“OK.”
“So that’s how it is.”
She nodded; a rapid one-two. She knew but she did not know. She knew but she could not trust herself. She was so often wrong. She was so often sloppy, melodramatic, blurting her exaggerations like a fool.
“OK,” she said again.
James bit his bottom lip, pressing the teeth in hard. “I decided a while ago that I wanted to tell you, but there was never the chance — over the phone wasn’t right.”
“Oh God,” she said, picturing the front room at home, the cord across the hall. “Of course not. No, no.”
“So I asked you here.”
“Yes.”
“Because I feel so close to you. And because I wanted to tell you in person.”
“Oh, yeah! I’m so glad you told me, James. I’m so glad…”
“You’re not the first person I’ve told, obviously.”
“Obviously,” she said, feeling, despite herself, a little offended.
“I mean, Amy and Lorraine know. I told them a few weeks ago.”
“OK!” she said, nodding, desperately trying for the right note of brightness. “OK!” she repeated, and she sounded like some annoying bird.
“Of course, they said they already knew.” He laughed properly for a moment. “Fuckers.”
“Ha!” Catherine said, with the same stupid brightness.
“But the big thing for me now, you see, is to tell my mother. Because she doesn’t know, needless to say. And I think it’s time for her to know.”
“Oh—” Catherine started, but James shook his head to indicate that he did not want her to speak.
“I’ve been needing to tell her. This weekend has just confirmed that for me. The way she’s been around you. You know? It’s time.”
“OK.”
“And it’s not going to be pretty, Catherine,” he said, kicking at the dust of the path as he walked. “I know that much.”
“Ah, no,” Catherine said quickly. “Ah, James.”
“No, no,” he said firmly. “I know that much. She’s not going to take it well.”
Catherine swallowed. She tried to find the right thing to say, and when it came to her, she felt a rush of gratitude. “But your mother is so brilliant,” she said, taking James’s arm. As she said it, she was picturing Peggy as she had been at the kitchen table that morning, cigarette in hand, gold bangles jangling, freckles on the bridge of her nose, the V-neck of her cotton top. That was a nice top, a modern top, a top that not many women Peggy’s age, Catherine thought, would wear. None of this she said to James; none of this could be helpful to him. But still, she said again, she was sure that his mother would be fine. Would, she said again, be brilliant.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Catherine.”
“But why?” Catherine felt almost stung; this seemed to her, suddenly, like a battle she wanted to win. “Why do you say that? Initially, maybe, she’ll be surprised. But she’s so great, James. She’s so mad about you.”
“How she is now is not what we’re talking about, Catherine,” James said, snatching his arm away from hers, and his tone was as sharp as she had ever heard it. He stepped ahead of her, his hands shoved in his pockets again. “How she is now,” he said over his shoulder, “is not the problem. The woman she is now is a woman who is seeing her son in a certain way. With you, for instance — well, I’ve told you.”
“She was just being friendly to me, for Christ’s sake!”
He stopped and looked back at her. For a moment she thought she saw tears in his eyes. But no, he was not crying. He was grimacing. He looked truly disappointed in her; he looked utterly sick of her. He sighed, staring past her now to the fields on the other side of the water. “Maybe I should never have let her believe even as much as she does.”
Catherine said nothing. Tears of her own were ready to start up, she suspected; she did not trust herself to speak.
“I mean, all of this, can’t you see, all of this — the way she sees the two of us, the way she’s so delighted with you — all of this, Catherine, is why.” He shook his head, and it was not dampness she had seen in his eyes, Catherine realized; it was pain.
“James,” she said weakly.
“You know, I was always close to Amy — you know that.”
She nodded. He had told her that Amy had been his best friend all through the last years of school; he had told her how, since Amy had started college and he had gone to Berlin, they had grown apart a little, and that this had been sad for him, but that it had felt natural. And anyway, he had said, now he had her. Now he had Catherine. Catherine had not allowed herself to think it through, what James had meant by this. Catherine, like the frightened child she was, had not allowed herself to ask. Now she felt a stab of envy at the thought of how much better Amy would have been at handling this situation, this conversation; how much better, it struck her, Amy very possibly already had been. Had he told Amy and Lorraine that he wanted to tell his mother? Probably. And probably they had not reacted anything like this; probably, they had reacted with common sense and calmness.
“And, you know, I think my mother had ideas about me and Amy too, is what I’m saying, but it didn’t matter so much back then,” James said. “We were kids. And Amy was never out here with me, not the way you are now.”
“OK,” Catherine nodded.
“I suppose what I’m saying is that I’ve never had to see the way my mother looked at a girl before now. At the way she looked at me with a girl, I mean.”
“Right.”
“And so, no. No more. It’s bad enough. I’m nineteen years old, Catherine. I have to put a name on it. I need her to know.”
“Of course you do,” Catherine said, and she reached out to touch him, but could not land on the right place; every part of him seemed to be some kind of force field. She let her hand go to the top of his arm, near where she had seen his father touch him the day before; she rubbed him there. He seemed to start at the feeling of her hand on him, as though he had not known it was coming, but then he relaxed. But then he sighed heavily, so maybe it was not relaxation at all; maybe it was exhaustion.
“I’m scared shitless about it, to tell you the truth,” he said, shaking his head.
“It’ll be all right,” she said, and she closed her fingers around his shoulder as she had seen his father do, and she thought he might come to her for a hug then, but he stayed where he was.
“It’ll be all right,” she said again, and with that, he seemed to decide something, and he nodded, once, briskly, and he took a step ahead.
“So now for you,” he said.
“Well,” she said, working to keep her voice steady; to keep it cheerful, even. “I’m glad you — I’m glad.”
He nodded. “Me too. I felt it was important. I felt it was time.”
“It is time,” she nodded eagerly. “It is important.” If she just repeated the words he used himself, she thought, if she just bounced them back to him, then surely she could not go far wrong. First, do no harm. Because what she had to concentrate on, she felt now, so strongly, was her face; what she had to put all her work into was the expression in her eyes, was the business of what she was doing with her mouth. Smile. Smile. Breathe through her nose — not too deeply, not like she was fighting for it. Widen her eyes; force them full of brightness. Show none of the riot going on inside; the bafflement, the confusion with all its stupid roars and plummetings, the astonishment, this weird temptation to stare. Show none of the fact that This! This! This! had now become Gay! Gay! Gay! — because that was wrong of her, utterly wrong. Nothing was more urgent now than to keep all of this out, to keep her face soft with calm and with intelligence and with openness, the face of someone wiser, someone better, the face of someone that she wanted, so badly, to be. He was reading her; he was watching her face for the story of how he would be received — for the story, almost, of what he was. And she would not give him a face by which he could justify a tone any darker than the one in which he was speaking to her now. She was Amy, she decided in that moment. She was Lorraine. She was able. She was knowing. She was for telling; she was for trusting; she was for shelter and for comfort and for relief. Still it banged in her brain, and silently she roared it away, because she should not even be thinking it, should not even be seeing it; she should just be seeing James, her friend, her best, best friend, and now he was walking, and Catherine was following, and the stone of the canal bank was so weathered and bird-stained and gray, and it led on to a path trodden down through this grass by who knew how many feet over who knew how many years.