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CHAPTER THREE: An Elf-Shaped Elephant

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Rob had gone back to his own bed after another hour or two looking through Arthur’s books. They had kissed at the kitchen door, long and languorously, but passion had not sparked again in the same way. They were both tired and it had been a hell of a day. Rob slept in the barn, in the loft at the end. Before the war, the handful of unmarried farm men had often lived there. There were barracks-like beds above and in a small room partitioned from the barn at the foot of the stairs to the loft there was a stove, a table, and a few easy chairs. The men used the water closet and bathroom at the back of the scullery and came into the house for their meals. It was only Rob out there now, which was to their advantage.

“Tomorrow,” Rob had said, forehead pressed to Matty’s. “Tomorrow I’m going to lay you down on a proper bed and take my time with you.”

Matty had grinned at him. “I’ll look forward to it,” he muttered, nipping again at Rob’s stubbled jaw. “I’ve got to go to town in the morning. I ordered some leek plants from Simon Parker. I kept meaning to put seed in and never got round to it. I’ve got to pick them up.”

“I’ll help you get them in. I keep forgetting today’s Friday. Is Mrs Beelock coming in?”

“No, she’s been having the weekends off. Her arthritis isn’t getting any better.”

Rob shot him a vulpine smile. “All the better, then,” he said and pressed a final kiss to Matty’s mouth. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

* * * *

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THINGS DIDN’T LOOK any different in the morning.

* * * *

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MATTY WAS UP EARLY despite the exertions of the previous night. He had slept reasonably well, but he was tired. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and a bowl of porridge, staring blankly out of the window at the continuing drizzle, when Rob chapped at the door and let himself in.

“All right?” Rob said.

“Yes. More or less. You?” His response was reflexive.

Rob stepped over toward him and laid a hand on his shoulder, then after a little pause, bent down and kissed him gently on the cheek, before going over to the stove, helping himself from the porridge pan and teapot, and pulling out the chair opposite to seat himself.

It was a normal morning.

Except it wasn’t.

“Yes,” Rob answered him, the response so delayed that Matty had almost forgotten what he’d asked. “It was a quiet night after all that. The cattle settled and I didn’t hear anything else.”

“Me either.” Matty took a swallow of his tea. “I slept all the way through ‘til it got light.”

“What time do you have to meet Parker?”

“I just said I’d see him in the morning. He was going to take the plants to the market for me and he’ll be there until lunchtime at his stall.”

“I’ll help Jimmy milk and then turn the cows out into the top field. By the time you’re back, I’ll be ready to help you plant the leeks.”

It seemed like they were having a normal conversation about normal things and ignoring the large, elf-shaped elephant lurking in the kitchen. Matty determinedly mixed his metaphors and grasped the elf-elephant by the horns.

“I want to go and have a look behind the byre,” he said firmly, “and go through more of the books this afternoon.”

Rob continued eating his porridge. “Good idea,” he said. “I’ll help. As much as I can anyway. I was going to re-stack some of the hay in the back byre, but it can wait. If you help with the evening milking, we can get it done in half the time and then we can come back and carry on reading.”

Matty swallowed uncomfortably. “You’re distinctly calm about it all.”

Rob looked up and met his eyes for the first time with a grimace. “Bloody hell! If you think that, you don’t know me as well as I thought you did.” He rested his licked-clean spoon on the edge of his blue-and-white Devonware bowl and reached for his tea. “I’m trying not to panic.” He gave small, thin-lipped smile that lacked humour. “I’ve met frightening things before, Matty, but I understood them. They were logical things to be afraid of. Bullets. Shellfire. The wire. But this... I don’t know what it is, only that it’s something I don’t understand. It’s scaring the daylights out of me inside, even if I’m not showing it,” he said and drank some of his tea.

Matty looked down at his own mug. It was nearly empty. “Sorry,” he said. He swallowed the dregs, but continued to hold the cup in his hand, taking comfort in its lingering warmth. “I’m out of sorts.”

There was a pause.

“Well,” said Rob. “Yes. Not unreasonably.” He stood up and put his bowl in the sink. “More tea?”

“Please.”

Rob brought the pot over to the table. He poured another cup for each of them and then seated himself again, opposite Matty. He picked his mug up with both hands and leaned back in his chair, stretching his legs under the table until they tangled with Matty’s. Matty picked up his own mug and smiled at him.

“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Which part?” Rob smiled back at him.

“I’m not sure.” Matty smiled back, unable to stop himself. “You and me? I think that’s going to be all right. Isn’t it?”

Rob didn’t break eye contact as he answered, slowly. “You and me? It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time. I’d like it to be all right.” He looked down into his mug, placed it on the table, and ran his finger round the lip. “I’ve not been with many people. Many men. A few, in France.” He looked up again and met Matty’s gaze. “No women, not really. Even before...before I went away.”

“What about Clemmie?” Rob had been walking out with Clemmie Booth in a desultory way, the same as Matty had been walking out with her sister Marie.

“Clemmie? No. We’re good friends still. She wasn’t ever looking for a husband. I think she was only walking out with me to stop her father trying to marry her off to someone else. She’s a telegraph clerk now, you know. Over in Salisbury. She joined the Auxiliary Corps. She wanted to get out of the village, make something of herself. Old Man Booth wasn’t going to let that happen without a fight.”

He hadn’t been keen on educating his daughters. “What about Marie? Do you hear from her? We exchanged a few letters at the beginning, but after I went forward, we lost touch.”

“Not directly. Clemmie and I write sometimes. She says Marie is going to stay in nursing. She doesn’t much want to come home either.”

The older Booths had an isolated upland farm further along the hill from the Webbers. Mr Booth had only allowed the girls to walk out with Matty and Rob because Matty’s mother had gone and talked to Mrs Booth. She’d felt sorry for the girls. He’d certainly been put on notice that if he put a hand on either girl, not only would Old Man Booth be after him, but so would his own mother.

“Just take them about a little bit, dear,” she’d asked Matty. “They’re only allowed out on a Sunday to church.”

Matty had liked both Clemmie and Marie. But not in the same way he’d liked Rob.

“I’d like it to be all right between us, too,” he said again, aloud.

“Then it will be.” Rob was definite. “The other... I don’t know about that. We need to find out what Arthur was doing.” He drank more of his tea and then cautiously asked, “How are you feeling this morning?”

“Better than I have done. It was a relief to sleep.” He rose from the table and started swilling out the porridge pan and crockery. “Let’s get going then. Once we’ve got the outside work done, we can see if we find anything in Arthur’s papers.”

Rob stood too and started drying the bowls with the tea-towel from in front of the range. “You’ve been looking by yourself all this time. Perhaps a fresh eye will help.”

“Perhaps. I’m so sick of it all. And last night... I’m scared too, Rob. I’m a rationalist, for goodness sake! I don’t even really believe in a god anymore. And that...last night. It wasn’t rational.”

“No, it wasn’t. But we both saw it and heard it. It happened. So, whatever it was, it was real.” Rob hung the last mug on its hook and turned toward Matty, taking his hand and drawing him closer, wet hands from scrubbing the saucepan and all. “Come here a minute.” He arranged Matty comfortably against him and Matty returned his embrace, resting his forehead on Rob’s shoulder. “We’ll get to the bottom of it, lad, don’t fret.” He ran his hands up and down Matty’s back as if he was soothing a nervous horse. “Try not to think about it for now. Let’s get things done and come back to it later. Perhaps we’ll have a different angle on it.”

Matty huffed a laugh and drew back. “I’d welcome that. I feel like I’ve been banging my head against a brick wall. Come on then.” He reached for his coat and cap. “Let’s go.”

* * * *

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THE SCENE OF LAST NIGHT’S drama was a let-down. There was nothing out of the ordinary there except the faint traces of Lin’s vomit. Matty didn’t know what he’d been expecting. An elf-shaped hole in the universe? A tidy fence painted white, with a snicket gate labelled Enter here to solve your mystery? There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary that he could see, only the churned-up ground.

“I didn’t really expect there to be anything peculiar here,” he said, flatly.

“No, there’s nothing to see,” Rob answered, poking at the mud desultorily with the toe of his boot. “I can feel something though. I think. That sort of pulled-all-ways feeling you get sometimes before thunder? Do you get that?”

“I know what you mean. I can’t feel anything.”

Rob hunched his shoulders. “I can’t really explain it any better than that.” He put a hand out, stretching toward the place where Lin’s gate had been. There was a clear line on the ground. On the one side of it, the side they were standing on, the soil was churned and disturbed with the marks of their not-quite-fight. On the other side, it was smooth and undisturbed. “It tingles. And it’s a bit tacky. Sticky.” He stretched out further, tentatively, palm toward the exact place the light had been. If it had been a gate, he would have had his hand flat on its surface. “I can feel a sort of resistance. Almost as if there’s something there that I can’t see. But not really.” He stepped forward and pushed his hand further, with no visible resistance.

“Did you see that?” He turned to Matty.

“No? What was it?” Matty had been watching, but he hadn’t seen anything at all.

“A bit of light. Very faint.” Rob drew his hand back and repeated the sweeping motion. “Same thing...it’s a flickering glimmer. Almost where the air feels thickest...” He paused. “Sorry, I’m not making sense.”

“No, it’s all right. You are. I just don’t think we understand it at all.” Matty bit his lip. “Do you think the gate thing is still there?”

“Maybe? I’m not sure.” Rob stepped forward, deliberately crossing the demarcation line in front of them. Matty reached out, too late to stop him.

Nothing happened.

“There’s nothing here,” Rob stated, unnecessarily, turning toward Matty again, hands back in his pockets. He stared at the ground and stirred it some more with the toe of his boot. “Nothing at all.”

They stood in glum silence for a moment or two before Matty said, “Let’s get on then. Maybe we’ll find something in the books to make sense of it all.”

* * * *

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LEEKS IN THE GROUND and cows milked, they made thick sandwiches of bread, butter, and jam and settled in the parlour as the clock was chiming six. It was dull outside and Matty lit the fire, more for its cheer than because it was cold. The low thrum of desire between them sang in a subdued tone, the anticipation that later they would be going to bed with each other.

Matty kept catching himself watching Rob in the deepening twilight instead of concentrating on the book he’d pulled at random from of the pile on the floor. Rob was sunk deep in the leather club-chair, absorbed in whatever he’d found, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, collar undone, an incongruous pair of spectacles perched on his nose.

“I didn’t know you wore specs,” Matty commented, without really meaning to say it out loud.

Rob put his finger on the page to mark his place and smiled as he looked up. “Not long had them to be honest,” he said. “I started to get headaches when I read, so I thought I’d better see about it. It’s helped quite a bit.”

He looked back down at the page. “I might have found something here,” he said.

Matty rose from where he’d been sitting on the settee and went over to perch on the arm of the chair. “What is it?”

Rob leafed back a few pages. He had picked a journal by the look of it. It was a brown leather book, worn and well-handled to softness. The ink was faded on the cream pages, but the script was beautiful, and easily understandable. “It’s written in a couple of different hands. Look, you can see. There’s this one, at the beginning—” He leafed further back. The writing changed to a smaller hand that made Matty think of an older person. “Some of it is in English...some sort of travel journal, I think. He’s talking about India and the Himalayas. Kashmir, Ladakh. And then sometimes he writes in some sort of code.” Rob leafed forward again. “Look, here,” he said and pointed to the page.

There were letters, but not in any language Matty recognised, and it wasn’t the beautiful, small, neat cursive of the previous page. The letters were separated out into a grid of columns and rows. “What is it?” he asked.

“Don’t know. But it’s not a proper language, is it?” Rob was hesitant. “It looks to me like some sort of Trench Code.”

He’d been in the Signals, Matty remembered again. “Can you crack it?” he asked.

“Perhaps, given enough time.” Rob smiled at him again. “I’m not overly good at it, though. If Arthur couldn’t do it...” His voice trailed off.

“He hadn’t had any training,” Matty said.

“I haven’t had any training. Only what I picked up from my captain while...” He abruptly stopped talking and bit his lip. Matty looked at him, waiting for him to continue. There was clearly a story there, but it was up to Rob whether he wanted to tell it or not. “Anyway,” Rob resumed. “Maybe. I can have a go. But although that’s interesting, it’s not the most interesting thing. Look, here.” He turned the pages forward again to where he’d been reading when Matty disturbed him. “Here, the hand changes. See.”

He pointed to the page. This hand was a larger cursive. Still fluid and beautiful, but completely different. It wasn’t as legible as the earlier one. “He says that his father has died and he’s using the book to continue his record of ‘Pater’s search’. There’s drawings. Temples, maybe? And a map of what he says is a cave system. It’s hellishly creepy.”

“Let me see?” Matty reached out his hand and Rob handed him the book. It wasn’t large, but it was thick. He turned the pages forward and backward, as Rob had been doing, so that Rob could still see them.

“There,” Rob said, stabbing with a blunt finger at the text. “It says he’s found the caves again and he wants to go back and explore them. That he can feel the pull.” Matty could hear him italicising the words. And here...” he turned the page, “...here there’s a sketch-map.”

It was difficult to make out the tiny labels on the map itself. It did look as if it could be a tunnel system. Matty peered at them. “Give me your glasses,” he said, absently, and Rob placed them in his outstretched hand.

“I couldn’t make it out,” he said. “Maybe take it over to the window?” The lettering was faded to a pale brown, but in the better light by the south-facing windows, Matty could decipher a bit more.

“It some more detail about the map,” he said. “Rough, steep, up, down, that sort of thing. And here...” He traced with his finger and realised Rob was looking over his shoulder, “...here it says border weak, pull strong. Where it opens out into this bulb-shape, look.”

Rob took his glasses off Matty’s nose and put them back on his own, peering closely at the page. “Yes, I see. Well,” he said and drew back. “That’s helpful I suppose. A border, the pulling thing. We’re on the right track, anyway.” He stepped away, back toward the chairs. “Have you found anything?”

“Not really. I’m still looking at the really old one, with all the different languages. Do you think that could be in code as well?”

Rob frowned, thinking. “I didn’t think so when I saw it...but I wasn’t really expecting anything like that. Let me have another look.”

They sat down together on the sofa and Matty picked up the embossed green book from where he’d put it on the floor. He handed it to Rob, sliding along the settee so that they were pressed thigh to thigh. Rob’s thigh was warm. As he took the book, he turned his head and smiled at Matty. Instead of taking the book out of Matty’s hand, Rob kissed him. It was a slow, soft press of Rob’s lips to his own, unhurried and affectionate, with their fingers entwined on the gilded cover of the book. It seemed to Matty that it was an action without expectation, a declaration of Rob’s position. Here they were, together. Rob wanted to kiss him. He wanted to kiss Rob. And so, Rob made it happen.

That seemed to sum up their relationship, from way back when. Whatever Matty needed or wanted, there was Rob, facilitating it. Quiet, persistent, and consistent. Steady and steadfast.

Matty took his other hand from the back of the settee and cupped Rob’s jaw. Rob gave a little noise in the back of his throat that Matty interpreted as approval, so Matty started kissing him back. He hadn’t had a lot of practice at kissing, but what he had done, he’d liked. He softened his lips and drew back a little, then drew his mouth across Rob’s. Then he pressed firmly but gently, close again. Rob’s breathing was speeding up, as was his own.

Rob drew back and smiled at him. “Do you want to look at this now? Or do you want to go to bed?” He dropped tiny, tender kisses along Matty’s jaw, from his chin up to a place under his ear that made Matty shiver.

“Erg,” he said, intelligently. “We should keep going...but bed sounds extremely good.” He took a turn at mouthing at Rob’s stubble, that made Rob draw in an extra breath.

* * * *

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ROB HAD NEVER REALLY slept in another person’s arms. They had fallen asleep as the last of the light faded out of the September day, the curtains open upon the trees and hills behind the house, satiated and laughing at stupid jokes and wordplay, with his head on Matty’s chest, Matty’s arms around him. It had been nice. Right.

He woke instantly, as he was prone to do these days, instantly alert. It was starting to get light, and so must be about half past five. He found himself thinking that they’d need to get on and see to the milking, get it out of the way before going back to the books. Jimmy had Sunday off, so he and Matty usually did it together. He pushed the thought out of his mind and focused on the legs entangled with his own, the hip beside his, the low, regular, slight snores coming from the man he was in bed with. Rob was lying on his back and Matty was on his front, buried like a piglet in the straw with the grey woollen blankets and the feathery quilt up round his ears.

He turned on his side, rolling closer and stroking a hand down Matty’s back and inadvertently poking his hip with his hard-on. Matty was wonderfully warm.

“Morning,” he said, nuzzling at Matty’s ear.

Matty made an undefinable grumbling noise.

Rob continued his exploration of Matty’s hairline and the back of his neck. He’d discovered last night that it made Matty wriggle in an uncommonly appealing fashion.

Finally, he got a reaction.

“Hhhhrumph. Geroff,” Matty said, exploding in a tangled flail of limbs as he rolled away, laughing. “Stop it, you bastard!”

Rob followed him, laughing too, as Matty rolled on to his back, pinning him pleasurably chest to chest. Matty had quite the impressive hard-on to match his own.

“Morning,” Matty said, finally, meeting Rob’s eyes and smiling. He thrust his hips upward a little and Rob mirrored him, maintaining his gaze and lowering his face to kiss him.

It quickly turned heated. They thrust together in symphony, slick-sliding together and moaning into each other’s mouths. Finally, Rob couldn’t maintain his breathing, thrusting, and the kissing all at once. He drew back a little and concentrated on watching his lover’s face. “Come on,” he whispered. “Come on, Matty, I want to see you. You’re close, I can feel it.”

Matty came with a quiet, pained gasp, and Rob followed him over. He tucked his forehead down to Matty’s shoulder and Matty tightened his arms around him. Suddenly, he felt a wave of emotion. “I think I’m in love with you,” he told Matty’s shoulder, quietly.

Matty nuzzled him, where his neck and shoulder joined. He didn’t answer for longer that Rob was comfortable with and as the hot flush of embarrassment washed over him Rob began to tense, ready to pull away. Matty tightened his arms. “No, don’t, Rob. Don’t go.” He was silent for a moment longer. “I’m in love with you, too,” he said, softly and sincerely, right in Rob’s ear. “I’ve been in love with you for years. I didn’t go on all those walks with you and the Booth girls because I wanted to court them. I wanted to spend time with you.” He swallowed. “And this summer. Since we came back. Since Arthur...” He paused again. “I think about you a lot, Rob. So. I’m in love with you too.” He squeezed Rob tighter for a moment and then relaxed, keeping Rob wrapped up close. “This has been a long time coming. And I’m glad it’s finally here.”

Rob relaxed completely, laid out on top of Matty, the sticky mess they had made sandwiched between them. “The cows,” he muttered. “We need to milk. And I need a tiddle.”

“In a minute. Rest here for a minute more.”

Rob curled against him a little more and settled down. The cows could wait five minutes, as could visiting the lav.