Joe didn’t point out that Kite could hardly look at him. Kite was better when you didn’t call his attention to himself. More and more, Joe had a feeling that when he wasn’t standing on a quarterdeck, what Kite most wanted was to be allowed to sit quietly in the corner of a conversation and go unnoticed. ‘When’s your train?’ Joe said instead.
‘Seven. In the morning.’
It gave Joe an unpleasant bolt of alarm. He had hoped Kite would be around for another week yet; or not even hoped, expected, because it was hard to travel anywhere between Christmas and New Year. ‘I’ll – are you okay at railway stations, do they make sense?’
‘No, they’re terrifying, but it’s all in English now, so that helps,’ Kite said. ‘I can’t accidentally go to Paris.’
There was a painful silence.
‘I can see you off?’ Joe offered.
‘No, I’m all right.’
Joe was starting to feel urgent about finding a reason to see him again. ‘I could bring you something to read for the way? There’s a lot you’d like, published lately. Nothing that can hurt.’
Kite shook his head. ‘No, better not. I’m honestly contorting myself into passions of anxiety already about things changing.’
‘Passions of anxiety. You.’
‘But thank you.’ Kite tipped some of the orange slices into a wine glass and slid it across to Joe. He looked, now, much more like someone who had been in a war than someone who was in the middle of one. His hair was short, and the scars down his neck had turned silver. There weren’t any new ones. He raised his eyes when he felt Joe looking at him. He was so familiar and such a stranger that it was like meeting an actor. He was the man from the sea, the one who waited, and looking at him here, Joe could finally remember the beach. It was where Jem and Agatha had been married.
He could remember that Kite had slipped away after the celebrations, which had been on the deck of the Victory. He must have thought he was giving the newlyweds some privacy. It had always been impossible to make him understand that he was wanted; having been told all his life that he was nothing but human jetsam attached to his famous sister. So they’d run down after him onto the beach. The three of them colliding had sent them all tumbling into the sea.
He could remember grasping Kite’s hands, unbroken then, and promising there was always space for him, and how Kite had never believed it, though he had pretended; and how Agatha, guiltily, had been glad her brother had never believed it. In bed that night, she’d confessed how badly she wanted something – someone – who was just hers, not who she cultivated for her brother’s career or the benefit of a hospital.
He could remember how his heart had splintered when he understood that, far from having made the three of them a proper family like he’d meant to, he’d just taken two people who belonged to Kite, and made it so that neither of them did.
‘I’m not going to see you again, am I?’ His heart was juddering. ‘After this. That’s it.’
‘No.’ Kite was quiet for a second. Joe thought he was going to change the subject or close in on himself again, but he did the opposite. ‘Are you all right? You’ve gone white.’
‘Of course. I’m …’ He trailed off, because he wasn’t. ‘You could stay.’
‘I can’t. I’m on leave for now, but I have to be back next week—’
‘You can’t tell me all this and then just vanish!’ What had begun as the steam from a small worry was building and building, powering whole pistons and mechanisms that were well on their way to firing full panic.
‘Then what am I supposed to do?’ Kite said, quite gently. ‘I can’t stay here, I have eight hundred people to look after. You have people here who need you too, the twins and your brother. I don’t know what—’
‘Then take me with you,’ Joe said, before he had decided to. He swallowed hard. ‘Look, those visions – those memories, those are the best things I have. Please.’
‘Your family, Joe—’
‘You’re my family! You were family before any of them. I’ve missed you even when I didn’t remember you. Everything I’ve done since losing you has been about getting back to you. And I know I’ve left you behind before for other families, but not this time. I can’t do it again.’ He swallowed when he noticed how much he was saying I. ‘Sorry. If you don’t want me to – look, I’d understand if you said you never want to see me again. I didn’t mean to just invite myself.’
Kite said nothing for a while. But then, ‘Seven o’clock, platform three. King’s Cross.’ He inclined his head, careful and full of courtesy. He was holding himself at a distance from the idea. ‘I’ll expect you if I see you. Don’t worry if you change your mind.’
Joe pulled him close. Kite turned to stone, but little by little he unstiffened, and hugged him back.
Home was a painting. There was a thinness to everything and sometimes he could see the canvas through it. He walked around the whole house, all the way up to the attic; the same attic where Joe and Alice Tournier had lived, in that other version of now, where M. Saint-Marie had not gone home to France, fed up with all the post-independence paperwork and restrictions designed to discourage Parisians from moving here, and left it to Joe. The view beyond its round window had been of a London blackened by the steelworks. Now, the towers were sandy-coloured, even in the dark, uplit by the street lamps. He stood in the place where Lily’s crib had been. The attic was just an attic now, full of the accumulated rubbish of past Christmases.
It had been real. There had been a real little girl who he’d fought to come back to. Kite was real, and had waited for him years ago by the sea.
He went slowly back downstairs. He passed the sun room, where the fire was still burning and their father was still going strong with the mince pies, and the regiment were ineffectively hushing each other as they sang a drunken song about a lion and a unicorn.
‘Boo!’ Toby caught him from behind and squashed him into a vice of a hug. ‘How are you, small bear?’
Joe was older, but he was a head smaller. Toby was a monster person. ‘I’m all right.’ He hesitated. ‘This is going to sound mad, but I need you to tell me whether or not someone was really there, or if I was just hallucinating.’
‘Who’s this we’re talking about?’ said Toby, who did a good impersonation of someone who found epilepsy visions only of mild interest. It wasn’t true, but he didn’t know Joe had heard him talking to Alice at night.
‘The man who came here today, the one who wasn’t from your regiment, the sailor. White, red hair. I think he sat with Sanjeev.’
Toby nodded. ‘Burn scars.’
Joe sagged. Toby squeezed him again, more gently this time.
‘Friend of yours?’
‘Yes. I thought … well, he serves in Scotland and I thought I’d go back up with him for a bit.’
‘Send me a haggis.’
‘Will do.’
‘Everything all right?’ Toby said, scrutinising him now.
‘Yes … yes.’ Joe looked up at him and wanted to say, I remember that in another life, you died in a field just beyond the Scottish border. But that changed; because a hundred years ago now, there was no siege at Edinburgh, no massacre. No genocide that set off the fury of the last surviving dregs of the English army, who became the Saints. They don’t exist any more. They didn’t shoot you this time.