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#foyles pere et fils
darkhorse-javert · 9 months
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A random, though sad, sequelette to this AU of Eternity Ring. Andrew and Sam in Peckham AU, paralleing Eternity ring TW; discussion of infertility
"By-the-by Dad." Andrew said in a very private, low voice as they walked along one of the Peckham streets "It would be best if you didn't make any mention or allusion about us and children tonight."
He looked across at his son, saw anew the heaviness in eyes and carriage, which hadn't been there when he'd left for America. Ah. He made only the low humm of agreement in his throat. Oh unfair world, to do this to them.
Andrew walked on in silence for a while, the pain nearly masked in his eyes, and then the words quietly burst out, "The doctor," and Andrew's tone gave the title the darkness of several crude adjectives, "says there's little likelihood of anything changing in that regard, ever." His shoulders were stiff, but still bruised and bowed somehow, "Sam's very cut up about it."
Not just Sam, nor for Sam's sake I think, The haunting in the eyes said it. But for the moment he supressed it. Andrew didn't want sympathy, he just wanted to unburden himself a little, the boy who had always had a good heart, buried deep and yet running quick to the surface.
And what can I say, really? That you Andrew, weren't our sole child by choice, but by Not-Happenstance. And I'd guess something similar for Sam, given the relative age gap between her and her parents. It's written in the family history if you know to look. And I wish it wasn't.
He considered his son, who was lifting his head and raising a hand as they turned on to the little close, waving and calling out- considered Sam as she stood at the front of the house they approached. Pale, drained, her spark stirred up for a good impression. The way she was with Jimmy, with the scavangers. Oh wretched world- they would have been wonderful parents. She hails him, appearing as bright as ever to an untrained eye
"Christopher, it's so good to have you back. Welcome Home -to England at least."
He embraced her, thin, kissed her on the cheek "Sam."
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kivrin · 7 years
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from a work in progress
Hastings, July 1945
“Got the rings today,” Andrew told his father, as they cleared the supper dishes.
Dad cocked his head. “Rings? Two?”
“Yeah. I know it seems a bit flash…”
“No, no.” He turned up his sleeves and started the water running.
“...but more and more men are wearing them.”
“And you want to be fashionable.” Dad raised his eyebrows and shut off the tap.
“No. Well, I don’t know that I’d have thought of it if I hadn’t seen men - like your friend Major Kieffer, say - wearing them. But it’s not fair, is it, for the woman to do everything, change her name and wear a ring.”
Dad kept looking at him.
“And I want… I don’t want her to ever worry that I’m…”
“Taking up with a girl in the WAAF. For example.”
“Yeah,” Andrew said, very low.
“Mm.” Dad washed dishes industriously for several minutes. “Sam suggest it?” he asked,
“No. My idea.”
“Mm,” Dad said again, with a different tone.
Andrew dried a plate and set it in the rack over the cooker. “Would… Dad. Would you hold the rings for me?”
“What, think you’ll lose them?”
“On the day, I mean.” He kept his eyes on his hands. “Would you stand up with me. Please.”
The sound of dishwashing stopped. In the sitting room the clock ticked.
“Be an honor,” Dad said, his voice a little rough. “But you don’t… are your friends really all…”
“No. Well, most of the ones I’d… have thought of, but even if…” Andrew swallowed. “The fact is, you are. The best man I know.”
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darkhorse-javert · 1 year
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What's your favorite episode of Foyle's War and why?
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Tough one
I think it might be "Enemy Fire".
all the hospital scenes are fabulous (especially the theatre skit). We get to see some more of RAF Life, and the darker side of it - injuries, and Ann's reaction
More Sam and Andrew relationship. More Foyle Pere et Fils, a few hints about Rosalind
And the old manor-lords tale
Turner quietly stepping up for Andrew.
There isn’t much foreshadowing towards the murderer, is the only possible flaw.
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kivrin · 7 years
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a scene for Foyle Friday
after Elise (series 8/9 episode 3)
When he left the cemetery he went to the Thames.  It was water, running water, even girdled with stone and choked with the waste of war and industry.  The sky was broader over it, and the air freer, and as he walked beside it his measured steps grew easier.  
The grave had been an anticlimax after the pyre Hilda had made for herself and Woodhead.   Everything about gathering there - even the coffin, even the black coats and hats - seemed an impertinent sequel to the finality of her choice.  He noticed that she was "Hilda" now, still, in his mind, though until her injury she had always been "Miss Pierce."  That, too, seemed an impertinence, or an irrelevance, a belated gesture towards an intimacy of mind that had never found, or needed, expression in words.  Her apology, that night in her flat, had been as startling as a touch.  
The river lapped against the stone pilings.  He wished, briefly, for a rock to throw, for some way to make a brief mark on the surface, but the urge passed and he walked on.
He'd thought for a moment that Elizabeth might follow him out of the cemetery, but she was wiser - or perhaps only more vain - than Elizabeth Lewes.  Be wary of Elizabeths, he thought, with a wry little smile.  She had only entreated him silently, and stood sorrowful but steady under his wordless no.
The sun strengthened abruptly and he had to look away from the sparkle on the water.  Sam had chosen the funeral to tell him in words what he had long anticipated and she had already divulged in hints.  He'd expected the news; he hadn't expected her to be so nervous, as if he might have been caught unawares.  He hadn't expected the sequel.  All those uncles, all those cousins, all Adam's friends and colleagues as well as her own, and she asked him to be godfather to her child?  A softer smile creased his face at the memory.
He walked, past wharves and warehouses, through parks and promenades and over bridges until, without conscious intent, he fetched up in the City.  He made his way against the tide of bowlers and brollies to one particular stone-fronted brick box where he waited until one particular junior clerk came down the steps.
It was nearly enough just to see him: tall and a little stocky now, the sunshine bright on his dark hair before he settled his hat on his head. Foyle left it until the last possible moment before he called out.  “Andrew.”
“Dad!”  
Andrew still looked like her when he smiled.  It still could send the same jolt of wonder to his heart, still could raise the same staggering questions.  Why Rosalind, why Andrew.  Why Sam (and, soon, little Sam.)  Why love, why birth, why a soft morning on a slow river with the trout rising and a flask of tea to warm you.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” Andrew demanded, still grinning.  “I nearly thought you’d bunked off to America again.  Never in the office, never in your rooms...”
“What, like you used to go months without answering my letters?”  
Andrew rolled his eyes, but the hand that landed on Foyle’s arm was warm.  “It’s good to see you.”
He ducked his head as he smiled, his throat constricting.  “How are you?” he asked, letting his hat shade his eyes as they joined the flow of foot traffic along the pavement.  
“I’m fine.  Are you all right?”  
“Yes, fine.  Been busy, but I got this afternoon off.”
“Oh?”  
“A… political function.”  He rubbed the placket of his overcoat between his thumb and forefinger.  “Thought you might let me buy you a drink.”  
“I don’t mind.  We may be hard pressed to find anything worth drinking, but I don’t mind.”
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kivrin · 7 years
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May 7, 1945 excerpt from a work in progress (other excerpts 1, 2, 3. 4) sequel to Burn Brighter Through the Cold.
Andrew woke gradually to a warm weight over his feet, dim light on his closed eyelids, and the faint scratching of a pen.  He kept still, savoring the fragile peace, knowing there was another, harsher waking to come.  He did not let himself wonder whether it would be the bustle of the base hospital or the rumble of the barracks.  He tried not to allow the thought that it might be Bruce’s sitting room at college; that he’d had too long a sleep, too long a dream, when he went round after an early lecture at Merton to rouse Bruce for his tute and then take advantage of the comfortable sofa there.  
The relation of the light and the bed (it was a bed, he could feel a sheet) were wrong for that, though.  Wrong, but familiar.  His own rooms at college?  What had he drunk last night, to dream so hard?
He opened his eyes, and had to squeeze them shut again at once against a sting that wasn’t all the sudden light.  The scene stayed on the inside of his eyelids, vivid as a Caravaggio: his own room at home, the bedside lamp moved to the desk, Dad writing by it in his shirtsleeves with his cufflinks and the clip of his fountain pen shining in the light.  Andrew couldn’t tell if the piercing feeling in his chest was joy at being home or grief that everything else had been real.
He must have made a noise, because the scratching stopped and the chair creaked as Dad moved, as if to come sit on the edge of the bed as he had in the long suffocating nights when neither of them could sleep.  Andrew knew he couldn’t bear that without the tears spilling over.  He opened his eyes again.
“Wake you?”  Dad said softly.  “Sorry.”  He put a hand out towards the lamp.
Andrew shook his head.  “No.  Time’s it?”
“Not quite midnight.  You can…”
“No.”  He stretched beneath the covers, wriggling his toes under the soothing pressure of the folded eiderdown at the foot of the bed, and turned onto his side.  “You just back?”
“Few hours.”  
“Find what you wanted in town?”
Dad made an equivocal motion with his head.  “Was worthwhile.”  In the half light his face was soft with weariness.  “Have a good evening?”
“Sam had to work.  Minding the kids for a meeting of the Married Families Club at SSAFA.  I got a bite at the Red Lion and walked her home after.”  He tucked his arm under his pillow and drew his knees up slightly, curling in with the memory of watching Sam gently disentangle small fingers from her hair.  “Thought it might get a bit rough in the streets, people annoyed to still be waiting, but it was fine.”
“Good.”  Dad wrote another line, then capped his pen and slid the paper closer to the lamp to let the ink dry.
“Working late,” Andrew observed.
He shook his head.  “Letter.  No one you know,” he added, before the question formed on Andrew’s lips.   
“All right, have your secrets.”
Dad smiled and sat back in the desk chair, fiddling idly with a button on his open waistcoat.
The wind sighed through the back garden, making the oak branches creak, a sound so familiar Andrew hadn’t known he missed it before this moment.   “Weren’t sitting up with me, were you?”
“I wasn’t ready to sleep.”  
Andrew studied him carefully.  “You all right?”
“Yes, fine.”  He looked to the shaded window.  “Just thinking.���  A moment passed.   “Milner’s with his wife at St. Mary’s,” he went on.  “May be a father by now.”
“He going to ring you?”
“No, no, no, don’t expect it.  But, no family of his own other than Mrs. Milner.”  Dad made a little shrugging motion with his mouth.  “So, perhaps.  When the baby.”
Again, as at the station, Andrew had an uncomfortable pang of envy and uncertainty, as if he’d been supplanted while he was away.  “Lucky little mite,” he said, around a yawn.  “Born in a world without war.”
All at once the quiet room felt even quieter.  Dad had gone very still, his eyes fixed on something beyond their reach.  “That’s what Rosalind said about you.”  His voice was rough.  “Day you were born.  She...”  he let out a breath and for a long moment Andrew thought that was all he would say, but he went on.  “Said you wouldn’t ever know… that.”
Rosalind.  Her name hung in the air.  How many years had it been, Andrew wondered, since he’d heard Dad say it?  Surely, when the first shock had faded, he’d used it with Uncle Charles, even if with Andrew it had always been ‘your mum,’ and with others ‘my wife.’  But Andrew could only remember the sound of it when mum was alive.  It had been a hopeful question when Dad came in from work; a sigh of admiration when she showed him a new picture; a rumble of annoyance when she told him to stay off a wrenched ankle.  And then, nothing.  Just that aching, hollow she.  
He studied Dad’s bent head.  “What did mum do?  In the last war?  Other than knit a battalion’s worth of socks,” he added.
“Two battalions, I think, by the end.”  Dad didn’t look at him, but he smiled, and it was a softer, less sad smile than Andrew had feared.  “She’d have liked to be a VAD, but her parents didn’t approve of such training for young ladies.  So, she rolled bandages, and played in Red Cross concerts, and collected suitable reading material for convalescent soldiers.  Eventually, she met people working on prosthetics for…”  He moved a hand towards his face.  “She never liked oil paints, but she was very good at matching colors.  Even difficult things like skin.  She’d do it in watercolor and then copy it in oil on the tin mask.”  He shifted in the chair.  “It wasn’t.... women weren’t called up, then.  Had to volunteer.”
“Like Sam,” Andrew pointed out.
“Like Sam.”  Dad tipped his head.
What would it be, to come home not to the remnants of his childhood, but to marriage, and fatherhood?  To Sam and a tiny bundle, tinier even than the baby she’d been grinning at in All Saints Street?   Andrew sat up and hugged his knees.  “Dad.  Do you ever think of marrying again?”
“Do you ever think of marrying at all?” he shot back.  The quirk of his lips spoke of teasing, but his hand, Andrew saw, had gone tight on his button.
“Didn’t seem… lucky… to think too much about it during the war.”  
Dad’s mouth turned wry.  “And now?”
Andrew shrugged again.   It struck him suddenly as unfair that he couldn’t bring Sam to meet Dad. That he had no way, short of a proposal, to signal seriousness of purpose.  But if Dad hadn’t met Sam first, he’d never have met Sam at all, and certainly never encountered her after he’d gone up to Debden in ‘41.  The whole courtship had been backwards that way, from their first meeting on the doorstep when she came to drive Dad to work, to their second chance after the days of nursing Dad side by side nearly as if they were already married.  
And of course, they’d never have met at all if it weren’t for the war.  
He thought of her heart beating against him, and the light in her eyes, and the warm touch of her hands.  But also the hurt and the anger in her voice.  That he put in her voice.
“I just got home, Dad,” he said. The silence stretched on.  Andrew stared at the lumps of his feet under the bedclothes.  In those first few years after Mum, he’d thought often and with dread of some strange woman sweeping in to make them a family of three again, but an alien family.  And as he’d grown he’d thought often, if indistinctly, of himself with some anonymous pretty wife and hazy-faced children.  
With Violet, and Kate, and other girls,  there’d been the sense that he’d have to choose: the family he came from, or the family he made.  At best, he’d thought, he’d always be interpreting one to the other. But Sam would never need Dad explained to her, and he’d never need to argue her virtues to Dad.  To be home with both Dad and Sam seemed natural, strange only when he had to remind himself that it had never happened outside those few days in ‘43.  
Andrew pleated the edge of the sheet.  “How did you know?  You and mum.”
The chair creaked. “Well.  Was rather a different time.”
“Dad.  Please?”  He looked over to his father.
Dad pulled in the corner of his mouth, then raised  his eyebrows in an expression of uncharacteristic helplessness.   “Can’t speak for her,” he said.  “Don’t know how she… just, that she did. Very grateful she did,”  he added softly.
“You, then.  How’d you know.”  
He spread his hands on his knees.  Outside, the wind sighed again.  “In the army,” he began. “What… wore on me.  More constantly even than the waiting…”  His eyes flicked to Andrew.  You know the waiting.
Andrew nodded.  
“The… living in public.  No privacy.  The noise, not war, just men.”  
Andrew nodded once more, though Dad’s eyes were far away. “When I.  Was sent home, I... longed for... solitude. But I found that Rosalind, sitting with Rosalind was... restful as being alone.”  He raised his head and let out a breath, then turned hesitantly to Andrew.  “Does that…?”
Maybe.  “Yes,” Andrew answered.  “And… was it… being married, I mean… how you expected?”
“No.”  Dad was very still.  Then he smiled, his eyes closing, and shook his head.  “It was better.  Unimaginably better.”
Andrew hugged his knees tighter, as if that might ease the sudden tightness in his chest, an almost unendurable stirring of something he wasn’t sure he could name.  Pleasure?  Hope?  Joy?  His eyes stung.
And then, like the return of a pendulum, like the pull of a wave drawing back into the sea, came the memories.  The dispersal hut; the Flamingo; light and shadow on the faces he’d known better than his own.  Charlie.  Douglas. Rex.  
“Not fair to keep a young woman waiting,”  Dad said.
“Fair.”  The word scraped through his chest like a sanding block.  “How is this, any of this, fair?  That I…have a chance at that, and Rex, Rex and Connie…”  His hands had curled into fists.  He stretched his fingers and tried to breathe evenly.  “Rex,” he repeated.  
“None of it’s fair,” Dad agreed, after a long silence.  “But not much of that’s your doing.  The bad or the good.”
I don’t think any of it is about deserving, Sam had said.  Not the good things that happen, nor the bad.   Andrew stared at his hands and tried to believe it.
“Didn’t know him as you did, of course, but.  I have the impression… Andrew.”
Andrew reluctantly raised his face to meet Dad’s.  
“That the last thing, the very last thing, Rex would want, is your unhappiness.”
Carry on for him, Dad had said, after Rex went down, when Andrew came and cried on his shoulder.  At the time Andrew had only thought of flying ops, not of the rest of life.  But it was what they’d fought for, wasn’t it, for peace and safety and ordinary work, for weddings and babies?  
And Rex himself, if Andrew had said you deserve this more… he would have laughed the strange bitter laugh that came out of him at odd moments, and thumped him on the shoulder, and said think I need your pity, Foyle?
“And I wonder, are you afraid Sam will say no, or that she’ll say yes?”
He had a nasty way of putting his finger on the crux of a problem.  Andrew sighed.  “Sam… you know how she has a way of… jumping into things, when she sees something that needs doing.  Planting potatoes, or getting a pram down steps.”  Andrew gave his father a pointed look.  “Nursing you through that bloody awful bronchitis.”
Dad twisted his mouth and tilted his head.  “All of those, even the, um, last… pretty strictly limited projects.”
“Yeah.”
“You were saying yesterday how strong she is.  Not strong enough to know her own mind, though?”
Andrew flopped back on the pillow.  “You’re worse than a seminar in logic, you know that?”
Dad made a little hmph of agreement that shifted into a yawn he covered with the back of his hand.  
“Sorry. I’m keeping you up.”
“No, no.  I’m the one woke you.”
“You didn’t wake me.”  Andrew tucked an arm under his head.  “But if you did I’d be glad.”  To his mild surprise, he found it wasn’t a figure of speech.  He was glad.  
Dad smiled, and shuffled his papers together.  “Go back to sleep,” he said gruffly as he rose.  
“Don’t you stay up,” Andrew countered.  
He switched off the light.  “Fuss, fuss, fuss.”
“Dad?” Andrew asked, when he had the door half-closed.  Dad didn’t speak, but he stopped.  “It’s the last thing mum would have wanted, too, isn’t it?  You being unhappy.”  
Dad was quiet so long that once again Andrew thought he wouldn’t answer at all, but finally, soft in the darkness, there came a single syllable.  “Yes.”
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kivrin · 8 years
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for Foyle Friday: a family headcanon
The final prompt from the headcanon challenge: family.
“Andrew!”  Foyle put his foot on the second step and leaned to shout up to the landing.  “You’ll be late!”
Water gurgled in the drain, but there was no movement.
“ANDREW!”
The bathroom door opened.  “Could… could you come up, Dad?”
“It’s ten to eight, you should be halfway down the hill!”
“Please?”
He chooses his moments, Rosalind had said, when as an infant Andrew’d been sick on her new bed jacket.  It had become a joke, something they muttered to each other when he cried in the night or asked an awkward question in a ringing voice.  Foyle dug his fingers into the banister and breathed against the hollow pain that familiarity didn’t seem to dull.
“Dad?”
“Yup.”  He trudged up the stairs and put a hand on the bathroom door.  “What’s the trouble?”
Andrew turned from the basin.  For a moment all Foyle could think was why are you covered with candy floss before his son’s face resolved into frightened dark eyes and a mass of bloodstained shaving soap.  
“Lean forward,” Foyle said, his voice steady though his heart was pounding.  “Try not to get any on your jumper.”  
“Sorry,” Andrew gulped.  
“Shh.”  Foyle put one hand on Andrew’s back and with the other hand groped for a towel.  He wet one corner under the tap and carefully began wiping the soap away.  With each stroke he breathed a little easier as he saw the expanse of unbroken skin.  Two nicks along the jawline, and a slice an inch long under the left cheekbone, that was all.  For an impatient novice with a straight razor it could have been much worse.  “What the devil were you trying to do?”  he asked, trying to mix lightness with the fervor of relief in the question.
“Shave.”
Foyle forbore to point out that the scattered fine hairs which might, by an imaginative and generous observer, be termed ‘stubble’ hadn’t suffered at all from the exercise.  He patted Andrew’s wounded cheek dry, then tore off a square from the toilet roll for the cut.  “Put some pressure on that.”  He rummaged in the medicine chest for a styptic pencil.  “This’ll sting,” he warned, before attending to the nicks.  Andrew swallowed hard, but didn’t flinch.  “Really not best to use someone else’s razor,” Foyle went on.  He picked up his razor from where Andrew had dropped it in the basin and rinsed it.
“I’m sorry, Dad.  I thought…”  Andrew shrugged.  “I should have asked.”  
“Yes.  Yes, you should, and I’d have shown you how to do it properly.”  
Andrew started to grin, then stopped when the movement tugged at his cheek. 
“Why today?”
“Well.”  Andrew looked at the floor.  “There’s this girl…”
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kivrin · 8 years
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Headcanon meme: Foyle - Bedroom/House/Living Quarters
He lets Elaine Reid think that Rosalind’s brother Charles’ wife Nora has found him a housekeeper, and allows Nora to conclude that Elaine has done it. Clumsy as his own efforts are, and bitterly as Andrew complains at participating, doing it themselves is better than having a stranger in the house.  And there is some faint comfort, he finds, in a floor swept or a window washed.  In defined tasks with visible results. In doing what Rosalind had done.
He does make changes.  He packs up her painting things and makes the studio a spare room. He moves some of her pictures so he can see them as he wrestles sheets into the mangle, or prods the lumps in a pot of porridge.  He shifts the armchairs and the settee closer to the fire in the sitting room. (Andrew argues with that; where will I lay out my trains? he demands, as if it hasn’t been three years or more since he abandoned the once-beloved train set in favor of model airplanes, and football, and longer hours of homework.)
He leaves their bedroom furnishings unaltered, but moves himself to sleep on the right-hand side of the bed, closer to the door.  On their wedding night he’d slept on the left, to protect the still-tender scars on his arm and side, and they never broke the habit.  Now he tries to break the habit of reaching out to touch her shoulder when he wakes.
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kivrin · 8 years
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“Rex and me... we look out for each other.”
And Foyle looks like he’s remembering men of whom he might have said the same.
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kivrin · 9 years
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Enemy Fire: Foyles pere et fils
F: Andrew? A: Are you still up? F: This is unexpected. A: Weekend pass. F: Well, good to see you. A: You're up very late. F: Yep. A: Oh, God. Dad, I'm so sorry. I should have been there with you. F: No.  I wasn't expecting you. A: I've let you down. F: No, you've not let me down. A: I'm letting everyone down. The thing is, I forgot - I just forgot. F: Andrew, it doesn't matter. A: No. Nothing much matters any more. Better be... F: Is that lipstick? On your cheek? A: Is it? Evening out. F: Oh.   Colour suits you.
[See gifs here] [Text copied from here]
I think Foyle starts off a little bit... not-pleased... when Andrew turns up, both because he’d settled into his solo evening, and because now he has to decide how and whether to bring up the anniversary that Andrew’s clearly not thinking about.  His “Yep” really rides the line between neutral “Yeah, it’s a thing I do sometimes” and passive-aggressive “If you don’t know why I’m not going to tell you.”  
Andrew, unsurprisingly for someone with the degree of depressive thinking he’s been exhibiting, perceives the passive-aggressive side of the comment, realizes the date, and is absolutely gutted.  
Foyle’s a little surprised, and not a little concerned, at how distressed Andrew is.  It seems that Andrew’s not (as Foyle had assumed) simply busy in his own life and feeling - as Sam, who’s just his age, had expressed that morning - that nine years is a very long time.  Andrew doesn’t think he forgot a pleasant but minor remembrance; he feels he’s betrayed his parents.  Foyle tries with increasing emphasis to break through Andrew’s distress, first with “I wasn’t expecting you” (which is not entirely true, judging from his behavior at the church, though “It wasn’t fair for me to expect you” is probably an accurate summation of his feelings) and finally with “it doesn’t matter.”
That works too well - Andrew calms down but all the way back to his exhausted low-affect baseline of the moment.  So Foyle tries to tease him a little about the lipstick (as if to say “life isn’t SO bad for you, is it?”)  It doesn’t work - Andrew’s too miserable to tease him back - but he hopes maybe something of the subtext under “the color suits you” of “the GIRL suits you” gets through.
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