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It’s all over now. That hope that he had cherished, so secretly, so tentatively, within his chest. It’s gone. Turned into a thing of lead and sunk so far down into the vast recesses of his heart that it’s past finding.
Only a dull ache remains.
A gray nothing. An emptiness with no horizon.
“Uh .... Ooooooooh."
”Who’s the lucky man?”
His own foolish words resound, still, in his mind, every replay a fresh torment.
When had that all happened? How was it that he missed his chance?
Morse takes a long draught of the dark ale cradled in his hand. It’s his first taste in months. It’s bitter and it’s sweet and it does absolutely nothing to fill the hollowness within.
But it does promise to dull the pain.
He sets the glass down, keeping his hand protectively curled round the cold of it. It’s all he’s got to hold onto now.
Wearily, he closes his eyes and tips his head back against the high seat of the pub booth, trying hard not to imagine that its tall, wooden sides are a metaphor.
He’s walled off. He’s boxed in. Cut apart from all the world.
He may as well be in his coffin.
He huffs a dry laugh, then, that no one is there to hear. Now, he’s just being maudlin.
But yet ... as he casts his gaze down to the dark and glossy table before him, the grain of it seems to move, somehow. It swims before his eyes like water.
The effect of the beer after so long? The shimmer of unshed tears?
Both perhaps, he supposes, or perhaps neither. Perhaps it’s just one more symptom of the downward spiral he’s been caught up in.
That current of despair.
Carrying him down and down and down.
It might have been so very different, once. He might have folded into it so gently, so easily, the family he had come to love. He knew all of their habits, their small ways. Just where the silverware drawer was. How Mrs. Thursday took her tea. What sandwich she made for her husband on Wednesday. Morse could even remember a time when Sam, now long since gone for a soldier, had stood barefoot in the kitchen in a pair of boyish pajamas, fishing the prize out of a cereal box.
He could not say he hadn’t tried. Once. Twice. Three times. Too many times to count. Each time he had been dismissed, as if he had not meant the words that had come so painfully to his lips.
“Marry me.”
If she did not know that he was dead in earnest, that his heart was breaking, then she never knew him at all.
“She’s French. You’ll like her.”
“You don’t look like you.”
“Did I miss something?”
No.
She never saw.
She never knew.
Or else.
Perhaps.
She did not want to.
It’s a hard, hard thing—nearly unbearable— knowing love is a thing that slips through your fingers. That you can’t seem to hold.
No matter how much you wanted it.
And he did want.
He was difficult. He was solitary. He was awkward. Yes, all of those things, all of those charges that Alice, that Jim, that so many, one after the other, had laid at his door.
“You’re different.”
But that did not mean he was not human. That he did not mean that he did not feel.
Just because he had never quite gotten the knack of it—just because he had never learned how to give voice to it—to all of the love welling over in his heart, did not mean that he didn’t wake up at four in the morning feeling as if it were spilling out of him. Falling. Puddling out like his own guts onto the hard, cold floor.
He was devoted to his work. To seeing justice done.
But he wasn’t a machine. He wasn’t that cold, unfeeling thing that sometimes he felt sure they thought he was.
He did not want to be alone.
He takes another sip of ale. Sits back and examines it in the light. Despite himself, the corner of his wide mouth jerks in a puppet’s string, lopsided smile.
The irony of it was, he was right back to where he had started from, back when he had tried to resign from the force.
There was nothing but to drink the beer and to let the world be the world.
To accept it.
It was his fate, he supposed. To always be second fiddle. Second best. Never to have a day in the sun.
Always the best man and never the groom.
So wanting, but unable, to take a step closer.
A step closer ….
A step closer ….
Although...
He had, once. Once, long ago, when it had been made achingly clear to him that his overtures would not be rejected.
Once, long ago, on a dock of a sunlit lake.
Suddenly, there’s a tight constriction in his throat. He swallows hard. He fights against it.
Once, he thought he had. Found someone. Someone who knew how to bridge that distance between himself and the world that he himself had never been brave enough to leap.
Once, a man with a knowing smile and starlight in his eyes had reached out and set his hand upon his shoulder. He had pulled him towards him as if, of all of those who had come to that wild and incoherent party, his presence was the one he desired above all else’s.
Bix knew nothing about him— save that he lived in a fishing shack at the edge of his property and that he had spent some time in prison. For what, he knew not…
Still, he had smiled upon him, no questions asked.
Still, he had laid all of the world at his feet.
"Anything you want, old man."
"It’s yours."
Just that easy.
À moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies.
All of this, and Bixby never even knew his Christian name. But the way he had caressed that one syllable of his surname sometimes made Morse believe that, perhaps it was true, what Bix had said—that anything was possible. It made him believe that perhaps, just perhaps, those other three syllables might not sound so very ridiculous—might, in fact, sound as sweet as the Scotch Bix tasted of—if they were to be spoken by that mouth.
"Endeavour ...”
“Morse?”
Morse looks up, his breath catching at the hollow of his throat. Suddenly, he’s there, sitting in the seat across from him, dressed in the same evening suit he wore on the last night he saw him. He’s not a ghostly figure, as one might have thought. He’s solid. He’s real. His brown eyes are two pools of amber warmth in the dim pub light. There’s even that familiar trace of a smile—the one that never seemed to leave his lips even when his eyes were full of his old, quiet sadness.
Incredibly, Bix heaves a deep breath, and Morse’s heart races, and his apotheosis is complete. He’s drunk on it, the living proof of what he dared not ever believe.
“Bix?” Morse gasps.
Bix releases a soft sigh on which a few words float to him.
“I’m sorry, old man.”
Morse flinches at the words.
The warm haze of the dream dissolves. The reality of his situation resurfaces.
He’s alone. Everyone is moving on. Even this, what can only be a pleasant illusion, is bound to fade.
“It’s fine,” he replies.
“I’m sure it isn’t. Oh, Jim. Jim, Jim, Jim. Who would have ever thought you had it in you? With the placement of a single card, he sweeps the table, wins it all. The woman whose steps have ghosted through your dreams. A permanent place at the Thursdays’ dining room table. In Thursday’s heart. His son-in-law.”
“Thanks,” Morse says.
Bixby takes a sip from his glass Scotch, which, too, has miraculously appeared before him.
He winces. He still has that split lip.
Morse frowns. He would have thought that the wounds of his past life would have healed over in the next.
It worries him that they have not.
Perhaps some wounds never heal.
“He’ll blaze over you in the ranks, you know,” Bixby says. “One day, you’ll be calling him Sir.”
“That was always a certain,” Morse replies, dourly. “It’s like he always says, isn’t it? Rank’s not about brains. It’s about playing the game. And I can’t play it.”
“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, old man. You won’t play it.”
Morse quirks a smile. It’s kind of him to say, but he rather thinks it’s not true. It’s not a choice. Not one that he can control, anyhow. It’s simply not in his nature, to take on that fluidity of water, to mirror the color that’s reflected in it. The one time he had tried it, breaking his face into a sycophantic smile, offering that Masonic handshake to see what response he might get, Batten had grimaced, repulsed. He had not been fooled for a minute.
Morse didn’t have the ability to change, to shift, as Jim did, hedging his bets.
He was made of something rather harder, like stone.
A stone growing colder with every passing year.
“You wouldn’t be happy with a life lived like that,” Bix persists.
“No,” Morse agrees.
That much is true. It would be like a knife, a worm in the gut, every morning. Looking at himself in the mirror, knowing what he had become. Compromised. It was so very easy to lose one’s way.
Bix dismisses the very idea of such a thing with a graceful, magician’s wave of his hand.
“Brown-nosing,” Bix scoffs. ”Shaking hands with the right people. Worrying about what such men think of you. Worrying about letting down the side. Imagine. Why, we are the side.”
Bix is trying. He’s trying so very hard to cheer him. It’s his court jester efforts, rather than his words, that do the trick. Morse can’t help but huff a laugh.
“What does that even mean?” he asks.
Again, Bix seems to dismiss such hair-splitting.
“You like it,” he says, daring him to deny it.
Morse bows his head to look into his beer, hiding his smile.
Bix sits back, his own smile deepening, pleased with himself.
Morse could bask for days in the dazzling warmth of that smile. He’s almost afraid to ask the question, lest the beautiful illusion evaporate.
“Why are you here?” he ventures, at last. “You didn’t come all this way just to kick through the leaves.”
A moment of silence falls between them. If somewhere, elsewhere there’s a murmur of conversation in the darkened pub, a shuffle of feet, or a bright clink of glass, Morse doesn’t hear it.
“Ah,” Bixby says. “It’s true. There’s never enough time to say all that one would wish. If I had known… I would have said it then… but, then… such love is one that does still fear to speak its name.”
Morse can scarcely draw breath enough to answer.
“Said what?”
Bixby’s smile fades, as the dark eyes grow solemn, soft with regret.
“There were so many times that I stood there, on that dock. Facing out over the water, trying to make out the green light at the end of Kay’s dock. But then, I met you. After everyone else had left the party, you stayed on. And you a policeman, of all things.” All at once, the dark eyes brighten. It’s like standing under the sky at the moment when gray summer rain clouds roll away, letting shine the sun. “By rights, you should have had me arrested. You’re the cleverest man I’ve ever known. Surely, you must have seen enough at that party to know that I was a fraud, a front for Harry Rose. You knew it from the moment you got there, from the moment you saw that painting.”
“Yes,” Morse admits.
He did know. But in that moment, he didn’t care about all that.
About the law.
He cared only about…
The single syllable seems to give Bix courage to go on.
“I turned away from the water, and there you were. Not a cold, distant glimmer from across the lake. But right before me, all tousled curls and your tie askew. And that’s when I knew. What I felt for her was but a pale shadow of what stirred then, in my heart. Your open look.” He indulges in a warm and velvet laugh. “Your ridiculous attempts to cheer me, even though you didn’t believe a word you said ….”
Morse smiles, too.
He remembers.
Oh, yes.
He’s lived the moment over and over, these past six years.
“Anything’s possible."
“That sudden, uncharacteristic chirp in your low warble of a voice,” Bixby says, remembering. “Your face framed in that golden light. I wanted to tell you that night, but I didn’t think you were ready to hear it.”
“No,” Morse agrees.
Morse reaches out to put his hand around his glass. He needs it now. He needs to hold on to something, as that shot, as that piercing shot, rings through the night air. Rings through his mind.
That moment. That long and deadly moment.
He had just pulled off the silk of his tie.
Rigoletto and then …. nothing.
Nothing but the cold plunge of water, the frantic cry of his own voice.
"Bixby? Bix?"
How very like him to find a way to give voice to what he wanted at the very moment that it was snatched away from him.
“No,” Morse says. “I didn’t know… not until it was too late.”
Although ... as soon as he says the words ... he realizes that they are not quite true, either.
Truth of it is, he had loved him from the moment he saw him, spinning around in that ridiculous top hat. He was the warmth to his coolness, the dream to his doubt.
He had been afraid to admit it to himself.
Not until he had heard the sound of a bullet ringing in the night.
And then, just like that, he’s there again, the film reel in his head circling a second course within sixty seconds: that panicked run, that plunge into the freezing water, his fear of the loss of him overcoming his fear of what he might find.
He had pulled up the body, with its face gone, blown away. He had cried out with the horror of it, but still, he cradled it in his arms, pulled what was left of him gently to shore.
He couldn’t leave him. Not in those dark depths, lost and alone and….
He had been alone long enough already. Just as he had.
Bixby reaches out and takes his hand, uncurling his fingers from around the glass he’s holding onto to the point of breaking. He curls his hand within his. He squeezes it, warming his numbed fingertips.
“Morse,” he says.
Morse’s eyes drift up to meet his.
And the terror of that night is gone.
“You asked why I came back. I wanted to tell you that this…."
He squeezes his hand yet tighter. It’s warm. So very warm.
“That this was real.”
Morse remains silent, taking it all in.
“It was important for me to tell you,” Bix says. “You were never second fiddle. Not to me. You were never second best.”
Morse swallows, feeling a telltale welling in his eyes.
Bix smiles, hopefully.
“We had our day in the sun. Didn’t we?”
Morse pauses, caught up in the memory.
They had. The sun had played on the water. The warming air had been soft and sweet and fresh with the scent of evergreen. Bixby had been in his element, showing off his shiny toys. Morse had laughed at his antics and then laughed again, surprised at his own laugher.
After Blenheim Vale, he had thought he would never laugh again.
It was cruel that it had been only a day. That there had been only a brush of fingertips, a handful of ardent kisses, fast and hard, just sweet enough to leave him wanting more, but not so tender so that they could not all be dismissed as a joke, if either party felt any qualms later about having crossed that line. About having broken the law.
Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?
“It isn’t enough,” Morse says.
“I know.”
Morse startles. He had expected more of Bix’s consolations, more of his endless silver linings.
The acknowledgement of the hard, ugly truth of it takes him off guard.
It wasn’t enough.
But it was something.
It was something to hold onto when the wolves came circling.
That handful of golden hours.
No one would ever guess to look at him, how fast he had fallen under Bix’s magic spell. How, once, he had spent a handful of careless, lovely hours, out under the sun.
Although, perhaps, Thursday had.
“He was ….” Morse had begun, before faltering.
“A friend?” Thursday had asked, a kindness in his eyes.
Then, he had discreetly turned away, not wanting to see more.
It had been April 1967, after all.
How strange it all is, really, now that Morse thinks of it. How wondrously strange.
Just as Morse might have had Bix arrested, Thursday might have had arrested him on quite a different sort of charge.
But yet .... neither said a word. They both had turned a blind eye.
Why had they turned a blind eye?
As if he can read his very thoughts, Bixby answers.
“Love, I suppose.”
Again, Morse bows his head over his ale. This time to hide, not a smile, but the sheen of tears.
Love.
Morse knows all too well how the world is beginning to see him.
He’s no longer young. He can feel himself growing harder, colder, steeling himself against it, year after year and case after case after case.
Putting up walls. Building barriers too thick for surmounting.
What choice does he have?
He needs must protect himself somehow. There is only so much you can take in yourself before you fall apart.
As he has been, all of these past three years.
And yet....
He would not give up. Thursday had been right. He was Inspector material.
One day, he would have a bagman of his own, with whom he would work, side by side. A man much like George Fancy, perhaps. Simple and good-hearted. Honest to a fault. Thoroughly decent. The family man that George would have been, no doubt, if he had not been struck down at the tender age of twenty-three.
He would be terrible to him, of course. Perhaps as awful as he had been to Fancy. His bagman would be terrible in his own way in return, his kind heart full of pity.
Pity.
The very last thing anyone wants.
Poor sod. Poor, lonely, bitter old man, he would think. Such a tragedy.
He would never guess that, once, he, too, had been young. He would never guess that, once, someone had even thought him beautiful. He would never know that he had once been cherished an even adored. That, once, his breath had caught in his throat as he had stood under the rose-colored light of that fantastic, gold-glitter party. He would never know how easy, how light, Bixby’s hand had rode upon his shoulder, guiding him on through the crowds. How lovely the sun had felt on his shoulders, his face, as he had turned to look up at him on their one day in the sun. He would never know of the stolen kisses, tasting of Scotch, each as bright and hard as the gold gambling chip Bix carried in his pocket.
“It .... It isn’t enough,” Morse says.
“I know,” Bixby says, heavily. “But one day, it will be.”
“No. It won’t. It won’t be.”
It won’t be.
But … it is some solace, this secret knowledge, fluttering where once his heart has been.
He knows, now, for one, that he can do it. He can get through that awful, approaching day. He can escort a maid of honor, lend her his arm with a false smile plastered on his face. He can give his speech, recite some verses of Donne, his mind empty to the words he speaks. He can fulfill his duties as best man, his past happiness buoying him through present pain.
“Wait for me?” Morse asks.
Bixby smiles all the brighter, happier now, at the note of hope in his voice.
“Of course, I will, old man. Of course, I will.”
Morse nods.
In the end, they’ll see it. Understand his true nature—the one that Thursday had said he could not run from—at last.
Yes. He was devoted to his work. To seeing justice done.
But it wasn’t all of him.
His life would not be one driven by duty … but by a far, far, simpler and more complicated thing.
Love.
His had been a story about love.
One day, they would see it, after he was gone. They would see all of it, all of those things he had loved.
They would see it in the reading of his will, where he would leave what he had to set up a scholarship for a student of music.
They would see it in a drawer full of postcards from a family in Blackpool, whom he had never mentioned once.
And they would see it in yet one more astounding and bewildering request:
To be buried beside a con man, a known associate of the notorious Harry Rose—the dusty, old case files that his future bagman digs out from a storage closet will show—shot by his identical twin brother on a long-ago night, back in April of 1967.