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The case that breaks them involves two dead children, a limbless torso they never manage to identify, and a severed ear. When they solve it (barely), James hasn't slept in nearly two full days, and it is all Lewis can do to keep him fed on something other than cigarettes. Innocent tells them to take a couple days off because they both look so peaky she can't imagine them getting any work done at all (they know because she tells them so). For the last eighteen hours running up to catching the psychopath that Lewis insists on calling That Bastard, they tell each other that they're going to get stinking drunk at the end of it, so pissed, so unutterably smashed that James will not remember his own name.
Instead, they have a uniform drive them to James's flat where they collapse miserably onto his double bed and fall into a sleep so deep that the case cannot even haunt their dreams.
The next day, James becomes voluntarily redundant and Robbie retires early. They do so with matching letters of resignation that say very little at all, but Innocent knows why they're leaving (or at least thinks she does). Robbie talks about moving to be nearer his Lyn and the grandbaby every day for a week, landline phone pinned to his ear as he cooks himself dinner for one (or, sometimes, two). James spends most of his afternoons focused on his application for the junior research fellowship at St. Gerard's, feeling absurd and hopeless as he admits that, no, he did not finish seminary in his cover letter. He spends most evenings washing it away with wine and, most mornings, hung over and weary.
After Laura —who calls irregularly and at odd hours, so James has pretend to be sober half the time— catches him out for being drunk for the third time, he drags himself to the Bodleian for a few days to flesh out his proposal, e-mails drafts back and forth with Professor Pinnock, and discovers how stunningly lovely Thomas Aquinas truly is on too little food and too many cigarettes.
He calls Lewis to pick him up when his hands won't stop shaking.
In the car, Lewis says, not looking away from the road, "Are you sure you want this?"
To James's surprise, he says, "I'm not sure I've ever wanted anything so much in my life." And he does. It's not the sense of obligation he had at seminary or the sense of drifting, patching over his life, with the CID. It's something real and actual, an almost physical longing for old tomes and older knowledge.
"There's a word for what you are," Lewis says darkly. "A bibliophile."
"Sir, I don't think bibliophiles have quite the same relationship with books as, say, a necrophiliac has with a corpse."
Lewis shakes his head. "I fear the lad doth protest too much," and James does not correct the quotation.
"Where are you going?"
"Home."
"Yes, but your home, not my home," James says, petulant like a child.
"You need feeding up."
"I do not." Lewis gives him a sidelong glance. "Keep your eyes on the road," James mutters. Lewis laughs.
Dinner as it turns out is roasted potatoes ("Is that rosemary? How very forward thinking of you, sir."), mushy peas, and a surprisingly delicate fillet of sole. James never remembers what they taste like because he is starving. Lewis doesn't serve James wine or a beer with dinner. Laura must have got to him. Afterward, Lewis offers James a cup of tea, which he declines. Lewis makes it anyway, and James accepts it —made to perfection— with as much grace as he can muster.
"I've been looking at flats in Manchester," Lewis says coolly. "On the internet, even."
"My goodness, did you use Google and everything?"
Lewis looks smugly pleased with himself in spite of James's chastisement. "I did at that. I found a fair few in my price range and not too far from Lyn." He trails off, eyeing James.
"There's a 'but' here."
Lewis gives a weak one-shouldered shrug, and James can feel it, a barrier behind which Lewis is hiding, knowing he can only do so for so long. "My lease isn't up for another few months, and I'd have some trouble trying to break it."
"All right," James says pacifically.
They watch a movie, some recent release that James will never remember and Lewis doesn't enjoy. When it finishes, even though James is dead sober, hasn't had a drink all night, he ends up falling asleep on Lewis's couch, a scratchy blanket tucked up to his chin.
In the morning, James considers fleeing, half a mind to stop at some coffee shop and then go to the Bodleian while he's still fresh, but he's left his spare key at home and he'd be a bad policeman if he went around leaving his fellow officers' doors unlocked even in this quiet, relatively safe corner of Oxford.
And then James remembers that he is no policeman at all.
He e-mails his materials in a few days later, unable to sit on them any longer, even if he could improve them. Professor Pinnock sends him an e-mail back, unofficial, to let him know they got them and good on him for getting them in early. He lets himself feel self-satisfied for about five minutes before he starts hunting for a real job, anything that will get him out of this rut, because no one in his right mind would ever hire Hathaway to do theological research, not with his CV, and because he can't bear to be alone with his thoughts.
He pokes through the mediocre, archaic websites of a few theology departments in Manchester before he has to stop himself. James is not invited, and it's a bit mad to think about chasing after his sixty-something career-copper boss, even if they're not working together anymore. He doesn't have that as an excuse, so he'd best get used to ready meals for one in front of the telly.
James laughs in spite of himself. He sounds like Lewis in a bad mood, grumbling about going home, so James will go to the pub with him instead. For a brief moment, sitting at his computer, staring at the profile of the University of Manchester's PhD in Religions and Theology as though it were some blind date he wanted to go on, he regrets giving up his career as a policeman. He had purpose and definition; now that is gone.
He starts writing the application for the Manchester program that evening, sipping a glass of red wine. He omits any mention of modern theology, the state of the soul in the twenty-first century, and writes instead about men long dead like he wants to.
They chat on the phone twice, maybe three times a week, not as often as they used to. Lewis always invites James over for dinner, and James usually says yes, although not every time. He tries to maintain the facade of having things to do with himself, rather than being an out of work copper who only gets out of the house for band practice and dinner with his (former) boss. He lets Laura set him up on dates with her doctor-friends, an endless stream of morbid, musicless minds. Sometimes, he suspects she is making a point.
Once, Lewis calls him in the middle of a dinner date. James takes it because his date has excused herself to go to the toilet, and the response is so ingrained in him after five years working together that he can hardly resist.
"Hathaway speaking."
"Always formal, aren't you?"
"Yes, sir." He picks at his mushroom risotto, its smoked cheese a little too sharp.
"There's a game on tomorrow night, and I was wondering if you'd want to keep me company."
"Who's playing?"
"Oh, it's Byron United versus Van Gogh."
James lets out a huff of laughter. "I'd like that." His date sits down across from him, and he holds up a single finger and tries to look apologetic. "Look, I've got to run. Shall I call you back later?"
"Sure. I'll be up late. There's a program on at ten that I'd like to catch."
James smiles. He knows the one, saw it advertised a few days ago and thought of Lewis. "Ten o'clock? That's past your bedtime."
"Cheeky bugger," Lewis murmurs and rings off.
"Bye," James tells the dead line and shuts his phone. "Sorry, Lissa."
She looks at him, a little sad. "What were we talking about?"
"The upcoming exhibition at the Ashmolean," he says. "You thought it was too exploitative to make a meaningful statement about women's sexual identities."
"I know what I think," she snaps, and James sips his wine. He does not bother to apologize. He thinks it's a sign.
They catch the game at Lewis's neighborhood pub over a couple of pints. Lewis mostly keeps his eyes on the screens, and James keeps up a pointed, trite commentary on the state of the modern intellect as deduced from sports broadcasting. At one point, during an advert, Lewis turns to James and says, "Laura says you've run through at least five different young women she knows."
James's cheeks burn, although it's at least half from the drink. "None of them suited."
"Mm," Lewis says thoughtfully over his pint glass. "Is that so?"
James shrugs. "I'm busy."
Lewis says, "No kidding," and it's equal parts snide and incredulous.
"Sir," James says, "believe it or not, but I don't put out on the first date." And it's true: James spent too much time with God, in seminary and before, to be able to properly relax now that he's pretending to have given Him up. He sips his beer and makes eyes at Lewis, just to embarrass him.
Lewis boggles at him, horrified at James's honesty and also at his own putative effrontery. "Lad, I didn't mean it like that—"
"No, no, nothing to offend the good Catholic." James pats his arm. "Don't worry, sir. None taken."
They're stumbling drunk afterward, and it's a lucky thing that they make it back the two hundred yards to Lewis's flat. At one point, Lewis nearly falls, and James catches him, a desperate clutching swoop, and Lewis looks straight into James's eyes, unguarded and clear. James knows at the time exactly what Lewis is thinking, but in the morning, he can't remember anymore.
Pinnock calls him one lazy November afternoon when he's half a pint in, thinking about nothing at all. He has to sober up right quick, but he's never sure if she doesn't notice that he's a little fuzzy round the edges. "Hello, James?"
"Speaking."
"It's Joanna." She asked him to call her that months before. He mostly forgets, though. "How are you?"
"Quiet," he says. "Not much for the noble unemployed to do."
She chuckles, soft and low. "Look, I've got a bit of work that needs doing, and I, well, can't pay you much. But I thought you might like something to do?"
It's kind, terribly kind, better than James deserves. "I'd love to. You don't have to pay me anything for it."
"Padding your CV already, Mr. Hathaway?"
She tells him about the little bit of research she needs done (and would he be a darling and also do some photocopying?), and he listens to her going on and on, the way she tends to do when they talk on the phone. She prompts him with little questions, makes him talk about inane everyday things, the sort of nonsense he doesn't even bother Lewis with. He knows why she wants to know by now. Her son is dead (they weren't fast enough then, either), and James is his dim shade, flitting about in the noonday sun.
On a surprisingly clear day in mid-December, James is sitting in Pinnock's office where he has become a regular ghost, swooping in and out from the copier room, sheaves of photocopies tucked into manila envelopes. Professor Pinnock has occasional research projects for him, but mostly he copies articles and handouts for her, and the work has a pleasant anesthetic effect on him. He listens to her regular reminders to work on his Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, marshals together the occasional spreadsheet, and tries to convince undergraduates hanging around her office for any reason to go away, please. (Sometimes, he pretends to be a policeman out of uniform. Oddly, this never works.)
He has his stocking feet propped up on her desk, paging through the Loeb edition of Cicero's De officiis. He does his best not to crib from the English, but sometimes the temptation overwhelms him, and he lets his gaze fall ever so lightly on the opposite page. Cicero's Latin has a fluid beauty to it, and Pinnock says that if he can learn to read it, he'll be able to read anything medieval with actual ease, rather than struggling like some of her colleagues whom she could mention but won't for decency's sake. He's getting better, but it makes him feel tired and young, terribly young, because he is nearly thirty and most of the things that Cicero is about haven't happened to him yet.
Somewhere in the twenty-first century, James's mobile rings.
He scrambles for it, dropping his tiny red book on the desk and scattering the papers at the top of half a dozen piles across the floor. The phone slips out of his pocket and skitters across the floor, sliding under a couch. James mouths, "Shit," and gets down on hands and knees to fish it out, accumulating a small collection of dust bunnies on his crisp suit jacket.
By the time he retrieves it, the call has gone to voicemail. It's Lewis, though, so he waits about a minute and then calls back. It takes less than two rings for him to pick up.
"Hello, sir," James says, slightly breathless, as he dusts himself off.
Something is up; James has not been on the police force for five years without learning a thing or two, especially about his inspector. Sitting in his own tiny kitchen, Lewis clutches at his cup of tea, staring into its milky depths, and James is finally forced to say, "What?", a little distraught because he's completely convinced in that instant that Lewis has finalized his plans to move up north to be near Lyn and James realizes then and there that it will simply kill him.
"I've been thinking."
"Oh, yes?"
"Would you like to go for a drink sometime?"
James narrows his eyes. They go for drinks all the time— "Sir, is that an invitation to rumpy pumpy?"
Lewis flushes scarlet. "If you like."
James sips his tea from his World's Best Dad mug with great and ponderous dignity. When he had allowed himself to imagine this moment, it had not looked like this; they were always drunk or about to die, fueled by alcohol or adrenaline. He has never imagined that it could happen sober and with complete sincerity. "Yes, I think I'd like that."
He listens to the alarm clock tick the seconds away, spilling into the darkness. Those seconds are gone. The beginnings of soft morning light creep in through the window, invading the still night. When it ticks past six, he sits up, pads to the bathroom, splashes water on his face. He is still James. His face looks the same. His eyes, though. They look tired. He'll have crow's feet soon.
He tiptoes back into Lewis's bedroom where he is still sleeping, now sprawled diagonal. He considers his clothes, sprawled across the floor. He can put them back on, can still run. Instead, he opens the creaking closet door, peers inside, and borrows a t-shirt, the first one his hand touches. At first, he just walks away, stealing out of the room, but the closet door, left ajar, reminds him of any number of crime scenes and he goes back to close it.
Then, he walks into the kitchen. He puts on a pot of coffee and he sits down at the breakfast bar and he thinks about Thomas Aquinas. He taps the ash into a sink, not really thinking. One day, he would like to get a grant to go to the Vatican. They have manuscripts of Aquinas's work there that are written in his own hand. He'll have to study paleography first, but there are summer workshops for that. He opens the little window over the sink and lights a cigarette as the pot begins to bubble. Will they let him smoke in the Vatican? Not in the reading rooms, surely, but elsewhere? And what will he tell them, that he is a lapsed Catholic? (Do they have forms that ask that?)
The coffee has finished brewing, and James is sipping at a cup with a splash of milk in it, contemplating his not very sizeable knowledge of the making of eggs, when Robbie wanders in wearing a bathrobe and pajamas that have seen better days. He takes one look at James and the old ratty t-shirt that he'd nicked from Robbie's closet and begins to laugh.
Before he stops, James is laughing, too.
Robbie goes up to see Lyn for Christmas, bringing back pictures of her and Mark, which he makes James print out for him because there are some things that a man must always have his sergeant do. James himself politely declines his parents' invitation for the third year running simply because he can. He gets completely pissed with Laura, another orphan of the storm, as they watch old Christmas classics on her new flat screen TV, a gift from her latest exotic beau. In his cups, James confesses most of the last few months of his life, but when he mentions Robbie propositioning him, she takes away the wine.
"Now, I know you're drunk," she says.
It takes him almost fifteen minutes to convince her, and he has to offer so many corroborating details that it's almost embarrassing. She says she's happy for them with the little twinkle in her eye that is all picture-book fairy godmother, and he kisses her cheek.
At the end of the bottle (not that one; the next one), Laura's couch is very comfortable, even if his legs hang off the end.
On New Year's, Robbie kisses him in the street as a clock tower clangs out the midnight hour. Twelve o'clock, and all is well.
They spend most of January together, cooped up in Robbie's tiny apartment, pretending it's the weather keeping them inside. His lease is up around the time James will hear back from St. Gerard's, and all James can think about is Robbie moving away to Manchester as soon as James finds out that he's got the fellowship and has to stay in Oxford. Pinnock has given James a respite from photocopying for good behavior and tells him to mind his Greek. His Greek is better than he pretends but still not very good, so he ends up curled up on Robbie's sofa more often than not, swearing at even the simplest koine. He should be able to read the Old Testament by now; he's a big boy.
Whenever he feels like hurling the book across the room, he asks Robbie to bring him a cup of coffee. Robbie generally refuses on grounds of his bad back and not letting James be a lazy arse, so James lumbers across the room and makes his own coffee, which is better anyway because he watches the pot more carefully and makes sure it doesn't burn.
Usually, Robbie picks up the book and stares at it, going a bit cross-eyed. "What's all this then? Haven't we got a translation by now?"
"It's a paedagogical exercise," James says automatically. "They even give the New Testament to a lot of beginning Greek students. And the Old Testament's easy, except when it's bloody difficult."
"Was this even written in Greek? I thought the Bible was in Hebrew." Yes, Robbie, it is. James can even read most of it in the original; biblical Hebrew was always his pet ancient language.
"It was translated into Greek. It's called the Septuagint."
Robbie raises an eyebrow. "Did you sneeze, James?"
James rolls his eyes. "It means 'seventy'." His fingers itch for a smoke at this point, and he has a cigarette lit and at his lips before he can think twice about it. The Septuagint is something to have a cigarette on. "Supposedly, Ptolemy II asked seventy-two Jewish scholars to translate the Old Testament into Greek for his library. When they had finished, he found that they'd all written the same translation, inspired by the Word of God. Some scholars thought it was even holier and more correct than the Hebrew text since it was doubly inspired." James takes a long drag on his cigarette. "It's all tosh of course —we've got multiple textual traditions for the Septuagint for goodness' sake— but I think it's nice tosh, don't you?"
And invariably Robbie tells him not to smoke in the house.
In February, James gets a phone call. It's Pinnock. She says, "Hello? James?", in a breathless sort of way. He can imagine her clutching the phone, her cheeks flushed and rosy, her white hair frizzy and flying away.
"Professor Pinnock— Joanna," he manages to stagger out.
She laughs. "You've got an interview."
"Oh, God," he says, more than a little irreverent.
"Yes," she says. "Precisely."
Robbie says he knew he'd get it all along, and James believes him, and only him, when he says it, although plenty of others say it, too. Robbie's comes with his secretive little smile, the one he saves for when he thinks James is being particularly clever, even if he isn't really.
They get a curry to celebrate but also because it's Tuesday. It is strange to watch all their little habits continue on just the same as before. Did they always look like this to everyone else? James wonders at that. Perhaps, Laura and Innocent knew all along. No: Innocent at least would have mentioned it. Or perhaps she did in her own way. (Innocent alone they don't keep up with. She is oddly untouchable. They send their regards through Laura mostly.)
The curry isn't vindaloo. In spite of James's protestations, it's lamb keema, which is also spicy but isn't going to take the roof off Robbie's mouth. James steals the last of the naan off Robbie's plate and claims it as his victory spoils. Robbie seems unconvinced, but doesn't argue, so James lets him pick what TV programme they are going to pretend to watch while James quietly and very politely seduces Robbie on his own couch.
Tonight, they are watching a documentary, something about the Second World War. Even Robbie gets bored during a sequence of silent footage with voiceovers, and James very nearly has his trousers undone when Robbie says, "You know my lease is about to be up," and James, panicking slightly, says, "Oh, really?", as though he doesn't know, and Robbie says, "Yes, on March fifteenth, and I was thinking that it might be nice if we, well, thought about, you know—", and James, for his own sanity, actually has to say, "If you say one more word about your apartment or my apartment or any apartment at all, so help me, I will take that vow of chastity," and that shuts Robbie up surprisingly quick.
The next morning, before James can make it out of bed, Robbie says, "But what I wanted to ask is: do you want to live together?"
"Oh," James says. "Yes."
"Good."
His interview is on February twenty-ninth. He drives to St. Gerard's and parks in the same place he did the first time. He smokes a single cigarette on his way from his car to the room that has been set aside for the interviews. The entire grounds are colourless and grey, but he wasn't wrong on that bright September day: he likes it here. It's lovely. He hopes they let him stay.
He would have made a restless priest; he was a good policeman; he will be a wandering academic. That's all right, though.