A Place I May Go Both In and Out Of

Lewis thought it was amazing, in retrospect, that no one had ever shot Hathaway before. Really, that was the central surprise, once he stopped to think about it: how had the man survived so long without taking a bullet? There was so much of him, all six feet and some-odd inches, always folded up in a way that seemed designed to take up less space, but that paradoxically made him look even taller. He hunched. He stooped. He was gawky. He gangled. And once you added the fair hair in— not to mention the shirts, all pink and purple and screaming to be noticed; the elaborate waistcoats— he was a natural target. Easy to aim at. Hard to miss.

And surprised that anyone would shoot him. That was the worst thing. There was CCTV footage; later, at the hospital, Lewis demanded to see it. It captured the look of disbelief, an almost comic expression, like Hathaway thought it might all be a prank. Shot? Surely not. Me? Then the spreading stain under his suit jacket, filling his turned-grey-by-the-footage shirt, and his wobbly legs suddenly giving way, and he went down in a tangly mass of elbows and angles.

That was the point at which Moody made Lewis turn off the footage, but Lewis figured there was only a short gap left— only a short gap of time that he couldn’t account for. The paramedics arriving. The ambulance leaving. Whatever had happened in the back of the ambulance, so that James was alive when they reached the hospital, so that when Lewis’s phone rang with the news, it wasn’t already too late. There was still time; he could still do something, even if he wasn’t sure what it was that he could do; he knew only a great sense of relief that the avenue hadn’t closed forever. Strange bit of analogy his brain came up with, avenue— as though James were walking away from him down a wide path that got narrower and narrower, heedless of that vanishing point they’d once discussed, where he’d disappear forever from view.

After the phone call, Laura had driven him to the hospital, because it was raining and he was— she said— in no fit state. “Did you know you were his next of kin?” she said in the car. “He has a sister, doesn’t he?”

“I think she’s quite a bit younger.” Lewis didn’t want to say, I don’t think they really know one another, which was the impression he’d gotten. All at once James’s loneliness, previously something half-imagined and abstract, loomed up as a real and physical, almost geographic thing. The lad was like an island. Like Iceland, always farther out than you thought it should be, so that you looked automatically in the wrong place on the map. It was easy to imagine him having no one.

“If I hadn’t been his next of kin,” he said to Laura, “I would’ve wanted to be.”

Maddox was the one who met them at the hospital, sweating and ashen-faced. She looked as though she’d been sick very recently. “I’m sorry; I’m so sorry!” she burst out as soon as she saw Lewis.

“Easy, lass!” Lewis braced her shoulders; she folded into his arms, as he’d suspected she’d might. “It’s not your fault, eh? Now tell us what’s happened.”

As Maddox began to explain— a museum curator selling off priceless treasures; an international art-smuggling ring; a warehouse that was unexpectedly guarded; a bullet in Hathaway’s shoulder, and another in his abdomen— it occurred to Lewis that it was strange that she should have apologised to begin with, as though she’d been given the safekeeping of Hathaway. More: as though she were keeping him safe for Lewis. He wanted to explain to her that this wasn’t the case, but everything inside him felt disarrayed, jumbled.

Laura came back from where she had been talking to a nurse. She was wearing such a serious, professional expression. For a moment, Lewis felt that he hardly knew her. This, he thought, was the face she showed to families, the face she reserved for the next of kin. All walled up and only a little window of self.

She must have seen his look of dread, because she touched his arm in reassurance. “No, it’s good news; it’s good news. As far as it goes. Just— not much news of any sort yet.”

They waited.

Lewis hadn’t spent a lot of time in hospitals. Really only when Maddox was injured, and then— so much work to do, so little time for worry. Though the weather through the window, the indecent watery September, did make him think inescapably of it.

Waiting for his kids. That was the longest he’d spent in hospitals. It had been a different age, then, for women and childbirth, so there had been a lot of waiting on his part. But there was a script for that, a nice neat social order, everyone offering their congratulations, like you were waiting to receive a prize you’d already been granted. He’d known to be nervous— had half-pulled-out his hair, had worn out his shoes with pacing, and— when Lyn was born, their first— had to be sick after spending the night drinking vending machine coffee. Still. He’d felt he knew the outcome.

When Morse was ill: another script, this time for the dying. And Lewis hadn’t been there at the end.

Nor with Val.

Gone before he got to London.

Not this limbo.

Limbo. What would James have said? Something about church doctrine. Did they still believe in Limbo, the Catholics? Lewis tended to lose track. Always changing their minds. (Well. James would have had something to say about that.) What was Limbo for? What were you meant to feel?

He sat in the hard plastic hospital chair and thought that he could have dealt with almost anything except sitting there, because the longer he sat there, the more the rush of panic wore off, and the more room that left for other thoughts to get in.

He thought inescapably of James in hospital years ago, James so terribly young in retrospect. Let him sleep it off, the doctor had said. We’ll keep him in for observation and send him back to you tomorrow. Lewis had nodded and prepared to head out. Then, at the hospital doors, he’d had to pause. For a long and paralyzing instant, he’d been aware of a tenderness that washed all through him, as though a rusted sluice gate in his heart had very suddenly dislodged, churning out unlooked-for emotion. He’d thought, I can’t leave the lad, and he’d realised that— quite without meaning to, when he himself hadn’t been paying attention— he’d decided to love Hathaway. Perhaps it was because someone so badly needed to do it, and no one else seemed to want the job.

So he had watched the exit doors opening and closing, and listened to the tannoy bawl, and after a little while he had turned around and gone back to James.

He’d expected James to grow out of it, maybe, that need for love. Lewis had an idea that most people did. Like starting a car battery: you gave it a good jolt and let it run for a little bit, and after that it could keep itself going. At least until the next jolt came along, and James would surely settle down soon enough. He was a nice lad, very bright and good-looking, educated, religious. Not hard for him to find a wife. A happy church wedding. Catholic: they’d have a bundle of kids. Or if James decided he was— well. There was always adoption. That was what James needed, Lewis thought. Family. An atmosphere of easy and generous affection.

But somehow it had never happened. And by the time he got back from New Zealand, Lewis found he’d stopped asking James about it. That had been June. He thought that James had been relieved. Like his lanky body, James’s strangeness seemed larger the more he tried to hide its dimensions. When he wasn’t trying so hard, he was just— James.

Just James. Now he was lying on a gurney with a surgeon’s hands in his guts. Lewis hated that idea— someone touching Hathaway’s insides. He was so private. He was so picky about being touched. No stranger should have the right to just cut him open.

“You all right?” Laura asked softly. She threaded her arm through his, rested her head against his shoulder.

“Not good at hospitals,” Lewis answered.

“They’re doing their best.”

“I know.” He laced their fingers together. “It’s just—“

He felt he couldn’t say. He’d never needed to say much to Laura. So much of their lives had always been shared. Looking at her, he saw that here too she saw what he was thinking, that his helplessness was something she understood. Her hand tightened, and he was grateful, so grateful for her.

Moody showed up around seven o’clock with the CCTV footage. “The important thing to do here,” he lectured, “is to stay very optimistic. You need anything at all, I’m on it. Personally on it. All you have to do is say the word.” Even he, though, had lost something of his aerobics teacher tone. After hours of crisis, Lewis supposed everyone was flagging a bit.

They all sat like unneeded marionettes in an old-time puppet show, resting against each other, slack-limbed and limp. Moody took phone calls in a low, muttered voice, and Maddox checked emails, occasionally saying in a thin voice, “They want to know if…” or “They’ve made an arrest, but…” or “Do you think we ought to… ?” None of it seemed to matter very much.

Lewis wondered if he ought to go to the hospital’s chapel. He didn’t believe in God anymore, or maybe he’d never really believed in God. There had been a time when he’d thought he could clearly mark out the transition from believing to not-believing in God. Now he wasn’t sure anymore. It seemed, in his memory, that he’d never given that much thought to God. He didn’t live in a world that needed God to be in it. James, of course, did, and perhaps that ought to count for something.

He was struck by the sudden impression that James was with God now, the God that Lewis himself didn’t believe in, as though he’d gone to a country that Lewis couldn’t enter. That long avenue, the vanishing point again. It was a peculiar thought, and if he had dwelled on it much further, it might have worried him more than it did, but it was at that instant that a doctor came into the little room, and told them that James was out of surgery and expected to live.

Everyone seemed to want to tell Lewis how lucky James had been. Lucky, because he’d been shot with a low-calibre handgun, which caused less damage; lucky, because he’d been shot at a bit of a distance, so the bullets had lost some velocity; lucky that the bullet hadn’t struck any major organs; lucky that Maddox had kept her head, and that she’d known what to do. They’d been close to a trauma centre. Lucky.

Even though he was stable, he’d still lost his spleen, and most of the blood in his body, so that when Lewis finally got a look at him through the glass of an observation window, he was quite literally as white as a sheet, but by that time the repetition had penetrated Lewis’s skull, so all he could think was: lucky.

You live a charmed life, he thought, gazing at James’s unconscious face. “You lucky sod,” he said, his voice thick. He pushed a hand against the glass, wishing James could see him. He didn’t want James to be with God, or in his own head, even. He wanted James here on earth. He wanted James to know how lucky he’d been. How lucky he still was.

Laura translated the medical talk. James would be in hospital at least a week— “Fingers crossed,” Laura said; it would be several months before he could think about work. “And there’s no guarantee, with his shoulder in the state it’s in, that…”

Lewis looked at her and saw that she thought James might never again be a copper. Well.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said.

Later, they were in the cafeteria, drinking lukewarm coffee and eating sarnies, when Laura tipped her head thoughtfully to one side and said, “Robbie, we can’t just send him home.”

She said it so calmly and sensibly that Lewis assumed for a moment she was making quite an ordinary statement. “Well, he’s staying here for the moment, isn’t he?” he pointed out.

“Yes; he looks good, but Dr. Mathai said at least six more days. But after that, I mean. Months at home? Who’s going to look after him? He won’t be able to wash dishes, much less carry out medical care. He’ll barely be able to get off the sofa for weeks! Not to mention it’s James, so he’ll try to do everything himself, and end up horribly injured. And he’ll be alone.”

She made a kind of and therefore gesture, which Lewis understood: alone, James would disappear into his own head, no doubt brooding about human mortality or somesuch. Lewis had very little insight into the inside of James’s head, but he knew it was a realm best explored in short journeys.

As he took another bite of his limp bacon sarnie, he reflected that it was good Laura was inclined to think about the future. He himself hadn’t thought about the future at all. He’d barely thought about the present! He’d been meant to call Lyn tonight (well, six hours ago, now) and he ought to get hold of James’s mobile and call Nell, regardless of what James would say about it later, and— where was James’s mobile? Possibly Maddox had it?

— But even as these practical concerns occurred, his thoughts were drifting back again to James’s sleeping body, so still below the hospital sheets. His eyelashes not even stirring on his cheekbones. Lewis wanted nonsensically to check on him: to make sure he was still there, that he hadn’t floated away. He had looked so weightless.

He said to Laura, “What do you want me to do? I can’t invent friends for the lad. Or family. I think there might be a priest he’s mentioned?” That was the sort of thing priests were supposed to do, wasn’t it? A commandment, or suchlike? Visiting the sick?

Laura looked at him like— an all-too-familiar look— she’d overestimated his intelligence. “You don’t have to invent anything, Robbie. We’ve got the guest room. Couldn’t we just… move him in? I can’t take more time off work, but you’re there so much lately; you could look after him a bit. I know it’d be—”

An imposition. An inconvenience. Odd, really. Not what you do. Though: then again, what did people do these days? Lewis felt he didn’t know. Young people with their Airbnbs and iPhones and Ubers, gay and bisexual and whatever James was, or marrying three people, sometimes— he’d seen it on the telly! No one would’ve thought of it in Newcastle, but nowadays there were no rules. And perhaps that was better.

He imagined James in his flat, lonely. James’s flat was too big, an empty, ramshackle place. James would drink too much and limp about listening to strange gloomy music, monks chanting about the Wrath of God and the End of Days. Play chess with himself and read dead Russian poets. (That was a new enthusiasm: worrying.) Ready meals from Waitrose, if he couldn’t cook: the depressing sound of the microwave. Lewis was feeling his spirits drag just thinking about it. And James with a bloody great hole in his belly, facing the end of his career!

“Do you think he would?” he asked Laura.

She shrugged. “We’re quite persuasive.”

“He’s quite stubborn.”

“Ah, but he’ll be doped to the gills.”

Lewis gave her a disapproving look. She smiled impishly. Then her smile faded.

“Really, Robbie. He needs a bit of looking after. We happen to have the time and the space.”

It was more than that, though. He thought she felt, as he did, slightly shaken. Touched by a cold finger of threat. As though they’d got home to find a window broken, a door forced open, and had feared— had realised the possibility in a flash— that they’d already lost what couldn’t be replaced. The fear abated a little in the face of the facts, but somehow never quite disappeared entirely.

It was an incongruous feeling. Four months ago, he’d been in New Zealand. Him and Laura and the green of the hills, the upside-down seasons, the oddly huge sky. James had been a shadow at the edge of his horizon, like a storm that never quite arrived, a mountain that hinted at far-off hardships.

Back in England, the distance hadn’t seemed to alter. As though it had crept inside of James. Lewis felt it was his fault; he had missed a junction somewhere; he had postponed something indefinitely; the landscape had shifted, and James was out there alone. Facing that vanishing point.

“Well,” he said. “Perhaps it’s worth a try.”

Lewis finally slept from about six to eight in the morning in a plastic chair beside James’s bed. Laura had gone back to the house to fetch clothes for them both. Strange, staying up all night— the sun leaking in through the window, the wrong colour, as though a whole season had passed when he wasn’t looking, and it was winter now.

James’s skin: the wrong colour, too, still eggshell-white, bloodless. At least he moved a little now, from time to time, a twitch or the rise and fall of his chest. Lewis was amazed he could sleep, even under sedation. The room was full of electrical noise. Beeps and hums. Whirring and ventilation. All the small sounds of James being kept alive.

Sleeping felt like closing his eyes for a second. It didn’t make him feel any less tired. When he woke, the light was stronger and James was looking at him: still heavily sedated, probably, with half-lidded and unfocussed eyes.

“Look who’s decided to join us,” Lewis said, keeping his voice very quiet.

James blinked very slowly. His mouth moved.

“You’ve had a tube down your throat. Might be difficult to speak for a bit.”

He took James’s right hand when James tried to lift it, to stop him pulling on the IV taped to the back. James’s eyebrows twitched, forming an anxious expression.

“You’re fine,” Lewis said. “You’re fine, lad. Well— you had us all worried, but the doctors tell me you’re on the mend. Do you remember what happened?”

He could tell at once that James didn’t.

“Your little gang of antiques smugglers decided to turn Kidlington into the OK Corral. You got in the way of a bullet— a couple of bullets. Maddox kept you hanging on; the doctors sewed you up— I’m afraid you’ll find that you’re short a spleen, but I’m told that’s not so bad. Badge of distinction, really, not having a spleen.”

“You,” James whispered. He looked confused. Already, his eyelids were drooping again.

Lewis squeezed his hand. “The doctor’ll be in shortly. Go back to sleep.”

James did.

Lewis remembered Maddox saying, some time in the middle of the night, when nothing had seemed to make very much sense, that they’d made an arrest. When she came back to the hospital around lunchtime, looking bloody weary, and wearing the same slightly rumpled clothes, she said, “It’s him, all right. Not that it matters. Just a hired gun, really. Suppose that’s how it goes.”

“You’re awfully young to be so cynical,” Lewis told her, but he understood, he thought. “It’s one more off the street, at least. And it was never going to make that kind of difference.” Was he cynical? He didn’t think so, though he was old: he had the privilege. He’d stood in a courtroom, was the thing, watching Simon Monkford sentenced.

Maddox wanted to tell Hathaway herself, and waited till the doctors next woke him. Lewis stood outside the room and waited till she exited, red-eyed.

“It’s just all so little. So random. It feels like it should mean something,” she said.

“I know.”

Lewis bought her a cup of coffee. They sat in the cafeteria.

“Do you think it does for him?” Maddox asked after a long silence. “I just mean— he’s religious, and that.”

Lewis shrugged. “Who knows what he thinks, half the time?”

She looked at him curiously for a moment. “If you don’t, I don’t think anyone does,” she said.

He slept again after Maddox had left, with a dim sense that Laura had looked in on him, and dreamt that he was digging a grave with Hathaway out in Wytham Woods— or rather, not digging a grave, but trying to uncover a body. They were destroying important forensic evidence, but with the easy logic of a dream, this didn’t seem to matter. At some point, partway through the dream, it occurred to Lewis that the body they were digging up was Hathaway’s, but the fact of this didn’t seem to disturb either of them. Lewis rested his arm on his shovel. There was blood on his shirt. It was a warm sunny day, beautiful in the forest. He squinted up at the light through the leaves. Hathaway looked tired. He sat on the ground, his back braced against a boulder. His shoulders were hunched. “Can we just sit here for a minute?” he said. “I used to feel that way,” Lewis told him, and looked down at Hathaway’s body in the grave, at the hole his shovel had punched into it.

He woke to the sound of voices and a vague sense of guilt. When he blinked, he saw Laura was talking to James.

“… strange,” James was saying in a slow, stoned-sounding voice. “New. Knitting-up things. All my… cells dividing… mitochondria… farandolae doing little… dances. Tired.”

Laura looked to be suppressing a smile. She was stroking James’s hair gently. “Well, it takes a lot of energy for your body to heal.”

“Mm,” James said, not very coherently. “Because they have to…. sing.”

Lewis rose and made his way over to them. His back was protesting the time it had spent in that damn chair. “How’s our patient?”

“Under the influence of heavy narcotics,” Laura answered drily. “He says he can feel his cells dividing.”

James appeared to have fallen asleep.

“But better?” Lewis asked.

“His progress is good. You missed Dr. Mathai. She was very impressed by your snoring.”

“Oi!” Lewis scratched his head, still feeling muzzy.

“Her medical opinion, which also happens to be mine, is that you should go home and eat something. Have a shower. I can stay here with James for a bit. He’ll be in and out for a while.”

“You don’t think he’ll…” Lewis didn’t enumerate what he thought might happen. He wasn’t sure he knew, but superstitiously he also felt that voicing the threat of danger might make his vague fears real.

Laura fixed him with a knowing look. “I think he’ll sleep,” she said. “I think if he wakes up at all, he’ll be mostly concerned with his dancing mitochondria. I won’t lie; he’s not out of danger, but it’s not touch and go.”

“Right, then.” Lewis started to leave, then paused. “I thought about—“ he said. “Calling Nell. His sister. I got his mobile off Maddox. I’m not sure he’d thank me for it.”

Laura said nothing. They looked at each other, exhausted. Maybe there was nothing to say. Nine years they’d known James, and no idea, still, what he wanted. No way of navigating the minefield of his inner life. It was enough to make you more than weary.

Lewis passed a hand over his face and turned away.

At home, he washed and found a fresh set of clothes. The sink was still full of dishes from yesterday’s lunch. There was a sense of life suspended. Strange, to not have Laura there. He went into the back garden and stood under the pergola, breathing in the clean air, the scent of cut grass and crisp leaves. There was an ashtray on the patio table: a few stray ends of Hathaway’s cigarettes. No one else they knew smoked. Lewis pictured him sitting there in the grey twilight, looking disaffected, as he always did. Hathaway came out here to smoke when he felt uncomfortable. He thought that Lewis didn’t know this, but of course Lewis did. He didn’t know how to make Hathaway comfortable, was the problem. It was possible, he’d come to think, that Hathaway couldn’t be comfortable. He lacked the right parts: like a lock in which the pins were misaligned. Try any key you liked, and it would still never open. Defective, it was.

But in retrospect, he thought that he should have tried harder. He should have tried other ways to open it.

He’d debated ringing Nell from Hathaway’s mobile, but he had an idea she might not answer, and so used his. The voicemail clicked on: she sounded young, quite ordinary.

“This is Detective Inspector Lewis,” he said. “I work with your brother. I wanted to let you know he’s in hospital. Gave us a good scare, but the doctors say he’ll be fine. Thought I should start off telling you that before I said he’s been shot. Obviously…” Lewis paused, because he suspected the things he would’ve normally said were not obvious for Nell and James. “If you’d like to visit, you’re welcome; maybe give me a ring?” He told her his number. “All right. Speak to you soon.”

He’d made himself uneasy, leaving the message. He hoped that he had done the right thing.

At the hospital, Laura was reading James the Guardian, summarizing all the arts and culture news, with editorial comments. “Glyndebourne’s doing a new Turn of the Screw… I don’t know if you like Britten. I’m not sure if you like opera, honestly. A postcolonial Midsummer Night’s Dream— the play, not the opera— you might find that interesting… Oh, dear, another Doctor Who doing Shakespeare. I’m afraid I’m never quite convinced. I’m probably a snob, though.”

Lewis stood in the doorway and watched her. His whole body ached with fondness. He couldn’t tell if Hathaway was asleep, but it didn’t seem to matter. Even the beige electronic machines surely found Laura’s voice a source of comfort. The atmosphere of the room itself had eased.

She paused when she noticed him. “Hello, you.”

“I should stop by his flat, get some music,” Lewis said. “Mind, the nurses might not put up with the stuff he listens to.”

Laura gave him a reproving look. But before she could speak, James shifted his head a fraction towards the door, vaguely squinting in Lewis’s direction.

“You’re,” he said— not very clearly.

“I’m,” Lewis agreed.

James stared at him very intently. “Have I… not got an arm?”

It took Lewis a moment to understand. “No; you’ve got both arms; one of ‘em’s been immobilised because you took a bullet to it. You’ve got all your bits and pieces. For the most part.”

“Oh.” James seemed confused by this. “And there wasn’t a bird?”

Lewis covered his laugh with a cough, and turned to Laura— who shook her head, obviously fighting a smile. “A bird?”

“Came through the window… big… seagull.” He frowned in dissatisfaction. “Bit me.”

“No; no seagulls. Nobody here but us chickens.”

“Mm,” James said. He looked as though he didn’t quite believe Lewis’s assurance, and suspected that Lewis might be in league with the seagull. “Why’m’I… sleepy.”

“You’re medicated,” Laura said gently. “You will be for a few days more. Are you in any pain?”

James screwed up his nose. He looked like he was falling back to sleep. “‘M fine. Don’t need to be here.”

Within a minute, he was out: drooling slightly.

“Poor lad,” Lewis said. “Tormented by invisible seagulls.”

“Things should get a bit clearer as they turn the drugs down.”

“I don’t know; he’s quite entertaining like this.” Lewis moved forward to take James’s hand and settle it on the bedsheets. He found himself reluctant to let go. “I was thinking, you know, what you were saying before. About— after. We should talk to him.”

“Let’s wait till he knows where both his arms are,” Laura said.

Dr. Mathai turned out to be a tiny woman with severe bangs who had apparently been prepared by Laura for the fact that Lewis would not understand her when she talked about things like anaerobic infection and haemodynamic stability. She looked in after Laura had gone home to sleep, introduced herself to Lewis, and had a brief, not very coherent conversation with James about the wings flapping in his red blood cells.

“They don’t hurt,” James assured her hazily.

She nodded gravely. “That’s good.”

Nothing she saw seemed to cause her concern. But as she went to leave, James wondered aloud, “Why can’t I see you?”

Dr. Mathai looked alarmed for a moment, till Lewis— putting the pieces together, no slack detective he— said, “He hasn’t got his glasses. They must’ve taken his contact lenses.”

When she had gone, he asked James, “Is it all right if I go round your flat? I’ll fetch you your glasses. Get some of that monk music you like, maybe something to read.”

“Yes,” James said. He was staring at the ceiling. Lewis was prepared for more rambling about birds and cellular division, but instead James said, quite unexpectedly, “You keep being here. It’s nice.”

“Where else would I be?” Lewis said, with a lightness he didn’t wholly feel.

“Mm. You and… Dr. Hobson. Like… bells. The really big ones. Can’t hear them from here.”

“Right. Of course. Bells.” Lewis shook his head. “I’ll pretend to know what that’s about.”

He used the pretext of straightening the corner of a sheet to rest his hand on James’s shoulder. The right shoulder, the one that hadn’t been shattered by a bullet. It was good to have James under his hand. They’d never touched very much, but there were things one couldn’t say in words— at least for Lewis there were. And when he thought about it, maybe more for James. Touch didn’t translate anything; it wasn’t a language. But it signalled that more was going unsaid.

“Bells and time,” James murmured. “I missed you.”

Lewis tightened his grip on his shoulder. “I know.”

James blinked at him drowsily, uncomprehending. “Always wanted to be a bell ringer. Never did it.” He sighed, and made a snuffling noise, and leant into Lewis’s touch. Very soon he was sleeping again.

When Lewis left, he saw that Nell had phoned and left no message. He phoned her back, standing outside the hospital, watching leaves push down the street. He’d forgotten, in the seasonless hospital, that it was September.

She was oddly hesitant, and odd in other ways. It was an odd conversation. Lewis had the sense that there was a subtext he had missed, a part of the dialogue he wasn’t having.

“You’re sure he’s all right,” she said, and then, “When you said he’d been shot. You mean—“

“We already have someone in custody.”

“Good; that’s— good. I’m glad he’s— all right.”

A long pause.

“I wasn’t sure if you might want to see him,” Lewis prompted.

“I don’t think he would want that. He doesn’t know you called me.”

“No,” Lewis admitted. “I could have asked, but the answer would’ve been about seagulls. Not a lot of sense to be got out of him at this point.”

She laughed, and sounded startled to have laughed. “You make him sound funny.”

“He is quite funny, I’ve found.”

“James,” she said, and Lewis couldn’t interpret her tone: whether it was a question, an interjection of disbelief, or a kind of sad, uncertain invocation. “I’d like to— can I meet you? I’d like to know— how he’s doing.”

“Yeah, all right.” Lewis told her the name of the hospital. “Say noon tomorrow? The cafeteria food’s a bit dodgy, but I don’t like to stay too far away. Just in case— you know.”

“It’s fine,” Nell said. “I really— thank you.”

“You won’t thank me when you’ve tasted what they call coffee!”

“No. Really. Thank you. I’m glad— someone’s there,” she said, and rang off quickly, before Lewis could offer a response.

Lewis had spent little time in James’s flat. It wasn’t that James kept people out of it; more that it wasn’t an especially welcoming place— as though it had never occurred to James that other people existed, or as though, within the confines of the flat, they didn’t exist. There was an enormous sofa, but it was always littered with the evidence of research: books, notebooks, printouts, and stray bits of paper, enough so that you had to clear a space to sit. The coffee table: a maze of more books, haphazardly scattered; often a bottle or two and a chessboard in disarray, along with half-empty fag packets and pencils and coffee cups. Even after one of James’s whole-scale, effortful tidies, an air of absent-mindedness remained: lamps and furniture placed more or less at random, none of them quite matching; books stacked on the floor by fireplace, desk, and doorway; things in frames hung here and there, in a half-hearted and uncertain attempt at convention.

It was the flat of someone who had never lived anywhere, or who had lived too many places. Once, Lewis had found an antique barometer stuffed between the sofa cushions. Another time, he’d peered into James’s bedroom, and the bed had been completely covered in books, with what looked like a broken bit of Mediaeval statuary propped against a pillow. James had never seemed to feel this needed explaining.

Now the flat felt empty, without its unifying occupant. Lewis had called it ramshackle, but it was beautiful, really— just very thinly lived-in. It was queer; he thought of Hathaway as being larger than other people, like a house that’d had extra rooms affixed to deal with the influx of art and books. But Hathaway took up so little space in his own home. Maybe the result of always trying to seem smaller than he was. He didn’t know, any longer, how to fit— the way that other people, ordinary people, fit in their houses. It was hard to stop hiding when that was how you had always lived.

Lewis dropped his key on the mantle and regarded the sofa’s piles of books. He didn’t know where to begin. He went to the stereo, the CD cases; James’s iPod was there, though perhaps he had music on his phone? Lewis had a vague idea that you could do that, these days. He picked up a handful of CDs: ensemble this and ensemble that, blocky pictures of churches and music with complicated names. Madrigals— James liked madrigals— and that Gregorian chant, or at least something with “chant” and “Grégorien” in the title, which he thought was probably right. Sorting through the rest of the CDs, he found some Django Reinhardt, a name even he recognised, and something called “Jazz Guitar Greats,” which couldn’t be too bad.

When he’d done with the CDs, he turned a helpless eye on the line of books beside them, which appeared to all be in Latin. The ones on the mantelpiece were in Greek. At least the stacks beside the fireplace were in English, though he couldn’t divine any order in them. A history of Parliament was sat beside a biography of Shelley, a history of the air-pump next to a volume of Keats. In another stack: an enormous work about the Jesuits, the complete works of Wittgenstein, and a Lives of the Saints. Lewis sighed and plucked out the Keats, which seemed the simplest thing on offer.

A quick shufty at the sofa yielded more poetry— most of which Lewis hadn’t heard of, but which came in editions labelled “classic,” which was promising— a battered King James Bible, and something by Dorothy Sayers that seemed more likely, at least, to be light-hearted and hospital-appropriate than the Dark Night of the Soul or the Imitation of Christ.

He took a look at the bedroom— where the bed showed a James-shaped space in the midst of what appeared to be catalogues from art exhibits— and, after locating James’s glasses on the night table, decided that the wisest course was avoid the whole thing. The closet-sized kitchen offered nothing except more books and the chessboard, which had migrated to a countertop beside an unwashed wineglass.

When he had packed a fair load of books into a cardboard box, he rested for a moment against the sofa and really looked at the room. It had changed since he’d last been there. The flux of James’s interests, partly. But there was a photo the mantlepiece he hadn’t seen before. A photo of James’s father: just propped against the bare wall, no frame. It was the only photo in the flat.

Lewis studied it. He had met Philip Hathaway only the once— had heard from James later, while in New Zealand, that his father was dead. Their brief encounter had offered no clues to the aura of suffering and abandonment that had always seemed to hang over James’s past. Lewis had his own ideas about Philip Hathaway’s failures, about the nature of James’s abandonment and its likely location. He’d hoped, for James’s sake, for a reconciliation. Fathers failed, but they loved, at some basic level. James needed to know that, to accept it.

But was it really enough to offer one’s son the bare minimum of love? Love like trace evidence, to be collected from a crime scene and analyzed long after the fact? He suspected that James, neck-deep in and ensnared by the doctrine of repentance, all that magical thinking about grace, would have answered unreservedly: yes. It didn’t seem right, though. You could love someone without forgiveness, without erasing their— well, sin.

He was the wrong person to judge. There was Mark, in Australia; would he describe his childhood as happy? Would he describe what Lewis had given him as love?

Somewhere, Lewis thought, he’d read an inspirational quote on a poster about holding two opposing thoughts at the same time. Maybe that was the trick: not trying to make things mesh together. Philip Hathaway had been a decent person, perhaps not so very distant from Lewis. And his son had suffered, been abandoned. Accept the first part, and the injury remained. Time didn’t undo itself, especially where hurt was concerned. It was the hardest lesson of many that Lewis had learned as he grew older. Maybe that was why James clung to the idea of outside intercession, something cutting all the threads in the web of suffering. A relief, to hurt and not hate the one who hurt you.

So after all maybe there was something to grace.

Maddox was at the hospital when Lewis returned. “Dr. Hobson thought you might want a bit of time at home,” she said.

Lewis checked his watch. It was 9:30 PM. “I feel like I don’t even know what day it is,” he said. “I don’t even know if it is day, or night, or—“

“I think you’re proving her point, sir.”

They were standing outside of Hathaway’s room. Lewis gestured towards his box of Hathaway’s possessions, which he had set on one of the ubiquitous mass-produced chairs. “I brought him his glasses. Some of the things he likes. Is he talking any sense yet?”

“A little bit. He remembered I’d been here before. He told me I’d better not bring him pork scratchings.”

Lewis grinned. “Perhaps kiwi fruit.”

She shuddered. “As if this place weren’t bringing back enough bad memories!”

“Is it really?” Lewis’s smile faded. “I didn’t think. You don’t have to stay, if you—“

“No. It’s okay. Just a bit—“ She made an odd, uninterpretable gesture. “Weird, being back, and feeling sort of— scared and helpless all over again, but for someone else. Makes me a bit emotional. But I want to stay.”

“If you’re sure.” Lewis tried to size her up. She was a determined lass. He supposed she’d had to be. She’d got into the habit of never backing down— maybe how she had made it work with Hathaway, back in the days when his hobby was pushing sergeants until they quit. He wanted her to know there was no wall behind her.

She met his eyes. “I want to be here.”

“Well. You may change your mind when you get a listen of his music, but I’ve brought headphones.” He fished them out. They weren’t what he thought of as headphones, those little button-sized ear-buds. “Up to you if you want to risk a book. They’re mostly poetry, I’m afraid.”

Maddox picked up one of the paperbacks with a dubious expression. “A piercing commentary on the nature of art,” she read. “A brilliant examination of the fundamental tenets of Christianity.” She turned over another book. “The Minor Poems of John Milton. Sounds like a riot.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” Lewis said, and clapped her on the shoulder with faux-jovialness. “Right. I’m off, then!”

Maddox called after him, “Do you think he’d notice if I just read him Girls Aloud lyrics?”

Laura was on the sofa when he reached home at last, curled with an afghan over her lap, with the lamplight turning her gently golden. The television was on, but she was reading a novel. Lewis could smell a red hint of wine from her half-empty glass. It was such an easy, domestic scene. It was everything he had wanted, these last few years. Like slipping back into a warm room after a few moments saying goodbye on the doorstep, when you’d almost gotten used to the cold, but not quite. He marvelled at how simple it had been. All he’d had to do was want it. It seemed unfair, maybe, that it had been so simple. But what could he do about it? Love had always come very naturally to him, like walking or any other kind of motion you learned when you were little. Nothing much to it; just something his body knew how to do.

With a sigh, he settled next to Laura and let his head fall against the cushions.

She eyed him, crooked-mouthed. “Who’s this stranger?”

“Ah, I know.” He nestled an arm around her shoulder. “What a set of days it’s been.”

“All’s well at the hospital?”

“Seems to be.” Lewis reached for the remote and nudged the volume of the television up. He didn’t want to think about the hospital, about James; he didn’t have the energy. He felt he’d exhausted some inner, emotional muscle. He wanted to sign himself over Laura’s arms and rest.

She seemed to sense this. She set her novel to one side, and rubbed at his belly with brisk affection. Without saying anything, she turned her attention to Newsnight, where some bird in a black feather headdress was being interviewed about autoharps. Probably James would have liked it.

And there he was again, interrupting.

Laura said, without looking at him, “You’re fretting. Not a fan of the autoharp renaissance?”

“Just imagining what Morse would have said. To call it a renaissance, Lewis, is to perpetrate an act of defamation upon the original.”

“Look at you, with your big words!” Laura laughed. “My mum had an autoharp in the Seventies. Wanted to be Joni Mitchell, I imagine. Bit of a hippie, my mum. I used to come home from school and find her at the kitchen table, bent over her book of chords, plink, plink, plink! You’ve never heard such a dreadful racket.”

“Least she had something she liked doing. That’s always good. Easy to lose that, when you turn into a parent.”

“Mm. I’ll have to take your word for it.”

“Did you never—“ Lewis hesitated. He didn’t want to stumble in this arena. He was aware of his membership in the clumsy sex of men, who, it seemed, could never understand women’s private emotions— and who made an extraordinary mess trying to fumble with them.

“—Want children of my own?” Laura finished for him. She gave him a knowing glance, as though she had read his discomfort. “I suppose I didn’t want them the way some women seem to want them. It was always one of a number of options. I don’t regret not having kids. It would have been… a different life.”

Robbie looked down at her: her faintly weathered face, the eyes that never managed to be anything other than kind (a great handicap, she had told him once: people always think I’m being nice, no matter what I say! it undercuts the force of my bollockings!) and the wit she’d always been matter-of-fact about displaying, never minding what others might think of it.

“You’d have made a good mother,” he said. “Not sure whether you’d have liked it.”

“Thank you— I think.”

“I wonder sometimes whether I was a good dad. There are things I wish I could do over.”

She looked at him without speaking, not pressing, but giving him the space to say more.

“It’s tricky, isn’t it? You get wiser, but you can’t do anything with it. Always too late. Sometimes I want to call him up— call them up— and say… I don’t know. That I’m sorry I did it wrong. But it won’t change the past.”

“No,” Laura agreed. “It’s overrated, changing the past. I’ve always thought… it’s like a drain. The past, I mean. Or a sieve. You can pour all your love into it, and in the end it’s still empty. I just think— what a waste.”

Hard not to think of Philip Hathaway, poring over his son’s schoolboy books. Visiting his son’s schoolboy priest, yet never breathing a word about it. “Suppose you’re right.”

“… So much wasted love,“ Laura said almost absent-mindedly. “Poured out into the past.”

They watched the television in silence for a little while, both of them edging close to sleep. Lewis thought of everything and nothing, floating vaguely from thought to thought. Mark in Australia, a landscape of hardship, bare and flat and pricklish— a landscape that gave you nothing you didn’t fight for. James on the Camino de Santiago, looking for God, maybe; looking for someone whose love didn’t come with conditions attached. Lyn’s son Jack, still in some ways so little. The care Lyn took with him, as though conscious of her every word’s long reverberations, the fingerprints that even the most casual of her touches left.

In the morning, Lewis arrived at the hospital to find James sleeping. Lucky, since Lewis was meant to meet Nell at noon, and he didn’t fancy having to mislead James, even by omission. He’d considered whether he ought to cancel the meeting. If he wasn’t prepared to tell James about it, should he… ? The doubt didn’t leave him. He hoped he’d made the right decision.

He was surprised by how easily he picked her out of a room full of people. He wasn’t sure what particular quality he had recognised. She was smaller and somehow sadder than he’d expected; young— he’d been right, much younger than James— and crumpled in some indefinable, under-the-skin manner. Very polite, he thought, as they made introductions.

When they were sat at one of the cafeteria tables, her hands played nervously with her cup of tea: circling it round and round. She didn’t look up. “You must think I’m a dreadful person,” she said. “Not to—“

“No,” Lewis interrupted gently. “I know there’s been— I know things haven’t been ideal. Seem to remember James thinking he’d fix things by sending the two of you on a silent retreat.”

That startled a wavering laugh from her. “Yes, well. He’s always been very good at silence. I suppose he learned to be.” A complex emotion crossed her face. “I do care about him,” she said. She sounded as though she were pleading before a court. “I do. It’s not easy.”

“I know it’s not.”

“When I heard your message, I thought at first— It seems silly now. I thought maybe he’d… hurt himself.” She stared fixedly down into her paper tea cup.

It was rare that Lewis found himself lost for words. He thought that if the idea had been ridiculous, it would merely have shocked him. But he could see why she hadn’t dismissed it out of hand. Though surely— “He wouldn’t.”

Nell looked at him carefully. “You don’t think so?”

“Suicide? It’s a mortal sin!”

She smiled a humourless smile. “Oh, of course. How could I have forgotten.”

Lewis shifted; he felt physically uncomfortable. “I shouldn’t be talking to you about this.”

Nell compressed her lips to a line. For a moment, Lewis had the alarming sense that she was about to say something terrible, something she couldn’t take back, something he wouldn’t be able to unhear. He could feel himself recoiling a little in anticipation. But she said only, “I’m sorry. It’s just— there’s never been anyone. To talk to. I suppose I don’t know what to say.”

They sat in silence for a moment.

“You could say if you want to see him,” Lewis ventured.

Immediately, Nell shook her head. “He won’t want me to. Not like this. He doesn’t ever want to see me, really.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.” Even as he said it, Lewis knew it was. James hated confusion, hated emotion, hated all the physical parts of himself. Anything he couldn’t subdue with his brain, he hated. He would hate seeing his sister because she would confuse and trouble him.

Nell was regarding him with an exhausted kind of amusement. “It's nice of you to say. But I can’t tell you don’t believe that.”

“All right; so it’s true. We don’t always want what’s best for us.”

Nell took a long drink of her tea. Her fingertips moved nervously against the cup. Lewis was reminded of James when he wanted a cigarette. That edginess, he thought— they had that in common, the striking impression of needing to be soothed.

“It’s funny, I always give him hell for—“ Nell started abruptly. A quick pause. She ducked her head. Hiding some emotion. “For doing whatever the hell he wants, no matter how much it hurts other people, no matter what it— just, the most selfish things. But I do know— I mean, I don’t know, but I— I know there’ve been things he didn’t… want. I’m not sure he really knows how to want things; not like normal people, and I hate… “ She bit her lip. “I hate that I always think, God, fine, just let him have this one thing at least, and it’s always something stupidly petty, and I hate him for being stupidly petty, and I hate that I know why he does it, and I hate that I still can’t forgive him, I hate—“

She was twisting her hands together so tightly that Lewis could see the blood leave the skin.

He reached out and put a hand on hers. It was what he would have done for a witness, or for anyone touched by a tragedy, a crime.

“I’m sorry,” Nell said. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear this.”

“I can’t pretend to understand,” Lewis said, although he thought he understood pieces, here and there. “And I can’t tell you what you should do. I’ve… got two kids meself, you know. A son and a daughter. They’re not much like you and James.”

“No,” Nell said. “I imagine not.”

“Their mum’s gone, and if I were gone, I’d like to think they could be there for one another. If only because no one else will ever know those family things. No one else will ever have known them as bairns, as schoolkids, all the picture books they liked, the embarrassing stories, the accidents, the birthday cakes. I know,” he said, suddenly conscious, a sharp spike of worry he’d set a foot wrong, “maybe it wasn’t like that for you, exactly—”

Nell gave him a weary half-smile. “We had our share of ordinary things.”

“Right. I didn’t meant to imply—“

“No; I understand. I understand what you’re saying, I mean.” She looked down at his hand, still overlapping hers. She didn’t make a move to shift it. “You love your kids,” she said. “You’re so lucky.”

At first Lewis thought he had misheard her, or that she’d misspoken. Then he understood that what she had said was more complex, perhaps something that was outside of his comprehension. He wasn’t sure how to respond for a very long time.

“Is it all right if I ask him?” he said at last. “What should I tell him?”

Nell was still looking down at their hands. Something in her had retreated.

“Tell him I was frightened,” she said.

James was awake when Lewis returned to his room, looking cross, which was to say: much more cognizant. He was wearing his glasses and glaring at Maddox, who had on headphones and appeared to be ignoring him.

“She won’t let me have a cigarette,” James said as soon as Lewis entered.

“Hello to you, too,” said Lewis. “Glad to see you’re feeling better.”

“I’m not feeling better. I feel worse because I’m awake. And I want a cigarette.”

Maddox removed one headphone. “I’ve found that if you ignore him for about ten minutes, he falls back asleep, sir. It seems to be the best way to manage him.”

“I don’t,” James protested, which was probably a lie.

“Right.” Lewis was strongly reminded of car trips with Lyn and Mark. “Maddox, you’re relieved of duty. I’ll deal with our invalid.”

Maddox packed up her bag and prepared to leave. Lewis noted that in spite of her sarky tone, she paused beside James’s bed to touch his hand briefly. Unusually for James, he didn’t comment— just gave her a suspicious look over his glasses.

When she had gone, Lewis said, “You ought to be nicer to her. She doesn’t have to be here. And I see she gave you your iPod and all.” He nodded to where the little device was lying on James’s lap.

“I don’t want to listen to music. All I can think about is smoking.”

“Well, it’s not going to happen. You’re in a hospital, for God’s sake! I’ll talk to the doctor; see if she can give you something to help.”

“I don’t want something,” James groused. “I want a cigarette.”

Lewis pulled a chair closer to his bedside. “How about a distraction?”

James gave him a sceptical look.

“You don’t think I can distract you?”

“I think you’re trying now.”

“You know, you were a lot easier to deal with last time I was in here. You told me all about how you thought I was a bell.”

James flushed. “I don’t really remember. I remember you being here a lot.”

“Course I was. Gathering embarrassing material for blackmail.”

“Yes; that’s what I was afraid of.” James stared down at his free hand. “Thank you. I should have said that first.”

Lewis felt acutely uncomfortable, perhaps because of his conversation with Nell. He didn’t think this was the right moment to mention it to James, when he seemed already slightly fragile and bad-tempered. Instead he said, “There’s no need. Just don’t get yourself kicked out of hospital for setting off the smoke alarms.”

“Pretty sure they can’t kick you out for that.”

“Let’s not test your luck.”

James wrinkled his nose petulantly, but settled back with a sigh. He did seem sleepy; Maddox had been right. Like a bad-tempered child who wouldn’t settle for a nap. “I hate this,” he said.

“I know. How about I read you something?”

“You hate everything I like to read.”

“Come on; I brought you a whole box of goodies. There must be something in there.”

Lewis began to hold up the books, one by one, for James’s evaluation. Herbert: no. Hopkins: no. Milton: thank God, no. Auden: “Maybe. I think you’d quite like Auden.” Chesterton: “Oh, that one. They’re mystery stories. Well, sort of.”

So Lewis opened the Complete Father Brown and began to read: “Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous…”

By the time he had finished the first story— a peculiar story! parts of it made Lewis want to roll his eyes, though he could certainly see the appeal for James: a priest who was a detective!— James was drowsing. Lewis could see him fighting sleep. He closed the book carefully and set it on his lap.

“Mm,” James said, without really waking. “Don’t go. No one ever read to me before.”

“No?”

“That I remember. Never needed it. Learned to read early. ’S nice.”

Lewis could imagine it: the child-James, tiny and towheaded, with thick spectacles, curled up with a book as big as his head. Probably he’d preferred to read alone. Probably he’d had no patience for the kinds of books that parents wanted to read to kids, about fluffy animals and talking toys. How would Lewis have reacted, if Lyn or Mark…? Felt robbed, maybe. Bewildered. What you’d gotten when you’d asked for a child was not what you’d expected, and now there were no take-backs. Still. It was hardly James’s fault. No one’s fault. Just… sad, he thought, sad.

“It is nice,” Lewis said. “Beats weeding the garden, which is what I was planning to be doing. Shall I read a bit more?”

James nodded, closing his eyes. Lewis took the book up and opened it to the second story.

“Aristide Valentin,” he read, “Chief of the Paris Police, was late for his dinner, and some of his guests began to arrive before him.”

James slept on and off for much of the day.

“It’s normal,” Dr. Mathai told Lewis, when she came to check in on James. “He’s going to be easily tired for a very long time, even after we start tapering off the opiates.”

“It doesn’t really hurt,” James told her, sounding faintly confused. “It just feels like someone gave me a kicking.”

But when the nurses changed his dressings (“You don’t have to stay here for this,” James said, sounding unhappy, but Lewis had glimpsed the nervous tension in his face) Lewis saw his injuries for the first time: the neat line of staples running up his chest, the red line of parted skin beneath. His shoulder bore a crooked pinwheel of black stitches. It looked painful. It looked unreal, like it had been painted on for some especially gruesome fancy dress party.

“You’re going to have an interesting time with air travel from here on out,” Dr. Mathai told James, peering at his shoulder. “You’ve still got part of a bullet in there. Just in very tiny pieces.”

James frowned. “I think that ups my cool factor.”

“What cool factor,” Lewis said, almost by reflex, and was glad he’d said it, because James turned and grinned quickly at him.

“You’re just jealous. How long’ve you been a copper? And not a really good scar to show for it.”

“I’ve got emotional scars,” Lewis said. “Most of them with your name on ‘em.”

“Right, right, blame the invalid.”

“And I got coshed on the head with a cricket bat once.”

James shook his head sadly. “That explains so much.”

Dr. Mathai cleared her throat. “Gentlemen,” she said meaningfully.

The two of them looked at her, abashed.

“We’re going to want to keep on eye on the shoulder,” she said. “They’re a tricky bit of business, shoulders. When you damage one, it’s like having a traffic accident right at a massive interchange. And, sorry to say, it is going to hurt. Quite a lot. You’re still on heavy medication, but I want to back it off and get you up and moving as soon as possible, maybe in the next two days.”

“Fine,” James said. He waved his good hand airily. “Whatever.”

Dr. Mathai exchanged a look with Lewis that managed to communicate amusement, concern, and trepidation. She said, “I’m going to remind you that you said that.”

When she had gone, Lewis watched James resettle in the bed. The clearer his thoughts got as the drugs wore off, the more restless he seemed to be, which was typical of James, really. Probably wished he could be rowing, or running, or some other means of physical escape.

The thought of escape, of James running from something, reminded Lewis of what he hadn’t had a chance to say. He held off for a little longer as the evening light settled in the room. The contrast between the antiseptic hospital lighting and the dark blue outside made the room feel small.

“James,” he said, when he couldn’t avoid it any longer. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

James blinked up at him. “Well, that’s not at all sinister-sounding.”

“It’s not sinister; it’s— well, I suppose there’s a few things, really, but you should know that— I thought your sister should know you were in hospital.”

He thought he could see the moment when the blank mask dropped over Hathaway’s features. It looked painful. “You—“

“I talked to her, just to tell her you were— you know. All right.”

James said nothing. It wasn’t the absence of emotion that was upsetting so much as the effort it clearly took took to keep the emotion off his face. His hand was fidgeting against the sheet as Nell’s had done with her cup.

Lewis was careful to keep his voice very gentle. “You gave her a scare, lad. She doesn’t want to lose you.”

“Oh, good. The bare essentials of polite fiction. I think that’s an improvement for us.” James’s voice wasn’t angry, but very determinedly neutral. Like he was discussing a subject he wasn’t interested in. “You can tell her thanks for that. Nice to be not wanted gone.”

Lewis rubbed his face. He could see he’d chosen the wrong moment, but he thought that probably there hadn’t been a right moment. James, at any given moment, was only a half-step away from prickly. It was hopeless trying to dodge the spines, at least for someone as straightforward as Lewis was by nature.

“Look,” he said. “All I’m saying is: I spoke to her. I think she’d quite like to see you, if you’d let her, but obviously I’m not going to ask you to do anything that’s… hurtful.”

“Obviously,” James repeated quietly. His head was turned towards the door.

“I’ll tell her it’s not a good time,” Lewis said. “Perhaps when you’re out of hospital.”

“Yes. Sure.”

That was transparently a brush-off, but Lewis let it go. “That’s the other thing I wanted to speak to you about. I’m sure they’ve told you that you can expect to be out of commission for a while.”

James made a restive, disgusted face. “It’s been implied, yes.”

“Two months, they reckon. Maybe longer. You’ll need someone to look after you; you can’t be doing it yourself. We thought— Laura and I thought—“

Lewis stopped. James was looking at him, wide-eyed and strange, clearly unsure what was about to happen. Anyone else might have guessed, anyone who wasn’t James.

“We thought perhaps you should move in with us for the time being. We’ve the spare room; we only really use it for Lyn’s visits. You’d have the place to yourself a fair bit while we’re working on cases, but— you know— someone there when you need it.” Lewis paused. He couldn’t read James’s expression, so he added, “I know you might prefer being in your own place—“

“No,” James interrupted. He still had that astonished, soft expression, like he was seeing something he couldn’t quite believe. “No, I—“

“It’s all right if you feel you—“

“I don’t want to impose—“

They stared at one another.

Lewis said, “You wouldn’t be imposing. We’d be happy to have you.” Privately, he thought that James didn’t know how to impose. He was so skittish, so nervous about taking up space that he was gone before he could settle, much less wear out his welcome. “Think of it as an act of Christian charity.”

That worked; James levelled an amused and sceptical look at him.

“What; you don’t think I go around doing acts of Christian charity? Well.” Lewis couldn’t help smiling at him a little fondly. “I suppose it must be something else, then.”

James kept his gaze fixed on Lewis. His glasses made him seem particularly inscrutable. His attention was curious and slightly fearful: wary. “I suppose it must be,” he said.

The next morning, Lewis took his cup of coffee into the spare bedroom and stood gazing pensively at the furniture around him. He and Laura had thought, when they decided to redo it— well, that had been a strange season. Retirement itching at him like a too-new, too-tight wool jumper, and not a word from James, who’d disappeared off the face of the earth. He’d felt lonely, despite living with Laura; she’d been at work, and he hadn’t, and he’d spent a lot of time on the phone with Lyn, trying to be someone to somebody. The spare room had been, he supposed, part of the same project. Laura hadn’t said anything, but she’d watched him carefully and offered very few of her own opinions.

There was a small double bed, its duvet patterned with pale blue flowers, and a whitewood night table with a jointed reading lamp. On the walls: some dried flowers from the BVI that he’d mounted and framed during the heavy crafting phase of early retirement; an old Magic Flute poster that he had saved from Morse’s office; a photograph of the cathedral in Florence that he’d taken when he’d been in Italy with Lyn. He’d started installing bookshelves before realizing he didn’t have enough books to fill them, then filled them instead with seashells, with a painted boomerang from Australia, with a photograph of a crocodile swimming in the Cherwell. Much later, when he and Laura returned from New Zealand, he’d had a whole new bunch of ornaments, but by then he’d realised what the room was, what he was making. It wasn’t a guest room so much as a snare for guests— as though he could bring them into his home, his heart, by showing them little pieces of himself.

Laura slipped through the doorway behind him. She was dressed for work. He could smell her perfume. (“The one necessity when you work where I work,” she always said.)

“What are you thinking?” she asked, stealing a sip of his coffee.

“I’m thinking I’m glad I put in those bookshelves.” When he looked at her, though, he saw that she wanted a serious answer. He sighed. “Ah, I don’t know. Thinking— I don’t want the lad to feel like a stranger. You know how he gets.” He could imagine Hathaway vanishing in this place, in the effort not to be too much, too loud, too disturbing.

Laura was silent. “I think,” she said eventually, “it’s not something you can design for. It’s something you have to do. We’ve made an all-right go of it so far, haven’t we?

“Sometimes I think so.”

“We’ll muddle through.”

“I know.” He didn’t say that that was what he was afraid of, that he didn’t want to muddle through with James.

“I have to go to work. I’ll swing by the hospital at lunch, all right?”

He kissed her goodbye. She left him worrying, still, in the centre of the room.

When Lewis got to the hospital, he found that the chief superintendent had been by, and that James was in a spectacularly disagreeable mood. The one fact didn’t appear to be related to the other; all Moody had done was deliver a number of Get Well Soon cards from the folk down at the station, and he’d left with promises that Hathaway’s recovery would be fully supported by his police benefits. Admittedly, the cards weren’t really Hathaway’s style— a sad puppy, some artfully photographed flowers, and for some reason a fat cartoon penguin— but it was the thought that counted, surely.

James wasn’t appreciative. “Half of them are hoping this means I’ll be invalided out and they won’t have to pretend to tolerate me again.”

Lewis, reading the polite inscriptions on one of the cards, raised an eyebrow. “That seems a trifle misanthropic.”

James snorted. “Please. And Moody says he’s watering my cactus. He’s undoubtedly going to murder it.”

“I’m sure the chief superintendent will take very good care of your cactus.”

“The glass is always half-full for you, isn’t it?”

Lewis looked up, startled. It wasn’t an unwelcome echo, just one he hadn’t expected. He had to force himself to put the sense of being haunted aside. “What’s got you in a temper, then?”

“Well, I’ve been shot,” James said snidely. “And I’m stuck in bed in a place where they don’t allow smoking, and I can’t play the guitar for— I don’t know, two months, at least. You’re going to have to phone my band.”

It would have been far too simple, of course, for him to merely come out and admit that this was what had been preying on him.

“Of course,” Lewis said. “Just tell me who to get in touch with.”

James set his mouth in a thin line and stared at the wall. “Julian. Our bassist. I’ll give you his number.”

Lewis let him sulk for a moment longer before suggesting, “Look at it as an opportunity. You could take up a second instrument.”

“Guitar’s my second instrument. Not allowed to play the piano, either. Always wanted to learn the oud, but wouldn’t you know it: streng verboten.”

“Ah, you’ll be up and strumming about in no time.” It couldn’t hurt, Lewis thought, to at least believe this was true. “Tell you what, I’ll take your guitar over to the house, so it’ll be there when you’re ready.”

“Thanks,” James said listlessly.

“So how are you feeling, apart from all that?”

“Like my abdomen’s stapled together. Like there’s a bullet in my shoulder.”

“Only little tiny pieces of it.” Lewis waited for James to say anything further, but James was stewing in his misery. “Is there anyone else you’d like me to call? Anything else I can get you?”

“No. You’re doing too much as is.” James was giving the strong impression that he wanted to pull the sheets over his face, and had been prevented from doing this only by the immobilization of his shoulder.

“Maybe you’re me latest retirement project. Haven’t got a case on at the moment. Just rattling around the house; nothing else to do; it’s a mercy, really.”

“You’re trying to make me feel better.”

“Is it working?”

James let his face answer for him. Sometimes he could look like a sad clown, with his curiously flexible mouth— something mournful but also ridiculous in it. Lewis sensed that he would not be able to offer consolation. James’s unhappiness was inner, and possibly something existential in nature; at any rate, it was going to go unexplained, as James’s unhappinesses tended to. Maybe he couldn’t explain them. He had learned to be too good at silence.

“Well,” Lewis said, “give me the number, then. Better break the sad news to— what is it your band’s called?”

James flushed. “We’re called Carmen Cecilia. It’s— because of St. Cecilia, except really it should be Carmen Ceciliae, in the Latin, that’s “Cecilia’s song,” but it’s catchier if it’s just Carmen Cecilia. I’m told. Apparently.”

“… Right,” Lewis said. “Of course. Catchier.”

“Let me give you Julian’s number,” James said, and fumbled for his mobile. He wasn’t meant to be using it in the hospital, but he seemed to still like having it in his hand, and kept getting hold of it after it had been taken away.

“I’ll tell him to send you a stuffed toy as a get-well-soon present. Maybe a rabbit. You could use a pet,” Lewis said.

Julian the bassist had a solid and amiable Welsh accent, which did not prove indicative of his general nature. “Oh, my God!” he said, when Lewis explained the situation. “He seriously got shot? I didn’t even know that happened! In real life, I mean, not on TV.”

“You do know he’s a police officer…?” Lewis asked, just to make sure. He found he could quite easily imagine James somehow neglecting to disclose this over the course of a decade’s friendship.

“Sure, but I never imagined him running around shooting people!”

“Not so much shooting people as getting shot at,” Lewis said drily. “Unfortunately.”

“Oh, my God! Is he all right? Why’s he not calling, why’re you calling? Is he on a ventilator? Can he not speak?”

“The hospital doesn’t allow cell phone use,” Lewis said. “He can speak fine. He’s a bit grumpy, as he can’t play guitar at the moment. His shoulder’s out of commission.”

“Oh, my God!” Julian the bassist said again. Lewis was beginning to find the phrase exhausting. “Can we come and see him in hospital?”

Lewis asked trepidatiously, “Who’s we?”

“The rest of the Carmen guys. I should tell Father Nick, from All Saints; he lets the band practice there. He loves James, he’ll be so worried. Oh, my God, just tell James not to worry about the band! I can’t believe he’d even— except, yes, I can, I totally can. We have to come see him.”

“I’ll… get back to you on that,” Lewis said, though he had warmed to Julian the bassist when Julian had demonstrated a clear familiarity with the style of James’s thinking. He suspected that James would not want the band to visit, but he suspected equally that such a visit might be good for James. The trick was going to be getting James to accept this idea.

“Don’t let him fob you off with some nonsense about not wanting to be a bother.”

Lewis found himself smiling at the man’s cheerfully dictatorial tone. A familiarity with James’s habits, as well as his thinking.

“Not to worry. I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said.

“No,” James said immediately.

“Ah, come on. They’re your mates!”

“They’re my bandmates. It’s not like we all hang out together.”

“They want to check up on you. They want to cheer you up!”

“That alone should tell you something. When have you ever known me to cheer up?”

James’s bad mood had persisted into the following day. His doctor had pried him out of bed that morning and made him walk the length of the hospital hallway— “Stay in bed too long,” she’d said, “and your muscles forget how to perform basic actions. Then you have to start all over. Much harder in the long term. It’s better to keep in practice, even though I know it’s tough.” It had taken a long time, and James had slept for two hours when it was over, looking absolutely shattered.

It was the first time Lewis had really seen him in pain: shuffling laboriously down the hallway, effort visible in his body, with his shoulder in a complicated-looking sling. His jaw had been set and he hadn’t made a sound, apart from breathing. There had been something in his expression that was hard to watch. Harder, Lewis thought, for him than for the doctor, not because she was used to putting patients through their paces, but because she didn’t know James, and didn’t know, therefore, that relentless self-punishment could almost be called his hobby. The look on his face made Lewis think of all the times James had swallowed down his suffering without ever allowing himself such a look.

Since waking up, James had kept himself busy by rubbishing all of Lewis’s suggestions and complaining almost continually. He didn’t want to read; he didn’t want to listen to music; he didn’t want Lewis to read to him, but when Lewis— at last, more than a little exasperated— offered to leave, he didn’t seem to want that, either.

“No, don’t. Please don’t,” James said. “Sorry. I’m being horrible.” His hand was clenching and unclenching miserably on the sheet.

“Well, if ever you’re allowed…” Lewis began.

“I shouldn’t be, though. It’s awful. You’ve done so much, really far too much, more than you need to. You shouldn’t feel that you have any obligation—“

Lewis thought he saw where this was going. “I’m not going to take back my invitation because you’re feeling a bit out of sorts! Anyway, Laura would kill me.”

“But surely—“

“We’re not having you over because we think it’ll be a jolly vacation; we’re having you over because we care about you, and we want to help. No one’s expecting you to be nice all the time.”

James twisted his head away. “Sorry,” he repeated quietly.

“You have to let other people help you. At least a little bit. Once in a while.”

Watching the expression on James’s face, Lewis recognised something that he had seen in the hallway. An action that should come easy and naturally didn’t; instead it hurt a lot. It felt uncomfortable and strange. How long had it been since James had had to use these muscles, if you could call them muscles, the parts of you that let yourself be loved? A long time, maybe.

He sighed. “Look… you’re allowed to be angry. You’ve had a bad thing happen. No one’s going to judge you for that. No one’s going to punish you just for being… human.”

James looked at him unreadably. “You’ve told me that before.”

“I’ll keep telling you, till you get it through your big thick head.” Lewis leant back in his chair, trying to move the mood to nonchalant. “Maybe you could start by letting your friends come and visit. At least bring a card by. Like people do.”

“Mm.” James still seemed unconvinced.

Lewis drew in a deep breath. He felt he was feeling his way through an unfamiliar landscape in the dark. “If I’m making you do something that you hate, if it’s— I don’t know— against your nature somehow, just tell me so. But I don’t think you want to be alone. I think you want to be around other people; it’s just… hard. Hard work.”

James didn’t say anything. For a second, the conversation sat at some sort of crossroads. James could get angry, and Lewis wouldn’t blame him, but perhaps if he got angry Lewis would never raise the topic again. James could say that Lewis had gotten it all wrong. James could fracture open like a window done in by one well-placed kick, and Lewis wasn’t sure how he’d handle that, a James who wasn’t made of defenses. It seemed more likely to happen now than it ever had been before, even at Crevecoeur.

But James just pushed a hand through his hair and chewed on his thumbnail, and after a while he shrugged. One-shouldered, because of the sling. It made him look careless, which he had possibly intended.

“Is that a yes, you’ll let your bandmates visit? I’ll bring them round, if you like; they can talk to me. You can pretend to fall asleep if it gets too much. I promise not to give the game away.”

That got a half-smile. “How could I resist such an offer?”

They sat in a silence that felt oddly like the aftermath of a storm. That was one difference between Morse and James, it came to Lewis— Morse’s silences had often felt aggressive, like he was deliberately pushing silence on you. James’s silences were like gasps for breath or long relieved sighs, like he was grateful that speaking hadn’t been forced on him.

Finally Lewis said, “I’ll go for a coffee; I’ve got to phone Lyn, been meaning to do it for days.” In reality he thought they both needed some time alone.

“But you’ll come back? I mean,” James added quickly, clearly regretting having said it, “you’ve got to finish reading Father Brown. You’re only partway through the first volume.”

Lewis smiled at him, trying to convey reassurance. “How could I resist such an offer?” he said.

Lyn had made tentative plans to bring Tim and Jack for Christmas. In the past, Lewis had generally gone to them— too difficult for them to travel with a small child. Last year, of course, he’d been with Laura’s family in New Zealand, not his notion of Christmas at all, but a cookout in their back garden, where strange birds hopped in the broad summer grass and Lewis had managed to burn his nose in the sun. This was the first time he’d had a home to host them, a proper home where he was settled.

Lyn had met Laura, but it had been— oh, years, now. He wanted her to meet Laura as she was now, in the house that they shared, the house that had been Laura’s and was filled still with Laura-ness. With her books and her pictures and odd souvenirs from her travels, carved Maori figurines and collections of blue-and-green sea glass. He wanted Lyn to know that he had someone as good as Laura, that she had agreed to be in some way indefinably his. And perhaps he wanted Laura to meet Lyn for the same reasons, to say: Look what I can call mine. Look how delightful, how charming, how intelligent she is. Even Jack, a generation further removed. My grandson, he could say. And Laura’s, if she wanted. She would never have grandkids of her own, but Lewis could give her this, the large, happy and growing family that he thought was good for all people.

Christmas was on his mind when he told Lyn that he hoped James would come to stay with him and Laura; “It might,” he said, “mean we have to fiddle around with the sleeping arrangements for Christmas, but that’s a long time off still, so we’ll see.”

He couldn’t quite imagine James as a part of any family’s Christmas. When he thought about James at Christmas, he imagined James kneeling in church, or perhaps playing with his band. That was what James had done the last two or three Christmases, played with the band— apparently Mediaeval jazz world music fusion was in hot demand around that time of year. Still. Lonely, Lewis would have thought, after the end of the concert, or whatever it was that being alone felt like to James.

Lyn being Lyn, she said that it would be no trouble at all, and poor James, and that anyways, she would quite like to meet him. Lewis had forgotten that they had never met. It seemed extraordinary. Nine years! But Lyn had always been in Manchester. He thought about them meeting. He had a curious urge to protect James, as though Lyn might not quite understand his James-ness.

Like Laura’s Laura-ness. Some quality he was enormously proud of. Or, no— “proud of,” those weren’t the right words. He was proud that he’d been granted special access to something so very valuable and deserving of love. He wanted others to see and appreciate this, but James was… James was hard to know.

Maybe it was this thought that led to him calling Nell Hathaway after he’d got off the phone with Lyn.

He realised as he was doing so that he didn’t know what Nell did for a living. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might be at work. But she answered straight away, as though she’d been waiting: “Mr. Lewis?”

Lewis winced, but he didn’t know what to tell her to call him. “Yeah, look, I’ve spoken to James. He’s having a bit of a rough time right now.”

“He doesn’t want to see me.”

“He just needs a chance to work things through,” Lewis said. “It’s difficult for him right now. You might try sending a card?”

Nell laughed, a little bitterly. “A card. Right.”

“If you want to give it to me, I’ll make sure he—“

“Doesn’t bin it?”

“He wouldn’t.”

“No. Sorry. That was unfair.” She was silent for a moment. “Thank you for offering. You’ve been very kind. More than I could’ve expected.”

Lewis was moved once more by the urge to fix something that was broken. It was the type of urge he always seemed unable to resist. “Listen, he’s meant to be staying at mine for a bit when he gets out of hospital. Send a card along. I’ll give you my address. Maybe you can come for dinner.”

“God, I take it back; you’re not kind, you’re foolhardy, to make that kind of offer.” But she added, after a moment, “I will, though. Send a card.”

He gave her his address and rang off, after saying, “You know, you should feel free to call if you— I don’t know, need an update.”

Though: She won’t, he thought, and marvelled that he knew this about her, or knew that in this way she was similar to James. James, too, would shrivel into nothingness before asking for more than he was given. Lewis didn’t know why— could only sense around their prickly shared edges— but all the same, the realization made him sad.

When he returned from the cafeteria, he found James asleep. It was unnerving, seeing James sleep so much; for so long, he’d been used to James not sleeping, pushing himself day and night towards some breaking point. Even more than the wounds Lewis had glimpsed, it seemed to signal some damage. Something James couldn’t shake off, something frighteningly serious.

Strange, too, to see him so undefended. In sleep, James looked like a child. He had an astonished expression. There had always been that blurring about him, a confusion of child and adult. The boy wonder, Innocent had called him, and Lewis had picked up the habit. The gifted child. That was part of it, surely. Always caught between knowing too much and too little, a brain that grew too fast and a body that stumbled along, slow. Out of step with those around him. At the same time, other roads led to that confusion, most of them roads that Lewis didn’t want to contemplate. No wonder James seemed pulled equally towards childhood and adulthood, with a kind of longing that hinted he’d never really experienced either one.

Lewis sat beside him. He felt immensely protective, as he had done while on the phone with Lyn; it wasn’t so much that he wanted to keep James safe— that ship had sailed— as he wanted to keep James safe from those who wouldn’t understand him. Who might try and force him to be one thing or the other.

Quietly, he took out his phone and settled down to read the cricket scores. At least he could stay here while James slept. He was reminded of twenty years ago or more, sitting a bedside vigil against Lyn and Mark’s nightmares. You wanted to be able to tell your kids that you’d keep them safe from every kind of hurt. But you couldn’t, you wouldn’t; the whole world lay before them, and they were always slipping a little more out of your grip. What you were trying to express was just that you loved them enough to try. To pit yourself against every kind of evil, knowing before you started that it was always, always going to be useless.

“We could use your help,” Maddox said that night at dinner. Lewis and Laura had gotten in the habit of having her over to dinner most Fridays, with her husband off in Canada— though it wasn’t, Laura had commented, as though Lizzie lacked for companionship; she was the sort who always seemed to have a gaggle of girl friends. More that what she lacked was a quiet, stable home to retreat to. The rest of her family were all in Leeds.

Lewis finished pouring the last of the Riesling into her glass. “What, on an antiques smuggling case?”

“It’s not really about that. It’s the reason DI Hathaway was out there in the first place; it’s about the people who put a gun in that scum dweller’s hands.” Her hand had tightened precariously around the stem of the wine glass.

“It can’t be about that, though,” Lewis said. “Can it?” He was feeling a trifle despondent, maybe because he himself had drunk a lot of wine. “It’s easier when you’re just catching murderers. You feel like you know when it’s over. Here— how many people do you have to get ahold of? And he still won’t be able to play the guitar.”

Maddox was looking at him like she didn’t know him. “How can you think like that and be a copper?”

“I’m retired, aren’t I?” And he’d almost retired back then, back when… And when they’d got the bastard, it had felt like an afterthought, a postscript. “Did it make a difference when we got Lawrie’s girlfriend, Pamela Carson?”

Maddox glanced away sharply, almost a flinch.

“Robbie,” Laura said. Her hand was on his wrist; he hadn’t noticed.

“I’m sorry,” he said at once. “I should never have asked you that.”

“No, you’re right. It didn’t help. I mean… I was glad you got her, but it didn’t help. It didn’t help me. I just feel like there must be something I can do; it makes me so…” A complicated gesture, fretful. “Angry, I guess.”

“You’re doing what you can do,” Lewis told her. “You’re doing everything you’re supposed to. It’s just not what I’m supposed to do.”

He didn’t know how to explain it better than that. It was the first time he’d had the thought: I know what I’m supposed to be doing— the first time since what had happened to James. Maybe the first time since he’d got back from New Zealand, when everything had suddenly seemed— not strange, but not-strange and not-familiar, disorientating somehow. It had been hard to re-adjust to his un-retirement. The nick had moved on in his absence, and James, James—

James had seemed distant, angry at the edges, childishly unhappy, but all of it hidden under a determined charade of everything-is-normal and nothing-is-wrong. Lewis hadn’t known how to ask him about it. All of his finely honed dealing-with-James skills had grown rusty in the months away from Oxford, and on some level, inadmissible to himself, perhaps he’d felt… well, exhausted. What do you want from me? he’d been tempted to yell, more than once. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? James didn’t know either. They had circled each other like satellites knocked out of alignment, wobbling and unable to find their right orbits again, wandering into loops of greater and lesser farther-out-ness.

He didn’t know what James wanted, now, but he knew what James needed from him. He knew what he was supposed to be doing. It was a start.

Lewis had arranged for James’s band to meet him at the hospital on Saturday. Maddox had taken what she insisted on calling Saturday’s “first shift,” though Lewis pointed out that she wasn’t getting paid to visit James, and could leave any time she liked. “I’m getting paid in schadenfreude,” she said. “Guess who taught me that word? You can’t tell me it’s not a little bit satisfying to see him bored to tears. Not after last year’s two-hour lecture on Mediaeval forest clearance.” It hadn’t quite been a lecture, since they’d all been at a pub at the time, but Lewis— remembering James’s inexhaustible zeal for the subject— took her point. And despite her pretense of irritation, her visits seemed to lift James’s spirits. When Lewis knocked on the door to James’s room, he found the pair of them peaceably listening to Woman’s Hour: Maddox playing a game on her phone, and James doing a crossword.

“Lizzie,” Lewis greeted Maddox. “James. As promised, I’ve brought round some fresh faces. You ready to see them?”

“Exciting!” Maddox said brightly.

James threw her a grumpy look.

“Don’t mind him,” she confided in a pseudo-whisper. “Deep down he’s jumping for joy. Very deep down.”

James said, “I’ve already made one momentous journey up and down the hallway today. I don’t think I’m allowed to jump for joy.”

“Well,” Lewis said, “your doctor told me you could have a bit of real food if you kept up with your exercise, so I’ve brought you a bit of that as well. Not much, mind— she vetoed half me suggestions. No chips or curry. Just a mango lassi and some grapes.”

He suspected James recognised the food for what it was: a bribe. And a distraction: as James was exclaiming over the mango lassi (“I’ve been living off jelly for about ten thousand years, and something else that I’m absolutely sure is Soylent Green—“), Lewis ushered the band in.

They’d made introductions in the lobby: Julian the bassist, nervous and hearty, who Lewis was almost certain was gay; Charlie the pianist, a sulky postgraduate almost hidden behind an overgrown mop of dark hair; and Neil, “our woodwind guy,” who played the soprano saxophone, the clarinet, and the shawm, and who was in the process of listing every other instrument he played when Julian saw fit to cut him off. And there was Father Nick, the elderly priest from All Saints, whom Lewis hadn’t specifically invited. This last made him nervous— he wasn’t sure James wanted to talk to a priest, and he wasn’t sure he wanted James to talk to one, either. Religion was a fraught subject on the best of days.

With Maddox there, it was necessary to go through all the names again. That helped, Lewis thought; her cheerful needling helped. “I can’t believe I get to meet your band!” she said to James, who was looking predictably uncomfortable. “I bet you’d’ve hidden them away forever if you could have. Of course it take a couple of bullets for you to admit you have friends.”

While she was chatting with the more extroverted Neil and Julian, Charlie slunk over to James’s bed. He was holding an enormous book, something you could crush someone’s head with. “I can’t believe you got shot. That’s well cool. That’s wicked,” he said, sounding exactly like a teenaged slacker, before pushing the enormous book at James. “We didn’t know if you were allowed to have flowers. So we got you this.”

James inspected it, looking genuinely excited. “Is this a facsimile of the Liber Floridus? I didn’t know this was in print!”

Charlie shrugged. “This mate of mine’s got an antiquarian mate in, like, Belgium. Figured it’s got flowers in it, so it’s, like, appropriate and that.”

“It’s perfect,” James said absently, paging through the book. “Thank you.”

Charlie shifted from foot to foot. “Are you really off guitar? Cos I got a wicked book of Occitan monophony and pilgrim songs. I bet they’d be super interesting, with the timbre of your voice. You’d have to learn, like— the ornamentation.”

James’s face had closed down a little, but not all the way. He stared down at what looked like a badly-drawn picture of an armadillo riding a housecat. Lewis supposed it must be what passed for Medieval art. “I don’t know,” he said after a while.

“Well.” Charlie ducked his head, hiding even further behind his heavy fringe. “I told Father Nick that if you’d do it, I’d make him play drums. There’s a lot of drums in Occitan pilgrim music,” he confided slyly.

That made James smile. “I’ll take it under consideration.”

After that, Neil and Julian elbowed their way in, and there was a lot of loud, very lighthearted talk about the lengths that James would go to in order to miss practice, and what they referred to as “previous attempts to skive off,” which all seemed to involve injury or major illness. (The smoke inhalation, the bullet graze, and the Great Pneumonia Disaster of 2014, Lewis recalled, but apparently there had been a second Great Pneumonia Disaster the previous year, while he was in New Zealand, which had gone unmentioned by James.) They wanted to know how Lewis put up with this work ethic.

“Ah, you know,” Lewis said. “You’ve just got to keep at him. Can’t let him slither out.”

This was true, actually, he reflected— not when it came to work, where James would drive himself into the ground if left unchecked, but when it came to almost anything outside of work. The slightest hint of emotion, and James became very slithery indeed.

He was doing it now, evading any reference to serious topics. Lewis wondered if the rest of Carmen Cecilia noticed that it was something he did. He suspected the secret to a long friendship with James was letting him do it; on the other hand, Lewis himself had mostly never let him do it, so— what did that mean?

He was distracted by the thought, and missed some change in the conversation. Suddenly Maddox was ushering the talky half of the band out of the room, offering to show them the way down to the lobby. Charlie followed, after saying to James all at once, in a rush, “I hope you feel better and come back soon, even though it’s still really cool that you got shot,” for which Lewis could hear the other band members chiding him in the hallway.

Only the priest (who was Lewis to call him “Father Nick,” as though they knew each other?) remained in the room with James and Lewis. He made his way to James’s bed. He was a little man, like a cartoon of a priest, frail and placid and slightly stooping. Probably it was the fact that he looked so much like a priest should look that made Lewis distrust him; certainly James seemed to like him, giving him one of his rare shy pleased smiles, although maybe that too put Lewis’s hackles up.

“Father,” James said, straightening as much as he could, “you really didn’t have to come. I’m perfectly fine, and I hate being a bother.”

“Getting shot by criminals is so terribly inconsiderate,” the priest agreed, deadpan but with a very heavy note of sarcasm. “Perhaps you could take up a more conventional lifestyle, and spare those of us who worry about you a great deal of grief.”

James said ruefully, “I’ve never been much good at conventional, I’m afraid.”

“No.”

They looked at one another. The look was impenetrable to Lewis. He simply felt he had no way to interpret its contents, no way to know what either man was thinking.

“Robbie,” James said, “could you give us a few minutes?”

For an irrational moment, Lewis didn’t want to say yes. He couldn’t justify this impulse; he just thought— well, it was jealousy, wasn’t it? Or was it? Not of this particular priest, but of this thing that had its claws in James, this thing that he was never going to understand. He didn’t like the idea of James having this other, hidden part to himself. Or maybe he just worried, worried that he couldn’t protect James. That James needed protecting, especially when it came to this.

It wasn’t fair. James was an adult, and Lewis was… biased.

“Of course,” Lewis said, as smoothly as though there’d been no hesitation, and with a nod to the two of them (their two heads bent towards each other) he turned to the door and left.

He called Laura from the cafeteria, stirring sugar into a cup of weak tea, more because he was unsettled than because he had something to say. She was at work; she’d been called in on a case. They talked a bit about everything and nothing: about what Lewis was planning to pick up for dinner, about dropping by James’s flat the following day to pack up some of his clothes and whatever else he wanted.

Towards the end of the conversation, Laura said, “Well, congratulations; you’re managed to go almost fifteen minutes without telling me why you really called; I think that’s a new record, even for you.”

Lewis heard something clatter in the background. He hoped she wasn’t standing over some poor sod’s dead body. The thought of her doing that while talking to him made him wince a bit.

“What, I can’t just want to hear your voice?” he tried.

“Mm, but you forget I am also something of a detective. Your voice has that distinct note of ‘I’m a man, and therefore can’t talk about my feelings, so I’m calling you in the hopes that you’ll force me to do it.’”

“So you knew why I called, then. You didn’t need me to tell you.”

“Robbie.”

He sighed. It took him a moment to marshal his thoughts, to figure out how to say, even in the most basic sense, what was bothering him. “Were you ever religious?” he asked finally.

“Oh, dear. I can guess where this is coming from. No, I wasn’t.”

“Not even before the—“

“Cutting up dead people? No. Although it does make a difference. I think you’ve got to go one way or the other, full tilt, when that’s your job. But— no. I was never very supernaturally minded. And I’m a woman, of course— that makes a difference, too, or it did when we were growing up. All those dreary old men telling me not to smile at boys. I just thought, What sort of a God would care about this?” Another clatter, then the sound of water running. “But you were.”

“A bit, yeah. In a sort of C of E way. I never gave it too much thought.”

“And now you don’t like it. Religion.”

“You’re the scientist. Aren’t you supposed to not like it?” Lewis knew he was avoiding giving an answer.

“As a scientist, I’m not supposed to do anything except science. But— no, I don’t mind it. I’d be a pretty hard-hearted pathologist. Though I suspect you object less to the idea of life after death than to the ideas about life before.”

Lewis was silent. “It’s difficult,” he said. He knew Laura would hear what he wasn’t saying.

“It’s difficult for him, too,” Laura said. Her voice was very gentle. “It’s not not difficult for any of us, Robbie.”

He knew she was right. He knew that James’s life had been painful, that he’d struggled with some of the same issues. More issues. “I know,” he said. “I do know that.”

Nevertheless, he was still thinking of it when he rang off a few minutes later. Everybody thought that their pain was worse, he guessed— that it gave them some special wisdom. He could remember so clearly, in the days after Val… becoming enraged when people tried to sympathise with him. You don’t know how I feel, he’d thought. No one has ever felt what I’m feeling right now. No one has ever felt this kind of pain. Pain made a person alone in the universe. Maybe he’d been angry at the notion even that God could know his pain.

Different for James. But then, James himself was different. James had probably already thought of himself as alone in the universe.

When Lewis returned from the cafeteria, the priest was gone. James was reading his art book. There with a scrubbed and slightly red-eyed look to his face, half-concealed by his glasses, that suggested he might have been crying— which was deeply uncharacteristic of James, and therefore worrying.

Lewis, immediately careful, sat in the chair closest to the bed. “Everything all right?” he asked neutrally.

James didn’t look up. “Yes; fine.”

“Did you have a good… confession, or whatever?”

There was a sharp rasp as James deliberately turned the page. “I don’t make confession. It’s why I don’t go to Mass. Well. Not the only reason.”

Lewis hadn’t known he didn’t go to Mass. Trying to cover his surprise, he said, “And your priest is okay with that, is he?”

James turned a page again, loudly. “He’s not ‘my priest.’ He’s a priest I happen to know.”

“You seemed pretty close.”

“I’ve known him a long time. I wanted to talk about some things with him.”

“You’re not having some kind of conversionary experience, are you?” Lewis eyed him uneasily.

James’s reaction was startling: he slammed the book closed, then fixed it with a focussed, concentrated stare. “You can’t convert to a religion you already belong to. And it’s really none of your business.”

“Right,” Lewis said, stung. “Sorry.” He meant it. He hadn’t wanted to upset James. He realised, with a sense of being slightly dim, that possibly James had had a religious experience of some kind. The man had been shot, had been in surgery for hours, had come reasonably close to dying. It hadn’t even occurred to Lewis, not in all this time, but it wasn’t out of the question.

James was looking up at him with a torn expression. “Can you just,” he said. “I know you don’t like it.”

“It’s not that I don’t like it,” Lewis protested.

James looked sceptical.

“I— you’re right; it’s none of my business. Especially now,” Lewis added. “With you in hospital and all.”

“It’s not just an in-hospital thing, though.”

“I know. How long’ve I known you?”

“Yeah, but you’ve never liked it.”

Lewis leaned back in his chair, tipping his head upwards. “Do you remember what you told me when we were first working together, about a million years back now? I said— I don’t remember what I said, probably about where God could stuff his wonders or summat. Tried to apologise for it the next day, and you looked at me and you said: God won’t mind.”

James tilted his head, face unreadable.

“You were so young, just this fresh-faced bit of nothing. Looking like a choirboy dressed up in his dad’s suit. I thought, Well, what does he know? What does he know about God’s wonders? Worst thing that’s ever happened to him is losing some Cambridge boat race.” He paused. “Thought you’d grow out of it, I suppose. Made it easy to tolerate. ‘Poor deluded lad, he doesn’t know what the world’s like yet.’”

James was watching him cautiously. “But you changed your mind,” he said.

“Took me a while.”

It hadn’t been one event. More a pattern emerging. An unhappiness that James sometimes seemed to emanate. Not an adultness— when confessing his role in Will McEwan’s life, he’d seemed more than ever like a muddled child— but a depth to him that Lewis could never quite manage to measure. He wasn’t like other people. His dimensions weren’t the same. And then at Crevecoeur— And then later, when his father was dying. His mother was dead already, Lewis knew. The anguish that had twisted James up like a spring, grinding his bones and muscles into new places. How had Lewis ever thought this boy was unworldly?

“Did that make it easier for you?” James asked.

“Harder,” Lewis told him.

“Do you hate me for that sometimes?”

He said it so matter-of-factly, as though if Lewis did, James wouldn’t blame him. His eyes were wide behind his glasses, curious.

Lewis paused and thought about the question. He didn’t want to be dishonest with James. “When I was in New Zealand,” he said, “I had this thought that you were like a stormcloud on my horizon. That sounds quite poetic, doesn’t it? I think I meant it like— a force of nature. Does that answer your question?”

James drew up his eyebrows. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to be a stormcloud.”

“Serves you right, for saying that I was a bell! It’s not a bad thing, being a stormcloud.”

James’s brow was still furrowed. “Isn’t it?”

Lewis shrugged. “Reckon I like you as you are. Thunder, lightning, and all.”

James looked away. “You sent me postcards from New Zealand.”

Lewis had: postcards of sheep, of boats, of kiwis and mountains. He’d never known what to write on them. On one, he’d actually just put: Greetings from New Zealand! On another: You would like the art here. As time went on, he wrote less and less, frustrated by his failure to put into words the emotions inspired in him by the stormcloud that was James. Even his emails had trailed off. But then, James hadn’t written at all from Spain— something that Lewis had kept reminding himself.

“Meant to send more,” Lewis admitted.

James shook his head. “I owe you. I owe you so many postcards.” His voice was very intent; he seemed to be trying to say something else.

“You don’t owe me anything,” Lewis said. “That’s not how it works.” But he could see James wasn’t convinced. He sighed. “Ah, well. Shall we table this discussion till you’re at least not stapled together at the edges?”

James was starting to look a bit vague; getting sleepy again, maybe. “All right,” he agreed.

“Anyways, I’m meant to be getting a list off you of what you want us to get from your flat, in terms of— clothes and so forth.”

A faintly wondering expression crossed James’s face. “Sir, are you still sure you want to— you really shouldn’t feel you have to—“

“Been a long time since you called me sir,” Lewis noted. “Haven’t we been through this? You think I’d give you the boot just because we got a bit stroppy? You want to get rid of me, you’ll have a harder time than that. Go on and make us a list, then, unless you’ve got a better offer.”

“No,” James said. “No better offer.” He had that rare smile again, just the slightest curve of his lips, just the barest hint of warmth in his eyes. He took the pen and paper Lewis gave him and started to write.

Laura had never been to James’s flat before. The first thing she said when she stepped inside the next day was, “God, it’s big! What on earth does he do with all this space?”

“Communes with God? Serenades the heavens?” Lewis picked up a stray CD lying face-down on a tabletop. It was labelled Khöömei Throat Singing — Greatest Hits. “He certainly doesn’t throw parties.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Depends on what you call a party.” Laura peered at a set of DVD cases. “Benjamin Bagby’s Beowulf,” she read aloud. “Performed live with Anglo-Saxon harp. Sounds like a good time.”

“Only he hasn’t got a telly.”

“Well, I hope he doesn’t mind it round ours. I’m not going to miss my stories.”

Laura, Lewis had discovered when he moved in, had a shameless addiction to costume dramas— the less well-scripted, the better. So far, Lewis had been subjected to five series of BBC One’s Pillardusk, the soapy tale of a nineteenth-century soldier who inherited the eponymous manor. The plot seemed to revolve around lots of heaving-breasted women running about in storms, or fiddle music playing over tourist board shots of the Cornish coast. Lewis never had any idea what was actually happening on the show. “It doesn’t matter what’s happening,” Laura had told him severely when he asked, to which Lewis— baffled— had said, “How can it not matter?”

The thought of James watching Pillardusk was irresistible. “I’m sure you’ll bring him around,” Lewis said.

The list James had given him at the hospital was mostly things like “jeans, t-shirts (purple, green, WOMAD 2012, 2001 Cambridge Folk Festival, ?? w/ever you find), underpants, socks,” but also had a “miscellaneous” section, under which heading James had included several novels, a biography of Wittgenstein, an anthology of Christian apologetics, and the Bible (“the english one with the leather cover but no art on it it’s the douay-rheims one but i expect you won’t know what that means,” James had written).

Lewis set Laura to collecting the books from their various locations. He had an uneasy feeling that collecting up James’s clothes was going to feel alarmingly intimate, and he didn’t want— Well. He knew that James wouldn’t know the difference, but somehow doing it himself felt less like an intrusion. What did that say about him, about him and James?

James’s wardrobe was, in contrast to his flat, immaculately organised: shoes lined up in precise pairs, waistcoats hanging next to suits, t-shirts as carefully folded as items in a store. A leftover public school habit, maybe. Lewis flipped through the shirts, feeling like a disturbance. Who kept a 15-year-old t-shirt from a music festival? he wondered. But there it was: worn soft from so much laundering, colour peeling off the printed logo on the front. Most of what James wore was formidable, formal. Stylish, but a bit like armour: designed to keep other people out. Over the years, Lewis had gradually gotten more casual glimpses. Sometimes he needed the confirmation that there was still something alive underneath. This shirt felt loved, and that was reassuring, also.

He realised as he was packing the clothes that James had forgotten to list outerwear. It was almost winter, and the house he shared with Laura could be cold; presumably, as well, at some point James would be up to going outside a bit more. James’s ordinary outerwear— the grimly tailored coats, all heavy black and grey wool— didn’t seem very comfortable. Lewis opted for big drapey jumpers instead, and a hoodie that read All Saints Annual Fish Fry 4 the Faithful! —chiefly because he was amused by the notion that James might at any point in his life have fried a fish.

Laura was standing near the window, gazing thoughtfully around her at the spare and strangely furnished central room.

“No pictures,” she said, when she noticed Lewis watching. “Not that I’m surprised.”

“No.” Lewis wondered how much Laura knew about James— how much James had told her, how much she had guessed. He had told her about Nell. About his father. “I don’t think there’ve been many people he cares to remember. Or many places.”

“Maybe he’s afraid of trying to keep hold of them,” Laura said. Meditatively, she touched a small box on the mantle. She didn’t try to open it. “Do you think he’s… Well, I was going to ask, Do you think he’s happy, but I suppose what I mean is, Do you think he’s as happy as he can be? James-happy. I know it’s not the same as other-people-happy.”

Lewis considered. “No,” he said honestly.

“No. I don’t either.”

“I worry about him, and then I think— it’s not my job to worry about him.”

“It should have been someone’s job,” Laura said. “But I get the sense it wasn’t. It still isn’t.”

“I suppose not.”

"Except ours, for a little while.”

Lewis looked at her. She returned his gaze with raised eyebrows. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up,” he said. “I’ve known him for a long time.”

He wanted to say: It’s not as simple as you’d like. He wanted to say: You don’t know what-all has happened to him, and I’m not sure that I do, either. He wanted to say, too: You’ve never had kids, and you don’t know what it’s like; it’s not like painting a picture; it’s not like tending a garden; it’s the most difficult thing in the world to raise a happy human being, much less make a go of what a human being has tried to salvage from the wreck of not being raised happily.

But he was thinking of Morse. Morse, who had thanked him. For what? He hadn’t made Morse less unhappy. He’d been what he himself had assumed James was, at the start: some cheerful, witless youth who hadn’t really suffered. Who hadn’t yet grown into the shoes grief was preparing for him. He’d always felt that he had failed Morse, in some sense; not for lack of trying— because he had handed over so much of himself, so much that in some ways he’d found himself remade— but simply because, in the end, Morse couldn’t be fixed. The despair that had almost had him as a child had never stopped hunting. Nothing Lewis had done had ever gotten it off his trail.

He wondered if the person he’d become might have made a difference. If he met Morse now, would things be the same? So maybe there was something of a second chance to all this. Another bright child done badly by, though James was ever his own creature, and in many ways not like Morse at all.

“I’m just putting the thought out there,” Laura said. “That we could… try a bit. I worry about him, too.”

“I know.” Lewis rubbed a hand over his face. “We’ll do what we can, I suppose. Might as well start by keeping him alive.”

He wanted to find something else to bring for James, something that wasn’t a piece of clothing or a book. But there was nothing. Nothing that he could understand. On the bedside table was a scallop shell holding a few round smooth stones. After some consideration, Lewis took that. He could explain to James what he’d been trying to do, if he’d got it wrong. James would laugh at him, maybe, but at least he’d know that Lewis had wanted to give him something, however misguided the effort, however mystified.

James was scheduled to be discharged from hospital on Monday morning, but at the last minute Dr. Mathai sent him for scans— “just to double-check nothing’s changed with your bullet fragments.”

“My bullet fragments,” James said with interest. “I like that. I own them now.”

“If it looks like they’re going to interfere with the shoulder joint, we’ll want to take them out.”

“You can’t take them away now; I’ve gotten attached to them. Well, literally.”

He was being flippant, Lewis suspected, to conceal discomfort. Nervous about leaving hospital, not knowing quite what would happen here on out. Lewis half-expected him at the last minute to declare that he would rather just, really, go on home and not be a bother, and perhaps someone could check up on him in a week.

But when he’d been returned from Radiology and given the all-clear to go, after a nurse had helped him to change effortfully from his hospital gown into tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt (one that Lewis had picked up from his flat, which read ROWBOT beneath a crossed pair of oars), James just looked at Lewis and Laura with a carefully neutral expression and pronounced himself ready to leave.

The nurses made him take a wheelchair, which he complained about all the way the lobby; when he was outside of the building, the first thing he did was ask for a cigarette.

“You can’t be serious!” Lewis said. “You’ve just got out of hospital, man!’

Hathaway fixed him with a level and uncompromising stare. “Robert. I have been confined to a single room for more than a week, during which my overriding concern has been not the bullet wound in my gut, but rather how unbelievably marvellous it was going to be when I finally escaped and felt the touch of a cigarette once more upon my lips.” He held out an imperious hand. “I know there were some in my coat pocket on the day I was brought in; I assume they’re in that bag you’re holding.”

The hospital had, indeed, given Lewis a bag of Hathaway’s possessions, and the cigarettes were indeed in there. Lewis made a last attempt: “You’re halfway to quitting! How many times have you tried to quit?”

“Lots,” James said. His hand didn’t waver.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake; he’s an adult, Robbie,” Laura said, and snatched the bag out of his grip. She fished the cigarettes and lighter out, and handed them over.

“And you a doctor,” Lewis said, shaking his head.

James lit a cigarette with a look of the utmost rapture. He exhaled smoke in Lewis’s face. Lewis waved it away with a theatrical expression of disgust.

Laura rolled her eyes. “We’re off to a promising start, I see.”

The doctor had given them a long list of items to purchase at the chemist’s, so they stopped on the way to the house and Laura ran in. Lewis, in the driver’s seat, turned to look at James, who already seemed a little drowsy.

“Are you in a nicotine coma back there?” Lewis asked.

“Mm. It’s lovely. Actually nicotine is a stimulant; it just creates the subjective experience of relaxation.” James sighed. “I really needed that.”

“I suppose you deserve it. Just don’t tell your doctor.” Lewis paused. “Listen, we’ve got the guest room all set up for you at the house, but you should feel free to— you know— make any changes.”

He and Laura had been up late trying to make the place look right. Maddox had come over with a casserole, and helped them organise books onto shelves. “I suppose this is his idea of light reading,” she’d remarked drily, hefting Les Misérables.

“Well, it’s the one in English, you see, not in French.” Lewis had set the Bible carefully on the bedside table, along with the scallop shell.

The end result wasn’t much like someplace where he could imagine James living so much as it was someplace where he would like James to live. Cheerful, and homely, and not too ascetic. He’d had a moment of crisis, wondering if that was quite fair to James— after all, shouldn’t he be allowed to live the way he liked?— but he’d reminded himself that, in the end, it wasn’t permanent.

“It’ll be fine,” James said, his eyes closed. “You don’t have to make any special effort.”

“I’m not making a special effort,” Lewis lied. “You can’t smoke in the house, you know.”

“I know.”

“And you’ll have to put up with Maddox coming to dinner now and then. I mean talk, not just sit there looking gloomy.”

“I do talk. Sometimes I talk.”

“And Sunday nights is Laura’s programme, for another six weeks or so, and she likes to watch the DVDs after it ends.”

“I don’t watch television. I’ll just stay in my room.”

“If that’s what you want,” Lewis said. Privately, he thought that this would never fly with Laura. She would have James tucked up on the sofa under an afghan before he knew what hit him.

“You really,” James said, “really don’t have to do anything. Just help me get to my appointments, and make sure I don’t keel over. That’s all I need.”

He sounded tired. Lewis watched him in the rear-view mirror. Sunlight glinted off his short gold hair. Someone had helped him shave in hospital, but not done a very good job of it, and there was a trace of pale stubble along his jaw. His blocky glasses made him look young, though he should have looked older— pain had left shadows under his eyes, and very faint frown lines at the sides of his mouth. That same confusion again, child and not-child; in his too-big t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, not so much tall as a jumble of gangly limbs.

Lewis was reminded of that hospital lobby, so many years back: the very first revelation of love. The first since Val, really, though of a different order. He hadn’t been sure he could feel that again. He’d thought of love, maybe, like a burn or a blister: healing from it turned your skin harder and thicker, so that after a while you couldn’t be hurt by it. You were impenetrable. He’d lost Morse; he’d lost Val; he’d lost Mark to Australia. Surely he had no soft parts left. And yet nevertheless it had happened: his layers peeling. New skin kept being revealed. He remembered reading a book to Lyn in which a boy was turned into a dragon and had to scrape all his dragon-scales off so that he could once more be a boy. It felt a little something like that. Now he had Laura, and his grandson, and despite all that had happened, he still had James.

“James,” he said, “it’s all right to need more than that. Laura and me— we’re not just putting up with you.”

“I know,” James said. His eyes were still closed.

Laura opened the car’s passenger side door and ducked in. She was carrying two laden bags. Outside, a light drizzle had started falling. “Lucky to have just missed the downpour!” she said. She sounded a little breathless. “Everyone ready to go?”

James was asleep, or pretending to be asleep.

Lewis started the car running. “Ready to be home,” he said.

Chapter 2: Epistles

Chapter Text

Dear Mr. Lewis,

Thank you for extending the kind invitation to write to James. I am enclosing a card for him, which I trust you will deliver on my behalf. Thank you as well for the enormous generosity and patience you have shown in offering to open your home to James. I know he can be personally challenging, and it is so good of you to offer to care for him at this difficult time. Please let me know if there is anything I can contribute to his recovery. If you should need to reach me for any reason, you have my mobile number already, and my email address is [email protected].

All my thanks,

Nell Hathaway

2 October 2016 at 18:17

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: You’re Welcome

Dear Nell,

No need to thank me for watching out for my own. James was my Sergeant for round about seven years. I know that this may not mean anything to you but I can tell you that my own governor from when I was a sergeant has been gone now for nigh on sixteen years and still there is not a week goes by I don’t think of him. True it isn’t always like that with coppers but sometimes we are lucky. I was lucky to have your brother as my Sergeant and I am lucky to call him my friend… Challenging though he can be, its true.

Just thought you might like to know that James is recovering well. This first week was tough which was to be expected but, he is a stubborn you-know-what when he sets his mind to be and is up walking about the house a few times a day now… If only to smoke his cigarettes which, I have done my best to break him of the habit but see above. I am mostly retired now so can keep him company in the days though he does complain I am useless at chess. Laura (my partner) is a doctor so he is well looked after.

I’ve given him your card but don’t know if he has read it. You know how he is… He has his computer here now if e-mail is more convenient.

Yours sincerely,

Robbie Lewis

3 October 2016 at 07:23

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: You’re Welcome

Dear Mr. Lewis,

I hope that it’s correct to address you as “Mr. Lewis.” I confess that I don’t know very much about the police. James is the only policeman I’d ever met until I met you, and he has never talked about his work. In fact he and I had barely spoken in twelve years until recently, as I sense you may have guessed, or perhaps he has told you.

Thank you so much for letting me know that James is well, or as well as he can be. I don’t want to ask you for information, because I know he wouldn’t like it. He thinks I would rather he just disappeared. I’m afraid I’ve said and done some things in the past that might have implied this, but people say and do unkind things, don’t they, and grow out of them. He has said and done his share of unkind things as well. It was a long time ago, but James doesn’t forget.

I hope he knows how fortunate he is, and that he’s grateful. Even if he doesn’t say it.

Please give him my best.

All my thanks,

Nell Hathaway

6 October 2016 at 21:03

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: You’re Welcome

Dear Nell,

I have never been too bothered about what people call me. Sometimes your brother still calls me Sir although I’m not his governor and I haven’t been for years. I suspect he does it to make a point but I’m sure I dont know what that is…

I should tell you that James has told me nothing about you. I don’t know what it is you fell out over or any of it. We always assumed he had no family on account of him not mentioning any. This is a typical James manouvre. Sometimes I think he thinks if he doesn’t talk about something then, that means it doesn’t exist. So, whatever terrible thing you think I think about you I’m not thinking. Im just pleased James has family.

Now for an Update: James is well and keeping up with his rehab… I am learning a lot about the shoulder joint. I always assumed it was just a bit swively on the inside but apparently not. Laura and I are learning lots of new swears, and the names of Catholic saints which James sometimes uses in place of swearing. Maybe that is not apropriate going by your e-mail address… We find it quite amusing though.

The other day James went for a smoke in the back garden (Laura and I won’t have him smoke in the house) and startled a fox that was in the shrubs. Well I say he startled a fox but I dont know which was the more startled. He dropped his cigarette… burnt a hole in the deck… and yelped so loud Laura came running! We have seen the fox since then and as James informs me it was the Feast of Saint Francis when he first saw it we have taken up calling it Frank. James assures me this is not blasphemous and that Saint Francis would approve.

I hope you’re well… I’ve told James you ask after him.

Yours sincerely,

Robbie Lewis

8 October 2016 at 10:49

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: You’re Welcome

Dear Mr. Lewis,

I feel I have to apologise for continuing to email you; I’m afraid I’m imposing on your time and patience, which are already so taken up by the family Hathaway. Don’t please feel obliged to keep writing to me if it is in fact an imposition. I will understand completely if you can’t.

I’m glad James is well. It’s nice to hear things about him that aren’t completely dire or disappointments. For a long time I only heard those kinds of things. I don’t mean to be critical. I suppose we’re both disappointments. I work in the parish office at St. Ann’s in Allbridge, that’s why I have this email address. It was difficult because I had to care for Dad, and they were very understanding. People aren’t, you know, nowadays. Or not very often.

I suppose I never asked what exactly happened to James. Probably I didn’t really want to know, I think that’s how it works, subconsciously. But I do want to know. You said his shoulder was hurt, but I know it must be more serious than that.

Thank you, as ever, for all that you’re doing.

All the best,

Nell Hathaway

9 October 2016 at 22:55

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Not a Problem

Dear Nell,

Its no trouble at all to write. I’m a retired gentleman for the most part… Time on my hands! Mostly I solve murders which, I have put on hold for the moment. Now I rail at the blackbirds in the garden which makes me feel very old, and yell at James to turn his music down which makes me feel in my prime again. Mind with my kids it was always that hip hop and techno… At least there’s only so loud you can make a hurdy gurdy!

This will make you laugh… It is Sunday and Laura must watch her show on Sunday, Pillardusk, the frocky skirts and lacy frills kind of thing all set in Cornwall with shipwrecks and so forth. Says James: This is dreadful, I don’t know how you can watch this, it’s just wrong, people didnt do that in the Nineteenth Century! Says Laura: Shhh. Half an hour later I say: How are things going at Pillardusk Hall? James and Laura: Shhh!

Now Laura’s trying to explain which ones of the characters are related to Russell Smolder. He is the main character of Pillardusk you see. James: I thought his daughter was dead! Laura: His first and third daughters are dead, but he has a secret daughter from his night of passion with Dusset McCallum. James: But Dusset McCallum’s married to the Captain of the Bonaventure, isn’t she? Laura: She is but he was at sea and she thought he was lost because Mr Balemargen tore up the letter with the news of his rescue.

So now you know how Sunday nights go in this house!

James had a bullet in his chest and another in his shoulder. Not much damage… so don’t worry… The doctors took out his spleen and left him part of the bullet in his shoulder so you can judge for yourself what kind of trade it was! We are a bit worried about the shoulder as it is tricky to heal and of course he’s hoping to row and play guitar again… His band have brought a cake round the house and say he can always play cowbell.

By the way you talk about disappointments I can tell you are related to James.

Yours Sincerely,

Robbie Lewis

10 October 2016 at 10:03

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: <no subject>

Look who me and James saw this morning!

Attachment: frankthefox.jpg

11 October 2016 at 20:32

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: <no subject>

Dear Mr. Lewis,

My father would have told you that foxes are a d*mned nuisance, and suggested that you buy a shotgun to “take care” of him. Fortunately, we moved away from the country when I was very young, so I don't share his prejudice. Frank the fox seems very good-natured.

I have a confession to make: You’ve been talking like I know my brother, and I feel I don’t know him at all. Not the way you talk about him. You must understand that James is almost seven years older, and he went away to school when I was very young. He was already so much like himself. Secretive, I suppose I mean. Our mother died not long after he finished university, and we’ve seen very little of each other since then. I didn’t even know he played in a band.

He is always so grim every time I see him. I think it hurts him to be around me. I remind him of things that he’d rather forget. Painful things that have happened. I can’t help that, though. He turns me into some horrible spectre, moaning at his window and rattling chains. Well, how would you feel if someone looked at you like that?

I was a disappointment because I didn’t go to university, achieved nothing, didn’t marry. Our father would have liked us both to marry up. He was keen for James to get on with the Mortmaigne family. He always thought that James would marry one of the Mortmaignes, and become an Earl or a Marquess or whatever they are. Laughable, but. He used to bring it up all the time, until, you know. Of course for me the aim was always lower.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this; it’s like therapy, really. Only I feel I have to explain the situation in some way. You’ve been so lovely. I don’t want you to misunderstand. Sometimes I hate him, and you should know that. But the person you talk about is someone different, and I wish that I could know him. That’s not your responsibility. You don’t even have to keep emailing. But I’m very glad to have this glimpse of my brother.

Sorry,

Nell Hathaway

12 October 2016 at 09:10

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: <no subject>

No need to apologise. I reckoned it was something like that. For what its worth James asked me if I was still in touch with you and I said yes I was and did he mind and, that I don’t say anything he would object to… Of course with James you never know. He says he does not mind, admitedly there was a long pause in there, so I think he doesn’t know what to think and is making his mind up.

He does not hate you but it is hard for him. Hes not like other people and when you expect him to be he feels a failure. Best not to. Other people can’t do what he can do after all, and so it makes sense when the other way round is true… Hard I know when what you need is not on offer… But hammering away at it won’t make it so.

Problem with being a parent is, you start out making your kids how you want them. Like having a house more than having a son or a daughter. What color scheme do I like? How shall I decorate it? But a house won’t decide its got it’s own taste and rubbish your ideas and chuck the work you’ve put into it. People who want houses are disapointed with children. Seems to me your dad wanted a house and came late to the idea that he might like kids.

James does indeed have a band, sort of jazzy with Medieaval tunes and world music. Called Carmen Cecilia which I know is to do with a saint. I am on their mailing list now and so I will try to forward you an e-mail about their new record.

So now you know that about him. What else… he is very bossy and quite hipocritical as well, yesterday we were driving back from a doctors appointment… he has lots of doctors appointments trying to keep him put together… and he demanded we stop for some kind of fancy ice coffee, never mind he is NOT meant to be drinking coffee… and its rich seeing how he has been after me about taking care of myself for years! Of course he plays the invalid card and I let him and later Laura looks at me very disapproving even though she is the one let him smoke his cigarettes!

Its Laura who deserves the thanks in all this… most of the work was her doctoring him in the early days. And she is clever which helps… not like James, but she was at Oxford… and they talk about art and books. Never went to university myself but I try to keep up with them and their chatter and they dont seem to mind too much.

That is all I have to report for now… I will send you the band e-mail…

Yours Sincerely,

Robbie Lewis

12 October 2016 at 09:27

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: FWD: Calling all HEPCATS to our RECORD RELEASE!

————Forwarded message—————

From: Carmen Cecilia <carmenceciliaband.co.uk>
Date: 2 October 2016 at 19:57
Subject: Calling all HEPCATS to our RECORD RELEASE!
To: “Mailing List” <[email protected]>

Friends, Oxonians, and the odd Cantabrigian (kidding— we know the only odd Cantabrigian around here is our guitarist James),

Carmen Cecilia is delighted to finally announce the release of our second album, A CANTICLE FOR EDDIE LANG! Many of you have been asking after the newer pieces we’ve been performing, and this is your chance to get ahold of them, recorded in crystal clear sound by the lovely and generous Kris Shakelton at Bread Cross Studio in Banbury.

Not only will you be able to purchase the album on our website, but we are also having a RECORD RELEASE PARTY at Oxford’s own HEPCATS Jazz Bar & Music Store on FRIDAY, 4 NOVEMBER. For all you early Christmas shoppers, we’ll have plenty of copies of the new album available, plus our first album (Nuages de l’Inconnaissance). There will be DRINKING and SNACKS from 8 pm onwards, so come on out to celebrate with us!

Some of you may have heard that James was seriously injured on his day job recently, but fortunately he’s doing well and is hoping to join us, so this is your chance to embarrass him by offering your best wishes.

Here’s the track listing of the new album, which is also available on our website:

The Danzon Chanson
Estampie
On the Half Shell
Misericordia
The Lute Player Is Sad
Tout Est Bien
Can Vei La Lauzeta Mover
An Amphibious Piece
The “Blow Thy Horn, Hunter” Mass
A Canticle for Eddie Lang
Draw On Sweet Night

Thanks as ever for all your love and support!

Peace,

Julian, Charlie, Neil, and (from his sickbed) James

Attachment: HepcatsFlyer.pdf

14 October 2016 at 11:55

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: <no subject>

Dear Mr. Lewis,

Thank you for sending along the information about James’s band. I don’t know that it’s my type of music, but I’m glad that he’s found something he enjoys doing. I hope he will be able to go back to it when he’s recovered. Have the doctors said anything?

I have to apologise for unloading all of my untidy emotions onto you. I realise there are topics on which you feel obliged not to comment, and things that it’s probably uncomfortable for you to know. After all you have not only to work with James, but also to live with him for the moment. I shall try not to trespass. I wish he were not so secretive but I suppose I understand.

I am glad that you and your partner are so tolerant with James. He hasn’t had many people to talk with about anything at all. I don’t know if this is a question of cleverness, although he has always been much cleverer than even he let on, or a question of trusting other people to take him seriously and have something interesting to say. I used to feel so small because he would look at me like he couldn’t believe I was so dull. Of course, now in retrospect I think that he really didn’t believe people could be so dull, and thought they were deliberately saying boring and trivial things. Maybe he was just baffled, as baffled at us as we were at him.

I’m not not clever. Can I say that? Well, I’ve said it. I didn’t go to university because Mum died, and things were very difficult, because it was sudden, and James didn’t handle it well. I mean, things had been difficult for a long time. But Dad was hopeless, the sort of man who’s always had a woman to do for him, and who had just assumed that he always would. He couldn’t boil an egg on his own! I don’t know if I would have left. I might’ve. But family’s important. I couldn’t just leave him.

I wish I could do more for James. Nothing I’m good at is the sort of thing he cares about, is the problem. I do a lovely Victoria sponge, my scones are all exactly the same size, and Father Graham loves my marrow and walnut cake. I actually do Care for the Sick visits with the Women’s Group at church. I even make damson gin for Christmas gifts. But you can’t make someone let you give them something.

Sorry to be such a sad sack. I hope all is well.

Thank you for everything,

Nell Hathaway

16 October 2016 at 22:05

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: A Night of Drama

High drama on tonight’s Pillardusk! Aparently a witchy old Great AUnt on her deathbed told Russell Smolder the long secret truth that his dead brother was his father’s only child and the estate of Pillardusk is not rightfully his! Now he must find out his real father’s identity and decide whether to tell the truth to his wife . Her name I believe is Rihanna and she was a pennyless maid before they got married. James says: Oh no! That’s just what her brother wants to shame her by telling everyone she’s married a b*stard. She’ll never live it down! Laura says: Isn’t it just like men.

If you could see the two of them gossiping over their mugs of cocoa.

Laura says by the way re you that “Lord! she must work hard.” Laura cuts up dead people for a living and has never in her life made a scone so she is envious… We are a pair the two of us as I burn everything I cook. Afraid I was a bit like your dad as a younger man. My wife died very suddenly and I was at sixes and sevens. Luckily my kids were a mite older than you. It was a good ten years before I did more than zap a ready meal. You’ve got to make a go of it sometime haven’t you. Wish I had done sooner… James made a difference always pushing me to change.

He has a cane now by the way… very distinguished… Only temporary! Says he feels like a Secretary Bird with it hobbling round. Have you seen them? I looked it up and the likeness is uncanny. James got cross when I laughed and laughed… only made him look more like it. ANyway he is managing to get about but it wears him ragged.

The doctors say he may need another operation on his shoulder. We’ll see. Think it would help if he’d take his pain meds! You can guess what he says to that! Otherwise all is improving… slowly… He gets a bit impatient.

Reckon I’d quite like a bit of damson gin. James tells me I have no taste mind but we can’t all be public schoolboys who read Greek and quote Milton. The world would be a very dull place if we were! My old governor was a right snob and I learnt to pay no attention. More about him than it was about me… About being lonely maybe, and angry at being lonely… You can tell the real snobs from the nice snobs that way. We should have you over for Christmas. Laura and me might put our heads together and plan a party.

Yours Sincerely,

Robbie Lewis

17 October 2016 at 07:04

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Forgot to attach these!

Some snaps from the last week. Look at #3… James in the background looking absolutely bewildered by overture of friendship… Typical really…

Attachment 1: frankthefox2.jpg
Attachment 2: guiltyfrank-caughtdigging.jpg
Attachment 3: hellofromfrank.jpg
Attachment 4: frank-hislittleface.jpg

18 October 2016 at 08:33

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Forgot to attach these!

Oh no, you want to stop him digging. It’s not good for the garden!

18 October 2016 at 12:09

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Forgot to attach these!

I know… Laura goes out in the garden and speaks to him severely but he looks at her very sad and she gives in… James goes all proper country and says we ought to Take Steps to get rid of him but just yesterday when he was smoking in the pergola I spied out the kitchen window and saw him having quite a thoughtful conversation with Frank… Aparently at any rate it does no good to trap em and send em elsewhere… They get attached to places and always come back.

18 October 2016 at 23:14

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Forgot to attach these!

They’re not tame animals, though. It’s important to remember that.

I didn’t realise you were a widower. I hope I didn’t stir up unhappy thoughts. I gather it was a long time ago but it persists, doesn’t it. In some ways I feel I had it easy, because really Dad was already gone, so I had time to get used to it. And with Mum it was sort of a half-death. Depression does that. If James had died, though— The thing is that you think things will just go on. Either they’ll be different— “This is awful now but someday it won’t be”— or they’ll drag on as they are forever— “This is awful, but it’s a part of my life now.” Even the awfulness of it feels familiar. So even that is a loss, and I suppose there’s grief. I hadn’t realised before.

I never imagined so many public schoolboys went into the police force! I was very surprised when I heard James had done. Everyone was; there was a general idea he was wasting his education. (No offense— but I’m sure you’ve encountered these ideas about policemen.)

Can’t you chop his pain meds up and put them in food or something? It’s probably what I would do. He’s never been good about pain.

I’m happy to send along some damson gin at Christmas. It’s no trouble, and I have your address. I’d like to be able to thank you for all you’ve done for James.

Nell

p.s. I can’t imagine James watching this television show! He doesn’t even own a television last I checked!

20 October 2016 at 07:17

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Forgot to attach these!

Ah, Morse wasn’t a public schoolboy… Morse being my old governor… grammar school boy made good. Did a stent at Oxford but no degree. NOt a fitter in with others. Its true he was an odd policeman… fond of poetry and music… Got me started on opera, used to correct my spelling. He just liked beautiful things I think and wanted to stop them being broken. Why he became a copper I mean. He never thought much of himself though… well he did and he didn’t. Thought he was the cleverest bloke in England most days, but he could have lived longer. Just didn’t try. We could none of us convince him he ought to stay. Wish he had… though… maybe hed have driven me to death then! James has always reminded me of him a bit.

Thing with death is you always think you should’ve said more. Lauras always telling me, You have to say things, you have to tell people. The first time I was in Italy I went round waving my hands at people speaking very loud English just hoping they’d understand… feels like that all the time trying to talk to people about the really important things. You think they understand… they act like they do… then you get squid instead of raviolis, a desert you didn’t order, you short them aciddentaly on the cheque. Bad enough in life but then afterwards you think, What if they never understood? Even if you tried.

At his PT yesterday James asked about music and Dr. says according to James no guitar for the near future but he can try a bit of piano next week so long as he doesn’t move his arm much. Laura has a lovely piano so hes going to give that go… no real music just finger exercises and so on. Imagine that will become wearying quite quickly… to me I mean not to him!

We’re at the stage now where he feels he should be helping round the house but he can’t do anything useful… or if he tries he falls asleep halfway through! I’ll give him a job picking dinner recipes from cookbooks or making a shopping list, and come back to find him snoring on the sofa with a vexed expression… He wants me to get case files from the office for him to go over. I might do it… idleness is no good for him.

I am informed that telly is “a cheap distraction” and “not a worth while use of time” and also something about Romans, mental rigour and children not studying the classics… however Laura has leant him her Pillardusk DVD’s and I believe he is in the third series now. : )

Will try threatening him about the pain meds.

Robbie Lewis

21 October 2016 at 23:54

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Plum weekend

I’m actually bottling the damson gin this weekend, as it takes two months to sit! I’m up to my elbows in plums and feel quite like a farmwife. I suppose that’s where the recipe comes from— my great-aunt used to make it, and that was Dad’s side, all country people. I think they originally came from Buckinghamshire. Anyways do let me know if you don’t want any, I promise I won’t be offended.

I’m worried I don’t know what to do for James for Christmas. For years it’s been a card, because he made it so clear he didn’t need nor want anything— although that’s not fair, I was also angry at him for a long time. Now I don’t know him well enough to know what he’d like. Is there something?

Do you think James became a policeman to protect beautiful things? I don’t think he likes beautiful things. I think they frighten him. But then— Catholic. We’re all taught that the world is full of glory, and that none of us deserve any of it. I mean, that’s too simple, but it’s what you hear as a child, the part of it you understand. I don’t think I got it as badly as James, who had a lot of reasons to believe it was true, even before what happened with Mum. He never grew out of it. If anything he grew into it more and more, with— I mean— things he realised about himself.

Funny that I stayed in the Church and he didn’t, when he’s still so tied up in it.

At least you try to talk. Unlike some people.

I think idleness is very good for James. He sounds happy.

23 October 2016 at 22:34

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Pillardusk Update

Dusset McCallum has been killed by her sea captain husband who discovered her infidelity! Now Rihannan Smolder has taken in Dusset’s illegitimate daughter much to the dismay of her family and the people of Chough. And Russell has challenged Dusset’s husband Jack to an illegal duel. And a terrible storm is sweeping in. I have pointed out that a good copper could come in and lock up Jack and Rihannan could sue him on behalf of the bairn for child support and distress compensation to which Laura and James say: Hush. They are on tenter hooks for the last two episodes.

By that you can tell all continues here as normal.

In answer to your question, No one ever knows what to buy James for Christmas. Just accept it is the way of things and get him a good jumper or some amusing socks. Do they make ones with little saints on them? If that is blasphemy ignore the sugestion.

Shall I try asking James if he would like you to come round for Christmas? Or his record party, if that would feel like lower stakes. I can tell him to e-mail you… That might be best.

I’m afraid I am in a rock and a hard place insofar as way back you’d said quite rightly that there are certain things I can’t comment on fairly and you have run aground a bit in them. You should talk to James about his faith and not to me as its a complicated matter. I think you also think he has told me more than he has about his family history. There are things I know about James that he and I don’t talk about and there are things I have guessed, and he and I don’t talk about those things either. It may be that it would be better all round if he talked about those things but no one can do the talking for him.

I will say what I said back at the hospital which is that people in a family share things no one else will ever share with them… and even when they aren’t happy things it means you can talk in shorthand without having to lay the whole thing bare. My daughter Lyn when she was roundabout twelve years took a tumble over her handlebars and knocked out her front tooth… blood pouring out of her split lip… a neighbour came and brought her in all wailing and well you can imagine… me and her mum in pieces thinking she’d bust her head open, trying to find the car keys so we could go to A and E, just really properly scared. Ended up all she needed was a few stitches and a new front tooth. She’s still got the scar on the top of her lip and sometimes she points to it and says, Dad do you remember, It was the first time I ever saw you scared. All she has to say. And I remember.

James and me… I guess we’re a bit like a family, we’ve got our own shorthand. But he can’t talk to me that way about things that happened earlier, not without having to dig up the parts that hurt again.

Sorry to be a bit heavy. Don’t mean you to feel you’ve done something wrong… you haven’t… I want to be careful not to do wrong by James. Haven’t always been as careful as I should be.

Laura says by the way that you should come round at Christmas and if you and James can’t speak to each other we can put a stripe of tape down the living room floor with one of you on each side of it.

25 October 2016 at 19:07

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: A Frank Update

As you will see he tried eating an aster and was not excited about it! Nor was Laura!

2nd photo… That’s James’s hand holding the apple. STill refuses to admit he has a soft spot.

Attachment 1: frankeatsanaster.jpg
Attachment 2: frankprefersapples.jpg
Attachment 3: curiousfrank.jpg

26 October 2016 at 18:35

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: And One More

Took this out the kitchen window…

Attachment: frank-heart2heartwithjames.jpg

27 October 2016 at 22:56

From: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: 4 November

It’s a public event. There are flyers up. Everyone is welcome.

Robbie thinks he did something wrong.

27 October 2016 at 23:29

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: 4 November

I’m not going to come if you don’t want me there. I don’t want to mess up your record release party; you deserve to have a good time.

I didn’t know you were in a band.

27 October 2016 at 23:59

From: “D.I. James Hathaway <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: 4 November

I’m probably not in a band anymore.

I don’t not want you there. Come if you want to.

28 October 2016 at 02:24

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: 4 November

Robbie said you were playing the piano again?

30 October 2016 at 22:36

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: The Weekly Update

Don’t know if you’re still interested in hearing about what’s happening round here… Which on Sundays means whats happening at Pillardusk Hall… Well the big cliffhanger this week is it turns out Oleanna Smolder, who was Russell Smolders mother, who was married to Lord Richard Smolder who it turned out was not Russell Smolders dad… had secretly married Lord Francis Smolder, who was the father of Lord Richard Smolder and it turns out that Lord Francis Smolder is Russells dad and because of how he was married to Oleanna first before Richard, Russell is the rightful heir to Pillardusk! Whew! Got all that! Aparently this is incest and very shocking and Russell must decide what to do about it and will his wife be horrified and so on. Next week is the series finale so we’ll see what happens…

Things have been down beat the last few days… James finds it hard to sleep often as he gets pain in the night and he becomes very bad tempered when he doesn’t sleep. His band came by with copies of the new record. Its certainly very musicky. James tells me one of the tracks is about walking the road to Santiago de Compostela. WOuld you believe he never sent me a single postcard much less a souvenir. Kids these days.

Now Laura’s worried about Frank the Fox in the coming winter. Where will he live? What if there’s a bad freeze? She says, Not that I want him living full time in My garden, but… It’s too late, we’ve all got attached.

Let us know if you’re coming down to the record release party. James’s band is going to give him a ride as he still can’t drive but Laura and I will be there for a bit earlier on… Our old bones, you know! We’d like to say hi.

Robbie

1 November 2016 at 01:13

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: The Weekly Update

Dear Robbie,

It’s past midnight now, which means that it’s technically All Saints Day. Tomorrow is All Souls, the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. They’re both commemorations of the dead, but some of the dead were perfect and some were imperfect. In the case of those who were imperfect, those of us on earth are supposed to pray for them. That’s how they become more perfect. They’re still moving towards salvation. Even in the case of mortal sin.

You probably don’t believe this. But it’s a nice idea. That it’s not too late to bring them closer to peace. That we can still make a difference.

I’m so sorry I said too much and made you feel I’d trespassed somehow. I seem incapable of not blundering where James is concerned. Perhaps we’re like oil and water and it’s just physics. But we have no right to trouble you by tangling you up between us.

I want James to enjoy himself at the party. I think it’s best if I don’t go. He has enough on his plate. Thank you though.

Sorry,

Nell

1 November 2016 at 14:46

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: The Weekly Update

Dear Nell,

Apologies not needed. You’ve done nothing wrong. You’d no way of knowing what James has or hasn’t said. I should have made myself clearer. THing is I worry a great deal about him. He is an important person in my life and the last year has not been easy. Laura and I were away visiting family on a long trip. Well you know how it is you imagine you’ll come back and every thing will be just as you left it… But of course it isn’t and you’ve just been absent to other people. Well… Thats all I’ll say. Last thing I want is to make a mistake.

If it helps James’s Sergeant will be at the party on Friday… Lizzie Maddox is her name and she is socialy adept as well as an experienced handler of Hathaways… the one at least… I’m sure she wouldn’t mind acting as a buffer if you wanted to drop by for a moment.

Course maybe you have made plans, I suppose Saturday is BOnfire Night after all. Are Catholics allowed to do that? I remember in Newcastle when I was a lad they still put the pope on some bonfires. Never thought about that before… Feel I should apologize to you!

Either way I’ll make sure to tell you what happens on the Pillardusk finale… Know you must be eager to find out if Russell will keep the hall and what will become of his illegitimate daughter! Aren’t we all!

All my best,

Robbie

2 November 2016 at 19:47

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: The Weekly Update

I’ll come by if it won’t be stressful for James. I’d like to say hello to you and see how he’s doing.

Most people celebrate Bonfire Night, I think. We weren’t allowed to as children because the Mortmaignes didn’t, so of course my parents thought that was the Correct Approach even after we moved away. Now I take a sort of frantic and deeply satisfying pagan glee in fireworks. I think most children who are forbidden things their friends enjoy grow up to be somewhat ravenous in this way.

I’m sure the Holy Father will forgive you for burning him in effigy. Mind you, it might take a while; I imagine there are lots of more serious sins on his list.

Shall I call you on Friday to see what time you’ll be there? Or you call me?

3 November 2016 at 02:25

From: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Thanks

for agreeing to come. It means a lot to Robbie.

3 November 2016 at 11:37

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Thanks

I wanted to come.

You didn’t tell me you’d been to Santiago de Compostela.

3 November 2016 at 17:12

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Tomorrow

Should be there around 8:30… Will give you a buzz as we’re leaving!

4 November 2016 at 02:55

From: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Thanks

I haven’t. Strictly speaking.

5 November 2016 at 14:53

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: A Racket

Laura and me enjoyed chatting with you last night! We were pleased to see the place so full… for pleased read surprised but what do we know! GLad you got on with Lizzie! She is a gem! Patience of a saint AND a decent copper!

Saw you spoke to James… Seemed to go all right I hope? Could tell he was getting a bit tired by time we went to leave but folk were lovely… He came home with so many cards and gifts his mates had to help him carry them in! Think he was a bit embarrassed to be honest.

AT the moment he is banging out something very tedious on the piano and has been doing for half an hour with a murderous look… Can’t wait till he has two hands again. Knew there was a reason I started my kids on computers not music. Laura says, If I hear that arpeggio one more time my brains are going to scramble and my ears will pop off my head. What a post mortem that would make!

Robbie

5 November 2016 at 22:07

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: A Racket

Hello Robbie!

I’m so glad I got to meet Laura and speak to you. Thank you for being so kind, and for introducing me to Lizzie, though I fear I must report that her opinion on the music was, “It’s just a load of moany noodling, isn’t it?” Then she said that actually this wasn’t surprising, coming from James.

James and I managed to be polite to each other for about thirty seconds, a not inconsiderable length of time. I was really shocked to see him— he’s lost so much weight, and his hair has gotten long. He used to wear it that way when he was at university. You told me he was using a cane, but I suppose I wasn’t expecting him to look so breakable— he’s my older brother. That’s supposed to mean he’s indestructible.

I can’t imagine what he would’ve done if you hadn’t looked out for him. Last time I saw him he was so unhappy. Now even as poorly as he looks, he’s not half so unhappy. Like you’ve chipped some of the layers of unhappiness away. I think you and Laura are really good for him. He couldn’t even manage to be properly grim when I was around.

I just said it was nice to see him and congratulations on the album— he looked like he thought I was being sarcastic— and that you’d asked me over at Christmas, and would he mind. He said it wasn’t his house and therefore not his business. For us, that counts as reasonably civil. I’m going to work on it.

I remember him being a very good pianist when he was a teenager. Then of course he discovered the guitar, and that was the end of that. There was a recital at his school— he must have been fourteen or fifteen; I was quite young— he played a Schubert piano trio, I think the Notturno (?) with two other students. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

I can imagine scales being tedious, though.

Nell

P.S. I am regretting saying I enjoyed fireworks. I swear they get louder every year, or (more probably) I’m getting older… I swear one has just gone off a foot from my house!

6 November 2016 at 22:46

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: The Fate of Pillardusk

Well… you’ll be happy to hear that all has worked out well for Mr Smolder. His wife did not chuck him over upon hearing of his true parentage but declared that all children should be loved equally regardless of birth and that she would raise Dusset McCallums daughter as her own. Oh… I forgot to say that Russell defeated Jack McCallum in the duel but showed mercy, where upon Jack went to London… Turns out he is a wealthy man on account of some sea battle or another and in the end to show his repentence and thanks he left the Smolders his fortune and took ship for the Americas to live as a new man. I suspect all of this only means the happy Smolders are going to face another round of misfortunes next year… haven’t check if it’s been recommissioned… Laura says: Yes of course! Now I’m asking her what else can possibly happen to these people, will an asteroid hit the Cornwall coast? To which she is giving me a very disapointed stare.

Now thats out of the way… Yes James’s hair has gotten long hasn’t it. Laura tried cutting it for him…. a tramatic experience for all involved. He refuses to go to a barber because he doesn’t want to have to explain about the shooting… and also he hates having to be driven places. Drs say no driving for another two weeks… We MIGHT survive till then if only because I have distracted him with case files.

I apreciate you saying what you said. Its gotten quite peculiar to think of him not being round the house… In spite of a good deal of frustration and a fair amount of pain this has been a happy time. Didn’t realise how much I missed having a houseful. Laura might feel different… on the other hand we’ve had her dinner on the table through the magic of co operation which means I juggle pans while James yells instructions at me.

Talking to a specialist about progress with the shoulder this week… should know soon, about fitness for work. Will keep you updated!

Robbie

7 November 2016 at 07:35

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Thanks

Am I allowed to ask what you mean when you say that “strictly speaking” you didn’t go to Santiago de Compostela?

8 November 2016 at 01:57

From: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Thanks

Yes.

Walked from France to Palas de Rei. Didn’t fancy walking any further. Came back.

8 November 2016 at 07:34

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Thanks

Am I allowed to ask why?

9 November 2016 at 10:12

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: News of Frank

He’s got his winter coat in!

Laura thinks we ought to put blankets under the deck.

Attachment: fluffyfrank.jpg

9 November 2016 at 21:07

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: News of Frank

Oh dear… It’s no use arguing though, is it? Look at his little whiskers!

10 November 2016 at 00:35

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Duly noted

Am I allowed to ask how long you’re planning to stay with Robbie and Laura?

10 November 2016 at 03:12

From: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Duly noted

Until I get my sling off.

10 November 2016 at 07:25

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Duly noted

Do you know yet when that will be?

10 November 2016 at 23:42

From: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Duly noted

No. Hopefully next week.

I’ve made it clear I’m happy to go. I’ve offered to go already. So whatever you’re thinking, don’t.

11 November 2016 at 00:14

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Duly noted

What on earth am I meant to be thinking? No, wait, don’t tell me: something awful about how awful you are, because that’s always what you think I think. You have this idea in your head of this horrible spectre who thinks you’re worthless and wants to punish you, and you just put it on me whenever it seems to fit, but I’m not the spectre, I’m not the one going round with it in my head!

Robbie and Laura love having you there. Of course they don’t want you to go. You look like a scarecrow, they don’t want you to just go limp around your gloomy flat not feeding yourself and reading books about the Apocalypse.

11 November 2016 at 00:50

From: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Duly noted

Thanks

11 November 2016 at 00:57

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Duly noted

James, that’s not what I meant.

11 November 2016 at 01:45

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Duly noted

I just think you’re really happy there and you should be happy.

11 November 2016 at 21:25

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Bit of an Update

Wanted to let you know we saw the specialist. He reckons there’s no easy decision to be made… Hes not crazy about the way James’s shoulder joint looks… something about iregular surfaces and debris. Suppose we thought things would just sort themselves out in the long run… not looking that way. He says they can try going in and cleaning things up a bit… But that means more recovery which I expect he’d hate, being a burden and so on… well of course he wants his old life back… and with no guarantees. Does he want to go on being a copper is one question… He’s thought about leaving often enough. And then the music factor… Hes in a fair bit of pain as well though he pretends otherwise… Difficult.

He also sat down with Lizzie about the case. She got his testimony already when he was still in hospital but there’ll be a trial soon enough. Funny how little we seem to think about it… too much else taking up worries I expect.

Not much talking round the house tonight. James in the garden, puffing like a chimney, probably hoping for some home spun wisdom from Frank.

Hoping all is better on your end…

Robbie

12 November 2016 at 11:34

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Don’t be cross

Robbie told me you’d been to the doctor and not heard what you’d hoped for.

Please talk to him about it. Please don’t do what you generally do, i.e. nothing while the world is falling apart around you and/or running away. There are people who want to help.

Are you thinking about leaving the police? I had no idea.

13 November 2016 at 01:15

From: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Don’t be cross

It wouldn’t be running away if I told you about it. And we’ve established that’s what I do.

13 November 2016 at 01:32

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Don’t be cross

It’s perfectly fine if you want to leave the police. Not like you need my permission. Under the circumstances, it even makes sense. You know what I mean. You can’t just crawl into yourself and vanish. Other people care for you. I know you think for some reason the ideal is to be some kind of Desert Father, but they weren’t hiding from absolutely everyone, were they? Which is not to say, by the way, I disapprove of that either, it’s your faith and you know best! But you need someone.

13 November 2016 at 02:01

From: “D.I. James Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Don’t be cross

You’re right. I don’t need your permission.

13 November 2016 at 23:52

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Bit of an Update

I’m so sorry that James didn’t get the answer he wanted. You didn’t say what you think he ought to do. I didn’t know he’d thought of leaving the police.

All is well here. I’m planning my Christmas baking; this is the last week to get it all together if one is making cakes and puddings. I’ll be chopping and stirring and steaming all next Sunday. Nice to get it all out of the way, and by it I mean the cursing and ruing and misery, before the season properly begins.

I’m really writing though to say something a bit out of order. You may well think it’s none of my business, or that I’m not in any position to give advice, and certainly not on the topic of James, which is profoundly true. But the thing is that there are things I do know about James that others find it hard to believe, simply because they haven’t had to see them play out again and again. Like you said— there are things others won’t understand, or only if they’re explained first, which is, if not impossible, then very painful.

One thing you need to know about James is that he finds it absolutely unfathomably difficult to believe that he might ever be loved. You may think you’re aware of this, you may think you’ve taken measures to address it, you may think that surely, surely it is obvious to anyone with a teaspoonful of brains how much you care for him, but I can assure you that to him, it is not obvious and is in fact constantly in doubt.

You said he wants his old life back, but I wonder if he does. Well, in terms of health of course, but I meant it when I said he seems happy. He’s not good at being happy, and even worse at trusting it’s not just going to go up in smoke. If you are happy as well, you ought to tell him, and make him believe he isn’t intruding upon your home, because I know he fears that he is.

I say this now because I think it may affect his decisions. But I say it generally because I want him to be happy, really I do, and I think that someone ought to emerge from the sort of— well, the cocoon of grief that has always been our inheritance. I suppose that metaphor makes James a butterfly, which he would hate. But really, someone ought to get out of it.

I want you to be happy as well, because I think you deserve it.

Sorry. Thank you. Sorry.

Nell

16 November 2016 at 18:11

From: “Dr. Laura Hobson” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: Lord, what fools

Hello Nell,

As everyone is busy being a bit dramatic at the moment, I thought it best to at least let you know we haven’t all died, nor even been rendered insane by your brother’s moody one-handed piano playing. As of yesterday it is two-handed piano playing, in fact (in theory if not in practice as his left arm is still mostly useless), but still very moody.

He and Robbie are in the grip of strong emotions and therefore largely incapable of speaking, especially to each other. James is meant to be moving back into his flat on Sunday, now that he’s got the use of his arm back, a plan that overestimates both the extent of his recovery and his general ability to care for himself. I’ve offered this opinion to no avail. I gather you’ve also said something.

I’m sure Robbie will get in touch about Christmas cards or send you a chain email or something, uncomfortably avoiding the subject at hand. It’s his way. Don’t be offended.

We’re thinking of having a Christmas get-together on 21 December. I assume all of this will have blown over by then. Robbie’s daughter’s family will be in town, so it’ll be very casual. Give me your address, and I’ll send you an invitation in the post.

Laura

16 November 2016 at 22:27

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “Dr. Laura Hobson” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Lord, what fools

Dear Laura,

Thank you for thinking of me. I’m glad to hear that everyone is well, if foolish.

My address is:

108 Partridge Circle
Allbridge
Oxfordshire
OX27 6QZ

I hope everything works out for the best…

Nell

20 November 2016 at 21:14

From: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>
To: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>

Subject: A Frank Update

You may have heard James is back safely installed in his flat… Which has kept us a bit busy… Sorry to have fallen out of touch.

One member of the household mourning his absince… Not sure where his evening companion has gone!

Attachment 1: frankatthedoor.jpg
Attachment 2: frank-lookingforjames.jpg

Chapter 3: Advent

Chapter Text

Having James in the house had never felt strange to Robbie. It had been strange to see James turned so weak— creaking around like an ungainly stork with his cane; falling asleep every two hours wherever he happened to be, whether it was on the sofa, at the kitchen table, in the garden, on the stairs; knocking every kind of object he could reach off shelves and counters and cursing because he couldn’t pick them up again— and strange to see the kind of weakness that the body could suffer. There was a long snakey scar running up James’s belly, and the skin of his shoulder had congealed into an unpleasant spider. James wore long-sleeved shirts; he didn’t seem to want anybody to look, but in fact Robbie didn’t need to see the scars to be aware of the damage.

Gradually he became used to absent-mindedly grabbing an afghan off an armchair and draping it over James in the newest place he’d decided to nap; to stirring at five in the morning, roused by a faint noise, and tottering into the kitchen to make two cups of tea without a word, while James watched him with a look of insomniac exhaustion. Those types of things had seemed strange at first— and the succession of waiting rooms: beige and mauve boxes, interchangeably furnished, where he’d sat reading Nell’s emails on his mobile phone.

Nell’s emails. That had started out strange, he supposed.

But James being there— no. Not his low quiet humming, or the shuffle of papers, the scratch of a pen inside of a book; James imperiously instructing him on how to pan-fry lentils, how to roast a winter squash, and look, look, just, no, that’s why you have to drain the liquid! Not the catty and unrepeatable chatter produced on Sunday nights by Laura and James, or their less ribald conversations over the dinner table— conversations that still tended so far towards the catty that Robbie had more than once rapped his wine glass to declare a cessation. Not the trail of clutter James left behind him, pill bottles and cigarette-smelling jumpers, water glasses and half-read books, a kind of oblivious yet purposive occupation. Not looking out the window to see James grin with soft-eyed fondness at the skittish little fox who had turned up in Laura’s garden.

It had just felt like life, real life, real life now, and he hadn’t had questions. Even writing to Nell became part of the rhythms of it. She was sharp, insightful, always slightly melancholy, paralyzed (he thought) by a need for approval, sincere in her affection for James. Robbie expected she would break through eventually to him.

And then— suddenly, it felt like, though he’d known it was coming— shifting the boxes back to James’s flat. The pill bottles, the jumpers, and the books. The house stripped bare. James limping about it, trying to find a stray sock, the last piece that was left of him. His own flat vast and badly lit and dusty, though he’d hired someone to clean it since he left, and the forlorn figure of him in it, leaning on his cane, taking up even less space than before.

The act of leaving him there had felt like a desertion. Robbie and Laura hadn’t spoken, driving away from the flat; nor until they got home, home-without-James.

It had been a week since then.

Robbie started questions to no one when Laura was at work; found himself with the afghan in his hands; flipped channels with a vague sense of something missing; picked through local apple crops at the farmer’s market without thinking about it (James loved Blenheim oranges and egremonts); thought about James with a vague sense of dread, not knowing if he was safe and well. He might have fallen. He might not be eating, or taking his medication. He might sit up all night, fleeing pain or nightmares.

Nell had said—

Well. She’d said a great many things.

Robbie had called James on Tuesday, then again on Thursday, conversations full of silences. “Bit boring, being round the house without you here,” Robbie had said. “Thinking of going back to work.” “Oh,” James had said, after a long hurt pause.

James wouldn’t be back at work anytime soon. If he decided to go back. He’d energetically dodged expressing any kind of preference. If you asked him about it, his face went china-plate blank.

“How is he,” Laura had asked, and Robbie hadn’t known how to answer. Her mouth drew down, and she shook her head. She understood what he was saying by not saying anything.

Saturday he’d found a stray notebook stuck under the sofa. It was the schoolboy kind, with lined paper and spiral binding. Inside, James had been taking notes on books he was reading. His handwriting in Greek was square and tidy, his handwriting in English almost illegible, but here and there quotes and phrases became clear. “There are no Grotesques in nature… even in monstrosity there is a kind of beauty.” “St Sequanus???” “**Man is an AMPHIBIOUS PIECE.” “??? Ref William of Malmesbury” Then a longer quotation:

“To the argument that there is a possibility the land is being gradually inundated by the sea, another indication of decay, Hakewill replies that the area taken up by the seas, rivers, baths, are about the same as they were in the past; what is lost in one place is recovered in another.”

It meant nothing to Robbie, but it struck him nevertheless. He touched his forefingers to the messy ink of James’s scrawl.

Laura came up behind him. “Did James leave that?” she asked.

Robbie nodded. “Found it jammed up under the sofa.

Laura looked at the notebook for a long moment. She looked like she wanted to reach for it. At last she said, “You should take it back to him.”

So now, Sunday, he was driving across town. It was raining— not cold enough for snow yet. Nowadays when it rained he had a moment of worry for the little fox that James had named Frank. Where did foxes go when it rained? Did they have little dens somewhere? He hoped Frank would have enough sense to stay put in the cozy and predator-less crawl space under the deck.

Robbie had felt fairly sure James would be at home, since he couldn’t walk or drive very far yet; sure enough, when he knocked, he heard James’s familiar awkward steps. The sound made something in his heart lurch.

James answered the door in a t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, wearing his glasses— a sure sign he was tired or in pain. His hair, which had got increasingly straw-like, was sticking up all over his head.

“Did I wake you?” Robbie asked.

“No— uh, no, come in,” James said, and limped back to collapse on the sofa.

He hadn’t unpacked any of the boxes. They were where Robbie and Laura had left them. The rest of the flat looked similarly untouched, apart from a large number of dirty mugs and cigarette packets crowding the table — an occasional Chinese takeaway box crammed in.

“I see you’re sticking to your medically suggested diet,” Robbie said drily, gesturing towards the table.

James didn’t look at him. “Moving drained my batteries.”

“You could turn on a lamp. It’s six o’clock.” The whole place was shrouded in grey shadows.

Robbie started to cross the room to do it himself, but James said, “No, it’s fine. I’ll get it,” levering himself to his feet and limping the few steps to the lamp. Gold light flooded a short distance, not enough to fill the flat, but enough to sort of haze its edges. It took James another few minutes to get seated again.

It was like getting back from New Zealand, but stranger and colder. Robbie felt he was in the wrong climate once more, the wrong James-climate, exiled from the equatorial regions.

“You left a notebook,” he said. “Found it under the sofa.” He held it out.

James had gone back to resolutely not looking at him. “Thanks. Can you put it over there, if it’s not too much trouble?” He gestured towards the broad table he used as a desk.

Robbie didn’t move. “It’s no trouble,” he said. He felt— maybe the word was unruly. He felt an unruliness in his heart. “It was never any trouble. You do know that.”

Some small flinch of James’s mouth suggested an unhappy response to this.

Robbie was still holding the notebook awkwardly, like some kind of charm. “It’s,” he said. “Thing is—“

“Please don’t,” James said hurriedly.

Robbie looked at him. He could see the tension running like a current through his body. He might not have noticed before. Or he might have. He’d always been good at reading James, always poor at knowing what to do with what he saw. “Don’t?”

“Please don’t say what you were going to say.”

It was strange to realise that James had never really asked him for much. The tone of the request wasn’t terribly familiar. It brought to mind a sunny day, bright leaves in the trees, beautiful Oxford, James saying, “Can we just sit here for minute?” in a voice that was too polite to plead.

“You don’t know what I was going to say,” he pointed out.

“I do. I—“ James pushed his hand through hair, a nervous gesture. “You were going to say, I could come back, just for a little while, if I’m not ready to manage on my own— but I don’t think I can.”

Lewis thought very carefully. He had the sensation of playing on a chessboard. What he said finally was, “And why’s that, then?”

Unexpectedly, James stood. It was one of those shows of motion that people make when they need to be doing something, anything, but it was noticeable because James still found it awkward to move. He was fiddling with a stack of records, back to Robbie, when he said, “Well, mostly because it would be just, really hyperbolic generosity, even by your standards, the sort of thing that no one can decently accept, and… the rest of it I don’t think really matters.”

He said all of this very fast, so that Robbie had to take a moment to process it, and to put the pieces together and get what “hyperbolic” meant. By the time he had done, James was already saying, “If you could just, maybe just leave the notebook; it’s already been quite a bad day, and I’m not sure I’m up to having this conversation.”

This was the same tactic that he had used to get out of conversations involving whether he wanted to leave the police force, or in fact any of his future plans. Robbie, thus aware of it as a tactic, pressed on. “That’s not what I was going to say. James— could you at least look at me?”

James tilted his head slightly. He had a distant, ironic, closed-off look.

“We miss you,” Robbie said. “Laura and me. We miss having you around. God knows why, given the way you’re acting right now, but we do. It was nice having you there. I know maybe you prefer being on your own, it’s hard not having your independence; I just think that right now, till you figure out where you stand with things…” He trailed off because James had jerked away and was moving restlessly across the room again. “Wish you would figure out where you want to be,” he said, after watching for a moment. “Hurts me just looking at you.”

James laughed a little raggedly at that. He didn’t stop moving. “Nell thinks I’m trying to be a Desert Father,” he said. “One of the early Christian hermits. They repudiated all the pleasures of civilization in order to live alone with God. Only I haven’t got God. So Nell reminds me.”

So you do talk to Nell, Robbie thought. Interesting. The mention of her reminded him forcefully of what she had written before James’s departure. He hadn’t known what to make of it at the time, or rather— he hadn’t known what to do about it, which was significantly different; it had inspired in him a vague sense of mounting alarm, a sense that he was going to betray James through some failure he wouldn’t even be aware of.

Like going to New Zealand. Like retiring, maybe. James had nodded his head and smiled and said, “Okay.” And then he’d run off to Spain, and when he’d got back he’d been so angry. Not even really at Robbie. Just angry. Why? He’d got promoted. Surely that was a good thing. But he hadn’t been happy.

“Well,” Robbie said, “You do look a Christian hermit with your hair like that. You should’ve let Laura give it another trim. Then again, if that was the look you were after… Suppose it always has been a mystery, what it is you’re after. What you want.“

James sighed explosively. “I want—“ He seemed at the edge of one of those nervy harangues, pushed past the boiling point of his bottle-it-up tendencies. Then he stopped. His colour changed. “I want,” he said slowly, “To sit down before I—“

He wobbled.

“Oh, for the love of—“ Robbie said, and just about caught him before he went down. They made their slow way down to the floor. Despite having lost weight, James was heavier than he looked. For a moment, Robbie was afraid that something was really wrong, or that he might have accidentally hurt James; he had got so used to thinking of him as fragile.

But James blinked up at him and said, in a resigned voice, “Fuck.”

It wasn’t anything Robbie hadn’t heard before, after those first few weeks. He said, “Next time, maybe you’ll listen to me before you literally run yourself into the ground.”

“Maybe. Probably not.”

“Good grief, man, you nearly gave me a heart attack!”

“Sorry.” James tried to sit up, and grimaced. “I really am sorry. I’m an idiot. If it helps, I feel like one.”

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t.” Robbie quashed the urgent and insane impulse to tug James closer, to cradle him like he might’ve done with one of his kids, back when they were at cradleable sizes. “Can you make it to the sofa?”

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“Right. Of course. You’re always fine.”

“Well,” James said, when he had got shifted to the sofa, sounded vaguely puzzled, “I am. Fine.”

Robbie stared at him, then ran a hand down his face. “Fine, for the record, does not mean I’m going to survive this. Fine means… you know, fine! Do you need a glass of water? A painkiller?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Coming from you, that means yes.” He went to dig the bottle out of one of the boxes. Of course James hadn’t even looked for it yet. Fortunately, all his dishes had stayed in the kitchen.

“You’re developing a lexicon,” James said with the flicker of a smile. He took the pill and the water Robbie handed to him.

“That’s supposed to help in translation, is it?”

“Mm,” James said. He let his head thud against the sofa-back. “You don’t have to stay. I really am fine.”

Robbie sighed and checked his watch. Laura would have dinner on the table. “Don’t suppose you’d just come home,” he said. “It’s Sunday night! Last week was gloomy without you. Laura says I’ve got no taste in telly at all. She’s got started on some new show about secret agents.”

“Did you tell her I’d been recruited by MI-5?”

“Hasn’t signed the Official Secrets Act, has she?” It was a joke, but at the same time it wasn’t. James should come with his own Official Secrets Act.

James’s eyes slid shut for a second. He looked exhausted. “I shouldn’t. It’ll be harder to leave next time.”

Robbie considered this. He didn’t feel he could say what he wanted to say— Don’t leave, then— and make James accept it. He wasn’t even sure it was what James wanted. And James would brush it off as a throwaway comment, anyway. Hyperbolic. That was the term he’d used. A word from Nell’s email came floating back: unfathomably. It made him think of James as a deep body of water, something that had always been the case, his sadness buried beyond the reach of what Robbie could see or measure. It meant groping in the dark, which he didn’t like doing.

“Let’s worry about the leaving part later,” he said. “You’ve got enough to worry about without it. Don’t want you coming down with you, what do you call it, existential flu and running off to Spain again. Mind, you wouldn’t get far, this time.”

James tipped his head to the side to study him. His brows were drawn up as though he were puzzling Robbie through.

“Besides,” Robbie added, “do you think I’m going to tell Laura I left you here in this condition? She’d have me head! And then you’d have her knocking your door down, probably committing you to hospital.”

James rolled his eyes. But he wasn’t saying no.

“And you’ve got two hands now,” Robbie said. “We could use your help round the house. You can do the cooking yourself now. No more yelling at me.”

“But I like yelling at you,” James said.

“At last, the truth comes out.” Robbie was already standing, going over to the untouched boxes, hefting the one that had clothes in it. “Come on; we’ll come back for your books later. You can open the doors for me.”

Stiffly, obviously still not wholly convinced, James pried himself up off the sofa and stood. “Are you sure you—“

“You’ll want your contact lenses,” Robbie interrupted him. “Or— I suppose they didn’t have contact lenses in the Christian desert, did they?

James gave him an unamused look, but went to fetch his contact kit.

They were out the door a few minutes later, into the gloomy dusk of early winter, street-lamps lit in warm haloes all down the street, the spindly outline of the university black on the horizon. Robbie stowed the box in the backseat of his car. James was leant against the passenger-side door, staring meditatively at him. His breath, in the sharp air, was like a ghost that couldn’t seem to keep itself together.

“Get in with you, then,” Robbie said. “It’s freezing out here!”

James hunched his shoulders up and, without further argument, did.

The new show that Laura was watching was called The Shadow Cabinet. “It’s no Pillardusk,” she told James, “but it’ll do.” Robbie found the plot even more difficult to follow (something to do with arms dealing in Westminster, and lots of infidelity— weren’t there any spies who could keep it in their trousers?) but he was glad of that now, because it let James relax and talk about nothing more than the security service.

“I promise!” he was protesting to Laura. “They did! Really, though, it’s that they go after people who are— you know— screwed-up.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Laura said.

She’d hardly commented when Robbie came home with James; just said, “The prodigal returns!” and laid an extra place at the table. Robbie thought she didn’t want to scare James off, and marvelled at how skilled she was as a detective, how good she was at picking up the signs he sometimes missed.

After the show had ended, James excused himself to smoke a cigarette in the garden.

Laura said, “I know someone who’s going to be very happy to see you. Frank’s been moping about ever since you left.”

James looked politely disbelieving, but within a few minutes of his lighting his cigarette, the fox came nosing out of the shrubbery and whirred inquisitively at James, then leapt on the desk and scratched happily at the wood, pausing and thrashing his tail before redoubling his efforts.

“No. Stop,” James told him. “You’re going to leave a mark. Look at you. You don’t even understand me. You have no higher intelligence.”

Frank leapt up and down again with excitement and then took off across the grass at top speed.

Laura, watching from the kitchen, buried her laugh in Robbie’s shoulder. “Good work,” she whispered to him. “You’ve pleased everybody. What did you say to him?”

Robbie sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. Come to stay now, worry about leaving later? Reckon I don’t know what to say. He’s all— twisted up about things. But I couldn’t leave him there, state he was in.”

“No.”

Outside, Frank had returned and James was leaning over to speak to him in low affectionate tones. Frank’s ears were perked and his tail was practically wagging.

“Who would’ve guessed,” Laura said pensively, leaning back against Robbie’s chest, “that the two of us would be the adopting sort.”

Things weren’t quite as they had been. James seemed tentative somehow— as though it wasn’t him who looked as though he might break, but Robbie and Laura, or perhaps the house itself. He tried hard to leave no trace of himself, picking up his pens and books and cigarettes and jumpers, and straightened up after other people as well. He even helped with the washing up, until the third water glass got broken (James still had very little finesse with his left arm and hand) and Robbie said, not unkindly, “Would you just go sit down and stop trying to prove something to the sink? I promise you’ve shown it who’s boss.”

James hadn’t played the piano since he got back.

In the early hours of Friday morning, sometime between four and five AM, Robbie woke in a way that felt familiar. A faint sound in the kitchen, he thought. He rolled out of bed, carefully not to disturb Laura, who was sleeping with the astonished expression characteristic of her dreams, and tugged on his dressing gown.

James was indeed in the kitchen, trying unsuccessfully to make a cup of tea. Robbie watched him for a moment— James hadn’t noticed his presence. He looked like a student, with his glasses and his stick-uppy hair and rumpled t-shirt, frowning severely as he tried to pour the kettle left-handed while holding the cup steady. It wasn’t going well. About half the water was ending up in the cup.

“Need some help?” Robbie asked quietly, moving into the room.

James flinched. “No. I should be able to do this by now.”

“Give it time.”

“I’ve given it more than two months. How am I supposed to go back to work when I can’t even make a cup of tea?”

“That’s what sergeants are for,” Robbie said. He grabbed a tea towel to mop up the water with, and went to fish another mug out of the cabinet. “Have you thought about not going back to work?”

James’s silence was eloquent.

“You used to talk about it all the time. You were never really happy in the job. Go sit down; I’ll finish this up.” The kettle was still hot; in no time at all the tea was steeping. Robbie added milk and brought the sugar to the table.

James was fidgeting with a pen. There was a notebook in front of him; he’d been writing something down. “I was happy,” he said. “Sometimes. I wasn’t unhappy.”

Robbie looked at him sceptically. “You quit.”

“I came back.”

“You were miserable.”

“That wasn’t about the job.”

“But the job wasn’t enough to make you happy,” Robbie said. He wanted to tread carefully. He knew that James’s misery had, in some way he didn’t fully understand yet, been about him retiring. But when he came out of retirement, James had been angry. So it wasn’t simple. “What would you do, do you think?”

The pen tip-tapped against the table. “I don’t know. Academia, maybe. Not a lucrative prospect. It doesn’t require you to have two arms, though.”

Robbie decided to set that aside for the moment. “Could you talk to— what’s her name? The woman whose son died? She seemed to have a good opinion of you.”

“Professor Pinnock. Maybe.”

“Just to get a sense of your options.” Robbie took a sip of his tea. “Is this why you can’t sleep?”

James sighed loudly and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I feel I should have a right not to answer that question.”

“That sounds like an American thing.”

That got a half-smile for a second, before James looked down. “It’s ludicrous anyway, the notion of leaving and just going back to university. It’d be… expensive—“

“You’d have your disability pension, if you couldn’t go back to work. Bit of money either way. Just a question of if you want to.”

“What if I don’t know what I want?” There it was again: that requesting tone, that polite tone of please don’t or please.

Robbie looked at him carefully. James was staring down at his notebook. He seemed to be mulling something over. He took his pen and heavily marked out several phrases, then turned the notebook round so Robbie could see that the page was divided into lists: Police, DPhil, ???. Under the Police heading, James’s scrawly, clambering writing had recorded: probably can’t, Lizzie - relief for her?, the dreams, recurring sense of failure, guilt, probably can’t, [something blacked out], BUT: letting people down, never sticking with anything, Robbie. Under the DPhil heading: probably not good enough, always reminded, [something blacked out], too old, no money, not sticking with anything, never see [incompletely blacked out] worse than when they [something blacked out], BUT: a relief, recovery time?, books, shoulder. Under ??? James had written simply: ? ?? Tibet?

“You’re not going to Tibet,” Robbie said. He held out his hand. James, after a moment of incomprehension, handed him the pen. Robbie drew a heavy line through the word and added a note reading: TOO FAR. TOO COLD. Then, after a brief hesitation, he drew an arrow from the name Lizzie to the BUT: section and crossed out relief for her?. He went ahead and crossed out letting people down as well. After a longer hesitation, he circled the last two blacked-out phrases under DPhil and wrote, in the margin, ROBBIE AND LAURA and WENT TO NEW ZEALAND, followed by a large question mark: ? To offset the heaviness of this, he returned to the ??? column and added, below the crossed-out Tibet?, JAZZ DJ, PROFESSIONAL HERMIT, OXFORD’S SNOBBIEST TOUR GUIDE. He turned the notebook around and slid it back across the table.

James looked at it. A smile played across his face. “They did have professional hermits,” he said. “In the nineteenth century.”

“I know. You’ve told me before. Where did you think I got it?”

“I’d be a very bad tour guide. You need lots of patience.” He paused. His fingers touched the margin where Robbie had filled in the missing phrases. He didn’t deny it. He didn’t say anything at all. So Robbie had been right, then.

“I’m not an idiot,” Robbie said. “Most of the time. I should have crossed that bit out as well, though, because it wouldn’t be an issue.”

“You think that now.” James still hadn’t looked up.

“Well, it’d be hard to avoid us if you were living with us, say.”

The idea floated above the table. Robbie had the sense that it would dissolve if either of them breathed too close to it; he himself was holding his breath, even though he’d phrased it as a hypothetical.

James was silent. He had hunched into himself, even more noticeable in his t-shirt than it had ever been in his coat and suit. He’d all but cured himself of that habit, in the last two months, though maybe that was due to having had to more-or-less relearn his body. Robbie would have taken the hunching to have James’s health back, but it wasn’t a tic he was happy to see again.

“I mean,” he said, when James continued to say nothing, “something to consider, if you wanted to save on expenses. We’re not grand, but I like to think we’re more comfortable than your average Tibetan monastery. Mind, we could install a shed for you to live like a hermit.”

A twitch of a smile. “You couldn’t afford my professional hermit rate.” James looked down again. “I don’t— I— I mean I’m—“

He was stumbling through words, and when he picked up the pen again, he dropped it. Robbie remembered that it was five in the morning— the sun just barely touching the sky outside the window— and that James had confessed to not getting very much sleep.

“You don’t have to say one way or the other,” he said. “Just give it a think. Test it out through the holiday.”

James looked wary. “Isn’t your family coming at Christmas? Won’t I be evicting them?”

“Ah, I’ve already warned them that might be the case. They’ll love staying in a hotel; it’s a special treat.”

James didn’t look reassured.

“Look,” Robbie said, “get some sleep. We’ll keep talking about it.”

He stood and collected the tea mugs, rinsing them out and setting them in the sink. By the time he returned, James’s eyes had closed. The lad could sleep absolutely anywhere! It was a gift. Robbie shook him awake, and motioned towards the sofa: go on, then. James nodded dazedly and staggered the few steps over. He was asleep almost before his head touched the cushions.

When Robbie flopped back into bed with Laura, she was already dozing, only half-asleep. She still said, “Oi!” as the bed rebounded, and elbowed him indignantly. “Have a heart! Some of us have to work in a few hours!”

Robbie sighed and kissed her shoulder in apology. “I’ve just asked James to live with us,” he said. “I think.”

“Did you?” Laura turned her head, frowning. “You think?”

“It was a conversation with James, so it was a bit mysterious. Told him to give it a go through Christmas, and we’ll see.”

“Hm.” She was either thoughtful or drowsing. After a moment she asked, “Do you think it’s what he wants?”

Robbie let his head drop back on the pillow. “Ah, I don’t know… Something Nell said, when I met her for the first time: I don’t think he knows how to want things.”

“Something to work on,” Laura said.

“I’m not his shrink. I’m not even his governor anymore. So who am I to… you know.”

Laura was watching him, open-eyed, her brow slightly furrowed. “Do you think it matters?” she asked.

When Laura had left for work, Robbie sat down to write to Nell. Their emails had, of late, been brief— Robbie had told her that James had moved back into the house, and that he and Laura were hoping he would stay. He’d referenced only obliquely what she’d said about James. He wanted to ask her what he was supposed to do about it, how you were supposed to make someone believe something that went against their nature. But he thought that she had no answers, any more than he did. He thought that probably she didn’t see how like James she was, in this respect at least. Skittish, half-domesticated where he was feral. Maybe that was unfair. They both had very nice manners. But sometimes Robbie felt they’d been raised by polite wolves.

He wrote to her instead that James was staying through Christmas, that he and Laura were still planning a party for the 21st, that there was no getting out of it, that Lizzie would be there with her husband (home from Canada for the rest of the year). After a hesitation, he added: ps Did you say something to James about God? It was the kind of subject that wasn’t really his business, but then— what was and wasn’t his business, these days? It seemed to fluctuate so much.

When he looked up from the computer, it was snowing outside. Only a few flurries. Not enough to stick. James was breathing evenly, still asleep on the sofa. He always looked slightly worried in his sleep. But then, he so often looked worried in waking life.

Robbie went to fetch a blanket from James’s room, where he seemed to have absentmindedly stockpiled them all. The door was open, so he reckoned it was all right to go in. (They had worked out these house-sharing kinks early on in the process— though James, of course, had tried to insist that it was Robbie and Laura’s house, and they should go where they liked.)

By the time James moved out, the room had ceased to resemble anything remotely designed for guests. The floor had been littered with little islands of books, stacked according to some secret Jamesian system. (“There are bookshelves,” Robbie had pointed out, but somehow the books never managed to make their way there.) The bed had become a nest of notebooks and jumpers. Little scraps of paper turned up everywhere with cryptic notations: De planctu Naturae; PR6567; ask Laura do they still teach this??; and once simply: GINGERBREAD. After he left, Robbie kept finding these notes in strange places. Between the couch cushions, at the bottom of a carrier bag, in the pocket of his coat. They were the only thing James had left, apart from the lost notebook and, oddly enough, the scallop shell.

James had been close-mouthed about that shell. Early on, Robbie had brought it for him, and said, “Call me foolish. It seemed like something you might want.” James had looked at it, turning it over and over in his hands. It fit neatly in his palm. He’d said, “It’s from Spain. It’s the symbol of Saint James, Santiago. Pilgrims wear it along the route.” “But you weren’t a pilgrim,” Robbie had said. James had said, “No.” There was never any further discussion of it.

But James had placed the shell carefully on one of the bookshelves, almost as though he’d hoped Robbie wouldn’t notice it, next to the boomerang that reminded Robbie of Australia-with-Morse. It was still there, overlooking the now much tidier room, the boxes of as-yet un-packed books. A pilgrim sign. A hint that James was only a visitor there? But he hadn’t taken it with him when he went.

Robbie wanted to ask, but couldn’t. He felt he was being tested: Are you sure you have what it takes to understand?

4 December 2016 at 09:17

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Little Update

I wouldn’t say I was “in touch” with James. We row over email. I think he’s probably written about twenty-five words to me. I don’t know what you mean, unless you mean I said it was no use trying to be a hermit-monk, because they weren’t hiding from everyone— meaning, not from God, not that it was any of my business. I know, I know, and I’m sorry— he was being horrible, in my defense.

It is true, though. He was comfortable when he thought God was a capricious father who loved you so long as you did what He said. He didn’t know what to do once he got outside that and had to consider that God might love him no matter what he did.

This all makes you uncomfortable, though, doesn’t it? You don’t like God.

Funny season for it to come up. Today’s the second Sunday of Advent.

Has it been snowing there? It has here. It’d be nice to have a white Christmas. Of course, one always thinks that— and then it melts! Not nice for foxes either, I’d imagine.

Nell

“I can’t believe a human being can take this much time shopping,” James said. “I worked with you for more than nine years, and I still can’t believe it.”

He was leaning against one of the glass-case counters; the owner of the shop— Fumifugium, one of those little antiques boutiques that always seemed to be popping up in Oxford— had been directing increasingly unhappy looks at him for the past five minutes.

“Is your shoulder hurting you?” Robbie asked.

“No; I’m just bored.”

“Then unless you want to help pick Laura’s Christmas present, you can just hush.”

“I already know what I’m giving her,” James said— somewhat smugly. “American pirate drama. It hasn’t aired here yet. I asked Lizzie to get Tony to help me make DVDs.”

“Well, I can’t give her DVDs. It has to be— you know— special.” Robbie eyed a pair of 19th century opera glasses, then a Victorian naturalist’s watercolour book. The trouble was, Laura didn’t like jewellery, which made gifts difficult. She was decidedly practical in her tastes— the closest she’d come to a luxury purchase since they’d been together was a set of handmade ceramic dishes from a gifted local potter.

“There’s a concert coming up at Wigmore Hall with that Lieder singer she likes.”

Robbie’s response to that must have shown in his face. Opera he had come to appreciate, even to enjoy. Lieder remained beyond his reach. Lot of toffs in tuxedos moaning in German. And all the songs sounded the same!

James shrugged theatrically. “You can’t say I didn’t try.”

Robbie sighed. “Ah, you’re right. We should move on.” He threw the shopkeeper an apologetic look.

They’d been on the way home from James’s PT when Robbie’d had the idea to stop. It was two and a half weeks till Christmas, and he’d done almost no shopping. The trip to Oxford was Lyn and Tim’s big present; he’d be putting them up in a nice hotel, paying for their meals, and doing a bit of child-minding so they could have time together. He always sent (rather helplessly) money to Mark. For Lizzie and Tony: a date night package at a local restaurant. Laura had suggested a gift voucher to a spa for Nell— “It’s the polite way of telling her she’s allowed to relax.” The chief question marks were James and Laura.

“Oh, hang on a moment,” James said when they were halfway down the street. “Do you mind if I duck in here?” He was gesturing to a music shop— the sort that sold scores, not the sort that sold records.

“Go ahead,” Robbie said. “Do you want me to…?” Wait outside, he gestured, because he was picking up on some odd faint prickliness.

Sure enough, James looked uncomfortable. “No; come if you want to.”

But he vanished as soon as they got in the door. Some time later, Robbie saw him talking to a shop clerk in the sheet music stacks, holding his left hand up in some kind of demonstration: curling and uncurling his fingers, showing the weakness in them. Thankfully, the clerk merely nodded and launched into an animated spiel, pointing now and then to sections of shelf. Making suggestions, probably.

Robbie turned his attention to the displays of tacky music gifts. A t-shirt reading Take Me To Your Lieder— that’d be a laugh for Laura, if he got her the Wigmore Hall tickets. A Chopin board for the kitchen. Ha. Warnings about sex and violins. Nothing good, unfortunately, about clarinets.

When James emerged, clutching a plastic carrier bag of purchases, Robbie was just beginning to be bored.

“Find what you were looking for?” he asked James.

“Yeah, I—“ James still looked tense, wary. He fell silent as they stepped out into the street. He glanced over at Robbie. Then he seemed to take a deep breath and, as though jumping off a cliff, said very rapidly, “I can’t just wait around for things to go back to what they were. I do know that. I know they might not be the same. I mean, no matter what, they’re always going to be— different. I might as well— get better at being— different.”

It was such an oddly general and uncertain little speech. It both was and wasn’t about music, Robbie thought, but he said cautiously, “So you’re thinking of trying a different approach to music?”

“Well, there’ve been one-handed pianists. Really good ones. I don’t know about guitar yet.” He paused. “Piano is… complicated.” Another pause. Neither of them looked at the other. “You know. But. In the end, everything is complicated that way. Nothing’s really separate from anything else.”

“That sounds like theology,” Robbie said.

They’d reached the parked car. James was squinting into the distance, his coat collar turned up against the wind. A few snow flurries gathered like salt along the seam of his shoulders. He was leaning on the cane he still needed to walk any distance, anything further than a few steps. For moment, Robbie had that sense of young-oldness again, the strange inability to pin down James’s age. He seemed old, old, impossibly old. “Maybe it is a kind of theology,” he said.

“Well,” Robbie said after a while, “we’re happy listening to you play the piano. Whatever you decide to do.”

That broke the serious mood. James turned to him, grinning ruefully. “Robert Lewis, you are a shameful liar. It’s terrible. You can’t stand it.”

“All right, it’s terrible,” Robbie confessed. “I’m sure it’ll get better when you’re playing, you know, songs.”

When they were in the car and the heater was cranking up, he thought to add, “But even if it didn’t get better, we’d still be happy for you to play. Just— might buy earplugs or summat. So long as it makes you happy.”

It took him a moment to realise James was watching him, head tipped back against the seat, a kind of tender and bemused curiosity in his look.

“What?” Robbie asked.

“Nothing.” James shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

But then the next day James checked the mail at his flat— he was driving now, short distances with a slow carefulness that made him feel, he complained, like he was about a hundred and twenty years old— and came back with a face like a crackling stormcloud, apparently because he’d got an invitation to the Thames Valley CID Christmas Party, which Robbie had forgotten to mention was on for Friday the sixteenth, and shut himself in his room, playing some sort of droning Russian folk music.

When he finally emerged to smoke a cigarette, Robbie followed him outside on the pretext of battening down the frost covers. He didn’t say anything; just set to work, his breath puffing white in the early twilight as he shifted stones on the blankets and tarps.

“It’s just,” James said after a long time, as though they’d been in the midst of a conversation, “part of me is saying, Why would you want to leave the only place you ever fitted? And then another part points out that I don’t really fit. That for twelve years I’ve been going to that party, putting up with the jokes about being posh and too clever and not ever having a date, thinking— one of these days it’ll happen. I don’t even know what it is, or why I’d want it.”

Robbie considered this. He straightened one edge of a tarp over the asters. He could smell frost on the grass. “Used to hate seeing you there,” he said. “Could always tell you weren’t enjoying yourself. Made me think of a jack in the box, like you were cramming yourself back into your body. Morse used to just not go. But then, Morse could’ve given a toss if anyone round there liked him or not.”

“I wish I could’ve met him. Morse.”

“Not sure you would’ve liked him. He was…” Robbie paused, trying to thing how to explain Morse. “I think you would’ve said,” he said finally, “that he didn’t hold out much hope of salvation.”

James didn’t say anything to that. His cigarette-end flared up red in the darkness.

“Expect that was what made it easier for him.” Robbie bent, his fingers clutching the hem of a blanket. He was glad his face was hidden. “He wanted to save people, but you want them to be saved. Too much heart inside you. He must’ve been that way once. Shoved it down inside him too often, maybe. I should’ve,” he said, and he was surprised to find his throat closed with emotion. He had to clear it before he could speak again. “I should’ve worried more about that happening to you. ”

He straightened, brushing his hands against his trousers. There. It would have to do.

“It wasn’t your job,” James said into the silence.

“You’re not a job,” Robbie returned. “Hell of a job you’d be if you were.”

Another silence. “I don’t know what I am, then,” James said finally, stiffly.

For the first time Robbie felt really tired, as though he’d been lifting the same weight for a long time. He turned abruptly to go inside, where there wouldn’t be this exhaustion, where Laura was waiting with her weightless affection. He could feel James watching him, waiting for an answer, his whole body tense as though about to flee.

“—Welcome,” Robbie said.

Laura had never been much of one for Christmas decorations, and Robbie had got out of the habit since Val’s death. They’d agreed to make a go of this year, given that they were having a party and Lyn’s family were visiting. But since Laura owned almost none of the necessary items, it had mean Robbie seeing what he could come up with from his own boxed-up things.

A lot of the Christmas stuff he’d sent to Lyn when he moved out of the house. He thought every family should have some hand-me-down ornaments, something you’d hung on the tree when you were a child and could pass on to your children. Some things he’d kept because they’d’ve made Lyn too sad, or because he couldn’t quite stand to part with them yet: crooked clay angels that Lyn and Mark had made in Sunday school, with silver paint blobbed on for their haloes and wings; a set of baubles that he and Val had bought just before they got married, at a Christmas market in Germany; a tiny family picture in a little gold hanging frame— 1989, he thought, or maybe 1990.

He got the boxes out on Friday and started unpacking them. After a while, James came into the room and pretended to read on the sofa while darting glances at him as though not sure he was allowed to look.

“I suppose Nell got all your family’s Christmas things,” Robbie said eventually, shoving fistfuls of unwrapped tissue paper into an empty box. “Or have you got a secret crate of them somewhere?” He couldn’t imagine it.

James shrugged. “Don’t know. Nell’s probably got them.”

“You never asked?”

“Didn’t care.” He bent his head over his book, but then said, “I was never really the Christmas sort.”

“No festive feelings?”

There was a pause. James said, “The Mortmaignes used to have wonderful Christmas parties. I expect now I’d disapprove; they were very ‘lord of the manor indulges the servants.’ But at the time I loved it. It was a window into a world I wanted to be part of.”

Robbie rested his hands on his knees, watching him. “The world of the upper classes?”

“No. I don’t know— music, culture, maybe. But more than that— I felt special, adored.” His mouth curled. His shoulders had crept forwards, defensive. He threw a challenging look at Robbie, as though daring him to react somehow.

“Suppose I understand that,” was all Robbie said. Carefully, he went back to picking baubles out of boxes. “Seems a shame not to like Christmas. Have you never watched a Doctor Who Christmas special?”

James stared at him flatly.

“The Queen’s speech?”

“Do you think she’s likely to say something I’ll find interesting?”

“I don’t know; what do you find interesting these days?”

James thought. “Mediaeval attitudes towards the wondrous, and the relationship between religion and the Romantic sublime.”

“It’s a bit specialised,” Robbie said gravely, “but you never know with Her Maj.”

James grinned at that, and later it didn’t take too much gentle pressure to get him to come with Robbie to pick out a tree. Robbie was glad of that; he hadn’t fancied going alone. The last time he’d been was a few weeks before Val died; it had been just her and him, talking about how empty the house felt around that time, and how happy they’d be to have the kids for a visit. He hadn’t wanted to go with Laura for that reason— she’d see through him at once, and he’d feel he’d ruined it.

With James, the whole experience was like a very strange lecture encompassing everything from the legend of St. Boniface, an etymology of the word balsam, the use of spruce wood in instrument-making, and pre-Christian pagan views on the animacy of trees. It was impossible to be too sad when James also treated the selection process as seriously as the investigation of a crime scene, shuffling about and scowling at various specimens, testing the needles, pulling out his mobile phone to look up facts and advice.

Eventually they settled on a nice little Nordmann fir, and managed to haul it back without too much trouble— though James was clearly unhappy that he wasn’t able to be of more help with the lifting, and compensated by offering a nonstop stream of panicky instructions to Robbie: “To the left! No, you’re going to hit the— I told you you were going to hit it!”

Laura, when she got home, was dubious about the number of pine needles on her carpet, but seemed overall pleased, and they spent the evening eating Indian takeaway from cartons while pinning tinsel to various surfaces, stringing lights, and hanging baubles. It was another of those things Robbie had approached with trepidation— how would he feel about decorating for Christmas without Val, Mark, or Lyn?— but it was such a wholly different scene, with James and Laura trading trivia about Victorian Christmas traditions and discussing Regency holidays (a conversation that included, memorably, Laura’s impression of a clergyman in a Jane Austen novel), that he was hardly reminded of the past.

When they’d finished, Laura insisted on opening a bottle of prosecco— “In acknowledgement of our hard work— all our hard work, but especially yours.” James had stayed away from drinking for months, since alcohol interacted with so many of his pills, but he took a glass and said, “Mostly Robbie’s hard work. Cheers.”

Robbie turned on the television and the news droned in the background as they polished off the bottle. James was sprawled out contentedly in an armchair. The fairy lights on the trees blinked. After a while, he took the glasses into the kitchen and James slipped outside to have a cigarette. Robbie watched as he paused at the edge of the deck and knelt down with some effort, whistling softly. Frank came skulking out of the darkness, sharp-eared and cautious, and nosed up to James’s hand, pushing at it like a cat asking to be stroked. James scratched under his chin. Robbie thought it was the most affection he’d ever seen James show to anybody— except Laura, maybe, and then only when she’d narrowly escaped death. Strange, when he felt so much for people.

Out in the garden, James laughed as Frank tried to gnaw on his knuckle. “You’re lucky I like you,” he said. “Yes, you. Lucky.” Frank yawned and stuck out his tongue before giving James an affectionate lick, and trotted off into the darkness, oblivious to his luck.

11 December 2016 at 20:33

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Little Update

Hmm… there might be some Christmas things somewhere. We gave a lot away when Mum died, because Dad didn’t particularly want it. James and I weren’t speaking then. I do remember seeing some Christmas candleholders when I moved Dad into the home, and I expect we’ve got Christmas china somewhere— he insisted on keeping all the china because he was convinced I’d get married and want it. (Oh, Lord.)

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but even if I found something, I’m not sure it would have the effect you wanted. Holidays were not especially happy times in our house. I remember being sick one year because the atmosphere was so tense. Which is not to say— well, anything I say would probably sound mad; I’ve found it’s impossible to explain how contradictory things can sit on top of one another, how you can love someone and yet find it absolutely unbearable to be around them, how you can not love someone and still be sort of tied to them. Love’s mysterious, isn’t it? There isn’t even a word for the opposite of love, when you think about it. That’s how much we don’t know about love.

As for God, I appreciate you saying that, but I don’t know if I’m the right person to talk to you about it. I’m the last person James would tell. My sense is it’s quite complicated. I do wish he’d come back to the Church, or to faith at least, but not for the reasons you probably think. It was important to him, it had to do with who he wanted to be in the world. But of course I can understand why he wouldn’t come back.

I’ve just heard on the radio that apparently we’re getting Siberian winds this week. Last time that happened, my pipes burst and I was washing with bottled water for a week! Not a lot of fun. I’m filled with dread and terror. Work is also difficult as we serve a lot of underprivileged people— at this time of year we’re always taking up collections to help them with their heat, but it never seems to be enough.

Hope you’re warm!

Nell

Robbie woke with a sense of resignation and checked the bedside clock: 4:15 AM. He sighed and stared at the ceiling before swinging himself to seated. He could hear the creak of a cabinet in the kitchen running into a glass. He envied Laura, who had learnt to sleep through anything, though he suspected that was probably his fault.

James was in the kitchen, sipping from a glass of water with a heating pad sticky-taped to his shoulder. He was reading a battered paperback novel.

“Morning,” Robbie said. “If that’s what we’re calling it now.”

“You really don’t have to get up,” James said. “It’s not like there’s anything you can do. And I’ve already taken a painkiller, before you shout at me about it.”

That was unusual, for James. Robbie studied him closely. His eyes were edged with little pain lines. “That bad?”

Reluctantly, James nodded. “I think it might be the weather. I noticed when it first got colder that…”

“You didn’t say anything,” Robbie said.

James shrugged. “There was nothing—“

“Yeah, yeah, nothing I could do, I know. Still.” Robbie sighed. “Your sister did say something about Siberian winds.”

James squinted at him. His eyes had that blurry look, behind his glasses, that hinted at more than one insomniac night. “You talk to Nell about the weather.”

“Why not? Seems like she could use someone to talk to.”

“I’m sure she could. I just didn’t think she talked about anything that didn’t involve someone she could criticise.”

“That’s a bit unfair. She says nice things about you. Told me about a piano recital you gave that she liked.”

“Did she.” James shifted in his chair.

“Yeah. Schubert, she said. Notturno. Thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard.”

James dropped his eyes. He turned the water glass in a circle on the table. “I didn’t know she remembered things like that.”

“She regrets whatever happened when the two of you fell out.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“I asked her not to,” Robbie said. “It didn’t seem right.”

James nodded. He looked exhausted. “It was my fault, you know. I abandoned her. She was sixteen years old.”

“When your mother died.” Robbie rubbed his eyes. “You were barely grown yourself,” he pointed out.

“Old enough to know better. But I wouldn’t’ve— I couldn’t do it the way she could. Take care of people. I knew she’d be better at it. That’s not an excuse, but—“ He shook his head. “I was always more like my mother. No good at caring about people.”

“I think you do all right,” Robbie said.

James reached out and touched the cover of the book he’d been reading. It was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Robbie saw— a water-stained little children’s edition. “We had copies of these in the house. The Chronicles of Narnia. I picked them up and read them when I was five. She thought I was lying to get attention when I told her. I always thought… she wished she could swap me for another child. That maybe she would’ve tried, with another child. Not... do what she did. She'd said... we had this row when I stopped playing the piano... So in a sense it was my fault.”

It was more or less what Robbie had expected, nothing he couldn’t’ve put together, based mostly on ten years of knowing James. He felt no reaction to it except a very, very deep, profound bone-tiredness. He went around the table and touched James’s shoulder; moved his hand to the back of his neck, trying to push some comfort into him through the point of contact. “Come on. Let’s get you to the sofa. Painkiller should be kicking in.”

James let himself be untaped from the heating pad and shepherded. Robbie sat beside him on the sofa, slipping an arm around him. The painkiller must have been kicking in, because James allowed this. In fact, he leant towards Robbie.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Robbie said, pitching his voice low. “And there’s nothing wrong with you or the way you care for people. You’re just— a bit mixed-up. But it’s all right.”

“You’re a better Christian than I am,” James murmured in a heavy voice.

“I doubt that,” Robbie said drily, “very much.”

“It’s true.”

As he slipped into sleep, James slid until his head rested on Robbie’s shoulder. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, or even really a strange one, to have James snuffling against his dressing gown collar. He remembered doing this for Lyn once, when she’d had her heart broken at nursing college and had stayed up all night crying her eyes out. He’d felt glad— not glad that Lyn was broken-hearted, although he’d never liked the boyfriend, but glad that there was something he was good for, something that had nothing at all to do with death. He’d been afraid that had ended when the kids left home. Then, later, when Val was gone, it had seemed like the only parts left of him were the sharp grim analytical parts that could stand over a corpse and ask who, what, why, where. He’d gone looking for the rest of him; looked on the other side of the world, in a place full of beauty and green things and kindness. All along he should have looked at home.

He shifted slightly to make his back more comfortable and closed his eyes. This would be all right, he thought. They could rest like this.

Perhaps embarrassed by letting his guard down in such a manner (upon waking later with his face still mashed against Robbie’s shoulder, he’d blinked two or three times muzzily and said in a voice of profound horror, “Oh, no, I’m so sorry—“), James proceeded to spend several hours torturing Mediaeval carols on the piano. Robbie, who only recognised the music as carols because he’d rather trepidatiously asked and James had told him that was what it was, found himself losing patience at an alarming rate— until finally he slammed out into the garden to work on the toy robot he’d been assembling for Jack.

The Siberian winds had indeed arrived and brought the bitter weather with them. He had to wrap up in his parka and was still cold and bad-tempered, dropping the screwdriver with half-frozen hands. He thought evil thoughts about sabotaging the piano and telling Laura it had suffered an accident.

Eventually he gave up and went back inside, numb and painful at the ear-tips. James was still banging away at something that sounded shockingly atonal and gloomy for Christmas. Robbie banged a cabinet door shut in the kitchen and then shouted, “Could you give it a rest, man!”

The music stopped. There was silence. After a while, James appeared in the kitchen wearing a bulky Fair Isle jumper and a hoodie unzipped over it. “I’m going out,” he said shortly.

Robbie eyed him warily. “All right. Mind you, it’s freezing out there.”

James gave the impatient-looking one-shouldered shrug he’d been perfecting. “I think I’ll survive.”

“Give me a ring if you get too tired to drive!” Robbie called after him. He wasn’t sure if James heard him; he was out the door already. If he had done, he didn’t respond.

He was gone for several hours. In the meantime, Laura came home from work. She was dealing with the case of a murdered child— or, well, she was hoping the charge would be murder; the child had died of hypothermia after being locked in a shed for misbehaving.

“The worst thing is,” Laura said after a glass and a half of wine, curled up on the sofa and staring into the distance, “there were no marks on her hands. She was eleven years old; surely she was clever enough to make noise or try to get out. But she didn’t. She just sat there and died.”

Robbie made a noncommittal noise. He knew as well as she did that there was nothing to say to cases like that. Nothing made them better, or easier to handle.

“Sometimes you just think— what’s the point of it all. You think you’ve done something good, made some progress, but there’s so much intolerable sadness in the world.”

Robbie sipped his wine, listening to the noise of the heater in the silence. “I don’t know what to tell you. Life goes on. That’s the only thing I’ve come away with.”

“That’s it? Life goes on?”

“Well, it does. It seems like it doesn’t, but it does. New things happen. Eventually not all of them will be sad.”

She didn’t seem satisfied by this answer. She hmmed thoughtfully. “Where’s James to provide the scriptural perspective?”

Robbie sighed. “He went out.”

“I see. Did you two have a row?”

“He was playing the piano.”

Laura winced.

“Ah, it’s not just that, though. I reckon we were both a bit stroppy.”

He didn’t mention that it was six days till the nineteenth, a date he couldn’t ever not be aware of somehow. For the first few years, it had felt like it was written in his bones, like his body knew even when he wasn’t paying attention. Like driving by the place where you’d had a road accident once, and feeling yourself go all nerves and alertness. He’d seemed to subconsciously expect further terrible shocks. Now it felt strange when he didn’t feel something. He waited for it, and when it didn’t come, he felt that he’d forgotten. It was difficult. He thought it would always be difficult. Life moved on, but the past didn’t disappear.

When James returned just before dinner, his hair had been ruthlessly barbered back into its usual severe style. It made him look older and more competent, less a student vagrant; yet at the same time self-conscious, and more awkward in his skin.

“My goodness,” Laura said, when he slunk through the door, seeming embarrassed. “It’s Detective Inspector Hathaway again.”

James ducked his head, running a hand over his short hair. “I never liked it long. It was past time to get it done.”

He didn’t say where else he’d been, and it didn’t really occur to Robbie to ask. James had a right to his own life, outside the house; it was probably a good sign, a good thing for him that he was willing to get back into the world. That was what he hadn’t been doing at his own flat.

But then after dinner, when Laura got up to put the plates in the sink, James joined his hands together in a tense, readying way and said, “I talked to Moody.”

“Oh?” Robbie said. So perhaps the hair was meant to suggest D.I. Hathaway again. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

“He doesn’t want me to make any rash decisions. He keeps saying I can come back whenever I want to, that I should take as much time as I want, and come back when I’m ready, even if it’s a year or something.”

“Isn’t that good?”

James’s intertwined fingers clenched. “It should be good. Shouldn’t it? That was what Innocent said, too. She said, you can come back when you’re ready. She said, Things are difficult right now. You’re confused. Like sooner or later I’d see she was right, and I was being silly, and her way was best. And I suppose I thought— she seems so sure. I’ve never been sure about anything. So she must know.”

Internally, Robbie winced. He could just see Innocent mothering James, who did often seem so confused. He too had been guilty of it— Trust me. I know what you need, better than you do.

“But the thing is,” James said, half to himself, “I’m not sure anyone does know. And I’m tired of people telling me I’ll come round to their way of thinking. I don’t want to just wait around for something to change, so I can have something I’ve never been sure I wanted. I’d quite like to make a rash decision. If I can’t now, then when can I?”

Laura had stopped rinsing plates and was leant against the sink, watching him quietly.

“So you’re going to leave,” Robbie said.

“The police. I think so.” He darted a look up, brow furrowed. “I know you don’t— understand.”

“I understand you were unhappy,” Robbie said honestly. “That was never what I wanted for you.”

“So you won’t be disappointed?” James was still squinting at him, slightly fearful.

Robbie remembered back to the age when he thought he knew what was best for James, when he’d imagined him married, maybe with children. All of the things he had wanted for James had turned out to be the wrong things. Instead he’d found himself wishing that James could just be James. Don’t get married, he’d thought, don’t learn to talk more, go on pilgrimages if you must; hang out with dead philosophers on Friday nights, but find some peace for yourself.

“I won’t be disappointed,” he said. “As long as you don’t run away to Tibet.”

“Oh, James,” Laura said with a tone of horrified disapproval. “Tell me you’re not planning to run away to Tibet.”

“He’d better not be planning to run away to anywhere,” said Robbie.

“I,” James said, sounding trapped. “No, I don’t think so?”

“Good,” Laura said, satisfied. “That’s settled, then.”

“Is it?” James appeared baffled. He looked from one of them to the other, oddly unguarded. “Somehow I thought it would be a lot more difficult than that.”

Some things remained easy, and some became difficult. The pain in James’s shoulder came and went, apparently according to untraceable shifts in the weather; the pain made him savage-tempered when he didn’t medicate it, but he complained that the painkillers caused him to feel he was made of golden syrup. (Privately, Robbie found the idea of James being made of golden syrup at least moderately amusing, and it was true that James on painkillers was slow, sweet, and somewhat drippy-natured.) Despite this, he had also begun dropping hints that he was well enough for Robbie and Laura not to feel compelled to house him.

Which was true, Robbie thought, but not the point; and also, hadn’t they been over this?

Things were made even more difficult by the impending anniversary, and then made even more difficult in turn by the upcoming fact of Lyn, Tim, and Jack’s arrival. He’d overlooked, when he first invited them, what it was going to be like to worry about presenting an ideal home, something that Lyn wouldn’t think of as automatically inferior to the one she’d grown up in, and worry about whether Lyn would really get on with Laura, whom after all she hadn’t seen in a long time, and what any of them would think of James.

James, too, was worried, and this didn’t help. He kept offering to leave, “even just for Christmas, because you clearly— you need the space, and I’m no good with people, and I’ll bring everyone down,” and a whole long list of reasons, even after he admitted to Robbie that he had no plans and would hole up in his flat for the duration.

Of the three of them, only Robbie went to the CID Christmas party, since he felt it was polite to at least pop in. Looking around the room made him feel slightly depressed, imagining how things would’ve gone with James in attendance— how aware he would have been of James lurking in the corner almost as though he were trying to not be there; the spiteful jokes from Knox and Hooper that he would’ve had to keep defusing. At least he could chat to Lizzie and Tony, though he felt a bit guilty for not letting on to Lizzie that her governor was planning to go.

When he got home, trailing gloominess behind him, he found Laura and James on the sofa: Laura’s feet in James’s lap. They were watching the end of a documentary about Antarctica that seemed to have an awful lot of Russian singing in it. James’s face was turned towards Laura, warmly animated, turned soft by the illumination of the lamp, and Laura’s nose was slightly wrinkled with laughter. Robbie stood in the doorway watching them for a minute, and felt such an obliterating surge of happiness that it seemed to reach down all the way into his feet, scouring all the sadness out of his body.

It didn’t last, of course; and if anything, it made him more worried, because he was so acutely aware of what he had to lose. But that was better, he thought, than not having known— than being back in that hospital waiting room. And he was surprised to find that it didn’t not last. The memory stayed like a seed with him, something harbouring warmth at every moment, something that could grow again.

The nineteenth came and went. Robbie didn’t mark it in any special way. It wasn’t a day he remembered because he wanted to remember it; it was a day he remembered because he couldn’t not remember.

After, he was the first one in the pre-dawn kitchen. James shuffled in later, carrying a bottle of whiskey.

“You’re not supposed to be drinking that,” Robbie said.

James plucked one glass out of the cabinet. He sat carefully across the table.

“No,” he said.

20 December 2016 at 11:43

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>, “Dr. Laura Hobson” <<[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Wolcum Yole & All of Ye!

It’s probably a bit late to offer, but is there anything I can bring to the party tomorrow? I imagine everything’s a bit mad, especially with family coming into town. I mean, I know it must be, or you wouldn’t be letting James write your reminder emails! : )

Just let me know, it’s no trouble! And thank you again for the invitation!

Looking forward to seeing all of you!

Nell

“Robbie,” Laura said in a voice of exquisite patience. “If they see you in Sainsbury’s again, someone’s going to think you’re a terrorist.”

“I’m just saying, it’d take ten minutes, and I’d be back with some tonic water.”

“Who the hell do we know who drinks tonic water?”

“I do,” said James, without looking up from the book he’d been hiding behind for more than an hour. “Sometimes.”

“You live here,” Laura said. “You’ll drink what you’re given.”

Robbie was attempting to understand when he’d lost control of the situation. He stared at the table, which was crowded with various kinds of bottles. Rationally, he knew it was an acceptable number of bottles, and that quite probably the amount of food currently stored in the kitchen could have fed a family of five through the apocalypse. Yet somehow the house didn’t feel ready.

“And,” Laura added, “Nell’s bringing homemade mince pies.”

James frowned and meaningfully turned a page.

“All right,” Robbie conceded. “I just—“

“You just think that Lyn and Tim will be here in an hour, and you’re worried, which is perfectly normal. What is not normal is making four trips to Sainsbury’s in one day.” Laura took him gently by the shoulders and steered him over to the sofa, then shoved him onto it. “Calm down.”

She didn’t seem concerned at all, which was extremely unfair. She never seemed to get concerned, barring near-death or temporary insanity on Robbie’s part. Everything else she just accepted with a wry and sharp-tongued tranquility. Robbie thought that it was good one of them had this trait, given their peculiar life together.

Because he didn’t have that trait, it wasn’t till Lyn had called to say they’d left their hotel in Oxford that he noticed James had disappeared.

He was smoking out in the garden, of course, in spite of the cold, cold weather— puffing away in jeans and a black jumper, without so much as mittens or a warm hat.

“You’ll catch your death,” Robbie reprimanded him, trying to keep his voice friendly. “Remember, you’ve not got a spleen anymore!” James had had a lecture from the doctors about susceptibility to infection.

James glanced at him. The hand that held the cigarette was jiggling slightly.

Robbie dropped the pretense. “You’ve still just got time to run, if you really can’t stand it. You’re not required to meet me family. I can tell them you’re ill.”

“No.” James drew in a long drag. “I want to. I do. How could I pass up possibly embarrassing stories about you?”

“Whatever keeps you going,” Robbie said, just as they heard the noise of a car pulling up and the shriek of an overexcited child.

“Famous last words,” James said.

Jack Lewis-Denham was five years old, and very fond of repeating this fact. He was still growing out of his early tow-headedness, and had inherited Robbie’s unfortunate tendency towards appled English cheeks—which had the effect of making him appear like an advertisement of a British schoolchild. He was fat-fisted and energetic and absolutely perfect, particularly in his miniature winter coat and bobble-hat. A good ten minutes had to be spent exclaiming over him before any serious introductions could be begun; fortunately, Laura seemed sympathetic to this necessity, and hung back with a tolerant grin.

Ten minutes was also about the extent of Jack’s patience. When he had exhausted himself with the joy of seeing his grandad, he immediately began whining at top volume about a particular stuffed toy that had been left in the car boot.

“Sorry,” Lyn said ruefully, scooping him up. “It was a long car trip. I’m Lyn, by the way,” she added to Laura and James. “Dad, we’ll just pop out to the car and get his Froggy.”

So Lyn was gone again, before Robbie had a chance to even hug her, and he was left with curly-haired, spectacled Tim, who was nice enough, but who always seemed to be flustered by Robbie.

“Hi. Uh. Hi,” Tim said, extending his arm like a plank. Robbie shook his hand. “Wow. This place is lovely, it’s really amazing.”

“I’m afraid Laura can take the credit for that,” Robbie said. “Laura, this is Tim, my son-in-law; Tim, Laura; and that one lurking in the back is James.”

“Sorry I took your room,” James said. He limped forward to shake hands— he still, most days, had to use the cane, and for once was maybe glad of it, of having something to cling to.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Tim said. “Wow, you really got shot? Wow! Oh, sorry, that’s probably rude.”

“I really got shot,” James said. “Don’t worry; I’m over it by now.”

Fortunately, after that, whirlwind Lyn was back, with her heavy armful of five-year-old and stuffed green frog. Said five-year-old consented to be set down and introduced to others: to Laura, who seemed to make him very shy, and to James, who impressed him by being so tall.

“So you’re James. Wow,” Lyn said.

“I already asked him did he really get shot,” Tim informed her.

Lyn thwacked him. “Oh my God, that is not what I was going to say! I have manners, not like some people. I was going to say, Wow, I’ve heard so much about you! You’re all right now, right?”

“Yeah, more or less,” James said.

“What happened to you?” Jack demanded. He had shoved half of one hand in his mouth.

“Erm. I got shot,” James said. His eyes sought Robbie’s, with a kind of Am I poisoning this child’s mind? panic.

“Who?”

“Who by? A— bad guy,” James said.

“And that’s enough of that line of questioning,” Lyn said, steering Jack away. Sorry, she mouthed over her shoulder.

“No, it’s all right,” James said. Robbie suspected he was, more than anything, relieved to have something to talk about.

Laura said, “We’ve gone ahead and set up for the party, so we have a whole houseful of drinks and snacks, if you want anything. Let me show you the kitchen; it’ll give me a chance to show off my garden…”

And that was that. They were off. Not too bad a start.

It was past seven o’clock before Robbie had a chance to really catch his breath and sit down and have a look at Lyn. It was strange; people talked about how much children grew between visits, and it was true— he still thought of Jack as a little toddling thing— but they never talked about the way that adult children changed, the little lines on their faces, new haircuts, hair colours, new styles, changes in weight… things that brought home to you how much time you’d missed with them. Lyn’s hair was blonde now, and her face was a little rounder. It amazed him that no matter how she changed, she was always Lyn, still Lyn.

“I love this house, Dad,” she was saying. “It’s gorgeous! It just feels really happy. Oh, and you’ve got such a nice tree—“

“James helped me pick that out,” Robbie said. “And he and Laura mostly decorated it. I gave up after the fairy lights.”

“Oh, no,” Lyn said, examining the tree, “you’ve got those horrible angels Mark and I made! They look like space aliens! I can’t believe you still have these!”

“I was extremely proud of you,” Robbie said. “Your evident artistic talent.”

“I should hide these,” Lyn said, but she didn’t.

Jack was playing with his toy cars on the rug, making them zoom around bits of furniture and up his dad’s shins. He had mellowed considerably since being allowed to race around the house a little, but still retained approximately twice the energy of anybody else, which he used mostly to make engine noises, tell Robbie his cars’ names (“Lightning McQueen, Tommy Tanker, Blaze, and Mr. Fast Guy”), and stare in fascination at James.

“Dad, you and Laura haven’t got any pets, have you?” Lyn asked. “There’s such a massive garden, it seems a waste. We’re planning to get Jack a D-O-G for his next birthday.”

(Jack, amazingly, failed to catch her out at this.)

“Well,” Laura said, and coughed. She and Robbie and James, all on the sofa, exchanged slightly ashamed glances. “There’s quite a lot of foxes in this area, actually, and we’ve sort of got quite attached to…”

“Oh, no, Dad, you didn’t!” Lyn groaned. “Oh, no, you’re one of those people. They’re pests, they’re really awful! But your heart always did go all melty.”

“I think you’ll find Frank is an extremely handsome and erudite fox,” James said, by way of protest.

“Oh, Lord, it has a name.”

“Frank,” Robbie said rather proudly. “From Saint Francis.”

“You’re so terrible. They’re feral, they’re as bad as rats.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d met Frank,” Robbie informed her.

“I should’ve got you a D-O-G,” Lyn said reprovingly. “A nice labrador retriever, maybe. Something friendly and sturdy. And it’d keep the foxes away.”

“To each his own,” Robbie said mildly. But he was glad when he heard Laura’s mobile buzz, and they could move off the topic. He didn’t want a labrador retriever.

“That’s Lizzie,” Laura said, checking. “She and Tony are on her way over, and she’s checking if they ought to pick up some wine. We’ve got loads, shall I tell her yes or no? I’ll tell her not to bother.”

“Suppose that’s the early warning alarm,” Robbie said. “Guests off the starboard portside.”

Laura and James turned to him with twin disappointed frowns.

Robbie rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t even start.”

Despite the bitter weather, they had a good turnout for the party. Laura, of course, even having slowed down a bit as she got older, could always be counted on to summon up lots of friends— though Robbie had strictly forbidden Alec Pickman from making an appearance. (“Unless he brings his own booze supply,” he said firmly. “Otherwise we can’t afford him!”) Robbie wasn’t sure how he felt about the realization that all his own friends were work-related, and most of those recent— though Jean Innocent was in town, and put in an appearance. He was startled by how pleased he was by that, though he couldn’t seem to stop addressing her as “ma’am.”

Nell Hathaway arrived just after eight, slightly flushed and bearing an enormous platter, wrapped up in a scarf that was about as large as she was. As ever, Robbie had a very strong impulse to place his hands on her shoulders and reassure her that everything was going to be okay. Instead, he pecked her on each cheek and passed her off to Laura, who took her to find her mince pies a place.

“She made the mincemeat herself,” Laura whispered to him later. “How on earth does she find the time?”

Robbie remembered James staying up all night in the office, fuelled by coffee, wine, and cigarettes, and thought he had an idea. “Any good?” he said.

“They smell like heaven. I’m holding off, trying to be polite.”

James, meanwhile, had ensconced himself in an armchair and appeared to be attempting to become invisible. Foiling him in this attempt was Jack, leaning against his chair-arm, asking him a series of serious-faced questions that Robbie couldn’t hear and kicking at the carpet with tiny trainers. James’s expression was perplexed and slightly alarmed. He kept turning to squint at Jack as though bemused by the existence of such an alien lifeform.

After a while, Lyn came to collect Jack— probably to show him off to more of Robbie’s friends; Jack was very much the star of the party, as Robbie felt was only right— and Nell wandered over to where James was sat. Unwound from her scarf, she was very precisely dressed in a herringbone skirt and ivory blouse. She and James matched in a way that Robbie couldn’t really label. As though they were doing not-quite-perfect imitations of other people. They would have looked more at home in a vintage children’s book. Robbie wondered if Nell liked children. He suspected she didn’t. He suspected that, like James, she found them hard to understand.

He started to wander over and save one or both of them from the situation, but Laura touched his arm.

“Give them a minute,” she said. “It could be a Christmas miracle.”

“It’s not Christmas yet,” Robbie pointed out, but he stayed put. James was stiff-faced, but neither of them was storming out of the room.

In the kitchen, Jack had about run his battery down, and was half-slumped against Lyn’s legs, half-stamping angrily in a demand for more sweets. When Robbie wandered in, Lyn gave him a rueful look.

“I think we’ve gone past bedtime,” she said. “We should probably go, or there’s liable to be a tantrum.”

“You were always a champion tantrum-thrower,” Robbie said. “You knew we couldn’t stand to see you unhappy.”

“You remember such nice things about me,” Lyn said. She unpeeled Jack’s arms from around her. “Say goodbye to Granddad!”

Jack scowled. “No!” he said. “You say goodbye! I don’t want to go!”

It took a good fifteen minutes of coaxing and promises before he could be persuaded that if he left now, he would get to see Robbie tomorrow. Only then would he consent to a lackluster hug, and to letting himself be carted off by his mother.

Robbie watched them go with a certain amount of nostalgia. He knew that, like most sorts of nostalgia, it was fueled by being able to forget the unpleasant bits— the kids screaming in the car and throwing whatever they could get their hands on, the embarrassment of towing them through a restaurant or a hotel lobby when they were throwing fits, the special kind of exhaustion when you’d been trying to get them to sleep for four hours, and the exhaustion when, after then sleeping for four hours, they woke you up again. He’d been relieved when Lyn and Mark had outgrown that phase. But at the same time, even then, he’d missed it— their fears and wants had been so simple then. It had felt like everything was in his power. He could pick them up and put them to his shoulder and comfort them; make them laugh, and erase the beginnings of sadness. Later life became more complicated. He lost that special power, no matter how hard he tried to hold on to it.

When he looked around again, he saw that James and Nell had vanished. At first this tripped alarm bells in him, till some instinct led him to look out into the garden.

Sure enough, there they were. The air itself seemed hard with frost, and their faces were flushed pink— one of the perils of being so fair. Nell, ever practical, had apparently insisted on swathing James in her scarf. She herself had pulled on her parka. They were talking, but not much; James was smoking. Abruptly he gestured out towards the garden with his cigarette and Nell laughed, delighted, clapping her hands together. James smiled that very rare unwary smile as he watched her. It was the most like an older brother that Robbie had ever seen him look, the first time he could imagine the two of them as children together.

James said something, and Nell offered him her arm to lean on; he knelt awkwardly at the edge of the deck and reached a coaxing hand out towards the shadows. Slowly, very slowly and hesitantly, Frank the Fox crept across the icy expanse of grass and touched James’s hand with his nose, whuffling at the fingers on offer. James gently stroked him under his chin.

Frank started slightly when Nell stepped forwards, but stuck around when he saw she had something in her hand: a bit of biscuit that she’d wrapped in a napkin. She held it out. Frank eyed James anxiously— can I trust this stranger?— and then sniffed at the biscuit and nipped it from her neatly, loping off into the safe dark part of the garden. James smiled as Nell laughed, and reached out for her to pull himself to his feet.

Robbie turned away. His heart felt painful in his chest. Was that all it took? he thought. Well, perhaps they’d be rowing again tomorrow. But this was the only way to heal a rift: by filling it with new stuff that wasn’t so painful. It got shallower, after a while; you could cross over it.

He went to find Laura. The party was winding down. Lizzie, hilariously tipsy, was telling Innocent all about the horrors of James as hospital patient, and how much worse he’d been when he’d got out (he’d gone through a phase of calling her four times a day, trying to long-distance micromanage their cases).

Innocent looked up when Robbie came near. “What a year it’s been,” she said. “I had no idea! So much drama!”

“Well, we got there in the end.”

“Apparently so.” She gazed at him thoughtfully. “I was going to say retirement suits you, Robbie. But it isn’t retirement. Or have you finally settled into it?”

“Don’t know,” Robbie said honestly. He thought back to the early days of retirement, plagued by solitude and a terrible restlessness. “Suppose I have. Finally got my house in order, maybe.”

“Mm. Perhaps I should have left you my cactus.”

Robbie studied her carefully. “I reckon you made the right decision, ma’am. He took very good care of it. Besides, I’m no good with plants.”

“No? Only with people.” She gave him a surprisingly kind, firm grin. Robbie felt oddly as though he’d received her endorsement. He wouldn’t’ve imagined he needed it, but it was reassuring all the same.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

By the time the last of the guests were trailing off, Robbie and Laura were both comfortably drunk with that long, slow drunk that comes of hosting parties, dashing down a drink here and there, till at the end of the night you find yourself clumsy and muzzy-minded, prone to fits of giddy laughter or falling asleep. Or, in Laura’s case, humming Gilbert and Sullivan while roaming round the kitchen, emptying out the ends of wine bottles and packing up cakes.

“Leave it,” Robbie said from where he was sprawled out on the sofa. “We can do it tomorrow.”

Laura ignored him. “Nell brought us a bottle of damson gin. It looks beautiful, I set it aside so no one would steal it. I made sure she got her gift from us as well, though I’m hoping she’ll stop by on Boxing Day.”

Nell had been one of the last to leave, embracing Robbie on the doorstep with a fierceness he hadn’t expected.

“Thank you,” she’d whispered. “Thank you, thank you.”

“You’ve nothing to thank me for,” Robbie’d said gently.

“Can’t I just feel grateful?” she’d said— and pulled back, sniffing a little, and then said, “Happy Christmas,” and: “Goodbye,” before she fled.

“Wonder if James would mind,” Robbie said now. “Is he still out in the garden?”

“Unless he’s frozen to death,” Laura said.

“You were the one who let him get away with not quitting smoking,” Robbie pointed out.

“As I’m sure you will remind me until the end of time.”

James was indeed smoking on the deck, though at least he’d put a coat on. A light snow was falling around him, the barest whisper of ice. James didn’t seem to notice it. He was staring off into the impenetrable dark of the sky.

“Come inside,” Robbie said. “Help us work out what to do with all this booze.”

“Yeah, I will,” James said, unmoving. “Just a minute.”

“Don’t know why you like the cold so much. Not like you’ve got much insulation on you.”

James exhaled pensively. “Places can be too comfortable,” he said. “Then you worry, Will I still feel the same way about something once I’m uncomfortable again?”

It was a jaw-droppingly straightforward answer, coming from James. Robbie considered it.

“Do you never think you’ll go on being comfortable?” he asked at last.

James shook his head, unspeaking: no.

“You might worry about that instead. Getting yourself comfortable.”

“I am,” James said. It wasn’t a protest. He was just stating something very plainly. “You’ve been really—“ He seemed to struggle with what to say next. He ground his cigarette out in the ashtray, watching the embers die with a quizzical expression. “Really— patient.”

Robbie waited.

“At first I thought you were being patient because you were waiting for me to recover. Or sort my life out, maybe. Go back to work. Now I don’t know what you’re waiting for. Maybe something that’s not going to happen.”

“I’m not waiting for anything,” Robbie said. He couldn’t help a fondly exasperated tone. “You’re not the ugly duckling or summat. I hate to break it to you, but I think it’s a bit late for you to turn into a swan.”

James squinted. “So what am I, then?”

“You’re just James. You don’t have to be anything else.” He paused. “I never meant to make you think you weren’t good enough. That you had to— I don’t know. Be a detective inspector, or go off to Spain to get rid of all your sins. You were always good enough.”

James’s expression didn’t change, but he looked down for a long moment. “Can I give you your Christmas present now? I know it’s a bit early.”

Feeling wrong-footed, Robbie said, “If you’d like to.”

James nodded, and turned to go inside. “It’s not wrapped or anything. I’ll get it from my room.”

Robbie waited in the kitchen. There was a strong Christmassy smell from the collection of biscuit tins and open bottles, red wine and brandy and sugar and rum. In the living room, Laura had fallen asleep on the sofa, and the blinking fairy lights on the tree freckled her with cheery auras of colour. She was snoring very softly.

James returned from his room, holding something the size and shape of a novel. He handed it to Robbie diffidently and took a careful step back, as though afraid of some explosion. He was holding his hands behind his back.

Robbie looked. It was a stack of postcards. The first was from Roncesvalles. Then Pamplona, Navarrete, Burgos, Léon, all the way across Spain. Cathedrals, windmills, vineyards, flowers. A statue of a knight killing a crocodile.

“I didn’t know what to say,” James said. “I kept buying them, but I never sent them. Nothing I could write ever seemed the right size or shape. I was afraid that you’d— I don’t know. But I saved them. They were for you. And I’ve had a lot of time lately to write. So I did.”

Robbie turned over the picture of the knight and the crocodile. James’s rambly handwriting read: This is meant to be St. George and the Dragon. A very English statue. I thought of you. I wish I could stick a spear right in the wriggling heart of whatever it is my dragon is. He turned to the next card, which had an image of a rose window. Recently being a human being feels a lot like being a stained glass window—— brittle when someone throws a rock through you. Someone else comes along and reforges the pieces. It takes ages. They’re so careful with the glass. Something Philip Larkin wrote about windows... Then the next card, a picture of a scallop-shell marker: “Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.” A fox in a trap will chew its own paw off. But if it lives it will heal, and we don’t call that strength...

“This is,” he said. He didn’t know what to say. He thought James could probably read it in his face by now. He curled his hands around the cards. “You know, you never told me why you turned around before you got to Santiago.”

James shrugged his odd one-shouldered shrug. There was a kind of shyness to him. “I suppose I wasn’t… ready. I wanted something. It was something important, and I wasn’t ready for it yet. Nell wants me to go to Mass with her on Sunday,” he added. “I told her I’d think about it.”

Robbie could almost see the James-logic working its way through this. He looked down at the cards again in silence. “What I want to give you for Christmas, I can’t give you,” he confessed. “You’ve already got a key to the house. You already live here. But I want you to know it’s your home. Whether or not you leave the police, whether or not you go to Mass. If you want it. For as long as you want it.”

James nodded. He had averted his face slightly. He stared at the floor. “Can I,” he said. “Can I—?”

He made an awkward, rather aborted gesture. Robbie interpreted it against all the evidence, and leant in so that James could hug him. It was a stiff, unpractised hug, as though James were trying to stay as far away as possible while also trying to get extremely close. The smell of snow and cigarette smoke had clung to his coat shoulders. Robbie pressed his face into the wool and tightened his arms around him. He wanted to communicate the idea of not letting go.

“I do,” James said, his voice muffled. “Just so you know.”

Christmas dawned bright and sunny, though very cold. James had got up early to go with Nell to Mass, which worked well, because— as he delicately said— the Lewis family needed some alone time. What this meant in reality was, more than anything, that James needed some time away from the Lewises. After three-and-a-half days of Lyn, Tim, and Jack, he’d begun to seem a little overwhelmed.

Robbie thought he could understand. Lyn was a lot. A lot like Val: cheerful and plain-speaking, exuberant in her affections. Tim, sweet, polite, conventional Tim, was sometimes drowned out by her. And Jack—

Jack’s Christmas gift to Robbie was an enormous handmade card on which he’d drawn an uninterpretable shape that— Lyn whispered, trying not to laugh— was meant to be Robbie in a very fast car. (“For some reason he’s obsessed with race cars. He thinks it’s the best thing you could possibly have.”) Someday Robbie would have to tell him about the Jag.

Inside, he’d written, in vast, irregular, and very careful letters: I WA T TU ALL WYS TEL YUE MERY CRISSMAS GRANPA I LOV YUE. Robbie tried hard not to grin. He could just picture Jack’s serious face as he gripped the red crayon that he had apparently used.

“Thank you,” he said. “I want to always tell you Merry Christmas as well. For a long time yet.”

Jack nodded solemnly and attached himself with octopus-like vigour to Robbie’s lower leg, pressing a kiss just above his kneecap before hurling himself back towards his pile of presents.

“He’s been practicing,” Lyn confided. “He’s getting better. When we read The Gruffalo, he can point to the words.”

It was hard not to think of James, child-James, absorbed in the Chronicles of Narnia. Nell hadn’t even been born yet. It was just James and his books on that vast estate. Maybe Scarlett Mortmaigne and Paul Hopkiss— strange children playing in the woods, in the shadow of danger. What must James make of Jack? This happy, ordinary creature who accepted as given that the world was full of kids like him, who would never be lonely, who would always be loved. Robbie was glad that Jack wasn’t like James. He suspected that James might’ve said the same. Certainly Robbie wasn’t disappointed in Jack. But he understood why James would find him difficult, disconcerting.

“You seem different,” Lyn said after a while, when they’d done opening presents, had had Christmas cake for breakfast, had gone through two pots of coffee, and had briefly released Jack to run shrieking through the garden, chasing blackbirds out of their nests in the back hedge (and probably causing a bit of a shock for old Frank, if he was under the deck).

“Do I?” Robbie reflected. They were reclining on the sofa. Jack had fallen asleep in his father’s arms, and Laura looked ready to follow, her head drooping onto Robbie’s shoulder. “Well, it’s been quite a year.”

“I know; hard to believe this time last year you were in New Zealand.”

“Hard for me. So much has happened since then.” Robbie absently covered Laura’s hand where it rested on his knee. “Good different or bad different?”

Lyn studied him. “Just different. Sometimes I worry you’ve got farther away from me. I wish we didn’t live so far apart. Every time I see you you’re different. You like opera now, and you cook, and you like foreign TV shows.” Laura had given James a complete set of a Danish detective drama called Mordfest, which was at least half, Robbie thought, a gift for herself.

“I don’t know if I like foreign TV shows. I haven’t watched it yet! And I only cook because James bullies me.”

“You’re such a liar. You like it.”

“Well, all right,” he said amicably. “But I’m still the same old me. I’ll always be your same old dad.”

He saw in her face the worry: would he be? Would she lose him? Would there be a point in the future that, once they went past, would mean they didn’t know each other any longer? He felt he’d had those same questions, but didn’t any longer. Something had changed. She was right; he was different. People grew. Not away, maybe, but outwards, covering more territory. James had had the same kind of fears; probably still did. Perhaps would always. But Robbie knew, felt it in his bones: it didn’t work like that.

“You promise?” Lyn said with a tremulous smile, looking for a moment like a child again.

Robbie said, “I promise.”

James returned in the late afternoon, after Lyn and Tim and Jack had left.

“Did you have a good time?” Robbie asked him. “Are you supposed to have a good time?”

“Any kind of joy means automatic excommunication,” James said, deadpan. He sat down, rubbing absently at his shoulder. He was walking a little easier these days, but still in a lot of pain. They’d have to talk to his surgeon about that in the new year. “Nell and I had lunch. Well. We had cake. And brandy. She gave me a jumper that someone she knows made for me in exchange for a cake. She does a whole trade in cakes, apparently. It’s a truly alarming jumper.”

But he lifted it out of its box rather tenderly. It was soft, enormously bulky, and red, green, and gold striped. It had very obviously been made by hand. Robbie had thought people didn’t make things like that by hand anymore. He said, “Just the thing to go with your new hat.”

One of his gifts to James had been an orange knit hat with fox ears. Robbie had thought it would be hilarious if James wore it to Mass. Disappointingly, James had refused.

James stroked the jumper thoughtfully. “I’ve told her I won’t apologise for what I feel isn’t wrong, and I don’t know yet if I can do that and be in the Church. But it’s not just that. It's... Do you remember when you asked me if I had a conversion experience in hospital?”

Robbie nodded with a certain amount of dread.

“I didn’t, but I had this dream. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I was still pretty out of it." He was looking down, abstracted, as though not quite present. "I dreamed a bird flew in through the window.”

“You told me,” Robbie said. “Or— well, you were confused. You thought it was a seagull.”

James said, “I think it was a dove. It sat on my chest and it just sort of pecked right at my heart, and I felt this lightness, like all the guilt had fallen away from me, and— all I had to do was be alive. That was enough. Just being alive. You were there next to me, you were sleeping. It didn’t— It didn't really feel like a dream.”

Robbie didn’t say what he thought, which was that there were a lot of ordinary explanations for this vision, and that of course James, who had trained to be a priest, would interpret a bird in a dream as being a dove, and would want absolution. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t want to offend James: he didn’t think it made a difference. It was meaningful if it was meaningful for James, if it offered him a promise of a way back towards God and love. He’d always known James needed God in a way he didn’t, in a way that was closed and mysterious to him.

“Seems like a good idea,” he said. “Wherever it came from.”

James looked at him, a smile playing on his lips. “You don’t believe any of it.”

Robbie shrugged. “Does it matter what I believe?” Then he changed his mind. “I believe you should be happy. If I thought there was a God, I can’t see as he’d be different. Something he created. He’d want that.”

James’s expression was unreadable, thoughtful.

“Ah, come on,” Robbie said, and ruffled his hair lightly. “There’s some more cake waiting to be eaten, and Laura wants to put her pirate show on. What’s it called again?”

“Five Fathoms. Apparently it’s about Benjamin Hornigold, the famous pirate turned pirate hunter.” James got an abstracted, lecturing look. “A fathom, of course, is six feet, the depth corpses were buried at sea, thus six feet under, but in fact it originally came from the term for an embrace. Fæðm, in Old English. The hold of your arms around someone. They used to it talk about the embrace of angels, engla fæðmum, in the texts. I always thought that was funny.”

Robbie wasn’t really listening; he’d lost James at Old English and gone to fetch the DVDs instead. “So if it’s about a real bloke, isn’t it all on Wikipedia already? The whole story?”

James wrinkled his nose. “I suppose so. More or less. But that’s not really the point, is it?”

“What’s not the point?” asked Laura, coming down the stairs slightly short of breath. “I’d better not catch you trying to start without me.”

“Finding out what happens next,” James said.

“Oh, I don’t know. I rather like not knowing.” She tucked her legs up under her on the sofa and wrapped an afghan over her shoulders. James, next to her, tugged his fox hat on and settled the red, green, and gold jumper on his lap. Robbie popped the DVD into the player and grabbed the remote before turning to find a place between them, settling with a sigh of great satisfaction into the space that had been prepared for him.

EPILOGUE

1 January 2017 at 14:21

From: “Nell Hathaway” <[email protected]>
To: “D.I. Robbie Lewis” <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Frosty Update

It was lovely to see you at the All Saints New Year’s fundraiser, even if only for a minute! I do hope James made it home all right; he had rather too much champagne. (I suppose he’s got out of the habit! Not a bad thing.) I think his pianist was driving him, something about talking over some four-handed piano motets. They all seem in very good spirits, the band I mean. I actually heard James singing at one point and thought Hell had frozen over. He used to always hate to sing.

I’m really writing though because I think you’ll enjoy this story: someone left a box of kittens on the doorstep of the priory last night! Father Graham found them early this morning, they were nearly half-frozen. Poor things! Well, better than drowning them, I suppose. Of course we’ve taken them in and are nursing them, and we’re going to find them homes. They’re all tabbies. One of them has too many toes, and such a cross little look on his face! I’m desperately resisting the urge to adopt him, but I suspect I may succumb in the end. I suppose I think— I never thought I could keep something alive, but after this past season, I think: who knows. There is so much more life in things than I expected, even maybe (most of all) in me.

Happy New Year to all of you. I hope it’s a good one.

Nell

p.s. I’m sending Laura the recipe for the mincemeat, do make sure she gets it!

Attachment 1: kittens.jpg
Attachment 2: tamurlainethekitten-sogrumpy.jpg

Notes:

Title from W.H. Auden's "Thanksgiving for a Habitat."
Pillardusk is inspired by so many things...... most obviously by Poldark, but also by Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. (SORRY.)
There are some passing references to Madeleine L'Engle's Murry books and to The Chronicles of Narnia, and one brief quotation from Clarence Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore.
Probably don't make friends with urban foxes without at least consulting a wildlife expert first.
I'm on Tumblr, and so is this fic!

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Jackie Thomas (Jackie_Thomas) on Chapter 1 Sat 30 Jul 2016 04:05PM UTC

I'm so enjoying this, my weekend treat. You more or less had me when Lewis remembers deciding to love James because no one else seemed to want the job. What a beautiful thought and very them. Lewis thoughts about James and his gentle care are wonderful. You've really captured how he accepts James as he is. I wonder how long I can hold out for chapter two.

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 1 Sun 31 Jul 2016 01:53AM UTC
  
  (I almost wanted to warn you when I saw this comment, like, "Chapter Two is... uh... very different!" But apparently it turned out okay. )
  
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danahid on Chapter 1 Sun 07 Aug 2016 03:34AM UTC

I'm loving this. I've laughed out loud, smiled, stopped and reread in wonder a perfectly phrased observation or description; I've felt my heart squeeze in empathy for James' loneliness. I have specially liked this:
He had a curious urge to protect James, as though Lyn might not quite understand his James-ness. Like Laura’s Laura-ness. Some quality he was enormously proud of. Or, no— “proud of,” those weren’t the right words. He was proud that he’d been granted special access to something so very valuable and deserving of love. He wanted others to see and appreciate this, but James was… James was hard to know.
So true to every character and their interactions with each other!

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theodora_dove on Chapter 1 Sun 23 Apr 2017 02:44AM UTC

AUGH you've written the james hathaway i identify with so much and it's both terrible and WONDERFUL (but mainly the latter)

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Hbfan26 (Guest) on Chapter 1 Fri 08 May 2020 10:27PM UTC

"perhaps it was because someone so badly needed to do it, and no one else seemed to want the job"
I think this genuinely.and honestly might be my favourite like of Lewis fanfiction ever !

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chipper on Chapter 1 Sat 12 Oct 2024 05:15AM UTC

But he was thinking of Morse. Morse, who had thanked him. For what? He hadn’t made Morse less unhappy. He’d been what he himself had assumed James was, at the start: some cheerful, witless youth who hadn’t really suffered. Who hadn’t yet grown into the shoes grief was preparing for him. He’d always felt that he had failed Morse, in some sense; not for lack of trying— because he had handed over so much of himself, so much that in some ways he’d found himself remade— but simply because, in the end, Morse couldn’t be fixed. The despair that had almost had him as a child had never stopped hunting. Nothing Lewis had done had ever gotten it off his trail.
Here I am reading and chuckling over Robbie’s bemusement at Laura’s telly and you punch me directly in my Morse feels

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theonlytwin on Chapter 2 Wed 27 Jul 2016 07:52AM UTC

this is excellent, the shifts in register are expertly done. also PILLARDUSK

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 2 Wed 27 Jul 2016 02:28PM UTC
  
  Thanks! I admit Pillardusk was a source of great joy and hilarity to me as I was writing.
  
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quintin (Guest) on Chapter 2 Wed 26 Jun 2019 04:22AM UTC

this is wonderful and excellent.
on a slightly unrelated note, i must ask if pillardusk is partially inspired at all by the lymond chronicles? just, the bit about russell smolder's mother marrying his "grandfather" before his father, and russell having a secret child made me wonder.

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theodora_dove on Chapter 3 Wed 27 Jul 2016 03:33AM UTC

I really enjoyed this! Such a good job capturing Hathaway's prickliness, and the careful dance of Lewis's interactions with him, and the challenges of caring for someone you don't understand, and of being cared for by someone who doesn't understand you. I loved how you portrayed the complexity of their relationship (and all the relationships) with such deftness, delicacy, and devastating flashes of truth. Hathaway + happiness (begrudging, hard-earned, but ultimately satisfying) is my OTP, and your story is a glorious indulgence for that impulse.
Also enjoyed picking up on the references along the way -- the weird biology of The Wind in the Door, the Sayers shout-out (Hathaway reading DLS is my new headcanon!), and the sly nod to the ridiculousness of Lymond.
Oh, and well done on Lewis's voice in his emails!

Last Edited Wed 27 Jul 2016 03:35AM UTC

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Wed 27 Jul 2016 02:29PM UTC
  
  Thank you so much! Sometimes I'm not sure if Hathaway would like Sayers (I'm conscious of criticisms of her) but I think probably she would at least be a guilty pleasure.
  
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Connie (Guest) on Chapter 3 Wed 27 Jul 2016 06:36PM UTC

I don't really know what to say but thank you for writing this. It's been ages since I last watched Lewis but this brought it all back, so I guess that means you captured the characters perfectly. I've bookmarked it so I can come back and read it again, because I know I'll want to reread it in the future. It's really wonderful.

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Wed 27 Jul 2016 09:13PM UTC
  
  Thank you! I love these characters so much that capturing them is the best thing I can do.
  
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bienfilatre on Chapter 3 Wed 27 Jul 2016 10:04PM UTC

That was so lovely! Much refreshed by this Christmas story in July. Thank you!

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Wed 27 Jul 2016 10:37PM UTC
  
  Thanks! I didn't set out to write a Christmas story, but somehow it was irresistible when I realized how centrally the story was going to be about family....
  
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2. 1. bienfilatre on Chapter 3 Fri 29 Jul 2016 01:19AM UTC
    
    I turned my mom onto it, and she's upstairs now reading for a second time. :) I love dragging her into fandoms, and you've definitely helped bring her into the Morseverse!
    (BTW she said specifically that she loved the prose style, and that you got the character voices just right. BOOYAH.)
    
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tritonvert on Chapter 3 Wed 27 Jul 2016 10:15PM UTC

Oh, this was very good--very, very good. I appreciate your kindness towards parents in this story--towards all the generations. Quite a lot here rang true to me, since this summer I've been negotiating my own share of grandparent-parent-child relationship complication.

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Wed 27 Jul 2016 10:46PM UTC
  
  Thank you! I don't know if I set out to be kind to parents, but I wanted to investigate families in a way that was truthful. Fortunately I think the show lends itself to that.
  
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aintyousomethin (Guest) on Chapter 3 Thu 28 Jul 2016 12:50AM UTC

It's taken me all day to be able to comment on this amazing story and I know I still won't do it justice. There is so much to absorb that I'll be reading it again and again. I love your characterization of James, Robbie and Laura. They are all so fully developed and this reads like a true story. I have loved spending time with these three and I can tell that you have too. What an impressive tribute to the show. I second the comment I saw about it being Christmas in July. I was so happy to see such a long story and by a wonderful new voice in this fandom. It would be selfish to hope for another story so soon after this but I know I'll be watching for anything you write.

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Thu 28 Jul 2016 06:10PM UTC
  
  Thank you! It's true, I did love spending time with them— everyone in this universe is so fun to write! I always swear I'm NEVER GOING TO WRITE ANYTHING AGAIN after writing a long story, but inevitably I do, so...
  
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Digs on Chapter 3 Thu 28 Jul 2016 01:01PM UTC

This is so wonderful! This isn't a very precise way of talking, but the impression I had was that Robbie was doing his best to see around the corners of James' James-ness, and then Nell's as well, because you do such a beautiful job of representing their fraught history in little glimpses--it's not really like my relationship with my brother but it still reminded me intensely of the way I interact with my brother. I love the way Robbie keeps telling himself he's just worried about James' relationship with God even while he's actually doing his own theological heavy lifting about grief and family and time. The emails basically had me clutching my chest as Robbie just determinedly Robbies Nell INTO THE D*MNED FOLD, omg, I will send you pictures of Frank until your WOUNDS are HEALED! And your description of what their house is like with Hathaway in it made me incredibly homesick for my own found-family house. I'm deep in my feels :0

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Thu 28 Jul 2016 06:54PM UTC
  
  Haha thank you! This is basically what I was going for, so I'm very happy it works!
  
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2. breathedout on Chapter 3 Sun 14 Aug 2016 09:11PM UTC
  
  Yes. Everything Digs said. :-)
  
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Jackie Thomas (Jackie_Thomas) on Chapter 3 Sat 30 Jul 2016 11:22PM UTC

Thank you for this beautiful story. Your writing is exquisite and I love the way you write these characters, especially Robbie's voice. I really like how James is gradually folded into the family, it is such a satisfying resolution.

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Sun 31 Jul 2016 01:53AM UTC
  
  Thank you!
  
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therebutforthe on Chapter 3 Mon 01 Aug 2016 12:10AM UTC

This is AMAZING, I'd forgotten how much I love these characters and now I have to go rewatch all of Lewis and cry. The difference in email styles between Robbie and Nell is such a great piece of characterization

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Wed 03 Aug 2016 09:30PM UTC
  
  Thank you! Nothing could make me happier than to entice someone back into watching Lewis again...
  
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wendymr on Chapter 3 Mon 01 Aug 2016 08:53PM UTC

I've taken five days to read this wonderful story, not because it actually took that long to read, but because I didn't want to finish it. From the horror of James being shot, and every step of his painful physical recovery, to the painful steps of Robbie and Laura impressing on him that he is loved, he is welcome, he is all right whatever he decides to do, I was savouring every word, often with a lump in my throat. Nell's insights into James: he doesn't know how to be loved, he can't understand kindness; and James's own explanation that he hates feeling comfortable because of how he'll feel when he's back feeling uncomfortable again - these all rang so true, and made my heart ache.
The postcards, and James wanting to hug Robbie, were cathartic - both for the two of them and for me! And Robbie's open, honest invitation to James to stay with them was the healing moment James needed.
Lovely story, one that will be downloaded for much re-reading. Thank you!

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Wed 03 Aug 2016 09:59PM UTC
  
  Wow! Thank you so much!
  
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greenapricot on Chapter 3 Wed 03 Aug 2016 04:18PM UTC

This reads and feels exactly how I think an episode of Lewis would it focused on the relationships within the show instead of a case. Which is to say everyone is so delightfully I character and I love it very, very, much.

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Sat 06 Aug 2016 03:50PM UTC
  
  This is the highest possible praise!
  
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tetsubinatu on Chapter 3 Thu 04 Aug 2016 11:16AM UTC

This was such a treat! Now I wish I'd read slower so that it wasn't over. :) Thank you.

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Sat 06 Aug 2016 03:50PM UTC
  
  Thanks!
  
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ecars01s on Chapter 3 Sat 06 Aug 2016 06:21PM UTC

Adult adoption of James has always been needed. Thanks for writing it.

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Fri 12 Aug 2016 05:20PM UTC
  
  Haha I agree! I wish more people would write it!
  
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Linguini on Chapter 3 Thu 11 Aug 2016 02:37PM UTC

I cannot find the words for how much I love this fic. 'Gorgeous' isn't quite strong enough. Nor are 'magnificent' or 'magical' or 'sublime.' It's soft and sweet and the perfect mix of the heavenly and the mundane. I am in awe.

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1. kvikindi on Chapter 3 Fri 12 Aug 2016 05:49PM UTC
  
  WOW! Amazing words! Thank you!
  
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