The Kingdoms, page 4
De Méritens waved back at Lily, then seemed to remember what he was saying. ‘I’m not in Paris: no, I’m not. Because. We’ve had a letter about an engine from the Lighthouse Board …’ He trailed off, like he often did, into mumbling. He could keep up an incomprehensible background buzz for hours at a time. Joe had had to teach himself not to listen. De Méritens was fishing around his desk now.
‘… coffin for two hundred francs.’
‘Pardon?’ Joe said.
De Méritens didn’t hear. ‘Here we are. An engine has broken down. They want an engineer out there.’ He paused, reading over the letter again. It was watermarked, and the hazy light behind him filtered through the government’s eagle crest at the top. ‘It’s urgent. It’s on a shipping route and we must send someone soon, or we’ll hit the winter and the sea freezes out there.’
Joe frowned. ‘Where is it?’
‘The Outer Hebrides.’
Frost went down his spine. ‘That’s the Eilean Mòr light.’
‘Quite.’ De Méritens looked uncomfortable. ‘I’ve got to send Atelier, but he’s already cross with me because I got drunk at his wife’s party – do me a favour and break it to him, will you? You’re all …’ he motioned at Joe generally ‘… charming. And you’ve got your special charm baby. So it should be easy, hey? Just, um – tell him he’ll have to leave on Friday. Back by mid-March. Long haul, but the sea freezes, you see. And it is rather foolish to have an unmanned lighthouse over winter. Our machines would generally look after themselves, but the temperatures up there – that’s steel-fissuring cold.’ He pattered his fingertips over his own stomach, which was his way of saying that he was pretty certain he had made an inarguable point, but then he crumpled. ‘You’re laughing,’ he said defeatedly.
Joe was. ‘I am not charming enough to persuade M. Atelier that he wants to go to an island off Scotland for three months.’
He was laughing, too, partly to cover over just how much his entire soul had snapped to attention. His free hand clamped of its own accord over the Eilean Mòr postcard in his pocket. This was it, the reason he had wanted to work here; the chance to go, to see if there was anything in the north that he remembered, or maybe even to find the person who had sent the postcard, why it was a hundred years old, all of it. Maybe Madeline was still there. If she had waited – he didn’t even know. The idea of seeing the lighthouse had so much gravity he already felt like he was falling towards it.
He had to concentrate to keep smiling. If he could just make it sound casual, it might work. ‘Can I go instead?’
De Méritens took a breath, stopped, then tried again. ‘Can you what?’
The postcard was much softer and more dog-eared than the Psychical Society invitation. Every morning, he thought he should get rid of it. Carrying written English around was stupid. Every morning, he put it off.
He hugged Lily nearer, because holding her made him feel obscurely protected. ‘I don’t know if you remember, but I came here asking you about that lighthouse. I … would like to go and see it, if it’s all right to send me. I passed the keeper’s exam,’ he added, his insides screwing tight with anticipation of being brushed aside. It wasn’t normal practice to send out an ex-slave. Ex-slave sounded a lot like ‘unqualified’ to most people, even if that ex-slave had passed all the same exams as everyone else and spent a lot of his time quietly talking the citizen engineers through the harder mathematics.
But de Méritens really did look like he was thinking about it. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Before you decide one way or another, there’s something else. That lighthouse shouldn’t be unmanned. It should have three keepers. But they’re missing.’
Joe lifted his eyebrows. ‘Was it the Saints?’
‘I said that,’ de Méritens said, a touch defensive. ‘But the Board says not. It’s the Outer Hebrides, there’s bugger all there. No one to terrorise, nothing to steal. The Saints concentrate on the docks at Newcastle. Other side of the country.’ He paused. ‘Given all that, are you sure you want to volunteer, on your salary? I can’t promote you. We’ll pay expenses and all that, but …’ His eyes flickered over Lily.
‘No, I want to go.’ Joe’s heart was straining against his breastbone as though it thought it could go by itself even if the rest of him didn’t. ‘I know it sounds mad, but … I don’t know. If I see it, I might remember something.’
De Méritens gave him a half-sympathetic, half-wary look. It was a familiar one; Alice aimed it at him all the time. People could see it was a nasty thing to live with, damn all memory of anything prior to a couple of years ago, but it made Joe different, in an unsettling way. He was living the thing that people feared, and they worried it might rub off on them.
‘Well. I won’t forget this, pun intended. It’s very good of you to volunteer, whatever the reason. You’re a braver man than me. Mme de Méritens would give me hell.’
Joe stopped himself before he could say aloud that Alice wouldn’t mind one way or another, because he would sound like he was complaining, even though he wasn’t. The idea of living with a twenty-four-year-old who was in love with him was much worse than being married to one who perceived him more as a piece of useful furniture. If she had been in love with him, he would have felt terrible for not loving her back. He couldn’t. Part of his mind was always waiting for someone else, whoever he had left behind, Madeline, or … whoever.
‘Alice is happy by herself,’ he said.
De Méritens nodded and faded into his background buzz as he looked over his desk for the paperwork.
Lily twisted to watch sparks fly down from a welding torch. Joe put his nose against her hair. He could take her with him. Alice wouldn’t mind; she wasn’t keen on motherhood. And then even if there was nothing for him at Eilean Mòr, it wouldn’t matter, because Lily would love a lighthouse, and it was a real chance to get her used to being around machinery.
Joe had strictly unspoken hopes about Lily. He wanted his own workshop one day, even if it was just fixing bits and pieces. Then he could employ whoever he liked, and then Lily could have a trade.
It stayed unspoken because he was frightened Alice would call it exactly what it was: idiotic. If he didn’t manage to open his own workshop, he would have wasted Lily’s childhood on something no one would ever employ her for. It would be better for her to be a midwife, like Alice, or a seamstress, something steady, and not surrounded by territorial men who would happily beat up a woman for getting above herself. But the hill Joe would die on was that any chance not to deliver babies for a living was worth it. Midwifery was horrendous. He knew that. He’d delivered Lily. That had gouged harrows through his soul in a way no exploding engine ever would. She deserved a choice, at least.
It all sounded very noble if he said it like that, but the other reason it all stayed unspoken was that he knew bloody well it was really just a way of keeping her with him. Lily was the only person in the world for whom he was just himself, not the ruin of who he used to be. And she showed every sign of quite liking him. That was a stupid, simple thing, but it was everything. Half the dismay he felt at the idea of letting her work at the godforsaken hospital was that it would mean she left him behind.
He came back to himself when he realised de Méritens’ background bumble was coming up to normal speech again.
‘Can you imagine, living in a lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides?’ de Méritens said, shaking his head. ‘I bet the poor bastards did a bunk. Place sounds one human sacrifice away from gibbering barbarism.’
‘Well, if I come back wearing skulls and a kilt you’ll know,’ Joe smiled, because he liked de Méritens and his tactlessness.
As de Méritens pottered off, looking happy, a man with a long coat and a straight bearing walked through the testing yard.
Joe’s heart lurched so hard it hurt. He set Lily down and ran out after him.
He felt the epilepsy coming. It had happened often in the last two years, but it wasn’t amnesia any more. It was euphoria. His chest felt like it was full of sunlight, so much it was confusing to look down and not see it beaming through his ribcage. He had to push one hand over his mouth, because it was making him cry. The ordinary world was only a curtain, which had been twitched aside. He could still see the engines and the yard gates, but they seemed gauzy. Only the man was really there.
‘Hey – hey.’ Joe caught his arm. He was shaking with happiness. ‘It’s you. What are you doing here, what …’
But then the man turned around, and he was only a stranger and Joe couldn’t remember for his life who he had thought he was.
‘God, I’m sorry. I thought you were … someone else.’
The man looked amicable enough and went on his way. Joe touched his own chest, trying to snatch at the memory as it trickled away, but it was gone. The testing yard was just the yard. The world wasn’t a curtain but the world, and whatever he had seen through it had vanished. He had to stand still through an anvil crash of disappointment. It happened every time, and every vision was the same, but it didn’t come any easier with familiarity.
It was the fourth time in two months. They were getting more frequent.
He hadn’t told anyone. There wasn’t money for any more doctors.
‘Tournier, you fucking idiot, what is a baby doing out here by herfuckingself!’
He swung back and saw it without sound, though the welder was still shouting at him. Lily had come out after him. She had stopped right in front of one of the train engines to look at the welding, square between the test tracks and completely out of sight of the mechanics who had just begun to ease the whole thing forward in a mist of steam. It was inching towards her, too slowly for her to have noticed.
He snatched her up. The engine hissed past them, and in the future that hadn’t happened, he saw the beak shape of the air-breaker knock her over, and then a shattering noise he would never forget, even though, really, he had never heard it. He didn’t realise he had been backing away until he bumped into the wall of the coal shed. It was corrugated iron, so it juddered and whooped.
Lily was staring at him, shocked to have been grabbed like that.
‘Don’t put her down or I’ll punch you in the face,’ the welder snarled. He was shaking too. As he spoke, he slung a mallet so hard onto the floor that it bounced twice, even though it must have weighed as much as a cannonball. Lily jumped.
Joe jolted back from him, sorry and furious at the same time. ‘Jesus, you’re scaring her!’
‘I’m scaring her? Get her out of here! You stupid bastard!’
He hurried to the gate and stood by the road, waiting to calm down, but it didn’t come and he still couldn’t remember, even under the steam-powered panic pressure, who he had thought the man was. He never could.
5
Joe lay looking at the gas lamp, which had been stuttering lately. It smelled chemical even when it was off. They kept the window open now, just in case, and so the long attic room was always cold.
The headboard bumped the wall. He had to concentrate not to wince. M. Saint-Marie could hear downstairs, he was sure. Alice pushed her hands under his shirt, pressing down on his collarbones. It added nastily to the feeling that there was a breeze-block right over his heart. He tried to think about something else.
He’d gone to St Paul’s on the way home, still shaken up about Lily and the engine. The inside of the cathedral had been loud with the work on the dome, and through the weave of the scaffolding, dull light from the steelworks’ lamps came down in tines. Pinned to the confession booths were printed signs that said, Confession available between the hours of 3.30 p.m. and 6 p.m. He was too late for it, which was a relief. M. Saint-Marie always wanted him to go, but Joe couldn’t look Père Philippe in the face these days.
He wished Alice would hurry up.
The cathedral had new electrical wiring. The dean had gone a bit far; the shrine of Maria had an electric halo now. But Joe liked the new prayer-candle set-up. Instead of lighting a taper and candle, you put a coin through a slot and an electric candle lit automatically. He’d put in a centime and prayed, like always, that he wasn’t going mad.
Alice stopped and sighed. There was a tiny moment when she saw him properly and looked sad, because he wasn’t Toby. She had never said that, but he knew it was true. He had spent a long time studying photographs, and he and Toby looked uncannily alike, or at least, they did if you could see past Joe’s being older and smaller. It must have been pronounced in twilight, because twilight was always when Alice seemed to catch the similarity strongly enough to want to see if he was like Toby to touch as well as to look at.
He wished she wouldn’t, but he wished for a lot of things and you couldn’t go round getting your own way all the time.
‘Is there any kind of insurance?’ she said, which was only a continuation of the previous conversation. ‘For if anything happens to you out there?’
‘No. But I’ll be all right.’
She hmmed as she got up. ‘You’ve got to wonder what it’s like up there, haven’t you,’ she said pensively. ‘No slavery. Women allowed to work properly. Everyone with their own choices. They can’t be how the papers say they are.’
Joe sat up slowly, not wanting to seem in a rush, though like always, he felt filthy. Alice smiled to say she was only complaining, not trying to say he shouldn’t go, and disappeared into the next room. The sound of running water exchanged places with her. He looked sideways at the floor while he righted his clothes and looped his scarf back on, and then gloves, so that he wouldn’t be able to feel anything.
Being married to someone he didn’t know had been fine at first. They’d been polite to each other and kept everything meticulously tidy, and that was it. But then Alice had started to see Toby in him. He’d said no; even the idea had scared him in a way he couldn’t trace. It would be betraying whoever he had left behind, and it wouldn’t be any less a betrayal just because he’d forgotten who that was, but it was more visceral even than that.
She’d told Père Philippe, who had dragged Joe to the doctor for pills and an examination, and then all but supervised. And then afterwards Joe had had to go outside and cry for a while.
He couldn’t understand why. Alice was beautiful, and he should have been glad, but all he felt was dirty. He had tried to explain. She’d been furious. She even asked him coldly if he just hated women, if he couldn’t bear to be near one. That had made him want to scream, because she would have punched him if he’d accused her of hating all men just because she didn’t want to sleep with one in particular. He had wanted to know how she’d feel if someone she’d only met a few times had demanded sex and called in the Church when she said no. There were whole societies for women who objected to that.
He didn’t say that. Père Philippe said that it was unnatural in a man, and anyway, you had to want to do it in order to do it, right? Joe had had to murder the urge to say that actually, it could be pretty bloody involuntary, which you would know if you weren’t professionally celibate.
But more than any of that, he stayed quiet because none of it was Alice’s fault. Toby was dead and she missed him, and she missed him alone, because Joe couldn’t remember him. It must have felt like being abandoned. Whatever Joe thought about it, they were married, she was his wife, before God, and he owed her anything that could make it better, even if it was only better for ten minutes. His own bizarre feelings on the subject were irrelevant.
He realised he hadn’t said anything yet. ‘No. I doubt they are.’
‘It just makes me angrier, the older I get. I don’t understand why the government can’t just see that if they admitted the Saints are what they are – this … amazing tiny shard of England like it used to be before the invasion – we wouldn’t be so bloody furious all the time. If they just said, yes, they’re not terrorists, or pirates, or criminals; they’re the last of a proper nation with its own laws and those laws are different to ours … are you listening?’
All Joe could think was that she sounded young. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re furious when you can’t vote.’
She leaned around the door. She had taken her hair out of its daytime knot, and now it was a tawny halo. Anyone normal couldn’t have kept his hands off her. ‘We, Joe, not you. It’s your life too; you might like to start giving a fuck what happens in it.’
He nodded and didn’t say that it still didn’t feel like his life.
‘Speaking of your life, do you know anyone who can look after Lily on Wednesdays?’
He looked up. ‘No, I’ll take her with me.’
Alice gave him the look she usually deployed when she caught him gazing at someone imaginary. ‘To a lighthouse where the sea freezes, where the previous keepers might have been killed.’
He frowned. ‘I – thought you’d be happy for the break.’
‘You’re insane,’ she said factually. ‘You’re not taking a baby to Scotland.’
‘I’m not insane,’ he said, struggling, because he knew she didn’t mean it to stab so deep as it had. ‘It will be fine, we’ll be fine—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘She stays here.’
‘But you …’ He trailed off, because he couldn’t think of any tactful way to say that Alice had never put Lily to bed, never given her a bath; that they both knew Alice resented Lily for not being Toby’s, in an involuntary way that clearly upset her as much as it did Joe. ‘She doesn’t know you very well,’ he tried.
‘Well, she’ll have to get used to me, won’t she. Because she damn well isn’t going off to Scotland with you. Joe, come on. You don’t understand the world enough to take her into it. You trust anyone who’s kind to you. You can’t do that, not with a little girl. I don’t mind the workshop, the people there keep an eye on you, but not Scotland.’
There was nothing he could say to that. She was right.
