It was that he was lonely.
It was that since Christmas he had been missing her worse than ever, a gap in his chest that he couldn't fill.
It was that Darius was there, and Darius had been so good to him after everything. Darius who, out of everyone left, knew him best.
It was that it was his birthday, and he had just turned seventy, and he needed to feel something good, something nice, just for one night.
(I want to feel something nice, the echo of Jack's voice across forty years, words still as soft as the night before he died.)
1993, a new year.
The first new year without Sorelli.
Strange, the things that could catch him and tear that gap inside anew.
Harry and Sheila came down for his birthday. The two of them were staying in a hotel, not wanting to impose on him, and Darius had arrived the day before from London, so all four of them went out for dinner that evening, and had a pleasant time, and shared two bottles of good red wine.
He missed Sorelli desperately, and tried not to think of missing her, and with his friends it was almost possible. The three of them were careful not to mention her, and part him wished they would, and be done with it.
They parted after dinner, Harry and Sheila going back to their hotel, he and Darius getting a taxi home, both of them just a little stumbly when they got inside again.
It was Darius who opened the fresh bottle of wine. It was him who put the record on. Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C Sharp Minor, The Moscow Waltz. Supposed to be a piece about grief and death, but it's always struck him as having a touch of romance to it, as ideal music to sway to, to think to.
To be to.
That was what they found themselves doing, swaying slowly to Rachmaninoff, Darius' arms wrapped around his waist, his arms around Darius' shoulders. How often had they danced like that, when they were still together? How often did they just hold each other, and lean in close, and feel the music in their bones?
Hundreds of nights, thousands of them, every one of them special, every one of them sacred in their own way.
Darius' lips, so soft beneath his. Darius' breath, warm in his mouth.
Twenty years, almost twenty years since they last kissed, and what possessed him? What made him do it, knowing how it had ended before? Knowing how it must surely end again?
Darius' body, pressed warm against him.
(The hollowness inside, the aching to be touched, to mean something, to be something to someone.)
Darius' hand on his chest, pushing him back.
"Raoul." Those dark eyes, searching his. "Raoul, are you sure?"
Was he sure? Sure that he wanted to kiss Darius, even after all those years?
(Sure that he had loved him, somewhere deep inside, even after everything, even when he thought he didn't, that he had learned not to. Sure, too, that some part of Darius felt the same.)
"I need to feel something good," he breathed, and Darius' thumb stroked his cheek. "Just for a night, just something good."
A nod, a hitching breath. "All right. Just for a night."
Just for a night.
A night.
One sweet night.
(Bed, his hip twinging but Darius was kissing him, and it was so long since he had kissed anyone, touched anyone. So long since anything, and they were too old for this, too old, but Darius was touching him and he needed that touch, craved it, even if the wine kept it from coming to anything more.)
(The morning light, Darius' fingers dark against his skin, his scars, his lips kiss-swollen. "I don't remember these," he whispered, and Raoul swallowed. "There was an accident," he breathed, "after you left…")
(The tears on Darius' cheeks, shining silver. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry…)
Neither of them wanted to go back to how things were. Neither of them wanted to be involved again, and he had promised himself that he wouldn't, not with anyone, not again. His life had moved on, their lives had moved on, had become too different. And they could never go back, could never strip off twenty years and more, and act as if none of it had ever happened, act as if Darius had never left him.
(It just felt like time...like time...like time...)
They could never go back, but they could pretend. Just for one night, just for one morning. They could hold each other, and kiss each other, and pretend.
And it was enough.
It was not getting involved, when it was just a night.
Darius went back to London, and he went back to writing about Sorelli, things the world would never see, but that he needed to get down on paper, needed to just be able to hold, in a written way.
And they would be all right, this time.
It was the first year since the war ended in 1945 that he visited Philippe's grave alone on his anniversary.
Sorelli always made a point of taking the day off, and joining him. No matter where she was working, London or Edinburgh or Paris or Cork, she would take the day off and come home to join him, so they could go to that grave together. And sometimes maybe he would visit it alone in the morning, and sometimes she would do the same, but they always went together, too, and brought flowers to him. Never stopped missing him, across all the years. Everything always a little different, always a little marked by his absence.
But she was gone, and how could he live with himself if he didn't visit Philippe?
So he went out and he bought some lilies, and took them to Glasnevin, and there looking down at the headstone bearing his brother's name, he was all too keenly aware of the empty space at his side.
He was not sure what sort of an afterlife he believed in, but he was sure that there must be something.
He needed there to be something.
(Still needs there to be something, to be able to believe in something.)
"I know she missed you terribly," he whispered, the tears damp on his cheeks, and he managed a smile. "And I hope you've found each other again. I hope you're happy together. I hope…"
Among all the things he wrote about her that have never seen the light of day, he wrote one that did, a quiet little tribute to her, that was published on the first anniversary of the day she died.
Noël rang him from Connemara to see how he was, and Harry came down from Belfast the next day. But that day he spent alone, with his own thoughts and his own memories, and he went alone to her grave.
With everything inside of him he couldn't think of a thing to say. He didn't really think she'd hear him, talking to her headstone. A quiet country graveyard, but there was no sense of her being there, for all the peace of it, for all the beauty of the trees. But it was a place to go, a place where she could be, maybe, where her body lay beneath the soil so it made sense for some part of her spirit to linger in some way, and all the things that he could say were words heavy on the back of his tongue.
He settled for brushing his fingers over her name cut into the stone. Eleanor "Sorelli" Conway. She told him once that she thought Eleanor a plain sort of name, and that her father had called her Ellie May, because Mary was her middle name. But it was Christine that first called her Sorelli, and the shape of it felt right, so when there was no one left to call her Ellie May or even Eleanor, she took Sorelli for her name, and loved it ever since.
A little bit unusual, but she was always a little bit unusual, and it was one of the things he loved in her.
(He half-expected Christine to appear, some version of her from some day far in the future, but she never did.)
There was a wrangle that summer over decriminalizing homosexuality. The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill, a thing long-dreamed of, discussed in the Dáil in that last week of June. Taking the offence out of acts of love with another man, and after all the years, all the hoping and arguing and campaigning, here it was. The "abolition of the offence of buggery between persons" they called it, as if it was a vulgar thing, when it was really an expression of love, of longing, a need for pleasure.
He hardly dared to believe it would be passed, even after all the attempts, even after the 1988 European ruling that the existing law was in breach of the Convention on Human Rights.
But it was passed, and when Robinson signed it into law on 7 July, that it would not be a criminal offence any more to do such things with another man, the tears welled in his eyes.
After all the years, all the secrecy—
That Sorelli hadn't lived to see it.
(How relieved she'd been, they'd both been, with the 1988 ruling, and how she'd hugged him and whispered that it had to be a sign of change, it had to be.)
To be able to hug her and tell her that it had happened, it had happened—
She'd be so happy.
His chest ached to think of it.
No way to tell her, no way she could know, but he bought a bottle of champagne, and drove down to that graveyard in Wicklow.
"They've finally done it," he whispered, and uncorked it. "Finally done it."
And he had one mouthful of the champagne, felt it fizzy and sweet in his mouth as he swallowed it, and poured the rest of the bottle over her grave.
It was two days later that Christine came. Two days later, and a younger Christine than he had seen in years, surely only in her twenties, and so pale.
Her eyes widened when she saw him, and the tears trickled down her cheeks, and he set his newspaper aside and frowned at her. "Christine?" He was just about to ask if she was all right, if there was anything she wanted him to get her, when those tears turned to weeping and he stood up and pulled her into his arms.
What could have happened? What terrible thing to send her back here weeping in his arms?
(Send her back to a time without Sorelli. Send her back to him, not to her father, not to anyone else who might know her secret in the future, but to him.)
And he knew it, knew it without knowing that he knew it, with a bone deep certainty, that he would know her in the future, in her own lifetime, that he would know her and they would be friends, saw it like a vision, and that he would die and leave her.
He would die.
He had to die.
She was coming from his death.
His head spun to think of it, but he held her tighter, and stroked her hair, and waited, waited for her to breathe, waited for her trembling to stop and her tears to slow.
This dear, sweet girl.
There were tears in his own eyes too, but he fought them back. Let him face it dry-eyed. Let him not upset her by crying now.
When her trembling eased, when her tears stopped, he sat her down beside him on the couch, and squeezed her hands, and looked into her eyes so blue, so raw with grief, and braced himself for what he had to say.
"I don't care whether you think I should know or not. Tell me about how it happens."
And her eyes welled again, and she didn't ask what he meant because she must have known that he knew, and she told him.
(His heart, weakened. His lungs, failing. Three days in hospital, and a date, late in the night of 21 March 2017, shortly before midnight. And she would be at his side.)
(2017. Twenty-four more years, a little less.)
(He could ask for no more than that.)
(He hugged her when she finished, and kissed her hair. "Thank you," he whispered, "thank you.")
(He cried in his own time, quietly, after she was gone, for the grief that he would put her through, for the length of time still left to him, for the simple fact of knowing when, but it was a relief to know, a relief.)
(A relief, too, to know that he would know her in the future, in her own time.)