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Robbie Lewis pulls into the driveway of a snug two-storey house, complete with flowering window boxes, pale green shutters, and a couple tricycles leaned up against the wood siding, and reflects with a certain measure of wonderment that this is not the sort of place he’d ever expected Detective Sergeant James Hathaway to live.
Not, of course, that he’s been a detective sergeant in quite some time—six years, Robbie marvels, as startled as ever by the elasticity time has acquired in what is undeniably his old age. He parks his car and heads up the front walk, unsure, suddenly, how four years managed to pass without him once setting eyes on James. Not all Robbie’s fault, of course, and certainly the separation sprang from no ill will, or indeed any conscious intent at all—merely their lives taking different paths. After Robbie had retired, electing to stay in Oxford while Laura finished out the years she needed to obtain a decent pension upon her own eventual retirement, James had proceeded to do a number of things that shocked Robbie quite speechless. Following his own resignation, James had gone (more or less directly, Robbie gathered) to the Botanical Gardens, where he had asked Liv Nash—from back during the Murray Hawes case—out to dinner. He had then, less than a year later, asked her to marry him. The next Robbie knew (or so it seemed), Liv was pregnant and had accepted a position at a nature preserve near Lyon, France, and James, with his predictably perfect command of French, had obtained a job at the university there, teaching theological history.
And now—four years and two small Nash-Hathaways later—he is back in England, a lecturer at Cambridge. Not quite Oxford, but close enough. And here Robbie is, standing on his front step, wondering how the James he’d known is faring in his new life.
Liv opens the door: bright-faced and lovely as ever, though her dark hair is threaded lightly with silver. “Robbie!” she exclaims, pulling him into a hug. “It’s so good to see you.”
“And you, Liv.”
She releases him from her embrace, looking around at the car. “I thought you were bringing Laura?”
“She got called out last-minute,” Robbie reports regretfully. “Body in the library, if you can believe it."
“I rather think I can.” Liv smiles. “How long—”
“Three months,” Robbie answers. “Three months till she chucks it all in and we move up to Manchester to be near the kids. We’ve just put down a deposit on a semi-detached, actually.”
“That’s wonderful, Robbie,” Liv says. She doesn’t ask if he and Laura are ever planning to get married, which Robbie appreciates; at this point in his life, marriage just doesn’t seem necessary to prove they mean to stay together. Liv leads him inside, past children’s wellies and miniature garden tools, and Robbie wonders if his younger self and James have somehow switched places. James Hathaway, family man, Robbie thinks, and frowns. He has always struggled to imagine James as a father, dealing with the mess and the noise and the chaos that children inevitably bring. He’s happy for James, of course, but even when he’d been at his most pushy about James needing a partner, he’d never imagined it ending in nappies and toddler-proofing and playdates. More a sort of inoculation against the existential flu, and presumably involving deep theological discussions and evenings at the symphony. He is seized with a sudden worry, as he steps over a plush Paddington Bear, for James’ state of being. He hopes, with more anxiety than he’d like, that James is happy.
“James is running a bit late,” Liv says apologetically as she leads him into a bright, plant-filled kitchen. “Sometimes his students keep him after his lecture. Not only the ones who fancy him, either.” She grins.
Professor James Hathaway, darling of his students, is another identity Robbie has trouble picturing his old sergeant fitting into. Perhaps he is growing unimaginative in his old age.
“Would you like to meet the kids?” Liv asks, with a rather shrewder look at him than Robbie was expecting.
“Absolutely,” he says, planting a wide smile on his face.
“Lucy! Will!” Liv calls, in the same clear tones with which Val—and mothers everywhere, Robbie supposes—used to summon her own itinerant offspring. From the next room, there is the sound of scrambling feet, and in the doorway appear two small children.
“This is Mr. Lewis,” Liv tells them. “He used to work with your dad. You remember, we talked about him earlier?"
The younger child’s—Will’s—eyes widen. “You’re the policeman!” he exclaims excitedly, hurrying up to Robbie.
“Used to be, yeah,” Robbie says, grinning. The boy has his mother’s rosy cheeks and long lashes, but his hair is James’, light and straight. He’s bouncing on his toes.
“Was my dad a good policeman?” he demands.
“He was, yeah. One of the best I’ve known.”
Will looks doubtful. “He’s a teacher now. Which is boring. I wish he was still a policeman.”
Robbie looks at Liv, suddenly uncertain—what would a small child think of James?—but she only laughs. “Your dad’s much happier now. And tell Mr. Lewis about the guitar!”
Will’s face lights up. “Daddy bought me a guitar! It’s small, because my hands are small. He’s going to teach me to play it, as soon as my fingers get a bit bigger.”
Robbie chuckles. “I hope you’ve both got the patience.” A thought strikes, and he leans in conspiratorially. “You should ask your dad about the time someone stole his guitar, and we had to track down the thief.”
Will stares at Robbie in awe. Robbie gives him a wink, then turns to his sister. She looks very much like Liv, but there’s a hint of James in her serious gaze, the way she holds her hands quietly behind her back.
“And you must be Lucy,” he says, sticking out his hand.
She shakes it gravely. “Hello, Mr. Lewis,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Very pleased to meet you,” Robbie replies.
But the girl has apparently exhausted her store of courage, and she retreats shyly to hide against her mother.
“Why don’t you both go and play,” Liv suggests, “till your dad gets home. Then we’ll have dinner, okay?”
The children obediently disappear back into the living room, the sounds of a small boy imitating a police siren traveling through the open doorway. Robbie tries to visualize the James he remembers playing cops and robbers and finds, disturbingly, that he can’t do it. The clue, he imagines James telling a baffled Will, lies in the forger’s mistranslation of the ancient Etruscan text.
He blinks back to reality with the sound of the front door opening, and before he even has time to prepare himself, James Hathaway is standing before him.
Was he always this tall? Robbie wonders inanely, before giving his former bagman a tentative smile. “Hello, James.”
“Hello, Robbie.” James’ voice is deep and steady and familiar, but he’s not quite so skinny as he used to be, and there are faint wrinkles—laugh lines, or worry lines? Robbie wonders—fanning the corners of his eyes and mouth.
“You were supposed to bring us Laura,” James states sternly, raising an eyebrow. “You’re rather remiss, Robbie.”
“And you’re late,” Robbie retorts, and then thinks, Shit, what if he wasn’t taking the piss?
But then James’ solemn expression cracks, and suddenly he and Robbie are rather unexpectedly embracing.
“I’ve missed you,” Robbie says, and Laura must be rubbing off on him because the words come out easily, painlessly.
And Liv must be rubbing off on James, because he answers, “I’ve missed you too,” without a hint of difficulty.
Then he breaks away, and with the old, familiar glint of mischief in his eye that goes straight to Robbie’s gut, he says, “How often have I pined for your sensible Northern perspective amidst the decadence of the Continent,” and he doesn’t say “sir” but Robbie can hear it anyway and there, there is the James Hathaway he knows.
Dinner passes pleasantly, Will chattering about policemen, Liv and James speaking of their new jobs and being back in England with the easy give-and-take of the well-suited couple. Robbie updates them on his own life (though it’s not as if they haven’t spoken in four years) as he secretly marvels at how well James works as half of a pair. After the meal, they retire to the living room, where thick, old tomes mix incongruously with picture books on the shelves and the sparse sort of clutter Robbie remembers from James’ old flat is nowhere to be found, replaced instead with crayon drawings and plastic trucks. The children settle in, Will on the floor amidst a makeshift miniature city, quiet Lucy at a low table covered with art supplies. James sinks into an armchair and Liv and Robbie follow suit.
The adults chatter for a while, pulling at pints and enjoying each others’ company with surprising ease, Robbie thinks, for people who haven’t seen each other in years. James laughs more freely and easily these days, Robbie is happy to observe, though he’s still James, still more likely to listen than to speak, still harbouring an absurdly large brain beneath that high forehead. The nagging feeling that something is wrong won’t leave Robbie; he keeps glancing at the children and wondering if they find their father silent and distant, if James really takes them to dance recitals and cleans them up when they’re ill. And if James is truly happy doing so.
Eventually, a comfortable silence descends, punctuated by truck noises from Will and the sound of a crayon being guided steadily across paper. Lucy draws with absolute deliberateness, her small features furrowed in intense concentration. As Robbie watches, unobserved, she suddenly stops, a blue crayon poised above the paper and a thunderstruck expression on her face.
She puts the crayon down and gets up from the table. Without a moment’s hesitation, she crosses to her father and puts a hand on his knee. She’s got a look Robbie remembers all too well from his own kids: the look of a small child with an impossible question.
Robbie feels a flutter of worry as he watches James. But the younger man merely looks down at his daughter and smiles.
“Daddy?” she asks.
“Yes, Lucy?”
“Why,” she enunciates, frowning, “is water blue when it’s in the sea, and clear when it’s in a glass?”
Robbie breathes a sympathetic sigh of relief—that’s nowhere near the most difficult question a child could ask.
“Ah,” James says gravely. “An excellent question. In the sea, the water is reflecting the sky, like a mirror would. If you put sea water in a glass, it would be clear.”
Lucy bites her lip, considering. After a moment her face clears and she nods, just once, and then returns to her drawing.
“She’s that age,” Liv says ruefully to Robbie. “A new question every five minutes. I’ve spent more hours on Wikipedia looking up answers than I can count.”
“Our chief inspector once called him a walking Wikipedia,” Robbie says, cocking his head toward James. “‘Only more accurate.’”
Liv laughs as James glares at Robbie. “Oh, you should come around more often, Robbie, I bet you have all sorts of stories James would never tell me.”
“No doubt,” Robbie concurs, and then, with a wicked grin at James, proceeds to list every nickname of James’ he can remember: Attaway Hathaway goes over particularly well.
The two men swap stories, ribbing each other good-naturedly, and when an eventual lull falls over the conversation there’s Lucy again, standing quietly at her father’s knee.
“Yes, Lucy?” James bends down to listen.
“Why is some water brown?” Lucy asks, brow furrowed. “The sky isn’t brown.”
“Well, sometimes water has bits of things in it—dirt, or sand,” James explains. “Or sometimes it’s because of what’s called pollution—people have put trash in it, or chemicals. Do you remember the pond your mum was helping clean up, back in Lyon?”
Lucy nods slowly. “Why do people put trash in the water?”
“Well,” James considers, as Robbie watches curiously, “sometimes it’s because they can’t be bothered to put their trash in a bin, or because they don’t care about keeping ponds clean. And sometimes, factories put chemicals in the water because it costs less money than getting rid of them properly.”
It’s a lot for a small child to swallow, but Lucy looks more concerned than confused. “It’s a bad thing to do, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“So are they bad people? The ones who put trash in the water.”
For a second something sharp and complicated flickers across James’ face, and the words he said when he announced he was leaving the force flash through Robbie’s mind—I used to believe people are basically good, and I don’t anymore. He is holding his breath, he realizes, waiting for James to answer.
“No,” James says, meeting Lucy’s gaze steadily. “They’ve just done something bad.”
Lucy looks skeptical. “But how can people be good if they do bad things?"
James thinks for a moment, his face taking on the familiar abstracted look Robbie recognizes well; James working out a tricky clue, James trying to remember an important bit of information. He recognizes, too, the tiny shift when James gets it, the way his eyes grow suddenly clear.
“Do you remember when Angelique smashed your clay pot, back at school in Lyon?” he asks.
Lucy nods.
“Is Angelique a bad person because she did a bad thing?”
Lucy shakes her head emphatically. “No. She was just angry because she was ill the day we made them, so she didn’t have one. She said she was sorry and that she wouldn’t do it again.”
James nods. “There you are, then. Does that make sense?"
Lucy’s eyes clear, too, just like James’ a moment ago. She nods. There’s a small silence, and for the first time she seems to realize that the gazes of all three adults are trained on her. She ducks her head and hurries back to her table, burying herself once more in her drawing.
Robbie looks at James, feeling something small and warm expanding in his chest. James catches his gaze and smiles faintly.
It’s nearing the hour when small children begin nodding off while vehemently maintaining that they’re wide awake, so Will is drooping over his now silent police car. Liv stands to lead him to bed; a brief standoff ensues; tears are only prevented by Robbie’s promise that he’ll come back and tell Will stories about his dad’s time on the force. Will yawns through his goodnight and Liv hoists him into her arms. He’s asleep on her shoulder before they’ve left the room.
“A few more minutes, okay, Lu?” Liv says on her way out. “As soon as I put Will down, it’ll be your bedtime.”
Lucy nods solemnly; no tears from her. Robbie is beginning to get a sense of what James might have been like as a child—something he’d always wondered about. To be honest, it’s not so far from what he imagined.
The room is silent, peaceful, and after a moment Robbie realizes that Lucy is looking surreptitiously between him and her father, another burning question in her eyes that’s she’s too shy to ask while Robbie is watching. He turns deliberately away and takes a book from a nearby shelf, pretending to read. Sure enough, a few seconds later he hears the pad of small feet crossing the room to James.
“Daddy,” Lucy says, and Robbie can’t help but look up—her voice is tight, constricted, edged with suppressed fear. He’s heard that voice before, once in a great while, from Lucy’s father, when cases went sour, back in a different life.
“Lucy,” James says, his voice a rush of concern, as he takes her hands. “What is it?”
“Do you ever feel,” she says, clearly holding back tears, “like you’re not really you, and the world’s not really real?”
James looks at Lucy for a long moment. Robbie is holding his breath again. It feels in that moment as if all the world is holding its breath, waiting for James to speak.
“Yes,” James says softly.
Lucy squeezes her eyes shut, then opens them again, wide and blue and pleading. “Does it make you frightened?”
“Yes,” James answers steadily. “Sometimes.”
“What makes it better?”
James squeezes her hands. “Come here.” He lifts her into his lap, and she snuggles against his chest. He strokes her dark silky hair and wraps a long arm firmly around her.
“Does that help?” he asks quietly.
She nods, her face pressed against him.
“Does it help for you?” she whispers.
A smile spreads across James’ face: warm, full, like the flush of spring sunshine.
“Yes. Yes it does.”
Robbie remembers his sergeant, lost, young, lonely—unsure of himself and of the world. That man isn’t gone, not entirely. James is still James. But what it means to be James has changed, Robbie can see that now; and thank heaven for that. Lucy falls asleep in James’ lap, and James threads his fingers through his daughter’s hair, and smiles at Robbie, content.