He glanced at her. “Anyone?”
“Anyone who is gay? There, I mean.” She stammered; she could not find the right way to say this. “In Germany, I mean. In your—”
James put his head to one side as though considering this very carefully. “Is there anyone who is gay in Germany? Hmm.”
“Stop it,” she said, laughing to cover her embarrassment. “You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, Catherine,” he said, so warmly that she felt guilty, for some reason. “I know what you mean. But no. There’s nobody. At least nobody I’ve met.” He pointed to her plate. “Finished?”
“Not yet.”
“You look finished. Are you going to eat the fat? Longford savages.”
“I mean, not yet, you haven’t met anyone just yet,” she said, passing him her plate. “I mean, when you go back, you’ll be meeting someone.”
He spluttered. “Oh, will I now?”
“I mean, you can,” Catherine said, embarrassed again. “I mean, you might. I mean—”
“Jesus, you’re giving me worse odds by the second. I think you’d better stop.”
“Come on, James,” she said, laughing. “You know what I mean.”
“I do,” he said, and he rocked back on his chair. “Here’s hoping.” He lifted his glass, which was empty now, as was Catherine’s, but they clinked anyway.
“I have a feeling,” she said. “You’ll get a fella, and I’ll get a fella, and we can compare notes.”
“Hmm,” he said, his eyes on the night sky.
“Compare photos, even,” Catherine said, and she let something suggestive enter her tone, so that he looked at her, to check, and she winked at him to let him know that she had intended it, and they both laughed.
“God, I love wine,” Catherine said mournfully. “I wish there was more.”
“More wine!” he said, mock-aghast. “Where do you think you are, Clarence House?”
She pouted. “Do you have anything else to drink?”
“There might be whiskey,” he said doubtfully, standing with the dinner plates and leaving them on the windowsill by the front door.
“Then bring on the whiskey!” she said, thumping the table. She had never had whiskey before, actually, but it would be exactly right for now, she decided; it was exactly what was needed. She threw her head back and stretched her arms wide, and as she did so, James, passing by her chair, leaned down to put his arms around her. She could smell him; the shower gel he had used before dinner, mostly, and something warmer, too, something more muggy and slightly sour; the food, probably, or the wine, maybe a trace of sweat from under his arms; maybe he had been sweating, telling her all that he had. Poor darling. She hugged him tighter, her arms on his arms. James made a sound like growling, and with one last squeeze, he pushed his lips hard and quick to her jaw.
“Oh, Catherine,” he said, standing again. “Look at it.”
She looked: the garden in moonlight, the stars sharp and sure of themselves, the sweep of silent meadows down to the canal.
“I wish it could always be like this,” he said.
“Me too.”
“Just you and me, and this weather, and this quiet.”
“Yeah,” Catherine said, and then she found that she was holding her breath, and she realized why: so that she would not say something else, something rash or foolish, to spoil the moment, the way she usually did. This was new. This was something else he had given her: this pause.
“Yeah,” she said again, and above her, she heard James sigh.
“Now, drink,” he said, heading for the front door. “Drink!” He went into the house, closing the door behind him; through its glass, she saw him move through the sitting room into the kitchen. She felt rising in her a shiver of gladness and of excitement, and she savored it as it ran through her. Already, in the half-minute since he had gone, she had thought of so many things she wanted to tell him.
* * *
Catherine had said that everything would be all right, and a month later, after James had come out to his mother, Catherine kept saying that everything would be all right. She had to say this. She needed to say it. She needed to believe it, because James seemed to have gone to a place where such belief was not merely naive, but irrelevant.
“Yeah,” he would reply when Catherine tried to reassure him. There was no anger in his tone, no sarcasm; just this flatness which suggested that he was taking in her words, and all words, to be considered later, sometime later, when he could spare the energy to listen to them, and to decide whether to keep them or cast them aside. They were in Carrigfinn again; James had come down from Dublin to be with his parents for his last days before going back to Berlin. Catherine had come to Carrigfinn to be with him on short notice; he had phoned her at home in Longford right after the conversation with his mother.
“Catherine,” he had said. “I need you to come. I need you to come down here to me, Catherine.”
Catherine had been waiting for the call; she had told him to call her as soon as he had spoken to his mother. It would be all right, she had told him over and over; everything would be all right, she had been telling him now for weeks. OK, his mother might be taken aback, might not know how to respond at first, but she would come round, Catherine knew that she would. She would be great, Catherine told James; she would be brilliant. James had never believed her; James had disagreed with her every time, muttering about wishful thinking, muttering about things being more complicated than Catherine realized, and Catherine had argued with him — fought with him even — telling him that he just wanted to be pessimistic, that deep down, he must want his mother not to be OK with what he was going to tell her — and when she thought of that now, she felt so ashamed. She felt so — what had she been doing, with all of her big, clever theories? Who had she been trying to fool?
“Catherine,” he had said on the phone when he had called to tell her how it had gone, and his voice had been only a whisper. Only a trace.
No, he had said, not well, it had not gone well, and there had been the shock, then, of hearing tears in his voice, and of feeling — before the flood of sorrow for him, before that — of feeling a mean, indecent stab of discomfort at this; that he should cry, dissolve into crying, and that she should hear it. But he did not dissolve; he kept going, kept his voice going, and kept it clear. No, not well, he said, not well at all. And Catherine asked for the details, for the when and the how, asked whether the setup had been as he had planned it, whether the words had been the words he had rehearsed, they had rehearsed; asked about timing, asked about location, as though it was a proposal she was asking him about, rather than what it had been. As though it had been an asking, rather than a telling — but then again, had it not been an asking? Had it not been an appeal? Asking his mother to hear him, to see him, to regard him the same way she always had; and his mother, sitting there in front of him, had put her head in her hands.
“She put her head in her hands, Catherine, and she cried and she cried. And she pulled at her hair. She took hold of her hair, and she pulled at it, as though she was trying to pull it out from the roots. Which I think she was.”
“No, no,” Catherine said, trying to soothe him, but he did not want to be soothed.
“I need you to come down here,” he said simply. “I can’t be here by myself. Please, Catherine. Please come.”
She nodded. “I can come in the morning. I can tell them I have to go to Dublin for something to do with college. I can get the train—”
“No, not tomorrow, Catherine. Tonight. The late train. Please.”
“James,” she said, his name sticking in her throat. “Tonight’s impossible. How would I explain it? They know there’s no train that late going to Dublin. They’d know—”