The Kingdoms, page 2
2
The nurse, a thin white lady, was brusque. Most of the other patients were educated people, so he should mind his manners, thank you. A Clerkenwell accent, the doctor had said; that must have been code for scummy. She put him in a narrow room with a bed and a desk and a view over the gardens, berating him all the while.
He thought she was just being rude at first, but then realised that he was making her nervous, so he put himself in a corner and tried to think small thoughts while she explained where everything was and what time meals were. He felt disconcerted, because he wasn’t a big enough man to loom. What the doctor had said about the tartan lining of his coat chimed again. Carefully, like it might be on a fuse, he took out the idea that he might have something to do with terrorists. It still didn’t sound right. He was pretty sure hardened terrorists would have to be angry people, and though he wasn’t confident of many things, he knew he had about as much inclination towards explosive rage as a Joe-shaped pile of salt. Not everyone would want a lot of it, but it was, basically, neutral.
That, part of his mind pointed out, was a chemistry joke. How does English scum of the earth from Clerkenwell know chemistry?
No use wondering that for now.
‘Um,’ he ventured, ‘are there any books?’ If he couldn’t get away from it all, going somewhere imaginary seemed like the next best thing.
‘There’s a library. It’s designed to be improving.’ Her whole posture made it clear he could do with improving. ‘French classics of course.’
Classic sounded a lot like it would be about the horrors of life in slums, and Fallen Women who were never interesting enough to actually fall off anything. ‘Anything English?’ he said, not with much hope.
The nurse stared at him. ‘What kind of place do you think this is?’
She didn’t let him speculate before she strode to the open door and vanished into the corridor with a disgusted huff.
He put his hands into his pockets and turned them out on the desk.
He had a few francs, new-minted, with Napoleon IV looking the age he was. There was a case of cigarettes. They were home-made, but the tobacco smelled good. From the same pocket came a tin with an enamel lid and a tiny picture of a ship on the front. He thought it was a snuffbox until he opened it and found matches inside. Last, from his inside pocket, there were two train tickets. They were both singles to the Gare du Roi, from Glasgow. The ticket inspector had clipped out the ‘Glas’.
His heart missed a gear and crunched. Two tickets.
He turned towards the door, meaning to go after the nurse, but then realised he didn’t know who he wanted her to look for. He put the tickets aside uneasily and tried to let it go like the doctor had said, and went downstairs to explore. But no matter how often he reasoned that the man who had helped him would have noticed someone else, or that it was possible he had just picked up a stray ticket by accident, he couldn’t shift the certainty that he had wandered off oblivious from someone who had been looking for him. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was.
He strained again to think of the train, the carriage, whether there had been a woman with dark hair who suited green, but he couldn’t remember a single person.
‘Madeline, come on, she’s called Madeline,’ he said aloud, trying to trick his brain into letting just a corner of that forgetting-shroud slip.
Nothing.
He hoped she was looking for him.
Feeling only half there, he spent the rest of the day ghosting around the open rooms downstairs and the gardens, which were full of cherry trees. That he was taken with the latter made him think he wasn’t used to gardens, but it was only a guess. He tried to read a book later, unsuccessfully, because the tight feeling in his chest wouldn’t go away for long enough to gather up much concentration. He stuck to the papers. They were full of ordinary things. The Emperor was in residence at Buckingham Palace for the season, having just arrived from Paris; there were festivities open to the public at St Jacques’ Park all week, with fireworks. After a lot of work underground to properly heat the vineyards, the price of plantations in Cornwall was rocketing, and so was the price of slaves because the owners got through so many, what with the digging and maintenance of the hot air flow; the usually thriving Truro slave market was quite empty. He found himself in the evening classifieds. Joseph Tournier, memory-loss patient at La Salpêtrière, seeks relatives.
There was no change. He sat awake through the night, trying to listen to his own memory. The more he listened, the more hollow it rang. But that tiny recollection of Madeline was right. He could see her if he thought about it, so he did think about it, hard. He told her name to the doctor. The doctor promised to pass it along to the police, but looked grim when Joe said he still didn’t know where he lived. Tuesday, the deadline of his stay, loomed taller.
On Saturday morning, someone did come, and it was an unexpected someone: a pin-sharp, purple-cravatted gentleman. When the doctor showed the man into the visiting room Joe froze, wondering who he could have offended, but the man let his breath out and smiled.
‘It is you! Oh, Joe. Do you recognise me?’ French, Paris French.
‘No,’ Joe said softly. His stomach screwed itself into a knot. There was no way he could have any normal business with someone like this. God, what if the doctor had been right, what if he had been involved with the Saints? This man was easily well-dressed enough to be a police commissioner, or one of those government people who introduced themselves politely, showed you the red badge, and then took you away to what they called an inquiries facility.
He had a surge of anger with himself. How could he know about red badges and inquiry facilities but not who Madeline was or where he bloody belonged?
‘I’m M. Saint-Marie. I’m your master. You’ve been in my household since you were a little boy.’ He said it kindly. ‘I hear you’re having a few problems remembering.’
Joe’s lungs hitched, because his instinct had been to say ‘Pleased to meet you’, which of course was wrong. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t …’ He trailed off uselessly. The man was too grand for the visiting room.
‘Never mind for now,’ the doctor said quickly. ‘Perhaps Mme Tournier?’
Joe looked up fast. Maybe it was Madeline.
Every atom of him wanted it to be. He still didn’t remember her properly, but it would be something, and seeing her would help, he knew it would – and she would help too, because if there was a single thing he did know about her, it was that she could help with anything. She was one of those people who could blast through walls and barely notice.
The observer voice in the back of his mind pointed out that, in its humble opinion, he sounded awfully like he was spinning a fairy-tale woman for himself.
Shut up, shut up.
She was real. Maybe she was just outside.
‘Mme Tournier?’ he asked. His voice came out tight.
‘Yes,’ the gentleman agreed. He looked worried, but he didn’t say anything about it. ‘I’ll fetch her.’
Joe waited, feeling like he might burst. Neither he nor the doctor spoke. The details of the room kept scratching at him. The only sound was glass scraping near the window, because the gardener had come in to water the ferns some of the patients were growing in bell jars. He flipped the bell up, sprayed the ferns with a perfume puffer, eased it down again. Outside, the man who said he controlled the weather was talking to a cherry tree.
The doctor was playing with his fountain pen, clicking the lid off and clicking it back on again. For a red-hot second, Joe thought he deserved a hand grenade in the face.
Well, said the voice, maybe you could manage the Saints after all.
Steps groaned just outside the door.
‘Hello again,’ said the gentleman as he came back in. He held the door open for someone else. ‘Here’s Mme Tournier.’
Joe’s heart swelled, and then crumbled.
It wasn’t her. There was nothing familiar about the woman called Mme Tournier. Her clothes were plain but well-ironed, and when she offered a quiet good morning, she spoke with a Jamaican swing. The way she moved was so quick and precise it made Joe wonder if she might be a governess, or a nurse.
‘I’m Alice. Do you know me?’ she asked. She was very young. Joe looked from her to the gentleman and wanted to demand how in the world either of them imagined he could possibly be married to her – he must have been twice her age – but neither of them seemed to think it was ridiculous. They only looked expectant, the gentleman nervously so, and Mme Tournier tiredly. Joe could see that she didn’t care whether he knew her or not.
‘No,’ he said. It came out indignant.
The gentleman looked even more nervous and Alice Tournier looked even more tired.
‘Well, you do,’ she told him.
Joe wanted to argue, or even run out. She was a child. The doctor was already beside him, though, holding his shoulder to keep him still.
Alice had even brought a photograph. Later, when the doctor had sent her back to the waiting room, Joe stared down at it. It was their wedding day. It must have been taken with a decent camera, because they didn’t have the stiff look people did when they’d had to keep exactly still for three or four minutes. Neither of them looked happy either. He couldn’t read his own face. Closed down, neutral. It wasn’t his resting expression, which was a kind of drilling attention that made him look like he was reading a physics textbook even when he was shaving.
‘Joe,’ the doctor said when he came back, grave. ‘M. Saint-Marie has informed us that you are a slave. You disappeared two months ago. The gendarmes have been looking for you. This is very serious.’ With each word, he tapped the end of his pen against one of the gold pins on the arm of his chair. The chairs were all grand but ancient. Someone had said they’d been donated by a gentleman’s club, which seemed right; if you sat down too heavily in one, it puffed cigar smoke. ‘I need you to tell me the truth. Is your memory gone, or did you run away and then change your mind? You can tell me if it’s the latter. M. Saint-Marie doesn’t want to press charges. He just wants you home.’
‘No!’ Joe said, and then had to force himself to calm down, because the doctor hardened and looked like he might call in the burly nurse with the tranquillisers. ‘No. I – can see what it looks like, but …’
‘I choose,’ the doctor said slowly, ‘to believe you. And that is what I will put on your medical records, a copy of which will go to the gendarmes. It will keep you from being prosecuted even should your master change his mind.’ He didn’t look like he believed it for a second. There was something hurt in his expression.
Joe nodded, feeling like he’d lost his grip on everything all over again. A slave. Escaped, maybe. He swallowed. ‘Listen – I’ve never seen that woman before. My wife is called Madeline. I’m sure …’
‘False memories are common. It is very unlikely that Madeline is real, Joe. The feeling of remembering her – that’s a hallucination.’
‘But I had two train tickets—’
‘Joe, we have put your case in every national and local newspaper. You don’t think she would have found you by now, if she had been looking?’
Joe had to stare at the carpet.
The doctor studied him for a while. ‘Mme Tournier has a photograph; that seems like proof to me. And you must consider that if you turn these people away, it couldn’t look more like an escape attempt if you tried. No medical report could stop the gendarmes investigating then.’
‘But—’
‘I will tell you,’ the doctor snapped, angry now, ‘exactly what the gendarmes will say. They will say that you are one of the many English slaves who decided it would be a good idea to join the Saints in Edinburgh. You escaped, you got there, you found it was not the wondrous Promised Land but a hideous mess well-supplied with zealots but not with proper food, and you decided to come home again and make up an amnesia story from knowledge of a very common disorder, which you could have heard about from anyone, or read about in any newspaper. At best, they would say, you have been extremely stupid; at worst, you didn’t get fed up and leave, but were posted south with some horrible mission to blow up a train. And frankly, I really couldn’t blame anyone who thought that was exactly what you’d done.’
Joe felt caged. M. Saint-Marie and Alice could have been anyone – it could have been some kind of scam, and he’d end up sold on a plantation somewhere in Cornwall.
But if he refused to go with them and he vanished into a gendarmerie, he would never come out. He had no clear idea about what happened to slaves who had run away, but he did know that he was walking a narrow, narrow bridge above a black gulf, and he could hear things shifting down in the deep places. He found himself twisting his head to one side, trying to get away from the thought. He wanted very much not to investigate those things too closely.
He looked up at the doctor again when he realised that if he wasn’t a slave, he wouldn’t feel like that. People who were safe didn’t have chasms like that in the bases of their minds. They just had a nice wine cellar.
‘I’ll go with them,’ he said.
The doctor lifted his eyebrows. ‘Good choice.’
So Joe went with Alice Tournier and M. Saint-Marie to a house he didn’t know. It was in a down-at-heel part of Clerkenwell, and the rooms had high ceilings and furniture that would have been expensive sixty years ago. M. Saint-Marie threw his arms round Joe and welcomed him home, a bit tearfully. More than anything, he put Joe in mind of a hen who had just rediscovered a lost chick, all bustle and cluck.
‘I didn’t run away,’ Joe said. His whole ribcage was crushing inward. ‘Or I don’t think I did.’
M. Saint-Marie shook his head while Joe was still talking. ‘Of course you didn’t. You’re such a beautiful boy; someone will have stolen you and given you a crack on the head in just the wrong place.’
Joe felt unbalanced by that. He had a charming smile, he’d worked that out at the hospital – the nurses had turned out to be extraordinarily nice once he started smiling – but it hadn’t occurred to him that he might have been stolen. He was, he’d thought all week, an odd-looking person; he had brown hair, straight, but the set of his bones wasn’t European, and he was two shades too sunny for all his ingredients to have come from this far north. One of the other patients had assumed he was from the south of France, one of the doctors had wondered if he might be Persian, and someone else again had said he had a bit of a Slavic look and did he know her cousin Ivan.
‘You’d be very valuable on the black market, even without a pedigree certificate,’ M. Saint-Marie was saying. ‘It’s flooded with Welshmen; you wouldn’t believe how ugly they are. No, you got yourself home. Thank God. If the gendarmes want to whinge about it, leave them to me. I’m responsible for you, I’m the one at fault.’
‘Um – do I have a pedigree certificate?’ asked Joe, who would have liked to know where he was from, if only because it might have explained where he had been, before the train station.
‘No, I’m sorry. You came from an … er, an unofficial breeder. Just a nice girl in Whitechapel.’
Whitechapel was not near Glasgow, that much he knew. He should have been interested; he should have fastened onto the idea of his parents like a bloodhound, but it was just another corner of the edifice of things he didn’t know.
‘We got your brother from her too, of course. I never did meet her husband,’ M. Saint-Marie said, embarrassed. ‘I rather think she was having children to order. All crossbreeds, all very lovely – she had photographs. Toby had quite an Oriental look, but you might not have shared a father, so I couldn’t really say … But never mind that now. How do you feel?’
He looked hopeful. Alice looked shattered. Joe looked around the living room. There were sun-faded silk rugs on the floor, and a Regency couch that was probably more for dusting than sitting, with holes in the upholstery. Pipes cackled in the walls. He didn’t recognise a single inch of it.
He promised aloud that it looked dead familiar now he was here.
3
The memories didn’t come back.
Joe tried to go back to La Salpêtrière, was told that slaves couldn’t make appointments without their responsible citizen, and he had to ask M. Saint-Marie. Thankfully, M. Saint-Marie went with him straight away. The doctor suspected a tumour, but there was no way to find out without surgery, and the mortality rate was so high it was more like a very expensive execution. The good news was that there had been no more amnesia bouts, so it probably wasn’t going to be fatal. The doctor delivered all this in the arch way of a person who didn’t believe for a minute that Joe had a problem at all. M. Saint-Marie lodged a formal complaint against the doctor for being a prick.
It didn’t matter as much as it could have, the not remembering. M. Saint-Marie was sweet and even more chickeny than Joe had thought at first. Alice he was never really sure of, but M. Saint-Marie said that was only to be expected. Alice was supposed to have married Joe’s brother, but Toby had been killed in action near Glasgow six months ago; and marrying Joe instead, it seemed, had been the only way to escape her horrible mistress and stay in the household of sedate, untroublesome M. Saint-Marie, who had only agreed to buy her on some kind of spousal licence Joe didn’t understand but which would have been void if she didn’t marry someone.
Joe turned that information over and over for a long time, but he still couldn’t remember a brother or the wedding.
He was glad of Alice and M. Saint-Marie. The outside world made him nervous. Joe knew Londres, and he didn’t. He could navigate well enough, and he knew where all the Métro stations were and how to buy tickets and all the boring necessary stuff – but he didn’t know street names or station names, and the first time M. Saint-Marie asked him to go up to the market for groceries, he had a nasty bolt of real fear. Saint-Marie saw it.
