They both gave him a look that said they had noticed he was imminently hysterical, but they were willing to bear with him for now.
They let him bundle them into clothes and coats, sat helpfully still while he laced up their shoes, and then stayed on either side of him, one to each hand, as he ran out into the road to hail an early cab.
52
King’s Cross, 1903
Horrors went through his head on the way to the station. Kite wouldn’t be there; or after everything, he, Joe, would disappear, and perhaps there would be a tingling a few seconds before it happened and he would know it – or worse, he would see Beatrix and George go to dust in front of him.
And even if everything was all right, even if he wasn’t insane and this was all real, Kite had not signed up for two children along with the crazed mess that was hardly anything more to him than an unnatural thing stitched together from the remnants of his friend.
It was too early for the commuter rush. The station was eerie, and where the trains sat breathing steam at the platforms, they loomed spectral. Joe walked as fast as the twins could go across what felt like the acres of concourse to platform three. He could feel his own pulse banging at the bones deep inside his ears. He knew what he was going to find. No Kite, no one waiting. The man from the sea would be imaginary. Yesterday, the party, life before, would be an epilepsy dream.
There was a man with red hair reading a newspaper, leaning back against one of the brick pillars. He was barely more than an outline in the vapour.
Joe had to get close to him before he was sure.
Bee lit up and hurried ahead of him. Kite must not have been able to hear very well at all now, because Bee tugged at his hand before he noticed them.
‘Hello,’ Joe managed, and thought he was doing very well not to cry. ‘I’m sorry about the children. I – I had to bring them. I’m sorry. Things have – changed overnight.’
Kite was watching him with well-controlled alarm, but alarm all the same. ‘Where’s their mother? Does she know they’re here?’
‘She’s dead. I woke up in an empty house. They’ve been dead for a year. Alice and Toby, they … but you met them, right? Yesterday, at the …’
‘I did. I did – Joe, you’re all right.’ Kite grasped his shoulders and gave him a shake, only light. ‘You’re not mad. You can just see things changing.’
‘Yes,’ Joe managed. He looked helplessly at the twins. ‘I think these two are mine now.’
‘Good. Right, let’s go then,’ Kite said, as if the unexpected addition of a pair of toddlers was not a thing that could possibly worry anyone. He lifted up Beatrix and asked her how she was, like he would have asked an adult.
‘Very well, thank you,’ she said, and Joe stared at her, because he had never heard her do that. She gave him a pointed look that made it clear she had only been waiting for someone who would listen.
It took until well after midnight to reach the Eilean Mòr gate. Even though Joe had brought enough money to get them all there in the relative comfort of first class, he had dreaded it, anticipated tears and God knew what, but George had been immaculately behaved for the entire journey. Joe suspected that he was trying to impress Kite. On the way out to the gate over a black sea, something in Joe’s chest screwed tighter. He’d forgotten how far out it was. An hour in which they could still just disappear. He had to bite his lip the whole way, ordering himself not to weep with the useless terror of the journey.
Kite must have noticed, because although he said nothing, he sat close and shared his brandy flask.
There was building work at the gate. The two pillars were surrounded by scaffolding now, and something was going on underwater; it looked like they were on their way to building an artificial island. There would, Kite explained, be a new tower to enclose the space, but it would be solid, with no doors. It wouldn’t last for ever, but it would be good for five hundred years.
Joe couldn’t believe it when they were through. Nothing was different and everything was. The Victory, a leviathan shape on the far side of the lighthouse, looked like a floating castle. Beatrix straightened up in Kite’s lap, and George grasped the bow, vibrating with excitement. They were both wide awake from having been bundled onto the boat in the dark.
Joe had to dash one hand over his eyes.
‘They gave you Victory,’ he said.
Kite glowed. ‘She’s perfect, isn’t she. Newly refitted.’ He leaned down to make sure Beatrix could see. ‘What do you think?’
Beatrix opened and closed her hands on his sleeve, the picture of frustration. ‘How, how to say – a da boat?’ She spread her arms out.
Either Kite was on her wavelength anyway, or he had a few words of Chinese. ‘Battleship.’
‘Battleship,’ she repeated.
‘You know it’s news to me that she even talks,’ Joe said, knocked sideways.
Beatrix patted Kite’s arm to make him lean down to her. ‘Other one name?’
‘Victory.’
Beatrix slid down to talk to George in their twins-burble. Joe could only understand a little of it, but he had a feeling they thought the ship was alive because Kite had called it she. He took a breath to explain, but then stopped. It was a good thing to believe.
He held himself just about together until they were on board. The sailors took over the children immediately; there was, incredibly, a nursery, because the women brought their children with them now. Joe stayed long enough with them to see that it was a bright, cheery room, warm and well-lit, right in the heart of the ship, next to the infirmary where no shots ever came through. There were matrons on duty, though all the children were asleep. One of them put the twins into a spare hammock. George looked like he’d never seen anything better in his life, and then fell asleep so abruptly he might have been knocked out. Beatrix sat quietly, bobbing to make the hammock swing. She giggled when the matron gave her an extra push. Joe had never seen them so happy to be put to bed. He kissed them both, and then found that he was shaking with the sense that he’d forgotten something, some danger that would still loom up and snatch them. The matron lifted her eyebrows at him.
‘Nothing worse for disturbing sleep than hovering fathers.’ She made it sound like an unfortunate medical condition.
He had to laugh, or sort of. He couldn’t help wondering if they had made it through with plenty of time to spare, or if there had only been forty seconds before one or all three of them winked out of existence, the inevitable outcome of some innocent conversation on either side of the gate, a dropped watch, a penny spun at the wrong second.
Kite touched Joe’s back, just between his shoulder blades. It stopped all those what-ifs hurling themselves around.
‘Night, Bee.’
She looked past him and smiled, and saluted at Kite, who must have just done it towards her.
The way into the stateroom was familiar. He’d walked this way before, he knew it, and when Kite opened the door, he knew the room. He knew the tilting windows, the dining table, the desk, all so powerfully that he could smell the wine and the cigarette smoke from that last night off Spain, before Trafalgar, before the shots had come in.
It was all beautifully repaired now, and on the desk was a gleaming bronze telegraph. But it was still itself, warmer and brighter than the cabin on Agamemnon, and somehow, it had soaked in all the good things that had happened far more than the bad.