Alex became a regular caller, after that.
Once a month, he'd stop by for a chat, usually when Christine was in school but sometimes when she had gone travelling. Raoul found the thought of a six-year-old Christine travelling through time mildly terrifying, but Alex just shrugged.
"I was the same at her age. And it's not as if I can do anything to stop it." And then he sighed. "Still, I'll rest easier when she's home again."
Those times, they mostly talked of Sorelli.
("I wish I could know her, especially with how important she'll be—she was—she is to Christine." "You'll get to know her well in time.")
Alex was almost as lonely as he was, even with Christine, and Anea Valerius. Raoul could see that, that sadness in him, and he wished he could do more to help him, but talking would have to be enough, and he always enjoyed their talks. Both of them did.
They talked of Sorelli, and they talked of Sylvia, and they talked of Christine too, of course, but Raoul was always careful not to give anything away about her future.
Often, they talked of history. And that was safe ground for both of them.
Alex had never gotten to do his PhD. Everything had happened, with Christine's birth and Sylvia's death, there wasn't time for it, and Raoul could understand but he hated the waste of potential when Alex had been one of the best students he'd ever known. And it was late in 1998 when they were talking about it, and Alex said,
"I've always been interested in the repeal of the External Relations Act."
And Raoul thought of Noël, and the debate thirty years later over what had and had not been known to the Cabinet, thought of all the articles he himself had written at the time, and smiled. "If you wanted to apply to Trinity, I can help you with that."
So Alex did.
He couldn't be Alex's supervisor, having retired, but he could write him references and help him get funding and then, after his acceptance, help him along in the background with research.
It was nice to have a project again.
And Alex introduced him to Anea, and suddenly he didn't feel so lonely anymore.
(Fabian Valerius, as it happened, had died a year and a half earlier, another name chalked up to 1997.)
Alex offered to introduce him to Christine, but he didn't want to meet her, not yet.
("I don't want it to be strange for her," he said, "whenever it happens that she meets me in the past." I don't want it to be too strange for myself, he meant, meeting her when she's six when yesterday she was sixty. It didn't feel right to him, somehow, and he thinks Alex understood.)
So Alex promised to keep quiet about him, and he was relieved.
1998 rolled into 1999, and they were making a documentary series about Ireland in its first seventy years of independence, so they wanted to interview him, because he was a historian, and he had lived through it.
So he talked about Philippe, and how Philippe had helped to hide guns during the war of independence though he was only seventeen. And it was sixty years since Philippe had died, and he had never stopped missing his brother, and they included a segment on his murder, so he talked about that too. They were interested in the theatre, and in censorship and films, so he talked about Sorelli, and about Darius and how some of his books had been condemned. His memories of World War II, and his memories of Noël as Minister, and his experience of tuberculosis. All these big important things he could talk about, elections and governments and the violence in the North, and how society had changed, how the world had changed from how it was in his younger years.
They called it Seven Ages, and had it ready for the year 2000.
(He watched it again, a couple of years ago, with Christine, all seven episodes in two days, and he cringed a bit to see himself on television, but she didn't seem to notice, and she enjoyed all the old footage they'd found for it.)
(He enjoyed it too, seeing these things again. Like a little window through time.)
He was interviewed, too, for a book on Noël, and several on Casement. And most of the things he could have said about Noël he thought it best to leave out, for one reason or another, but he said all he could about Casement, and found the old notes on his diaries in Sorelli's handwriting, and something ached within him to be reminded of how she had gone to see them in his place, and how happy she had been to bring the information back to him, and he was pleased to think that the work she had once done could be a help to someone else, now, too.
Sheila came twice to see him that year, and both times insisted that he needed to eat more, so they went out to dinner together and enjoyed it, and it amused him to think that any onlooker would think they were simply an elderly couple out for an evening, and never realise that they were friends, who were mourning a man they had both loved.
It was nice, to share his memories of Harry with her.
Wonderful, too, to hear her memories of him, in turn.
He saw in the Millennium in the quiet of his own sitting room, with just the clock, and the record player, and the Millennium candles for company.
It was the best way he could spend it, and he wouldn't change a thing.
Christine came to see him on his birthday, from 2019.
It caught him off-guard to see her so young. The more time went by, the less he was used to seeing her in her youth, more and more accustomed to the older versions of her that visited, and they didn't cause the same ache in his heart. But the appearance of young Christines, that young Christine there in front of him, brought so many memories with her, of when they had all been young, and well, and alive, of when they had been happy together, and if he squinted just a little he could almost see Sorelli beside her, grinning with mischief.
His throat was tight, and if his smile looked as forced as it felt, then she didn't say.
(He invited her in, and made her tea, and when she heard what date it was she hugged him and wished him a happy birthday, and he smiled to hide the tears prickling in his eyes and whispered that it was happy now with her here, and she played the violin for him but mostly they talked, and it pleased him to hear she was doing post-doc work in Trinity ("they've given me your old office" and something soft caught in his heart) and he asked after Erik, as he had gotten into the habit of doing, because it was nice to hear of her being happy in the future and he liked the man even having not met him, and she told him she'd finally persuaded Erik to record some of his music, and Raoul hoped it would go well for him.)
He didn't have a cake, because what was the point in buying a birthday cake just for himself when there was no one to share it with? But she kissed his forehead as he sat in his armchair and told him she'd be back before long, and went out, and when she came back she had a small chocolate Swiss roll, and some candles, and he didn't have the heart to tell her it made him feel foolish, but she put seven candles in the cake, and lit them, and insisted he blow them out, and when she grinned at him it cheered something deep inside, that he hadn't known needed cheering.
An hour later she was gone, and he still had most of a Swiss roll, but he didn't mind, and he felt better, looking at it, for having had her there, for however short a time.
Mostly, the years were unremarkable.
Sometimes students would come to him to ask him questions about things he had researched, but mostly his visitors were Alex and Anea, every now and then, and Sheila the odd time, and different Christines come to see him.
Mostly he was alone, but he had his garden, and he still had access to the university library, so he kept himself up-to-date with historical research, just out of interest. To keep his mind occupied, so that he was not always dwelling on his own past. Helping Alex with his thesis worked well enough as a distraction, and the feeling of pride that swelled in his chest every time he saw the progress that he was making made him smile.
He considered, briefly, getting himself a dog, but he wouldn't know the first thing about one, and it sounded like too much hassle.
The weekly phone calls from Sheila kept him tethered, and he enjoyed hearing all about John and Leanne and their own families.
(Harry would have been very proud.)
2001 brought the horrendous foot and mouth outbreak in the UK, and for weeks he decided it best not to watch the news. The images of burning piles of cattle and sheep carcasses made him feel ill, and then when it came to the North, and came to Louth, it was more than he wanted to think about.
They cancelled the St Patrick's Day celebrations. If he were superstitious, he might have thought it a sign of the end times.
(Christine from 2020 visited him in those days, and when he told her about all the cancellations, she shivered and said, "they've done the same now with the pandemic.")
(He was grateful, in an odd sort of way, that he would not be alive for this pandemic. It sounded altogether too frightening.)
Later in the year, he watched as the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, and it reminded him of the day Kennedy was shot, and how Darius had found him in his library to tell him the news, and his thoughts were of Philippe, going out on the water on an unassuming day, and getting blown up.
(How many people went to work that eleventh of September, and never got the chance to say goodbye?)
He remembered how he and Darius had danced in front of the fire all those years ago, because they had to dance, had to feel alive, and how Sorelli and Christine danced under the streetlights in Edinburgh, and then he turned the television off, and got himself a drink.
(The terrible things that people do to each other, and all in the name of what? For what? All this needless death—Why?)
2002, and there was a series in the Savoy where they showed an old film of Sorelli's every Friday night for eight weeks.
He went to each of them, and it was the highlight of his week.
(Ten years since she had died, and it still felt as if she might just walk in the door when he was least expecting.)
He turned eighty on 6 January 2003 and Alex brought him a cake that Anea had baked, and Sheila phoned to wish him well, and Christine came to see him from 2035, and it was only that evening, when things had quietened down and he was alone again, that he started laughing to think of how ridiculous it was that he had lived to see eighty (how ridiculous it was that he would live fourteen more years) and the laughing turned to crying, but there was no one there to see him, and he didn't care.
Alex finished up his thesis that year, and submitted it for review, and after he passed his viva and could officially be called Doctor Alexander Daaé, he came straight to see Raoul, and he was laughing with the sheer happiness of the moment, and Raoul was laughing with him, pouring champagne to celebrate the occasion because he had never doubted that he could do it and had the bottle already bought to be ready, when a peculiar look crossed Alex's face, and he gasped, and was gone in an instant, a heap of clothes left on the floor.
Raoul gathered them up, his back cracking from stooping, and left them folded neat on the chair.
Whether Alex had gone forwards or backwards that time, he never knew, but he hoped only that he had gone to sometime happy.
23 January 2004.
What should have been Philippe's one hundredth birthday.
Oh, he knew it was foolish to think of his brother living to be a hundred years old, foolish to ever consider that he could have, but the day stood as itself, that date, the day he would have been a hundred, the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, and there was nothing that Raoul could do that would mark it properly, rightly.
So he sat down, and he wrote Philippe a long letter telling him everything, all sorts of things, and drank a toast to his memory, and burned the letter.
And then he drove to Glasnevin, never mind he had a shot of whiskey in him and an aching hip, and leaning heavy on his cane, wrapped up in his heavy coat, he hobbled in to see his grave.
There, plain as day, 1904 carved into the weathered headstone.
(Their parents must have been so happy, that day, so proud, so full of hope, never knowing, never dreaming, how it would all end.)
"Happy birthday," he said, softly, and the drizzle was damp on his cheeks.
A hundred years.
Such an unfathomably long time.
He used to wonder how things would have been if Sorelli had never developed tuberculosis and she and Philippe had married in their own time. He thinks Philippe would have lived, though he can't explain why, and the thought of that alternative life missed out on made his heart twist so much he decided it best not to think of it.
He thought instead, sometimes, of how things might have been if Sorelli had never become an actress. Likely she would have called herself Eleanor to the end of her days and married some nice young farmer and had ten or twelve children and been happy, but he can never imagine Sorelli living that sort of life, not when she was so full of adventure, so full of fire, so he stopped thinking of that unlikely possibility, too.
Better, that way, not to wonder on such things.
It was in 2006 that Sheila first got sick, and the news was a blow that drove the air from his lungs.
Breast cancer, found too late and it had spread, and they estimated that she only had a handful of months left to live.
He found out when she called him to come to Belfast, so he drove up, though the long journey made his bones ache, and she told him over tea, very quietly, and calmly, and he was the one that cried, and hugged her.
"If there's anything you need…" he whispered, and her smile was sad, and soft.
"I know."
She lasted longer than anyone expected, into 2007, dying a week before Harry's tenth anniversary, and he got the train to Belfast for her funeral, instead of driving. It was easier, when he didn't want to have to focus on anything.
Mostly he thought of her, and of Harry, and how they had loved each other, and how he would miss her terribly.
His hip wouldn't let him carry the coffin, and when John asked him if he would, he had to politely decline. He read Auden, instead, because Leanne asked him to, Sheila's own wish, read it as they lowered her down, and changed all the hes in it to shes, and it was then that he decided he would have Auden read at his own funeral, too.
Christine had never told him the details of it, but he knew she would be the one to do it.
When Alex came to see him, on 2 May 2008, he did not know it would be the last time he visited in linear time. Alex didn't say a thing, and he knows, now, it was because he had not wanted to worry him, but he wished he would have, so he could tell him, properly, how much his friendship had meant, how much he had meant.
Instead they listened to Mary Black, and drank tea, and talked about Alex's current research, into De Valera's leadership during World War II, and that speech he made rebuking Churchill when it was almost over. How clearly Raoul could remember hearing it for the first time, can remember it still, the crackling voice over the radio, the drizzling rain outside.
He thinks, looking back, knowing what he does, that Alex had wanted to pretend, for a little while, that his life wasn't ending.
It was Anea who rang him with the news three days later.
Alex, dead. A brain haemorrhage. Just collapsed. She was going to the school to tell Christine and pick her up, and it was all he could do to gasp around the sudden pain in his chest, and whisper that he was sorry.
Alex, dead. How could it be?
Christine, sixteen and alone like he had been, once upon a time.
That poor girl.
(If he could take it upon himself, the pain that she was going through, if he could take Alex's place and bring him back, he would, without a second thought.)
The first time he came face to face with Christine in linear time was at her father's funeral.
He didn't know when he was supposed to meet her, but he couldn't let them bury Alex and not be there, so he went, and he joined the line of mourners going up to shake hands with her, and as he shook her hand he looked into her face, this face so much younger than he could ever remember seeing it, so pale, and she nodded as he whispered that he was sorry, and he wished he could reach out, and brush those tears from her eyes, but it was all he could do to keep his own tears at bay, and besides, she didn't know him. How would she?
He slipped back outside, into the sunlight, and settled his hat back on, and thought how May is a horrible month.
The coming of summer, marked with the anniversaries of the dead.