"You asked me to work for you once…I said no. I never said why," Milner said slowly. He was a thorough man yet even for him, there had been a certain gravity, a pause between the words that was unusual. Foyle considered all the responses he could make, the glass of bitter in front of him, the way the light in the pub made him think of the word tavern, how easily the barman could have been from another time. Rosalind preferred landscapes, never falling out of love with the Impressionists, but he would have liked to have seen what she made of this scene, how she would have captured the light on Milner's face that could only come from something burning.
"I never asked you why," Foyle said. The silence after he spoke was not awkward, but it was charged with an energy that was unfamiliar.
"I thought I could do better," Milner replied, dropping his gaze. Foyle waited, sure there was more to come.
"I can hardly believe I was ever that young. That wrong. I was afraid of you, of what it would mean to be your sergeant," Milner added and Foyle could not helping thinking, how young he still was, how the War could alter a man. Paul must be at least five years older than Andrew but they were both distant from him now, veterans of a different conflict, horrors Foyle would never know.
"Wrong, eh?" Foyle repeated, curious about where Milner, Paul, intended to go with the conversation. Why had he brought it up tonight, an ordinary sort of evening in a chaotic world they'd all become accustomed to. Sam did not seem troubled that she was spending her years of brightest beauty in a drab uniform, all her pretty hair tucked away, clapped up in the dark interior of the Wolesley and Milner arrived every morning right on time, ready for the crimes that must have occurred, the tedium of paperwork and stewed tea. Did he even flinch when the bombers came?
"I couldn't imagine then what I know now to be facts. Perhaps it wasn't a mistake, saying no. You might have transferred me, as I was then," Milner said, stroking the sides of his glass. If they held a hand of cards, it would be a tell, but only sitting at the table, nursing their pints, Foyle did not know what to call it and that intrigued him.
"What made you change your mind, when I came to see you in hospital?" Foyle asked. He wanted to know the answer and he thought Paul wanted to say it aloud.
"The War, what else?" Milner replied, looking straight at Foyle as he hadn't before. "You had yours, I had mine. I knew…I knew you'd understand and that I could understand you. And because I was so damned bored in that bed and I thought I'd feel that way forever and then you offered me something to occupy myself with. Doesn't sound the way I thought it would, sir."
"What ever does? And don't call me sir if we're not at work," Foyle said. Milner grinned at him then, a rare, sunny smile that took the years away from his face but not his dark eyes. He knew from his own looking-glass that the shadow there would never pass away but it was a weight that could be balanced by the right work, the right love. Both was better, one would do.