It was hard to tell if Kite had heard. ‘I think I’m going to faint.’
‘You have to … you can’t know what it’s like, to have children,’ Joe said, begging now, though he wasn’t even sure what he was begging for. Not information any more. ‘Look – if you need me. I don’t know where I’ll be, but find the Psychical Society. They’re at Pont du Cam. Cambridge, I mean. That’s forever money, they’ll outlast any changes we’ve made here.’
Kite nodded, but Joe still couldn’t tell if he had understood. Joe was about to say he’d better take him back to the ship, but Drake, the marine, must have seen how bad the gunshot wound was, because he was coming back now, hurrying towards them through the alley.
‘Sir, are you …?’
Kite looked like he wanted to speak, but he buckled into Drake’s arms.
‘Don’t you dare run,’ Drake said to Joe.
Joe didn’t want to. But Kite was as safe as he was going to be and Lily might have been disappearing while he hesitated, and although the panic pressure that had always come with trying to leave was still strong, it wasn’t paralysing any more.
Joe managed to get to the porch of a church with no windows before he had to stop, the world gone too blurry for him to walk.
47
Eilean Mòr, 1807
When Joe let himself into the lighthouse, it was exactly as he’d left it. He had thought he was tired and hungry, but he couldn’t sit down. Instead he spent the next half-hour tidying, then cleaning the brine from the windows and easing heat into the engine to unfreeze the pipes, all the while feeling more and more urgent, because he knew he had to go back to the mainland, but he couldn’t stop.
But then there was nothing left to do. He stood with his hands against the wall where the heavy-weather gear hung, his head close enough to them to smell the wax on the nearest jacket. When he lost the circulation in his fingertips and they needled, he straightened up, put the gear on and started the howling walk to the tiny harbour.
He took a hammer and chisel with him to the stone gate in the sea. He wrote Alice and Lily. The dust spiralled away on the wind. He touched the first few letters of Madeline. And under Madeline, Jem. It was all there; he felt like he had all the pieces, but he couldn’t match them up. He was never going to know. It was too cold to stay standing there. He took as deep a breath as he could, then stepped through and didn’t feel any different at all.
Part VI
HOME
48
London, 1903
There was a Christmas song on the phonograph and it danced through the house. So did the twins, who had tiny holly crowns made of silk leaves. Joe laughed when he saw. Toby was chasing them through an obliging assault course made of his cavalry regiment. Joe had a child’s-eye view because he was sitting under the dining table, fiddling with the hydraulics of the porcelain Taj Mahal fountain. It was a monstrosity, but Toby had brought it back from the Punjab as a present, so here it was, only a bit worse for wear from travel. Fifteen bottles of wine were waiting on the side for when he had fixed the valve in its base.
There was a roar when George won and five or six men swept him up and exclaimed what a good officer he would make one day. Beatrix drifted away with her head down, and Joe realised with a pang that she was already used to being left out. He put his arms out. She came to see under the table too.
‘You are destined for better things than horses,’ he said, in the hope that firmness made things true. ‘Will you help me fix this?’
She nodded. He could never tell if she understood exactly, or just understood enough to know that she was being asked a question. He brushed her hair back. It was black and smooth, tied up in a knot with a ribbon now, but he couldn’t shift the impression that it was curly. That was a leftover from the epilepsy hallucinations of another little girl, one who had been his, not Toby’s. He tried not to think about her too much, but she felt real, and whenever he came up from the hallucination – it still happened every month or so – it took him hours to get over the crushing panic that he must have left her somewhere. Being told by doctors and everyone else that she was imaginary didn’t help. He’d even sewn a duck on Beatrix’s nightdress because it had looked so wrong duckless; the little girl in the hallucinations had one. That was before it had dawned on him that sewing things on the clothes of other people’s children was creepy and that he was making Toby nervous.
Beatrix reached for the screwdriver. He gave it to her. ‘You can do this screw, all right? This way round. Good girl.’
She nodded again. He watched her while he guided her hands, aware that she would only have to decide to get up suddenly and she would bang her head against the underside of the table, but unlike George, she was a still child. She would sit exactly where you left her, for hours, uncomplaining.
George squeaked and laughed as Toby put him on his shoulders. Beatrix watched, then looked down into her lap and turned the screwdriver around twice. She was pretending it was more interesting than it was. Something in his heart splintered.
‘Toby,’ he said.
Toby leaned down, which tipped George upside down. ‘Hello?’
‘Take Bee for a spin too. She’s left out.’
‘Wha-at?’ Toby laughed. He dumped George into Joe’s arms and scooped her up. ‘Left out? Never!’ He galloped away.
George looked annoyed, but was soon placated with the screwdriver, which he seemed to like.
‘Doorbell!’ one of Toby’s friends called. ‘Shall I get it?’
‘I will,’ Joe said. He needed to stretch. ‘Who are we expecting now?’
‘Carol singers probably,’ Toby offered. ‘Shouldn’t think Kahn and Co. will be in for half an hour yet, they’re coming from some blasted heath in darkest Willesden.’
‘Tell them to bugger off,’ Joe and Toby’s father rumbled from the next room. He pretended that he didn’t speak English, although Joe had noticed there was a distinct correlation between his English abilities and the increased potential of mince pies. ‘It’s awkward being privately serenaded by an entire choir.’
‘Humbug,’ Joe said, but he went.
‘Bug,’ said George to Alice, who passed them on the stairs with a tray of differently shaped pastries.
‘How’s the fountain?’ she asked Joe.
‘Fit for a very tasteless maharajah in about ten minutes,’ he promised, awkward, because he didn’t know what to do with Alice minus Toby. Married people were closed off; you couldn’t get to know a person’s wife without someone else looking at you funny, and so although Alice had been his sister-in-law for years now, Joe had no idea what she was like, apart from incredibly elegant.
And he knew she didn’t like him. She had never said she thought he was an embarrassment, the permanent bachelor who didn’t have his own children or his own life and who kept clinging onto hers and Toby’s, but he could feel it coming off her sometimes.
‘Horrible, isn’t it,’ she agreed.
Joe smiled a bit. Agreeing with him was, for her, a mark of overpowering Christmas cheer and goodwill to all men.