The first snowdrops are just poking their way up now. The first snowdrops of his last spring, and he regrets only that it is too cold for him to go out into the garden himself and see them, too cold to sit out there for a little while, and watch the birds gathering twigs for their nests, to pick some of those delicate little flowers and press them for Christine, or set them in a vase, just for a few days. Hopefully he should see the early daffodils, though it might be a bit much to hope for the greater periwinkles at the end of the garden. That flush of purple in the green always reminds him just a little of Mary Black's song about leaving Néidín. It was one of Sorelli's favourites.
Never can he hear it, and not think of her.
Has he told Christine that? This young Christine? Or is it something she will have to find out for herself?
So many things he could say, so many things to try to put words around, and is it better that she find them out in time? Or should he give her as many little pieces as he can?
He knows the date of his death, knows how it will happen, has known it for so long now, more than twenty years. (Twenty-four years, very nearly. Twenty-four years of knowing the date of his own death, but he has managed well, he thinks, in living as if he did not know.) He would bundle himself up well and go out into the garden, but his bones ache and he has no desire to hasten his last illness, has no desire to deprive himself of even a moment of wellness.
So he behaves, and watches the birds and the flowers out through the windows, and thinks that it will not be so very long, now, until the end.
Just a few weeks.
It's peaceful, really, not having to worry about things, to know the few things of the future that he needs to know. That Christine will be well, and happy. That she will still love Erik and he will still love her and they'll be happy together. That Anea will keep an eye on them both, as she has done for this young Christine (so young, really, when he thinks about it, compared to some of the Christines he has known) all of her life.
As she does for him, when she drops in on him, every morning and evening, to bring him the paper and check if he needs anything and she usually insists on cooking for him and fussing over him and he lets her because she wants to do it, and Sorelli would be pleased to know that there's still someone to make a fuss of him in her absence.
She always did worry.
Christine comes too, of course, when she can, and if she misses a day here or there he doesn't mind because she's a busy young woman even without getting tossed through time, and he has no right to monopolise her time, especially not when he has known her for so many years, almost all of his life, really, certainly the vast majority of it. When she is not in this time, it is just as likely that she's with him and Sorelli, deep in the past.
If his younger self, that younger self that first met her properly all the way back in 1945, was to know that she would still be in his life now, more than seventy years later, he would be dumbfounded.
Raoul almost wishes he could tell him, just to see the surprise on his own younger self's face.
No way he can, of course, but it's amusing to think about.
He told it to Erik when he came yesterday and Erik snorted and laughed. He was right after bringing in a couple of those snowdrops, and had set them in water beside the window, their drooping white heads framed against the glass, and Raoul smiled to himself to see this young man, who does seem so much a boy at times, laughing. It's good to make him laugh. He should laugh more often, especially now that his shoulder has healed after his accident.
"Are you composing at the minute?" he asked, and something flickered in Erik's face, before he nodded.
"It's a surprise," he said, but there was mischief in his eyes, and Raoul decided, as he has done at some point every day since he first met him, that Christine made an excellent choice in loving this man.
After that day that he met Harry in the Phoenix Park and they went for drinks, they took up writing. The only other regular correspondent he had ever had was Sorelli when he was in school, though they did write letters every time she was away filming something, and of course he had written Darius on a regular basis whenever he was in England, but he couldn't count that somehow. It was different when they were involved with each other, and then they weren't involved and there were no letters and he preferred to not have to remember that. But taking Harry on as a regular correspondent when he had gone back to Belfast was a nice way to occupy himself, and there was always something interesting in the letters he received, some new observation, some witticism.
It was only sometimes they wrote of Jack, and they did not often refer to the time that they had been together, and both of those things were fine. As if, after everything, they had learned to be friends on their own merits, without the influence of anything else.
It was nice just to have him as a friend. He had not realised how much he'd missed Darius for that alone.
He still has all of those old letters, from Sorelli, from Harry, even from Darius, and odd other ones from different people at different times, tucked away safe with the ones from Philippe.
It has always seemed wrong, somehow, to ever let anything happen to them.
Of course, he was far from being idle in those years. Noël and Sorelli both got involved with the new Socialist Labour Party, and that drew Raoul into it, gave him a focus alongside his research. Sorelli even considered standing for election, and might have too and would certainly have gotten in, but she would have had to curtail her acting and directing, and she never liked curtailing those unless she had to, never did unless he, Raoul, needed her. They decided, together, that it would be better for her to use her platform as an actress to speak out against things. She could draw more attention to the things that needed attention, and no one could say that she only got elected because of who she was.
They rang in 1978 together, he and Sorelli, and Christine was not there so when midnight came they kissed each other's cheeks, and toasted a glass of champagne to the year gone out, and danced, slowly, together, around the sitting room of her little cottage.
He couldn't think of a nicer way to ring in a new year.
He turned fifty-five a few days later and Christine had popped into their time by then, and when she heard the date she hugged him and insisted they all go out for dinner. The dancing came after, and the three of them drank so much in the pub they found themselves in that they got a taxi home and fell into the same bed together and slept.
When the morning came, his head pounding and the room spinning, he extracted himself from between his two favourite ladies, and swore never to drink so much again.
He was not looking for love. He decided, after Darius, that he had tasted enough of it. Anyway, he was too old to look for anyone else. Who in their right mind would take an interest in him? A man in his fifties, hair turning grey, these wrinkles coming into his face, not to mention his scars. What man would want him? No, he decided. Best not to even consider it. He had Sorelli, and he had his friendship with Noël, and Christine every time she came, and he had his research and his students and his articles. He didn't need any more that.
Besides, homosexual acts were still a criminal offense, and it was best to keep himself out of trouble.
It was too much trouble to even think about looking.
Then he met David, and David was twenty years younger, a new professor of history, and as his heart thudded in his chest he knew he had just found trouble.
He was hardly involved with David long enough, really, to miss him when he was gone. Three months in late 1978, and then David went off to Edinburgh. Three months of kisses, and glances, and soft touches, and all it came to, in the end, were a couple of letters over and back across the sea, and that was it.
It was almost a relief, really, to be his own man again, and he knew, then, that he would never get involved with anyone else.
He thinks now, looking back, that it was as well, really. True it might be nice to still know romance in his old age, but he has enough in his life as it is. Anything more might only tire him.
Forty years since Philippe's death and it seemed an utterly ridiculous span of time. That his brother, his dear older brother, could be dead forty years?
How could it be that long?
How could it be allowed to be that long?
(He and Sorelli went together to the grave, like they did every year, even the year he was sick with TB, and brought flowers and lay them down, and as he squeezed her hand he knew she was wondering the same thing. How could it be that long, when it seemed like only yesterday he had last walked through the door?)
1979 and they knew things were getting shaky in the government, had suspected it for a while, but when, at the end of the year, Charles Haughey challenged Jack Lynch for the leadership of Fianna Fáil and thus of the government, it still came as a bit of a surprise. That Haughey succeeded was less surprising, but what Raoul remembers best is sitting in the visitors' gallery of the Dáil with Sorelli and Christine, when Noël made his scathing speech against Haughey.
…my awful nightmare is that this man is a dreadful cross between Richard Milhous Nixon and Dr Salazar…
And as the shiver went down Raoul's spine, he looked to Christine and found her gazing rapt upon the proceedings beneath her, and wondered how much of this was still spoken of in her time, and how momentous of an occasion did it really prove to be.
(He's had his answer in all the decades since, in the elections, the scandals, the tribunals, the documentaries, and that short clip of Noël, outside the Dáil after that speech, the touch of grey in his hair and that squint in his eye, and they play it in them all for the power of its quiet gravitas, my fear of Mister Haughey is his obsessional preoccupation with being the leader…)
He and Sorelli, lying by the fire, the last night of 1979. And as they toasted themselves, toasted the decade just gone out, the good and the bad of it, they wondered what the next years would bring.
(Recession, Noël's retirement from politics, Sorelli's stepping back from acting to make documentaries, the movement, small but sure, to decriminalise homosexuality, and Raoul still writing, still stirring up trouble in the newspapers, when he needed to.
First there was Belfast with Harry, and when Harry moved to kiss him, Raoul drew back and shook his head. "We can't do that again," he whispered. "Things are too different for the both of us."
("I'll not come between you and your family," he added, and Harry nodded, and swallowed. "I'm sorry if I made you think that you would.")
They still had their letters, could still be friends, and anything more would have been a mistake, but Raoul has never forgotten that moment when Harry's lips were just about to brush his, and he was almost about to let them.
(He has always been grateful, to that little thing inside, that whispered enough, and saved them.)