The Kingdoms

a question. He brushed her hair back. It was black and smooth, tied up in a knot with a ribbon now, but he couldn’t shift the impression that it was curly. That was a leftover from the epilepsy hallucinations of another little girl, one who had been his, not Toby’s. He tried not to think about her too much, but she felt real, and whenever he came up from the hallucination – it still happened every month or so – it took him hours to get over the crushing panic that he must have left her somewhere. Being told by doctors and everyone else that she was imaginary didn’t help. He’d even sewn a duck on Beatrix’s nightdress because it had looked so wrong duckless; the little girl in the hallucinations had one. That was before it had dawned on him that sewing things on the clothes of other people’s children was creepy and that he was making Toby nervous.

Beatrix reached for the screwdriver. He gave it to her. ‘You can do this screw, all right? This way round. Good girl.’

She nodded again. He watched her while he guided her hands, aware that she would only have to decide to get up suddenly and she would bang her head against the underside of the table, but unlike George, she was a still child. She would sit exactly where you left her, for hours, uncomplaining.

George squeaked and laughed as Toby put him on his shoulders. Beatrix watched, then looked down into her lap and turned the screwdriver around twice. She was pretending it was more interesting than it was. Something in his heart splintered.

‘Toby,’ he said.

Toby leaned down, which tipped George upside down. ‘Hello?’

‘Take Bee for a spin too. She’s left out.’

‘Wha-at?’ Toby laughed. He dumped George into Joe’s arms and scooped her up. ‘Left out? Never!’ He galloped away.

George looked annoyed, but was soon placated with the screwdriver, which he seemed to like.

‘Doorbell!’ one of Toby’s friends called. ‘Shall I get it?’

‘I will,’ Joe said. He needed to stretch. ‘Who are we expecting now?’

‘Carol singers probably,’ Toby offered. ‘Shouldn’t think Kahn and Co. will be in for half an hour yet, they’re coming from some blasted heath in darkest Willesden.’

‘Tell them to bugger off,’ Joe and Toby’s father rumbled from the next room. He pretended that he didn’t speak English, although Joe had noticed there was a distinct correlation between his English abilities and the increased potential of mince pies. ‘It’s awkward being privately serenaded by an entire choir.’

‘Humbug,’ Joe said, but he went.

‘Bug,’ said George to Alice, who passed them on the stairs with a tray of differently shaped pastries.

‘How’s the fountain?’ she asked Joe.

‘Fit for a very tasteless maharajah in about ten minutes,’ he promised, awkward, because he didn’t know what to do with Alice minus Toby. Married people were closed off; you couldn’t get to know a person’s wife without someone else looking at you funny, and so although Alice had been his sister-in-law for years now, Joe had no idea what she was like, apart from incredibly elegant.

And he knew she didn’t like him. She had never said she thought he was an embarrassment, the permanent bachelor who didn’t have his own children or his own life and who kept clinging onto hers and Toby’s, but he could feel it coming off her sometimes.

‘Horrible, isn’t it,’ she agreed.

Joe smiled a bit. Agreeing with him was, for her, a mark of overpowering Christmas cheer and goodwill to all men.

‘Ooh, are those the pie things?’ his father called hopefully.

‘She doesn’t understand, Ba,’ Joe called back, ‘you’ll have to try harder …’

‘My English is fine,’ his father huffed, although since he also swore up and down that King Edward was a fine figure of a man, Joe suspected that it was code for appalling.

Joe opened the door, still laughing, but then stopped, because his heart vaulted.

There was no choir outside. Only a man. There were burn scars across the left side of his face and he looked as if somebody might once have abandoned him in the Arctic and left him to find his own way home, but he was well-dressed and he held himself so straight he must have been from the army or the navy. Joe had met too many of Toby’s military friends to place him, but that didn’t stop him feeling happy to see him.

‘You came. I haven’t seen you for ages.’

The man looked alarmed. ‘Pardon?’

‘Come in, it’s freezing,’ Joe said. ‘Sorry – you’re going to have to believe me, I’m very glad to see you but I can’t remember where we know each other from. Are you from the regiment? No, you can’t be,’ he corrected himself, puzzled. There were no white people in the regiment. The army grouped soldiers more or less by colour. Toby was too noticeably Chinese to go in with a white regiment, so he had gone in with the Sikhs. He always said he was lucky not to look more like Joe, who would have been dumped into a regiment full of hopeless Eton boys and dead years ago after some heroic stupid charge.

‘No, the Psychical Society.’ The man was well-spoken, officerly. ‘Eleanor Sidgwick is coming too, but I’m the placeholder. She just called on someone else on the way. She gave me your Christmas card for proof. We don’t … know each other,’ he added.

‘Sorry,’ Joe said, though he was still sure they did. He had to crush the feeling down. ‘I’ve got you mixed up.’

‘It’s all right. You’re …’ He had to glance again at the envelope, then turned it around helplessly for Joe to see. Mr Tchang.

‘Jang,’ said Joe, charmed because the man had looked so worried by the spelling. ‘It’s just how the French write Chinese, I don’t know how they came up with something so odd.’ He put George down. George ran off, following the sound of Toby tickling Beatrix in the next room and cavalrymen horsing about. ‘Do you work there? At the