"Glenfiddich."
He hadn't planned to come to the pub, but it was Rosalind's birthday and he was the only person to mark the day. She hadn't cared much for spirits, liquor or otherwise, but he didn't think she'd mind his choice, not when she'd haunted him so despite her predilections. Andrew might have noticed but it wouldn't be the same for him; he could not remember her as anyone but his mother. He hadn't the memories of her gleeful laughter, the way she had clapped her hands together in delight when it rained, the greedy pleasure she took in the last of the raspberry jam. It had been such a long time since she had gone and she hadn't aged, not as Foyle had, through years and war and being solitary.
"Is it what you want?" she said, the woman sitting beside him, whom he'd expected to be waiting for a man to join her. She was dark-haired, as Rosalind had been, but that was all the similarity between the two. She was lithe and her lips were stained red and she was very much alive. He didn't answer and she waited, then gestured to the tumbler in front of him.
"Glenfiddich?" she added, her own hand wrapped around a glass of something the deep unwavering gold of an autumn day, the further thing from the pale brown sherry Rosalind had preferred if she had to drink something to make their hostess feel at ease.
"No. But they won't have what I want," he said. He was surprised he had said so much but she wouldn't understand it anyway.
"Some things are beyond our grasp." She spoke lightly but he recognized her tone, the way he was sometimes startled by his own face in the glass, the familiar become rare. She was watching him the way he watched others, the way he had never been able to teach Milner. Her mouth curved, the way his wife's mouth had when she was pleased by him, but he didn't know why this woman would be pleased. He didn't know anything but he found he wanted to.
"I'm Lix," she said before he could ask her, before he could think of how he might begin. She started it and stopped him, her name heard in his mind as licks, the suggestion of suggestion and hunger. He looked at her, an eyebrow raised in inquiry.
"Alexis, but I can't bear it, who could?" she said. She shook her head a little, her hair soft around her pale face, a contrast to the line of her cheek, her throat, the arch of her brow. There was nothing young about her.
"Do you think we should all rename ourselves then?" he asked, sipping at the Scotch. It was not what he had had wanted but he wanted it now, as he found he wanted her to speak again, to say something he could not anticipate. A peculiar conversation, one he did not think Andrew or Sam could ever envision him entertaining, but the words came and he wanted to say them. To hear them said to her and to hear her response.
"Perhaps. Perhaps it depends on what you are called," she said.
"Christopher," he said, offered really, to see what she would do. She finished her drink in a swallow and pushed the glass away. Her fingers were stained with nicotine, ringless, the nails buffed. They were a portrait of her but not the whole.
"Nothing else?"
"Kit, a long time ago now. Foyle mostly," he said.
"Christopher, though. That's you, that's you now," she replied. She liked the truth; she let her shoulders relax in the white silk blouse and she shifted on the bar stool, gathering the shadows around her like a empress's ermine mantle, like an old silk dressing gown worn for comfort and the slide of it against bare skin.
"Yes. I think so," he answered, warm though Rosalind was nowhere nearby, just this woman who had no name to suit her.
"Alix, that's what the Queen was called once," he said. She might be too young to remember that one but he did. She didn't smile but she was happy, so that he saw how she had not been before, how long it had been since she was.
"Alix then, at least for tonight," she said. She might be a creature more at ease at night but he'd discover that. And what she had lost that brought her to a pub alone, as if she was waiting and yet waiting to be left. He had been left and knew what it cost; he was old enough to know he didn't want to leave her. Not her voice, nor her mind, not that steady gaze that rested on him with curious patience and frank appraisal.
"At least. But perhaps tomorrow as well," he said. He didn't reach for her hand but he moved as if he might and she did not withdraw her own. She turned her palm so he could see the tracing of veins at her wrist and those he did touch, very lightly.
"Yes," she said. It had been a long time, too long some would say, but he remembered enough of courtship to see it could be that and had solved enough cases to see how it might come out. Alix was still and he wondered what she knew and what she could make of it. Of him. Them.