Agatha had got up an experiment with a frog and a Leyden jar when he came back to her rooms in Edinburgh. She had an apron on over her ordinary clothes. He put his bag in the corner and sat down on the spare stool. He was there for three or four seconds before she saw him.
‘Jesus! I’m putting a bell on you,’ she laughed. ‘How was it, what did you find?’ She looked properly. ‘What have you done with Jem?’
‘I … don’t know.’ He was quiet for a second, because he wanted to say, just let me keep it for another five minutes, but it wasn’t his.
‘Missouri.’ It had a rattle to it, like she was shaking a tax box at him.
He explained as much as he understood. It left him hollowed out. He felt like that man from the story who, because he couldn’t pay in coins, had to pay with an equal measure of flesh flensed off his chest.
‘That’s it?’ she said at last. ‘You left him there.’
He nodded.
Downstairs somewhere, doors clattered open and voices drifted up the stairs. They must have just opened the bar for dinner. Very different to that grand house on Jermyn Street, this, but of course the English banks had collapsed. They had no money now.
Agatha smoothed down her skirt, tipping herself towards the light while she made sure there was nothing on it. Since he could remember, she had worn white, or patterned white, but the navy women now were dyeing their dresses dark blue, like officers’ jackets. She put her wedding ring in the top drawer, and locked it. When she came back around the desk, she slapped him so hard he fell onto his hands and knees.
‘Get out,’ was all she said.
50
London, 1903
The frost fair glittered. Around the stalls, electric lights that ran on an elderly generator loud enough to hear, over the hiss of chestnuts on hotplates and the plinking song that came from the bicycling fortune teller’s music box. Joe and Kite had made a couple of circuits through it while Kite told the story.
They walked while Joe tried to think what to say, which took a long time. It was all true, he could feel that; he had recognised it while Kite was saying it. Once or twice he could have joined in but didn’t, because his voice had gone somewhere else.
The Clock Tower sang out midnight, and then so did St Paul’s and all the carillons of other bells along the river. He stared at Parliament. He could remember it in ruins.
It was like trying to remember a dream. It all ran together in a blur of sounds and engines. When he looked back towards the cathedral, he had a vivid memory of printed signs saying when confession was available and Mary with an electric halo, but he couldn’t have said when it had been, or what he had done before or after. Beside him, Kite was quiet, and different, because he wasn’t just a beaten-up sailor any more; knowing what he had looked like before the burn scars made them a translucent mask over someone who was still handsome.
The cold was rising off the ice. He could feel it getting under his sleeves and the hem of his coat, so he stopped to buy some of the chestnuts, which were covered in hot sugar, and gave them to Kite to hold. Kite bumped his shoulder against Joe’s to say thank you.
‘You came to make sure I had a family, didn’t you?’ Joe said. ‘Not kicking about by myself above a shoe shop or something.’
Kite didn’t say yes or no, or what he would have done if there had been a lonely shoe shop. ‘I came to say goodbye. The gate is being bricked up, there will be no way through in a fortnight’s time.’
Joe looked away and over the ice. Kite offered him the chestnuts. ‘Thanks. Do I seem the same, in any …?’
Kite nodded. ‘I think you’re the same thing in three different lights.’
‘But we’re not talking about morning and evening light, are we,’ Joe said, because although he couldn’t remember anything specific that Kite had said to him in the past, he had a good idea of the shape of his conversation. ‘It’s more along the lines of ultraviolet, infrared and visible, isn’t it. And don’t say you don’t know what the electromagnetic spectrum is, it’s impossible to sit in a room with me in any iteration of myself and not get onto it at some point.’
‘Yes I know, because my sister had to rescue me once from Someone’s X-ray experiments. What sort of lunatic makes a fluoroscope in the shed?’
Joe sort of laughed and choked at the same time. He couldn’t tell if he remembered, or if he could just imagine it well.
‘Was it hard this time?’ Kite asked after a while.
‘No. I lost my memory while I was in Harris. The vicar there took me in until the sea ice melted and then we went to a doctor in Glasgow. Toby and Alice came up to fetch me.’ He frowned when he remembered how things had been when he’d left. ‘How is it in Edinburgh? Was there a siege?’
‘No. It’s all right. Better.’ Kite eased away and walked further from him, just out of reach. ‘Although I hope we aren’t making everything even worse than before by bricking up the gate.’
‘No, that sounds sensible – why would it?’
Kite pointed upward. ‘The design of all the light bulbs just changed while we were standing here.’
‘It … has,’ Joe said slowly.
‘It’s all the people going to and fro at the gate. I’ve tried to stop the crew going ashore too much, but we have to make supply runs and everyone wants to see what a hundred years in the future looks like. I think there’s a lot of flotsam from both times floating around between the two now. It must affect things.’ Kite was watching the string of lights above them, like he was daring them to change again. ‘We keep getting visits from the future-side whalers. They know what the gate is, more or less, so they keep coming to lecture us about modern shipbuilding.’
Joe laughed.
Kite smiled too, and Joe suspected he had a soft spot for the whalers. ‘But, every time someone from your side comes to my side, something changes, doesn’t it, however small, because they shouldn’t be there. I’ve been worried all week that someone from your side will call the wrong person from my side a moron and I’ll wake up to find everyone here is speaking Russian or Hindustani or God knows.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be all right. We can live with different light bulbs,’ Joe said, although now Kite had pointed it out, he felt uneasy.
At Knightsbridge, the hotel room was airy and simple, with a broad fireplace and coal in the grate, waving heat across the hearthrug. Kite stayed downstairs to fetch some wine – the night manager was keeping it hot – so Joe went up alone to stoke the fire. He had flames flickering over it again by the time Kite opened the door with his elbow and came through as if it were Joe’s space and not his. He set the wine glasses down carefully on the table where, anticipating the wine, the housekeeping people had left a bowl of oranges and a sharp knife. He took an orange and began to cut it up, and shied back when Joe touched his arm.
‘Do you mind if I take the wine with me? I can sneak out with the glass I think, then I’ll be out your way,’ Joe said, aware how monstrously strange it must be to have him in the room at all, when he remembered being Jem Castlereagh and Joe Tournier but wasn’t either of them.
‘No – stay. You’ll freeze.’