* * *
Later in the night, she woke, and instantly realized why: she was freezing. James had taken all of the quilt. Gently, she tried to pull it from him, and he grunted; she tried again, and he shouldered her away. In the half-light, shivering now, she peered at him, holding onto her duvet — as determined a sleeper, it struck her, as he was determined in everything else. His face was so delicate as she watched him: the fineness of his cheekbones, the fullness of his lips, the dark slice of shadow beneath his chin. He was beautiful, it struck her, something she had never seen in him before; he was not handsome in the way that she usually found men handsome, but he was something else, something fuller, something so much more solid. It was not right, that nobody should look at this face the way she was looking at it now, from this angle, in this intimacy; it was not right that nobody should lie beside James and watch him while he hogged their pillow and their duvet. She shivered again and this time grabbed at the quilt much more forcefully; but still James would not yield it, so she nudged him, hard, with her elbow. He cried out, and it was a sound so full of disbelief and outrage that Catherine could not help laughing.
“What did you do to me?” James said, lifting his face to her; he sounded as panicked and confused as though he had woken on top of a moving train. “What did you do to me?”
“Give me the duvet,” Catherine said, tugging it away from him. “You’re keeping it all to yourself.”
“You didn’t have to hit me,” he said, in a tone of deep grievance.
“I didn’t hit you,” she said. “I couldn’t wake you.”
“You hit me.”
“Go back to sleep,” she said, and he did.
5
Come on.” Zoe’s voice interrupted Catherine as she sat in the library the following week, trying to prepare for her Michael Doonan interview. “You’ve been hunched up at this desk all day. Time for a cuppa.”
“I can’t,” Catherine said, gesturing to the books on her desk.
“Engines of Everything,” Zoe said, picking one of them up. “What a pretentious bloody title. I’m taking you away from it. You look like you haven’t had fresh air in days.”
It was not that she had gone days without fresh air — quite the opposite; she had spent most of the last two weeks slacking off to spend time with James — but it did not surprise Catherine to hear Zoe say that she looked unwell. She felt heavy, and sluggish, and as though she was dragging herself around — and yet at the same time, she felt in her limbs the constant jitter of something like panic. She had been sitting here, trying to read Doonan’s books, but on each attempt a line was all she had been able to manage, or two, before the words and the page in front of her had dissolved. She did not know what was wrong with her; it was as though she was restless and yet paralyzed at the same time. James was in the darkroom, developing photographs he had taken of Aidan that morning outside the Old Library, and she was meeting him at four o’clock to head home, but for ages now she had not been able to stop looking at her watch, seeing how long was left to go; she was getting absolutely nothing done. Just when Zoe had come up to her, she had been considering whether she could get away with going over to the darkroom, letting herself into House Four and up the stairs, into the PhotoSoc offices; could she think of some plausible reason for showing up like that? That she had wanted to see how the work was going? But she could not, surely, just go into the darkroom; she would let the light in, and destroy the photographs, and — no, she could not do that, of course she could not do that. But why did she even want to go up there at all? And yet she did; she wanted to see him. It was ridiculous. She would see him at four o’clock, which was, now, hardly even an hour away. She would have the whole evening with him. And she had had pretty much the whole week with him, and the week before that; they had spent most of every day sitting in cafés, or on the Green, or going to exhibitions, or looking around the shops. And not much more than a week ago, she had been feeling crowded by him; not much more than a week ago, she had been wishing that he would do more of his own thing, and leave her to hers. And now — this. But what was this? What was this feeling? What were these feelings, because there was more than one of them: there were several of them, and it was by them, now, that she was crowded; it was by them, now, that she was feeling cornered, feeling overwhelmed. James—
“Come on,” Zoe said again, pulling her up by the shoulders. “I’m staging an intervention, Citsers. Tea.”
As Catherine had known she would do, Zoe steered the conversation around again to the subject of Emmet, and to the question of how things were between Emmet and Catherine, as Zoe put it, “post-Stag’s.”
“Which is not quite as promising as ‘post-shags,’” she said, arching an eyebrow, “but it’s a start.”
“I’m telling you, Zoe. You’re barking up the wrong tree. It was just a drink. We were talking about TN stuff. There’s nothing more than that happening. How could there be?”
“Why wouldn’t there be?”
“Because he’s Emmet. He’s a messer.”
“He’s cute. And he clearly likes you. He’s been flirting with you all year.”
“I told you, Zoe, it’s not flirting. He’s Emmet. He’s The Doyle. It’s just the way he goes on. Everything is a joke with him. Everything is a parody.”
“You seemed to be having a perfectly nice time with him in the Stag’s.”
“Yeah, but only because we were messing. That’s exactly my point. There can only be so much of him slagging me about being a culchie and me slagging him about having gone to a private school.”
“Well. You don’t have to talk. You can just shag.”
“Oh, God,” Catherine groaned. “Can we talk about something else, please? Do we have to spend all of our time talking about boys?”
“We don’t spend all of our time talking about boys,” Zoe said, but the accusation seemed to rattle her, because she stirred her tea for a long moment, staring at its milky surface. She sighed. “How’s James, then?”
Catherine coughed out a laugh. “James is a boy.”
Zoe made a face. “Yeah, but you know what I mean. How did his photo shoot with Aidan go? Any chance of a bit of hot boy-on-boy action there?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Zoe!” Catherine said, more forcefully than she had intended; she had caught the attention of several people at nearby tables, and Zoe’s eyes were wide with injured surprise. “Sorry,” she muttered, but Zoe did not even blink.
“What was that for? You’re not seriously feeling possessive of Aidan, are you?”
She spluttered. “Oh my God. Zoe!”
But Zoe’s expression had suddenly changed; she was looking over Catherine’s shoulder, and had assumed a huge, cheeky smile. “Stop talking about him,” she said, out of the corner of her mouth, waving now, and Catherine turned to see Aidan striding down the steps of the coffee dock, waving back in his laconic way.
“Oh, great,” Catherine said, reaching for her tea.
Aidan was looking well today, even handsome, wearing a checked shirt she hadn’t seen before and a pair of black jeans, and he had shaved, which was not something he always bothered to do, and she wondered if he had cleaned himself up because he was getting his photograph taken, which was an idea that ought to have made her laugh, but that instead, like almost everything at the moment, just made her feel a strange mixture of irritation and anxiety. She wondered again if she could sneak off and meet up with James at an earlier time than the one they had arranged; she felt intensely the desire to be with him, talking to him, rather than here with Zoe and Aidan. But she pushed it back. It was not something she should listen to.