Christine and James had been writing to each other at least once a month. Or really, Christine had been writing to James, who responded to her letters with abrupt postcards, if he responded at all. Occasionally, though, a real letter, typed, would arrive instead, a letter that was lengthy and funny and, like a good newspaper column, only obliquely personal. 

It had been a year and half since he’d graduated. Since then he’d been pursuing a master’s at LSE, political communication, while she remained an undergrad in Toronto. She was going to visit her father, enjoying a long-coveted temporary assignment in Geneva, over the last reading week of her degree, and proposed a stopover in London on her way back home. She started looking into youth hostels, but James dismissed the idea in one of two rushed phone calls, cajoling her instead into staying at his mother’s cousin’s house in Hampstead Heath, where he was renting a room. 

“Beryl will love it. You don’t need to stay in a hostel. Just stay here.” He called out to the cousin, away from the phone – “Is it alright if my friend comes for a couple of days?”, his voice rising on the “friend” instead of the “days,” an intonation more British than Canadian, though his accent, all hard “Rs,” hadn’t wavered. “My old roommate.”

The faint murmur of an agreeable conversation at the other end was relayed back to her: Christine could stay in his room while he slept on the sofa (“settee”) in the living room (“lounge”) downstairs. 

“Beryl wants you to come,” he said, and as Christine continued to protest — that Beryl had strong feelings one way or another seemed improbable — he continued: “If you say no, my mother will call Beryl and insist. Then she’ll call you. Just come stay here.”

James’s mother was a force of nature. It was generally easier to go along with whatever she thought was right than to submit to the browbeating that might follow. Christine finalized her plans. 

*

Beryl, a compact woman in her sixties with a sharp silver bob, was at the house when Christine arrived from the airport. It had been decades since she’d had anyone in the house with her, she said as she led Christine upstairs. It was nice to have company again. The cramped and tiny room James had offered up was neat: bed made, dresser drawers and wardrobe doors pulled tight, textbooks stacked on a small half-desk under the window. Christine set her duffel bag down in the corner and looked out at the terrace houses on the other side of the street. She’d expected some transatlantic version of the nest of strewn clothing and paper that had been his Toronto bedroom, a place which — once Christine had become familiar with its piles and mounds, its topography — had felt like a cozy blanket fort.

Back downstairs, Beryl boiled water for tea. A front-loading washing machine abutted the kitchen counter. A beer-sized fridge was tucked under the sink, over which plates stood in a neat vertical row in a rack. Off the back of the kitchen, low gray light suffused a glassed-in room.

Beryl started to pour milk into a mug and Christine opened her mouth to object before changing her mind, emitting instead a strangled, choked grunt.

“Do you not take milk?” asked Beryl, holding up the mug as if to empty it.

“I don’t always. But sometimes I do,” said Christine. Her voice, she imagined, was light, the voice of the happy-go-lucky sort who took tea, and life, as it came. “I’ll have it with milk.” 

A spoon clattered as Beryl set the mug onto the counter. She did not pour a cup for herself.

“So you and James were flatmates,” Beryl said. 

Christine paused, in case a question was about to follow, but as it became clear it would not, she nodded. “Yes, for two years. We had a third roommate too.”

“When was the last time you saw each other?” Beryl said. Her tone was one of professional disinterest, a clerk at reception filling out an intake form.

“Just over a year ago,” Christine said. It’s what she had been telling people, though if she actually added up the months, it was longer. Closer, in fact, to two years.

“Lots to catch up on, then,” Beryl said. 

Christine frowned slightly. She had been sharing her news with James by letter, keeping him up to date: her plans after graduation; the most recent peregrinations of her divorced parents; the end of her relationship with Jeremy, the science masters student she’d met by contradicting him at a party. She’d maintained a long-distance relationship with Jeremy after he’d left for a doctoral program at Cornell. He’d returned to Toronto regularly, and she’d taken the long bus ride to visit him a few times, changing in Buffalo, listening to music since reading made her car sick. 

But he’d met someone else, eventually, a German fellow candidate who’d appeared first as an entry on the calendar hanging in his kitchen (“Tanja – dinner”), then as a friend who’d joined them on a hike, and finally as the subject of pointed comments and arguments, until he’d sent Christine a letter that began, “I think you know I’ve been seeing Tanja,” without actually having ever admitted to it before that.  

Christine had written to James, too, about her thoughts on another possible referendum on Quebec sovereignty, about the Contract with — or on — America, about her studies, her reluctance to work on her honours paper in history. It was already February and she’d barely sketched it out, a return to the high-procrastinating ways of her early years of university. Back then James had coaxed her into working to deadline, and perhaps she’d written to him hoping he’d do the same again, but postcards and proto-columns didn’t lend themselves to advice. Or to personal news.

Perhaps there was, on reflection, some catching up to do.

Beryl dispensed sightseeing tips. The Victoria and Albert, if it was raining. A walk up the heath to see the view. Christine said she wanted to visit a bookstore; Beryl provided directions with a weary expression. She handed over a copy of London A-Z before excusing herself to run errands in a hurried way that left Christine wondering, as she sipped the insipid tan-coloured liquid in her mug, if she had bored her host.

*

There had been a time when Christine felt like she knew everything about James and he knew everything about her – more than most people, at least, everything important – and though they hadn’t been in the same place for a while, the idea that he had an entire, separate life in London was unsettling and shadowy, a pencil study awaiting details. 

He brought a friend along to lunch the day after she arrived. Damian peppered Christine with questions about the O.J. Simpson trial that had just begun, as if being on the other side of the North American continent had somehow afforded her a front row seat; his entertaining, self-deprecatingly posh patter seemed to obstruct learning about James’s London life, rather than facilitate it.

“So have you been collecting a bouquet of English roses?” Christine asked James as they walked home from the tube station. 

In his last years of undergrad, when they’d lived together, James had seduced his way through a prodigious slate of classmates. He’d spent more time with one girl, Katya, toward the end, but broke things off shortly before his graduation, leading to more than one need-to-talk confrontation in the front hallway in the weeks that followed. The break-up hadn’t come as a surprise to Christine, though: she had heard enough of the planning for grad school, could sense the ways James kept himself separate that were invisible to the smitten Katya. 

“English girls are weird,” he said. As his confidence had always come as a result of her waiting, not asking, she smiled in what she imagined, or hoped, was a coquettish way, and let it go.

Christine and James had crawled into bed with each other from time to time when they’d been roommates, in a cozy and intimate way that was ostensibly entirely platonic, and somehow not. They’d almost kissed a few times, shared quiet late-night encounters they’d never spoken about in daylight, but there had always been a point at which one of them pulled back. They’d been slightly off-step with each other. She’d gone through phases of being attracted to James, aware of him in every way, and other periods where it felt like he was a surrogate brother, the guy she was most herself with, and she appreciated his otherness, his maleness, without craving it. 

The summer before this London visit she’d visited James’s family cottage without him. It wasn’t the first time she’d been a guest — she’d joined him there a couple of times when they’d been roommates — but this was different, a visit to his parents on her own, something she’d only agreed to because James’s mother had, as was her way, insisted.

On her way there, Christine had worried about feeling awkward without James around, but being with his parents turned out to be like spending time with a favourite aunt and uncle. James’s presence was everywhere: a familiar jacket hanging in the front hall, furniture covered in cereal box stickers he and his siblings had pasted on years earlier. She sorted through a box of hockey trading cards, soft from years of handling, leafed through pages of photos of summers past trapped in crinkly plastic. She read a Hardy Boys book from the shelf of the bunkbedded room he’d once shared with his late brother, as if reading something James might or might not have read as a child could bring him closer. He called from London while she was in the kitchen helping to make dinner one night and they spent a few minutes talking over each other and apologizing (“Sorry – no, you go”) before she handed the phone back to his mother. 

Swaddled in an ancient plaid quilted blanket in the lower bunk later that night, she realized she had missed him all year, the cottage weekend just the apex of a melancholy that had crept in since he’d moved out of the apartment the spring before. As she lay awake a thought emerged, then subsided again in an incisive, ephemeral middle-of-the-night way: that what she’d always thought was confusion about her feelings for James might be, instead, just one single, confusing feeling. 

*

Dinner at the Indian place on the last night of her visit was too spicy for her taste. She picked at the plate of chips James ordered for her, dabbing hesitant smears of sauce from the chicken tikka. After dinner they walked first along the Victoria Embankment. They turned up away from the river and wove through city streets until they found a pub in Covent Garden where boisterous patrons, pint glasses in hand, spilled outside in the chilly early spring air. James got them drinks and they slid into a table next to a group of men who roared with laughter every few minutes.

James asked about Jeremy, and whether she’d heard from him, which suggested he’d read her letters more carefully than his replies might have suggested. She said she hadn’t, recently, and was just as glad.

“Long distance,” James said, shaking his head. “It doesn’t work.” 

“Not always,” Christine said. “It does sometimes work.” She stopped. James raised his eyebrows. “Seriously,” she added. “Lots of couples spend years apart. You can’t categorically say long distance doesn’t work.” She had spoken so strongly she felt shaky. She picked at the edge of a paper coaster.

“Okay, sometimes,” James said. “But Jeremy’s going to graduate and go teach or do a postdoc or whatever in the middle of nowhere. You’re basically never going to be in the same place again.”

“I could be,” she said. People made things work, if they were meant to. Couples could catch up to each other.

“You two are in different stages.” His tone shifted from dismissive to authoritative. “It was never going to work out.”

Erratic jumping and deafening chair-scraping had overtaken the laughter at the next table. James stood up. Christine, feeling annoyed, stayed sitting. Having prodded into, then dispatched, her relationship, James now seemed to have decided the conversation was over.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go outside.” He reached out a hand with mock courtliness. She looked at him heavily for a few seconds before rising. He stood against the door and let her pass.

“He didn’t even really break up with me,” she said, as James returned from the bar with more pints.

He handed her a glass. “Maybe he didn’t know how to tell you,” he said. She snorted. James always had exacting standards for how guys she dated should behave. This take on Jeremy was unexpectedly generous.

Pleasantly tipsy by last call, she followed James onto the tube line, and then a bus. She realized that, unusually, he was as drunk as she was, maybe more; they were both loose and happy and swinging around lamp posts and eating a package of Jaffa cakes (“I’ve always liked the name,” James said). 

He pulled her arm and they raced down Beryl’s street to the front door.

“It’s really nice to see you,” he said. He squeezed her hand. “I forgot how much fun we have together.”

He shook out the contents of his knapsack onto the step to find his keys before discovering they were bulging out of the pocket of his jeans. They stumbled into the house. In the kitchen, he filled two glasses of water and handed one to her.

“We should go to bed,” he said. “You have your flight.  I didn’t even think of that. It might be a rough trip.”

She replied in a whisper, thinking of Beryl sleeping upstairs. “I’ll be okay. I don’t think I drank as much as you did.” 

He took the glass out of her hand and put it on the counter. He drew a finger along one cheek and she felt her head move back involuntarily. She pressed herself against the counter and closed her eyes. His hair brushed her cheek. She felt a puff of breath. He kissed her in the place where her hair met her forehead, so lightly it almost tickled, like the feathery kiss of a baby. She kept her eyes closed, her face upturned, but though she could still feel the warmth of his face, millimetres away from hers, there was no follow-up; his lips did not travel to anyplace less childlike. A faint, cool breeze rustled her hair as he pulled away. 

She reached out for his arm and drew him back to her. He drew another finger along her jawline and she closed her eyes again. Finally he stepped away and put the water glass back in her hand, wrapping her fingers around it.

“Good night,” he said. “I hope you get some sleep.”

*

Beryl, printed silk scarf tucked into the collar of a neat trench coat, poked her head into the sunroom where they were eating a subdued breakfast the next morning. She smiled tightly at Christine before turning to James. 

“Is it today, Suzy’s do?” she asked. James’s eyes widened. 

“Yeah,” he said. Alarm faded into sheepishness. “Tonight through Sunday.”

“So you may be gone by the time I’m back—”

“Probably, yeah,” he said hastily. 

“All right then.” Beryl beamed broadly at the room, her eyes landing on Christine. “Hope you had a lovely time catching up. Safe flight.” 

The front door opened, then latched closed. James was looking into middle distance.

“I thought you didn’t like English girls,” Christine said. The light tone she had attempted came out sharp. She busied herself with spreading cold butter onto an equally cold piece of toast.

“She’s American,” James said. “There’s hardly anyone British in the program.” 

The flat, conversation-ending tone increased rather than decreased the urgency of her need for explanation. “I would have liked to meet her,” she said. It wasn’t exactly true. But there were other things she would have liked. She would have liked to have found out about Suzy before this morning. She would have liked to have heard about Suzy from James, rather than Beryl, whose smug expression now nagged at her. She might have liked to at least have seen Suzy, or some sign of Suzy. 

Her face was getting hot. “Did she know I was here?” she pressed. 

“She knew one of my old roommates was visiting.” She opened her mouth. “And she knows one of my roommates was a girl,” he added, before she could speak. 

“Why wouldn’t—”

He turned and looked at her so directly that she didn’t finish her question. 

“I wanted to tell you I’d met someone, first,” he said. 

But he hadn’t known how, she completed for herself. 

He looked up at the clock on the wall. “You should get ready,” he said. “I’ll clean up.” 

On the Tube she took a seat. He stood in front of her and nudged her knee with his. She went through the motions of a smile. They’d spent three days together, and she had utterly failed to catch up.  

Near the platform for the train to the airport, they stood looking at the ground.

“Well – I should—” she said. He shrugged off the duffel bag he’d carried for her and draped it over her shoulder. He tucked the strap back into place as it rolled down her arm and kissed a spot in front of her right ear.

“I am glad you came,” he murmured. By the time she re-adjusted the bag it took her a second to find him, his back already retreating into the crowd.

“Bye!” she called. At last, a question came to her, and she yelled more loudly: “James! Goodbye! When will I see you again?” He raised one arm in a stiff-armed wave. A few seconds later, she couldn’t see him at all.

A single tear as the train to the airport jerked into motion quickly turned into mostly silent, yet wholly unconcealable sobbing. The older woman in the seat next to her, elegantly dressed and with eyebrows out of a Persian miniature, touched her shoulder to ask in carefully accented English if she was all right. Trying to see past the reflection of her own puffy face in the window to the suburban landscape beyond, Christine nodded. 

The churning in her mind of the the frantic last few seconds of her visit, of Beryl’s beaming face, of James disappearing into the crowd, of him saying he’d “met someone,” words he’d never used before, was replaced unexpectedly by the image of her high school Latin teacher, fond of employing somewhat inscrutable gestures to act out new vocabulary while the class guessed the meaning. 

Another sob gulped out involuntarily. She took the tissue offered by the bejewelled hand beside her and wiped her cheek. The Kleenex carried a soft scent of something lightly floral. Rosewater, maybe. It smelled like care.

She peered up the aisle of the train carriage for inspiration. Distraction. She matched words she had learned through Latin class pantomime:

Fenestra – window. Angusta – narrow.

She tried to conjure up her ninth grade Latin class again. They were undisciplined and giddy, shouting out answers they knew made no sense. She could see the teacher standing at the front of the classroom, arm pointed upward at a ninety-degree angle, jerking his forearm to the right insistently as his gesture generated one misguided guess after another: 

“Asking a question!” “Signalling a turn!” “A windmill!” 

He’d finally, as was often the case, given them the translation of the word in question, waving stiffly to demonstrate, as he said it out loud: vale - farewell.

She dragged the tissue over her eyes and turned back to the window. 

James was going to graduate and find a job and settle down with someone, maybe even with Sally, or Suzy, or whatever his mystery girlfriend’s name was. He and Christine were never going to be in the same place again. Their friendship-with-potential, which had shimmered between them since they’d met, would evaporate — was evaporating — into nothing, like a soap bubble. One day, neither one of them would be sure that it had ever been there at all.

“I’ll be OK,” she assured her seatmate. She felt pressure on her back, delicate fingers, the gentle brush of a heavy ring. She didn’t shrug it away. She let the hand hold her together. Later, sitting at the gate with a coffee waiting for her plane, she could still feel the place where the hand had been.