Lessons for Survivors

by Charlie Cochrane

  “Are professors allowed to do this sort of thing?” They hadn’t made love since Orlando had been given his title properly, what with lectures and paperwork and investigating. It felt like years.

  “I’d have thought it would be de rigueur for professors. Or should be, at least. Even for mathematicians. Their bodies aren’t just a means of conveying their brains from point A to point B.” Jonty proved his theorem by moving his fingers up from Orlando’s thigh to his crotch. “See? This isn’t designed for calculating, even if it’s as rigid as a set of Napier’s bones.”

  Orlando wasn’t sure he was capable of calculating anything at the moment, not even the likely interval between now and the inevitable explosion of ecstasy that always followed Jonty’s fingers, or any other part of Jonty, making contact down there. “Well, what is it designed to do, then?” When they’d first been partners, in bed as well as in investigating, Orlando had found it hard enough to even think of a word to describe the act of intercourse, let alone say it out loud. Now he enjoyed talking smutty on occasions, and getting Jonty to do the same, not that the imp needed much prompting.

  “I’ll resist the temptation to say, ‘If you need to ask the question, you won’t understand the answer.’” Jonty carried on stroking his target. “This thing was especially made for pleasing me, of course. In a variety of ways.”

  “Not for pleasing me?” Orlando’s voice was hoarse, now. Anybody’s voice would have been hoarse with that being done to them.

  “You as well, of course, but not without me being involved somewhere. Solitary pleasures are never quite as satisfying.”

  They kissed gently, then eagerly, tongues exploring and tasting. This was a joy that never dulled with repetition: a simple kiss as exciting a prelude to the main event as a man could wish for. It was more than a dozen years since they’d first shared a sexual experience. Orlando often wondered how he had survived his empty and unfulfilled life before Jonty had come along and opened his eyes to a world of delights that were neither numerical nor logical.

  “Have I not broken you of that desperate habit yet?” Jonty had made his way down to Orlando’s chest, trailing kisses all the way, but he came back up to eye level to remonstrate.

  “What habit?” Orlando tried hard to think of some little nasty practice that he might have fallen into, particularly when the war had kept them apart.

  “Thinking too hard when we’re supposed to be concentrating on the flesh, not the intellect. I can almost hear your brain cells clashing together.” Jonty dived down again, edging the line of kisses southwards.

  “I shall try my hardest to clear my brain, but as I’ve told you a million . . . oh.” There was no chance of Orlando speaking or even thinking now, not with Jonty doing that, there.

  Normally Orlando was the methodical one, ensuring that every inch of skin on Jonty’s chest was tasted. Ensuring each process on Jonty’s backbone had been caressed and stimulated before letting his fingers make their way before, behind, and between in search of their ultimate goal.

  But now Jonty was inching kisses all over Orlando’s chest, across his flanks, and onto his back. This reversal of their usual roles was proving both unsettling and wildly exciting. When Jonty’s tongue reached the little place just above Orlando’s hip bone, where the great scar on his chest ended, it felt like he might just go berserk.

  “It’s remarkable how well you’ve kept your shape.” Jonty sat back for a moment, all the better to admire his lover’s fine lean frame. “Like a man twenty years younger.”

  “Oh, hush.” Orlando was secretly pleased, of course he was, but it didn’t do to confess the fact. It was exactly the sort of evidence of vanity that might be kept and used against him on a later occasion. “And it’s remarkable how you’ve never lost the ability to prattle on and on, even at the most intimate of moments. One day I’ll insist on rogering in silence, and then where will you be?”

  “I seem to recall we’ve done it before, and I’m sure we could do it again. Is that a challenge?” It seemed so daft, the pair of them lying naked now and greatly aroused, talking instead of doing, but that had often been the way of things. At least some element of sex was, for both of them, cerebral rather than just carnal.

  “It wasn’t, but it is now.” Orlando drew Jonty towards him, silencing him in the best way he knew: with deep urgent kisses. This was going to be a test for both of them. They’d managed hush before, whispers as opposed to talking aloud, but utter silence they’d rarely succeeded in. How would they know if it was to be “turn” or “turnabout” or any other of the coded terms they used to describe their preference of the night? How would they know when it was the moment for proper union?

  Jonty pulled out of the kiss. “If I’m to keep silent then your brain is to stop processing stuff, as well. I can hear it whirring and chugging away in there. Whatever’s exercising it now?”

  Orlando hoped he hadn’t turned too deep a shade of crimson. It was rare for him to blush now, so rare that Jonty always made a special point of mentioning it and being impertinent. “If we’re completely silent from now on, how will I know what you want to do?”

  “Turn or turnabout, you mean? Turnabout.” Jonty grinned, running his fingers along his lover’s chest and down to the field of ultimate engagement. “Anything else to clarify before we go into action? There’ll be no calling out then.”

  Orlando could barely raise his voice above a whisper. It was all very well discussing these things in the heat of passion, but to be planning them in advance like a military strategy was . . . actually, it was rather exciting. “We’ll take it nice and slowly. Just, you know, to get the feel of things. Oh, do stop laughing. You’re worse than one of the dunderheads.”

  “I’ll be sensible.” Jonty crossed his heart and raised his hand. “Actually, I’ll say it for you as you can’t manage the words: You’ll go once more into the breach, or whatever euphemism you want to use for partial rogering, then we’ll calm down a bit before we go for the big finish. Make the moment last.”

  Orlando nodded, glad that Jonty understood him so well and the conversation could cease. They might have thirteen years of experience with each other, but every new engagement was to be regarded as something significant, sacred, precious. And after their separation during the war and the confusion and heartbreak that had followed the end of hostilities, intimacy with each other was something they’d never take for granted again. “One last thing. Can I say ‘I love you’ now, if I’m not allowed to say it then? You know, at the moment of . . . um . . . crisis?”

  “You never need to say it out loud, although I’ll never tire of hearing it. I’ve known it for so long.” Jonty caressed Orlando’s face, then let his hand wander lower again. The time for action had come. “So, so long . . .”

  Orlando wasn’t sure if the last remark had been intended as a pun and, frankly, he’d gone past the point of caring. He focussed his mind, at last, on the pleasures of the flesh.

  “Are you asleep?” Orlando realised it was a stupid question as soon as it was out of his mouth. He’d be jolly lucky not to get a clout in response if he woke his light-of-love. He hoped he’d judged the signs right; Jonty had a certain tenor to his breath when asleep, and that note had been missing these last ten minutes.

  “Sex has obviously affected your powers of logic again. How can you expect a sensible answer to that question?” Jonty turned over, snuggling up against his lover. “Talking of sex, you’re not after a second helping are you? Because I feel absolutely shattered.”

  “No, of course not.” Orlando wasn’t lying for once; neither of them was getting any younger. Even if the spirit had been willing, the flesh felt a bit drooping. “I just wanted to talk about the case.”

  “Have you been lying awake worrying about it? I could feel you tossing and turning.”

  “Did I wake you? Sorry.” When they were younger, and their bodies weren’t quite so wilted, they’d have lain in each other’s arms after the act of love, disc
ussing the case they were working on. Strange how often they’d made some sudden leap of deduction in a haze of postcoital bliss. Now sleep usually overtook them too quickly for such luxuries. “No, I haven’t been lying awake. Well, only this last half an hour.” Worrying about Owens too, although he wasn’t going to admit that. “Something about Mitchell doesn’t quite ring true. It’s been gnawing at me since we were in the pub. Of course now I’ve twigged it, the thing’s entirely obvious.”

  “Well, it may be to a professor of mathematics, but a humble student of the Bard is struggling to get what’s going on.” Jonty arranged the covers around himself, making a little nest. “Especially at two o’clock in the morning, or whatever it is. Please enlighten me, if that’s not beneath your dignity.”

  “He says he served out with the Cambridgeshires. How did he have time to get home at the end of the war and find a parish and get to know the Priestlands before Peter’s death when the man was already dead before the Armistice?”

  “Eh? Can you say that again slowly?”

  “We . . . must . . . assume . . . Ow!” Orlando rubbed his shin. It was a low blow to give a man a kick while sharing a bed with him. And not just low, dextrous with it. He moved his legs out of range.

  “Not as slowly as all that, for goodness sake. You clearly haven’t had enough shin whacks recently and are getting into bad habits again.” Jonty jiggled his foot as a warning.

  Orlando mustered all the dignity that his sore shin would allow. “We must assume that he’s been in the parish since earlier last year to have come to know the Priestlands reasonably well. Unless he was there prewar, of course, or knew them from somewhere else.”

  “I didn’t get that impression from what he’d said, so while I have no definite evidence one way or the other, I feel—don’t roll your eyes, I saw that, even in the dark—it’s unlikely to be so. I can offer some nice objective evidence about the first part, because when I got dragged round the church, I saw the painted board with the list of vicars.” Jonty yawned. “The previous vicar had served until October 1917. I remember because his name was Sheridan and I couldn’t help wondering if he was related to Dr. Sheridan, although apparently he isn’t. Then there must have been an interregnum, because your man Mitchell didn’t take up the post until March of last year.”

  “He’s not my man.”

  “More’s the pity, if you saw him. Very nicely turned out lad. I bet he has all the old maids’ hearts aflutter.”

  “As you keep saying. Behave. Irrespective of all that, what was he doing back in Blighty in early 1918, or late 1917, I suppose, to be interviewed or whatever it is they do to prospective parish priests?” Orlando pulled the covers tighter around him; the night was reaching its coldest point.

  “They make them meet three old maids of the parish in a locked room and see if they can avoid being molested over a period of one hour. Any handsome young priest who passes through the fire of that ordeal must be the one for the job.”

  “Can you never be serious?”

  “Not after the events of a few hours ago. And anyway, I’ve seen enough of being serious over the last few years. I think it’s my duty to be frivolous for the rest of my life. Except in our bed, of course.” Jonty laughed. “I bet you’re blushing. Shame I can’t see it.”

  Orlando deliberately ignored the remark, resolving to make his friend pay amends in that same bed, whenever they were both up to it again. “Mitchell. Did he seem like he’d got an injury that would have sent him home?”

  Jonty, suddenly serious despite all his earlier protestations, became quiet while he considered, his steady breathing reflecting his depth of thought. “Not that I was aware of. I suppose he might have been sent home with trench fever or a bit gaga, and then recovered sufficiently to take up light duties in his parish. Might even have had a wooden leg under his tweed trousers, and was so adept at using it that I didn’t notice.”

  “Is there any chance that it wasn’t him in the photo? That all the bit about being an officer was just a pretence? A nice convenient lie to impress the ladies?” It seemed like a long shot, but loose ends and inconsistencies always nagged at Orlando. He hated everything that didn’t coincide with his mathematically logical view of the world. Except, of course, the gloriously subjective, annoying, messy, and irrational Jonty Stewart.

  “It certainly looked like him, although I suppose it might have been a twin brother. I hope there aren’t two sets of twins in this case, like Shakespeare had. That would drive me mad.” Jonty sighed, the sigh turning into another yawn. “Sorry, I need my beauty sleep. Is this important?”

  “I don’t know. It niggles, and I’m always wary of things in a case that niggle. Like why he said that Peter was the elder,” Orlando said, fidgeting to get comfortable, as unsettled physically as mentally.

  “Maybe Rosalind lied to him.”

  “But why?”

  “To impress him? To make him think she was richer than she was? Because she likes to lie and knows she can get away with it? My head’s spinning.” Jonty yawned. “Right. Then who can we contact to have Mitchell’s war record confirmed?”

  “Willshire.” The name was dropped into the conversation with finality, like a bombardment sweeping away all opposition.

  “Of course, the very man.” Willshire had been their boss at Room 40 and had maintained a spider’s web of information gathering, both within official channels and without. People said he could have found out anything, from the name of the next derby winner to what Baron von Richthofen had been having for breakfast. He probably kept the web in active service. “Will you do the honours or me?”

  “Me. Tomorrow.”

  “Today, you mean.” Jonty yawned again, leaned over to give Orlando a kiss, then snuggled down. “Get some sleep. Professors need all they can get their grubby mitts on.”

  “Sleep or rogering?” Orlando shot his legs across the bed before they could be attacked again.

  Jonty had always lauded the power of the subconscious brain to solve problems or to mull over facts and rearrange them into a surprising order. He said it was like squinting at a faint star; if you looked at it straight on, you couldn’t see it, but gaze slightly to one side and it was there, on the edge of your field of vision. Orlando, when consulted, had always been prosaic about the matter. Even Dr. Panesar—what right had he to be so boring?—had put it down to nothing more than the construction of the eye, an arrangement of cells in the middle of the retina that gave a lack of clarity or some such twaddle.

  Jonty didn’t doubt the truth of the anatomical explanation, but he preferred his own: That some ideas, like faint stars, were too nebulous to be fixed straight on. That to pin them down under intense scrutiny was to lose them. Better to look at something else and let the thoughts come to fruition in peace. After all, how many great notions had come to inventors and philosophers when they’d been doing something else entirely rather than inventing, often something mundane, as if the conscious body needed to be occupied so the rest of the brain could get on with important things?

  In their own experience, the solutions to cases had been found in dreams, or when they’d awoken in a clarity of mind that had driven them towards a solution. Not via Orlando’s beloved logic, much as “himself” would have liked that. This time, Jonty had awakened with Orlando snuggled up to him, gently purring and looking beatific. And while Jonty’s brain might not have laid out the entire solution to the Priestland case, it had given him the next step.

  Historically, if he’d wanted to get some inside information on someone from the past, Jonty would have been straight in touch with his parents. By telephone, preferably, striking while the iron was hot. While he no longer had the option of accessing the powerful weapon that was the combined Stewart parental brain, he could still make use of something almost as potent. While Jonty’s brothers seemed only to have inherited the family looks, his sister Lavinia was heir to the Stewart intelligence and the Forster native wit. Maybe she could get onto the scent ove
r the next few days, while he and Orlando were kept in Cambridge by college and university duties?

  “Hmhphm.” The susurration of gentle snores emanating from the other occupant of the bed had turned into speech, albeit incoherent.

  “Good morning, Orlando. Lovely to see you.” How many times had Jonty spoken those words on waking? They’d become as important and iconic to them now as “That sir, is my chair,” and a half a dozen other little phrases. A secret language they could even speak in the presence of others, the only public acknowledgement they could ever make of their love.

  “Hmm.” Orlando snuggled further into Jonty’s embrace, seeming still a bit befuddled, either from last night’s satiation or from the lack of sleep caused by airing investigational thoughts long into the night. “Sleep well?”

  At last the emanations from the man’s mouth were beginning to make sense.

  “Excellent. I now know my next step on the Priestland case. And I have another idea. About tackling Owens.”

  “Really?” Any absence of clarity in Orlando’s brain had evidently dissipated; he was fully alert now.

  “Thought that might wake you up. Now, you’ll have to suspend your moralising, as this is hardly the most Christian of suggestions. Not exactly a case of turning the other cheek.”

  “Are you suggesting we use one of my foolproof methods of murder? The ones that could never be detected?” Orlando reached over, curling his hand to better twiddle with his lover’s hair. “The ones I was saving for when I get tired of you?”

  “So your sleeping mind’s been mulling it over too?” Jonty ignored the remark; that particular one was becoming old hat. “I wasn’t thinking of going as far as murder. Just a bit of his own medicine. Who’s the most formidable female you can think of, now that Mama no longer walks this earth? If that’s too hard, I’ll give your poor befuddled brain a clue: she has no great love for Owens, either.”