Lily twisted to watch sparks fly down from a welding torch. Joe put his nose against her hair. He could take her with him. Alice wouldn’t mind; she wasn’t keen on motherhood. And then even if there was nothing for him at Eilean Mòr, it wouldn’t matter, because Lily would love a lighthouse, and it was a real chance to get her used to being around machinery.
Joe had strictly unspoken hopes about Lily. He wanted his own workshop one day, even if it was just fixing bits and pieces. Then he could employ whoever he liked, and then Lily could have a trade.
It stayed unspoken because he was frightened Alice would call it exactly what it was: idiotic. If he didn’t manage to open his own workshop, he would have wasted Lily’s childhood on something no one would ever employ her for. It would be better for her to be a midwife, like Alice, or a seamstress, something steady, and not surrounded by territorial men who would happily beat up a woman for getting above herself. But the hill Joe would die on was that any chance not to deliver babies for a living was worth it. Midwifery was horrendous. He knew that. He’d delivered Lily. That had gouged harrows through his soul in a way no exploding engine ever would. She deserved a choice, at least.
It all sounded very noble if he said it like that, but the other reason it all stayed unspoken was that he knew bloody well it was really just a way of keeping her with him. Lily was the only person in the world for whom he was just himself, not the ruin of who he used to be. And she showed every sign of quite liking him. That was a stupid, simple thing, but it was everything. Half the dismay he felt at the idea of letting her work at the godforsaken hospital was that it would mean she left him behind.
He came back to himself when he realised de Méritens’ background bumble was coming up to normal speech again.
‘Can you imagine, living in a lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides?’ de Méritens said, shaking his head. ‘I bet the poor bastards did a bunk. Place sounds one human sacrifice away from gibbering barbarism.’
‘Well, if I come back wearing skulls and a kilt you’ll know,’ Joe smiled, because he liked de Méritens and his tactlessness.
As de Méritens pottered off, looking happy, a man with a long coat and a straight bearing walked through the testing yard.
Joe’s heart lurched so hard it hurt. He set Lily down and ran out after him.
He felt the epilepsy coming. It had happened often in the last two years, but it wasn’t amnesia any more. It was euphoria. His chest felt like it was full of sunlight, so much it was confusing to look down and not see it beaming through his ribcage. He had to push one hand over his mouth, because it was making him cry. The ordinary world was only a curtain, which had been twitched aside. He could still see the engines and the yard gates, but they seemed gauzy. Only the man was really there.
‘Hey – hey.’ Joe caught his arm. He was shaking with happiness. ‘It’s you. What are you doing here, what …’
But then the man turned around, and he was only a stranger and Joe couldn’t remember for his life who he had thought he was.
‘God, I’m sorry. I thought you were … someone else.’
The man looked amicable enough and went on his way. Joe touched his own chest, trying to snatch at the memory as it trickled away, but it was gone. The testing yard was just the yard. The world wasn’t a curtain but the world, and whatever he had seen through it had vanished. He had to stand still through an anvil crash of disappointment. It happened every time, and every vision was the same, but it didn’t come any easier with familiarity.
It was the fourth time in two months. They were getting more frequent.
He hadn’t told anyone. There wasn’t money for any more doctors.
‘Tournier, you fucking idiot, what is a baby doing out here by herfuckingself!’
He swung back and saw it without sound, though the welder was still shouting at him. Lily had come out after him. She had stopped right in front of one of the train engines to look at the welding, square between the test tracks and completely out of sight of the mechanics who had just begun to ease the whole thing forward in a mist of steam. It was inching towards her, too slowly for her to have noticed.
He snatched her up. The engine hissed past them, and in the future that hadn’t happened, he saw the beak shape of the air-breaker knock her over, and then a shattering noise he would never forget, even though, really, he had never heard it. He didn’t realise he had been backing away until he bumped into the wall of the coal shed. It was corrugated iron, so it juddered and whooped.
Lily was staring at him, shocked to have been grabbed like that.
‘Don’t put her down or I’ll punch you in the face,’ the welder snarled. He was shaking too. As he spoke, he slung a mallet so hard onto the floor that it bounced twice, even though it must have weighed as much as a cannonball. Lily jumped.
Joe jolted back from him, sorry and furious at the same time. ‘Jesus, you’re scaring her!’
‘I’m scaring her? Get her out of here! You stupid bastard!’
He hurried to the gate and stood by the road, waiting to calm down, but it didn’t come and he still couldn’t remember, even under the steam-powered panic pressure, who he had thought the man was. He never could.
5
Joe lay looking at the gas lamp, which had been stuttering lately. It smelled chemical even when it was off. They kept the window open now, just in case, and so the long attic room was always cold.
The headboard bumped the wall. He had to concentrate not to wince. M. Saint-Marie could hear downstairs, he was sure. Alice pushed her hands under his shirt, pressing down on his collarbones. It added nastily to the feeling that there was a breeze-block right over his heart. He tried to think about something else.
He’d gone to St Paul’s on the way home, still shaken up about Lily and the engine. The inside of the cathedral had been loud with the work on the dome, and through the weave of the scaffolding, dull light from the steelworks’ lamps came down in tines. Pinned to the confession booths were printed signs that said, Confession available between the hours of 3.30 p.m. and 6 p.m. He was too late for it, which was a relief. M. Saint-Marie always wanted him to go, but Joe couldn’t look Père Philippe in the face these days.
He wished Alice would hurry up.
The cathedral had new electrical wiring. The dean had gone a bit far; the shrine of Maria had an electric halo now. But Joe liked the new prayer-candle set-up. Instead of lighting a taper and candle, you put a coin through a slot and an electric candle lit automatically. He’d put in a centime and prayed, like always, that he wasn’t going mad.
Alice stopped and sighed. There was a tiny moment when she saw him properly and looked sad, because he wasn’t Toby. She had never said that, but he knew it was true. He had spent a long time studying photographs, and he and Toby looked uncannily alike, or at least, they did if you could see past Joe’s being older and smaller. It must have been pronounced in twilight, because twilight was always when Alice seemed to catch the similarity strongly enough to want to see if he was like Toby to touch as well as to look at.
He wished she wouldn’t, but he wished for a lot of things and you couldn’t go round getting your own way all the time.
‘Is there any kind of insurance?’ she said, which was only a continuation of the previous conversation. ‘For if anything happens to you out there?’