Joe felt like he was being torn in two. He needed to know, needed to, because he could see that one day soon, he would give up. He would lie in bed awake at night, watching the purple lights on the gloss-painted skirting board in the bedroom, with no idea why he was awake, no idea why he hallucinated a man who waited for him, no idea who Madeline was or where. It would all stop mattering, and there was nothing soothing about that prospect.
But then there was Lily.
It wasn’t a choice at all, not really.
‘I suppose you’d better go and help your men, then?’ Joe managed. He wanted to cry, but an alarmed part of him pointed out that if his tears froze, he would be out here on the ice blind.
‘And find our ship,’ Kite agreed. He looked sad, and sorry.
Joe nodded, numb. Making the decision to stay, to not know, not investigate, had cracked something in him. He couldn’t tell what, or what the consequences would be, only that there would be consequences. But maybe it was better to just put it all behind him. Lily would be old enough to talk soon. If he felt broken, he would have to learn to live with it.
‘Good luck,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’ Kite didn’t sound particularly relieved. ‘When you get back to the boarding house, don’t let anyone talk you out of leaving. All right? You have to get away from this place.’
‘Okay,’ Joe said softly. He hugged him. It was unbearable to feel the shape of him through their clothes. Kite looked like he could kill someone with one good left hook, but up close, he was smaller than Joe. The idea of leaving him on a deck that had to be sanded felt like murder. ‘Are you going to be in trouble, for not taking me?’
‘No. I can say no one was here. Someone fixed the lamp and left.’
Joe couldn’t leave it at that. He searched around for something to say, anything useful. ‘You’re right. About the Siege of Edinburgh, it’s famous. It happens soon. This year.’
‘How does it …?’
Joe shook his head a little. ‘The French navy shells the city until there’s nothing left. Then …’ He stopped, because he’d read it not even that long ago. M. Saint-Marie had got together a stack of history books so Joe could learn the world properly. When he’d read them, it had all seemed very factual and ordinary, but now he was talking to someone who had it still to come, all the facts and figures made a knot in his throat. ‘They forced all the survivors to dig a long trench outside the city, told them it was for defensive purposes, and then they got everyone in the trench and shot them. It was the end of the war. You need to get out. Take your crew to Jamaica – the resistance was successful there. It’s a free state now. Well, free-ish,’ he had to add, because the image of Alice was there in his mind, tapping her foot and reminding him that her aunt had sold her for a strip of land on a pineapple farm.
‘I’ll do my best,’ Kite said, and Joe knew that he wouldn’t be able to, that the men on his ship would have families and no one would just leave everything behind. Kite smiled briefly, and turned away.
Joe did too. He walked slowly, feeling like there was a chain trickling out behind him, back to the lighthouse, and the more it spooled, the worse he felt.
It was only a few miles to the beach, but it was impossible to see far, so he had to rely on a compass bearing. When he reached the shore, everything was white. Icicles hung from the whale ribs. The dead cormorants were still perched there.
The inn was empty except for the landlord, who had built the fire much smaller than yesterday. He looked alarmed.
‘What are you doing back here?’
‘The lighthouse is haunted,’ Joe said dully.
‘Yes,’ the innkeeper agreed, as if that had always been obvious. ‘But … everyone’s gone up to Stornaway for the winter. I’m just shutting away the last few things.’
‘Do you know how I can get back to the mainland?’ Joe asked. It was a strange struggle. He felt foggy, like a cloud had come to sit inside his skull, and it was hard to make out the shapes of his thoughts. He rubbed his temple. This was how he’d felt at the Gare du Roi. He wanted to punch himself in the head.
‘The mainland! You can’t. You’d have to walk. Even if all the ice is solid, which it won’t be – you’d freeze before you got halfway.’ The landlord paused, impatient now. ‘Look, you can’t stay here, just go out to the lighthouse and rough it. Have some rum.’
‘Thanks.’ Joe sat with it and waited for the foggy feeling to go away. He gave his memory a poke, to make sure it was still there. Yes. He’d come from Londres, Lily was with Alice, and he had run out of the lighthouse, scared. He took off the heavy coat and put it on the bar stool beside him. It was warm in here, too warm after the frozen sea.
After a while, he couldn’t remember why he’d been so spooked. Thinking about it, he couldn’t really bring to mind the lighthouse at all. Empty rooms, maybe; and he’d done something with the door handles. There’d been a strip of red light, somewhere. What had he said to the barman just now? Ghosts? Christ, what bullshit. He must have been having epilepsy hallucinations again. Trust him to walk for miles over ice before he realised that what he was scared of was imaginary.
He scuffed the back of his hair, so frustrated he could have yanked it out. Of all the times to have a recurring bout of amnesia, after two years of remembering well, this was absurd. He wondered if there was just some belligerently unadventurous part of his brain that switched off if he tried to go further than twenty miles from home.
No, said the quiet voice in the cellar of his mind. It wasn’t that.
He had no idea why it would say so.
The landlord must have felt sorry for him, because he put a wrapped packet down in front of Joe at the bar. ‘Lunch,’ he said. ‘For your way back.’
Joe smiled and thought, not for the first time, how basically decent humans were. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
The memory of the lighthouse came back, more or less, once he was inside. Yes; he did remember the spiralling stairway up to the lamps. And the door handles – he’d changed them because they were wooden, because metal ones would burn you in this cold. The lamp room was familiar, now he was here. He pushed up the main switch handle, and the great lamp crackled as it came on. Soon the carbon rods were brilliant, and the light sang out.
Which was odd, because he felt sure he had left the lamp on when he left before. It would have been stupid to try and cross the ice in the dark.
Someone had been here. He looked around the room again, properly, and then he saw the gold coin on the floor by some playing cards. He picked it up slowly. Someone had been here and poked about in the little time he’d been away. Someone had come in with a friend, had a nice card game, shut off the lamp, and vanished.
But when he looked round, there was nobody here. He had a strong sense that he’d lost something important, but he couldn’t think what it was.
13
Something banged a long way away. Joe thought at first that it was a lightship firing a gun for a fog signal, but it came again too soon for that.
With his ear to the window he heard it more clearly. It was drums. Winding on his scarf, he leaned out onto the lamp gantry. The drumbeat wasn’t fast – it was a march, and it was coming from somewhere so close he should have been able to see something, but there was nothing. The islands were empty.