He still has the sketchbooks, the photographs. Even the photographs of other men, from before he met Jack, Jack's old lovers, and he had considered trying to track them down, that maybe they would want them, but Jack had left this collection to him, and the trust in such an act was such that he could not bring himself to part with them. Not then, not then in the months after he died and not in the years and decades afterwards.

He has not taken them out in such a long time, has kept them safe in his study, never far from him. And it is not that he has not been able to bear looking at them, because the hollow of grief has long since closed, and though there remains an ache it is not enough to keep him from breathing, not enough that it possesses him every moment like it once did. It is more that he just has no longing to see them, no longing to see those other men, no longing to see himself through Jack's eyes, rendered carefully on paper.

Himself at twenty-nine sometimes feel like such a stranger, when it is so very far in the past. And sometimes it feels like he has changed very little, in the six and a half decades since.

He takes them out tonight, the sketchbooks, and settles with them at the fire. He has found himself wondering, lately, whether or not he should leave a note for Christine to burn them after his day, or whether or not one of them should be buried with him. But he thinks, now, it is better to leave them, better to let her have them, if she wants them. Her feelings about history and the pieces of it are much the same as his, and she has not met Jack, not yet, but there will come a time, not that far from now, when she will travel back in time and he will introduce them, and they will mean all the more to her then, made more by having met him, though they would mean the world to her now, just for the fact that he has had them for so long, for the fact that he is in them.

There is nothing in them that it would not do for her to see. Jack was always very tasteful in his art. But still there are one or two that are just a little more than the others, and he wonders what she will think when she sees them.

Perhaps it is best that he will not know.


That year, 1953, was a year of learning to be again. It was not that the world had changed but that he had changed, and had to learn how to exist in it again, knowing what he did about himself. Not just his homosexuality, and learning to exist within that took him years, both inside of and outside relationships. Not just his new limitations, the breathlessness from the cavity in his lung, that Noël warned him would never go away, because lung tissue when it's destroyed is gone forever and no one could know that as well as Noël. Not just the having to be extra careful, his increased risk of pneumonia, the way a cold could drain him so much more than he was used to. Not just the new steadiness of the vertigo ebbing away or the returning hearing in his ear (never fully returned, always a little weaker on the left than the right, ever since.)

But the hollowness. The space within him, where Jack had been and should still have been. He had tasted love, and the very light seemed different because of it, the flowers a little brighter.

Sorelli gave him the flowers they presented to her on closing night, and he pressed the petals of some, and hung others to dry, their dark red deepening almost to black. And when they were dried, he slipped one into Jack's sketchbook (where its dust lives still) and gave one to Sorelli.

Two he brought with him to Clare, and buried in the sand looking out on the sea.


It was September before he went back to Trinity, and something about the walls made it seem a little greyer. A book of Keats sitting on the desk in his office made his throat tighten, and if his eyes prickled then it was surely only the dust.

He hid it away and drew shaky breaths.


Skeff brought him a complete collection of Proust in the original French, as a welcome back gift, never mind they have never shared a department.

If he were a suspicious man, he might have thought either Noël or Sorelli had put him up to it, to occupy his mind.


He still has that old complete collection of Proust. Reading it was an adventure in translation, with dictionaries and juggling verb tenses, and it took him the whole of two years.

It lives on the shelf beside Marx, which did come from Noël one year. And Beckett, from Sorelli.


Harry came to see him, on the day after Jack's first anniversary.

He had driven to Newcastle, to walk the grounds, and spend a little time in the place where Jack's life ended, the place that held the whole of their love. He had sworn he would never go back there, but something pulled him to, something that ached to be close to him in any way he could. So he did, and the grounds were just as he remembered, and whether that was better or worse he could not decide.

Sorelli joined him in his bed that night, for the first time in months, and neither of them spoke, just leaned close to each other, and it was a little easier to breathe.

It was the next day that Harry came to him.

"I was wondering how you are," he said, and the very sight of him was enough that the tears came, unbidden.


Harry's visits were to become regular over that winter. Once a week, and he always managed a smile, and often they spoke of Jack, and how he had been, and it was hard to breathe, at first, around the ache in his chest, but it was easier in time, to hear of Jack scaling trees to get the perfect sketch and waiting in the cold all night to catch the sunrise just right in a photograph, to hear of him perched on cliffs and in graveyards, writing, and thinking, and dreaming. To hear him made real, by someone who had known him, truly known him, and not only loved him as he was dying, loved him when he was trapped within walls.

He was still taking his daily walks, had come to enjoy them and the space it brought his head, and sometimes Christine joined him, if she was in his time, and they might not speak of anything at all. And sometimes it was Sorelli, and the quiet of her was a little different, a little more introspective. And he often went alone, but that winter Harry came to join him, several times, and they did not speak but sometimes they caught each other's eyes, and grinned as if there were a joke only they could know.

That Harry, too, was a homosexual, he already knew.

That Harry had loved Jack, once, he knew without asking.


His birthday, and a small party just on a whim, hardly even a party. A bottle of chartreuse and the record player, and Sorelli and Christine.

And Harry.

At the end of the night, as they swayed slowly before the fireplace, after Sorelli and Christine had slipped upstairs—as they swayed in each other's arms, so close he could feel Harry's heart beating in his chest, as their lips met for the first time, there was nothing he would change about it, nothing he would change, because that kiss felt wholly right.


It was that they were both a little broken.

It was that they both needed someone.

It was that they were both mourning Jack.


Harry slipped into his life as if he had belonged there from the first moment.

Looking back, now, he wonders that it had seemed so easy.


When he woke, tangled in the sheets of his bed, the morning after that first night, and saw the sandy glow of Harry's eyelashes in the morning sunlight, he wondered if this was how it was meant to be.

That he did not feel guilt, for having loved him in the night, was the strangest part.


That spring of 1954, Sorelli turned forty. She bought a cottage in Wicklow, and moved down there to live in the countryside, with the quiet and the trees and he visited her once a week and they often met for tea in Dublin, but it was not the same, her being so far away.

And he missed her. Missed her in a way he could hardly admit, when she had been the closest thing he had had to family for so long. But he had Harry, and Harry kept the big house from being empty.

There was always music, always callers, always stories and poetry and tales of politics, and photographs in some stage of development, and that he saw Sorelli less, that he saw Christine less, it seemed only right, when his days and nights were so full.


Four years he was with Harry. Four years, and he does not regret them, not even now, not even after it ended the way it did, slowly with fractures and not a great schism. No recriminations, just a parting, as if they had always understood that it could only be temporary.

He is not sure whether or not he ever really loved Harry. He cared about him, certainly, enjoyed his company. His laugh and the light in those green eyes, the way his fingers would skim his side, skim his thigh. It was something like love, maybe. Something that wanted to be love, and could have been, in a different time. If they were not who they were. If Jack was not always, somehow, still between them.


That last day in early February 1957. The misting drizzle outside. They had been parting, slowly, for weeks, Harry's things leaving the house, one-by-one.

There was a woman, he knew. Emma, but he had never met her. Never felt inclined to.

"I think—" and Harry's voice was soft.

"Yes." There was gravel in his throat, because he had not slept properly in weeks.

One soft last kiss, and Harry was gone.


He drove to Wicklow and spent the night with Sorelli, and there were no tears and few words, but he knew she knew, and she squeezed his hand, and held him close.


There was an election, and it kept him same.

Noël, after losing his seat in 1954 thanks to that decision to join Fianna Fáil (and they discussed it many times, the rights and wrongs of the matter, the necessity of being in a party, but Raoul still feels it was a lapse in judgement on his part), was running as an independent, and hitting the campaign trail gave Raoul something to do, kept him out of the house, kept him from dwelling on Harry.

With Sorelli at his side, and Christine hopping in and out, it was almost like 1948 again, almost like being young again, almost like the nine years in between had never happened, and if he went to tears the night Noël was confirmed elected, if more of those tears were over the ache for Harry, the sudden desperate new grief for Jack, then Sorelli didn't comment, just drew him into her arms, and kissed his forehead, and promised without words that they would get through it.

(Someone snapped a photo of them, like that, him weeping and her holding him, and put it in the papers, but she only smiled at him, when she saw it, and told him it doesn't matter a damn what the world thinks.)

Of all the times he ached for Philippe, that was one of the worst.