have children. It might not be that one of you can’t get pregnant, it might be that both of you can’t because I am infertile.”

“Wow, I hadn’t thought of that. Is there a way to check?”

“I need to move my six-monthly check-ups down to a clinic in London. When I get an appointment I will ask them how I go about checking.”

“Okay, but do you think there is anything else that we can do about Grandfather’s concern.”

Ten minutes of talking round the subject got them nowhere. If Andrew had live swimmers they were just going to have to see what happened. There was no way of hypothesising about the problem. They would only know how to deal with the situation if it actually happened. Until then there was no point in worrying about it.

“So the second thing he raised about this, an adjunct to his main point, was we should think about when we have children.”

Suzanne and Andrew both looked confused.

“It was a strange conversation. Grandmother was 30 and 33 years old when she had Mum and Uncle Ash. But compared to the age when Indian women normally have children it was a lot older. He said that it was more difficult for Grandmother because she was older than if she had had children in her early twenties.”

Andrew puzzled through this but Suzanne was well ahead of him.

“So she was just more tired, everything was that little bit more difficult?”

“Exactly. He didn’t say he expected me to be knocked up any time soon but he just shared it, something for us to think about.”

Yet another thing Andrew had never contemplated. He didn’t think he wanted to be a dad anytime soon.

“So that was all informational, just things to think about. Then he told me we have to go and see Mum and Dad. We didn’t raise our voices but we did fight about it. You heard him yesterday. Mum is going to go ballistic. And it will be bad enough at me but I shudder to think what she will say to the two of you. I really don’t know what to do. I understand that I have to tell them eventually, but at the same time I dread it.”

“So let’s drive down one day and tell her, sorry them. If she reacts badly then we can just leave. There isn’t much alternative is there. We can hardly tell your dad and expect him to let your mum know.”

“I just don’t want to have to deal with her negativity, for you to see the ugliness.”

“I am not even introducing you to my parents. Your parents will at least be happy to see you.”

This allowed them to park the issue of the Baroness for the moment.

“You are just not going to tell your parents?”

“There is no point. The last thing I ever said to my father was did he wish I had died from my cancer?”

Ara and Suzanne gasped.

“Yeah, exactly. And he wouldn’t look me in the eye. I don’t know that there is any coming back from that. I thought I would take Grandma to church on Sunday morning and I presume we will talk about my parents then. I am putting her in a shit situation but there is no way round it. My parents are not going to be an issue for us.”

“What if we have children?”

Andrew sighed.

“I don’t know. We will have to see. Gwen is coming over to meet Suzanne and me next Saturday, why don’t we go and see your parents on the Sunday, just get it over with. If it is as bad as you fear then we can leave but we have not put it off.”

A resigned sigh and nod.

“I suppose.”

Enthusiastic agreement.

“Anyway, the final issue was about his house. When he sold his business he set up trusts for the four grandchildren, and I will get mine in about 18 months. But he talked about the house. He asked me if I would like it, if we would use it. I spent the most time there of all his grandchildren, way more than the boys combined. Now he knows it will not go down well with the rest of the family but he asked me if it was realistic that I would use it, whether we would use it. What do you think?”

“It is a lovely gesture but would we really use it? It seems too far away. Would we end up just using it two weeks a year in the summer?”

Suzanne’s point was the key one, it was in the middle of nowhere.

“Andrew?”

“Do you want to keep it, for all the memories?”

“Tell me what you think first.”

“Suzanne is right. It is too far away to use with any regularity. Plus as you said there are the issues with your family.”

“Good, we are on the same page. I told him that with the three of us working in London, that it would be difficult to get up and use it much. I can’t see getting on the train or driving for four hours at the end of a long week of work. He understood all that, but was making me the offer. He is thinking of selling the house, it is too big and too much to maintain. It is like the house in London, there are rooms he never uses anymore.”

“What about the memories?”

“He will still have them but he has been on his own in that house for 29 years. I never brought people to the house, so I think the three of us there even for just a day made him realise that it doesn’t make any sense. But even although he isn’t going to give me the house he is going to give me some more money, more than George and my cousins.”

“Do you think the rest of the family will squawk?”

“I don’t know. After the war he started his own engineering firm, which he sold when he retired. He told me that both Mum and Uncle Ash got money then and he set up the trusts for the rest of us. So we have all benefited from his generosity. I thought about it on the train up and I am not going to worry about it. I rarely see George or my cousins. If I was cheating everyone out of a share then it would be an issue, but we all have been treated very well, more than we deserve.”

Later, lying in bed Ara asked about Suzanne’s naughtiness.

“I had asked Andrew about the dungeon. Even just saying the word seems so over the top. Anyway, we talked about it, how he is excited for it just like we are, and then he started talking about what he was going to do to me. When he started talking about what the two of you were going to do to me, well we ended up having to stop.”

As Suzanne had been talking Ara had stroked Andrew to hardness and lowered herself onto him.

“We found a forestry road and once we were secluded we fucked right there. All that was shielding us from view if anyone came up the road was the car door.”

The three of them fucked for quite a while that night, falling asleep in a big sticky mess. That flat had so many of these memories.

As Andrew ran round the Meadows the following morning he wondered why he wasn’t more nervous. It wasn’t that he was looking forward to shocking his Grandma but he wasn’t really concerned that she would flip out. Because of the problems with his parents he figured that his Grandma might not be totally accepting of what they were doing but she was not going to make a fuss. And that was probably being unfair to her. They all had to have a quick shower to wash the excesses of the previous evening off them before they headed across the street to the pool. As Andrew swam backstroke, looking up at the wrought iron skylights, he thought about all the years that he had been there. More than seven years, first off early mornings when at school, and then concentrated bursts when he was back in town. It had been fabulous to have a pool 44 paces from the flat.

Andrew would have preferred to bring Grandma over to his flat rather than the three of them invade hers but it was too many sets of stairs for her. So after calling to make sure she was home, and that none of the rest of the family were randomly visiting, the three of them readied themselves to tell yet another person. And no, trying to explain it was not getting any easier.

“Andrew, how good to see you.”

He was hauled down for a hug.

“And Suzanne, how are you dear?”

Suzanne was also hugged.

“Grandma, this is Arabella.”

“That is a lovely name. Welcome, come in all of you.”

There followed ten minutes of fluttering about getting tea sorted before they finally were able to settle. Deep breath time.

“The three of us wanted to come and see you Grandma. I wanted to let you know that I am living with Suzanne and Ara. All three of us are living together.”

It took maybe four seconds for the penny to drop but then Grandma did the classic ‘oh my’ face. She even put her hand to her mouth. There was maybe another ten seconds of silence, which seemed like ten minutes at the time, before she stunned the three of them.

“So how am I going to be able to brag about this at church on Sunday, Andrew McLeod? You and your wicked ways.”

None of them were expecting that reaction and they looked at each other with a ‘is that it?’ look on their faces.

“Andrew, this is shocking in some ways. In a lot of ways but I can see how happy you are. I want you to be happy. And the other thing is you are different. Ever since you recovered from your cancer you have been this driven boy, now this driven man. I think it was Patrick that said it to me once. He and Shona were visiting and we were laughing about something you had done and he said you do everything to excess. And he didn’t mean it in an unkind way. It was an observation. Going to the Open University while at school, all the computer companies, all the money, everything. But you make it work. So yes, it is shocking, my grandson living with two women, but if anyone was going to do it then it would be you. More tea?”

Andrew guessed that his Grandma knew that there was more to Ara and Suzanne’s relationship but it was politely glossed over. He was happy, they were happy, so his Grandma was happy. It was oddly relaxing. They stayed and had lunch with her and afterwards Auntie Vi came across the hall and the two of them schooled them in rummy. They left the two little old ladies to their sherry and the horseracing although Andrew promised to take his Grandma to church on the Sunday morning. But they stood at the foot of the stair all thinking the same thing.