Chapter Text
She’s very direct, Esme. But she is, Bixby supposes, French. So there’s that.
Somehow, she has a way of popping out with things, things that Bix had always felt he could say only under an umbrella of soft suggestion or side-step allusion.
Or things he never thinks to bring up at all.
He hasn't spoken with her for three months, but, as soon as he picks up the phone, she immediately asks, “Have you seen them? The ads?”
Bixby sighs.
After all of these years, every now and then, by sheer force of habit, Bixby still pulls the arts and entertainment section from his newspaper first, to save the crossword for Endeavour.
And then, just the other morning, he saw it: a picture of a man who looked so like Endeavour as to momentarily rob him of breath—a man with the same austere cheekbones and stubborn chin—a man with even Endeavour's uncannily big blue eyes—standing alone in the center of a bleak and forsaken moor.
For a moment, Bixby wasn’t sure what to make of it, until his eyes fell to the words below, written across the green-gray grass in white script:
As A Circling Bird
The Life and Loves of Endeavour Morse
It was a film, a movie for God’s sake.
Oh, hell.
He had set the paper aside, resolving to avoid that section for the next several weeks, resolving to pretend as if he’d never seen it. But now, Esme has asked him about it point-blank, and so he has to say it.
“Yes,” Bixby tells Esme. “I’ve seen them.”
There’s a pause.
“I’ll go with you, if you want,” she says.
Bixby huffs a laugh. “I’m not going to see the damned thing.”
He already saw the original. Why would he need to see a remake?
“You know you’re going to,” Esme says. “I’m going to. But I don’t want to go alone, really. And I don’t want you to, either. You notice what they’re calling it, don’t you?”
Well, of course, they would seize upon that book. Whatever Endeavour had said to Mrs. Pettybon through the Thursdays’ television screen notwithstanding, more than one of Endeavour’s poems do contain a bit of a sexual charge— and the collection found in As A Circling Bird tops them all.
Bixby always liked to think that perhaps it was because Endeavour had been missing him, wandering around alone up in Scotland, but he knows it might just as well not be the case. Bix is old enough to see now how often he tends to put himself at the center of things, just as he always was, in his youth, the glittering center of every party.
But more and more, as he stands under the scatter of stars, he realizes just how small a figure in the wide universe he really is—how many things there are that he simply does not know.
Where Endeavour is now or what he is doing being at the top of that list.
“Yes, I noticed that,” Bixby tells Esme, wearily. “Do you know who this actor is? Shaun Evans? He really does look a lot like him.”
“I don’t know. He was on a comedy, in Britain. Teachers,” Esme says.
Then, there is a pause.
“He played ‘the gay one,'” Esme says.
Bixby groans. “Oh, God.”
So, just as Bixby expected from the title of the film, this is what it will be all about, then: a complicated tale of the most beautiful soul Bixby had ever encountered reduced to one titillating question.
Gee, which team was he batting for, anyway?
He expects some reprimand from Esme, once he’s expressed his sense of dismay. This, probing, this dissecting dressed up as "openness," might be just the sort of thing she approves of. She has so many Views On Things, and she doesn’t like it all if you don’t share them, or even if you do, and are simply a bit more reticent about them, simply more inclined, as Bixby is, to keep one’s private life private.
He’s lucky, really, that she’s speaking to him at all, he supposes. This time last year, she had left the house in a cloud of impatience, all but shaking the dust from her feet as she went.
She had been organizing some sort of Pride march at the university where she lectures, and had asked him to speak at the rally, but he had begged off, telling her he wouldn’t be the best person for the job, since he was basically straight.
There had been a long pause.
“What?” she asked, blankly.
“What do you mean, ‘what?’” Bixby asked.
“How can you say that? You were with Endeavour for thirty years. You took him to Denmark to get married as soon as it was legal, for god’s sakes. You were ground-breakers!”
“Well. Yes. But that was Endeavour,” Bixby said.
And how could he explain? It wasn’t the sort of thing he would happily discuss with anyone at all, really, let alone Esme, who was the closest thing he would ever have to a daughter, even though she wasn’t quite young enough to be. It was just too damn . . . awkward? uncomfortable?
Just wrong on any number of levels, really.
What could he say? He was, basically, attracted to women, that was all there was to it. There were some men, too, it was true, who over the years had caught his eye, but . . .
But Endeavour. There was no one who could hold a candle to him really, in Bixby’s eyes.
Because it was Endeavour’s eyes he had fallen in love with first; not just because they were luminous and breathtaking, but because of the way he had looked at him once, at a party, as though he saw right through him, as if he knew he was a fraud.
Then, on another afternoon, he looked at him again as if he forgave him for it.
And then he had pulled Bix off the dock— despite the fact that he was wearing a rather expensive suit—and down into the lake with him, laughing that laugh that sounded just like the ripple of water.
The first look had captured Bix's imagination, the second his heart.
But he hadn't wanted to explain this. Not to Esme.
“It just . . . I don't know. Does it matter one way or the other? I loved Endeavour because he was Endeavour, not because he was a man or a woman. Sometimes I even sort of wished he was a woman. Not for me, but . . . . for him. He would have made a good father,” Bix had said.
Esme had put her hand to her forehead, as if she had a tremendous headache coming on. “Oh. My. God. I should be angry, but . . . You are just honestly the most confused person I have ever met.”
“You know what I meant,” Bix had said. And if she had felt impatient with him, now he did with her.
Who did she imagine had spent endless hours on the carpet playing Pêche with her children? Who did she think took them out in the woods looking for Moon Face? Who did she think set up their tent so they could go “camping” in their back garden while she and Marcel were off on their little romantic weekends in Provence?
Bix had had phone calls to make in those days.
But today, Esme seems to be on his side. Endeavour, the real Endeavour, belongs to them. And now he’ll be sold for seven Euro a ticket, scrutinized like an insect under a microscope by movie-goers munching on popcorn and slurping sodas noisily through straws.
Today, they are united.
How will the story get told? That is their main concern. Bix certainly never talked to any of these writers or producers. Nor has Esme or Guillaume.
Whoever the script writers talked to, they will be the ones to color the story, to determine which Endeavour is projected onto that one-dimensional screen.
But who? Who would have talked to them? Not Win Thursday. But Strange, perhaps? Or George and Shirley? He can’t see Tony involving himself in a project like this. But Kay?
Or could it be Bruce? Box? Susan? Jerome Hogg?
Oh, God.
*************
The movie begins with his mother’s death. It’s a shame, really. Bixby wouldn’t have minded seeing Endeavour when he was first Endeavour, before he was Morse, before he had any secrets. It needn't have been anything much, really. It would have been nice, just to see him climbing a tree or looking cautiously and carefully into a bird’s nest or just walking by a brook, idly along.
Bixby’s siblings had all died before he was born, and, strangely enough, when he and Endeavour were older, Bix found himself wishing more and more that he had met him long ago, even though, in their childhood years, an ocean had separated them.
He would not have minded seeing a younger Endeavour, sitting in the branches of a tree, reading a book. He would have projected himself onto the screen, barefoot and tossing around a squashed, brown football.
“Hey, kid. We’re getting a game together. Wanna play?” Josiah would ask, and Endeavour would wrinkle his nose.
But instead, the movie begins right as he's trundled off to his father’s and Gwen’s. It’s all very artfully done, the mood set in a montage of shots: Endeavour hiding in his room and listening to records while his father and stepmother bicker downstairs, Endeavour reading a storybook to Joycie while their father and her mother bicker downstairs.
There are a few uplifting scenes as well: Epic shots of blue skies and green fields, Endeavour riding Joycie about on the handlebars of an old bicycle. One gathers that the audience is meant to infer that already young Morse is destined for bigger and better things, as he traverses the tranquil landscape, standing up on the pedals to make the bike go faster, to make Joycie laugh. They are off, away from the grim brick house, away from Cyril and Gwen, finding a space in which to dream.
Bixby looks over at Esme, and she’s smiling slightly at the scene, her beautiful oval face illuminated in the blue screen light.
But Bixby finds himself wondering who they spoke to to get all of this. Could it be Joyce? Would she talk to them? Perhaps so. These are all innocent enough memories; there is no reason why she should not have shared them.
And then, time passes, and instead of a teenaged actor playing Endeavour, sitting quietly at the back of the class, it’s the man Bix had seen in the ad, Shaun Evans.
Endeavour is looking out the window when a teacher comes to the door and informs Morse that he is to go and speak to the headmaster. Endeavour is perplexed; he isn't the sort of boy usually called out of class.
It's a funny flicker of a look, subtle and so like Endeavour's that Bixby begins to relax a little. He isn't quite sold on the writers, but this Shaun Evans, Bix feels, is all right, really. He seems as if he's set on playing Endeavour as a person, not just as a type, as Bixby had so feared.
The camera follows Endeavour down a long hall and into the more formal setting of the office. A man behind a large desk hands him a letter—it's an offer of a scholarship, of course, to Oxford.
It’s an odd moment, ironic, one supposes. Endeavour looks as if he might pass out from happiness, but the audience, of course, already knows that he's walking straight to Susan and Henry and mad attempts at bacchanals.
The audience knows, already, that his years at Oxford are doomed.