July 31, 1968
It had taken a few weeks for things to settle, but it all turned normal much quicker than they might have all expected. Perhaps it was their history and this way they could all sort of pick up from where they left off. But they'd gotten into a new routine that soon felt very comfortable.
On Thursdays, Tim and Mike hosted Patrick and Shelagh at their house for dinner. Shelagh had started working as a nurse and midwife again at Radcliffe, now as Nurse Mannion instead of Sister Bernadette, so she would often come over to see Tim right after she finished her shift. She now had a locker for her things at the hospital, so she could change out of her uniform there and wear her own clothes out and about.
Tim was amazed and delighted to see that Shelagh somehow had adopted a wonderful dress sense in the last three weeks. She seemed to have an endless array of pretty dresses and patterned slacks and brightly colored blouses and cardigans to wear with her adorable shoes. Tim usually had no reason to pay any attention to women's clothing, but he was quite impressed with Shelagh's wardrobe.
On Sundays, Tim and Mike would go over to see Patrick and Shelagh at the house they now shared. Shelagh was getting the hang of cooking and had made some lovely things. Tim was happy to help her however he could, and she often asked his advice with her recipes.
Yes, it was all comfortable and wonderful. Their strange family had grown. Tim had Mike to fall asleep with and wake up with each and every day. And he now had a father and almost a mother who loved each other so much it was almost embarrassing sometimes. But Tim really didn't mind. Whenever Dad would sneak a kiss with Shelagh or put his arms around her or whatever else, Tim just watched with a beaming smile. They were so happy together, and it was incredible to see.
But somewhere deep down, Tim found a tiny part of himself becoming just the slightest bit jealous. Not of Dad or of Shelagh, of course. He really was happy for them. He was gladder than he could say that they'd found their way back together and they were creating this life for themselves and the love they shared. For so very long, they'd not been allowed to be together. She had been a nun, and it wasn't right that she should love any man or that any man should love her. Nuns were not permitted to have their own lives in that regard. But now Shelagh had left that life and she and Dad were together and in love and would probably be married within the year.
And that was just it. They were allowed to be together now. Yes, it was a bit of a scandal that Doctor Turner had led a nun astray. But once she had left the Order, she was free to marry him. The only impediment to their happiness had been removed. Tim did not have that luxury. There was absolutely nothing that could be done for him and Mike. They had been extremely careful since the moment they'd figured out their feelings and what they meant. They'd had to be. It had been less than a year since the Sexual Offences Act had been passed by Parliament which had decriminalized 'homosexual acts' when consensual and between men over the age of twenty-one. So now, at least, Tim and Mike's relationship was not illegal. It was not, however, widely accepted. And other than a small handful of their very liberal friends an even smaller number of other gay friends they had, no one knew the true nature of the relationship. Tim and Mike were housemates and friends to everyone else. Including Dad.
One of the reasons Mike had left his family's farm, despite being very happy with the prospect of being a farmer all his life, was because he had known from the time he was about fourteen that he was gay. And he knew that his family, being strongly religious and even more strongly conservative, would not accept him. His mother, he'd told Tim, had always tried to introduce him to local girls, and she surely would have pressured him into a marriage he could not have accepted. And if he had, he was sure that whatever woman ended up his wife would lead a sad life with a husband who could not love her as a husband should and recoiled at the very idea of the acts that would have given her children. So he had worked hard to be able to get admittance into Oxford and pay for it himself and other than occasional letters, turned his back on that little farming community he'd come from.
Tim had an altogether different problem. He and Dad had always been so very close. And when he was young, he'd always been very awkward around girls. He'd made friends with some of them, but he never really understood what the other boys were talking about when it came to girls. It almost seemed like an elaborate joke to him. How could they look at the girls their age and have any feeling whatsoever about their breasts? It never made any sense to Tim. What also never made sense was when he had shared a locker room with the other boys and why they never seemed distracted by any of it. He did not know how many times one of the other boys had shouted at him to get his attention and teased him for daydreaming when his gaze was fixated on the developing bicep on someone's arm or their toned abdominals. Everyone else was able to change in and out of their sports kit without problem. At the time, Tim had thought that maybe they'd had friends or brothers they'd spent time with in a way Tim never had. It was not until many years later that Tim understood what it really meant.
Mike had not been the first man Tim had been with. That fact had come to a surprise to Mike, actually. Tim didn't blame him. He'd been so unbearably awkward around Mike at first, no wonder he thought that Tim didn't know what he was doing. No, Tim had first experimented with a boy in his dormitory his first year at Oxford. Hormones of boys that age are quite powerful, they'd found. And, to put it bluntly, they'd shagged like rabbits. But it did not take long for Tim and Billy both to discover that they didn't actually like each other when either of them had his pants on. Things ended rather quickly thereafter. Mike was different, though. He'd lived in a different dormitory, and Tim had met him in one of his classes during second term that first year. And for Tim, it was love at first sight. They'd learned that they could not have been more different in their backgrounds but they were practically identical in their perspectives on the world. They got along famously as friends, even though Tim could barely string a sentence together in Mike's presence. They'd talked and drank beer all night at a party about two months after they met, and Mike gave that beautiful, perfect smile and leaned in and kissed him. After which Tim promptly threw up from the alcohol.
When Mike helped Tim back to his dormitory, they'd continued to talk and discovered that they both shared the same sensibility towards each other. And Mike had asked if he and Tim could see each other more, in private. The rest was history. They'd fallen deeply in love and gotten a flat together for their second and third years at Oxford and bought their house after graduation. And thanks to the forbidden nature of the love they shared—though finally no longer criminal—this was all they could ever have. Dad and Shelagh had found their way to be together, to be able to marry and hold hands and kiss on a public street if they wanted to. And that was something Tim and Mike would never have.
The sound of the doorbell rang on a Wednesday afternoon interrupted Tim's brooding while he was supposed to be working. He put down his pencil and went to answer it.
To his surprise, Shelagh was at the door. "Hello, Timothy," she greeted. "Sorry to come by unannounced, but I was hoping you might have a bit of time to help me with some recipes." She held up a cookbook that had about a dozen scraps of paper sticking out of it, presumably used to mark the pages she wanted to save.
Tim laughed. "Sure, come on in."
Shelagh embraced him and kissed his cheek as she entered his house. She went straight into the kitchen as Tim closed the door behind them. "I do hope I'm not interrupting your work," she said.
He shook his head. "These drawings aren't due until next week. And I've been working on them for long enough today anyway."
"Can I see them?" she asked.
Tim smiled. Shelagh was a very curious sort of person. She was genuinely interested in so many things and liked to ask a lot of questions. It also helped that she was a brilliant nurse and midwife, so she had a better understanding of medical science than almost anyone. "Everything is sitting on the desk in my room," he told her. "Go on and have a look. I'm going to start the kettle and give the buns some hay." He really should have done that about an hour ago, but he'd lost track of time.
Shelagh went down the hall to Tim's room and he filled the kettle, switching it on before he went outside to see to the rabbits. They were hopping around adorably.
"Hey you all," he greeted cheerfully. The friendlier and braver ones liked to come over and say hello whenever Tim came by. There were a few small ones who were a bit more nervous. They would scamper away from the invasion.
Tim spoke softly to the little animals, scattering fresh hay in their pen and leaning down to give the friendly ones a few pets and scratches on their little heads. They were such sweet little things and Tim absolutely adored them. He and Mike were never going to have children, even if they'd wanted them, so this was the best they could do. They had their little bunny babies, and that suited them just fine.
When Tim went back inside, he found that Shelagh had not returned. He turned off the kettle and set the tea to steep while going to see what she was doing in the bedroom. Probably still looking at his drawings. He was working on a rather odd set at the moment. There was a researcher in London doing some very strange things with the pancreas. Not a very well-known organ, the pancreas. Tim had to work harder on that than on most things, what with the odd shape and texture. And the relation to the spleen and gallbladder was always tricky to get right. Very few people ever got to see the drawings in progress, so she might have been interested.
But Shelagh was not looking at the drawings when he came in. She was sitting on the end of the bed across from his work desk. And she had a very strange expression on her face. She looked all at once sad and worried and confused.
"Everything alright?" he asked with concern.
She took a deep breath. That was odd. "Timothy, do you and Mike sleep in the same bed together?"
Tim thought he might be having a heart attack.