It was all there, like a map.
‘Love you,’ he said.
Toby kissed his forehead. ‘I love you too, you tiny oddball. Last glass of wine?’
Joe agreed. Toby walked him to a sofa, both hands on Joe’s shoulders, probably to keep him from changing his mind.
‘What happened to the Taj Mahal?’ Joe asked, because there were just a lot of empty wine bottles now where it had stood.
‘Is that the start of a joke? I don’t know, what did happen to the Taj Mahal?’
‘No, the … model, the fountain.’
‘What?’ Toby said, looking confused in the edgy way he’d carried around with him ever since he and Alice had had to fetch a memoryless, bewildered Joe from Glasgow.
‘Nothing,’ said Joe. He wondered if it was possible to drop a brick in 1809 and, by some convoluted process of history, cause a demented potter not to think of making a ceramic Taj Mahal fountain a hundred years later.
Like an oil-slick layer, Joe became aware of a new memory, of Toby bringing back chintz for Alice, not a tasteless fountain. But that oil-slick memory was very, very thin. Everything else was still there underneath.
George and Beatrix were still playing by the fire. Alice’s rule, which worked amazingly, was that they went to bed when they were tired, whenever that was, but on the condition they were quiet after eight o’clock. Once Toby had gone to talk to other people, Joe knelt down with them on the hearthrug and built forts for a while, wondering if they would notice when he was gone. Briefly, maybe, but it would be fine. Alice loved them, Toby loved them; even Joe and Toby’s father adored them in his gruff way. He pulled Bee into his lap anyway, to try and soak in the memory of holding a child. He wasn’t going to have one of his own now.
He must have dozed off.
The clocks struck three, and he became aware that the room had quietened enough for him to hear the hall clock tick. The room was empty now, the embers of the fire clicking, the few candles left on the mantel burning down to pools of liquid wax. Someone had already taken away most of the decorations. No more festoons of holly looped along the ceiling; there were just a few clusters of ivy and bells around the mantel mirror. The detritus of the party was gone too: the wine glasses, the mince-pie plates, everything. He twisted around, worried that someone had asked him to help and he hadn’t heard. Alice said he had an unnerving way of ignoring people sometimes – particularly, she pointed out, if he was listening to an epilepsy hallucination.
He stood up, lifting Bee with him, because it would disturb her less than setting her down. He was going to have to get some proper sleep if he was going to get to King’s Cross for seven. King’s Cross, which had once been the Gare du Roi.
Vaguely, he wondered why Alice hadn’t come in to take the twins from him. She didn’t love leaving him with her children, but maybe she was cheerful enough not to mind for tonight.
He put Bee to bed, then George, set an alarm for six and fell into bed himself in the next room. His quilt cover was different to the one he’d woken up with. Another dropped brick in 1809, probably.
51
Joe woke up at half past five because the house was too silent. They had employed a full staff over Christmas; with eleven people from the regiment staying for the week, it was too much work for just Joe and Toby and Alice by themselves. All week, the cooks had been up at five, and Joe had woken to the cosy sound of pots clanging in the kitchen directly below his room, knowing he didn’t have to use them or wash them up. There was no clanging now; no doors opening and closing; nothing. And there was a strange tight feeling in his stomach. He’d had bad dreams, but he couldn’t recall them.
He went to look around downstairs, which was all dark. And deserted. His heart starting to squeeze, he went fast up the stairs to the master bedroom that had once belonged to M. Saint-Marie and was now Toby and Alice’s.
Empty. There were sheets over the furniture.
Joe was normally good at functioning even when he was feeling panicky, because he’d had so much practice. Now, though, he felt sick, and he had to lean against the wall for a second before he could get together the nerve to look into the twins’ room.
They were there. Bee heard the door open and sat up.
‘Morning?’ she asked, full of faith that he would know best, however tired she was.
‘I …’ He sank down on to his knees beside her small bed. ‘Bee. Sweetheart; can you remember where your mum and dad are?’
She looked blank. ‘Mum?’
‘Yes, dolly, where is she?’
Bee blinked once and then looked away, and clapped absent-mindedly. She was too little.
Joe was torn. He wanted not to let them out of his sight, but he wanted to know as well if there was anyone else here, because at seven o’clock he was supposed to be on a railway platform.
‘Don’t move,’ he said, and hunted through the whole house.
It was all empty. There was no sign of any party, no sign of the regiment, no sign that anyone had used the kitchen yesterday. A plate and two babies’ bottles stood on the drying rack. That was it.
Joe stopped halfway back up the stairs and told himself aloud to pull it together. When the Taj Mahal fountain had gone missing yesterday, he had remembered why. He did know where Toby and Alice were, he had to; his memory would have changed, but the new layer would be thin.
Unless he was wrong; unless he had dreamed a wonderful life where everyone was here, and where the man who waited by the sea stopped waiting and came to the door.
‘Come on,’ he said softly into the candlelight. ‘Where are they? You know.’
Bee must have known that something was the matter, because she came to the top of the stairs now, towing George. They were too tiny to speak properly, but they had a shared burble that both of them seemed to understand, and when they found him, they both looked anxious, watching him like a pair of baby owls.
‘Toby is …’ Joe said aloud, and left a quiet to try and force his mind to fill in the gap.
Toby is dead.
Toby has been dead for a year.
Toby and Alice died of malaria in India.
Even though they were here yesterday.
The new memory already felt more solid. The older one, the one of last night and the party, and Kite, was already starting to fade. He had looked after the twins alone this year, always afraid that one of Alice’s relatives or a lawyer, or someone, would power in and declare that a single man had no right to bring up children by himself.
‘We have to go,’ he said to them. ‘Right now. Come on, let’s get you dressed.’
Maybe it was a dream, maybe he would get to the station and there would be no such person as Missouri Kite – who the hell was called Missouri anyway? – and he would have to trail to the hospital to report that his brain had absolutely buggered itself this time. If he had to say it aloud, that a man he recognised from epilepsy hallucinations had come to find him from ninety-five years ago, it had the ring of obvious madness.
Or maybe it wasn’t, and some accidental conversation at the Eilean Mòr gate had changed the world overnight, and George and Bee might vanish as thoroughly as Alice and Toby before he even reached the station.
He had to swallow a rock of gritty panic. ‘Quick, now. We’re going on a train, won’t that be fun?’