“But that’s different,” Catherine said, frowning. “That’s a separate thing.”
“No,” James said, shaking his head. “You didn’t do that to us.”
“I did part of it. I did enough.”
“No,” he said firmly. “There’s no point in telling yourself that. If you want to tell yourself, that’s another matter. That’s, however you put it, a separate thing.”
He was not trying to comfort her, Catherine realized. He was not trying to take something painful away. It was as if he was trying to tell her that something painful had never been hers to hold on to at all.
“You were supposed to be in Baggot Street that weekend,” she said, “the two of you. You were going to come for dinner, stay the night…”
He made a noise of disbelief. “Why would we need to stay the night? We didn’t need to use someone else’s house. We would have gone home to Liam’s place, or to mine.”
“It was something I heard Lorraine suggesting. That you would stay. Make a weekend of it. And then there was the photo.”
“What photo?”
“The photo of Liam.”
He squinted at her. “The photo of Liam was taken afterwards.”
Not that photo, she wanted to say, but there was no point — there was no point in raking this over. It was so long ago. It had been, anyway, such a small thing.
But James was still frowning, still shaking his head. “You must be misremembering, Catherine. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I think the idea was—”
“Because we weren’t hiding,” he said over her.
“Yes, you were,” she said quietly.
“No,” he said sharply. “No, we weren’t. Hiding from you, maybe. But that was different. That was”—he changed his intonation—“a separate thing.”
“So you do blame me.”
“Blame?” he spat. “I blame the bastards who parked that car. I blame the bastards who stole it, the ones who drove it up there knowing—”
“But you were up there because of what I did,” Catherine said, and she saw, then, a bin, and she threw her coffee into it; it landed with a slosh.
“You weren’t really into that, were you?” James said, and she was astonished to see that he was almost laughing. She stared at him.
“Do you even know what I said to him? What I told Liam that day?”
“You told him we were fucking,” James said, in the same vaguely bemused tone. “And you said I was — how was it that your mother put it that time?”
“My mother?”
“Troubled,” James said, nodding in evident satisfaction at having remembered the word, or at having had the chance to present it. “Troubled, that’s what you said I was. Which he had no trouble, so to speak, believing. The rest of it, though”—he shrugged—“sure, all he had to do was ask me.”
She stared at him. The collar of his denim shirt, fluttering slightly in the breeze. The gray in his beard. A freckle high on his cheek, maybe a mole; he should get that checked. But that was not something she should even be noticing; that was not something it was her place to notice.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said again, feeling the need to insist on it.
He shook his head. “You don’t need to tell me that, Catherine. That’s your business. The being sorry, I mean. That’s part of your life. I don’t mean anything harsh by that. I don’t mean that it’s worthless or anything, your being sorry, or your apology, or sorrow, or however you’d put it. I just mean, it’s yours.”
“Yeah,” Catherine said, her voice hollow. She felt she was being fobbed off, somehow; she felt as if, all over again, she was being refused.
“I have my own things,” he said, and he gave a short laugh. “Fuckin’ plenty of them.”
He sighed. “That’s the walkway,” he said, pointing up ahead. A bright green lane for cyclists and pedestrians arched across the river, pinned at two points by tall, thin towers at the top of which sentry windows were visible. It was a strange structure, looking like something out of a graphic novel against the clouds, against this city which seemed, dourly, to have turned its back to them. As they watched, a cyclist whizzed down the platform and onto the island path, disappearing behind the scraggy trees.
“People come out here to get a bit of headspace,” James said. “It’s a weird old spot.” He pointed to the city. “Look, there’s the Chrysler, look, peeking out between those two lumps of things. Can you see it?”
She squinted. “I think so.”
“Well, you wouldn’t mistake the Chrysler. It’s beautiful. Where are you staying?”
“The Standard.”
“Oh-ho,” he said, gleefully. “Sex with Michael Fassbender up against the plate-glass windows?”
Catherine made a face. “I wouldn’t complain.”
“Well, you’re a free agent now,” he said, and he took her arm. The touch of him, the solidness of him; for a moment, Catherine could not breathe. He swayed into her, and she swayed against him, and then they were in step; then they had their rhythm. The path, and the yellow flowers, and the grass verging scruffy against the gravel, and the water’s edge, and the bridge was coming, and the bridge would take him away.
“You trusted me, and I don’t think I did the right thing with that, James,” Catherine said. “I don’t know why I did what I did with it.”
He shrugged; she felt it, against the arm he was holding, as a tug. “I wasn’t that good to you, either.”
“Not deliberately.”
“Neither of us was acting deliberately. Maybe that was the problem.”
“Maybe,” she said doubtfully.
“We were kids, Catherine. We were wains, as my mother would say. It’s all a long time ago now.”
“Not that long.”
“Are you joking?” he said, and he pointed to his face. “Look at these wrinkles.” He made a show of examining the skin around her eyes. “You’re not doing too badly, actually. Fuck you anyway.”
She burst out laughing; he was laughing too. It was a performance, of course; a performance with which he could steer them out of dicey territory. It was what he had always done, and he was still doing it now, only now he was so much better at it — Catherine saw it, the smoothness, the quickness, the practice he had had. He stuck out his bottom lip now, in a mock sulk, and pretended to glower at her skin again, and she laughed again, like he wanted her to, like he needed her to do.
“You’re terrible, Muriel,” she said, in an Australian accent.
“I’m terrible, Muriel,” he said, in exactly the same twang. He gripped her arm very tightly for a moment, and then he let it go.
At the entrance to the walkway, they hugged goodbye; not a long hug, but not a short hug, either, and as he stepped back away from her, James sighed. Nothing had been said about keeping in touch, or about meeting up again during the rest of her stay here; they had not exchanged email addresses or phone numbers, had not said anything, even, about finding each other on Facebook. Catherine would have felt ridiculous suggesting this, even though it seemed to be staring them in the face as something obvious now, something natural; they had, after all, mentioned it several times. But she could not do it; she felt that the move, if it was to be made, was up to him. And what was it anyway, only staged photos and inane ramblings? They were better off without it, probably. They were better off just bumping into one another whenever the world sent them one another’s way.
“Listen,” James said now, and he glanced towards the city. “This show of mine, Catherine. In the gallery.”
“Oh, I can’t,” Catherine said. “I thought I mentioned — I’m flying back to London on Monday night.”