Fic: Nerves (Lewis)
Title: Nerves
Author: heron236
Rating: PG 15
Genre: Romance
Pairings/Characters: Lewis/Hathaway, Hobson/OMC, Zoe Suskin/OMC, Prof. Bernie Rutherford
Word count: c. 9,000
Disclaimer: The main characters and their back-stories are Colin Dexter’s/ITV’s/the ITV writers’. Their physical tics are presumably the actors’ work. I’m just paying homage.
Summary: Sequel to Partners; begins the afternoon before Lewis and Hathaway’s appointment at the Registry Office.
Spoilers: Set, like Partners, after 5.4 “The Gift of Promise”. Does (rather gratuitously) mention a number of culprits.
Author’s note: Oddly influenced by (/rips off) the endings of Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell - apologies to the shades of those two if they’re aware! Direct quotes from Andrew Marvell and Ash; subliminal quotes from The Magnetic Fields.
Many thanks to touchshriek for cheerleading and beta-ing. I’m glad you liked the puffins!
*******************************
He’d found and paid for his book (for the record, Another Country by James Baldwin), and now Hathaway was browsing in the History section, waiting for Lewis to come for him. But when he glanced up it was Zoe Suskin he saw heading his way, looking disconsolate.
“Zoe! What’s up?”
“I wanted to follow up this reference, but the library copy’s in use and here they say it’s out of print…”
“Let’s see.” She let him take the details out of her hand. “Oh, I’ve got that. Somewhere. Not unpacked yet, but I can dig it out. I’ll drop it off at college for you.”
Her face brightened. “Really? Oh, thank you James!”
“No problem.”
Looking past her across the shop, his attention was caught, and he slouched down even further against the bookcase, so that he was closer to her level when he pointed over her shoulder: “Hey, what about him? Over there, in Classics.”
Zoe gave a perfunctory glance and then looked at him steadily. “Are you trying to help me because you can’t help your younger self?”
Another of her scalpel questions. Reflexively, he pulled back, his chin jerking up in defence. His body having given him away, none of the deflective responses he could think of were likely to convince, so, their eyes still locked, he let his head drop forwards again, levelling out his gaze, and attempted to call her bluff - also known as giving in: “Possibly.”
They both smiled, and he added “You didn’t have a proper look.”
She responded automatically, as if they were playing a memory game: “He’s got wavy brown hair and grey eyes and he’s reading Thucydides.”
Hathaway narrowed his eyes at her to show that she had incriminated herself, and Zoe looked, briefly, unusually coy. She sighed. “It’s just that I’d really rather have time to get to know someone, before having to…expose myself.”
He raised his eyebrows to signal the innuendo, and she rolled her eyes and in retaliation added, “Although maybe not five years…”
He tried to look dignified and not laugh, but he couldn’t manage it. “Huh. I did see some people in the meantime, you know.” She looked quizzical. “Women who were prepared to make the running, in fact, which goes to show…”
She was unconvinced. In a lower voice Hathaway continued, “You know, I had to ask to be his Sergeant, otherwise I’d have only spent one case with him.” He nodded back towards the student. “Have another look.”
“I know what he looks like: I’ve seen him before, in the library,” she said, making Hathaway smile, but she still turned.
At that moment, the subject looked up, and she squeaked with alarm. Lewis, strolling towards them, was amused to see her whirl back round, grab the book that Hathaway was holding, and open it at random. Reaching them, he said “Surveillance operation, is it?”
Zoe shuddered at him. “James wants me to talk to that boy.”
“Ah, does he now.” Lewis took his own look. “That one? He’s what - 12?”
“Well, so’s Zoe…” Hathaway countered, keen, for her own good, to tease her into acting like a stroppy teenager occasionally.
“I’m 16!” she retorted.
“You’re right then,” Hathaway continued, to Lewis, “he’s too young for her.”
Zoe elbowed him.
Still considering the target, Lewis added ruminatively, “He’s a slow reader…”
Zoe was defensive: “He is reading it in the original Ancient Greek..!”
But Hathaway knew Lewis’ tones better. “No, he might have something there, Zoe. His attention’s not on the book…”
Lewis nodded. “And despite you two being so obvious, he’s still here…”
“Right,” Hathaway said decisively, suddenly pushing himself upright and propelling Zoe across the room in front of him. Raising his voice, he began his own, one-sided, conversation: “It should be about here, Zoe. Thucydides, Thucydides, yes. Perhaps this gentleman can tell you what he thinks of this edition. You never know, he might even play chess…”
He side-stepped round the intended, steering Lewis ahead of him with a hand placed in the small of his back. After they’d covered a short distance, he turned to check on Zoe, who as he’d expected was scowling after him. Then she realised that the young man was eyeing her expression with alarm, and they both giggled nervously. The boy spoke first. “Do you really play chess?”
Heading for the doors, the two men exchanged looks - Lewis’ slightly challenging and Hathaway’s slightly rueful.
“More matchmaking?”
Hathaway shrugged. “You’ve got to spread the joy…”
Lewis smiled appreciatively, but said carefully, “She will be all right - she’s bright, she’ll make her way….”
“I know. But she does need friends,” Hathaway replied, with an unavoidably defensive edge.
“I know,” Lewis said lightly, trying not to sound too understanding.
***
As they worked their way towards the outside table where Laura was sitting, Lewis asked, with a nod towards the bag in Hathaway’s hand, “What did you get?”
“Another one from my reading list.”
“Of course, you can’t just be in a same-sex relationship, you have to read up on the background.,,”
“Of course,” Hathaway said, his eyes twinkling appreciatively, then added, looking past Lewis, “Although probably best not to pour coffee on the lady, even in your moment of insight…”
Lewis turned back to see his coffee cup tilting dangerously towards the woman whose table they were passing. “Oh, I’m sorry!”
“You’re ok - you didn’t get me,” she said, smiling up at them. She continued to smile to herself as they carried on, having been speculating about them since she first saw them going into the café.
As they weren’t working, they each conscientiously kissed Laura on the cheek, as if, she thought, she were a great-aunt.
“All this patronising kissing!” she complained. “I have got a love-life of my own, you know!”
“Yes, where is it, sorry, he?” asked Lewis, looking about.
“He’ll be here shortly,” she said, and had a quick look at her phone to check that she hadn’t missed a message.
The two men exchanged slightly shame-faced smiles and then Hathaway said “Apparently,” (he had begun using this preface to emphasise that he too had not always known whatever fact he was about to pass on), “the first coffeehouse in Britain was in Oxford.”
“Really? Where, exactly?” asked Laura.
“I don’t know - I didn’t get that far.”
Lewis gave him the look of ostentatious surprise which no longer needed to be glossed with a reference to “your so-called speed-reading”, and which Hathaway acknowledged with a mock-rueful smile.
“This is what comes of leaving him in Blackwell’s while I saw the…”
- Laura raised her eyebrows as Hathaway put his fingers in his ears and began to hum -
“…solicitor.”
Laura looked from Hathaway to Lewis. “Why is…?”
“To update my will,” he added, and she began to see. “For the baby as well - I…”
Hathaway dropped his hands quickly and said, with airy cunning: “There’s a new picture…”
“Oh yes,” said Lewis, easily diverted, “I’ve got to show you this…”
And with admirable restraint Hathaway sat back and let Lewis slowly bring the photo up on his phone himself.
“There you go,” he said, passing it across to Laura.
“Oh, how lovely…”
Lewis beamed proudly.
After a moment Laura realised that she could think of nothing to add, and, handing back the phone, asked, “So how is Lyn?”
“Exhausted, poor love. But they sent us a present, from Mark as well: whisky tumblers.”
“How macho,” she said, and Hathaway’s lips twitched and Lewis raised his eyebrows at him in appreciation of the sally. “Talking of ‘The Event’, what are you wearing tomorrow?”
“Clothes,” said Lewis, provokingly.
“Nice clothes,” added Hathaway.
“Ok…”
“Floral waistcoats, cravats,” Lewis crunched his complimentary biscuit, “top hats…”
Hathaway gave in: “New suits.”
“You can’t have too many, apparently…”
“Not ones that actually fit…”
She gave them what was intended to be a quelling look.
“ ‘New suits’…That’s a lot of help, thank you. What I want to know is what should I wear?”
“Whatever you like, Laura.”
“You’re sure to look lovely.”
“Thank you, James, but my main concern is looking appropriate.”
“Oh, stuff that,” he said dismissively with his most po-faced expression, and then the pair opposite her dissolved into giggles.
Her mouth was twitching but she narrowed her eyes:
“Or I could be arrested for battery and not be there at all…?” and was unable to stop herself adding, in the same mock-repressive vein, “You do realise that this is an important occasion - a public display of your commitment?”
She instantly regretted it as both pairs of eyes were drawn to her in surprise, and Hathaway’s flickered towards Lewis and then down to the wobbly table.
It was Lewis who managed a tension-easing mock-grumble:
“We seem to go public every day just by existing - after tomorrow he’s threatening to raise his ring-finger to anyone who honks…”
Laura found herself wondering what they were doing in the street to get themselves honked at. Gazing at each other as if no-one else existed, probably - it was a habit of theirs. Hoping to redeem herself, she turned to Hathaway:
“There will be rings, then?”
“Just collected them,” he said, looking over to Lewis for permission and then taking the midnight-blue box out of his inner jacket pocket.
He carefully slid the catch for Laura, lifted out one of the matching silver bands, and tilted it so that she could see their initials, engraved inside.
“Oh, James…”
He smiled back at her with gratitude.
At that moment an approaching figure caught her eye.
“Here’s Elliott now,” she said, standing to wave.
Hathaway stowed the box away safely and glanced surreptitiously at Lewis, whose attention seemed to have wandered. He put a hand on his arm, Lewis started then smiled at him, and they both stood and turned, ready to be introduced.
***
Ambling home side-by-side, Hathaway waited as Lewis pondered, his right hand dancing over the passing stonework.
Eventually Lewis said “Hmm.”
“ ‘Hmm’ ?”
“A bit smooth…”
“More than a bit. But he is a consultant - it goes with the job.”
“Good-looking?”
“I suppose so,” Hathaway said, pretending to consider, then glanced across, one eye closed against the low sun, to add lightly, “Not my type.”
Lewis grinned but returned the casual tone: “Ah, but you’ve got strange taste.”
Hathaway ducked his head, smiling, and then met his eyes: “And you haven’t?”
They held each other’s gaze for a handful of paces, and Lewis’ hand fleetingly glided over Hathaway’s lower back, before he returned to his list of questions:
“Too smooth, do we think?”
“He seemed sincere enough. I’m sure she knows what she’s doing. We might not have seen him at his best, though - I think we unnerved him.”
“What, us?”
“Well, you were giving him the casually sceptical tone combined with the narrowed stare.”
“No harm in his knowing we’ve got our eyes on him.”
Hathaway snorted. “Poor bloke.”
***************
***************
Hathaway sat on the kitchen table with his feet on a chair, a tea-towel over his knee as he waited for something else to dry, idly rolling the two rings across the table beside him: trundle, trundle, trundle, clattering spin to a halt; trundle, trundle, trundle, oops: chink as one hit the wine bottle…
“Stop that, will you?” Lewis snapped, without turning round.
“Sorry.”
Hathaway quickly stilled the rings, put them back in their slots, tried to close the box quietly (so that the answering “snap” seemed, combatively, louder than ever), and then set it down gently on the table.
He put the tea-towel aside and slid tentatively off the table, watching Lewis’ back as he remained stock-still, standing in front of the sink. The periods of distraction had become more frequent as the evening went on, and now they seemed to have reached a crisis point.
“Is…?” He cleared his throat and made a second attempt. “Is it the rings? Are they too much?”
“Not… Not just the rings.”
Lewis glanced across the room at a photo of Val, and then returned to gazing down at the baking dish in front of him.
“We could just let that soak,” said Hathaway, trying desperately to sound natural, and moving forward to within touching distance before hesitating.
No reply.
It was no good. Hathaway felt the old plummeting sensation as if he’d never been free of it. Fleetingly, he wanted to rush out, distraught. His body actually tensed. But how would he know when it was the right moment to come home, and what good would such melodrama do either of them? He studied the creases on the back of Lewis’ shirt, fighting to regain his recent confidence, and his turbulent emotions threw up a painfully idiotic surge of anger at Lewis for making this crisis inevitable by suggesting that they get hitched at all.
He slipped away into the living-room, where some Palestrina was still playing, and was briefly soothed and then overwhelmed by the polyphony. He crossed to the stereo to turn it off; read a line of the sleeve notes of a Jefferson Airplane LP that was lying out; laid a hand in benediction on the headstock of his guitar; took out a half-empty packet of cigarettes from the guitar case, put one in his mouth and then removed it again. He picked up a book from the coffee table and, putting it back, leant on its shelf, head down. After a moment he puffed out his cheeks, exhaled sharply, and stood up to his full height. When he returned to the kitchen, he felt as if he’d been away for hours. Lewis hadn’t moved.
As Hathaway settled diagonally into the door-frame - always sensible when earthquakes threaten, he thought distractedly - Lewis finally spoke again:
“Chloe Brooks… As good as dead, it seemed. Days before Val…
And then she came back. Woke up, still in that moment - the party, the attack - December 2002 all over again.
She came back as if no time had passed, but Val’s long gone. How is it possible?
When I think about that, it’s like the years in between disappear for me too - as if I’m starting from scratch all over again…”
Starting from scratch. As Hathaway had been in December 2002 - safely through the assessment, waiting to hear if he’d passed the fitness and medical and would soon be starting initial training…
In the immediate aftermath of the conversation with Will he’d felt no obvious upheaval, not even once he’d seen him again after Will had gone back to The Garden. He’d been so sure - of his path, of the rightness of the doctrine. But the reaction set in before his mind caught up. Part of the attraction for him of the priesthood had been the chance to continue to think deeply about the most fundamental questions - to discuss them with others who didn’t find seriousness laughable and without academia’s preoccupation with funding and assessment. But then, for the first time, the thrill of immersion with apparently like-minded souls in a shared canon wore thin. Strangely lethargic and disconsolate, he took a leave of absence from the seminary. Holed up with the poetry of John Donne among others, he found himself yearning so strongly for the generosity of spirit, the humanity, and the love he rediscovered there that he managed to return for just a week before, erratic and distracted, he was sent away, or sent himself away.
But as for what came next… For a time he didn’t have the energy to see a future beyond the next day. But then he happened upon a copy of Edward Thomas’ In Pursuit of Spring, and was coaxed out to look for the signs of the coming Spring himself. The return of life to the hedgerows which he monitored on his daily round, chain-smoking as he went, struck him as an unoriginal source of solace, but was no less effective for all that. Within the comforting rhythm of his walks (reminiscent of patrolling the estate with his father), he was able to acknowledge to himself his fear that he’d lost sight of the respect and compassion due to each uncertain individual embroiled in the confusions of human interaction. He himself had in the past tried to deny his own distress by occupying - cramming - himself with religion, music, exercise, and anything else available to be devoured - literature, history… But he’d gone too far in detaching himself, and meanwhile his anger, and his grief for his younger self, had still to be faced.
It was then that the idea of joining the police grew upon him - a way to help the injured through the darkness of whatever strange trick life had played on them, beyond debilitating anger and distress, to a place of understanding; within what he judged from the outside to be a brisk and collaborative professional culture that would keep him focussed, prevent him brooding, and demand a no-nonsense façade behind which he could hide.
It was Lewis’ generosity of spirit, humanity and love that had undone him, or made him - given him the confidence to relax (awkwardly, but the awkwardness had played its part in provoking Lewis’ tenderness) into a version of himself that he hadn’t quite expected.
Their relationship, even in its platonic incarnation, was, quite simply, the best thing that had ever happened to him. And that was not the case for Lewis. It wasn’t anyone’s fault - the age difference made it nigh-on inevitable. And if he could save Lewis the pain he was in now and all the previous years of suffering, if he could whisk Val out of the path of that car, he would. Even though the relationship they had now or had had previously would never have happened. Their paths could still have crossed at the station, but Lewis the contented family man would have had a home to go to, would not have had the time, and the insight due to his own sadness, to sense and worry at the chinks in the façade. And if he had not begun to unbend under Lewis’ attention and example, would he have shown to Fiona so much of the vulnerability that she could not quite like in a man? Luckily for them both, she hadn’t been one to wait while he learnt how to handle himself in a relationship. He closed his eyes: too many what-ifs - he needed to focus.
Lewis was speaking again:
“When it seems such a short time ago, it seems strange to be choosing rings…and talking about a public commitment - disloyal, almost, when I think what we had together, what we were to each other…”
Husband and wife, with all the historical and cultural weight that went with those terms. Their union had no doubt delighted their respective families, and they had created a nuclear family of their own - built their own world… He winced yet again at the memory of his petulant “it’s not my fault you lost your wife, sir” at the end of their very first day together, goaded into overreaction by a thousand far more snide remarks about God and the priesthood. Someone else might have hit him, but instead the next day Lewis had been the one to apologise.
All he could say now was “We don’t need to do this…”
Not when it set up a comparison, a competition, which he could not win if he wanted to (and how hopeless was the part of him that did).
He forced himself to take a deep breath, and release it, and then advanced to lay a tentative hand on Lewis’ shoulder. When he didn’t recoil, he took up his characteristic kitchen posture - right arm looped around Lewis’ neck, palm laid flat over his heart, chin resting against his hair. They were both tense, and he almost lost faith. Then he thought to pass Lewis a handkerchief with his free hand, and Lewis wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and finally relaxed against him, placing a hand on his.
When Hathaway eventually drew back, Lewis half-turned after him with an unconscious murmur of protest, and Hathaway wanted to shout his relief. Instead he adjusted his height so that he wasn’t looming, gave Lewis space, and said, diffidently, with a gesture towards the jewellery box sitting on the table, “Forget about all this. Why don’t you take me through the pictures - tell me about Val…”
Lewis blinked at him.
“Please. She’s… She’s part of who you are - I’d be honoured if you’d share that with me.”
Lewis’ mouth twisted, and then he rubbed his eyes and shuffled out of the room, looking very much his age. Turning to follow, Hathaway was uncertain as to what was happening, and attempted to lurk unobtrusively just inside the door of the living-room. Lewis reappeared with a photo album, and, sitting down on the sofa, placed it on the coffee-table in front of him.
“I did one of these each for the kids as well. Not much, is it.”
Hathaway made a noise which inevitably failed to articulate both disagreement and consolation, and edged round onto the sofa, giving Lewis rather more space than usual.
Lewis looked at him with a hint of rallying wryness: “You’ll need to sit closer than that if you’re going to see...”
In his current mood this felt like a second proposal, but Hathaway managed to fight down a foolish smile as he shifted over.
Lewis picked up the album and opened it so that it rested across their knees. Hathaway looked down and saw a first double-page spread alternating a small boy and a small girl growing into adolescence, alone and with parents, siblings and cousins. And then over the page they were together - in a garden, by the sea, and there it was: the wedding photograph. And after that more and more pictures: of the young family at home and with grandparents; the children laughing, crying, playing with cousins, blowing out candles; holiday photos of all four and then two, arm-in-arm, hair ruffled in some long-lost breeze - foretelling a happy retirement never to come; silly snaps of home-life, including Lewis sitting on a ladder, spattered with paint, waving a brush at the camera…
At first they were almost silent, Lewis buffeted by memory and loss, and Hathaway, well-aware of it, wondering why he’d thought this might help. But he pushed himself to ask, in a detached tone, about individuals and locations, and Lewis became increasingly forthcoming, eventually spontaneously describing each occasion, and flicking back and forth to show comparisons. A number of times he laughingly recalled squabbles that had gone on behind the scenes: the tent for which he hadn’t checked there were enough pegs; the dress that he’d let Lyn wear when Val had told her she couldn’t; the birthday meal that was spoilt because he and Mark were back late from Mark’s first legal pub drink… The irreplaceable ups and downs of everyday family life, Hathaway thought sadly. Then he realised that he was being given a gift. This had been a happy, but ordinary, marriage - not the epitome of impossible perfection that he’d been accustomed to think it.
The album ended, of course, with the familiar, last picture of Val. Lewis rubbed his thumb meditatively across the corner of the page, and then eventually closed the volume and wiped his eyes. Looking about him, feeling drained but oddly renewed, he noticed for the first time Hathaway’s preoccupied air as he sat staring ahead. Moving past with the album, he leaned unnecessarily on Hathaway’s shoulder, and returned with two tumblers of whisky. He waved one in front of Hathaway, who, reverie broken, cupped both hands to receive it, and then sprawled back onto the sofa.
“So. Now you tell me something.”
“Something in particular?”
“No… Actually, yes - tell me about winning the Boat Race.” Hathaway grunted in surprise. “Is there a picture?”
“Mm…” he said vaguely and, putting down his glass, headed off into the spare room, which was still full of boxes they hadn’t yet unpacked.
Lewis called after him, “It’ll be in the last box you try, so try that one first!”
“Right…” came back faintly, and Lewis smiled to himself, picturing the raised eyebrows which went with that tone.
After a while he added, “Oh, watch out, by the way - I think I saw a spider in there earlier…”
There was a distant noise of disbelief. “You do know that joke’s worn thin?”
“Not for me it hasn’t. And one day I’ll be telling the truth…”
“I know: it’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, except that I’m the one who’ll be eaten…” Hathaway said dryly as he came back into the room, holding the framed presentation set out in front of him as if it belonged to someone else.
“Ah, a diptych…” said Lewis sagely, successfully prompting a smile.
The left-hand photograph was of the eight on the water at the moment of victory; on the right the rowers were standing in a line on the bank, the shivering cox dripping on the end, arms around shoulders and necks to hold each other up. Their printed names and scrawled signatures ran across the foot.
Hathaway sat back, disassociating himself from the pictures, while Lewis studied the younger version, red-faced and glassy-eyed with exertion like the others, sagging between the men either side, clearly very fit but dwarfed in stature by some of his fellows.
“We might have seen you on the telly - those special features they have beforehand; the interviews afterwards. Val loved those human interest pieces - the athletes filmed in their kitchens eating eight Weetabix for breakfast…”
“I couldn’t speak afterwards. And depending on who you were supporting, you might have turned off by then…”
“Ah, that does depend - on the week I’d had. If the old stone had been glowing in the sunshine, it’ve been Oxford. But if some dons had been making my life hell…!” Lewis grimaced, and, surprising himself, Hathaway chuckled.
“As for the features,” Hathaway continued, “they did want to do one on me - seeing as I was actually British and an undergraduate - but I managed to put them off….”
Lewis looked at his deceptively mild expression with eyebrows raised, and grinned: “I can imagine..!”
He traced a finger over the wake of the boat, which showed the speed with which they’d been cutting through the water.
“So how was it - the experience?”
Hathaway nodded to the right-hand picture. “You can see. By the end, you don’t know much about it. It’s better than losing, of course, after all the training, but you just get paralytic either way.”
“But being part of a team…” not adding, “knowing you, that’s the part I find hard to imagine…”
Hathaway laughed shortly: “There’s a squad of you, down the gym in the early hours all through the winter, training side-by-side, urging each other on but paranoid that your rivals are getting too fit, all competing for the coach’s praise, waiting to find out who’ll make the boat. There’s no team.”
“So why did you do it?”
“Ah… The grace, the power, the speed… Because I set myself the challenge. But once was enough - the next year I stayed in the library; single-sculling for pleasure only. The coach never spoke to me again. I still eat malt loaf, though.”
“So that’s where it comes from - training fuel.”
Hathaway nodded and made as if to take back the set. Lewis held on to it: “We could put it up.”
Hathaway hesitated, then sat back again with a noise of equivocal assent.
“Well, you have kept it…”
“True.”
“So? In here?”
“Or the hall.”
“Bit dark.”
“Exactly.”
Lewis chose to ignore this. “In here, then.” He looked about him, at his prints of Hadrian’s Wall and Bamburgh Castle, and Hathaway’s elegant ancestor portrait. “Over there, beside the bookcase?”
“Which side?”
“This side, where we’d actually be able to see it.”
Lewis turned the frame over to check the fixture, and nodded to himself. “I’ll get the bits.”
“Now?” asked Hathaway, looking up as Lewis moved swiftly past him towards the hall cupboard.
“Of course now. You can get on with marking the wall up for me.”
In a few minutes the set was safely in place, and they were back on the sofa, Lewis gazing proudly at both the pictures and his own work, and Hathaway scratching his jaw-line and wondering where they went from here - whether a decision had been made.
Still restless, Lewis looked across at him and was hit by a wave of complex emotion, which expressed itself as overwhelming, if unfocussed, desire. Watching him, Hathaway saw the familiar, knowing, smile harden into something more intent yet detached. About to speak, he was forestalled by Lewis reaching over, taking possession of him, and, with uncharacteristic abandon, pushing aside the coffee table (setting the glasses skittering on their Uccello coasters) and applying his weight so that they were almost immediately, and for the first time, on the floor. Taken aback by this attack of unusually voracious and oddly impersonal passion, Hathaway wasn’t given the time to realise that it was, as much as his own earlier anger, a reaction to nervous strain. As he struggled mentally to catch up, unable immediately to give way to the moment, Lewis drew back enough to say:
“Come on then, kiss me like you mean it…”
Fighting for breath, Hathaway let his arms drop to the carpet in mock astonishment:
“How could you possibly think that I don’t mean it?”
Lewis chuckled then, and seemed to see him more as himself, but it was still his impatience that set the tempo, although, as his own emotional turmoil kindled an equal need for physical action, Hathaway managed to assert himself enough to be the first with a hand on a fly.
As they lay side-by-side, half under the coffee table, waiting for their breathing and pulses to slow, Lewis increasingly blithe and Hathaway still thoughtful, Lewis beat a light tattoo with his fingers on the back of Hathaway’s hand. Starting, Hathaway said, almost at random, “Bit of a contrast…”
“With what?”
“Our first night…”
Lewis grinned. “Mitigating circumstances, though! Your leg, and painkillers; and I wouldn’t have eaten as much naan bread if I’d known…”
He hooked the other’s little finger with his own, and Hathaway considered him with a half-smile.
Lewis squeezed his finger and plucked at his clinging shirt with his free hand: “Might need to take up squash again…”
Hathaway smiled but said, “Apparently you should get fit for squash, rather than look to get fit through it…”
“Why didn’t you tell me that at the time?!”
“I didn’t want to imply that you were unfit.”
Lewis thought about this, Hathaway turning his head to watch him from beneath his lashes, and then they both began to laugh.
***
As Hathaway was cleaning his teeth before bed, he heard Lewis call:
“Did you iron the shirts or will I do them now?”
“The shirts? I…uh…no, they’re still in the pile…”
“Ok.”
Lewis fetched the ironing board from the hall cupboard. He could sense Hathaway hesitating in the doorway, and added “Is that all right?”
“Yes…” Hathaway replied, rather faintly, his eyes starting to shine.
They both knew what was meant, and that an undemonstrative shared understanding was usually enough - in fact, what they both preferred. But Lewis was aware that this required something more, for which Hathaway was, even if unconsciously, waiting, and that, however much progress they’d made with communication, this time he could not ask. And so he turned and pulled Hathaway forward with a hand on his neck, so that they were forehead-to-forehead:
“I’m sorry about earlier: thinking aloud, talking nonsense. I shouldn’t have put you through that.”
“No, it’s fine…” he replied shakily. “I’d rather know what you’re thinking. And it was one of our vows, after all…”
“Well, thank you for asking about Val - having the generosity, and the courage…” And Lewis relaxed his grip to make eye-contact as Hathaway shifted, keen to show that he recognised now how difficult it had been for him.
“Going through the album… Yes, we did have a good marriage, although we still argued at times, because everybody does. I’ll always regret that she was taken so young, but we had longer together than many; we saw the kids grow up.
“And she is gone.” He sighed. “She’s been gone a while. And in that time, well…looking at some of the photos I hardly recognised myself. There’s no going back ever. I’m a different person now for losing her and knowing you. And I wouldn’t be without you. So I am sure about tomorrow - no comparisons, no disloyalty; don’t think I’m not.”
Lewis cleared his throat. “And I hope that when I’m gone, you’ll find…”
“Don’t…”
He tightened his grip again, determined to make his point, his voice softer: “If she’d had the chance, she would have said the same to me - I think really I’ve known that all along. And I would have said the same as you. But time passes, and here I am, in love with you, so…”
Half-laughing at being so movingly wrong-footed, Hathaway said “You know I can’t - wouldn’t dare - argue with that, but just…don’t skip past the rest of our time together. Not tonight. I won’t accept the wisdom of experience as an excuse. ‘Though we cannot make our Sun stand still, yet we will make him run.’ We’ve got it to live yet…”
Lewis gave a low grunt of acquiescence, and they remained resting against each other for a long while.
***************
***************
They quickly fell asleep in a loose embrace. But in the middle of the night, Lewis became aware that Hathaway was shifting uncomfortably, and rubbing his scarred thigh.
“All right?”
“Mm…” he replied, distantly.
Lewis reached out to find the switch for his bedside light, and then turned back to see Hathaway gazing at the ceiling, looking drawn.
“Is your leg troubling you?”
“Hm? No…”
Hathaway closed his eyes for a second. Having woken up, he had started off with the intention of counting his blessings, which had seemed a perfectly sensible and appropriate thing to do. But the act of uncovering and examining each occasion when things could have gone wrong, or more badly wrong, had sent him into a downward spiral, and he was struggling to pull himself out of it. But vows or no, after the evening they’d had, he could not now start a conversation with Lewis about the fragility of human life.
He jerked himself up and out of bed, and headed for the door.
“James? Jamie…”
“Getting some water…” he said as he went out.
Lewis looked across at the full glass beside the pile of books on Hathaway’s bedside cabinet, and sighed. He pushed himself up against the pillows to wait, relaxing a little when he caught the first faint sound of guitar strings.
Twenty-one minutes later, by the alarm clock, the bedroom door slowly reopened and Hathaway reappeared, edging his way around it.
“Still awake, I’m afraid, so you’ll have to tell me what the matter is, before I think the worst.”
Hathaway folded himself onto the end of the bed, hugging his legs, and peered at Lewis over his knees.
“Which would be…?”
“That you’re tired of me and my…baggage? Is that the word?”
He rubbed his chin against his right knee, considering. “It’s definitely a word…”
It had been a clumsy attempt at a joke expressing his sense of guilt at what he’d put him through earlier, but Lewis was truly worried about him now that Hathaway had forgotten to give a reassuring reply. He freed his legs from the covers and, as the simplest way of making contact, placed his own right foot on top of Hathaway’s. It felt ice-cold. He flipped back the corner of the duvet on Hathaway’s side, and said “Get in man, will you?” - anxiety making him sharp.
Hathaway looked at him blankly, then unfolded himself off the side of the bed and slid back in, onto his back, duvet pulled up to his chin.
Lewis looked down at him. “So?”
Hathaway squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them. “You’re not going to turn that light out?”
“Not just now, no.”
Lewis carried on waiting. This was their new achievement, being proven in both senses this evening - that while it might still take both of them a long time to say what was really on their minds, they would at least both always stay within reach now until the truth came, as it eventually would.
Hathaway rubbed his eyes with both hands and sighed.
“It’s stupid,” he said bleakly. Lewis continued to wait. “And inappropriate.” Now with raised eyebrows.
“I was just thinking…about… Well, you said it wasn’t my fault, but if I’d told you what I’d realised had been happening to Briony, you could have worked it all out sooner and you wouldn’t have been turning up in my stead with Paul pointing a gun at you…”
Lewis knew full well that this was just a preamble, but he answered it seriously enough:
“The way he was going about things, it was always going to end with a gun pointed at someone.
“And,” his finger-tips searching out the scar on Hathaway’s left arm, “I’ve a far more valid what-if than yours, since I almost got you killed by asking you to distract him for me.”
Hathaway was not in the mood to be comforted, even by his own possible death, and dismissed this:
“Maybe grazing me was intentional. We did enough shooting with my father - to instil in us ‘a proper respect for firearms’.”
“Not with hand-guns, surely? But ok, in that case, what did he have against Coleman? That one went down as manslaughter.”
Hathaway shrugged, uninterested. “His cuckolding Augustus, I suppose. Family first, just as his parents taught him.”
“And yours?”
“I was always told that our duty was to the estate - to do right by the land and what it supported. But the point is that it was my fault that…”
Before he could continue, Lewis jumped in, attempting to pile up counter-evidence.
“The point is that, talking of guns, you also distracted Voss from Judith Suskin…”
“…as you did from me, but he…”
(Ignoring the interruption) “…and Babs Temple from me - you’re the one who saved her and Hugh Mallory in spite of themselves…”
“So I’m good at saving murderers from suicide - but why? So they don’t ‘escape Justice’? To stop them committing a sin?”
“Because it was the right thing to do! And not just murderers, no - there’s Jessica Rattenbury…”
“Only because you realised…”
“And you risked that macerator thing to save Franco. As well as stopping Diana Ellerby…”
“Ah, a murderer I didn’t save…”
“…sending me up in flames with her…”
Lewis ground to a halt. He’d been trying to keep up a convincing momentum, but he knew he couldn’t ward off the inevitable - that’s why it was called ‘the inevitable’, after all - and he was half-tempted to interrupt himself to complain to Hathaway about how self-conscious he’d become over the aptness of language, while also regretting ending on an example which included the word “flames”, when Hathaway broke in. And there it was:
“If you’d died, rescuing me from the fire…”
Lewis just managed to stop himself saying “if I’d died, you wouldn’t have been alive to know about it” - he always had to remind himself that there had been others there too, although they’d had their hands pretty full with Zoe.
“Will ended up killing himself because of what I said so unthinkingly, fixated on texts and edicts, proud to be apart from messy humanity. I thought I’d found my place in the world, and I was so grateful that, step-by-step, I’d accept anything, spout anything, however vicious…
“And what that led Feardorcha - Zoe - to do…
“And if you’d died too, when you’d come after me even though I’d lied to you for so long…” Tears were forming now.
“I’ll never forgive myself for not getting in touch with him as soon as I realised how wrong I’d been...”
Lewis put an arm around Hathaway’s shoulders. He thought for a moment, hoping to find a convincing form of words.
“He knew, when he asked you, who and where you were intellectually at that moment - he knew the answer he would get. And he’d already chosen to lay himself open to those Garden jokers.
“The only sanction he really needed was his own, and it’s not your fault if he couldn’t give it until he felt it was too late.”
He wasn’t sure how much of Hathaway’s attention he had, but after a while Hathaway wiped his nose and said, very quietly:
“You sound angry with him.”
Lewis looked up at the ceiling and realised that this was true. “Well, I’m biased - his insistence that you were to blame almost got you killed, and you’re still suffering for his self-hatred now. If you’ve been able to accept this” (making a gesture with his free hand which encompassed the two of them together) “for yourself, then he ought to have been able to do the same. He had love and he couldn’t let himself embrace it.”
Hathaway considered this, and then countered, “Then we should pity him.”
“Oh yes, but perhaps love makes me belligerent. Maybe I’ve more in common with Feardorcha…”
Hathaway’s lips quirked at this.
Lewis sighed. “But no, if I’m honest, I’m angry with him because he had me acting as if I blamed you too.”
“You were right to be furious.”
“Hurt pride. But I’ve been as bad myself at times. I conveniently forgot that it takes a long time to come to trust someone enough to tell them the most painful truths. Or just to realise that you don’t have to suffer alone any more.”
They lay in silence, and then Lewis did something he hadn’t intended. Pulling them closer together so that his right arm was across Hathaway’s chest and his hand over his heart, he said:
“When you do this, you don’t remember, do you? I don’t think you do. I always think of it, every time.”
Moved by the depth of emotion in Lewis’ voice, Hathaway closed his eyes, determined to make the connection. Suddenly he felt a stab of desperation, just before an image formed of a figure silhouetted against flames. His body jerked involuntarily, and Lewis gripped him closer.
“Zoe…”
“And me holding you back. You see, you tried to stop her going back in, and I prevented you. Another reason not to feel guilty.”
As the first tears fell, Lewis tightened his grip still further so that Hathaway’s head was resting beneath his chin, and stroked his back. He spoke soothingly, almost continuously, in a low voice. Hathaway felt more than heard the words - as gusts in his hair and a rumble through Lewis’ chest overlaying his heartbeat.
Eventually the tension left his shoulders, and some time later he gave a watery chuckle.
“Ah,” said Lewis.
“It’s nothing to do with me - my body’s just programmed to respond to the resonance of your voice at that pitch.”
“Oh aye?” Lewis smiled, and extended the range of his stroking beneath Hathaway’s waistband and into the groove beyond.
After a few moments, Hathaway struggled up, hands planted either side of Lewis, and gazed down at him, watching the lazy, seductive grin spread across his face, before kissing him gently. Hathaway’s hair was sticking up, the neck of the old gig t-shirt he was wearing was sagging open, and, although tear-stained, his expression - a mixture of bashful defiance and mirth - was beautifully familiar and infinitely alluring.
“Mm…” said Lewis, “ ‘bee-stung lips, kisses sweeter than wine…’ ”
“What? Are you quoting my teenage music at me now?”
“Well, if you will play it…”
“Song’s in the past tense though - lost happiness remembered...”
“Pedant.”
“Always…” kissing him again, more insistently, “…Jo.”
“Is that what you’re calling me today?”
“It’s a diminutive of John…”
“And the fact that everyone else is perfectly happy to call me by a ‘diminutive’ ” - Hathaway smiled - “of my first name…? You like to be different.”
“I like to be different” Hathaway agreed, and then, reaching across to the drawer of his bed-side cabinet, perhaps distracted by the kiss Lewis placed on his passing collarbone, inadvertently knocked from the top The Metaphysical Poets (Penguin edition), Sum by David Eagleman, Herodotus’ Histories and On and Off the Field by Ed Smith. Lewis caught him round the waist just as his momentum was about to take him onto the floor with the books, and rolled him back into a laughing tangle.
Having ended up the closer, Lewis was the one finally to get to the drawer. Once back in the centre of the bed, he looked down at Hathaway, gazing at him heavy-lidded, and they shared a flickering smile at the sight of their own yearning mirrored in the other’s eyes.
“So…”
“So,” Hathaway agreed, reaching down between them to caress him; Lewis gave a shivering sigh and dropped his head onto Hathaway’s shoulder. Returning the folded tube to Lewis’ hand, Hathaway inhaled sharply as Lewis reached down to ready him in turn, and then tilted himself back on the pillows and pulled Lewis towards him. They watched each other for as long as possible, the pleasure of each only assured by that of the other.
***
Still later, without being aware that he’d been asleep, Lewis was woken by the sound of himself saying “Still too old…”
“Hm?” came the answering murmur.
“I… Nothing…”
“Mm? Too old for…?”
“Uh, for you, I suppose…”
Hathaway shifted slightly. “People are always telling me I was born middle-aged.”
“Sod people.”
He laughed. “Fair point.”
Lewis rubbed his face. “I just don’t want you to have to become my carer.”
“We’ve been caring for each other for a long time.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Thinking of Denniston and his wife? That was illness, not age.”
“But I could become ill.”
“So could I, for that matter. Leave it now. Go back to sleep.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Yes you were - you were breathing.”
Lewis snorted. “I do that - it’s a feature.”
“No, I mean you were breathing in the way you do when you’re asleep.”
“How would you know? You were asleep yourself!”
“I wasn’t. I was listening to your breathing,” Hathaway countered, adding, to himself, “thinking ‘this is my place; you’re my only home.’ ”
“Well I’m sorry if…”
“No. I like it.”
Moved, Lewis said, darkly, “You say that now…” and was rewarded with a muffled chuckle.
***************
***************
In the morning, Lewis made the mistake of starting to shine their shoes after he’d got changed.
“Oh, sod it. Are there any more shirts clean?” he called to the bathroom, where Hathaway was shaving.
“Probably. Why, what have you done?” He ducked his head round the door to see, and laughed at Lewis’ rueful expression as he inspected the black streak on his sleeve. “I’ll do it - you carry on.”
Reappearing, now dressed, shortly afterwards with the ironing board, he asked (since he was confident now that it was going to happen), “Just to be clear, why are we doing this again?”
Lewis looked up, recognising that, despite appearances, it was the moment for a serious answer.
“Because I want to prove something to myself as well as you,” he acknowledged, “and because I’m conventional,” - they both smiled at the application of that term in this context - “and because we have the opportunity others in the past haven’t, and you should never take that lightly.”
Hathaway had a sudden vision of a boy with a shock of dark hair and inky fingers, working on an essay. “Suffrage? Or the Jarrow Marchers?”
Lewis smiled. “Ah, you can’t grow up on Tyneside without hearing about those lads. And you - are you just humouring me?”
“No!” he said, unable for a moment to be anything other than painfully honest. Lewis watched him, wishing his own hands weren’t covered in shoe polish. “I didn’t expect it, but I’m…honoured…that…”
“Oh, come here will you?” Lewis said, standing up.
Hathaway smiled and crossed the room to hug him, while Lewis held his hands out to either side.
After some time spent just breathing, Hathaway said, musingly, “I see the real point now of setting a date for the formal start of a relationship - it’s deadline forcing you to confront the things you’ve been glossing over…” He had an odd glimpse of his alternative self leading couples in pre-marital instruction, recognised the biblical parallels to the journey they’d just completed, tightened his hold on Lewis and pushed it all away. Meanwhile Lewis was saying something about not every couple being as wise as they were.
As Hathaway righted himself, he looked Lewis up and down and winced.
“What?”
“Just, does it have to be that tie?”
“I’m not wearing matching ties.”
“We haven’t got matching ties. Apart from black, and we’re not wearing black. But you’re clashing with yourself, let alone me!”
“Right. Just for that…” Lewis daubed a spot of shoe polish on the end of Hathaway’s nose. “Now we’re neither of us ready..!”
Hathaway looked with helpless happiness into his sparkling eyes: “You’re such a child…!”
***************
***************
Laura was keeping look-out outside the Registry Office, and bustled up to them as they arrived.
“Boys…” And then, “Good grief, you two look terrible!”
They blinked blearily at her.
“…and handsome, of course - very handsome,” she continued hurriedly, and was glad to see them laugh. Wondering if they’d got any sleep at all, she jumped to one conclusion, and then another, and settled on a fairly accurate mix of the two.
“We’re fine.”
“Very much so.”
She looked again at Lewis. “Are you sure that’s a new suit?”
Hathaway got in first. “Don’t blame me - it’s the way he wears them.”
***
They exchanged the rings afterwards by the river. Laura took a picture, and refused to apologise or delete it once they’d realised.
***
As Hathaway stood at the bar, still unconsciously turning the ring on his finger, settling it into its new home, the sun-dazzle cleared and he recognised his favourite philologist and palaeographer, coming to the end of a pint.
“Can I get you another, Professor Rutherford?”
She looked up in surprise and then considered him shrewdly - still shining the ring, silk tie loosened and top button undone.
“Celebrating, Mr… don’t tell me… Hathaway?”
She was interested to see him colour and look down, ostensibly at the book she was holding, and to see Lewis, who came in at that moment, run a casual hand across his back as he passed by on the way to the toilets.
He looked back up and met her eyes. “Definitely. Same again?”
When Lewis came back and stopped with a hand on Hathaway’s shoulder to wait to help carry the drinks, Hathaway said “I don’t think you’ve met, have you? Professor Rutherford helped us with the message left at the mirror killing.”
“Oh, the one you misread?” he replied, teasingly.
“…Yeah!”
Prof. Rutherford, uncharacteristically self-effacing, sipped her pint, until Lewis turned to her and belatedly introduced himself.
“So, Mr Lewis, have you also an interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls?”
The two men shifted their weight in shared amusement at the way a don will always wrench a conversation onto her or his own subject.
“Well, Professor…”
“Bernie, please…”
He nodded. “As it happens, Bernie, I was looking at your Introduction to -Palaeography, is it? - before 1100 the other day - his copy of course - since I didn’t recognise the word: very interesting, particularly the section on Viking runes…”
“Ah, Lindisfarne Mead - an excellent alternative to a hot toddy!”
He deftly handled the way she’d leapt three stages of thought, from his accent via Viking raids on Northumbrian monasteries to monastic booze: “Well, it beats Buckfast!”
Hathaway smiled proudly to himself, and then confessed, “I’ve never been to Holy Island, or Northumberland in fact...”
“What?!” the other two chorused in disbelief.
“Well, we’ll have to do something about that,” Lewis said. “It’s a great coast for walking - beaches, and castles…”
“Very evocative in the sea fret,” added Prof. Rutherford.
“ ‘Evocative’, you see - you’ll like that…”
Hathaway bit his lip to rein in his happiness and nodded.
“Oh, and a Hermitage at Warkworth too... And boat-trips to the Farne Islands, to see the puffins…”
Hathaway wrinkled his nose.
“What?”
“Boats and I don’t really get on…”
“But what about your rowing?”
“Ah, but rowing’s different - smaller waves, and you’re in control.”
Lewis gave him his “why am I not surprised?” look. “But puffins, man!” He looked to Prof. Rutherford for support.
“Puffins,” she agreed.
Clearly it would be unthinkable to pass up such an opportunity.
“Ok then, puffins,” he conceded. “As long as you promise not to sigh when I enlighten you with something from a guidebook.”
“Ah, I’m not sure I can promise that. But you’ll be benefiting from my local knowledge, don’t forget, so…”
“True - I’ll look forward to that!”
Soon afterwards they remembered Laura and Elliott, and Hathaway ducked out with their drinks. He was back almost immediately, still holding the full glasses, with a look of amusement.
Lewis raised his eyebrows: “All right?”
“Oh, they’re fine…” Hathaway said with as much meaning as possible, and set the drinks back down on the bar.
Lewis grinned at him: “You’re not blushing, though.”
“The new me - man of the world as well as discrete.”
Lewis laughed and returned to a conversation about the interpretation of fragmented evidence, Hathaway settling back in beside him.
He then thought to check his phone, and found a text from Zoe - “He does play chess. And he’s not rubbish at it.” - which he showed Lewis with a smile. Responsibility suddenly weighed heavy: “Do you think we should run a check on him?”
Lewis looked at him fondly. “We’ll wait for a name first, shall we?”
***
Author: heron236
Rating: PG 15
Genre: Romance
Pairings/Characters: Lewis/Hathaway, Hobson/OMC, Zoe Suskin/OMC, Prof. Bernie Rutherford
Word count: c. 9,000
Disclaimer: The main characters and their back-stories are Colin Dexter’s/ITV’s/the ITV writers’. Their physical tics are presumably the actors’ work. I’m just paying homage.
Summary: Sequel to Partners; begins the afternoon before Lewis and Hathaway’s appointment at the Registry Office.
Spoilers: Set, like Partners, after 5.4 “The Gift of Promise”. Does (rather gratuitously) mention a number of culprits.
Author’s note: Oddly influenced by (/rips off) the endings of Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell - apologies to the shades of those two if they’re aware! Direct quotes from Andrew Marvell and Ash; subliminal quotes from The Magnetic Fields.
Many thanks to touchshriek for cheerleading and beta-ing. I’m glad you liked the puffins!
*******************************
He’d found and paid for his book (for the record, Another Country by James Baldwin), and now Hathaway was browsing in the History section, waiting for Lewis to come for him. But when he glanced up it was Zoe Suskin he saw heading his way, looking disconsolate.
“Zoe! What’s up?”
“I wanted to follow up this reference, but the library copy’s in use and here they say it’s out of print…”
“Let’s see.” She let him take the details out of her hand. “Oh, I’ve got that. Somewhere. Not unpacked yet, but I can dig it out. I’ll drop it off at college for you.”
Her face brightened. “Really? Oh, thank you James!”
“No problem.”
Looking past her across the shop, his attention was caught, and he slouched down even further against the bookcase, so that he was closer to her level when he pointed over her shoulder: “Hey, what about him? Over there, in Classics.”
Zoe gave a perfunctory glance and then looked at him steadily. “Are you trying to help me because you can’t help your younger self?”
Another of her scalpel questions. Reflexively, he pulled back, his chin jerking up in defence. His body having given him away, none of the deflective responses he could think of were likely to convince, so, their eyes still locked, he let his head drop forwards again, levelling out his gaze, and attempted to call her bluff - also known as giving in: “Possibly.”
They both smiled, and he added “You didn’t have a proper look.”
She responded automatically, as if they were playing a memory game: “He’s got wavy brown hair and grey eyes and he’s reading Thucydides.”
Hathaway narrowed his eyes at her to show that she had incriminated herself, and Zoe looked, briefly, unusually coy. She sighed. “It’s just that I’d really rather have time to get to know someone, before having to…expose myself.”
He raised his eyebrows to signal the innuendo, and she rolled her eyes and in retaliation added, “Although maybe not five years…”
He tried to look dignified and not laugh, but he couldn’t manage it. “Huh. I did see some people in the meantime, you know.” She looked quizzical. “Women who were prepared to make the running, in fact, which goes to show…”
She was unconvinced. In a lower voice Hathaway continued, “You know, I had to ask to be his Sergeant, otherwise I’d have only spent one case with him.” He nodded back towards the student. “Have another look.”
“I know what he looks like: I’ve seen him before, in the library,” she said, making Hathaway smile, but she still turned.
At that moment, the subject looked up, and she squeaked with alarm. Lewis, strolling towards them, was amused to see her whirl back round, grab the book that Hathaway was holding, and open it at random. Reaching them, he said “Surveillance operation, is it?”
Zoe shuddered at him. “James wants me to talk to that boy.”
“Ah, does he now.” Lewis took his own look. “That one? He’s what - 12?”
“Well, so’s Zoe…” Hathaway countered, keen, for her own good, to tease her into acting like a stroppy teenager occasionally.
“I’m 16!” she retorted.
“You’re right then,” Hathaway continued, to Lewis, “he’s too young for her.”
Zoe elbowed him.
Still considering the target, Lewis added ruminatively, “He’s a slow reader…”
Zoe was defensive: “He is reading it in the original Ancient Greek..!”
But Hathaway knew Lewis’ tones better. “No, he might have something there, Zoe. His attention’s not on the book…”
Lewis nodded. “And despite you two being so obvious, he’s still here…”
“Right,” Hathaway said decisively, suddenly pushing himself upright and propelling Zoe across the room in front of him. Raising his voice, he began his own, one-sided, conversation: “It should be about here, Zoe. Thucydides, Thucydides, yes. Perhaps this gentleman can tell you what he thinks of this edition. You never know, he might even play chess…”
He side-stepped round the intended, steering Lewis ahead of him with a hand placed in the small of his back. After they’d covered a short distance, he turned to check on Zoe, who as he’d expected was scowling after him. Then she realised that the young man was eyeing her expression with alarm, and they both giggled nervously. The boy spoke first. “Do you really play chess?”
Heading for the doors, the two men exchanged looks - Lewis’ slightly challenging and Hathaway’s slightly rueful.
“More matchmaking?”
Hathaway shrugged. “You’ve got to spread the joy…”
Lewis smiled appreciatively, but said carefully, “She will be all right - she’s bright, she’ll make her way….”
“I know. But she does need friends,” Hathaway replied, with an unavoidably defensive edge.
“I know,” Lewis said lightly, trying not to sound too understanding.
***
As they worked their way towards the outside table where Laura was sitting, Lewis asked, with a nod towards the bag in Hathaway’s hand, “What did you get?”
“Another one from my reading list.”
“Of course, you can’t just be in a same-sex relationship, you have to read up on the background.,,”
“Of course,” Hathaway said, his eyes twinkling appreciatively, then added, looking past Lewis, “Although probably best not to pour coffee on the lady, even in your moment of insight…”
Lewis turned back to see his coffee cup tilting dangerously towards the woman whose table they were passing. “Oh, I’m sorry!”
“You’re ok - you didn’t get me,” she said, smiling up at them. She continued to smile to herself as they carried on, having been speculating about them since she first saw them going into the café.
As they weren’t working, they each conscientiously kissed Laura on the cheek, as if, she thought, she were a great-aunt.
“All this patronising kissing!” she complained. “I have got a love-life of my own, you know!”
“Yes, where is it, sorry, he?” asked Lewis, looking about.
“He’ll be here shortly,” she said, and had a quick look at her phone to check that she hadn’t missed a message.
The two men exchanged slightly shame-faced smiles and then Hathaway said “Apparently,” (he had begun using this preface to emphasise that he too had not always known whatever fact he was about to pass on), “the first coffeehouse in Britain was in Oxford.”
“Really? Where, exactly?” asked Laura.
“I don’t know - I didn’t get that far.”
Lewis gave him the look of ostentatious surprise which no longer needed to be glossed with a reference to “your so-called speed-reading”, and which Hathaway acknowledged with a mock-rueful smile.
“This is what comes of leaving him in Blackwell’s while I saw the…”
- Laura raised her eyebrows as Hathaway put his fingers in his ears and began to hum -
“…solicitor.”
Laura looked from Hathaway to Lewis. “Why is…?”
“To update my will,” he added, and she began to see. “For the baby as well - I…”
Hathaway dropped his hands quickly and said, with airy cunning: “There’s a new picture…”
“Oh yes,” said Lewis, easily diverted, “I’ve got to show you this…”
And with admirable restraint Hathaway sat back and let Lewis slowly bring the photo up on his phone himself.
“There you go,” he said, passing it across to Laura.
“Oh, how lovely…”
Lewis beamed proudly.
After a moment Laura realised that she could think of nothing to add, and, handing back the phone, asked, “So how is Lyn?”
“Exhausted, poor love. But they sent us a present, from Mark as well: whisky tumblers.”
“How macho,” she said, and Hathaway’s lips twitched and Lewis raised his eyebrows at him in appreciation of the sally. “Talking of ‘The Event’, what are you wearing tomorrow?”
“Clothes,” said Lewis, provokingly.
“Nice clothes,” added Hathaway.
“Ok…”
“Floral waistcoats, cravats,” Lewis crunched his complimentary biscuit, “top hats…”
Hathaway gave in: “New suits.”
“You can’t have too many, apparently…”
“Not ones that actually fit…”
She gave them what was intended to be a quelling look.
“ ‘New suits’…That’s a lot of help, thank you. What I want to know is what should I wear?”
“Whatever you like, Laura.”
“You’re sure to look lovely.”
“Thank you, James, but my main concern is looking appropriate.”
“Oh, stuff that,” he said dismissively with his most po-faced expression, and then the pair opposite her dissolved into giggles.
Her mouth was twitching but she narrowed her eyes:
“Or I could be arrested for battery and not be there at all…?” and was unable to stop herself adding, in the same mock-repressive vein, “You do realise that this is an important occasion - a public display of your commitment?”
She instantly regretted it as both pairs of eyes were drawn to her in surprise, and Hathaway’s flickered towards Lewis and then down to the wobbly table.
It was Lewis who managed a tension-easing mock-grumble:
“We seem to go public every day just by existing - after tomorrow he’s threatening to raise his ring-finger to anyone who honks…”
Laura found herself wondering what they were doing in the street to get themselves honked at. Gazing at each other as if no-one else existed, probably - it was a habit of theirs. Hoping to redeem herself, she turned to Hathaway:
“There will be rings, then?”
“Just collected them,” he said, looking over to Lewis for permission and then taking the midnight-blue box out of his inner jacket pocket.
He carefully slid the catch for Laura, lifted out one of the matching silver bands, and tilted it so that she could see their initials, engraved inside.
“Oh, James…”
He smiled back at her with gratitude.
At that moment an approaching figure caught her eye.
“Here’s Elliott now,” she said, standing to wave.
Hathaway stowed the box away safely and glanced surreptitiously at Lewis, whose attention seemed to have wandered. He put a hand on his arm, Lewis started then smiled at him, and they both stood and turned, ready to be introduced.
***
Ambling home side-by-side, Hathaway waited as Lewis pondered, his right hand dancing over the passing stonework.
Eventually Lewis said “Hmm.”
“ ‘Hmm’ ?”
“A bit smooth…”
“More than a bit. But he is a consultant - it goes with the job.”
“Good-looking?”
“I suppose so,” Hathaway said, pretending to consider, then glanced across, one eye closed against the low sun, to add lightly, “Not my type.”
Lewis grinned but returned the casual tone: “Ah, but you’ve got strange taste.”
Hathaway ducked his head, smiling, and then met his eyes: “And you haven’t?”
They held each other’s gaze for a handful of paces, and Lewis’ hand fleetingly glided over Hathaway’s lower back, before he returned to his list of questions:
“Too smooth, do we think?”
“He seemed sincere enough. I’m sure she knows what she’s doing. We might not have seen him at his best, though - I think we unnerved him.”
“What, us?”
“Well, you were giving him the casually sceptical tone combined with the narrowed stare.”
“No harm in his knowing we’ve got our eyes on him.”
Hathaway snorted. “Poor bloke.”
***************
***************
Hathaway sat on the kitchen table with his feet on a chair, a tea-towel over his knee as he waited for something else to dry, idly rolling the two rings across the table beside him: trundle, trundle, trundle, clattering spin to a halt; trundle, trundle, trundle, oops: chink as one hit the wine bottle…
“Stop that, will you?” Lewis snapped, without turning round.
“Sorry.”
Hathaway quickly stilled the rings, put them back in their slots, tried to close the box quietly (so that the answering “snap” seemed, combatively, louder than ever), and then set it down gently on the table.
He put the tea-towel aside and slid tentatively off the table, watching Lewis’ back as he remained stock-still, standing in front of the sink. The periods of distraction had become more frequent as the evening went on, and now they seemed to have reached a crisis point.
“Is…?” He cleared his throat and made a second attempt. “Is it the rings? Are they too much?”
“Not… Not just the rings.”
Lewis glanced across the room at a photo of Val, and then returned to gazing down at the baking dish in front of him.
“We could just let that soak,” said Hathaway, trying desperately to sound natural, and moving forward to within touching distance before hesitating.
No reply.
It was no good. Hathaway felt the old plummeting sensation as if he’d never been free of it. Fleetingly, he wanted to rush out, distraught. His body actually tensed. But how would he know when it was the right moment to come home, and what good would such melodrama do either of them? He studied the creases on the back of Lewis’ shirt, fighting to regain his recent confidence, and his turbulent emotions threw up a painfully idiotic surge of anger at Lewis for making this crisis inevitable by suggesting that they get hitched at all.
He slipped away into the living-room, where some Palestrina was still playing, and was briefly soothed and then overwhelmed by the polyphony. He crossed to the stereo to turn it off; read a line of the sleeve notes of a Jefferson Airplane LP that was lying out; laid a hand in benediction on the headstock of his guitar; took out a half-empty packet of cigarettes from the guitar case, put one in his mouth and then removed it again. He picked up a book from the coffee table and, putting it back, leant on its shelf, head down. After a moment he puffed out his cheeks, exhaled sharply, and stood up to his full height. When he returned to the kitchen, he felt as if he’d been away for hours. Lewis hadn’t moved.
As Hathaway settled diagonally into the door-frame - always sensible when earthquakes threaten, he thought distractedly - Lewis finally spoke again:
“Chloe Brooks… As good as dead, it seemed. Days before Val…
And then she came back. Woke up, still in that moment - the party, the attack - December 2002 all over again.
She came back as if no time had passed, but Val’s long gone. How is it possible?
When I think about that, it’s like the years in between disappear for me too - as if I’m starting from scratch all over again…”
Starting from scratch. As Hathaway had been in December 2002 - safely through the assessment, waiting to hear if he’d passed the fitness and medical and would soon be starting initial training…
In the immediate aftermath of the conversation with Will he’d felt no obvious upheaval, not even once he’d seen him again after Will had gone back to The Garden. He’d been so sure - of his path, of the rightness of the doctrine. But the reaction set in before his mind caught up. Part of the attraction for him of the priesthood had been the chance to continue to think deeply about the most fundamental questions - to discuss them with others who didn’t find seriousness laughable and without academia’s preoccupation with funding and assessment. But then, for the first time, the thrill of immersion with apparently like-minded souls in a shared canon wore thin. Strangely lethargic and disconsolate, he took a leave of absence from the seminary. Holed up with the poetry of John Donne among others, he found himself yearning so strongly for the generosity of spirit, the humanity, and the love he rediscovered there that he managed to return for just a week before, erratic and distracted, he was sent away, or sent himself away.
But as for what came next… For a time he didn’t have the energy to see a future beyond the next day. But then he happened upon a copy of Edward Thomas’ In Pursuit of Spring, and was coaxed out to look for the signs of the coming Spring himself. The return of life to the hedgerows which he monitored on his daily round, chain-smoking as he went, struck him as an unoriginal source of solace, but was no less effective for all that. Within the comforting rhythm of his walks (reminiscent of patrolling the estate with his father), he was able to acknowledge to himself his fear that he’d lost sight of the respect and compassion due to each uncertain individual embroiled in the confusions of human interaction. He himself had in the past tried to deny his own distress by occupying - cramming - himself with religion, music, exercise, and anything else available to be devoured - literature, history… But he’d gone too far in detaching himself, and meanwhile his anger, and his grief for his younger self, had still to be faced.
It was then that the idea of joining the police grew upon him - a way to help the injured through the darkness of whatever strange trick life had played on them, beyond debilitating anger and distress, to a place of understanding; within what he judged from the outside to be a brisk and collaborative professional culture that would keep him focussed, prevent him brooding, and demand a no-nonsense façade behind which he could hide.
It was Lewis’ generosity of spirit, humanity and love that had undone him, or made him - given him the confidence to relax (awkwardly, but the awkwardness had played its part in provoking Lewis’ tenderness) into a version of himself that he hadn’t quite expected.
Their relationship, even in its platonic incarnation, was, quite simply, the best thing that had ever happened to him. And that was not the case for Lewis. It wasn’t anyone’s fault - the age difference made it nigh-on inevitable. And if he could save Lewis the pain he was in now and all the previous years of suffering, if he could whisk Val out of the path of that car, he would. Even though the relationship they had now or had had previously would never have happened. Their paths could still have crossed at the station, but Lewis the contented family man would have had a home to go to, would not have had the time, and the insight due to his own sadness, to sense and worry at the chinks in the façade. And if he had not begun to unbend under Lewis’ attention and example, would he have shown to Fiona so much of the vulnerability that she could not quite like in a man? Luckily for them both, she hadn’t been one to wait while he learnt how to handle himself in a relationship. He closed his eyes: too many what-ifs - he needed to focus.
Lewis was speaking again:
“When it seems such a short time ago, it seems strange to be choosing rings…and talking about a public commitment - disloyal, almost, when I think what we had together, what we were to each other…”
Husband and wife, with all the historical and cultural weight that went with those terms. Their union had no doubt delighted their respective families, and they had created a nuclear family of their own - built their own world… He winced yet again at the memory of his petulant “it’s not my fault you lost your wife, sir” at the end of their very first day together, goaded into overreaction by a thousand far more snide remarks about God and the priesthood. Someone else might have hit him, but instead the next day Lewis had been the one to apologise.
All he could say now was “We don’t need to do this…”
Not when it set up a comparison, a competition, which he could not win if he wanted to (and how hopeless was the part of him that did).
He forced himself to take a deep breath, and release it, and then advanced to lay a tentative hand on Lewis’ shoulder. When he didn’t recoil, he took up his characteristic kitchen posture - right arm looped around Lewis’ neck, palm laid flat over his heart, chin resting against his hair. They were both tense, and he almost lost faith. Then he thought to pass Lewis a handkerchief with his free hand, and Lewis wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and finally relaxed against him, placing a hand on his.
When Hathaway eventually drew back, Lewis half-turned after him with an unconscious murmur of protest, and Hathaway wanted to shout his relief. Instead he adjusted his height so that he wasn’t looming, gave Lewis space, and said, diffidently, with a gesture towards the jewellery box sitting on the table, “Forget about all this. Why don’t you take me through the pictures - tell me about Val…”
Lewis blinked at him.
“Please. She’s… She’s part of who you are - I’d be honoured if you’d share that with me.”
Lewis’ mouth twisted, and then he rubbed his eyes and shuffled out of the room, looking very much his age. Turning to follow, Hathaway was uncertain as to what was happening, and attempted to lurk unobtrusively just inside the door of the living-room. Lewis reappeared with a photo album, and, sitting down on the sofa, placed it on the coffee-table in front of him.
“I did one of these each for the kids as well. Not much, is it.”
Hathaway made a noise which inevitably failed to articulate both disagreement and consolation, and edged round onto the sofa, giving Lewis rather more space than usual.
Lewis looked at him with a hint of rallying wryness: “You’ll need to sit closer than that if you’re going to see...”
In his current mood this felt like a second proposal, but Hathaway managed to fight down a foolish smile as he shifted over.
Lewis picked up the album and opened it so that it rested across their knees. Hathaway looked down and saw a first double-page spread alternating a small boy and a small girl growing into adolescence, alone and with parents, siblings and cousins. And then over the page they were together - in a garden, by the sea, and there it was: the wedding photograph. And after that more and more pictures: of the young family at home and with grandparents; the children laughing, crying, playing with cousins, blowing out candles; holiday photos of all four and then two, arm-in-arm, hair ruffled in some long-lost breeze - foretelling a happy retirement never to come; silly snaps of home-life, including Lewis sitting on a ladder, spattered with paint, waving a brush at the camera…
At first they were almost silent, Lewis buffeted by memory and loss, and Hathaway, well-aware of it, wondering why he’d thought this might help. But he pushed himself to ask, in a detached tone, about individuals and locations, and Lewis became increasingly forthcoming, eventually spontaneously describing each occasion, and flicking back and forth to show comparisons. A number of times he laughingly recalled squabbles that had gone on behind the scenes: the tent for which he hadn’t checked there were enough pegs; the dress that he’d let Lyn wear when Val had told her she couldn’t; the birthday meal that was spoilt because he and Mark were back late from Mark’s first legal pub drink… The irreplaceable ups and downs of everyday family life, Hathaway thought sadly. Then he realised that he was being given a gift. This had been a happy, but ordinary, marriage - not the epitome of impossible perfection that he’d been accustomed to think it.
The album ended, of course, with the familiar, last picture of Val. Lewis rubbed his thumb meditatively across the corner of the page, and then eventually closed the volume and wiped his eyes. Looking about him, feeling drained but oddly renewed, he noticed for the first time Hathaway’s preoccupied air as he sat staring ahead. Moving past with the album, he leaned unnecessarily on Hathaway’s shoulder, and returned with two tumblers of whisky. He waved one in front of Hathaway, who, reverie broken, cupped both hands to receive it, and then sprawled back onto the sofa.
“So. Now you tell me something.”
“Something in particular?”
“No… Actually, yes - tell me about winning the Boat Race.” Hathaway grunted in surprise. “Is there a picture?”
“Mm…” he said vaguely and, putting down his glass, headed off into the spare room, which was still full of boxes they hadn’t yet unpacked.
Lewis called after him, “It’ll be in the last box you try, so try that one first!”
“Right…” came back faintly, and Lewis smiled to himself, picturing the raised eyebrows which went with that tone.
After a while he added, “Oh, watch out, by the way - I think I saw a spider in there earlier…”
There was a distant noise of disbelief. “You do know that joke’s worn thin?”
“Not for me it hasn’t. And one day I’ll be telling the truth…”
“I know: it’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, except that I’m the one who’ll be eaten…” Hathaway said dryly as he came back into the room, holding the framed presentation set out in front of him as if it belonged to someone else.
“Ah, a diptych…” said Lewis sagely, successfully prompting a smile.
The left-hand photograph was of the eight on the water at the moment of victory; on the right the rowers were standing in a line on the bank, the shivering cox dripping on the end, arms around shoulders and necks to hold each other up. Their printed names and scrawled signatures ran across the foot.
Hathaway sat back, disassociating himself from the pictures, while Lewis studied the younger version, red-faced and glassy-eyed with exertion like the others, sagging between the men either side, clearly very fit but dwarfed in stature by some of his fellows.
“We might have seen you on the telly - those special features they have beforehand; the interviews afterwards. Val loved those human interest pieces - the athletes filmed in their kitchens eating eight Weetabix for breakfast…”
“I couldn’t speak afterwards. And depending on who you were supporting, you might have turned off by then…”
“Ah, that does depend - on the week I’d had. If the old stone had been glowing in the sunshine, it’ve been Oxford. But if some dons had been making my life hell…!” Lewis grimaced, and, surprising himself, Hathaway chuckled.
“As for the features,” Hathaway continued, “they did want to do one on me - seeing as I was actually British and an undergraduate - but I managed to put them off….”
Lewis looked at his deceptively mild expression with eyebrows raised, and grinned: “I can imagine..!”
He traced a finger over the wake of the boat, which showed the speed with which they’d been cutting through the water.
“So how was it - the experience?”
Hathaway nodded to the right-hand picture. “You can see. By the end, you don’t know much about it. It’s better than losing, of course, after all the training, but you just get paralytic either way.”
“But being part of a team…” not adding, “knowing you, that’s the part I find hard to imagine…”
Hathaway laughed shortly: “There’s a squad of you, down the gym in the early hours all through the winter, training side-by-side, urging each other on but paranoid that your rivals are getting too fit, all competing for the coach’s praise, waiting to find out who’ll make the boat. There’s no team.”
“So why did you do it?”
“Ah… The grace, the power, the speed… Because I set myself the challenge. But once was enough - the next year I stayed in the library; single-sculling for pleasure only. The coach never spoke to me again. I still eat malt loaf, though.”
“So that’s where it comes from - training fuel.”
Hathaway nodded and made as if to take back the set. Lewis held on to it: “We could put it up.”
Hathaway hesitated, then sat back again with a noise of equivocal assent.
“Well, you have kept it…”
“True.”
“So? In here?”
“Or the hall.”
“Bit dark.”
“Exactly.”
Lewis chose to ignore this. “In here, then.” He looked about him, at his prints of Hadrian’s Wall and Bamburgh Castle, and Hathaway’s elegant ancestor portrait. “Over there, beside the bookcase?”
“Which side?”
“This side, where we’d actually be able to see it.”
Lewis turned the frame over to check the fixture, and nodded to himself. “I’ll get the bits.”
“Now?” asked Hathaway, looking up as Lewis moved swiftly past him towards the hall cupboard.
“Of course now. You can get on with marking the wall up for me.”
In a few minutes the set was safely in place, and they were back on the sofa, Lewis gazing proudly at both the pictures and his own work, and Hathaway scratching his jaw-line and wondering where they went from here - whether a decision had been made.
Still restless, Lewis looked across at him and was hit by a wave of complex emotion, which expressed itself as overwhelming, if unfocussed, desire. Watching him, Hathaway saw the familiar, knowing, smile harden into something more intent yet detached. About to speak, he was forestalled by Lewis reaching over, taking possession of him, and, with uncharacteristic abandon, pushing aside the coffee table (setting the glasses skittering on their Uccello coasters) and applying his weight so that they were almost immediately, and for the first time, on the floor. Taken aback by this attack of unusually voracious and oddly impersonal passion, Hathaway wasn’t given the time to realise that it was, as much as his own earlier anger, a reaction to nervous strain. As he struggled mentally to catch up, unable immediately to give way to the moment, Lewis drew back enough to say:
“Come on then, kiss me like you mean it…”
Fighting for breath, Hathaway let his arms drop to the carpet in mock astonishment:
“How could you possibly think that I don’t mean it?”
Lewis chuckled then, and seemed to see him more as himself, but it was still his impatience that set the tempo, although, as his own emotional turmoil kindled an equal need for physical action, Hathaway managed to assert himself enough to be the first with a hand on a fly.
As they lay side-by-side, half under the coffee table, waiting for their breathing and pulses to slow, Lewis increasingly blithe and Hathaway still thoughtful, Lewis beat a light tattoo with his fingers on the back of Hathaway’s hand. Starting, Hathaway said, almost at random, “Bit of a contrast…”
“With what?”
“Our first night…”
Lewis grinned. “Mitigating circumstances, though! Your leg, and painkillers; and I wouldn’t have eaten as much naan bread if I’d known…”
He hooked the other’s little finger with his own, and Hathaway considered him with a half-smile.
Lewis squeezed his finger and plucked at his clinging shirt with his free hand: “Might need to take up squash again…”
Hathaway smiled but said, “Apparently you should get fit for squash, rather than look to get fit through it…”
“Why didn’t you tell me that at the time?!”
“I didn’t want to imply that you were unfit.”
Lewis thought about this, Hathaway turning his head to watch him from beneath his lashes, and then they both began to laugh.
***
As Hathaway was cleaning his teeth before bed, he heard Lewis call:
“Did you iron the shirts or will I do them now?”
“The shirts? I…uh…no, they’re still in the pile…”
“Ok.”
Lewis fetched the ironing board from the hall cupboard. He could sense Hathaway hesitating in the doorway, and added “Is that all right?”
“Yes…” Hathaway replied, rather faintly, his eyes starting to shine.
They both knew what was meant, and that an undemonstrative shared understanding was usually enough - in fact, what they both preferred. But Lewis was aware that this required something more, for which Hathaway was, even if unconsciously, waiting, and that, however much progress they’d made with communication, this time he could not ask. And so he turned and pulled Hathaway forward with a hand on his neck, so that they were forehead-to-forehead:
“I’m sorry about earlier: thinking aloud, talking nonsense. I shouldn’t have put you through that.”
“No, it’s fine…” he replied shakily. “I’d rather know what you’re thinking. And it was one of our vows, after all…”
“Well, thank you for asking about Val - having the generosity, and the courage…” And Lewis relaxed his grip to make eye-contact as Hathaway shifted, keen to show that he recognised now how difficult it had been for him.
“Going through the album… Yes, we did have a good marriage, although we still argued at times, because everybody does. I’ll always regret that she was taken so young, but we had longer together than many; we saw the kids grow up.
“And she is gone.” He sighed. “She’s been gone a while. And in that time, well…looking at some of the photos I hardly recognised myself. There’s no going back ever. I’m a different person now for losing her and knowing you. And I wouldn’t be without you. So I am sure about tomorrow - no comparisons, no disloyalty; don’t think I’m not.”
Lewis cleared his throat. “And I hope that when I’m gone, you’ll find…”
“Don’t…”
He tightened his grip again, determined to make his point, his voice softer: “If she’d had the chance, she would have said the same to me - I think really I’ve known that all along. And I would have said the same as you. But time passes, and here I am, in love with you, so…”
Half-laughing at being so movingly wrong-footed, Hathaway said “You know I can’t - wouldn’t dare - argue with that, but just…don’t skip past the rest of our time together. Not tonight. I won’t accept the wisdom of experience as an excuse. ‘Though we cannot make our Sun stand still, yet we will make him run.’ We’ve got it to live yet…”
Lewis gave a low grunt of acquiescence, and they remained resting against each other for a long while.
***************
***************
They quickly fell asleep in a loose embrace. But in the middle of the night, Lewis became aware that Hathaway was shifting uncomfortably, and rubbing his scarred thigh.
“All right?”
“Mm…” he replied, distantly.
Lewis reached out to find the switch for his bedside light, and then turned back to see Hathaway gazing at the ceiling, looking drawn.
“Is your leg troubling you?”
“Hm? No…”
Hathaway closed his eyes for a second. Having woken up, he had started off with the intention of counting his blessings, which had seemed a perfectly sensible and appropriate thing to do. But the act of uncovering and examining each occasion when things could have gone wrong, or more badly wrong, had sent him into a downward spiral, and he was struggling to pull himself out of it. But vows or no, after the evening they’d had, he could not now start a conversation with Lewis about the fragility of human life.
He jerked himself up and out of bed, and headed for the door.
“James? Jamie…”
“Getting some water…” he said as he went out.
Lewis looked across at the full glass beside the pile of books on Hathaway’s bedside cabinet, and sighed. He pushed himself up against the pillows to wait, relaxing a little when he caught the first faint sound of guitar strings.
Twenty-one minutes later, by the alarm clock, the bedroom door slowly reopened and Hathaway reappeared, edging his way around it.
“Still awake, I’m afraid, so you’ll have to tell me what the matter is, before I think the worst.”
Hathaway folded himself onto the end of the bed, hugging his legs, and peered at Lewis over his knees.
“Which would be…?”
“That you’re tired of me and my…baggage? Is that the word?”
He rubbed his chin against his right knee, considering. “It’s definitely a word…”
It had been a clumsy attempt at a joke expressing his sense of guilt at what he’d put him through earlier, but Lewis was truly worried about him now that Hathaway had forgotten to give a reassuring reply. He freed his legs from the covers and, as the simplest way of making contact, placed his own right foot on top of Hathaway’s. It felt ice-cold. He flipped back the corner of the duvet on Hathaway’s side, and said “Get in man, will you?” - anxiety making him sharp.
Hathaway looked at him blankly, then unfolded himself off the side of the bed and slid back in, onto his back, duvet pulled up to his chin.
Lewis looked down at him. “So?”
Hathaway squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them. “You’re not going to turn that light out?”
“Not just now, no.”
Lewis carried on waiting. This was their new achievement, being proven in both senses this evening - that while it might still take both of them a long time to say what was really on their minds, they would at least both always stay within reach now until the truth came, as it eventually would.
Hathaway rubbed his eyes with both hands and sighed.
“It’s stupid,” he said bleakly. Lewis continued to wait. “And inappropriate.” Now with raised eyebrows.
“I was just thinking…about… Well, you said it wasn’t my fault, but if I’d told you what I’d realised had been happening to Briony, you could have worked it all out sooner and you wouldn’t have been turning up in my stead with Paul pointing a gun at you…”
Lewis knew full well that this was just a preamble, but he answered it seriously enough:
“The way he was going about things, it was always going to end with a gun pointed at someone.
“And,” his finger-tips searching out the scar on Hathaway’s left arm, “I’ve a far more valid what-if than yours, since I almost got you killed by asking you to distract him for me.”
Hathaway was not in the mood to be comforted, even by his own possible death, and dismissed this:
“Maybe grazing me was intentional. We did enough shooting with my father - to instil in us ‘a proper respect for firearms’.”
“Not with hand-guns, surely? But ok, in that case, what did he have against Coleman? That one went down as manslaughter.”
Hathaway shrugged, uninterested. “His cuckolding Augustus, I suppose. Family first, just as his parents taught him.”
“And yours?”
“I was always told that our duty was to the estate - to do right by the land and what it supported. But the point is that it was my fault that…”
Before he could continue, Lewis jumped in, attempting to pile up counter-evidence.
“The point is that, talking of guns, you also distracted Voss from Judith Suskin…”
“…as you did from me, but he…”
(Ignoring the interruption) “…and Babs Temple from me - you’re the one who saved her and Hugh Mallory in spite of themselves…”
“So I’m good at saving murderers from suicide - but why? So they don’t ‘escape Justice’? To stop them committing a sin?”
“Because it was the right thing to do! And not just murderers, no - there’s Jessica Rattenbury…”
“Only because you realised…”
“And you risked that macerator thing to save Franco. As well as stopping Diana Ellerby…”
“Ah, a murderer I didn’t save…”
“…sending me up in flames with her…”
Lewis ground to a halt. He’d been trying to keep up a convincing momentum, but he knew he couldn’t ward off the inevitable - that’s why it was called ‘the inevitable’, after all - and he was half-tempted to interrupt himself to complain to Hathaway about how self-conscious he’d become over the aptness of language, while also regretting ending on an example which included the word “flames”, when Hathaway broke in. And there it was:
“If you’d died, rescuing me from the fire…”
Lewis just managed to stop himself saying “if I’d died, you wouldn’t have been alive to know about it” - he always had to remind himself that there had been others there too, although they’d had their hands pretty full with Zoe.
“Will ended up killing himself because of what I said so unthinkingly, fixated on texts and edicts, proud to be apart from messy humanity. I thought I’d found my place in the world, and I was so grateful that, step-by-step, I’d accept anything, spout anything, however vicious…
“And what that led Feardorcha - Zoe - to do…
“And if you’d died too, when you’d come after me even though I’d lied to you for so long…” Tears were forming now.
“I’ll never forgive myself for not getting in touch with him as soon as I realised how wrong I’d been...”
Lewis put an arm around Hathaway’s shoulders. He thought for a moment, hoping to find a convincing form of words.
“He knew, when he asked you, who and where you were intellectually at that moment - he knew the answer he would get. And he’d already chosen to lay himself open to those Garden jokers.
“The only sanction he really needed was his own, and it’s not your fault if he couldn’t give it until he felt it was too late.”
He wasn’t sure how much of Hathaway’s attention he had, but after a while Hathaway wiped his nose and said, very quietly:
“You sound angry with him.”
Lewis looked up at the ceiling and realised that this was true. “Well, I’m biased - his insistence that you were to blame almost got you killed, and you’re still suffering for his self-hatred now. If you’ve been able to accept this” (making a gesture with his free hand which encompassed the two of them together) “for yourself, then he ought to have been able to do the same. He had love and he couldn’t let himself embrace it.”
Hathaway considered this, and then countered, “Then we should pity him.”
“Oh yes, but perhaps love makes me belligerent. Maybe I’ve more in common with Feardorcha…”
Hathaway’s lips quirked at this.
Lewis sighed. “But no, if I’m honest, I’m angry with him because he had me acting as if I blamed you too.”
“You were right to be furious.”
“Hurt pride. But I’ve been as bad myself at times. I conveniently forgot that it takes a long time to come to trust someone enough to tell them the most painful truths. Or just to realise that you don’t have to suffer alone any more.”
They lay in silence, and then Lewis did something he hadn’t intended. Pulling them closer together so that his right arm was across Hathaway’s chest and his hand over his heart, he said:
“When you do this, you don’t remember, do you? I don’t think you do. I always think of it, every time.”
Moved by the depth of emotion in Lewis’ voice, Hathaway closed his eyes, determined to make the connection. Suddenly he felt a stab of desperation, just before an image formed of a figure silhouetted against flames. His body jerked involuntarily, and Lewis gripped him closer.
“Zoe…”
“And me holding you back. You see, you tried to stop her going back in, and I prevented you. Another reason not to feel guilty.”
As the first tears fell, Lewis tightened his grip still further so that Hathaway’s head was resting beneath his chin, and stroked his back. He spoke soothingly, almost continuously, in a low voice. Hathaway felt more than heard the words - as gusts in his hair and a rumble through Lewis’ chest overlaying his heartbeat.
Eventually the tension left his shoulders, and some time later he gave a watery chuckle.
“Ah,” said Lewis.
“It’s nothing to do with me - my body’s just programmed to respond to the resonance of your voice at that pitch.”
“Oh aye?” Lewis smiled, and extended the range of his stroking beneath Hathaway’s waistband and into the groove beyond.
After a few moments, Hathaway struggled up, hands planted either side of Lewis, and gazed down at him, watching the lazy, seductive grin spread across his face, before kissing him gently. Hathaway’s hair was sticking up, the neck of the old gig t-shirt he was wearing was sagging open, and, although tear-stained, his expression - a mixture of bashful defiance and mirth - was beautifully familiar and infinitely alluring.
“Mm…” said Lewis, “ ‘bee-stung lips, kisses sweeter than wine…’ ”
“What? Are you quoting my teenage music at me now?”
“Well, if you will play it…”
“Song’s in the past tense though - lost happiness remembered...”
“Pedant.”
“Always…” kissing him again, more insistently, “…Jo.”
“Is that what you’re calling me today?”
“It’s a diminutive of John…”
“And the fact that everyone else is perfectly happy to call me by a ‘diminutive’ ” - Hathaway smiled - “of my first name…? You like to be different.”
“I like to be different” Hathaway agreed, and then, reaching across to the drawer of his bed-side cabinet, perhaps distracted by the kiss Lewis placed on his passing collarbone, inadvertently knocked from the top The Metaphysical Poets (Penguin edition), Sum by David Eagleman, Herodotus’ Histories and On and Off the Field by Ed Smith. Lewis caught him round the waist just as his momentum was about to take him onto the floor with the books, and rolled him back into a laughing tangle.
Having ended up the closer, Lewis was the one finally to get to the drawer. Once back in the centre of the bed, he looked down at Hathaway, gazing at him heavy-lidded, and they shared a flickering smile at the sight of their own yearning mirrored in the other’s eyes.
“So…”
“So,” Hathaway agreed, reaching down between them to caress him; Lewis gave a shivering sigh and dropped his head onto Hathaway’s shoulder. Returning the folded tube to Lewis’ hand, Hathaway inhaled sharply as Lewis reached down to ready him in turn, and then tilted himself back on the pillows and pulled Lewis towards him. They watched each other for as long as possible, the pleasure of each only assured by that of the other.
***
Still later, without being aware that he’d been asleep, Lewis was woken by the sound of himself saying “Still too old…”
“Hm?” came the answering murmur.
“I… Nothing…”
“Mm? Too old for…?”
“Uh, for you, I suppose…”
Hathaway shifted slightly. “People are always telling me I was born middle-aged.”
“Sod people.”
He laughed. “Fair point.”
Lewis rubbed his face. “I just don’t want you to have to become my carer.”
“We’ve been caring for each other for a long time.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Thinking of Denniston and his wife? That was illness, not age.”
“But I could become ill.”
“So could I, for that matter. Leave it now. Go back to sleep.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Yes you were - you were breathing.”
Lewis snorted. “I do that - it’s a feature.”
“No, I mean you were breathing in the way you do when you’re asleep.”
“How would you know? You were asleep yourself!”
“I wasn’t. I was listening to your breathing,” Hathaway countered, adding, to himself, “thinking ‘this is my place; you’re my only home.’ ”
“Well I’m sorry if…”
“No. I like it.”
Moved, Lewis said, darkly, “You say that now…” and was rewarded with a muffled chuckle.
***************
***************
In the morning, Lewis made the mistake of starting to shine their shoes after he’d got changed.
“Oh, sod it. Are there any more shirts clean?” he called to the bathroom, where Hathaway was shaving.
“Probably. Why, what have you done?” He ducked his head round the door to see, and laughed at Lewis’ rueful expression as he inspected the black streak on his sleeve. “I’ll do it - you carry on.”
Reappearing, now dressed, shortly afterwards with the ironing board, he asked (since he was confident now that it was going to happen), “Just to be clear, why are we doing this again?”
Lewis looked up, recognising that, despite appearances, it was the moment for a serious answer.
“Because I want to prove something to myself as well as you,” he acknowledged, “and because I’m conventional,” - they both smiled at the application of that term in this context - “and because we have the opportunity others in the past haven’t, and you should never take that lightly.”
Hathaway had a sudden vision of a boy with a shock of dark hair and inky fingers, working on an essay. “Suffrage? Or the Jarrow Marchers?”
Lewis smiled. “Ah, you can’t grow up on Tyneside without hearing about those lads. And you - are you just humouring me?”
“No!” he said, unable for a moment to be anything other than painfully honest. Lewis watched him, wishing his own hands weren’t covered in shoe polish. “I didn’t expect it, but I’m…honoured…that…”
“Oh, come here will you?” Lewis said, standing up.
Hathaway smiled and crossed the room to hug him, while Lewis held his hands out to either side.
After some time spent just breathing, Hathaway said, musingly, “I see the real point now of setting a date for the formal start of a relationship - it’s deadline forcing you to confront the things you’ve been glossing over…” He had an odd glimpse of his alternative self leading couples in pre-marital instruction, recognised the biblical parallels to the journey they’d just completed, tightened his hold on Lewis and pushed it all away. Meanwhile Lewis was saying something about not every couple being as wise as they were.
As Hathaway righted himself, he looked Lewis up and down and winced.
“What?”
“Just, does it have to be that tie?”
“I’m not wearing matching ties.”
“We haven’t got matching ties. Apart from black, and we’re not wearing black. But you’re clashing with yourself, let alone me!”
“Right. Just for that…” Lewis daubed a spot of shoe polish on the end of Hathaway’s nose. “Now we’re neither of us ready..!”
Hathaway looked with helpless happiness into his sparkling eyes: “You’re such a child…!”
***************
***************
Laura was keeping look-out outside the Registry Office, and bustled up to them as they arrived.
“Boys…” And then, “Good grief, you two look terrible!”
They blinked blearily at her.
“…and handsome, of course - very handsome,” she continued hurriedly, and was glad to see them laugh. Wondering if they’d got any sleep at all, she jumped to one conclusion, and then another, and settled on a fairly accurate mix of the two.
“We’re fine.”
“Very much so.”
She looked again at Lewis. “Are you sure that’s a new suit?”
Hathaway got in first. “Don’t blame me - it’s the way he wears them.”
***
They exchanged the rings afterwards by the river. Laura took a picture, and refused to apologise or delete it once they’d realised.
***
As Hathaway stood at the bar, still unconsciously turning the ring on his finger, settling it into its new home, the sun-dazzle cleared and he recognised his favourite philologist and palaeographer, coming to the end of a pint.
“Can I get you another, Professor Rutherford?”
She looked up in surprise and then considered him shrewdly - still shining the ring, silk tie loosened and top button undone.
“Celebrating, Mr… don’t tell me… Hathaway?”
She was interested to see him colour and look down, ostensibly at the book she was holding, and to see Lewis, who came in at that moment, run a casual hand across his back as he passed by on the way to the toilets.
He looked back up and met her eyes. “Definitely. Same again?”
When Lewis came back and stopped with a hand on Hathaway’s shoulder to wait to help carry the drinks, Hathaway said “I don’t think you’ve met, have you? Professor Rutherford helped us with the message left at the mirror killing.”
“Oh, the one you misread?” he replied, teasingly.
“…Yeah!”
Prof. Rutherford, uncharacteristically self-effacing, sipped her pint, until Lewis turned to her and belatedly introduced himself.
“So, Mr Lewis, have you also an interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls?”
The two men shifted their weight in shared amusement at the way a don will always wrench a conversation onto her or his own subject.
“Well, Professor…”
“Bernie, please…”
He nodded. “As it happens, Bernie, I was looking at your Introduction to -Palaeography, is it? - before 1100 the other day - his copy of course - since I didn’t recognise the word: very interesting, particularly the section on Viking runes…”
“Ah, Lindisfarne Mead - an excellent alternative to a hot toddy!”
He deftly handled the way she’d leapt three stages of thought, from his accent via Viking raids on Northumbrian monasteries to monastic booze: “Well, it beats Buckfast!”
Hathaway smiled proudly to himself, and then confessed, “I’ve never been to Holy Island, or Northumberland in fact...”
“What?!” the other two chorused in disbelief.
“Well, we’ll have to do something about that,” Lewis said. “It’s a great coast for walking - beaches, and castles…”
“Very evocative in the sea fret,” added Prof. Rutherford.
“ ‘Evocative’, you see - you’ll like that…”
Hathaway bit his lip to rein in his happiness and nodded.
“Oh, and a Hermitage at Warkworth too... And boat-trips to the Farne Islands, to see the puffins…”
Hathaway wrinkled his nose.
“What?”
“Boats and I don’t really get on…”
“But what about your rowing?”
“Ah, but rowing’s different - smaller waves, and you’re in control.”
Lewis gave him his “why am I not surprised?” look. “But puffins, man!” He looked to Prof. Rutherford for support.
“Puffins,” she agreed.
Clearly it would be unthinkable to pass up such an opportunity.
“Ok then, puffins,” he conceded. “As long as you promise not to sigh when I enlighten you with something from a guidebook.”
“Ah, I’m not sure I can promise that. But you’ll be benefiting from my local knowledge, don’t forget, so…”
“True - I’ll look forward to that!”
Soon afterwards they remembered Laura and Elliott, and Hathaway ducked out with their drinks. He was back almost immediately, still holding the full glasses, with a look of amusement.
Lewis raised his eyebrows: “All right?”
“Oh, they’re fine…” Hathaway said with as much meaning as possible, and set the drinks back down on the bar.
Lewis grinned at him: “You’re not blushing, though.”
“The new me - man of the world as well as discrete.”
Lewis laughed and returned to a conversation about the interpretation of fragmented evidence, Hathaway settling back in beside him.
He then thought to check his phone, and found a text from Zoe - “He does play chess. And he’s not rubbish at it.” - which he showed Lewis with a smile. Responsibility suddenly weighed heavy: “Do you think we should run a check on him?”
Lewis looked at him fondly. “We’ll wait for a name first, shall we?”
***