When a man becomes a father he is no longer a mere mortal; he is either a hero or a monster. And Siger Holmes was never a hero to his sons.
He is an old man now, but the memories still reoccur, rising unbidden, rolling out like a newsreel into the blank, dimming distance.
He knows he could have done it differently…
September 1966
As the months following the World Cup victory ebbed by, the summer turned Indian. Flight Lieutenant Siger Holmes had followed his traditional migratory path whenever he found himself on leave, and headed towards Oxford's dreaming spires.
He found his father, a physicist, in his office at the college. Professor William Mycroft Holmes, portly and resplendent behind his desk, eyed his favourite son with a wry amusement as he handed him three fingers of fine scotch.
A knock on the door precipitated Violet Sherringford's entrance into his life. She was a sleek little creature in a pencil skirt; he felt his heart judder when he saw her. The meeting was plainly arranged and carefully timed by his father. It was with pride that he introduced his son to his most promising research student. Violet brushed a dark curl away from her face, not at all surprised.
Adopting his military bearing and his charming smile that had coaxed so many women into bed, he enveloped her hand in his. Vaunted, venerated and respected in his own world, he was determined to impress now he was stood outside of his own sphere.
"Flight Lieutenant Siger Holmes. Per ardua ad astra." He said.
"Ah. Omne ignotum pro magnifico." She replied, wearily.
Her grey eyes churned like machinery as she regarded him disinterestedly. For the first time in his life, he was speechless.
He was twenty-seven, she barely twenty. What else could he do but marry her?
April, 1967
With the Professor working from Oxford for the majority of the year, the newlyweds moved into the family manor in Sussex.
Violet immediately took over his father's old study, spreading out her papers and notes and formulae across the desk, overwhelming the room with paper.
Her absent presence engulfed the house. The noise of her thoughts, louder than the clatter of her typewriter, emanated in rays, out from the sealed room.
March 1968
They had a baby; the baby died.
Siger wondered if Violet had even noticed.
After he was born, she looked at Sherrinford fleetingly and declared the blonde baby looked like his father. A few days later she had handed the child over to the nannies and returned to her desk.
The day of the funeral, she looked up from her equations to see her husband dressed in black. He begged her to dress, to come to the church, to say goodbye to her firstborn. She snapped her pencil in half and took to her bed, locking the door behind her.
She would not emerge for two weeks.
It had never occurred to Siger that genius could be frail.
June 1969
She left equations like calling cards all over the house. She drew them on the mirror in her plum-coloured lipstick, streaked them onto the bathroom mirror following a shower, sketched them into the dust on the mantelpiece.
Siger could trace her movements through the house from these carelessly dropped thoughts. They were like a foreign language to him; he could read both Russian and Arabic, but these symbols floated away beyond his comprehension.
He wondered how his wife could make these numbers tessellate in her mind.
He took Polaroids of her abandoned calculations, before he cleaned them away, and pushed the photographs under her study door.
February 1970
It had taken months of persuasion to convince Violet that she wanted to have another child.
The baby was born a month after Professor Holmes had died, so it seemed only natural that they named the child after his grandfather. Their second son was burdened by high expectations from the day of his birth.
Mycroft looked more like his mother, with dark hair and pale eyes.
The baby was installed in the nursery. Violet wrapped herself in her floral dressing gown and returned to her desk. Siger pulled on his uniform and returned to the aerodrome.
August 1974
Four years old, and he never spoke a word.
Mycroft had grown into a still, silent child. He liked to sit in the garden, beneath a tree, making taxonomic drawings of snails. He could recreate the helix of their shells perfectly.
He had read almost every book in the house.
Around a year previously his mother had suddenly taken an interest in him, emerging periodically from her study to gift him with mathematical problems. He took to numbers as quickly as he took to letters.
Mycroft's passions, always caught somewhere between science and poetry, ignited the cooling embers in his mother's heart. Violet always had time for her son.
Siger taught Mycroft chess, which he both loved and excelled at immediately. Siger tried to lure speech out of him, opening his mouth widely around the word "Checkmate" as he sounded the vowels. Mycroft remained tight-lipped and, when declaring victory on the chessboard, smiled serenely before he reached out and toppled his father's King.
Violet had been growing ever more distant, scarcely eating or sleeping as she wrote paper after paper after paper. Her name was well-known among physicists, and she gave lectures in the same theatres Siger's father once had.
Siger felt like a stranger in his own home. He sank back into his chair and drank heavily, watching his wife drive away from the house in her blue Bentley, back to the hallowedness of an Oxford that no longer included him.
A soft, alien voice interrupted his reverie:
"She does love you, you know. In her own way."
Siger blinked in surprise at his son's first words. Mycroft merely shrugged at the look of disbelief his father was giving him, and returned his attention to his botanical textbook.
June 1975
He never thought he had it in him to beat a child. How terrible it is to be wrong.
Even though speech had come to his son, he remained mostly silent. Mycroft refused to eat his porridge, poking at the lumps in it with the reverse end of his spoon.
Siger's temper was flaring and fading like a palpitating heartbeat. Anything could have driven him over the edge if is occurred at the wrong moment. He poured sugar into the bowl and pushed it towards his son. Mycroft's gaze, with the clockwork mechanism so like his mother's working furiously behind his eyes, focussed in on his father's face.
"Mummy knows you still smoke. You should've taken more care to disguise your yellow teeth." Mycroft had said.
A flash of white anger blinded him. When his vision returned, his son was bleeding on the kitchen floor.
Startled, he moved towards the boy, but froze when he heard a cold voice from behind him.
"Don't you dare…"
His breath caught in his throat.
Violet stood, framed in the doorway. The roar of the lioness rushed out from behind his wife's eyes, and he understood, for the first time, how real her love for their son was.
"Mummy…" came Mycroft's small voice, choked with tears. But, from beyond the pain, came a pouring of awe and elation into his tone, as his exalted mother swept him into her arms.
Siger retreated upstairs, to his office, and opened the whiskey he had hidden in his drawer.
Mycroft always ate his porridge after that.
December 1975
Siger thought Mycroft has retreated back into silence again, when he heard the unfamiliar voice of his son from behind the door to Violet's study.
The boy still spoke, just not to him.
Angered, he went to confront his wife later that day.
Violet was startled by the interloper, looking strange and out of place amongst her text books in his air force uniform. She placed her pen on her desk and looked over her spectacles at him expectantly as he paced the carpet.
"I never meant to strike the boy."
"That isn't why he doesn't speak to you anymore."
"No?"
"No. Mycroft is a pragmatic boy. You don't understand him, so he doesn't see the need to try and engage with you any further."
Violet waved a dismissive hand at him, and brought the tip of her fountain pen back down to the notebook she had been writing in. Siger stared at his wife for a full minute, but she did not look up again.
January 1977
After ascending through the ranks, Group Captain Holmes found himself longing for another child.
He wanted a son who would look up to his father, who wanted to make model planes and visit the airbase. Although Mycroft would still stoop to playing chess with his father, he was otherwise disinterested, often too lost in his own thoughts. Too like his mother.
Mycroft, now aged seven, habitually shut himself away with his books in the attic room; only Violet could get him to emerge if he were in one of his moods. He was a mercurial and intense child, and Siger could not see anything of himself in his son.
It had taken years, this time, to persuade Violet that an addition to the family would be beneficial. She had insisted that the publication of her work took priority. Eventually, she relented.
Sherlock was born in the same month as Modern Atomic Physics: Spectra and Structure was published, and he looked even more like his mother than Mycroft did.
Neither Violet nor Mycroft took any interest in the new arrival. Siger hung an Airfix Spitfire over Sherlock's crib and went back to work.
May 1980
At least Sherlock had begun speaking like normal children did. Even if his first word was his brother's name, the combined consonants sounding strange and discomforting on an infant tongue.
Unfortunately, Sherlock showed no interest in aeroplanes. Nor did he care for anything Mycroft had at that age; he refused to read or to draw or to play chess.
Instead, he clung fiercely to his brother. To Siger's surprise, Mycroft didn't seem to mind. His eyes seemed brighter than normal when he held his little brother's hand.
Together, they lay on the lawn in the shadow of the rhododendron bush, while Mycroft taught his brother the scientific names of the beneficial insects. Sherlock spent the rest of the evening drawing pictures of bumblebees.
March 1981
They were lonely boys, but they were, somehow, lonely together, so that made all the difference.
December 1981
No one ever decorated the Christmas tree. It occupied a corner of the living room, looking as though it had crept in from the garden.
Sherlock had discovered pirates just in time for Christmas so, beneath the bare, green branches of the fir tree and wrapped in colourful paper, lay a pirate hat and toy galleon, and copies of Treasure Island and The Black Corsair.
Siger was beginning to feel that, at last, he had a son he could understand.
February 1982
Sherlock had discovered chemistry, and with this discovery vanished every hope that Siger may have had that his youngest son might follow in his footsteps.
Mycroft helped with his chemical equations and, together, they burnt holes in the carpet.
April 1982
The television blared. The newsreader's serious expression, the soft furrow of worry creasing his brow indicating his concerted effort to enunciate ever word clearly, played constantly, interspersed with footage of the warzone. The bleak terrain of the Falklands, despite being so far away, looked a lot like the Scottish Highlands.
Mycroft was enraptured.
He did not think of his father, now awaiting orders, on the air force base on a volcanic island in the South Atlantic. He had barely noticed that his father had left.
June 1982
Siger didn't know why he expected his sons to run down the drive to greet him when he returned from the war.
March 1983
Siger resolved to teach his sons Morse code, certain it would spark their interest. It did, and they had both mastered it inside a week.
From there the boys moved on to Esperanto and, after communication in that tongue became too easy, then began developing their own idioglossia.
Gradually, their peculiar vowel sounds dissipated, as their language evolved into gesture. A nod, a wink, a tilt of the head, and whole sentences were seemingly communicated.
The house became silent again.
December 1983
The violin was a Christmas present. An idea of Mycroft's.
The scraping notes of unpractised fingers echoed around the house, lulling Siger into a peaceful slumber.
January 1987
The affair had been easy to begin. It was propelled by hotel rooms and red roses and covert, whispered phone calls; things Violet would have despised. It was easy to continue; no one at the house noticed when he was gone.
Jane looked like his wife, only without the fatal intensity. Her eyes were brown.
While she slept, he touched her dark curls and thought about the mahogany of his wife's desk.
May 1987
No one knew when the declaration had been made or when the first battle had taken place. All that mattered now was that Mycroft and Sherlock were at war. Or, more accurately, Sherlock was at war with his elder sibling who, without really trying, always managed to be the better, more brilliant of the brothers. Mycroft remained stoic, impassive, watching his beloved brother rage against him.
The door to Violet's study remained locked. Siger opened another bottle.
June 1987
The boys were sorry they had upset their Mummy. Siger could hear them from behind her study door, their laughter peculiar and uneasy in their throats.
He waited outside until Violet dismissed her children. Mycroft met his gaze as they walked past him, giving him a look so complex in its fury and so intricate in its sadness. Sherlock looked straight through him.
Both brothers departed to different parts of the house.
Watching them go, Siger caught himself wondering what life might have been like if Sherrinford, the son that had looked like him, had lived.
August 1987
It all came out, of course. Violet may have been wrapped up in her work, but their sons saw everything. Sherlock had confronted him, threatened to expose his affair. Out of rage and panic he had slapped the boy.
Violet promptly asked him to leave.
"I should never have married you. It was a mistake." He said, not meeting her eyes. Her eyes would undo him.
Violet didn't respond to that, but he could see she agreed with him.
"Sherlock thinks Mycroft should have told me sooner." She mused, looking out into the garden, "As though that would have made any difference."
So that had been it then; the fraternal war's precipitating factor. Mycroft had known too, had figured it all out before Sherlock, but had chosen to remain silent. Mycroft had sided with family politics instead of truth.
After Siger packed his suitcase, he placed his wedding ring on the bedside table.
In another room, in another part of the house, Mycroft was also packing, preparing for his first term at Oxford.
As Siger drove away from the house, he idly wondered if his sons would ever make amends and lie in the garden identifying insects again.
December 1987
He did what divorced fathers were supposed to do.
He took Sherlock to the zoo and to the Natural History Museum. Sherlock remained sullen and petulant. He scratched at his arm and asked to go home.
Trying to catch up with both of them over the Christmas period was worse. They sat in the kitchen of his new home while Siger tried to make conversation. Mycroft, growing rapidly thinner, pushed the food round his plate and drank coffee, answering questions about his tutors and his lectures with single words and short phrases. Sherlock would not speak at all.
They didn't speak to each other, either, and Siger wondered if their feud was deepening or if they were communicating silently. He watched them carefully, but couldn't discern whether the twitch of Mycroft's head, the tapping or Sherlock's fingers or the fluttering of both their eyelids were indications of conversation or of impatience.
When the meal was finished they both left separately.
October 1990
He married again, of course.
Jane's needs were simple; so were her thoughts. She looked beautiful in her wedding dress.
Neither Mycroft nor Sherlock would come to the wedding.
November 1990
He watched the news of Margaret Thatcher's resignation on the six pm broadcast, and thought of his eldest son, no doubt glued to the television again.
July 1991
He had wanted to go to Mycroft's graduation, but no invitation had been forthcoming.
Mycroft had, of course, graduated with honours. He also published a complicated paper on binomial theorem that got him noticed by the academic community, and offers of scholarships for postgraduate study flooded in. His son's glittering career was already laid out before him.
Someone did send him a copy of Mycroft's paper. He never did find out whom.
September 1991
He had to leave. He asked to be transferred abroad and was sent to the base in Gibraltar.
The air was warm and tasted different.
November 1991
Siger asked everyone he knew – his superiors, friends in the Ministry of Defence, anyone who might be able to penetrate that secret veil. No one was quite certain.
Was it MI5 or MI6? Some secret office of the government? Who was it exactly that had spirited his eldest son away from Oxford academia and drawn him down to the murky depths of London's political intrigue?
No one could quite provide him with a straight answer, although he did find one reference to his progeny buried deep within governmental papers, saying one M. Holmes had been appointed to the treasury office in Whitehall as an accountant.
Siger didn't believe a word of it.
September 1994
Sherlock chose Cambridge over Oxford and chemistry over physics.
Whether that was to spite Mycroft in particular or family tradition as a whole, Siger couldn't be sure.
October 1995
Through clandestine whispers he had managed to trace the career of his eldest son, a rising star within some branch of government intelligence.
Then the whispers stopped entirely.
That wasn't because his star had fallen, but because it had ascended higher than the heavens.
July 1997
He telephoned the offices at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, to enquire if he could obtain a ticket for his son's graduation. When he gives the receptionist Sherlock's name she almost drops the telephone. He hears her swear under her breath before she tells him the student of that name dropped out six months before completion.
Concerned, he unconsciously dials Violet's number.
"Holmes." Hearing her crisp and cultured voice again after all these years knocks the wind out of him. Although he is gratified to know that she has kept his name.
"Violet…Violet, it's me."
"Siger…what do you want?" She sounds tired, but that's what a decade can do.
"I've just got off the phone with Sherlock's college. They said he's not graduating this year. What's going on?"
Suddenly, he is shocked to hear her crying. The line crackles, briefly covering her muffled sobs. He holds the line, waiting for her to pull herself together. After a minute, she does.
"I'm sorry, Siger. I can't talk about this." Her voice sounds raw, "You'll have to speak to Mycroft."
She gives him their son's office number and hangs up. Siger listens to the dial tone for a moment before he puts the phone down.
He doesn't call Mycroft.
April 1999
A few days had passed since he had returned to Britain, and returned to Jane. He had spent the time walking through the Cornish countryside with her, reflecting that there was nothing in the world quite like a sunny day in England. For the first time in a long time he felt truly relaxed.
He and Jane had rented a cottage near the sea; a trite image, perhaps, but one that made him happy.
When he returned from his walk one afternoon, Jane presented him with a letter addressed to him, saying it had been delivered earlier that morning. Even though the postman would not brave the treacherous path to the cottage and they had yet to tell anyone of their return.
Siger tore the envelope open, failing to mask the sudden panic clamouring at his throat. He recognised his eldest son's florid script immediately. The letter had been written in green ink.
I am sure you understand that you are not welcome. Kindly leave in the manner in which you arrived. Promptly.
- M
He took a moment to re-read the letter, tracing his fingers delicately over the signed initial, before he stuffed it into his pocket. Without explaining to Jane, he began to pack.
January 2000
Of course Jane had left him; he was surprised she had hung on as long as she did. Surprised she came abroad with him in the first place.
There were so many reasons. She missed her country, and she was tired of military bases. She was lonely, and could no longer remain married to an indifferent man.
But Siger knew it was because Jane looked like his ex-wife, and he kept a copy of Modern Atomic Physics: Spectra and Structure by Dr. V.R. Holmes in the drawer of his bedside table.
As his soon-to-be second ex-wife sat down at her computer to book her plane tickets home, he opened up the aging volume. Violet's esoteric science washes over him. He doesn't understand a word.
October 2001
War is declared against Afghanistan, and Siger knows he will not see action. He's not certain when he became an old man, but he feels it now.
He sits at a desk and flicks idly through news reports. In the background of one photograph he spots a familiar silhouette. He is older now, and carrying both an expensive umbrella and the weight of the world, but that can only be his boy.
Siger wonders whether Mycroft started or tried to stop this war. The tension round his son's eyes gives nothing away.
May 2003
The Science of Deduction. Siger smiled softly as he browed the website.
Trust Sherlock to invent his own job.
March 2004
He retired from the air force and returned to Britain.
He expected to receive a letter from Mycroft warning him away again, but nothing appeared.
It seemed his sons had forgotten about him.
August 2007
He heard Violet had died from her obituary in The Times. The article was accompanied by a photograph of her at her desk. Although her hair had greyed and her face had wrinkled, those dominant eyes still pierced outwards from the photograph, tearing a hole in his psyche. Sixty-one was no age to die; she still looked like the girl he had met at the end of that summer in Oxford.
On the day of the funeral he had dressed in black and driven to the house, despite knowing he would not be brave enough to step out of the car.
He parked in the driveway, and stared up at the house, registering the changes. It was falling into disrepair, the ivy that clung to the façade surely masking even further decay. With two grown-up sons blazing their own trails through the world and work that bound her to her college, it seemed none of the remaining Holmeses had any time for maintaining the manor.
He noticed two tall silhouettes by the kitchen window, gazing out at him. He knew they would notice; they always noticed everything.
He wishes he was brave enough to go in to the house, to speak to his sons, to ask them how they are. He wishes he knew which one of his sons was the taller one.
But he knows if he sets foot in there, one of the young men would punch him and the other would poison his tea. He wonders which one would choose which course of action; it would probably happen in the opposite manner to his predictions. They were always defying expectations.
He starts the engine, puts the car in gear and drives away.
January 2009
He hears about Sherlock everywhere, in every newspaper, ever since his son had met that doctor. He sits in the dark, in front of the glowing computer screen, savouring every word of John Watson's blog.
June 2012
He has been told not to think of it as his death bed, that he might still pull through. But he won't, and he knows he won't. The cancer has eaten away too much.
The hospital room offers a good view of central London, but his attention is entirely focussed on the television in the corner of the room, screening a 24-hour news channel. His youngest son's name, distinctive and unmistakable, appears emblazoned along the red ticker ribbon every three minutes.
They call him a fraud, and Siger tries not to imagine Sherlock's crushed, ruined body. He had seen men who had fallen from great heights before, shattered upon the ground and drenched in blood. He blinks heavily, wondering vaguely as to why he isn't crying.
A tall man that he does not recognise strides into the room. He is dressed in a suit so well-tailored that makes Siger, in his thin cotton pyjamas, suddenly feels unworthy and insignificant. He is carrying an umbrella, tapping the tip of it restlessly, impatiently against the cold linoleum floor. Siger forces himself to raise his gaze to the man's face.
He recognises those eyes. Those grey, fierce, penetrating eyes.
"Mycroft?"
The man does not reply but, for a moment, looks uncertain.
"Mycroft…" Siger finds his throat closing around the words. He swallows to force the syllables out, "I'm sorry about your brother."
Mycroft glances at him sharply and Siger regrets speaking. But then, Mycroft's stiffened expression melts away, leaving behind the serene, omniscient smile of a boy about to win a game of chess.
And Siger understands.
Sherlock Holmes lives.