He was still on crutches for his fortieth birthday.
When he lamented, to himself more so than anyone else, that he couldn't go dancing, Sorelli saw fit to remind him that he could have hurt himself an awful lot worse.
And then added that as she had spent her twenty-fifth birthday with her leg in a cage and confined to bed in Steevens' Hospital, that he really couldn't complain.
Darius watched this exchange with a single raised eyebrow, but elected not to comment.
(When he did get off the crutches, three weeks later, and was hobbling around again with a leg that ached if it got too cold, Darius did take him dancing, though it was only in the parlour, and it was only the two of them there.)
(Afterwards they lay each other down in bed and kissed and touched in a way they had not done since his fall, and that was the best belated present he could have gotten.)
He'd suspected for a while that Noël wasn't quite himself. He was more tired, more reticent, a good deal slower climbing stairs. And it was easy to pretend that it was from work, from trying to do too much, so he didn't say anything and kept his own counsel. But Sorelli commented on it, and McQuillan, and Darius who didn't know Noël as well as they did but knew him well enough by then. And Christine, when she came and learned it was February 1963, had a slight flicker of something in her face that was gone as soon as he blinked.
It was then that he knew it wasn't mere tiredness.
It was, as it happened, a relapse of his tuberculosis. It was not the first time. It was, by Raoul's own estimate, the fourth time. Noël himself said the fifth, and seemed frustrated more than anything at having to rest.
Though he did smile, just slightly, and say, "the newest drugs work wonders."
Not just streptomycin, not anymore.
Raoul could admit that was a relief.
(His own hearing never did completely recover, and when he has not slept well, the world can swim a bit, as if to remind him of how lucky he is, that he recovered as well as he did from his own illness.)
It was only a couple of months before Noël was back to himself, working too hard and causing trouble in the Dáil. The whole thing did make Raoul wonder though. If Noël, who knew all about TB, who had spent twenty years treating it and saving people (saving him, even), who had legislated and brought things in to prevent it and find it in time, if he could suffer so many relapses, then what was there keeping him, Raoul, from suffering one?
Sheer dumb luck? Or was it a sign of some sort of Fate keeping him alive?
He has never been a man for believing in Fate. Not even knowing Christine as he does. Not even with the way his whole life has worked out, seeming almost charmed that he could survive such things as he has. But he did wonder, in that spring of 1963, if maybe there were greater forces at play than mere men and their luck.
No wonder the Romantics could seem almost half-mad, if these sort of things sometimes crossed their minds.
He kept his ruminations to himself, that year, but he did write a story or two teasing them out, just a little. And neither of them were ever meant to be published, only ever meant as a way for him to try to get his thoughts in order, but he wonders, now, after so many years, if maybe he should have put them out in the world. If maybe that was a path his life could have taken, becoming an author of fiction. Perhaps not all that strange for a historian. So much of what he has always done is piecing together the shards of people's lives, of their actions, to try and find reason.
Maybe he could have made a good writer, if he had chosen to try.
Too late now to wonder and besides, he is happier with his contributions to the study of history. He might have lost focus, if he had spent too much energy in diversifying.
November 1963 started with Noël and McQuillan wrapping up the NPDs and joining the Labour Party (more correct to say they were finally allowed to join the Labour Party), and before it ended the American President was dead.
Not that the two events were linked in any way greater than having taken place within a given span of time, but that's how Raoul always remembers November 1963.
It was Darius who told him the news about John F. Kennedy. Sorelli was filming in Scotland and he was deep in his library trying to decide whether or not to also join Labour (he felt they had strayed somewhat from socialist principle but showed some potential and had hope of improving themselves, though he was hesitant over the way they had scapegoated Skeff twenty years earlier and forced him out of the party by implying he was a communist), when Darius found him and told him.
(He supposes the very fact of that links the two events in some way, if only in his own head.)
But Darius told him that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated with a shot to the head on a completely unassuming day.
And Raoul couldn't help himself, but he thought of Philippe, going out on the water on an unassuming day, and had to get himself a drink.
(Some memories never fade with time, just find their way into other things, and permeate them.)
It seemed almost distasteful to dance that night. But they had to dance. Had to dance, if only to prove they were alive.
(Sorelli, years later, told him how she had gotten drunk and gone out with every intention of causing some sort of disturbance, because she too had thought of Philippe, she too could not hear of terrible things happening to other people without thinking of him, and she would have done so, too. Would have gone out and caused trouble to fill every newspaper, but Christine found her, and Christine went with her, and they danced beneath the streetlights in the drizzling rain of Edinburgh at night, and it forced her pieces together, so she would not come apart, not this time.)
(She treasured that night for the rest of her life.)
(Turning horror into beauty. Christine was always very good at it.)
The years 1964 to 1968 were, in hindsight, mostly unremarkable. Make no mistake there were remarkable things happening. Wars all over the world and people dying and being killed and a whole list of protests that went on and on. But those things did not touch Raoul, could not touch him, and that was his privileged position, to just watch from the sidelines safe from it all though he did wonder, more than once, if he could not be caught in the crossfire, if the Americans and the Soviets finally did blow up at each other.
But the blow up never came, and he found it better not to let himself think about such things, not any more than he needed to.
It was easier, easier on his sanity and easier on his heart, to focus on the things he was good at. Writing and researching. Sending letters to the newspapers. Loving Darius in the darkness and by daylight when they were away from the eyes of others. Going to all of Sorelli's films and performances and going to dances and after parties with her when she needed him to. He even got good at not caring what the newspapers thought of him, what they wrote of him, when they were photographed together. Let them write as they would. No use in arguing with them, when they would only write it all again anyway, given half a chance.
He made it his policy, to take his happiness where he could find it. And sometimes that meant dancing with Sorelli and sometimes it meant trying to ferret pieces of the future out from Christine though he didn't really want to know and was mostly doing it to tease her. And sometimes it was just walking on the cliff edge with Darius, and reading the books he was writing, and suggesting edits when he did decide to attempt a career at fiction.
(A career that would have gone better for him, if he had not been such a noted supporter of socialist politics and gotten himself censored on three different occasions.)
He even took up keeping a garden, and grew roses and carnations just for something to do with his hands, and he loved drying the flowers, and watching how their colours would change.
He considered photography, wondered whether or not he could take it up as another practical thing. Most of his photographs would be of Darius, and that would be no bad thing, but while there was more than enough space in the house for a dark room he never had a head for keeping chemical processes straight, so he set the notion aside with mild regret.
Likely he would not have made a good photographer anyway. It would have reminded him too much of Jack, and unsteadied his hands. And though he had learned to be happy in spite of that old grief still living in his bones, he had long-since learned that it was best not to tempt it into becoming anything more. Best not to give it space to grow.
He took Jack's photographs out instead, and put the best ones up in his study, and Darius smiled at him with a slight sadness in his eyes, and kissed him.
He wondered, often, in those middle years, what Philippe would have been like if he had lived. Part of it, he will admit, was that he was finding himself turning grey. This sprinkling of silver through his once golden hair. Darius told him it made him look distinguished, but Darius had been slightly grey in a distinguished sort of way as long as they had known each other, so he considered his judgement to be mildly suspect. Sorelli he could trust to be blunt, and she told him it was about time he started getting a little grey. She had been pulling out her greys as they appeared for years.
Still. Seeing his face in the mirror with these new greys, seeing the webbing lines around his eyes that had never been there and the new creases at the corners of his mouth, it made him wonder. What would Philippe have been like?
Their father was grey when he died. Their father was also only fifty-two and there are not many photos of him from after the war. Philippe never said it, not in so many words, and he has had nobody to ask since, no way of finding out, but he has always suspected the man to have suffered from shell-shock. He was at the Somme, and at Ypres, and who knows where else, and Raoul has heard enough stories, interviewed enough old soldiers, to know what those places were like.
(He asked Christine, once, if she had ever been to the Front, if time had ever cast her back to there, but she shook her head and softly whispered, "no.")
("My father turned up in a clearing station once," she said, "and pretended to be an orderly helping with the wounded, but that's the closest either of us ever got.")
But Philippe. Philippe was never through the war, never would have gone to fight in the second war when it came because he abhorred violence, and Raoul could not help wondering, in those years of the mid-sixties, how he would have looked, what he would have been like. He would have been in his sixties, would have lived longer than their father and surely would have been grey and maybe a little stooped, but he could not imagine him without his good humour, could not imagine him without that sparkle in his eye and his hint of a grin. And part of him ached, still, that there was no way he could know, no way he could find out, even as he knew it was futile.
He could only look at himself in the mirror, and wonder.
The relapse of his illness and joining Labour had together cost Noël his Dáil seat in 1965. It gave him more time to focus on his psychiatry studies, necessitated by the closure of Newcastle sanatorium and his finding himself unemployable as a doctor. (Raoul was oddly relieved that the nature of history meant he himself could never become unemployable, there would always be a field for him to ease his way into.) When he headed for Libya in March 1968 to work on eradicating TB there, with the intention of it being a long-term absence, Raoul was pleased that he'd found something to turn his energy to, even knowing he'd miss him terribly and his bemused smile.
He's always wondered what, exactly, happened in Libya, that Noël was back within two weeks, the whole plan gone out the window. Noël's remark of it "not to my taste" was as close as he ever got to the full story, but he was as happy not knowing.
Prying has never been to his taste.
Still, it meant when the election came in 1969 that they were ready for it.
God but he'd missed having a good campaign.
The Seventies would be Socialist.
That was their platform. "The Seventies will be Socialist." A Labour majority in the Dáil and they would sort the problems of the world, or at least of the country, and all would be well.
He came very close to standing himself, but decided the scrutiny was unwanted anywhere near his relationship with Darius. So he held himself back, and campaigned hard for Labour and for Noël, and the whole thing ended up a flop and there was no Labour majority and Fianna Fáil were still in power as they had been for the last twelve years, but they did get Noël back into the Dáil and he decided to be content with that.
Content with that, and then Noël had a heart attack and insisted it was nothing to worry about, that it was only small, but Raoul was fucking frightened and Noël's wife Phyllis even more so, and he never drove so fast in his life as he did that day after Sorelli phoned him at a conference in Cork to tell him the news because Darius was in London meeting a publisher (and Raoul had only finished delivering his paper on the 1848 rebellion and was taking questions when the secretary came to him with the news that he had to get to the phone, and at the remove of almost fifty years he can laugh now at the fright Sorelli must have given the poor boy, and at the way he himself ran from the room without taking a single question).
And it was only afterwards, after the panic had died down, after Noël was out of hospital and definitely alright, that Raoul realized it was a sign they were getting old.
Getting old, and not the men they used to be.
(And in hindsight, it was a sign of how the next decade would be, but that was far from his mind, then.)
