Someone upstairs dropped a glass. It made Kite jump. If he was absolutely still, if you’d taken a photograph of him, he looked like a powerful man. Moving, there was a china fragility to him.
‘Look,’ Joe said, ‘this is none of my business, but are you all right? I mean generally.’
‘Yes, thank you. I think that lady is looking for you,’ he added, as politely as if a grown woman had come in, but it was Beatrix, with her wandering walk and the expression that worried Joe so much – the one that said she was never sure if she would be welcome.
He couldn’t remember her ever having not been welcome, but he was painfully conscious that what was the most unmemorable and passing half-moment for an adult was the formative turning point of a small child’s life. He picked her up and made a fuss of her, even though he could feel that it was unkind to do that in front of a man who spent Christmas in the attic of the first obliging stranger he stumbled across.
‘This is Beatrix,’ he said. ‘She’s my niece. Say hello, Bee.’
She opened and closed her hand. Kite looked worried that he was going to frighten her.
‘She gets a bit neglected,’ Joe said, wanting to explain himself. ‘She’s got a twin brother. He’s loud and she fades into corners if you’re not careful. Don’t you?’ he added to her.
She nodded. He tickled her to make sure she knew it wasn’t an accusation, but she only looked down at her own chest.
‘Old soul,’ Kite said.
‘Yes.’ With a fresh ache, Joe missed the little girl who had turned out to be a false epilepsy memory; missed her just as if she’d been real, and taken away. He hugged Beatrix closer. Stealing the twins helped.
Unfortunately, this meant he talked about them all the time, even though he knew that for any thinking adult, there were types of yeast more interesting than other people’s children.
‘I think she’s going to be clever,’ he said, though everything in him yelled that everyone who had ever loved a child always thought it was the next Mozart. ‘God, I’m sorry. I bore on about them all the time, I plan not to and then it just sort of comes out, it’s unbearable.’
‘No. I think you’re right about her,’ Kite said, and Joe tried to imagine how anyone learned grace like that.
Beatrix patted his shoulder, worried now, and he realised she had come to fetch him because dinner was ready. Cutlery and glasses clinked along the corridor; the maids had gone.
‘Come on, she’s right. Better get up there before the gannets from the maths department pilfer everything.’
Kite looked unsettled when Beatrix leaned towards him.
‘You can hold her,’ Joe said.
‘But – I might drop her.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Joe said, and put her in Kite’s arms.
Kite held her properly, like she was precious, and for her part, Beatrix looked pleased with him. She put both her hands over one of his and rubbed to see if the scars would come off, and squeaked interestedly when they wouldn’t. He crooked his fingertip over hers, just, still afraid that he was going to hurt her. Beatrix curled against his chest. She must have felt safe. She was too used to being hauled around by people whose minds were on other things. Joe had to push away the urge to put his arm round them both. He couldn’t tell where it came from, or why it was so wonderful to see Kite with her. Clearly the epilepsy was determined to have a party tonight too. He shoved his hands into his pockets. If he could just not do anything insane or sinister in front of this poor man, it would be a good night.
Kite gave her back in the doorway rather than put her down. Joe smiled, but Kite didn’t stay with them at dinner. He sat with some cavalrymen who spent the whole evening boasting to him about some charge or other in the Sudan, but he seemed to mind that less than a small child and overfamiliar strangers.
Joe kept finding his attention straying down the table. The cavalrymen had managed to engage Kite a lot more than he had and now, they were laughing together. He kept deciding to concentrate on something else, but within a few minutes he was listening again, jealous.
He couldn’t shift the certainty that he knew the man. He couldn’t remember how. All the tired old dream-images were suggesting themselves for the job. Names on pillars, the sea, a book in French. They were so worn out he could see through the fabric of them. It made him sad, because shamefully, they were the brightest things he had.
He had to leave the room to try and make his brain reset itself with a change of scene.
Under the sweep of the stairs was a cupboard with low rafters and floorboards that still smelled new, because it wasn’t used for anything. The glow of the candle was good, and so were the striped shadows the light made in the rafters.
He liked it because it was a door to nowhere, and he kept looking at doors to nowhere as if there was something just past them he couldn’t see. It was maddening, but it was good at the same time, to feel like there was somewhere else, waiting.
The cupboard was like a ship’s cabin too. He loved ships.
He had a vision of sitting at a table aboard an old ship, the wood creaking with the tide just like the stairs above him were creaking now, sharing a cigarette across a table full of fruit and baklava, while someone leaned against his left side. He could remember being happy; the kind of happiness that hurt because it couldn’t last and tomorrow it would be gone.
‘You’re going mad,’ he said aloud, and got up fast, though he wanted to stay and see more imaginary things. He surprised Kite, who had just been coming down the stairs.
‘I doubt you’re mad,’ Kite offered. He must have heard him through the knotholes.
‘You’re not going already?’
‘It’s past eleven.’
‘Let me walk with you,’ Joe said, in every bleak expectation that Kite would say no.
‘Thank you,’ Kite said. He smiled. ‘Just as well. I don’t know the way.’ He gave Joe the card of a Knightsbridge hotel.
‘I’ll get you there, come on.’
‘Why did you think you were going mad?’ Kite asked as they went out into the cold, Joe still shrugging into his coat.
‘I … see things,’ Joe said. He shook his head. ‘Hence the Psychical Society. It’s just epilepsy visions, but they’re …’ He trailed off, feeling stupid. ‘I get déjà vu too, a lot. Even now. I feel like I know you. I’d swear I do. I’ve been jealous about you all evening.’
Kite didn’t veer away or look doubtful about being taken through London by a madman. ‘From where?’
‘I don’t know,’ Joe said tiredly. ‘Like I say, it’s just déjà vu. I have hallucinations too. A lighthouse. Having dinner on an old ship.’ He sighed. ‘A man who waits by the sea. I mean it’s clear, very clear. I can see him skimming stones.’
‘Yes. That’s right.’
Joe looked up sharply. ‘What?’
‘Yes,’ Kite said again. ‘You’re not mad.’ He looked as afraid as he had holding Beatrix. ‘I lied before. You do know me. It’s you I came to see.’
Joe’s breath caught in the back of his throat and so did all his words. ‘I can’t make any of it join up, it’s – more real than dreams but not so real as real.’ He caught Kite’s arm, probably too hard. ‘Please. Do you know what happened to me?’