"Where there is sorrow there is holy ground" for whomever it calls to mind for you. (So sorry you are under the weather. Feel better dear!)
Thank you! This inevitably called Lix Storm to mind for me.
Strangely enough, Lix has been seeing more of her flat since it happened. More of the perfect little pencil drawings over the sofa with its still-plump cushions. More of the kitchenette with its always-gleaming sink. More of the bedroom, which has not always been as solitary as it feels now. It is not that the offices of The Hour had been a sanctuary. They had been far more than that: a place where she could be centered, where she could do good work, where she could look to the future, and where even the sharpest edges of the past did not hurt too much.
She’s not sure what the offices are now. They are quieter. There is fear in the hallways that was absent before. And there is, of course, grief, that Shakespeare knew would fill any room defined by an absence. Lix is not always sure, when she finds herself with a handkerchief pressed to her eyes and a hand pressed to her mouth, whom she is weeping for. For Sophia? For Freddie? For herself? She has always hated self-pity.
There is no particular reason for her to be working late on this particular Thursday. January has slid into February, the calendar alone marking the days of undifferentiated rain and mist. Freddie is still in hospital; Cilenti is not yet on trial. Things might or might not be about to blow sky-high in Nairobi, or in Berlin. Lix sighs, and clicks off her desk lamp, and drinks off the last of her whisky. It is on her way back from washing out the glass that she sees the light at the other end of the hall. Very quietly, very carefully, Lix sets the glass back on her desk.
He is sitting with his elbows balanced on his blotting pad, his forehead balanced on his fingertips. Lix looks at him, and tells herself firmly that they could never have made things work. They could never have been lovers outside a war zone. (And what else, demands another interior voice, are you in now?) Very slowly he raises his head to look at her. With something like terror she thinks: it will not be many years before he is old. And then she tells herself that that is nonsense, just one more of the nightmare thoughts that come in the hours between midnight and dawn.
“Lix.” His voice is hoarse, and still too familiar. “You’re working late.”
She takes this as an invitation, and moves into the room, leans one hip on his desk. He doesn’t challenge this, even with so much as a grimace. She wishes this didn’t make her want to cry. “Only fools,” she says crisply.
Randall half-laughs under his breath. “Well. Perhaps.”
There is a long moment of silence during which she wonders about offering him a cigarette, or about just smoking one herself. Then she says, accusingly: “You have no excuse.”
“You’re still the man in charge,” says Lix wryly. “The trustees aren’t going to lay siege to the place at two o’clock in the morning. Go home, Randall,” she adds, more gently. “There’s no one here to be managed but me. And you know better than to attempt that.”
He gives her a half-smile. “I should.” There is another silence. Lix wonders if they are unable to speak to each other, or if they have no need to. Surely, she thinks, it should be easier to tell the difference between the two.
“Who was it,” asks Randall, “who said: ‘Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground’?”
“Serve you right if I told you you’d made it up,” says Lix. “But it’s Wilde.”
“Come on,” says Lix; “you can’t let the cleaners find you.”
“It is.” Still he has not moved. “There’s an all-night café up the Godolphin Road,” says Lix, “but their coffee is execrable. Mine’s much better.” He draws himself up; his look sharpens. “Come along,” says Lix again. “You can sleep on the sofa.”
