Chapter Text
Self-indulgence can only get you so far. This is what Lucy tells herself when she wakes the day after Norrie’s funeral and finds that her feet are warm for once. Lockwood’s heat has pervaded the whole bed, chasing away the damp chill of Tooting Mews.
It’s still dark outside; the luminous dial of her watch reads 6.45 a.m. She hasn’t wasted the day then. Lucy squirms out from under Lockwood’s arm as cautiously as she can, but he wakes, of course. His eyes snap open, two glittering slits in the gloom.
“Luce?”
“I need the loo,” she says, because it’s the most cast-iron excuse she can think of. “Go back to sleep.”
She rifles rapidly through a pile of laundry for clean clothes and a towel and bolts before he can wake fully. The shower never heats up all the way here, but today Lucy doesn’t even try to force it. She leaves the temperature at a nice, penitential cold, and goes back to her bedsit shivering, damp hair clinging to her neck.
Lockwood has gotten up in the meantime and has taken it upon himself to make her bed and fold her laundry. It’s on the tip of Lucy’s tongue to joke that if she’d known all she needed to do to get him to do housework was to leave the company, she’d have done it years ago, but that would probably hurt him, and she’s about to hurt him enough as it is.
“Hey,” he says, putting a stack of neatly folded clothes down on the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“All right, yeah.” She shifts from foot to foot, knowing what she needs to say and hating every moment of it. “You?”
The smile he gives her rattles her heart, like the winter wind shakes her loose window pane. It’s too tender, too soft; it makes her want to scream.
“Good. Don’t know when I last slept so well actually.” He gives a self-conscious laugh, and Lucy wavers even further. Bite the bullet, she tells herself sternly. “Listen,” he continues. “I was thinking I might take a cab back to Portland Row and pick up the skull for you, raid the fridge. I’m sure George won’t mind if I pilfer his leftovers. I can be back in an hour or two.”
“No!” Lucy blurts. It comes out more abruptly than she means to, but she’s starting to panic.
“No as in don’t go?” He raises an eyebrow. “You can come too if you want. George would be happy to see you.”
“I mean, no as in this has to stop.” She gestures between the two of them. “You just — taking care of everything, like we’re still… like I’m not…”
“You want me not to take care of you,” he repeats slowly. His face is shutting down, mask upon mask slipping into place, and oh, how she hates when he does this — and how grateful she is for it now, when she needs every possible layer of defence against him.
“It’s not that I’m not thankful,” she says, because she is. The knowledge of her debt to him makes her feel even smaller and uglier than she’s already felt in her grief. “You’ve been more than kind, and I’ll never be able to repay you.” Except in keeping you alive, she thinks but doesn’t say.
Lockwood is smiling again, but it’s a different smile now, rueful and self-mocking. “But?” he prompts her. Lucy takes a deep breath.
“But I left for a reason, and I’ve kept my distance for a reason. That still stands. And you — you complicate things, Lockwood. I mean, you make them seem too simple.”
“Well, which is it?” He’s artificially relaxed, hands in his pockets and shoulders loose, and he’s still smiling that bitter smile. It’s the awful scene at the café all over again, her desperate to part friends and him determined to make her rip herself out of him.
“You’ll keep finding reasons to come over here,” Lucy says miserably. “To make sure I’m eating, or sending my invoices, or ordering my kit on time. And then you’ll start wanting to know about my cases, and then you’ll start suggesting that you help me with them or I help you, and before I know it, I’ll be right back where I started.”
“Would that be so bad?” Lockwood’s mask slips — or maybe he’s just adopted a new, more effective one: raw desperation. “Come on, Luce, we had some good times, didn’t we?”
“Had.” She crosses her arms and stares him down. “That’s then. This is now.”
He rocks back on his heels a little, absorbing the blow. His voice is ragged when he speaks.
“What do you want from me then? To leave you to rot here, doing God knows what to yourself? I found you on the floor yesterday!”
Lucy shrugs this off. “Grief does funny things to people. I’ll get better.”
“You’ll get better faster with people around you, Lucy.”
This is undeniably true and she breaks his gaze. “Maybe. But not you.”
He closes his eyes, dark lashes against pale cheeks. Randomly, Lucy remembers one of her old Ladybird fairy tale books, with the queen who wished for a child with hair as dark as ebony and skin as white as snow. (She'd died, the queen in the story. Maybe all good mothers did.) After a moment, Lockwood nods. He puts on his jacket and his greatcoat and stuffs yesterday’s tie in his pocket.
On his way out the door, he pauses and looks back at her with grave gentleness. “It doesn’t have to be like this, Luce,” he says.
Her throat closes up, and she literally turns her back on him. The past 48 hours have shown that she can’t trust herself not to helplessly accept his kindness, over and over again. The more she knows she doesn’t deserve it, the harder it is to say no. So she can’t even afford to look at him as he goes, closing the door with a soft click behind him. It’s only later, after she’s quite thoroughly cried herself out, that she remembers the skull — she still has no idea how she’s getting him back.
For a whole 24 hours, Lucy does nothing about it. She focuses on confirming rebookings for her postponed jobs, checking her stocks of food and equipment and catching up on her casebook — a cheap, hardback copybook she paid a pound for, a far cry from George’s leather-bound tome. The next morning, she sleeps late and spends longer again lying in bed, putting off the moment of decision. Eventually, she knows she will have to go back to Portland Row and ask for the skull. The best she can do is to aim for a moment when Lockwood’s likely to be out or asleep.
However, her spiralling is once again interrupted by a knock on the door. Her heart sinks: Lockwood must have got tired of waiting for her and come back himself, and she cannot, cannot, cannot face him.
The knock comes again and she groans. Why won’t anyone just leave her to rot in peace? It doesn’t seem like too much to ask of the world.
“Go away,” she shouts.
The door nearly shakes with the force of the knock this time and the voice that comes from behind it is not Lockwood’s.
“Stop being a pig-headed idiot and let me in.”
The shock gets her out of bed. She pads to the door and wrenches it open, and there, like a miracle is —
“George?” she says wonderingly. He looks haggard; his once plump cheeks are drooping, as though he’s lost weight very suddenly. Has he been sick? The thought strikes her like a blow.
“I brought you the skull,” he says, hefting what appears to be a canvas shopping bag. Oh, she’s going to be hearing about that later. “And some food. Lockwood said your fridge was empty.”
“Thank you,” she says, accepting the bag. What else can she say?
“So,” says George. He stands in the doorway, looking sullen.
“So,” Lucy repeats idiotically.
“This is a dump you’ve got yourself,” he remarks.
She lets out a slightly hysterical snort. “It’s a pit, yeah.”
“Are you going to invite me into said pit?”
“Did Lockwood put you up to this?”
George’s doughy face hardens. “He asked if I would bring you the skull because you didn’t want to see him. Which, given that he just dropped everything to go haring up the country with you for two days, seems like a pretty shitty thing to say, Luce.”
Lucy hugs herself. The spark of warmth she’d felt at seeing George has dwindled to nothing and she feels that inner chill again.
“It’s complicated,” she mumbles. George crosses his arms and huffs.
“So?” he says.
“So?”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” He shoves his way past her, snatches the bag out of her hands and makes a beeline for the fridge.
It’s a strange morning. The skull gibbers and jeers at her silently from behind the silver-glass of its jar, while George grumpily cleans out her fridge — and it must be looking nasty if he thinks it requires cleaning — and fills it with tupperware containers full of stew and curry. One of the boxes contains homemade crumpets, which George goes to toast only to discover that she has no butter. An even grumpier trip to the corner shop ensues, and Lucy ends up with a properly stocked kitchen for the first time since she’s moved in.
“I’ve seen you in the papers,” she says hesitantly, as they eat their late breakfast. “It looks like you’re doing well.”
George grunts. He has butter smeared on his chin and crumbs on his disgracefully shabby jumper and Lucy feels so homesick, she thinks she might cry.
“Lockwood’s been like a man possessed,” he says. “I’ve never seen him work so much.”
“Oh.” Lucy blinks. Lockwood has always lived for their work — she can’t possibly imagine how he could work more than he used to, unless he’s stopped sleeping altogether. Don’t know when I last slept so well, she remembers him saying. Maybe there was more to that comment than she realised. “I guess it’s paying off?” she offers.
“The thing about payoffs, Luce,” George says in a philosophical sort of tone, “is that you have to be alive to enjoy them.”
She looks at him sharply but he’s inscrutable as ever; however, where before she always thought that he was laughing behind the bland face he presented to the world, now it seems like grief he’s hiding. He will be alive, she thinks fiercely. I’m making sure of it. But as is her habit now, she keeps the words inside and says simply, “Lockwood’s too smart to die. All of you are.”
George grunts and drains his tea. “Be seeing you,” he says and that’s that. Another click of the door, another friend gone. Lucy goes back to rotting.
Stewing in grief sounds like a good five-year plan. For the next few days, Lucy devotes all her time to it when she’s not on cases. She comes back to the flat in the early hours of the morning, dumps her kit on the floor, sits down beside it and just lets herself freeze and freeze and freeze. Occasionally, between memories of Norrie, Lockwood’s words come back to her: “I found you on the floor.” He knows a spiral when he sees one, she imagines, and she flips the bird at the mental image of him. The nerve of Mr Self-Sufficiency telling her she needs other people!
“Ugh,” says the skull one night. “I’ve changed my mind about the Carlyle and Skull thing. Can you put me up for adoption? This is depressing even by my standards.”
This does at least motivate her to get up off the floor, but only to dump the jar in the sink and cover it with a tea towel. Then she goes back to her very important floor time.
Unfortunately for her, God has other plans — or certainly George does. He turns up again, less than a week after Lucy returns from the north, laden down with another bag of groceries.
“I’ve come to collect my tupperware,” he says gruffly and cringing, Lucy has to admit that she hasn’t washed any of it yet. George doesn’t bat an eyelid — it’s almost as if he’s expected this. He washes the empty boxes and all the other dirty crockery and stocks up her fridge again.
“There,” he says at the end. “Almost like a human being lives here.”
Lucy laughs in spite of herself. “Don’t flatter me too hard, George. I might start thinking you miss me.”
“Don’t fish for compliments,” he retorts. “Or I might start thinking you miss me.”
“I do miss you,” she whispers.
He shoves his glasses higher up his nose, a familiar gesture of irritation. “You’ve a funny way of showing it,” he says.
“That must be it this time,” she says when he leaves. She’s addressing a picture of Norrie that’s been taped over her bed since she got here. “He’s had enough of me now.”
But she’s wrong. He comes back again, and again. Each and every time, he brings food and he tidies up in some way. He does the washing up or the laundry and once he even changes her sheets (she had slept on the bare mattress for three days. She doesn’t admit this to him). He’s brusque and she’s catty, and more than one visit ends with him storming out. She keeps on thinking she’s surely seen the last of him and he keeps on showing up again.
“I don’t know why he’s still coming,” she confesses to the picture of Norrie one night. “I’m afraid to ask.”
She has at least graduated to sleeping in bed the majority of the time.
Ash Wednesday rolls around. Lucy only really registers it because she sees a woman in the street with ash on her forehead when she goes out for her morning Thai curry. Last year, Lockwood had talked her into going to mass with him, and the year before that, she’d gone quite happily with Norrie’s family. She doesn’t feel like going by herself — and so she forces herself to leave the flat early so that she can get to an evening mass before work.
“Remember thou art dust and into dust thou shalt return,” the priest intones as he makes the sign of the Cross on her head with damp, gritty ash. Lucy nearly laughs at him. Is there anyone who needs the reminder that this world is fleeting and impermanent less than she does? Last year, in the big Gothic church in Marylebone, she had been sure that Lockwood would be a part of her life forever; the year before, she’d been equally sure about Norrie. She knows better than this wispy old man ever will that life is constantly crumbling away, faster than her fingers can catch.
She goes on the job with the blobby cross still smeared on her skin and a kindhearted girl from Atkins and Armstrong takes her aside to tell her she has dirt on her face.
“Yeah,” sighs Lucy. “I know.”
“Maybe next year I’ll be the one that’s gone,” she comments to the picture of Norrie when she gets back. She imagines the grinning face in the polaroid turning to a frown.
She’s woken by the phone ringing and answers it on autopilot. “Hello, Lucy Carlyle, freelance listener, how may I help you?”
“How much do you charge for congratulations?” says the voice on the other end of the line.
“What?” It’s too early in the day for this.
“Congratulate me, Lu, I’m engaged!”
It’s Mary, of course it’s Mary. She’d forgotten that Ash Wednesday fell on Valentine’s Day this year, and Valentine’s Day was Mary’s deadline for Robbie. Or maybe the other way around — it was hard to tell with them.
“Congratulations,” she stutters and collects herself. “Tell me everything.”
Mary starts to paint a picture: new clothes, her favourite meal in her favourite place, her favourite music, a ring she’d loved but told Robbie not to buy because it was too expensive. Even Lucy, whose profession has about as much room for romance as it does for prettiness, thinks it sounds a little magical.
“Are you happy?” she asks and she means, tell me how happy you are so I can breathe it in.
“Even though I knew it was coming, I was stunned,” Mary confesses, then hesitates. “I don’t know if you find this Lu, but there’s always this part of me that’s waiting for everyone to say ‘haha, only joking, I never liked you.’ You know? And even though I know Robbie loves me, I think I was always waiting for him to, I dunno, show his true colours. Sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
“No.” Lucy’s throat is closing up, so she can’t say much. “Not silly at all.”
They part on promises for more phone calls to plan visits and clothes and, “You’ll be my bridesmaid, won’t you?” The way Mary blurts it out makes Lucy think she’s nervous. Does she make Mary nervous?
“Of course, if you want me,” she says. “But I won’t be offended if you want one of the others instead.”
“Why would I want one of the others?”
“Well. They’re —” Lucy doesn’t know how to finish. They’re more beautiful? More stylish? More fun at parties? Less likely to fight with Mam at the reception? “I dunno.”
“Say you’ll do it.”
“Okay. I’ll do it.”
After Mary hangs up, Lucy sits cross-legged on the bed, looking up at Norrie again. “Now I have to stay alive until next winter,” she says. “How am I going to manage that?”
The talk with Mary starts a thaw. Pebbles long held in permafrost are uncovered and tumble, striking rocks on the way down. The rocks strike stones and things begin to move again. When George next comes, Lucy sees his tiredness again, but this time she manages to grasp its full implications. He’s spending every day in the archives, every night working cases and every spare scrap of time he gets in between, he comes and tidies her horrible little flat. The shame of it guts her, and the next time she looks at the washing up and feels that inner chill coming on, she shoves it away. She does the dishes for George, empties the bin for George, shoves the laundry into drawers — all for George.
When he next visits her, he does a visible double-take.
“Finally got sick of me and hired a maid?” he asks.
“I thought if I tidied up before you came, you might have time for a game of cards,” she says and his eyes brighten. But naturally, it turns out she doesn’t have such a thing as a deck of cards, so they make yet another trip to the corner shop together. There’s the very first hint of warmth in the sun today, and Lucy tips her head back to soak it up until she catches George looking at her.
“Why don’t we get breakfast out?” he says. She can’t think of anything she’d rather do.
They treat themselves to a full English at a hole-in-the-wall place around the corner. At first, there’s an awkward sort of tension. Lucy feels the ice creep again and she pushes against it. She asks George about himself, how he’s doing and gradually discovers that her picture of near constant work wasn’t far off the mark. Lockwood is pushing all of them, but most of all himself, by the sounds of things. She wants to ask how he is, but doesn’t dare. George seems to swell with righteous anger when she mentions him, and yeah, from the outside, she supposes she looks pretty ungracious. She feels pretty ungracious. She has no idea how to fix anything any more.
“I saw you got the Agency of the Month award,” she comments instead. She doesn’t have to say which one, because there’s only one as far as anyone in London is concerned. “You all must have been thrilled.” It’s as close as she dares come.
George waves it away with his ketchup-smeared fork. “I didn’t care and Lockwood was pissed about having to take a night off. Holly seemed to enjoy herself though.”
Whenever he mentions Holly, he gives her the same funny look, a blend of apprehension and slyness. Lucy doesn’t take the bait though; her mind has gotten stuck on Lockwood not wanting to go to a party. A party thrown for him.
“Lockwood was pissed about getting an award?” It seems like it should be okay to say his name if George says it first, but he still gives her a sharp look.
“I told you. He does nothing but work these days. I don’t think he’s taken a night off in six weeks.”
Lucy laughs at this, because she assumes he’s joking. But George just stares at her until the laughter trails weakly away. “You’re being serious.”
“Deadly.”
Deadly is right. Lockwood being a workaholic is nothing new, but this something else. This is — “George, that’s so dangerous.”
“The penny is dropping,” says George with bitter satisfaction. Lucy drops her cutlery and puts her head in her hands.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” says George, but he doesn’t even bother to sound sincere.
“I was trying to protect him,” Lucy bursts out and the silence is so long that she eventually peeks through her fingers, only to find him thoughtfully dipping a slice of white pudding in his baked beans. He has a magical way of getting under her skin, does George. She kicks him in the shin and he gives her a stony look.
“Give me a minute,” he says. “I’m trying to figure out what loony universe you’d have to operate in for that to make sense.”
The story of the Fetch is never very far below Lucy’s surface, and it turns out that all it takes for the dam to burst is some old-fashioned ribbing from George. She breaks and tells him the whole wretched thing, about the Lucy Carlyle method, and the arguments with Lockwood and the dungeon under Aickmere’s and the hollow boy with the gaping hole where his heart should be.
“That’s a little on the nose,” George remarks. He’s taken his glasses off the way he does when he doesn’t want to see things.
“Sorry?” says Lucy.
“Never mind. Ghosts aren’t subtle I guess.” He polishes his glasses in a perfunctory way and reluctantly puts them back on. “All right, so there is an insane logic behind your insane decisions. Unfortunately, like most insane decisions, it remains, as stated, insane.”
“Thanks George.”
“Don’t mention it. Look, Luce, I’m not saying your intentions weren’t noble. But it just hasn’t worked.”
“I know.” She dips a mushroom into her egg yolk, but it’s gone all cold and congealed, and she loses what’s left of her appetite. “But I don’t know what to do. I can’t waltz back to Portland Row and expect things to magically be okay again after all this. I can barely look after myself these days, never mind…”
“How do you think I feel?” he says plaintively and then sighs. “But I suppose you’re right, it’s not that simple.”
Lucy shivers. The air seems to have lost that faint whiff of spring.
That night, she sits on her bed to put on her boots before going out to work, her mind a thousand miles away. “Norrie,” she says suddenly to the picture on the wall. “If you’re up there — you better be up there — keep him safe, yeah?”
For the next few weeks, she checks the papers with less longing and more anxiety and breathes a sigh of relief when the headlines from her nightmares fail to materialise. She agonises about Lockwood, wavering back and forth: is he really still safer without her? Would coming back make things any better or worse? Could she really be happy at Portland Row again?
She still hasn’t made her mind up when the knock on the door comes. Despite an absolutely miserable job with a team of Rotwell’s finest idiots the night before, she’s been up for about half an hour, cleaning up the flat. It’s been a few days since George has been over and she wants that game of cards.
“Come in,” she yells when she hears the sharp rap on the door. “You caught me,” she says without turning around from the sink. “I was trying to get these out of the way before you came.”
“That’s very kind.”
The cup in her hand falls back into the sink with a splash. That’s not George. Lucy spins around and yep, that’s Lockwood. Lockwood in a sharp new suit and the tie she bought him last year, Lockwood with his hands in his pockets again, trying to look relaxed and not quite pulling it off. Lockwood, here in her flat like she’d summoned him with the force of her yearning.
“Hi,” she says. “You’re not George.”
“Not the last time I checked, no.” He looks around. “You’ve got the place looking nice, haven’t you?” It’s a diplomatic way of saying that the floor is now visible. He spots the jam jar full of daffodils on her table. “Where’d you half-inch those?”
“Some nice old lady in Surbiton gave them to me after I cleared a gibbering mist out of her cellar.”
“I hope she also paid you in actual money.”
“She did.” Lucy pushes her hair out of her face with a soapy hand and his eyes track the movement. “What are you doing here, Lockwood?” she blurts out and regrets it.
“I know.” He looks at the floor. “You asked me not to come.”
It’s a chance to apologise and Lucy seizes it with both hands. “Yeah, I — I’m sorry about that. I wasn’t myself.”
He looks up, his hair falling into his eyes and he’s never looked younger to her. The moment of vulnerability hangs between them for a moment and then dissipates when he smiles. “I know, Lucy.”
It’s not what he says so much as the way he says it; with the same, profound gentleness he’d used when he last spoke to her, with a complete confidence in her that she doesn’t deserve. She wants to melt into it, but if she touches him, she might start crying and she’s determined to stop being such a sponge. She wants to be the one who looks after him now.
“Will you have a cup of tea?”
His smile brightens. “Please.”
She invites him to sit in her only chair, thanking George internally for her newfound habits of cleanliness, and fumbles her way through making the tea. Once they both have a cup, she sits on the bed and tries to start again, less abruptly. “It’s good to see you, Lockwood.”
“Yeah. You too.” He can’t seem to take his eyes off her face and Lucy starts to feel self-conscious. Is there something at the corner of her mouth? She tries to swipe at it discreetly. “How have you been?” he asks.
The urge to bluster about her simple, noble freelancing life rises and she squashes it. She’s trying to do something new. “Recovering,” she says honestly. “It’s been a bit slow, but I’m starting to feel less —”
“Numb?”
“Yeah.” Now that you’re here, I don’t feel numb at all. “How about you?” she asks, and it’s all so clumsy, so stilted and she wants to shrink away from it, but she won’t, she won’t. She looks closely at his face for signs of the exhaustion that she’s seen in George, and it’s there all right. The overbright eyes ringed by bluish shadows and the new scar on his neck — it’s there.
“Busy,” he says, because apparently she's the only one who’s adopted a vow of honesty, or at least a vow of non-deflection. “Actually, that’s sort of why I’m here.” He takes a deep breath. “I was wondering if you’d consider working a job with us. Just a one-time thing.”
Lucy’s heart judders in her chest. This is it, this is her chance. “I’m listening,” she says.
The Guppy case seals two things in Lucy’s mind: one, she misses working at Lockwood and Co (this sounds like an obvious revelation, but she had had her doubts as to whether she could really work with the team again after everything); and two, Lockwood is not safer without her. Hearing George’s grim hints was one thing, but actually seeing Lockwood walk calmly into the arms of the most dangerous ghost she’s ever hunted is a shocking dose of reality.
Afterwards, she stands out in the crisp night air and shares a bar of chocolate with him. As she watches him eat, his face grey with tiredness, her decision crystallises within her.
“Lockwood,” she says. “I’ve been thinking.” She doesn’t miss how still he goes, almost quivering with alertness. “It would be good to chat again. About things. Wouldn’t it?”
Wow, that’s articulate, she thinks. Way to go Lucy. Nobel prize for speech-making, incoming. But Lockwood is nodding eagerly, his tiredness vanishing and she takes heart. “Maybe after this we could meet somewhere and have tea?” she continues. “And talk?” (She feels a belated pang of sympathy for Quill Kipps. This asking-people-out business is harder than it looks.)
“Sounds excellent, Luce.” He’s giving her his warmest, most eye-crinkling smile and it’s fizzing up and down her spine like lightning. “How about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s good.” She can’t even be bothered playing it cool, she just grins back at him. “Tomorrow’s great.”
Despite being physically dog-tired, she’s too strung out to sleep when she gets back to Tooting, and she sits up, looking at Norrie’s photo as her mind races. Ever since the mill, a part of her has been asleep, she admits. When Norrie died, she had thought that perhaps it had gone with her — that the deepest reaches of her heart would just be dead forever. But perversely, the opposite has happened: since Norrie’s death, it’s as if a cool spring breeze has started blowing into her, like when the wind would come off the sea when they were kids. It’s like someone’s been breathing life into her again.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” says Lucy, not talking to the picture now, but to the person who is somehow more there than she is herself. “You’re doing this?”
There is no answer, no special feeling, no well-timed gust of air to disturb the curtains. All the same, Lucy believes it.
“Make this work,” she begs. “I know you’re up there. Please just — help me fix this.”