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The summer after his first year at Oxford, Posner goes back to Sheffield.
He's the only one, which shouldn't surprise him as much as it does. He's heard, after all, about all their plans: Dakin to Spain with his posh girlfriend; Akthar, visiting cousins in Canada; Rudge, off on some rugby junket where American colleges pay to have them come and beat the home team; the Cambridge boys all sharing a flat in town and working various odd jobs while smoking, Posner suspects, copious amounts of marijuana procured from Timm's cousin. Even Scripps was making a move -- to Paris, having won some sort of summer writing residency.
It's not pathetic, Posner tells himself. It's responsible. Term may have ended, but he already knows his course load for next year, and there's no reason not to get a head start on reading. If he's ever going to beat The Four Horsemen of his personal apocalypse, as he's come to think of them (a small homosexual Jew from Sheffield), he's pretty sure he'll need at least a 2:1 under his belt.
His parents are thrilled to see him, in their own ways. "Oh Davey, how tall you've grown," his mother says, her eyes welling with tears as he drags his trunk full of books over the doorway.
"Thanks, Mum," he says, even though they're still the same height when he hugs her.
His father stands in the kitchen doorway. "They working you too hard?" he asks.
Posner stands a bit straighter. "Just hard enough," he says.
His father smiles.
Somehow, he thought that Sheffield would feel different with a year of Oxford behind him. Or maybe that he'd feel different. But his bedroom walls are still the same shade of blue, with the same photographs and posters hung at precise intervals. His parents still dote on him in their own ways, his mother who is overwhelmed by love, and his father who is frozen by it. He rides his bicycle to the library and sees the old landmarks: the church, the post office, the pubs. Everyone in the shops recognizes him, and they ask about university. He gives the answers he thinks they want to hear, wishes meanly that he didn't recognize them back, that his memory had evolved past this place.
A few times, he thinks about biking to Cutlers', but the route from his house would take him past the site of the accident. According to his mum, they've put up a plaque there on the street, in Hector's honor. He wonders what the epitaph says, but doesn't go look. It's not going to be right, whatever it is. None of it is right anymore; that's the problem -- it's all the same, and it's all wrong.
June stretches out into July. Posner starts getting postcards: the Toronto skyline, the Empire State Building. Dakin sends him a postcard of a topless woman windsurfing -- on the back, he writes, "Greetings from parts unknown!" Posner shoves that one into the bottom of his dresser, pins the others on his wall.
Scripps doesn't send a postcard; he writes a letter, six pages long in his cramped handwriting. Posner takes it with him to the library, reads it as he eats his cheese sandwich in the parking lot at lunch. It's humid but not hot, fat clouds hanging low in the sky without ever raining. The whole city smells like ashes and defeat, but Scripps's words bring him hundreds of miles away: the slope of the staircase up to his tiny flat in the Quartier Latin, the family of cats who scavenge and fight and fuck below his window, the elaborate etiquette of when to stand and when to sit on the Métro.
"You should come visit," Scripps writes. "You'd love it here, and your French was always much better than mine." At first, Posner thinks it's just rote politeness, a clever way of introducing a story about trying to order "duck" at a restaurant and asking for "wanker" instead. (Although it does make him smile.) But when he gets to the end of the letter, there's a postscript in a different color of ink, as though Scripps had added it later:
I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every hour holy.
I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough
just to stand before you like a thing,
dark and shrewd.
I want my will, and I want to be with my will
as it moves towards deed;
and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times,
when something is approaching,
I want to be with those who are wise
or else alone.
Below it, he's written his address in Paris.
Posner folds up the letter again carefully, tucks it in his shirt pocket. When he goes back inside, he tries to get back to reading about the making of the English working class, but his thoughts keep coming back to Rilke, and Scripps.
They'd spent a lot of time together, this past year. Less than they had at Cutlers', but it felt more meaningful now that they were at Oxford, a place that imbued everything with arch significance. They bonded over their tutors (equally brutal), their roommates (equally brutish), and the peculiar happenstance of falling out of love with two all-consuming and in the end rather dissatisfying objects of adoration at the same time.
"Do you think it was a phase, then?" Scripps asked, sprawled across Posner's bed one Sunday morning in January. He'd taken to showing up in Posner's rooms, rather than attending mass.
Posner swiveled in his desk chair, thinking. "I mean, the homosexual part hasn't changed. I just think Dakin's a bit of a prick."
"That hasn't really changed either," Scripps said.
"No," Posner said, "but one day I woke up and I couldn't remember what it was about him that I was in love with. And then I realized that I wasn't anymore."
"Fuck," Scripps groaned. "It's quite unnerving how much our experiences have in common."
Posner laughed. "The last thing Dakin needs is to be compared to God Almighty."
"You're right," Scripps said, "his head might actually explode. Best keep it our little secret, yeah?" He held out his hand for Posner to shake on it.
Posner remembers looking down down at Scripps's hand, his sturdy fingers and the dusting of tawny hair across the backs of his knuckles.
"Our secret," he echoed, and shook. That was the only time Scripps had come close to telling him what it was that made him lose his faith.
He's at the market buying milk for his mum, when he hears a familiar voice. "Posner?"
Posner turns. "Mr. Irwin?"
Objectively, Irwin looks almost the same as he did a year ago, but somehow the minor differences stand out: a different, squarer style of glasses; his hair a bit shorter at the front. And the cane, clasped in his right hand, his left laden down with a basket. After the accident, Posner got the sense that Irwin thought they all blamed him for it, and held himself apart from them. Of course, they did (or at least, Posner did), but his assumption of bad faith stung all the same.
"Call me Tom, please," he says. "What are you doing here?"
"Home for the summer." The 'sir' almost slips out, but he catches himself at the last moment. From the twist of his lips, Irwin notices.
"Really?" Irwin says. "I would've imagined you'd stay well clear of here, once you got out."
"I'm getting a head start on reading for next term," he says. It's what he's told everyone else who's asked, but he feels defensive with Irwin. "I did well on my Prelims, and my tutor thinks I could pull a First."
"You always were the most hard-working student." Posner's not sure if that's entirely a compliment. Almost as an afterthought, Irwin adds, "Have you kept in touch with any of the others?"
Dakin's name hangs unspoken between them. Irwin's hand shifts on the head of his cane. His eyes are flat, almost reptilian, behind the lenses of his glasses. Twelve months ago, Posner might have felt smug at his discomfort, but now he mostly just finds it funny, and a little sad. He's proud of himself for that.
"All of them, actually," Posner says -- and maybe a bit of smugness does still bleed into his tone. "Most of them are traveling -- I've been getting postcards from Dakin in Spain."
"It's lucky your address hasn't changed, then," Irwin says.
Something goes cold inside him, a hard lump in his chest that leeches outward.
To his credit, Irwin looks to regret his words almost immediately, and changes the subject. Apparently even Felix wasn't crass enough to give Hector's classes to the man who might have accidentally caused his death, so now Irwin taught Sixth Form while Totty handled the scholarship candidates.
(Actually, Irwin taking over might have appealed to Hector's appreciation of epic consequence -- Turnus and the belt of Pallas, or something like that.)
"They're none of them as talented as you lot were, though," Irwin says, all professional detachment. "We'll be lucky if we place half of them."
Posner tries to offer reassurance, but it sticks in his throat. "Actually, I'd better be going," he says, awkwardly. "My mother's waiting on me for supper."
"Of course," Irwin nods. "It was good to see you, Posner. Good luck with your summer."
As Posner moves to leave, though, Irwin reaches out and catches him by the shoulder. Posner can feel him struggle to keep his balance.
"Keep moving forward," he says. "Going back never does anyone any good. You're not fucked, not yet -- not if you keep moving forward."
Posner swallows. He thinks of his confession in the classroom, eighteen months ago. He thinks about Hector, about Dakin, about Rudge's view of history as one fucking thing or another. "You too, sir," he says.
Irwin releases him, with a smile that's almost sad. "I'm working on it," he says.
Posner repacks his bags that night. He leaves most of his books except for his copy of The Book of Hours, and tucks Scripps's letter in between the pages.
His mother cries when he tells her he's leaving, but makes him write down the name of her favorite French perfume. His father lectures him for fifteen minutes about neglecting his studies, and then hands him a hundred francs.
He takes the train to London early the next morning. It's mostly full of businessmen with their faces hidden behind their newspapers. He slips his walkman earphones on, and falls asleep to Ian McCulloch singing about escaping over walls.
At Victoria Station, he buys a combined train and ferry ticket to Paris. The next train to Dover doesn't leave for another hour and a half, so he buys himself a coffee and a scone. He sits under the big departure board and eats, two napkins spread over his knees to catch any crumbs.
He sees a phone booth, and realizes he hasn't told Scripps he was coming. His throat starts to close up as panic grips him: Scripps didn't really mean the invitation; he's out of town; he'll slam the door in Posner's face. It's that last one that breaks his downward spiral -- he can't imagine Scripps ever being cruel.
The train to Dover fills up quickly with other young people and families on holiday. Posner sits next to a pensioner from Chiswick named Dot, who opens her rucksack midway through Kent to reveal a container of scotch eggs and three French phrasebooks. She reminds him of Totty, somehow -- a certain dignity, even in inauspicious circumstances.
She's never been further than Birmingham, she tells him, adding, "I never really much saw the point. But after Bernie died in May -- " her husband, a veteran of the 12th Lancers who'd seen action at Dunkirk, Alamein, and Monte Cassino, "I realized that there was nothing keeping me where I was. And if I wasn't going to be with him, I might as well be somewhere else."
She offers him a scotch egg, and even though he hates them, he thanks her and eats it in small, precise bites.
They reach Dover in mid-afternoon, a crowd of tourists streaming onto the ferry. There's a rush for the best views, but Posner has his size and his sharp elbows working in his favor. He stands at the railing on the port side, and watches the white cliffs disappear behind a welter of frothing wake. They'd memorized the Arnold poem in Hector's class: "And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / Where ignorant armies clash by night." But out on the open water of the Channel, Posner can't find any sorrow to match the poem's tone -- there's a lightness in his chest that feels like it won't ever stop expanding.
At customs, his French proves serviceable; the customs agent barely gives him a second glance before stamping his passport. He looks for Dot when boarding the train in Calais, but ends up alone, across from a couple who spend most of the ride locked in one another's arms. The scenery of northern France proves equally intriguing as the advanced geometry of their profiles in conjunction with one another.
The Gare du Nord at nine pm is still crowded with rush-hour commuters, and Posner swims among them. His bags pull at the muscles of his shoulders and the sides of his stomach rub together, but that same lightness remains. He buys a map, a train pass, and on a whim, a bottle of wine with half his remaining francs. On the Métro, he catches snippets of conversation between married couples, fathers and daughters, but after two or three lines he loses the thread. The simultaneous intimacy and distance appeals to him.
Emerging above ground on the Left Bank, Posner blinks against the setting sun, mole-like. He ducks under an awning, opens up his map and searches out Scripps's street. (He's memorized the address without trying.) The three blocks stretch out before him; they feel longer than the distance he's already traveled. He ducks his head and keeps walking, dodging a puddle of unknown composition.
He recognizes Scripps's building from the description of the butcher shop on the ground floor in his letter. It's old -- pre-Haussmann, supplies a voice in his head that sounds a bit like Hector. He goes to press the buzzer for Scripps's flat, but then an old man emerges, dragging a suitcase behind him.
"Thank you," the man says, as Posner holds the door for him. "Thank god this rain has stopped."
Posner juggles tenses, comes up with, "Is it going to rain tomorrow?"
The man smiles, showing a gold-capped molar. "Sunshine for the rest of the week."
He knows the staircase to Scripps's apartment as though he's been there before -- each bend in the wood, each creak exactly the same as in his letter. Posner counts each step; he reaches the top floor at eighty-seven and his foot hangs in space for a moment, expecting more. The small hallway is almost entirely dark, a single window shedding the last beams of dusk.
He navigates to Scripps's door by touch alone. His fingers slide over the wood-grain finish, the raised number "16." He wonders, not for the first time, what he's doing here, but there's nothing for it now. He lifts his hand, forms a fist to knock --
But the door swings open before he can make contact.
"I thought I heard a ruffian on the stair," Scripps says, grinning. He's wearing a t-shirt and cuffed jeans, and a day and half of stubble across his jaw. He looks so good -- he looks like home, Posner thinks, in a way that nothing in Sheffield did, and then he thinks, oh, you utter tit....how could you not have known?
"You aren't surprised to see me?"
"I hoped you'd come," Scripps admits. "I didn't know if you would, but."
"Well," Posner manages, around the lump in his throat, "here I am."
"'Behold, I stand at the door and knock,'" Scripps quotes. He makes a face at the end, half-bashful and half-pleased, the way he always used to do at school when playing the role of the good Christian.
"You didn't let me knock," Posner points out. He takes a step forward towards Scripps, and then another.
"Close enough," Scripps says, and tugs him the rest of the way.