The Kingdoms, page 38
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.
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?’
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.
Home. It was coming up through the deck.
He had to sit down, because all the strength had evaporated from his knees. When he looked up, Kite was sitting next to him, very still, not touching him. He looked anxious.
‘I know it must have been bad, leaving. But – I swear, they’re safer here than—’
‘I know,’ Joe said. He started to laugh, because when he said I, it felt different now. He knew who that was. ‘It all looks a damn sight better than the last time we were here, doesn’t it? Much nicer now it’s not on fire.’
Kite did his unbearable trick of turning to glass. ‘You remember that then?’
‘We were sitting here, with Tom and Rupert Grey.’ Joe studied the dust in the air. He could nearly see their ghosts in it, the lamps that night in the heat, the glitter of the wine glasses. ‘I think that was the happiest I’ve ever been. I’d been sick missing you, it was making me crotchety with the men, I could hardly sit still more than fifteen minutes for that last six months. And then there you were.’
When Kite cried, Joe’s whole chest hurt. Joe pulled him close, and even that didn’t feel near enough. He kissed him once, very softly, for permission, then again when Kite leaned up to him, cradling the nape of his neck where the bones were fragile. His fingertips already knew the pattern of the burn scars. And then it was all there, everything, and all of him: Jem, Joe Tournier, Joe Zhang, different and not, three winking facets of a person who he wasn’t sure had a name. Whoever he was, though, he had a surge of joy when Kite sank forward against his shoulder.
He put his head down a little. Kite smelled of cedar, from the sea chest his clothes lived in. Joe touched his arm where there was a new burn, too precise to be accidental. There were hints of cruciform shapes in it. Kite took it back and folded it close to his own chest without looking up.
