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One wretched autumn afternoon, Henry Le Vesconte and his companion were drifting unmarked through the London crowds when he heard a voice that he had hoped never to hear again. He ignored it and quickened his pace, but his pursuer was undeterred. The fourth time the voice called his name, he turned around.
The years since their last meeting had not changed Francis Crozier so very much. Perhaps the soft lines of his body were a little softer. Slumped shoulders, round belly, weary face. His appearance was neat enough, but it was the neatness of a man who was trying his best, not a man who was looked after. He's not drinking anymore, thought Henry. At least, not at the moment. He himself was not drinking, at the moment.
"Will you walk with me?" said Crozier. “There's a park not far from here.“
Henry found himself nodding curtly. "I have nothing to say to you," he said, lest the man should read too much into the nod. And yet I cannot talk to anyone but you, he might have added.
They did not speak again until they reached the park gates. It was raining, a fine grey drizzle, and the park was almost deserted. They found a bench in a corner under some trees and sat down. Henry was ashamed of his own relief at finding shelter. Absurd of him to mind a little shower of rain, after everything. The ache had never quite left his bones, though, and with every winter that passed, it became more troublesome.
Crozier glanced up at the space just over Henry's left shoulder. "Would he like to sit as well? I can make room," he said.
Henry stared at him blankly. "You can see him?"
“Yes, I see him." He smiled. "Hello, James. I'm sorry I didn't greet you before. You must admit that it's a novel situation, and I never had your grasp of etiquette."
The ghost of James Fitzjames looked at Crozier with recognition but without warmth. Henry felt a small stab of satisfaction, as he might if his pet cat refused to be stroked by someone he disliked.
"Is that why you were so eager to walk with me?" said Henry. "For him?" It would be ridiculous to feel a pang because a man he hated had not wanted his company for its own sake, but Henry knew himself to be a ridiculous man.
“Mine seems to have wandered off," Crozier said, glancing around. "But he’ll be back soon. He never goes far."
"Yours?"
"Ah, there he is. Behind that tree.“
It might be Thomas Blanky or Jopson, thought Henry, but he did not believe it. After a moment, a tall figure emerged, as known as an old scar.
“Hello, James,“ said Henry, drily. You fool, he told himself. You should have known it. When did you ever have anything that belonged just to you?
This other James was painfully thin and drawn, his face marked by the disease that had killed him. His movements were slow and deliberate.
Crozier was looking at Henry's James. Henry had to bite back the urge to make excuses for how overdressed his James was for a damp, grey afternoon in a London park.
“That was his costume at Carnivale, “ said Crozier. “Britannia.”
James at Carnivale, before that night went so bloody wrong. More vital than anyone Henry had even known. His face flushed. High-spirited as a boy. Before he started to sicken. When he and Henry still told each other everything.
"It already had a hold of him, that night. The sickness,“ said Crozier, as if their thoughts had brushed against each other. Henry felt briefly, spitefully glad that Crozier was not entirely above the petty desire to show that he had known James best.
Then Crozier asked, almost tenderly, “How have you been, Henry?" and his sense of triumph curdled.
How weary he was of this man’s gentleness. It was not an easy, uncomplicated gentleness. Like his neatness of dress, it was a choice that Crozier woke up and made every morning, even when there was nobody to witness it. He, Henry, instinctively understood this, although Henry could not bring himself to care whether the world saw his contempt or his unshaven face.
He wanted to speak names – Jopson, Little – to test the boundaries of the man's supposedly boundless forgiveness. He wanted to catch him out in the act of holding a grudge. Most of all, he wanted a bloody drink.
The two Jameses were greeting one another warily, like dogs who have never met before. Next to each other, they did not quite look like the same man, but like brothers with a strong familial resemblance. Crozier's James was the taller of the two.
"Yours has his nose," said Crozier. "Mine used to be a better likeness, but the details slip away, no matter how hard you try to fix them in your memory."
The Jameses had started a silent but animated conversation. Henry tried to interpret their gestures but could not tell what they were talking about.
“Is yours solid?“ he asked. "Can it be touched, I mean?"
“I can't tell for sure,“ said Crozier. “Perhaps, but it feels wrong to touch him. Forbidden, somehow.”
Henry did not like to admit it but he felt the same. In the beginning, he had taken the presence of James for the product of delirium, later drunkenness. When he finally realised that James was there to stay, it had felt as though the rules of their cohabitation were already fixed, and it was unthinkable to move into another phase of intimacy.
"Does yours ever say anything?"
"No. Not with words. Does yours?"
"No."
The Jameses had progressed to some kind of cheerful horseplay on the damp grass.
"How can the same man have two ghosts?" asked Henry, to distract himself from the tangle of two sets of long slender limbs. Would there ever be a time when this long-dead man lost his power to quicken Henry's pulse?
"I don't believe in ghosts, Henry," said Crozier.
"A strange admission in the circumstances." A few feet away, the two ghosts of James Fitzjames were tussling on the grass over a hat. Crozier's James looked so brittle that Henry had the urge to call out to his own James and warn him to play gently. "Let him have his hat back, James," he said, and then felt ridiculous.
“If I ever believed in something more than the here and now, that belief died when he did," said Crozier. "What was left of him, we put in the ground. It would not have hurt so much to think of him disrespected and pawed, if I’d believed that the part of him that mattered was beyond their reach."
"If there are no ghosts, then how would you explain this? How do you explain him?"
"I don't know. A memory. A likeness made of my memories. There are holes in him, where my memories fall short."
“Why would you choose to remember him so unhappy?“ asked Henry accusingly.
“Do you think he looks unhappy?"
Crozier was right, of course, damn him. His James had the tired but serene gaze of a man whose whole world has shrunk to one beloved face. It was monstrously unfair that the man Henry loved had long returned to dust and yet even that did not spare Henry the sight of him gazing, besotted, at another man.
Crozier said, "I wish I could remember whether he was truly at peace in the end. Sometimes I think that's just something I tell myself, the way you tell a child a story so it can sleep."
"Damn you, you know how happy he was. He was stupid with happiness. I wished you both in Hell enough times because of it."
"Thank you, Henry," said Crozier, and Henry remembered how this man put him at a disadvantage. How he insisted on transmuting Henry's savagery into kindness.
The Jameses came loping up, laughing. Henry's James was bare-headed, his robes mud-spattered. There was a bright red streak across his hairline.
Crozier saw it too. "I should not have said what I did about Carnivale," he said.
"The blood was there before," lied Henry.
Henry's James had been watching Crozier curiously. With a sudden movement, he knelt and took the man's hand. Then he drew the hand towards him and held it against the bare skin of his own throat. Henry heard the shocked hiss of Crozier's breath.
“Why did he do that? What does it mean?“ Henry asked. He heard the panicked edge in his voice, the inflection of a child who knows himself to be shut out of an adult conversation, and he despised himself for it.
“I'm sorry, James," said Crozier. "I am so sorry."
Henry's James shook his head emphatically. He tightened his fingers around Crozier's fingers with a small squeeze, and gave him a faint smile. He mouthed a syllable, or syllables. Henry turned his face away.
The light was fading when they said their farewells. They did not make any promises to meet again, but Henry doubted that this would be the last time. He watched the tall figure and the shorter one walk into the distance, their heads close together, and for a moment the present and the past folded into each other.
It occurred to him that he had badly wanted to talk to someone who had known and loved the same man he knew and loved. But there was nobody who did, and that was just another thing to live with.
It occurred to Henry that the rain had grown heavier and he was sitting like a fool on a damp bench in the cold.
“Well, come now,“ he said to his own James. "Let's see if we can find somewhere out of the rain."