Chapter 22 Courage
Despite living on the fourth floor, in the two decades that Ned had owned his flat he had rarely taken the lift in his building, choosing instead to take the stairs at a decent pace, two at a time if he was feeling particularly athletic.
That was until he started bringing home groceries for a family of four that included a growing sixteen-year-old boy.
He hadn’t thought it possible to buy this much food under rationing.
Arms laden with vegetables, meat, butter and bread, Ned juggled his way into the lift, halting abruptly when he heard, “Hold the doors!”
Ned leaned against the lift’s door, desperately grasping at his bags as one of his more rotund neighbours hurried forward. Sweating, the man wheezed, “Good evening, Pinsent. Much obliged.”
Ned really should know his name. Hunter? Humphries? Better not risk it. “Evening,” he responded.
The lift shuddered off to its slow climb, and the man seemed to pull himself together. “You are the talk of the building, Pinsent. Such generosity to move in a whole family.”
“We all must do our part, mustn’t we?” Ned forced an awkward smile onto his face. He’d long suspected he was the favourite subject of gossip for some of his more elderly neighbours, but knowing that the Villierses were being talked about raised his hackles.
The busybody nodded. “Of course, of course. Although, you might want to remind them that this isn’t East London. We do have a dedicated servants’ entrance.”
Ned’s temper flared, and he shifted to hold his groceries with as commanding a presence as he could muster. “Mr Villiers and his family are staying with me as guests. I would be very offended should anyone ask them to use anything other than the main entrance.”
“There’s no need for rudeness, Pinsent,” his neighbour answered primly.
“Exactly, none at all.”
The lift shuddered to a stop at their floor and Ned strode off towards his flat.
After so many years of living alone, it was peculiar to open the door to his flat and find lights on and voices coming from inside.
At least this evening the voices didn’t immediately hush as he opened the door.
In the week since the Villiers family had moved in, Ned kept trying to be a gracious host, but he couldn’t seem to get the Villierses to stop trying to be invisible house guests.
He found Charlie and Betty in the kitchen. They kept congregating in the only room the architect had assumed the owner would never use, as demonstrated by the kitchen’s tiny windows and plain white tile.
“Good evening,” Ned mumbled as he finally managed to put down his bags on the counter.
“Is it evening?” Charlie rubbed his eyes. “Maybe we’re just getting old, but I swear with Betty working nights and me days it is worse than when the children had colic. One of us is always waking the other.”
With Villiers Automotive closed indefinitely, both husband and wife had started at the munitions factories. They certainly looked exhausted, Charlie’s whole body slumped against the wall, and Betty’s eyes were ringed with dark circles.
“We can’t have Britain’s best munitionette on the production line tired.” Ned’s words masked a very real worry about the injury and death statistics for munition workers. “Should we re-examine sleeping arrangements?”
Ned’s flat only had two proper bedrooms, and there had been some debate about who would sleep where.
In the end, Charlie and Betty settled into the narrow, windowless room at the end of the hall that had been built for a live-in servant, while Frank and Ellie slept in the guestroom.
Ned was a bit ashamed that everyone had insisted he stay in his cavernous master bedroom, but surely no one could debate the swap now.
Charlie broke out into a broad grin and said, “Not a bad idea for me to bunk in with you. Leave Betty to sleep through the day without interruption.”
That was most definitely not what Ned meant.
“Might actually help Ned rise at a decent hour,” Betty teased as she started to sort through Ned’s grocery purchases. “You sure you wouldn’t mind?”
Would Ned mind having Charlie sleep beside him, night after night? Laugh with him as they turned off the lights? Bask in the heat from his body under the covers?
Had he learned nothing from ’32?
“Of course not,” Ned answered as he tossed a potato from hand to hand.
Everyone must do their part, after all.
???
That evening, Charlie knocked politely on Ned’s bedroom door at ten o’clock, already changed into a pair of slightly overlarge tartan pyjamas.
After the briefest of greetings, he’d calmly climbed into the right side of the bed, discreetly turned on his back away from Ned, and promptly fallen asleep, seemingly unperturbed that the last time they had been together in this bed, they had fucked the night away, gasping words of love into each other’s mouths.
Ned had tried to match that same casualness, but his body refused to cooperate, reacting to the familiar way the mattress dipped for that specific person, the disconcerting smell of his former lover. Ned’s body ached with lust and the desire to feel Charlie’s skin against his own again.
Ned shifted onto his side and fought the urge to give his cock more than a quick squeeze.
He would survive this. He just needed to remember to have a wank before bed.
???
As the weeks turned into a month, Ned learned to cope with more repressed sexual frustration than he’d felt since his boarding school days.
He didn’t know if he could ever train his body to not react to the sight of Charlie shirtless in the moonlight, however.
Ned had woken slowly, dragged away from sleep by the slow realisation that the space beside him was empty.
He cracked his eyes open to Charlie in front of the window, black-out curtains open and the low light casting a silver glow on his torso.
After giving himself a moment to enjoy the sight, Ned hauled himself out of bed, pulling on his silk dressing gown and reaching for Charlie’s plaid.
He wordlessly placed it around Charlie’s shoulders, as if the flannel could banish whatever demons were keeping Charlie from sleeping.
Charlie pulled the gown around his front but didn’t turn away from the window. “Sorry for waking you.”
They never spoke directly about what kept one another up at night.
Ned suspected that Charlie was as scared to know the cause of Ned’s nightmares as Ned was to know Charlie’s.
Over the past few weeks they had built a pattern of soft words in the dark, being a reassuring presence to the other that here and now was not there and then.
Ned leaned against his dresser. “Do you want some warm milk?”
“We used up the last of the rations this morning at breakfast. Or yesterday morning. No idea what time it is.”
“Port then?” They both kept their voices soft even though there was no chance that Frank or Ellie could hear them from their room at the other end of the flat.
“My shift’s in a few hours.”
Outside a gust of wind blew a branch against Ned’s window.
The moon was particularly bright tonight.
In the trenches they would have said it was a good night for a raid.
He wondered what normal people saw when they looked up at the moon.
Was little Ellie comforted about the calm of the night?
Or had the air-raid alarms permanently marred it for her?
“You should go back to bed.” Charlie turned around from the window to face Ned.
“You should, too.”
Charlie’s answer was to slip off his robe and go back under the covers.
Ned was probably already half asleep when he murmured, “You must miss Betty on nights like this.”
He hadn’t expected any response, never mind Charlie’s gravelly, “We don’t have that type of marriage.”
“What type of marriage do you have?” he whispered, unable to leave Charlie’s comment alone.
“The type where she keeps asking if we’ve kissed yet.”
Jesus Christ.
“She knows about…?” Ned managed to stutter out.
“She knows we had an affair. That I loved you.” Charlie’s voice wasn’t quite so sleepy anymore either.
“I didn’t mean to expose you, it’s just that there was a time…
well, after our trip to France… Actually, none of that matters.
Just to say that I felt I had to tell her about myself, and there was no way of doing that without mentioning you. ”
“I trust you both.” Ned found he was surprisingly unbothered that Betty knew his greatest secret.
Charlie shifted in the bed. “I thought she’d sue for divorce, take the children away.”
“She didn’t.” Ned knew he was stating the obvious, his mind still trying to resemble itself after being blown apart by Charlie’s revelation.
“Divorce wasn’t what either of us wanted. I think we both realised we didn’t love each other as we should, though. So we decided to build something else instead.”
“A something where she thinks you and I should kiss.” Did Ned mean that as a statement?
“I believe her exact words earlier this week were, ‘I don’t have the patience for months of longing glances across the dinner table’.
” There was a hint of humour in Charlie’s voice.
“If I’d have to really say what she thinks, it's that life’s too short to not take every opportunity you have at happiness.
No matter what that happiness looks like. ”
“You married a wise woman.”
“Don’t think I don’t know it.”
The next question was on the tip of Ned’s tongue. Did Charlie want to kiss? Want… everything else?
For Ned, that he wanted to kiss Charlie was a given. Whether he thought that was a good idea was another matter altogether. He was nearly fifty, for Christ’s sake, he was supposed to be past his cock making decisions for him.
Ned must have been lost in his thoughts for too long, as the mattress dipped as Charlie shifted on his side. Ned listened as Charlie’s breathing settled into a steady sleep.