Come, Let Us In Affections Riot

By Witte Piet

This book follows on directly from "You must no Longer lie Alone"," and covers the lives of three gay couples over a period of several years. The principal characters are Sandro Mascagnoli and Dominic Overton. It traces their lives from Dom's final undergraduate year and Sandro's first postgraduate year through their higher degree study to them getting jobs and becoming civil partners. Thereafter it tells how they adopted twin daughters and how Sandro's uncles David and Jonathan acquire a new adopted son, Tommy. The careers of Sandro's brother Luke and his partner Tom in Italy are also followed. During the story, both Sandro and Tom get Ph.D.s and Tom gets an academic job in Italy. Luke builds up his reputation as a director and manager of opera, but has not yet established himself securely in his career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Witte Piet
• Release date: Mar 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781631024672

Witte Piet

The author started writing gay romances after he had retired from a long career as an academic scientist. It is a widespread illusion that authors of erotica are practised experts in the art of venery. In fact, this is in most cases quite untrue, they are more generally working out their erotic fantasies in fiction, as is the case with Witte Piet. The author's aim is to write pleasant and enjoyable stories about love between men, not leaving the sex behind at the bedroom door, but entering into plenty of explicit detail, with some crude language. One of the author's mottoes is a quotation from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” so there is for example no poverty among the lead characters. The fields are all "highbrow", involving student life in one of England's ancient universities, and areas of science, religion, music, literature (especially seventeenth-century poetry) and life in the English countryside and in Italy.

Book preview

Preface

This is the beginning of my sixth novel, and the time has come to tell you about my writing policy. The most famous quotation from Jane Austen is the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice. Perhaps the second best known is one quoted by Stella Gibbons on the title page of her masterly novel Cold Comfort Farm. The sentence is the opening words of Chapter 48 of Mansfield Park: Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. That could almost be the title of this book. The style I aspire to is to tell a romantic yet happy story about gay male characters. Some of the incidents and much of the conversation are crude, but that only reflects real life.

This story continues the saga of three gay couples, David and Jon Singleton-Scarborough, Tom Appleton and Luke Singleton-Scarborough, and Dom Ovenden and Sandro Mascagnoli. It follows on from You must no Longer lie Alone. It was previously published in three parts on Literotica.com. All the characters in the story are imaginary, although some of the main characters are models of the sort of person that I would like to be. Some places and institutions mentioned are real: others are imaginary. All literary quotations are genuine. The opera Anna Veronica and its composer are totally imaginary. I hope that expert readers will forgive any inaccuracies in my representation of the worlds of engineering and opera, and not forget that this is a work of fiction. Once again there are a lot of characters in this story. You can refresh your memory about their identity using the Character List in the Appendix. 

[Literary Note: Willem Elsschot (1882-1960) was a Flemish poet and novelist. The quotation in Chapter XLIV is from his poem Het Huwelijk (The Marriage)].

Chapter I Dom: Life in Fountain Street

Late in September 20—, I awoke in our room at Rockwell’s Barn. I disengaged myself from Sandro’s right arm, got out of bed, released a noisy fart from my rear-end, and looked out of the window. The Ixfordshire countryside was beginning to show its autumn colours, and brown and yellow leaves were falling from the trees at the slightest breeze. It had been a long, hot summer, and autumn had started early. I turned round and looked at my darling boy, still lying asleep, his long dark hair spread out over the pillow, his sweet lips slightly parted, showing a hint of his white teeth. As I looked at him, a wave of tenderness swept over me. I realized how lucky I was to have such a wonderful mate. In two weeks’ time, my final undergraduate year in Camford would begin, but for most of that year I would be sharing a bed with my sweet boyfriend under my uncle’s silk sheets. I resolved that when in the future the two of us had our own house, we also would get silk sheets.

Today however, I was going to London for the day to get a new suit. Most of my clothing was from Giorgio Armani, but my parents liked me to have just one English-cut suit from the family tailors in Savile Row, which they paid for! I had chosen the pattern and the material (wool) and today was to be the final fitting. I was also going to order a pair of hand-made shoes.

My Italian boyfriend, Sandro Mascagnoli had arrived in England three weeks before, for the wedding of his brother’s partner’s sister and we were enjoying a short spell together without work or responsibilities. He was to start in his lab later that week, and we would be busy for the next few days getting ready to move our possessions to the flat in Fountain Street, Camford, where he, I and Sandro’s uncle Jonathan Singleton-Scarborough would be living. I adjourned to our bathroom, where I had my morning shit. Then we both showered and shaved before joining Jon for breakfast. Are you sure you did the right thing, moving out of College? asked Jon.

Oh, yes, I said, it’s my final year, and there are too many distractions in College. Jennifer would never leave me alone. Sandro will be busy in his lab, and he has a lot of work to get through, so you needn’t think that we will be idling our time away in sex and drinking! Camford is a wonderful place and I want to leave it with a good degree. I can’t think why my brother Michael opted for Oxbridge, Camford is much better. Sandro loves it. He says it is better than Venice!

I agree with you about that! said Jon. But as you’re gay, maybe you should have gone to Buckingham! Buckingham was Camford’s gay-friendly college. Sandro’s brother Luke Singleton-Scarborough had been a student there.

I didn’t know I was gay when I went up to university, I replied. That was your nephew’s doing!

Sandro grinned. Are you having regrets then? he asked. Do you wish that you were fucking Jennifer? he asked with a grin as he named our fag-hag.

Of course not! I replied, If I didn’t have a train to catch, I would punish you mercilessly for that remark!

About three hours later, I came out of Piccadilly Circus underground station and began to walk up Regent Street towards Savile Row and the shop of Fanthorpe and Crowley. I entered the shop and an assistant came up to me. I have an appointment for a fitting at 11-30, I said.

The man looked in a book. Oh, yes, please come this way, my lord, he said. I nearly died of embarrassment. Clearly my mother had made the appointment! Because she had married into our family and become a countess, she loved the titles that embarrassed my father and me. In Camford, I had gone to extreme lengths to conceal the courtesy title. I was registered with both college and university under my birth names of Dominic Francis Ovenden, and my signature Dominic Ovenden gave nothing away. After all, I told myself, Viscount Ovenden was not a real peerage. The only real lord in the family was my grandfather, the Marquess of Wakefield, who had actually sat in the House of Lords until evicted, with all but 90 of his colleagues, by the Blair government in the nineteen-nineties.

However, I had nothing to fear about any breach of confidentiality at Fanthorpe and Crowley. A firm that holds delicate and intimate information like on which side a customer’s genitals sit in his trouser crotch, is not going to be indiscreet! The fitter commented on how my body measurements had changed since my last suit. I replied that the old suit dated from the days when I was a skinny teenager. The suit would be ready in three days. I told them to send it to Fountain Street, but to address it to Jon, and I gave them his card. They measured me for the shoes, and I was told they would be ready in three weeks. I said that I would slip up from Camford one Saturday so that they could be fitted. Like the suit, they would not be worn every day. My usual garb in Camford was the standard student one of jeans and trainers. In fact, because of his access to Italian clothes, Sandro often looked smarter than me. We never criticized one another’s clothes, because we were really only interested in what was underneath!

Alessandro Mascagnoli had transformed my life. Until I met him, I was a geek with little interest in sex, and uncertain of my sexuality. Then this wonderful gay Italian boy came into my life and made it clear very early on in our acquaintance that he wanted me. He was almost my height, but much slimmer, with delicious brown skin and long black hair that he wore in a ponytail. We swam and played squash together and eventually, after taking care of him when he was injured after he had been mugged for his iPhone, I realized that I had fallen in love with him. He is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Coming out to our families was a slow business, complicated in my case by the revelation by my widower grandfather, Lord Wakefield, that he also was gay and was sleeping with his chauffeur, who was actually a very old friend from his student days, whom my grandfather had invited to come and live at Getheringthwaite, family home of the Ovendens, after my grandmother the Marchioness had died. He was very supportive, assuring me that unlike him, I had no reason to hide in the closet, and that I should not fear about succession to the title, because I had two brothers who could succeed if I had no biological children (adopted children cannot succeed to a hereditary title). However, he cleverly gave me the job of revealing to my parents not only my own sexual orientation, but his as well!

My parents were astonished by the revelation of not one but two gays in the family, and at the time of this story were only just getting used to the idea. My brother Michael was delighted by the fact that I would never have any biological children, and had no interest in living on the family estate in Yorkshire. This meant that he could have the estate, a bigger income than me in order to maintain it, and the prospect of either inheriting the title when I popped my clogs, or if he was already dead, the eldest of any sons that he might legitimately father would get the title. As for me, I just hoped that my grandfather would have many more years of happy fucking with his boyfriend before my father inherited the title, and I would move up one step to become Earl of Batley. At that stage, Michael would get the house and the estate, as my father was happy in his job as a university professor, with no desire to be a country landowner. Michael had promised me a smaller house on the estate.

Sandro had got a first in civil engineering earlier that year and been awarded a Ph.D. studentship by Rail-UK, by which he would spend one further year in Camford, developing a signalling application that would be tested in Rail-UK’s development lab in Oxtedborough, where he would spend the next year. So after the coming academic year, we would have to make decisions about our life together. By then, I would have my degree.

But in the meantime, we were enjoying sleeping together in a king-size bed under silk sheets each night. The narrow single beds in college had been impossible for two to sleep in on a regular basis. I had negotiated a mutually satisfactory rent as a tenant in Fountain Street with Sandro’s Uncle Jon. Jon and his partner David had no need to provide an extra room, just a little space to store my books and clothes, as I would be sharing Sandro’s bed! There was a small room that we could use as a study, and we had our own small bathroom. The space in the flat was rather restricted, and Sandro made clear to me from day one that we should not be shy about farting. His uncle was very flatulent, he said, and no-one in the family was restrained about releasing gas. No apology was necessary unless the fart was a stinker. Once I got used to hearing the sound of farts regularly, I began to feel that it was a very comfortable habit, at least for an all-male family.

Chapter II Sandro: My first days as a research student

I was rather worried about how I would get on with my new supervisor, Dr Philip Ashburton, university Reader in Civil and Railway Engineering. He had shown signs of being homophobic when I had first met him, but the things he had said were so extreme as to be libellous, and I suspected that it was some kind of ploy. When I arrived in the lab, he took me round the whole department and introduced me to everyone, which I thought was a good start. I had my own stretch of bench and a small desk beside it. The technicians and other research students seemed friendly and welcoming, and I soon settled down. To my surprise however, there seemed to be no social life in the lab apart from the daily tea and coffee sessions.

When term had begun, between 5-30 and 6 pm each day I would finish work and go to the computer lab to meet Dom, who usually had a lecture at 5 pm. We would then often go for a drink and a meal at the Sparrowhawk or a student restaurant, except on Wednesdays and Fridays, when Jon would cook for us at Fountain Street. Sometimes, he joined us to eat, but every Tuesday and Sunday during term, we all dined in college, although Jon was on High Table. He also ate in college when he was not cooking the evening meal, leaving us to cook or eat out. I was hopeless at cooking, but Dom, to my surprise, was quite good. He had learnt cookery at school.

I had fancied him from the very first moment that I met him, a year previously. He was a muscular blond, slightly taller than me, and in many ways an archetypal Englishman, which my two uncles were not. Before he came up to Camford, he had spent three years